The World's Greatest Books - Volume 9 Part 17

Had he slid into the pa.s.sages, where it is dark, or had he indeed, when in the yard, met with no interruption from the cat, and secreted himself in any of the out-houses, it is hardly possible but that some member of the family must have been bitten.

_To the Same_

Olney, _November_ 4, 1782. You tell me that John Gilpin made you laugh to tears, and that the ladies at court are delighted with my poems. Much good may they do them! May they become as wise as the writer wished them, and they will be much happier than he. I know there is in the book that wisdom that cometh from above, because it was from above that I received it. May they receive it too! For whether they drink it out of the cistern, or whether it falls upon them immediately from the clouds--as it did on me--is all one. It is the water of life, which whosoever shall drink it shall thirst no more. As to the famous horseman above mentioned, he and his feats are an inexhaustible source of merriment. At least we find him so, and seldom meet without refreshing ourselves with the recollection of them. You are at liberty to deal with them as you please.

_To Mrs. Newton_

Olney, _November_ 23, 1782. Accept my thanks for the trouble you take in vending my poems, and still more for the interest you take in their success. To be approved by the great, as Horace observed many years ago, is fame indeed.

The winter sets in with great severity. The rigour of the season, and the advanced price of grain, are very threatening to the poor. It is well with those that can feed upon a promise, and wrap themselves up warm in the robe of salvation. A good fireside and a well-spread table are but very indifferent subst.i.tutes for those better accommodations; so very indifferent, that I would gladly exchange them both for the rags and the unsatisfied hunger of the poorest creature that looks forward with hope to a better world, and weeps tears of joy in the midst of penury and distress.

What a world is this! How mysteriously governed, and in appearance left to itself! One man, having squandered thousands at a gaming-table, finds it convenient to travel; gives his estate to somebody to manage for him; amuses himself a few years in France and Italy; returns, perhaps, wiser than he went, having acquired knowledge which, but for his follies, he would never have acquired; again makes a splendid figure at home, shines in the senate, governs his country as its minister, is admired for his abilities, and, if successful, adored at least by a party. When he dies, he is praised as a demi-G.o.d, and his monument records everything but his vices.

The exact contrary of such a picture is to be found in many cottages at Olney. I have no need to describe them; you know the characters I mean.

They love G.o.d, they trust Him, they pray to Him in secret, and, though He means to reward them openly, the day of recompense is delayed. In the meantime, they suffer everything that infirmity and poverty can inflict upon them. Who would suspect, that has not a spiritual eye to discern it, that the fine gentleman was one whom his Maker had in abhorrence, and the wretch last mentioned dear to Him as the apple of His eye?

It is no wonder that the world, who are not in the secret, find themselves obliged, some of them, to doubt a Providence, and others absolutely to deny it, when almost all the real virtue there is in it is to be found living and dying in a state of neglected obscurity, and all the vices of others cannot exclude them from worship and honour. But behind the curtain the matter is explained, very little, however, to the satisfaction of the great.

_To the Rev. John Newton_

Olney, _January_ 26, 1783. It is reported among persons of the best intelligence at Olney--the barber, the schoolmaster, and the drummer of a corps quartered at this place--that the belligerent powers are at last reconciled, the articles of the treaty adjusted, and that peace is at the door.

The powers of Europe have clashed with each other to a fine purpose.

Your opinions and mine, I mean our political ones, are not exactly of a piece, yet I cannot think otherwise on this subject than I have always done. England, more perhaps through the fault of her generals than her councils, has in some instances acted with a spirit of cruel animosity she was never chargeable with till now. But this is the worst that can be said.

On the other hand, the Americans, who, if they had contented themselves with a struggle for lawful liberty, would have deserved applause, seem to me to have incurred the guilt of parricide, by renouncing their parent, by making her ruin their favourite object, and by a.s.sociating themselves with her worst enemy for the accomplishment of their purpose.

France, and, of course, Spain, have acted a treacherous, a thievish part. They have stolen America from England, and, whether they are able to possess themselves of that jewel or not hereafter, it was doubtless what they intended. Holland appears to me in a meaner light than any of them. They quarrelled with a friend for an enemy's sake. The French led them by the nose, and the English have thrashed them for suffering it.

My views of the contest being as they have always been, I have consequently brighter hopes for England than her situation some time since seemed to justify. She is the only injured party.

America may perhaps call her the aggressor; but, if she were so, America has not only repelled the injury, but done a greater. As to the rest, if perfidy, treachery, avarice, and ambition can prove their cause to have been a rotten one, those proofs are found on them. I think, therefore, that, whatever scourge may be prepared for England on some future day, her ruin is not yet to be expected.

_To the Same_

Olney, _November_ 17, 1783. Swift observes, when he is giving his reasons why the preacher is elevated always above his hearers, that, let the crowd be as great as it will below, there is always room enough overhead.

If the French philosophers can carry their art of flying to the perfection they desire, the observation may be reversed, the crowd will be overhead, and they will have most room who stay below. I can a.s.sure you, however, upon my own experience, that this way of travelling is very delightful.

I dreamt a night or two since that I drove myself through the upper regions in a balloon and pair, with the greatest ease and security.

Having finished the tour I intended, I made a short turn, and with one flourish of my whip, descended; my horses prancing and curvetting with an infinite share of spirit, but without the least danger either to me or my vehicle. The time, we may suppose, is at hand, and seems to be prognosticated by my dream, when these airy excursions will be universal, when judges will fly the circuit and bishops their visitations, and when the tour of Europe will be performed with much greater speed and with equal advantage by all who travel merely for the sake of saying that they have made it.

_To His Cousin, Lady Hesketh_

Olney, _November_ 9, 1785. I am happy that my poems have pleased you. My volume has afforded me no such pleasure at any time, either while I was writing it or since its publication, as I have derived from yours and my uncle's opinion of it. But, above all, I honour John Gilpin, since it was he who first encouraged you to write. I made him on purpose to laugh at, and he served his purpose well.

_To the Same_

Olney, _February_ 9, 1786. Let me tell you that your kindness in promising to visit us has charmed us both. I shall see you again. I shall hear your voice. We shall take walks together. I will show you my prospects, the hovel, the alcove, the banks of the Ouse, everything I have described. My dear, I will not let you come till the end of May, or the beginning of June, because, before that time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us. When the plants go out, we go in.

I will tell you what you shall find at your first entrance. _Imprimis_, as soon as you have entered the vestibule, if you cast a look on either side of you, you shall see on the right hand a box of my making. It is the box in which have been lodged all my hares, and in which lodges Puss at present. But he, poor fellow, is worn out with age, and promises to die before you can see him.

My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns, and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which Jupiter keeps his wine. He swears that it is a cask, and that it will never be anything better than a cask to all eternity. So if the G.o.d is content with it, we must even wonder at his taste and be so too.

_To the Same_

Olney, _March_ 6, 1786. Your opinion has more weight with me than that of all the critics in the world. To give you a proof of it, I make you a concession that I would hardly have made to them all united. I do not indeed absolutely covenant that I will discard all my elisions, but I hereby bind myself to discard as many of them as, without sacrificing energy to sound, I can. It is inc.u.mbent on me, in the meantime, to say something in justification of the few I shall retain, that I may not seem a poet mounted on a mule rather than on Parna.s.sus. In the first place, "the" is a barbarism. We are indebted for it to the Celts, or the Goths, or the Saxons, or perhaps to them all. In the two best languages that ever were spoken, the Greek and the Latin, there is no similar enc.u.mbrance of expression to be found. Secondly, the perpetual use of it in our language is, to us miserable poets, attended with two great inconveniences.

Our verse consisting of only ten syllables, it not infrequently happens that the fifth part of a line is to be engrossed, and necessarily too, unless elision prevents it, by this abominable intruder; and, which is worse in my account, open vowels are continually the consequence--_the_ element--_the_ air, etc. Thirdly, the French, who are equally chargeable with the English with barbarism in this particular, dispose of their _le_ and their _la_ without ceremony, and always take care that they shall be absorbed, both in verse and in prose, in the vowel that immediately follows them. Fourthly, and I believe lastly, the practice of cutting short "the" is warranted by Milton, who of all English poets that ever lived, had certainly the finest ear.

Thou only critic of my verse that is to be found in all the earth, whom I love, what shall I say in answer to your own objection to that pa.s.sage--

Softly he placed his hand On th' old man's hand, and pushed it gently away.

I can say neither more nor less than this, that when our dear friend the general sent me his opinion on the specimen, quoting those very words from it, he added, "With this part I was particularly pleased; there is nothing in poetry more descriptive."

Taste, my dear, is various; there is nothing so various, and even between persons of the best taste there are diversities of opinion on the same subject, for which it is by no means possible to account.

_To John Johnson, Esq._

Weston, _June_ 7, 1790. You never pleased me more than when you told me you had abandoned your mathematical pursuits. It grieved me to think that you were wasting your time merely to gain a little Cambridge fame, not worth having. I cannot be contented that your renown should thrive nowhere but on the banks of the Cam. Conceive a n.o.bler ambition, and never let your honour be circ.u.mscribed by the paltry dimensions of a university! It is well that you have already, as you observe, acquired sufficient information in that science to enable you to pa.s.s creditably such examinations as, I suppose, you must hereafter undergo. Keep what you have gotten, and be content.

You could not apply to a worse than I am to advise you concerning your studies. I was never a regular student myself, but lost the most valuable years of my life in an attorney's office and in the Temple. It seems to me that your chief concern is with history, natural philosophy, logic, and divinity. As to metaphysics, I know little about them. Life is too short to afford time even for serious trifles. Pursue what you know to be attainable, make truth your object, and your studies will make you a wise man. Let your divinity, if I may advise, be the divinity of the glorious Reformation. I mean in contradiction to Arminianism, and all the _isms_ that were ever broached in this world of ignorance and error.

_Obiter Dicta_

Men of lively imaginations are not often remarkable for solidity of judgement. They have strong pa.s.sions to bias it, and are led far away from their proper road, in pursuit of petty phantoms of their own creating.

Excellence is providentially placed beyond the reach of indolence, that success may be the reward of industry, and that idleness may be punished with obscurity and disgrace.

I do not think that in these costermonger days, as I have a notion Falstaff calls them, an antediluvian age is at all a desirable thing, but to live comfortably while we do live is a great matter, and comprehends in it everything that can be wished for on this side the curtain that hangs between time and eternity.