The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper Part 54

MARGARET.

A song of grat.i.tude and cheerful prayer Still shall go forth my pretty babes to greet, As on life's firmament, serenely fair, Their little stars arise, with aspects sweet Of mild successive radiance: that small pair, Ellen and Mary, having gone before In this affection's welcome, the dear debt Here shall be paid to gentle Margaret: Be thou indeed a pearl--in pureness, more Than beauty, praise, or price; full be thy cup, Mantling with grace, and truth with mercy met, With warm and generous charities flowing o'er; And when the Great King makes his jewels up, Shine forth, child-angel, in His coronet!

And while hovering about this fairy-land of sweet-home scenery, and confessing thankfully to these domestic affections, your author knows one heart at least that will be gladdened, one face that will be brightened by the following

BIRTH-DAY PRAYER.

Mother, dear mother, no unmeaning rhyme, No mere ingenious compliment of words, My heart pours forth at this auspicious time: I know a simple honest prayer affords More music on affection's thrilling cords, More joy, than can be measured or express'd In song most sweet, or eloquence sublime.

Mother, I bless thee! G.o.d doth bless thee too!

In these thy children's children thou _art_ blest, With dear old pleasures springing up anew: And blessings wait upon thee still, my mother!

Blessings to come, this many a happy year; For, losing thee, where could we find another So kind, so true, so tender, and--so dear?

Is it an impertinence--I speak etymologically--to have dropped that sonnet here?--Be it as you will, my Zoilus; let me stand convicted of honesty and love: I ask no higher praise in this than to have pleased my mother.

Penman as I am, have been, and shall be, innumerable letters have grown beneath my goose-quill. Who cannot say the same indeed? For in these patriotic days, for mere country's love and post-office prosperity, every body writes to every body about every thing, or, as oftener happens, about nothing. Nevertheless, I wish some kind pundit would invent a corrosive ink, warranted to consume a letter within a week after it had been read and answered: then should we have fewer of those ephemeral doc.u.ments treasured up in pigeon-holes, and docketed correspondence for possible publication. Not Byron, nor Lamb, nor West, nor Gray, with all their epistolary charms, avail to persuade my prejudice that it is honest to publish a private letter: if written with that view, the author is a hypocrite in his friendships; if not so, the decent veil of privacy is torn from social life, confidence is rebuked, betrayed, destroyed; and the suspicion of eaves-droppings and casual scribblings to be posthumously printed, makes silence truly wisdom, and grim reserve a virtue. This public appet.i.te for secret information, and, if possible, for hinted scandal--this unhallowed spirit of outward curiosity trespa.s.sing upon the sacred precincts of a man's own circle--is to the real author's mind a thing to be feared, if he is weak--to be circ.u.mspectly watched, if he is wise. Such is the present hunger for this kind of reading, that it would be diffidence, not presumption, in the merest school-boy to dread the future publication of his holiday letters; who knows--I may jump scathless from the Monument, or in these Popish times become excommunicated by special bull, or fly round the world in a balloon, or attain to the authorship of forty volumes, or be half-smothered by a valet-de-place, or get indicted for inveterate Toryism, or any how, I may--notwithstanding all present obscurities that intervene--wake one of these fine mornings, and find myself famous: and what then? The odds at Tattersall's would be twelve to one that sundry busy-bodies, booksellers or otherwise, would sc.r.a.pe together with malice prepense, and keep _cachet_ for future print, a mult.i.tude of careless scrawls that should have been burnt within an hour of the reading. Now, is not this a thing to be exclaimed against? And, utterly improbable on the ground of any merit in themselves as I should judge their publication (but for certain stolidities of the same sort, that often-times have wearied me in print), I choose to let my author's mind here enter its eternal protest against any such treachery regarding private

LETTERS.

Tear, scatter, burn, destroy--but keep them not; I hate, I dread those living witnesses Of varying self, of good or ill forgot, Of altered hopes, and withered kindnesses.

Oh! call not up those shadows of the dead, Those visions of the past, that idly blot The present with regret for blessings fled: This hand that wrote, this ever-teeming head, This flickering heart is full of chance and change; I would not have you watch my weaknesses, Nor how my foolish likings roam and range, Nor how the mushroom friendships of a day Hastened in hot-bed ripeness to decay, Nor how to mine own self I grow so strange.

So anathema to editors, maranatha to publishers of all such hypothetical post-obits!

Every one can comprehend something of an author's ease, when he sees his ma.n.u.script in print: it is safe; no longer a treasure uninsurable, no longer a locked-up care: it is emanc.i.p.ated, glorified, incapable of real extermination; it has reached a changeless condition; the chrysalis of illegible cacography has burst its bonds, and flies living through the world on the wings of those true Daedali, Faust, and Gutenberg: the transition-state is pa.s.sed: henceforth for his brain-child set free from that nervous slumber, its parent calmly can expect the oblivion of no more than a death-like sleep, if he be not indeed buoyed up with certain hope of immortality. "'Tis pleasant sure to see one's self in print," is the adequate cause for ninety books out of a hundred; and, though zeal might be the ostentatious stalking-horse, my candour shall give no better excuse for the fourteen lines that follow; they require but this preface: a most venerable chapel of old time, picturesque and full of interest, is dropping to decay, within a mile of me; where it is, and whose the fault, are askings improper to be answered: nevertheless, I cast upon the waters this meagre morsel of

APPEAL.

Shame on thee, Christian, cold and covetous one!

The laws (I praise them not for this) declare That ancient, loved, deserted house of prayer As money's worth a layman landlord's own.

Then use it as thine own; thy mansion there Beneath the shadow of this ruinous church Stands new and decorate; thine every shed And barn is neat and proper; I might search Thy comfortable farms, and well despair Of finding dangerous ruin overhead, And damp unwholesome mildew on the walls: Arouse thy better self: restore it; see, Through thy neglect the holy fabric falls!

Fear, lest that crushing guilt should fall on thee.

I fear much, poor book, this finale of jingling singing will jar upon the public ear; all men must shrink from a lengthy snake with a rattle in its tail: and this ballast a-stern of over-ponderous poetry may chance to swamp so frail a skiff. But I have promised a dozen sonnets in this after-thought Appendix; yea, and I will keep that promise at all mortal hazards, even to the superadded unit proverbial of dispensing Fornarinas. Ten have been told off fairly, and now we come upon the gay court-cards. After so much of villanous political ferment, society returns at length to its every-day routine, heedful of other oratory than harangues from the hustings, and glad of other reading than figurative party-speeches. Yet am I bold to recur, just for a thought or two, to my whilom patriotic hopes and fears: fears indeed came first upon me, but hopes finally out-voted them: briefly, then, begin upon the worst, and endure, with what patience you possess, this creaky stave of bitter

POLITICS.

Chill'd is the patriot's hope, the poet's prayer: Alas for England, and her tarnish'd crown, Her sun of ancient glory going down, Her foes triumphant in her friends' despair: What wonder should the billows overwhelm A bark so mann'd by Comus and his crew, "Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm?"

Yet, no!--we will not fear; the loathing realm At length has burst its chains; a motley few, The pseudo-saint, the boasting infidel, The demagogue, and courtier, hand in hand No more besiege our Zion's citadel: But high in hope comes on this n.o.bler band For G.o.d, the sovereign, and our father-land.

That last card, you may remember, must reckon as the knave; and therefore is consistently regarding an ominous trisyllable, which rhymes to "knavish tricks" in the national anthem; our suit now leads us in regular succession to the queen, a topic (it were Milesian to say a subject) whereon now, as heretofore, my loyalty shall never be found lacking. In old Rome's better antiquity, a slave was commissioned to whisper counsel in the ear of triumphant generals or emperors; and, in old England's less enlightened youth, a baubled fool was privileged to blurt out verities, which bearded wisdom dared not hint at. Now, I boast myself free, a citizen of no mean city--my commission signed by duty--my counsel guarantied by truth: and if, O still intruding Zoilus, the liberality of your nature provokes you to cla.s.s me truly in the family of fools, let your antiquarian ignorance of those licensed Gothamites blush at its abortive malice; the arrow of your sarcasm bounds from my target blunted; pick up again the harmless reed: for, not to insist upon the prevalence of knaves, and their moral postponement to mere lack-wits, let me tell you that wise men, and good men, and shrewd men, were those ancient baubled fools: therefore would I gladly be thought of their fraternity.

But our twelfth sonnet is waiting, save the mark! Stay: there ought to intervene a solemn pause; for your author's mind, on the spur of the occasion, pours forth an unpremeditated song of free-spoken, uncompromising, patriotic counsel; let its fervency atone for its presumption

Bold in my freedom, yet with homage meek, As duty prompts and loyalty commands, To thee, O, queen of empires! would I speak.

Behold, the most high G.o.d hath giv'n to thee Kingdoms and glories, might and majesty, Setting thee ruler over many lands; Him first to serve, O monarch, wisely seek: And many people, nations, languages, Have laid their welfare in thy sovereign hands; Them next to bless, to prosper and to please, n.o.bly forget thyself, and thine own ease: Rebuke ill-counsel; rally round thy state The scattered good, and true, and wise, and great: So Heav'n upon thee shed sweet influences!

