My Life as an Author Part 20

"Lo! on this sensitive, link-- It is one link, not a chain-- Man with his brother can think Spanning the breadth of the main,-- Man to his brother can speak Swift as the bolt from a cloud, And where its thunders were weak There his least whisper is loud!

"Yea; for as Providence wills, Now doth intelligent man Conquer material ills, Wrestling them down as he can,-- And lay one weak little coil Under the width of the waves, Distance and Time are his spoil, Fetter'd as Caliban slaves!

"Ariel?--right through the sea We can fly swift as in air; Puck?--forty minutes shall be Sloth to the bow that we bear: Here is Earth's girdle indeed, Just a thought-circlet of fire,-- Delicate Ariel freed Sings, as she flies, on a wire!

"Courage, O servants of light, For you are safe to succeed; Lo! you are helping the Right, And shall be blest in your deed.

Lo! you shall bind in one band, Joining the nations as one, Brethren of every land, Blessing them under the sun!

"This is Earth's pulse of high health Thrilling with vigour and heat, Brotherhood, wisdom and wealth, Throbbing in every beat; But you must watch in good sooth Lest to false fever it swerve,-- Touch it with tenderest truth As the world's exquisite nerve!

"Let the first message across-- High-hearted Commerce, give heed-- Not be of profit or loss, But one electric indeed: Praise to the Giver be given, For that He giveth man skill, Glory to G.o.d in the Heaven!

'Peace upon earth, and goodwill!'"

Another Electric poem of mine called "The First Message," also in Gall's edition, was sent over by telegraph to America. What a miserable muddle, by the way, those meddlesome revisers have made of The Angel's Message;--preferring a dubious sigma to a comma, they have utterly spoilt that sublime trilogy by making "Peace upon earth, goodwill towards men," read "Peace upon earth among men in whom he is well pleased." How clumsy and how ungrammatical, _in_ whom! The whole dear Bible has been terribly damaged by their 36,000 needless alterations in the New Testament (not 100 having been really necessary), and I know not how many more myriads in the Old, but happily their Version falls dead, and will soon be as forgotten as Dr. Conquest's "Bible with 20,000 emendations," whereof I now possess a somewhat scarce copy in the library at Albury. I have less than no patience with those princ.i.p.ally clerical revisers; albeit for their chairman, Dr. Ellicott, I retain a pleasant memory from Orkney recollections in old days.

But this is a digression, wrung from me by my righteous wrath against those who have done their worst to spoil for us The Angel's Message, the first word uttered by the telegraphic wire under the sea.

Returning to the subject of Electrics I have something of interest to say which will be news to my readers. One day when casually dipping into Addison's _Spectator_ at Albury, I made the following discovery which I recorded in the newspapers at the time, and give the extract now fully as thus:--

In the 241st No. of Addison's _Spectator_, bearing date Thursday, December 6th, 1711, and as signed "C." (one of the letters of the mystic Clio), by the great Joseph Addison himself, occurs the following remarkable antic.i.p.ation of our presumably most modern discovery. Those who have access to the London edition of the _Spectator_ of 1841, published by J.J. Chidley, 123 Aldersgate Street, can verify the verbatim faithfulness of the following extract from page 274:--

"Strada, in one of his Prolusions (Lib. II. prol. 6), gives an account of a chimerical correspondence between two friends by the help of a certain loadstone, which had such virtue in it, that if it touched two several needles, when one of the needles so touched began to move, the other, though at never so great a distance, moved at the same time, and in the same manner. He tells us that the two friends, being each of them possessed of one of those needles, made a kind of dial-plate, inscribing it with four-and-twenty letters, in the same manner as the hours of the day are marked upon the ordinary dial-plate. They then fixed one of the needles on each of these plates in such a manner that it could move round without impediment, so as to touch any of the four-and-twenty letters.

"Upon their separating from one another into distant countries, they agreed to withdraw themselves punctually into their closets at a certain hour of the day, and to converse with one another by means of this their invention.

