Chapter IX · (continued 2)

He entered the town, now a busy, thriving place, and, crossing the market-place, made straight for the Jacques Bonhomme. There it was, not a whit changed, just as dingy-looking, with its stunted laurels before the door, that stood wide open as in the midst of summer. There, too, was the picturesque old manor-house opposite, just as he had first seen it, only that the roof was not covered with snow nor fringed with icicles. The ivy was thicker; it had grown quite over the front wall, but had been roughly clipped away from a space over the balcony, leaving the escutcheon visible—a gray patch amidst the glistening Pg 675 green of the ruin-loving parasite. Two persons were coming out of the house as M. Gombard drew near. A group of poor people stood at the lodge, evidently awaiting them, with eager, questioning faces. One of these persons was the doctor, the other was the curé. The doctor walked on in silence. The curé spoke: “Alas! my friends, she is gone from us. We must be resigned; for the loss is all ours, the gain all hers.”

M. Gombard felt a great pang go through him. He stood near the group, and heard the tearful cries that answered the curé’s words: “Ah, la bonne demoiselle! Yes, it is a happy deliverance for her; but what a loss for us, for the sick, for all Cabicol!” And they dispersed, lamenting, and repeating through their tears: “Pauvre Mlle. Bobert! Our good friend! She is gone! The funeral is to be to-morrow!”

So she had died, as she had lived, “Mlle. Bobert.” M. Gombard lingered a moment, looking up at the deep, latticed window where the slight figure would never be seen looking forth again. She was to be buried to-morrow, they had said. He resolved to wait and attend the funeral. He remained gazing up at the picturesque old edifice, which had arrested his curiosity and admiration for its own sake before he had become interested in its mistress. Whom would it go to now? he wondered.

A step on the pathway outside made him turn and look in that direction. He was startled, but not much astonished to see the fiancé of Mlle. Bobert approaching. Poor man! He looked much older than M. Gombard had expected to find him. Evidently he had suffered during these eleven years; his life had been blighted as well as M. Gombard so well remembered. How was this? The unhappy man was ignorant of his sorrow! He was saluting the dead, and he knew it not.

“Monsieur, pardon me,” said M. Gombard, meeting him with an outstretched hand and a face full of genuine compassion. “You have evidently not heard the sad news?”

“Concerning whom?” inquired the gentleman, giving his hand, but looking very blank.

“Who? Why … Mlle. Bobert!”

“What has happened to Mlle. Bobert, monsieur?” asked the gentleman.

“What has happened? Good heavens! Can it be possible.… The worst has happened: she is dead!”

“Ah!” exclaimed the gentleman. Was this man some near relation of hers, or did he mistake him for one?

“I tell you she is dead!” repeated M. Gombard, his surprise rising rapidly to indignation. “She died only a few minutes ago, and she is to be buried to-morrow!”

“Naturally; that is the law. A person who dies this morning must be buried to-morrow, unless,” the speaker continued, fancying he had here a clue to M. Gombard’s excitement—“unless good reason can be shown for obtaining a delay, in which case, as a resident, I may be of some use to you; you seem to be a stranger here.”

M. Gombard could not credit his senses. Was he dreaming, or was this man gone mad? He stared at Pg 676 him for a moment in dumb amazement. At last he said:

“Perhaps I am under a mistake.… I may be taking you for a person who resembles you strongly. Who are you, monsieur?”

“I am an archæologist by profession; my name is De Valbranchart.” He drew out his pocket-book and handed a card to M. Gombard.

“Henri, Comte de Valbranchart,” repeated M. Gombard absently. He had heard the name before; but where? “The name is not unknown to me,” he added.

“It can hardly be unknown to any one who has read history,” replied the count, with quiet hauteur. “The De Valbrancharts played a stirring part in the history of France as early as the twelfth century. But their day is over; they have no existence in the present. I am the last of the name.”

“Where have I heard it before?” said M. Gombard musingly.

“Perhaps at Cabicol,” returned the count. “This old house was the home of my family for three hundred

As he said this he looked up at the stone shield, where a lion passant, on gule, was still visible, surmounted by a fleur-de-lis argent, en chef. Raising his hat deferentially to the worn and partly-obliterated symbols of a glory that lived only in his faithful memory, the Comte de Valbranchart bowed to M. Gombard and passed on.

“And so this was the lady-love he worshipped,” said M. Gombard to himself, as the tall, pensive man disappeared down the street. “He never loved her, perhaps he never knew her; and if I had only known, I might have.… But it is no use regretting the irreparable. I should have been a more miserable man at this hour, if I had won her and loved her all these years.”

Pg 677

THE HOME-LIFE OF SOME EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS.

The happiest lives,” says Southey, speaking of his own, “are those which have the least variety.” There never was a truer saying. All the knowledge of the world involved in a stormy life, whether of vice, adventure, poverty, or political prominence, is not worth the half of the quiet happiness of a home-life and of what people lightly and mistakenly call monotony. And not only in such a life does the soul grow and the higher part of man gradually and calmly ripen, but his mind grows, his art grows, his genius widens and deepens. There are no shocks to arrest the creations of his mind; no periods of untrue, feverish, excited joy, followed by a ghastly reaction and a sad blank, to disturb the rest that alone produces lasting works. Not all poets and artists understood this, because very few were perfect men; not all common men understand it, because if their inborn propensities do not (and they do in only exceptional cases) lead them to this quiet haven, it requires severe experiences and much repentance before they can enter such a state. It is true that the works universally reckoned the greatest have been accomplished by men whose lives were spent among storms; but since the men who wrote them could so heroically overcome this inner obstacle, what magnificent things might they not have done if their lives had been differently ordained! The Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, King Lear were the offspring of volcanic natures savants, discoverers, and even our single selves. For ourselves, we almost invariably care more for the life of a man than for his works; and as this century has Pg 678 developed a peculiar turn for biography, even that of ordinary and obscure persons—which is often none the less interesting—it has been a liking easy to satisfy. If, however, readers of poets prefer to see their ideal with their own eyes and look upon him as a demigod, biography is not a thing likely to be pleasant to them. It is often disenchanting, and many people shrink from the true if it be not likewise in accordance with their preconceived notions. The English poets of the last century were emphatically men, good specimens of their time and surroundings, by no means souls stranded on a foreign world and accidentally fitted with clogging bodies whose necessities were a vexation to the spirit.

The earliest of the rising generation of that time who came prominently before the public, and has never since lost his place, is Dean Swift. He was “of the earth, earthy,” yet not a type of very common humanity. His life was full of strange incidents and extraordinary contradictions. He was, like Milton, by inclination rather a politician than a writer, and yet his poems have outlived his pamphlets. Sometimes he was coarse in language and brutal in manner—a fashion of his age, itself a contrast to the other extreme affected by society, that of a finical and artificial delicacy. Yet he won the almost unsolicited affection of pure-minded, sensitive, well-educated women. Now he was a miser, now a prodigal; now he entered a state which so many other poets conscientiously eschewed, himself worse fitted for it than they were; and now he showed a tenderness of feeling and a nobleness of soul which seemed inconsistent with this one life-act of defiant recklessness. For it was not hypocrisy; to that £100 Pg 679 a year, in favor of a poor struggling curate with less than half that income and eight children to support; but some of his friends thought that the loss of congenial society which this small preferment involved somewhat moved him to this renunciation. Going back to Moor Park, he made acquaintance with “Stella”—Esther Johnson—a ward of his patron, a girl of fifteen, who loved him devotedly, and whose heart he broke. He became her tutor, and his genius, his appearance, and his manner captivated the child-woman. Engaged at the time to a Miss Waryng, whom he fancifully styled “Varina,” he broke his promise to her, and in the details of their quarrel showed himself as insolent as dishonorable. At this time of his life he was, if not a handsome, at least a very striking man. He was tall and well made, with deep-blue eyes and black hair and eyebrows, the last very bushy, and his expression stern and haughty—the very hero of a young girl’s dreams. After Sir William’s death he removed Stella to the neighborhood of his own parsonage, where she lived in a little cottage with an elderly companion, and never saw Swift except in the presence of a third person. Sir Walter Scott charitably attributes his avoidance of marriage with her to prudential reasons, and in this anomalous relation to the woman he loved he sees an attempt “in the pride of talent and of wisdom … to frame a new path to happiness”; and the consequences, he continues, were such as to render him “a warning, where the various virtues with which he was endowed ought to have made him a pattern.” In one of his visits to London he met “Vanessa”—Esther Vanhomrigh—to whom he offered the same Platonic

Swift’s fits of avarice were great sources of amusement to his visitors. It is said that he occasionally allowed some guests of his, ladies of high rank, a shilling each to provide for themselves when asked to dine with him. Another such droll tale, but rather illustrating the contrary disposition, is told of him by Pope: “One evening Gay and I went to see him. On our coming in, ‘Heyday, gentlemen,’ says the doctor, ‘what’s the meaning of this visit? How came you to leave all the great lords you are so fond of, to come hither and see a poor dean?’ ‘Because we would rather see you than any of them!’ ‘Ay, any one that did not know so well might believe you. But since you are come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose?’ ‘No, doctor, we have supped already.’ ‘Supped already? That’s impossible! Why, it is not eight o’clock yet. That’s very strange; but if you had not supped, I must have got something for you. Let me see; what should I have had? A couple of lobsters; ay, that would have done very well—two shillings; tarts, a shilling. But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much before your usual time only to spare my pocket.’ ‘No; we had rather talk with you than drink with you.’ ‘But if you had supped with me, as, in all reason, you ought to have done, you must then have drunk with me. A bottle of wine, two shillings. Two and two is four, and one is five—just two and sixpence Pg 680 apiece. There, Pope, there’s half a crown for you, and there’s another for you sir; for I won’t save by you, I am determined.’ In spite of everything we could say to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money.”

