Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/455

Charles Dickens]

This is a larger venture

That in the Fisheries sank,

And this is more than I like to tell—

Swallowed in Dodge's Bank.

"This is a newspaper, vanished,

With thrice a thousand at least;

And this is a project, fair to study,

For making champagne from yeast.

This is a stone—pray, watch it;

Ten thousand fully told,

For converting old shoes to sugar,

And turning flint to gold!"

And still he kept throwing, throwing

The stones into the sea.

"Howard! your losses grieve you!"

"The devil a bit," quoth he;

"But if I don't grow wiser

Next time that Cash runs riot,

I'll either drown or hang myself

To keep my guineas quiet."

IN THE HONEYMOON.

"Oh world! I've tried thee and I tire;

Thy pleasures are but future pain:

Though much is good that we desire—

Nothing is good that we attain!"

My love looked o'er my shoulder—

Inquisitive beholder,

As thus I wrote and thought,

And said, "False rhymer, over free,

Is this your verdict upon me,

Despised as soon as caught?"

Lovers, ye know the answer due!

But quick as thought, her fingers flew

O'er cheeks and ears like bolt from quiver,

And slew the kiss I meant to give her.

THOSE CONVENT BELLES.

is an old-fashioned expression, "our wits jumped together," to denote that two persons, without previous concert, arrived at the same conclusion. It is astonishing how people's wits, although separated by time and place, will, under like circumstances, jump together. On our table there has been lying, not unread, a book called "Le Couvent; Mémoires d'une Religieuse," "Memoirs of a Nun, by Sister X." We leave the candid reader to judge whether anybody else's wits have lately been jumping in accordance with the authoress's.

Her story, though not short, is simple. Under the influence of religious excitement, she felt it her duty to leave her parents, and quit domestic, for conventual life. Once caged, her friends were further estranged from her by silence and concealments which were not her fault. Then grim death passed that way, and rendered regrets and remorse equally unavailing. The charm of enthusiasm and novelty was broken before very long; but the irrevocable step having been taken, nothing remained but bitter repentance. Her superiors were not slow to discover the change, nor to mete out its punishment without stint or mercy. In such cases, both parties' minds become envenomed; compromise and reconciliation are scarcely possible. Persecution followed persecution; until the refractory nun, to escape incarceration in a dungeon, cut the Gordian knot (instead of trying, like poor Miss Saurin, to untie it) by scaling her prison walls, and running away.

Sister X. repudiates, at the outset of her narrative, any hostility to the Papal religion. She has nothing to say either against the celibacy of the clergy, or monastic vows. What she would proclaim on the housetops is, that multitudes of young girls are caught by deceitful promises, of a happiness unattainable on earth. She would tell them that conventual life has its suffering, its weariness, its regret, its persecution, its bitterness. She would have everybody know the abuse there made of moral force, in default of material force.

We may be told, over and over again, that nuns are no longer constrained by violence. True; abbesses no longer have their dungeons as a right; official condemnations are out of fashion; but does not moral compulsion still exist? What is to become of a poor girl, whose dower has been swallowed by the ever-gaping gulf of monastic poverty? In vain will they say, as to a prisoner who has completed his term, "Go; you are free; the doors are open." Go whither? When a justly-offended and undervalued family have banished you from their thoughts; when you have not a rag to cover you, nor a farthing to buy a morsel of bread, and when ruined health is your only patrimony, where can you go? Sister X. requires that every person who has become tired of a cloistered life, and who brought a dower to the establishment, should have a right, on retiring from it, to at least a portion of that dower. It seems to us that Sister X.'s wits have not, in this matter, jumped alone.

Sister X. accuses nunneries of being too much given to intrigue, indiscreet curiosity, worldly frequentations, and, above all, to an inordinate greed of gain. In convents, as throughout the rest of the world, with and for money almost everything can be done. It strangely unsettles the balance of justice. "A rich postulant! A noble postulant! What a deal of good we might do with her money! What dust we might throw in people's eyes with her name!" Whilst vulgar postulants are kept to the