to Rob Roy, Sir Walter relates the visit paid to the freebooter's Highland quarters by a father and son, to treat for the recovery of "lifted" cattle-the scene a wide moor by night, across which a north-east wind was whistling; the Highlanders plaided, but the two Lowlanders unprotected from frost. Rob directed one of his followers to offer the old man a portion of his plaid ; but “as for the callant, he may keep himself warm by walking about and watching the cattle." The lad of fifteen heard this sentence with no small distress; and as the frosty wind grew more and more cutting, it seemed to freeze the very blood in his young veins. He had been exposed to weather all his life, he told Scott, but never could forget the cold of that night; insomuch that, in the bitterness of his heart, he cursed the bright moon for giving no heat with so much light.

But to recur, in passing, at a tangent, to winter as it was, and still is, in the city where Paul the aged was desolate and in bonds. Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the native Romans resigning themselves to the short, sharp misery which winter brings to a people whose arrangements are made almost exclusively with a view to summer; how they, somehow or other, manage to keep up their poor frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet and uncomplaining endurance that, to the author of Transformation, really seemed “the most respectable point in the present Roman character." For, by his testimony, neither in New England, nor in Russia, nor scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, is there such discomfort to be borne as by Romans in wintry weather, when the orangetrees bear icy fruit in the gardens, and when the rims of all the fountains are shaggy with icicles, and when there is a slide in the piazza of St. Peter's, and sometimes a fall of great snowflakes into the dreary lanes and alleys of the miserable city. "Wherever we pass our summers, may all our inclement months, from November to April, henceforth be spent in some country that recognises winter as an integral portion of its year!" And no doubt the author of this aspiration would have gone along with his congenial compatriot's protest against

THE CLOAK AND THE BOOKS.

471

the use, in certain country houses of New England, of patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion; the only way to make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful being, as he alleges, to get the dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney.

This is getting far away (by the distance of a hemisphere at least) from St. Paul pinched with prison cold. Of him and his parchments we are rather reminded, with a difference, by the zealous Benedictine, Dom Rivet, ailing and aged, but spent with toil more than laden with years, when he was forced, by a severe cold, to have a fire in his room: "c'est le seul adoucissement qu'il se permit." That excellent and exemplary parish priest, Robert Walker of Seathwaite, admiringly and affectionately commemorated by Wordsworth, used to study by night, when the family were at rest, in a little room which he had built on the roof of his house, slating it, and fitting it up with shelves for his books, his stock of cloth (homespun), his wearing apparel, and his tools. "There many a cold winter's night, without fire, while the roof was glazed with ice, did he remain reading or writing till the day dawned." He was just the man who, if he had the Apostle's occasion to send for cloak and books, would have laid apostolic emphasis on the latter-especially the books. A jovial prelate of the Elizabethan age was professedly ready to let "back and sides go bare," for a consideration; but that consideration was a sufficiency of "jolly good ale and old." Robert Walker's consideration would have been books.

One feels drawn towards Mrs. Inchbald by this among other engaging characteristics, that she would pass a winter without a fire, the want of which she sometimes felt so as to make her 66 cry with cold," in order to be able to afford one to an ailing sister. One of the commissaries appointed to visit the young princess, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte de France, in the Temple, has described her attitude, souffrante et appauvrie, knitting indeed, but with hands swollen with cold and chilblains. Of Jean Paul we read, that while waiting for an answer from the bookseller Voss, of Berlin, as to the acceptance or refusal of

that manuscript which the Leipzig publishers had, one and all, declined, he “learnt well the severest experience in physical existence, that of a cold stove plus an empty stomach." When plus, the affirmative, is used as a negative sign of this sort, and in a privative sense, it is very hard lines indeed.

