King Edward II., in Marlowe's historical drama, tells the Abbot, Good father, on thy lap Lay I this head, laden with mickle care. The Revolution had not yet asserted its hour and power of darkness when Louis the Sixteenth exclaimed, on leaving the grave of his attached minister, Vergennes, "Happy were I, might I repose in peace beside him!" What says the old king on the tower in Uhland's ballad? "My hair is grey and my sight nigh gone ; 66 My sword it resteth upon the wall; "O blessed rest! O royal night! Wherefore seemeth the time so long, Till I see yon stars in their fullest light, So, but with a pagan difference, does Wordsworth glance, in one of his sonnets, at the veteran Sertorius, that great leader, sick of strife and bloodshed, who so longed in quiet to be laid in some green island of the western main. What poet, indeed, excels Wordsworth in the impressiveness of his tributes, first and last, to the sublime attractions of rest? For instance, there is his mountain recluse, confessedly aweary of the traverses and toils of life, its perplexing labyrinths, abrupt precipitations, and untoward straits, all which the earth-born wanderer having passed, he must again encounter, just as the river, that other earth-born wanderer, must, after brief respite here and there: UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF REPOSE. 159 And elsewhere what other yearning, asks he, was the master tie of the monastic brotherhood, upon airy rock or in green secluded vale, collected from afar in undissolving fellowship? -what but this, "The universal instinct of repose, The longing for confirmed tranquillity, To the wilderness the Psalmist would wing his flight, were the wings of a dove his. "Lo, there would I get me away far off, and remain in the wilderness." The isolated calm of the desert, its even savage seclusion, were as a spell to that troubled spirit, tossed with tempests and not comforted. Not of the wilderness thought he as we think of it when we read how Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil-albeit when the devil leaveth Him, behold, angels came and ministered unto Him; or again, when we read how the possessed Gadarene, which had devils long time, and wore no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs, was driven of thed evil into the wilderness. Rather the Psalmist thought of it as the Son of David did, when He said to the disciples in the flush of excitement and exertion, "Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest awhile;" for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. And so they departed into a desert place by ship privately. How often the Latin poet's aspiration is breathed by other lips "Ah, Montalais! Ah, Malrome !" sighed a worn-out French marshal, "Quand m'envelopperai-je tout entier de votre quiétude si douce, loin des affaires, des soucis et des hommes !" Southey breathes the wish, in his earlier days, "Oh for a snug island in the farthest of all seas, surrounded by the highest of all rocks, . . . secluded from the worst of all possible monsters, man!" In his Hymn to the Penates he had versified and diversified the wish: "And loathing human converse, I have strayed Where o'er the sea-beach chilly howled the blast, Cicero had his retreat at Astura, that little island so sequestered and solitary, covered with a thick wood, in whose shady aisles he used to find repose when aweary of the strife of tongues, his own included. You may make a solitude and call it peace, if you like, some one has shrewdly said; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the result of such a choice of life would be discontent, irritation, and immovable gloom. The time is past when men who were grieved with the iniquities of their kind, disgusted with the hollowness of society, or perplexed with the enigmas of human destiny, followed the "fashionable or pious usage" of quitting so unsatisfactory a scene, and retiring to solitude and meditation. Mrs. Agassiz, in the book on Brazil which bears on the title-page her husband's name conjointly with her own, speaks more than once of the melancholy which is produced by the magnificent scenery she describes; and a reviewer on this side of the Atlantic allows that the vast impenetrable forest solitudes are no doubt oppressive after a time; but he is fain to add, that a poor cockney, who upon the whole has abundant opportunities of familiarity with his own race, feels his mouth water for a moment, and has a temporary misgiving as to the advantages of civilization. "He is conscious of a half-desire to pack up his portmanteau and be off, to sling his hammock in the midst of the forests and beside the inexhaustible streams of the DAYDREAMS OF DESERT LIFE. 161 mightiest river on earth" (the Amazons). Overwrought minds in failing bodies now and then "Dream of such spots, when they have said their prayers,— Or some tired parent, holding by the hand A child, and walking tow'rds the setting sun.” Even a gentle recluse poet, whose views of the world were but glimpses through the loop-holes of retreat, could sigh forth his "Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, a boundless contiguity of shade!" Popé follows, that is imitates, Dr. Donne, when he satirically prays to be borne quickly hence, to wholesome solitude, the nurse of sense, where contemplation prunes her ruffled wings. If age had tamed the passions' strife, and fate had cut his ties to life, the author of Marmion, at the time of writing that poem, would have thought it passing sweet to dwell by lone St. Mary's silent lake, and rear again the chaplain's cell, "Like that same peaceful hermitage Where Milton longed to spend his age. In some such mood, but in another tense, or time of life, spoke Wordsworth's Youth from Georgia's shore, when he talked to Ruth of green savannahs, and endless lakes, each with its fairy crowd of islands, that together lie as quietly as spots of sky among the evening clouds: "How pleasant, then," he said, "it were, a fisher or a hunter there, in sunshine or in shade to wander with an easy mind, and build a household fire, and find a home in every glade !" But he wanted a companion, as definitely and as explicitly as Childe Harold, when uttering his— "Oh that the Desert were my dwelling-place, and when dilating on the pleasure there is in the pathless woods, and the rapture there is on the lonely shore. Earlier stanzas in the Pilgrimage depict a soft quiet hamlet of a kind that seems made for those who have felt their mortality, and sought M a refuge from the cares of life, "in the deep umbrage of a green hill's shade," living henceforth in a sort of calm languor, which "hath its morality," though it may look like idlesse to the superficial observer; for, "If from society we learn to live, 'Tis solitude should teach us how to die." Dr. Channing found the greatest attraction of his summer retreat to consist in the shelter it secured him from all the collisions of life; and sometimes, when embosomed in that entire seclusion, seeing nothing around him but the beautiful order of nature, and hearing only its sweet sounds of winds, and woods, and waters, he would say, "It is good to be here," feeling as if a paradise were spreading around him, so that he shrank from the thought of entering again the field of strife and opening his ear to new notes of discord. But then he would remind himself that the virtue which flies to the shade when God gives a work to be done in the world, which puts away anxiously every painful sight and sound, is not the virtue of Christianity; nor was it his belief that the greatest happiness, even in this life, is secured by escaping from its conflicts. Well he knew, and taught, that Christianity indeed recommends and promises peace to its followers; but he also knew and taught that this peace is of inward origin, growing from the root of a vigorous piety; not that which is infused into us by scenes of outward tranquillity—a peace the world cannot give, even less than it can take away. K OLD KING DAVID IN THE FIELD. 2 SAMUEL xxi. 17. ING DAVID was old and within a year or two of his death, when his presence in the field, to wage war against the Philistines, at serious risk to his life, to say nothing of his failing strength (for in this last campaign David "waxed faint"), occasioned a peremptory protest on the part of his |