Brave Men and Women Part 30

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON--SIR WALTER RALEIGH--XENOPHON-- CaeSAR--NELSON--HENRY OF NAVARRE--QUEEN ELIZABETH-- SYDNEY SMITH--ROBERT HALL--LATIMER--TOM HOOD.

Baron m.u.f.fling relates of the Duke of Wellington, that that great general remained at the d.u.c.h.ess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful." The baron, who is a very good authority on the subject, having previously proved that every plan was laid in the duke's mind, and Quatre Bras and Waterloo fully detailed, we may comprehend the value of the sentence. It was the bold, trusting heart of the hero that made him cheerful. He showed himself cheerful, too, at Waterloo. He was never very jocose; but on that memorable 18th of June he showed a symptom of it. He rode along the line and cheered men by his look and his face, and they too cheered him. But, when the danger was over--when the 21,000 brave men of his own and the Prussian army lay stiffening in death--the duke, who was so cheerful in the midst of his danger, covered his face with his hands and wept. He asked for that friend, and he was slain; for this, and a bullet had pierced his heart. The men who had devoted themselves to death for their leader and their country had been blown to pieces, or pierced with lances, or hacked with sabers, and lay, like Ponsonby covered with thirteen wounds, upon the ground. Well might the duke weep, iron though he was. "There is nothing," he writes, "nothing in the world so dreadful as a battle lost, unless it be such a battle won. Nothing can compensate for the dreadful cruelty, carnage, and misery of the scene, save the reflection on the public good which may arise from it."

Forty years' peace succeeded the great battle. Forty years of prosperity, during which he himself went honored to his tomb, rewarded the constant brave look and tongue which answered his men, when he saw the whole side of a square blown in, with "Hard work, gentlemen! They are pounding away! We must see who can pound the longest." It is not too much to say that the constant cheerfulness of the Duke of Wellington was one great element of success in the greatest battle ever fought, one of the fifteen decisive battles in the world, great in the number engaged, greater in the slaughter, greatest in the results. But all commanders ought to be cheerful. Gloomy looks do not do in the army. A set of filibusters or pirates may wear looks and brows as black as the sticking-plasters boots that their representatives are dressed in at the minor theaters; but a soldier or a sailor should be, and as a rule is, the most cheerful of fellows, doing his duty in the trench or the storm, dying when the bullet comes, but living like a hero the while. Look, for instance, at the whole-hearted cheerfulness of Raleigh, when with his small English ships he cast himself against the navies of Spain; or at Xenophon, conducting back from an inhospitable and hostile country, and through unknown paths, his ten thousand Greeks; or Caesar, riding up and down the banks of the Rubicon, sad enough belike when alone, but at the head of his men cheerful, joyous, well dressed, rather foppish, in fact, his face shining with good humor as with oil. Again, Nelson, in the worst of dangers, was as cheerful as the day. He had even a rough but quiet humor in him just as he carried his c.o.xswain behind him to bundle the swords of the Spanish and French captains under his arm. He could clap his telescope to his blind eye, and say, "Gentlemen, I can not make out the signal," when the signal was adverse to his wishes, and then go in and win, in spite of recall. Fancy the dry laughs which many an old sea-dog has had over that cheerful incident. How the story lights up the dark page of history! Then there was Henry of Navarre, lion in war, winner of hearts, bravest of the brave, who rode down the ranks at Ivry when Papist and Protestant were face to face, when more than his own life and kingdom were at stake, and all the horrors of religious war were loosened and unbound, ready to ravage poor, unhappy France. That beaming, hopeful countenance won the battle, and is a parallel to the brave looks of Queen Elizabeth when she cheered her Englishmen at Tilbury.

But we are not all soldiers or sailors, although, too, our Christian profession hath adopted the t.i.tle of soldiers in the battle of life. It is all very well to cite great commanders who, in the presence of danger, excited by hope, with the eyes of twenty thousand men upon them, are cheerful and happy; but what is that to the solitary author, the poor artist, the governess, the milliner, the shoemaker, the factory-girl, they of the thousand persons in profession or trade who are given to murmur, and who think life so hard and gloomy and wretched that they can not go through it with a smile on their faces and despair in their hearts? What are examples and citations to them? "Hecuba!"

cries out poor, melancholy, morbid Hamlet, striking on a vein of thought, "what's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" Much.

