University of Virginia Library

COUNTRY PHILOSOPHY.

WILLIAM AND JAMES.
WILLIAM.
Good morrow, neighbour, 'tis a tuneful morning:
The birds have jump'd into their singing gear
Most suddenly, and spring, before our thought,
Comes with the wheatear on the fallow side.

JAMES.
I told my wife that I should find you here
On the first blackbird's whistle, and I came
And here I find you: let us chat an hour:
This is no busy season to our hands—
Time to look round, and little else to do
But breathe sound air and broaden like green corn.
What power this March sun shakes upon our path.

WILLIAM.
Lean on this boundary hedgerow of our farms.
We are near enough for talking: I can watch
My beasts at graze, and you can count your stacks,
Your feet upon your holding, mine on mine.

JAMES.
William, I think I've slipped a score of years
Since yesternight: this touch of frost has given
A spice and savour to the calm serene,
And makes the sunshine burnish on the hedge,
Or 'tis my fancy. I'm as fanciful
This morning as a youngster of eighteen—
There goes one: listen, down the lane, to the right:
He whistles, now he sings by breaks, “Fair lips
Whom are ye for, if ye are not for me?”

WILLIAM.
This hawthorn bird is out before the buds
That feed him; for the thorny twigs are bare
That nurture up their blossoms near the tread
Of feet that pause not earthwards for delight,
When blooms of may shower on the clasping hands,
Or blind those eyes from forward-searching care.

JAMES.
Why, friend, you have that from some book of songs.

WILLIAM.
Not I; the air's to blame; if some old thrush
In spring forgets his hoarseness into song.
I shall be mute enough by harvest week,
With other occupation than at ease
To lounge and pipe a careless flourish here.

JAMES.
Each month has office in the farmer's year,
And chief in this I count our calling best,
That nature's scope and change are all our own,
And so we cannot lack variety.
See yonder townsman in his warehouse walls:
What change, except in his thermometer,
With wet or burning pavement, marks his days
Or notes the deeper year; and gives him rest
From that eternal simper at his wares
When customers bite briskly? He shall see,
From zero to the dog-day weather-point,
One patch of sky.

WILLIAM.
And yet this very man
Secure in his importance, holds us cheap
As bumpkins, speaking broad, with swollen hands,
And counts his apeish mincings as the trick
Of true gentility, ‘what clowns are these.’

JAMES.
I would not wear his manners for a week
To be a squire a twelvemonth and a day;
Content to be no better than my father,
And, thank these hands, no worse, to pay my way
And move about my pastures in no fear
Of bailiffs or the rent-day, with a son
To take the old place on when I am gone,
And keep a stranger from the fields where I
Have been a boy and grew a man and died.

WILLIAM.
Your scheme of life is brother to my own;
I shall not change my trade, tho' it has rubs
And stiff ones: now this agent of our squire's,—
The man was born to plague me, and his thought
Comes like a city whiff to taint in smoke
The freshness of the morning,—well this man,
Whose soul is in his pockets, and whose eyes
Purblind to aught but stiff arithmetic,
Would have me square my hedgerows like a rule,
And prune to faultless parallelogram
The wilderness of May-bloom and its nests.
‘Cut straight that curving brook,’ quoth he, ‘it wastes
A good half acre; clear the rubbish growth
That cumbers round its reaches; let it run
In ship-shape current like the squire's main-drain:’
I cannot keep my temper with the man:
We'll change the subject.

JAMES.
O, I let him talk
Above his gases and his phosphate base,
His lime and silicon: it pleases him
And prints well in the ‘Herald’ with this head,
‘The chemistry of farming:’ yet this man
Of mighty theory is but a babe
In practice; I have seen him over-reach'd
By very shallow knaves: this wordy man
Bought at the fair last week a flock of ewes
Not worth a halter.

WILLIAM.
Serve him richly right:
And yet the squire shall keep him after this;
He'll talk him round in his smooth fluent way:
Well it's no gear of mine.

JAMES.
The world flows on,
And in its stream some dregs waft uppermost.
But truce to these discomfortable themes:
Look round, forget them: timid spires of green
Creep thro' the fallowy ridges, frail to bear
One dew-drop's burthen, yet shall these prevail
Weak infants of the harvest to the full
And stately ear, to clothe the upland side
As with a forest-sea, wherein the breeze
Has visible workings, and the cloud is seen
To mask and free the light in gleamy falls.

WILLIAM.
The morning draws, and we have paid enough
In leisure to its freshness. I must set
Some graftings in my orchard, whence my son,
Who knows? shall reap the apples—now—farewell.
But as I go one word—that boy of yours
Is very often at our place of late:
I may not think his early schoolfellow
My son his main attraction; and our Jane
Is smartened up I fancy when he comes.
Well, well, let things fare on: but well I know
If there is aught in this I shall be glad,
And you I think, James, will not take it ill.

THE NAMELESS PICTURE.

THE MOTHER'S ADVICE.

I have heard you out, my boy; now let me speak.
We are alone together, you and I:
So we have been: the new tie changes all.
You are not pledged as yet? So far is well—
Nay now, be patient, hear me till the end:
I do not mean to gainsay with one word
Your marriage as a marriage: 'tis the way
And process of the world: the mother's turn
Cedes to this stronger heritage of time,
And the wise mother grieves not: only this,
I deem it in my duty chiefly now
To mind you how past things have stood with us,
To argue out your future as I may
In all forbearance where I see you touch'd
So nearly: therefore hear, my boy, and weigh
The words as calmly as the words are said.
It is my right and duty to advise
Tho' hardly to forbid: these few calm words
And I have done: yours is it to decide,
The sequel good or evil most is yours:
And as you say hereafter so shall I.
For when your father died, and left the land
Encumber'd, you had been at school a year,
And you and I were lonely in the world
And very poor at first: the place is small,
The income scarce enough to hold our heads
Above the yeoman, but the name is old,
And you at least are born a gentleman;
But one so little rich this name can bring
No license to be idle. This alone
Were profit more than loss, if this were all.
Weigh then, my son, her station with your own,
To her in fairness weigh it while you may.
Most free am I of narrow county pride,
That mates by pedigree, and would despise
Earth's fairest choice with no armorial stem;
But this at least allow me to premise,
As something in the scale of yes or no,
Her grade is not as yours: tho' young and fair,
The daughter of a village lawyer, still
She is not much to bring me for your wife
Without a dower to this bare manor-house,
Whose crumbling rafters chide their needy lord.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF A TOWN HERO.

JAMES AND MARY.

Beside a furzy common patched with sand,
An ancient mansion stood, a piebald heap
Of blackened oak and plaster: in the days
Of queenly Bess a hall, a farmstead now.
Here Martha Bruce for many years abode,
A widowed mother with a single child,
Mary a comely blossom of eighteen.
Now Martha, ere she fell in widowhood,
Had in her cares of wisedom fretful grown:
A grievance-searching nature hers, most keen
To guage and probe the petty rubs and thorns
Of household custom: dwelling on her cares,
She bred them for herself from carelessness
And want of system; then on these complained
In needless-fretful whining, till she made
The mote annoyance bulge a beam of wrong,
And half believed herself an injured drudge,
The very model of a wife ill-used.
And thus she found her trouble for herself
By faults of nature part, of nurture more:
Forsooth she had been delicately bred,
A yeoman's daughter upon gentry's verge,
Taught that to move in homely usefulness,
To touch a pan or darn a stocking end,
Were loss of caste: the lady must not toil;
And the more helpless the more lady she.
And thus the girl grew, till she came to wed,
Environed with a draff gentility:
And when she wedded with a poorer man
She started on the test of married days
With slender stock of foresight; soon to fail,
And sour herself and make a curse of home,
Alternative in shrewing and in tears.
And, after years, her goodman chanced to die;
She, left with narrow store and one weak child,
Held barely on the farm as best she might
Unthrifty, cankered with penurious days,
While still she gave her want the fiercer sting
With jarring discontents, and evil thoughts
Against her richer neighbours in the land.
And she would prate to Mary as she grew,
Filling the child with vainness and conceit,
How ne'er another lass in all the shire
Could touch her Mary's beauty by a league.
And she could tell, nay, well enough she knew,
Mary's sweet face should drive the neighbour lads
Half mad in time: but she was not for these.
Nay, but she hoped her child would bring her ease,
And come to marry in a wealthy house,
And comfort her old mother's latter days
In sunshine and the honour of her name.
But to the fair face, dreaming on the world
Of future wonder and the things to be,
The rolling years came slowly, till the time
Had shaped her woman and had overborne
Her girlhood. Then the mother looked at her
And thought, ‘My wish sights haven in this child.
My still endeavour all these eighteen years
Has fruited richly. I shall see good days
And lay my bones in honourable rest.’
But westward of the heath by some hours' ride,
James Bolton lived, half farmer and half squire,
Florid, fair-built, some twenty-four years old:
Who rode his hunters: kept his park of deer,
A small one: owned some land and rented more.
He, from the hunt thrown out one winter eve,
Pushed meditative homewards with loosed rein;
And chanced on Mary leaning near a well
To lift her pitcher: in whose gentle eyes
He read a power that seemed to clothe in light
The gray lane with its bare and soughing twigs
Of leafless hazel: and his horse drew up
Guessing the rider's mind. But James's blood
Came at a leap in crimson to his face,
Deep as the red leaves showering from the eaves
Of cottage trailers: somewhat less she blushed;
As the warm west answers the eastern glow
At sunrise matching with a fainter rose.
And so they dwelt confusedly: but he
Grasping suggestion, with a quickened brain,
From the mid flutter of his heart, devised
To feign a thirsty pretext for delay,
So perhaps to speak a word or change a glance.
And she, how could she else? with some faint smile
Willingly gave the bright wave of the well
Caught from its source and trickling now no more
In prison walls, and reached it, near as fair
As she, whose story in the Church is read,
The mother of the favoured Israel.
But, after that James Bolton sought her heart,
On Mary loathing towards that other grew:
Where hardly she had borne him from the first
Outright she hated now, and gave to James
A deeper tenderness: so time went on.
Then Martha told her daughter, and the girl
Looked scared, but answered nothing for the night;
Nor would the mother press her further then.
So Mary slipt in silence to her rest;
But ere she slept she wrote to James, and told
How things went ill against their love at home:
And how her mother hurried on the match
She hated, and she knew not what to do.
On James his trouble thickened as he read,
For need of action came in unripe hour,
Ere he had settled purpose with himself.
He feared his mother likewise; who abode
And kept his house with him, and watched her son
With jealous and maternal tyranny.
She, daughter of a county family,
Had ruled her goodman straitly till his death,
Quelling his free-will with superior birth
And right assumed of territorial pride:
And, since this sway bore weaker on the son,
She ever strove, by straining it the more,
To brace her tottering frail prerogative.
Thus, to sustain her ground, she came to feel
Past reason querulous on imagined slight
And faintest contradiction: and James knew
That all her heart, as all her pride, was set
To match him with a slip of some great squire,
Whose race had held their acres, sire to son,
Since rose with rose contended, in a chain
Of proud, obscure, and dull gentility.
Now James had wrote to Mary he would come
The morrow; so he turned the question round
Thro' all that day and half a restless night
In sleep, that came, more hateful than unrest,
To feign distorted shadows of his thought.
And so with light he rose, and unrefreshed
Rode out across the meadows, crushing down
His care with motion in the whistling airs
Of morning: and he rested not his steed
Until he found her by the lisping well
Pallid as he was pale, and in her eyes
He read the crisis of his life was come.
Then she, ‘Alas, my own and not my own!
I tremble in the presence of this hour,
Which parts or binds us all our doom of days
Till we are cold in earth, and summer-time
Is one with winter on the pulseless heart.
We plant weak vows eternal, else unroot
The slender threads which held us in a soil
Of rich delusion. Thine, O love, to choose:
On thee self-doubtful leaning I withhold
My wavering judgment: yet in one resolve
Most resolute am I, that if mistrust
Or fleck of unsure purpose touch thy wish
To cast in hand with mine this earthly time—
I will begone and see thy face no more,
And bear it patiently, as bear I can:
And better thus, than in my autumn days
To hang a clog about the neck I love
When this poor cheek has worn its freshness by.’
And so they kissed and parted. But James rode
Homewards with loosened rein: no ease at heart:
Vext that he had not acted fair and well.
So, pricking on the faster to beat down
The chafing thought, he took across the fields,
To slice an angle from the road, and cleared
The fences in his line: but at the third
The horse, who rose not, crushing thro' the stakes
Rolled on his rider, whom some ploughmen came
And found, to bear him homewards sense-bereft.
But James was long in fever from his fall,
And him his mother tended. But mischance
Brought in his coat the letter to her hand,
Last writ of Mary, when they brought him in
Helpless and stunned. She read it, and long days
The mother watched him, scheming to unweave
The love this letter taught. Some comfort this,
His illness, bad in most, was good in this
That she might plot unthwarted: and she held,
All means were holy and a mother's right
To stave her son from this perpetual shame
Of mating low: for all her thought was blind
And warped with narrow county pride; and chief
She feared her spinster sisters in their hall
Lined with the canvas faces of past squires,—
Great squires, each in his narrow walk supreme,
Lords of the hind and acres at their gate,
They drank, bred, hunted their allotted time,
Then gave the parish-church one hatchment more.
But James, who mended slowly, chanced to read
The County Herald, lighting on the news:
And for a space the ceiling and the walls
Swam round him, sick and stunned. He giddily rose,
And strove to dress and dash aside his pain;
But on him came his weakness and prevailed,
As clearer flashed conviction of his full
And utter desolation. Could he mend
An hour of her irrevocable doom
Now were his strength at fullest? Lost as dead
Was Mary now: could strong despair unknit
Life-woven vows, the goodman from his wife?
And, if he moved, of bad should worse ensue
To Mary full as wretched as himself,
If he knew right, in this thrice-loathed result
Of motherly compulsion. Fool and blind
To waver two months since: then blindly ride
A break-neck course in spleen: thus men lost all.
He wished his neck had broken: this had spared
All self-reproach, much bitterness of time
Hereafter, and the sting of wasted chance.
He must not even see her, but sit still,
In forced inaction dribbling out his days
With trivial occupation as they came.
So wore his life away; till at the last
In apathy or weakness, or in both,
He wedded as his mother bade him wed,
And never knew her guilty till his grave.

THE NAIAD.

River of mine, dear source and parent stream,
Thy daughter loves upon thy lucid edge
To dream away the summer, and entwine
Thy lilies in her locks the long day thro'.
No sister naiad mine to take delight
Among thy ripples with me, nor beguile
The lazy silence with alternate song.
I am alone with nature and my sire.
How sweet recumbent by thy gleamy rims
To watch this azure Iris floating out
Her curtained petals in the rosy dawn.
To catch the tender murmur of the sedge
Rising and bending in the cloven stream,
With all its hoary blooms just crisp with wind.
The pastimes of a lonely nymph are these,
Not undelightful days of pensive calm:
There is a cavern where I love to sleep,
With reedy echoes slumberous at its mouth,
And overgrown with fern leaves intricate;
The bees are rustling thro' it all day long,
And drop on drop an amber rillet falls.
No mortal eye has seen my secret nest.

DANIEL BEFORE BELSHAZZAR.

Behold I am a stranger, and alone
Amid the pride of Babylon: my race,
The children of captivity, were led
From Judah by thy father in his war,
Mean captives of the sword; and who am I
To stand alone amid thy thousand lords,
And read thee to thy face the words of fear?
And yet, O King, the writing is not hard:
Search out the haughty annals of thy reign,
For thy recorded empire must ensure
This sequel, surely as night draws the day.
To godless pride there is but one result,
And he who bears himself against high God,
Dooms in that hour his own devoted head.
Thy gifts be to thyself and not for me.
Let other reap reward, but I will none.
Shall I presume to barter recompence
If I interpret this divine decree?
The prophet is no merchant of his craft,
Nor sells his inspiration. Learn and hear.
Who gave thy father majesty beyond
The nations in his glory? Whose right arm
Clothed him with terrible fear, and set the necks
Of alien kings beneath his wrathful feet?
Who gave thy sire his conquest and his throne?
Who built secure dominion round his rest,
And made him King indeed: a King to slay
Or keep alive the nations as he chose,
To cancel or establish with his nod?
The most high God, the King of kings, gave all,
And prospered in thy father's hand a time
His delegated sceptre that he throve:
Until his heart was lifted in his pride,
And God eternal heard his impious joy.
For thus the King had spoken as he walked
For pleasure on his palace-roof, to view
His large metropolis beneath his feet—
‘Is not this city Babylon the great,
Which I have builded for my realm's abode,
The house of all my kingdom, founded sure
As an eternal empire in the might
Of my great glory; this majestic work
For my continual honour till the end?’
But while the word was in his throat there fell
A voice from heaven upon him in his pride,
‘Thy kingdom is departed:’ and they drave
The madman from his palace: and he dwelt
With beasts and grazed their herbage, as the dews
Of heaven were wet upon him: till he knew
That the high God, to whom man's kings are dust,
Rules in the kingdom of the sons of men,
And delegates His power to whom He will.
This hast thou known, Belshazzar, yet refused
To humble thee before Him. Thou hast dared
To lift thyself against the Lord of heaven.
Thou hast defiled the vessels of His house
With idol wine, and given in these the praise
To gods of stone and silver; in whose mouth
There is no speech nor seeing in their eyes.
But the high God thou hast not glorified:
Is not thy breath as vapour in His hand,
And all thy ways as nothing in His sight?
Then came the hand of anger from the Lord,
And in thy feasting hour against the wall
It wrote; and word by word I will declare
The writing and assurance of thy doom.
Mene.
Thy kingdom God hath numbered out
And finished it henceforward from the earth.

Tekel.
Thou in the balances art weighed,
And God hath found thee wanting utterly.

Peres.
Thy kingdom is divided: God
Hath given it to the Persians and the Medes.

Nay, bring me no reward, no scarlet robe
Or chain of honour. Why should I desire
A barren title in a falling realm?
This and thy splendour are no longer thine.
The alien armies even now have scaled
Thy rampart, or have dried to their device
The mighty river's arm, and taught its wave
Another course. I forge no idle dream:
And even as I speak my words are deed.
Is there no sound upon the whispering night
Beyond this impious hall? Pale are ye now.
I hear the tread of armies: thou, O King,
Art nothing, for the Median will not spare.
Ye stand like sheep, and herd about the base
Of each dumb idol: surely these shall save,
For these are gods indeed, and they shall wake
From stony sleep and hurl the intruding host
Beyond Euphrates. They are gods indeed!
Down on thy knees, Belshazzar, for thy time
Is at its overthrow: thy sand is run:
Thy sceptre is departed evermore:
Entreat for mercy thine insulted God.