Gryll Grange Part 9

He called his boy with morning light, Told him the vision of the night, And bade his play be brought.

His finished page again he scanned, Resting his head upon his hand, Absorbed in studious thought He knew not what the dream foreshowed: That nought divine may hold abode Where death's dark shade is felt: And therefore were the Muses nine Leaving the old poetic shrine, Where they so long had dwelt.

II

The theatre was thronged once more, More thickly than the day before, To hear the half-heard song.

The day wore on. Impatience came.

They called upon Philemon's name, With murmurs loud and long.

Some sought at length his studious cell, And to the stage returned, to tell What thousands strove to ask.

'The poet we have been to seek Sate with his hand upon his cheek, As pondering o'er his task.

'We spoke. He made us no reply.

We reverentially drew nigh, And twice our errand told.

He answered not We drew more near The awful mystery then was clear: We found him stiff and cold.

'Struck by so fair a death, we stood Awhile in sad admiring mood: Then hastened back, to say That he, the praised and loved of all, Is deaf for ever to your call: That on this self-same day, 'When here presented should have been The close of his fict.i.tious scene, His life's true scene was o'er: We seemed, in solemn silence awed, To hear the "Farewell and applaud,"

Which he may speak no more.

'Of tears the rain gave prophecy: The nuptial dance of comedy Yields to the funeral train.

a.s.semble where his pyre must burn: Honour his ashes in their urn: And on another day return To hear his songs again.'

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ A beautiful fiction.

_Mr. Falconer._ If it be a fiction. The supernatural is confined to the dream. All the rest is probable; and I am willing to think it true, dream and all.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ You are determined to connect the immaterial with the material world, as far as you can.

_Mr. Falconer._ I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Certainly, there is much in the material world to displease sensitive and imaginative minds; but I do not know any one who has less cause to complain of it than you have. You are surrounded with all possible comforts, and with all the elements of beauty, and of intellectual enjoyment.

_Mr. Falconer._ It is not my own world that I complain of.

It is the world on which I look 'from the loopholes of retreat.' I cannot sit here, like one of the G.o.ds of Epicurus, who, as Cicero says, was satisfied with thinking, through all eternity, 'how comfortable he was.'{1} I look with feelings of intense pain on the ma.s.s of poverty and crime; of unhealthy, unavailing, unremunerated toil, blighting childhood in its blossom, and womanhood in its prime; of 'all the oppressions that are done under the sun.'

1 Comprehende igitur animo, et propone ante oculos, deura nihil aliud in omni aeternitate, nisi, Mihi pulchre est, et, Ego beatus sum, cogitant em.--Cicero: _De natura deorum_, 1. i. c. 41.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I feel with you on all these points; but there is much good in the world; more good than evil, I have always maintained.

They would have gone off in a discussion on this point, but the French cook warned them to luncheon.

In the evening the young lady was sufficiently recovered to join the little party in the drawing-room, which consisted, as before, of Mr.

Falconer, Mr. Gryll, Doctor Anodyne, and the Reverend Doctor Opimian.

Miss Gryll was introduced to _Mr. Falconer._ She was full of grateful encomium for the kind attention of the sisters, and expressed an earnest desire to hear their music. The wish was readily complied with. She heard them with great pleasure, and, though not yet equal to much exertion, she could not yet refrain from joining in with them in their hymn to Saint Catharine.

She accompanied them when they retired.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I presume those Latin words are genuine old monastic verses: they have all the air of it.

_Mr. Falconer._ They are so, and they are adapted to old music.

Dr. Anodyne. There is something in this hymn very solemn and impressive.

In an age like ours, in which music and pictures are the predominant tastes, I do not wonder that the forms of the old Catholic worship are received with increasing favour. There is a sort of adhesion to the old religion, which results less from faith than from a certain feeling of poetry; it finds its disciples; but it is of modern growth; and has very essential differences from what it outwardly resembles.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ It is, as I have frequently had occasion to remark, and as my young friend here will readily admit, one of the many forms of the love of ideal beauty, which, without being in itself religion, exerts on vivid imaginations an influence that is very often like it.

_Mr. Falconer._ An orthodox English Churchman was the poet who sang to the Virgin:

'Thy image fells to earth. Yet some, I ween, Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend, As to a visible Power, in which did blend All that was mixed and reconciled in thee, Of mother's love with maiden purity, Of high with low, celestial with terrene.'{1}

1 Wordsworth: Ecclesiastical Sonnets, i 21.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._--Well, my young friend, the love of ideal beauty has exercised none but a benignant influence on you, whatever degree of orthodoxy there may be in your view of it.

The little party separated for the night.

CHAPTER XII

THE FOREST DELL--THE POWER OF LOVE--THE LOTTERY OF MARRIAGE

(Greek pa.s.sage) Philetaerus: Cynagis.