We all have trials; but it is certain that good temper and cheerfulness will make us bear them more easily than any thing else. "Temper," said one of our bishops, "is nine-tenths of Christianity." We do not live now in the Middle Ages. We can not think that the sect of Flagellants, who whipped themselves till the blood ran into their shoes, and pulled uncommonly long faces, were the best masters of philosophy. "True G.o.dliness is cheerful as the day," wrote Cowper, himself melancholy-mad enough; and we are to remember that the precept of the Founder of our faith, that when we fast we are to anoint our countenances and not to seem to fast, enjoins a certain liveliness of face. Sydney Smith, when a poor curate at Foster-le-Clay, a dreary, desolate place, wrote: "I am resolved to like it, and to reconcile myself to it, which is more manly than to fancy myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post of being thrown away, or being desolated, and such like trash." And he acted up to this; said his prayers, made his jokes, did his duty, and, Upon fine mornings, used to draw up the blinds of his parlor, open the window, and "glorify the room," as he called the operation, with sunshine. But all the sunshine without was nothing to the sunshine within the heart. It was that which made him go through life so bravely and so well; it is that, too, which renders his life a lesson to us all.

We must also remember that the career of a poor curate is not the most brilliant in the world. That of an apprentice boy has more fun in it; that of a milliner's girl has more merriment and fewer depressing circ.u.mstances. To hear always the same mistrust of Providence, to see poverty, to observe all kinds of trial, to witness death-bed scenes--this is not the most enlivening course of existence, even if a clergyman be a man of mark and of station. But there was one whose station was not honored, nay, even by some despised, and who had sorer trials than Sydney Smith. His name is well known in literature; and his writings and his example still teach us in religion. This was Robert Hall, professor of a somber creed in a somber flat country, as flat and "deadly-lively," as they say, as need be. To add to difficulties and troubles, the minister was plagued with about as painful an illness as falls to the lot of humanity to bear. He had fought with infidelity and doubt; he had refused promotion, because he would do his duty where it had pleased G.o.d to place him; next he had to show how well he could bear pain. In all his trials he had been cheerful, forcible, natural, and straightforward. In this deep one he preserved the same character.

Forced to throw himself down and writhe upon the floor in his paroxysms of pain, he rose up, livid with exhaustion, and with the sweat of anguish on his brow, without a murmur.

In the whole library of brave anecdote there is no tale of heroism which, to us, beats this. It very nearly equals that of poor, feeble Latimer, cheering up his fellow-martyr as he walked to the stake, "Be of good cheer, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a fire in England as by G.o.d's grace shall not be readily put out." The very play upon the torture is brave, yet pathetic. Wonderful, too, was the boldness and cheerfulness of another martyr, Rowland Taylor, who, stripped to his shirt, was forced to walk toward the stake, who answered the jeers of his persecutors and the tears of his friends with the same n.o.ble constant smile, and, meeting two of his very old parishioners who wept, stopped and cheered _them_ as he went, adding, that he went on his way rejoicing.

Heroes and martyrs are perhaps too high examples, for they may have, or rather poor, common, every-day humanity will think they have, a kind of high-pressure sustainment. Let us look to our own prosaic days; let us mark the constant cheerfulness and manliness of Dr. Maginn, or that much higher heroic bearing of Tom Hood. We suppose that every body knows that Hood's life was not of that brilliant, sparkling, fizzing, banging, astonishing kind which writers such as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, and some others, depict as the general life of literary men. He did not, like Byron, "jump up one morning, and find himself famous." All the libraries were not asking for his novel, though a better was not written; countesses and dairy-women did not beg his autograph. His was a life of constant hard work, constant trial or disappointment, and constant illness, enlivened only by a home affection and a cheerfulness as constant as his pain. When slowly, slowly dying, he made cheerful fun as often almost as he said his prayers. He was heard, after, perhaps, being almost dead, to laugh gently to himself in the still night, when his wife or children, who were the watchers, thought him asleep. Many of the hard lessons of fate he seasoned, as old Latimer did his sermons, with a pun, and he excused himself from sending more "copy" for his magazine by a sketch, the "Editor's Apologies," a rough pen-and-ink drawing of physic-bottles and leeches. Yet Hood had not only his own woes to bear, but felt for others. No one had a more tender heart--few men a more catholic and Christian sympathy for the poor--than the writer of the "Song of the Shirt."

What such men as these have done, every one else surely can do.

