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ОглавлениеOf the verses in this fine poem which speak for the various British Dominions I take only the one that represents my own country. At the time Kipling wrote, the inhabitants of our beloved mother-country did not seem to fully realize that we were their kindred—that our fern and clematis made English posies—but no doubt their feeling has altered since we have fought side by side in mutual defence. However, to us England was always “home,” and when Kipling wrote this poem he entered straight into our hearts.
FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
RUFINUS
Here lilies, here the rosebud, and here too
The windflower with her petals drenched in dew,
And daffodillies cool, and violets blue.
MELEAGER
It’s oh! to be a wild wind—when my lady’s in the sun—
She’d just unbind her neckerchief and take me breathing in,
It’s oh! to be a red rose—just a faintly blushing one—
So she’d pull me with her hand and to her snowy breast I’d win.
PLATO TO ASTER
Thou gazest on the stars—a star to me
Thou[6] art—but oh! that I the heavens might be
And with a thousand eyes still gaze on thee!
PALLADAS
Breathing the thin breath through our nostrils, we
Live, and a little space the sunlight see—
Even all that live—each being an instrument
To which the generous air its life has lent.
If with the hand one quench our draught of breath,
He sends the stark soul shuddering down to death.
We, that are nothing on our pride are fed,
Seeing, but for a little air, we are as dead.
AESOPUS
Is there no help from life save only death?
“Life that such myriad sorrows harboureth
I dare not break, I cannot bear”—one saith.
“Sweet are stars, sun, and moon, and sea, and earth,
For service and for beauty these had birth,
But all the rest of life is little worth—
“Yea, all the rest is pain and grief” saith he
“For if it hap some good thing come to me
An evil end befalls it speedily!”[7]
PHILODEMUS
I loved—and you. I played—who hath not been
Steeped in such play? If I was mad, I ween
’Twas for a god and for no earthly queen.
Hence with it all! Then dark my youthful head,
Where now scant locks of whitening hair instead,
Reminders of a grave old age, are shed.
I gathered roses while the roses blew,
Playtime is past, my play is ended too.
Awake, my heart! and worthier aims pursue.
W. M. Hardinge (Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1878).
My notes tell me nothing of Hardinge, except that he was the “Leslie” in Mallock’s New Republic. Another version of Plato’s beautiful epigram (which was addressed to “Aster,” or “Star”) is the following by Professor Darnley Naylor:
Thou gazest on the stars, my Star;
Oh! might I be
The starry sky with myriad eyes
To gaze on thee!
The Greek Anthology is a collection of about 4,500 short poems by about 300 Greek writers, extending over a period of one thousand seven hundred years, from, say, 700 B.C. to 1000 A.D. At first these poems were epigrams—using the word “epigram” in its original sense, as a verse intended to be inscribed on a tomb or tablet in memory of some dead person or important event. Later they included poems on any subject, so long as they contained one fine thought couched in concise language. Still later any short lyric was included.
This wonderful collection forms a great treasure-house of poetry, which gives much insight into the Greek life of the time, and it also largely influenced English and European literature. For instance, the first verse of Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” is taken direct from the Anthology (Agathias, Anth. Pal., V., 261). I may add that the second verse, in which the poet sends the wreath, not as a compliment to the lady but as a kindness to the roses which could not wither if worn by her, is also borrowed from a Greek source. (Philostratus, Epistolai Erotikai.)
Numberless English and European scholars have attempted the difficult task of translating or paraphrasing these little poetic gems into correspondingly poetic and concise language, but the beauty of the original can never be fully retained.
PLATO TO STELLA
Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled:—
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendour to the dead.
Shelley’s Version.
PTOLEMY
I know that we are mortal, the children of a day;
But when I scan the circling spires, the serried stars’ array,
I tread the earth no longer and soar where none hath trod,
To feast in Heaven’s banquet-hall and drink the wine of God.
H. Darnley Naylor’s Version.
Although there cannot be absolute certainty, this Ptolemy is no doubt the great Greek astronomer; and the epigram would date from about 140 A.D.
HERACLEITUS.
They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
William (Johnson) Cory (1823-1892).
This is a paraphrase of verses written by Callimachus on hearing of the death of his friend, the poet Heracleitus (not the philosopher of that name).
Francis Thompson (Sister Songs) hoped that his “nightingales” would continue to sing after his death, just as light would come from a star long after it had ceased to exist:
Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse,
Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,
Set with a towering press of fantasies,
Drop safely down the time,
Leaving mine islèd self behind it far
Soon to be sunk in the abysm of seas,
(As down the years the splendour voyages
From some long ruined and night-submergèd star).