Among the literary practical jokes he sometimes played was a book of prophecies he published in ridicule of a yearly almanac of predictions by one Partridge. The chief event foretold was the astrologer’s own death on the 29th of March, 1708. As soon as the date was past an elaborate account of Partridge’s last moments and sayings came out in “a letter to a person of honor.” Partridge found it hard to persuade people of his continued existence, and, having once complained to a Doctor Yalden, was repaid by the latter by an additional account of his sufferings and end by his supposed attendant physician. The poor man was driven frantic; he says the undertaker and the sexton came to him “on business”; people taunted him in the streets with not having paid his funeral expenses; his wife was distracted by being persistently addressed as Widow Partridge, and was “cited once a term into court to take out letters of administration”; while “the very reader of our parish, a good, sober, discreet person, has two or three times sent for me to come and be buried decently, or, if I have been interred in any other parish, to produce my certificate, as the act requires.” Sir Walter Scott remarks, as an odd coincidence, that in 1709 the Company of Stationers obtained an injunction against any almanac published under the name of John Partridge, as if the poor man had been dead in sad earnest.

Unsatisfactory as was the homelife £20,000 when the boy was twelve years old. Instead of putting this money in the bank, he kept it in the house in a strong chest, and drew upon the sum for all he wanted for many years, by which method it was considerably lessened before his son inherited it. Many of the despicable traits or foolish weaknesses of Pope’s character were due to his sufferings. He was deformed in person, and so feeble that he had to be dressed and tended like a child. He was laced in stays to keep him erect, and was so small that at table it was necessary to place him in a high chair. Dr. Johnson says that “his legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help.” He wanted help even in the night, and would often call up a servant for coffee or for pen and paper; but he was lavish of money to compensate for the trouble he gave, and a servant in Lord Oxford’s house once declared that so long as it was her business to answer the poet’s bell she would not ask for wages. In other respects, however, Pope was absurdly miserly, and one of his habits—that Pg 681 of writing his verses on the backs of letters and other loose leaves and scraps—got him the nickname of “paper-sparing Pope.” It was his friend Swift who originated this saying. He was hardly thirty when his Homer had gained him an independence, and he set up his own house at Twickenham, though he still passed half his time at his parents’ home at Binfield. Twickenham had the charm of society, which to Pope was a great solace. Here he gathered a circle of admiring friends; for the place was a kind of centre of literature and fashion. Lady Mary Montagu, with whom he fell in love and then quarrelled, was his neighbor; Bolingbroke lived at Dawley, and Lord Burlington at Chiswick. Fine court people and “elegant company,” as he writes, flocked to visit him, and, though he enjoyed it, he seems to have been partly discontented with it. It was the weak protest of the higher nature, dwarfed but not crushed by the lower. His filial piety shines out as a redeeming point in his selfish, narrow, loveless life, and it never wearied of its prolonged task; for his mother died at ninety-three (in 1733), at his house, and he mourned her deeply and tenderly. Another good and innocent trait was his love of gardening, though it was but the formal, lifeless gardening of his day, when the taste prevailed for grottoes and masonry and clipped trees. He writes to Swift: “The gardens extend and flourish.… I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have melons and pineapples of my own growth.” To another friend he writes: “I am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for another [his mother], and I thank God for every wet day and grotte, or series of catacomb-like passages in the chalk cliff overlooking the sea. This is on the Pugin property, and there are like galleries, we believe, a little further, leading from the gardens of Sir Moses Montefiore.

Richmond, adjoining Twickenham, is as classic ground in its literary associations. Here Thomson, the author of The Seasons, lived for the twelve last years of his life, at a pretty cottage called Rosedale House, now much altered and enlarged. But the summer-house in the garden remains the same as it was in the poet’s time. “It is,” says Mr. Howitt, “a simple wooden construction, with a plain back and two outward-sloping sides, a bench running round it within, a roof and boarded floor, so as to be readily removable all together. It is kept well painted of a dark green, and Pg 682 in it stands an old, small walnut table, with a drawer, which belonged to Thomson.” A tablet let into the front of the alcove above bears the following inaccurate inscription:

Here Thomson sang “The Seasons” and their change.

His famous poem was composed several years before, and begun when he had scarcely a roof over his head. The first part, “Winter,” was written in a lodging over a bookseller’s shop, to whose master he sold the poem for three guineas. It was neglected until a clergyman, “happening to turn his eye upon it, was so delighted that he ran from place to place celebrating its excellence.” Would such simple means be enough now to herald a new author, although literature is supposed nowadays to be so much more respected and lucrative a calling than in the last century? Before this stroke of luck Thomson had been drudging as a tutor, teaching his patron’s little boy of five years old his alphabet, and wasting his Scotch university education in such dreary pursuits. He had been brought up for the Presbyterian ministry, being himself a Scotch minister’s son; but he found himself unfit for that calling, and set out from Edinburgh for London “to seek his fortune,” with a little money and some letters of recommendation tied up in his pocket-handkerchief. He had no sooner reached London than both were stolen, and this misfortune was soon followed by a worse—the death of his widowed mother. After the happy hit of his “Winter,” however, he had no more trouble; the patrons of literature took him up, his poems sold fast, and he completed his Seasons, while also Pg 683 too much in luck and grew careless and indolent; his ambition was to live in peace, in luxurious dreams, in easy, social fellowship. He was kind but apathetic, and as careless of himself as of others, so that, though he had money enough to live more than comfortably, he was once arrested for a debt of seventy pounds. The actor Quin, as was often the case with friends of those detained in a “sponging-house” in those rollicking days when such confinement was not supposed to entail any disgrace, went to see him and ordered supper from a tavern close by. When they had done, Quin said seriously: “It is time now, Jemmy Thomson, we should balance our accounts.” The poet, with the instinct of a debtor, supposed that here was some further demand he had forgotten; but Quin went on to say “that he owed Thomson at least £100—the lowest estimate he could put upon the pleasure he had derived from reading his works; and that, instead of leaving it to him in his will, he insisted on taking this opportunity of discharging his debt. Then, putting the money on the table, he hastily left the room.”

A ludicrous anecdote is told of Thomson, which, if not true, is typical of his undoubted indolence—namely, that he would wander about his garden with his hands in his pockets, biting off the sunny side of the peaches that grew upon the wall. He was fond of walking, however. Laziness often brings dirt in its train, and Johnson, himself no Rhadamanthus on this score, calls Thomson slovenly in his dress, while other biographers aver that he took care only of his wig. His barber at Richmond said he was very extravagant about it, and had as many as a dozen wigs. One

It is curious to note how many poets have been bachelors. Gray, too, was one. The son of a well-to-do London citizen, he was sent to Eton and Cambridge, and at the latter place spent many years of his later life. He was emphatically a student, rather cold and fastidious in manner, but a devoted son and a true friend. His mother “cheerfully maintained him [at college] on the scanty produce of her separate industry.” He travelled with Horace Walpole, and learned modern languages in his wanderings, and was one of the first English sight-seers at Herculaneum. On his return to England his father died, and he and his mother lived at West Stoke, near Windsor, where he wrote his famous Elegy. One of his early friends, Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, a kindred spirit, learned, young, and poetical, but indolent, writes affectionately to Gray: “Next to seeing you is the pleasure of seeing your handwriting; next to hearing you is the pleasure of hearing from you.” Soon after the premature death of his young friend Gray went to live at Cambridge, and ten years later his happy, quiet life was disturbed by the death of his mother—a blow he never recovered. Towards the close of his life, thirteen years later, he writes to a friend: “I had written to you to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is that in one’s whole life one can never have more than a single mother. You may think this obvious, Pg 684 and what you call a trite observation. You are a green gosling! I was, at the same age, very near as wise as you; and yet I never discovered this with full evidence and conviction—I mean till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago, and seems but as yesterday, and every day I live it sinks deeper into my heart.”

