Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/274

 the harper with his harp, lived always in sight of nature. Their little fussy lives and noisy works were ever in contrast with its silence and permanence; change and decay with the constant seasons and the everlasting hills. Who cannot understand the red man's reverence for inanimate nature read by this light—especially his reverence for the setting sun? For the night cometh, reminding him of his own little candle of an existence, while he knows that the great orb has risen upon a hundred generations of hunters, and will rise upon a hundred more. As for him and his works, his knife will be buried with him, and there an end of him and his works.

And we Europeans to-day are in the same case with regard to the silence and permanence of Nature, contrasted with the perpetual flux and noise of human life. Who thinks of his death without thinking of it? who thinks of it without thinking of his death? Mother, whose thoughts dwell about her baby in churchyard lying; Mary, of sister Margaret who died last year, or of John who was lost at sea, say first and last—"There the sea rolls, ever as ever; and rages and smiles, and surges and sighs just the same; and were you and I and the whole world to be drowned to-day, and all the brave ships to go down with standing sails, to-morrow there would not be a drop the more in the ocean, nor on its surface a smile the less. Doesn't the rain rain upon my baby's grave, and the sun shine upon it, as indifferent as if there were neither babies nor mothers in the world?" Why, this strain is to be found in all the poetry that ever was written. Walter Mapes may be quoted, with his, "I propose to end my days in a tavern drinking," but his and all such songs merely result from a wild effort to divorce this "grand thought" from the mind.

But we need not go to America for a red Indian, nor afield to the hills for illustration; that is to be found in the impression produced on many thoughtful minds by the contemplation of social life in any two periods. We behold Sir Richard Steele boozing unto maudlinness in purple velvet and a laced hat; Captain Mohock raging through Fleet Street with a drawn rapier; reprobate old duchesses and the damsels who were to be our grandmothers sitting in the same pew, and then looking about us, say—"Here we are again!—the duchess on the settee, Mohock lounging against the mantelpiece, Dick Steele hiccuping on the stairs in a white neckcloth. There they go through the little comedy of life, in ruffles and paste buckles; here go we in swallow-tails and patent leathers. Mohock married, and was henpecked: young Sanglant is to be married to-morrow. The duchess being dead, one of those demure little damsels takes up the tradition, and certain changes of costume having been accomplished, becomes another wicked old woman; and so it goes on. They die, and we die; and meanwhile the world goes steadily round. There is sowing and reaping, and there are select parties, and green peas in their season, and oh! this twopenny life!"

Mind you, I have other ideas. What is all this melancholy, at bottom, but stupidity and ingratitude? Are we miserable because He who made all beautiful things preserves them to us for ever? True, He has