When I consider the shortness of my life, lost in an eternity before and behind, “passing away as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day,” the little space I fill or behold in the infinite immensity of spaces, of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me—when I reflect this, I am filled with terror, and wonder why I am here and not there, for there was no reason why it should be the one rather than the other; why now rather than then. Who set me here? By whose command and rule were this time and place appointed me? How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.
Pascal (Pensées).
Ye weep for those who weep? she said,
Ah, fools! I bid you pass them by.
Go weep for those whose hearts have bled
What time their eyes were dry.
Whom sadder can I say? she said.
E. B. Browning (The Mask).
See also Seneca (Hipp.), Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent, “Light sorrows speak, but deeper ones are dumb.”
Star unto star speaks light.
P. J. Bailey (Festus, Scene 1, Heaven).
O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—
How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death’s imperishable wing!
D. G. Rossetti (Lovesight).
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
George Eliot (Romola).
Room in all the ages
For our love to grow,
Prayers of both demanded
A little while ago:
And now a few poor moments,
Between life and death,
May be proven all too ample
For love’s breath.
Roden Noel (The Pity of It).
There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining
Under those spider-webs lying!...
Is it your moral of Life?
Such a web, simple and subtle,
Weave we on earth here in impotent strife,
Backward and forward each throwing his shuttle,
Death ending all with a knife?
Over our heads truth and nature—
Still our life’s zigzags and dodges,
Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature—
God’s gold just showing its last where that lodges,
Palled beneath man’s usurpature.
So we o’ershroud stars and roses,
Cherub and trophy and garland;
Nothings grow something which quietly closes
Heaven’s earnest eye; not a glimpse of the far land
Gets through our comments and glozes.
R. Browning (Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha).
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha is an imaginary name, but it probably indicates the great Sebastian Bach, who came from that part of Germany. The “masterpiece, hard number twelve,” referred to in the poem, may be (Dr. E. Harold Davies tells me) the great Organ Fugue in F Minor, which is in “five part” counter-point.
This very interesting poem is written in a half-humorous fashion, but its intention is quite serious. In a wonderfully imitative manner,[8] it describes the wrangling and disputing in a five-voiced fugue (where five persons appear to be taking part):
One is incisive, corrosive;
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant;
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive;
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant:
Five ... O Danaïdes, O Sieve!
(For killing their husbands the fifty Danaïdes were doomed to pour water everlastingly into a sieve.)
“Where in all this is the music?” asks Browning. And, although he is writing humorously, yet, however rank the heresy, he finds that the fugue, with its elaborate counterpoint, is wanting in the essentials of true art. He prefers Palestrina’s simpler and more emotional mode of expression:
Hugues! I advise meâ poenâ[9]
(Counterpoint glares like a Gorgon)
Bid One, Two, Three, Four, Five, clear the arena!
Say the word, straight I unstop the full-organ,
Blare out the mode Palestrina.
In the poem, where occurs the passage quoted, one can vividly follow the poet’s thought. Music is essentially the language of feeling, of emotion; the fugue is a triumph of invention, and, therefore, the result of intellect. Feeling is elemental, simple, and unanalysable. The subtleties of pure harmony are the expression of deepness and richness of feeling; the intricacies of the fugue are artificially constructed and, therefore, unsuited to the expression of pure emotion. They represent intellect as against feeling. And essentially in the moral world, but also in our general outlook upon truth and nature, the spiritual perception is derived from simple human emotion rather than intellect; “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” (The whole of Browning’s poetry teaches that love, not intellect, is the solution of all moral problems, and the goal of the universe.)
In the poem the organist has been playing on the organ in an old church; and Browning suddenly sees an illustration of his thought in the fine gilded ceiling covered by thick cobwebs. The cobwebs that obscure the gold of the ceiling are the intellectual wranglings that destroy music in the fugue—and both are symbolical of what occurs in our lives. Truth and Nature, “God’s gold”—the pure, simple truths of the higher life—are over us, bright and clear as the noon-day sun. But by doubts and disputations, warring philosophies and contending creeds, by strife over non-essentials, casuistries, self-deceptions, by questions of dogma (often as fine as any spider’s web), by endless “comments and glozes,” we lose sight of the elemental truths and clear principles that should guide our lives. The pure and simple-hearted reach the Mount of Vision: to them comes the clear sense of Love and Duty. Those of us who turn our intellects to a perverse use and exclude the spiritual perception of the soul are like the spiders who cover up “stars and roses, Cherub and trophy and garland.” We obscure and forget all noble ideals, abolish God’s high “legislature,” and follow a lawless life of selfish passion and sordid ambitions. The Good and Beautiful and True have been obliterated and forgotten; “God’s gold” is tarnished, His harmonies lost in discord; and we become morally dead.
