THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 GUT OF 
 
 Frances E, Adams 
 
 and 
 Ifrs. Helen Barr 
 
GAVE MILUIS m 
 
 BESyTifyL WIFE, 
 
 Ruskin's Life Sacrifice to an 
 Artist. 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF A PICTURE. 
 
 WAS PAINTING THE FAIREST FACE 
 IN ENGLAND. 
 
 A L.ove> Wlilcli BroiijjrI»t Happiness 
 
 and Prosperity to a No^v 
 
 .Great Man. 
 
 To few ihehhas come the success that 
 Sir John Millals, Royal Academician, 
 the most prosperous painter in all Eng- 
 land, has attained, and to few has been 
 given the same amount of romance in 
 life and the same prominence, at a very 
 early age. Just now the very greatest 
 honor that can be extended to a Brit- 
 iah subject in the world^of art, the pres- 
 idency of the Royal Academy, has been 
 tendered him, and the seat that Sir 
 Frederic Leighton, lately dead, so long 
 ably filled. And once again Is revived 
 the well-nigh forgotten story of now 
 John Ruskin, England's great critic, 
 gave hla own beautiful wife to the 
 young artist who, while painting her 
 face, fell in love with her and was loved 
 in turn. It Is her exqui-sltely lovely 
 face that is pictured in MiHais' most 
 widely known canvas, "The Huguenot 
 Lover." The other face, that of the 
 man about who.se arm she ties the 
 " "broidered 'kerchief," \a the Idealized 
 face of the painter himself. 
 
 If you s-houM step into S-ir John Mil- 
 lais' s^uperb house in South Kensington, 
 London, a house that he has built nlm- 
 self — and It is not only superb archi- 
 tecturally, but filled with fine exampk-s 
 of m,odern art, in canvases as well as 
 furniture and decorations, for Millais' 
 wraith has been for years very large — 
 you would not recognize in the matron 
 of this great hous'ehold, a typical Brit- 
 ish wife, her hair silvered, her form 
 round and' the mother of many daugh- 
 ters, the dainty, clinging figure of the 
 
 Roman Catholic maiden in the pic- 
 ture. Yet they are one and the same. 
 The thein plain John Everett M.illais, 
 boy artist, but even) at that time the 
 wielder of a brusih of geniuss, painted her 
 as she then was, faithfully, with every 
 line of her sweet face told in the col- 
 ored pigments. From that hour he fell 
 in love with her, though she was an- 
 other man's wife. 
 The other man was no one else than 
 
 the even at that time famous John Rus- 
 I kin. An anchorite always, a hermit 
 among his books, this art philosopher 
 was in no wise fitted for a married life, 
 and least of all to be wedded to the sym- 
 pathetic, affectionate little English 
 woman who fcrund in him only a 
 gloomy, moody savant, irresponsive to 
 her caresses. Posing at first for Mill- 
 ais as a diversion, she found numberless 
 attractions in the cleVer young fellow of 
 the world, and if Ruskin had not sud- 
 denly awakened to the fact that his wife 
 had begun to love elsewhere, there 
 would have been a broken heart and a 
 spoiled life. 
 
 But the moody philosopher knew how 
 to bear defeat, and besides, so engrossed 
 was he in all his absorbing studies that 
 a wife did not matter much to him. 
 With hardly a moment's hesitation, 
 once he was aware that the woman 
 really cared for Millais and could be 
 happy with him, he handed her over— 
 literally— to his friend. "If you lov« 
 her, she is yours," the great critic is re* 
 ported to have generously said. 
 
 A formal divorce was pushed through 
 the English courts as rapidly as poS' 
 sible, and as soon as it was granted Mrs 
 Ruskin became Mrs. John Millais 
 Without a single pang of regret th« 
 author of "Modern Painters" turnec 
 back to his books and left the younj 
 couple to make their way, a way thai 
 was now assured. 
 
 And a very happy marriage It proved 
 A family soon sprang up under the Mil- 
 lais rooftree, and John EJverett Millais 
 grew more and more prosperous ever.> 
 year. He always has attributed his 
 success in life to this romance of his 
 boyhood, and the fact that his wife, ever 
 though she was not his then, stood ic 
 the center of the little canvas that haj 
 since become so renowned. 
 
 It is interesting to know that the ex- 
 act size of this picture, now in a private 
 gallery in the town of Preston, England 
 is three feet two inches by two feet one 
 inch, and that Millais got $750 for it 
 $250 more being afterward added by th< 
 purchaser, a picture dealer, after th< 
 engraving made from it by the celebrat- 
 ed engraver, T. O. Barlow, had scored a 
 great success and made much money 
 The value of the original canvas to-daj 
 would probably be thousands.— Ne^w 
 York World. 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 THREE LECTURES BY 
 
 JOHN EUSKIiT, LL.D. 
 
 1. OF KING f^" TREASURIES. 
 
 2. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 
 
 3. OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 EEVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 JOHN WILEY & SONS, 
 
 15 ASTOR PLACE. 
 
 1879 
 
LOAN STACK 
 
 GIFT 
 
 4^30 & 
 
PR 
 5:2-40 
 
 PREFACE. ^^\^ 
 
 Being now fifty-one years old, and little likely to change 
 my mind hereafter on any important subject of thought 
 (unless through weakness of age), I wish to publish a con- 
 nected series of such parts of my works as now seem to 
 me right, and likely to be of permanent use. In doing so 
 I shall omit much, but not attempt to mend what I think 
 worth reprinting. A young man necessarily writes other- 
 wise than an old one, and it would be worse than wasted 
 time to try to recast the juvenile language : nor is it to be 
 thought that I am ashamed even of what I cancel ; for 
 great pai-t of my earlier work was rapidly written for tem- 
 porary purposes, and is now mmecessary, though true, 
 even to truism. What I wrote about religion, was, on the 
 contrary, painstaking, and, I think, forcible, as compared 
 with most religious writing; especially in its frankness 
 and fearlessness : but it was w^hoUy mistaken ; for I had 
 beon educated in the doctrines of a narrow sect, and had 
 read history as obliquely as sectarians necessarily must. 
 Mingled among these either unnecessaiy or erroneous 
 
 151 
 
IV PEEFACB. 
 
 statements, I find, indeed, some that might be still of 
 value; but these, in mj earlier books, dibfigured by 
 affected language, partly through the desire to be thought 
 a fine writer, and partly, as in the second volume of 
 Modern Painters, in the notion of returning as far as 1 
 (!Ould to what I thought the better style of old English 
 literature, especially to that of my then favourite, in prose, 
 Kichard Hooker. 
 
 For these reasons, though, as respects either art, policy, 
 or morality as distinct from religion, I not only still hold, 
 but would even wish strongly to re-afiirm the substance of 
 what I said in my earliest books, I shall reprint scarcely 
 anything in this series out of the first and second volumes 
 of Modern Painters ; and shall omit much of the Seven 
 Lamjps and Stones of Venice : but all my books written 
 within the last fifteen years will be republished without 
 change, as new editions of them are called for, with here 
 and there perhaps an additional note, and having their 
 text divided, for convenient reference, into paragraphs 
 consecutive through each volume. I shall also throw to- 
 gether the shorter fragments that bear on each other, and 
 fill in with such unprinted lectures or studies as seem to 
 I no worth preserving, so as to keep the volumes, on an 
 average, composed of about a hundred leaves each. 
 
PREFACE. t; 
 
 The first book of which a new edition is required 
 chances to be Sesame and Lilies, from which I now de- 
 tach the old preface, about the Alps, for use elsewhere ; 
 and to which I add a lecture given in Ireland on a sub- 
 ject closely connected with that of the book itself. I am 
 glad that it should be the first of the complete series, for 
 many reasons ; though in now looking over these two lec- 
 tures, I am painfully struck by the waste of good work in 
 them. They cost me much thought, and much strong 
 emotion ; but it was foolish to suppose that I could rouse 
 my audiences in a little while to any sympathy with tlio 
 temper into which I had brought myself by years of 
 thinking over subjects full of pain ; while, if I missed my 
 purpose at the time, it was little to be hoped I could at- 
 tain it afterwards ; since phrases written for oral delivery 
 become ineffective when quietly read. Yet I should only 
 take away what good is in them if I tried to translate them 
 into the language of books ; nor, indeed, could I at all 
 have done so at the time of their delivery, my thoughts 
 then habitually and impatiently putting themselves into 
 foi-ms fit only for emphatic speech : and thus I am startled, 
 in my review of them, to find that, though there is much, 
 (forgive me the impertinence) which seems to me accurately 
 and energetically said, there is scarcely anything put in a 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 form to be generally convincing, or even easily intelli 
 gible : and I can well imagine a reader laying down the 
 book without being at all moved by it, still less guided, to 
 any definite course of action. 
 
 I think, however, if I now say briefly and clearly what 
 I meant my hearers to imderstand, and what I wanted, and 
 Btill would fain have, them to do, there may afterwards be 
 found some better service in the passionately written text. 
 
 The first Lecture says, or tries to say, that, life being 
 very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to 
 waste none of them in reading valueless books ; and that 
 valuable books should, in a civilized country, be within 
 the reach of every one, printed in excellent form, for a just 
 price ; but not in any vile, vulgar, or, by reason of small- 
 ness of type, physically injurious form, at a vile price. For 
 we none of us need many books, and those which we need 
 ought to be clearly printed, on the best paper, and strongly 
 bound. And though we are, indeed, now, a wretched and 
 poverty-struck nation, and hardly able to keep soul and 
 body together, still, as no person in decent circumstances 
 would put on his table confessedly bad wine, or bad meat 
 witliout being ashamed, so he need not have on liis slielvea 
 ill-printed or loosely and wretchedly-stitched books ; for, 
 tliough few can be rich, yet every man who h<:inestly exerts 
 
PREFACE. VL 
 
 himself may, 1 thiiik, still provide, for himself and hia 
 family, good shoes, good gloves, strong haniess for his cart 
 or carriage horses, and stout leather binding for his books. 
 And I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning 
 of his due and wise provision for his household, to obtain aa 
 soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, ser- 
 viceable, and steadily — ^however slowly^ncreasing, series 
 of books for use through life ; making his little library, 
 of all the furniture in his room, the most studied and deco- 
 rative piece ; every volume having its assigned place, like 
 a little statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and 
 strictest lessons to the children of the house being how to 
 turn the pages of their own literary possessions lightly and 
 deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dogs' ears. 
 
 That is my notion of the founding of Kings' Treasuries ; 
 and the first Lecture is intended to show somewhat the use 
 and preciousness of their treasures : but the two following 
 ones have wider scope, being written in the hope of awaken- 
 ing the youth oi England, so far as my poor words might 
 have any power with them, to take some thought of the 
 purposes of the life into which they are entering, and the 
 natui-e of the world they have to conquer. 
 
 These two lectures are fragmentary and ill-arranged; 
 but not, I think, diffuse or much compressible. The 
 
vm PREFACE. 
 
 entire gist and conclusion of them, however, Is in the last 
 Bix paragraphs, 135 to the end, of the third lecture, which 1 
 would beg the reader to look over not once nor twice, 
 (rather than any other part of the book), for they contain 
 the best expression I have yet been able to put in words of 
 what, so far as is within my power, I mean henceforward 
 both to do myself, and to plead with all over whom I have 
 any influence, to do also according to their means: the 
 letters begun on the first day of this year, to the workmen 
 of England, having the object of originating, if possible, 
 this movement among them, in ti*ue alliance with whatever 
 trustworthy element of help they can find in the higher 
 classes. After these paragraphs, let me ask you to read, 
 by the fiery light of recent events, the fable at p. 142 (§ 
 117), and then §§ 129 — 131 ; and observe, my statement 
 respecting the famine at Orissa is not rhetorical, but certi- 
 fied by ofiicial documents as within the truth. Five hun- 
 dred thousand persons, at least, died by starvation in our 
 British dominions, wholly in consequence of carelessness 
 and want of forethought. Keep that well in your memory ; 
 and note it as the best possible illustration of modern poli- 
 tical economy in true practice, and of the relations it has 
 accomplished between Supply and Demand. Then begin 
 the 8e(jond lecture, and all will read clear enough, I think, 
 
PREFACE. U 
 
 to tlie end; only, since that second lecture was wi-itten. 
 questions have arisen respecting the education and claims 
 of women which have greatly troubled simple minds and 
 excited restless ones. I am sometimes asked my thoughts 
 on this matter, and I suppose that some girl readers of tho 
 second lecture may at the end of it desire to be told sum- 
 marily what I would have them do and desire in the pre- 
 sent state of things. This, then, is what I would say to 
 any girl who had confidence enough in me to believe what 
 I told her, or do what I ask her. • 
 
 First, be quite sure of one thing, that, however much 
 you may know, and whatever advantages you may possess, 
 and however good you may be, you have not been singled 
 out, by the God who made you, from all the other girls in 
 the world, to be especially informed respecting His own 
 nature and character. You have not been born in a lumi- 
 nous point upon the surface of tlie globe, where a perfect 
 theology might be expounded to you from your youth up, 
 and where everything you were taught would be true, and 
 everything that was enforced upon you, right. Of all the 
 insolent, all the foolish persuasions that by any chanct? 
 could enter and hold your empty little heart, this is the 
 proudest and foolishest, — that you have been so much the 
 darling of the Heavens, and favourite of the Fates, as to be 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 bom in the very nick of time, aid in the punctual place, 
 when and where pure Divine truth had been sifted from 
 the erroi-s of the E^ations ; and that your papa had been 
 providentially disposed to buy a house in the convenient 
 neighbom'hood of the steeple under which that Immaculate 
 and final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. Do not 
 think it, child ; it is not so. This, on the contrary, is the 
 fact, — unpleasant you may think it ; pleasant, it seems to 
 me^ — ^that you, with all your pretty dresses, and dainty 
 looks, and kindly thoughts, and saintly aspirations, are not 
 one whit more thought of or loved by the great Maker 
 and Master than any poor little red, black, or blue savage, 
 running wild in the pestilent woods, or naked on the hot 
 Bands of the earth: and that, of the two, you probably 
 know less about God than she does ; the only difference 
 being that she thinks little of Him that is right, and you, 
 much that is wrong. 
 
 That, then, is the first thing to make sure of ; — that you 
 are not yet perfectly well informed on the most abstruse 
 of all possible subjects, and that, if you care to behave 
 with modesty or propriety, you had better be silent 
 about it. 
 
 The second thing which you may make sure of is, that 
 however good you may be, you have faults ; that howevei 
 
PREFACE XI 
 
 dull you may be, you can find out what some of them aie ; 
 i»,nd that however slight they may be, you had better make 
 some — ^not too painful, but patient — effort to get quit of 
 them. And so far as you have confidence in me at all, 
 trust me for this, that how many soever you may find or 
 fancy your faults to be, there are only two that are of real 
 consequence, — Idleness and Cruelty. Perhaps you may be 
 proud. Well, we can get much good out of pride, if only 
 it be not religious. Perhaps you may be vain : it is highly 
 probable; and very pleasant for the people who like to 
 praise you. Perhaps you are a little envious : that is really 
 very shocking ; but then — so is everybody else. Perhaps, 
 also, you are a little malicious, which I am truly concerned 
 to hear, but should probably only the more, if I knew you, 
 enjoy your conversation. But whatever else you may be, 
 you must not be useless, and you must not be cruel. If 
 there is any one point which, in six thousand years of 
 thinking about right and wrong, wise and good men have 
 agreed upon, or successively by experience discovered, it 
 is that God dislikes idle and cruel people more than any 
 others ; — that His first order is, " Work while you have 
 light;" and His second, "Be merciful while you have 
 mercy." 
 " Work while you have light," especially while you have 
 
Xll PREFACE 
 
 tlie light of momiag. There are fevr things more won 
 derful to me than that old people never tell ycnng ones 
 how precious their youth is. They sometimes sentimental- 
 ly regret their own earlier days ; sometimes prudently for- 
 get them ; often foolishly rebuke the young, often more 
 foolishly indulge, often most foolishly thwart and restrain ; 
 but scarcely ever warn or watch them. Remember, then, 
 tliat I, at least, have warned you^ that the happiness of 
 your life, and its power, and its part and rank in earth or 
 in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now. 
 They are not to be sad days ; far from that, the first duty 
 of young people is to be delighted and delightful; but 
 they are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. There ia 
 no solemnity so deep, to a rightly-thinking creature, as that 
 of dawn. But not only in that beautiful sense, but in all 
 their character and method, they are to be solemn days. 
 Take your Latin dictionary, and look out " sollennis," and 
 fix the sense of the word well in your mind, and remem- 
 ber that every day of }'our early life is oraaining irrevo- 
 cably, for good or evil, the custom and practice of your 
 soul ; ordaining either sacred customs of dear and lovely 
 recurrence, or trenching deeper and deeper the furrows 
 for seed of sorrow. Now, therefore, see that no day passes 
 Id which you do not make yourself a somewhat bettei 
 
PREFACE. jaMt 
 
 creature : aud in order to do that, find out, first, what yon 
 are now. Do not think vaguely about it ; take pen and 
 paper, and write down as accurate a description of your 
 self as you can, with the date to it. If you dare not do 
 BO, find out why you dare not, and try to get strength of 
 heart enough to look youi-self fairly in the face, in mind 
 as well as body. I do not doubt but that the mind i& a 
 less pleasant thing to look at than the face, and for that 
 very reason it needs more looking at ; so always have two 
 mirrors on your toilet table, and see that with proper care 
 you dress body and mind before them daily. After the 
 dressing is once over for the day, think no more about it : 
 as your hair will blow about your ears, so your temper and 
 thoughts will get rufiied with the day's work, and may 
 need, sometimes, twice dressing ; but I don't want you to 
 carry about a mental pocket-comb; only to be smooth 
 braided always in the morning. 
 
 Write down then, frankly, what you are, or, at least, 
 what you think yourself, not dwelling upon those inevitable 
 faults which I have just told you are of little consequence, 
 ar.i which the action of a right life will shake or smooth 
 away; but that you may detennine to the best of your 
 intelligence what you are good for, and can be made into. 
 Yon will find that the mere resolve not to bo useless, and 
 
XIV PEEFACE. 
 
 the houest desire to help other people, will, in the qiickesl 
 and delicatest ways, improve yourself. Thus, from the 
 beginning, consider all your accomplishments as means of 
 assistance to others; read attentively, in this volumej 
 paragraphs 74, 75, 19, and 79, and you will understand 
 what I mean, with respect to languages and music. lu 
 music especially }'0u will soon find what personal benefit 
 there is in being serviceable : it is probable that, however 
 limited your powers, you have voice and ear enough to 
 sustain a note of moderate compass in a concerted piece ; — 
 that, then, is the first thing to make sure you can do. Get 
 your voice disciplined and clear, and think only of accu- 
 racy ; never of effect or expression : if you have any soul 
 worth expressing it will show itself in your singing ; but 
 most likely there are very few feelings in you, at present, 
 needing any particular expression ; and the one thing you 
 have to do is to make a clear-voiced little instrument oi 
 yourself, which other people can entirely depend upon for 
 the note wanted. So, in drawing, as soon as you can set 
 down the right shape of anything, and thereby explain its 
 character to another person, or make the look of it clear 
 and interesting to a child, you will begin to enjoy the art 
 vividly for its own sake, and all your habits of mind and 
 powers of memory will gain precision: but if yon only 
 
PREFACE. XT 
 
 try to make showy drawings for praise, cr pretty ones for 
 amusement, your drawing will have little or no real inter- 
 est for you, and no educational power whatever. 
 
 Then, besides this more delicate work, resolve to do 
 every day some that is useful in the vulgar sense. Learn 
 first thoroughly the economy of the kitchen ; the good and 
 bad qualities of every common article of food, and the 
 simplest and best modes of their preparation : when you 
 have time, go and help in the cooking of poorer families, 
 and show them how to make as much of everything as pos- 
 sible, and how to make little, nice : coaxing and tempting 
 them into tidy and pretty ways, and pleading for well- 
 folded table-cloths, however coarse, and for a flower or two 
 out of the garden to strew on them. If you manage to 
 get a clean table-cloth, bright plates on it, and a good dish 
 in the middle, of your own cooking, you may ask leave to 
 say a short grace ; and let your religious ministries be con- 
 fined to that much for the present. 
 
 Again, let a certain part of your day (as little as you 
 choose, but not to be broken in upon) be set apart for 
 making strong and pretty dresses for the poor. Learn the 
 sound qualities of all useful stuffs, and make everything of 
 the best you can get, whatever its price. I have many 
 reasons for desiring you to do tliis, — too many to be told 
 
XVI PREFACE. 
 
 just DOW, — ^trust me, and be sure you get eyeiytlimg as good 
 as can be : and if, in the villanous state of modern trade, you 
 cannot get it good at any price, buy its raw material, and 
 set some of the poor women about you to spin and weave, 
 till you. have got stuff that can be trusted : and then, every 
 day, make some little piece of useful clothing, sewn with 
 your own fingers as strongly as it can be stitched ; and 
 embroider it or otherwise beautify it moderately with fine 
 needlework, such as a girl may be proud of having done. 
 And accumulate these things by you until you hear of 
 some honest persons in need of clothing, which may often 
 too sorrowfully be ; and, even though you should be de- 
 ceived, and give them to the dishonest, and hear of their 
 being at once taken to the pawnbroker's, never mind that, 
 for the pawnbroker must sell them to some one who has 
 need of them. That is no business of yours ; what con- 
 cerns you is only that when you see a half -naked child, 
 you should have good and fresh clothes to give it, if ita 
 parents will let it be taught to wear them. If they will 
 not, consider how tliey came to be of such a mind, which 
 it will be wholesome for you beyond most subjects of in- 
 quiry to asceitain. And after you have gone on doing 
 tliis a little while, you will begin to understand the mean- 
 ing of at least one chapter of your Bible, Proverbs xxxi., 
 
PREFACE. XVll 
 
 without need of any laboured comment, sermon, or 
 meditation. 
 
 In these, then (and of course in all minor ways besides, 
 that you can discover in your own household), you must 
 be to the best of yom* strength usefully employed during 
 the greater part of the day, so that you may be able at the 
 end of it to say, as proudly as any peasant, that you have 
 not eaten the bread of idleness. Then, secondly, I said, 
 you are not to be cruel. Perhaps you think there is no 
 chance of your being so ; and indeed I hope it is not 
 likely that you should be deliberately unkind to any crea- 
 ture ; but unless you are deliberately kind to every creature, 
 you will often be cruel to many. Cruel, partly through 
 want of imagination (a far rarer and weaker faculty in 
 women than men), and yet more, at the present day, 
 through the subtle encouragement of your selfishness by 
 the religious doctrine that all which we now suppose to be 
 evil will be brought to a good end ; doctrine practically 
 issuing, not in less earnest efforts that the immediate un- 
 pleasantness may be averted from ourselves, but in our 
 remaining satisfied in the contemplation of its ultimate 
 objects, when it is inflicted on others. 
 
 It is not likely that the more accurate methods of lecent 
 mental education will now long permit young people to 
 
XVIU PREFACE. 
 
 grow up ill the pei*siiasioii that, in any danger or distress^ 
 tliej may expect to be themselves saved by the providence 
 of God, while those around them are lost by His Im- 
 providence: but they may be yet long restrained fi*om 
 rightly kind action, and long accustomed to endure both 
 their own pain occasionally, and the pain of others always, 
 with an miwise patience, by misconception of the eternal 
 and incurable nature of real evil. Observe, therefore, 
 carefully in this matter : there are degrees of pain, as de- 
 grees of faultfulness, which are altogether conquerable, 
 and which seem to be merely forms of wholesome trial or 
 discipline. Yom- fingei-s tingle when you go out on a 
 frosty morning, and are all the warmer afterwards ; your 
 limbs are weary with wholesome work, and lie down in the 
 pleasanter rest ; you are tried for a little while by having to 
 wait for some promised good, and it is all the sweeter 
 when it comes. But you camiot carry the trial past a cer- 
 tain point. Let the cold fasten on your hand in an extreme 
 degree, and your fingers will moulder from their sockets. 
 Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the 
 end of life you shall not recover the former vigour of your 
 frame. Let heart-sickness pass beyond a certain bitter 
 point, and the heart loses its life for ever. 
 Now, the very definition of evil is in this irremediable- 
 
PEEFACE. XIX 
 
 ness. It means sorrow, or sin, which end in death ; and 
 assuredly, as far as we know, or can conceive, there ard 
 many conditions both of pain and sin which cannot but so 
 end. Of course we are ignorant and blinld creatui-es, and 
 we cannot know what seeds of good may be in present suf- 
 fering, or present crime ; but with what we cannot know, 
 we are not concerned. It is conceivable that murderers 
 and liars may in some distant world be exalted into a 
 higher humanity than they could have reached without 
 homicide or falsehood ; but the contingency is not one by 
 which our actions- should be guided. There is, indeed, a 
 better hope that the beggar, who lies at our gates in misery, 
 may, within gates of pearl, be comforted , but the Master, 
 whose words are our only authority for thinking so, never 
 Himself inflicted disease as a blessing, nor sent away the 
 hungry unfed, or the wounded unhealed. 
 
 Believe me, then, the only right principle of action here, 
 is to consider good and evil as defined by our natural 
 sense of both ; and to strive to promote the one, and to 
 conquer the other, with as hearty endeavour as if there 
 were, indeed, no other world than this. Above all, get 
 quit of the absurd idea that Heaven will interfere to cor- 
 rect great errors, while allowing its laws to take their 
 coui'se in punishing small ones. If you prepare a dish oi 
 
XX PREFACE. 
 
 food carelessly, you do not expect Providence to make 
 it palatable; neither if, through yeai-s of folly, you mis- 
 guide your own life, need you expect Divine interfe* 
 rence to bring round everything at last for the best. 1 
 tell you, positively, the world is not so constituted: the 
 oonsequences of great mistakes are just as sure as those 
 of small ones, and the happiness of your whole life, 
 and of all the lives over which you have power, de- 
 pends as literally on your own common sense and discre- 
 tion as the excellence and order of the feast of a day. 
 
 Think carefully and bravely over these things, and 
 you will find them true: having found them so, think 
 also carefully over your own position in life. I assume 
 that you belong to' the middle or upper classes, and 
 that you would shrink from descending into a lower 
 sphere. You may fancy you would not: nay, if you 
 are very good, strong-hearted, and romantic, perhaps 
 you really would not; but it is not wrong tliat you 
 should. You have then, I suppose, good food, pretty 
 rooms to live in, pretty dresses to wear, power of ob- 
 taining every rational and wholesome pleasure ; you are, 
 moreover, probably gentle and grateful, and in the habit 
 of every day thanking God for these things. But why 
 do you thank Him? Ib it because, in these mattei-s, 
 
1»REFACE. XXI 
 
 as well as in your religious knowledge, you think He 
 has made a favourite of you. Is the essential meaning 
 of your thanksgiving, ''Lord, I thank thee that I am 
 not as other girls are, not in that I fast twice in the 
 week while they feast, but in that I feast seven times 
 a week, while they fast," and are you quite sure this 
 is a pleasing form of thanksgiving to your Heavenly 
 Father ? Suppose you saw one of your own true earthly 
 sisters, Lucy or Emily, cast out of your mortal father's 
 house, starving, helpless, heartbroken ; and that every 
 morning when you went into your father's room, you 
 said to him, "How good you are, father, to give me 
 what you don't give Lucy," are you sure that, whatever 
 anger your parent might have just cause for, against 
 your sister, he would be pleased by that thanksgiving, 
 or flattered by that praise? Nay, are you even sure 
 that you are so much the favourite: suppose that, all 
 this while, he loves poor Lucy just as well as 3^ou, and 
 is only tr^dng you through her pain, and perhaps not 
 angry with her in anywise, but deeply angry with you, 
 and all the more for your thanksgivings? Would it 
 not be well that you should think, and earnestly too, 
 over this standing of yours; and all the more if you 
 wish to believe that text, which clergymen so mur,h di^f 
 
XXU PEEFACE. 
 
 like preacjhing on, "How hardly shall they that have 
 riches enter into the Kingdom of God?" You do not 
 believe it now, or you would be less complacent in 
 your state; and you cannot believe it at all, until you 
 know that the I^ngdom of God means; — "not meat 
 and drink, but justice, peace, and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost," nor until you know also that such joy is not 
 by any means, necessarily, in going to church, or in 
 singing hynms; but may be joy in a dance, or joy in 
 a jest, or joy in anything you have deserved to possess, 
 or that you are willing to give ; but joy in nothing that 
 separates you, as by any strange favour, from your fel- 
 low-creatures, that exalts you through their degradation 
 — exempts you from their toil — or indulges you in time 
 of their distress. 
 
 Think, then, and some day, I believe, you will feel 
 also, — ^no morbid passion of pity such as would turn you 
 into a black Sister of Charity, but the steady fire of 
 perpetual kindness which will make you a bright one, 
 I speak in no disparagement of them ; I know well how 
 good the Sisters of Charity are, and how much wo owe 
 to them ; but all these professional pieties (except so far 
 as distinction or association may be necessary for effec- 
 tiveness of work), are in their spirit wrong, and in prao 
 
PREFACE. XXUl 
 
 tice merely plaster the sores of disease that ought never 
 have been permitted to exist; encouraging at the same 
 time the herd of less excellent women in frivolity, by 
 leading them to think that they must either be good up 
 to the black standard, or cannot be good for anything. 
 Wear a costume, by all means, if you like; but let it 
 be a cheerful and becoming one ; and be in your heart 
 a Sister of Charity always, without either veiled or 
 voluble declaration of it. 
 
 As I pause, before ending my preface — thinking of 
 one or two more points that are difficult to write of — 
 I find a letter in TTie Times, from a French lady, 
 which says all I want so beautifully, that I will print 
 it just as it stands: 
 
 Sm, — It is often said that one example is worth many sermons. 
 Shall I be judged presumptuous if I point out one, which seems 
 to me so striking just now, that, however painful, I cannot help 
 dwelling upon it ? 
 
 It is the share, the sad and large share, that French society 
 and its recent habits of luxury, of expenses, of dress, of indul- 
 gence in every kind of extravagant dissipation, has to lay to its 
 own door in its actual crisis of ruin, misery, and humiliation. If 
 our menageres can be cited as an example to English housewives, 
 so, alas! can other classes of our society be set up as an example 
 -•not to be followed. 
 
 Bitter must be the feelings of many a French woman whose 
 
XXIV PREFACE. 
 
 days of luxury and expensive habits are at an end, and whose 
 bills of bygone splendour lie with a heavy weight on her con- 
 science, if not on her purse! 
 
 With us the evil has spread high and low. Everywhere have 
 the examples given by the highest ladies in the land been fol' 
 lowed but too successfully. 
 
 Every year did dress become more extravagant, entertainments 
 more costly, expenses of every kind more considerable. Lower 
 and lower became the tone of society, its good breeding, its deli- 
 cacy. More and more were monde and demi-monde associated in 
 newspaper accounts of fashionable doings, in scandalous gossip, 
 on racecourses, in 'premieres representations^ in imitation of each 
 other's costumes, mohiliers and slang. 
 
 Living beyond one's means became habitual — almost necessary— 
 for every one to keep up with, if not to go beyond, every one else. 
 
 What the result of all this has been we now see in the wreck 
 of our prosperity, in the downfall of all that seemed brightest 
 and highest. 
 
 Deeply and fearfully impressed by what my own country has 
 incurred and is suffering, I cannot help feeling sorrowful when I 
 see in England signs of our besetting sins appearing also. Paint 
 and chignons, slang and vaudevilles, knowing "Anonymas" by 
 name, and reading doubtfully moral novels, are in themselves 
 small offences, although not many years ago they would have ap- 
 peared very heinous ones, yet they are quick and tempting con- 
 veyances on a very dangerous high-road. 
 
 I would that all Englishwomen knew how they are looked up 
 to from abroad — what a high opinion, what honour and reverence 
 we foreigners have for their principles, their truthfulness, the fresh 
 and pure innocence of their daughters, the healthy youthfulneai 
 of their lovely children. 
 
PREFACE. XX^ 
 
 May I illustrate this by a short example which happened very 
 Dear me? Dui'ing the days of the emeutes of 1848, all the houses 
 in Paris were being searched for fire-arms by the mob. The one 
 I was living in contained none, as the master of the house repeat- 
 edly assured the furious and incredulous Republicans. They were 
 going to lay violent hands on him, when his wife, an English 
 lady, hearing the loud discussion, came bravely forward and assured 
 them that no arms were concealed. "Vous etes anglaise, noua 
 vous croyons; les anglaises disent toujoui-s la v€rit€," was the 
 immediate answer, and the rioters quietly left. 
 
 Now, Sir, shall I be accused of unjust' criticism if, loving and 
 admiiing your country, as these lines will prove, certain new fea- 
 tures strike me as painful discrepancies in English life ? 
 
 Far be it from me to preach the contempt of all that can make 
 life lovable and wholesomely pleasant. I love nothing better than 
 to see a woman nice, neat, elegant, looking her best in the prettiest 
 dress that her taste and purse can afford, or your bright, fresh young 
 girls fearlessly and perfectly sitting their hoi-ses, or adorning their 
 houses as pretty [sic; it is not quite grammar, but it is better tlian if 
 it were ;] as care, trouble, and refinement can make them. 
 
 It is the degree leyond that which to us has proved so fatal, 
 and that I would our example could warn you from, as a small 
 repayment for your hospitality and friendliness to us in our days 
 of trouble. 
 
 May Englishwomen accept this in a kindly spirit as a new-year's 
 wish fi'om 
 
 A Fkench Ladt, 
 
 Dec. 29. 
 
 That, then, is the substance of what I would fain say 
 convincingly, if it might be, to my girl friends; at all 
 
XXYl PREFACE. 
 
 events with cei-tainty in my own mind that I was thui 
 far a safe guide to them. 
 
 For other and older readers it is needful I should 
 wi'ite a few words more, respecting what opportunity I 
 liave had to judge, or right I have to speak, of such 
 things; for, indeed, too much of what I have said about 
 women has been said in faith only. A wise and lovely 
 English lady told me, when Sescmie and Lilies first 
 appeared, that she was sure the Sesame would be use- 
 ful, but that in the Lilies I had been writing of what 
 I knew nothing about. Which was in a measure too 
 true, and also that it is more partial than my writings 
 are usually: for as Ellesmere spoke his speech on the 
 
 intervention, not indeed otherwise than he felt, 
 
 but yet altogether for the sake of Gretchen, so I wrote 
 the Lilies to please one girl; and were it not for w^hat 
 I remember of her, and of few besides, should now 
 perhaps recast some of the sentences in the Lilies in 
 a very different tone: for as years have gone by, it 
 has chanced to me, untowardly in some respects, for- 
 tunately in others (because it enables me to read his- 
 tory more clearly), to see the utmost evil that is in 
 women, while I have had but to believe the utmost 
 good. The best women are indeed necessarily the mos< 
 
PREFACE. XXVll 
 
 diflicult to know; they are recognized chiefly in the 
 happiness of their husbands and the nobleness of their 
 children; they are only to be divined, not discerned, 
 by the stranger; and, sometimes, seem almost helpless 
 except in their homes; yet without the help of one of 
 them,* to whom this book is dedicated, the day would 
 probably have come before now, when I should have 
 written and thought no more. 
 
 On the other hand, the fashion of the time renders 
 whatever is forward, coarse, or senseless, in feminine 
 nature, too palpable to all men: — the w^ak picturesque- 
 ness of my earlier writings brought me acquainted with 
 much of their emptiest enthusiasm; and the chances of 
 later life gave me opportunities of watching women in 
 states of degradation and vindictiveness which opened to 
 me the gloomiest secrets of Greek and Syrian tragedy. 
 I have seen them betray their household charities to 
 lUst, their pledged love to devotion ; I have seen mothei*s 
 dutiful to their children, as Medea ; and children dutiful 
 to their parents, as the daughter of Herodias : but my 
 trust is still unmoved in the preciousness of the natures 
 that are so fatal in their error, and I leave the words 
 of the Lilies unchanged; believing, yet, that no man 
 
XXVDl PREFACE. 
 
 ever lived a right life who had not been chastened bj 
 a woman's love, strengthened by her com-age, and 
 guided by her discretion. 
 
 What I might myself have been, so helped, I rarely 
 indulge in the idleness of thinking; but what I am, 
 since I take on me the function of a teacher, it is well 
 that the reader should know, as far as I can tell him. 
 
 Not an unjust person ; not an unkind one ; not a 
 false one ; a lover of order, labour, and peace. That, 
 it seems to me, is enough to give me right to say all 1 
 care to say on ethical subjects: more, I could only tell 
 definitely through details of autobiography such as none 
 but prosperous and (in the simple sense of the word) 
 faultless, lives could justify ; — and mine has been neither. 
 Yet, if any one, skilled in reading the torn manuscripts 
 of the human soul, cares for more intimate knowledge 
 of me, he may have it by knowing with what persona 
 in past history I have most sympathy. 
 
 I will name three. 
 
 In all that is strongest and deepest in me, — that fits 
 me for my work, and gives light or shadow to my being, 
 I liave sympathy with Guido Guinicelli. 
 
 In my constant natural temper, and thoughts of thinga 
 and of people, with MarmonteL 
 
PREFACE. XXIX 
 
 In my enforced and accidental temper, and thoughts 
 of things and of people, with Dean Swift. 
 
 Any one who can miderstand the natures of those 
 tliree men, can understand mine; and having said sc 
 nnich, I am content to leave both life and work to be 
 remembered or forgotten, as their uses may deserve. 
 
 Denmarh Hilly 
 
 Ut January y 1871. 
 
PREFACE-LAST EDITION. 
 
 A PASSAGE in the fifty-third page of this book, 
 referring to Alpine travellers, will fall harshly on the 
 reader's ear since it has been sorrowfully enforced by 
 the deaths on Mont Cervin. I leave it, nevertheless, as it 
 stood, for I do not now write unadvisedly, and think 
 it wrong to cancel what has once been thoughtfully said ; 
 but it must not so remain without a few added words. 
 
 No blame ought to attach to the Alpine tourist for 
 incurring danger.. There is usually sufiicient cause, and 
 real reward, for all difficult work; and even were it 
 otherwise, some experience of distinct peril, and the 
 acquirement of habits of quick and calm action in its 
 presence, are necessary elements, at some period of life, w 
 the formation of manly character. The blame of bribing 
 guides into danger is a singular accusation, in behalf of a 
 people who have made mercenary soldiers of themselves 
 for centuries, without any one's thinking of giving their 
 
XXXU PREFACE. 
 
 fidelity bettA?.f employment: though, indeed, the piece of 
 work they did jti the gate of the Tuileries, however useless, 
 was no UDwiso one; and their lion of flawed molasse 
 at Lucerne, wortLloss \u point of art though it be, is never- 
 theless a better re^-ard than much pay ; and a better 
 ornament to the old w)wn than the Schweizer Hof, or flat 
 new quay, for the promenade of those travellers who do 
 not take guides into danger. The British public are how- 
 ever, at home, so innocent of ever buying their fellow 
 creatures' lives, that we may justly expect them to be 
 punctilious abroad I They do not, perhaps, often calculate 
 how many souls flit annually, choked in fire-damp and sea- 
 sand, from economically watched shafts, and economically 
 manned ships; nor see the fiery ghosts writhe up out 
 of every scuttleful of cheap coals : nor count how many 
 threads of girlish life are cut off and woven annually by 
 painted Fates, into breadths of ball-dresses; or soaked 
 away, like rotten hemp-fibre, in the inlet of Cocytus which 
 overflows the Grassmarket where flesh is as grass. We 
 need not, it seems to me, loudly blame any one for paying 
 a guide to take a brave walk with him. Therefore, gentle- 
 men of the Alpine Club, as much danger as you care 
 to face, by all means ; but, if it please you, not so much 
 talk of it. The real ground for reprehension of Alpine 
 
PREFACE. XXXUl 
 
 climbing is that, with less cause, it excites more vanitj? 
 than any other athletic skill. A good horseman knows 
 what it has cost to make him one ; everybody else knows it 
 too, and knows that he is one ; he need not ride at a fence 
 merely to show his seat. But credit for practice in climb- 
 ing can only be claimed after success, which, though 
 perhaps accidental and unmerited, must yet be attained at 
 all risks, or the shame of defeat borne with no evidence of 
 the difficulties encountered. At this particular period, also, 
 the distinction obtainable by first conquest of a peak is as 
 tempting to a traveller as the discovery of a new element 
 to a chemist, or of a new species to a naturalist. Yanity ia 
 never so keenly excited as by competitions which involve 
 chance ; the course of science is continually arrested, and 
 its nomenclature fatally confused, by the eagerness of even 
 wise and able men to establish their priority in an unim- 
 portant discovery, or obtain vested right to a syllable in a 
 deformed word ; and many an otherwise sensible person 
 will risk his life for the sake of a line in future guide- 
 books, to the fact that " horn was first ascended by Mr. 
 
 X. in the year "; — never reflecting that of all the lines 
 
 in the page, the one he has thus wrought for will be 
 precisely the least interesting to the reader. 
 Tt is not therefore strange, however much to be regrettai, 
 
XXXIV PREFACE. 
 
 that while no gentleman boasts in other cases of his saga- 
 city or his courage — while no good soldier talks of the 
 charge he led, nor an}'- good sailor of the helm he held, — 
 every man among the Alps seems to lose his senses and 
 modesty with the fall of the barometer, and returns from 
 his Nephelo-coccygia brandishing his ice-axe in everybody's 
 face. Whatever the Alpine Club have done, or may yet 
 accomplish, in a sincere thirst for mountain knowledge, and 
 in happy sense of youthful strength and play of animal 
 spirit, they have done, and will do, wisely and well ; but 
 whatever they are urged to by mere sting of competition 
 and itch of praise, they will do, as all vain things must be 
 done for ever, foolishly and ill. It is a strange proof 
 of that absence of any real national love of science, of 
 which I have had occasion to speak in the text, that no 
 entire survey of the Alps has yet been made by properly 
 qualified men ; and that, except of the chain of Chamouni, 
 no accurate maps exist, nor any complete geological section 
 even of that. But Mr. Keilly's survey of that central group, 
 and the generally accurate information collected in the 
 guide-book published by the Club, are honourable results 
 *)f English adventure ; and it is to be hoped that the con- 
 tinuance of such work will gradually put an end to the 
 vulgar excitement which looked upon the granite of the 
 
PREFACE. XXXV 
 
 Alps only as an unoccupied advertisement wall for chalk 
 iug names upon. 
 
 .. Kespecting tlie means of accomplishing such work with 
 ^east risk, there was a sentence in the article of our leading 
 public journal, which deserves, and requires expansion. 
 " Their " (the Alpine club's) " ropes must not break." 
 Certainly not! nor any one else's ropes, if they may be 
 rendered unbreakable by honesty of make; seeing that 
 more lives hang by them on moving than on motionless 
 seas. The records of the last gale at the Cape may teach 
 us that economy in the manufacture of cables is not always 
 a matter for exultation ; and, on the whole, it might even 
 be well in an honest country, sending out, and up and 
 down, various lines east and west, that nothing should 
 break ; banks, — ^words, — nor dredging tackle. 
 
 Granting, however, such praise and such sphere of 
 exertion as we thus justly may, to the spirit of adventure, 
 there is one consequence of it. coming directly under my 
 own cognizance, of which I cannot but speak with utter 
 regret, — the loss, namely, of all real understanding of the 
 character and beauty of Switzerland, by the country's being 
 now regarded as half watering-place, half gymnasium. It 
 is indeed true that under the influence of the pride which 
 gives poignancy to the sensations which others cannot 
 
XXXVl PREFACE. 
 
 share with us (and a not unjustifiable zest to the pleasure 
 which we have worked for), an ordinary traveller will 
 usually observe and enjoy more on a difficult excursion 
 than on an easy one ; and more in objects to which he is 
 unaccustomed than in those with which he is familiar. He 
 will notice with extreme interest that snow is white on the 
 top of a hill in June, though he would have attached little 
 importance to the same peculiarity in a wreath at the 
 bottom of a hill in January. He will generally find more 
 to admire in a cloud under his feet, than in one over his 
 head ; and, oppressed by the monotony of a sky which is 
 prevalently blue, will derive extraordinary satisfaction 
 from its approximation to black. Add to such grounds of 
 delight the aid given to the effect of whatever is impressive 
 in the scenery of the high Alps, by the absence of ludicrous 
 or degrading concomitants ; and it ceases to be surprising 
 that Alpine excursionists should be greatly pleased, or 
 that they should attribute their pleasure to some true and 
 increased apprehension of the nobleness of natural scenery. 
 But no impression can be more false. The real beauty of 
 the Alps is to be seen, and seen only, where all may see it, 
 the child, the cripple, and the man of grey hairs. There ia 
 more true loveliness in a single glade of pasture shadowed 
 by pine, or gleam of rocky brook, or inlet of unsullied lake 
 
PREFACE. XXX Vll 
 
 among the lower Bernese" and Savoyard hills, than in the 
 entire field of jagged gneiss which crests the central ridge 
 from the Shreckhorn to the Yiso. The valley of CI use, 
 through which unhappy travellers consent now to be 
 invoiced, packed in baskets like fish, so only that they may 
 cheaply reach, in the feverous haste which has become the 
 law of their being, the glen of Chamouni whose every 
 lovely foreground rock has now been broken up to build 
 hotels for them, contains more beauty in half a league of it, 
 than the entire valley they have devastated, and turned 
 into a casino, did in its uninjured pride ; and that passage 
 of the Jura by Olten (between Basle and Lucerne), which is 
 by the modern tourist triumphantly effected through a 
 tunnel in ten minutes, between two piggish trumpet grunts 
 proclamatory of the ecstatic transit, used to show from 
 every turn and sweep of its winding ascent, up which one 
 sauntered, gathering wild -flowers, for half a happy day, 
 diviner aspects of the distant Alps than ever were achieved 
 by toil of limb, or won by risk of life. 
 
 There is indeed a healthy enjoyment both in engineers- 
 work, and in schoolboys' play ; the making and mending 
 of roads has its true enthusiasms, and I have still pleasure 
 euough in mere scrambling to wonder not a little at 
 the supreme gravity with which apes exercise their 
 
:XXXV111 PREFACE. 
 
 superior powers in that kind, as if profitless to them. 
 But neither macadamisation, nor tunnelling, nor rope 
 ladders, will ever enable one human creature to understand 
 the pleasure in natural scenery felt by Theocritus or Virgil; 
 and I believe the athletic health of our schoolboys might 
 be made perfectly consistent with a spirit of more courtesy 
 and reverence, both for men and things, than is recog- 
 nisable in the behaviour of modern youth. Some year or 
 two back, I was staying at the Montanvert to paint Alpine 
 roses, and went every day to watch the budding of a 
 favourite bed, which was rounding into faultless bloom 
 beneath a cirque of rock, high enough, as I hoped, and 
 close enough, to guard it from rude eyes and plucking 
 hands. But, 
 
 " Tra erto e piano era un sentiero ghembo, 
 Che ne condusse in fianco del'a lacca," 
 
 and on the day it reached the fulness of its rubied fire, I 
 was standing near when it was discovered by a forager on 
 the flanks of a travelling school of English and German 
 lads. He shouted to his companions, and they swooped 
 down upon it ; threw themselves into it, rolled over and 
 over in it, shrieked, hallooed, and fought in it, trampled 
 it down, and tore it up by the roots breathless at last 
 
PREFACE. XXXIX 
 
 with rapture of ravage, they fixed the brightest of the 
 remnant blossoms of it in their caps, and went on theii 
 way rejoicing. 
 
 They left me much to think upon ; partly respecting 
 the essential power of the beauty which could so excite 
 them, and partly respecting the character of the youth 
 which could only be excited to destroy. But the incident 
 was a perfect type of that irreverence for natural beauty 
 with respect to which I said in the text, at the place 
 already indicated, "You make railroads of the aisles of 
 the cathedrals of the earth, and eat off their altars." 
 For indeed all true lovers of natural beauty hold it in 
 reverence so deep, that they would as soon think 
 of climbing the pillars of the choir of Beauvais for 
 a gymnastic exercise, as of making a play-ground of 
 Alpine snow : and they would not risk one hour of their 
 joy among the hill meadows on a May morning, for the 
 fame or fortune of having stood on every pinnacle of the 
 silver temple, and beheld the kingdoms of the world 
 from it. Love of excitement is so far from being love 
 of beauty, that it ends always in a joy in its exact 
 reverse ; joy in destruction, — as of my poor roses, — or in 
 actual details of death ; until, in the literature of the day 
 " nothing is too dreadful, or too trivial, for the greed oi 
 
xl PREFACE. 
 
 the public."* And in politics, apathy, irreverence, and 
 lust of luxury go hand in hand, until the best solem- 
 nization which can be conceived for the greatest event 
 in modern European history, the crowning of Florence 
 capital of Italy, is the accursed and ill-omened folly of 
 casting down her old walls, and surrounding her with a 
 " boulevard ;" and this at the very time when every 
 stone of her ancient cities is more precious to her than 
 the gems of a Urim breastplate, and when every nerve 
 of her heart and brain should have been strained 
 to redeem her guilt and fulfil her freedom. It is not by 
 making roads round Florence, but through Calabria, that 
 she should begin her Eoman causeway work again; and 
 her fate points her march, not on boulevards by Arno, 
 but waist-deep in the lagoons at Venice. Not yet, indeed , 
 but five years of patience and discipline of her youth 
 would accomplish her power, and sweep the martello 
 towers from the cliffs of Verona, and the ramparts from the 
 marsh of Mestre. But she will not teach her youth that 
 discipline on boulevards. 
 
 Strange, that while we both, French and English, can 
 give lessons in war, we only corrupt other nations when 
 they imitate either our pleasures or our industries. We 
 • PaU MaU Gazette, August 15th, article on the Forward murders 
 
PEEFACE. xli 
 
 English, had we loved Switzerland indeed, should have stri 
 yen to elevate, but not to disturb, the simplicity of her people, 
 by teaching them the sacredness of their fields and waters, 
 the honour of their pastoral and burgher life, and the 
 fellowship in glory of the grey turreted walls round theii 
 ancient cities, with their cottages in their fair groups by the 
 forest and lake. Beautiful, indeed, upon the mountains, 
 had been the feet of any who had spoken peace to their 
 children ; — who had taught those princely peasants to 
 remember their lineage, and their league with the rocks of 
 the field ; that so they might keep their mountain waters 
 pure, and their mountain paths peaceful, and their tradi- 
 tions of domestic life holy. "We have taught them 
 (incapable by circumstances and position of ever becoming 
 a great commercial nation), all the foulness of the modern 
 lust of wealth, without its practical intelligences ; and we 
 have developed exactly the weakness of their temperament 
 by which they are liable to meanest ruin. Of the ancient 
 architecture and most expressive beauty of their country 
 there is now little vestige left ; and it is one of the few rea- 
 sons which console me for the advance of life, that I am old 
 enough to remember the time when the sweet waves of the 
 Reuss and Limmat (now foul with the refuse of manu- 
 facture) were as crystalline as the heaven above them 
 
xlii PREFACE. 
 
 when her pictured bridges and embattled towers ran 
 unbroken round Lucerne ; when the Ehone flowed in deep- 
 green, softly dividing currents round the wooded ramparts 
 of Geneva ; and when from the marble roof of the western 
 vault of Milan, I could watch the Rose of Italy flush in the 
 first morning light, before a human foot had sullied its 
 summit, or the reddening dawn on its rocks taken shadow 
 of sadness from the crimson which long ago stained the 
 ripples of Otterburu. 
 
 3{'ri-r '"^fi 
 
SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 LECTURE I.— SESAME. 
 OF kings' treastjrles. 
 
 "You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound.** 
 
 — LuciAN : The Fisherman. 
 
 I BELIEVE, ladies and gentlemen, that my first duty this even 
 iiig is to ask your pardon for the ambiguity of title undei 
 which the subject of lecture has been announced; and for 
 having endeavoured, as you may ultimately think, to obtain 
 your audience mider false pretences. For indeed I am not 
 going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, 
 understood to contain wealth ; but of quite another order of 
 royalty, and material of riches, than those usually acknow- 
 ledged. And I had even intended to ask your attention for 
 a little while on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives in 
 taking a friend to see a favourite piece of scenery) to hide 
 what I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning 
 as I might, until we had unexpectedly reached the best 
 point of view by winding paths. But since my good plain* 
 
6 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 spoken friend, Canon Anson, has already partly anticipated 
 my reserved "trot for the avenue" in his first advertised 
 title of subject, "How and What to Read;" — and as also I 
 liave heard it. aaid, by men practised in public address, that 
 hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavour to 
 follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his purpose, I 
 will take the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly 
 that I want to speak to you about books; and about the 
 way we read them, and could, or should read them. A 
 grave subject, you will say; and a wide one! Yes; so 
 wide that I shall make no effort to touch the compass of 
 it. I will try only to bring before you a few simple tli oughts 
 about reading, which press themselves upon me every day 
 more deeply, as I watch the course of the public mind with 
 respect to our daily enlarging means of education, and the 
 answeringly wider spreading, on the levels, of the irrigation 
 of literature. It happens that I have practically some con- 
 nexion with schools for different classes of youth; and I 
 receive many letters from parents respecting the education 
 of their children. In the mass of these letters, I am always 
 Btnick by the precedence which the idea of a " position m 
 ifo" takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — more 
 CBpecially in the mothers' — minds. "The education befit" 
 ting such and such a station in life'*'' — this is the phrase, 
 this the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can 
 
OF KINGS' TPwEASURIES. 7 
 
 make out, .an education good in itself: tht conception of 
 abstract lightness in training rarely seems reached by the 
 writers. But an education "which shall keep a good coat 
 on my son's back ; — an education which shall enable him tc 
 ring with confidence the visitors' bell at double-belled doors ; 
 — education which shall result ultimately in establishment of 
 a double-belled door to his own house ; in a word, which 
 ehall lead to advancement in life." It never seems to occur 
 to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself 
 is advancement in Life ; — that any other than that may per- 
 hnps be advancement in Death ; and that this essential edu- 
 cation might be more easily got, or given, than they fancy 
 if they set about it in the right way; while it is for no 
 price, and by no favour, to be got, if they set about it in 
 the wrong. 
 
 Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective in 
 the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first — • 
 at least that which is confessed with the greatest frankness, 
 and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful exertion 
 — is this of " Advancement in life." My main purpose this 
 evening is to determine, with you, what this idea practically 
 includes, and what it should include. 
 
 Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life" means 
 becoming conspicuous in life ; — obtaining a position which 
 shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or lionoup 
 
8 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 able. We do not understand by this advancement, in gcn^ 
 ral, the mere making of money, but the being known to 
 have made it ; not the accomplishment of any gi'eat aim, 
 but the being seen to have accomplished it. In a word, we 
 liiean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That 
 thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first 
 infirmity of weak ones ; and, on the whole, the strongest 
 impulsive influence of average humanity : the greatest efforts 
 of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, 
 as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 
 
 I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want 
 you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort ; especially 
 of all modem effort. It is the gratification of vanity which 
 is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and balm of repose; so 
 closely does it touch the very springs of life, that the 
 wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as 
 in its measure mortal; we call it "mortification," using the 
 same expression which we should apply to a gangrenous and 
 incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us may be phy- 
 •icians enough to recognise the various effect of this passion 
 upon health and energy, I believe most honest men know ' 
 and would at once acknowledge, its leading power witl 
 tliem as a motive. The seaman does not commonly desire 
 to be made captain, only because he knows he can manage 
 the ship better than any other sailor on board He wantf 
 
9 
 
 to be made captain that he may be called captain. The 
 clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only 
 because he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as 
 Iiis, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wants to 
 be made bishop primarily that he may be called " My Lord." 
 And a prince does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject 
 to gain, a kingdom because he believes that no one else can 
 as well serve the state upon the throne ; but, briefly, because 
 he wishes to be addressed as "Your Majesty," by as many 
 lips as may be biought to such utterance. 
 
 This, then, being the main idea of advancement in life, 
 the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our station, 
 particularly to that secondary result of such advancement 
 which we call *' getting into good society." We want to 
 get into good society, not that we may have it, but that 
 we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its goodness de- 
 pends primarily on its conspicuousness. 
 
 Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what 1 
 fear you may think an impertinent question? I never can 
 go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audi- 
 ence are either with me or against me : (I do not much care 
 which, in beginning;) but I must know where they are; and 
 I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think 1 
 am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am 
 
 resolved to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted 
 
 1* 
 
10 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 as probable ; for whenever, in my writings on Political Eco 
 nomy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity, — or what 
 used to be called " virtue " — may be calculated upon as a 
 human motive of action., people always answer me, saying, 
 "You must not calculate on that: that is not in human 
 nature: you must not assume anything to be common to 
 men but acquisitiveness and jealousy; no other feeling ever 
 has influence on them, except accidentally, and in matters 
 out of the way of business." I begin accordingly to-night 
 low down in the scale of motives ; but I must know if you 
 think me right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask tliose who 
 admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive 
 in men's minds in seeking advancement, and the honest 
 desire of doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary 
 one, to hold up their hands. (About a dozen of hands held 
 up — the audience partly not being sure the lecturer is serious^ 
 and partly shy of expr^sing opinion.) I am quite serious 
 — I really do want to know ♦what you think; however, I can 
 judge by putting the reverse question. Will those who 
 think that duty is generally the first, and love of praise tho 
 second motive, hold up their hands ? ( One hand reported to 
 lave been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good : I see 
 you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too 
 near the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting 
 farther question, I venture to assume that you will admit 
 
n 
 
 duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think 
 that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some 
 renl good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a 
 secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You 
 will grant that moderately honest men desire place and 
 office, at least in some measure for the sake of their benefi 
 cent power ; and would wish to associate rather with sensi 
 ble and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant 
 persons, whetlier they are seen in the company of the sensi- 
 ble ones or not. And finally, without being troubled by 
 repetition of any common truisms about the preciousness of 
 friends, and the influence of companions, you will admit, 
 doubtless, that according to the sincerity of our desire that 
 our friends may be tnie, and our companions wise, — and in 
 proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which we 
 choose both, will be the general chances of our happiness 
 and usefulness. 
 
 But, granting that we had both the will and the sense to 
 choose our friends well, how few of us have the power! or, 
 at least, how limited, for most, is the sj)here of choice I 
 Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or 
 necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. "We can- 
 not know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we 
 cannot have at our side when w^e most need them. All the 
 higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneatli, 
 
12 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good 
 furtimr, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound 
 of his voice ; or put a question to a man of science, and be 
 answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes' 
 talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with words 
 worse than silence, being deceptive ; or snatch, once or twice 
 in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path 
 of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a Queen. And 
 yet these momentary chances we covet ; and spend our years, 
 and passions, and powers in pursuit of little more than 
 these ; while, meantime, there is a society continually open 
 to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, what- 
 ever our rank or occupation ; — talk to us in the best words 
 they can choose, and with thanks if we listen to them. And 
 this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, — and 
 can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant audi- 
 ence, but to gain it ; — kings and statesmen lingering patiently 
 in those plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our book- 
 case shelves, — we make no account of that company, — ^per- 
 haps never listen to a word they would say, all day long I 
 
 You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, that 
 the apathy with which we regard this company of the noble, 
 vrho are praying us to listen to them, and the passion with 
 which we pursue the company, probably of the ignoble, who 
 despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, are grounded in 
 
OF kings' treasukies. 13 
 
 this, — that we can see the faces of the living men, and it ia 
 themselves, and not their sayings, with which we desire to 
 become familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you never were 
 to see their faces ; — suppose you could be put behind a screen 
 in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would 
 you not be glad to listen to their words, though you were 
 forbidden to advance beyond the screen? And when the 
 screen is only a little less, folded in two, instead of four, and 
 you can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards that 
 bind a book, and listen, all day long, not to the casual talk, 
 but to the studied, determined, chosen addresses of the wisest 
 of men ; — this station of audience, and honourable privy 
 council, you despise I 
 
 But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 
 people talk of things that are passing, and are of immediate 
 interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay; that 
 cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you 
 about passing matters, much better in their writings than in 
 their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does in.flu» 
 ence you, so far as you nrefer those rapid and ephemeral 
 writings to slow and enduring writings — books, properly so 
 called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the 
 books of the hour, and the books of all time. Maik this dis* 
 tinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the 
 bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It 
 
14 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 is a distinction of species. There are good books fcr the 
 hour, and good ones for all time ; bad books for the hour, 
 and bad ones for all time. I must define the two kinds 
 before I go farther. 
 
 The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of the 
 bad ones — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of some per- 
 son whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for 
 you. Very useful often, telling you what you need to know; 
 veiy pleasant often, as a sensible friend's present talk would 
 be. These bright accounts of travels; good-humoured and 
 witty discussions of question ; lively or pathetic story- 
 telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, by the real 
 agents concerned in the events of passing history; — all these 
 books of the hour, multipljdng among us as education 
 becomes more general, are a peculiar characteristic and 
 possession of the present age: we ought to be entirely 
 thankful for tliem, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we 
 make no good use of them. But we make the worst pos- 
 sible use, if we allow them to usurp the place of true books : 
 for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely 
 letters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's* letter 
 nay be delightful, or necessary, to-day: whether worth 
 keeping or not, is to be considered. The newspaper may 
 be entirely proper at breakfast time, but assuredly it is not 
 reading for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 15 
 
 long letter which gives you so pleasant an account of tha 
 inns, and roads, and weather last year at such a place, oi 
 which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real 
 circumstances of such and such events, however valuable 
 foi" occasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the 
 word, a "book" at all, nor, in the real sense, to be " read." 
 A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing ; 
 and written, not with the view of mere communication, but 
 of permanence. The book of talk is printed only because 
 its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once ; if 
 he could, he would — the volume is mere inultiplication oi 
 his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India ; if you 
 could, you would ; you write instead : that is mere con^ 
 veyance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply 
 the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve it. 
 The author has something to say which he perceives to 
 be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he 
 knows, no one has yet said it ; so far as he knows, no one 
 else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melo- 
 diously if he may; clearly, at all events. In the sum of. 
 his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, 
 manifest to him ; — this the piece of true know^ledge, or sight, 
 which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him 
 to seize. He would fain set it down for ever ; engrave it 
 on rock, if he could ; saying, " This is the best of me ; foi 
 
16 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, iika 
 another ; my life was as the vapour, and is not ; but this 
 I sa^y and knew : this, if anything of mine, is worth your 
 memory." That is his " writing ; " it is, in his small human 
 way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, 
 his inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book." 
 
 Perhaps you think no books were ever so written ? 
 
 But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, 
 or at all in kindness? or do you think there is never any 
 honesty or benevolence in wise people? None of us, I 
 hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit 
 of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, 
 that bit is his book, or his piece of art.* It is mixed always 
 with evil fragments— ill-done, redundant, affected work. 
 But if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true 
 bits, and those are the book. 
 
 Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by 
 their greatest men ; — by great leaders, great statesmen, and 
 great thinkers. These are all at your choice ; and life is 
 sliort. You have heard as much before; — yet have you 
 measured and mapped out this short life and its possibili- 
 ties ? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read 
 that — that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? 
 Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your etable- 
 boy, wlien you may talk with queens and kings; or flattei 
 
 * Note this sentence carefullj, and compare the Q,u6en. of Vu Aat 
 S10fl. 
 
OF kings' TKEj^SURIES. 17 
 
 yoursoh es that it is with any worthy consciousness of yout 
 own claims to resptct that you jostle with the common 
 crowd for entree here, and audience there, when all the 
 while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide 
 as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the 
 mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter 
 always ; in that you may take fellowship and rank accord- 
 mg to your wish ; from that, once entered into it, you can 
 never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy 
 of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will 
 be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive 
 to take high place in the society of the living, measured, aa 
 to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place 
 you desire to take in this company of the Dead. 
 
 " The place you desire," and the place you Jit yourself 
 for^ I must also say ; because, observe, this court of the 
 past differs from all living aristocracy in this : — it is open to 
 labour and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will 
 bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian 
 of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar 
 person ever enters there. At the portieres of that silent 
 Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question, " Do 
 you deserve to enter ? " " Pass. Do you ask to be the 
 companion of nobles ? Make yourself noble, and you shall 
 be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise ? Loari} 
 
18 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 to undei stand it, and you shall hear it. But on other 
 terms ? — no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to 
 you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philo- 
 Bopher explain his thought to you with considerable pain; 
 but here we neither feign nor interpret ; you must rise lo the 
 level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, 
 and share our feelings, if you would recognise our presence." 
 
 This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that it 
 is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you 
 are to be among them. ISTo ambition is of any use. They 
 dcorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your 
 love in these two following ways. 
 
 I. — ^First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and 
 to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe ; 
 not to find your own expressed by them. If the person 
 who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not 
 read it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in many 
 respects. 
 
 Very ready we are to say of a book, " How good this is — 
 that's exactly what I think !" But the right feeling is, " How 
 strange that is I I never thought of that before, and yet I 
 see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some day." 
 Dut whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that 
 you go to the author to get at hia meaning, not to find youi*8, 
 Ju Ige it afterwards, if you think yourself qualified to do so j 
 
OF kings' treasueies. 19 
 
 but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if the author is worth 
 aDytbing, that you will not get at his meaning all at once ; — 
 nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long tima 
 arrive in any wise. Not that he does not say what he means 
 and in strong words too ; but he cannot say it all ; and what . 
 is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way and in parables, 
 in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite sea 
 the reason of this, nor analyse that cruel reticence in the 
 breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their 
 deeper thought. They do not give it you by way of help, 
 but of reward, and will make themselves sure that you 
 deserve it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the 
 same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, 
 to you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the earth 
 should not carry whatever there is of gold within 't at once 
 to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know 
 that all the gold they could get was there ; and without any 
 trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, 
 cut it away, and coin as much as they needed. But Nature 
 does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the 
 earth, nobody knows where : you may dig long and find 
 none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 
 
 And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When 
 you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, " Am T 
 inclined to work as an Australian miner would ? Are my 
 
20 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim 
 myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, 
 and my temper ?" And, keeping the figure a little longei", 
 even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful 
 one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind 
 or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to 
 crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxea 
 are your own care, wit, and learning ; your smelting-furnace 
 is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any 
 good author's meaning without those tools and that fire; 
 often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest 
 fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal. 
 
 And, therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and authori- 
 tatively, (I hnow I am right in this,) you must get into the 
 habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself oi 
 their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter by letter. 
 For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters 
 in the function of signs, to sounds in function of signs, that 
 the study of books is called " literature," and that a man 
 versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of 
 letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet 
 connect with that accidental nomenclature this real principle : 
 — that you might read all the books in the British Museum 
 (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly " illi- 
 terate," uneducated person ; but that if you read ten pages 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 21 
 
 of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real 
 accuracy, — you are for evermore in some measure an educated 
 person. The entire difference between education and non- 
 education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it), con- 
 ists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not 
 know many languages, — may not be able to speak any but hia 
 own, — may have read very few books. But whatever language 
 he knows, he knows precisely ; whatever word he pronounces 
 he pronounces rightly ; above all, he is learned in i\\e peerage 
 of words ; knows the words of true descent and ancient 
 blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille ; remem- 
 bers all their ancestry — \\^xv intermarriages, distantest rela- 
 tionships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and 
 offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at 
 any time, and in any country. But an uneducated person 
 may know by memory any number of languages, and talk 
 them all, and yet truly know not a word of any, — not a word 
 even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman 
 will be able to make his way ashore at most ports ; yet he 
 has only to speak a sentence of any language to be known 
 for an illiterate person : so also the accent, or turn of expres- 
 sion of a single sentence will at once mark a scholar. And 
 this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated 
 persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, 
 in the parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man 
 
22 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 a certain degree of inferior standing for ever. And this It 
 right; but it is a pity that the accuracy insisted on is not 
 greater, and required to a serious purpose. It is right that a 
 false Latin quantity should excite a smile in the House of 
 Commons; but it is wrong that a false English meaning* 
 should not excite a frgwn there. Let the accent of words bo 
 watched, by all means, but let their meaning be watched 
 more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few words 
 well chosen and well distinguished, will do work that a thou- 
 sand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in the 
 function of another. Yes ; and words, if they are not 
 watched, will do deadly work sometimes. There are masked 
 words droning and skulking about us in Europe just now, — 
 (there never were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, 
 blotching, blundering, infectious "information," or rather 
 deformation, everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms 
 and phrases at schools instead of human meanings) — there 
 are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, 
 but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight 
 for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this, or that, 
 or the other, of things dear to them : for such words wear 
 chamieleon cloaks — "groundlion " cloaks, of the colour of the 
 ground of any man's fancy : on that ground they lie in wait, 
 and rond him with a spring from it. There were never crea« 
 lures of prey so mischievous, never .liplomatists so cunning, 
 
OF kings' treasuries. ' 23 
 
 riever poisoners so deadly, as these masked words ; the}^ are 
 the unjust stewards of all men's ideas : whatever fancy or 
 favourite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favoui^ 
 He masked word to take care of for him; the word at last 
 comes to have an infinite power over him, — you cannot get 
 at him but by its ministry. And in languages so mongrel in 
 breed as the English, there is a fatal power of equivocation 
 put into men's hands, ahnost whether they will or no, in 
 being able to use Greek or Latin forms for a \vord when they^ 
 want it to be respectable, and Saxon or otherwise common 
 forms when they want to discredit it. What a singular and 
 salutary effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds 
 of people who are in the habit of taking the Form of the 
 w^ords they live by, for the Power of which those words tell 
 them, if we always either retained, or refused, the Greek 
 Corm " biblos," or " biblion," as the right expression for 
 book " — instead of employing it only in the one instance in 
 which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it 
 everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for the many 
 simple persons who worship the Letter of God's Word 
 Instead of its Spirit, (just as other idolaters worship His pic 
 ture instead of His presence,) if, in such places (for instance) 
 as Acts xix. 19 we retained the Greek expression, instead of 
 translating it, imd they had to read — " Many of them also 
 which used curio as arts, brought their bibles together, and 
 
24 SESAME AOT) LILIES. 
 
 burnt them before all men ; and tbey counted the price of 
 them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver!" Or if, 
 on the other hand, we translated instead of retaining it, and 
 always spoke of " The Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible,*' 
 it might come into more heads than it does at present that 
 the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and 
 by which they are now kept in store,* cannot be made a 
 present of to anybody in morocco binding ; nor sown on any 
 wayside by help either of steam plough or steam press ; but 
 is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by us with con- 
 tumely refused ; and sown in us daily, and by us as instantly 
 as may be, choked. 
 
 So, again, consider what effect has been produced on the 
 English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form 
 " damno," in translating the Greek KaraKptVo), when people 
 charitably wish to make it forcible ; and the substitution of 
 the temperate "condemn" for it, when they choose to keep 
 it gentle. And what notable sermons have been preached 
 by illiterate clergymen on — " He that believeth not shall be 
 damned ;" though they would shrink with horror from trans- 
 lating Heb. xi. 7, "The saving of his house, by which he 
 damned the world," or John viii. 12, "Woman, hath no man 
 damned thee? She saith, No man. Lord. Jesus answered 
 her. Neither do I damn thee ; go and sin no more." And 
 
 .8 Peter iU. 5-7. ^^^^^^ 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 25 
 
 divisions in the mind of Europe, which have cost seas of 
 blood, and in the defence of which the noblest souls of men 
 have been cast away in frantic desolation, countless as forest 
 leaves — though, in the heart of them, founded on deepef 
 causes — have nevertheless been rendered practicably possi- 
 ble, mainly, by the European adoption of the Greek word 
 for a public meeting, to give peculiar respectability to such 
 meetings, when held for religious purposes ; and other colla- 
 teral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one of using 
 the word " priest " as a contraction for " presbyter." 
 
 Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit 
 you must form. Nearly every word in your language haa 
 been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, German, 
 French, Latin, or Greek ; (not to speak of eastern and primi- 
 tive dialects.) And many words have been all these ; — that 
 IS to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, French or Ger- 
 man next, and English last : undergoing a certain change 
 of sense and use on the lips of each nation ; but retaining a 
 deep vital meaning which all good scholars feel in employing 
 them, even at this day. If you do not know the Greek 
 alphabet, learn it ; young or old — girl or boy — whoever you 
 mny be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of course, 
 implies that you have some leisure at command), learn your 
 Greek alphabet ; then get good dictionaries of all these 
 languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a word, 
 
26 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 hunt it down patiently. Read Max Miiller's lectures tho 
 roughly, to begin with ; and, after that, never let a word 
 escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe work; hut 
 you will find it, even at first, interesting, and at last, end- 
 lessly amusing. And the general gain to your character, in 
 power and precision, will be quite incalculable. 
 
 Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 
 Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to leani 
 rjiy language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
 meanings through which the English word has passed; and 
 i hose which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 
 
 And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your 
 j^rmission, read a few lines of a true book with you, care- 
 fully ; and see what will come out of them. I will take a 
 book perfectly known to you all ; No English words are more 
 familiar to us, yet nothing perhaps has been less read with 
 BUicerity. I will take these few following lines of Lycidas. 
 
 *'Last came, and last did go, 
 
 The pilot of the Galilean lake ; 
 
 Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 
 
 (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain), 
 
 He shook his mifred locks, and stern bespake, 
 
 How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, 
 
 Bnow of such as for their bellies' sake 
 
 Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold 1 
 
OF kings' treasueies. 27 
 
 Of otliei care they .ittle reckoning make, 
 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
 
 And shove away the worthy bidden guest; 
 
 Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 
 A sheep-liouk, or have learn'd aught else, tlie least 
 
 That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs 1 
 
 What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; 
 
 And when they hst, their lean and flashy songs 
 
 Grate on their scrannel pipes of wietched straw; 
 
 The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed. 
 
 But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
 
 Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 
 
 Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
 
 Daily devours apace, and nothing said." 
 
 Let us think over this passage, and examine its words. 
 First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. 
 Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the very types 
 of it which Protestants usually refuse most passionately ? 
 His '' mitred " locks ! Milton was no Bishop-lover ; how 
 comes St. Peter to be " mitred ? " *' Two massy keys he 
 bore." Is this, then, the power of the keys claimed by the 
 Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton 
 only in a poetical licence, for the sake of its picturesqueness, 
 that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to help his 
 effect? Do not think it. Great men do not play stage 
 tricks with doctrines of life and death : only little men do 
 
28 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 that. Miltou means what he says ; and means it with his 
 might too — IS gomg to put the whole strength of his spirit 
 presently into the saying of it. For though not a Jover of 
 Ihlse bishops, he was a lover of true ones ; and the Lake- 
 pilot is liere, in his thoughts, the type and head of true epis 
 copal power. For Milton reads that text, " I will give unto 
 thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven " quite honestly. 
 Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out of the book 
 because there have been bad bishops ; nay, in order to under- 
 stand him, we must understand that verse first ; it will not 
 do to eye it askance, or whisper it under our breath, as if it 
 were a weapon of an adverse sect. It is a solemn, univer- 
 sal assertion, deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But 
 perhaps we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a 
 little farther, and come back to it. For clearly, this marked 
 insistance on the power of the true episcopate is to make us 
 feel more weightily what is to be charged against the false 
 claimants of episcopate ; or generally, against false claimants 
 of power and rank in the body of the clergy; they who, "for 
 their bellies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into tho 
 «<)ld.» 
 
 Do not think Milton uses those three words to fill up hi? 
 verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three ; 
 specially those three, and no more than those — " creep," and 
 "intrude," and "climb;" no other words would or could 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 29 
 
 serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they 
 exliaustively comprehend the three classes, correspondent to 
 the tliree cliaracters, of men wlio dishonestly seek ecclesiasti 
 cal power. First, those who " creep'^ into the fold ; who do 
 not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do 
 all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility 
 of office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, 
 and unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who 
 " intrude" (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by 
 natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, 
 and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and 
 authority with the common crowd. Lastly, those who 
 " climb," who, by labour and learning, both stout and sound, 
 but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition, gain 
 high dignities and authorities, and become " lords over the 
 heritage,", though not "ensamples to the flock." 
 Now go on : — 
 
 " Of other care they little reckoning make, 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast 
 Blind mouths — " 
 
 I piausc again, for this is a strange expression ; a broken 
 metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. 
 
 Not so : its very audacity and pithiness are intended to 
 
30 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 make us look close at tlie phrase and remember it. Those 
 two monosyllables express the precisely accurate coiitrariea 
 of right character, in the two great offices of the Chui'ch — 
 those of bishop and pastor. 
 
 A Bishop means a person who sees. 
 
 A Pastor means one who feeds. 
 
 The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore 
 to be Blind. 
 
 The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be 
 fed, — to be a Mouth. 
 
 Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind 
 mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. 
 Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
 desiring power more than light. They want authority, not 
 outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule ; though it 
 may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king's 
 office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock ; to 
 number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full 
 account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of the 
 souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of his 
 ilock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do la 
 at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, 
 he can obtain the history from childhood of every living sou/ 
 in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back 
 street, Bill, and Nancy, knocking each other's teeth out I — 
 
OF kings' treasukies. 81 
 
 Does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon 
 them ? Has he had his eye upon them ? Can he circum* 
 Btantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating 
 Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop 
 though he had a mitre as h.gh as Salisbury steeple ; he is no 
 bisliop, — he has sought to be at the helm instead of the 
 masthead ; he has no sight of things. " Nay," you say, it is 
 not his duty to look after Bill in the back street. What ! 
 the fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is only those 
 he should look after, while (go back to your Milton) " the 
 hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim 
 wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing about it) 
 " daily devours apace, and nothing said ? " 
 
 " But that's not our idea of a bishop."* Perhaps not ; but 
 it was St. Paul's; and it was Milton's. They may be right, 
 or we may be ; but we must not think we are reading either 
 one or the other by putting our meaning into their words. 
 
 I go on. 
 
 "But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw.'* 
 
 This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not 
 lOokcd after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they 
 have spiritual food." 
 
 And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual 
 
 * Compare the 13th Letter in Time and Tide. 
 
82 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 food ; tney are only swollen with wind." At first you ma^ 
 think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
 ij is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and 
 Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of " Spirit." 
 It is only a contraction of the Latin word " breath," and au 
 indistinct translation of the Greek word for " wind." The 
 same word is used in writing, " The wind bloweth where it 
 listeth ;" and in writing, " So is every one that is born of the 
 Spirit ;" born of the breathy that is ; for it means the breath 
 of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it ia 
 our words "inspiration" and "expire." Now, there are two 
 kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled ; God's 
 breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, 
 and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on 
 the hills; but man's breath — the word which he calls 
 spiritual, — is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the 
 fen. They rot inwardly with it ; they are puf'^d up by it, ah 
 a dead body by the vapours of its own decom^ osition. This 
 iri literally true of all false religious teaching ; the first, and 
 last, and fatalest sign of it is that " pufiing up."' Your con- 
 verted children, who teach their parents ; yo'^^- converted 
 convicts, who teach honest men ; your convened dunces 
 who, havhig lived in cretinous stupefaction half iheir lives, 
 suddenly awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy 
 themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; 
 
OF KINGS TREASURIES. 33 
 
 your sectariaus of every species, small and great, Catholic oi 
 Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think 
 themselves exclusi\ ely in the light and others wrong ; and 
 pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can bi 
 f aved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word 
 iiastead of act, and wish instead of work : — these are the true 
 fog children — clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, 
 of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh : blown 
 bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and corrupt- 
 ing, — " Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 
 
 Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of 
 the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the differ' 
 ence between Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this 
 power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; he sup- 
 poses both the keys to be of the gate of heaven ; one is of 
 gold, the other of silver : they are given by St, Peter to the 
 sentinel angel ; and it is not easy to determine the meaning 
 either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, or of 
 the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of 
 heaven ; the other, of iron, the key of the prison, in which 
 (he wicked teachers are to be bound who "have taken away 
 the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves." 
 
 AVe have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to 
 
 gee, and feed ; and, of all who do so, it is said, " He that 
 
 watereth, shall be watered also himself." But the reverse ii 
 
 2* 
 
34 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered himself, 
 and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight,— 
 Bhut into the perpetual prison-house. And that j^rison opens 
 here, as well as hereafter: he who is to be bound in heaven 
 must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong 
 . angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, " Take him, 
 and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its 
 measure, against the teacher, for every help withheld, and for 
 every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced ; so 
 that he is more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and 
 farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the 
 bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as " the golden 
 opes, the iron shuts amain." 
 
 We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much 
 more is yet to be found in them ; but we have done enough 
 by way of example of the kind of word-by-vvord examina- 
 tion of your author which is rightly called *' reading;" 
 watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves 
 always in the author's place, annihilating our own person- 
 ality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly 
 " to say, "Thus Milton thought," not *'Thus I thought, in 
 mis-reading Milton." And by this process you will gradually 
 come to attach less weight to your own " Thus I thought" at 
 other times. You will begin to perceive that what you 
 thought was a matter of no serious importance j — that your 
 
OF kings' TREASUIilES. 35 
 
 tbouglits on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and 
 wisest that could be arrived at thereupon : — in fact, that 
 unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to 
 have any "thoughts" at all ; that you have no materials for 
 tbem, in any serious matters;* — no right to "tbink," but only 
 to try to learn more of tbe facts. Nay, most probably all 
 your Hfe (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you 
 will have no legitimate right to an " opinion" on any busi- 
 ness, except tliat instantly under your hand. "What must ol 
 necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, 
 how to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commo- 
 dity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse? There 
 need be no two opinions about these proceedings ; it is at 
 your peril if you have not much more than an " opinion" on 
 the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your 
 own business, there are one or two subjects on which you 
 are bound to have but one opinion. That roguery and lying 
 are objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out of the 
 way whenever discovered ; — that co\'etousness and love of 
 quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even in children, and 
 deadly dispositions in- men and nations ; — that in the end, tho 
 God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind 
 people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones ; — on 
 these general facts you are bound to have but one, and that 
 a very slrong, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, 
 
 * Modem "Education" for the most part signifies giving- people the 
 facility of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance 
 to them. 
 
S6 SESAME AXD LILIES. 
 
 governments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
 you can know nothing, — judge nothing ; that the best you 
 can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, i? 
 to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to under 
 stand a little more of the thoughts of others, which so soon 
 as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the 
 thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than perti- 
 nent questions. To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and 
 exhibit to you the grounds for i^jdecision, that is all they can 
 generally do for you! — and well for them and for us, if 
 indeed they are able " to mix the music with our thoughts, 
 and sadden us with heavenly doubts." This writer, from 
 whom I have been reading to you, is not among the first or 
 wisest : he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is 
 easy to find out his full meaning, but with the greater men, 
 you cannot fathom their meaning ; they do not even wholly 
 measure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had asked 
 you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead 
 of Milton's, on this matter of Church authority ? — or for 
 Dante's ? Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea 
 what either thought about it ? Have you ever balanced the 
 jcc'Te with the bishops in Richard IH. against the character 
 of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St. Dominic 
 against that of him who made Viigil wonder to gaze upon 
 him, — " disteso, tanto vilmentc, nell' eterno esilio j" or of 
 
OP kings' treasukies. 87 
 
 him whom Dante stood beside, " come '1 frate che coiifessa 
 lo perfido assassin ? "* Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men 
 better than most of us, I presume ! They were both in the 
 midst of the main struggle between the temporal and spiii- 
 ual powers. They had an opinion, we may guess? But 
 where is it? Bring it into court! Put Shakespeare's or 
 Dante's creed into articles, and sevid that up into the Eccle- 
 siastical Courts ! 
 
 You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
 many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching 
 of these great men ; but a very little honest study of them 
 will enable you to perceive that what you took for your own 
 "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, help- 
 less, entangled weed of castaway thought : nay, you will see 
 that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough 
 heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, 
 partly overgrown with pestilent brakes and venomous wind- 
 sown herbage of evil surmise ; that the first thing you have 
 to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scorafully to set 
 fire to this ; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash heaps, 
 and then plough and sow. All the true literary work b<?fore 
 you, for life, must begin with obedience to that ord»»r, 
 Bre!.k up your fallow ground, and sow not among thoma,^^ 
 II. Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, 
 ♦ Inf. xix. 71; X2iii..n7. 
 
38 SESAME ^ND LILIES. 
 
 that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this 
 higher advance to make; — you have to enter into their 
 Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you must 
 stay with them that you may share at last their just and 
 mighty Passion. Passion, or " sensation." I am not afraid 
 of the word ; still less of the thing. You have heard many 
 outcries against sensation lately; hut, I can tell you, it is 
 not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling dif- 
 ference between one man and another, — ^between one animal 
 and another, — is pi-ecisely in this, that one feels more than 
 another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not 
 be easily got for us ; if we were earth-worms, liable at every 
 instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much 
 sensation might not be good for us. But, being human crea- 
 tuies, it is good for us ; nay, we are only human in so far as 
 we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion 
 to our passion. 
 
 You know I said of that great and pure society of the 
 dead, that it would allow "no vain or vulgar person to entei 
 there." What do you think I meant by a " vulgar" person ? 
 What do you yourselves mean by " vulgarity ?" You will 
 find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence 
 of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and inno 
 cent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped blunU 
 ness of body and mind ; but in true inbred vulgarity, thcrtj 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 39 
 
 is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capa- 
 ble of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, 
 without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It i? 
 in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, 
 in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; the)! 
 are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are 
 incapable of sympathy, — of quick understanding,— of all 
 that, in deep insistance on the common, but most accurate 
 term, may be called the "tact" or touch-faculty of body and 
 soul : that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the 
 pure woman has above all creatures; — fineness and fulness 
 of sensation, beyond reason ; — the guide and sanctifier of 
 reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true : — it 
 is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recog- 
 nise what God has made good. 
 
