a thing that might be realized in Parliament. Hunting, the pleasure of his boyhood, did not long satisfy him. He, too, regarded that kind of sport only as a type of some more real occupation. He even at times would say, like Nisus to his sweet friend,― "Aut pugnam, aut aliquid jamdudum invadere magnum, Mens agitat mihi, nec placida contenta quiete est." The truth was, like many other youths of high spirit, he resembled Reinfeld, brother of the Emperor Rodolph, in being stricken "tædio rerum humanarum," and that at the age of twenty. He thirsted after something in his soul, as if, in regard to the need of living water, he was not as insensible as Andron Argivus was to the natural thirst, who, if traversing a Libyan desert, would not have sought for a drink, as Picus of Mirandula tells us. Promise him only recreations, the amusements of Paris, the best introductions to foreign courts,—(just before his death he was invited, by a friend who had loved him from his boyhood, to assist at the coronation of the present Emperor of Russia, under the especial protection of one of his first ministers,)—set before him the prospect of inheriting a competent fortune, of enjoying the pleasures even of the chase with every facility, and he was like Homer's hero, οὐδέ τι θυμὸς Ηθελ ̓ ἔτι ζώειν καὶ ὁρᾷν φάος ἠελίοιο. Here was suggested a lesson for men, to awaken them; for parents, to remind them of a duty; for the laborious poor, to encourage them; for the rich, to rouse them to a sense of their obligations. In fine, a source of grave thought at intervals to the young is the indefinite but unmistakable sense which they entertain that we are clad in black mortality, and that the dark curtain of the eternal world must at last drop between us. “Childhood and youth have their secret misgivings," as De Quincey remarks in his chapter on their afflictions. Their heart is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to any capital wound. * Autobiograph. Sketches. Many besides one I must not name have been thinking, year after year, from early boyhood, that youth at least was already finished. With the down yet on their chins, their last hour will seem to have sounded, and they cannot but feel, in regard to that, as born of human kind. "Between two breaths what crowded mysteries lie,- Forth from the darkness of the past we glide, In airy pageant on the eternal screen, Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame, Then seek the dust and stillness whence we came *." These grave thoughts, reflected back to us from the young mind, furnish a great and efficacious lesson to maturity; for that mind of youth never thinks of resisting them as it would an attempt to make it grave by force. These thoughts, expressed in such an artless way, act like the discourse of the Abbé de Montmort, as described by Madame de Sevigné. "He did not scold us," she says; "he did not address us with anger; he only implored us not to fear death, since it is the sole passage by which we have to rise again with Jesus Christ. We granted what he asked. We were all pleased; there was nothing in what he said that shocked us. He was courageous, he was modest, he was sensible, he was devout. I was to the highest degree charmed." Under these impressions the rough-bearded man even seeks to repay his youthful monitor by addressing him in his turn, with the best grace he can, which often is not much, words of encouragement. He will repeat to him at least the lines of a poet, and say, "Think not the struggle that draws near To meet the foe; Nor let thy noble spirit grieve Its life of joyous peace to leave * Holmes. "A life of youthful bliss and worth 'Tis but a name. And yet its glory far exceeds That base and sensual life which leads To want and shame." a dif Youth hardly needs the admonition. It cries with the same poet, the beauty of whose thought and words it feels in ferent way from that of the last speaker, "O Death, no more, no more delay; My spirit longs to flee away, And be at rest; The will of Heaven my will shall be,— To God's behest. "My soul is ready to depart, No thought rebels, the obedient heart Breathes forth no sigh; The wish on earth to linger still Were vain, where 'tis God's sovereign will That we shall die *." It was with such sentiments that René Marie-Albert de Jouenne D'Esgrigny met death in his sixteenth year. A few days before, the happiest of happy boys, surrounded with all whom he loved, he left the world without a complaint, without a murmur, without an expression of regret, just as a year before, our John and Thomas left it, to be ready for him there above, let us hope, and to rejoice with him for ever. Manhood and age can therefore learn from children and youth a practical sense of their mortality; and they need the lesson. "It is persons advanced in years," said a great priest, "who always give us most trouble when they come to die. Young people depart as if they were only leaving one room in the house for another. Yes, just so, one room for another, nothing more †." * Longfellow. + Dr. Doyle. CHAPTER XX. QUARRY, however small, though it were only like this hollow behind the summit of a chalky bourn, forms a pleasant spot for children. There can be such climbing, and rolling, and scrambling, and dirtying of shoes. It is quite a little Switzerland to them; and if there are only a few plashes of water in the level below, there are the lakes. In fact, to an artistic eye, it really has analogous charms; for whether the scale be small or gigantic, nature has those accidental fractures, and those forms resulting from the fall or unloading of earth which, as I have often felt, and as a great observer lately remarks, "can never be invented, so felicitous are the consequences of her fancy or her fury." Here is a hollow that hardly deserves the name of a quarry, but there are ups and downs in it, and it is screened on one side with a little grove of shrubs, crowning the edge of a bank that separates it from the garden, which is half public and half private, on which declivity the children can recline, with faces towards the evening sun; and the place is so secluded that they like it all the better for being little attractive to others. Alas! I little thought that here was to be their last sitting under the green leaves, gathering the flowers. Near Mount Alvernia, in Tuscany, there is a summit of the Apennines which has the name of "The Great Sigh," "Planctus Magnus," so called, tradition says, from Totila having been moved to lament the burning of Arezzo and the slaughter in the plain, as he beheld from that height the smoking ruins, and heard the distant cries of the perishing population. Though we are in the Children's Bower, a great sigh will sometimes reach us; and the ground even here can yield a melancholy seat for us who are still unstruck, as well as it can give later in VOL. II. * Vital. Chronica Montis Alverniæ, 13. the close adjoining, to those who will be in want of it, a grave. For though some one might think "That when they die the tomb may be a bush, Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush," here already stands the consecrated pile ready to receive them, near the verge of the salt flood, if their survivors, scorning "Those droplets which from niggard nature fall," should wish to make the turbulent surge, that on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes, weep for aye before their bones. No one will expect to find the young, or those who learn from them, letting us into a secret like that which Petrarch divulges of himself,—that they are fond of complaining, and that they take pains to have their eyes always full of tears. But here we cannot avoid speaking of the sufferings of the young, and of some few of the lessons which a consideration of them can supply. "Lo! what is good of life is but a dream, Childhood and youth suffer in this life with the whole creation; and they who know not any chastisement, know not their part. The common people, when they see a boy in poverty and hunger smiling and playing in the street, call him, laughing, for all his mirth, a little bunch of misery. They know what he has to endure. The rich find that even their own son has no perfect exemption from the same lot. Seneca says of Augustus, when he lost the two he loved best in the world, Agrippa and Mecænas, "Tot habenti millia hominum duos reparare difficile est." Thus nature knows how to equalize us all in regard to sorrow. M. de Beauchène, by his recent work entitled "Louis XVII. sa Vie, son Agonie, sa Mort," profoundly interested the public in the sufferings of that royal boy during his long martyrdom; but how common is the phenomenon of virtuous and delicate children enduring lengthened afflictions and complicated disasters! What is most common is sad enough. Henry d'Osseville, in his tenth year, suffered great pains before his death. |