Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

Nothing can be truer than that all the pageants and indulgences of voluptuous and worldly life; all the conventional and factitious ideas and feelings which it engenders, vanish totally and at once before one touch of real nature. But the effect is pain, cutting pain. The heart swells, and tears gush from the eyes, but they are tears of bitterness. The fallen and stained man recollects the innocent child-the soul which needs the drams of social excitation looks back to its former healthful and gladsome state, and the simple food on which it lived;—the spirit has, like the raven, abandoned the ark to feed upon foulness and pollution. What would not that man give to have washed from his remembrance the past good, the present evil?

I have always considered "The Pleasures of Memory” to be the most complete misnomer of the beautiful and very feeling poem which is so entitled. which is so entitled. All the images which the poet crowds together on revisiting the place of his birth, are surely any thing rather than of pleasure :

Up springs, at every step, to claim a tear,

Some little friendship formed, and cherished here!"

And is the blight of early friendships to be classed among the pleasures of our mind? Is the recollection of the gush of full and fond abandonment with which one young heart meets another, now checked and dried up for ever;—is the demolition of that fabric of affection which we thought founded on a rock, but which the waves of time and of worldliness, proved to be on shifting sand;-are these things pleasures?

How does the poet try to shew the justice of his titlehow does he attempt to prove that "Memory" is indeed "blessed," that she is in truth an "ethereal power"? He revisits the house in which he was born. He finds the VOL. III. PART II.

2 B

court grass-grown," the "6 gateway mouldering," the mansion desolate! The hall, the scene of merry-hearted revelry, and of all those offices of hospitality and kindliness, which are common to an English manor-house, is

"Now stained with dews, with cobwebs darkly hung." Every thing throughout the house, which speaks to remembrance and affection, is sinking into decay; the garden is a desert, the very clock has ceased to count the hours now growing so sad, so saddening. All the loved friends, who peopled this loved scene, have passed away, like its prosperous days, all is solitude, silence, ruin. And we are told that these things are pleasures, that we are to bless the faculty by which we are enabled to enjoy them!

Well may Mr. Rogers print as "an affecting reverse of the picture," the beautiful and most powerful stanzas which are said to have been written on a blank leaf of his book:"Pleasures of memory!-oh, supremely blest,

And justly proud beyond a poet's praise,

If the pure confines of thy tranquil breast,
Contain, indeed, the subject of thy lays,

By me how envied !—for to me,
The herald still of misery,
Memory makes her influence known

By tears and sighs and grief alone,

I greet her as the fiend, to whom belong

The vulture's ravening beak, the raven's funeral song.

"She tells of time mis-spent, of comfort lost,
Of fair occasions gone for ever by,
Of hopes too fondly nursed, too rudely crost,
Of many a cause to wish, yet fear, to die.
For what beside the instinctive fear
Lest she survive, detains me here,

When all the life of life' is fled,

What but the deep inherent dread,

Lest she beyond the grave resume her reign,

And realize that hell which priests and beldams feign ?"

I have been particularly led to think of these things by a circumstance which occurred to me a few days ago. Looking

over the contents of an old chest, I lighted upon some of my school-books, which had lain there neglected, probably almost ever since I left school. They were covered with all the marks and fingerings which such books usually display nondescript figures, dates, and scraps of Latin

"Hic liber est meus,

Testis est Deus,
Quis eum furatur

Per collum pendatur,"

and other similar effusions of traditionary school-wit. In a Phædrus, I found in the margin my initials and these words, "Last lesson, July 14th"-and then the date of the year, which I shall withhold. This had been written, as the date shewed me, just as I was about to go home for the midsummer holidays, after the first half-year I had been at school. A crowd of the impressions of that time rose upon me, but I was to have them brought before me much more vividly still. In turning over the leaves of the book, I found a folded paper, which, when I opened it, proved to be a letter from my mother, wrapped up in the draft of my answer, or, as we used to call it at school," the foul copy." The paper and the ink were both discoloured by time, but the writing was perfectly legible. The letter had been written about a fortnight before the beginning of the holidays, and was full of the anticipations of pleasure on my return home after my first absence from it,-and chalked out many plans of amusement for me on my arrival. It gave me tidings of my sisters, of my garden, of my pigeons, of my poney, of the favourite groom,-and was written in a large clear hand that I might read it more readily than the fine sloping dashing writing of a lady would have permitted to so young a child. I turned to my answer. It was written on lines, which had all the appearance of being ruled by myself, as they were far less horizontal than oblique,-and

the hand was that of a boy of nine years old, when he has not the writing-master at his shoulder. I managed, however, to decipher it. It was on the same topics as my mother's-and written evidently under that intoxication of spirit in which a school-boy always is for about a month before the holidays. Those who recollect their feelings on "going home," during their school-day time-still more their first going home-and yet still more, those who remember their mother's feelings then,-may well figure to themselves these two letters.

My young heart was thus, as it were, laid bare before me. When we look back through the mist of years, our view of what really was is but very faint and imperfect. But here, every feeling was shewn to me in all the freshness of contemporary time, in all the reality of their actual expression. Oh! what did I feel at that moment!

"The thoughts of other days were rushing on me;

The loved, the lost, the distant, and the dead,

Were with me then."

My throat felt tightened and choked, till a gush of irrepressible tears relieved me. And what tears were those! I hope my worst enemy may never be cursed by shedding such. I looked upon the record of my childish thoughtshow buoyant was their spirit!-how sinless were their anticipations !-They were breathed, too, to a mother for whom my love was something more than filial. To all the deep and holy feelings of that affection, was added one of fond fellowship, which the gay and cordial kindliness of my mother's manners towards her children inspired. That mother, alas! I lost not long after the time of which I speak, and this I look upon to be one of the heaviest misfortunes which can befall any man. For, if there be any thing which can restrain the ebullitions of hot youth, which can keep the steps of a wayward and impetuous

mind, in the straight path,—it is the influence of a mother. I do not speak of that direct guidance, which, especially in these days, it is almost impossible should exist;—but if the mother be a woman of the heart and mind which mine was, the smallest spark of good feeling in the son will actuate and restrain him. Nothing can more strongly propel towards good,-nothing can be a more powerful inducement to eschew evil, than the reflection that, by the course which we shall follow, we shall give either gladness, or sorrow and deep shame to our mother's heart.Yes!

"I had not wandered wild and wide,

With such an angel for my guide;

Yes! Heaven and man might now approve me

If she had lived, and lived to love me!"

Oh! God,-how bitterly did the contrast between that time and this strike upon what is left to me of a heart, as I looked upon those memorials of my youthful self! I was then happy in all the bright-heartedness of sunny infancy-innocent in all the purity of that passionless age,— and now!

If the waters of ob ivion had been offered to me then, I would have drained the cup to its last drop, even though, as in the Eastern story, Death had been mingled in the draught.

THE. REV. MR. IRVING.

It must be somewhat strange to the small quiet congregation of the Scottish Church in Hatton Garden, to see the whole town, fashionable, political, legal, literary, critical, crowding to their remote place of worship. I doubt whether so many dashing equipages have been in the habit of going

« ForrigeFortsæt »