 We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not 
 merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel 
 with them what is Righteous. Now, to feel with them, we 
 must be like them ; and none of us can become that without 
 pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested know- 
 ledge, — not the first thought that comes, — so the true pnssioi 
 is disciplined and tested passion — not the first passion thnt 
 jonies. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treache 
 rous ; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and fai 
 in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true 
 
40 SESAME AND LILISS. 
 
 purpose and no true passion left. "Not that any feeling pes- 
 sible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when 
 undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force and justice; it is 
 wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is 
 a mean wonder as of a child who sees a juggler tossing 
 golden balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think 
 that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which 
 every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of 
 heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made 
 them? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a 
 forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master's busi- 
 ness; — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front of 
 danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand — ^the 
 place of the great continents beyond the sea; — a nobler 
 curiosity still, which questions of the source of the River of 
 Life, and of the space of the Continent of Heaven, — things 
 which "the angels desire to look into." So the anxiety is 
 ignoble, with which you linger over the course and cata- 
 strophe of an idle tale ; but do you think the anxiety is less, 
 or greater, with which you watch, or ought to watch, the 
 dealings of fate and destiny with the life of an agonised 
 nation ? Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, 
 ')f your sensation that you have to deplore in England at 
 this day; — sensation which spends itself in bouquets and 
 •peeches; in rcvelliugs and junketings; in sham fights and 
 
OF KINGS TREASURIES. 41 
 
 gay puppet shows, while ycu can look on and see noble 
 nations murdered, man by man, woman by woman, child by 
 child, without an effort, or a tear. 
 
 I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but 
 in a word, I ought to have said " injustice " or " unrighteous- 
 ness " of sensation. For as in nothing is a gentleman better 
 to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is 
 a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be 
 discerned from a mob, than in this, — that their feelings 
 are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and 
 of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; 
 its feelings may be — usually are — on the whole generous 
 and right ; but it has no foundation for them, no hold 
 of them; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your 
 pleasure ; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching 
 a passion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it 
 will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on ; — 
 nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when 
 the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, 
 passions are just, measured, and continuous. A great 
 nation, for instance, does not spend its entire national 
 wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a 
 single ruffian's having done a single murder ; and for a 
 couple of years, see its own children murder each other 
 by their thousands or tens of thousands a day, consider 
 
42 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 iug only what the effect is likely to be on the price 
 of cotton, and caiing nowise to determine which sida 
 of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a great natiou 
 send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts 
 and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds en 
 thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor 
 men's savings, to close their doors " under circumstancea 
 over which they have no control," with a " by your leave ; " 
 and large landed estates to be bought by men wlio have 
 made their money by going with armed steamers up and 
 down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, 
 and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the com- 
 mon highwayman's demand of " your money or your life," 
 into that of " your money and your life." Neither does a 
 great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be 
 parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them 
 by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra 
 per week to its landlords ;* and then debate, with drivelling 
 
 * See the evidence in the Medical officer's report to the Privy Council, 
 just published. There are suggestions in its preface which will malce 
 some stir among us, I fancy, respecting which let me note these poiula 
 ollowing : — 
 
 There are two thecries on the subject of land now abroad, and in conten 
 tion; both false. 
 
 The first is that by Heavenly law, there have always existed, and most 
 
OF KJNGS' TREASURIES. 43 
 
 tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not 
 piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its 
 
 continue to exist, a certain number of hereditarily sacred persons, to whoL 
 tlie earth, air, and watei of the world belong, as personal property ; of 
 wliich earth, air, and water these persons may, at their pleasure, permit, or 
 forbid, the rest of the human race to eat, to breathe, or to drink. Thia 
 theory is not for many years longer tenable. The adverse theory is that 
 a division of the land of the world among the mob of the world would 
 immediately elevate the said mob into sacred personages; that housea 
 would then build themselves, and corn grow of itself; and that everybody 
 would be able to live, without doing any work for his living. This theory 
 would also be found highly untenable in practice. 
 
 It will, however, require some rough experiments, and rougher cata- 
 strophes, even in this magnesium-lighted epoch, before the generahty of 
 persons wiU be convinced that no law concerning anything, least of 
 all concerning land, for either holding or dividing it, or renting it 
 higli, or renting it low, would be of the smallest ultimate use to tlie 
 people, so long as the general contest for life, and for the means of Hfe, 
 remains one of mere brutal competition. That contest, in an unprincipled 
 nation, will take one deadly form or another, whatever laws you make for 
 it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law for England, if it 
 could be carried, that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes, 
 according to classes ; and that every nobleman's income should be paid to 
 huu as a fixed sa^ry or pension by the nation; and not squeezed by him 
 in a variable sum, at discretion, out of the tenants of liis land. But if you 
 could get such a law passed to-morrow; and if, which would be farther 
 necessary, you could fix the value of the assig^iod incomes by making « 
 
44 SESAME AKD LILIES. 
 
 raurdeiers. Also, a great nation having made up its mind 
 that hanging is quite the wholesomest process for ili 
 
 given weight of pure wheat-flour legal tender for a given sum, a twelve" 
 month would not pass before another currency would have been tudtlj 
 established, and the power of accumulative wealth would have re-asserted 
 itself in some other article, or some imaginary sign. Forbid men to buy 
 each other's lives for sovereigns, and they will for shells, or slates. There 
 is only one cure for public distress — and that is public education, directed 
 to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just There are, indeed, many lawH 
 conceivable which would gradually better and strengthen the national 
 temper ; but, for the most part, they are such as the national temper must 
 be much bettered before it would bear. A nation in its youth may be 
 helped by laws, as a weak child by backboards, but when it is old, it cannot 
 that way straighten its crooked spine. 
 
 And besides, the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one ; distribute 
 the earth as you will, the principal question remains inexorable, — Who ia 
 to dig it? Which of us, in brief words, is to do the hard and dirty work 
 for the rest — and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and dean 
 work, and for what pay ? Who is to do no work, and for what pay? And 
 there are curious moral and religious questions connected with these. How 
 far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, 
 In order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together, and make one 
 ery beautiful or ideal soul ? If we had to deal with mere blood, instead 
 of spirit, and the thing might literally be done (as it has been done with 
 lufants before now) so that it were possible, by taking a certain quantity of 
 blood from the arms of a given number of the mob, and putting it all into 
 one person, to make a more azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing 
 
45 
 
 homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish 
 between the degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not 
 yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood 
 track of an unhappy crazed boy, or grey-haired clodpati 
 Othello, " perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment 
 that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite 
 speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in their 
 father's sight, and killing noble youths in cool blood, faster 
 than a country butcher kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, 
 a great nation does not mock Heaven and its Powers, by 
 
 would of course be managed ; but secretly, I should conceiye. But now, 
 because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can be 
 done quite openly ; and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after the 
 manner of weasels ; that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns dig- 
 ging and ditching, and generally stupijfied, in order that we, being fed 
 gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves. Yet there is a 
 great deal to be said for this. A highly-bred and trained English, French, 
 Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more a lady) is a great production ; a 
 better production than most statues ; being beautifully coloured as well aa 
 Bhaped, and plus all the brains ; a glorious thing to look at, a wonderful 
 thing to talk to ; and you cannot have it, any more than a pyramid or a 
 church, but by sacrifice of much contributed life. And it is, perhaps, 
 better to build a beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple 
 and more delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above us, than 
 ko a wall ; only the beautiful human creature will have some duties to d« 
 in return — duties of living belfry and rampart — of which presently. 
 
16 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love 
 of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at 
 the same time, that it is actuated, and intends- to bo 
 actuated, in all chief national deeds and measures, by 
 no otlier love. 
 
 My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk 
 about reading. We want some sharper discipline than that 
 of reading ; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot read. 
 No reading is possible for a people with its mind in this 
 state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to 
 them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English 
 public, at this moment, to understand any tlioughtful writing, 
 — so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of 
 avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than 
 this incapacity of thought ; it is not corruption of the inner 
 nature ; we ring true still, when anytlrmg strikes home to 
 us ; and though the idea that everything should " pay " Kaa 
 infected our every purpose so deeply, that even when we 
 would play the good Samaritan, we never take out our two- 
 pence and give them to the host, without saying, " When I 
 come again, thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a capa- 
 city of noble passion left in our hearts' core. We show it in 
 our work — in our war, — even in those unjust domestic affeo* 
 tions which make us furious at a small private wrong, while 
 we are polite to a boundless public one : we are still iudus 
 
47 
 
 tiious to the last hour of the day, though we add the gam- 
 bler's fury to the labourer's patience ; we are still brave to 
 the death, though incapable of discerning true cause for bat- 
 tle, and are still true in affection to our own flesh, to the 
 death, as the sea-monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And 
 there is hope for a nation while this can be still said of it. 
 As long as it hold? its life in its hand, ready to give it for its 
 honour (though a foolish honour), for its love (though a sel- 
 fish love), and for its business (though a base business), there 
 is hope for it. But hope only ; for this instinctive, reckless 
 virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a 
 mob of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline 
 its passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one 
 day, with scorpion whips. Above all, a nation cannot last as 
 a money-making mob : it cannot with impunity, — it cannot 
 with existence, — go on despising literature, despising science, 
 despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and 
 concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these 
 are harsh or wild words ? Have patience with me but a 
 little longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause by 
 clause. 
 
 I. I say first we have despised literature. What do we, ns 
 a nation, care about books ? How much do you think wo 
 spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as com- 
 pared with what we spend on our horses ? If a man spend* 
 
'48 sesame and lilies. 
 
 lavishly on his library, you call him raad — a bibliomaniaa 
 But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin 
 themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear 
 of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower 
 fltill, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelvea 
 of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as 
 compared with the contents of its wine-cellars ? What posi- 
 tion would its expenditure on literature take, as compared 
 with its expenditure on luxurious eating ? We talk of food 
 for the mind, as of food for the body : now a good book con 
 tains such food inexhaustibly ; it is a provision for life, and 
 for the best part of us ; yet how long most people would look 
 at the best book before they would give the price of a large 
 turbot for it ! Though there have been men who have 
 pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, 
 whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, 
 than most men's dinners are. We are few of us put to such 
 trial, and more the pity ; for, indeed, a precious thing is all 
 the more precious to us if it has been won by work or 
 economy ; and if public libraries were half as costly as pub- 
 lic dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets 
 do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect 
 there was good in reading, as well as in munching and spark- 
 ling ; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making 
 even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it if 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 49 
 
 worth bnying. No book is worth anything which is not 
 worth much ; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and 
 reread, and loved, and loved again ; and marked, so that you 
 can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can 
 seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewife 
 bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is 
 good ; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, 
 in a good book ; and the family must be poor indeed which, 
 once in their lives, cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, 
 pay their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and 
 we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's books 
 out of circulating libraries ! 
 
 II. I say we have despised science. " What !" (you ex- 
 claim) " are we not foremost in all discovery, and is not the 
 whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
 tions?" Yes; but do you suppose that is national work? 
 That work is all done in spite of the nation ; by private 
 people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to 
 make our profit of science ; we snap up anything in the way 
 of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough ; but 
 if the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to ws, that 
 is another story. What have we publicly done for science? 
 We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of 
 our ships, and therefore we pay for an observatory ; and wo 
 allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be aimu 
 
60 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 ally tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, 
 for t ho British Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a 
 place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children li' 
 anybody will pay for their ovvm telescope, and resolve ano 
 ther nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our 
 own ; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly 
 perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something 
 else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and 
 tells us w^here the gold is, and where the coals, we understand 
 that there is some use in that; and very properly knight him: 
 but is the accident of his having found out how to employ 
 himself usefully any credit to 'tis? (The negation of such 
 discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be some 
 discradit to us, if we would consider of it.) But if you doubt 
 these generalities, here is one fact for us all to meditate upon, 
 illustrative of our love of science. Two years ago there was 
 a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; 
 the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for 
 perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a 
 whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced 
 by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market 
 worth, among private buyers, would probably have been 
 Rome thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the 
 BInglish nation for seven hundred: but we woukl not give 
 •even hundred, and the whole series would have been in the 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 61 
 
 Mimicli museum at this moment, if Professor Owen** bad not, 
 vvith loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the Bn« 
 tish public in person of its representatives, got leave to give 
 four hundred pounds at once, and himself become answer* 
 able for the other three! which the said public will doubtless 
 pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about 
 the matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if any 
 credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, 
 what this fact means. Your annual expenditure for public 
 purposes (a third of it for military apparatus) is at least 50 
 millions. "Now lOOl. is to 50,000,000^. roughly, as seven 
 pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose then, a gentleman 
 of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured 
 from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park- 
 walls and footmen only, professes himself fond of science ; 
 and that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that 
 an unique collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of 
 creation, is to be had for the sum of seven pence sterling ; 
 and that the gentleman, who is fond of science, and spends 
 two thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping hia 
 gervant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you four 
 
 * I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission: which of course 
 he co^ild not with propriety have granted, had I asked it ; but I considoP 
 It so important that the public should be aware of the fact, that I do what 
 Heems to n«e right, though rude. 
 
52 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 pence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra three 
 pence yourself, till next year !" 
 
 III. I say you have despised Art ! " What !" you again 
 answer, " have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we 
 not pay thousands of pounds for single pictures? and have 
 we not Art schools and institutions, more than ever nation 
 had before ?" Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake of the 
 shop. You would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and crock- 
 ery as well as iron ; you would take every other nation's 
 bread out of its mouth if you could;* not being able to do 
 that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of the 
 world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer- 
 by, "What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of your owd 
 faculties or circumstances; you fancy that, among your damp, 
 flat, fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the 
 Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his 
 volcanic cliffs ; — that Art may be leai*ned as book-keeping is, 
 and when learned, will give you more books to keep. You 
 care for pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the 
 bills pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on 
 tlie wall for the bills to be read, — never for the pictures to 
 be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by 
 repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, 
 nor whether they are taken care of or not ; in foreign conn* 
 tries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the 
 
 ♦That waa our real idea of "Free Trade' — "All the trade to 
 myself." You find now that by "competition" other people caa 
 manage to sell something as well as you — and now we call for Proteo 
 tion again. Wretches 1 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 53 
 
 world rotting in abandoned wreck — (and, in Venice, with the 
 Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces containing 
 them), and if you heard that all the Titians in Europe were 
 made sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it would 
 ot trouble you so much as the chance of a brace or tw-^o of 
 game less in your own bags in a day's shooting. That ii 
 your national love of Art. 
 
 IV. You have despised nature ; that is to say, all the deep 
 and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revo- 
 lutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France ; you have 
 made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one 
 conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round 
 their aisles, and eat off their altars.* You have put a railroad 
 bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled 
 the cliffs of Lucerne by Toll's chapel ; you have destroyed 
 the Olarens shore of the Lake of Geneva ; there is not a quiet 
 valley in England that you have not filled with bellowing 
 fire ; there is no particle left of English land which you have 
 not trampled coal ashes into — nor any foreign city in which 
 the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old 
 Streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of 
 new hotels and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves, which 
 your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as 
 soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to 
 climb, and slide down again, with "shrieks of delight." 
 
 * 1 meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzerland, Italy, 
 Bouth Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals— places 
 to be reverent in, and to worship in; and that we only care to driy« 
 through tiheu : and to eat and drink at their most sacred places. 
 
64 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 When you are past shrieking, having no l* iman articulate 
 voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of the:r 
 valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with 
 cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive 
 hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrow- 
 fullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the 
 deep inner significance of thera, are the English mobs in the 
 valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty 
 howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing 
 their Christian thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling 
 in knots in the "towers of the vineyards," and slowly 
 loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till evening. 
 It is pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty ; more 
 pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of 
 mirth. 
 
 Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of 
 words of mine for proof of this. I will merely print one of 
 the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the habit of cutting 
 out and throwing into my store-drawer ; here is one from a 
 Daily Telegraph of an early date this year; date which 
 though by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable 
 for on the back of the slip, there is the announcement that 
 "yesterday the seventh of the special services of this year 
 was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in St. Paul's ; " and 
 there is a pretty piece of modern political economy besides, 
 
 ^ lr\ a 'WV fj ^v I 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 65 
 
 worth preserving note of, I think, so I print it in the note 
 below.* But my business is with the main 2:)aragrriph, relat. 
 ing one of such facts as happen now daily, which, by chance, 
 has taken a form in which it came before the coroner. I 
 will print the paragraph in red.f Be sure, the facts them- 
 selves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all 
 of us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some 
 day. 
 
 " An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy 
 coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spital- 
 fields, respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. 
 Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said that she lived 
 with the deceased and his son in a room at 2, Cobb's court, 
 Christ Church. Deceased was a 'translator' of boots. 
 Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased and hia 
 son made them into good ones, and then witness sold thera 
 
 * It is announced that an arrangement has been concluded between 
 the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Credit for the payment of the 
 eleven millions which the State has to pay to the National Bank by the 14th 
 hist. This sum will be raised as follows : — The eleven commercial members 
 of the committee of the Bank of Credit will each borrow a million of florins 
 for three months of this bank, which wiU accept their biUs, which again 
 ydU be discounted by the National Bank. By this arrangement the Nationai 
 Rmk will itself furnish tJie funds with which it will be paid. 
 
 f Tlie following extract was piinted in red in the English edition. 
 
56 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 for what she could get at the shops, which was very little 
 indeed. Deceased and his son used to work night and day to 
 try and get a little bread and tea, and pay for the room 
 (is. a week), so as to keep the home together. On Friday 
 night week deceased got up from his bench and began to 
 shiver. He threw down the boots, saying, * Somebody else 
 must finish them when I am gone, for I can do no more.' 
 There was no fire, and he said, ' I would be better if I was 
 warm.' Witness therefore took two pairs of translated 
 boots* to sell at the shop, but she could only get I4:d. for 
 the two pairs, for the people at the shop said, ' We must 
 have our profit.' Witness got 14lb. of coal, and a little 
 tea and bread. Her son sat up the whole night to make the 
 
 * translations,' to get money, but deceased died on Saturday 
 morning. The family never had enough to eat. — Coroner: 
 
 * It seems to me deplorable that you did not go into the 
 
 workhouse.' — Witness: 'We wanted the comforts of our 
 
 little home.' A juror asked what the comforts were, for 
 
 he only saw a little straw in the corner of the room, the 
 
 windows of which were broken. The witness began to cry, 
 
 and said that they had a quilt and other little things. The 
 
 deceased said he never would go into the workhouse. Ti 
 
 Rammer, when the season was good, they sometimes made as 
 
 much as lOs. profit in the week They then always saved 
 
 towards the next week, which was generally a bad one. Id 
 
 * One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the 
 good of all classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wea« 
 no " translated " articloa of dress. See the preface. 
 
57 
 
 winter they made not half so much. For three years tney 
 had been getting from bad to worse. — Cornelius ColHiis said 
 that he had assisted his father since 1847. They used to 
 work so far into the night that both nearly lost thei. 
 eyesight. Witness now had a film over his eyes. Five 
 years ago deceased applied to the parish for aid. The 
 relieving officer gave him. a 41b. loaf, and told him if 
 lie came again he should ' get the stones.' * That disgusted 
 
 ♦ This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labour is curiously coinci 
 dent in verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may remem- 
 ber. It may perhaps be well to preserve beside this paragraph another 
 cutting out of my store-drawer, from the Morning Post^ of about a parallel 
 
 date, Friday, March 10th, 1865 : — " The salons of Mme. C , who did 
 
 the honours with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with 
 princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in fact, with the same male com- 
 pany as one meets at the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame 
 Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of Parliament were 
 present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. 
 On the second floor the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy 
 of the season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty 
 fare of the Parisian demimonde, I copy the menu of the supper, which 
 was served to all the guests (about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice 
 Yquem, Johannisberg, Laffitte, Tokay, and Champagne of the finest 
 yintage'i were served most lavishly throughout the morning. After 
 supper dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the ball 
 tei-minated with a chaine diabolique and a cancan cCenfer at seven in ilm 
 
 morning. (Morning-service — 'Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under thw 
 
 3* 
 
58 . SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 deceased, and he would have nothing lo do with them since 
 They got worse and worse until last Friday week, when 
 they had not even a halfpenny to buy a candle. Deceased 
 then lay down on the straw, and said he could not live 
 till morning. — ^A juror: You are dying of starvation yourself, 
 and you ought to go into the house until the summer. 
 Witness : If we went in we should die. When we come out 
 in the summer we should be like people dropped from the 
 sky. No one would know us, and we would not have even 
 a room. I could work now if I had food, for my sight 
 would get better. Dr. G. P. Walker said deceased died 
 from syncope, from exhaustion from want of food. The 
 deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months he had 
 had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a particle 
 of fat in the body. There was no disease, but if there 
 had been medical attendance, he might have survived the 
 syncope or fainting. The coroner having remarked upon the 
 painful nature of the case, the jury returned the following 
 
 opening eyelids of t"he Morn. — *) Here ia the menu: — 'Consomm6 de 
 volaille ^ la Bagration; 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. Bonchees 4 la Talloy* 
 and. Saumons froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets de boevif en Bellevue, 
 timbales niilanaises chaiidfroid de gibier. Dindes truffdes. Pdt^s de 
 foie^ gras, buissons d'esrevisses, saJades v^n^tiennes, gel^s blanches 
 aux fruits, gateaux manoini, parisiens et parisiennes. Froiuages glac^ 
 Ajianjw. Dessert.' " 
 
OF kings' tkeasuries. 59 
 
 verdict, 'That deceased died from exhaustion from want of 
 food and the common necessaries of life; also through want 
 of medical aid.' " 
 
 " Why would witness not go into the workhouse ?" yot. 
 ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against tlie 
 workhouse which the rich have not ; for of course every one 
 who takes a pension from Grovernment goes into the work- 
 house on a grand scale : only the workhouses for the 
 rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called 
 play-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it 
 appears ; perhaps if we made the play-houses for them pretty 
 and pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions at home, 
 and allowed them a little introductory peculation with the 
 public money, their minds might be reconciled to it. Mean- 
 time, here are the facts : we make our relief either so insult- 
 ing to them, or so painful, that they rather die than take it at 
 our hands ; or, for third alternative, we leave them so 
 untaught and foolish that they starve like brute creatures, 
 wild and dumb, not knowing what to do, or what to ask. I 
 say, you despise compassion ; if you did not, such a news- 
 paper paragraph would be as impossible in a Christian 
 country as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public 
 Btreets.* "Christian" did I say? Alas, if we were but 
 
 * 1 im heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall GatetU 
 
60 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 wholesomely un-Christian, it would be impossible: it is oiii 
 imaginaiy Cliristianity that helps us to commit these crimes, 
 
 efjtablished ; for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated 
 .nen, in independent position, and of honest purpose, may indeed beconi 
 all that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor wiU therefore^ 
 I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the 
 journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, 
 which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense wrongness which 
 only an honest man can achieve who has taken a false turn of thoughi 
 In the outset, and is following it, regardless of consequences. It contained 
 at the end this notable passage : — 
 
 " The bread of affliction, and the Wcater of affliction — aye, and the bed- 
 steads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought to 
 give to outcasts merely as outcasts." I merely put beside this expression of 
 the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of the message which 
 Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a trumpet'' in declaring to the 
 gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist 
 of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread 
 to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out (margin 
 'afflicted') to (hy house." The falsehood on which the writer had mentally 
 founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this : " To confound the 
 (Ituctions of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers 
 of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence 
 ,0 so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus 
 eveised in our minds betore wo car. deal with any existing problem 
 of nalional distress. " To understand that the dispensers of the poor-ratoi 
 Are the almoners of the nation and should distribute its alrns with a 
 
61 
 
 for we revel find luxuriate hi our faith, for the lewd sensation 
 of it ; dressing it up, like everything else, in fiction. The 
 dramatic Chiistianity of the organ and aisle, of dawn-service 
 and twilight-revival — the Christianity which we do not fear 
 to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about the 
 devil, in our Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts, chanting hymns 
 through traceried windows for back-ground effect, and artisti- 
 cally modulating the " Dio " through variation on variation 
 of mimicked prayer : (while we distribute tracts, next day, 
 for the benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we 
 suppose to be the signification of the Third Commandment ;) 
 — this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are 
 triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the 
 touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to do a piece of 
 common Christian righteousness in a plain English word or 
 deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found one 
 National act or hope thereon, — we know too well what our 
 faith comes to for that ! You might sooner get lightning 
 out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your 
 modern English religion. You had better get rid of the 
 smoke, and the organ pipes, both: leave them, and the 
 
 gentleness and freedom of hand as much greater and franker than that 
 possible to individual charity, as the collective national wisdom and powor 
 may be supposed greater than those of any smgle person, is the foundation 
 of all law respecting pauperism." 
 
62 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 Gotliic windows, and the painted glass, to the property manj 
 give up youi carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy 
 expiration, and laok after Lazarus at the door-step. For 
 there is a true Church wherever one hand meets another 
 Helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church wliicb 
 ever was, or ever shall be. 
 
 All these pleasures, then, and all these virtues, I repeat, 
 you nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you 
 who do not ; by whose work, by whose strength, by whose 
 life, by whose death, you live, and never thank them. Your 
 wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all ise alike 
 impossible, but for those, whom you scorn or forget. The 
 policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all 
 night to watch the guilt you have created there, and may 
 have his brains beaten out and be maimed for life at any 
 moment, and never be thanked ; the sailor wrestling with the 
 sea's rage ; the quiet student poring over his book or hia 
 vial ; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without 
 bi'ead, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hop^ 
 less, and spurned of all : these are the men by whom Eng« 
 Jaud lives ; but they are not the nation ; they are only the 
 body and nervous force of it, acting still from old habit in a 
 convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our 
 National mind and purpose are to be amused ; our National 
 religion, the perfoimance of church ceremonies, and preachr 
 
OF K[]S"GS' TREASUEIES. G3 
 
 ing of soporific truths (or untrutlis) to keep the mob quietly 
 at work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for 
 this amusement is fastening on us as a feverous disease of 
 parched throat and wandering eyes — senseless, dissolute, 
 merciless. When men are rightly occupied, their amuse- 
 ment grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a 
 fruitful flower; — when they are faithfully helpful and com- 
 passionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, 
 and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. 
 But now, having no true business, we pour our whole mascu 
 line energy into the false business of money-making ; and 
 having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed 
 up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, 
 but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pic 
 tures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The 
 justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on the 
 stage ; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute 
 the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature 
 of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some kmu) 
 for the noble grief we should have borne with our fellows, 
 and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloat 
 over the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew 
 of the grave. 
 
 It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these 
 things ; the facts are trightful enough ; — the measure of 
 
64 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 national fault involved in them is perhaps not as great as it 
 would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands oi 
 deaths daily, but we mean no harm ; we set fire to houses, 
 and ravage peasants' fields ; yet we should be sorry to find 
 we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart ; still 
 capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the 
 end of his long life, having had much power with the public, 
 being plagued in some serious matter by a reference to 
 "public opinion," uttered the impatient exclamation, "The 
 public is just a great baby !" And the reason that I have 
 allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix them- 
 selves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, 
 the more I see of our national faults or miseries, the more 
 they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterate- 
 ness, and want of education in the most ordinary habits of 
 thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dulness 
 of brain, which we have to lament ; but an unreachable 
 schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from the true school- 
 boy's in its incapacity of being helped, because it acknow- 
 ledges no master. There is a curious type of us given in 
 one of the lovely, neglected works of the last of our gieat 
 painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, 
 dud of its brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning 
 sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead 
 who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, a 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 65 
 
 group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a 
 grave, to strike them off with stones. So do we play with 
 the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them 
 far from us with om* bitter, reckless will, little thinking that 
 those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only 
 upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vaults 
 nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would 
 awake for ns, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call 
 them by their names. How often, even if we lift the marble 
 entrance gate, dp we but wander among those old kings in 
 their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the 
 crowns on their forelieads; and still they are silent to us, and 
 seem but a dusty imagery; because we know not the incan- 
 tation of the heart that would wake them; — which, if they 
 once heard, they would start up to meet us in their power 
 of long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider us; and, 
 as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, 
 "Art thou also become weak as we — art thou also become 
 one of us ?" so would these king.?, with their undimmed, 
 unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, *' Art thou also become 
 pure and mighty of heart as we ? art thou also become one 
 of us?" 
 
 Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — "magnanimous" — to 
 be this, is indeed to be great in life ; to become this increas- 
 ingly, is, indeed, to " advance in hfe," — in life itself— not in 
 
6Q SESAME AKD LILIES. 
 
 the trappings of it. My friends, do you remember that old 
 Scythian custom, when the head of a house died ? How he 
 was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and 
 carried about to his friends' houses; and each of them placed 
 him at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence'? 
 Suppose it were ofiered to you, in plain words, as it is offered 
 to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian hon- 
 our, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive.. Sup- 
 pose the offer were this: "You shall die slowly; your blood 
 shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at 
 last only as a rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall 
 fade from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of 
 Caina; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more 
 gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more orders on 
 its breast — crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow 
 before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and 
 down the streets ; build palaces for it, feast with it at their 
 tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough 
 within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the 
 golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown- 
 edge on the skull ; — no more. "Would you take the offer, 
 verbally made by the death-angel? Would the meanest 
 among us take it, think you? Yet practically and verily we 
 grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us grasp 
 at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who 
 
OF kings' treasuries. 67 
 
 desires to advance in life without knowing what life is ; who 
 means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, 
 and more fortune, and more public honour, and — not more 
 personal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart i 
 getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker 
 whose spirit is entering into Living * peace. And the men 
 who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the 
 earth — they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as 
 they are true, are only the practical issue and expression of 
 theirs ; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties, — ■ 
 costly shows, with real jewels instead of tinsel — the toys of 
 nations ; or else, they are no royalties at all, but tyrannies, 
 or the mere active and practical issue of national folly ; for 
 which reason I haye said of them elsewhere, "Visible govern- 
 ments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, 
 the harness of some, the burdens of more." 
 
 But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear 
 Kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if 
 governed nations were a personal property, and might be 
 bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of whose 
 flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he was to 
 gather ; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, "peo- 
 ple-eating," were the constant and proper title of all mo- 
 narchs ; and enlargement of a king's dominion meant the 
 
 ♦ *' rd 6i ^6vrina rov irvcvuaTOS ^w^ Koi slpfivti,^ 
 
68 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 same thing as the increase of a private man's estate ! Kings 
 who think so, however powerful, can no more be the tr\ifl 
 kings of the nation than gad-flies are the kings of a horse ; 
 they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide it. 
 They, and their courts, and their armies are, if one could 
 see clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, with 
 bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered, trumpeting 
 in the summer air ; the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes 
 fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mista 
 of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, 
 if at all, and hate ruling; too many of them make "il gran 
 refiUto ;" and if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are 
 likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make its " grau 
 refitito " of them* 
 
 Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if 
 ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion by the 
 force of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It matters 
 very little whether Trent cuts you a cantcl out here, or 
 Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter to 
 you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, 
 ** Go," and he goeth ; and to another, " Come," and ho 
 Cometh. Whether you can turn your people as you can 
 Trent — and where it is that you bid them come, and where 
 go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your people 
 hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by yoa 
 
OF -kings' TEEASURIES. 6S 
 
 You may measure your dominion by multitudes better than 
 by miles ; and count degrees of love latitude, not from, but 
 to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator. Measure ! nay 
 you cannot measure. Who shall measure the difference 
 between the power of those who " do and teach," and who 
 are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven — and the 
 power of those who undo, and consume — whose power, at 
 the fullest, is only the power of the moth and the rust? 
 Strange ! to think how the Moth-kings lay up treasures for 
 the moth, and the Rust-kings, who are to their peoples' 
 strength as rust to armour, lay up treasures for the rust; and 
 the Robber-kings, treasures for the robber ; but how few 
 kings have ever laid up treasures that needed ho guarding — ■ 
 treasures of which, the more thieves there were, the better I 
 Broidered robe, only to be rent — helm and sword, only to be 
 dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be scattered — there have 
 been three kinds of kings who have gathered these. Sup- 
 pose there ever should arise a Fourth order of kings, who 
 had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that there 
 was a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold 
 cc'ild not equal, neither should it be valued with pure gold. 
 A web more fair in the weaving, by Athena's shuttle ; an 
 armour, forged in diviner fire by Yulcanian force — a gold 
 only to be mined in the sun's red heart, where he sets over 
 the Delphian cliffs; — deep-pictured tissue, impenetrable 
 
70 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 armour, potable gold! — the three great Angels of Conduct, 
 Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and waiting at the posts 
 of our doors, to lead us, if we would, with their winged 
 power, and guide us, with their inescapable eyes, by tho 
 path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye 
 has not seen ! Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard 
 and believed this word, and at last gathered and brought 
 forth treasures of — Wisdom — for their people ? 
 
 Tliink what an amazing business that would be ! How 
 inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom. 
 That we should bring up our peasants to a "book exercise 
 instead of a bayonet exercise ! — organize, drill, maintain with 
 pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of 
 armies of stabbers! — find national amusement in reading- 
 rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give prizes for a fair shot at a 
 fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an 
 absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of 
 the capitalists of civilized nations should ever come to sup 
 port literature instead of war ! Have yet patience with me, 
 while I read you a single sentence out of the only book, pro- 
 perly to be called a book, that I have yet written myself, the 
 one that will stand, (if anything stand,) surest and longest of 
 all work of mine. 
 
 " It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europ« 
 (hat it is entire'} capitaUsls* wealth which supports unjust wars. Just 
 
71 
 
 wars do not neeJ so much money to support them; for most of the 
 men who wage such, wage them gratis ; but for an unjust war, men'a 
 bodies and souls have both to be bought; and the best to^ls of war 
 {oT them besides, which makes such war costly to the maximum ; not 
 to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations 
 which have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to 
 buy an hour's peace of mind with; as, at present France and Eng- 
 land, purchasing of each other ten millions' sterling worth of conster- 
 nation, annually (a remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen 
 leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried by the ' science ' of the modern 
 political economist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). And, all 
 unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the enemy, only by 
 loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent taxation 
 of the people, who appear to have no will in the matter, the capital- 
 ists' will being the primary root of the war; but its real root is the 
 covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, 
 fiankness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his 
 own separate loss and punishment to each person." 
 
 France and England literally, observe, buy panic of each 
 other; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand thousand 
 pouuds' worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of 
 buying these ten millions' worth of panic annually, they 
 made up their minds to be at peace with each other, and buy 
 t^n millions' wcith of knowledge annually; and that each 
 nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a year in 
 founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, 
 
72 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 royal gardens^ and places of rest. Might it not be better 
 somewhat for both French and Enorlish ? 
 
 It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Kever- 
 theless, I hope it will not be long before royal or national 
 libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with 
 royal series of books in them ; the same series in every one 
 of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, prepared for 
 that national series in the most perfect way possible; their 
 text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and 
 divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, 
 and strong, and thorough as examples of binders' work ; and 
 that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and 
 orderly persons at all times of the day and evening; strict 
 law being enforced for this cleanliness and quietness. 
 
 I could shape for you other plans, for art-galleries, and f( r 
 natural history galleries, and for many precious, many, it 
 seems to me, needful, things ; but this book plan is the easi- 
 est and needfuUest, and would prove a considerable tonic to 
 what we call our British constitution, w^hich has fallen drop- 
 sical of latej and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and 
 wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws 
 repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws established 
 for it, dealing in a better bread ; — ^bread made of that old 
 enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors ;— 
 doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries. 
 
73 
 
 Friends, the treasuries of true kings are the streets of their 
 cities; and the gold they gather, which for others is as the 
 mire of the streets, changes itself, for them and their jteople, 
 into a crystalline pavement for evermore. 
 
LECTURE II.— LILIES. ' 
 
 OF queens' gakdens. 
 
 ** Be thou glad, oh thirsting" Desert ; let the desert be made cheerful, 
 and bloom as the lily ; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild 
 with wood." — Isaiah 35, i. (Septuagint.) 
 
 It will, perhaps, be well, as tliis Lecture is the sequel of oue 
 previously given, that I should shortly state to you my gene- 
 ral intention in both. The questions specially proposed to you 
 in the first, namely. How and What to Read, rose out of a far 
 deeper one, which it was my endeavour to make you propose 
 earnestly to yourselves, namely. Why to Read. I want you 
 to feel, with me, that whatever advantages we possess in the 
 present day in the diffusion of education and of literature, 
 can only be rightly used by any of us when we have appre- 
 hended clearly what education is to lead to, and literature to 
 teach. I wish you to see that both well-directed moral train- 
 ing and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a power 
 over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the 
 measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly / conferring indeed 
 the purest kingship that can exist among men: too many 
 other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia 
 or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous;— 
 
OF queens' gardens. 76 
 
 spectral — that is to say, aspects and shadows only of royalty, 
 hollow as death, and which only the "Likeness of a kinglj 
 crown have on ;" or else tyrannous — that is to say, siibsti* 
 tilting their own wnll for the law of justice and love by which 
 all true kings rule. 
 
 There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave tliis idea 
 with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it — only ona 
 pure kind of kingship; an inevitable and eternal kind, 
 crowned or not: the kingship, namely, which consists in a 
 stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that 
 of others ; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise 
 them. Observe that word " Slate ;" we have got into a loose 
 way of using it. It means literally the standing and stability 
 of a thing ; and you have the full force of it in the derived 
 word " statue " — " the immoveable thing." A king's majesty 
 or "state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be called a 
 state, depends on the movelessness of both: — without tre- 
 mor, without quiver of balance; established and enthroned 
 upon a foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter nor 
 overthrow. 
 
 Believing that all literature and all education are only use 
 ful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and 
 therefore kingly, power — first, over ourselves, and, through 
 ourselves, over all around us, I am now going to ask you to 
 consider with me farther, what special portion or kind of 
 
7fl SESAME AND LTLTES. 
 
 this royal authority, arising out of noble education, may 
 rightly be possessed by women; and liow far they al^so are 
 called to a true queenly power. Not in their households 
 merely, but over all within their sphere. And in what sense, 
 if they rightly understood and exercised this royal or giBt 
 cious influence, the order and beauty induced by such benig- 
 Dant power would justify us in speaking of the territories 
 over which each of them reigned, as "'Queens' Gardens." 
 
 And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper 
 question, which — strange though this may seem — remains 
 among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of its infinite 
 importance. 
 
 We cannot determine what the queenly power of women 
 should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power 
 should be. We cannot consider how education may fit them 
 for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed what is 
 their true constant duty. And there never was a time when 
 wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination per- 
 mitted, respecting this question — quite vital to all social 
 happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly 
 nature, their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem 
 uever to have been yet measured with entire consent. We 
 Dear of the mission and of the rights of Woman, as if these 
 could ever be separate from the mission and ihe rights of 
 Man ; — as if she and her lord wore creatures of independen; 
 
OF queens' gardens. 77 
 
 kind and of irreconcileable claim. This, at least, is wrong. 
 And not less wrong — perhaps even more foolishly wrong (foi 
 I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) — is the ide 
 that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of hei 
 lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and 
 supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of 
 his foi-titude. 
 
 This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her 
 who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could 
 be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave I 
 
 Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and 
 harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is true) of what 
 womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with 
 respect to man's ; and how their relations, rightly accepted, 
 aid, and increase, the vigour, and honour, and authority of 
 both. 
 
 And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last lecture : 
 namely, that the first use of education was to enable us to 
 consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all points of 
 earnest difficulty. That to use books rightly, was to go to 
 them for help : to appeal to them, when our own knowledge 
 and power of thought failed ; to be led by them into wider 
 sight, purer conception than our own, and receive from them 
 the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, 
 against our solitary and unstable opinion. 
 
78 SESAME AKD LILIES. 
 
 Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the 
 wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise 
 on this point: let us hear the testimony they have left 
 respecting what they held to be the true dignity of woman, 
 and her mode of help to man. 
 
 And first let us take Shakespeare. 
 
 Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes ;— 
 he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure 
 in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, 
 exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and the still 
 shghter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 
 In his laboured and perfect plays you have no hero. 
 Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been 
 so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice 
 round him ; but he is the only example even approximating 
 to the heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — Antony, stand in 
 flawed strength, and fall by their vanities ; — Hamlet is indo- 
 lent, and drowsily speculative ; Romeo an impatient boy ; the 
 Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; 
 Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough 
 and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he 
 links into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, 
 b yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, 
 Baved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that hai 
 not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and error- 
 
OF queens' gakdens. 79 
 
 less purpose; Cordelia, Desderaona, Isabella, Hermione, 
 Imogen, Queen Katlierine, Perdita, Sylvia, Yiola, Rosalind, 
 Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all fault- 
 less ; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 
 
 Then observe, secondly, 
 
 The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly 
 or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, is by the 
 wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there i8 
 none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own 
 want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding 
 of his children ; the virtue of his one true daughter would 
 have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he 
 had cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him. 
 
 Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; — nor the one weak- 
 ness of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority of his percep- 
 tive intellect to that even of the second woman character in 
 the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his 
 error : — " Oh, murderous coxcomb ! What should such a 
 fool Do with so good a wife ?" 
 
 In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave strata- 
 gem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless 
 impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale, and in Cyni- 
 beline, the happiness and existence of two princely house- 
 holds, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death 
 by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed a1 
 
80 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In 
 Measure for Measure, the injustice of the judges, and the 
 corrupt cowardice of the brother, are opposed to the victori- 
 ous truth and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, 
 the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved 
 her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is 
 his ruin ; her prayer at last granted, saves him — not, indeed, 
 from death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer of 
 his country. 
 
 And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickle- 
 ness of a lover who is a mere wicked child? — of Helena, 
 against the petulance and insult of a careless youth ? — of the 
 patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly 
 devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," who appears 
 among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive pas- 
 sions of men, as a gentle angel, to save merely by her presence, 
 and defeat the worst intensities of crime by her smile ? 
 
 Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shake- 
 speare's plays, there is only one weak woman — Ophelia; and 
 it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is 
 not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he 
 needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. 
 Finally, though there are three wicked women among the 
 principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they 
 are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary 
 laws of life ; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the 
 power for good which they have abandoned. 
 
OF QUEENS' GAEDENS. 81 
 
 Such, in broad ligbt, is Shakespeare's testimony to the 
 position and character of women in 'human life. He repre- 
 sents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, — incor- 
 ruptibly just and pure examples — strong always to sanctify, 
 even when they cannot save. 
 
 Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature 
 of man, — still less in his understanding of the causes and 
 courses of fate, — but only as the writer who has given us the 
 broadest view of the conditions and modes of ordinary 
 thought in modern society, I ask you next to receive the 
 witness of Walter Scott. _ 
 
 I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no 
 value: and though the early romantic poetry is very beauti- 
 ful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's 
 ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear 
 a true witness, and in the whole range of these there are but 
 three men who reach the heroic type* — Dandie Dinmont, Rob 
 Roy, and Claverhouse : of these, one is a border fjirmer ; ano- 
 ther a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad cause. And 
 these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage and 
 
 * I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have 
 noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great 
 cliaracters of men in the Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrow- 
 ness of thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in 
 Edward Glendenning, and the like ; and I ought to have noticed that 
 there are several quite perfect characters sketched sometimes in the 
 backgrounds; three — let us accept joyously this courtesy to England 
 and her soldiers — are English officers : Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, 
 and Colonel Mannering. 
 
83 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly 
 applied, intellectual poVer; while his younger men are the 
 gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid 
 (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials 
 they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent 
 character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing 
 with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged, and reso- 
 lutely subdued, there is no trace in his conceptions of men. 
 Whereas in his imaginations of women, — in the characters of 
 Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Cathe- 
 rine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice Bridge- 
 north, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — with endless varieties 
 of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, we find in all a 
 quite infallible and inevitable sense of dignity and justice; 
 a fearless, instant, and imtiring self-sacrifice to even the 
 appearance of duty, much more to its real claims; and, 
 finally, a patient wisdom of deeply restrained afiection, which 
 does infinitely more than protect its objects from a momen- 
 tary error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the 
 characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the 
 tale, we are just able, and no more, to take patience in hear- 
 ing of their unmerited success. 
 
 So that in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is 
 the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth ; 
 it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over or 
 educates his mistress. 
 
 Next, take, though more briefly, graver and deeper testi- 
 
OF queens' gardens. 83 
 
 mony-— that of the great Italians and Greeks. You. know 
 well the plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a love poem 
 to his dead lady, a song of praise for her watch over his soul. 
 Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet saves him from 
 destruction — saves him from hell. He is going eternally 
 astray in despair ; she comes down from heaven to his help, 
 and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, inter- 
 preting for him the most difficult truths, divine and human; 
 and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. 
 I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began I 
 could not cease: besides, you might think this a wild ima- 
 gination of one poet's heart. So I will rather read to you 
 a few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to 
 his living lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling of all 
 the noblest men of the thirteenth century, preserved among 
 many other such records of knightly honour and love, which 
 Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from among the early 
 Italian poets. 
 
 For lol thy law is passed 
 That this my love should manifestly be 
 
 To serve and honour thee: 
 And so I do; and my delight is full, 
 Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 
 
 Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
 Since thus my w^ill was set 
 
84 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 To serve, Lhou flower of joy, thine excellence: 
 Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 
 
 A pain or regret, 
 . But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense: 
 Considering that from thee all virtues spread 
 
 As from a fountain head, — 
 That in thy gift is wisdom's best avaU^ 
 
 And honour without fail; 
 With whom each sovereign good dwells separate^ 
 Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 
 
 Lady, since I conceived 
 Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, 
 
 My life has been apart 
 In shining brightness and the pi tee of trvih ; 
 
 Which till that time, good sooth, 
 Groped among shadows in a darken'd plaoe^ 
 
 Where many hours and days 
 It hardly ever had remember'd good. 
 
 But now my servitude 
 Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 
 
 A man from a wild beast 
 Thou madest me, since for thy love I lired. 
 
 rou may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have had 
 a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. His 
 own spiritual subjection to them was indeed not so absolute; 
 
OF queens' gardens. 85 
 
 but as regards their own personal character, it was only 
 because you could not have followed me so easily, that I 
 did not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's; 
 and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and 
 faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; 
 the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful 
 kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the 
 housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon 
 the sea ; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety 
 of the sister, and daughter, in Antigone ; the bowing down 
 of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent ; and, finally, the expecta- 
 tion of the resurrection, made clear to the soul of the 
 Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, 
 to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness 
 of death. 
 
 Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind 
 upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and show 
 you why he wrote a Legend of Good Women; but no 
 Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show 
 you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and 
 sometimes vanquished ; but the soul of Una is never 
 darkened, and the spear of Britomart is never broken. 
 Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the 
 most ancient times, and show you how the great people, — • 
 by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Law* 
 
86 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 giver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by 
 his own kindred ; — how that great Egyptian people, wisest 
 then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form 
 :)f a woman ; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver's 
 buttle : and how the name and the form of that spirit, 
 adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that 
 Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to whose faith 
 you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most pre- 
 cious in art, in literature, or in types of national vir- 
 tue. 
 
 But I will not wander into this distant and mythical 
 element ; I will only ask you to give its legitimate value 
 to the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, 
 — consistent as you see it is on this head. I will ask you 
 whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main 
 work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious 
 and idle view of the relations between man and woman ; — 
 nay, worse than fictitious or idle ; for a thing may be 
 imaginary, yet desirable, if it were possible ; but this, their 
 ideal of women, is, according to our common idea of the 
 marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we 
 ay, is not to guide, nor even to think, for herself. The 
 man is always to be the wiser ; he is to be the thinker, the 
 ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, as in power 
 Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this 
 
' OF queens' gardens. 87 
 
 matter ? Are all these great men mistaken, or are we 1 
 Are Shakespeare and ^schylus, Dante and Homer, mere!} 
 dressing dolls for us ; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, 
 the realization of which, were it possible, would bring 
 anarchy into all households and ruin into all affections ? 
 Kay, if you could suppose this, take lastly the evidence 
 of facts, given by the human heart itself. In all Christian 
 ages which have been remarkable for their purity or pro- 
 gress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient devo- 
 tion, by the lover, to his mistress. I say obedient — not 
 merely enthusiastic and worshipping in imagination, but 
 entirely subject, receiving from the beloved woman, how- 
 ever young, not only the encouragement, the praise, and 
 the reward of all toil, but, so far as any choice is open, or 
 any question difficult of decision, the direction of all toil. 
 That chivalry, to the abuse and dishonour of which are 
 attributable primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in 
 peace, or corrupt and ignoble in domestic relations; and 
 to the original purity and power of which we owe the 
 defence alike of faith, of law, and of love ; — that chivalry, 
 1 say, in its very first conception of honourable life, assumes 
 the subjection of the young knight to the command — shoulQ 
 it even be the command in caprice — of his lady. It assumes 
 this, because its masters knew that the first and necessary 
 impulse of every truly taught and knightly heart is this 
 
88 SESAME AND LILIES, 
 
 of blind service to its lady : that where that true faith and 
 ca])tivity are not, all wayward and wicked passion must be ; 
 and that in this rapturous obedience to the single love of 
 hifi youth, is the sanctification of all man's strength, and 
 the continuance of all his purposes. And this, not because 
 such obedience would be safe, or honourable, were it ever 
 rendered to the unworthy; but because it ought to be 
 impossible for every noble youth — it is impossible for every 
 one rightly trained — to love any one whose gentle counsel 
 he cannot trust, or whose prayerful command he can hesitate 
 to obey. 
 
 I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I 
 think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge 
 of what has been and to your feeling of what should be. 
 You cannot think that the buckling on of the knight's 
 armour by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic 
 fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth — that the soul's 
 aimour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's 
 hand has braced it ; and it is only when she braces it loosely 
 that the honour of manhood fails. Know you not those 
 lovely lines — ^I would they w^ere learned by all youthfnl 
 ladies of England : — 
 
 " Ah wasteful woman I slie who may 
 On her sweet self set her own price, 
 Knowing he cannot choose but pay— 
 
OF queens' GAEDE^TS. 89 
 
 How has she cheapen'd Paradise 1 
 How given for nought her priceless giffc, 
 How spoiled the bread and spill'd the wine, 
 Which, spent with due, respective thrift, 
 Had made brutes men, and men divine I " * 
 
 This much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I 
 believe you will accept. But what we too often doubt ii 
 the fitness of the continuance of such a relation throughout 
 the whole of human life. We think it right in the lover 
 and mistress, not in the husband and wife. That is to say, 
 we think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one 
 whose affection we still doubt, and whose character we aa 
 yet do but partially and distantly discern ; and that this 
 reverence and duty are to be withdrawn when the affection 
 has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the charac- 
 ter has been so sifted and tried that we fear not to entrust 
 it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see how 
 ignoble this is, as well as how unreasonable? Do you not 
 feel that marriage — when it is marriage at all, — is only the 
 seal which marks the vowed transition of temporary into 
 untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love "' 
 
 But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function 
 of the woman reconcileable with a true wifely subjection? 
 Simply in that it is a guiding^ not a detemiining, functioa 
 * Coventry Patmore, 
 
90 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 Let me try to show you briefly how these powers seem to bi 
 rightly distinguishable. 
 
 We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of 
 the "superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could be 
 compared in similar things. Each has what the other has 
 not: each completes the other, and is completed by the 
 other : they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and per- 
 fection of both depends on each asking and receiving from 
 the other what the other only can give. 
 
 Now their sepaiate characters are briefly these. The man's 
 power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the 
 doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect 
 is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, 
 for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever 
 conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not 
 for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, 
 but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees 
 the qualities of things, their claims and their places. Her 
 great function is Praise : she enters into no contest, but 
 infallibly judges the crown of contest. By her office, and 
 place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. Tho 
 man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all 
 peril and trial : — to him, therefore, the failure, the oflTence, 
 the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued, 
 often misled, and always hardened. But he guards the 
 
OF queens' gardens. 91 
 
 woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless 
 she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no tempta- 
 tion, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature 
 of home — it is the place of Peace ; the shelter, not only fron 
 all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far 
 as it is not this, it is not home ; so far as the anxieties of the 
 outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, 
 unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is 
 allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it 
 ceases to be home ; it is then only a part of that outer world 
 which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far 
 us it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth 
 watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none 
 xnay come but those whom they can receive with love, — so 
 far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler 
 shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a weary land, and 
 light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea ; — so far it vindicates 
 the name, and fulfils the praise, of home. 
 
 And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always 
 round her. The stars only may be over her head ; the glow^ 
 worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her 
 foo^. : but home is yet wherever she is ; and for a noble 
 woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with 
 cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, 
 for those who else were homeless. 
 
92 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to be,— 
 the woman's true place and power? But do not you see 
 that to fulfil this, she must — as far as one can use such terms 
 of a human creature — be incapable of error ? So far as she 
 rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be endur- 
 iogly, incorruptibly good ; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, 
 not for self-development, but for self-renunciation : wise, not 
 that she may set herself above her husband, but that she 
 may never fail from his side : wise, not with the narrowness 
 of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentle- 
 ness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, 
 modesty of service — ^the true changefulness of woman. In 
 that great sense — " La donna e mobile," not " Qual pitim' al 
 vento;" no, nor yet "Variable as the shade, by the light 
 quivering aspen made ;" but variable as the light, manifold in 
 fair and serene division, that it may take the colour of all that 
 it falls upon, and exalt it. 
 
 II. I have been trying, thus far, to show you what should 
 be the place, and what the power of woman. Now, secondly, 
 we ask. What kind of education is to fit her for these ? 
 
 And if you indeed think this a true conception of her oflice 
 and dignity, it will not be diflScult to trace the course of 
 education which would fit her for the one, and raise her to 
 the other. 
 
 The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful persons now 
 
OF queens' gardens. 98 
 
 dc'^abt this, — is to secure for her such physical training and 
 iotercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her beauty 
 the highest refinement of that beauty being unattainable 
 without splendour of activity and of delicate strength. To 
 perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power ; it cannot 
 be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only 
 remember that all physical freedom is vain to produce beauty 
 without a corresponding freedom of heart. There are two 
 passages of that poet who is distinguished, it seems to me, 
 from all others — not by power, but by exquisite rightnesa — 
 which point you to the source, and describe to you, in a few 
 syllables, the completion of womanly beauty. I will read the 
 introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you 
 specially to notice: 
 
 ' " Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
 Then Nature said, a lovelier flower 
 
 On earth was never sown. 
 This child I to myself will take ; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A lady of my own. 
 
 ** Myself will to my darling be 
 Both law and impulse; and with me 
 
 The girl, in rock and plain, 
 111 earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
 
94 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 rihall feel an overseeing power 
 To kindle, or restrain. 
 
 "The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her, for her the willow bend ; 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motions of the storm, 
 3-race that shall mould the maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
 ' And vital feelings of delight 
 Shall rear her form to stately height, — 
 
 Her virgin bosom swell. 
 Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
 y While she and I together live, 
 
 Here in this happy dell." 
 
 " Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly 
 feelings of delight ; but the natural ones are vital, necessary 
 to very life. 
 
 And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be 
 vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do not 
 make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on 
 good girl's nature — ^there is not one check you give to her 
 inslincts of affection or of effort — which will not be indelibly 
 written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more 
 painful because it takes away the brightness from the 
 
OF queens' gardens. 95 
 
 eyes of innocence, and the cliarm from the brow of vir 
 tue. 
 
 This for the means : now note the end. Take from the 
 same poet, in two lines, a perfect description of womanly 
 beauty — 
 
 " A countenance in which did meet 
 Sweet records, promises as sweet." 
 
 The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can only 
 consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in the 
 memory of happy and useful years, — ^fuU of sweet records ; 
 and from the joining of this with that yet more majestic 
 childishness, which is still full of change and promise; — 
 opening always — ^modest at once, and bright, with hope of 
 better things to be won, and to be bestowed. There is no 
 old age where there is still that promise — it is eternal youth. 
 
 Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical frame, 
 and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill 
 and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts which 
 tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and refine its 
 natural tact of love. 
 
