University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.
More Azure.

Highfield and our heroine dropped in upon the
whole azure coterie, at Miss Appleby's, with the exception
of Mr. Fitzgiles Goshawk, whose absence
afforded an excellent subject for declamation; especially
when Lucia informed the company he was indisposed.

“Poor fellow, his sensibilities will be the death of
him at last,” cried Miss Appleby.

“Unfortunate youth,” said Miss Overend, “his
wretchedness is mysteriously affecting; by the by,
can any body tell what makes him so unhappy?”

“I dare say he is suffering the pangs of disappointment,”
said Puddingham.

“Disappointment in what?” said she briskly.

“Oh, why you know genius is always hoping impossible
things, and chasing the rainbows of imagination—ever
anticipating unreal joys, and reaping

real sorrows. I knew a man of genius, once, a
great poet, who pined himself into a decline, because
he could not get his whiskers to grow.”

“La!” said Miss Overend, “I dare say that is
the cause of Mr. Goshawk's interesting melancholy,
you know he has no whiskers.”

“I dare say,” quoth Paddleford, a sighing, whining,
cork-hearted pretender to sentimental rouéism;
“I dare say the poor fellow is in love with a married
woman.”

“Has he been to Italy?” said Miss Overend,
“if he has, I could almost swear he had fallen in
love with a beautiful nun he saw through the grates
of a convent.”

“I shouldn't be surprised,” said Mrs. Coates, “If
he had committed murder.”

“Murder!” screamed the other ladies.

“I mean an innocent, disinterested, sentimental
murder, committed in a moment of irrigation, without
any intention—what do you think, nephew?”

“I rather think it must be the whiskers, as my
friend Puddingham suggested. I feel myself in the
same predicament, and am sentimentally dead, for
want of a muzzle a la mode de bison.”

Lucia privately resolved that Master Highfield
should pay for making sport of the hallowed and
mysterious sorrows of Mr. Goshawk. She knew
or thought she knew their origin; and to have the
perplexities of pining, speechless, inexpressible passion
associated with a bison's whiskers! It was too

bad; and her cousin should pay for it dearly, if he
possessed the least spark of feeling. Highfield took
his leave soon after, excusing himself on the score of
some business. But the truth was, he felt himself
somewhat indisposed.

“Well, Lucia,” said Miss Appleby, “I suppose
you had a delightfully affecting interview with your
cousin, after the affair. What did he say?”

“Nothing,” said Lucia.

“Nothing; what a stupid man! Why Mr.
Goshawk talked of his excruciating feelings on the
occasion a whole hour, till he brought tears into my
eyes. Oh, such a beautiful flow of language, such
powerful delineations of passion! I wish you had
heard him.”

“Mr. Highfield is a very common-place man,”
said Puddingham, pompously. “You might stand
under a gateway a whole day in a shower, without
hearing him say any thing remarkable.”

“What is a chance act of gallantry and presence
of mind, compared with the genius that immortalizes
it in words that burn and thoughts that freeze? For
my part, give me the man that talks eloquently,”
said Mr. Paddleford.

“Yes,” said Miss Overend; “mere physical
courage and animal strength may do great things;
but to say great things, requires the aid of a lofty,
inaccessible genius, which nine times in ten is so
immersed in its own sublime chrysalis, that it can't
get out in time to do any thing in a case of emergency.”

“To be sure,” said Mrs. Coates; “a great
action is often frustificated by a splendid chaotic
congeries of intellectual vapours, that produce a
deflection of the mind from the object before it.”

Lucia, though a little affronted with Highfield,
was too generous to suffer him to be undervalued in
this manner, especially in his absence.

“And so, my good friends,” said she, “you
would persuade me that I am more indebted to Mr.
Goshawk, for his elegant description of my danger,
than to my cousin, who rescued me from it. I
might have been in my grave by this time, but for
my cousin.”

“But then what a beautiful elegy Mr. Goshawk
would have written, my dear. You would have
been immortalized. Only think of that!” said Miss
Appleby.

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Coates; “what is the trumpery
pain of anneeheelation to the eternal immortality
of living in immortal verse—of floating down
upon the stream of oblivion, into the regions of
never dying brightness!” Mrs. Coates waxed
more azure every day.

“My dear aunt,” cried Lucia, interrupting the
good lady, who was losing herself in a Dismal
Swamp of meteors, as she called them; “my dear
aunt, I am aware of the superiority of words over
deeds, in an age of development like the present,
and that he who performs a great action is but an
instrument in the hands of the man of genius who

celebrates it in never dying verse. I know too that
it is mere selfishness on our part, to feel grateful for
an action done in our own behalf, instinctively perhaps,
and without one single good feeling on the
part of him who performs it; but still there is something
in the gift of life that seems to deserve at
least our gratitude.” This was the most azure
speech our heroine had made since her accident.

“The gift of life!” cried Paddleford; “what is
life, that we should be grateful for it? A scene of
disappointment without hope, and hope without
disappointment; a chapter whose beginning is tears,
whose last verse is written in blood; a mirror, which
presents to us every day a new wretch in the same
person; a spectral shadow, ever changing, yet still
the same; a long lane, whose windings end where
they began, and begin where they end; a rope
twisted with our heart-strings, embalmed in our tears,
and having at one end a slipping noose, with which
all mankind are at last tucked up!”

“Oh!” groaned the whole azure coterie, horror-stricken
at this soul-harrowing picture.

“What language!”

“What sentiment!”

“What feeling!”

“What soul-subjewing retrospections!” exclaimed
Mrs. Coates. “What a happy devil-opement
of mind!”

Lucia was overawed and silenced by the eloquence
of Paddleford, and the suffrages of all the

company. She became doubtful, to say the least,
as to the propriety of feeling gratitude for such a
worthless gift as that of life, and relapsed into a
decided preference of the gift of speech over the
capacity for action. She looked on the great Paddleford
as a most sublime mortal; for such indeed
is the intrinsic dignity of that courage which defies
death in a good cause, that even the affectation of
contempt of life imposes a feeling of respect upon
the inexperienced. Lucia never dreamed that Paddleford
came near breaking his neck a few nights
before, by jumping out of a second story window on
a false alarm of fire; or that while he affected a
contempt for life, he never met a funeral or heard a
bell tolling, without a fit of the blue devils.

“What a beautiful dress you've got!” said Miss
Overend to Lucia.

The sublime contempt of this life now suddenly
gave place to an admiration of the things of this
life. The whole party gathered round our heroine;
and “where did you get this?” and “la! how
cheap!” and dissertations on the relative excellence
of gros de Naples, gros des Indes, cotepaly, foulard
Damasce, and Palmerienne, gradually restored them
to a proper feeling of resignation to the evils of this
world.