"Accordingly, when they were some hundred miles asunder, each of them shut himself up in his closet at the time appointed, and immediately cast his eye upon his dial-plate. If he had a mind to write anything to his friend, he directed his needle to every letter that formed the words which he had occasion for, making a little pause at the end of every word or sentence, to avoid confusion.

"The friend in the meanwhile saw his own sympathetic needle moving of itself to every letter which that of his correspondent pointed at. By this means they talked together across a whole continent, and conveyed their thoughts to one another in an instant over cities or mountains, seas or deserts.

"If Monsieur Scudery, or any other writer of romance, had introduced a necromancer, who is generally in the train of a knight-errant, making a present to two lovers of a couple of these above-mentioned needles, the reader would not have been a little pleased to have seen them corresponding with one another when they were guarded by spies and watchers, or separated by castles and adventures.

"In the meanwhile, if ever this invention should be revived or put in practice, I would propose that upon the lover's dial-plate there should be written not only the four-and-twenty letters, but several entire words which have always a place in pa.s.sionate epistles, as flames, darts, die, language, absence, Cupid, heart, eyes, hang, drown, and the like. This would very much abridge the lover's pains in this way of writing a letter, as it would enable him to express the most useful and significant words with a single touch of the needle.--C."

Thus far Addison, a hundred and seventy years ago, and Strada (whoever he may be, for ordinary biographical dictionaries ignore him), perhaps fifty before him, and the two unknown experimentalists, perhaps twenty beyond that, making in all two hundred and forty or fifty years ago as the date of electrical invention: whereof we see no further mention in the _Spectator_. But is it not also among the "Century of the Marquis of Worcester's Inventions"?--as is possible; the scarce volume is not near me for reference. Let the curious reader who can, turn to it and see.

Meanwhile, how strangely Addison and Strada have antic.i.p.ated the dial-plate, and the needles, and the letters, and the short forms for common words, all so familiar to our telegraphists. Verily there is nothing new under the sun.

Extract from my Archive-book, No. 8. Date October 15, 1856.

"I was again an electric guest, this time at the Great Albion dinner (Liverpool) to Mr. Morse, whom I had met at Erith and in America. A day or two afterwards I sent him a letter of invitation to Albury, enclosing the sonnet below; and not knowing his London address I posted it to my brother Charles in London for him to read and forward. Lucky enough that I did so, for Mr. Morse had just sailed for America: so Charles had both prose and poetry telegraphed to him in New York,--and the Company would not charge any money for it! This is perhaps the only time a sonnet ever travelled by telegraph, and certainly the only time it ever so travelled gratis."

Here it is, for which I had a very complimentary and grateful note from "Samuel F.B. Morse, as an ardent admirer," &c. As never in print till now, I trust it will be acceptable to my readers. Mr. Morse's published speech was religiously high-minded and true-hearted, as indicated in the sonnet.

_To Professor Morse, in pleasant memory of October 10, 1856, at the Albion._

"A good and generous spirit ruled the hour; Old jealousies were drowned in brotherhood, Philanthropy rejoiced that skill and power, Servants to science, compa.s.s all men's good; And over all Religion's banner stood, Upheld by _thee_, true Patriarch of the plan Which in two hemispheres was schemed to shower Mercies from G.o.d on universal man.

Yes, this electric chain from East to West More than mere metal, more than Mammon can, Binds us together kinsmen, in the best As most affectionate and frankest bond, Brethren at one, and looking far beyond The world in an electric union blest."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

THE RIFLE: A PATRIOTIC PROPHECY.

There is an extinct pamphlet, now before me, published by Routledge in 1860, ent.i.tled "The Rifle Movement Foreshown in Prose and Verse from 1848 to the Present Time,"--from my pen,--which proves that, in conjunction with my friend Evelyn and a few others, I may justly claim to have originated that cheap defence of England, at Albury, more than a dozen years before it was thought of anywhere by any one else. Take the trouble to read the following longish extract from the fifth edition of the above, and please not to omit the leash of ballads wherewith it ends.

"And now, next, about this Rifle pamphlet. Every page carries its date honestly, and several very curiously. In some of the editions there appears a rifle ballad of mine, written in 1845, and published in 1846 (in the first issue of my Ballads and Poems--Hall & Virtue) with the strange t.i.tle "Rise Britannia, _a Stirring Song for Patriots in the Year 1860_:" an antic.i.p.ation by fourteen years of the actual date of the Rifle Movement. In all the editions, the papers on 'Cheap Security'

(being Talks between Naaman m.u.f.f (a Quaker), Till (a commercial gent), Dolt (a philanthropist), Funker (an ordinary unwarlike paterfamilias), and a certain Tom Wydeawake (patriotic but peculiar)) contain detailed allusions, though written several years before any definite existence, to the National Rifle a.s.sociation, and to exactly such annual prize gatherings of riflemen as those at Wimbledon Common and Brighton Downs, and this latest at Blackheath. The discouragements of Tom Wydeawake and his few compeers were remarkable. He himself might fairly have claimed the honours of origination, discussed some two or three years ago, but he left them to others--_Sic vos non vobis_, &c."

"Without mentioning names, several--since distinguished as prominent in Rifledom--were once, to my certain knowledge, and still to be evidenced by their extant letters, bitterly opposed to the whole movement,--and I cannot conclude these remarks better or more appositely than by adding here, with real dates, the three following ballads, which tell their own tale briefly and suggestively." I print them here, as they are now to be found nowhere else.

The first, published in newspapers during June 1859 (following several others of a like character, with my name or without it), was the origin of the Volunteers' motto--being headed

_Defence not Defiance._

"Nearer the muttering thunders roll, Blacker and heavier frowns the sky,-- Yet our dauntless English soul Faces the storm with a steady eye; Hands are strong where hearts are stout; Our rifles are ready--look out!

"No one wishes the storm to roll here-- No one cares such a devil to raise,-- And in brotherhood, not in fear, Only for peace an Englishman prays,-- Yet he may shout in the midst of the rout, Our rifles are ready--look out!

"Keep to your own, like an honest man, And here's our hand, and here's our heart, Let the world see how wisely you can Play to the end a right neighbourly part,-- But if mischief is creeping about, Our rifles are ready--look out!

"No defiance is on our lips, Nothing but kindliness greets you here; Still, in the storm our dolphin ships Round the Eddystone dart and steer,-- And on sh.o.r.e--no doubt, no doubt-- Our rifles are ready--look out!

"Not Defiance, but only Defence, Hold we forth for humanity's sake,-- And, with the help of Omnipotence, We shall stand when the mountains quake: Only in Him our hearts are stout; Our rifles are ready--look out!"

_A Rhyme for Albury Club._

"A rhyme for the Club, for the brave little Club That stoutly went forward when others held back, And, reckless of many a sneer and a snub, Steer'd manfully straight upon Duty's own tack,-- Though quarrelsome peacemongers did their small worst, In spite of their tongues and in spite of their teeth, We stood up for England among the few first, With rifles and targets on Surrey Blackheath!

"Time was when Tom Wydeawake, ten years agone, Toil'd to arouse dull old Britain betimes, By example--he shouldered his rifle alone, By precept--he showered his letters and rhymes,-- With bullets he peppered old Sherborne's hillside, With ballads and articles worried the Press,-- The more he was sneer'd at, the stronger he tried, And would not be satisfied short of Success.

"And now is his Fancy the front of the van, And England an archer, as in the past years, And stout middle age carries arms like a man, And all the young fellows are smart Volunteers: And Herbert, and Elcho, and Spencer, and Hay, And Mildmay, and all the best names in the land On a national scale achieve grandly to-day What Wydeawake schemed with his brave little band!

"Then cheers for the Queen! for the Club! and the Corps!

For Grantley, and Evelyn, and Sidmouth, and all; With Franklin, and Mangles, and six dozen more, The first to spring forth at Britannia's call!

And long may we live with all peaceably here-- For olive, not laurel, is Glory's true wreath-- But if the wolf comes, he had better keep clear Of a Club of crack shots upon Surrey Blackheath!"

_July 1860._

And the third is a small record of our Easter Monday's Review, 1864, alluding to the present universality of the Rifle Movement contrasted with its originally small beginnings on the same spot.

_Surrey Blackheath._