 All such knowledge should be given her as may enable hef 
 to understand, and even to aid, the work of men : and yet it 
 should be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it were, or 
 could be, for her an object to know ; but only to feel, and to 
 
96 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or perfect/ 
 ness in herself, wliether she knows many languages or one 
 but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show 
 kindness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of a 
 stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to her own worth or 
 dignity that she should be acquainted with this science or 
 that ; but it is of the highest that she should be trained in 
 habits of accurate thought ; that she should understand the 
 meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural 
 laws, and follow at least some one path of scientific attain- 
 ment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of Humi- 
 liation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men can 
 descend, owning themselves for ever children, gathering peb- 
 bles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how 
 many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of 
 events, or how many names of celebrated persons — it is not 
 the object of education to turn a woman into a dictionary ; 
 but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter 
 with her whole personality into the history she reads ; to 
 picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagina- 
 tion ; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic dr 
 curastances and dramatic relations, which the historian to< 
 often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by hji 
 arrangement : it is for her to trace the hidden equities of 
 divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the 
 
OF queens' gardens. 97 
 
 tateful threads of woveD fire that connect error with its retri« 
 bution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the 
 limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is 
 being for ever determined, as the moments pass in which she 
 draws her peaceful breath ; and to the contemporary cala 
 raity which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would recur 
 no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagining 
 what would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she 
 were daily brought into the presence of the suffering which 
 is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is to be 
 taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the pro- 
 portion which that little woi-ld in which she lives and loves, 
 bears to the world in which God lives and loves ; — and 
 solemnly she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of 
 piety may not be feeble in proportion to the number they 
 embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it is for the mo- 
 mentary relief from pain of her husband or her child, when 
 it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none to 
 love them, — and is "for all who are desolate and oppressed." 
 Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence ; perhaps 
 you will not be with me in what I believe is most needful for 
 me to say. There is one dangerous science for women — one 
 which let them indeed beware how they profanely touch — 
 that of theology. Strange, and miserably strange, that while 
 
 they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and pause at 
 
 5 
 
98 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 the threshold of sciences where every step is demonstrahli 
 and sure, they will plunge headlong, and without one thought 
 of incompetency, into that science in which the greatest men 
 have trembled, and the wisest erred. Strange, that they will 
 complacently and pridefully bind up whatever vice or folly 
 there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind 
 incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated 
 myrrh. Strange, in creatures born to be Love visible, that 
 where they can know least, they will condemn first, and think 
 to recommend themselves to their Master by scrambling up 
 the steps of His judgment-throne, to divide it witb Him. 
 Most strange, that they should think they were led by the 
 Spirit of the Comforter into habits of mind which have 
 become in them the unmixed elements of home discomfort ; 
 and that they dare to turn the Household Gods of Christi- 
 anity into ugly idols of their own — spiritual dolls, for them 
 to dress according to their caprice ; and fiom which their 
 husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they 
 should be shrieked at for breaking them. 
 
 I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl's education 
 Bliould be nearly, in its course and material of study, the 
 game as a boy's; but quite differently directed. A woman, 
 in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband ia 
 hkelj to know, but to know it in a different way. His com 
 mand of it should be foundational and progressive, hcrSj 
 
OF QUEENS GAKDENS. 99 
 
 general and uccompHshed for daily and helpful use. Not but 
 that it would often be wiser in men to learn things in a 
 womanly sort of way, for present use, and to seek for the 
 discipline and training of tlieir mental powers in such 
 branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for social 
 service ; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to know any 
 language or science he learns, thoroughly, while a woman 
 ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as 
 may enable her to sympathise in her husband's pleasures, 
 and in those of bis best friends. 
 
 Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as she reaches. 
 There is a wide difference between elementary knowledge 
 and superficial knowledge — between a firm beginning, and a 
 feeble smattering. A woman may always help her husband 
 by what she knows, however little ; by what she half-knows, 
 or mis-knows, she will only teaze him. 
 
 And, indeed, if there were to be any difference between a 
 girl's education and a boy's, I should say that of the two the 
 girl should be earlier led, as her uitellect ripens faster, into 
 deep and serious subjects ; and that her range of literature 
 ghould be, not more, but less frivolous, calculated to add the 
 qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy 
 of thought and quickness of wit ; and also to keep her in a 
 lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into any 
 question of choice of books ; only be sure that her books are 
 
100 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 not heaped up in her lap as they fall out of the package of 
 the circulating library, wet with the last and lightest spray of 
 the fountain of folly. 
 
 Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with respect to that 
 8ore temptation of novel-reading, it is not the badness of a 
 novel that we should dread, but its over-wrought interest 
 The weakest romance is not so stupifying as the lower forms 
 of religious exciting literature, and the worst romance is 
 not so corrupting as false liistory, false philosophy, or false 
 political essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, 
 if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life 
 uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless 
 acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be called 
 upon to act. 
 
 I speak therefore of good novels only ; and our modern 
 literature is particularly rich in types of such. Well read, 
 indeed, these books have serious use, being nothing less than 
 treatises on moral anatomy and chemistry ; studies of human 
 nature in the elements of it. But I attach little weight to 
 this function: they are hardly ever read with earnestness 
 cnougli to pei-mit them to fulfil it. The utmost they usually 
 do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or the 
 hitterness of a malicious one ; for each will gather, from the 
 novel, food for her own disposition. Those who are naturally 
 proud and envious will learn from Thackeray to despisa 
 
OF queens' gardens. 10] 
 
 Humanity; those who are naturally gentle, to pity it; those 
 who are naturally shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, thera 
 might be a serviceable power in novels to bring before us, in 
 vividness, a human truth which we had before dimly cod 
 ceived ; but the temptation to picturesqueness of statement 
 is so great, that often the best writers of fiction cannot resist 
 it; and our views are rendered so violent and one-sided, that 
 their vitality is rather a harm than good. 
 
 Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at 
 decision how much novel-reading should be allowed, let me 
 at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, or 
 history be read, they should be chosen, not for what is out 
 of them, but for what is in them. The chance and scattered 
 e\al that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a 
 powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl ; but the 
 emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly 
 degrades her. And if she can have access to a good library 
 of old and classical books, there need be no choosing at all. 
 Keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl's way : 
 turn her loose into the old library every wet day, and let her 
 alone. She will find what is good for her ; you cannot : for 
 there is just this difference between the making of a girl's 
 character and a boy's — you may chisel a boy into shnpe. as 
 you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better 
 kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannoi 
 
102 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 nammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does,— 
 she will wither without sun ; she will decay in her sheath, as 
 the narcissus does, if you do not give her air enough ; she 
 may fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave her without 
 lielp at some moments of her life; but you cannot fettei 
 her ; she must take her own fair form and way, if she take 
 any, and in mind as in body, must have always 
 
 " Her household motions light and free 
 And steps of virgin liberty." 
 
 Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn 
 in a field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better 
 than you ; and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter 
 and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest 
 thought were good. 
 
 Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and let her 
 practice in all accomplishments be accurate and thorough, 
 BO as to enable her to understand more than she accomplishes, 
 I say the finest models — that is to say, the truest, simplest, 
 nsefullest Note those epithets ; they will range through all 
 fche arts. Try them in music, where you might think them 
 tlie leasi applicable. I say the truest, that in which the notes 
 most closely and faithfully express the meaning of the words, 
 or the character of intended emotion ; again, the simplest, 
 that in which the meaning and melody are attained with the 
 
OF queers' gardens. 103 
 
 fewest and most significant notes possible ; and, finally, tlie 
 usefullest, that music which makes the best words most 
 beautiful, which enchants them in our memories each with its 
 own glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the 
 heart at the moment we need them. 
 
 And not only in the material and in the course, but yet 
 more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education be aa 
 serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they were 
 meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their 
 fiivolity. Give them the same advantages that you give 
 their brothers — appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue 
 in them ; teach them also that courage and truth are the 
 pillars of their being: do you think that they would not 
 answer that appeal, brave and true as they are even now, 
 when you know that there is hardly a girl's school in this 
 Christian kingdom where the children's courage or sincerity 
 would be thought of half so much importance as their way 
 of coming in at a door ; and when the whole system of 
 society, as respects the mode of establishing them in life, is 
 one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, in 
 not daring to let them live, or love, except as their neigh 
 hours choose ; and imposture, in bringing, for the purpose of 
 our own pride, the full glow of the world's worst vanity upon 
 a girl's eyes, at the very period when the whole happiness 
 of her future existence depends upon her remaining undazzled ? 
 
104 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but noble 
 teachers. You consider somewhat, before you send your 
 boy to school, what kind of a man the master is; — whatso- 
 ever kind of man he is, you at least give him full authority 
 over your son, and show some respect to him yourself; if no 
 comes to dine with you, you do not put him at a side table ; 
 you know also that, at his college, your child's immediate 
 tutor will be under the direction of some still higher tutor, foi 
 whom you have absolute reverence. You do not treat the Dean 
 of Christ Church or the Master of Trinity as your inferiors. 
 
 But what teachers do you give your girls, and what reve 
 rence do you show to the teachers you have chosen ? Is a 
 girl likely to think her own conduct, or her own intellect, of 
 much importance, when you trust the entire formation of 
 her character, moral and intellectual, to a person whom you 
 let your servants treat with less respect than they do your 
 housekeeper (as if the soul of your child were a less charge 
 than jams and groceries), and whom you yourself think you 
 confer an honour upon by letting her sometimes sit in the 
 drawing-room in the evening? 
 
 Thus, then, of literature as her help, and thus of art. 
 There is one more help which she cannot do without — on 
 which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other in- 
 fluences besides, — the help of wild and fair nature. Heai 
 tide of the education of Joan of Arc : 
 
OF queens' gardens. 105 
 
 *' The education of this poor girl was mean according to the present 
 standard; was ineflably grand, according to a purer philosophic stand- 
 aid; and only not good for our age, because for us it would be unat* 
 tain able. * * * 
 
 *' Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to the advan 
 tages of her situation. The fountain of Domr6my was on the biink 
 of a boundless forest ; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies, 
 that the parish priest {curS) was obliged to read mass there once a 
 year, in order to keep them in any decent bounds. * * * 
 
 " But the forests of Domr^my — those were the glories of the land , 
 for in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered 
 into tragic strength. * Abbeys there were, and abbey windows,' — 
 Mike Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' that exercised even princely 
 power both in Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their 
 sweet bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins or 
 vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scat- 
 tered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the 
 deep solitude of the region ; yet many enough to spread a network 
 or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a 
 heathen wilderness." * 
 
 Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods 
 
 ighteen miles deep to the centre ; but you can, perliaps. 
 
 keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to keep 
 
 them. But c?o you wish it ? Suppose you had each, at the 
 
 * "Joan of Arc: in reference to M. MicheleVs History of France." Df 
 
 Quiuoey's Works. Vol Hi. p. 217. 
 
•106 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your chil 
 dren to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them 
 oom to run, — no more — and that you could not change your 
 abode ; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, 
 or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of 
 the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke 
 Would you do it ? I think not. I can tell you, you would 
 be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold 
 instead of four-fold. 
 
 Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The 
 whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough 
 for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let 
 them aU run there. And this little garden you will turn into 
 furnace-ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; 
 and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For 
 the fairies will not be all banished ; there are fairies of the 
 fuiTiace as of the wood, and their first gifts seem to be 
 " shai*p arrows of the mighty ;" but their last gifts are " coals 
 of juniper." 
 
 And yet I cannot — though there is no part of my subject 
 that I feel more — press this upon you ; for we made so little 
 tise of the power of nature while we had it that we shall 
 Iiardly feel what we have lost. Just on the other side of the 
 Mersey you have your Snowdon, and your Meuai Straits, 
 Olid that mighty granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesc^a, 
 
OF queens' gardens. 107 
 
 splendid in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep 
 sea, once thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, looking 
 westward; the Holy Head or Headland, still not without 
 awe when its red light glares first through storm. Theso 
 are the hills, and these the bays and blue inlets, which, 
 among the Greeks, would have been always loved, always 
 fateful in influence on the national mind. That Snowdon is 
 your Parnassus ; but where are its Muses ? That Holyhead 
 mountain is your Island of ^gina, but where is its Temple 
 to Minerva? 
 
 Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had achieved 
 under the shadow of our Parnassus, up to the year 1848 ? — • 
 Here is a little account of a Welsh school, from page 261 of 
 the Report on Wales, published by the Committee of Coun- 
 cil on Education. This is a school close to a town contain- 
 ing 5,000 persons : — 
 
 " I then called up a larger class, most of whom had recently comt- 
 to the school. Three girls repeatedly declared they had never heard 
 of Christ, and two that they had never heard of God. Two out of six 
 thought Christ was on earth now ('they might have had a worse 
 thought, perhaps'), three knew nothing about the crucifixion. Four 
 out of seven did not know the name.3 of the months, nor the number 
 of days in a year. They had no notion of addition beyond two and 
 two, or three and three; their minds were perfect blanks." 
 
 Oh ye women of England ! from the Princess of that Wales 
 
108 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 to the simplest of you, do not tliink your own children cat 
 be brought into their true fold of rest while these are scat- 
 tered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. And do not 
 tliink your daughters can be trained to the truth of their 
 own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God 
 made at once for their school-room and their play-ground, 
 lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly 
 in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them 
 also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes 
 forth for ever from the rocks of your native land — waters 
 which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and 
 you only worship with pollution. You cannot lead your chil- 
 dren faithfully to those narrow axe-hewn church altars of 
 yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven — the mountains 
 that sustain your island throne, — mountains on which a 
 Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven rest in every 
 wreathed cloud — ^remain for you without inscription ; altars 
 built, not to, but by, an Unknown God. 
 
 III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the teaching, 
 of woman, and thus of her household office, and queenliness. 
 We come now to our last, our widest question, — "What is 
 her queenly office with respect to the state ? 
 
 Generally, we are under an impression that a man's dut'ea 
 are publi-j, and a woman's private. But this Is not altogether 
 no. A man has a personal work or duty, relating to his own 
 
OF queens' gardens. 109 
 
 home, and a piiLHc work or duty, which is the expanaiou of 
 the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a porsonal 
 work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work 
 and duty, which is also the expansion of that. 
 
 Now the man's work for his own home is, as has been 
 said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence; the 
 woman's to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. 
 
 Expand both these functions. The man's duty as a mem 
 ber of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, in 
 the advance, in the defence of the state. The woman's duty, 
 as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the order 
 iug, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the 
 state. 
 
 What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need be, 
 against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in a more 
 devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his country, 
 leaving his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, to do his 
 more incumbent work there. 
 
 And, in like manner, what the woman is to be within her 
 gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the 
 mirror of beauty ; that she is also to be without her gates, 
 where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, love- 
 liness more rare. 
 
 And as within the human heart there is always set an 
 iustiuct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you cannot 
 
110 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 quench, but only warp and corrupt if you withdraw it from 
 its true purpose; — as there is ihe intense instinct of love, 
 which, rightly disciplined, maintains all the sanctities of life 
 ^nd, misdirected, undermines them; and must do either the 
 )ne or the other ; so there is in the human heart an inextin 
 guishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed, 
 maintains all the majesty of law and life, and misdirected, 
 wrecks them. 
 
 Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, and 
 of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keepg 
 it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire 
 of power I — For Heaven's sake, and for Man's sake, desire it 
 all you can. But what power? That is all the question. 
 Power to destroy ? the lion's limb, and the dragon's breath ? 
 Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide and to guard. 
 Power of the sceptre and shield ; the power of the royal 
 hand that heals in touching, — that binds the fiend and looses 
 the captive ; the throne that is founded on the rock of 
 Justice, and descended from only by steps of mercy. Will 
 3'ou not covet such power as this, and seek such throne aa 
 hifii, and be no more housewives, but queens ? 
 
 It is now long since the women of England arrogated, 
 nuiversally, a title which once belonged to nobility only , 
 and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple 
 ^itle of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentlcmaiv. 
 
OF queens' gardens. Ill 
 
 insisted on tlie privilege of assuming the title of " Lady," * 
 which properly corresponds only to the title of " Lord." 
 
 I do not blame them for this ; but only for their narrow 
 motive in this. I would have them desire and claim th 
 title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but 
 the oiBoe and duty signified by it. Lady means "bread- 
 giver" or "loaf-giver," and Lord means " maintain er of 
 laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which is 
 maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given to 
 the household ; but to law maintained for the multitude, and 
 to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has 
 legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer 
 of the justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal 
 claim to her title, only so far as she communicates that 
 help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women 
 once, ministering to Him of their, substance, were permitted 
 to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known, 
 as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 
 
 * I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our English 
 youth of ceriaiu ranks, in which both boj and girl should receive, at a 
 given age, their knighthood and ladyhood by true title ; attainable only by 
 certain probation and trial both of character and accomplishment ; and to 
 be forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonourable act. Such 
 an institution would bo entirely, and with all noble results, possible, in a 
 nation which loved honour. That it would not be possible among its 
 is Qot to the discredit of the scheme. 
 
112 SESAME AND LTLTES. 
 
 And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power of iht 
 Dominus, or House Lord, and of the Doraina, or Hou8e-Lady, 
 is great and venerable, not in the number of those through 
 whom it has lineally descended, but in the number of those 
 whom it grasps within its sway ; it is always regarded with 
 reverent worship wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, 
 and its ambition co-relative with its beneficence. Your fancy 
 is pleased with the thought of being noble ladies, with a 
 train of vassals. Be it so ; you cannot be too noble, and 
 your train cannot be too great ; but see to it that your train 
 is of vassals whom you serve and feed, not merely of slaves 
 who serve and feed yow ; and that the multitude which 
 obeys you is of those whom you have comforted, not oppress- 
 ed, — whom you have redeemed, not led into captivity. 
 
 And this, which is true of the lower or household dominion, 
 is equally true of the queenly dominion ; — that highest dignity 
 is open to you, if you will also accept that highest • duty. 
 Rex et Regina — Roi et Reine — " i?^^A^doe^s ; " they differ 
 hut from the Lady and Lord, in that their power is supreme 
 over the mind as over the person — that they not only feed 
 and clothe, but direct and teach. And whether consciously 
 or not, you must be, in many a heart, enthroned : there is no 
 putting by that crown ; queens you must always be ; queens 
 to your lovers ; queens to your husbands and your sons ; 
 queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows 
 
OF queens' gardens. lis 
 
 itself, and will for ever bow, before the myrtle crowu, and 
 the stainless sceptre, of womanhood. But, alas I you are too 
 often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in t\\9 
 least tliings, while you abdicate it in the greatest ; and ]eav« 
 ing misrule and violence to work their will among men, in 
 defiance of the power, which, holding straight in gift from 
 the Prince of all Peace, the wicked among you betray, and 
 the good forget. 
 
 " Prince of Peace." N'ote that name. When kings rule 
 in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, they 
 also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, receive the 
 power of it. There are no other rulers than they : other rule 
 than theirs is but misrule ; they who govern verily " Dei 
 gratis " are all princes, yes, or princesses, of peace. There 
 is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women 
 are answerable for it ; not in that you have provoked, but in 
 that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone 
 to fight ; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for 
 you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when 
 there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no 
 misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies lastly with you. 
 Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to 
 bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy in their 
 own struggle; but men are feeble in sympathy, and con 
 tracted in hope ; it is you only who can feel the depths of 
 
114 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 pain; and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of trying 
 to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within 
 your park walls and garden gates; and you are content to 
 know that there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness 
 — a world of secrets which yon dare not penetrate ; and of 
 suffering which you dare not conceive. 
 
 I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing among 
 the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no depths to 
 which, when once warped from its honour, that humanity can 
 be degraded.' I do not wonder at the miser's death, with 
 his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at 
 the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped about his feet. 
 I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of a single 
 victim, done by the assassin in the darkness of the rail way, 
 or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not even wonder at the 
 myriad-handed murder of multitudes, done boastfully in the 
 daylight, by the frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, 
 unimaginable guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of their 
 priests, and kings. But this is wonderful to me— oh, how 
 wonderful! — ^to see the tender and delicate woman among 
 you, with her child at her breast, and a power, if she would 
 wield it, over it, and over its father, purer than the air of 
 heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth — ^nay, a magni- 
 tude of blessing which her husband would not part with for 
 all that earth itself, though it were made of one entire and 
 
OF queens' gardens. 11(j 
 
 perfect chrysolite : — to see her abdicate this majesty to play 
 at precedence with her next-door neighbour ! This is won- 
 derful — oh, wonderful ! — ^to see her, with every innocent feeh 
 mg fresh within her, go out in the morning into her garden 
 to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift theif 
 heads when they are drooping, with her happy smile upon 
 her face, and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a 
 little wall around her place of peace : and yet she knows, in 
 her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, 
 outside of that little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the 
 horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by 
 the drift of their life-blood. 
 
 Have you ever considered what a deep under meamng 
 there lies, or at least, may be read, if we choose, in our cus- 
 tom of strewing flowers before those whom we think most 
 happy ? Do you suppose it is merely to deceive them into 
 the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in showers at 
 their feet? — that wherever they pass they will tread on herbs 
 of sweet scent, and that the rough ground will be made 
 smooth for them by depth of roses? So surely as they 
 believe that, they will have, instead, to walk on bitter herbs 
 and thorns ; and the only softness to their feet will be of 
 snow. But it is not thus intended they should believe 
 there is a better meaning in that old custom. The path of a 
 good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise 
 
116 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 behind her steps, not before them. " Her feet ha\ e touched 
 the meadows, and left the daisies rosy." You think that 
 only a lover's fancy;— false and vain! How if it/conld be 
 true ? You think this also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — 
 
 " Even the light harebell raised its head 
 Elastic from her airy tread." 
 
 But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not 
 destroy where she passes. She should revive ; the harebella 
 should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I am 
 going into wild hyperbole? Pardon me, not a whit — I 
 mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute truth. 
 You have heard it said — (and I believe there is more than 
 fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one) — 
 that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some one 
 who loves them. I know you would like that to be true ; 
 you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your 
 flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them : nay, 
 more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to 
 guard them — if you could bid the black blight turn away, 
 and the knotted caterpillar spare — if you could bid the dew 
 fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in 
 frost — " Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that 
 the spices of it may flow out." This you would think a 
 great thing? And do you think it not a greater thing, that 
 
OF queens' gakdens. 117 
 
 all this, (and how much more than this!) you cmi do, for 
 fairer flowers than these — flowers that could bless you for 
 having blessed them, and will love you for having loved 
 them ; — flowers that have eyes like yours, and thoughts lik( 
 yours, and lives like yours ; which, once saved, you save for 
 ever ? Is this only a little power ? Far among the moor- 
 lands and the rocks, — far in the darkness of the terrible 
 streets, — these feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh 
 leaves torn, and their stems broken — will you never go down 
 to them, nor set them in order in their little fragrant beds, 
 nor fence them in their shuddering from the fierce wind? 
 Shall morning follow morning, for you, but not for them ; 
 and the dawn rise to watch, far away, those frantic Dances 
 of Death ;* but no dawn rise to breathe upon these living 
 banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose; nor call to 
 you, through your casement, — call, (not giving you the name 
 of the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's great 
 Matilda, who, on the edge of happy Lethe, stood, wreathing 
 flowers with flowers,) saying : — 
 
 " Come into the garden, Maud, 
 For the black bat, night, has flown, 
 And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
 And the musk of the roses blown ?" 
 
 Will you not go down among them? — among those sweet 
 ♦ See note, p. 57. 
 
118 -SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 living things, whose new courage, sprung from the earth 
 with the deep colour of heaven upon it, is starting np in 
 Btrength of goodly spire ; and whose purity, washed from 
 the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of promise 
 — and still they turn to you, and for you, " The Larkspui 
 listens — I hear, I hear ! And the Lily whispers — I wait." 
 
 Did you notice that 1 missed two lines when I read yoi 
 that first stanza ; and think that I had forgotten them ? 
 Hear them now : — 
 
 " Come into the garden, Maud, 
 For the black bat, night, has flown ; 
 Come into the garden, Maud, 
 I am here at the gate, alone." 
 
 Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this 
 Bweeter garden, alone, waiting for you ? Did you ever hear, 
 hot of a Maude, but a Madeleine, who went down to her 
 garden in the dawn, and found One waiting at the gate, 
 whom she supposed to be the gardener? Have you not 
 sought Him often; — sought Him in vain, all through the 
 i night ;— sought Him in vain at the gate of that old garden 
 where the fiery sword is set? He is never there ; but at tlie 
 gate of this garden He is waiting always — waiting to takf 
 your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the valley 
 
OF queens' gardens. 119 
 
 to see whether the vine has flourished, and the pomegraDate 
 budded. There you shall see with Him the little tendrils of 
 the vines that His hand is guiding — there you shall see the 
 pomegranate springing where His hand cast the sanguine 
 seed ; — more : you shall see the troops of the angel keepers 
 that, with their wings, wave away the hungry birds from the 
 pathsides where He has sown, and call to each other between 
 the vineyard rows, " Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that 
 spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes." Oh — you 
 queens — you queens ! among the hills and happy greenwood 
 of this land of yours, shall the foxes have holes, and the 
 birds of the air have nests ; and, in your cities, shall the 
 stones cry out against you, that they are the only pillowa 
 where the Son of Man can lay His head ? 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS AETS. 
 
 Lecture delivered in the theatre of the Royal College of Science, 
 Dublin, 1868. 
 
 96. When I accepted the privilege of addressing you 
 to-day, I was not aware of a restriction with respect to 
 the topics of discussion which may be brought before this 
 Society* — a restriction which, though entirely wise and 
 right under the circumstances contemplated in its Intro- 
 duction, would necessarily have disabled me, thinking as 
 I think, from preparing any lecture for you on the subject 
 of art in a form which might be pei-manently useful. 
 Pardon me, therefore, in so far as I must transgiess such 
 limitation ; for indeed my infringement will be of the letter 
 — not of the spirit — of your commands. In whatever I 
 may say touching the religion which has been the foun 
 dation of art, or the policy which has contributed to its 
 power, if I offend one, I shall offend all; tor I shall take 
 no note of any separations in creeds, or antagonisms in 
 parties: neither do I fear that ultimately I shall offend 
 
 • That no reference should be made to religious questions. 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE Am> ITS ARTS. 121 
 
 any, by proving — or at least stating as capable of positive 
 proof — the connection of all that is best in the crafts and 
 arts of man, with the simplicity of his faith, and the sin- 
 cerity of his patriotism. 
 
 97. But I speak to you under another disadvantage, by 
 which I am checked in frankness 'of utterance, not here 
 only, but everywhere ; namely, that I am never fully 
 aware how far my audiences are disposed to give me 
 credit for real knowledge of my subject, or how far they 
 grant me attention only because I have been sometimes 
 thought an ingenious or pleasant essayist upon it. For I 
 have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the misfor- 
 tune, to set my words sometimes prettily together ; not 
 without a foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had 
 of doing so ; until I was heavily punished for this pride, 
 by finding that many people thought of the words only, 
 and cared nothing for their meaning. Happily, therefore, 
 the power of using such pleasant language — if indeed it 
 ever were mine — is passing away from me ; and whatever 
 I am now able to say at all, I find myself forced to 
 say with great plainness. For my thoughts have changed 
 also, as my words have ; and whereas in earlier life, 
 what little influence I obtained was due perhaps chiefly to 
 the enthusiasm with which I was able to dwell on the 
 beauty of the physical clouds, and of their colouis in the 
 
 ■"X 
 
122 SESAME AISB LILIES. 
 
 Bky ; so all the influence I now desire to retain must he 
 due to the earnestness with which I am endeavouring to 
 trace the form and beauty of another kind of cloud tlian 
 those ; the bright cloud, of which it is written — 
 
 " What is your life ? It is even as a vapour that ap 
 peareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." 
 
 98. I suppose few people reach the middle or latter 
 period of their age, without having, at some moment of 
 change or disappointment, felt the truth of those bitter 
 words; and been startled by the fading of the sunshine 
 from the cloud of their life, into the sudden agony of 
 the knowledge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a 
 dream, and the endurance of it as transient as the dew. 
 But it is not always that, even at such times of melan- 
 choly surprise, we can enter into any true perception that 
 this human life shares, in the nature of it, not only the 
 evanescence, but the mystery of the cloud ; that its 
 avenues are wreathed in darkness, and its forms and 
 courses no less fantastic, than spectral and obscure ; so 
 that not only in the vanity which we cannot grasp, but 
 in the shadow which we cannot pierce, it is true of thia 
 cloudy life of ours, that " man walketh in a vain shadow, 
 and disquieteth himself in vain." 
 
 99. And least of all, whatever may have been the eager« 
 oess of our passions, or the height of our pride, are W9 
 
mystekt of life and its arts. 123 
 
 able to understand in its depth the third and most solemn 
 character in which our life is like those clouds of heaven ; 
 that to it belongs not only their transience, not only 
 their mystery, but also their power ; that in the cloud of 
 the human soul there is a fire stronger than the light- 
 ning, and a grace more precious than the rain ; and that 
 though of the good and evil it shall one day be said 
 alike, that the place that knew them knows them no more, 
 there is an infinite separation between those whose brief 
 presence had there been a blessing, like the mist of 
 Eden that went up from the earth to water the garden, 
 and those whose place knew them ordy as a driftiiig and 
 changeful shade, of whom the heavelily sentence is, that 
 they are " wells without water ; clouds that are carried 
 with a tempest, to whom the mist of darkness is re- 
 served for ever ? " 
 
 100. To those among us, however, who have lived 
 long enough to form some just estimate of the rate of 
 the changes which are, hour by hour in accelerating catas- 
 trophe, manifesting themselves in the laws, the arts, and 
 the creeds of men, it seems to me, that now at least, if 
 never at any former time, the thoughts of the true nature 
 of our life, and of its powers and responsibilities, should 
 present themselves with absolute sadness and sternness. 
 