His favorite study at Cambridge—first at Peter-house College, then at Pembroke Hall, between which places he spent nearly forty years of his life—was Greek, taking, as he said, “verse and prose together, like bread and cheese”; but his only public office was the professorship of modern history, the duties of which he was, through ill-health, unable to fulfil. The stiffness of his bearing and fastidiousness of his dress made him a favorite butt of the undergraduates, and his real attainments, intellectual as well as moral, were wholly powerless to restrain within due bounds that spirit of mischief which the gravest “dons” themselves confess to in their own far-off youth and heyday. One of these jokes was the reason of his leaving Peter-house in indignation and removing to Pembroke Hall. Gray had a nervous dread of fire, and always kept a rope-ladder by him in case of danger. One night the “boys” “placed exactly under his bedroom window a large tub full of water, and some who were in the plot raised a cry of ‘fire’ at his door. Gray, terrified by the report of the calamity he most dreaded, rushed from his bed, threw himself hastily out of the window with his rope-ladder, and descended exactly into the tub.” The two bars to which he fastened his ladder are still to be seen at the window of the chambers he used. But in later years, when the fame

In that age of artificiality this was a great step forward. Men affected to be appalled by the savageness of life away from the capital; they magnified the fleeting, ignoble gossip of their taverns and coffee-houses into affairs of sublime importance. A country-house to them was a doll’s house, a toy near London, tricked out with fantastic imitations of foreign curiosities; a full, healthy, natural life was their horror. But Gray, though of this age, was not of this clique; he lived outside the world of fashion and coffee-houses; his travels, and especially his studies, gave his mind a wider range. This cannot be said of poor, jovial, unlucky Goldsmith, the jest of Fortune, the Micawber among Pg 685 poets. There is a wonderful disparity between his miserable, shiftless life and the fame of his works, both prose and poetry. He is one of the most popular of poets and novelists, and his life was one of the most checkered, though uniformly unlucky, that ever were. Before he was twenty he wrote street ballads to earn bread, but was ready to share his pittance with any one poorer than himself. One winter night he gave the blankets off his bed to a shivering creature, and “crept into the ticking to shelter himself from the cold.” Never did avarice come near his heart; indeed, his indiscriminate charity often brought him into sore straits. He was for two or three years a sizar at Dublin University—a sad position since the old generous days when the church protected and encouraged poor students, and foundations that still remain were made for their support. They indeed remain, but the spirit of charity and Christian brotherhood that inspired them has gone, and poor scholars find the universities as worldly a place as any other, and have to go through a fiery ordeal to gain knowledge. At last Goldsmith, goaded by the contempt and insults he met with, even from his tutor, who once knocked him down, ran away to Cork with one shilling in his pocket. He once told Sir Joshua Reynolds “that of all the exquisite meals he had ever tasted, the most delicious was a handful of gray peas given him by a girl, after twenty-four hours’ fasting.” Refusing to become a clergyman, for which career he felt unfitted, he studied medicine with small success, though he managed to get a degree after such a tour through Europe as reminds one of the mediæval students’ doings. He started with Pg 686 meet civility abroad.” Then he turned to that most uncertain yet fascinating pursuit—letters, his old love. It barely kept him alive; he was dunned and worried; lived in a wretched attic, and wore clothes too shabby to go out in, except after nightfall. In these days of brilliant gas-lit shops and streets even that comfort would have been denied him. He was a bookseller’s hack, and wrote to order, and was naturally delighted at the chance of an appointment as surgeon on the coast of Coromandel; but this fell through, unluckily for himself, though not for posterity. Goldsmith had a dog, to whom he taught simple tricks, which were as great a vexation to the poor animal as his own troubles were to the master (selfish human beings, how little we follow the lesson. ‘Put yourself in his place’!), and this faithful companion was a great solace to him.

The way in which the Vicar of Wakefield was given to the world is too well known to be more than glanced at. Version and counterversion of the scene have been given by Johnson and others; it is pitiful to think that such a book should have depended upon the chance of his being able to get out to offer it to a publisher. While Goldsmith sat a prisoner in his own room (it is still shown at Islington, London) Johnson took the treasure and sold it for sixty pounds. It is to be hoped the author changed his landlady after her behavior to him in arresting him for his rent; but perhaps she had some provocation, for when he had money he did not always put it to the wisest purposes. Others, too, must have been either foolishly trusting or deliberately kind; for he owed £2,000 at his death, one of the bills being the

The year Goldsmith died, 1774, Robert Southey was born, a man whose life was in all respects different—shielded, domestic, happy, and uneventful. “I have lived in the sunshine,” he says of himself. He worked hard and was thoroughly happy, singularly unambitious, but imaginative and enthusiastic. He was born at Bristol, and his early school-life and holidays with an eccentric aunt were among his most cheerful reminiscences. This old lady, Miss Tyler, was one of those excruciatingly neat housekeepers who make every one about them uncomfortable. “I have seen her,” writes her nephew, “order the teakettle to be emptied and refilled because some one had passed across the hearth while it was on the fire preparing for her breakfast. She had a cup once buried for six weeks to purify it from the lips of one she accounted unclean. All who were not her favorites were included in that class. A chair in which an unclean person had sat was put out in the garden to be aired; and I never saw her more annoyed than on one occasion when a man who called on business seated himself in her own chair; how the cushion was ever again to be rendered fit for her use she knew not.” Dust was of course her pet aversion, and she took more precautions against it “than would have been needful against the plague in an infected city.” Southey was adoringly fond of his mother, from Pg 687 whom he inherited “that alertness of mind and quickness of apprehension without which it would have been impossible for me to have undertaken half of what I have performed. God never blessed a human creature with a more cheerful disposition, a more generous spirit, a sweeter temper, or a tenderer heart.” In all this the happy poet was her counterpart. He went to Westminster School, then to Balliol College, Oxford, but distinguished himself rather by feats of physical prowess than by hard study. He learned to row and swim, and lived a healthy out-door life, as he had done in his childhood when he roamed the country round Bristol with Shad, his aunt’s servant-boy. Vice and dissipation had no attractions for him, though there were but too many opportunities for self-indulgence at the university. At nineteen he wrote his first epic poem, “Joan of Arc.” He was an enthusiastic republican, and one of the most eager supporters of the Pantisocracy scheme—a social Utopia, to be realized by a handful of young emigrants, who were to choose some tract of virgin soil in America, and support themselves by manual labor, while their wives would undertake all domestic duties. Their earnings were to go to a common fund, and their leisure hours be spent in intellectual exercises. Of course the pleasant dream faded away, and the group of destined companions dispersed; but three of the enthusiasts married three sisters at Bath, and some bond of the old time was kept up for many years by this connection. Southey’s marriage was not made public till the return of the bridegroom from Portugal, where he had promised to accompany his uncle, on the very day his marriage took place. His bride kept her maiden transportation to London seems a heavier punishment than Pg 688 any sins of mine deserve.” During an absence in Edinburgh he writes to his wife: “What I have now to say to you is that, having been eight days from home, with as little discomfort as a man can reasonably expect, I have yet felt so little comfortable, so great a sense of solitariness, and so many homeward yearnings, that certainly I will not go to Lisbon without you—a resolution which, if your feelings be at all like mine, will not displease you.” His happy life was as regular as clock-work: drudging, money-making work, reading, siesta, poetry, meals, long rambles, each had its appointed time, and his days were as full as they were happy. The domestic propensities which worldly men called his ruin and the marrers of his prospects of rank and wealth, were in reality what inspired his poetry, and thus made him immortal. His poetry belongs to our century, yet such a stride have we made—we will not say forward in the sense of greater excellence, but in that of utter difference—since his time that we venture to include him in this sketch, reckoning by his birth and early struggles, which after all made the man, and thus moulded the poet.

Melancholy, unhappy, restless Cowper was, with all the love and care he elicited from good and devoted women, a great contrast to Southey. He was terribly sensitive, clinging, loving, but somewhat weak. The picture of the boy of six years old playing with his young mother’s dress, pricking the pattern of her gown into paper with a pin, as he describes himself in the pathetic poem on the receipt of his mother’s picture, is a touching and suggestive one; for his mother died when he was a child, and he never forgot her for the fifty remaining years of Pg 689 “A Chinese of ten times my fortune would avail himself of such an opportunity without scruple; and why should not I, who want money as much as any mandarin in China?” Cowper’s friends all had something to do with his poetry. His poem “To Mary,” in which he notes the constant clicking of her knitting-needles, was a tribute to Mrs. Unwin, and many of his early verses were suggested by her; the “Task” and “John Gilpin’s Ride” (written, he says, in the saddest mood, and as a forced antidote to that sadness) were subjects given him by Lady Austen, a warm-hearted, impulsive woman; and his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and her sister Theodora, his only love, from whom he was parted in his first youth, and who remained single for his sake, inspired some of his tenderest and most delicate verses.

Lady Hesketh, writing to Theodora from Olney, gives the following sketch of their friend’s life in its more tranquil and happy aspect: “Our friend delights in a large table and a large chair. There are two of the latter comforts in the parlor. I am sorry to say that he and I always spread ourselves out on them, leaving poor Mrs. Unwin to find all the comfort she can in a small one, half as high again as ours and considerably harder than marble.… Her constant employment is knitting stockings, which she does vis-à-vis Mrs. Unwin. At this time of the year he always writes in the garden, in what he calls his boudoir. This is in the garden. It has a door and a window, just holds a small table with a desk and two chairs, but, though there are two chairs, and two persons might be contained therein, it would be with a degree of difficulty. For this cause, as I make a point of not disturbing a poet in his retreat, I go not there.”

So the dreamy, strange, yet often too realistic life of Cowper passed away toward the last decade of the eighteenth century, and, like most poets, he has left behind him the immortalized memory of the pure and noble women who loved him with the love of a guardian angel. No man ever needed it more, and in this case indeed God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.

Pg 690

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER

FROM THE FRENCH.

December 12, 1868.

With the fall of the leaves of autumn the cemeteries become populous. The year 1868, as formerly 183-, will have been fatal to great men. Berryer is dead! A great voice silenced. “I shall not, then, see the happiness of France!” he said a little time before his death—this holy death which has worthily crowned the good and noble life of a man exceptionally great both as regards the intellect and the heart. How all things pass and fade away! Oh! how sad is this world, in which so many separations and farewells are the prelude to the last great separation at death. Violeau, the sweet Breton poet, in writing to his friend Pierre Javouhey, said:

Alone! It is one of the sadnesses of earth. On high is the great meeting again, and the great and eternal happiness!

It is not only the death of the great orator lamented by France which makes me write to you so sadly, dear; it is that Isa has taken the veil, and we are going away. I cannot be so selfish as to consent that my mother should spend a second 1st of January far away from her Brittany, which she loves with the same fondness that I love Ireland,

Isa is already in heaven; her mother reproaches herself for not having divined her daughter’s longing, and resigns herself to this separation better than I could have believed possible. It is true that Lizzy is all that is delightful, and gives up to her the sweet little Isa almost entirely.

Sarah, the radiant Sarah, came to me yesterday in trouble; her sister writes to her distressing letters. Neither the enchantment of Spain, the brilliant position of her husband, nor the princely state in which she lives are able to satisfy this poor heart, to whom the first condition of human felicity—visible affection—is wanting. This was Sarah’s expression. “I understood her at once,” she said. Another disappointed life, unless, indeed, the dear young wife should courageously accept her trial. Will this ardent, simple, and perhaps too-confiding nature be altogether downcast at finding her hopes deceived, or will she cast herself on God, and serve him in his poor? We must help her to do this, must we not? The Père Charles Perraud, the Lent preacher of two years ago, is preaching the Advent at Sainte-Croix. The Annales quote the following words of Père Gratry: “It was this same Charles Perraud, this being so entirely of the same nature, Pg 691 his equal in goodness, greatness, and intellect, who during the whole of his short life was his brother and companion-in-arms.”

Read an article by Alfred Nettement on the three La Rochejacquelein. More mourning! Mgr. Pie has presided over the last obsequies of the Comte Auguste, and Mgr. Dupanloup over those of Berryer. The Comte de Chambord thus sees those who have remained faithful to him disappear one by one. This great family of the Bourbons appears to have been predestined for the deepest sorrows. Don Carlos is at Paris; he was to have gone to hunt at Chambord, but the death of the Comte de la Rochejacquelein has made him give up his intention. Spain has had her ’93. The despoiled and exiled Jesuits are come into France. Queen Isabella is at Paris. How poor are the times we live in! It seems as if every noble enthusiasm were extinct, and the whole world eaten up with the frightful leprosy of selfishness. Sursum corda! Would that I could raise them all!

Shall I tell you of the immortal festival of the Immaculate Conception, this glory of our age and of Pius IX.—become to us an unforgetable day since the sacrifice of Isa?

What memories! The Mass, the hymns, the crowd that filled the chapel, the betrothed of Christ so beautiful beneath her veil, the sermon, the last kiss, the last embrace, the tears—all these things cannot be narrated.

Dear Kate, let us pray for Ireland.

December 18, 1868.

I want to write to you once more from this room, where I have so loved you, dear Kate.

Rorate cœli desuper et nubes pluant Justum.

Union—a sort of contrast between Berryer and Lamennais. From the first few lines I recognized the lion’s paw; it is only Alfred Nettement who can write thus. What a grievous difference between these two grand figures, and what an abyss of sadness in these lines: “The grave-digger asks, ‘Is there to be a cross?’ M. Bocher answers, ‘No’; Lamennais said, ‘Nothing shall be put over my tomb.’” In the Christian world nothing is talked of but an admirable letter of Mgr. Dupanloup upon the Council. I have read the letter of thanks of the Holy Father.

Kate dearest, I am going away full of serenity and hope, since this departure is the will of God. We have seen almost everybody; these two last days are reserved for intimate friends. All our preparations are made. Most of the drawing-rooms are already closed, and this gives me an impression of mourning. Jack’s desire has been granted: he died peacefully yesterday evening while René was finishing the prayers for the dying. Thus there is nothing more to keep us. I could not bear the idea of leaving this good old man.

Margaret promises me to come from time to time to give a little life to this isolated spot and visit Edith, so sorrowful at our departure. Nothing would be easier, my dear, than to take her to Brittany, or even to Orleans; but the doctor is utterly averse to this project, and only undertakes to cure her on condition that she does not quit Ireland.

Edward at first manifested a sombre despair, but we have succeeded in calming him. The two Australiennes, whom we have tamed with so much difficulty, have their Pg 692 eyes full of tears when they look at us.

Adieu dear Kate.

December 31, 1868.

No more of balmy Ireland! but still the family, kind hearts, pleasant society, walks and drives, concerts among ourselves, study, the poor, and that which is worth all else—prayer. Ah! my God, on the threshold of this new year I render thee thanks for the so many and great benefits with which thou hast overwhelmed me. How sweet, O Lord! is thy love. Bless the church, France, my country, my family. “When will eternity come, in which endless centuries will pass as one day?”

René wrote to you the morning of our arrival, and told you of the Christian calm of our adieux, so full of hope. Is it not a delightful and wholly unmerited happiness to have had this long sojourn in Ireland, when I had not expected to be able to remain there more than a month at the most?

Three happy things to-day. Kate, Margaret, and Isa are come to me in three letters, which I have just read over again to enjoy their charm. Margaret announces a resurrection. Lady R——, the recluse, whom no one remembered ever to have met anywhere, has been going out for a month past. I am rejoiced to hear it. I have so much desired it, and so often asked it of God. But side by side with this unexpected news is a shade—death; but death smiling, heaven opened, and an angel taking flight from earth to return to God, and to pray for those who remain in this vale of tears, where the love of God has spared her from a lengthened sojourn: our dear little Victoria G——, the interesting orphan, is gone

Emmanuel grows, “and is determined to live.” Margaret is admirable in her goodness. It is this which I find so attractive in her; there is nothing in the world preferable to goodness. Lizzy has been in great distress for some days, her little Isa being threatened with the croup. Poor mothers!—always anxious and tormented while on earth. O the sorrows of mothers! Nothing touches me more; all my sympathy is for them. They have here below the most immense joys and the most heartrending anguish. What happiness must it be to have a child of one’s own, to pray by his cradle, to consecrate him to God from the dawn of his existence, and to see one’s self live again in him!

Kate, Kate, I do not tell you how greatly your pages touched me. What wishes shall I offer you this evening that I have not offered a hundred times before?—wishes for holiness, happiness in God, and of a blessed union in eternity. May every one of your days add a flower to your crown, my beloved!

January 3, 1869.

The year is begun; shall we see it close? Marcella was most particularly kind and sweet on the 1st of January. I sent to the nearest station an enormous package addressed to you, for your chapel and poor; have you received it? The three graces put into it some bunches of violets. Our Brittany is charming, notwithstanding the winter. Pg 693 Edith has written a long and kind letter; she is regaining her strength. Mistress Annah, whom I asked to send me full details, tells me of the amiability of the two children, who are making real progress, and are scarcely to be recognized since the terrible brother is no longer there. Adrien takes him to-morrow to a friend who has some business at Paris. You cannot imagine what this child is. René assures me that there is in him the making of a saint. God grant it! He frightens me.

Picciola grows and grows—not only in height, but also in virtue. Thérèse and Anna follow her; but, in any case, my darling advances with wonderful rapidity. I have taken up Homer again, whom I am translating from the open book. How much I prefer reading Bossuet or Joseph de Maistre!

Lizzy sends me four pages of news—many particulars respecting Isa the saint and Isa the angel, about the mothers, friends, etc.; but the flower of the basket is that Mary Wells has entered a convent. Again another who chooses the better part!

To-morrow the Saint of the Seacoast is coming here; we shall try to keep her. What an enjoyable life it is in this Brittany, the sister of Ireland! We have installed with the keeper a blind old man, to whom René reads every day, and who is a model of patience. If his eyes are closed to earth, they are truly open to heaven, of which he speaks luminously.

I speak to you but seldom of Hélène. She lives but for sacrifice, and has entirely broken with the outer world since the day of which René told you. Every three months a sign of life to her mother. O Gertrude! her life is a martyrdom!

God guard you, dear Kate!

January 12, 1869.

Visit to M. le Curé with Picciola. This poor presbytery, close to the church and the resting-place of the dead, reminds me of Lamartine:

We are reading the Chronicles of Brittany for the instruction of the children. What quantities of warm knitted articles are made during our evenings! The good aunt of M. le Curé often comes to our manufactory. She is a very amiable woman, most charitably indulgent, something of an artist, and enjoys an opportunity for conversation; my mother is always pleased to see her. The good curé is scarcely ever in his presbytery; he is a Breton: and what need I say more?

René is unwell. He has a superb indifference about his health, and this makes me uneasy. Tell him to suffer himself to be taken care of, and to forget the outside world a little. He has a truly apostolic soul—always seeking out some good to do, and utilizing even his moments of leisure. How far I am behind him!

Our life is become an encampment; and, as Raoul says, we only want turbans and bournous to be Arabs altogether. Already there are sounds of departure, and yet it is so pleasant here! The Saint of the Seashore remained with us two days. “Adieu until Pg 694 eternity!” These words made me start: has she had any warning of death? I have made her promise to write to me on the slightest symptom of illness. Picciola offered her some violets. “Thanks, dear child; I shall guard them carefully and lovingly. I am passionately fond of flowers, because I see in them an emblem, and because all the hearts of men are the flowers of the garden of God.”

Letter from Margaret, who is sighing after our next meeting, and complains of my silence and, what is a more serious matter, of that also of Kate. Marcella writes to you; she is perfection.

Dear Kate, here is Isa’s photograph. Is it not herself, with her gentle look, full of deep melancholy, and her graceful and dignified attitude? Every one here says that she is made to look older than she does; but to my eyes she is always charming. Her little hands, the prettiest that an artist could dream of, can only be guessed at under the well-represented folds of her wide sleeves. Lizzy has just lost her father-in-law—dead from a sudden attack. Would that I could turn aside all the sadness of a soul so worthy of happiness as hers! I have read to Picciola the Evening Prayer on board Ship, and feel a sort of envy at such emotions. To behold the ocean, and find one’s self a small and feeble creature between sea and sky, a mere speck in immensity; to see other skies, other shores; to contemplate the wonders of the New World, the virgin forests and unknown regions, nature in her primitive and magnificent beauty—all this must enlarge the soul. Distant voyages would indeed be enjoyable, were it not for the departures and farewells.

January 22, 1869.

Listen to what my brother is reading to me: “Learn to dwell in the Wound of the Heart of Jesus. Would you develop your desires, and bring forth good works? It is the nest of the dove. Do you love meditation? It is the retreat of the solitary sparrow. Do you love tears and sighs? It is there that the turtle-dove makes her moan. Are you hungry? You will there find the heavenly manna which fell in the desert. Are you athirst? There you will find the fountain of living water which flows out of Paradise, and sheds itself abundantly in the heart of the faithful.”

Kate dearest, my heart is always with you. We shall be at Orleans on the 1st of February. It is a great pity to leave the country, where everything is green and flourishing. My brothers wish to go to Paris, and I wished very much also to go thither with them; but René has asked me to employ the money that this journey would have cost in clothing a whole family from the South, just arrived here in a pitiable condition. To refuse would have been to show myself unworthy of him or of you. Thus our meeting again is indefinitely postponed. A saint once said: “Not to do good enough is to do a great harm.”

Anna, the attractive Anna, is feverish again, and it is partly on her account that my mother presses us to go to Orleans, where we shall consult several physicians. May not our temperature disagree with this southern flower? What a poor thing is life, in which anxiety is always at the side of happiness!

Would you like to have the following Pg 695 from Gertrude’s journal? It was written at the time when she was beginning to divine Hélène’s desire: “Grant, O my God! that this sacrifice may be possible to us; place my child at a distance from her cup of sorrow, take her in the morning of her life, all white, young, fair, loving, and beloved, my God—so ardently and piously beloved!”

Read Alix, a beautiful book by Mlle. Fleuriot. It is a book which gives one repose—a story of our Brittany: Paula, Mme. de Guenharic, two strong-minded women, the Beatitudes, so attractive, the grave Raymond, the fiery Tugdual, interested me intensely. Then this beautiful and poetic Alix, the lily of Goasgarello, too early plucked; this sweet young girl who was too well loved to die—how much her story touched me! And this book is fact. Alix personifies the lily of St. Brieuc, the beloved pupil of Mlle. Fleuriot, the chosen one of her heart. Ah! how death is everywhere snapping the purest affections.

Picciola spends part of her recreation-time with The Children of Captain Grant. She praised the book so much that it made me wish to read it, and truly I find it full of interest from beginning to end. What a talent for description and contrasts!

Dear Kate, pray for us and for Anna, that there may not be another violent separation. My mother is writing to you. I have news of Margaret from Lord William, who is like another brother to us.

I have made Marcella, who did not know any of Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s works, read Ladybird. This book has astonished our dear Italian, because she did not expect to find in it so much powerful emotion, but she considers it admirably M. d’Arberg, a hero and martyr of Christian self-devotion; the angelic Mary, whose gentle character beams throughout all the narrative like a reflection of heaven—all this is interesting, perhaps far too much so. René, to whom I mentioned Marcella’s impressions, said in answer: “I do not like these exciting dramas, but rather such readings as give rest to the mind, and I can understand what St. Augustine meant by saying that he could not enjoy any book in which there was not to be found the name of Jesus. ‘The name of Jesus is a name of delight,’ says St. Bonaventure; ‘because, meditated upon, it is nourishment; uttered, it is sweetness; invoked, it is an unction; written, a reparation of our powers, and in all that we do it is a guide and support.’ St. Philip Neri also says: ‘The name of Jesus pronounced with reverence and love has a particular power of softening the heart.’” Dear and beloved sister, pax vobis et nobis!

January 29, 1869.

The corridors encumbered with packages, the windows without curtains—everything shows that we are going away. Anna constantly has this fever, and the poor mother a sword in her heart. The twins pray earnestly, our poor make novenas. How impatient I am to be at Orleans! The good doctor from Hyères, the devoted friend of Marcella, will be there also on the 3d, to give Pg 696 his opinion respecting the dear child’s state. May God be with us!

Have been out with René. Marcella never leaves her daughter. My sisters are busy with their children. Gertrude helps my mother in her correspondence. Visits to our dear neighbors who do not move about. The Southerns are installed in a tolerably comfortable cottage, the father has found some work, the young daughters will be employed as needle-women by our kind neighbors and in the village; all is satisfactory with regard to them. Edward writes heartrending letters to his good friend René. He declares that he will run away, and other things of the same sort. Pray for this little volcano, dear Kate.

A letter from Karl, whose first steps in the priesthood are rewarded by joys truly celestial. Oh! what grandeur is in the sacerdotal life; but also what sacrifices. I forgot at the time to tell you of a visit we paid the old English Homer, whose daughter was the involuntary cause of Margaret’s trouble. Oh! how beautiful she is. Tall, very tall, with black eyes full of mental vigor, luxuriant hair, remarkable purity of diction. Another flower for the cloister. Will not so many excellent souls obtain the redemption of England?

Kate dearest, with you I ask of God: Trahe me post te; or rather I would say. Trahe nos. A thousand kisses.

February 10, 1869.

“My son, let not thy soul give way beneath the labors which thou hast undertaken for me, neither suffer thyself to be discouraged by affliction, but at all times let my promise strengthen and comfort thee.” René has just read me Mme. de Clissey, but if you love this pretty creature, do not keep her here.”

I was obliged to make a strong effort over myself to conceal the terrible impression these words had made upon me. I obtained from the doctor, who wanted to start immediately, a few days’ delay. God aided me, dear Kate. Lucy, who is just now very much indisposed, suggested that Edward should accompany Marcella, and, as Anna was inconsolable at leaving us, Berthe confided her daughter to the care of Lucy. The four set out to-morrow; Pg 697 see how our home-party is lessened. You will perhaps wonder that we are not all going to Hyères. My generous mother had thought of it; but, besides the fatigue she feels, notwithstanding her green old age, from these frequent changes of place, her sons have important reasons for passing the winter here, and I cannot leave her, even for Marcella. Moreover, my purse is quite exhausted, and I shall find it necessary to be rigorously economical in order to provide for the needs of my poor. I have been considering what retrenchments I could make in my own expenses. What do you advise me, dear Kate? I am afraid of mistaking superfluities for necessaries.

You can understand the grief of my heart. Marcella and I were as one single soul, and this morning, in my meditation, I was considering whether I had not loved her too much, and sacrificed more useful occupations to the pleasure of being with her. I spoke about it to René, my other conscience. “I do not think so,” was his answer.

Let us pray for the travellers, dear and excellent Kate.

February 20, 1869.

Margaret writes to me, regretting Marcella for my sake, and promising to spend the summer with us. Marcella sends me beautifully long letters every day, so that I am, as it were, present with her in her daily life. In order that Anna may abbé is alarmed at her progress. Alix and Marguérite are charming; but where are the absent? I do not like empty places.

The Annals publish some letters on the Catechism by Mgr. Dupanloup. They are the most delicate and beautiful revelations, and show in all its excellence this apostolic soul. He depicts in his unique style his emotions as catechist at Saint-Sulpice, and we find here that love of souls, and especially of the souls of children, which has produced his finest pages upon education. There is an admirable passage upon Albert de la Ferronays, speaking of his fervor. And then the great bishop returns to the subject of this child grown into a young man, and assisted by him in his last moments: “He had been always faithful. Possessing a mind Pg 698 full of vivacity, and the most tender of hearts, he kept them both in subordination, giving them only to God and to a creature angelic as himself whom he met with on his way and married in Italy. She did not then belong to the Catholic Church, but, being led onward and persuaded by the virtues and example of her husband, and perhaps also by sorrow, she made her first communion by the death-bed of Albert, who thus had the ineffable and supreme consolation of making his last communion together with her whom he had loved best upon earth.” He adds that “these two souls were like two angels, and an apparition in this world of the beauty of heaven.” The Père Meillier, Superior of the Lazarists of Angers, is preaching the station at Sainte-Croix, and the Père de Chazournes, author of the admirable life of the Père Barrelle, preaches at St. Paterne.