So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul.
Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air;
Cold plashing past it, crystal waters roll;
We visit it by moments, ah, too rare!...
Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high,
Upon our life a ruling effluence send;
And when it fails, fight as we will, we die,
And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.
Matthew Arnold (Palladium).
(Referring to the Gorham case) The future historian of opinion will write of us in this strain: “The people who spoke the language of Shakespeare were great in the constructive arts: the remains of their vast works evince an extraordinary power of combining and economizing labour: their colonies were spread over both hemispheres, and their industry penetrated to the remotest tribes: they knew how to subjugate nature and to govern men: but the weakness of their thought presented a strange contrast to the vigour of their arm; and though they were an earnest people, their conceptions of human life and its Divine Author seems to have been of the most puerile nature. Some orations have been handed down—apparently delivered before one of their most dignified tribunals—in which the question is discussed: ‘In what way the washing of new-born babes according to certain rules prevented God’s hating them.’ The curious feature is, that the discussion turns entirely upon the manner in which this wetting operated; and no doubt seems to have been entertained by disputants, judges, or audience, that, without it, a child or other person dying would fall into the hands of an angry Deity, and be kept alive for ever to be tortured in a burning cave. Now, all researches into the contemporary institutions of the island show that its religion found its chief support among the classes possessing no mean station or culture, and that the education for the priesthood was the highest which the country afforded. This strange belief must be taken, therefore, as the measure, not of popular ignorance, but of their most intellectual faith. A philosophy and worship embodying such a superstition can present nothing to reward the labour of research.”
James Martineau (Essay on “The Church of England”).
In the Gorham case, which went on appeal to the Privy Council, it was decided that Mr. Gorham’s beliefs, although unusual, were not repugnant to the doctrines of the Church of England. His views were that baptism is generally necessary to salvation, that it is a sign of grace by which God works in us, but only in those who worthily receive it. In others it is not effectual. Infants baptized who die before actual sin are certainly saved, but regeneration does not necessarily follow on baptism.
In such matters one question stands out very prominently. The priest is consecrated to the high office of teaching the eternal truths of Christ—Love and Duty and Moral Aspiration. How can he keep those truths in due perspective when his intellect is engaged in warfare over miserable casuistries.
And as the strife waxes fiercer among the priests of the Most High, they call in the aid of hired mercenaries. Think of the lawyers paid by one side or the other to argue questions of baptism and prevenient grace! It was precisely this introduction into religion of legal formalism and technicality, the arguing from texts and ancient commentaries, the verbal quibbling and hair-splitting, the “letter” that “killeth” as against the “spirit” that “giveth life,” which led to Christ’s bitter invectives against the “Scribes” or lawyers of His day.
Seeley, in Ecce Homo, points out that when Christ summoned the disciples to him, he required from them only Faith, and not belief in any specific doctrines. As it was not until later that they learnt He was to suffer death and rise again, they could at first have held no belief in the Atonement or the Resurrection. “Nor,” says Seeley, “do we find Him frequently examining His followers in their creed, and rejecting one as a sceptic and another as an infidel.... Assuredly those who represent Christ as presenting to man an abstruse theology, and saying to them peremptorily: ‘Believe or be damned,’ have the coarsest conception of the Saviour of the world.”
As I have read somewhere, “From all barren Orthodoxy, good Lord, deliver us.”[10]
For while a youth is lost in soaring thought,
And while a maid grows sweet and beautiful,
And while a spring-tide coming lights the earth,
And while a child, and while a flower is born,
And while one wrong cries for redress and finds
A soul to answer, still the world is young!
Lewis Morris (Epic of Hades).
Poems are painted window panes.
If one looks from the square into the church,
Dusk and dimness are his gains—
Sir Philistine is left in the lurch!
The sight, so seen, may well enrage him,
Nor anything henceforth assuage him.
But come just inside what conceals;
Cross the holy threshold quite—
All at once ’tis rainbow-bright,
Device and story flash to light,
A gracious splendour truth reveals.
This to God’s children is full measure,
It edifies and gives you pleasure!
Goethe.
This is George MacDonald’s translation (but never can a translation of poetry reproduce the original). MacDonald says of the poem: “This is true concerning every form in which truth is embodied, whether it be sight or sound, geometric diagram or scientific formula. Unintelligible, it may be dismal enough regarded from the outside; prismatic in its revelation of truth from within.” Among the arts this statement is most applicable to poetry, and hence the reason why notes are often required to assist many persons to “come inside,” to enter into the heart of a poem—to reach the point of vision.
DE TEA FABULA
Do I sleep? Do I dream?
Am I hoaxed by a scout?
Are things what they seem,
Or is Sophists about?
Is our τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι a failure, or is Robert Browning played out?
Which expressions like these
May be fairly applied
By a party who sees
A Society skied
Upon tea that the Warden of Keble had biled with legitimate pride.
’Twas November the third.
And I says to Bill Nye,
“Which it’s true what I’ve heard:
If you’re, so to speak, fly,
There’s a chance of some tea and cheap culture, the sort recommended as High.”
Which I mentioned its name
And he ups and remarks:
“If dress-coats is the game
And pow-wow in the Parks,
Then I’m nuts on Sordello and Hohensteil-Schwangau and similar Snarks.”
Now the pride of Bill Nye
Cannot well be express’d;
For he wore a white tie
And a cut-away vest:
Says I: “Solomon’s lilies ain’t in it, and they was reputed well dress’d.”
But not far did we wend,
When we saw Pippa pass
On the arm of a friend
—Dr. Furnivall ’twas,
And he wore in his hat two half-tickets for London, return, second-class.
“Well,” I thought, “this is odd.”
But we came pretty quick
To a sort of a quad
That was all of red brick,
And I says to the porter: “R. Browning: free passes and kindly look slick.”
But says he, dripping tears
In his check handkerchief,
“That symposium’s career’s
Been regrettably brief,
For it went all its pile upon crumpets and busted on gunpowder leaf!”
Then we tucked up the sleeves
Of our shirts (that were biled),
Which the reader perceives
That our feelings were riled,
And we went for that man till his mother had doubted the traits of her child.
Which emotions like these
Must be freely indulged
By a party who sees
A Society bulged
On a reef the existence of which its prospectus had never divulged.
But I ask: Do I dream?
Has it gone up the spout;
Are things what they seem,
Or is Sophists about?
Is our τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι a failure, or is Robert Browning played out?
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
This parody on Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James” was written at the time when the Browning Society at Keble College, Oxford, came to an end—apparently, according to these verses, because its funds had been exhausted in afternoon teas!
τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι (pronounced toe tee ane einai). In Oxford special attention is paid to Aristotle; and Quiller-Couch, being an Oxford man, assumes that his readers are familiar with this phrase. It means “the essential nature of a thing,” or, literally, “the question what a thing really is.” Such a Society would be engaged in discovering the true meaning of Browning’s difficult poems, so that the phrase is as appropriate as it is amusing in its application.
The title “De Tea fabula” is a pun on Horace’s “Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur” (Sat. 1, 69). “Wherefore do you laugh? Change but the name, of thee the tale is told.” Oxford, which Matthew Arnold called the home of lost causes, still refuses to pronounce Latin correctly, and makes te rhyme with fee, see, bee. It ought of course to rhyme with fay, say, bay. Or possibly Sir Arthur has reverted to the pronunciation of ea which prevailed until the end of the Eighteenth Century. See Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”:
Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.
Dr. Furnivall (1825-1910), an eminent philologist, was the founder of the society, the first society ever formed to study the works of a living poet. From the context he may have specially admired, as he certainly threw special light upon, Browning’s Pippa Passes.
Scout at Oxford is a (male) college servant.
One fine frosty day,
My stomach being empty as your hat.
R. Browning (Fra Lippo Lippi).
The “cheekiest” line I know.
TO THE MOON
The wind is shrill on the hills, and the plover
Wheels up and down with a windy scream;
The birch has loosen’d her bright locks over
The nut-brown pools of the mountain stream:
Yet here I linger in London City,
Thinking of meadows where I was born—
And over the roofs, like a face of pity,
Up comes the Moon, with her dripping horn.
O Moon, pale Spirit, with dim eyes drinking
The sheen of the Sun as he sweepeth by,
I am looking long in those eyes, and thinking
Of one who hath loved thee longer than I;
I am asking my heart if ye Spirits cherish
The souls that ye witch with a harvest call?—
If the dreams must die when the dreamer perish?—
If it be idle to dream at all?
The waves of the world roll hither and thither,
The tumult deepens, the days go by,
The dead men vanish—we know not whither,
The live men anguish—we know not why;
The cry of the stricken is smothered never,
The Shadow passes from street to street;
And—o’er us fadeth, for ever and ever,
The still white gleam of thy constant feet.
The hard men struggle, the students ponder,
The world rolls round on its westward way;
The gleam of the beautiful night up yonder
Is dim on the dreamer’s cheek all day;
The old earth’s voice is a sound of weeping,
Round her the waters wash wild and vast,
There is no calm, there is little sleeping,—
Yet nightly, brightly, thou glimmerest past!
Another summer, new dreams departed,
And yet we are lingering, thou and I;
I on the earth, with my hope proud-hearted,
Thou, in the void of a violet sky!
Thou art there! I am here! and the reaping and mowing
Of the harvest year is over and done,
And the hoary snow-drift will soon be blowing
Under the wheels of the whirling Sun.
While tower and turret lie silver’d under,
When eyes are closed and lips are dumb,
In the nightly pause of the human wonder,
From dusky portals I see thee come;
And whoso wakes and beholds thee yonder,
Is witch’d like me till his days shall cease,—
For in his eyes, wheresoever he wander,
Flashes the vision of God’s white Peace.
R. Buchanan.
There is no short cut, no patent tramroad, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.
George Eliot (The Lifted Veil).
Let us think less of men and more of God.
Sometimes the thought comes swiftening over us,
Like a small bird winging the still blue air;
And then again, at other times, it rises
Slow, like a cloud, which scales the skies all breathless,
And just overhead lets itself down on us,
Sometimes we feel the wish across the mind
Rush like a rocket tearing up the sky,
That we should join with God, and give the world
The slip: but, while we wish, the world turns round
And peeps us in the face—the wanton world;
We feel it gently pressing down our arm—
The arm we had raised to do for truth such wonders;
We feel it softly bearing on our side—
We feel it touch and thrill us through the body,—
And we are fools, and there’s the end of us.
P. J. Bailey (Festus).
It fell upon a merry May morn,
I’ the perfect prime of that sweet time
When daisies whiten, woodbines climb,—
The dear Babe Christabel was born.
...
Look how a star of glory swims
Down aching silences of space,
Flushing the Darkness till its face
With beating heart of light o’erbrims!
So brightening came Babe Christabel,
To touch the earth with fresh romance,
And light a Mother’s countenance
With looking on her miracle.
With hands so flower-like soft, and fair,
She caught at life, with words as sweet
As first spring violets, and feet
As faery-light as feet of air.
...
She grew, a sweet and sinless Child,
In shine and shower,—calm and strife;
A Rainbow on our dark of Life.
From Love’s own radiant heaven down-smiled!
In lonely loveliness she grew,—
A shape all music, light, and love,
With startling looks, so eloquent of
The spirit burning into view.
Such mystic lore was in her eyes,
And light of other worlds than ours,
She looked as she had fed on flowers,
And drunk the dews of Paradise[11]
...
Ah! she was one of those who come
With pledgèd promise not to stay
Long, ere the Angels let them stray
To nestle down in earthly home:
And, thro’ the windows of her eyes,
We often saw her saintly soul,
Serene, and sad, and beautiful,
Go sorrowing for lost Paradise.
She came—like music in the night
Floating as heaven in the brain,
A moment oped, and shut again,
And all is dark where all was light.
...
In this dim world of clouding cares,
We rarely know, till wildered eyes
See white wings lessening up the skies,
The Angels with us unawares.
Our beautiful Bird of light hath fled;
Awhile she sat with folded wings—
Sang round us a few hoverings—
Then straightway into glory sped.
And white-wing’d Angels nurture her;
With heaven’s white radiance robed and crown’d,
And all Love’s purple glory round,
She summers on the Hills of Myrrh.
Thro’ Childhood’s morning-land, serene
She walked betwixt us twain, like Love;
While, in a robe of light above,
Her better Angel walked unseen,—
Till Life’s highway broke bleak and wild;
Then, lest her starry garments trail
In mire, heart bleed, and courage fail,
The Angel’s arms caught up the child.
Her wave of life hath backward roll’d
To the great ocean; on whose shore
We wander up and down, to store
Some treasures of the times of old:
And aye we seek and hunger on
For precious pearls and relics rare,
Strewn on the sands for us to wear
At heart, for love of her that’s gone.
Gerald Massey (The Ballad of Babe Christabel).
These exquisite verses appear to be forgotten.
If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!
R. Browning (James Lee’s Wife).
... He knows with what strange fires He mixed this dust.
Hereditary bent
That hedges in intent
He knows, be sure, the God who shaped thy brain.
He loves the souls He made,
He knows His own hand laid
On each the mark of some ancestral stain.
Anna Reeve Aldrich.
I have lost the dream of Doing,
And the other dream of Done,
The first spring in the pursuing,
The first pride in the Begun,—
First recoil from incompletion, in the face of what is won.
E. B. Browning (The Lost Bower).
It is the saddest of things that we lose our early enthusiasms.
The other (maiden) up arose[12]
And her fair lockes, which formerly were bound
Up in one knot, she low adowne did loose:
Which, flowing long and thick her clothed around.
And the ivorie in golden mantle gowned:
So that fair spectacle from him was reft,
Yet that, which reft it, no less faire was found:
So, hid in lockes and waves from looker’s theft,
Nought but her lovely face she for his looking left.
Withall she laughèd, and she blushed withall,
That blushing to her laughter gave more grace,
And laughter to her blushing.
Spenser (Faerie Queene 2, XII, 67).
I love and honour Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. Nor can you excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, “He acted, and thou sittest still.” I see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and one for the sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.
R. W. Emerson (Spiritual Laws).
You know what a sad and sombre decorum it is that outwardly reigns through the lands oppressed by Moslem sway. By a strange chance in these latter days, it happened that, alone of all the places in the land, this Bethlehem, the native village of our Lord, escaped the moral yoke of the Mussulmans, and heard again, after ages of dull oppression, the cheering clatter of social freedom, and the voices of laughing girls. When I was at Bethlehem, though long after the flight of the Mussulmans, the cloud of Moslem propriety had not yet come back to cast its cold shadow upon life. When you reach that gladsome village, pray heaven there still may be heard there the voice of free innocent girls. Distant at first, and then nearer and nearer the timid flock will gather round you with their large burning eyes gravely fixed against yours, so that they see into your brain; and if you imagine evil against them they will know of your ill-thought before it is yet well born, and will fly and be gone in the moment. But presently if you will only look virtuous enough to prevent alarm, and vicious enough to avoid looking silly, the blithe maidens will draw nearer and nearer to you; and soon there will be one, the bravest of the sisters, who will venture right up to your side, and touch the hem of your coat in playful defiance of the danger; and then the rest will follow the daring of their youthful leader, and gather close round you, and hold a shrill controversy on the wondrous formation that you call a hat, and the cunning of the hands that clothed you with cloth so fine; and then, growing more profound in their researches, they will pass from the study of your mere dress to a serious contemplation of your stately height, and your nut-brown hair, and the ruddy glow of your English cheeks. And if they catch a glimpse of your ungloved fingers, then again will they make the air ring with their sweet screams of delight and amazement, as they compare the fairness of your hand with the hues of your sunburnt face, or with their own warmer tints. Instantly the ringleader of the gentle rioters imagines a new sin; with tremulous boldness she touches, then grasps your hand, and smoothes it gently betwixt her own, and pries curiously into its make and colour, as though it were silk of Damascus or shawl of Cashmere. And when they see you, even then still sage and gentle, the joyous girls will suddenly, and screamingly, and all at once, explain to each other that you are surely quite harmless and innocent—a lion that makes no spring—a bear that never hugs; and upon this faith, one after the other, they will take your passive hand, and strive to explain it, and make it a theme and a controversy. But the one—the fairest and the sweetest of all—is yet the most timid; she shrinks from the daring deeds of her playmates, and seeks shelter behind their sleeves, and strives to screen her glowing consciousness from the eyes that look upon her. But her laughing sisters will have none of this cowardice; they vow that the fair one shall be their complice—shall share their dangers—shall touch the hand of the stranger; they seize her small wrist and draw her forward by force, and at last, whilst yet she strives to turn away, and to cover up her whole soul under the folds of downcast eyelids, they vanquish her utmost strength, they vanquish her utmost modesty and marry her hand to yours. The quick pulse springs from her fingers and throbs like a whisper upon your listening palm. For an instant her large timid eyes are upon you—in an instant they are shrouded again, and there comes a blush so burning, that the frightened girls stay their shrill laughter as though they had played too perilously and harmed their gentle sister. A moment, and all with a sudden intelligence turn away and fly like deer; yet soon again like deer they wheel round, and return, and stand, and gaze upon the danger, until they grow brave once more.
A. W. Kinglake (Eothen).
