Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

began to speak to the people; but the sheriff begged him not to proceed, and he contented himself with asking for their prayers, and desiring them to bear witness for him that he died in the faith of the holy Catholic Church, and a faithful servant of God and the king. He then repeated the Miserere psalm on his knees; and, when he had ended and had risen, the executioner, with an emotion which promised ill for the manner in which his part in the tragedy would be accomplished, begged his forgiveness. More kissed him. "Thou art to do me the greatest benefit that I can receive," he said; "pluck up thy spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, that thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty.' The executioner offered to tie his eyes. "I will cover them myself," he said; and, binding them in a cloth which he had brought with him, he knelt and laid his head upon the block. The fatal stroke was about to fall, when he signed for a moment's delay while he moved aside his beard. "Pity that should be cut," he murmured, "that has not committed treason." With which strange words,-the strangest, perhaps, ever uttered at such a time, the lips most famous through Europe for eloquence and wisdom closed forever.

"So," concludes his biographer, "with alacrity and spiritual joy he received the fatal axe, which no sooner had severed the head from the body, but his soul was carried by angels into everlasting glory, where a crown of martyrdom was placed upon him which can never fade nor decay; and then he found those words true which he had often spoken,-that a man may lose his head and have no harm."

This was the execution of Sir Thomas More,-an act which sounded out into the far corners of the earth, and was the world's wonder, as well for the circumstances under which it was perpetrated, as for the preternatural composure with which it was borne. Something of his calmness may have been due to his natural temperament, something to an unaffected weariness of a world which in his eyes was plunging into the ruin of the latter days. But those fair hues of sunny cheerfulness caught their color from the simplicity of his faith; and never was there a grander Christian victory over death than in that last scene lighted with its lambent humor.

ALEXANDER SMITH, 1830-1867.

THIS Scotch writer, who early attained considerable celebrity as a poet, but whose later prose writings deserve quite as much commendation, was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, December 31, 1830, and educated at Glasgow. In 1852 his first work-Life Drama-appeared in the columns of the Critic, and was

warmly commended in the Eclectic. The next year it was published in London, with other poems, and had a wide circulation in this country as well as in England. In 1854, Mr. Smith was appointed Secretary to the University of Edinburgh, and soon after delivered a series of lectures, including one on "Burns as a National Poet." In 1855, during the Crimean War, he produced Sonnets on the War; in 1857, a volume entitled City Poems; and in 1861, Edwin of Deira. In 1863 he published Dreamthorp, a Book of Essays written in the Country, which have been deservedly commended for their grace and beauty of style and suggestive thought. Indeed, we hardly know a book that affords more pleasing reading. His latest work (1866) is A Summer in Skye,—in which he gives some very interesting accounts of the primitive and singular manners of the inhabitants of that beautiful Scotch island, as well as graphic descriptions of its charming scenery. He died January 5, 1867.

THE LIBRARY-THE GARDENA

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre: the stage is time, the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp! what processions file past! what cities burn to heaven! what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hear or cry "Bravo!" when the great actors come on shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the outcomings and ingoings of the patriarchs Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at even-tide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession,-all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books, as of a half-peopled world!-what bleating of flocks!-what green pastoral rest!-what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels. O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all! Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's

1 From Essay XI., entitled Books and Gardens.

court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe; there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, -they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library; but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.

The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It sees every thing, but is itself unseen, or, at all events, unregarded. My study-window looks down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye. Without meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the ongoings of the quiet place. Around my house there is an old-fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy plots and fantasticallyclipped yews, which have gathered their darkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials, in which the sun is constantly telling his age; and statues, green with neglect and the stains of the weather. The garden I love more than any place on earth: it is a better study than the room inside the house which is dignified by that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit in the moss-house, which is warm and cosy as a bird's nest, and wherein twilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of color spread for me in the curiously-shaped floral spaces. My garden, with its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and go in the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees nature takes me into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. It is curious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. The sickly seamstress in the narrow city lane tends her box of sicklier mignonette. The retired merchant is as fond of tulips as ever was Dutchman during the famous mania. The author finds a garden the best place to think out his thought. In the disabled statesman every restless throb of regret or ambition is stilled when he looks upon his blossomed apple-trees. Is the fancy too far brought, that this love for gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in the world's dawn when but two persons existed, a gardener named Adam, and a gardener's wife called Eve?