The English Opium-eater, in the course of his Confessions, breaks into an apostrophe, “O ancient women!" addressed to the daughters of toil and suffering, to assure them of his conviction, formed from hard experience during his starved life in London, and on the wild hill-sides in Wales, that amongst all the hardships and bitter inheritance of flesh they are called upon to face, not one, not even hunger, is comparable to that of nightly cold. A more killing curse there does not, he affirmed, exist for man or woman, than that bitter combat between the weariness that prompts to sleep, and the keen, searching cold that forces you from the first access of sleep to start up horror-stricken, and to seek warmth vainly in renewed exercise, though long since fainting under fatigue. In a subsequent publication he has expatiated on the "perfect frenzy of misery" induced by the "awful passion of cold," from which he suffered when giving up opium. He describes cold as a sensation which then first, as a mode of torment, seemed to have been revealed; and how in the months of July and August, and not at all the less during the very middle watch of the day, he sat in the closest proximity to a blazing fire, with cloaks, blankets, counterpanes, hearth-rugs, horse-cloths, piled upon his shoulders, but with hardly a glimmering of relief. And with his wonted impressiveness of statement he records the awe with which he was struck, at the revelation of powers so unsearchably new lurking within old affections so familiarly known as cold. Reasoning from the analogy of the case, he pondered the thought that nothing whatever has been truly and seriously felt by man; nothing searched or probed by human sensibilities to a depth below the surface; for if cold could give out mysteries of suffering so novel, all things in the world might be yet unvisited by the truth of human sensations: all experience worthy of the name was yet to begin.

IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE.

473

IN A MOMENT, IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE.

THE

I CORINTHIANS XV. 52.

HE Apostle's teaching is, that although we shall not all sleep the sleep of death, we shall all be changed; must all be changed,—because flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor corruption inherit incorruption. Flesh and blood must therefore be changed into a spiritual body. And this change, he tells us, shall be at the signal sound or summons of the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. And furthermore, this change shall be, in the case of the living, instantaneous; in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. What was corruptible flesh and blood, becomes within that instant of time a spiritual body. The process of transformation can scarcely be called a process, such is the electric speed of the change. Absolute conversion, regeneration, transfiguration, nay, transubstantiation, all within a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

It is not here proposed to dwell on the nature of that miraculous new creation itself, but simply to make the miraculous celerity of its accomplishment the text for some notes on even the present capacity of our common nature to experience a dense multitude of sensations within almost a moment of time. Awful are the potentialities of our mental fabric in this respect.

Byron has taught us how possible it is to gather in one drop of time "a life of pain, an age of crime.” The Giaour is the example in point, when for but an instant he restrains his fiery barb :

Oh, who its dreary length shall date?
Though in Time's record nearly nought,
It was Eternity to thought!

For infinite as boundless space

The thought that conscience must embrace,
Which in itself can comprehend

Woe without name, or hope, or end."

In his poem of The Island, again, Byron closes a minute description of the looks and doings of its new denizens with the avowal,

"This is a long description, but applies

To scarce five minutes past before the eyes;
But yet what minutes! Moments like to these
Rend men's lives into immortalities."

And in his tragedy of Werner, he speaks of "moments which might date for years, did Anguish make the dial.” Once more, in a copy of verses addressed by him to Lady Blessington, the fourth stanza runs—

“My life is not dated by years—

There are moments which act as a plough,
And there is not a furrow appears

But is deep in my soul as my brow."

Quite a commonplace with the poets is such a comment as this of Campbell's, on the final fortune of his Ritter Bann: "One moment may with bliss repay unnumber'd hours of pain,”—much as Burns begins a letter to Clarinda with the remark that "some hours save the rest of the vapid, tiresome, miserable months and years of life." A moment's thinking is an hour in words,* says Hood in the Hero and Leander; and there may be a world of sorrow in a tear-drop's span. Sainte-Beuve says of Madame de Pontivy, "Elle vivait autant d'un quart d'heure de présence quasi muette, qu'elle

*

So, "I could have summed up years and years while he said a dozen words," asserts Pip in Great Expectations, a highly excited listener to a highly sensational narrative.