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IMMORTELLES.
I M M O R T E L L E S
FROM
CHARLES DICKENS.
#!! #ſh.
£ombon :
JOHN MOXON, 28, MADDOX STREET, REGENT STREET,
1856.
I.ONDON .
TAYLOR AND GREENING, PRINTERS, GRAYSTOKE PLACE, FETTER LANE.
3.
:
S.§
£4.24
14, ºtº-
! 0-253 – 3 is
5. 2 & 3 '7
IMMORTELLES.
THE peeuliar genius of Dickens is by many
people considered to be displayed in Farce
and Comedy; nevertheless, there is truth on
the side of those who assert that his excel-
lence lies not in the mere superficial fun he
produces. They say that the world would
not lose much if it never heard from him
another laughable thing; but could we spare
so easily the subject-matter of any one of his
inimitable pensive episodes 2 It must be a
dull fool, indeed, who will never laugh; but
one cannot laugh for ever, and it must be more,
tiring still to be the mere caterer for this
same love of laughter, Dickens's genius is
quite powerful enough to put a humorous
B
2 IMMORTELLES FROM
face on things not essentially witty; and
though the very soul of wit does not lie very
deep, it is always a natural fire—never is it
well for high pressure to produce it, even
granting that it may be, like the embryo,
forced into hatching by the heated oven.
'Tis pitiful to see the tasked and jaded spirit
toiling to satisfy a vast multitude of insa-
tiable appetites with pleasantries. The
favourite authors of the mobocracy seldom
deserve immortality; “passing away” will
be written on most of the cates prepared for
such stomachs only : even the moment after
ribless Laughter has shaken his fat sides at
one of Dickens's masterly identities, and
Fancy herself has helped involuntarily to
“tuck up little Paul in his basket-bed,” and
even to “toast him brown for a muffin,” a
half-snarling sigh has been provoked, and one
has been ready to say, If it were not for
these muffin analogies Dickens himself would
not be relished. In vain may “old Time
CHARLES DICRENS. 3
and his brother Care set marks, as on a tree
that is to come down in good time;” in vain
does he sketch the features of the “remorse-
less twins,” while, as he says, they are
striding through their human forests,
“notching as they go.” Were it not for
palpable identity, 't were in vain that the
face of the “little Paul turned to us, crossed
and recrossed with a thousand little creases,
which the same deceitful Time would take
delight in smoothing out and wearing away
with the flat part of his scythe, as a proper
preparation of the surface for his deeper
operations.” The sad and gay, the serious
and vain, are all part of the same changing
spectacle—Wain show !—mere amusement,
nothing more. The moralising of Dickens is
worth more than all his farcical efforts, all his
powerful comedy, and even than all his wit,
although we may sometimes see by its bright
flashes that his very Soul is on fire, and his
memory scouring the elements for metaphors
4. IMMORTELLES FROM
to discharge its fulness. For those who
think consistently with the true spirit of
Dickens, his reasonings il penseroso are far
more pleasant than the lighter measure of
this universal favourite. Nay, this freshlet
of thought, rescued from the common tide,
might flow on for ever, purling as it went,
fertilising many a thirsty nook, refreshing
many a melancholy traveller coming to
languish on the extremest verge of the
world's swift brook. We may say with
Shakspere, “How infectively” would he
“pierce through the body of the country,
city, court, yea, and of this our life.” So
quiet and so sweet would be the style of
these gentle abstractions, it might seem a
thing so precious, and so apart from the
great world, as to remind us of the portion
taken by the old patriarch, “out of the
hand of the Amorite, with the sword and
with the bow.” The author of “The Natural
History of Enthusiasm” has well said, that
CHARLES DICKENS. 5
“every record of external shows that does
not lead the mind to better things, tends to
consolidate and fasten the world's incurable
worldliness.” Dickens's episodical digression
is as healthful and as free as the mountain
air; there is no yoke upon its neck; it is a
sweet escape of the over-tasked spirit into
the cool and pleasant region of unpaid
thought. Here he bathes him in the clear
waters; here he lies down in the green pas-
tures; his lips touch the living spring; and
here all his early fancies and associations hie
them back to their rightful owner again, and
remind us of poor Ariel working wild work
for Prospero’s will; he screams in the wind
and groans in the storm, at his bidding; but
sweeter than the infant’s lullaby is his wild
hum of liberty when the world-like wizard
takes his purchased rights, and sends him
forth free again, to live “under the blossom
that hangs on the bough.”
Writers, whose appeal is made so exclu-
6 IMMORTELLES FROM
sively to the excitabilities of mankind, Will
not find it possible, says a known critic
of the highest order, to work upon them
continuously without a diminishing effect.
Something more, it seems, than to charm the
fancy is necessary to satisfy the understand-
ing, and take permanent possession of the
strongholds of fame. So keenly are Dickens's
realities of nature, and the truths they sug-
gest, felt by almost all his admirers, that it
is necessary to warn these enthusiastic devo-
tees to allow themselves to exercise that
freedom of opinion and independence of
judgment which, with due humility, ought
ever to be maintained by every one; nor
ought young readers, especially, to be dis-
couraged in the desire to obtain a correct
idea of the actual weight of his real merits
or deficiencies by the popular voice, which,
be it ever remembered, has not always the
healthiest tone. An old adage says, “The
strongest lovers are not always the longest”
CHARLES DICKENS. 7
(or something to that effect); nor will it
appear, from the fate of former favourites in
the lighter paths of fame, that unlimited
admiration of the mere peculiarities of a style
of writing will do so much to keep alive a
name, as an adequate appreciation of his
higher and graver endowments; in other
words, the intellectual, moral, and only truly
immortal part of anybody's writings. To
group together some of the rarer beauties
that we find so profusely scattered in the
pages of our author, as we do fresh-gathered
flowers, with all their exquisite tints and
vital fragrance, as the objects of an affec-
tionate regard; to preserve a pleasure which
the younger mind shall not outgrow, will
be the purpose of the following pages.
And now we will begin with an extract,
only adding the condition that we shall not go
straight through with any one book or tale,
but branch off, fancy-free, or our work may
prove a most tedious journey to its end,
8 IMMORTELLES FROM
although it may be through a wilderness of
SWeetS.
But here let Dickens speak, and surely
“King Lear” himself would own one of those
“servile ministers” that would not give him
“leave to ponder on thoughts that hurt him
more; ” for is not Shakspere's spirit abroad
when Dickens calls upon an angry wind to
“rage and blow *
“Still athwart their darker boughs, the
sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold,
and the red light mantling in among their
swarthy branches, used them as foils to set
its brightness off, and aid the lustre of the
dying day. A moment, and its glory was no
more. The sun went down beneath the long
dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in
the west, an airy city, wall heaped on wall,
and battlement on battlement; the light was
all withdrawn, the shining church turned
cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile;
CHARLES DICKENS. 9
the birds were silent; and the gloom of
winter dwelt on everything. An evening
wind uprose too, and the slightest branches
cracked and rattled as they moved in skeleton
dances to its moaning music. The wither-
ing leaves, no longer quiet, hurried to and
fro in search of shelter from its chill pursuit;
the labourer unyoked his horses, and with
head bent down trudged briskly home beside
them ; and from the cottage windows lights
began to glance and Wink upon the darkening
fields. Then the village forge came out in
all its bright importance; the lusty bellows
roared haſ haſ to the clear fire, which roared
in turn, and bade the shining sparks dance
gaily to the merry clinking of the hammers
on the anvil. The gleaming iron, in its
emulation, sparkled too, and shed its red-hot
gems around profusely. The strong Smith
and his men dealt such strokes upon their
work, as made even the melancholy night
rejoice, and brought a glow into its dark face
10 IMMORTELLES FROM
as it hovered about the door and windows,
peeping curiously in, above the shoulders of
a dozen loungers. As to this company, there
they stood, spellbound by the place, and casting
now and then a glance upon the darkness in
their rear, settled their lazy elbows more at
ease upon the sill, and leaned a little further
in ; no more disposed to tear themselves
away than if they had been born to cluster
round the blazing hearth like so many crickets.
Out upon the angry wind l how from sighing
it began to bluster round the merry forge,
banging at the wicket, and grumbling in the
chimney, as if it bullied the jolly bellows for
doing anything to order; and what an im-
potent Swagger it was, too, for all its noise;
for if it had any influence on that hoarse
companion, it was but to make him roar his
cheerful song the louder, and by consequence
to make the fire burn the brighter, and the
sparks to dance more gaily yet: at length
they whizzed so madly round that it was too
CHARLES DICKENS. 1 1
much for such a surly wind to bear: so off it
flew with a howl, giving the old sign before
the alehouse door such a cuff as it went, that
the ‘Blue Dragon' was more rampant than
usual ever afterwards, and indeed before
Christmas, reared clean out of his crazy
frame. It was small tyranny for a respect-
able wind to go wreaking its vengeance on
Such poor creatures as the fallen leaves, but
this wind happening to come up with a great
heap of them just after venting its humour
on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and
scatter them, that they fled away, pell-mell,
some here, some there, rolling over each
other, whirling round and round upon their
edges, taking frantic flights into the air, and
playing all manner of extraordinary gambols
in the extremity of their distress. Nor
was this enough for its malicious fury,
for not content with driving them abroad, it
charged small parties of them into the wheel-
wright's saw-pit, and below the planks and
| 2 IMMORTELLES FROM
timbers in the yard, and scattering thesawdust
in the air, it looked for them underneath ;
and when it did meet with any, whew how it
drove them on and followed at their heels |
The scared leaves only flew the faster for all
this: and a giddy chase it was, for they got
into unfrequented places, where there was no
outlet, and where their pursuer kept them
eddying round and round at his pleasure;
and they crept under the eaves of houses, and
clung tightly to the sides of hay-ricks, like
bats; and tore in at open chamber-windows,
and cowered close to hedges; and in short
went anywhere for safety. But the oddest
feat they achieved was, to take advantage of
the sudden opening of Mr. Pecksniff's front-
door, to dash wildly into his passage, whither
the wind following close upon them, and
finding the back-door open, incontinently
blew out the candle held by Miss Pecksniff,
and slammed the front-door against Mr.
PeckSniff, who was at that moment entering,
CHARLES DICKENS. 13
with such violence, that in the twinkling of
an eye he lay on his back at the bottom of
the steps. Being by this time weary of such
trifling performances, the boisterous rover
hurried away rejoicing, roaring over moor
and meadow, hill and flat, until it got out
at Sea, where it met with other winds
similarly disposed, and made a night of it.”
Oh! truly this is the churlish chiding of
“Duke Senior's' wintry windl with some-
what less of classical circumstance, to com-
mend his blusterings to our notice,—“Prithee
be calm, good wind blow not a word away,
till I have found each letter in the letter.”
—Q--
“Go your ways,” said Pinch, apostrophis-
ing the coach, “I can hardly persuade myself
but you’re alive, and are some great monster
who visits this place at certain intervals, to
bear my friends away into the world; you're
more exulting and rampant than usual to
14 IMMORTELLES FROM
night, I think, and you may well crow over
your prize.”
“OLD HUMPHREY’s” CHILDHOOD.
“That I may not make acquaintance with
my readers under false pretences, or give
them cause to complain hereafter that I have
withheld any matter which it was essential
for them to have learnt at first, I wish them
to know—and I smile sorrowfully to think
that the time has been when the confession
would have given me pain—that I am a mis-
shapen, deformed, old man. I have never
been made a misanthrope by this cause. I
have never been stung by any insult, nor
wounded by any jest upon my crooked figure.
As a child I was melancholy and timid, but
that was because the gentle consideration
paid to my misfortune sunk deep into my
spirit and made me sad, even in those early
days. I was but a very young creature when
my poor mother died, and yet I remember
that often when I hung around her meck,
CEIARLES DICKENS. I5
and oftener still when I played about the
room before her, she would catch me to her
bosom, and bursting into tears, soothe me
with every term of fondness and affection.
God knows I was a happy child at those
times—happy to nestle in her breast—happy
to weep when she did—happy in not know-
ing why. These occasions are so strongly
impressed upon my memory, that they seem
to have occupied whole years. I had
numbered very very few when they ceased
for ever, but before then their meaning had
been revealed to me. I do not know whether
all children are imbued with a quick percep-
tion of childish grace and beauty and a
strong love for it, but I was. Ihad no thought,
that I remember, either that I possessed it
myself or that I lacked it, but I admired it
with an intensity I cannot describe. A
little knot of playmates—they must have
been beautiful, for I see them now—were
clustered one day round my mother's knee in
16 IMMORTELLES FROM
eager admiration of some picture representing
a group of infant angels, which she held in
her hand. Whose the picture was, whether
it was familiar to me or otherwise, or how all
the children came to be there, I forget: I
have some dim thought it was my birthday,
but the beginning of my recollection is that
we were altogether in a garden, and it was
summer weather—I am sure of that, for One
of the little girls had roses in her sash. There
were many lovely angels in this picture, and
I remember the fancy coming upon me to
point out which of them represented each child
there, and that when I had gone through
all my companions, I stopped and hesitated,
wondering which was most like me. I
remember the children looking at each other,
and my turning red and hot, and their
crowding round to kiss me, saying that they
loved me all the same; and then, and when the
old sorrow came into my dear mother's mild
and tender look, the truth broke upon me
CHARLES DICKENS. 17
for the first time, and I knew, while watching
my awkward and ungainly sports, how
keenly she had felt for her poor cripple boy.
I used frequently to dream of it afterwards,
and now my heart aches for that child as if
I had never been he, when I think how often
he awoke from some fairy change to his own
old form, and sobbed himself to sleep again.”
So deeply touching is this little unaffected
picture of patient suffering, that few of the
true and kind will fail to appreciate it to a
great degree; yet it is just possible that the
stout of heart and sound of frame, active of
limb, and perfect in each sense, may fail to
understand all its deep-toned harmonies;
for this ranks among the melodies made for
the deaf ear. This is a picture seen best by
the blind, and its step is like the kind adopted
pace limited to the Cripple himself—telling
him of heaven-born sympathy welling up in
many secret places to slake his continual thirst
for human love and tenderness.
18 IMMORTELLES FROM
And now to carve out dials quaintly,
point by point, thereby to see the “minutes
how they run.”
–C–
“Chief and first among all these is my
clock — my old cheerful companionable
clock. How can I ever convey to others an
idea of the comfort and consolation that this
old clock has been for years to me! It is
associated with my earliest recollections.
It stood upon the staircase at home (I call
it home still, mechanically) nigh sixty
years ago. Ilike it for that, but it is not on
that account, nor because it is a quaint old
thing in a huge oaken case curiously and
richly carved, that I prize it as I do. I in-
cline to it as if it were alive, and could
understand and give me back the love Ibear
it. And what other thing that has not life
(I will not say how few things that have)
could have proved the same patient, true,
untiring friendl How often have I sat in
CHARLES DICKENS. 19
the long winter evenings feeling such
society in its cricket-voice, that raising my
eyes from my book and looking gratefully
towards it, the face reddened by the glow of
the shining fire has seemed to relax from
its staid expression and to regard me kindly;
how often in the summer twilight, when my
thoughts have wandered back to a melan-
choly past, have its regular whisperings
recalled them to the calm and peaceful
present; how often in the dead tranquillity
of night has its bell broken the oppressive
silence, and seemed to give me assurance that
the old clock was still a faithful watcher at
my chamber door! My easy chair, my desk,
my ancient furniture, my very books, I can
scarcely bring myself to love, even these last,
like my old clock 1
“Friend and companion of my solitude 1
mine is not a selfish love; I would not keep
your merits to myself, but disperse some-
thing of pleasant association with your
C 2
20 IMMORTELLES FROM
image through the whole wide world; I
would have men couple with your name
cheerful and healthy thoughts; I would have
them believe that you keep true and honest
time; and how would it gladden me to know
that they recognise some hearty English
work in Master Humphrey’s Clock -
“Let me believe that it was something
better than curiosity which rivetted my at-
tention, and impelled me strongly towards
this gentleman. I never saw so patient and
kind a face. He should have been sur-
rounded by friends, and yet here he sat
dejected and alone when all men had their
friends about them. As often as he roused
himself from his reverie he would fall into it
again, and it was plain that whatever was
the subject of his thoughts they were of a
melancholy kind, and could not be con-
trolled.
“He was not used to solitude;—I was
sure of that, for I know by myself that if he
CHARLES DICKENS. 2]
had been, his manner would have been
different, and he would have taken some
slight interest in the arrival of another. I
could not fail to mark that he had no ap-
petite—that he tried to eat in vain—that
time after time the plate was pushed away,
and he relapsed into his former posture.
His mind was wandering among old Christ-
mas days, I thought. Many of them sprang
up together, not with a long gap between
each but in unbroken succession like days of
the week. It was a great change to find him-
self for the first time (I quite settled that it
was the first) in an empty silent room with
no soul to care for. I could not help follow-
ing him in imagination through crowds of
pleasant faces, and then coming back to that
dull place with its bough of misletoe sicken-
ing in the gas, and sprigs of holly parched up
already by a Simoon of roasted and boiled. The
very waiter had gone home, and his repre-
sentative, a poor lean hungry man, was
22 IMMORTELLES FROM
keeping Christmas in his jacket. I grew
still more interested in my friend. His
dinner done, a decanter of wine was placed
before him. It remained untouched for a
long time, but at length with a quivering
hand he filled a glass and raised it to his
lips. Some tender wish to which he had
been accustomed to give utterance on that
day, or some beloved name that he had been
used to pledge, trembled upon them at that
moment. He put it down hastily—took it up
once more—again put it down—pressed his
hand upon his face—yes—and tears stole
down his cheeks, I am certain. Without
pausing to consider whether I did right OF
wrong, I stepped across the room, and sitting
down beside him laid my hand gently on his
arm. “My friend,' I said, ‘forgive me if I
beseech you to take comfort and consolation
from the lips of an old man. I will not
preach what I have not practised, indeed.
Whatever be your grief, be of a good heart—
CHARLES DICKENS. 23
be of a good heart, pray.’ “I see that you
speak earnestly,” he replied, ‘and kindly
I am sure, but— I nodded my head to show
that I understood what he would say, for I
had already gathered from a certain fixed
expression in his face and from the atten-
tion with which he watched me while I
spoke, that his sense of hearing was de-
stroyed. “There should be a free-masonry
between us,’ said I, pointing from himself
to me to explain my meaning—“if not
in our grey hairs, at least in our mis-
fortunes. You see that I am but a poor
cripple.' I have never felt so happy under
my affliction since the trying moment of
my first becoming conscious of it, as when
he took my hand in his with a smile that
has lighted my path in life from that day,
and we sat down side by side. This was the
beginning of my friendship with the deaf
gentleman, and when was ever the slight and
easy service of a kind word in season, repaid
24 IMMORTELLES FROM
by such attachment and devotion as he has
shown to me!”
Thou kind and pious soul, Old Hum-
phrey ! Blest be thy confidence in thy
fellows Whatever may be urged in favour
of a reserved disposition, as being from a
modest diffidence, I am still inclined to think
it a very distant relation to that same
modesty, and in its complexion much more
resembling ungenerous, suspicious fear. If
every member of society were possessed of a
reserved disposition, where would all that
good that has been done from open-hearted
sympathy in each other's joys and sorrows
be left 1. Oh, how truly distressing it is to
see dwellers on this same troubled earth, and
inheritors of that same kingdom of heaven,
approaching each other in the studied for-
mality of polite common-place, where each
heart, perhaps, would feel relieved by the
free disclosure of that which really occupies
CHARLES DICKENS. 25
it. What folly to suppose life long enough
to be trifled and frittered away in insincerity.
Even if we happen to rank among the most
worldly-minded there is a power of sympathy
within us; and Surely we have some hope,
some wish, ungratified, some care that another
may by possibility remove, and thus our
tenderness may be returned with usury while
we lend a hand as well to lighten the burden
of another. And what has given poor mor-
tals the idea that it is in any creature's power
to hide its heart for ever? Will not every
thought one day be revealed, when white-
robed angels will give ear, as well, and pity
the poor heart that has refused sympathy so
long from those created to bestow it, and has
not given any ? Look at the benefactors of
mankind, and see how rarely is the reserved
disposition found among them; when it is
found among them it is but the earthly taint
that clings to the best of mortal excellencies.
Go forward, thou kind heart, brave in thine
26 IMMORTELLES FROM
own true-heartedness; the Sneer of the
worldly-wise ones will cover them with
shame one day ! Go forward, telling of all
thy purposes of good; of thy confidence in all
—of thy love to all—of thy faith in all—of
thy hopeswarm and bright (from thy truthful
heart) for all—and rich will be thy reward;
few will be thy disappointments compared
with the good thou wilt do. Open thine
heart wit 2 to receive the blessing, for I tell
thee the windows of heaven are open to give
it thee, and thy God tells thee that thy faith
shall conquer the world!
- —sº-
“That constant pacing to and fro, that
never-ending restlessness, that incessant tread
of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and
glossy—is it not a wonder how the dwellers
in narrow ways can bear to hear it? Think
of a sick man in such a place as St. Martin’s-
court, listening to the footsteps, and in the
midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite
CHARLES DICKENS. 27
himself (as though it were a task he must
perform) to detect the child’s step from the
man's, the slipshod beggar from the booted
exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the
dull heel of the sauntering out-cast from the
quick tread of the expectant pleasure seeker—
think of the hum and noise being always
present to his senses, and of the stream of
life that will not stop, pouring on, on, On,
through all his restless dreams, as if he were
condemned to be dead but conscious, in a
noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for
centuries to come. --
“Then the crowds for ever passing and
repassing on the bridges (on those that are
free of toll at least), where many stop on fine
evenings looking listlessly down upon the
waters with a vague idea that bye and bye
it runs between green banks, which grow
wider and wider until at last it joins the
broad vast sea—where some halt to rest from
heavy loads, and think, as they look over the
28 IMMORTELLES FROM
parapet, that to smoke and lounge away one's
life, and lie sleeping in the Sun upon hot
tarpaulin in a dull and sluggish barge, must
be happiness unalloyed—and where some,
and a very different class, pause with heavier
loads than they, remembering to have heard
or read in some old time, that drowning was
not a hard death, but of all means of suicide
the easiest and best,-
‘Thinking (poor souls) to mend themselves
By boldly ventºring on a world unknown
And plunging headlong in the dark?
'Tis mad;
No frenzy half so desperate as this:
Those only are the brave who keep
Their ground,
And keep it to the last.’
“At sunrise, too, in the spring or summer,
when the fragrance of sweet flowers in the
air, overpowering even the unwholesome
steam of last night's debauchery and driving
the dusky thrush, whose cage has hung out-
CHARLES DICKENS. 29
side a garret window all night, half mad with
joy 1 Poor bird—the only neighbouring
thing at all akin to the other little captives,
Some of whom, shrinking from the hot hands
of drunken purchasers, lie drooping on the
path already, while others, saddened by close
contact, await the time when they shall be
watered and freshened up to please more
Sober company, and make old clerks who pass
them on their road to business wonder what
has filled their breasts with visions of the
country.”
No fertility of invention could give the
home-born pleasure to many a pale trade-
bound dweller in a stifling wilderness of
bricks and mortar that these pure breathings
of nature are calculated to bestow. The
uncaged thrush, rejoicing in its native wood-
lands, whose full gutterals are moistened in
clearest brooks, utters not more freshly its
appeal to the happy children of the spring.
30 IMMORTELLES FROM
And thou poor “dusky thrush,” trilling thy
notes amidst the choking chimneys of ten
thousand fires, thou dost but emulate the
sweet appeal of Truth and Sincerity amid
the moral smokes that darken counsel among
men. How like the tender mercies of our
author's gifted mind to spend a pitying
thought even on these little ones of low
estate, these the “feathered captives,” who
“shrinking from the hot hands of drunken
purchasers, lie drooping on his path.” Oh,
who will not remember that in this Dickens
does but follow his blessed Master, whose assu-
rance stands that not a sparrow falleth to the
ground unheeded by its great Creator.
“The looker-on was a round, red-faced,
sturdy yeoman, with a double chin, and a
voice husky with good living, good sleeping,
good humour, and good health. He was
past the prime of life, but “Father Time’
is not always a hard parent, and though he
CHARLES DICKENS. 31
tarries for none of his children, often lays his
hand lighter upon those who have used him
well, making them old men and women inex-
orably enough, but leaving their hearts and
spirits young and in full vigour. With such
people the grey head is but the impression of
the old fellow’s hand in giving them his
blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the
quiet calendar of a well-spent life.”
This description of “old Warden” persuades
us that no class or condition of life excludes
the personification of the kindly social spirit.
Dickens's “old Warden” is, in his way, as
pleasant a variety of mankind as the classical
Atticus himself. So warm a heart and calm
a temper are enough to propitiate the
favour of “Old Time,” especially as he gets
a thank-offering at many a hand, for the sake
of such men, that may owe him a grudge for a
less merciful conduct to themselves. Gabriel
Warden would not, we are sure, suffer dis-
32 IMMORTELLES FROM
composure to damp his good-humoured
sympathy in the passing occurrences of a
friend's life, nor prevent his trying to in-
spire them, amidst their greatest trials, with
life and courage. And who does not know
that “a soul thus supported out-does itself,
whereas if it be unexpectedly deprived of
these succours, it droops and languishes.”
“Varden,” Dickens says, “only looked more
jolly and more radiant after every struggle,”
and “troubled his peace of mind no more
than if he had been a straw upon the water's
surface.” -
Warden like Atticus had friends of all
complexions of mind and features of cha-
racter. One tells him “that without him
he should have lacked his right hand; for
although he was an older man than he,
nothing could conquer him.” The cheeriest,
stoutest hearted fellow in the world: that he
had a right to be so—“a better creature
never lived :” he reaps what he has sown.
CHARLES DICKENS. 33
Besides to such as these Gabriel Varden
had been a trusty friend and confidant to
many whom Time had changed, and whom
the secret undermining havoc of care and
suffering had altered even more than he.
Still Warden changed not with every friend
whose condition varied from his, but stood
his ground to support them still, all the
better, perhaps, for this variance; as if he
had been philosopher enough to know that a
likeness of inclination in every particular is
not so requisite to form a benevolence in two
minds towards each other, as it is generally
imagined; for, as Addison tells us, “we
shall find some of the firmest friendships to
have been contracted between persons of
different humours; the mind being often
pleased with those perfections which are new
to it, and which it does not find among its
own accomplishments.”
The History of “David Copperfield” is not
ID
34 IMMORTELLES FROM
very episodical, and it is so very full of inci-
dent that one seems quite impatient of digres-
sion, lest we should find the poor little
friendless Hero in some worse predicament
when we return from our wanderings ; but
nothing is over-strained or unnatural. Few
people have encountered just such a dark
unmitigatedly evil lot as poor “Oliver
Twist,” we may hope ; but I am inclined to
think hundreds of orphans undergo many of t
the hardships of “David Copperfield: ” and
I am sure Mr. Dickens's name ought to
stand as a Star for ever in the firmament
of such as have once experienced the scanty
cheer of the “Orphan's home !” I think it
was Charles Lamb who wrote an estimable
poem in behalf of an orphan shepherd lad,
“Who watched a rigid master's sheep,
And many a night was heard to sigh,
And many a day was seen to weepſ"
But, oh, were such gentle chroniclers always
at hand, they might note rivers that early
CHARLES DICKENS. 35
watered the now, perchance, deepened furrows
of the best and noblest men we have! But
in the absence of such kindly-commissioned
spirits as those of Dickens (par excellence)
and Lamb, may not the stricken orphan say
“Lord put thou my tears into thy bottle.”
And stout must be the heart of the debased
man or insensate woman who could heedlessly
offend one of these little ones; for better
for him, or her, shall it be in the day of the
great account, that a mill-stone had been
hanged about his neck, and he had been
cast into the Sea.
The only thing we really do not find in
every-day matter-of-fact orphan-life is a
“Betsy Trotwood.” Would that every stern
cliff beetled over the dwelling-place of one,
even if their innocent wrath were as per-
petually stirred up by the somewhat hypo-
thetical “Donkey Boys upon the Green.”
She is the best character in the whole book,
and most true to (eccentric) life, but we
D 2
36 IMMORTELLES FROM
dare not suppose such an one often terminates
the journey of other than the poetical orphan
boy I this being a sketch of the sunny side,
not bleak, sterile reality, truly
Let us note a few of “Betsy Trotwood’s”
features, and hear a little of her conversation;
for, from it we may learn something. David
begins after some rather melancholy “con-
templation of the fire.”
“Don’t you think, aunt, that you could
advise and counsel Dora a little, for our
mutual advantage, now and then?”
“Trot,” returned my aunt, with some emo-
tion, “no l—Don’t ask me such a thing ! »
“Her tone was so very earnest that I raised
my eyes in surprise.
“I look back on my life, child,” said my
aunt, “and think of some who are in their
graves, with whom I might have been on
kinder terms. If I judged harshly of other
people's mistakes in marriage, it may have
CHARLES DICKENS. 37
been because I had bitter reason to judge
harshly of my own. Let that pass. I have
been a grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of
Woman, a good many years. I am still, and
I always shall be. But you and I have done
one another some good, Trot, at all events, you
have done me good, my dear; and division
must notcome betweenus atthis time of day.”
“Division between us /* cried I.
“Child, child !” said my aunt, smoothing
her dress, “how soon it might come between
us, or how unhappy I might make our Little
Blossom if I meddled in anything, a prophet
couldn’t say. I want our pet to like me, and
be gay as a Butterfly. Remember your own
home in that second marriage; and never
do both me and her the injury you have
hinted at l”
“I comprehended, at once, that my aunt
was right; and I comprehended the fullextent
of her generous feelings toward my dear wife.
“These are early days, Trot,” she pur-
38 IMMORTELLES FROM
sued, “and Rome was not built in a day,
nor in a year. You have chosen freely for
yourself;” a cloud passed over her face
for a moment, I thought; “and you have
chosen a very pretty and very affectionate
creature. It will be your duty, and it
will be your pleasure too—of course I
know that ; I am not delivering a lecture
—to estimate her (as you chose her) by
the qualities she has, and not by the qualities
she may not have. The latter you must
develop in her if you can. And if you cannot,
child,” here my aunt rubbed her nose, “you
must just accustom yourself to do without
'em. But remember, my dear, your future
is between you two. No one can assist you;
You are to work it out for yourselves. This
is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless you
both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood
you are!”
“ My aunt said this in a sprightly way,
and gave me a Kiss to ratify the blessing.
CHARLES DICKENS. 39
“Now,” said she, “light my little lantern,
and see me into my band-box by the garden
path;” for there was a communication be-
tween our cottages in that direction. “Give
Betsy Trotwood's love to Blossom, when
you come back; and whatever you do, Trot,
never dream of setting Betsy up as a scare-
crow, for if I ever saw her in the glass, she's
quite grim enough and gaunt enough in her
private capacity!” With this my aunt tied
her head up in a handkerchief, with which
she was accustomed to make a bundle of it
on such occasions; and I escorted her home.
As she stood in the garden, holding up her
little lantern to light me back, I thought her
observation of me had an anxious air again ;
but I was too much occupied in pondering
on what she had said, and too much im-
pressed—for the first time, in reality—by
the conviction, that Dora and I had indeed
to work out our future for ourselves, and
that no one could assist us, to take much
notice of it.”
40 IMMORTELLES FROM
Poor little weary-winged, sacrificial dove
(from the “old Fowler’s” bow she had
“ ta'en a hurt.”)—amiable, ignorant, pretty
little Dora, stealing down with the slippers
to cry her child tears upon the shoulder of
her faithful Boy, is a touching, innocent
picture, but I think most people (admirers
and all) misunderstand the little weakling
altogether until the winding up of her story,
when, as in our Author's pretty metaphor,
the “Poor little Blossom withered in its
bloom upon the Tree l’” and died 1
Betsy Trotwood is a far more intelligent
and intelligible character to converse upon,
though it is possible there may be fifty Doras
to one Betsy Trotwood in the world;—but
One Word more upon the married life of this
little pet, remarking that, in that “vast
fermenting mass” we call society, how many
selfish, wearisome, weak women will fancy
themselves like “Dora” (innocent and Pretty)
because they are as inefficient; but it surely
CHARLES DICKENS. 41
is a great mistake in their conception of the
sort of character that that poor little pitiable
girl was intended to represent. Had every
girl as much guileless humility, also, it is
more than probable that such a husband as
David Copperfield is made to make would be
amply contented with them, be their early
management of a household even as ineffi-
cient—
“For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.”
Many people laud Betsy Trotwood simply
because she has the good sense to hold her
peace at a critical moment for the honour of
David and his little “child wife,” having
perhaps fatally experienced that an “open
rebuke is not always better than secret Love,”
though Solomon affirms it to be so; but this
is not half her merit. The candour of true
self-knowledge guides her tongue, and shapes -
her counsel with far more wisdom and grace
than all the subtlety of social diplomacy. She
42 IMMORTELLES FROM
gives him heart and hope, too, in the only
way for an uninspired mortal to do under
such a dilemma. To make head against
difficulties in their high tide was a task, in-
deed, for one poor mortal man She would
vainly attempt to teach by trite precept what
none but unerring wisdom has resources for;
but she judged that her protegée David had
a large heart and a strong heart, and to this
she appeals, wisely cherishing rather than
Sapping the root of his happiness, and aiding,
under a temporary flintness, what, under
divine control, was to be the indestructible
energy of lifel What could she give him in
return for a wasted, heedlessly spilled drop
of this golden oil? No after efforts could
lighten his burden, if, because his “chariot
wheels dragged heavily for a short space,”
she had only aided him to take the wheels off
from the cumbrous machine for ever. She
might well say a “Prophet could not say
how soon she might do this.”
CHARLES DICKENS. 43
Cannot each of us say with our Master
Poet, that “in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
of Saucy and audacious eloquence:
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity,
In least, speak most, to my capacity.”
—sº-
THE CHANCERY COURT.—(From BLEAK House.)
“We walked down to Westminster where
the Court was then sitting.
* # % # º: #
“When we came to the Court, there was
the Lord Chancellor—the same I had seen in
his private room in Lincoln's Inn—sitting, in
great state and gravity, on the bench ; with the
mace and seals on a red table below him, and
an immense flat nosegay, like a little garden,
which scented the whole Court. Below the
table, again, was a long row of solicitors, with
bundles of papers on the matting at their feet;
and then there were the gentlemen of the bar
44 IMMORTELLES FROM
in wigs and gowns—some awake and some
asleep, and one talking, and nobody paying
much attention to what he said. The Lord
Chancellor leaned back in his very easy chair,
with his elbow on the cushioned arm, and his
forehead resting on his hand; some of those
who were present, dozed; some read the news-
papers; some walked about, or whispered in
groups; all seemed perfectly at their ease, by
no means in a hurry, very unconcerned, and
extremely comfortable. To see everything
going on so smoothly, and to think of the
roughness of the suitors' lives and deaths; to
see all that full dress and ceremony, and to
think of the waste, and want, and beggared
misery it represented; to consider that, while
the sickness of hope deferred was raging in
so many hearts, this polite show went calmly
on from day to day, and year to year, in such
good order and composure; to behold the
Lord Chancellor, and the whole army of
practitioners under him, looking at one
CHARLES DICKENS. 45
another and at the spectators, as if nobody
had ever heard that all over England the
name in which they were assembled was a
bitter jest; was held in universal horror,
contempt, and indignation; was known for
something so flagrant and bad, that little
short of a miracle could bring any good out
of it to any one: this was so curious and self-
contradictory to me, who had no experience
of it, that it was at first incredible, and I
could not comprehend it. I sat where
Richard put me, and tried to listen, and
looked about me; but there seemed to be no
reality in the whole scene, except poor little
Miss Flite, the mad woman, standing on the
bench, and nodding at it.”
IHad the little human perfectionist Esther
been commenting upon and drawing together
the mass of society generally under its great
Lord Chancellor, she could not have told the
wondrous story better—with its big wigs, its
46 IMMORTELIES FROM
little wigs, its gowns and garniture, its whole
array of practitioners and spectators, its buzz
and hollow laugh, its heaps and piles, and
bags full of things for the burning, its dread-
ful bill of costs at last handed over to every
suitor whether successful or otherwise, I
think it would have been a miracle of de-
scription. The young world following and
gliding successively into shade upon the old
false system—trusting to it, hoping in its
fallacies, living for it, being at last dis-
appointed in it with all its promises, grave or
gay duped of inheritance, cheated of its life
here as of that hereafter—she could not better
have described its solemn mockeries, its
serious jests, its sickness of hopes deferred,
its dress and ceremony, its waste and want,
its polite show, its cruel contempt, its smooth
indifference of suffering, its state and gravity.
But the magician under whose wand Esther
moves had not any such intention, and the
great scandal of the high Court of Chancery
CHARLES DICKENS. 47
is his vocation. Well, we may have a
mission, too, in spite of Mr. Jellyby, to
remind our Juniors, while they so deeply
mourn the victims of a Jarndice versus Jarn-
dice suit, a Grindley, or a poor Miss Flite, it
is possible we are tempted to forget the High
Court of Certainty at which we must appear,
haply never having yet tried the power of
the Greatest Advocate that suitor ever had,
though if we “agree not with our adversary
quickly whiles we are in the way he will
deliver us to the Judge and the Judge will
deliver us to the officer and we shall be cast
into prison.”
—º-
A Fog IN LONDON.
“Implacable November weather. As
much mud in the streets, as if the waters
had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet
a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, Wad-
dling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-
48 IMMORTELLES FROM
hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-
pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes
of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes
—gone into mourning, one might imagine,
for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistin-
guishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;
splashed to their very blinkers. Foot pas-
sengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in
a general infection of ill-temper, and losing
their foot-hold at street corners, where tens
of thousands of other foot passengers have
been slipping and sliding since the day
broke (if the day ever broke), adding new
deposits to the crust upon crust of mud,
sticking at those points tenaciously to the
pavement, and accumulating at compound
interest. Fogeverywhere. Fog up the river,
where it flows among green aits and mea-
dows; fog down the river, where it rolls
defiled among the tiers of shipping and the
waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty)
city. Fog on the Essex marshes; fog on the
CHARLES DICKENS. 49
Rentish heights; fog creeping into the
cabooses of collier brigs; fog lying out on
the yards, and hovering in the rigging of
great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of
barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners,
wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog
in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of
the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin;
fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over
the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with
fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers
places in the streets, much as the Sun may,
from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the
shops lighted two hours before their time—
as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard
and unwilling look.”
50 IMMORTELLES FROM
If any thing could be deeper and denser .
than a London fog, it is only certainly the
obscurity which settles and stagnates on the
mind; from dyed-in prejudice and inherited
sophistications, resulting in second-hand,
artificial, spiritless forms, tastes, and ideas,
such as ever since the fall of man have kept
up a deadly struggle with every noble
peculiarity of primitive growth (not medi-
aeval); old as the hills, old as the first
stamp of God upon created form, yet fresh
and fruitful as the earliest blossom that ever
gladdened the heart of a new earth when
“God saw that it was good.” There is
nothing so like a fog as prejudice—wilful
blindness to the truth, as the Smothering in-
fluence of selfish policy and crafty “medio-
crity,” which loves the darkness (or the fog)
rather than the light, because its deeds are
evil. Hence have we cramping, narrowing,
moral machines of all possible kinds to keep
the mental stature at a medium pointſ
CHARLES DICKENS. 51
Hence are rules made for limits to the ever-
enlarging, growing heart of man so tight and
pent, that if they ever swell unmeasuredly
they burst, and if they gradually increase
in size they throb but to animate an unwieldy
monstrocity; something less than a philoso-
pher or poet, and too great and cumbrous
for a common business man.
One is struck occasionally with the
singular manner in which really benevolent
persons' views have been carried out,
in infant institutions particularly:—what
masses of masonry sometimes enclose the
little fleshy hearts | how strange it seems
to build such frightful, gloomy, strong
houses to lodge the frail infants, found house-
less, and kindly rescued from death in every
shape (but living death) upon doorsteps, in
dens and holes of darkness, wickedness, and
misery of every kind;—but if so much is
done, and they are so considerately sent into
the country away from the fermenting Town,
- E 2
52 IMMORTELLES FROM
why be so grudging of the light and sun-
shine? “God is light, and in him is no
darkness at all!” We glance but at His
perfections, we cannot compare His attributes
to the mere material light admitted through
a window; but if we open the narrow portals
of our own hearts to receive His fulness we
shall hear the cry of the young plants long-
ing for the natural sunshine, as well as
provide food, clothing, medicine, and in-
struction. What know these young ones
of incense-breathing morn, sweet meadow
hay, the flowery dell, and upland breeze,
in that Bleak House upon the Chalk?
Though (I ween 'tis very healthy) doubt-
less it was kindly intended to keep them
safe and tight against all human contamina-
tion; and if their natural parents had them
still, it is possible the fumes of gin and filth
would have been no good exchange for what
they now respire; but still some kindly
beings have higher aims yet, and by
CHARLES DICE ENS. 53
degrees are carrying them out. Then
“happy they the happiest of their kind, those
other men, whom the Spirit from on high
has visited—whose eyes have been anointed
with eye-salve, that they may see, and who
do see things invisible to flesh and blood.”
They see that God is light, and to that
light the young plants should turn their
leaves, their blossoms, their branches, with
insatiate desire for “more light, more light !”
They cannot think that they can have
enough of light; not but the (moral) light
by which they live, like the natural light,
bursts not upon them in one sudden, unen-
durable blaze, but it goes on increasing from
the morning twilight to the perfect day, and
when at last the noon of such light as they
can in this life bear is reached, they know
that it is but as the morning twilight of the
world to come. Under this view they will still,
even in their mostillumined condition, be often
heard to cry with them, in the poet's words—
54 IMMORTELLES FROM
“How long ! how long shall these benighted eyes
Languish in shades, like feeble flies
Expecting spring? How long shall darkness soil
The face of earth, and thus beguile
our souls of springful action? When, when
Will day begin to dawn?” QUARLES.
THE WATCHING STARS.
“The ancient stars look coldly down
On man, the creation of a day;
They lived before him, and live on
Till his remembrance pass away.”
Lady Dedlock and Tulkinghorn, the
lawyer, continued their watchful hold upon
each other.
From BLEAK House.
“Their need for watching each other
should be over now, but they did do it all
this time, and the stars watch them both
through the open window. Away in the
moonlight lie the woodlandfields at rest, and
the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one.
CHARLES DICKENS. 55
The narrow one ! Where are the digger
and the spade, this peaceful night, destined
to add the last great secret to the many
Secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence? Is
the man born yet, is the spade wrought
yet? Curious questions to consider, more
curious perhaps not to consider under the
watching stars upon a summer night.”
What is the watchful gaze of years of
earth-born hate in intensity to the faithful
steadfast constancy of one kindly blinking
star in the midst of the dark night. So like
the loving watcher by the “bed of parting
life I’’ closing its eyelids, or setting but when
the “sun of righteousness,” likened to the
sun of the morning, has risen, and the glooms
of night are past for evermore.
So, also, the poet Waughan speaks:—
“Stars are of mighty use; the night
Is dark and long;
The road foul, and where one goes right,
Six may go wrong.
56 IMMORTELLES FROM
One twinkling ray
Shot o'er some cloud,
May clear much way,
And guide a crowd
God's saints are shining lights: who stays
Here long, must pass
O'er dark hills, swift streams, and steep ways,
As Smooth as glass,
But these all might,
Like candles, shed
Their beams, and light
Us into bed.
They are, indeed, our Pillar—fires
Seen as we go;
They are that City's shining Spires
We travel to :
A sword-like gleam
Kept man, for sin
First out, this beam
Will gleam him in.”
When we think we have an enemy at
work we are apt to watch their every action
as though their enmity to ourselves had
invested them with omniscience. Fear is
CHARLES DICKENS. 57
the passion of our minds, and fear hath
torment. How well it is for us to look off
from such poor erring mortals and remember
that at least our mortal foe has not equal
power to the great arch enemy of man, and
though Satan may be cognisant of the past and
present, he knows not of the future / That
Secret is still secure within the bosom of our
God |
—Q–-
LADY DEDLOCK.—(From BLEAK HousE.)
“In truth she is not a hard lady naturally;
and the time has been when the sight of the
venerable figure sueing her with such strong
earnestness would have moved her to great
compassion. But, so long accustomed to
suppress emotion and keep down reality; SO
long schooled, for her own purposes, in that
destructive school which shuts up the natural
feelings of the heart like flies in amber, and
spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the
good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling,
58 IMMORTELLES FROM
the sensible and the senseless; she has sub-
dued even her wonder until now.”
What a mistake does the Jesuit of society
make, when, like a traitor to human nature,
he bids the young not habitually to look
up to the face of his fellow men. Look
not up, says that dark and fearful being
whose breath is racks and screws—whose
heaven is unlimited dominion—Look not
up higher than midway his breast, smooth
those wrinkles from thy brow and round
about thy nose, for they speak of emo-
tion within, of sympathy for things that
you must never feel. Great Spirit of Truth !
is it thus thy votaries are to be misled !
Where would be then the image of our
Maker, where the mirror of the heart |
Many want natural courage to think, as
well as moral stamina, and, as some one justly
says, every step that is taken towards the
extinction of prejudice is attended with the
CHARLES DICKENS. 59
danger of an opposite excess, but it is no less
clearly our duty to advance against preju-
dices; and they deserve the highest praise
who unite the greatest steadiness with the
greatest precaution.
-º-
THE EXIT OF AN OUTCAST.—(From BLEAK House.)
Poor dying Jo; who knows “not so much
as one short prayer,” is taught as follows, by
Mr. Woodcourt (in the article of Death), the
“Lord's Prayer:”—what could he better
teach him 2
“It’s turned very dark, sir. (Jo says.) Is
there any light coming?”
“It is coming fast, Jo.”
“Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces,
and the rugged road is very near its end.”
“Jo, my poor fellow !”
“I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm
a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of
your hand.”
60 IMMORTELLES FROM
“Jo, can you say what I say?”
“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I
knows it's good.”
“OUR FATHER,”
“Our Father!—yes, that's wery good, sir.”
“WHICH ART IN HEAVEN,”
“Art in Heaven—isthelighta-comin, sir?”
“It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY
NAME l’’ -
“Hallowed be—thy—”
“The light is come upon the dark be-
nighted way. Dead
“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and
gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and
Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead,
men and women, born with Heavenly com-
passion in your hearts. And dying thus
around us, every day !”
Thus far we read Charles Dickens for our
edification, but lest we mistake the “way,
the truth, and the light,” let us add to his
CHARLES DICKENS. 61
application of the prayer of our Lord—one
inspired by his spirit.
“May the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ,
the love of God, and the fellowship of the
Holy Ghost be with us.”
DESCRIPTION OF A QUIET NIGHT. BY DICKENS.
“When the moon shines very brilliantly,
a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from
her that influence even crowded places full
of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty
high roads and on hill-summits, whence a
wide expanse of country may be seen in
repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away
into a fringe of trees against the sky, with
the gay ghost of a bloom upon them ; not
only is it a still night in gardens and in woods,
and on the rivér where the water-meadows
are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles
on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs,
and whispering rushes; not only does the
62 IMMORTELLES FROM
stillness attend it as it flows where houses
cluster thick, where many bridges are re-
flected in it, where wharves and shipping
make it black and awful, where it winds from
these disfigurements through marshes whose
grim beacons stand like skeletons washed
ashore, where it expands through the bolder
regions of rising grounds, rich in corn-field
wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles
with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a
still night on the deep, and on the shore
where the watcher stands to see the ship
with her spread wings cross the path of light
that appears to be presented to only him;
but even on this stranger's wilderness of
London there is some rest. Its steeples and
towers, and its one great dome, grow more
ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their
grossness, in the pale effulgence; the noises
that arise from the streets are fewer and are
softened, and the footsteps on the pavements
pass more tranquilly away.”
CHARLES DICKENS. 63
Oh, sweet, pale moon! oh, rare pale
moon! sun-light mellowed sunlight so-
bered soft, soothing draught, poured from
the fair queen's raised braker, upon the
weary, dreaming earth, down-shooting into
each deep, silent valley, through each secret
glade, each tangled wood-path. It lies upon
the hill, and it mingles its liquid light with
the peaceful waters. In the mild moon-beam
comes forth the fox-cub to drink, and the
timid fawn and wild leveret now come
hither to nip the dewy thyme, or slake in the
brook their thirst. Peace seems to reign on
earth, while the spirit of the poet, unspent
by business and its endless cares, rides in its
chariot of the clouds to and fro over the
earth—great as the commissioned spirit of
the storm, and free as the chartered winds.
But forth too creeps every foul and noisome
thing—forth goes the grim beast of prey to
seek his victim, and more cruel than he,
forth steps the whisperer of falsehood to tell
64 IMMORTELLES FROM
the tale of slander—the lier in wait for
blood goes forth, he has light enough, per-
chance, to do the foul deed on which he is
intent, but less of that which maketh mani-
festis on him than would set him forth to all
the world! The moon-beam sheds a
mellowed light, 'tis true, upon even the
narrow sheep-track upon the hill-side, and
casts a quivering ray upon the unquiet brake
and fern as well, but it shows not up the
the fowler's hidden snare that entangles the
unwary ones: we need, indeed, a surer,
keener light upon the way that leads us to
the “Lamb of God that taketh away the
sins of the world,” than that of the moon-
beams of poesy, or the dark-lantern-like
lights of the middle ages, to discern the
straight and narrow way which the written
word makes out for us to tread. And what
is it that we do when in the moral world we
prefer the soft moon-beam to the full flood of
light, poured forth from the bosom of God—
CHARLES DICKENS. - 65
the sun of light and life; is it not the
poetry in his works that subdues us | bow
we not to the Queen of Heaven (the moon
walking in her brightness) rather than
to Him—the Eternal who sitteth in the
Heavens refusing to share his dignity or
delegate his power to any creature.
—0–
“DEw” of THE MORNING !—(From BLEAK House.)
“We turned into the Park. The air was
bright and dewy, and the sky without a
cloud. The birds sang delightfully; the
sparkles in the fern, the grass, and trees,
were exquisite to see; the richness of the
woods seemed to have increased twenty-fold
since yesterday, as if, in the still night
when they had looked so massively hushed
in sleep, Nature, through all the minute de-
tails of every wonderful leaf, had been more
wakeful than usual for the glory of that day.
“This is a lovely place,” said Richard,
F
66 IMMORTELLES FROM
looking round. “None of the jar and dis-
cords of law-suits here !”
But Esther adds, “There was other trouble
here !” And where was trouble not, Esther?
we may reply. Yet still come forth ! The
breath of early morning will give tone and
strength to the heart heavily laden, and free
fresh thoughts to chase despair—with pur-
poses and hopes far sweeter than the sweetest
and softest dreams of unbroken mid-day
slumbers. Then comes Memory ! not
flinging the gloom of yesternight on the
white day, but robed in softest light of orient
State.
Then she leads by the hand her infant
Hope! and our ‘spirit's keener eyes can see
beyond our life's distress.” No mist of earth
or faintness of obscure night will hinder the
‘lordly music' flowing into our hearts from
the new hum of life at the prime of the
opening day.
CHARLES I)ICKENS. 67
THE PROUD BARONET IN HIS HUMILLATION.—
(From BLEAK House.)
“Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the
same attitude as though he were still listen-
ing, and his attention were still occupied.
At length he gazes round the empty room,
and finding it deserted, rises unsteadily to
his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a
few steps, supporting himself by the table.
Then he stops; and, with more of those inar-
ticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems
to stare at something.
“Heaven knows what he sees. The green,
green woods of Chesney Wold, the noble
house, the pictures of his forefathers,
strangers defacing them, officers of police
coarsely handling his most precious heir-
looms, thousands of fingers pointing at him,
thousands of faces Sneering at him. But if
such shadows flit before him to his bewilder-
ment, there is one other shadow which he can
name with something like distinctness even
F 2
68 IMMORTELLES FROM
yet, and to which alone he addresses his
tearing of his white hair, and his extended
3.TIſlS.
“It is she, in association with whom,
saving that she has been for years a main
fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he
has never had a selfish thought. It is she
whom he has loved, admired, honoured, and
set up for the world to respect. It is she
who, at the core of all the constrained for-
malities and conventionalities of his life, has
been a stock of living tenderness and love,
susceptible as nothing else is of being struck
with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost
to the exclusion of himself; and cannot bear
to look upon her cast down from the high
place she has graced so well. And, even to
the point of his sinking on the ground,
oblivious of his suffering, he can pronounce
her name with something like distinctness in
the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a
tone of mourning and compassion rather than
reproach.”
CHARLES DICKENS. 69
In gazing around upon the portraits on
the walls of “Chesney Wold,” none exceed
in stateliness and dignity this last one of
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. In his
Sad and low estate it is one above reproach
—it is the honourable man dishonoured, not
made dishonourable. We can hear him
Say—
“My lady is too high in position, too
handsome, too accomplished, too superior in
most respects to the best of those by whom
she is surrounded, not to have her enemies
and traducers, I dare say. Let it be known
to them, as I make it known to you, that
being of Sound mind, memory, and under-
standing, I revoke no disposition I have
made in her favour. I abridge nothing I
have ever bestowed upon her. I am on
unaltered terms with her, and I recall—
having the full power to do it, if I were
so disposed, as you see—no act I have done
for her advantage and happiness.
70 IMMORTELLES FROM
“His formal array of words might have at
any other time, as it has often had, something
ludicrous in it; but at this time it is serious
and affecting. His noble earnestness, his
fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his gene-
rous conquest of his own wrong and his own
pride for her sake, are simply honourable,
manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can
be seen through the lustre of such qualities
in the commonest mechanic, nothing less
Worthy can be seen in the best-born gentle-
man. In such a light both aspire alike, both
rise alike, both children of the dust shine
equally.
“Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his
head back on his pillows, and closes his eyes.”
Let the Rich and great Man rejoice when
he is brought low; it is not even in the tide
of the full and weary sea in the depths of
its tranquillity, that we can see the marvels
of the great Deep of the Spirit's Life.
CHARLES DICKENS. 71
Tempest-tost we reel to and fro, and stagger
as a drunken man, and are at our wit’s end I
Then, as a good old bishop quaintly says,
We who see trouble cry every man to his
God, and Jonah that is fast asleep under the
hatches is awakened and chidden to his
prayers.
Some one else well says, Whether the
promise that all things shall work together
for good to those who love God is to be ac-
complished by perpetual sunshine or by
incessant storms, no one can anticipate in his
own case: Or, if any one is excepted, it must
be the Enthusiast, who might almost with
certainty calculate upon receiving a dis-
pensation, the very reverse of that which he
has fondly anticipated. He might thus
calculate, both because his expectations are
in themselves exorbitant, and because the
presumptuous temper from which they spring
loudly calls for the rebukes of Heaven.
72 IMMORTELLES FROM
A SKETCH OF THE DEDLOCK TOWN House.—
(From BLEAK House.)
“Impassive, as behoves its high breed-
ing, the Dedlock town-house stares at
the other houses in the street of dismal
grandeur, and gives no outward sign of
any thing going wrong within. Carriages
rattle, doors are battered at, the ‘world’ ex-
changes calls; ancient charmers with skeleton
throats, and peachy cheeks that have rather
ghastly bloom upon them seen by day-light,
when indeed these fascinating creatures look
like Death and the Lady fused together, dazzle
the eyes of men. Forth from thefrigid mews
come easily-swinging carriages guided by
short-legged coachmen in flaxen wigs, deep
sunk into downy hammer-cloths; and up
behind mount luscious Mercuries, bearing
sticks of state, and wearing cocked hats
broadwise: a spectacle for the Angels l’”
A spectacle for the Angels! How pungently
CHARLES DICKENS, 73
stinging is this drop of gall upon the view-
less arrow, this winged shaft of truth !
William Howitt gives a meaning to the
rattle of some of those downy easily swinging
carriages. The efforts of those “ancient
charmers,” also, which “Death and the
Lady” of Dickens may enhance. His are
valuable materials for thought on the subject
of that same polite society, whose habita-
tions, “stately and dull,” or shining and
brilliant, are, as occasion offers, so skilfully
pictured by our present social favourite.
Howitt says that the same poison infects all
English society belonging to the same classes.
They are (too truly) the pride of life and
the pride of the eye. They are that con-
tinual struggle for precedence, and those
jealousies which are generated by a false
social system. Every man lives now-a-days
for public observation. He builds his house,
and organises his establishment, so as to
strike public opinion as much as possible.
74 IMMORTELLES FROM
Every man is at strife with his neighbour in
the matter of worldly greatness. The conse-
quence is, that a false standard of estimation,
both of men and things, is established—show
is substituted for real happiness, and no man
is valued for his moral or intellectual qua-
lities so much as for the grandeur of his
house, the style of his equipage, the richness
of his dinner service, and the heavy extra-
vagance of his dinners. The result of this
is, that most are living to the full extent of
their means, many beyond it; and few are
finding, in the whole round of their life, that
alone which better and higher natures seek
—the interchange of heart and mind, which
yields present delight, creates permanent
attachments, and fills the memory with en-
during satisfaction. This, it must be con-
fessed, is a wretched state of things, but it is
one which every person conversant with
society knows to exist, and which intelligent
foreigners witness with unfeigned surprise.
CHARLES DICKENS. 75
“A TERRIBLE IMPRESSION.”—(LADY DEDLOCK.)
“She has thrown herself upon the floor,
and lies with her hair all wildly scattered,
and her face buried in the cushions of a
couch. She rises up, hurries to and fro,
flings herself down again, and rocks and
moans. The horror that is upon her is
unutterable. If she really were the mur-
deress, it could hardly be, for the moment,
more intense.
“For, as her murderous perspective, before
the doing of the deed, however subtle the
precautions for its commission, would have
been closed up by a gigantic dilation of the
hateful figure, prevented her from Seeing
any consequences beyond it; and as those
consequences would have rushed in, in an
unimagined flood, the moment the figure was
laid low—which always happens when a
murder is done; so, now she sees that when
he used to be on the watch before her, and
76 IMMORTELLES FROM
she used to think, “if some mortal stroke
would but fall on this old man and take him
out of my way !’ it was but wishing that all
he held against her in his hand might be
flung to the winds, and chance-sown in many
places. So, too, with the wicked relief she
has felt in his death. What was his death
but the key-stone of a gloomy arch removed,
and now the arch begins to fallin a thousand
fragments, each crushing and mangling piece-
meal!
“Thus a terrible impression steals upon
and overshadows her, that from this pursuer,
living or dead—obdurate and imperturbable
before her in his well-remembered shape, or
not more obdurate and imperturbable in his
coffin-bed,—there is no escape but in death.
Hunted, she flies. The complication of her
shame, her dread, remorse, and misery, over-
whelms her at its height; and even her
strength of self-reliance is overturned and
whirled away, like a leaf before a mighty
wind! » -
CHARLES DICKENS. 77
What time we have a sense of sin, and
none of expiation. Our life seemed then but
as an arrow flying in the dark
Dr. Johnson does not appear to have been
dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of
scorn, the love of love: as he is known to
have said, he did love a good hater l—
poor man, his old robust Tory prejudice and
superstitions led him into this blind-folded
warfare against the armies of the living God.
Those champions are the morning stars
that sing together, and the company of the
heavenly host making the realms of earth
and air ring with good will to men and
peace on earth.
Yet it seems a mean advantage to take of
a great man, to revive what might have been .
a thoughtless ebullition—who also had dark
and narrow times to live in, compared with
ours, and whose piety was genuinely honest
though not pure. His light being but as a
stray sunbeam shining into a room full of
78 IMMORTELLES FROM
book-dust and worm-fret and mould—while
his very love of hate seems entitled to
respect in comparison with the deadly drip
of the serpent-bane, the slow poisoning prin-
ciple of the day in which we live, spite of the
light—a day which knows not, in its wide
extremes of full delicious living and sordid
and secret misery, the angel of sympathy
ever crying with its exceeding bitter cry,
I know thy works, that thou art neither
cold nor hot—I would that thou Wert cold
or hot! To thee is it nothing, oh Day !
that that faithful and true witness is against
thee.
Some of those who are consummately
skilled in the knowledge of the human mind,
say that in our day a machinery is at work
to preclude all genuine feelings by exciting
the enthusiasm of the imagination I This
can only be accomplished by the direction of
a powerful agency; for the end proposed
will, as it is manifest, be best attained when
CHARLES DICKENS. 79
the emotions which spring from the imagina-
tion are carried up to the very nearest
possible resemblance to those belonging to
the human heart. Excitements are employed
in this grand machinery of delusion, which
quicken the physical sensibilities—nay, the
deepest sensibilities of the soul are still
addressed by dramatic and poetic images;
but with all an undisguised appeal to the
heart is unknown to the system.
—Q- .
“SNow HILL.”—(From NICHOLAs NICKLEBY.)
“Snow Hill! What kind of place can the
quiet town's-people who see the words em-
blazoned in all the legibility of gilt letters
and dark shading, on the north-country
coaches, take Snow Hill to be 2 All people
have some undefined and shadowy notion of
a place whose name is frequently before flheir
eyes or often in their ears, and what a vast
number of random ideas there must be
80 IMMORTELLES FROM .
perpetually floating about, regarding this
same Snow Hill. The name is such a good
one. Snow Hill–Snow Hill too coupled
with a Saracen's Head: picturing to us by a
double association of ideas, something stern
and rugged A bleak desolate tract of
country, open to piercing blasts and fierce
wintry storms—a dark, cold, gloomy heath,
lonely by day, and scarcely to be thought of
by honest folks at night—a place which
solitary wayfarers shun, and where desperate
robbers congregate—this, or something like
this, should be the prevalent notion of Snow
Hill in those remote and rustic parts, through
which the Saracen's Head, like some grim
apparition, rushes each day and night with
mysterious and ghost-like punctuality,
holding its swift and headlong course in all
weathers, and seeming to bid defiance to the
elements themselves.
“The reality is rather different, but by no
means to be despised, notwithstanding.
CHARLES DICKENS. 81
There, at the very core of London, in the
heart of its business and animation, in the
midst of a whirl of noise and motion:
stemming as it were the giant currents of
life that flow ceaselessly on from different
quarters and meet beneath its walls, stands
Newgate ; and in that crowded street on
which it frowns so darkly—within a few feet
of the squalid tottering houses—upon the
very spot on which the vendors of soup and
fish and damaged fruit are now plying their
trades—scores of human beings, amidst a
roar of sounds to which even the tumult of
a great city is as nothing, four, six, or eight
strong men at a time, have been hurried
violently and swiftly from the world, when
the scene has been rendered frightful with
excess of human life; when curious eyes
have glared from casement, and house-top,
and wall and pillar, and when, in the mass of
white and upturned faces, the dying wretch,
in his all-comprehensive look of agony, has
G.
82 IMMORTELLES FROM
met not one—not one—that bore the impress
of pity or compassion.”
“O matter and impertinency mixed
Reason in madness ll"
Viewing such a motley current of the
human stream as Dickens thus describes,
indifferent to that “all-comprehensive look
of agony,” upon the like of which God mani-
fest in the flesh, turned not away—seems more
of a dead entrancement—further from all
good, than the poor madman King, who in his
depth of earnestness exclaimed—Howl, howl,
howl, howl l—Oh ye men of stones, had I
your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that
heaven's vault should crack. More potently
than even this great poet, one has said, Lord,
rend thine heavens and come down l and
we must discern him walking upon this great
sea and current of life, commanding its heav-
ing billows and breaking up at will its secret
channels, its hidden deeps, before we under-
CHARLES DICKENS. 83
stand all mysteries and all knowledge.
Dickens has a spirit of description, and often
lays a ground plan upon which a still higher
Superstructure may be raised. It occurs in
the Bible that a man named Bezaleel was a
wise-hearted man, in whose heart the Lord
put wisdom to work for the rearing of the
sacred tent. It was he that had the cutting
of the stones, to set them, and the carving of
the wood, and to make any cunning work,
&c. And women that were wise-hearted did
spin with their hands, and wrought that
which they spun both of blue and of purple
and of scarlet, and of fine linen. Now shame
on those who would desecrate these most
holy symbols; but, oh, does it not teach that
mere earthly men may thus be employed
subserviently in the rearing up the temple
of the heart for God—in this wilderness life.
But, perhaps, We ought to feel a pious
jealousy lest the honour due to him who
worketh all in all should be in any degree
- G 2
84 - IMMORTELLES FROM
compromised. While we only desire in all
humility to discover and rejoice with all the
host of his earthly agents, and all the beau-
tiful orders of his heavenly servants—rising
and still rising towards perfection, seeing and
admiring, without hazard of forgetting Him
who is absolutely perfect, and who is the
only fountain and first cause of whatsoever is
excellent.
Bienrich Heine's opinion of London is,
I have seen the greatest wonder which the
world can show to the astonished spirit; I
have seen it and am still astonished; and
still there remains fixed in my memory the
stone forest of houses, and amid them the
rushing stream of faces of living men with
all their motley passions, all their terrible
impulses of love, of hunger, and of hatred—
I mean London. Send a philosopher to
London, but, for your life, no poet ! Senda
philosopher, them, and stand him at the corner
of Cheapside, where he will learn more than
CHARLES DICKENS. 85
from all the books of the last Leipsic Fair;
and as the billows of human life roar around
him, so will a sea of new thoughts rise before
him, and the Eternal Spirit which moves upon
the face of the waters will breathe upon him ;
the most hidden secret of human harmony
will suddenly be presented to him, he will
hear the pulse of the world beat audibly, and
see it visibly, for if London is the right hand
of the world—its active, mighty right hand—
then we may regard the route which leads
from the Exchange to Downing-street as the
world's pyloric artery. But never send a poet
to London This down-right earnestness of
all things—this colossal uniformity, this
machine-like movement, this troubled spirit
in pleasure itself, this exaggerated London
Smothers the imagination and rends the heart.
And should you ever send a German poet
thither—a dreamer, who stares at everything,
even a ragged beggar-woman, or the shining
Wares of a goldsmith's shop—why then, at
86 IMMORTELLES FROM
least, he willfind things going right badly with
him.–Pictures of Travels on the same Road.
What would the foregoing poet think of
the following man machine for Smothering
the imagination and rending the heart.
RALPH NICKLEBy—(with his niece Kate).
“It was a curious contrast to see how the
timid country girl shrunk through the crowd
that hurried up and down the streets, giving
way to the press of people, and clinging
closely to Ralph as though she feared to lose
him in the throng; and how the stern man
of business went doggedly on, elbowing the
passengers aside, and now and then ex-
changing a gruff salutation with some
passing acquaintance, who turned to look
back upon his pretty charge with looks ex-
pressive of surprise, and seemed to wonder
at the ill-assorted companionship. But it
would have been a stranger contrast still, to
have read the hearts that were beating side
CHARLES DICKENS. 87
by side; to have laid bare the gentle
innocence of the one, and the rugged villany
of the other; to have hung upon the guile-
less thoughts of the affectionate girl, and
been amazed that among all the wily plots
and calculations of the old man, there should
not be one word or figure denoting thought
of death or of the grave. But so it was;
and stranger still—though this is a thing of
everyday—the warm, young heart palpitated
with a thousand anxieties and apprehensions,
while that of the old man lay rusting in its
cell, beating only as a piece of cunning
mechanism, and yielding no one throb of hope,
e º º * }}
or fear, or love, or care, for any living thing.
The
most subtle thing in nature is acquisitive
How like men are to their gods !
selfishness.-It is a case-hardening develop-
ment of worldliness. – The tales of full
fraught Sorrow—of abundance—of poverty
or riches, of destitution, or of cloying,
88 IMMORTELLES FROM
cleaving, leaguing fraternization—all specu-
lations, or calculations, successes or disap-
pointments, go on to the same goal. They all
case and emboss the slave of the principle
tighter in his cerements of a parching annihi-
lation.—The word miser very feebly repre-
sents this type of living death.--This is the
blind canker worm that can feast in the rose
of health and beauty, and fatten amidst the
foulest species of corruption, but whose tooth
of gold presses the life out, grain by grain,
unfelt by the flesh that is nourishing it: and
its mental annihilation is ten times more
complete. But ours is more a day of greedy
gain, our high demon is mammon rampant;
but amidst our closer characters many a Ralph
Nickleby may be found, nursing himself in
his theories of acquisitiveness, and in his full
dominion over the souls and bodies of his poor
relations, or his victims, by their own act.—
It is an old saw, Riotous living begins
what the keen arrows of famine finish; but
CHARLES DICKENS. 89
it is no excuse, before the great Searcher of
hearts, that for this we are to shut up our
hearts and make the steep hill and narrow
path more difficult still. Our souls must go
naked and hungry to the throne of God, if we
would ever know fulness that will go to
satisfy for ever: and what man is so lean and
bare as one whom death has laid asleep by
the side of his only treasures!
A Journey OUT OF LONDON.
(From NICHOLAs NICKLEBY.)
“It was, by this time, within an hour of
noon, and although a dense vapour still en-
veloped the city they had left, as if the very
breath of its busy people hung over their
schemes of gain and profit and found greater
attraction there than in the quiet region
above, in the open country it was clear and
fair. Occasionally in some low spots they
came upon patches of mist which the sun
had not yet driven from their strongholds;
90 IMMORTELLES FROM
but these were soon passed, and as they
laboured up the hills beyond, it was pleasant
to look down and see how the sluggish mass
rolled heavily off before the cheering in-
fluence of day. A broad fine honest sun
lighted up the green pastures and dimpled
water with the semblance of summer, while
it left the travellers all the invigorating
freshness of that early time of year. The
ground seemed elastic under their feet; the
sheep-bells were music to their ears; and,
exhilarated by exercise, and stimulated by
hope, they pushed onward with the strength
of lions.
“The day wore on, and all these bright
colours subsided, and assumed a quieter tint,
like young hopes softened down by time, or
youthful features by degrees resolving into
the calm and serenity of age. But they
were scarcely less beautiful in their slow
decline than they had been in their prime;
for nature gives to every time and season
CHARLES DICKENS. 91
some beauties of its own ; and from morn-
ing to night, as from the cradle to the grave,
is but a succession of changes so gentle and
easy, that we can scarcely mark their pro-
gress. To Godalming they came at last, and
here they bargained for two humble beds, and
slept soundly. In the morning they were
astir, though not quite so early as the
sun, and again afoot; if not with all the
freshness of yesterday, still with enough of
hope and spirit to bear them cheerily on.
“It was a harder day's journey than
that they had already performed, for there
were long and weary hills to climb ; and in
journeys, as in life, it is a great deal easier
to go down hill than up. However, they
kept on with unabated perseverance, and
the hill has not yet lifted its face to heaven
that perseverance will not gain the summit
of at last.
“They walked upon the rim of the Devil's
Punch-bowl, and Smike listened with greedy
92 IMMORTELLES FROM
interest as Nicholas read the inscription
upon the stone which, reared upon that
wild spot, tells of a foul and treacherous gº
murder committed there by night. The
grass on which they stood had once been
dyed with gore, and the blood of the mur-
dered man had run down, drop by drop, into
the hollow which gives the place its name.
‘The Devil's Bowl,” thought Nicholas, as
he looked into the void, “never held
fitter liquor than that l” Onward they kept
with steady purpose, and entered at length
upon a wide and spacious tract of downs,
with every variety of little hill and plain to
change their verdant surface. Here, there
shot up almost perperidicularly into the sky
a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to
any but the sheep and goats that feed upon
its sides, and there, stood a mound of green,
sloping and tapering off so delicately, and
merging SO gently into the level ground,
that you could scarcely define its limits.
CHARLES DICKENS. 93
Hills swelling above each other, and undu-
lations, shapely and uncouth, smooth and
rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown neg-
ligently side by side, bounded the view in
each direction; while frequently, with un-
expected noise, there uprose from the ground
a flight of crows, who, cawing and wheeling
round the nearest hills, as if uncertain of
their course, suddenly poised themselves
upon the wing and skimmed down the long
vista of some opening valley with the speed
of light itself.
“By degrees the prospect receded more and
more on either hand, and as they had been
shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so
they emerged once again upon the open
country. The knowledge that they were draw-
ing near their place of destination gave them
fresh courage to proceed; but the way had
been difficult, and they had loitered on the
road, and Smike was tired. Thus, twilight
had already closed in when they turned off
94 IMMORTELLES FROM
the path to the door of a road-side inn, yet
twelve miles short of Portsmouth.”
—6–
THE MOURNING GARB OF POVERTY-
(From NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.)
“So dusty and hot,” observed the speaker,
adjusting her dress for her.
“Rate might have said, that mourning is
sometimes the coldest wear which mortals
can assume; that it not only chills the
breasts of those it clothes, but, extending its
influence to summer friends, freezes up their
sources of good-will and kindness, and
withering all the buds of promise they once
so liberally put forth, leaves nothing but
bared and rotten hearts exposed. There are
few who have lost a friend or relative, con-
stituting in life their sole dependence, who
have not felt this chilling influence of their
sable garb. She had felt it acutely, and feel-
ing it at the moment, could not quite restrain
her tears.”
CHARIES DICKENS. 95
When all tears are wiped away from all
human eyes—the tears of the Blessed by the
soft hands of angels, yea, by the hand of
God! and those others (in the outer darkness)
are dried in the Sad Salt-pits of their despair
—the world will perhaps learn that tears
really are as the blessed Pool of Siloam, in
which to wash the halt, and suffering, and
blind, for healing. But the children of this
world think not so : they learn to anticipate
the anguish of the fixed unhopeful tor-
ment, and gather and store away in the dry
crannies of their wearisome brains, cold
maxims for worldly use, which they drop in
their strong days like molten lead into their
children's hearts, and when their own days of
weakness come round again, they find the
effect of the irreligious work they have done.
Their children, like their younger selves—
hard, obdurate, unpitying, and devilish in all
smooth cruelty—are as ill-adapted to weep
with those that weep as they are to rejoice
96 IMMORTELLES FROM
with those that rejoice: ’tis Satan's work to
contradict the out-flowing of the smitten
rock. Tears come in mercy, and few hearts
would break under present affliction, if it
were not for the pride that arises from the
absence of all sense of God, and the worship
of the false maxims of the alien spirit. But
these ideas ought to be very far from encour-
aging the waste of things so precious as tears.
But they are sacred to compassion and real
woe. Wilful waste makes woeful want,
and will not One who has regard to the real
sufferer chide the flagrant waste of balm, so
precious, when it has no needs be. Sym-
pathy is the least nourished faculty in the
whole arcanum of mental provisions for this,
or the coming, evil day: we have a specious
thing upon the world to represent it, but so
unlike, that the angels might laugh amidst
their ministrations to see the tawny stranger
ruffling his plumage among theirs.
There are many lives of much pain, hard-
CHARLES DICKENS. 97
ship, and suffering, which, having no stirring
interest for any but those who lead them, are
disregarded by persons who do not want
thought or feeling, but who pamper their
compassion, and need high stimulants to
rouse it. There are not a few among the
disciples of charity who require, in their
vocation, scarcely less excitement than the
votaries of pleasure in theirs; and hence it
is that diseased sympathy and compassion
are every day expended on out-of-the-way
objects, when only too many demands upon
the legitimate exercise of the same virtues in
a healthy state, are constantly within the
sight and hearing of the most unobservant
person alive. In short, charity must have
its romance, as the novelist or play-wright
must have his. A thief infustian is a vulgar
character, scarcely to be thought of by per-
sons of refinement; but dress him in green
velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change
the scene of his operations from a thickly-
FI
98 IMMORTELLES FROM
peopled city to a mountain road, and you
shall find in him the very soul of poetry and
adventure. So it is with the one great
cardinal virtue, which properly nourished
and exercised, leads to, if it does not neces-
Sarily include, all the others. It must have
its romance, and the less of real, hard,
struggling work-a-day life there is in that
romance the better.”
Yet in the midst of these very people is
held the eneffable folly which designates as
enthusiasm the intensity of genuine emotions,
while they approve, as rational, mere deliriums
of the fancy, which intercept the influence
of momentous truths upon the heart. Such
is the wisdom of the world !
—4×—
A NATURAL INFERENCE.
“Parents who never showed their love,
complain of Want of natural affection in their
children. Children who never showed their
CHARLES DICKENS. 99
duty, complain of want of natural feeling in
their parents. Law-makers who find both
so miserable that their affections have never
had enough of life's sun to develope them,
are loud in their moralisings over parents and
children too, and cry that the very ties of
nature are disregarded. Natural affections
and instincts are the most beautiful of the
Almighty's works, but like other beautiful
works of his, they must be reared and
fostered, or it is as natural that they should
be wholly obscured, and that new feelings
should usurp their place, as it is that the
sweetest productions of the earth, left un-
tended, should be choked with weeds and
briars.”
Barren of what is good; and all the grain
It will bring forth,
As of its own accord, will not be worth
The pains of gathering
So poor a thing.
Some faint desire,
That quickly will expire,
H 2
100 IMMORTELLES FROM
Wither, and die, is all thou canst expect
If thou neglect
To sow it when 'tis ready.
— C-
A STERN MORAL FOR THE RESTLESs CROWD IN LONDON
WITH ITS FANTASTIC GROUPS.—
(From NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.)
“They rattled on through the noisy,
bustling, crowded streets of London, now dis-
playing long double rows of brightly-burning
lamps, dotted here and there with the
chemist's glaring lights, and illuminated
besides with the windows of the shops,
where sparkling jewellery, silks and velvets
of the richest colours, the most inviting
delicacies, and most Sumptuous articles of
luxurious ornament, succeeded each other in
rich and glittering profusion. Streams of
people, apparently without end, poured on
and on, jostling each other in the crowd, and
hurrying forward, Scarcely seeming to notice
the riches that surrounded them on every
side; while vehicles of all shapes and makes,
CHARLES DICKENS. 101
mingled up together in one moving mass
like running water, lent their ceaseless roar
to swell the noise and tumult.
“As they dashed by the quickly-changing
and ever-varying objects, it was curious to
observe in what a strange procession they
passed before the eye. Emporiums of splen-
did dresses, the materials brought from every
quarter of the world; tempting stores of
everything to stimulate and pamper the
sated appetite, and give new relish to the
oft-repeated feast; vessels of burnished gold
and silver, wrought into every exquisite
form of vase, and dish, and goblet ; guns,
swords, pistols, and patent engines of de-
struction ; screws and irons for the crooked,
clothes for the newly-born, drugs for the
sick, coffins for the dead, and churchyards
for the buried—all these jumbled each with
the other, and flocking side by side, seemed
to flit by in motley dance, like the fantastic
groups of the old Dutch painter, and with
102 IMMORTELLES FROM
the same stern moral for the unheeding rest-
less crowd.
“Nor were there wanting objects in the
crowd itself to give new point and purpose
to the shifting scene. The rags of the squalid
ballad-singer fluttered in the rich light that
showed the goldsmith's treasures, pale and
pinched-up faces hovered about the windows
where was tempting food, hungry eyes wan-
dered over the profusion guarded by one thin
sheet of brittle glass—an iron wall to them;
half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze
at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.
“There was a christening party at the
largest coffin-maker's, and a funeral hatch-
ment had stopped some great improvements
in the bravest mansion. Life and Death
went hand in hand—wealth and poverty
stood side by side—repletion and starvation
laid them down together.”
Oh, what a mass of human interests, of
CHARLES DICKENS. I03
which the world takes scanty note, is com-
prised within this mighty confluence of end-
less streams and tides of human life Its
Sound has gone out into all the earth.
What miracles are worked within it, and yet
what greater ones are in store to stem the
progress of evil, and hold the great heart of
the universe consolidated—that great swell-
ing, heaving heart | Oh, the hopes, and
loves, and trials, and struggles, that go to
produce one miracle by human means / The
pains, and penalties, and deaths, (and burials)
and mortal bruises — the festivals and
fraternisations—the indignities that gall and
fret—and the calls of duty that compel to
action and fellowship, for purposes of real
good—that haply, some valuable account
may at last be rendered, when, at the final
day, the Lord and Father of men requires
of his richest, strongest sons—how each has
showed his faith by works of love towards
his poorer, weaker brethren.
104 IMMORTELLES FROM
REMINISCENCES.
On an occasion, when the good Mr.
Cherryble is to pay a visit, poor Mrs.
Nickleby, amidst exultations and regrets,
in expectation of being restored to her
wonted enjoyment of good society, reflects
with bitterness of spirit on the sad change
which has deprived her of certain choice
trifles appertaining to former luxury and
refinement, is vexed to find her daughter
Rate less affected by the loss of these ele-
gancies, and by a petulant observation
brings back the images of joyous days, and
much loved ones rise up before their minds,
being invoked from the shades, together
with far less important things belonging to
their former life, which poor Mrs. Nickleby,
accustomed ever to give utterance to what
is uppermost in her mind, has never conceived
it possible for Kate to hide, (for her sake);
and chides her provoking calmness.
CHARLES DICKENS. I 05
“My dear mamma,” said Kate, stealing
her arm round her mother's neck, “why do
you say what I know you cannot seriously
mean or think, or why be angry with me
for being happy and content? You and
Nicholas are left to me, we are together once
again, and what regard can I have for a few
trifling things of which we never feel the
want? When I have seen all the misery
and desolation that death can bring, and
known the lonesome feeling of being solitary
and alone in crowds, and all the agony of
separation in grief and poverty when we
most needed comfort and support from each
other, can you wonder that I look upon this
as a place of such delicious quiet and rest,
that with you beside me I have nothing to
wish for or regret? There was a time, and
not long since, when all the comforts of our
old home did come back upon me, I own,
very often—oftener than you think perhaps
—but I affected to care nothing for them, in
106 IMMORTELLES FROM
the hope that you would so be brought to
regret them less. I was not insensible,
indeed. I might have felt happier if I had
been. Dear mamma,” said Kate, in great
agitation, “I know no difference between
this home and that in which we were all So
happy for so many years, except that the
kindest and gentlest heart that ever ached
on earth has passed in peace to Heaven.”
“Kate, mydear]Kate,” cried Mrs. Nickleby,
folding her in her arms.
“I have so often thought,” sobbed Kate,
“of all his kind words—of the last time he
looked into my little room, as he passed up-
stairs to bed, and said “God bless you,
darling.” There was a paleness in his face,
mamma—the broken heart—I know it was
—I little thought so then—”
“A gush of tears came to her relief, and
Kate laid her head upon her mother's breast,
and wept like a little child.
“It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in
CHARLES DICKENS. 107
our nature, that when the heart is touched
and softened by some tranquil happiness of
affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead
comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly.
It would almost seem as though our better
thoughts and sympathies were charms, in
virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold
some vague and mysterious intercourse with
the spirits of those whom we dearly loved in
life. Alas! how often and how long may
those patient angels hover above us, watching
for the spell which is so seldom uttered, and
so soon forgotten!”
These passages of exquisite tenderness and
beauty commend themselves to our hearts
and make a lasting impression; but still, if
not reminded of the fact of their being the
words of Dickens so fitly spoken, they so
naturally adapt themselves and form an
unity (to borrow a term from Mr. Curdle)
with our own minds, that we may compare
I 08 IMMORTELLES FROM
them to the sweet night dews which the
thirsty flowers drink up, giving out the
bland nourishmenton the morrow infragrance
of their own.
Brings back the images of joyous days,
And much-loved shades rise up before our soul!
-C-
AN UNCOMMON PORTRAITURE.
(From NICHOLAs NICKLEBY.)
“A sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted
blue coat, made pretty large, to fit easily, and
with no particular waist; his bulky legs
clothed in drab breeches and high gaiters,
and his head protected by a low-crowned
broad-brimmed white hat, such as a wealthy
grazier might wear. He wore his coat
buttoned; and his dimpled double-chin
rested in the folds of a white neckerchief—
not one of your stiff starched apoplectic
cravats, but a good easy old-fashioned white
neckcloth that a man might go to bed in and
be none the worse for it. But what principally
CHARLES DICKENS. I 09
attracted the attention of Nicholas, was the
old gentleman's eye, -never was such a clear,
twinkling, honest, merry, happy eye as
that. And there he stood looking a little
upward, with one hand thrust into the
breast of his coat, and the other playing
with his old-fashioned gold watch-chain: his
head thrown a little a one side, and his hat a
little more on one side than his head, (but
that was evidently accident; not his ordinary
way of wearing it,) with such a pleasant
Smile playing about his mouth, and such a
comical expression of mingled slyness,
simplicity, kind-heartedness, and good hu-
mour, lighting up his jolly old face, that
Nicholas would have been content to have
stood there, and looked at him until evening,
and to have forgotten, meanwhile, that there
was such a thing as a soured mind or a crab-
bed countenance to be met with in the whole
wide World.”
1 10 IMMOR TELI,ES FROM
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.
In our intercourse with the world let us
see what of truth there is in each person
whom we meet, rather than begin by teach-
ing them the truth which is in us, and it is
more than probable that we shall find this is
the readiest way of setting forth all that is
divine, in that which we contain in earthern
vessels. Who can forget the fact that the
Pharisees of old going about to establish
their own righteousness, mistook the right-
eousness that was of God |
—“G-
A BRIGHT DAY.-(From NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.)
“It was a day of serene and tranquil happi-
ness; and as we all have some bright day—
many of us, let us hope, among a crowd of
others—to which we revert with particular
delight, so this one was often looked back
to afterwards, as holding a conspicuous place
in the calender of those who shared it.”
CHARLES DICKENS. 111
The words are soon said, “a happy day,”
and yet how much it comprehends. The
young (as they tell us), are always getting
happy days and the happiest days, if their
lot is tolerably good; but all the good
fortune in the world will not bring one really
happy day—no, the heart must be attuned
to gladness by a hand divine, before one
happy day can come again, to one whom
worldly sorrow has set a jar for ever. The
harp must indeed be re-strung before it can
again join in the melody of all glad things,
even for one long, bright, happy day. But
when we hear the middle-aged and old talk
of happy days without a cloud or stain, and
yet feel, from their inharmonious temper
of mind, they have no distinct knowledge of
the principle of all good, we are sure they
are greatly degeiving themselves or making
a wilful compromise with their experience—
But godliness with contentment is great
galn.
1 12 IMMORTELLES FROM
A MoTHER's PRIDE.
“Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but
it cannot be the pride of a mother in her
children, for that is a compound of two cardinal
virtues— faith and hope. This was the
pride which swelled Mrs. Nickleby's heart
that night, and this it was that left upon her
face, glistening in the light when they re-
turned home, traces of the most grateful
tears she had ever shed.”
Maternal love, even personified by a Mrs.
Nickleby, commands a tribute of respect, or
we might be taking a step backward from
the ridiculous to the sublime if we pass
abruptly from her presence to a record of a
higher quality of mother's love. Even a
Widow Rudge with her poor boy Bar-
naby naturally creates a greater depth of
interest; but taking a still higher ground,
no mother should lightly esteem herself or be
CHARLES DICKENS. 113
lightly esteemed ! Let us stand by the
moss-grown stone of Rachel, and, remem-
bering that the patriarch mother died as a
type to all who should come after, learn
what honour and responsibility attaches to
the name—not to the name only, but in
very deed. Every mother must die (like
Rachel) to selfishness before she can by right
enter into all the hallowed privileges vested
in the mother's name. Then, holy be it !
and all-blessed be the memory of such as,
dying on the road to Bethlehem in antici-
pation of the rising of the great Morning
Star, lived here among us rejoicing in hope,
patient in tribulation, and weeping tears of
joy over their prized little ones, heeded
neither this world's scorn for their anxiety,
or for the toils of their unostentatious life.
For theirs was a glad prospect: on this their
beloved eyes might in peace grow dim, and
their tender loving hearts cease to beat
The self-renuciation of the true mother is
I
I 14 IMMORTELLES FROM
one of the most beautiful and holy types in
nature. We have, it is true, some specimens
of the ostrich-mother in society, at once as
repulsive as the other is lovely. We do not
gather grapes off thorns nor figs off
thistles; and the apathy so plainly dis-
cernible in the feelings of the parents and
children of our era is a very PLAIN incident
on the domestic life of society; but may we
not account for this by the continual oc-
currence of interested marriages. Boswell
relates of his “lion,” that he once declared
that if every marriage were made by the
Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of
characters and circumstances, without the
parties having any choice in the matter,
they would in general be quite as happy.
At least, we may say, the people concerned
would not incur such guilt in their fearful
determination to set at nought every gracious
instinct at the shrine of pleasure and fashion.
Gracious God, to see the conflict (for the dear
CHARLES DICKENS. 115
life) waged by thousands of poor tenderlings
with servants who are, many of them, cor-
poral fiends—to see the indifference of the
real thorough-paced fashionable mother in this
day of grace makes the spirit heave with
groans and tears which cannot be uttered 1
The sea-monsters which a prophet speaks of
are better mothers than these. The thin Vail
of sickly affectation which sometimes deceives
us for a moment, will not cover the trans-
gressor from the eye of God, when at her
hand. He requires the immortal spirit, by her
neglect consigned to the outworking of
wickedness in life—the worst of crimes,
perhaps, or at best to an enfeebled judg-
ment, a tainted body, and a narrow soul.
THE widow AND HER SON.—(From BARNABY RUDGE.)
There has been no dearth of fantastic
creations and picturesque fancies among the
novel writers of the age—whether of Mad-
man-gay or of the Wamba sort; but
I 2
H 16 IMMORTELLES FROM
there is much that is purely original in
Barnaby Rudge, for all this we are free to
confess that Dickens's portraiture of his
harmless hero has some most heroic touches
belonging to it. Like the village children
who flocked around him, we all know
Barnaby, and sympathise with the poor
widow Rudge—as we read her boy's whole
life and history.
“The last time she looked back upon those
roofs among the trees, she carried him in her
arms an infant. How often since that time had
she sat beside him night and day, watching
for the dawn of mind that never came; how
had she feared and doubted, and yet hoped,
how long after conviction forced itself upon
her The little stratagem she had devised to
try him—the little tokens he had given in
his childish way, not of dulness but of
something infinitely worse, so ghastly and
unchildlike in its cunning—came back as
CHARLES DICKENS. I 17
vividly as if but yesterday had intervened.
The room in which they used to be ; the
spot in which his cradle stood; his old and
elfin-like face but ever dear to her, gazing at
her with a wild and vacant eye, and crooning
some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked
him; every circumstance of his infancy came
thronging back, and the most trivial, perhaps,
the most distinctly. His older childhood too;
the strange imaginings he had ; his terror of
certain senseless things—familiar objects he
endowed with life; the slow and gradual
breaking out of that one horror, in which
before his birth his darkened intellect began;
how in the midst of all, she had formed some
hope and comfort in his being unlike another
child, and had gone on almost believing in
the slow development of his mind until he
grew a man, and then his childhood was
complete and lasting; one after another all
these old thoughts sprang up within her,
strong after their long slumber, and bitterer
than ever.”
II 8 - IMMORTELLES FROM
We are not quite sure that this last extract
will be to everybody's taste, but we have no
fear of this sort for the mother's prayer, as it
involves no doctrinal subtlety.
“Oh thou,” she cried, “who hast taught
me such deep love for this one remnant of the
promise of a happy life, out of whose
affliction, even, perhaps the comfort springs
that he is everarelying, loving child, to me—
never growing old or cold at heart, but
needing my care and duty in his manly
strength as in his cradle time—help him, in
his darkened walk through this sad world, or
he is doomed, and my poor heart is broken.”
Criticism of a mother's prayer seems out
of place.
Oh, you that hold a nobler office upon earth
Than arms or power of brain, or birth could give :
Pause ere you triumph too scornfully over
the poor forlorn mother of such an one as
CHARLES DICKENS. 119
Barnaby, for recollect that such as he
could never read to doubt or read to Scorn
those awful truths, which haply even such
an one as he might receive like a little
Child; and one and all of the wisest of us
must do so, or verily our highest worldly
wisdom will become but the veriest foolish-
ness. What good is it that some have
high gifts and talents, those whose joyful
Scorn edged with sharp laughter cuts atwain
the knots that tangle human Creeds,-the
wounding cords that bind and strain the
heart until it bleeds—if the same power and
ability is more ordinarily used in wounding
than in healing? Is it not strange that the
higher the gifts very often the less the
grace? So that we almost habitually learn to
couple great abilities with undisciplined
temper and the term good-natured passes
current for stupidity.
120 IMMORTELLES FROM
THE ALARM BELL l—(From BARNABY RUDGE.)
To man's natural heart, the voice of Abel's
blood crying to God against his brother
appeals not more feelingly to the appalled
sense than does Dickens's Alarm Bell. His
story of the ghastly Murderer in Barnaby
Rudge, whether as mounted highwayman or
as fugitive and vagabond, strikes us with the
horror of a grim reality. *
Taking the opportunity of a general uproar
and spoliation under operation in the close
neighbourhood of an old haunt, the murderer
ventures to enter stealthily the despoiled
habitation of old John Willet—who at the
moment is under the panic dread of death, by
the No Popery mob that have just passed
like a simoon through his house, destroying
as they went, and in very wantonness leaving
the old “bully inn-keeper” fast bound in his
chair. The unpitied wretch enters and feeds
upon the scattered fragments that fall in the
CHARLES DICKENS. | 21
way of his hungry quest, drains the spent
casks of their remaining drops, and prepares
to leave the house before the mob return,
when an alarm bell rings in the distance,
which it appears was last raised by the
hand of his victim, and its effect upon the
startled wanderer, who Cain-like hears in it
a deep-mouthed voice from heaven, is thus
finely told:—
“The man was hurrying to the door, when
suddenly there came towards them on the wind,
the loud and rapid tolling of an alarm bell,
and then a bright and vivid glare streamed
up, which illumined, not only the whole
chamber, but all the country.
“It was not the sudden change from dark-
ness to this dreadful light, it was not the
sound of distant shrieks and shouts of triumph,
it was not this dread invasion of the serenity
and peace of night, that drove the man back
as though a thunder-bolt had struck him.
1 22 IMMORTELLES FROM
It was the Bell! If the ghastliest shape the
human mind has ever pictured in its wildest
dreams had risen up before him, he could not
have staggered backward from its touch, as
he did from the first sound of that loud iron
voice. With eyes that started from his head,
his limbs convulsed, his face most horrible to
see, he raised one arm high up into the air,
and holding something visionary, back and
down, with his other hand, drove at it as
though he held a knife and stabbed it to the
heart. He clutched his hair, and stopped his
ears, and travelled madly round and round;
then gave a frightful cry, and with it rushed
away. Still, still, the Bell tolled on and
seemed to follow him—louder and louder,
hotter and hotter yet. The glare grew
brighter, the roar of voices deeper; the crash
of heavy bodies falling, shook the air; bright
streams of sparks rose up into the sky; but
louder than them all—rising faster far, to
Heaven—a million times more fierce and
CHARLES DICKENS. 123
furious—pouring forth dreadful secrets after
its long silence—speaking the language of
the dead—the Bell I the Bell I What hunt
of spectres could surpass that dread pursuit
and flight ! Had there been a legion of them
on his track, he could have better borne it.
They would have a beginning and an end,
but here all space was full. The one pursuing
voice was everywhere: it sounded in the
earth, the air; shook the long grass, and
howled among the trembling trees. The
echoes caught it up, the owls hooted as it
flew upon the breeze, the nightingale was
silent and hid herself among the thickest
boughs: it seemed to goad and urge the angry
fire, and lash it into madness; everything
was steeped in one prevailing red; the glow
was everywhere; nature was drenched in
blood: still the remorseless crying of that
awful voice—the Bell, the Bell ! It ceased;
but not in his ears. The Knell was in his
heart. No work of man had ever voice like
I 24 IMMORTELLES FROM
that which sounded there, and warned him
that it cried unceasingly to Heaven. Who
could hear that Bell, and not know what it
said There was murder in its every note—
cruel, relentless, savage murder—the murder
of a confiding man, by one who held his every
trust. Its ringing summoned phantoms from
their graves. What face was that, in which
a friendly smile changed to a look of half
incredulous horror, which stiffened for a
moment into one of pain, then changed again
into an imploring glance at Heaven, and so
fell idly down with upturned eyes, like the
dead stags he had often peeped at when a
little child : shrinking and shuddering.
There was a dreadful thing to think of, now !
and clinging to an apron as he looked He
sank upon the ground, and grovelled down
as if he would dig himself a place to hide in,
covered his face and ears; but no, no, no—a
hundred walls and roofs of brass could not
shut out that bell, for in it spoke the wrath-
CHARLES DICKENS. 125
ful voice of God, and from that, the whole
wide universe could not afford a refuge l’”
LET Loose.—(From LITTLE DORRIT).
Dickens has here pictured another (in-
dividual) Cain travelling along upon his
stoney road, under the frown of all Nature
and of God! within the pages of his (ad-
mirable) Little Dorrit. Hungry, thirsty,
Weary, frantic, under sight of the blessings
of others, murmuring at the light and
warmth given to those who had not got his
“mark” upon them, perhaps, though under
various other shades and degrees of wicked-
IſleSS.
“And Cain was very wroth and his
countenance fell.” This ever ! at sight of
another's good, and wherefore does a living
man complain l—a man for the punishment
of his sins |
“A late, dull autumn night was closing in
126 IMMORTELLES FROM
upon the river Sãone. The stream, like a
sullied looking-glass in a gloomy place, re-
flected the clouds heavily; and the low banks
leaned over here and there, as if they were
half curious, and half afraid, to see their
darkening pictures in the water. The flat
expanse of country about Chalons lay a long
heavy streak, occasionally made a little
ragged by a row of poplar trees, against the
wrathful sunset. On the banks of the
Sãone it was wet, depressing, solitary; and
the night deepened fast.
“One man, slowly moving on toward
Chalons, was the only visible figure in the
landscape. Cain might have looked as
lonely and avoided. With an old sheep-
skin knapsack at his back, and a rough un-
barked stick, cut out of some wood, in his
hand; miry, footsore, his shoes and gaiters
trodden out, his hair and beard untrimmed;
the cloak he carried over his shoulder,
and the clothes he wore, sodden with wet;
..CHARLES DICKENS. 127
limping along in pain and difficulty; he
looked as if the clouds were hurrying from
him, as if the wail of the wind and the
shuddering of the grass were directed against
him, as if the low mysterious plashing of
the water murmured at him, as if the fitful
autumn night were disturbed by him.
“He glanced here, and he glanced there,
sullenly but shrinkingly ; and sometimes
stopped and turned about, and looked all
round him. Then he limped on again, toil-
ing and muttering : - -
“‘To the Devil with this plain that has no
end | To the Devil with these stones that
cut like knives | To the Devil with this
dismal darkness, wrapping itself about one
with a chill ! I hate you !’
“And he would have visited his hatred
upon it all with the scowl he threw about
him, if he could. He trudged a little further,
and looking into the distance before him,
stopped again.
I 28 IMMORTELLES FROM
“‘I, hungry, thirsty, weary — you im-
beciles, where the lights are yonder, eating
and drinking, and warming yourselves at
fires | I wish I had the sacking of your
3 25
town, I would repay you, my children
How different is the man below, though I
grant he may have taken but few steps
toward perfection,-‘‘a belief in all the
gentle and good things his life had been
without.” This, perhaps, truly gives the
strict and real reason for his still being,
after all his disappointments, a believer in
them—and also for his continuing to be so
fresh and agreeable a man;–still having
something to learn, still having a natural
spring time belonging to his constitution,
and though he had this something still to
learn, his troubles were breaking up the good
soil in a kindly way.
“He was a dreamer in such wise, because
CHARLES DICKENS. 129
he was a man who had deeprooted in his
nature a belief in all the gentle and good
things his life had been without. Bred in
meanness and hard dealing, this had rescued
him to be a man of honourable mind and open
hand; bred in coldness and severity, this had
rescued him to have a warm and sympathetic
heart; bred in a creed too darkly audacious
to pursue, through its process of reversing the
making of man in the image of his Creator
to the making of his Creator in the image of
an erring man—this had rescued him to judge
not, and in humility to be merciful, and have
hope and charity.
“And this saved him still from the whimper-
ing weakness and cruel selfishness of holding
that, because such a happiness or such a virtue
had not come into his little path, or worked
well for him, therefore it was not in the
great scheme, but was reducible, when found
in appearance, to the basest elements. A
disappointed mind he had, but a mind too
. K
I 30 IMMORTELLES FROM
firm and healthy for such unwholesome air
—leaving himself in the dark, it could rise
into the light, seeing it shine on others and
hailing it. -
“Therefore, he sat before his dying fire,
sorrowful to think upon the way by which he
had come to that night, yet not strewing
poison on the way by which other men had
come to it. That he should have missed so
much, and at his time of life should look so
far about him for any staff to bear him com-
pany upon his downward journey and cheer
it, was a just regret. He looked at the fire
from which the blaze departed, from which
the after glow subsided, in which the ashes
turned grey, from which they dropped to
dust, and thought, ‘How soon I too shall
pass through such changes, and be gone l’
“To review his life, was like descending a
green tree in fruit and flower, and seeing all
the branches wither and drop off one by one
as he came down toward them.”
CHARLES DICKENS. 131
He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend,
Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure
For life's worst evils, to have no time to feel them,
Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turned out,
The wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity,
Yet such the barrenness of busy life.
PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE.
SUN AND SHADow.—(From LITTLE DoRRIT.)
“Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning
in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a
fierce August day was no greater variety in
southern France then, than at any other
time, before or since. Everything in Mar-
seilles, and about Marseilles, had staring
habit, had become universal there. Strangers
were stared out of countenance by staring
white houses, staring white walls, staring
white streets, staring tracts of arid road,
staring hills from which verdure was burnt
away. The only things to be seen not
fixedly staring and glaring were the vines
K 2
132 IMMORTELLES FROM
drooping under their load of grapes. These
did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air
barely moved their faint leaves.
“There was no wind to make a ripple on
the foul water within the harbour, or on the
beautiful sea without. The line of demar-
cation between the two colours, black and
blue, showed the point which the pure sea
Would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the
abominable pool, with which it never mixed.
Boats without awnings were too hot to touch;
ships blistered at their moorings; the stones
of the quays had not cooled, night or day,
for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese,
Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, French-
men, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians,
Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the
builders of Babel, come to trade at Mar-
seilles, sought the shade alike—taking refuge
in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely
blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set
with one great flaming jewel of fire.
CHARLES DICKENS. I 33
“The universal stare made the eyes ache.
Towards the distant line of Italian coast,
indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds
of mist, slowly rising from the evaporation of
the sea; but it softened nowhere else. Far
away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared
from the hill-side, stared from the hollow,
stared from the interminable plain. Far
away the dusty vines overhanging wayside
cottages, and the monotonous wayside
avenues, of parched trees without shade,
drooping beneath the stare of earth and sky.
So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long
files of carts, creeping slowly towards the
interior ; so did their recumbent drivers,
when they were awake, which rarely hap-
pened; so did the exhausted labourers in the
fields. Everything that lived or grew, was
oppressed by the glare; except the lizard,
passing swiftly over rough stone walls, and
the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like a
rattle. The very dust was scorched brown,
134 IMMORTELLES FROM
and something quivered in the atmosphere
as if the air itself were panting. Blinds, shut-
ters, awnings, were all closed and drawn to
keep out the stare. Grant it but a chink or
keyhole, and it shot in like a white-hot arrow.
The churches were the freest from it. To
come out of the twilight of pillars and arches
—dreamily dotted with winking lamps,
dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows
piously dozing, spitting, and begging—was
to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for
life to the nearest strip of shade. So, with
people lounging and lying wherever shade
was, with but little hum of tongues or bark-
ing of dogs, with occasional jangling of
discordant church bells, and rattling of
vicious drums, Marseilles, a fact to be
strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the
sun one day.”
There was a “villanous” prison in Mar-
seilles, as Dickens tells us, looming in shades
CHARLES DICKENS, 135
and hooding its deep-set eyes amidst all this
“staring” of white-hot things which he de-
scribes; and who better can touch the very
string to waken a chord of sympathy within
us, toward the captives in the dungeon, who,
all unheeded by the buzzing crowd outside,
tells up his weary days, nights, hours, and
minutes by the measured ebb (where no flow
is) of his own sad life-tide. Others have told
of prison glooms and horrors, but did ever
any rival Dickens—in command of our sym-
pathies, who tells us so faithfully of the
“prison taint” on everything there; “the
imprisoned air,” the imprisoned light and
“imprisoned damps,” and oh! of the im-
prisoned men all deteriorated by confinement.
The captive so faded and haggard l—The
“beautiful child” let in by the turnkey to
look at the “poor birds” as if by comparison
to make the heart pitiful—shedding a holy
light from the little “fair face, touched with
divine compassion, as it peeped shrinkingly
136 IMMORTELLES FROM
through the gate, was like an angel’s in the
prison,” and must surely have as “good an
attraction” for us as it had for the poor
captive John Baptist Cavalletto. This man,
(an Italian) described as a true son of the
land that gave him birth—“in his sub-
mission, in his lightness, in his good humour,
in his short-lived passion, in his easy con-
tentment with hard bread and hard stones,
in his ready sleep, and in all his fits and
starts altogether”—is yet with painful truth-
fulness portrayed in a passion of eagerness
for the dear outer life beyond the prison
walls, when upon the removal of a fellow
prisoner—who goes guarded away to be tried
for his life—the yells and execrations of the
populace strike his ears, for Monsieur
Rigaud (the departing prisoner) was one
very unequally matched in shade of crime
with John Baptist, and, as the turnkey most
emphatically tells him, the crowd had not
much love toward him.
CHARLES DICKENS. 137
“As to that little man himself (Signor
Cavalletto), his whole attention had become
absorbed in getting near the door, and
looking out at it. Precisely as a beast might
approach the opened gate of his den and eye
the freedom beyond, he passed those few
moments in watching and peering, until the
door was closed upon him. There was an
officer in command of the soldiers; a stout,
serviceable, profoundly calm man, with his
drawn sword in his hand, smoking a cigar.
He very briefly directed the placing of Mon-
signor Rigaud in the midst of the party, put
himself with consummate indifference at
their head, gave the word, March 1 and so
they all went jangling down the staircase.
The door clashed—the key turned—and a
ray of unusual light, and a breath of unusual
air seemed to have passed through the jail,
vanishing in a tiny wreath of smoke from
the cigar.
“Still, in his captivity, like a lower animal
| 38 IMMORTELLES FROM
—like some impatient ape, or roused bear of
the smaller species—the prisoner, now left
solitary, had jumped upon the ledge, to lose
no glimpse of this departure. As he yet
stood clasping the grate with both hands, an
uproar broke upon his hearing; yells, shrieks,
oaths, threats, execrations, all comprehended
in it, though (as in a storm) nothing but a
raging swell of sound distinctly heard.
“Excited into a still greater resemblance to
a caged wild animal by his anxiety to know
more, the prisoner leaped nimbly down, ran
round the chamber, leaped nimbly up again,
clasped the grate and tried to shake it, leaped
down and ran, leaped up and listened, and
never rested until the noise, becoming more
and more distant, had died away. How
many better prisoners have worn their noble
hearts out so; no man thinking of it; not
even the beloved of their souls realising
it; great kings and governors, who had made
them captive, careering in the sunlight
CHARLES DICKENS. I 39
jauntily, and men cheering them on. Even
the said great personages dying in bed, making
exemplary ends and sounding speeches; and
polite history, more servile than their instru-
ments, embalming them ſ”
But in very spite of servile ministers,
with kings and counsellors of the earth,
which build desolate places for themselves,
there is one who hears the sighings of the
prisoner—He the good master and Lord of
all, who was numbered with the trans-
gressors though sinless—He hath broken the
gates of brass and cut the bars of iron in
Sunder. How gently comes death to the
weary captive. How soft and green his
grave: there the prisoners rest together;
they hear not the voice of the oppressor.
The small and the great are there; and the
servant is free from his master.
I 40 IMMORTELLES FROM
THE SUN GOING DOWN UPON THE MEDITERRANEAN.
(From LITTLE DORRIT.)
“The sun went downina red, green, golden
glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and
the fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air,
as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a
better order of beings; the long dusty roads
and the interminable plains were in repose—
and so deep a hush was on the sea, that it
Scarcely whispered of the time when it shall
give up its dead.”
Yet must thou hear a voice—Restore the
dead! Earth shall reclaim her precious
things from thee I
Restore, restore, restore the dead thou
sea!
– Cº-
The Pilgrims of LIFE—(From Little Donert)
“The day passed on; and again the wide
stare, stared itself out; and the hot night
was on Marseilles; and through it the cara-
CHARLES DICKENS. 14 I
van of the morning, all dispersed, went their
appointed ways. And thus ever, by day and
night, under the sun and under the stars,
climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the
weary plains, journeying byland and journey-
ing by sea, coming and going so strangely, to
meet and to act and react on one another,
move all, we restless travellers, through the
pilgrimage of life.”
For ’tis not his nature to advance or die;
He stands not still, but or decays, or grows
Into a boundless blessing, which may vie
With the immortal lights, in its eternity
THE CHILD OF THE MARSHALSEA.
(From LITTLE DORRIT.)
“Wistful and wondering, she would sit in
summer weather by the high fender in the
Lodge, looking up at the sky through the
barred window, until bars of light would
arise, when she turned her eyes away, be-
142 IMMORTELLES FROM
tween her and her friend, and she would see
him through a grating, too.”
And is the child of the debtor the only
one who, looking up to the bright heavens,
sees them, but, as through iron bars, who
does not sometimes see a single cloud on a
Sunny day,
While all the rest of heaven is clear
A frown upon the atmosphere,
That hath no business to appear
When skies are blue, and earth is gay !
Yes, so it is that in our own eye is the
beam, which appears to us a mote in our
brother's eye.
He that saith he is in the light and
hateth his brother, is in darkness until now.
Quickly let that darkness pass,
Let the true light come at last,
Let the bars and barriers fall
From the vision of us all:
With links unfastened still remain
The memory of our broken chain.
CHARLES DICKENS. 143
THE HEAD of A FALLEN FAMILY.
(From LITTLE DORRIT.)
“At what period of her early life, the
little creature began to perceive that it was
not the habit of all the world to live locked
up in narrow yards, surrounded by high
walls with spikes at the top, would be a diffi-
cult question to settle. But she was a very,
very little creature indeed, when she had
somehow gained the knowledge, that her
clasp of her father's hand was to be always
loosened at the door which the great key
opened; and that while her own light steps
were free to pass beyond it, his feet must
never cross that line. A pitiful and plaintive
look, with which she had begun to regard
him when she was still extremely young,
was, perhaps, a part of this discovery.
“With a pitiful and plaintive lookfor every-
thing indeed, but with something in it for
only him that was like protection, this Child
144 IMMORTELLES FROM
of the Marshalsea and child of the Father of
the Marshalsea, sat by her friend the turnkey
in the lodge, kept the family-room, or Wan-
dered about the prison-yard, for the first eight
years of her life. With a pitiful and plain-
tive look for her waywardsister; for her idle
brother; for the high blank walls; for the
faded crowd they shut in ; for the games of
the prison-children as they whooped andran,
and played at hide and seek, and made the
iron bars of the inner gateway “home.”
Some there are, whose names will live
Not in the memories, but in the hearts of men,
Because those hearts they comforted and raised ;
And where they saw God's images cast down,
Lifted them up again, and blew the dust
From the worn features and disfigured limb.
CHARLES DICKENS. I 45
THE “LITTLE GATE" THROUGH WHICH THE CHILD PASSED
oUT of CHILDHooD INTO THE CARE-LADENED WORLD.
(From LITTLE DoRRIT.)
“But that was long afterward, when his
(the turnkey's) god-daughter was past six-
teen.
“The first half of that space of her life was
only just accomplished, when her pitiful and
plaintive look saw her father a widower.
From that time the protection that her won-
dering eyes had expressed towards him be-
came embodied in action, and the Child of the
Marshalsea took upon herself a new relation-
ship towards the Father.
“At first, such a baby could do little more
than sit with him, deserting her livelier place
by the high fender, and quietly watching
him. But this made her so far necessary to
him that he became accustomed to her, and
began to be sensible of missing her when she
was not there. Through this little gate she
passed out of childhood into the care-laden
world. L
o
• e * *
- tº
146 IMMORTELLES FROM
“What her pitiful look saw at that early
time in her father, in her sister, in her
brother, in the jail ; how much or how little
of the wretched truth it pleased God to make
visible to her, lies hidden with many mys-
teries. It is enough that she was inspired
to be something which was not what the
rest were, and to be that something, different
and laborious, for the sake of the rest.
Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the in-
spiration of a poet or priest, and not of the
heart impelled by love and self-devotion to
the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!
“With no earthly friend to help her, or so
much as to see her, but the one so strangely
assorted; with no knowledge even of the
common daily tone and habits of the common
members of the free community who are not
shut up in prisons; born and bred in a social
condition, false even with a reference to the
falsest condition outside the walls; drinking
from infancy of a well whose waters had their
CHARLES DICKENS. 147
own peculiar stain, their own unwholesome
and unnatural taste ; the Child of the Mar-
shalsea began her womanly life.”
It is good to bear the yoke in one's youth.
The pensive child will full often prove the
wisest man, though he may not so easily
fall to laughing, as Shakspeare makes Sir
John Falstaff tell us, “the fellow does who
never had the ache in his shoulders.” Shall
we indeed “speak of the inspiration of a poet
or a priest,” as Dickens says, “and not of
the heart inspired by love and devotion to the
lowliest work in the lowliest way of life l’”
“He that is greatest among you, let him
be your minister.” This counsel is literally
taken by the children of men in their fami-
lies—who does not remark that some, not
all, are the ministering spirits to those who
shall (still for all that) be heirs of salvation
—thus doing God’s work by his spirit, they
are, indeed, the offspring of God, inspired of
Him.
L 2
I 48 IMMORTELLES FROM
AN Axiom BY THE WAY-(From LITTLE DORRIT.)
“A generous nature is not prone to strong
aversions, and is slow to admit them even
dispassionately, but when it finds ill-will
gaining upon it, and can discern between
whiles that its origin is not dispassionate,
such a nature becomes distressed.”
Charity suffereth long and is kind!
“GREAT Houses AND THEIR PARASITES.”
(From the pages of LITTLE DoRRIT.)
“They rode to the top of Oxford-street,
and there alighting, dived in among the
great streets of melancholy stateliness, and
the little streets that try to be as stately, and
succeed in being more melancholy, of which
there is a labyrinth near Park-lane. Wilder-
nesses of corner-houses, with barbarous old
porticoes and appurtenances; horrors that
came into existence under some wrong-
headed person in some wrong-headed time,
CHARLES DICKENS. I 49
still demanding the blind admiration of all
ensuing generations, and determined to do so
until they tumbled down, frowned upon the
twilight. Parasite little tenements, with the
Cramp in their whole frame, from the dwarf
hall-door on the giant model of his Grace's in
the square, to the squeezed window of the
boudoir commanding the dunghills in the
mews, made the evening doleful. Ricketty
dwellings of undoubted fashion, but of a ca-
pacity to hold nothing comfortably except a
dismal smell, looked like the last result of the
great mansions' breeding in-and-in ; and,
where their little supplementary bows and bal-
conies were supported on thin iron columns,
seemed to be scrofulously resting upon
crutches. Here and there a hatchment,
with the whole science of heraldry in it,
loomed down upon the street like an arch-
bishop discoursing on Vanity. The shops,
few in number, made no show, for popular
opinion was as nothing to them. The pastry-
I 50 IMMORTELLES FROM
cook knew who was on his books, and in
that knowledge could be calm, with a few
glass cylinders of dowager peppermint-drops
in his window, and half-a-dozen ancient spe-
cimens of currant jelly. A few oranges
formed the greengrocer's whole concession to
the vulgar mind. A single basket, made of
moss, once containing plover's eggs, held all
that the poulterer had to say to the rabble.
Every body in those streets seemed (which is
always the case at that hour and season) to
be gone out to dinner, and nobody seemed to
be giving the dinners they had gone to. On
the door-steps there were lounging footmen,
with bright parti-coloured plumage and white
polls, like an extinct race of monstrous birds;
and butlers, solitary men of recluse demean-
our, each of whom appeared distrustful of all
other butlers. The roll of carriages in the
Park was done for the day; the street lamps
were lighting; and wicked little grooms, in
the tightest-fitting garments, with twists in
CHARLES DICKENS. 151
their legs answering to the twists in their
minds, hung about in pairs, chewing straw
and exchanging fraudulent secrets. The
spotted dogs who went out with the car-
riages, and who were so associated with
splendid equipages that it looked like a
condescension in those animals to come out
without them, accompanied helpers to and
fro on messages. Here and there was a
retiring public-house, which did not require
to be supported on the shoulders of the
people, and where gentlemen out of livery
were not much wanted.”
—
A PLEASANT CONTRAST TO THE ABOVE, “MR. CLENNAM's
WALK.—(From LITTLE DORRIT.)
“A tranquil summer sunset shone upon
him as he approached the end of his walk,
and passed through the meadows by the river
side. He had that sense of peace, and of
being lightened of a weight of care, which
country quiet awakens in the breasts of
152 IMMORTELLES FROM
dwellers in towns. Everything within his
view was lovely and placid. The rich foliage
of the trees, the luxuriant grass diversified
with wild flowers, the little green islands in
the river, the beds of rushes, the water-lilies
floating on the surface of the stream, the
distant voices in boats borne musically
toward him on the ripple of the water and
the evening air, were all expressive of rest.
In the occasional leap of a fish, or dip of an
oar, or twittering of a bird not yet at roost,
or distant barking of a dog, or lowing of a
cow—in all such sounds there was the pre-
vailing breath of rest, which seemed to
encompass him in every scent that sweetened
the fragrant air. The long lines of red and
gold in the sky, and the glorious track of
the descending sun, were all divinely calm.
Upon the purple tree-tops far away, and on
the green height near at hand, up which the
shades were slowly Creeping, there was an
equal hush. Between the real landscape and
CHARLES DICKENS. 153
its shadow in the water there was no division,
both were so untroubled and clear; and
while so fraught with solemn mystery of life
and death, so hopefully reassuring to the
gazer's soothed heart, because so tenderly
and mercifully beautiful.
“Clennam had stopped, not for the first
time by many times, to look about him, and
suffer what he saw to sink into his soul, as
the shadows looked and seemed to sink
g deeper and deeper into the water.”
Mercifully beautifull What a good ex-
pression! What is beautiful that is not mer-
cifully so? Nothing in nature, truly 1 Nature
may be perverted, we know, but the original
intention was the same—sweet sounds, beau-
tiful colours, sweet smiles, tastes, feelings,
all the beautiful and holy, might have been
held back, when ignorance rejected them for
other fancied good, -the first self-willed
wish for which we dared to arraign the
154 IMMORTELLES FROM
providence of God, by rashly desiring it out
of the accustomed order of His returning
season for each vicissitude of good or ill.
And who has not so rejected present favours,
while the clouds of early affection on our
youthful eyes concealed the emptiness of the
objects of our passionate desires.
Pause ! Stop ! Look about you, and suffer
the shadow of your grief to sink deeper into
the deep waters of your soul, and you will
find it, like the shadow on the river finds
an end. Peace is at the bottom ; your grief
was but a dark shadow that passed over the
sun, and sunk at last below the peaceful
wave of time. As Dickens has, a handful of
blown roses launched upon the river at
night: -
“So the flowers, pale and unreal in the
moonlight, floated away upon the river; and
thus do greater things that once were in our
breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to
the eternal seas.”
CHARLES DICKENS, I 55
A PRETTY METAPHOR FOR LITTLE DoRRIT ENTERING THE
PRISON GATE.
“The cage door opened, and when the
small bird, reared in captivity, had tamely
fluttered in, Mr. Clennam saw it shut again
—and then he came away.”
Just in proportion to the pain of our cap-
tivity in the cage of evil circumstances, so
will our fervent spirits strive and energise
towards the final enfranchisement of the
heart and mind: endued by our Maker with
sense and feeling to read things without, so
as to have understanding of them. And
though in meekness we may grow tame, and
continually suffer to have the door closed
upon our fluttering pinions without repining,
still in the end we shall soar to the skies
beyond; and our lark-notes will be all the
louder and more jubilant for having lain so
long upon the close-cut sod, within our iron
cage of early difficulties. 'Twas there much
I 56 IMMORTELLES FROM
good seed fell to our share, beyond what falls
to the lot of the free groundling; and We, the
prisoners of hope, will not complain of being
captives in the hands of mercy.
A MANUFACTURING Town.—(From HARD TIMEs.)
“It was a town of red bricks that would
have been red, if the smoke and ashes
had allowed it; but as matters stood, it
was a town of unnatural red and black like
the painted face of a savage. It was a town
of machinery and tall chimneys out of which
interminable serpents of smoke trailed them-
selves for ever and ever, and never got un-
coiled. It had a black canal in it and a river
that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and
vast piles of building full of windows, where
there was a rattling and a trembling all day
long, and where the piston of the steam-
engine worked monotonously up and down,
like the head of an elephant in a state of
CHARLES DICKENS. 157
melancholy madness. It contained several
large streets, all very like one another, and
many small streets still more like one another,
inhabited by people equally like one another,
who all went in and out at the same hours,
with the same sound upon the same pave-
ments, to do the same work, and to whom
every day was the same as yesterday and to-
morrow, and every year the counter part of
the last and the next.”
These attributes of Coke Town were, in the
main, inseparable from the work by which it
was sustained; against them were to be set
off, comforts of life which found their way
all over the world, and elegancies of life which
made, we will not ask how much of the
fine lady who could scarcely bear to hear the
place mentioned.
The story of “Hard Times” (like Coke
Town), has in it the river running with an
ill-savoured “dye,” we must own, compared
158 IMMORTELLES FROM
with the clear, buoyant tide that runs gam-
bolling through Dicken's towns and cities
(yea, and through this our life) so infectively.
To our grief there is a devious current in
which the dye has tinged the pure water
with its own dark shade. Innumerable are
the serpent coils and windings of his own
peculiar style. His feathery smokes, even
out of factory chimneys, appeal to the sense,
and arrows keen shine through his loop
lights upon the curious corners and crannies
of society. Dim are these at all hours—not
dark enough, perhaps, to explore by mission.
Its martyrs not called by name, and yet in
that very dimness more fatally out of the
way to a perfect reciprocation of truth and
light than the fastnesses of central Africa.
A SHREWD HINT FROM MR. CHOAKUMCHILD’s ScHool-RooM.
- (From HARD TIMEs.)
“He went to work in this preparatory
lesson not unlike Morgiana in the Forty
CHARLES DICKENS. 1.59
Thieves : looking into all the vessels ranged
before him, one after another, to see what
they contained. Say, good Mr. Choakum-
child—when from thy boiling store, thou
shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost
thou think that thou wilt always kill out-
right the robber fancy lurking within—or,
sometimes, only maim him and distort him?”
Mr. Gradgrind in “Hard Times” is,
doubtless, a highly coloured portrait; but
that his errors in education are popularly ours
there can be quite as little doubt: urged on
by the thousand “Bounderbys” that abound
even now, and must have abounded even
more in the early part of our generation (as
the seed of their liberal sowing is so
abundantly realised at this present time).
Joint originators these (the Gradgrinds and
Bounderbys) of three parts of vapidity and
half-heartedness that surround us, in ex-
change, it may be, for the gross and profane
160 IMMORTELIES "FROM
license of a time just prior to it. The
marked revival of the serious tone in Society,
cannot be objected to by grave thinkers; but
the “mystery” of educating the reason,
without stooping to the cultivation of the
sentiments and affections will never, we are
sure, be fully elucidated. Surely objections
to the cultivation of natural faculties, which
lead us up to our God in his works, would
vanish if more completely understood. The
deep mystery of an almost universal love for
nature (where the natural faculties have not
been destroyed by the Gradgrind mechani-
cal system) seeks an exposition; and thus
“it is not with morbid feeling that a poet,
for instance, can either study or expound
human nature. His ministry is to inspire
his fellow beings with high and happy emo-
tions, to foster a just sense of the dignity of
human nature, to make man lowly-wise, to
cheer him amid his frailties, and not depress
him, to animate his heartwith faith, and hope,
CHARLES DICKENS. 161
and love, not to chill and harden it with dis-
content and hatred. Instead of aggravating
all that is dark and forlorn in man’s mingled
nature, it belongs to the poet, of all others,
to show that while the son of earth is lying
on the earth, lonely, benighted, his head
pillowed on a stone, thoughts of a better
life—the soul's celestial aspirations—are
ascending and descending over him, like
angels in the Patriarch's dream.
“The very source of true poetry is love, a
divine glow and vision conscious of the
radiant glories belonging to all surrounding
things in God’s creation, whether in the -
heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or
in the waters under the earth. We cannot
approach perfection in this holy art until, at
least, we have begun to ascend one step in
that great “ladder of revelation.” This
single step taken is truly the beginning of
that wonderful power which casts its bright
beams upon our heads through the valley
M
162 IMMORTELLES FROM
below amidst its gloom, as William Howitt
Says, anticipating the destiny that awaits us.
“Where the great trials of humanity are
perpetually going on, comparatively un-
soothed and unheeded—where each creature
carries about with him the great mystery and
kingdom of his own mind, in which many a
battle is fought and won—a triumph rejoiced
over in secret, defeat deplored, submitted to
patiently (or pusillanimously), and all im-
mortalised though not made history of ;-
it must ever be a blessing to relieve the
groaning, over-surfeited worldly world of
some of its worldliness; and the more we
really spiritualise and refine the sense the
better we can ever perform its meanest
drudgery. High thinking is very compati-
ble with low (or moderate) living, so far as
the creature comforts of this life are con-
cerned; and let us rejoice over and impart
with assiduity and confidence such poetry as
England has ever maintained pre-eminently
CHARLES DICKENS. 163
pure, simple, holy. The best of poetry is
ever in close alliance with real uncorrupted
Christianity, and with degeneracy in the one
always comes the decline of the other, for it
is to Christianity that we owe the fullest
inspirations of the celestial spirit of poetry.”
—(Reed's Int, to English Lit.)
“HEAD AND HEART.”—A Colloquy.
(From HARD TIMES.)
“‘But,” said Mr. Gradgrind, slowly, and
with hesitation, as well as with a wretched
sense of helplessness, ‘if I see reason to mis-
trust myself for the past, Louisa, I should
also mistrust myself for the present and the
future. To speak unreservedy to you, I do.
I am far from feeling convinced now, how-
ever differently I might have felt only this
time yesterday, that I am fit for the trust you
repose in me; that I know how to respond to
the appeal you have come home to make
M 2
164 IMMORTELLES FROM
to me; that I have the right instinct—Sup-
posing it for the moment to be some quality
of that nature—how to help you, and to set
you right, my child.”
“She had turned upon her pillow, and lay
with her face upon her arm, so that he could
not see it. All her wildness and passion had
subsided; but, though softened, she was not
in tears. Her father was changed in nothing
so much as in the respect that he would have
been glad to see her in tears. !
“Some persons hold,” he pursued, still
hesitating, “that there is a wisdom of the
Head, and that there is a wisdom of the
Heart. I have not supposed so ; but, as I
have said, I mistrust myself now. I have
supposed the Head to be all-sufficient. It
may not be all-sufficient; how can I venture
this morning to say that it is 1 If that other
kind of wisdom should be what I have
neglected and should be the instinct that is,
wanted, Louisa——”
CHARLES DICKENS. I 65
“He suggested it very doubtfully, as if he
were half unwilling to admit it even now.
She made no answer; lying before him on
her bed, still half-dressed, much as he had
seen her lying on the floor of his room last
night. *
“Louisa,” and his hand rested on her hair
again: “I have been absent from here, my
dear, a good deal of late; and though your
sister's training has been pursued according
to—the system,” he appeared to come to
that word with great reluctance always, “it
has necessarily been modified by daily associ-
ations begun in her case at an early age. I
ask you — ignorantly and humbly, my
daughter—for the better, do you think?”
“Father,” she replied, without stirring,
“if any harmony has been awakened in her
young breast that was mute in mine until it
turned to discord, let her thank Heaven for
it, and go upon her happier way, taking it
as her greatest blessing that she has avoided
my way.”
I 66 IMMORTELLES FROM
“Oh, my child, my child !” he said, in a
forlorn manner, “I am an unhappy man to
see you thus ! What avails it to me that you
do not reproach me, if I so bitterly reproach
myself!” He bent his head, and spoke low
to her. “Louisa, I have a misgiving that
some change may have been slowly working
about me in this house, by mere love and
gratitude; that what the head had left undone
and could not do, the heart may have been
doing silently. Can it be so?”
She made him no reply.
“I am not too proud to believe it, Louisa.
How could I be arrogant, and you before
me! Can it be so? Is it so, my dear?”
Pride whether of heart or head is a blind
principle. The highest order of genius has,
it is true, sometimes been coupled witha large
share of the quality, but not to the enhance-
ment of its perception. And if we trace, step
by step, the painful ills attendant upon the
CHARLES DICKENS. I 67
abuse of unlimited power, in any shape, un-
disciplined mind will appear upon reflection
to be only a godless charter to prey unchecked
upon that part of the race who happen to be
an easier quarry from their mental position
being weaker. Wature is frugal, and nature,
without the grace of God, produces not a
creature who can be depended on safely, as
Milton says, to govern the rest self-know-
ing, and from thence magnanimous to corre-
spond with heaven.
Set the heart in motion by the light
divine, and the scene of usefulness daily
opens wider and wider. For in the moral
world, that field of light and life and endless
glories, we shall find paths unknown before
to traverse; and no poet’s dream was ever
half so bright as that fair life of God, that
best of all philosophy. “Out of the heart
are the issues of life,” and out of the heart
filled with the knowledge of God, come many
deep and holy thoughts, sometimes uttered
168 IMMORTELLES FROM
in common places, and sometimes wrapped
in the language of angels. -
The least sagacious possess, Locke tells us,
a touchstone which is natural reason, and
is only spoiled and lost by assumed prejudice,
over-Weening presumption, and narrowing our
minds.
The fancied ground on which the unfor-
tunate theorist Gradgrind stood has ceased to
feel solid. To do him justice he had believed
it solid, and had meant to do right. In
gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean
excise-rod, and in staggering over the uni-
verse with his rusty stiff-legged compasses,
he had meant to do great things. Within
the limits of his short tether he had tumbled
about annihilating the flowers of existence
with greater singleness of purpose than many
of the blatant personages whose company he
kept.
CHARLES DICKENS. 169
A CONCEIT.—(From HARD TIMES.)
“Bring to me,” says Mr. Choakumchild,
“yonder baby just able to walk, and I will
engage that it shall never wonder.”
Childhood of the mind is in keeping with
the childhood of the body. To preserve both
inviolate until natural maturity would be
wisdom.
The gentle twilight and the gradually
brightening dawn bespeak for us a divine
illustration of the moral necessity for a slow
and progressive development of strong light,
either moral or physical. A child without
wonder, like Mr. Choakumchild's specimen,
must be one whose growing soul has been
shorn of the budding-horns of future rays;
or otherwise must have been born of matter
too gross ever to emit light by its own scin-
tillations.
A glance of the mind, by rather abrupt
170 IMMORTELLES FROM
transition, gives a poetical imagination no bad
exchange for the above in Barnaby, the child
of wonder and harmless delight. The gold
he is too anxious to possess is that of the
golden sunset—he longs to gather the bright
specks of the gold which he sees piled up
yonder in the sky, and therein was not so
far deceived as those, in whose hands the
real metal turns dim and dull, who have 80
dug for it in the chambers of imagery as to
turn their own bright thoughts of gold into
Sordid ones of lead, who have gained a
weight of sin and care in place of glittering
rays exceeding the diamond’s lustre—wit-
nessing for God in the world, before Saints
and sinners. Not having this brightness,
but all the other weight, Barnaby's was the
better exchange—though like him, poor
simpleton, we all are apt to think more of the
things life would give to us having the
sparkling gold (blessed or unblessed) than
we are conscious we really possess in its
CHARLES DICKENS. I 71
absence. Few of us believe, with the poor
widow Rudge, that it glitters brightest at
a distance. The poor alchemist that ex-
changed his broad pieces in earnest of future
mines, was not more deluded than ourselves
when, in our anxiety to be rich in this world,
we sacrifice the endurable treasures in a
better, and trust madly to have a full
revenue from the affection and virtue of the
young, after years spent in mental stimulus
to pride by false philosophy to the deadening
of the sympathies of nature and of grace.
LINGERING ANGELS.—(From BARNABY RUDGE.)
“In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's
mercies to mankind, the power we have of
finding some germs of comfort in the hardest
trials, must ever occupy the foremost place;
not only because it supports and upholds us
when we most require to be sustained, but
because in this source of consolation there is
Something we have reason to believe of the
172 IMMORTELLES FROM
divine spirit, something of that goodness
which detects, amidst our own evil doings, a
redeeming quality; something which even
in our fallen nature, we possess in common
with the angels; which had its being in the
old time when they trod the earth, and
lingered on it yet, in pity. How often, on
their journey, did the widow remember with
grateful heart, that out of his deprivation
Barnaby's cheerfulness and affection sprang!
Bow often did she call to mind that but for
that, he might have been sullen, morose,
unkind, far removed from her—Vicious,
perhaps, and cruel! How often had she
cause for comfort, in his strength, and hope,
and in his simple nature | These feeble
powers of mind which rendered him so soon
forgetful of the past, safe in brief gleams
and flashes—even they were a comfort now.
The world to him was full of happiness; in
every tree, and plant, and flower, in every
bird, and beast, and tiny insect whom a
CHARLES DICKENS. I73
breath of summer wind laid low upon the
ground, he had delight. His delight was
hers; and where many a wise son would
have made her sorrowful, this poor light-
hearted idiot filled her breast with thank-
fulness and love.”
Oh, dreary lifel we cry, oh, dreary life!
And still the generations of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live, while we are keeping strife,
With heaven's true purpose on us, as a knife,
Against which we may struggle, ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land : Savannah swards
Unvaried sweep: hills watch unworn; and rife,
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest trees,
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory. Oh I thou God of old !
Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these ;
But so much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by, contented through heat and cold.
These sweet lines of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning show in what sense poor Barnaby
better fulfilled the intention of his being,
perchance, than we.
174 IMMORTELLES FROM
THE Moon, shRNING THROUGH A GRATED WINDOW,
WATCHED BY Poor BARNABY IN PRISON.
“But the moon came slowly up in all her
gentle glory, and the stars looked out; and
through the small compass of the grated
window, as through the narrow crevice of
one good deed in a murky life of guilt, the
face of heaven shone bright and merciful. -
He raised his head, gazed upward at the
quiet sky, which seemed to smile upon the
earth in sadness, as if the night, more
thoughtful than the day, looked down in
sorrow on the sufferings and evil deeds of .
men; and felt its peace sink deep into his
heart. He, a poor idiot, caged in his narrow
cell, was as much lifted up to God, while
gazing on the mild light, as the freest and
most favoured man in all the spacious city;
and in his ill-remembered prayer, and in the
fragment of the childish hymn, with which
he sang and crooned himself asleep, there
CHARLES DICKENs. 175
breathed as true a spirit as ever studied
homily expressed, or old cathedral arches
echoed.”
The spirit of the freedom from without
crooned in the (child-punished) breast of the
poor changeling; his prayer was the wild
natural cry of want uttered by all nature to
the all-sustaining One, and, therefore, inas-
much as it was child-like, it did ascend on
high and pierce the covering of cloud, the
wild bird sang in the forest, though it seemed
some nightly enchanter had changed the
trees to stone, and the sweet free air came
measuredly between the twisted meshes of a
tangled web spread by a crafty fowler for a
silly dove. But mercy dwells in every
place; though we see her sweet face, as
Barnaby did the light, through a close frame
and iron bars, it would seem she never
could come at us but for faith.
How earth may pierce to heaven yet leave
Vain man below.
176 - IMMORTELLES FROM
THE ALPS.–(From LITTLE DORRIT.)
“In the autumn of the year, darkness and
night were creeping up to the highest ridges
of the Alps.
“It was vintage time in the valleys on the
Swiss side of the Pass of the great Saint
Bernard, and along the banks of the Lake of
Geneva. The air there was charged with the
scent of gathered grapes. Baskets, troughs,
and tubs of grapes, stood in the dim village
doorways, stopped the steep and narrow village
streets, and had been carrying all day along
the roads and lanes. Grapes, split and
crushed under foot, lay about everywhere.
The child carried in a sling by the laden
peasant-woman toiling home, was quieted
with picked-up grapes; the idiot Sunning his
big goitre under the eaves of the wooden
chalet by the way to the waterfall, sat
munching grapes; the breath of the cows
and goats was redolent of leaves and stalks
CHARLES DICKENS. 177
of grapes; the company in every little
cabaret were eating, drinking, talking
grapes. A pity that no ripe touch of this
generous abundance could be given to the
thin, hard, stoney wine, which, after all, was
made from the grapes |
“The air had been warm and transparent
through the whole of the bright day. Shin-
ing metal spires and church-roofs, distant
and rarely seen, had sparkled in the view;
and the Snowy mountain-tops had been so
clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the
intervening country, and slighting their
rugged height for something fabulous, would
have measured them as within a few hours'
easy reach. Mountain-peaks of great cele-
brity in the valleys, whence no trace of their
existence was visible sometimes for months
together, had been since morning plain and
near in the blue sky. And now, when it
was dark below, though they seemed solemnly
to recede, like spectres who were going to
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178 IMMORTELLES FROM
vanish, as the red dye of the sunset faded
out of them and left them coldly white, they
were yet distinctly defined in their loneli-
ness, above the mists and shadows. -
“Seen from those solitudes, and from the
Pass of the Great St. Bernard, which was
one of them, the ascending Night came up
the mountain like a rising water. When it
at last rose to the walls of the Convent of
the Great Saint Bernard, it was as if that
weather-beaten structure were another Ark,
and floated away upon the shadowy waves.
“Darkness, outstripping Some visitors on
mules, had risen thus to the rough convent
walls, when those travellers were yet climb-
ing the mountain. As the heat of the
glowing day, when they had stopped to
drink at the streams of melted ice and snow,
was changed to the searching cold of the
frosty rarefied night air at a great height, so
the fresh beauty of the lower journey had
yielded to barrenness and desolation. A
CHARLES DICKENS. 179
craggy track, up which the mules, in single
file, scrambled and turned from block to
block, as though they were ascending the
broken staircase of a gigantic ruin, was their
way now. No trees were to be seen, nor
any vegetable growth, save a poor brown
scrubby moss, freezing in the chinks of rock.
Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the way-
side pointed upward to the convent, as if the
ghosts of former travellers overwhelmed by
the Snow, haunted the scene of their distress.
Icicle-hung caves and cellars built for refu-
gees from sudden storms, were like so many
whispers of the perils of the place; never-
resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered
about, hunted by a moaning wind; and
snow, the besetting danger of the mountain,
against which all its defences were taken,
drifted sharply down.
“The file of mules, jaded by their day's
work, turned and wound slowly up the
steep ascent; the foremost led by a guide
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180 IMMORTELLES FROM
on foot, in his broad-brimmed hat and
round jacket, carrying a mountain staff or
two upon his shoulder, with whom another
guide conversed. There was no speaking
among the string of riders. The sharp cold,
the fatigue of the journey, and a new sensa-
tion of a catching in the breath, partly as if
they had just emerged from very clear crisp
water, and partly as if they had been sobbing,
kept them silent.
“At length a light on the summit of the
rocky staircase gleamed through the snow
and mist. The guides called to the mules,
the mules pricked up their drooping heads,
the travellers' tongues were loosened, and in
a sudden burst of slipping, climbing, jingling,
clinking, and talking, they arrived at the
convent door. w
“Other mules had arrived not long before,
some with peasant riders and some with
goods, and had trodden the snow about the
door into a pool of mud. Riding saddles
CHARLES DICKENS. 181
and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells,
mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks,
provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey
and butter, straw bundles and packages of
many shapes, were crowded confusedly to-
gether in this thawed quagmire and about
the steps. Up here in the clouds, every
thing was seen through cloud, and seemed
dissolving into cloud. The breath of the
men was cloud, the breath of the mules was
cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud,
speakers close at hand were not seen for
cloud, though their voices and all other
sounds were surprisingly clear. Of the
cloudy line of mules hastily tied to rings in
the wall, one would bite another or kick
another, and then the whole mist would be
disturbed : with men diving into it, and
cries of men and beasts coming out of it,
and no bystanders discerning what was
wrong. In the midst of this, the great
stable of the convent, occupying the base-
182 IMMORTELLES FROM
ment story and entered by the basement
door, outside which all the disorder was,
poured forth its contribution of cloud, as if
the whole rugged edifice were filled with
nothing else, and would collapse as soon as
it had emptied itself, leaving the Snow to
fall upon the bare mountain summit.
“While all this noise and hurry were rife
among the living travellers, there too silently
assembled in a grated house, half a dozen
paces removed with the same cloud enfolding
them, and the same snow flakes drifting in
upon them, were the dead travellers found
upon the mountain. The mother, storm-
belated many winters ago, still standing in
the corner with her baby at her breast; the
man who had frozen with his arm raised to
his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it
with his dry lips after years and years. An
awful company, mysteriously come together l
A wild destiny for that mother to have fore-
seen, ‘Surrounded by so many and such com-
CHARLES DICKENS. 183
panions upon whom I never looked, and
never shall look, I and my child will dwell
together inseparable, on the great St. Ber-
nard, outlasting generations who will come
to see us, and will never know our name or
one word of our story but the end.’”
To give, as Mr. Dickens does, the autumn
ripeness to the clustering grapes—to steal
with him up the ridges of the Alps, with the
night and darkness—to bathe ourselves in
clouds—is to have the sun's bright power,
and the blackness of the night, at as ready
a command as Dame Nature herself. For
he never goes one line beyond her sketch,
or defaces her shading by one mis-directed,
ill-judged, streak of paint. We breathe the
crisp air simply by applying our eyes to his
atmospheric illusion; and one is hot or cold
by an enchantment which the presiding
genius of the mountain land has bestowed
upon a favourite seer in its prophetic ovation.
184 IMMORTELLES FROM
It is quite delightful to find the spirit of
our writer equally congenial, with mountain
inspirations as with all the close and pent
precincts of heart-stories breathed in the
fulness of his genius amidst such widely
different scenes—in the life of towns. Mr.
Dickens's great skill appears in setting
simple truths exactly in the right frame for
a good picture: not to sympathise with his
descriptions and not to appreciate them, only
strikes one as arguing want of natural taste.
The children of truth and affection have a
simple yet peculiar language of their own, by
which, among all the rude tumults of a
jarring world, or the smoother tones of
artifice and dissimulation, they distinguish,
comfort, support, and delight each other;
and thus we have our favourite authors near
us, as a sort of crutch to aid us in every
ascent, until the hypochondriac fear of not
being able to use our own eyes gradually
wears away.
CHARLES DICKENS. 185
It is really a pure moral enjoyment,
above intellectual fascination, that binds
one’s heart up in a book, and makes it
such a necessary part of our provision; and
I ask you, must not one who can continue
to agitate, exalt, or deeply affect the heart,
first feel the like sensation himself? De-
ception and feigning may have art to affect
the mind, but truth in sentiment alone has
power to reach and stir a generous heart.
–0–
“NATURE's FACEs.”—(From OLIVER Twist.)
“Alas! how few of nature's faces are left
to gladden us with their beauty The cares,
and sorrows, and hungerings of the world,
change them as they change hearts; and it
is only when those passions sleep, and have
lost their hold for ever, that the troubled
clouds pass off, and leave heaven's surface
clear. It is a common thing for the counte-
nances of the dead, even in that fixed and
186 IMMORTELLES FROM
rigid state, to subside into the long-forgotten
expression of sleeping infancy, and settle
into the very look of early life: so calm, so
peaceful do they grow again, that those who
knew them in their happy childhood kneel
by the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel
even upon earth.”
Well may we kneel in awe-beholding
the Angel of the meanest little one ! But
there is another reason also, for the presence
of the Angel in the calm countenance of
death: it is that the fetter of our hard
Worldly Master is broken and his wage
stopped (and well if a shout of joy has rung
in heaven ere that). Had we, with the little
children, but the grace to choose the good
Master, with their angels, we should ever
behold the face of a Father, and smile in
life as after death; for His yoke is easy and
His burden is light, and He calls upon his
true sons to rejoice evermore.
CHARLES DICKENS. 187
AN ExCELLENT ExAMPLE OF THE Power of DRESS.
“Young Oliver Twist was Wrapped in
the blanket which had hitherto formed his
only covering, he might have been the child
of a nobleman or a beggar; it would have
been hard for the haughtiest stranger to
have assigned him his proper station in
society. But now that he was enveloped in
the old calico robes which had grown yellow
in the same service, he was badged and
ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a
parish child—the Orphan of a workhouse—
the humble, half-starved drudge—to be
cuffed and buffeted through the world—de-
spised by all, and pitied by none.”
Poor baby! thy case seems hard, but thy
tears will be wiped; while for the beings
who cuffed and buffeted thee in the world it
were happier that a mill-stone had hung
about their neck, and that they had sunk
I88 IMMORTELLES FROM
into the deep sea, than that they had offended
thee, for that thou art badged and ticketed
by guardians above, and belong to the great
IPoor House !
—“C-
SPIRIT LIFE.-(From OLIVER Twist.)
“The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep
a.S though these marks of pity and compassion
had awakened some pleasant dream of a love
and affection he had never known. Thus a
strain of gentle music, or the rippling of
water in a silent place, or the odour of
a flower, or even the mention of a familiar
word, will sometimes call up sudden dim
remembrances of scenes that never were in
this life—which vanish like a breath—which
some brief memory of a happier existence,
long gone by, would seem to have awakened
..—which no voluntary exertion of the mind
can ever recall.
The beings of the mind are not of clay,
Essentially immortal, they create
*
CHARLES DICKENS. 189
And multiply in us a brighter ray,
And more beloved existence—
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Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.
A SoLEMN THING TO HEAR
“Oh l if, when we oppress and grind our
fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought
on the dark evidences of human error, which,
like dense and heavy clouds, are rising,
slowly it is true, but not less surely, to
Beaven, to pour their after vengeance on
our heads—if we heard but one instant, in
imagination, the deep testimony of dead
men's voices, which no power can stifle, and
no pride shut out—where would be the in-
jury and injustice, the suffering, misery,
cruelty, and wrong, that each day's life brings
With it !”
I90 IMMORTELLES FROM
Aye! could we mortals see the future
recompense, for piled up testaments to
cruelty, injustice, brutal wrong, and violent
aggression, might we not, with rational con-
sistency and in conformity with some of
the actual procedures of the present social
system, imagine, for example, the merciless
tyrant who in cold indifference has held an
innocent child, in fear and terror, past con-
ception, years upon years, taught by some
divine energy, what it was to encounter in
another world with spirits stronger than
himself, more fierce—who, with mockery
showing their warrant, shall grapple with his
strength (in which he trusted), hale him to
the abyss, find there a chain strong enough
to bind him to the rock, where he is to chafe
and taste the retributive miseries which he
(a brute in life) had heaped on innocent
ones, and feel the agony of fruitless
strivings and writhings, under his own once
strong and cruel hand! This is a picture
CHARLES DICKENS. 191
given by a great and good writer; he engages
our respect for his righteous indignation in
the cause of the innocent life ; but we
must first implore the striving of the
Spirit of God, within even the heart of such a
very brute, that he might, while in this
mortal world, get grace to lead him like a
weak and feeble little child, up to the foot of
mercy, there to lay down his instruments of
cruelty, his thoughts of violence, and his
heart of a beast — like that of the great
Ring of Babylon—and take up that of a man
- endowed with the blessed weakness of a
little child: then might he enter into the
Kingdom of Heaven, nor fear the strength of
the avenging giant angels who will have the
future binding of the men who here below
emulated the fiends.
192 IMMORTELLES FROM
“GoD BLESS Us EveRY ONE, SAID TINY TIM,” THE LAST
OF ALL.—(From CHRISTMAS CAROL.)
“He sat very close to his father's side,
upon his little stool. Bob held his withered
little hand in his, as if he loved the child,
and wished to keep him by his side, and
dreaded that he might be taken from him.
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he
had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim
will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the ghost,
“in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch
without an owner, carefully preserved. If
these shadows remain unaltered by the
future the child will die.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind
Spirit ! say he will be spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the
future, none other of my race,” returned the
Ghost, “will find him here. What then?
CHARLES DICKENS. 193
If he be like to die, he had better do it, and
decrease the surplus population.”
“Scrooge hung his head to hear his own
words quoted by the Spirit, and was over-
come with penitence and grief.
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in
Heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked
Cant until you have discovered what the
surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide
what men shall live, what men shall die?
It may be, that in the sight of Heaven you
are more worthless and less fit to live than
millions like this poor man's child. Oh,
God l to hear the insect on the leaf pro-
nouncing on the too much life among the
hungry brothers in the dust 1”
“Scrooge bent before the ghost's rebuke,
and trembling cast his eyes upon the ground.
But he raised them speedily, on hearing his
OWIl Ila. IOle.
“Mr. Scrooge I’” said Bob; “I’ll give you,
Mr. Scrooge, the founder of the feast.”
* O
194 IMMORTELLES FROM
Oh, Christmas-day ! oh, day of Christ
let not thy whitening snows or bitter biting
winds, this year, blow sight and memory of
the hungry brothers of our Lord from before
the eyes of the stewards of his good things
in this world. Let them pitying see lest at
your feasts, He come unbidden and find you
wanting as much in spirit as the least of
these, his poorer brethren, in earthly viands,
or wrappings from the winds that blow and
bite upon their bodies. Yet are they covered,
in comparison of you, in sight of the All-
seeing One. Go out ! go out, into the
frozen nooks and courts (but not from wind
and pain)—shine out, like streaming, warm-
ing sunbeams, in loving mercies, this year of
grace, eighteen hundred and fifty six. Let
not the “Christmas Carol,” for thirteen
years chime on unheeded ! Its memories of
mercies; its high-toned sympathies, its love
of the poor unloved. Let not the Ghost of
CHARLES DICRENS. 195
Marley stalk still unheeded, lest a greater
than he arise to certify against you.
They hear not Moses, nor the Prophets, nor
their God, neither will they hear him
THE END.
London: TAYLOR and GREENING, Printers, Graystoke-place, Fetter-lane.
AN.
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