 And although I know that this feeling is much deepened 
 
124 SESAIVIE AND LILIES. 
 
 in my own mind by disappointment, which, by chance, haa 
 attended the greater number of my cherished purposes, 
 I do not for that reason distrust the feeling itself, 
 though I am on my guard against an exaggerated degree 
 of it : nay, I rather believe that in periods of new effort 
 and violent change, disappointment is a wholesome medi- 
 cine; and that in the secret of it, as in the twilight so 
 beloved by Titian, we may see the colours of things with 
 deeper truth than in the most dazzling sunshine. And 
 because these truths about the works of men, which I 
 want to bring to-day before you, are most of them sad 
 ones, though at the same time helpful ; and because also 
 I believe that your kind Irish hearts will answer more 
 gladly to the truthful expression of a personal feeling, 
 than to the exposition of an abstract principle, I will per- 
 mit myself so much unreserved speaking of my own causes 
 of regret, as may enable you to make just allowance for 
 what, according to your sympathies, you will call either 
 the bitterness, or the insight, of a mind which has sur- 
 rendered its best hopes, and been foiled in its favourite 
 aims. 
 
 101. I spent the ten strongest years of my life, (from 
 twenty to thirty,) in endeavouring to show the excellence 
 of the work of the man whom I believed, and rightly 
 believed, to be the greatest painter of the schools of 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS AETS. 125 
 
 England since Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in the 
 power of every great truth or beauty to prevail ultimately, 
 and take its right place in usefulness and honour; and I 
 strove to bring the painter's work into this due place, 
 while the painter was yet alive. But he knew, better than T, 
 the uselessness of talking about what people could not see foi 
 themselves. He always discouraged me scornfully, even 
 when he thanked me — and he died before even the superficial 
 effect ot'my work was visible. I went on, however, thinking 
 I could at least be of use to the public, if not to him, in 
 proving his power. My books got talked about a little. 
 The prices of modern pictures, generally, rose, and I was 
 beginning to take some pleasure in a sense of gradual 
 victory, when, fortunately or unfortunately, an opportunity 
 of perfect trial undeceived me at once, and for ever. 
 The Trustees of the National Gallery commissioned me 
 to arrange the Turner drawings there, and permitted me 
 to prepare three hundred examples of his studies from 
 nature, for exhibition at Kensington. At Kensington they 
 were and are, placed for exhibition ; but they are not 
 exhibited, for the room in which they hang is always 
 empty. 
 
 102. Well — this showed me at once, that those ten years 
 of my life had been, in their chief purpose, lost. For that, 
 I did not so much care ; I had, at least, learned my own 
 
126 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 business thoroughly, and should be able, as I fondly sup« 
 posed, after such a lesson, now to use my knowledge 
 with better effect. But what I did care for, was the — to 
 me frightful — discovery, that the most splendid genius in 
 the arts might be permitted by Providence to labour and 
 perish uselessly ; that in the very fineness of it there might 
 be something rendering it invisible to ordinary eyes; but, 
 that with this strange excellence, faults might be mingled 
 which would be as deadly as its virtues were vain; that 
 the glory of it was perishable, as well as invisible, and 
 the gift and grace of it might be to us, as snow in sum- 
 mer, and as rain in harvest. 
 
 103. That was the first mystery of life to me. But, while 
 my best energy was given to the study of painting, I had 
 put collateral effort, more prudent, if less enthusiastic, in- 
 to that of architecture; and in this I could not complain 
 of meeting with no sympathy. Among several personal 
 reasons which caused me to desire that I might give this, 
 my closing lecture on the subject of art here, in Ireland, 
 one of the chief was, that in reading it, I should stand 
 near the beautiful building, — the engineers' school of your 
 college, — which was the first realization I had the joy to 
 see, of the principles I had, until then, been endeavouring 
 to teach; but which alas, is now, to me, no more than 
 the richly canopied monument of one of the most earnest 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 12? 
 
 souls that ever gave itself to the arts, and one of my truest 
 and most loving friends, Benjamin "Woodward. Nor was 
 it here in Ireland only that I received the help of Irish 
 sympathy and genius. When, to another friend, Sir Thomaa 
 Deane, with Mr. Woodward, was entrusted the building 
 of the museum at Oxford, the best details of the work 
 were executed by sculptors who had been born and trained 
 here ; and the first window of the fagade of the building, 
 in which was inaugurated the study of natural science in 
 England, in true fellowship with literature, was carved 
 from my design by an Irish sculptor. 
 
 104. You may perhaps think that no man ought to speak 
 of disappointment, to whom, even in one bianch of labour, 
 so much success was granted. Had Mr. Woodward now 
 been beside me, I had not so spoken ; but his gentle and 
 passionate spirit was cut off from the fulfilment of its pur- 
 poses, and the work we did together is now become vain. 
 It may not be so in future; but the architecture we en- 
 deavoured to introduce is inconsistent alike with the reck- 
 less luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid 
 misery of modern cities; among the formative fashions of 
 the day, aided, especially in England, by ecclesiastical senti- 
 ment, it indeed obtained notoriety ; and sometimes be- 
 hind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may detect 
 the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, and, with 
 
128 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 toil, decipher its floral carvings choked \^ith soot. I felt 
 answerable to the schools I loved, only for their injury. 
 I perceived that this new portion of nay strength had also 
 been spent in vain ; and from amidst streets of iron, and 
 palaces of crystal, shrank back at last to the carving of 
 the mountain and colour of the flower. 
 
 105. And still I could tell of failure, and failure repeated, 
 as years went on; but I have trespassed enough on your 
 patience to show you, in part, the causes of my discour- 
 agement. Now let me more deliberately tell you its results. 
 You know there is a tendency in the minds of many men, 
 when they are heavily disappointed in the main purposes 
 of their life, to feel, and perhaps in warning, perhaps in 
 mockery, to declare, that life itself is a vanity. Because 
 it has disappointed them, they think its nature is of dis- 
 appointment always, or at best, of pleasure that can be 
 grasped by imagination only; that the cloud of it has no 
 strength nor fire within ; but is a painted cloud only, to 
 be delighted in, yet despised. You know how beautifully 
 Pope has expressed this particular phase of thought :— 
 
 *' Meanwhile opinion gilds, with varying rays, 
 These painted clouds that beautify our days ; 
 Each want of happiness by hope supplied, 
 And each vacuity of sense, by pride. 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ABTS. 129 
 
 Hope builds as fast as Knowledge can destroy ; 
 In Folly's cup, still laughs the bubble joy. 
 One pleasure past, another still we gain, 
 And not a vanity is given in vain." 
 
 But tlie effect of failure upon my own mind has been 
 just the reverse of this. The more that my life disap- 
 pointed me, the more solemn and wonderful it became 
 to me. It seemed, contrarily to Pope's saying, that 
 the vanity of it was indeed given in vain ; but that 
 there was something behind the veil of it, which was 
 not vanity. It became to me not a painted cloud, but 
 a terrible and impenetrable one: not a mirage, which 
 vanished as I drew near, but a pillar of darkness, to 
 which I was forbidden to draw near. For I saw that 
 both my own failure, and such success in petty things 
 as in its poor triumph seemed to me worse than failure, 
 came from the want of sufficiently earnest effort to 
 understand the whole law and meaning of existence, and 
 to bring it to noble and due end ; as, on the other 
 hand, I saw more and more clearly that all enduring 
 success in the arts, or in any other occupation, had 
 come from the ruling of lower purposes, not by a 
 conviction of their nothingness, but by a solemn faith in 
 the advancing power of human nature, or in the 
 promise, however dimly apprehended, that the mortal 
 
130 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 part of it would one day be swallowed up in immortal- 
 ity; and that, indeed, the arts themselves never had 
 reached any vital strength or honour but in the effort 
 to proclaim tliis immortality, and in the service either 
 of great and just religion, or of some unselfish patriotism, 
 and law of such national life as must be the foundation 
 of religion. 
 
 106. Nothing that I have ever said is more true or 
 necessary — nothing has been more misunderstood or 
 misapplied — than my strong assertion, that the arts can 
 never be right themselves, unless their motive is right. 
 It is misunderstood this way : weak painters, who have 
 never learned their business, and cannot lay a true line, 
 continually come to me, crying out — " Look at this 
 picture of mine; it inust be good, I had such a lovely 
 motive. I have put my whole heart into it, and taken 
 years to think over its treatment." Well, the only answer 
 for these people is — if one had the cruelty to make it 
 — " Sir, you cannot think over anything in any number 
 of years, — you haven't the head to do it ; and though 
 you had fine motives, strong enough to make you burn 
 yourself in a slow fire, if only first you could paint a 
 picture, you can't paint one, nor half an inch of onej 
 you haven't the hand to do it." 
 
 But, far more decisively we lave to say to the men 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 131 
 
 who do know their business, or may know it if they 
 choose — " Sir, you have this gift, and a mighty one ; see 
 that you serve your nation faithfully with it. It is a 
 greater trust than ships and armies : you might cast 
 them away, if you were their captain, with less treason 
 to your people than in casting your own glorious 
 power away, and serving the devil with it instead of 
 men. Ships and armies you may replace if they are 
 lost, but a great intellect, once abused, is a curse to 
 the earth for ever." 
 
 107. This, then, I meant by saying that the arts must 
 have noble motive. This also I said respecting them, 
 that they never had prospered, nor could prosper, but 
 when they had such true purpose, and were devoted to 
 the proclamation of divine truth or law. And yet I saw 
 also that they had always failed in this proclamation — 
 that poetry, and sculpture, and painting, though only 
 great when they strove to teach us something about 
 the gods, never had taught us anything trustworthy 
 about the gods, but had always betrayed their trust in 
 the crisis of it, and, with their powers at the full reach, 
 became ministers to pride and to lust. And I felt also, 
 with increasing amazement, the unconquerable apathy in 
 ourselves the hearers, no less than in these the teachers ; 
 and that, while the wisdom and rightness of every act 
 
132 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 and art of life could only he consistent with a right 
 understanding of the ends of life, we were all plunged 
 as in a languid dream — our heart fat, and our eyes 
 heavy, and our ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand 
 or voice should reach us — lest we should see with our 
 eyes, and understand with our hearts, and be healed. 
 ^"lOS. This intense apathy in all of us is the first great 
 mystery of life ; it stands in the way of every percep 
 tion, every virtue. There is no making ourselves feel 
 enough astonishment at it. That the occupations or 
 pastimes of life should have no motive, is understandable ; 
 but — That life itself should have no motive — that we 
 neither care to find out what it may lead to, nor to 
 guard against its being for ever taken away from us — 
 here is a mystery indeed. For, just suppose I were 
 able to call at this moment to any one in this audience 
 by name, and to tell him positively that I knew a 
 large estate had been lately left to him on some curious 
 conditions; but that, though I knew it was large, I did 
 not know how large, nor even where it was — 
 whether in the East Indies or the West, or in England, 
 or at the Antipodes. I only knew it was a vast estate, 
 and that there was a chance of his losing it altogether 
 if he did not soon find out on what terms it had been 
 left to him. Suppose I were able to say this positively 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 133 
 
 to any single man in this audience, and be knew that 
 I did not speak without warrant, do you think that he 
 would rest content with that vague knowledge, if it 
 were anywise possible to obtain more? Would he not 
 give every energy to find some trace of the facts, and 
 never rest till he had ascertained where this place was, 
 and what it was like? And suppose he were a young 
 man, and all he could discover by his best endeavour 
 was, that tbe estate was never to be his at all, unless 
 he persevered, during certain years of probation, in an 
 orderly and industrious life; but that, according to tbe 
 rightness of bis conduct, the portion of tbe estate 
 assigned to him w^ould be greater or less, so that it 
 literally depended on his behaviour from day to day 
 whether he got ten thousand a year, or thirty thousand 
 a year, or nothing whatever — would you not think it 
 strange if the youth never troubled himself to satisfy 
 the conditions in any way, nor even to know what was 
 required of him, but lived exactly as he chose, and 
 never inquired whether his chances of the estate were 
 increasing or passing away? Well, you know that this 
 is actually and literally so with the greater number of 
 the educated persons now living in Christian countries. 
 Nearly every man and woman, in any company such aa 
 this, outwardly professes to believe — and a laige numbei 
 
134 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 unquestionably think they believe — much more than this; 
 not only that a quite unlimited estate is in prospect for 
 them if they please the Holder of it, but that the 
 infinite contrary of such a possession — an estate of perpet- 
 ual misery, is in store for them if they displease this 
 great Land-Holder, this great Heaven-Holder. And yet 
 there is not one in a thousand of these human souls 
 that cares to think, for ten minutes of the day, where 
 this estate is, or how beautiful it is, or what kind of 
 life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life thev 
 must lead to obtain it. 
 
 109. You fancy that you care to know this: so little do 
 you care that, probably, at this moment many of you are 
 displeased with me for talking of the matter! You came 
 to hear about the Art of this world, not about the Life of the 
 next, and you are provoked with me for talking of what you 
 can hear any Sunday in church. But do not be afraid. 
 I will tell you something before you go about pictures, ana 
 carvings, and pottery, and what else you would like better to 
 hear of than the other world. Nay, perhaps you say, " We 
 want you to talk of pictures and pottery, because we are sure 
 that you know something of them, and you know nothing of 
 the other world." Well— I d<m't. That is quite true. Bui 
 the very strangeness and mystery of which I urge you to 
 take notice is in this — that I do not ; — nor you either. Can 
 
MYSTEEY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 135 
 
 yoa answer a single bold question unflincbingly about tbat 
 other world — Are you sure there is a heaven ? Sure there is 
 a hell? Sure that men are dropping before your faces 
 through the pavements of these streets into eternal fire, or 
 sure that they are not ? Sure that at your own death you 
 are going to be delivered from all sorrow, to be endowed 
 with all virtue, to be gifted with all felicity, and raised into 
 perpetual companionship with a King, compared to whom 
 the kings of the earth are as grasshoppers, and the nations 
 as the dust of His feet ? Are you sure of this ? or, if 
 not sure, do any of us so much as care to make it sure? 
 and, if not, how can anything that we do be right — how 
 can anything we think be wise ; what honour can there 
 be in the arts that amuse us, or what profit in the pos- 
 sessions that please? 
 
 Is not this a mystery of life ? 
 
 110. But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a beneficent 
 ordinance for the generality of men that they do not, 
 with earnestness or anxiety, dwell on such questions of 
 the future ; because the business of the day could not be 
 done if this kind of thought were taken by all of us for 
 the morrow. Be it so : but at least we might anticipate 
 that the greatest and wisest of us, who were evidently 
 the appointed teachers of the rest, would set themselvea 
 apart to seek out whatever could be surely known of 
 
136 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 the future destinies of their race ; and to teach this in 
 no rhetorical or ambiguous manner, but in the plainest and 
 most severely earnest wo.ds. 
 
 Now, the highest representatives of men who have thus 
 endeavoured, during the Christian era, to search out these 
 deep things, and relate them, are Dante and Milton. 
 There are none who for earnestness of thought, for mastery 
 of word, can be classed with these. I am not at present, 
 mind you, speaking of persons set apart in any priestly 
 or pastoral office, to deliver creeds to us, or doctrines; but 
 of men who try to discover and set foi-th, as far as by 
 human intellect is possible, the facts of the other world. 
 Divines may perhaps teach us how to arrive there, but 
 only these two potts have in any powerful manner striven 
 to discover, or in any definite words professed to tell, what 
 we shall see and become there: or how those upper and 
 nether worlds are, and have been, inhabited. 
 
 111. And what have they told us? Milton's account of 
 the most important event in his whole system of the uni- 
 verse, the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to him- 
 self; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in 
 a great part spoiled and degraded from, Ilesiod's account 
 of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. 
 The rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every 
 urtifice of invention is visibly and consciously employed ; 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 137 
 
 not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable 
 by any living faith. Dante's conception is far more intense, 
 and, by himself, for the time, not to be escaped from ; 
 it is indeed a vision, but a vision only, and that one of 
 the wildest that ever entranced a soul — a dream in which 
 every grotesque type or phantasy of heathen tradition is 
 renewed, and adorned ; and the destinies of the Christian 
 Church, under their most sacred symbols, become literally 
 subordinate to the praise, and are only to be understood by 
 the aid, of one dear Florentine maiden. 
 
 112. I tell you truly that, as I strive more with this 
 strange lethargy and trance in myself, and awake to tht 
 meaning and power of life, it seems daily more amazing 
 to me that men such as these should dare to play with 
 the most precious truths, (or the most deadly untruths,) by 
 which the whole human race listening to them could be 
 informed, or deceived; — all the world their audiences for 
 ever, with pleased ear, and passionate heart ;— and yet, to 
 this submissive infinitude of souls, and evermore succeeding 
 and succeeding multitude, hungry for bread of life, they 
 do but play upon sweetly modulated pipes ; with pompous 
 nomenclature adorn the councils of hell; touch a trouba- 
 dour's guitar to the courses of the suns ; and fill the epen 
 ings of eternity, before which prophets have veiled theii 
 faces, and which angels desire to look into, with idle puppets 
 
138 SESAltfE AND LILIES. 
 
 of their scholastic imagination, and melancholy lights of 
 frantic faith in their lost mortal love. 
 
 Is not this a mystery of life ? 
 
 113. But more. We have to remember that these two 
 great teachers were both of them warped in their temper, 
 and thwarted in their search for truth. They were men of 
 intellectual war, unable, through darkness of controversy, 
 or stress of personal grief, to discern where their own 
 ambition modified their utterances of the moral law; or 
 their own agony mingled with their anger at its violation. 
 But greater men than these have been — innocent-hearted — 
 too great for contest. Men, like Homer and Shakespeare, of 
 so unrecognized personality, that it disappears in future 
 ages, and becomes ghostly, like the tradition of a lost 
 heathen god. Men, therefore, to whose unoffended, un- 
 condemning sight, the whole of human nature reveals itself 
 in a pathetic weakness, with which they will not strive ; 
 or in mournful and transitory strength, which they dare 
 not praise. And all Pagan and Christian civilization thus 
 becomes subject to them. It does not matter how little, 
 or how much, any of us have read, either of Homer o^ 
 Shakespeare; everything round us, in substance, or in 
 thought, has been moulded by them. All Greek gentlemen 
 were educated under Homer. All Roman gentlemen, by 
 Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and English 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 139 
 
 gentlemen, by Roman literature, and by its principles. 
 Of the scope of Shakespeare, I will say only, that the 
 intellectual measure of every man since born, in the 
 domains of creative thought, may be assigned to him, 
 according to the degree in which he has been taught by 
 Shakespeare. Well, what do these two men, centres of 
 mortal intelligence, deliver to us of conviction respecting 
 what it most behoves that intelligence to grasp? What 
 is their hope; their crown of rejoicing? what manner of 
 exhortation have they for us, or of rebuke? what lies 
 next their own hearts, and dictates their undying words ? 
 Have they any peace to promise to our unrest — any re- 
 demption to our misery ? 
 
 114. Take Homer first, and think if there is any sadder 
 image of human fate than the great Homeric story. The 
 main features in the character of Achilles are its intense 
 desire of justice, and its tenderness of affection. And in 
 that bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided con- 
 tinually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the 
 desire of justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill- 
 governed passion, the most unjust of men: and, full of the 
 deepest tenderness in his heart, becomes yet, through ill- 
 governed passion, the most cruel of men. Intense alike 
 in love and in friendship, he loses, first his mistress, and 
 then his friend ; for the sake of the one, he surrenders to 
 
140 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 death the armies of his own land ; for the sake of the 
 other, he surrenders all. Will a man lay down his life for 
 his friend? Yea — even for his dead friend, this Achilles, 
 though goddess-bom, and goddess-taught, gives up his 
 kingdom, his country, and his life — casts alike the innocent 
 and guilty, with himself, into one gulf of slaughter, and 
 dies at last by the hand of the basest of his adversaries. 
 Is not this a mystery of life? 
 
 ^^ 115. But what, then, is the message to us of our own 
 poet, and searcher of hearts, after fifteen hundred years of 
 Christian faith have been numbered over the graves of 
 men ? Are his words more cheerful than the heathen's — 
 is his hope more near — his trust more sure — his reading of 
 fate more happy ? Ah, no ! He difiers from the Heathen 
 poet chiefly in this — that he recognizes, for deliverance, 
 no gods nigh at hand; and that, by petty chance — by 
 momentary folly — by broken message — by fool's tyranny — 
 or traitor's snare, the strongest and most righteous are 
 brought to their ruin, and perish without word of hope. 
 He indeed, as part of his rendering of character, ascribes 
 the power and modesty of habitual devotion, to the gentle 
 and the just. The death-bed of Katharine is bright with 
 vision of angels; and the great soldier-king, standing by 
 nis iQ\f dead, acknowledges the presence of the hand that 
 oan save alike by many or by few. But observe that from 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 141 
 
 tliose who with deepest spirit, meditate, and with deepest 
 passion, mourn, there are no such words as these ; nor in 
 their hearts are any such consolations. Instead of the per- 
 petual sense of the helpful presence of the Deity, which, 
 through all heathen tradition, is the source of heroic 
 strength, in battle, in exile, and in the valley of tho 
 «?hadow of death, we find only in the great Christian poet, 
 the consciousness of a moral law, through which "the 
 gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments 
 to scourge us ; " and of the resolved arbitration of the 
 destinies, that conclude into precision of doom what we 
 feebly and blindly began ; and force us, when our indis- 
 cretion serves us, and our deepest plots do pall, to the 
 confession, that " there's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 rough hew them how we will." 
 
 Is not this a mystery of life ? 
 
 116. Be it so then. About this human life that is to be, or 
 that is, the wise religious men tell us nothing that we can 
 trust; and the wise contemplative men, nothing that can 
 give us peace. But there is yet a third class, to whom 
 we may turn — the wise practi;^.al men. We have sat at 
 the feet of the poets who sang of heaven, and they have 
 told us their dreams. We have listened to the poets who 
 Bang of earth, and they have chanted to us dirges, and 
 words of despair. But there is one class of men more: — 
 
142 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 men, not capable of vision, nor sensitive to sorrow, but 
 firm of purpose — practised in business; learned in all that 
 can be, (by handling, — ) known. Men, whose hearts and 
 hopes are wholly in this present world, from whom, there- 
 fore, we may surely learn, at least, how, at present, con« 
 veniently to live in it. What will they say to us, or 
 show us by example? These kings — these councillors — 
 these statesmen and builders of kingdoms — these capital- 
 ists and men of business, who weigh the earth, and the 
 dust of it, in a balance. They know the world, surely ; 
 and what is the mystery of life to us, is none to them. 
 They can surely show us how to live, while we live, and 
 to gather out of the present world what is best. 
 
 117. I think I can best tell you their answer, by telling 
 you a dream I had once. For though I am no poet, I 
 have dreams sometimes: — ^I dreamed I was at a child's 
 May-day party, in which every means of entertainment had 
 been provided for them, by a wise and kind host. It was 
 in a stately house, with beautiful gardens attached to it; 
 Rnd the children had been set free in the rooms and gar- 
 dens, with no care whatever but how to pass their after- 
 noon rejoicingly. They did not, indeed, know much about 
 what was to happen next day ; and some of them, I 
 thought, were a little frightened, because there was a 
 chance of their being sent to a new school where there 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 143 
 
 were examinations; but they kept the thoughts of that 
 out of their heads as well as they could, and resolved to 
 enjoy themselves. The house, I said, was in a beautiful 
 garden, and in the garden were all kinds of flowers ; 
 swert grassy banks for rest; and smooth lawns for play; 
 and pleasant streams and woods ; and rocky places for 
 climbing. And the children were happy for a little while, 
 but presently they separated themselves into parties; and 
 then each party declared, it would have a piece of the 
 garden for its own, and that none of the others should 
 have anything to do with that piece. Npxt, they quar- 
 relled violently, which pieces they would have; and at last 
 the boys took up the thing, as boys should do, "practi- 
 cally," and fought in the flower-beds till there was hardly 
 a flower left standing; then they trampled down each 
 other's bits of the garden out of spite ; and the girls 
 cried till they could cry no more ; and so they all lay 
 down at last breathless in the ruin, and waited for the 
 time when they were to be taken home in the evening.* 
 
 118. Meanwhile, the children in the house had been mak- 
 ing themselves happy also in their manner. For them, there 
 
 * I have sometimes been asked what this means. I intended it to 
 pet forth the wisdom of men in war contending for kirgdoms, and 
 rhat follows to set forth their wisdom in peace, contending foi 
 irealth. 
 
144 SESAME AKD LILIES. 
 
 had been provided every kind of in-doors pleasure : there 
 was music for them to dance to; and the library was 
 open, with all manner of amusing books ; and there was a 
 museum, full of the most curious shells, and animals, and 
 birds; and there was a workshop, with lathes and car- 
 penter's tools, for the ingenious boys ; and there were 
 pretty fantastic dresses, for the girls to dress in ; and 
 there were microscopes, and kaleidoscopes; and whatever 
 toys a child could fancy ; and a table, in the dining-room, 
 . loaded with everything nice to eat. 
 
 But, in the midst of all this, it struck two or three of 
 the more "practical" children, that they would like some 
 of the brass-headed nails that studded the chairs; and so 
 they set to work to pull them out. Presently, the others, 
 who were reading, or looking at shells, took a fancy to 
 do the like ; and, in a little while, all the children, nearly, 
 were spraining their fingers, in pulling out brass-headed 
 nails. With all that they could pull out, they were not 
 satisfied ; and then, everybody wanted some of somebody 
 else's. And at last, the really practical and sensible 
 ones declared, that nothing was of any leal consequence, 
 that afternoon, except to get p'enty of brass-headed nails; 
 and that the books, and the cakes, and the microscopes, 
 were of no use at all in themselves, but only, if they 
 tould be exchanged for nail-heads. And, at last, they 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 145 
 
 began to fight for nail-heads, as the others fought for 
 the bits of garden. Only here and there, a despised 
 one shrank away into a corner, and. tried to get a little 
 quiet with a book, in the midst of the noise; but all 
 the practical ones thought of nothing else but counting 
 nail-heads all the afternoon — even though they knew 
 they would not be allowed to carry so much as one 
 brass knob away with them. But no — it was — " who has 
 most nails? I have a hundred, and you have fifty; or, 
 I have a thousand and you have two. I must have as 
 many as you before I leave the house, or I cannot 
 possibly go home in peace." At last, they made so 
 much noise that I awoke, and thought to myself, " What 
 a false dream that is, of children.''^ The child is the 
 father of the man; and wiser. Children never do such 
 foolish things. Only men do. 
 
 119. But there is yet one last class of persons to be in- 
 terrogated. The wise religious men we have asked in 
 vain ; the wise contemplative men, in vain ; the wise 
 worldly men, in vain. But there is another group yet. 
 In the midst of this vanity of empty religion— of tragic 
 contemplation — of wrathful and wretched ambition, and 
 dispute for dust, there is yet one great group of 
 persons, by whom all these disputers live — the persons 
 who have determined, or have had it by a beneficent 
 
146 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 Providence determined for them, that they will do 
 something useful; that whatever may be prepared for 
 tliem hereafter, or happen to them here, they will, at 
 least, deserve the food that God gives them by winning 
 it honourably; and that, however fallen from the purity, 
 or far from the peace, of Eden, they will carry out 
 the duty of human dominion, though they have lost its 
 felicity; and dress and keep the wilderness, though they 
 no more can dress or keep the garden. 
 
 These, — hewers of wood, and drawers of water — these 
 bent under burdens, or torn of scourges — these, that 
 dig and weave — that plant and build ; workers in wood, 
 and in marble, and in iron — by whom all food, clothing, 
 habitation, furniture, and means of delight are produced, 
 for themselves, .and for all men beside ; men, whose deeds 
 are good, though their words may be few ; men, whose 
 lives are serviceable, be they never so short, and worthy 
 of honour, be they never so humble ; — from these, surely 
 at least, we may receive some clear message of teaching : 
 and pierce, for an instant, into the mystery of life, and 
 of its arts. 
 
 120. Yes; from these, at last, we do receive a lesson. 
 But I grieve to say, or rather — for that is the deeper truth of 
 the matter — I rejoice to say — this message of theirs can only 
 be received by joining them — ^not by thinking about thera# 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 147 
 
 . You sent for me to talk to you of art ; and I have obeyed 
 you in coming. But the main thing I have to tell you 
 is^ — that art must not be talked about. The fact that 
 there is talk about it at all, signifies that it is ill done, or 
 cannot be done. No true painter ever speaks, or ever 
 has spoken, much of his art. The greatest speak nothing. 
 Even Reynolds is no exception, for he wrote of all that 
 he could not himself do, and was utterly silent respecting 
 all that he himself did. 
 