And now for my Raffaellesque disguise of a vulgar baker's twelve, the largess m.u.f.fin of Mistress Fornarina: thirteen cards to a suit, and thirteen to the dozen, are proverbially the correct thing; but, as in regular succession I have come upon the king card, I am free to confess--(pen, why will you repeat again such a foolish, stale Joe-Millerism?)--the subject a dilemma. Natheless, my good nature shall give a royal chance to criticism most malign: whether candour acknowledge it or not, doubtless the author's mind reigns dominant in the author's book; and, notwithstanding the self-silence of blind Maeonides, (a right notable exception,) it holds good as a rule that the majority of original writings, directly or indirectly, concern a man's own self; his whims and his crotchets, his knowledge and his ignorance, wisdom and folly, experiences and suspicions, therein find a place prepared for them. Scott's life naturally produced his earlier novels; in the '_Corsair_,' the '_Childe_,' and the '_Don_,' no one can mistake the hero-author; Southey's works, Sh.e.l.ley's, and Wordsworth's, are full of adventure, feeling, and fancy, personal to the writers, at least equally with the sonnets of Petrarch or of Shakspeare. And as with instances ill.u.s.trious as those, so with all humbler followers, the skiffs, pinnaces, and heavy barges in the wake of those gallant ships: an author's library, and his friends, his hobbies and amus.e.m.e.nts, business and pleasure, fears and wishes, accidents of life, and qualities of soul, all mingle in his writings with a harmonizing individuality; nay, the very countenance and hand-writing, alike with choice of subject and style and method of their treatment, ill.u.s.trate, in one word, the author's mind. These things being so, what hinders it from occupying, as in honesty it does, the king's place in this pack of sonnets? Nevertheless, forasmuch as by such occupancy an ill-tempered sarcasm might charge it with conceit; know then that my humbler meaning here is to put it lowest and last, even in the place of wooden-spoon; for this also (being mindful of the twelve apostle-spoons from old time antecedent) is a legitimate thirteener: and so, while in extricating my muse from the folly of serenading a non-existent king, I have candidly avowed the general selfishness of printing, believe that, in this avowal, I take the lowest seat, so well befitting one of whom it may ungraciously be asked, Where do fools buy their logic?

List, then, oh list! while generically, not individually I claim for authorship

THE CATHEDRAL MIND.

Temple of truths most eloquently spoken, Shrine of sweet thoughts veiled round with words of power, The '_Author's Mind_,' in all its hallowed riches, Stands a cathedral: full of precious things; Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken, Cloister, and aisle, dark crypt, and aery tower: Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches, And secret stores, and heap'd-up offerings, Art's n.o.blest gems, with every fruit and flower, Paintings and sculpture, choice imaginings, Its plenitude of wealth and praise betoken: An ever-burning lamp portrays the soul; Deep music all around enchantment flings; And G.o.d's great Presence consecrates the whole.

Now at length, in all verity, I have said out my say: nor publisher nor printer shall get more copy from me: neither, indeed, would it before have been the case, for all that Damastic argument, were it not that many beginnings--and you remember my proverbial preliminarizing--should, for mere ant.i.thesis' sake, be endowed with a counterpoise of many endings. So, in this second parting, let me humbly suggest to gentle reader these: that nothing is at once more plebeian and unphilosophical than--censure, in a world where nothing can be perfect, and where apathy is held to be good-breeding; _item_, (I am quoting Scott,) that "it is much more easy to destroy than to build, to criticise than to compose;"

_item_, (Sir Walter again, _ipsissima verba_, in a letter to Miss Seward,) that there are certain literary "gentlemen who appear to be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to _make_ pots and pans, set up for _menders_ of them, and often make two holes in patching one;" _item_, that in such possible cases as "exercise" for "exorcise," "repeat" for "repent," "depreciate" for "deprecate," and the like, an indifferent scribe is always at the mercy of compositors; and lastly, that if it is, by very far, easier to read a book than to write one, it is also, by at least as much, worthier of a n.o.ble mind to give credit for good intentions, rather than for bad, or indifferent, or none at all, even where hyper-criticism may appear to prove that the effort itself has been a failure.

PROBABILITIES;

AN AID TO FAITH.

BY

Martin Farquhar Tupper, A.M., F.R.S.

THE AUTHOR OF

"PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY ALMOST THOU PERSUADEST ME TO BE A CHRISTIAN."

CONTENTS

SUBJECTS. PAGE.

An Aid to Faith 459

G.o.d and his Attributes 466

The Triunity 472

The G.o.dhead Visible 476