Kitabı oku: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 13, No. 376, June 20, 1829», sayfa 3

FITZMAURICE THE MAGICIAN

"I have lived three hundred years! In that time—in all that time, I have never seen the glorious sun descend, but followed still its rolling course through the regions of illimitable space. I have shivered on the frozen mountains of the icy north, and fainted beneath the sultry skies of the blazing east: the swift winds have been my viewless chariot, and on their careering wings I have been hurried from clime to clime. But, nor light, nor air, nor heat, nor cold, have been to me as to the rest of my species; for I was doomed to find in their extremes a perpetual torment. I howled, under the sharp, pinching pangs of the icy north; I panted with agony, in the scorching fervour of the blazing east; and when mine eyes have ached, with vain efforts, to pierce the darkness of the earth's centre, they have been suddenly blasted with excessive and intolerable delight.

"All the currents of human affection—all that makes the past delightful, the present lovely, and the future coveted, were dried up within me. My heart was like the sands of the desert, parched and barren. No living stream of hope, of gladness, or of desire, quickened it with human sympathies. It was a bleak and withered region, the fit abode of ever-during sorrow and comfortless despair. I was as a blighted tree, that perishes not at the root, but is withered in all its branches. Tears, I had none. One gracious drop, falling from my seared orbs, would have been the blessed channel of pent-up griefs that seemed to crush my almost frenzied brain. Sighs, I breathed not. They would have heaved from my bursting heart some of that misery, which loaded it to anguish. Sleep never came. I was denied the common luxury of the common wretched, to lose, in its sweet oblivion, its brief forgetfulness, the sense of what I was. Death, natural death, closed his many doors against me. All that lived, except myself—the persecuted, the weary, and the heavily laden of man's race—could find a grave! I, alone, looked upon the earth, and felt that it had no resting place for me! God! God! what a forlorn and miserable creature is man, when, in his affliction, he cannot say to the worm, I shall be yours! I might have cast away, indeed, the YENARKON—the Giver of Life—the elixir of the Sibyl—but that would have been to subject myself to a power of darkness, in whose fell wrath I should have suffered the casting away of mine eternal soul!

"Thus the stream of time rolled on, burying beneath its dark waves, our little span of present, in the huge ocean of a perpetual past, and devouring, as the food of both, our swift decaying future. But I floated on its surface, and beheld whole generations flourish and fade away, while age and silver hairs, growing infirmities, and the closing sigh that ends them all, mocked me with a horrible exemption. I remained, and might have remained, for ages yet to come, the fixed and unaltered image of what I was, when in Mauritania I encountered the potent Amaimon, the damned magician of the den, but for that—woman's faith, and man's fidelity—which have made me what I AM!

"This was my destiny. Now mark, how I became enthralled to it; and how it befell, that at last I shook it off, and found redemption.

"In my middle manhood, when scarcely forty summers had glowed within my veins, I left my native Italy, and journeyed to the Holy Land, upon the strict vow of a self-imposed penance. It was for no sin committed in my days of youth, but for the satisfaction of an ardent piety, and the growing spirit of a long enkindled devotion. I had patrimonial wealth in Apulia; I had kindred; I had friends. I renounced them all, to dedicate myself, thenceforth, to the service of THE CROSS. My purpose was blessed, by a virtuous mother's prayers, that I might approve myself a worthy soldier of Christ; and it was sanctified by a holy priest at the altar.

"Even now, the recollection is strong within me, of the feelings with which, as the rising sun illumined the tops of the surrounding hills, I approached the once glorious, and still sacred, city of Jerusalem—that chosen seat of the Godhead—that Queen among the nations. Eclipsed, though it was, and its majestic head trodden into the dust, by the foot of the infidel, my gladdened eyes dwelt upon what was imperishable, and my wrapt imagination pictured what was destroyed. The valleys of Jehosaphat and Gehinnon, Mount Calvary, Mount Zion, and Mount Acre, stretched before me. The palace of King Herod, with its sumptuous halls of marble and of gold—the gorgeous Temple of Solomon—the lofty towers of Phaseolus and Mariamne—the palace of the Maccabees—the Hippodrome—the houses of many of the prophets—grew into existence again, beneath the creative force of fancy. I stood and wept. I knelt, and kissed the consecrated earth which once a Saviour trod."

"THE HUNTED STAG: A SKETCH

 
What sounds are on the mountain blast?
Like bullet from the arbalast,
Was it the hunted quarry past
Right up Ben-ledi's side?—
So near, so rapidly he dash'd,
Yon lichen'd bough has scarcely plash'd
Into the torrent's tide.
Ay!—The good hound may bay beneath,
The hunter wind his horn;
He dared ye through the flooded Teith
As a warrior in his scorn!
Dash the red rowel in the steed,
Spur, laggards, while ye may!
St. Hubert's shaft to a stripling reed,
He dies no death to-day!
 
 
'Forward!'—Nay, waste not idle breath,
Gallants, ye win no green-wood wreath;
His antlers dance above the heath,
Like chieftain's plumed helm;
Right onward for the western peak,
Where breaks the sky in one white streak,
See, Isabel, in bold relief,
To Fancy's eye, Glenartney's chief,
Guarding his ancient realm.
So motionless, so noiseless there,
His foot on rock, his head in air,
Like sculptor's breathing stone!
Then, snorting from the rapid race,
Snuffs the free air a moment's space,
Glares grimly on the baffled chase,
And seeks the covert loan."
 

"THE COMPLAINT OF THE VIOLETS

 
By the silent foot of the shadowy hill
We slept in our green retreats,
And the April showers were wont to fill
Our hearts with sweets;
And though we lay in a lowly bower,
Yet all things loved us well,
And the waking bee left its fairest flower
With us to dwell.
But the warm May came in his pride to woo
The wealth of our virgin store,
And our hearts just felt his breath, and knew
Their sweets no more!
And the summer reigns on the quiet spot
Where we dwell—and its suns and showers
Bring balm to our sisters' hearts, but not—
Oh! not to ours!
We live—we bloom—but for ever o'er
Is the charm of the earth and sky:
To our life, ye heavens, that balm restore,
Or bid us die!"
 

"THE FOUNTAIN: A BALLAD

 
Why startest thou back from that fount of sweet water?
The roses are drooping while waiting for thee;
'Ladye, 'tis dark with the red hue of slaughter,
There is blood on that fountain—oh! whose may it be?'
Uprose the ladye at once from her dreaming,
Dreams born of sighs from the violets round,
The jasmine bough caught in her bright tresses, seeming
In pity to keep the fair prisoner it bound.
Tear-like the white leaves fell round her, as, breaking
The branch in her haste, to the fountain she flew,
The wave and the flowers o'er its mirror were reeking,
Pale as the marble around it she grew.
She followed its track to the grove of the willow,
To the bower of the twilight it led her at last,
There lay the bosom so often her pillow,
But the dagger was in it, its beating was past.
Round the neck of the youth a light chain was entwining,
The dagger had cleft it, she joined it again.
One dark curl of his, one of her's like gold shining,
'They hoped this would part us, they hoped it in vain.
Race of dark hatred, the stern unforgiving.
Whose hearts are as cold as the steel which they wear.
By the blood of the dead, the despair of the living,
Oh, house of my kinsman, my curse be your share!'
She bowed her fair face on the sleeper before her,
Night came and shed its cold tears on her brow;
Crimson the blush of the morning past o'er her,
But the cheek of the maiden returned not its glow.
Pale on the earth are the wild flowers weeping,
The cypress their column, the night-wind their hymn,
These mark the grave where those lovers are sleeping
Lovely—the lovely are mourning for them."
 

The Casket.

THE COSMOPOLITE

COUNTRY CHARACTER

(For the Mirror.)

Country society has but little relief; and in proportion to intellectual refinement, this monotony appears to increase. We have always been favourable to Book Clubs in country towns, and about ten years since, established one in the anti-social town of –. The plan worked well; its economy was admired, and extensively adopted all over England, but we heard little of its contributing to the social enjoyments of the people. Twenty families reading the same books, and these passed from house to house, among the respectability of the town, might have brought about a kind of consanguinity of opinion, and led to frequent interchange of civilities, meetings of the members at each others' houses, or at least a sort of how-d'ye-do acquaintance. The case was otherwise. The attorney and the doctor joined our society that their families of ten or twelve sons and daughters might keep under the sixpences and shillings of the circulating library; but they soon became jealous of new books, although they often returned them uncut and unread; and so far from knitting the bonds of acquaintance, we at last thought our plan served to estrange the members, by affording the little aristocracy frequent opportunities for venting their splenetic pride; the books were like disjunctive conjunctions, and when we left the place, the "society" did not promise to live another year.

We could entertain ourselves, at least, with sketches of a few of the members of this disjointed body; but we must be content with one, and that shall be the bookseller of the town.

Imagine a man of middle height, rather inclined to obesity, and just turned of fifty-eight. He had a broad, low forehead, sunken eyes, an aquiline nose, a heavy, hanging lip, and a chin which buried its projections in ample and unclassical folds of neckerchief. He was bald, except a tuft on the occiput, or hinder part of his head, and on dress occasions he wore powder. He was a widower, his wife having been dead about ten years, leaving him two daughters, the amiability of whose dispositions was a painful contrast to the uneven temper of their father. He kept a good table, and had the best cellar of grape wine in the town, but entertained little company. His guests were usually the valets or butlers of the gentry in the neighbourhood; but the housekeepers were never invited by his daughters, a point of propriety in male and female acquaintanceship which amused us not a little. His business was of a most multifarious description, and besides the trades of bookseller, stationer, and druggist, he had a printing-office, and was, moreover, a self-taught printer, He was post-master and stamp sub-distributor, receiver of bail, and agent for insurances—little official appointments which would have made him mayor in a corporate town. Of late years, he seldom meddled with these matters of business; but tired of their common track, he struck out a course of life, which was neither public nor private, but made him a sort of oracle in the town, whose opinions were freely printed and gratuitously circulated, whilst the author was seldom seen except at vestry-meetings. In this way he acted as secretary to a benevolent society established by the gentry, and such was his enthusiasm that he gave his services and £200. worth of printing during the first year; and the Committee in return presented him with a handsome piece of plate with a complimentary inscription, which he had the modesty to keep locked up, and never to display even to his visiters. This proved him to be a benevolent man, and he would have been ten times more useful had not his charitable disposition been over tinged with oddity and caprice. His contact with the poor of the parish soon made him overseer, although his religious observances would not qualify him for churchwarden; for he only went to church at funerals, to which he was frequently invited, his staid appearance, and a certain air of gentility of which he was master, being in such cases no mean recommendation. Overseer and select vestryman, he printed the parish accounts, for the most part gratuitously, although the poor and even the better portion of the towns-people never gave him full credit for this generosity, conceiving that he was repaid by some secret services or funds. The oddity of his pursuits was only exceeded by their variety. In politics he was a disciple of Cobbett, and year after year, foretold a revolution, an alarm which he communicated to every one of his household. He took extreme interest in all new mechanical projects, but seldom indulged in the practical part of them. In wine-making he was once a very experimentalist, and studied every line of Macculloch and unripe fruit; next, he turned over every inch of his garden, analyzed the soil à la Davy, and salted all his growing crops. His cogitative habits led him to take long walks in the country, and he soon flew from horticultural chemistry to real farming; and about the same time took to road making and macadamization, and became a surveyor of the highways. But the trustees wanting to macadamize the miserably pitched street of the town, he bethought him of dust in summer and mud in winter, and drew up a long memorial to the lords of the soil, remonstrating with them on their impolitic conduct; but all in vain. It is curious, however, to reflect that what the people of a country town about ten years ago thought a curse to their roads should now be adopted in many of the principal London Streets. The last we heard of our bookseller's hobbies, was that he had bought the lease of a house for the sake of the large garden attached to it, and here, like Evelyn in his Elysium Britannicum, he passes his days in the primitive occupation of gardening.