I pray you, what can mortal man do better Than live his daily life as pleasantly As daily means avail him? Life's frail tenure Warns not to trust to-morrow.

The next day Mr. Falconer was perfectly certain that Miss Gryll was not yet well enough to be removed. No one was anxious to refute the proposition; they were all so well satisfied with,the place and the company they were in, that they felt, the young lady included, a decided unwillingness to go. That day Miss Gryll came to dinner, and the next day she came to breakfast, and in the evening she joined in the music, and, in short, she was once more altogether herself; but Mr. Falconer continued to insist that the journey home would be too much for her.

When this excuse failed, he still entreated his new friends to remain; and so pa.s.sed several days. At length Mr. Gryll found he must resolve on departing, especially as the time had arrived when he expected some visitors. He urgently invited Mr. Falconer to visit him in return. The invitation was cordially accepted, and in the meantime considerable progress had been made in the Aristophanic comedy. Mr. Falconer, after the departure of his visitors, went up into his library. He took down oner book after another, but they did not fix his attention as they used to do; he turned over the leaves of Homer, and read some pa.s.sages about Circe; then took down Bojardo, and read of Morgana and Falerina and Dragontina; then took down Ta.s.so and read of Armida. He would not look at Ariosto's Alcina, because her change into an old woman destroyed all the charm of the previous picture. He dwelt on the enchantress who remained in unaltered beauty. But even this he did only by fits and starts, and found himself continually wandering away towards a more enchanting reality.

He descended to his bedroom, and meditated on ideal beauty in the portraits of Saint Catharine. But he could not help thinking that the ideal might be real, at least in one instance, and he wandered down into his drawing-room. There he sat absorbed in thought, till his two young handmaids appeared with his luncheon. He smiled when he saw them, and sat down to the table as if nothing had disturbed him. Then, taking his stick and his dog, he walked out into the forest.

There was within moderate distance a deep dell, in the bottom of which ran a rivulet, very small in dry weather, but in heavy rains becoming a torrent, which had worn itself a high-banked channel, winding in fantastic curves from side to side of its narrow boundaries. Above this channel old forest trees rose to a great height on both sides of the dell The slope every here and there was broken by promontories which during centuries the fall of the softer portions of the soil had formed; and on these promontories were natural platforms, covered, as they were more or less accessible to the sun, with gra.s.s and moss and fern and foxglove, and every variety of forest vegetation. These platforms were favourite resorts of deer, which imparted to the wild scene its own peculiar life.

This was a scene in which, but for the deeper and deeper wear of the floods and the bolder falls of the promontories, time had made little change. The eyes of the twelfth century had seen it much as it appeared to those of the nineteenth. The ghosts of departed ages might seem to pa.s.s through it in succession, with all their changes of faith and purpose and manners and costume. To a man who loved to dwell in the past, there could not be a more congenial scene. One old oak stood in the centre of one of the green platforms, and a portion of its gnarled roots presented a convenient seat. Mr. Falconer had frequently pa.s.sed a day here when alone. The deer had become too accustomed to him to fly at his approach, and the dog had been too well disciplined to molest them.

There he had sat for hours at a time, reading his favourite poets.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Reading his favourite poets. 107-77]

There was no great poet with some of whose scenes this scenery did not harmonise. The deep woods that surrounded the dwelling of Circe, the obscure sylvan valley in which Dante met Virgil, the forest depths through which Angelica fled, the enchanted wood in which Rinaldo met the semblance of Armida, the forest-brook by which Jaques moralised over the wounded deer, were all reproduced in this single spot, and fancy peopled it at pleasure with nymphs and genii, fauns and satyrs, knights and ladies, friars, foresters, hunters, and huntress maids, till the whole diurnal world seemed to pa.s.s away like a vision. There, for him, Matilda had gathered flowers on the opposite bank;{1} Laura had risen from one of the little pools--resting-places of the stream--to seat herself in the shade;{2} Rosalind and Maid Marian had peeped forth from their alleys green; all different in form, in feature, and in apparel; but now they were all one; each, as she rose in imagination, presented herself under the aspect of the newly-known Morgana.

1 Dante: Purgatorio, c. 28.

2 Or in forma di Ninfa o d' altra Diva, Che del piu chiaro fondo di Sorga esca, E pongasi a seder in sulla riva.

PETRARCA: Sonetto 240.

Finding his old imaginations thus disturbed, he arose and walked home.

He dined alone, drank a bottle of Madeira, as if it had been so much water, summoned the seven sisters to the drawing-room earlier and detained them later than usual, till their music and its old a.s.sociations had restored him to something like tranquillity. He had always placed the _summum bonum_ of life in tranquillity, and not in excitement. He felt that his path was now crossed by a disturbing force, and determined to use his utmost exertions to avoid exposing himself again to its influence.