CHAPTER V.

MORAL SUFFERING AND INDIVIDUALITY.

"There seems to have been a period of Shakspere's life, when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience, the memory of hours mispent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen associates, by chance or circumstances, peculiarly teaches; these as they sank down into the depths of his great mind seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jacques gazing with undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play."

HENRY HALLAM.

"(I had) a most emphatic feeling of my individuality--my insulated existence-except that close and interminable connection from the very necessity of existence with the Deity. To the continent of human Nature, I am a small island near its coast; to the Divine existence I am a Peninsula."

JOHN FOSTER.-Journal,

"His introverted spirit, bestowed

Upon his life an outward dignity
Which all acknowledged."

EXCURSION.

WE have before noticed how interesting it is to read the Biography of Wordsworth, as written by himself in his Poems-many of his Poems form the history of his

128 THE APPARITION OF THE LEECH GATHERER.

great adventures-they are the chronicles of the meetings and the musings which gave life to his mind. But in harmony of course with his character they are subjective. Thus, in that very fine Poem the Leech Gatherer, on the Lonely Moor. To a mind like that of our Poet, especially as we have described him in the early years of his life, there come moments of deep and bitter despondency when the spirit hangs wondering on the future, and life seems a dark, a most difficult and unsolved riddle. It was in such a moment among the mountains, when his spirit was reflecting their sternness, and cold and misty clouds hung brooding over his spirit, it was a time of strong and potent reaction, he had before been excited by enthusiastic dreams; the Poet rose after a night of storm, the wind had been roaring, and the rain fell in floods, but now over the whole face of nature came a change; the birds were chattering and singing among the trees, and the pleasant noise of waters echoed among the hills, the grass was bright with rain drops, and the hare run over the plashy and sedgy earth, it was the glad morning of a glad day after the turbulent and the troubled night; the Poet felt the gladness and the glory of the seasonas happy as a boy was he-the roar of the distant woods and waters, the sky-lark warbling in the heavens, the beauty, the majesty, of nature only impressed him still more with the vanity of man, deep melancholy struck into his spirits, his former elevation was now the measure of his fall and prostration, he felt himself to be out of harmony with nature and with all her

THE APPARITION OF THE LEECH GATHERER. 129

gladness and her joy. How know I, reasoned he, how long it may be thus with me? The ghosts of poverty, and care, and solitude, and distress, and pain of heart, haunted him even on the bright morning. His meditations were the meditations of thousands of men, my whole life has hitherto been a summer mood, all things have come unsought to me, but how can I expect that it will be so with me for ever. If I take no heed of myself have I any right to expect that others will take heed of me, and then to confirm these impressions came the melancholy recollections of Chatterton "the Marvellous Boy,"

"The sleepless soul that perished in his pride
Of him who walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plough along the mountain side.”

He thought of the gladness with which their life began, and of its melancholy close, "despondency and madness." This is the most solemn and afflictive of human moods, this is that state of the soul in which we impeach Providence and make shipwreck of faith, and reasoning is useless to redeem from it; no cleverly constructed argument can avail, no ingenious rhetoric, nothing can impress the spirit like the spectacle of a soul in deeper distress than we are yet maintaining, a brave, and faithful, and heroic heart. And this spectacle was reserved for the Poet, he beheld in his distance beside a base black pool or tarn leaning against the sky, an old man, greyheaded, feeble, a very photograph of desolation, a being, half alive, half dead, bent double, prest by sickness,

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THE LEECH GATHERER.

leaning upon a piece of shaven wood; to such a mind as the Poet's in such a place, he would seem the very incarnation of the genius of desolation; our Poet made up to him and spoke, and found him quiet and courteous, not without that stateliness of speech, such as religion gives to all, even to the poorest and most ignorant of mankind; and gradually he unfolded that he was a Leech Gatherer, that he roamed from moor to moor, from pond to pond, and he found them less common than in days of old, but still he persevered; travelled, stirring the waters of the ponds about with his feet, still labouring on by the good help of God. In the Poem itself we can indeed see the man, there he is, no doubt allowed to settle on the clear lake of his calm spirit; in that desolation, hearing him speak thus, his shape seemed to Wordsworth like that of a messenger sent to him from some far region, with human strength, he was troubled by the old man's shape in that lone and solitary spot; and pacing to and fro he made the devout and unquestioning reliance upon the goodness of the great all father, he became instantly invested with high and sublime attributes in that solemn wood, covered with its gorgeous but prairie-like vesture of gorse, the infinite blue sky overhead, the waste of mountains all around, and the solitary tarn, and this man so utterly deserted there, and yet with his quiet deep heart of faith. The Poet laughed himself to scorn to find in this poor crippled wanderer so deep and fervid a trust that the emotion of his mind was answered, strength and resolution, and independence, were born

ESTHETIC VIEWS OF SUFFERING.

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out of the gloom of heart and desolation of spirit through which he had passed. We have heard this piece ridiculed, but in truth, unadorned as it is, it has ever appeared to us most sublime, the piece is ragged, frowning, moor-like in its character, and that old man wandering to and fro, like a solitary bird over the heath, deriving consolation from the roar and wail of winds and waters there is something Hebraic, and in the grandeur of the Poem we are carried instantly to Elijah in his cave of the deep wilderness fed with ravens, yet relying unfaltering on him who met him by the brook of Cherith.

When it is affirmed that suffering is the gate by which we enter nature, and by which nature enters us; we only reiterate the lesson Schiller was so fond of inculcating, that feeling is all; or as Schlegel has with great eloquence affirmed, that it is the centre of unity in the mind*, and he must be the greatest Poet and the highest teacher, who is able to lay the largest range of faculties under contribution, to bring their varying testimonies in the most perfect balance. There is a poetry of suffering which rends our heart to witness, so intense, so prolonged and passionate is the agony, but we give to this the name of madness, because that suffering becomes in itself a centre, creating a rebellion in the mind, and does not bow in vassalage to a superior judgment, and to a higher and unitizing law. In the Retreat in York, some three or four years since, a man

F. Schlegel. Philosophy of Language, Sec. II.