Adventures Among Books Part 8

Then, one day,

"He heard it said: Poor Julio, thy Agathe is dead."

She died

"Like to a star within the twilight hours Of morning, and she was not! Some have thought The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught."

Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes "d.a.m.n her!" (the Lady Abbess, that is) and suggests that thought must be read "thaft."

Through "the arras of the gloom" (arras is good), the pale breezes are moaning, and Julio is wan as stars unseen for paleness. However, he lifts the tombstone "as it were lightsome as a summer gladness." "A summer gladness," remarks Mr. Aytoun, "may possibly weigh about half-an- ounce." Julio came on a skull, a haggard one, in the grave, and Mr.

Aytoun kindly designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying "Dust ho!"

Now go, and give your poems to your friends!

Finally Julio unburies Agathe:--

"Thou must go, My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below, Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude, But where is light, and life, and one to brood Above thee, till thou wakest. Ha, I fear Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here, Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.

And Convent fathers, and a choristry Of sisters saying Hush! But I will sing Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering Down on the dews to hear me; I will tune The instrument of the ethereal moon, And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall In harmony and beauty musical."

Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture of the distraught priest, setting forth to sail the seas with his dead lady, not an invention that Nanteuil might have ill.u.s.trated, and the clan of Bousingots approved?

The Second Chimera opens n.o.bly:--

"A curse! a curse! {8} the beautiful pale wing Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering, And, on a sunny rock beside the sh.o.r.e, It stood, the golden waters gazing o'er; And they were nearing a brown amber flow Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below!"

Julio appears with Agathe in his arms, and what ensues is excellent of its kind:--

"He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed, Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste, The silent ladye, and he mutter'd wild, Strange words about a mother and no child.

"And I shall wed thee, Agathe! although Ours be no G.o.d-blest bridal--even so!"

And from the sand he took a silver sh.e.l.l, That had been wasted by the fall and swell Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring-- A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing, Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died In ages far away. 'Thou art a bride, Sweet Agathe! Wake up; we must not linger!'

He press'd the ring upon her chilly finger, And to the sea-bird on its sunny stone Shouted, 'Pale priest that liest all alone Upon thy ocean altar, rise, away To our glad bridal!' and its wings of gray All lazily it spread, and hover'd by With a wild shriek--a melancholy cry!

Then, swooping slowly o'er the heaving breast Of the blue ocean, vanished in the west."

Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead maid:--

"A rosary of stars, love! a prayer as we glide, And a whisper on the wind, and a murmur on the tide, And we'll say a fair adieu to the flowers that are seen, With sh.e.l.ls of silver sown in radiancy between.

"A rosary of stars, love! the purest they shall be, Like spirits of pale pearls in the bosom of the sea; Now help thee, {9} Virgin Mother, with a blessing as we go, Upon the laughing waters that are wandering below."

One can readily believe that Poe admired this musical sad song, if, indeed, he ever saw the poem.

One may give too many extracts, and there is scant room for the extraordinary witchery of the midnight sea and sky, where the dead and the distraught drift wandering,

"And the great ocean, like the holy hall, Where slept a Seraph host maritimal, Was gorgeous with wings of diamond"--

it was a sea

"Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald."

There follows another song--

"'Tis light to love thee living, girl, when hope is full and fair, In the springtide of thy beauty, when there is no sorrow there No sorrow on thy brow, and no shadow on thy heart, When, like a floating sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art

"But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tide And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside, It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best, When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest."

We ought to distrust our own admiration of what is rare, odd, novel to us, found by us in a sense, and especially one must distrust one's liking for the verses of a Tweedside angler, of a poet whose forebears lie in the green kirkyard of Yarrow. But, allowing for all this, I cannot but think these very musical, accomplished, and, in their place, appropriate verses, to have been written by a boy of twenty. Nor is it a common imagination, though busy in this vulgar field of horrors, that lifts the pallid bride to look upon the mirror of the sea--

"And bids her gaze into the startled sea, And says, 'Thine image, from eternity, Hath come to meet thee, ladye!' and anon He bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy one That shook amid the waters."

The picture of the madness of thirst, allied to the disease of the brain, is extremely powerful, the delirious monk tells the salt sea waves

"That ye have power, and pa.s.sion, and a sound As of the flying of an angel round The mighty world; that ye are one with time!"

Here, I can't but think, is imagination.

Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those pa.s.sages, nor that where, in tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked sailor swims to the strange boat, sees the Living Love and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of the wave.

But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier approves the pa.s.sage where an isle rises above the sea, and the boat is lightly stranded on the sh.o.r.e of pure and silver sh.e.l.ls. The horrors of corruption, in the Third Chimera, may be left unquoted, Aytoun parodies--

"The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses, And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses."

Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on limpets, "by the ma.s.s, he feasteth well!"

There was a holy hermit on the isle,

"I ween like other hermits, so was he."

He is Agathe's father, and he has retired to an eligible island where he may repent his cruelty to his daughter. Julio tells his tale, and goes mad again. The apostrophe to Lunacy which follows is marked "Beautiful"

by Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb's remark that madness has pleasures unknown to the sane.

"Thou art, thou art alone, A pure, pure being, but the G.o.d on high Is with thee ever as thou goest by."

Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes, bringing

"A murmur far and far, of those that stirred Within the great encampment of the sea."

The tide sweeps the mad and the dead down the sh.o.r.es. "He perished in a dream." As for the Hermit, he buried them, not knowing who they were, but on a later day found and recognised the golden cross of Agathe,

"For long ago he gave that blessed cross To his fair girl, and knew the relic still."

So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say, with Walton, "and I hope the reader is sorry."

The "other poems" are vague memories of Sh.e.l.ley, or antic.i.p.ations of Poe.

One of them is curiously styled "Her, a Statue," and contains a pa.s.sage that reminds us of a rubaiyat of Omar's,