 The moment a man can really do his work, he becomes 
 speechless about it. All words become idle to liim — all 
 theories. 
 
 121. Does a bird need to theorize about building its nest, 
 or boast of it when built? All good work is essentially 
 done that way — without hesitation, without difficulty, with- 
 out boasting; and in the doers of the best, there is an 
 inner and involuntary power which approximates literally 
 to the instinct of an animal — nay, I am certain that in 
 the most perfect human artists, reason does not supersede 
 instinct, but is added to an instinct as much more divine 
 than that of the lower animals as the human body is 
 more beautiful than theirs ; that a great singer sings not 
 with less instinct than the nightingale, but with more — 
 only more various, applicable, and governable ; that a great 
 ftrchitect does not build with less instinct than the beavei 
 
148 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 x)r the bee, but with more — with an innate cnnnins: of 
 proportion that embraces all beauty, and a divine inge 
 nuity of skill that improvises all construction. But be that 
 as it may — be the instinct less or more than that of infe- 
 rior animals — like or unlike theirs, still the human art ia 
 dependent on that first, and then upon an amount of 
 practice, of science, — and of imagination disciplined by 
 thought, which the true possessor of it knows to be in- 
 communicable, and the true critic of it, inexplicable, except 
 through long process of laborious years. That journey of 
 life's conquest, in which hills over hills, and Alps on Alps 
 arose, and sank, — do you think you can make another 
 trace it painlessly, by talking? Why, you cannot even 
 carry us up an Alp, by talking. You can guide us up 
 it, step by step, no otherwise — even so, best silently. You 
 girls, who have been among the hills, know how the bad 
 guide chatters and gesticulates, and it is "put your foot 
 here," and " mind how you balance yourself there ; " but 
 the good guide walks on quietly, without a word, only 
 with his eyes on you when need is, and his arm like an 
 iron bar, if need be. 
 
 122. In that slow way, also, art can be taught — if you 
 have faith in your guide, and will let his arm be to you as 
 an iron bar when need is. But in what teacher of art have 
 you such faiih? Certainly not in me; for, as I told you 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 149 
 
 at first, I know well enough it is only because you think 
 I can talk, not because you think I know my business, that 
 you let me speak to you at all. If I were to tell you any- 
 thing that seemed to you strange, you would not believe 
 it, and yet it would only be in telling you strange things 
 that I could be of use to you. I could be of great use to 
 you — infinite use, with brief saying, if you would believe 
 it; but you would not, just because the thing that would 
 be of real use would displease you. You are all wild, for 
 instance, with admiration of Gustavo Dore. Well, suppose 
 I were to tell you, in the strongest terms T could use, that 
 Gustave Dore's art was bad — bad, not in w^eakness, — not 
 in failure, — but bad with dreadful power — the power of 
 the Furies and the Harpies mingled, enraging, and polluting; 
 that so long as you looked at it, no perception of pure 
 or beautiful art was possible for you. Suppose I were to 
 tell you that! What would be the use? Would you 
 look at Gustave Dore less? Rather, more, I fancy. On 
 the other hand, I could soon put you into good humour 
 with me, if I chose. I know well enough what you like, 
 and how to praise it to your better liking. I could talk 
 to you about moonlight, and twilight, and spring flowers, 
 and autumn leaves, and the Madonnas of Raphael — how 
 motherly ! and the Sibyls of Michael Angelo — how ma* 
 jestic! and the Saints of Angelico— how pious! and the 
 
150 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 Cherubs of Correggio — how delicious ! Old as I am, I could 
 play you a tune on the harp yet, that you would dance 
 to. But neither you nor I should be a bit the better or 
 wiser; or, if we were, our increased wisdom could be of 
 no practical effect. For, indeed, the arts, as regards 
 teachableness, differ from the sciences also in this, that 
 their power is founded not merely on facts which can be 
 communicated, but on dispositions which require to be 
 created. Art is neither to be achieved by effort of think- 
 ing, nor explained by accuracy of speaking. It is the in- 
 stinctive and necessary result of powers which can only 
 be developed through the mind of successive generations, 
 and which finally burst into life under social conditions 
 as slow of growth as the faculties they regulate. Whole 
 aeras of mighty history are summed, and the passions of 
 dead myriads are concentrated, in the existence of a noble 
 art; and if that noble art were among us, we should feel 
 it and rejoice; not caring in the least to hear lectures 
 on it; and since it is not among us, be assured we have 
 to go back to the root of it, or, at least, to the place 
 where the stock of it is yet alive, and the branches began 
 to die. 
 
 123. And now, may I have your pardon for pointing out, 
 partly with reference to matters which are at this time 
 of greater moment than the arts — that if we undertook 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 151 
 
 Buch recession to the vital germ of national arts that have 
 decayed, we should find a more singular arrest of their 
 power in Ireland than in any other European country. 
 For in the eighth century, Ireland possessed a school of 
 art in her manuscripts and sculpture, which, in many of 
 its qualilies — apparently in all essential qualities of decor- 
 ative invention — was quite without rival ; seeming as if it 
 might have advanced to the highest triumphs in archi- 
 tecture and in painting. But there was one fatal flaw in 
 its nature, by which it was stayed, and stayed with a 
 conspicuousness of pause to which there is no parallel: so 
 that, long ago, in tracing the progress of European schools 
 from infancy to strength, I chose for the students of 
 Kensington, in a lecture since published, two characteristic 
 examples of early art, of equal skill; but in the one case, 
 skill which was progressive — in the other, skill which was 
 at pause. In the one case, it was work receptive of cor- 
 rection — ^hungry for correction — and in the other, work 
 which inherently rejected correction. I chose for them a 
 corrigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I grieve 
 to say that the incorrigible Angel was also an Irish Angel ! * 
 124. And the fatal difference lay wholly in this. In both 
 pieces of art there was an equal falling short of the needs 
 of fact ; but the Lombardic Eve knew she was in the 
 * See Tlie Two PatTis, p. 27. 
 
152 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 wrong, and the Irish Angel thought himself all right 
 The eager Lombardic sculptor, though finnly insisting on 
 his childish idea, yet showed in the irregular broken touches 
 of the features, and the imperfect struggle for softer lines 
 in the form, a perception of beauty and law that he could 
 not render; there was the strain of effort, under conscious 
 imperfection, in every line. But the Irish missal-painter 
 had drawn his angel with no sense of failure, in happy 
 complacency, and put red dots into the palms of each 
 hand, and rounded the eyes into perfect circles, and, I 
 regret to say, left the mouth out altogether, with per- 
 fect satisfaction to himself. 
 
 125. May I without offence ask you to consider whether 
 this mode of arrest in ancient Irish art may not be in- 
 dicative of points of character which even yet, in some 
 measure, arrest your national power? I have seen much 
 of Irish character, and have watched it closely, for I 
 have also much loved it. And I think the form of fail- 
 ure to which it is most liable is this, that being gener- 
 ous-hearted, and wholly intending always to do right, 
 it does not attend to the external laws of right, but 
 thinks it must necessarily do right because it means to 
 do 80, and therefore does wrong without finding it out ; 
 and then when the consequences of its wrong come 
 upon it, or upon others counected with it, it cannot con- 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 153 
 
 ceive that the wrong is in anywise of its causing or of 
 its doing, but flies into wrath, and a strange agony of 
 desire for justice, as feeling itself wholly innocent, which 
 leads it farther astray, until there is nothing that it 
 is not capable of doing with a good conscience. 
 
 126. But mind, I do not mean to say that, in past or 
 present relations between Ireland and England, you have 
 been wrong, and we right. Far from that, I believe 
 that in all great questions of principle, and. in all de- 
 tails of administration of law, you have been usually 
 right, and we wrong; sometimes in misunderstanding 
 you, sometimes in resolute iniquity to you. Neverthe- 
 less, in all disputes between states, though the strongest 
 is nearly always mainly in the wrong, the weaker is 
 often so in a minor degree ; and I think we sometimes 
 admit the possibility of our being in err->r, and you 
 never do. 
 
 127. And now, returning to the broader question, what 
 these arts and labours of life have to teach us of its mys- 
 tery, this is the first of their lessons — that the more 
 beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of 
 people who feel themseloes wrong; — who are striving 
 fr»r the fulfilment of a law, and the grasp of a loveli- 
 ness, which they have not yet attained, "vyhich they feel 
 even farther and farther from attaining, the more they 
 
154 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 Strive for it. And yet, in still deeper sense, it is the 
 work of people who know also that they are right. The 
 very sense of inevitable error from their purpose marks 
 the perfectness of that purpose, and the continued sense 
 of failure arises from the continued opening of the eyes 
 more clearly to all the sacredest laws of truth. 
 
 128. This is one lesson. The second is a very plain, and 
 greatly precious one, namely : — that whenever the arts 
 and labours of life are fulfilled in this spirit of striving 
 against misrule, and doing whatever we have to do, 
 honourably and perfectly, they invariably bring happi- 
 ness, as much as seems possible to the nature of man. 
 In all other paths, by which that happiness is pursued, 
 there is diappointment, or destruction : for ambition and 
 for passion there is no rest — no fruition ; the fairest plea- 
 sures of youth perish in a darkness greater than their 
 past light ; and the loftiest and purest love too often 
 does but inflame the cloud of life with endless fire of 
 pain. But, ascending from lowest to highest, through 
 every scale of human industry, that industry worthily 
 followed, gives peace. Ask the labourer in the field, at 
 the forge, or in the mine ; ask the patient, delicate- 
 fingered artisan, or the strong-armed, fiery-hearted worker 
 in bronze, and in marble, and with the colours of light; 
 and none of these, who are true workmen, will ever teU 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 155 
 
 you, that they have found the law of heaven an unkind 
 one — that in the sweat of their face they should eat 
 bread, till they return to the ground; nor that they ever 
 found it an unrewarded obedience, if, indeed, it waa 
 rendered faithfully to tlie command — " "Whatsoever thy 
 hand findeth to do — do it with thy might." 
 
 129. These are the two great and constant lessons which 
 our labourers teach us of the mystery of life. But there 
 is another, and a sadder one, which they cannot teach ns, 
 which we must read on their tombstones. 
 
 "Do it with thy might." There have been myriads 
 upon myriads of human creatures who have obeyed this 
 law — who have put every breath and nerve of their being 
 into its toil — who have devoted every hour, and exhausted 
 every faculty — who have bequeathed their unaccomplished 
 thoughts at death — who being dead, have yet spoken, by 
 majesty of memory, and strength of example. And, at 
 last, what has all this "Might" of humanity accomplished, 
 in six thousand years of labour and sorrow ? What has it 
 done f Take the three chief occupations and arts of men, 
 one by one, and count their achievements. Begin with 
 the first — the lord of them all — agriculture. Six thousand 
 years have passed since we were set to till the ground, 
 from which we were taken. How much of it is tilled ? 
 llow much of that which is, wisely or well ? In tLt 
 
156 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 very centre and chief garden of Europe — where the two 
 foi-nis of parent Christianity have had their fortresses — 
 where the noble Catholics of the Forest Cantons, and the 
 noble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys, have maintained, 
 for dateless ages, their faiths and liberties — there the un- 
 checked Alpine rivers yet run wild in devastation : 
 and the marshes, which a few hundred men could re- 
 deem with a year's labour, still blast their helpless in- 
 habitants into fevered idiotism. That is so, in the centre 
 of Europe ! While, on the near coast of Africa, once the 
 Garden of the Hesperides, an Arab woman, but a few 
 sunsets since, ate her child, for famine. And, with all 
 the treasures of the East at our feet, we, in our own 
 dominion, could not find a few grains of rice, for a 
 people that asked of us no more ; but stood by, and 
 saw five hundred thousand of them perish of hunger. 
 
 130. Then, after agriculture, the art of king."*, take the 
 next head of human arts— weaving ; the art of queens, hon- 
 oured of all noble Heathen women, in the person of their 
 virgin goddess — honoured of all Hebrew women, by the 
 word of their wisest king — " She layeth her hands to the 
 spindle, and her hands hold the distaff; she stretcheth 
 out her hand to the poor. She is not afraid of the 
 snc'V for her household, for all her household are clothed 
 with scarlet. She maketh herself covering of tapestry ; 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 157 
 
 her clothing is silk and purple. She maketh fine linen, 
 and selleth it. and delivereth girdles to the merchant." 
 What have we done in all these thousands of years with 
 this bright art of Greek maid and Christian matron ? 
 Six thousand years of weaving, and have we learned to 
 weave ? Might not every naked wall have been purple 
 with tapestry, and every feeble breast fenced with sweet 
 colours from the cold ? What have we done ? Our fin- 
 gers are too few, it seems, to twist together some poor 
 covering for our bodies. We set our streams to work 
 for us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our spinning- 
 wheels — and, — are we yet clothed? Are not the streets of 
 the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and 
 rotten rags ? Is not the beauty of your sweet children 
 left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, 
 nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the 
 suckling of the wolf in her den ? And does not every 
 winter's snow robe what you have not robed, and shroud 
 what you have not shrouded ; and every winter's wind 
 bear up to heaven its wasted souls, to witness agamst 
 you hereafter, by the voice of their Christ, — " I was 
 naked, and ye clothed me not ? " 
 
 131. Lastly — take the Art of Building — the strongest- 
 proudest — most orderly — most enduring of the arts of mail , 
 that, of which the produce is in the surest manner ao* 
 
158 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 cumulative, and need not perish, or be replaced ; but if 
 once well done, will stand more strongly than the un- 
 balanced rocks — more prevalently than the crumbling bills. 
 The art which is associated with all civic pride and 
 sacred principle ; with which men record their power — ■ 
 satisfy their enthusiasm — make sure their defence — define 
 and make dear their habitation. And, in six thousand 
 years of building, what have we done? Of the greater 
 part of all that skill and strength, no vestige is left, but 
 fallen stones, that encumber the fields and impede the 
 streams. But, from this waste of disorder, and of time, 
 and of rage, what is left to us? Constructive and pro- 
 gressive creatures, that we are, with ruling brains, and 
 forming hands, capable of fellowship, and thirsting for 
 fame, can we not contend, in comfort, with the insects of 
 the forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of the sea. 
 The white surf rages in vain against the ramparts built 
 by poor atoms of scarcely nascent life ; but only ridgea 
 of formless ruin mark the places where once dwelt our 
 noblest multitudes. The ant and the moth have cells 
 for each of their young, but our little ones lie in festering 
 heaps, in homes that consume them like graves ; and 
 nisrht by night, from the corners of our streets, rises up 
 the cry of the homeless — "I was a stranger, and ye took 
 me not b." 
 
]VIYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 15S 
 
 132. Must it be always thus ? Is our life for ever to be 
 without profit — without possession ? Shall the strength of 
 its generations be as barren as death ; or cast away their 
 labour, as the wild figtree casts her untimely figs ? Is it 
 all a dream then — the desire of the eyes and the pride of 
 life — or, if it be, might we not live in nobler dream than 
 this? The poets and prophets, the wise men, and the 
 scribes, though they have told us nothing about a life to 
 come, have told us much about the life that is now. 
 They have had — they also, — their dreams, and we have 
 laughed at them. They have dreamed of mercy, and of 
 justice ; they have dreamed of peace and good-will ; they 
 have dreamed of labour undisappointed, and of rest undis- 
 turbed ; they have dreamed of fulness in harvest, and 
 overflowing in store ; they have dreamed of wisdom in 
 council, and of providence in law ; of gladness of parents, 
 and strength of children, and glory of grey hairs. And 
 at these visions of theirs we have mocked, and held them 
 for idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplishable. What 
 have we accomplished with our realities ? Is this what 
 has come of our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? 
 this, our mightiest possible, against their impotent ideal ? 
 or, have we only wandered among the spectra of a baser 
 felicity, and chased phantoms of the tombs, instead of 
 visions of the Almigthy ; and walked after' the imagina 
 
160 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 tions of our evil hearts, instead of after the counsels of 
 Eternity, until our lives — not in the likeness of the cloud 
 of heaven, but of the smoke of hell — have beccme "as a 
 vapour, that appeaieth for a little time, and then vanisheth 
 away ? " 
 
 133. Does it vanish then ? Are you sure of that? — sure, 
 that the nothingness of the grave will be a rest from thig 
 troubled nothingness ; and that the coiling shadow, which 
 disquiets itself in vain, cannot change into the smoke of 
 the toj-ment that ascends for ever? Will any answer that 
 they are sure of it, and that there is no fear, nor hope, 
 nor desire, nor labour, whither they go ? Be it so ; will 
 you not, then, make as sure of the Life that now is, as 
 you are of the Death that is to come ? Your hearts are 
 wholly in this world — will you not give them to it wisely, 
 as well as perfectly ? And see, first of all, that you have 
 hearts, and sound hearts, too, to give. Because you have 
 no heaven to look for, is that any reason that you should 
 remain ignorant of this wonderful and infinite earih, which 
 is firmly and instantly given you in possession ? Although 
 your days are numbered, and the following darkness sure, 
 is it necessary that you should share the degradation of 
 the brute, because you are condemned to its mortality ; or 
 live the life of the moth, and of the worm, because you 
 are to companion them in the dust? Not so; we may 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 161 
 
 have but a few thousands of days to spend, perhaps hun- 
 dreds only — perhaps, tens ; nay, the longest of our time 
 and best, looked back on, will be but as a moment, as the 
 twinkling of an eye ; still, we are men, not insects ; we are 
 living spirits, not passing clouds. *'He maketh the winds 
 His messengers ; the momentary fire, His minister ; " and 
 shall we do less than these f Let us do the work of men 
 while we bear the form of them ; and, as we snatch our 
 narrow portion of time out of Eternity, snatch also our 
 narrow inheritance of passion out of Immortality — even 
 though our lives he as a vapour, that appeareth for a 
 little time, and then vanish eth away. 
 
 134. But there are some of you who believe not this — • 
 who think this cloud of life has no such close — that it is 
 to float, revealed and illumined, upon the floor of heaven, 
 in the day when He cometh with clouds, and every eye 
 shall see Him. Some day, you believe, within these 
 five, or ten, or twenty years, for every one of us the 
 judgment will be set, and the books opened. If that be 
 true, far more than tliat must be true. Is there but 
 one day of judgment ? Wliy, for us every day is a day 
 of judgment — every day is a Dies Irae, and writes its 
 irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think 
 you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave 
 are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses— 
 
162 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the 
 midst of judgment — the insects that we crush are our 
 judges — the moments we fret away are our judges — 
 the elements that feed us, judge, as they minister — and 
 the pleasures that deceive us, judge, as they indulge. 
 Let us, for our lives, do the work of Men while we bear 
 the Form of them, if indeed those lives are N'ot as a 
 vapour, and do Not vanish away. 
 
 135. "The work of men"— and what is that? Well, we 
 may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of 
 being wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for 
 the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but 
 of what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk 
 into the sin of Ananias, and it is a mortal one — we 
 want to keep back part of the price ; and we continu- 
 ally talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm ik 
 a cross was the weight of it — as if it was only a thing 
 to be carried, instead of to be — crucified upon. '*They 
 that are His have crucified the flesh, with the affections 
 and lusts." Does that mean, think you, that in time 
 of national distress, of religious trial, of crisis for every 
 interest and hope of humanity — none of us will cease 
 jesting, none cease idling, none put themselves to any 
 wholesome work, none take so much as a tag of lac« 
 off their footmen's coats, to save the world ? Or doei 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 163 
 
 It rather mean, that they are ready to leave houses, 
 lands, and kindreds — yes, and life, if need be ? Life ! — 
 some of us are ready enough to throw that away, joyless 
 as we have made it. But '-^station in Life" — how many 
 of us are ready to quit tJiat f Is it not always the great 
 objection, where there is question of finding something 
 useful to do — " We cannot leave our stations in Life ? " 
 
 Those of us who really cannot — that is to say, who 
 can only maintain themselves by continuing in some 
 business or salaried office, have already something to do; 
 and all that they have to see to, is that they do it 
 honestly and with all their might. But with most people 
 who use that apology, "remaining in the station of life 
 to which Providence has called them," means keeping all 
 the carriages, and all the footmen and large houses they 
 can possibly pay for; and, once for all, I say that if ever 
 Providence did put them into stations of that sort — which 
 is not at all a matter of certainty — ^Providence is just 
 now very distinctly calling them out again. Levi's 
 station in life was the receipt of custom; and Peter's, the 
 shore of Galilee ; and Paul's, the antechambers of the 
 High Priest, — which "station in life" each had to leave, 
 with brief notice. 
 
 And, whatever our station in life may be, at this crisis, 
 those of us who mean to fulfil our duty ought, first, to 
 
X64 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 live on as little as we can; and, secondly, to do all the 
 wholesome work for it we can, and to spend all we can 
 spare in doing all the sure good we can. 
 
 And sure good is first in feeding people, then in 
 dressing people, then in lodgii-g people, and lastly in 
 rightly pleasing people, with arts, or sciences, or any other 
 subject of thought. 
 
 136. I say first in feeding; and, once for all, do not let 
 yourselves be deceived by any of the common talk of 
 '* indiscriminate charity." The order to us is not to feed 
 the deserving hungry, nor the industrious hungry, nor 
 the amiable and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to 
 feed the hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, that if 
 any man will not work, neither should he eat — think of 
 that, and every time you sit down to your dinner, ladies 
 and gentlemen, say solemnly, before you ask a blessing, 
 "How much work have I done to-day for my dinner?" 
 But the proper way to enforce that order on those below 
 you, as well as on yourselves, is not to leave vagabonds 
 and honest people to starve together, but very distinctly 
 to discern and seize your vagabond ; and shut your 
 vagabond up out of honest j^eople's way, and very sternly 
 Ihen see that, until he has worked, he does not eat. But 
 the first thing is to be sure you have the food to give; 
 and, therefore, to enforce the oiganization of vast activi- 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 165 
 
 ties in agriculture and in commerce, for the production of 
 the wholesomest food, and proper storing and distribution 
 of it, so that no famine shall any more be possible among 
 civilized beings. There is plenty of work in this business 
 alone, and at once, for any number of people who like to 
 engage in it. 
 
 137. Secondly, dressing people — that is to say, urging 
 every one within reach of your influence to be always neat 
 and clean, and giving them means of being so. In so far 
 as they absolutely refuse, you must give up the effort with 
 respect to them, only taking care that no children within 
 your sphere of influence shall any more be brought up 
 with such habits ; and that every person who is willing to 
 dress with piopriety shall have encouragement to do so. 
 And the first absolutely necessary step towards this is the 
 gradual adoption of a consistent dress for different ranks 
 of persons, so that their rank shall be known by their 
 dress ; and the restriction of the changes of fashion within 
 certain limits. All which appears for the present quite 
 impossible; but it is only so far as even difficult as it is 
 difficult to conquer our vanity, frivolity, and desire to 
 appear what we are not. And it is not, nor ever shall be, 
 creed of mine, that these mean and shallow vices are 
 nnconquerable by Christian women. 
 
 138. And then, thirdly, lodging people, which you may 
 
166 SESAME AOT) LILIES. 
 
 think should have been put first, but I put it th jd, because 
 we must feed and clothe people where we find them, and 
 lodge them afterwards. And providing lodgment for 
 them means a great deal of vigorous legislation, and 
 cutting down of vested interests that stand in the way, 
 and after that, or before that, so far as we can get it, 
 thorough sanitary and remedial action in the houses that 
 we have; and then the building of more, strongly, beau- 
 tifully, and in groups of limited extent, kept in proportion 
 to their streams, and walled round, so that there may be 
 no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, but clean 
 and busy street within, and the open country without, 
 with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard round the 
 walls, so that from any part of the city perfectly fresh air 
 and grass, and sight of far horizon might be reachable in 
 a few minutes' walk. This the final aim; but in immediate 
 action every minor and possible good to be instantly done, 
 when, and as, we can ; roofs mended that have holes in 
 them — fences patched that have gaps in them — walls 
 buttressed that totter — and floors propped that shake; 
 cleanliness and order enforced with our own hands and 
 eyes, till we are breathless, every day. And all the fine 
 arts will healthily follow. I myself have washed a flight 
 of stone stairs all down, with bucket and broom, in a 
 Bavoy inn, where tliey hadn't washed their stairs since 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 167 
 
 they first went up them? and I never made a better 
 sketch than that afternoon. 
 
 139. These, then, are the three first needs of ci\ilized life; 
 and the law for every Christian man and woman is, that 
 they shall be in direct service towards one of these three 
 needs, as far as is consistent with their own special oc- 
 cupation, and if tliey have no special business, tlien 
 wholly in one of these services. And out of such ex- 
 ertion in plain duty all other good will come ; for in 
 this direct contention with material evil, you will find 
 out the real nature of all evil ; you will discern by the 
 various kinds of I'esistance, what is really the fault and 
 main antagonism to good ; also you will find the most 
 unexpected helps and profound lessons given, and truths 
 will come thus down to us which the speculation of all 
 our lives would never have raised us up to. You will 
 find nearly every educational problem solved, as soon as 
 you truly want to do something ; everybody will become 
 of use in their own fittest way, and will learn what ia 
 best for them to know in that use. Competitive exami- 
 nation will then, and not till then, be wholesome, because 
 it will be daily, and calm, and in practice ; and on these 
 familiar arts, and mirmte, but certain and serviceable, 
 know^ledges, will be surely edified and sustained the 
 greater arts and splendid theoretical sciences. 
 
168 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 140. But much more than this. On such holy and simple 
 practice will be founded, indeed, at last, an infallible reli- 
 gion. The greatest of all the mysteries of life, and the mosi 
 terrible, is the corruption of even the sincerest religion, 
 which is not daily founded on rational, effective, humble, 
 and helpful action. Helpful action, observe! for there is 
 just one law, which obeyed, keeps all religions pure — ^for- 
 gotten, makes them all false. Whenever in any religious 
 failh, dark or bright, we allow our minds to dwell upon 
 the points in which we differ from other people, we are 
 wrong, and in the devil's power. That is the essence of 
 the Pharisee's thanksgiving — " Lord, I thank thee that I 
 ara not as other men are." At every moment of our 
 lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we 
 differ with other people, but in what we agree with 
 them ; and the moment we find we can agree as to any- 
 thing that sliould be done, kind or good, (and who but 
 fools couldn't ?) then do it ; push at it together ; you 
 can't quarrel in a side-by-side push ; but the moment that 
 even the best men stop pushing, and begin talking, they 
 mistake their pugnacity for piety, and it's all over. I 
 will not speak of the crimes which in past times have 
 been committed in the name of Christ, nor of the follies 
 "which are at this hour held to be consistent with 
 obedience to Him; but I will speak of the morbid cor 
 
MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS. 169 
 
 ruption and waste of vital power in religious sentiment, by 
 which the pure strength of that w^hich should be the guiding 
 soul of every nation, the splendour of its youthful man- 
 hood, and spotless light of its maidenhood, is averted or 
 cast away. You may see continually girls who have 
 never been taught to do a single useful thing thoroughly ; 
 who cannot sew, who cannot cook, who cannot cast an 
 account, nor prepare a medicine, whose whole life has 
 been passed either in play or in pride ; you will find girls 
 like these, when they are earnest-hearted, cast all their 
 innate passion of religious spirit, which was meant by 
 God to support them through the irksomeness of daily 
 toil, into grievous and vain meditation over the meaning 
 of the great Book, of which no syllable was ever yet to 
 be understood but through a deed; all the instinctive 
 wisdom and mercy of their womanhood made vain, and 
 the glory of their pure consciences warped into fruitless 
 agony concerning questions which the laws of common 
 serviceable life would have either solved for them in an 
 instant, or kept out of their way. Give such a girl any 
 true work that will make her active in the dawn, and 
 weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow- 
 creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and 
 the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform 
 itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace. 
 
170 SESAME AND LILIES. 
 
 So with our youths. We once taught ttem to make 
 Latin verses, and called them educated ; now we teach 
 them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a bat, and 
 call them educated. Can they plough, can they sow, 
 can they plant at the right time, or build with a steady 
 hand? Is it the effort of their lives to be chaste, 
 knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word and 
 deed ? Indeed it is, with some, nay with many, and the 
 strength of England is in them, and the hope ; but we 
 have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the 
 toil of mercy; and their intellect from dispute of words 
 to discernment of things; and their knighthood from the 
 errantry of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly 
 power. And then, indeed, shall abide, for them, and 
 for us an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible religion ; 
 shall abide for us Faith, no more to be assailed by temp- 
 tation, no more to be defended by wrath and by fear; 
 — shall abide with us Hope, no more to be quenched by 
 the years that overwhelm, or made ashamed by the 
 shadows that betray ; — bhall abide for us, and with us, 
 the greatest of these ; the abiding will, the abiding name, 
 of our Father. For the greatest of these, is Charity 
 
 THE EN1X