CHARLES KINGSLEY, 1819

THE REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, D.D., was born near Dartmoor, Devonshire, 1819, and was educated at Magdalen College, Cambridge, where he obtained distinguished honors. In 1844 he became curate, and soon after rector, of Eversley, in Hampshire. The same year appeared his first work, under the title of Village Sermons, which were much admired for their wisdom as well as for their clear and simple style. In 1848 was published The Saint's Tragedy, or the True Story of Elizabeth of Hungary, which was a fair and honest representa tion of the piety of the Middle Ages. His labors now took a new direction. is conjunction with Rev. F. D. Maurice and some other kindred spirits, he interested himself deeply in the amelioration and Christianization of the working classes. One of the fruits of this noble spirit was Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, a novel of great power and interest, and whose hero was taken from a London workshop. This was followed by Yeast, a Problem, showing the condition of the English agricultural laborer. In 1853 appeared Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, delineating the conflicts of Christianity with Paganism in the fifth century. Two years after he published what has been called the best of his works in this line,- Westward Ho! or the Voyages and Adventures c' Sir Amyas Leigh, Knt., in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth.1 His other prose workare-Sermons on National Subjects; David, Four Sermons; The Gospel of the Pentateuch; Two Years Ago; Miscellanies, two volumes; The Heroes, or Greek Fair Tales for my Children; besides a large number of articles in the magazines. Besides these numerous prose works, so creditable to his heart as well as to his taste and scholarship, Mr. Kingsley has written some very fine poetry. Andromeda is the longest of his later poems; but he will be best remembered and prized for his shorter pieces and his lyrics, many of which are exceedingly beautiful. In 1859 he was appointed Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. His latest work is Hereward, the Last of the English?

WORDS versus WORKS.

Dost thou fancy, as the heathen do, that God needs to be flattered with fine words? or that thou wilt be heard for thy much speaking and thy vain repetitions? He asks of thee works as well as words; and, more, He asks of thee works first, and words after. And better it is to praise Him truly by works without words, than falsely by words without works.

Cry, if thou wilt, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts!" but show that thou believest Him to be holy, by being holy thyself. Sing, if thou wilt, of "The Father of an Infinite Majesty;" but show that thou believest His Majesty to be infinite, by obeying his commandments like those Three Children, let them cost thee what they may.

1 See a short analysis of this in GEORGE BRIMLEY'S Essays.

2 A novel depicting the roving adventures

of Hereward, son of the famous Lady Godiva of Coventry, and the "grim earl" Leofric, her husband.

[ocr errors]

SCIENCE NOT THE GREATEST.

Science, indeed, is great; but she is not the greatest. She is an instrument, and not a power; beneficent or deadly, according as she is wielded by the hand of virtue or vice. But her lawful mistress-the only one which can use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly grow and prosper and prove her divine descent-is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God. * * * History gives us many examples in which superstition, many. again, in which profligacy, have been the patent cause of a nation's degradation. It does not, as far as I am aware, give us a single case of a nation's thriving and developing when deeply infected with either of those two vices.

THE POETS OF THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH

CENTURIES.

If poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace, Shakspeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too idolized names be rased henceforth from the calendar. * * * In one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style in which almost every one has been trying to write it since Pope and plain sense went out and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in, let it be so written; and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to music" be presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too classic laurel, but with an electro-plated brass medal, bearing the due inscription, "Ars est nescire artem." And when, in twelvemonths' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps decried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.

In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellencies after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded: naturalness produced by studious art; sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God., If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction and by the fondness for perpetual antitheses, let him remember that what seems strange to our day was natural and habitual in his; and that, in the eyes of our grandchildren,

1 Taken from his Essay entitled "Alexander Pope and Alexander Smith."

2 "The perfection of art is to be ignorant of art."

« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »