Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/402

390 of Childhood, and records the passionate woe which mastered his young heart when thus bereaved of his "dear, noble Elizabeth." Previously he had lost another sister—little Jane—but was then too young to be abidingly impressed. For indeed—

And simple as the creed of Wordsworth's cottage-girl had been this baby-brother's feelings at his first bereavement:

"I knew little more of mortality," he says, "than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but, perhaps, she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again—crocuses and roses: why not little Jane?"

This, the first wound in his infant heart, admitted, therefore, of speedy healing. Little Jane was sorrowed for, but not without hope—hope, that is, not in the Scripture sense, but in respect to the heaven that lies about us in our infancy, paradise before paradise is lost. Quite different was the sorrow startled into sudden, throbbing life, when, after an interval of happy years, Elizabeth was removed from him who loved her so well. "Blank anarchy and confusion of mind," he says, "fell upon me. Deaf and blind I was, as I reeled under that revelation. I wish not to recal the circumstances of that time, when my agony was at its height, and hers, in another sense, was approaching. Enough it is to say, that all was soon over; and the morning of that day had at last arrived which looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no consolation."

It was on the day after Elizabeth's death, that the Boy (to use Goethe's emphatic phrase) crept unseen to the room where she lay—gazed in rapt wonderment on the Early Called—and fell into a trance as he gazed. This trance is so characteristic of the author—so akin to the dream-experiences of the Opium-eater—so true to the philosophy which declares the child the father of the man—and moreover is recorded in diction so rich in musical cadence, so melting in expression, so perfectly attuned to the subject, as though floating a dreamy echo from unearthly orchestra—that we cannot quote, in our desultory (and so far damaging) way, a more significant illustration of the writer's mind and manner, when translating into words his suspiriosæ cogitationes.

Behold him, then, standing beside the fair young corpse. And hear him, and heed his every word of description—for not a word but tells—not a word but is instinct with feeling of the finest, fraught with meaning of the deepest. "Awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood,