University of Virginia Library

2. II.

I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at
the breakfast-table, the morning after our arrival, when
Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my
virtues as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same
moment, he said simply in parenthesis, “My cousin
Edith, Mr. Slingsby,” and went on with his story. I
rose and bowed, and as Fred had the parote, I had
time to collect my courage, and take a look at the
enemy's camp—for, of that considerable household, I
felt my star to be in conjunction or opposition with
hers only, who was at that moment my vis-à-vis across
a dish of stewed oysters.

In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait-painting,
I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I
see at this moment (I have carried it about the world
for ten years) as distinctly as the incipient lines of age
in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in
that time from dread or admiration, or something between
these, to pity; she was so unscrupulously and
hopelessly plain—so wretchedly ill and suffering in
her aspect—so spiritless and unhappy in every motion
and look. “I'll win her heart,” thought I, “by being
kind to her. Poor thing! it will be something new to
her, I dare say!” Oh, Philip Slingsby! what a doomed
donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy!

And yet even as she sat there, leaning over her untasted
breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy—with her
large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow
complexion, and not one redeeming feature—there
was something in her face which produced a phantom
of beauty in my mind—a glimpse, a shadowing of a
countenance that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at
her last innocent orison—a loveliness moulded and
exalted by superhuman and overpowering mind—instinct
through all its sweetness with energy and fire.
So strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my
thoughts of her as an angel in heaven (for I supposed
her dying for many a month, and a future existence
was her own most frequent theme), she always rose to
my fancy with a face half Niobe, half Psyche, radiantly
lovely. And this, too, with a face of her own, a boná
fide physiognomy, that must have made a mirror an
unpleasant article of furniture in her chamber.

I have no suspicion in my own mind whether Time
was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of
those Christmas holydays. The second Saturday had
come round, and I just remember that Fred was very
much out of humor with me for having appeared to
his friends to be everything he had said I was not, and
nothing he had said I was. He had described me as
the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, and agreeable
dog in the world. And I was not that at all—
particularly the last. The old judge told him he had
not improved in his penetration at the university.

A week! and what a life had been clasped within
its brief calendar, for me! Edith Linsey was two
years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She
was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of
consumption; and it was little matter whom she loved,
or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by
a new affection, she could beguile the preying melancholy
of illness; for by that gentle name they called,
in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of character
that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have
been endured for a day. But she was not capricious,
or bitter to me! Oh no! And from the very extreme
of her impatience with others—from her rudeness, her
violence, her sarcasm—she came to me with a heart
softer than a child's, and wept upon my hands, and
weighed every word that might give me offence, and
watched to anticipate my lightest wish, and was humble,
and generous, and passionately loving and dependant.
Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She
gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate
abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar
character, but more to her own solemn conviction that
she was dying—that her best hope of life was not worth
a week's purchase.

We had begun with books, and upon them her past
enthusiasm had hitherto been released. She loved her
favorite authors with a passion. They had relieved
her heart; and there was nothing of poetry or philosophy
that was deep or beautiful, in which she had not
steeped her very soul. How well I remember her repeating
to me from Shelley those glorious lines to the
soaring swan:—

There was a long room in the southern wing of the
house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtained,
dim old place, with deep-embayed windows, and so
many nooks, and so much furniture, that there was
that hushed air, that absence of echo within it, which
is the great charm of a haunt for study or thought.
It was Edith's kingdom. She might lock the door,
if she pleased, or shut or open the windows; in short,
when she was there, no one thought of disturbing her,
and she was like a “spirit in its cell,” invisible and
inviolate. And here I drank into my very life and
soul the outpourings of a bosom that had been locked
till (as we both thought) the last hour of its life—a
flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran my
heart like lava, sweeping everything into its resistless
fire, and (may God forgive her!) leaving it scorched
and desolate when its mocking brightness had gone
out.

I remember that “Elia”—Charles Lamb's Elia—
was the favorite of favorites among her books; and
partly that the late death of this most-to-be-loved author
reminded me to look it up, and partly to have
time to draw back my indifference over a subject that
it something stirs me to recall, you shall read an imitation
(or continuation, if you will) that I did for Edith's
eye, of his “Essay on Books and Reading.” I sat
with her dry and fleshless hand in mine while I read
it to her, and the fingers of Psyche were never fairer
to Canova than they to me.

“It is a little singular,” I began (looking into her
eyes as long as I could remember what I had written),
“that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which
the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought
of writing a book upon `Reading.' The refinements

the true epicure in books are surely as various as
those of the gastronome and the opium-eater; and I
can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural
occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless
is that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indolence
has never numbered among its votaries one of
the busy craft of writers.

“The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for
hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true
secret of the thing is no more adapted to their comprehension
than the sublimations of Louis Eustache Ude
for the taste of a day-laborer. The refined reading-taste,
like the palate of gourmanderie, must have got
beyond appetite—gross appetite. It shall be that of a
man who, having fed through childhood and youth
on simple knowledge, values now only, as it were, the
apotheosis of learning—the spiritual nare. There are,
it is true, instances of a keen natural relish: a boy, as
you will sometimes find one, of a premature thoughtfulness,
will carry a favorite author in his bosom, and
feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the
exquisite story:—

“The pleasure as well as the profit of reading depends
as much upon time and manner, as upon the
book. The mind is an opal—changing its color with
every shifting shade. Ease of position is especially
necessary. A muscle strained, a nerve unpoised, an
admitted sunbeam caught upon a mirror, are slight
circumstances, but a feather may tickle the dreamer
from paradise to earth. `Many a froward axiom,'
says a refined writer, `many an inhumane thought
hath arisen from sitting uncomfortably, or from a want
of symmetry in your chamber.' Who has not felt, at
times, an unaccountable disrelish for a favorite author?
Who has not, by a sudden noise in the street, been
startled from a reading dream, and found, afterward,
that the broken spell was not to be rewound? An
ill-tied cravat may unlink the rich harmonies of Taylor.
You would not think Barry Cornwall the delicious
heart he is, reading him in a tottering chair.

“There is much in the mood with which you come
to a book. If you have been vexed out of doors, the
good humor of an author seems unnatural. I think
I should scarce relish the `gentle spiriting' of Ariel
with a pulse of ninety in the minute. Or if I had
been touched by the unkindness of a friend, Jack
Falstaff would not move me to laughter as easily as
he is wont. There are tones of the mind, however,
to which a book will vibrate with a harmony than
which there is nothing more exquisite in nature. To
go abroad at sunrise in June, and admit all the holy
influences of the hour—stillness, and purity, and
blam—to a mind subdued and dignified, as the mind
will be by the sacred tranquillity of sleep, and then to
come in with bathed and refreshed senses, and a temper
of as clear joyfulness as the soaring lark's and
sit down to Milton or Spenser, or, almost loftier still,
the divine `Prometheus' of Shelley, has seemed to
me a harmony of delight almost too heavenly to be
human. The great secret of such pleasure is sympathy.
You must climb to the eagle poet's eyry.
You must have senses, like his, for the music that is
only audible to the fine ear of thought, and the beauty
that is visible only to the spirit-eye of a clear, and for
the time, unpolluted fancy. The stamp and pressure
of the magician's own time and season must be upon
you. You would not read Ossian, for example, in a
bath, or sitting under a tree in a sultry noon; but
after rushing into the eye of the wind with a fleet
horse, with all his gallant pride and glorious strength
and fire obedient to your rein, and so mingling, as it
will, with his rider's consciousness, that you feel as
if you were gifted in your own body with the swiftness
and energy of an angel; after this, to sit down
to Ossian, is to read him with a magnificence of de
lusion, to my mind scarce less than reality. I never
envied Napoleon till I heard it was his habit, after a
battle, to read Ossian.

“You can not often read to music. But I love,
when the voluntary is pealing in church—every breath
in the congregation suppressed, and the deep-volumed
notes pouring through the arches of the roof with the
sublime and almost articulate praise of the organ—to
read, from the pew Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes.
The solemn stateliness of its periods is fitted to music
like a hymn. It is to me a spring of the most thrilling
devotion—though I shame to confess that the
richness of its eastern imagery, and, above all, the inimitable
beauty of its philosophy, stand out somewhat
definitely in the reminiscences of the hour.

“A taste for reading comes comparatively late.
`Robinson Crusoe' will turn a boy's head at ten.
The `Arabian Nights' are taken to bed with us at
twelve. At fourteen, a forward boy will read the
`Lady of the Lake,' `Tom Jones,' and `Peregrine
Pickle;' and at seventeen (not before) he is ready for
Shakspere, and, if he is of a thoughtful turn, Milton.
Most men do not read these last with a true relish till
after this period. The hidden beauties of standard
authors break upon the mind by surprise. It is like
discovering a secret spring in an old jewel. You take
up the book in an idle moment, as you have done a
thousand times before, perhaps wondering, as you
turn over the leaves, what the world finds in it to admire,
when suddenly, as you read, your fingers press
close upon the covers, your frame thrills, and the
passage you have chanced upon chains you like a
spell—it is so vividly true and beautiful. Milton's
`Comus' flashed upon me in this way. I never could
read the `Rape of the Lock' till a friend quoted some
passages from it during a walk. I know no more exquisite
sensation than this warming of the heart to an
old author; and it seems to me that the most delicious
portion of intellectual existence is the brief period in
which, one by one, the great minds of old are admitted
with all their time-mellowed worth to the affections.
With what delight I read, for the first time,
the `kind-hearted plays' of Beaumont and Fletcher!
How I doated on Burton! What treasures to me
were the `Fairy Queen' and the Lyrics of Milton!

“I used to think, when studying the Greek and
Latin poets in my boyhood, that to be made a school-author
was a fair offset against immortality. I would
as lief; it seemed to me, have my verses handed down
by the town-crier. But latterly, after an interval of a
few years, I have taken up my classics (the identical
school copies with the hard places all thummed and
pencilled) and have read them with no little pleasure.
It is not to be believed with what a satisfaction the
riper eye glides smoothly over the once difficult line,
finding the golden cadence of poetry beneath what
once seemed only a tangled chaos of inversion. The
associations of hard study, instead of reviving the old
distaste, added wonderfully to the interest of a re-perusal.
I could see now what brightened the sunken
eye of the pale and sickly master, as he took up the
hesitating passage, and read on, forgetful of the delinquent,
to the end. I could enjoy now, what was a
dead letter to me then, the heightened fulness of Herodotus,
and the strong-woven style of Thucydides,
and the magnificent invention of Eschylus. I look
an aversion to Homer from hearing a classmate in the
next room scan it perpetually through his nose.

There is no music for me in the `Iliad.' But, spite of
the recollections scored alike upon my palm and the
margin, I own to an Augustan relish for the smooth
melody of Virgil, and freely forgive the sometime
troublesome ferule—enjoying by its aid the raciness
of Horace and Juvenal, and the lofty philosophy of
Lucretius. It will be a dear friend to whom I put
down in my will that shelf of defaced classics.

“There are some books that bear reading pleasantly
once a year. `Tristram Shandy' is an annual with
me. I read him regularly about Christmas. Jeremy
Taylor (not to mingle things holy and profane) is a
good table-book, to be used when you would collect
your thoughts and be serious a while. A man of
taste need never want for Sunday reading while he
can find the sermons of Taylor, and South, and Fuller—writers
of good theological repute—though, between
ourselves, I think one likelier to be delighted
with the poetry and quaint fancifulness of their style,
than edified by the piety it covers. I like to have a
quarto edition of Sir Thomas Brown on a near shelf,
or Milton's prose works, or Bacon. These are healthful
moods of the mind when lighter nutriment is distasteful.

“I am growing fastidious in poetry, and confine
myself more and more to the old writers. Castaly of
late runs shallow. Shelley's (peace to his passionate
heart!) was a deep draught, and Wordsworth and
Wilson sit near the well, and Keats and Barry Cornwall
have been to the fountain's lip, feeding their
imaginations (the latter his heart as well), but they
have brought back little for the world. The `small
silver stream' will, I fear, soon cease to flow down to
us, and as it dries back to its source, we shall close
nearer and nearer upon the `pure English undefiled.'
The dabblers in muddy waters (tributaries to Lethe)
will have Parnassus to themselves.

“The finest pleasures of reading come unbidden.
You can not, with your choicest appliances for the
body, always command the many-toned mind. In the
twilight alcove of a library, with a time-mellowed
chair yielding luxuriously to your pressure, a June
wind laden with idleness and balm floating in at the
window, and in your hand some Russia-bound rambling
old author, as Izaak Walton, good-humored and
quaint, one would think the spirit could scarce fail to
be conjured. Yet often, after spending a morning
hour restlessly thus, I have risen with my mind unhinged,
and strolled off with a book in my pocket to
the woods; and, as I live, the mood has descended
upon me under some chance tree, with a crooked root
under my head, and I have lain there, reading and
sleeping by turns, till the letters were blurred in the
dimness of twilight. It is the evil of refinement that
it breeds caprice. You will sometimes stand unfatigued
for hours on the steps of a library; or in a
shop, the eye will be arrested, and all the jostling of
customers and the looks of the jealous shopman will
not divert you till you have read out the chapter.

“I do not often indulge in the supernatural, for I
am an unwilling believer in ghosts, and the topic excites
me. But, for its connexion with the subject
upon which I am writing, I must conclude these
rambling observations with a late mysterious visitation
of my own.

“I had, during the last year, given up the early
summer tea-parties common in the town in which the
university stands; and having, of course, three or
four more hours than usual on my hands, I took to an
afternoon habit of imaginative reading. Shakspere
came first, naturally; and I feasted for the hundredth
time upon what I think his (and the world's) most
delicate creation—the `Tempest.' The twilight of
the first day overtook me at the third act, where the
banquet is brought in with solemn music by the fairy
troop of Prospero, and set before the shipwrecked
king and his followers. I closed the book, and leaning
back in my chair, abandoned myself to the crowd
of images which throng always upon the traces of
Shakspere. The fancy music was still in my mind,
when an apparently real strain of the most solemn
melody came to my ear, dying, it seemed to me as it
reached it, the tones were so expiringly faint and low.
I was not startled, but lay quietly, holding my breath,
and more fearing when the strain would be broken,
than curious whence it came. The twilight deepened,
till it was dark, and it still played on, changing the
tune at intervals, but always of the same melancholy
sweetness; till, by-and-by, I lost all curiosity, and,
giving in to the charm, the scenes I had been reading
began to form again in my mind, and Ariel, with his
delicate ministers, and Prospero, and Miranda, and
Caliban, came moving before me to the measure, as
bright and vivid as the reality. I was disturbed in the
midst of it by Alfouse, who came in at the usual
hour with my tea; and, on starting to my feet, I listened
in vain for the continuance of the music. I sat
thinking of it a while, but dismissed it at last, and went
out to enjoy, in a solitary walk, the loveliness of the
summer night. The next day I resumed my book,
with a smile at my previous credulity, and had read
through the last scenes of the `Tempest,' when the
light failed me. I again closed the book, and presently
again, as if the sympathy was instantaneous, the
strain broke in, playing the same low and solemn melodies,
and falling with the same dying cadence upon
the ear. I listened to it, as before, with breathless attention;
abandoned myself once more to its irresistible
spell; and, half-waking, half-sleeping, fell again into
a vivid dream, brilliant as fairy-land, and creating itself
to the measures of the still audible music. I could
not now shake off my belief in its reality; but I was so
wrapt with its strange sweetness, and the beauty of my
dream, that I cared not whether it came from earth or
air. My indifference, singularly enough, continued
for several days; and, regularly at twilight, I threw
aside my book, and listened with dreamy wakefulness
for the music. It never failed me, and its results were
as constant as its coming. Whatever I had read—
sometimes a canto of Spenser, sometimes an act of a
play, or a chapter of romance—the scene rose before
me with the stately reality of a pageant. At last I
began to think of it more seriously; and it was a relief
to me one evening when Alfonse came in earlier than
usual with a message. I told him to stand perfectly
still; and after a minute's pause, during which I heard
distinctly an entire passage of a funeral hymn, I asked
him if he heard any music? He said he did not. My
blood chilled at his positive reply, and I bade him
listen once more. Still he heard nothing. I could
endure it no longer. It was to me as distinct and
audible as my own voice; and I rushed from my room
as he left me, shuddering to be left alone.

“The next day I thought of nothing but death.
Warnings by knells in the air, by apparitions, by mysterious
voices, were things I had believed in speculatively
for years, and now their truth came upon me
like conviction. I felt a dull, leaden presentiment
about my heart, growing heavier and heavier with
every passing hour. Evening came at last, and with
it, like a summons from the grave, a `dead march'
swelled clearly on the air. I felt faint and sick at
heart. This could not be fancy; and why was it, as
I thought I had proved, audible to my ear alone? I
threw open the window, and the first rush of the cool
north wind refreshed me; but, as if to mock my attempts
at relief, the dirge-like sounds rose, at the instant,
with treble distinctness. I seized my hat and
rushed into the street, but, to my dismay, every step
seemed to bring me nearer to the knell. Still I hurried
on, the dismal sounds growing distractingly louder,
till, on turning a corner that leads to the lovely

burying-ground of New Haven, I came suddenly upon
—a bell foundry! In the rear had lately been hung,
for trial, the chiming bells just completed for the new
Trinity church, and the master of the establishment
informed me that one of his journeymen was a fine
player, and every day after his work, he was in the
habit of amusing himself with the `Dead March in
Saul,' the `Marsellois Hymn,' and other melancholy
and easy tunes, muffling the hammers that he might
not disturb the neighbors.”

I have had my reward for these speculations, dear
reader—a smile that is lying at this instant, perdu, in
the innermost recess of memory—and I care not much
(without) offence) whether you like it or no. She
thanked me—she thought it well done—she laid her
head on my bosom while I read it in the old library of
the Flemings, and every word has been “paid for in
fairy gold.”

I have taken up a thread that lengthens as I unravel
it, and I can not well see how I shall come to the
end, without trespassing on your patience. We will
cut it here, if you like, and resume it after a pause;
but before I close, I must give you a little instance of
how love makes the dullest earth poetical. Edith
had given me a portefeuille crammed with all kinds of
embossed and curious note-paper, all quite too pretty
for use, and what I would show you are my verses
on the occasion. For a hand unpractised, then, in
aught save the “Gradus ad Parnassum,” I must own
I have fished them out of that same old portefeuille
(faded now from its glory, and worn with travel—but
O how cherished!) with a pleasant feeling of paternity: