Ceres' Runaway and Other Essays
by Alice Meynell
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Contents:

Ceres' Runaway
A Vanquished Man
A Northern Fancy
Laughter
Harlequin Mercutio
The Little Language
Anima Pellegrina!
The Sea Wall
The Daffodil
Addresses
The Audience
Tithonus
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Popular Burlesque
Dry Autumn
The Plaid
Two Burdens
The Unready
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult

CERES' RUNAWAY

One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of
a Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop--at least while the
charming quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipality does
not exist that would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth
of green in the high places of the city. It is true that there have
been the famous captures--those in the Colosseum, and in the Baths
of Caracalla; moreover a less conspicuous running to earth takes
place on the Appian Way, in some miles of the solitude of the
Campagna, where men are employed in weeding the roadside. They
slowly uproot the grass and lay it on the ancient stones--rows of
little corpses--for sweeping up, as at Upper Tooting; one wonders
why. The governors of the city will not succeed in making the Via
Appia look busy, or its stripped stones suggestive of a thriving
commerce. Again, at the cemetery within the now torn and shattered
Aurelian wall by the Porta San Paolo, they are often mowing of
buttercups. "A light of laughing flowers along the grass is
spread," says Shelley, whose child lies between Keats and the
pyramid. But a couple of active scythes are kept at work there
summer and spring--not that the grass is long, for it is much
overtopped by the bee-orchis, but because flowers are not to laugh
within reach of the civic vigilance.

Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these
accessible places, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing
success and victory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits,
lodges in the sun, swings in the wind, takes wing to find the
remotest ledges, and blooms aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth
century, of the seventeenth, and of the eighteenth. As the historic
ages grow cold it banters them alike. The flagrant flourishing
statue, the haughty facade, the broken pediment (and Rome is chiefly
the city of the broken pediment) are the opportunities of this
vagrant garden in the air. One certain church, that is full of
attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great
stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest
summit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the
fair middle of Rome lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of
accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the
Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds
its account in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco
and stone. "A bird of the air carries the matter," or the last sea-
wind, sombre and soft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has
lodged in a little fertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild
oats!

If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and
cry, this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot
catch it. And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed, to mark the
flight of the agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flying buttress,
or taking the place of the fallen mosaics and coloured tiles of a
twelfth-century tower, and in any case inaccessible, the grass grows
under their discomfited feet. It actually casts a flush of green
over their city piazza--the wide light-grey pavements so vast that
to keep them weeded would need an army of workers. That army has
not been employed; and grass grows in a small way, but still
beautifully, in the wide space around which the tramway circles.
Perhaps a hatred of its delightful presence is what chiefly prompts
the civic government in Rome to the effort to turn the piazza into a
square. The shrub is to take the place not so much of the pavement
as of the importunate grass. For it is hard to be beaten--and the
weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes
its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in
tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the
"third" (which is in truth the fourth) Rome.

When I say grass I use the word widely. Italian grass is not turf;
it is full of things, and they are chiefly aromatic. No richer
scents throng each other, close and warm, than these from a little
hand-space of the grass one rests on, within the walls or on the
plain, or in the Sabine or the Alban hills. Moreover, under the
name I will take leave to include lettuce as it grows with a most
welcome surprise on certain ledges of the Vatican. That great and
beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as it were house upon
house, here magnificent, here careless, but with nothing pretentious
and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral window on a ledge to
the sun, prospers this little garden of random salad. Buckingham
Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one cannot
well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning themselves on any
parapet it may have round a corner.

Moreover, in Italy the vegetables--the table ones--have a wildness,
a suggestion of the grass, from lands at liberty for all the
tilling. Wildish peas, wilder asparagus--the field asparagus which
seems to have disappeared from England, but of which Herrick boasts
in his manifestations of frugality--and strawberries much less than
half-way from the small and darkling ones of the woods to the pale
and corpulent of the gardens, and with nothing of the wild fragrance
lost--these are all Italian things of savage savour and simplicity.
The most cultivated of all countries, the Italy of tillage, is yet
not a garden, but something better, as her city is yet not a town
but something better, and her wilderness something better than a
desert. In all the three there is a trace of the little flying
heels of the runaway.

A VANQUISHED MAN

Haydon died by his own act in 1846, and it was not, in the event,
until 1853 that his journal was edited, not by Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, as he wished, but by Tom Taylor. Turning over these
familiar and famous volumes, often read, I wonder once more how any
editor was bold to "take upon himself the mystery of things" in the
case of Haydon, and to assign to that venial moral fault or this the
ill-fortune and defeat that beset him, with hardly a pause for the
renewal of the resistance of his admirable courage.

That he made a mere intellectual mistake, gave thanks with a lowly
and lofty heart for a genius denied him, that he prepared himself to
answer to Heaven and earth for the gift he had not, to suffer its
reproach, to bear its burden, and that he looked for its reward, is
all his history. There was no fault of the intellect in his
apprehension of the thing he thought to stand possessed of. He
conceived it aright, and he was just in his rebuke of a world so
dull and trivial before the art for which he died. He esteemed it
aright, except when he deemed it his.

His editor, thinking himself to be summoned to justify the
chastisement, the destruction, the whole retribution of such a
career, looks here and there for the sins of Haydon; the search is
rewarded with the discovery of faults such as every man and woman
entrusts to the common generosity, the general consciousness. It is
a pity to see any man conning such offences by heart, and setting
them clear in an editorial judgement because he thinks himself to
hold a trust, by virtue of his biographical office, to explain the
sufferings and the failure of a conquered man.

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad but
satisfied, to conclude with "See the result of--", or "So it ever
must be with him who yields to--," or whatever else may be the
manner of ratifying the sentence on the condemned and dead? Haydon,
we hear, omitted to ask advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape
his course thereby unless it pleased him. Haydon was self-willed;
he had a wild vanity, and he hoped he could persuade all the powers
that include the powers of man to prosper the work of which he
himself was sure. He did not wait upon the judgement of the world,
but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world? He
was foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when
there was a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when the
possession--which was the preservation--of these was at stake.
There he was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own
cause, the first, the fatal, the final injury--the initial subtle
blow that sent him on his career so wronged, so cleft through and
through, that the mere course and action of life must ruin him--this
judgement, in art, directed him in the decision of the most
momentous of all public questions. Haydon admired, wrote,
protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, it seems, we
owe our perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts which are
the fragments of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydon
trusted himself with the trust that worked his own destruction.
Into the presence especially of those seated figures, commonly
called the Fates, we habitually bring our arts for sentence. He
lent an effectual hand to the setting-up of that Tribunal of
headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused,
neglected, forgot him--and by chance-medley was right, was right!--
had no possible authority for anything that it did against him, and
that he might have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius;
moreover, that he was mortally wounded in the last of his forty
years of battle by this ironic wound: among the bad painters chosen
to adorn the Houses of Parliament with fresco, he was not one. This
affront he took at the hands of men who had no real distinctions in
their gift. He might well have had, by mere chance, some great
companion with whom to share that rejection. The unfortunate man
had no such fortuitous fellowship at hand. How strange, the
solitude of the bad painter outcast by the worst, and capable of
making common cause indomitably with the good, had there been any
such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none. There were ranged the unjust judges with their
blunders all in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and
there was no artist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better
than their favoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one
uncompanioned, and a man besides through whose heart the public
reproach was able to cut keenly.

Is this sensibility to be made a reproach to Haydon? It has always
seemed to me that he was not without greatness--yet he was always
without dignity--in those most cruel passages of his life, such as
that of his defeat, towards the close of his war, by the show of a
dwarf, to which all London thronged, led by Royal example, while the
exhibition of his picture was deserted. He was not betrayed by
anger at this end of hopes and labours in which all that a man lives
for had been pledged. Nay, he succeeded in bearing what a more
inward man would have taken more hardly. He was able to say in his
loud voice, in reproach to the world, what another would have barred
within: one of his great pictures was in a cellar, another in an
attic, another at the pawnbroker's, another in a grocer's shop,
another unfinished in his studio; the bills for frames and colours
and the rent were unpaid. Some solace he even found in stating a
few of these facts, in French, to a French official or diplomatic
visitor to London, interested in the condition of the arts. Well,
who shall live without support? A man finds it where he can.

After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds us
some other little thing--I think it is inaccuracy. Poor Haydon says
in one phrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and in
another soon following that the money given or lent to him had been
insufficient to pay them completely; and assuredly there are many
revisions, after-thoughts, or other accidents to account for such a
slip. His editor says the discrepancy is "characteristic," but I
protest I cannot find another like it among those melancholy pages.
If something graver could but be sifted out from all these journals
and letters of frank confession, by the explainer! Here, then, is
the last and least: Haydon was servile in his address to "men of
rank."  But his servility seems to be very much in the fashion of
his day--nothing grosser; and the men who set the fashion had not to
shape their style to Haydon's perpetual purpose, which was to ask
for commissions or for money.

Not the forsaken man only but also the fallen city evokes this
exercise of historical morality, until a man in flourishing London
is not afraid to assign the causes of the decay of Venice; and there
is not a watering place upon our coasts but is securely aware of
merited misfortune on the Adriatic.

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils,
and never a shilling in pay for teaching them. He painted a good
thing--the head of his Lazarus. He had no fault of theory: what
fault of theory can a man commit who stands, as he did, by "Nature
and the Greeks"? In theory he soon outgrew the Italians then most
admired; he had an honest mind.

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never to be
gained, the impossible pardon--pardon for that first and last
mistake--the mistake as to his own powers. If to pardon means to
dispense from consequence, how should this be pardoned? Art would
cease to be itself, by such an amnesty.

A NORTHERN FANCY

"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat
Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and
witty answer to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to
write like a madman.'  'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing
to write like a madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a
fool.'"  Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be
heard, a light high note, in English poetry throughout two centuries
at least, and one English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the
mad maid's song, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against
the crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that
had made the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy,
inconstancy--may have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this
tune of innocence, and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear.
"I heard a maid in Bedlam," runs the old song. High and low the
poets tried for that note, and the singer was nearly always to be a
maid and crazed for love. Except for the temporary insanity so
indifferently worn by the soprano of the now deceased kind of
Italian opera, and except that a recent French story plays with the
flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by woe (and
this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have
found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met
elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the
treble note astray.

At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfast
Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that
high note, so delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of
words might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales,
and laughed at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived
so long in the strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out

Packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry
and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid
called Barbara.

It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs
of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there
is nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some
have died for love."  To one who has always recognized the greatness
of this poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much
Ruskin prized it, it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in
Modern Painters, where this grave lyric is cited for an example of
great imagination. It is the mourning and restless song of the
lover ("the pretty Barbara died") who has not yet broken free from
memory into the alien world of the insane.

Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam
entreats the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he
could endure to lose "the bliss, but not the place."  (And although
this dramatic "Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics
except to be scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative
thought.)  It is nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature
visits the fancy of English poets with such a wild recurrence. The
Englishman of the far past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-
lighted winters, and the intricate life and customs of the little
town, must have been generally a home-keeper. No adventure, no
setting forth, and small liberty, for him. But Tom-a-Bedlam, the
wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet and his horn for
alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, free
to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and the chill fancy
of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey that had
no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the
swinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it
was one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.

Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English
Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they
had a name for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky
Swallow, Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him came
the "Abram men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to
the fairs and wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body
was dressed like a maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap."  But after the
Civil Wars they vanished, and no man knew how. In time old men
remembered them only to remember that they had not seen any such
companies or solitary wanderers of late years.

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and
not singing within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring."
Wordsworth, who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes
the crazed one a wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by
chance, rare as an Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-

I too have passed her in the hills
Setting her little water-mills.

His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall
in such a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization,
bourgeois in the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her
after death to the company of man, to the "holy bell," which
Shakespeare's Duke remembered in banishment, and to the congregation
and their "Christian psalm."

The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad,
than Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the
maid crazed by love. They left her to her light immortality; and
she might be drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile
nor bury her. She might have her hair torn by the bramble, but her
heart was light after trouble. "Many light hearts and wings"--she
had at least the bird's heart, and the poet lent to her voice the
wings of his verses.

There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she. The vagrant
woman of later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer
Elliott's fine lines in "The Excursion" -

Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried!
Wife of my bosom, wedded to my soul!

Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her. She
had no child, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had
long forgotten how it died. She hailed the wayfarer, who was more
weary than she, with a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her
"good-morrow" rings from Herrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow. She
knows that her love is dead, and her perplexity has regard rather to
the many kinds of flowers than to the old story of his death; they
distract her in the splendid meadows.

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the
tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia. Strange
was the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The
world has become once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less
serious and more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and
perhaps will never recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more
starry madness. Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself
bound to recur to the legend of the mad maid, but his "crazed
maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful but dull, and sings of her own
"burning brow," as Herrick's wild one never sang; nor is there any
smile in her story, though she talks of flowers, or, rather, "the
herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is the surest of all signs
that the strange inspiration of the past centuries was lost,
vanished like Tom-a-Bedlam himself. It had been wholly English,
whereas the English eighteenth century was not wholly English.

It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have
played in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example,
could so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and
intelligible sentiment. And as to Dante, who put the two eternities
into the momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his
disregard of this northern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was
an alien upon earth, what were she in the Inferno? What word can
express her strangeness there, her vagrancy there? And with what
eyes would they see this dewy face glancing in at the windows of
that City?

LAUGHTER

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain
nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not
for the paradox one might say, it never was so grave. Everywhere
the joke "emerges"--as an "elegant" writer might have it--emerges to
catch the attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense
of humour wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the
violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in
abeyance, and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the
vagrant encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of
the game. It stands in untoward places, or places that were once
inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, some
ubiquitous tryst, with the compliant jest.

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a
constant signalling, an endless recognition. Forms of approach are
remitted. And the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of
meeting, or no gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the
promiscuity become, go up and down the pages of the paper and the
book. See, again, the theatre. A somewhat easy sort of comic
acting is by so much the best thing upon our present stage that
little else can claim--paradox again apart--to be taken seriously.

There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away
from the Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women,
fittest for children, and unfitted for the beard. Laughter is
everywhere and at every moment proclaimed to be the honourable
occupation of men, and in some degree distinctive of men, and no
mean part of their prerogative and privilege. The sense of humour
is chiefly theirs, and those who are not men are to be admitted to
the jest upon their explanation. They will not refuse explanation.
And there is little upon which a man will so value himself as upon
that sense, "in England, now."

Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like
rhetoric and the arts, a habit. And it is in some sort a habit when
it is not inevitable. If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must
confess that we laugh oftenest because--being amused--we intend to
show that we are amused. We are right to make the sign, but a smile
would be as sure a signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but
be changing the convention; and the change would restore laughter
itself to its own place. We have fallen into the way of using it to
prove something--our sense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but
laughter should not thus be used, it should go free. It is not a
demonstration, whether in logic, or--as the word demonstration is
now generally used--in emotion; and we do ill to charge it with that
office.

Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among
such a people as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes who
laugh without cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who
perhaps first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that
they were not gloomy; but a vast number of laymen also who had not
that excuse; and many women who laugh in their uncertainty as to
what is humorous and what is not. This last is the most harmless of
all kinds of superfluous laughter. When it carries an apology, a
confession of natural and genial ignorance, and when a gentle
creature laughs a laugh of hazard and experiment, she is to be more
than forgiven. What she must not do is to laugh a laugh of
instruction, and as it were retrieve the jest that was never worth
the taking.

There are, besides, a few women who do not disturb themselves as to
a sense of humour, but who laugh from a sense of happiness.
Childish is that trick, and sweet. For children, who always laugh
because they must, and never by way of proof or sign, laugh only
half their laughs out of their sense of humour; they laugh the rest
under a mere stimulation: because of abounding breath and blood;
because some one runs behind them, for example, and movement does so
jog their spirits that their legs fail them, for laughter, without a
jest.

If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to
signal their perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall
keep the laugh for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom,
and simply, and not thrice at the same thing--once for foolish
surprise, and twice for tardy intelligence, and thrice to let it be
known that they are amused--then it may be time to persuade this
laughing nation not to laugh so loud as it is wont in public. The
theatre audiences of louder-speaking nations laugh lower than ours.
The laugh that is chiefly a signal of the laugher's sense of the
ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has the disadvantage of
covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from the actors. It is a
public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is called upon for a public
laugh. He may laugh in public, but let it be with private laughter
there.

Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times
of dispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humour
in a place better guarded, as something worth a measure of
seclusion. It should not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in
adventurous places. For the sense of humour has other things to do
than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter. It has
negative tasks of valid virtue; for example, the standing and
waiting within call of tragedy itself, where, excluded, it may keep
guard.

No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best.
This would be to deny Shakespeare as his comrades knew him, where
the wit "out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine," and to deny Ben
Jonson's "tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus," and the
rest. Doubtless Greece determined the custom for all our Occident;
but none the less might the modern world grow more sensible of the
value of composure.

To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein
as to this of humour, and none other do we indulge with so little
fastidiousness. It is as though there were honour in governing the
other senses, and honour in refusing to govern this. It is as
though we were ashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and
suspicious of temperance, and diffident of moderation, and too eager
to thrust forward that which loses nothing by seclusion.

HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO

The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell
with him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally,
for English drama. That manner of man--Arlecchino, or Harlequin--
had outlived his playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and
the Clown. A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little
in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one
play, and of the subordinate Tranio in the other, is less quickly
spent, less easily put out, than the smouldering of the old man.
Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedy and comedy of
Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, his brightest, his
most vital shape.

Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the
busybody, the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise,
the mercurial one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of
Moliere. He is officious and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille
and Ergaste and Scapin; but he tends to be a lacquey, with a
reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin comedy than to the
Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory survives
differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, his friend."
What convinces me that he virtually died with Mercutio is chiefly
this--that this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fully
capable of the death that he takes at Tybalt's sword-point; he lived
indeed, he dies indeed. Another thing that marks the close of a
career of ages is his loss of his long customary good luck. Who
ever heard of Arlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his
sword-play, overtaken by tragedy? His time had surely come. The
gay companion was to bleed; Tybalt's sword had made a way. 'Twas
not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but it served.

Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the
primitive Italian play, because Harlequin, on that conventional
little stage of the past, has a hero's place, whereas when he
interferes in human affairs he is only the auxiliary. He might be
lover and bridegroom on the primitive stage, in the comedy of these
few and unaltered types; but when Pantaloon, Clown, and Harlequin
play with really human beings, then Harlequin can be no more than a
friend of the hero, the friend of the bridegroom. The five figures
of the old stage dance attendance; they play around the business of
those who have the dignity of mortality; they, poor immortals--a
clown who does not die, a pantaloon never far from death, who yet
does not die, a Columbine who never attains Desdemona's death of
innocence or Juliet's death of rectitude and passion--flit in the
backward places of the stage.

Ariel fulfils his office, and is not of one kind with those he
serves. Is there a memory of Harlequin in that delicate figure?
Something of the subservient immortality, of the light indignity,
proper to Pantaleone, Brighella, Arlecchino, Colombina, and the
Clown, hovers away from the stage when Ariel is released from the
trouble of human things.

Immortality, did I say? It was immortality until Mercutio fell.
And if some claim be made to it still because Harlequin has
transformed so many scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand
children, since Mercutio died, I must reply that our modern
Harlequin is no more than a marionnette; he has returned whence he
came. A man may play him, but he is--as he was first of all--a
doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino took life, and, so promoted,
flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be again what he first
was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so now a man plays
the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children see, a
poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life.

With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the
serious ages of the world an hour's refuge from the unforgotten
burden of responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed,
made dramatically the spectator's own. We are not serious now, and
no heart now is quite light, even for an hour.

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish
master of the magic of local things.

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it
nourishes; inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom
Goldoni and Gallina and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois
of the Veneto, use no dialect at all.

Neither Goldoni nor Gallina has charged the Venetian language with
so much literature as to take from the people the shelter of their
almost unwritten tongue. Signor Fogazzaro, bringing tragedy into
the homes of dialect, does but show us how the language staggers
under such a stress, how it breaks down, and resigns that office.
One of the finest of the characters in the ranks of his admirable
fiction is that old manageress of the narrow things of the house
whose daughter is dying insane. I have called the dialect a
shelter. This it is; but the poor lady does not cower within; her
resigned head erect, she is shut out from that homely refuge,
suffering and inarticulate. The two dramatists in their several
centuries also recognized the inability of the dialect. They laid
none but light loads upon it. They caused it to carry no more in
their homely plays than it carries in homely life. Their work
leaves it what it was--the talk of a people talking much about few
things; a people like our own and any other in their lack of
literature, but local and all Italian in their lack of silence.

Common speech is surely a greater part of life to such a people than
to one less pleased with chatter or more pleased with books. I am
writing of men, women, and children (and children are not forgotten,
since we share a patois with children on terms of more than common
equality) who possess, for all occasions of ceremony and
opportunities of dignity, a general, national, liberal, able, and
illustrious tongue, charged with all its history and all its
achievements; for the speakers of dialect, of a certain rank, speak
Italian, too. But to tamper with their dialect, or to take it from
them, would be to leave them houseless and exposed in their daily
business. So much does their patois seem to be their refuge from
the heavy and multitudinous experiences of a literary tongue, that
the stopping of a fox's earth might be taken as the image of any act
that should spoil or stop the talk of the associated seclusion of
their town, and leave them in the bleakness of a larger patriotism.

The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of
languages that might all have proved right "Italian" had not Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be
taught hard things in their dialect, although they can live, whether
easy lives or hard, and evidently can die, therein. The hands and
feet that have served the villager and the citizen at homely tasks
have all the lowliness of his patois, to his mind; and when he must
perforce yield up their employment, we may believe that it is a
simple thing to die in so simple and so narrow a language, one so
comfortable, neighbourly, tolerant, and compassionate; so
confidential; so incapable, ignorant, unappalling, inapt to wing any
wearied thought upon difficult flight or to spur it upon hard
travelling.

Not without words is mental pain, or even physical pain, to be
undergone; but the words that have done no more than order the
things of the narrow street are not words to put a fine edge or a
piercing point to any human pang. It may even well be that to die
in dialect is easier than to die in the eloquence of Manfred, though
that declaimed language, too, is doubtless a defence, if one of a
different manner.

These writers in Venetian--they are named because in no other
Italian dialect has work so popular as Goldoni's been done, nor so
excellent as Signor Fogazzaro's--have left the unlettered local
language in which they loved to deal, to its proper limitations.
They have not given weighty things into its charge, nor made it
heavily responsible. They have added nothing to it; nay, by writing
it they might even be said to have made it duller, had it not been
for the reader and the actor. Insomuch as the intense
expressiveness of a dialect--of a small vocabulary in the mouth of a
dramatic people--lies in the various accent wherewith a southern
citizen knows how to enrich his talk, it remains for the actor to
restore its life to the written phrase. In dialect the author is
forbidden to search for the word, for there is none lurking for his
choice; but of tones, allusions, and of references and inferences of
the voice, the speaker of dialect is a master. No range of phrases
can be his, but he has the more or the less confidential inflection,
until at times the close communication of the narrow street becomes
a very conspiracy.

Let it be borne in mind that dialect properly so called is something
all unlike, for instance, the mere jargon of London streets. The
difference may be measured by the fact that Italian dialects have a
highly organized and orderly grammar. The Londoner cannot keep the
small and loose order of the grammar of good English; the Genoese
conjugates his patois verbs, with subjunctives and all things of
that handsome kind, lacked by the English of Universities.

The middle class--the piccolo mondo--that shares Italian dialect
with the poor are more strictly local in their manners than either
the opulent or the indigent of the same city. They have moreover
the busy intelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its
keenest. Their speech keeps them a sequestered place which is
Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and beyond the
reach of alteration. And--what is pretty to observe--the speakers
are well conscious of the characters of this intimate language. An
Italian countryman who has known no other climate will vaunt, in
fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like manner he is conscious
of the local character of his language, and tucks himself within it
at home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad. A properly spelt
letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs Dingley and
Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language, ill-
written, was "snug."

Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the nobler
language insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller?
discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in
despair thus prattle and gibber and stammer? Rather perhaps this
departure from English is but an excursion after gaiety. The ideal
lovers, no doubt, would be so simple as to be grave. That is a
tenable opinion. Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and
age by age they have exchanged language imitated from the children
they doubtless never studied, and perhaps never loved. Why so?
They might have chosen broken English of other sorts--that, for
example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the
Frenchman conceived by the Englishman--a complication of humour
fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a
fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the
masterly adaptation of the simple savage's English devised by Mrs
Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian. But none of these
found favour. The choice has always been of the language of
children. Let us suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping
Venus in the Titian picture, and the noble child that rides his lion
erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the
inspirers of those prattlings. "See then thy selfe likewise art
lyttle made," says Spenser's Venus to her child.

Swift was the best prattler. He had caught the language, surprised
it in Stella when she was veritably a child. He did not push her
clumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged
in her a childhood he had loved. He is "seepy."  "Nite, dealest
dea, nite dealest logue."  It is a real good-night. It breathes
tenderness from that moody and uneasy bed of projects.

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the
stranger's fresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a
phrase that is its own essential possession, and yet is dearer to
the speaker of other tongues. Easily--shall I say cheaply?--
spiritual, for example, was the nation that devised the name anima
pellegrina, wherewith to crown a creature admired. "Pilgrim soul"
is a phrase for any language, but "pilgrim soul!" addressed, singly
and sweetly to one who cannot be over-praised, "pilgrim-soul!" is a
phrase of fondness, the high homage of a lover, of one watching, of
one who has no more need of common flatteries, but has admired and
gazed while the object of his praises visibly surpassed them--this
is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an Italian heaven.

It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this
impetuous, sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a
sentence of life passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and
the modern editor had thought it necessary to explain the
exclamation by a note. It was, he said, poetical.

Anima pellegrina seems to be Italian of no later date than
Pergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the
more modern love-song suited the day of Bellini. But it is only
Italian, bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any
other European nation, but only of this.

To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of
those buoyant words:-

Felice chi vi mira,
Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would
be but a property of the turn of speech. It is rather the
profounder advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such
feeling as the very language keeps in store. In another tongue you
may sing, "happy who looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other
tongue shall the little meaning be so sufficient, and in what other
shall you get from so weak an antithesis the illusion of a lovely
intellectual epigram? Yet it is not worthy of an English reader to
call it an illusion; he should rather be glad to travel into the
place of a language where the phrase is intellectual, impassioned,
and an epigram; and should thankfully for the occasion translate
himself, and not the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the
charm may still be unknown to Englishmen--"piuttosto bruttini."  See
what an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not
reluctant, but tolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of
pictures, or works of art of several kinds, and you confess at once
that not otherwise should they be condemned. Brutto--ugly--is the
word of justice, the word for any language, everywhere translatable,
a circular note, to be exchanged internationally with a general
meaning, wholesale, in the course of the European concert. But
bruttino is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive that forbears to
express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence, and is,
moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the rear--
"rather than not."  "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way
that we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, this
paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the
printed and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that
shall go no further. After the sound of it, the European concert
seems to be composed of brass instruments.

How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into
which a traveller hither has to enter! Do we possess anything here
more essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany)
than our particle "un"? Poor are those living languages that have
not our use of so rich a negative. The French equivalent in
adjectives reaches no further than the adjective itself--or hardly;
it does not attain the participle; so that no French or Italian poet
has the words "unloved", "unforgiven."  None such, therefore, has
the opportunity of the gravest and the most majestic of all ironies.
In our English, the words that are denied are still there--"loved,"
"forgiven": excluded angels, who stand erect, attesting what is not
done, what is undone, what shall not be done.

No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain
of loss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in
sight. All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-
foretelling is the word, and it has a plenitude of knowledge.

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this,
proper to character and thought, and by no means only an accident of
untransferable speech. And it is impossible for a reader, who is a
lover of languages for their spirit, to pass the words of
untravelled excellence, proper to their own garden enclosed, without
recognition. Never may they be disregarded or confounded with the
universal stock. If I would not so neglect piuttosto bruttini, how
much less a word dominating literature! And of such words of
ascendancy and race there is no great English author but has
abundant possession. No need to recall them. But even writers who
are not great have, here and there, proved their full consciousness
of their birthright. Thus does a man who was hardly an author,
Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights. He has
incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at
that time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood,
and the head he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief."

This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a
local rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an
intellectual place--Felice chi vi mira--or the art-critic's phrase--
piuttosto bruttini--of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.

As for French, if it had no other sacred words--and it has many--who
would not treasure the language that has given us--no, not that has
given us, but that has kept for its own--ensoleille? Nowhere else
is the sun served with such a word. It is not to be said or written
without a convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come
light and radiation. The unaccustomed north could not have made it,
nor the accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-
south; therefore neither England nor Italy can rival it. But there
needed also the senses of the French--those senses of which they say
far too much in every second-class book of their enormous, their
general second-class, but which they have matched in their time with
some inimitable words. Perhaps that matching was done at the moment
of the full literary consciousness of the senses, somewhere about
the famous 1830. For I do not think ensoleille to be a much older
word--I make no assertion. Whatever its origin, may it have no end!
They cannot weary us with it; for it seems as new as the sun, as
remote as old Provence; village, hill-side, vineyard, and chestnut
wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air is light, and white
things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, white cattle,
shining on the way from shadow to shadow. A word of the sense of
sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the
paraphrase is but a picture. For ensoleille I would claim the
consent of all readers--that they shall all acknowledge the spirit
of that French. But perhaps it is a mere personal preference that
makes le jour s'annonce also sacred.

If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," was written in Latin, this
could be only that it might in time find its true language and
incomparable phrase at last--that it might await the day of life in
its proper German. I found it there (and knew at once the authentic
verse, and knew at once for what tongue it had been really destined)
in the pages of the prayer-book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck
church, and in the accents of her voice.

THE SEA WALL

A singular love of walls is mine. Perhaps because of childish
association with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright
shadows of grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves
prick above into the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living
in London, with its too many windows and too few walls, the city
which of all capitals takes least visible hold upon the ground; or
for the sake of some other attraction or aversion, walls, blank and
strong, reaching outward at the base, are a satisfaction to the eyes
teased by the inexpressive peering of windows, by that weak lapse
and shuffling which is the London "area," and by the helpless
hollows of shop-fronts.

I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of
wrought-iron. A wall is the safeguard of simplicity. It lays a
long level line among the indefinite chances of the landscape. But
never more majestic than in face of the wild sea, the wall,
steadying its slanting foot upon the rock, builds in the serried
ilex-wood and builds out the wave. The sea-wall is the wall at its
best. And fine as it is on the strong coast, it is beautiful on the
weak littoral and the imperilled levels of a northern beach.

That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass that
passes away into shingle at its foot. It is at close quarters with
the winter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the
sky-line of sea is jagged. Never from any height does the ocean-
horizon show thus broken and battered at its very verge, but from
the flat coast and the narrow world you can see the wave as far as
you can see the water; and the stormy light of a clear horizon is
seen to be mobile and shifting with the buoyant hillocks and their
restless line.

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as
secures many a mile of gentle English coast to the east. The Dutch
dyke has not that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it
springs with a look of haste and of height; and when you first run
upstairs from the encumbered Dutch fields to look at the sea, there
is nothing in the least like England; and even the Englishman of to-
day is apt to share something of the old perversity that was minded
to cast derision upon the Dutch in their encounters with the tides.

There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the
slight derision of the nations who hold themselves to be more
romantic, and, as it were, more slender. We English, once upon a
time, did especially flout the little nation then acting a history
that proved worth the writing. It may be no more than a brief
perversity that has set a number of our writers to cheer the memory
of Charles II. Perhaps, even, it is no more than another rehearsal
of that untiring success at the expense of the bourgeois. The
bourgeois would be more simple than, in fact, he is were he to stand
up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image of his dismay
is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wanton art.
And, when all is done, who performs for any but an imaginary
audience? Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are
not the least of the makings of an author. A few men and women he
achieves within his books; but others does he create without, and to
those figures of all illusion makes the appeal of his art. More
candid is the author who has no world, but turns that appeal inwards
to his own heart. He has at least a living hearer.

This is by the way. Charles II has been cheered; the feat is done,
the dismay is imagined with joy. And yet the Merry Monarch's was a
dismal time. Plague, fire, the arrears of pension from the French
King remembered and claimed by the restored throne of England, and
the Dutch in the Medway--all this was disaster. None the less,
having the vanity of new clothes and a pretty figure, did we--
especially by the mouth of Andrew Marvell--deride our victors,
making sport of the Philistines with a proper national sense of
enjoyment of such physical disabilities, or such natural
difficulties, or such misfavour of fortune, as may beset the alien.

Especially were the denials of fortune matter for merriment. They
are so still; or they were so certainly in the day when a great
novelist found the smallness of some South German States to be the
subject of unsating banter. The German scenes at the end of "Vanity
Fair," for example, may prove how much the ridicule of mere
smallness, fewness, poverty (and not even real poverty, privation,
but the poverty that shows in comparison with the gold of great
States, and is properly in proportion) rejoiced the sense of humour
in a writer and moralist who intended to teach mankind to be less
worldly. In Andrew Marvell's day they were even more candid. The
poverty of privation itself was provocative of the sincere laughter
of the inmost man, the true, infrequent laughter of the heart.
Marvell, the Puritan, laughed that very laughter--at leanness, at
hunger, cold, and solitude--in the face of the world, and in the
name of literature, in one memorable satire. I speak of "Flecno, an
English Priest in Rome," wherein nothing is spared--not the
smallness of the lodging, nor the lack of a bed, nor the scantiness
of clothing, nor the fast.

"This basso-rilievo of a man--"

personal meagreness is the first joke and the last.

It is not to be wondered at that he should find in the smallness of
the country of Holland matter for a cordial jest. But, besides the
smallness, there was that accidental and natural disadvantage in
regard to the sea. In the Venetians, commerce with the sea,
conflict with the sea, a victory over the sea, and the ensuing
peace--albeit a less instant battle and a more languid victory--were
confessed to be noble; in the Dutch they were grotesque. "With mad
labour," says Andrew Marvell, with the spirited consciousness of the
citizen of a country well above ground and free to watch the labour
at leisure, "with mad labour" did the Dutch "fish the land to
shore."

How did they rivet with gigantic piles,
Thorough the centre, their new-catched miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their watery Babel far more high
To reach the sea than those to scale the sky!

It is done with a jolly wit, and in what admirable couplets!

The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.

And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea-
nymphs should find themselves provided with a capital cabillau of
shoals of pickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and
it must be allowed that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony.
There is not a smile for us in "Flecno," but it is more than
possible to smile over this "Character of Holland"; at the excluded
ocean returning to play at leap-frog over the steeples; at the rise
of government and authority in Holland, which belonged of right to
the man who could best invent a shovel or a pump, the country being
so leaky:-

Not who first sees the rising sun commands,
But who could first discern the rising lands.

We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell,
more than his practical joke, and more than the heart that was light
in so burly a frame--we have lost with these the wild humour that
wore so well the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much
order, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality-
-in a word, the Couplet, the couplet of the past. We who cannot
stand firm within two lines, but must slip beyond and between the
boundaries, who tolerate the couplets of Keats and imitate them,
should praise the day of Charles II because of Marvell's art, and
not for love of the sorry reign. We had plague, fire, and the Dutch
in the Medway, but we had the couplet; and there were also the
measures of those more poetic poets, hitherto called somewhat
slightingly the Cavalier poets, who matched the wit of the Puritan
with a spirit simpler and less mocking.

It was against an English fortress, profoundly walled, that some
remembered winter storms lately turned their great artillery. It
was a time of resounding nights; the sky was so clamorous and so
close, up in the towers of the seaside stronghold, that one seemed
to be indeed admitted to the perturbed counsels of the winds. The
gale came with an indescribable haste, hooting as it flew; it seemed
to break itself upon the heights, yet passed unbroken out to sea; in
the voice of the sea there were pauses, but none in that of the
urgent gale with its hoo-hoo-hoo all night, that clamoured down the
calling of the waves. That lack of pauses was the strangest thing
in the tempest, because the increase of sound seemed to imply a lull
before. The lull was never perceptible, but the lift was always an
alarm. The onslaught was instant, where would it stop? What was
the secret extreme to which this hurry and force were tending? You
asked less what thing was driving the flocks of the storm than what
was drawing them. The attraction seemed the greater violence, the
more irresistible, and the more unknown. And there were moments
when the end seemed about to be attained.

The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to
describe it, words fit for the sharp strokes of material things; but
the fierce gale is soft. Along the short grass, trembling and
cowering flat on the scarped hill-side, against the staggering
horse, against the flint walls, one with the rock they grasp, the
battery of the tempest is a quick and enormous softness. What down,
what sand, what deep moss, what elastic wave could match the bed and
cushion of the gale?

This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the sea-wall up
together. The next day it left the waters white with the thrilling
whiteness of foam in sunshine. It was only the Channel; and in such
narrow waters you do not see the distances, the wide levels of
fleeting and floating foam, that lie light between long wave and
long wave on a Mediterranean coast, regions of delicate and
transitory brightness so far out that all the waves, near and far,
seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyond the other, and
league beyond league, into foam. But the Channel has its own
strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with the
freshest of all noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon
the white sea-wall, under the random shadow of sea-gulls and the
light of a shining cloud.

THE DAFFODIL

To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the
watershed and breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter--
fresh and warm are the energies of such bracing action; but more
animating still is it to live so as to breast the stress of time.

Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time
and enlarge the capacity of the day--our poor day that so easily
shrinks and dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The
date, every first of March, for example, may sweep upon a large
curve and come home annually after a swinging flight. To the
infinite variety of natural days may be entrusted half the work of
strengthening the flight against time, but the other half must be
the task of the vehement heart. Nature assuredly does not fail.
Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder as the unforeseen can
set them, and a crowd of children is not more various. But the
resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking. We are
inclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon
the gates of the wind, and to go the smooth road.

We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killing
course than the natural event would take us. It is not enough that
we should run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail the
current with the ease of our untimely luxuries. Our daffodils are
no longer to have the praise of their daring, for we no longer
relate them to the lagging swallow. By the time the barely budding
woods give a poor man's lodging to the cold daffodil--a scanty kind
taking the wind with a short stalk and giving it but small petals to
buffet--we have already said farewell to the tall and splendid
green-house daffodil that never braved the cold. We gave to this
our untimely welcome long before the snowdrop came, and the golden
name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound. And when we part with
the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly know or care
whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows of woodlands, or
whether it is over or to come. We are attending to a yellower
tulip, no doubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew is
opening in the chilly wood.

The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accused
ourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and
have not noted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for
ourselves memories confused and undefined. Late springs and early,
gentle and hard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has
its way and its revenges. If we are resolved to live quickly, why,
nothing is easier. There are no such brief days as those that are
indistinct; and the sliding on the way of time is, of all habits,
the most tyrannously careless. It is first a laxity, then a habit,
and next a folly; and when we keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the
birthday of daffodils, and have hardly felt the cold, and do not
know where the sun rises, we are already on the way of least
resistance, the friction of life is gone; and in our last old age
the past will seem to dwindle even like the dwindled present of our
decline.

There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, one
single grasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it,
to meet it, to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of
its own; and this is travel. It is the finest and most effectual
flight against time of all. What elastic days are those wherein I
make head against a travelling landscape, meet histories and
boundaries, hail frontiers, face a new manner of building, cross the
regions of silver roofs and of heavy Alpine stone, and bring with me
the late light upon billowy gables and red eaves! And how buoyant
the week in which I anticipate the sun upon the roofless east! How
serried are the days with forests, how enlarged by plains, how
thronged by cities, how singled by the pine, how newly audible by a
new sea! Far was the sunrise from the sunset, and noon is one
memorable midday with shortened shadows upon some solitary road.

Our fathers had friction of another kind: hardship at home, winters
and nights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springs
that brought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring.
None of us has seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those
emancipated voices. The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky! Bright
nights and glowing houses have surely robbed us of that variety, and
all these untimely fruits and flowers have suppressed even the small
privations of a winter in disguise.

In those days Englishmen had to breast the times as they were. They
had the privilege of their latitude--vigorous and rigorous seasons.
They had a year full of change--their time was stretched whether
with impatience or with patience, with conflict or with felicity.
Their salt meats were not the worst of it; there was the siege of
darkness, the captivity of cold, the threat of storm, and the labour
to close with the closing enemy, to break ways and save animals
alive, and keep the laws in force in the street in the long and
secret nights. From such a season of winter at home, winter well
known, men broke free to hail their daffodils. They found them,
short, strong, and shivering, in the still open and undefended
woods. In the springs before Chaucer, and earlier than the day of
the first spring lyric, in the same places grew the keen wild
flowers as now; but they assuredly were marked with another welcome;
they made memories; this year's wild harvest was not confused with
that of last year, or of half-a-score of years gone by. Distance of
vital time set the springs far apart, and made the daffodils
strangers.

They were greeted with the courtesy due to strangers, so fresh must
have been the senses of the villager, and of the citizen of the
village town. Suburbs divide a city from the fields as walls did
never. He of old went from a little town, close and serried as a
new box of toys, with one step into the unsmirched country, carrying
an unsated heart. Refreshed with the animating compulsion of
changeful life were man and woman, and much like their child in a
constant capacity for unique experiences, unique days, years that
are separate, known, and distinguishable, and not only separate but
long.

Indeed, some of us who travel hardly know how to remedy our
fugitive, resembling, hastening, and collapsing seasons, even by
means of this sovereign remedy of travel. It is to be feared that a
modern journey is not always to us so bracing a manner of living as
was the untravelled journey of hard days at home to the ancient
islander. To journey as he did, keeping his feet, with a moving
heart against the moving seasons, to resist, to withstand, widened
the hours; but his posterity are taking all means to narrow their
own, even on the railway. To go the same way every year, for
instance, is to lose, when a few such years are gone, nearly all the
gain to life. To take no heed at all of the way, but merely to be
by any means at the end of the travelling, to sleep or go by night,
and to calculate Europe by hours, half-hours, junctions, and dining-
cars, is but to close up the time as though you closed a telescope.
A long railway journey and a long motor journey may be taken with
the flight of time as well as against it, and the habit of summaries
can use these too to its own end. Precipitate, unresisting, are the
day in the train and the heedless night. We love to reproach
ourselves with living at too great a speed, having, perhaps, no
sense of the second meaning of the phrase. Medicine may, perhaps,
fulfil her promise of giving us a few more years, but habit derides
her by making each year a scanty gift.

Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will not
let the sun rule the day. He would see to it that our hours were
various; but we have preferred to his various face the plain face of
a clock, and the lights without vicissitudes of our nights without
seasons.

ADDRESSES

Not free from some ignominious attendance upon the opinion of the
world is he who too consciously withdraws his affairs from its
judgements. He is indebted to "the public."  He is at least
indebted to it for the fact that there is, yonder, without, a
public. Lacking this excluded multitude his fastidiousness would
have no subject, and his singularity no contrast. He would, in his
grosser moods, have nothing to refuse, and nothing, in his finer, to
ignore.

He, at any rate, is one, and the rest are numerous. They minister
to him popular errors. But if they are nothing else in regard to
himself, they are many. If he must have distinction, it is there on
easy terms--he is one.

Well for him if he does not contract the heavier debt shouldered by
the man who owes to the unknown, un-named, and uncounted his
pleasure in their conjectured or implicit envy; who conceives the
jealousy they may have covertly to endure, enjoys it, and thus
silently begins and ends within his own morosity the story of his
base advantage.

Vanity has indignity as its underside. And how shall even the
pleasure in beauty be altogether without it? For since beauty, like
other human things, is comparative, how shall the praise, or the
admiration, thereof be free from (at least) some reference to the
unbeautiful? Or from some allusion to the less beautiful? Yet
this, if inevitable, is little; it may be negligible. The triumph
of beauty is all but innocent. It is where no beauty is in question
that lurks the unconfessed appeal to envy. That appeal is not an
appeal to admiration--it lacks what is the genial part of egoism.
For who, except perhaps a recent writer of articles on society in
America, really admires a man for living in the approved part of
Boston?

The vanity of addresses is as frequent with us as on the western
side of the Atlantic. It is a vanity without that single apology
for vanity--gaiety of heart. The first things that are, in London,
sacrificed to it are the beautiful day and the facing of the sky.
There are some amongst us whose wives have constrained them to dwell
underground for love of an address. Modern and foolish is that
contempt for daylight. To the simple, day is beautiful; and
"beautiful as day" a happy proverb.

Over all colour, flesh, aspect, surface, manifestation of vitality,
dwells one certain dominance. And if One, vigilant for the dues of
His vicegerent, should ask us whose is the image and superscription?
We reply, The Sun's.

The London air shortens and clips those beams, and yet leaves
daylight the finest thing we know. Beauty of artificial lights is
in our streets at night, but their chief beauty is when, just before
night, they adorn the day. The late daylight honours them when it
so easily and sweetly subdues and overcomes them, giving to the
electric lamp, to the taper, to the hearth fire, and to the spark, a
loveliness not their own.

With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and there
amongst us is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object of
unconfessed contempt. Both are contrary to that more authentic,
that essential solitariness wherein a few men have the grace to
live, and wherein all men are compelled to die. Both are
unpublished even now, even in our days, when it costs men so little
to manifest the effrontery of their opinions.

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness is
chiefly that here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the
distinction brought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose,
between it and our actual life, a generation or two, an education or
two. Obviously, it was riches that made the class differences, if
not now, then a little time ago. Therefore the New England citizen
should not be reproved by us for anything except his too great
candour. A social guide-book to some city of the Republic is in my
hands. I note how the very names of streets take a sound of
veneration or of cheerful derision from the writer's pen. It is
evident that the names are almost enough. They have an expression.
He is like a naif teller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his
own smiles in order till he have done.

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaks it
upon parishes. He turns me a phrase with the northern end of a town
and makes an epigram of the southern. He caps a sarcasm with an
address.

In truth, we too might write social guide-books to the same effect,
had we the same simplicity. It is to be thought that we too hold an
address, be it a good one, so closely that if Fortune should see fit
to snatch it from us, she must needs do so with violence. Such
unseemly violence, in this as in other transactions, is ours in the
clinging and not hers in the taking. For equal is the force of
Fortune, and steady is her grasp, whether she despoil the great of
their noble things or strip the mean of things ignoble, whether she
take from the clutching or the yielding hand.

Strange are the little traps laid by the Londoner so as to capture
an address by the hem if he may. You would think a good address to
be of all blessings the most stationary, and one to be either gained
or missed, and no two ways about it. But not so. You shall see it
waylaid at the angles of squares, with no slight exercise of skill,
delayed, entreated, detained, entangled, intricately caught,
persuaded to round a corner, prolonged beyond all probability,
pursued.

One address there will in the future be for us, and few will visit
there. It will bear the number of a narrow house. May it avow its
poverty and be poor; for the obscure inhabitant, in frigid humility,
shall have no thought nor no eye askance upon the multitude.

THE AUDIENCE

The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage
waiting is only a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre
every night takes place. The audience are the players. Their
audience on the stage are bound to watch them, to understand them,
to anticipate them, and to divine them. But once known and their
character established in relation to a particular play, the
audience--what is called the audience--need give no further trouble.
They themselves cannot alter; they are fixed and compelled by the
tremendous force of averages. The most inexorable of laws, and the
most irresistible of necessities are upon them; they cannot do
otherwise; they are out of the reach of accidents; they are made
fast in their own mediocrity. They are a thousand London people;
and no genius, or no imbecility, amongst them has any effect upon
that secure sovereignty of a number.

The long laugh generally means that the house--by its unalterable
majority--has laughed at one joke three times. The stage waits upon
the audience, and the audience rehearses its collective and
inevitable laugh. It performs. It communicates itself, and art is
a communication. A small and chosen party is made up, behind the
footlights, to see a thousand people, given helpless into the hands
of destiny and subject to averages, so express themselves.

The audience's audience (the people on the stage) are persuaded into
applauding the laugh too long and too often. The author is, of
course, one of them, and he applauds by making too many such
translations. They are perhaps worth making, and even worth
renewing in acknowledgement of a smile; but it is surely to
encourage the house unduly to make them so important. The actors
applaud their audience by repeating--and not once or only twice--a
piece of comic business. Does the Average laugh so well as indeed
to deserve all this?

The Average does little more than laugh. It knows that its own
truest talents are indubitably comic. We have no real tragic
audiences. This is no expression of regret over legitimate
audiences, or audiences of the old school, or any audiences of that
kind, whose day may or may not have had a date. It is a mere
statement of the fact that audiences have lost, or never had, a
distinguishing perception of emotion, whereas they have every kind
of perception of humour, distinguishing and general. Their laugh
never fails. If their friends behind would really care to improve
them, it might be done by exacting from them a little more
temperance in their sense of comedy. We shall never have a really
good school of audience without the exercise of some such severity.

For obviously when we call an average unchangeable, we mean that it
is unchangeable for its time merely. There might be a slow
upraising of the level. It would still be a level, and there would
still be a compelling law upon one thousand that it should do the
same thing as another thousand; but that same thing might become
somewhat more intelligent.

When a fine actor does a fine thing, have we such a school of
audience as to merit this admirable supply to their demands?--this
applause of their understanding? Is there not in the whole
excellent piece of work, something all too independent of their part
in the theatre?

If Caligula wished that mankind had but one neck for his knife, and
Byron that all womankind had but one mouth for his kiss, so the
audience has conceived that all arts should have but one mystery for
its blundering, and thus thinks itself interested in acting when it
does but admire the actor as in a drawing.

The time may come when a national school of dramatic audience shall
not accept artifices that could not convince the fool amongst them;
when one brilliant moment of simplicity on the one side of the
footlights shall meet a brilliant simplicity on the other. Which
troupe, which side, to begin?

TITHONUS

"It was resolved," said the morning paper, "to colour the borders of
the panels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and
other patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would
need renewing from time to time. The colours, therefore,"--and here
is the passage to be noted--"are all mixed with wax liquefied with
petroleum; and the wax surface sets as hard as marble. . . The wax
is left time to form an imperishable surface of ornament, which
would have to be cut out of the stone with a chisel if it was
desired to remove it."  Not, apparently, that a new surface is
formed which, by much violence and perseverance, could, years hence,
be chipped off again; but that the "ornament" is driven in and
incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is nothing
possible to cut away by any industry. In this humorous form of
ornament we are beforehand with Posterity. Posterity is baffled.

Will this victory over our sons' sons be the last resolute tyranny
prepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeat of the
future? To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the
strongest of human desires. It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by
the human race; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards, let this
success in the stencilling of St Paul's teach us, to our confusion.
There is evidently a man--a group of men--happy at this moment
because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, to force our
posterity to have their cupola of St Paul's with the stone mouldings
stencilled and "picked out" with niggling colours, whether that
undefended posterity like it or not. And this is a survival of one
of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history.

It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and
not to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager,
eternal legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of
this former human wish. If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon
the earth, which yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the
Reformers' who arrested the moving man, and inhibited the moving
God. The sixteenth century and a certain part of the age
immediately following seem to be times when the desire had
conspicuously become a passion. Say the middle of the sixteenth
century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in England--
for in those days we were somewhat in the rear. There is the
obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure
upon power. Then was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single
sign and style. Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp
the fate of the unborn. The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to
come were to be as the day then present would have them, if the dead
hand--the living hand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold
in death--could by any means make them fast.

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that
may be more than willing to build for itself. The day may soon come
when no man will do even so much without some impulse of apology.
Posterity is not compelled to keep our pictures or our books in
existence, nor to read nor to look at them; but it is more or less
obliged to have a stone building in view for an age or two. We can
hardly avoid some of the forms of tyranny over the future, but few,
few are the living men who would consent to share in this horrible
ingenuity at St Paul's--this petroleum and this wax.

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of
Parliament, and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the
future. How the frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the
day should be made secure against all mischances--smoke, damp, "the
risk of bulging," even accidents attending the washing of upper
floors--all was discussed in confidence with the public. It was
impossible for anyone who read the papers then to escape from some
at least of the responsibilities of technical knowledge. From
Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all kinds of expert and
most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to defeat the natural
and not superfluous operation of efficient and effacing time.

The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date,
decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order of
architecture. Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place
with unparalleled obstinacy. They had not the malice of the
petroleum that does violence to St Paul's; but they had instead an
indomitable patience. Under the commands of the master Cornelius,
they baffled time and all his work--refused his pardons, his
absolutions, his cancelling indulgences--by a perseverance that
nothing could discourage. Who has not known somewhat indifferent
painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes? Cornelius
caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in the
case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years,
with frequent stirrings. This was in order that the whole fresco,
when at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for
immortality. Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those
mechanical means that should avert the risk of bulging already
mentioned. He neglected no detail. He was provident, and he lay in
wait for more than one of the laws of nature, to frustrate them.
Gravitation found him prepared, and so did the less majestic but not
vain dispensation of accidents. Against bulging he had an underplot
of tiles set on end; against possible trickling from an upper floor
he had asphalt; it was all part of the human conspiracy. In effect,
the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand well. It would have been
more just--so the present age thinks of these preserved walls--if
the day that admired them had had them exclusively, and our day had
been exempt. The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages have
undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?

In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder to
shoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and
art. They had just called iron into their cabal. Cornelius came
from Munich to London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a
heart of confidence into the breast of the Commission. The
situation, he averred, need not be too damp for immortality, with
due care. What he had done in the Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek
might be done with the best results in England, in defiance of the
weather, of the river, of the mere days, of the divine order of
alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime
that had not been kept quite long enough, ready to fulfil its
mission; they would have none of it. They evaded it, studied its
ways, and put it to the rout. "Many failures that might have been
hastily attributed to damp were really owing to the use of lime in
too fresh a state. Of the experimental works painted at Munich,
those only have faded which are known to have been done without due
attention to the materials. Thus, a figure of Bavaria, painted by
Kaulbach, which has faded considerably, is known to have been
executed with lime that was too fresh."  One cannot refrain from
italics: the way was so easy; it was only to take a little less of
this important care about the lime, to have a better confidence, to
be more impatient and eager, and all had been well: not to do--a
virtue of omission.

This is not a matter of art-criticism. It is an ethical question
hitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not always been obliged
to face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present,
and in part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured-
-that is, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of
person or property. Some such hold upon the time to come we are
obliged to claim, and to claim it for our own sakes--because of the
reflex effect upon our own affairs, and not for the pleasure of
fettering the time to come. Every maker of a will does at least
this.

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They
found the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will.
It did not satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the
dead, nor to efface the records of a past that offended them. It
did not satisfy them to bind the present to obedience by imperative
menace and instant compulsion. When they had burnt libraries and
thrown down monuments and pursued the rebels of the past into the
other world, and had seen to it that none living should evade them,
then they outraged the future.

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the
effectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run
in time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed
their subjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those
rigid counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the
world, they silenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They
wrote in statute books; they would have written their will across
the skies. Their hearts would have burnt for lack of records more
inveterate, and of testimonials that mankind should lack courage to
question, if in truth they did ever doubt lest posterity might try
their lock. Perhaps they did never so much as foresee the race of
the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their prohibitions and
penalties are no more than documents of history.

If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of
these our more diffident times! They, who would have written their
present and actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written
it in petroleum and wax upon the stone. Fate did them wrong in
withholding from their hands this means of finality and violence.
Into our hands it has been given at a time when the student of the
race thought, perhaps, that we had been proved in the school of
forbearance. Something, indeed, we may have learnt therein, but not
enough, as we now find.

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and
the probable wisdom of our successors. A certain reverend official
document, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately
recommended to the veneration of the present times "those past ages
with their store of experience."  Doubtless, as the posterity of
their predecessors our predecessors had experience, but, as our
ancestors, none--none. Therefore, if they were a little reverend
our own posterity is right reverend. It is a flippant and novelty-
loving humour that so flatters the unproved past and refuses the
deference due to the burden of years which is ours, which--grown
still graver--will be our children's.

THE TOW PATH

A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided
must have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird
your shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on
the even path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side
of meadows.

The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain,"
only too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of
the riverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink,
are swept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green. The
line drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows
taut; it makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress
of your easy power.

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the
joys of "feeling hearts" according to the erroneous sentiment of a
verse of Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the
joys of sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual
act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy
labourers with the oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means
of violence. Here, on the long tow-path, between warm, embrowned
meadows and opal waters, you need but to walk in your swinging
harness, and so take your friends up-stream.

You work merely as the mill-stream works--by simple movement. At
lock after lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to
the wheel that turns by no greater stress, and you and the river
have the same mere force of progress.

There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the
bright Thames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing
by so many curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as
the wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings
the lighted clouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying
high for mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own
weight. You will not envy them for so brief a success. Did not
Wordsworth want a "little boat" for the air? Did not Byron call him
a blockhead therefor? Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing.

All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry.
Even the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than
you, walking your effectual walk with the line attached to your
willing steps. Your moderate strength of a mere everyday physical
education gives you the sufficient mastery of the towpath.

If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give
it life, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the
buoyant burden--the yielding check--than ever before. An
unharnessed walk must begin to seem to you a sorry incident of
insignificant liberty. It is easier than towing? So is the drawing
of water in a sieve easier to the arms than drawing in a bucket, but
not to the heart.

To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the
wings of metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the
spirit and the line.

No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it
depends upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any
depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it
apt to set you at naught or charge you with a make-believe. It
accompanies, it almost anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just
so much as to give your briskness good reason, and to justify you if
you should take to still more nimble heels. All your haste,
moreover, does but waken a more brilliantly-sounding ripple.

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to
carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your
figure, enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes
free. No watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path.
What little outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer
smoothly towed. Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your
head high and watch the birds, or listen to them. They fly in such
lofty air that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of
their flight shows silver for a moment, but they are blue birds in
that sunny distance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons. The
days are so still that you do not merely hear the cawing of the
rooks--you overhear their hundred private croakings and creakings,
the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by wings.

As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an
end. This year's robins are in full voice; and the only song that
is not for love or nesting--the childish song of boy-birds, the
freshest and youngest note--is, by a happy paradox, that of an
autumnal voice.

Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist's
wheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome that light but resounding
note. Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent,
stealthy soles of the barefooted in the south.

THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS

It is no small thing--no light discovery--to find a river Andromeda
and Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer
night around a pole-star in the waters. One star or two--delicate
visitants of streams--we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of
the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition. Or the
southern waves may show the light--not the image--of the evening or
the morning planet. But this, in a pool of the country Thames at
night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it is the startling image of a
whole large constellation burning in the flood.

These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and more
vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or
the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters
play a painter's part in setting their splendid subject free. Two
movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright
flashing of constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark
flashes of the vague bats flying. The stars in the stream fluctuate
with an alien motion. Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of
large stars escapes and returns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the
steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote,
have a suddenness of gleaming life. You imagine that some
unexampled gale might make them seem to shine with such a movement
in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in
its incessant flight and rebound, could really show such altered
stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet's "wanton"
with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. At moments some
rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-set,
widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars,
and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then
one broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and
a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague,
wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else
at once so keen and so elusive.

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no
such vanishings as these. The dimmer constellations of the soft
night are reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by
the large and vague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the
Pleiades.

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the
river Thames--the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys
on all the winds up and down England and across it in the end of
summer. It is a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-
tiptoe wherever the wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty
points when it is not flying. The streets of London are among its
many highways, for it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of
weather. But it gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the
water so that its finely-feathered feet are wet. On gentle breezes
it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the waters.

All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations. It
is far adrift. It goes singly to all the winds. It offers thistle
plants (or whatever is t