Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/690

682 the government, leaving the conduct of affairs very much to his nephew, Captain Brooke, whom he has designated as his heir and successor, and who is represented as being also heir in a large degree to his uncle's principles, courage, and sagacity.

Rajah Brooke sought persistently for many years to give perpetuity to his life's work by placing Sarawak under British protection. He made repeated offers to surrender to the Queen all right and title which he had acquired, on any terms which would secure the welfare of the natives. But these offers have been definitely rejected; the seeming protection which Sarawak enjoyed through the position of its ruler as Governor of Labuan has been withdrawn, and the little state left to work out unaided its destiny. What shall be the final fate of this interesting experiment, whether there shall arise successors to the founder wise enough to maintain the government so bravely established, or whether the infant state shall perish with the man who called it into existence, and become only a memory, it is impossible to foretell; but, living or dead, its annals will always be a noble monument to him whose force of character and undaunted persistency created it.

The earlier portraits we have of Rajah Brooke depict him as a man of a peculiarly frank, open, and pleasing exterior, yet with a countenance marked by intelligence, thought, and energy; but underneath all a certain dreaminess of expression, found often in the faces of those born for adventure and to seek for the enterprise of their age fresh fields, new El Dorados hidden in strange lands and unfamiliar seas.

The later portraits give us a face, plain, sagacious, yet full of an expression of kindly benevolence. The exigencies of a busy life have transformed romance into reality and common-sense; the adventurer and knight-errant has but obeyed the law of his age, and become a noble example of the power of the Anglo-Saxon mind to organize in the face of adverse circumstances a state, and to construct out of most unpromising elements the good fabric of orderly social life.

ARCH, 1845.—Nature sometimes displays a little tenderness for our vanity, but is never careful for our pride. She is willing that we should look foolish in the eyes of others, but keeps our little nonsensicalnesses from ourselves.

Perhaps there are higher intelligences that look upon all the manifestations of the human mind—metaphysics, ethics, histories, politics, poems, stories, etc., etc.—with the same interest that we look upon flowers, or any other humble production of nature,—finding a beauty and fitness even in the poorest of them, which we cannot see in the best.

A child or a young girl so sweet and beautiful, that God made new flowers on purpose for her.

May 4.—On the river-side, by the Promontory of Columbines. The river here makes a bend, nearly at a right angle. On the opposite side, a high bank descends precipitately to the water; a few apple-trees are scattered along the declivity. A small cottage,