Cheerfulness is a Christian duty; moroseness, dulness, gloominess, as false, and wrong, and cruel as they are unchristian. We are too far advanced now in the light of truth to go back into the Gothic and conventual gloom of the Middle Ages, any more than we could go back to the exercises of the Flagellants and the nonsense of the pre-Adamites.

All whole-hearted peoples have been lively and bustling, noisy almost, in their progress, pushing, energetic, broad in shoulder, strong in lung, loud in voice, of free brave color, bold look, and bright eyes.

They are the cheerful people in the world--

"Active doers, n.o.ble livers--strong to labors sure to conquer;"

and soon pa.s.s in the way of progress the more quiet and gloomy of their fellows. That some of this cheerfulness may be simply animal is true, and that a man may be a dullard and yet sit and "grin like a Cheshire cat;" but we are not speaking of grinning. Laughter is all very well; is a healthy, joyous, natural impulse; the true mark of superiority between man and beast, for no inferior animal laughs; but we are not writing of laughter, but of that continued even tone of spirits, which lies in the middle zone between frantic merriment and excessive despondency.

Cheerfulness arises from various causes: from health; but it is not dependent upon health;--from good fortune; but it does not arise solely from that;--from honor, and position, and a tickled pride and vanity; but, as we have seen, it is quite independent of these. The truth is, it is a brave habit of the mind; a prime proof of wisdom; capable of being acquired, and of the very greatest value.

A cheerful man is pre-eminently a useful man. He does not "cramp his mind, nor take half views of men and things." He knows that there is much misery, but that misery is not the rule of life. He sees that in every state people may be cheerful; the lambs skip, birds sing and fly joyously, puppies play, kittens are full of joyance, the whole air full of careering and rejoicing insects, that everywhere the good outbalances the bad, and that every evil that there is has its compensating balm.

Then the brave man, as our German cousins say, possesses the world, whereas the melancholy man does not even possess his own share of it.

Exercise, or continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do our duty.

Cheerful people live long in our memory. We remember joy more readily than sorrow, and always look back with tenderness on the brave and cheerful. Autolycus repeats the burden of an old song with the truth that "a merry heart goes all the day, but your sad ones tires a mile a!"

and what he says any one may notice, not only in ourselves, but in the inferior animals also. A sulky dog, and a bad-tempered horse, wear themselves out with half the labor that kindly creatures do. An unkindly cow will not give down her milk, and a sour sheep will not fatten; nay, even certain fowls and geese, to those who observe, will evidence temper--good or bad.

We can all cultivate our tempers, and one of the employments of some poor mortals is to cultivate, cherish, and bring to perfection, a thoroughly bad one; but we may be certain that to do so is a very gross error and sin, which, like all others, brings its own punishment, though, unfortunately, it does not punish itself only. If he "to whom G.o.d is pleasant is pleasant to G.o.d," the reverse also holds good; and certainly the major proposition is true with regard to man. Addison says of cheerfulness, that it lightens sickness, poverty, affliction; converts ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and renders deformity itself agreeable; and he says no more than the truth. "Give us, therefore, O! give us"--let us cry with Carlyle--"the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time; he will do it better; he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their appointed skies."

"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness! altogether past calculation the powers of its endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful must be uniformly joyous--a spirit all sunshine--graceful from very gladness--beautiful because bright." Such a spirit is within every body's reach. Let us get out into the light of things. The morbid man cries out that there is always enough wrong in the world to make a man miserable. Conceded; but wrong is ever being righted; there is always enough that is good and right to make us joyful. There is ever sunshine somewhere; and the brave man will go on his way rejoicing, content to look forward if under a cloud, not bating one jot of heart or hope if for a moment cast down; honoring his occupation, whatever it may be; rendering even rags respectable by the way he wears them; and not only being happy himself, but causing the happiness of others.

x.x.xVII.

HAROLD.

THE LAST SAXON KING OF ENGLAND.

The father of Harold, the last Saxon king of England, was named G.o.dwin, and was the first great English statesman. It was from him that Harold in a great measure inherited his vigor and power, though, indeed, he came altogether of a n.o.ble race, both by lineage and character, for his mother was a daughter of Canute the Great.

All the English loved Harold; he was strong and generous, and a better counselor than G.o.dwin, his father, in many ways. At first he never sought any thing for himself; but as time went on, and he found how he was obeyed, and how he was beloved, how the whole country turned her eyes to him as the fittest king when Edward the Confessor should be gone, he also took the same idea into his mind, and gave himself to rule, to teach, and to act as one who should by and by be king.

Edward's queen, Edith, was Harold's sister; but there was another Edith, who influenced Harold more than any one else in many ways. From his boyhood he and she had played together, and they grew up, never so much as thinking that a time would come when they would separate.

The more Harold saw her the more he felt he should like to ask her to be his wife, and have her always with him; but there were many things which made that impossible. And then England required Harold. If he thought only of his own happiness his country must suffer. The great n.o.bles wished him to establish the kingdom by marrying the daughter of one of the most powerful lords; this would connect the people and the land more closely, and prevent quarrels and divisions; and the government required the whole of Harold's services, and the people required his watchfulness, his thought, his care, his presence.

All his life through he had consulted Edith, and now at this terrible moment he consulted her again. He stood before her, and in great trouble and agony of spirit told her just how things were, scarcely daring to look at the woman he loved; for if he looked at her, England, her greatness and her needs, all melted away, and he saw nothing but a beaming vision of a quiet, beloved home, free from the storms of the great world outside.

But Edith too was unselfish, pure and good; so she put all thought of personal happiness away, and putting her hand on his shoulder, said, "Never, O Harold, did I feel so proud of thee, for Edith could not love thee as she doth, and will till the grave clasp her, if thou didst not love England more than Edith." So these two separated.

His whole energy was given to his king and his country. He had no great love for the monks; but he sought out the good and n.o.ble ones, put power into their hands, and gave them his support in ruling wisely and well.

The Abbey of Waltham had fallen into almost complete decay; he chose two humbly born men, renowned for the purity and benevolence of their lives, and gave to them the charge of selecting a new brotherhood there, which he largely endowed.

At last Edward pa.s.sed quietly away, and with one accord Harold, the beloved, was chosen king and crowned.

Over the sea dwelt William, duke of the Normans, With no careless ear did he hear that Edward was dead Edward dead! Edward! Why, Edward, in a moment of friendship, had promised the English throne to him--had even, William a.s.serted, left it him in will; therefore his rage was great when he heard that Harold was not only proclaimed and crowned king, but was ready to defend his claim by battle sooner than yield. William was a man of power and iron will; he forced his reluctant Normans to listen to his complaint, equipped an army, and sailed for Britain. On came the queer little ships of war, nearer and nearer to England's white, free cliffs, and cast anchor in Pevensey Bay.

William, eager and impatient, sprang from his ship; but his foot slipping, he fell, to rise again with both his hands full of earth, which he showed to his scared soldiers in triumph, crying:

"So do I grasp the earth of a new country."

Meanwhile Harold had gathered his forces, and they were a.s.sembled on Senlac Hill, an advantageous position. He himself was in the center, his brave brother Gurth at his right hand.

A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle, which raged the whole day, victory now leaning to the English and now to the Normans.

There was a cry that the duke was killed. "I live!" he shouted, "and by G.o.d's help will conquer yet!" And tearing off his helmet he rushed into the thickest of the battle, and aimed right at the standard. Round that standard the last sharp, long struggle took place. Harold, Gurth, all the greatest who still survived, met there. With his tremendous battle-ax the king did mighty slaughter, till, looking upward as he swung his ax with both hands, a Norman arrow pierced his eye, and he fell.

"Fight on!" he gasped. "Conceal my death--England to the rescue!" One instant he sprang to his feet, and then fell back--lifeless. One by one the other n.o.ble guardians fell around him, till only Gurth was left, brave chief and last man, with no thought of surrender, though all was gone and lost.

"Spare him! spare the brave!" shouted one; but the brave heart was already pierced, and he sank beside his king and brother. So fell the last of the Saxon kings, and so arose the Norman race.

Long did they search the battlefield for Harold's body, disfigured by wounds and loss of blood, but long did they seek it in vain, till a woman whose toil had never ceased burst into a sharp cry over a lifeless form. It was Edith, who with many another woman had watched the battle.

The body was too changed to be recognized even by its nearest friends; but beneath his heart was punctured in old Saxon letters "Edith," and just below, in characters more fresh, "England," the new love he had taken when duty bade him turn from Edith; which recalls the lines of Lovelace to Lucasta:

"Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe of the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not not honor more."

x.x.xVIII.