WEARY AND WORN-OUT. 153 pleasure: I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith, and carry me hence." To his dear Probst he writes that, although overwhelmed with age and weariness, old, cold, and half blind, he is not permitted as yet to take his repose, but longs for it wearily. Prompted by other motives were the similar longings for the last rest uttered, while comparatively young and lusty, by Robert Burns; as where he writes to his father, as early as 1781, that he is quite transported at the thought, that ere long, perhaps very soon, he shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this mortal life; "for I assure you I am heartily tired of it; and, if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it." Seven years later he makes this entry in his common-place book: "I am such a coward in life, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam, 'gladly lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace."" Later again his longing finds utterance in the pathetic cry of the old ballad— 66 "O that the grave it were my bed, My blankets were my winding-sheet, The clocks and the worms my bedfellows a', The negress in the American story catches at the words, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," calling them good words, and asking who said them, and venting a wish that she knew where to find Him: "I would go; 'pears like I never should get rested agin. At nights it's 'most midnight 'fore I can get my supper; and den 'pears like I don't turn over and shut my eyes 'fore I hear de horn blow to get up, and at it again in de mornin'." The dying factory-girl in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South used to think once, that if she could have a day of doing nothing, to rest her-a day in some quiet place like that Margaret Hale tells her of—it would maybe set her up. But now she has had many days of enforced idleness, and is just as weary of them as she used to be of work. "Sometimes I'm so tired out I think I cannot enjoy heaven without a piece of rest first. I'm rather afeard o' going straight up there without getting a good sleep in the grave to set me up." As though to recover her strength, after she was gone hence, and should be no more seen.—Madge Wildfire is sad to think of her "puir bit doggie," as she saw it lying dying in the gutter: "But it's just as weel, for it suffered baith cauld and hunger, when it was living, and in the grave there is rest for a' things-rest for the doggie, and my puir bairn, and me.” Rest for all things. Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh began the lines Goethe wrote in pencil on the walls of the wooden hut at Ilmenau, in the prime of life; and they end with, "Warte nur, bald Ruhest du auch." Just before he died he re-visited the hut, and read the lines over again, and recalled the past, and wiped the tears from his eyes at the recollection, and repeated the last line, Ja, warte nur, bald ruhest du auch—Yes; wait but a little, thou too wilt soon be at rest. The rest, says his biographer, was nearer than any one expected. There was not long to wait. Denn auch über eine kleine Weile so wird kommen, der da kommen soll, und nicht verziehen. Is it not so written in the Epistle to the Hebrews? Mr. Thackeray's fine old French Comtesse declares for her part, in a calm old age, that when the end comes with its great absolution, she shall not be sorry. "One supports the combats of life, but they are long, and one comes from them very wounded; ah, when shall they be over?" Romola is described towards the end of her troubled course as weary of this stifling crowded life, and longing for that repose in mere sensation which she had sometimes dreamed of in the sultry afternoons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself floating naïad-like on the waters; and afterwards we read of the imagination of herself gliding away in a boat on the darkening waters as growing more and more into a longing, as the thought of a cool brook in sultriness becomes a painful thirst. When Mr. Charles Reade takes leave of his Triplet, in a brief sentence recording the year of his death, he does so in the expressive words, REST FOR THE WEARY. 155 "And I, who laugh at him, would leave this world to-day, to be with him; for I am tossing at sea-he is in port." What says Mr. Browning's art-philosopher among old pictures in Florence?— "When a soul has seen By means of Evil that Good is best, And through earth and its noise, what is heaven's serene, When its faith in the same has stood the test Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, The uses of labour are surely done. There remaineth a rest for the people of God, And I have had troubles enough for one." Bidding Gordon good-night, Schiller's Wallenstein suggestively says, I think to make a long Sleep of it; for the struggle and turmoil Of this last day or two was great. Take care that they awake me not too early." That is in the fifth act of a tragedy, and the tragedy is Wallensteins Tod. The worn-out warrior's injunction is of a kind to recall the strain of quite another speaker, of clerical origin,— "I am as one Whom an officious hand disturbs in sleep, To wipe away some heavy day's turmoil." Who, it has been asked, has not felt his heart echo to that saying of the brilliant Frenchwoman's, half intended as a point, but carried by nature, against the very will of the speaker, into a homely and most touching truth: "At times I feel the want to die as the wakeful feel the want to sleep"? Worn, wearied, and sated, who has not felt the want expressed by this "the justest of similes"? Charlotte Smith, looking for repos ailleurs, is fain to fancy it in the moon, whose mild and placid light sheds a soft calm upon her troubled breast, and evokes a sonnet from it : "For, oft I think, fair planet of the night, That in thy orb the wretched may have rest; The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go, Forget in thee their cup of sorrow here. Drawing a long sigh, the dying woman in Dred says thoughtfully, dwelling on the word of promise Tiff has read to her from the gospel,*"Rest, rest, rest! Oh, how much I want it! Don't talk to me any more now, I'm getting sleepy. There, there, now give me rest, please do." Of Margaret, in Land at Last, we read that "Rest, only rest," that was her craving: let her once more be restored to her ordinary strength, and then let her rest until she died. "Ah, had she not had more than the ordinary share of trouble and disquietude, and could not a haven be found for her at last?" De profundis is the draught of sighs in Mrs. Browning's poem, of that name,— the sighings of a life-prisoner for release from life's prison-house -asking and praying "Only to loose these pilgrim-shoon, (Too early worn and grimed) with sweet "Only to lift the turf unmown From off the earth where it has grown, "What harm would that do? Green anon Crabbe has a crabbed sketch of the worn-out hedger and ditcher, who asks why yet he lives, when he desires to be free * It is a repeat of a parallel passage on the same text, in fact, and from the same pen, in another tale, already cited (p. 153). ACHING BONES OF WEARY ELD. 157 at once from life and life's long labour: friendless he believes himself to be, and he can help none; then let his bones beneath the turf be laid, and men forget the wretch they would not aid: "Thus groan the old, till, by disease oppress'd, They taste a final woe, and then they rest.” God sends His servants to bed when they have done their work, is one of Fuller's quaint sayings. And this is a subject upon which, as Southey has remarked, even Sir Richard Blackmore could write with a poet's feeling, in the lines beginning, "Thou dost, O Death, a peaceful harbour lie,❞—and which go on to tell how in Death's arms the weary lie down to rest: "Cripples with aches* and with age opprest, Did the reader, the general reader, ever read Sir Richard Not more weary the veteran field-labourer of Blackmore and Crabbe, in his way, than monarchs many, in theirs, than grandees many more, in theirs. The old king in Ethwald: A Tragedy feels himself sinking under the burthen of years and cares: full many a storm on that grey head has beaten, and now, on his high station he stands— “Like the tired watchman in his air-rock'd tower, Who looketh for the hour of his release. I'm sick of worldly broils, and fain would rest A word of two syllables; as in the disputed yet scarcely disputable line, by John Kemble's pronunciation made so noteworthy, in Shakspeare's Tempest. |