Benoni is charmingly beautiful. I make him pray for our invalids, and go myself daily to Notre Dame des Miracles. Oh! surely no more death, dear Kate.

February 27, 1869.

Our Italians have again found their beautiful sunshine, and for two days past Anna has had no fever, and Picciola is less pale. Marianne has been charged to send me every three days an exact bulletin of every hour and every minute. The devoted attention of the doctor is unequalled; he regulates everything, meals, sleep, and the times of going out. Marcella says, “This man is to me, as it were, an apparition of Providence.” Think how she must suffer, especially when she reflects that so long a sojourn in the North has been injurious to the delicate chest of her child. Oh!

March 5, 1869.

Tolerably good news of the exiles. But I have painful forebodings. René gently scolds me for my sadness. Pray for our sick ones, dear Kate.

The great poet Lamartine is just dead. Doubtless at his last hour his mother’s God, the God of his earliest years, consoled and softened his dying moments. Oh! these great minds misled, these sublime dreamers who wander out of the right way, what sorrowful pity they inspire. How everything passes away and dies! I was reading this evening that M. Guizot, writing to one of his friends, and telling him that he is teaching his little children to read, adds: “I know of only three lives here below: family life, political life, and Christian life; I am leading the first, with the memories of the second, and the hopes of the third.”

Read Anne Séverin, by Mrs. Craven, author of the Récit d’une Sœur. The style is perfect. The angelic women who appear in it, the Catholic youth of Guy, the fragrance of Christian sentiment which pervades the impassioned descriptions of these pages, combine to make them present a beautiful whole. Mme. Bourdon has reproached this work with having shown us three generations living by love alone; she recalls the answer made by Alexandrine when reminded of the happy days she had spent with Pg 699 Albert: “I no longer think of those days.” Alexandrine was, as it were, transfigured by the love of God, and such sacrifices as hers are not required of every soul.

Did I tell you of my happiness at again seeing Sainte-Croix? I prefer our cathedrals of stone to the most beautiful churches of Italy, always excepting Saint Peter’s at Rome. It is so calm, so solemn, so Catholic! I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing for you a fine passage by the eloquent Abbé Bougaud, in one of his discourses, I do not now remember which: “There is in the grandeur of Christianity at Orleans, in the touching beauty of its influence, in its permanent union with the destinies of the city, a monument which speaks more than any words. Whether Orleans was reached, as formerly, by ascending the Loire by steamboat, or whether, as now, by descending upon it on the railway, the first objects which attract observation are the spires and towers of Sainte-Croix. They have changed in form and aspect, and have been by turns ogival, romanesque, perhaps Byzantine—splendid always. In the full Middle Ages they were called by a historian ‘the eighth wonder of the world,’ and still, at the present time, whoever has seen them once loves to see them again, and whithersoever our studies, our reveries, or business take us, we never fail to return to them with pleasure or to salute them with emotion. Place near to this grand basilica, like two satellites, St. Euverte on the one side, with the tombs of its ancient bishops and its triple cemetery, Gallo-Roman and Christian, and on the other St. Aignan, with its precious relics, borne at times on the shoulders of kings, and its Fidelity and Courage.”

I do not talk to you about the sermons, not having been able to go and hear any at present. We have all had severe colds on the chest. My life is quite changed since I no longer have Marcella and Picciola. Perhaps I have been wrong to give up my heart in this manner. Oh! but then it is because the heart is so vast. Happy they who have asked God alone to fill it! This is what I say in my sadness, and it is wrong, since God’s goodness and mercy to me have indeed been marvellous. O dear Kate! if separation from a friend is so painful to me, what, then, would it be if Heaven were to deprive me of the sweet and strong support which it has bestowed? How much I hold to this world! Scold me, dearest, but love me.

March 10, 1869.

You have wound me up again, dear sister; a thousand thanks. Oh! how cowardly I was; I was afraid of suffering—that friend of the Christian, that visitor from God, that messenger from eternity!

Four letters: first, Marcella, who blesses Providence for the improvement Pg 700 of her child—the fever has disappeared; second, Picciola, my delicious flower, who says to me the prettiest things in the world; third, Margaret, who is counting the days by the side of Emmanuel’s cradle; fourth, Edith, who feels herself stronger. By the way, the fiery Edward is becoming reasonable; his professors entertain the best hopes in his regard. Marianne wrote to me yesterday. She is not yet reassured respecting our sick child. You may imagine what precautions are taken to be careful about her without her knowledge. Dear, sweet little soul! she spends all that her purse contains for the benefit of the indigent. The amiable colony writes to us en masse. Nothing can be prettier than these gazettes. I had thought of sending them to you, but my mother makes them her daily reading. Edouard herborizes, composes music, sings, occupies himself with history, rocks the babies—that is to say, he amuses and plays with the children. Marcella organizes parties of poor people, gives lessons to two young girls without fortune who have been recommended to her by the doctor. Lucy is at the head of the household affairs; arranges and regulates everything with her graceful vivacity, and heartily enjoys this pleasant life. Anna and Picciola (according to the same chronicle) study a little and amuse themselves much. Gaston is becoming a man. Then we have details, incidents, stories about birds, flowers, lambs, children. Edouard, the editor, assures us that our presence alone is wanting to complete the charms of the South.

Gertrude has entered the Third Order of St. Francis. The days are not long enough for the duties she has created for herself; there

The name of Johanna does not often occur in my letters, nor yet that of Paul. This is unjust, for both of them love my Kate. You will be so good as to pray especially for this sister of your sister on the 15th and the 20th. Marguérite, Alix, and Thérèse, the tall and serious Thérèse, scarcely ever leave me. And how pretty also is Jeanne when she sends kisses to Madame Kate! O youth! how sweet a thing thou art, with one’s family and country.

I wept with you for the Prince Royal of Belgium. The thought of Picciola makes me forgetful of many subjects when I write to you. “By as many languages as a person knows,” said Charles V., “so many times he is a man.” “By so many Pg 701 times as any one is a father,” adds some one else, “so many times over does he live.” In reading the account of this death, I thought of all the hearts who are weeping or who have wept by a cradle from whence a life has fled.

The beatification of Madame Elizabeth is under consideration. The Cathedral of Orleans possesses a treasure which may soon become a precious relic, an alb in guipure which was formerly a robe-de-fête worn by the pious princess. At Notre Dame des Doms at Avignon is preserved a chasuble made out of the last dress worn at the Conciergerie by Marie Antoinette. Paul and Johanna have seen this chasuble.

Could you have fifty Masses asked for at Notre Dame des Victoires, dear Kate, on behalf of my mother? We are getting some said almost everywhere.

May the blessings of Jesus and Mary be with you!

March 15, 1869.

René is writing to you, and, quick! here I am, dearest. Good news from everywhere. My correspondence is inexhaustible. I attended yesterday upon a worthy man, somewhat peevish, who declared to me that I was clumsy. I begged his pardon for it. The fact is he suffers fearfully from a cancer in the leg. And he is poor, with a family! It was my good angel who led me thither; no one visits them, and they are so embittered by misfortune that pity is, to them, insupportable. I took Marguérite and Alix with me this morning, and they were so sweet and amiable that I obtained permission from the peevish man to do whatever I like. And plenty there is to be done! The most indispensable things have

March 19, 1869.

Communion at St. Paterne, where there was a multitude. Beautiful singing. The organ, and a little exhortation by the Père de Chazournes for the closing of the Paschal retreat. On returning, great joy; a little child is born to us, and to us a son is given. Johanna is doing well. Paul is in transports. The house is upside down.

Jeanne is asking to see the angel who brought her brother. At eleven o’clock, to do honor to Saint Joseph, I took the young ones to Sainte-Croix, then to the Calvaire and Recouvrance. There was in the two latter churches exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. A profusion of flowers and lights, and an unwonted splendor, which delighted me, I had so much to ask, so much to pray for. Pray with us, dear Kate, for this pretty innocent who is just arrived, that he too may become a saint!

Gertrude’s forgetfulness of self is admirable. Berthe and Johanna wonder unceasingly at her disinterestedness and detachment from this world. Little by little she despoils herself of all worldly superfluities; sells her jewels one after another, her collections also, of which, some time ago, she was fanatically fond. Kate, in her place I think I should be dead. I should never console myself, if I were a mother without children. And what a mother she is! If you could only see her by the cradle of the little new-born babe, or when she is teaching anything to the other children! What sweetness of language! What tenderness of expression! Ah! poor broken heart which has twice given Pg 702 up its universe. God is with her!

My cross man has consented to change his lodging; and now they are installed, eight in number, in a healthy and airy street, where I have furnished three small rooms. The new abode is bright in its cleanliness; the mother wept for joy on entering it. The poor man, who still shows some repugnance to my attentions, was carried thither. His wound is frightful. I have found work for the young daughters, and the little ones go to the Christian Brothers. The mother, worn down by grief and privations, with her sight weakened by weeping, is incapable of any employment. Thérèse helped me to install them, and we shall go and see them frequently. That which I am most anxious about is to draw them nearer to God.

Picciola is no better; Anna is very well. Let us continue to pray! All that I do, thoughts, prayers, actions, go to one end—these two cures. Shall I be heard?

Found in the Annals a good article on “Eugénie de Guérin.” The flower of it is this: “There is an interior and private literature; this is as superior to the other as the soul is to the body; it is that of Eugénie de Guérin. This literature of the heart has pages which no other can ever equal. It [the Journal] is an attractive book, and one of the best which could be offered to the human soul. It bears a double character of mystery and of intimacy which centuples its value. What pleasure the reader finds in believing himself also regarded in the light of a confidant! living soul, taking from and giving to all things around her that life whose divine fire she possessed in the highest degree. It was a soul open to heaven, a winged soul, which rested a moment upon all things in succession, but always to rise again towards heaven, singing like the lark, or else moaning like the dove.”

“The faith which penetrated all the faculties of Eugénie de Guérin,” says M. Nicolas, “had in it nothing romantic, nothing dreamy, nor even ideal; it was a clearly defined and positive faith, the faith of a good woman in a nature of the highest distinction; it was the nature of a child and of a bird, springing and warbling, gathering all the happiness it met with, and carrying it home to be enjoyed in its nest. The sorrow in which she was plunged by the death of Maurice was extreme. This sorrow arose, as it were, from its bed and beat upon her faith as the sea beats upon its shores. But her Journal was eminently secret; she there freely poured out, in the bosom of God alone, the grief which she restrained within herself before men. This Journal was to her a Garden of Olives, where she went apart to faint.”

Kate dearest, I will no longer disturb your solitude but with a joyful Alleluia. All here love you dearly, beloved sister of my life.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Pg 703

MODERN MELODISTS.

SCHUBERT.

In the present day, when all musicians, from the purveyor of the opéra bouffe to the composer of sacred music, rival each other in attempting the style which has immortalized Schubert, the time appears opportune for studying the works of the principal melodists. In default of other merit, we may at least lay claim to that of novelty—if, indeed, novelty can have any value when every one is making it his boast. Even Scudo,[160] the only writer who has devoted a few pages to Romance music, has contrived not to say a word about Schubert and the German masters, although, on the other hand, he has thought well to enumerate productions that have fallen into permanent oblivion.

Every people has its popular songs, its religious hymns and canticles, its ballads and romances; but of all these, three principal streams are easily distinguishable—three great melodic currents, from which flow all the rest. These are, firstly, the German Lied, to which belong all the Scandinavian, Hungarian, and Sclavonic ballads; then the Italian canzona, the primitive type of the music of Southern Europe, and which has apparently some affinity with the seguidilla, the bolero, the jota, and malagueña of Spain—picturesque romances, on which is perceptible, in some indescribable manner, an Arabic impress; and, lastly, as the centre of the intermediate current, the French chanson, which, though less profound than Lied, is nevertheless more true and more emotional than the brilliant vocalizations of Italy and Spain.

How different have the destinies of these three currents proved! Whilst the German stream has flowed on from age to age, enriched in its course by genius and learning, in Italy and France the melodic current, being isolated, has been gradually dwindling to a mere thread, at last disappearing altogether. Not that the French chanson was by any means without its characteristic merit; a charming simplicity, a gentle melancholy, marked its earliest beginnings, and it preserved these characters from the old melodies of Thibaut de Champagne and the noëls of the middle ages to the chansons of eighteenth century. But after this development of a too prolonged infancy it found an inglorious end at the hands of the vulgar songmakers of the nineteenth century. The simplicity of the past now became insipidity, and the Amédée of Beauplan and the productions of Loïsa Puget obtained a success at which future times will stand amazed.

The destiny of the Italian canzona was the same. Its palmy days were those of its infancy, and the innumerable romances which are now to be heard, from the Gulf of Genoa to the Lido, and from the Alps to the Bay of Naples, weary the ear of the wondering traveller. Fertile in its barcarolles of Viva la Francia, Viva Garibaldi, Santa Lucia, Italy has no need to envy Pg 704 France her Beauplan and Mlle. L. Puget.

But whilst the romance and the canzona were thus dwindling away, the Lied was mounting to a marvellous height. “The combined work of the greatest poets—of Klopstock, Schiller, and Goethe—and of the greatest musicians—Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, Weber, etc.”[161] —it followed, step by step, the progress of the art, and, assimilating to itself each fresh conquest of musical science, it acquired, as years went on, increasing richness of harmony and power of rhythm.

It is this style only which merits a careful study. Leaving, therefore, to the learned the care of drawing from oblivion those rare French and Italian songs which are worthy to be rescued, we proceed at once to the consideration of the German Lied, and, without seeking into its beginnings or following its development, we will take it at its apogee—namely, when it attained, with Schubert, that perfection of beauty which cannot be surpassed.

Schubert is essentially a lyric genius. Great developments are foreign to his nature; with a few touches he traces the ideal which has appeared to him, but these few strokes suffice to produce a work of imperishable beauty.

Venturing little into public, Schubert, whose timidity was equal to his extreme sensibility, led a quiet and uneventful existence; but, like the Æolian harp, the soul of the lyric poet vibrates to the slightest breath. Needing no inspiration from outward events, it is moved from within by every variety of feeling. It was in the heart of Schubert that the tempests raged which make us tremble; there

We will quote a few of these confidential lines, which will form the best introduction to the immortal songs which he has left us, as well as the best commentary upon them:

“Sorrow,” he writes, “quickens the understanding and strengthens the soul; joy, on the contrary, renders it frivolous and selfish.”

“My works,” he says elsewhere, “are the offspring of my intellect and my grief. The world appears to prefer those which my grief alone has created.”

If we would know what were his thoughts upon faith, we find him writing as follows: “Man comes into the world with faith. It precedes by a long distance either reason or knowledge. To understand, we must first believe. Faith is the ground into which we must drive our first stake—the base for every other foundation.”

He one day wrote to his father: “My ‘Hymn to the Blessed Virgin’ has moved the hearts of all: every one seemed to think my piety something wonderful. This, I think, is because I never force my devotion, nor ever write hymns and prayers unless I feel a real inspiration to do so; for then only is it true devotion.”

On another occasion he comes home greatly impressed by a magnificent quintette of Mozart’s he had just been hearing, and on a Pg 705 stray piece of paper writes these words: “The enchanting notes of Mozart’s music are still resounding in me. Thus do those beautiful productions, which time cannot efface, remain engraven in the depth of our souls. They show us, on beyond the darkness of this life, the certainty of a future full of glory and of love. O immortal Mozart! what imperishable instincts of a better life dost thou implant within us.”

O immortal Schubert! we in our turn may ask, Who shall express the emotions evoked by thee in our hearts?

That which chiefly characterizes the melodies of Schubert, taken as a whole, is their depth of feeling. He is never at a loss to find accents which go at once to our hearts. He makes us weep with Rosemonde and love with Marguérite; “The Erl King” (Le Roi des Aulnes) freezes us with terror, and hurries us on, in spite of ourselves, towards the mysterious abyss of the legend; in “The Young Nun” (La Jeune Religieuse) we are made in turn to experience the sufferings of the struggle and the final transports of the soul’s victory over sense.

To know Schubert well, we must see how he has expressed the different sentiments of the human heart—not love and terror simply, but infinite varieties of intermediate and moderate feeling; and in these we shall find, as his common characteristics, grace and brilliancy.

Who shall sing of love unless he knows its pains? Schubert has felt it all—its timid tenderness, its ardent passion, and it may be its despair. In his “Pensées d’Amour” are not these six bars the unfolding, as it were, of a heart which is opening

(thus sings Byron). A happy dream; a tenderness as shy as it is deep—were these ever rendered with a more delicate charm?

After this sweet and tranquil reverie follows impassioned devotion. The “Serenade” is too well known to require that we should linger over it. Who does not recall the appeals of that supplicating voice, and the plaintive answers of the accompaniment?

How immensely inferior for the most part are the serenades to which public favor has given a celebrity! All the masters of the modern Italian school have sung under a balcony; and without going so far back as Stradella, whose lovely romance in D minor has nothing in common with the modern Lied, we will say a few words on the serenades of Le Barbier and Don Pasquale, which appear to be the most extensively known.

The one addressed by Almaviva to Rosina—or, to speak more accurately, to the public—seems to us unworthy of Rossini’s reputation. A phrase, rather wanting in fulness, some passages for the voice, a few organ touches—this is all; the whole, however, very well written for giving relief to the fine notes of a tenor. But this is not enough to constitute a chef d’œuvre; and probably Rossini was thinking of this kind of music when he boasted before Bellini that he wrote from his mind rather than from his heart, at the same time assuring the young man’s simplicity that this was “quite sufficient for the worthy public.”

The serenade in Don Pasquale is graceful and coquettish. If Donizetti Pg 706 intended this declaration of love to be taken merely as a jest, he has perfectly succeeded.

M. Gounod has written several serenades, without including his “Aubades.” To speak of the former only, the serenade of Mephistopheles “Vous qui faites l’endormie,”[162] in Faust, is not wanting in charm, though something more incisive would be better suited to an infernal singer. The famous serenade, “Quand tu dors,”[163] has less originality than the foregoing, although agreeably written for the voice. It is an excellent vocalization, which, more than once, Bordogni must have regarded with a jealous eye. It is not until the andante amoroso that it expresses anything like passion. As to the serenade of the page in Romeo and Juliet, it is inferior again to its two elders.

To find a serenade comparable to those of Schubert, we must address ourselves to Mozart. Who that has heard Don Juan does not remember the marvellous contrast, long since remarked by critics, between the melodious phrase, full of character and tenderness, and the light accompaniment which falsifies every word uttered by Don Juan? Love is on his lips, while mocking indifference is in his heart.

In the expression of suffering, desolation, and despair we shall find that Schubert is greater still; and mention as examples “Rosemonde,” “Marguérite,” and “Les Plaintes de la Jeune Fille.” The artist, following his inspiration, renders the same thought under very different forms; he finds in his soul deep and varying shades which escape the vulgar and are the marks of true genius. In all

In “Rosemonde” we hear the complaint of a soul which knows the sufferings of abandonment, but not the pangs of despair. After an introduction in F major full of sweetness and tenderness, the opening of the melody in F minor impresses us painfully; but about the middle of each of these strophes the young girl, recovering, with the A natural, the original key, lets us plainly see that she still has hope.

Marguérite hopes no more. From the very opening we feel troubled by the agitated movement of the accompaniment: it is like the sorrowful murmur of the soul preceding sobs of anguish, and is prolonged still for a moment after the unhappy girl has said for the last time, “C’en est fait; il m’oublie—l’ingrat que j’aimais!”[164] What accents of abandonment have we here! On the words, Mes jours sont flétris,[165] grief swells almost to madness. But Marguérite, presently recovering herself, retraces the past, and seems to see again her lover. Again she cries:

Her suffering has become almost insupportable. She stops, and the Pg 707 agitation continues only in her heart. After a few bars she resumes in a low voice: “C’en est fait, il m’oublie,” etc., and the melody ends on the fifth, then a very new effect, though now frequently employed.

If, after a short pause, we read the “Plaintes de la Jeune Fille,” we are soon under the influence of an entirely different emotion. The agitation of the preceding melody is changed for a more self-contained but even more poignant pain. The maiden, ripened by long suffering, confides to the tossing waves the woe which consumes her. A solemn and lugubrious phrase escapes her; her words are slow, her sorrow fearfully calm. Ten years of tears and contemplation were needed to change Marguérite to this.

To find repose from violent emotions we need not have recourse to any other than Schubert, among whose eminent characteristics are those of sweetness, gracefulness, and contrasting brilliancy and splendor. From among a multitude of admirable melodies we will mention only “La Truite,” “Le Nautonnier,” and “Le Départ” (“The Trout,” “The Sailor,” and “The Departure”).

In “La Truite” Schubert unexpectedly finds himself met by a great difficulty. If it be true that people are soon tired of descriptive poetry, it is still more incontestable that the descriptive style is ill suited to music.

We must make an exception for certain powerful physical effects, such as tempest under all its forms; and yet here again what we are most sensible of in the storms of Gluck, Beethoven, and Weber is the troubled state of the human mind in presence of the disturbance of nature.

One day, when the genius of the Creation the roaring of lions and tigers, the swiftness of the stag, together with other equally unmusical ideas; he consequently fell into the grotesque. Schubert had to describe the joyous sportings of the trout “in its limped crystal.” He had the good taste to trouble himself very little about it. To find a melodic phrase full of charm and feeling was his first care; and need we say that he succeeded? The light and graceful design of the accompaniment may perhaps remind us of the trout—“His graceful dartings and his rapid course” (“Ses élans gracieux, sa course volage”)—but it is nothing more than a detail of the description which comes merely as an addition to the dominant sentiment.

“Le Nautonnier” is the triumphal song of the mariner who, after braving the violence of the tempest, returns safely into port. Rapid as the wind which fills the sails of his bark, agitated as the waves which threaten to engulf him—such is the rhythm of the two first phrases; but soon, with the major and the E flat of the treble, the song of victory bursts forth: man has conquered the force of the elements. This is undeniably one of the most vigorous melodies ever written by Schubert.

“Le Départ” is a no less powerful production. It is not a little surprising to read, as the title of a song by the melancholy Schubert: “Le Départ: Chant de Joie.” It is, in fact, the song of one carried away by a love of change and a thirst for new pleasures—one who can say with Byron that

Pg 708 This song is remarkable for the proud loftiness of its melodious march, and for the ardor which impregnates its rhythm. It is a wonderful intermingling of carelessness and eagerness, the more observable because it was so rarely that Schubert was called upon to express feelings too exterior and noisy for his timid and concentrated nature.

Beethoven, who had made deep acquaintance with human suffering, and in whose wondrous pages it is expressed with so much power, would nevertheless at times sing also his notes of gladness. He built the immensely grand finale of the “Symphony and Chorus” upon Schiller’s “Hymn of Joy.”

It is a wondrous hymn! After a splendid opening by the orchestra alone follows the phrase in D major, of antique nobleness and simplicity; but, alas! this moment of interior calm is cruelly expiated. The grand phrase is made to undergo successive tortures; after changing into a plaint of sorrow, it becomes a cry of despair, almost of madness.

Elsewhere again, in the incomparable finale of the Symphony in A, Beethoven has sung of joy—joy carried to its utmost limits of enthusiasm and ecstasy. To follow Beethoven in his impetuous course produces an indescribable emotion, less akin to pleasure than to pain, since violent feeling, from whatever cause it may arise, is invariably attended by suffering. Excess, whether of joy or love, is pain, very pure but very penetrating; for it is one of the conditions of our human nature to be unable to rise on high without suffering here below.

Besides, after the mysterious nuptial march of the Symphony in A can we be surprised that the joy of Beethoven is only a delusion of the heart, and beneath this feverish ardor must not some great moral suffering be hidden?

But we must return from the digression into which we have been led by the consideration of the “Chant de Joie,” whose great author, however, would not reproach us for it, being himself a profound admirer of Beethoven. We have now to see how Schubert has rendered the sentiment of terror.

Only to name “The Erl King” and “The Young Nun” is a sufficient reminder of the greatness of this composer in the expression of dramatic feeling. These two Lieder are known all over the world; “The Erl King,” more especially, popularized by Mme. Viardot, is one of those few melodies of Schubert which have crossed the Alps and become favorites in Italy.

Criticism has for so long past awarded its admiration to the strangely fascinating song of the black spectre and the terrified cries of the child that it would be superfluous to do more than allude to them; but it will be well to devote a few lines to the consideration of “The Young Nun,” which has been very little studied.

In the first part what an intermingling there is of terror and wild love! Listen to this fragment of two bars, thrice interrupted, more by the storm within the heart than the outward fury of the elements, Pg 709 and thrice resumed with a chromatic scale.[169] After the triple reiteration of ascendants, three new fragments descend, also chromatically, with a bass accompaniment of a lugubrious character, and a harmonic sequence expressive of acute distress:

From the depths of this abyss, with the words souvenir de douleur (remembered pain), which evoke a whole past, there springs up a new thought of exquisite tenderness; and here we have a glimpse of the key of F major, but only for a moment, the melody falling back into F minor.

“L’orage grondait ainsi en mon cœur” (Thus rolled the storm within my heart). Here, for the moment, passion carries the day; the three cries of terror, interrupted at the opening, are uttered again, more hurriedly, at the remembrance of this distracting love “which agitated her by day and night,” then a fresh burst of despair recurs in the chromatic descent which takes us back to F minor.

In this line we hear once more, but for the last time and very softly, the gloomy burden of the bass, immediately after which reappears the A natural, which victoriously restores

“La paix est rentrée à jamais dans mon cœur” (Peace has returned to dwell for ever in my heart), sings the young nun in an inspired voice. This time the triumph is complete. At the words, “Descend, my Saviour, from the eternal home,” the musical phrase mounts like a thanksgiving hymn. The effect is marvellous, and what is not less so is the fact that Schubert has recourse only to the most natural means to produce it. A simple change of key, the passage in the major—a form so frequently insipid—is, in his hands, invested with a surprising power.

Among the other Lieder of the sombre kind is one deserving especial attention—namely, “The Young Girl and Death” (La Jeune Fille et la Mort). In this we are attracted not so much by the beauty of the melody as by the musical problem which it may help us to solve. How ought music to speak of supernatural beings? How is it to be made suitable to the utterances of the Divinity, of demons, or of Death? We have here a serious difficulty. Is it fitting that the musician should put a melody into the mouths of abstract beings? Whatever may be the beauty of the phrase that is sung, the effect does not meet the requirements of the case or answer our expectations. Is it, then, needful to have recourse to recitative? But recitative has not the depth demanded by the subject. What, then, must be done? Let us refer to Gluck; this great master has more than one secret to reveal to those who thoroughly study him.