Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/407

Rh intellectual aberrations which were more powerful for thy own ruin than for the misleading of others!"—Sketches of Life and Manners: fro th Autobiography of an English Opium-eater. (1840.)To his early-lost sister pertains this fragment:—"Dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I fancy a tiara of light or a gleaming aureola in token of thy premature intellectual grandeur …. thou next, but after an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned away from our nursery; and the night which for me gathered upon that event, ran after my steps far into life; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for good or ill that whicj else I should have been. Pillar of fire that didst go before me to guide and to quicken,—pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to my dawning fears the secret shadow of death, by what mysterious gravitation was it that my heart had been drawn to thine?"—Selections Grave and Gay, vol. i. (1853.)Again, take the perforation of the "Pleasures oi Opium:"—"Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion forthat summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury; and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges:—thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos: and 'from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,' callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the 'dishonours of the grave.'"—Confessions of an English Opium-eater. Part II. What solemn beauty, what perfectness of rhythm, in this apostrophe to the Greek Antigone!—"Holy heathen, daughter of God, before God was known" [i.e. known in Greece], "flower from Paradise after Paradise was closed; that quitting all things for which flesh languishes, safety and honour, a palace and a home, didst make thyself a houseless pariah, lest the poor pariah king, thy outcast father, should want a hand to lead him in his darkness, or a voice to whisper comfort in his misery; angel, that badest depart for ever the glories of thy own bridal day, lest he that he shared thy nursery in childhood, should want the honours of a funeral; idolatrous, yet Christian Lady, that in the spirit of martyrdom troddest alone the yawning billows of the grave, flying from earthly hopes, lest everlasting despair should settle upon the grave of thy brother," &c.—The Antigone of Sophocles. Part I. (1846.)  Prom Antigone turn to Joan of Arc:—"Daughter of Domrémy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her country—thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy portion in this life; to do—never for thyself, always for others; to suffer—never in the persons of generous champions, always in thy own:—that was thy destiny; and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is short: and the sleep, which is in the grave, is long! Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long."—Joan of Arc. Part I. ( 1847.)There is a grandly pathetic apostrophe to the Bishop of Beauvais, in the second part of the essay on Joan of Arc; but its effect would be so completely lost by parcel quotation (and it is far too long to give entire), that even our sharp practice in decimating fractions and compound division, shrinks from abridging it. One more illustration, however, we annex—suggested by a nearly fatal accident blighted face he looked in vain, among "many, many myriad of female faces" anxiously scrutinised by him in later visits to London, when the