Various

What a glorious night! How dazzling look the shining sand, the glistening water, in the moon’s mellow rays which fall now so brightly upon them, and bathing in its effulgence those two youthful figures who are pacing to and fro on the ramparts of Fortress Monroe, nearest the bay. The lady was gazing on the ground, and he—into her lovely face. ’Twas Edith and Lennard!

Vainly had he sought the interview during the day, but he could only see her the centre of an admiring circle, for Edith was decidedly the “star of beauty” and the “belle” amid the many who thronged the crowded saloons of the Hygeia Hotel. At last she promised to walk with him; and directly after tea had she gone with Charles to the garrison, and there, ’neath that brightly shining moon, had he told her of his fault—of his love.

And Edith?

She like a true woman forgave him, for she loved much. At first, however, she made him writhe under her assumed inconstancy, until she saw his agony, and then, when almost in despair of regaining his lost treasure—her love—came her forgiveness, like the manna to the starving Israelites. Adding, by way of coda to her musical words, the laughing exhortation, “To be a good boy, and she would—try to love him.”

A week later finds them en route for A——, Charles Lennard accompanying them; for he is as eager to ratify his engagement now as he was before to free himself. He had told Bel Ashton, the day after the ball, of his engagement, and she did not break her heart, but was soon as gay and as graceful as ever, “winning golden opinions” from all sorts of people, for Mr. Ashton was very wealthy, and Bel was his only child!

Mrs. Morton was very much astonished to see Edith return so full of happiness, and bringing back, as “quiet as a lamb,” the recreant knight. Nor did she advert to the letter or Edith’s protestation, but once, and that was when preparing for their marriage, she exclaimed with a smile: “So, Edith, instead of coming back to love no one but your mother, you only return to fill my hands full of labor and perplexity, and my heart full of grief at the thoughts of parting with you, even for a while.”

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LINES,

SUGGESTED BY ROGERS’ STATUE OF RUTH.

———

BY THOMAS BUCHANAN READ.

———

From age to age, from clime to clime,

A spirit, bright as her own morn,

She walks the golden fields of Time,

As erst amid the yellow corn.

A form o’er which the hallowed veil

Of years bequeaths a lovelier light,

As when the mists of morning sail

Round some far isle to make it bright.

And as some reaper ’mid the grain,

Or binder resting o’er his sheaf,

Beheld her on the orient plain,

A passing vision, bright and brief;

And while he gazed let fall perchance

The sheaf or sickle from his hand—

Thus even here, as in a trance,

Before her kneeling form I stand.

But not as then she comes and goes

To live in memory alone;

The perfect soul before me glows

Immortal in the living stone.

And while upon her face I gaze

And scan her rarely rounded form,

The glory of her native days

Comes floating o’er me soft and warm;—

Comes floating, till this shadowy place

Brightens to noontide, and receives

The breath of that old harvest space

With all its sunshine and its sheaves!

It is a form beloved of yore,

And when that passed the name breathed on;

But now the form lives as before

To charm even though the name were gone.

And though the future years may dim

And mar this lovely type of Truth,

Through every action, feature, limb,

The breathing stone shall whisper Ruth!

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FERDINAND DE CANDOLLES.

Of all the social miseries of France, none are more fruitful in catastrophes of every kind than the idle uselessness of the well-born, and the over-education of those who are not so. France being, as one of her writers observes, the China of Europe, her habits, customs, and traditions, endure, in fact, through the organized destruction of succeeding revolutions, and whilst throne after throne lies in the dust, the prejudices of that fictitious universe called the world, are standing still, fixed, firm, and uprising in inflexible strength from roots that plunge deep into the soil. For instance, the old idea that a gentilhomme or a Grand Seigneur should not know how to spell, although obsolete as far as grammar and orthography are concerned, lives on yet in the notion that a gentleman must not work. This has hitherto proved an uneradicable opinion, and the general incapability and instinctive laziness of the upper classes in France, can, alas! amply testify to its prevalence throughout the country. It is not that the aristocracy of France are wanting in talent or intelligence; on the contrary, they have far more of what may be called native capacity than the classes beneath them—but they are unpractical, unbusiness-like, unused to any things in the shape of affairs. They are admirable if always in the first place, but rebel at the bare thought of helping on the governing machine in its hidden wheels; and whilst with us every public office counts gentlemen by the dozen, and noble names are to be found even in the most unconspicuous, though useful places; in France an ancient family would think itself degraded if one of its sons were to be discovered amongst the workers of a bureau.

The following tale, the circumstances of which are yet uneffaced from many a memory in Paris, will perhaps serve to exemplify the sad truth of what I advance, and give a slight notion of the immediate action of certain false principles upon our neighbors’ mind. The hero of the ensuing pages, Ferdinand de Candolles, was the last scion of one of the most ancient houses in France. Ferdinand’s father died whilst the boy was in early infancy, and the entire charge of her son, whom she idolized, fell upon Madame de Candolles. At eighteen, Ferdinand was a tall, handsome youth, prodigiously proud of his name, highly romantic in his notions, ready to do battle with any given number of individuals in honor of Dieu, le Roi, ou sa fame, making a terrible quantity of bad verses, but as incapable of explaining to you M. de VillÈle’s last financial measure, or the probable influence of the increasing growth of beet-root sugar upon the colonial markets, as he would have been of expounding the doctrines of Confucius in Chinese.

The Revolution of 1830, fell like a thunder-bolt upon France, and the Bourbons of the elder branch allowed themselves to be driven from their post. The elements of revolution had been for the last seven or eight years fermenting far more in society, in the arts and in literature, than in the political sphere; and Ferdinand, with all his heart and soul a devoted royalist, as far as the government was concerned, was naÏvely and unsuspectingly in every thing else, a determined revolutionist, overthrowing intellectual dynasties, spurning authority, mocking at control, gloating over Victor Hugo, George Sand, e tutti quanti, and fancying the whole was quite compatible with the political faith he would sooner have died than resign. Sometimes Madame de Candolles would think very seriously of what could be the future career of her son, and the word Nothing! emblazoned in gigantic ideal letters, was the only answer her imagination ever framed. In 1832, it so happened that the now prefect named in the department, was an old friend of the widow’s family—a bourgeois, it is true, still a respectable man, whose father and uncle had, in very difficult times, rendered more than one signal service to Madame de Candolles’ own parents. M. Durand and his wife drew Ferdinand and his mother as much about them as they possibly could, and whenever he found an occasion of insinuating any thing of the kind into the widow’s ear, the well-intentioned prÉfet would talk seriously, nay, almost paternally, of her son’s future, and the little it seemed likely to offer him. One day, after a conversation in which Madame de Candolles had more freely than usual admitted the barrenness of the lad’s prospects, M. Durand contrived to lead her insensibly toward the notion of some employment whereby a becoming existence might be insured, hinted that there were positions where political opinions need be no obstacle, to which the nomination even did not emanate directly from the government, and ended by proposing to invest Ferdinand with the dignity of head librarian to the BibliothÈque de la Ville, a place yielding some hundred and fifty pounds a year, and just left vacant by the death of Madame Durand’s nephew. Madame de Candolles’ surprise was scarcely surpassed by her indignation, and, though she managed to cover both by a slight veil of politeness, there was in her refusal a degree of haughtiness that went well-nigh to disturb the honest prÉfet’s equanimity. As to Ferdinand, he did not exactly know, when the offer was first made clear to him, whether he ought not to take down a certain sword worn at Marigny by his ancestor, PalamÈde de Candolles, and punish M. Durand with positive loss of life for his audacity; but, when what he called reason returned, he determined simply by the frigid dignity of his manners in future to make the bourgeois functionary of Louis Philippe feel the full extent of his mistake, and bring him to a proper consciousness of the wide difference between their relative positions. Nor was this all; one day, some six months after, Madame de Candolles took occasion to pay a visit to the prÉfecture, and leading M. Durand aside, to solicit him for the still unfilled post of librarian, in favor of Ferdinand’s foster-brother, a market-gardener’s son! He was, she said, an exceedingly clever young man, knew Latin, Greek, and all sorts of things, had just served his time in a notary’s office, and would be the very thing for the situation proposed!—(successor to Madame Durand’s own nephew!) The prÉfet was sufficiently master of himself to refuse politely, alleging that he had already made choice of a librarian; but when Madame Durand heard the story, she vowed undying hatred to all aristocrats, and whenever she afterward met Madame de Candolles, tossed her plumed head as though she had been a war-horse. So ended our hero’s first and only chance of official employment, rejected, we have seen with what disdain. He had then attained the age of twenty-three.

In the course of the following year General de Candolles died, leaving all he possessed to his nephew. This “all” was not much, still it was something—some twenty-odd thousand francs, or so—and if the widow had lived long enough, it might have increased; but, unfortunately, before Ferdinand had reached the age of twenty-five, his mother also died, leaving him completely—positively “alone in the world.” With what Madame de Candolles left (her chief resources had come from a small annuity) Ferdinand found himself at the head of about two thousand pounds sterling. With two thousand francs a year, which this would yield, he might have lived comfortably enough in any part of the provinces, and indulged in a quiet laugh at the prÉfet, who wanted to make a bibliothÉcaire of him. But, of course, such sensible arrangements did not enter into his head. He was (the naÏf royalist and aristocrat!) wild with admiration of “Hernani” and le Roi s’amuse, and for the moment thought of little beyond the soul-stirring delights of seeing Bocage in Antony, or Madame Dorval in Marion Delorme. To Paris, of course, tended all his desires, and to Paris he accordingly went, as soon as the first months of mourning were expired, and he had put what he termed order into his affairs.

We will not dive into the details of his existence in the great capital during the first period of his residence there. Suffice it to say, that the literary mania soon possessed him entirely, and he dreamt of little short of European fame. Here, indeed, thought he, was a career into which he might throw himself with all his energy. Lamartine and De Vigny were gentlemen like himself, and there was in poetry nothing to sully his escutcheon. Unfortunately, Ferdinand mistook for talent the means afforded him by his purse for drawing flatterers about him, and for some time he bought his most fatal illusions with his positive substance. Dinners to journalists, and parties of pleasure with all the world, soon reduced his capital considerably, but what did that matter? when he should be famous, publishers would besiege him, laying thousands at his feet for a fortnight’s labor. He was already the acknowledged idol of certain salons, and when the tragedy he had written should be performed, his name would be glorious throughout the world. By dint of pecuniary sacrifices, the performance of this play at the ThÉÂtre FranÇais had been obtained, and what with newspaper scribblers, claqueurs, actresses, and human leeches of every sort who fastened upon his pocket, the author found himself, half an hour before the curtain drew up, on the fancied dawn of his glory, literally deprived of every farthing he possessed, except one solitary five-franc piece in his waistcoat pouch. Ferdinand smiled gayly on perceiving this, and thought what a strange thing fortune was, and fame, too, and how, on the morrow, he should be on the high road to riches!

Well, to cut the matter short, the tragedy was a dead failure, as it merited to be, and before the last act was ended, Ferdinand’s golden dreams were rudely dispelled, and he clutched the piÈce de cent sous in his waistcoat-pocket as though it were to save him from going crazy. When the curtain dropped he escaped from the theatre unseen, muffled up in his cloak like some criminal flying from detection. But his fate was lying in wait for him. As he turned round the corner of the house which led into the least frequented of the surrounding streets, he perceived three or four carriages waiting for their occupants, and he stood for an instant, hesitating whether to go backward or forward. At that moment, a ray from the rÉverbÈre fell upon the face of a lady who, enveloped in mantle and hood, was waiting for the arrival of her equipage. Ferdinand had never seen that face before, but he stood riveted to the spot, for something in his heart whispered, it is she—the one! The preceding carriages received their respective charges, and whirled them off; the last one drew up, and the door was opened by the footman—the lady dropped her glove, whilst turning to bid adieu to her companion. Ferdinand, unconscious that he had sprung to her side, raised it up, and offered it to its owner. “Thank you, Armand,” said she, “what a wretched stupid play—was it not?” and then turning round—“A thousand pardons, monsieur!” she exclaimed, “I mistook you for another person;” and so, with a bow, she entered her carriage, and the door closed with a bang.

Ferdinand stood upon the spot where he had seen her stand, until a sergent de ville touched him on the arm, and told him to move on. “What a wretched stupid play!—was it not?” the sentence rang in his ear, but brought with it the echo of the tone—that magic sound that had struck upon the chords of his secret soul, and under whose vibration they were still striking their response—the honeyed voice, not the hard words, had wounded him, and he confessed that, though deadly, the poison was nectar to the taste.

Day after day, hour after hour, did Ferdinand spend in the vain attempt to discover his unknown idol, and the less he succeeded in the enterprise, the more the object of his pursuit became lovely in his eyes, and was surrounded with ideal charms. It would be useless to enter into the painful details of Ferdinand’s life during this period.

The day after the failure of his tragedy, the Marquise de Guesvillers, an ancient dowager of the Faubourg St. Germain, and his chief prÔneuse, sent to beg the discomfited author would come dine with her tÊte-À-tÊte. Ferdinand had a reason now for desiring to explore to the utmost extent the upper regions of society, and he accepted the invitation. The old lady greeted him with a half-benevolent, half-mischievous smile—“My dear child,” said she, when the servant had closed the door, “now that Providence has saved you from becoming an homme de lettres, we must try to make something of you. Heaven be praised! pen and ink must have lost its charm for you at last;” (a pinch of snuff,) “it seems your play was as bad as your enemy could wish; Madame de Rouvion was there, and has just told me so—poor dear Hector de Candolles,” (another pinch of snuff,) “if he could have guessed that a great-grandson of his would write a play! But, however, that is over now, and we have only to rejoice that things were no worse: when the recollection of your aventure shall have quite subsided, we will find a wife for you, and settle you in life! Thank Heaven! you are cured of your taste for pen and ink!” and these last words the good lady repeated over and over again in the course of the evening, and each time with remarkable satisfaction. Once or twice Ferdinand was tempted to shake the monotonous little dowager to pieces, and shout in her ear—“Woman! I must live by pen and ink, or starve!” but the remembrance of the face he had seen the night before, froze the words on his tongue, and he submitted to the torture in silence.

For months in the salons, whither Madame de Guesvillers carried him, he sought out the object of his dreams, but she never appeared, and Ferdinand went on leading la vie de BohÈme, until hope began almost entirely to fade away. One evening, he had, for the fiftieth time, accepted an invitation to some soirÉe, where his indefatigable patroness insisted upon his going; and he was, as usual, looking on whilst others amused (or fancied they amused) themselves, when the conversation of two ladies near him attracted his attention—he knew not why.

“So Blanche Vouvray is come back at last?” said one.

“She is coming here to-night,” replied the other.

As the two talkers moved away, a certain movement might have been observed toward the middle of the room, and many and loud greetings welcomed a new comer, who seemed to have been long absent. Mysterious magnetism of the heart! Ferdinand knew what had happened, and was prepared, when he turned round, to recognize at last—standing in the midst of a group, who were pressing eagerly around her—the one, so long, so vainly sought; the vision that had risen over his ruin like a star over the tempest-torn sea, that had come and vanished in the momentous night, when it was proved to him that his sole resources, for a bare existence, must depend, in future, upon hard, ignoble, unavowed and insufficient toil!

There she stood—bright, beautiful and glad, beaming on all about her; dispensing favors in look, gesture and smile, and inflicting wound after wound on Ferdinand’s heart by the incomparably sweet voice that, do what he would, seemed to his ear always to repeat—“What a wretched, stupid play!—is it not?” It was the only link between them—the one sole sign whereby she had acknowledged his existence.

How long the soirÉe lasted, was what M. de Candolles never knew; he simply thought it a time—it might be one protracted moment—during which there was light; then, the light went out, and darkness spread over every thing around. He would not ask to be presented to Mademoiselle de Vouvray; he was content to watch her; and, when she was gone, he mechanically closed his eyes, locked up his vision within his inmost self, and then, re-awakening, went forth, to be once more alone with his idea!

Time passed on, and Ferdinand’s passion increased with every hour. Three or four times in the week he found means to feast his eyes upon the object of his adoration, and the remaining days and nights were spent in trying to draw poetic inspiration from what threatened to be the source of something very nearly akin to madness. Ferdinand’s actual talent, however, was of such a perfectly ordinary stamp, that it profited in no degree by the strong element love afforded it, and one fine morning—when he least expected it—a blow so stunning was dealt him that his whole fabric of existence was well-nigh shivered to the earth. The proprietor of the paper wherein, for the last year or two, M. de Candolles had published anonymously the chief productions of his pen, suddenly told him that he should in future be obliged to refuse his contributions unless signed by his own name! M. de Candolles, he urged, was known in many salons of the beau monde, and probably what he might write would be read by a good number of people, whereas the lucubrations of Jaques Bargel—Ferdinand’s pseudonyms—only occupied space, and brought neither fame nor money to the journal. M. de Candolles received the announcement, which went near to show destitution staring him in the face, with becoming fortitude. He would sooner have died than allow his name to be dragged forward into publicity; and at the thought of the elegant, aristocratical, disdainful lady of his worship discovering that he lived by writing feuilletons, he felt the very ground fail beneath his feet.

Ferdinand was, after the circumstance we have just related, reduced to a species of misery even he had as yet not suspected. Unable to pay for the lodging, small and dirty as it was, that he had hitherto inhabited, he was now reduced to rent a small attic belonging to the collection of servants’ rooms in a tolerably good-looking house. The one thought that absorbed him was fear lest Blanche de Vouvray should discover the necessities of his life. This, and this alone, combated the wild passion wherewith she had inspired him. But he reckoned without feminine instinct and feminine curiosity. Blanche de Vouvray had not been half-a-dozen times in the same salon with M. de Candolles, before she felt she was adored, and her next feeling was one of considerable anxiety to know how she should bring her slave to confess the charm. Blanche was a person of irreproachable conduct; but still, it was tiresome to be so evidently worshiped, and yet know nothing at all about it!

Poor Ferdinand! The struggle for existence was rapidly wearing him out. The want of almost every necessary of life, the constant recourse to a morsel of bread, or a little rice, and a few potatoes, for daily food, coupled with the perpetual tension of the brain, required to secure even these, miserable as they were—all this was doing its deadly work, and M. de Candolles’ health was visibly failing every day. One evening, this was so plain to all eyes that, at Madame de Guesvillers’ house, many good-natured persons told Ferdinand he really must take care, or they should hear of his going off in a galloping consumption. An hour or two later, some one opened a window behind where he was standing—

“Do not remain where you are—pray!” said a voice beside him. It was timidly yet earnestly said—the sweet voice was unsteady, and there was such an expression in the last word, “Pray!” Ferdinand turned without answering: his eyes met Blanche de Vouvray’s—she looked down, but not before she had involuntarily replied to his passionate and melancholy glance.

M. de Candolles soon left the room. His brain was on fire, and he rushed homeward like one possessed. Part of his prudence was gone. He snatched up pen and ink, and wrote—wrote to her! All that Ferdinand had never yet found, was found now—the hidden spring was reached, and the tide of eloquence gushed forth, strong, rapid, irresistible.

Such a letter as few women have ever received was put, the next morning, into Mademoiselle de Vouvray’s hands. The first effect of it was electrical—she became confused, and like one in a dream; but, almost as soon, the feminine instinct awoke, and involuntarily she admitted that her end was gained—he had spoken at last! What lay beyond was uncertain—might be dangerous, and had best be altogether set aside. She would avoid M. de Candolles in future. This was not so easy: that very night she met him in the vestibule of the Grand Opera, with little, old Madame de Guesvillers on his arm. He bowed to, but did not look at her; was cold, silent and reserved, and really did seem as though he had one foot in the tomb. He would, perhaps, not live another year—that was a shocking thought—and Blanche shivered as she rolled over the Pont Royal in her comfortable carriage. There could be no harm in answering his letter from a certain point of view she now adopted, and accordingly she did answer it, and a very virtuous, and consoling, and amiable composition her answer was. From this moment the possibility of writing tempted both; and, from time to time, they availed themselves of it, though it never degenerated into a habit. Ferdinand’s pecuniary resources growing less and less with every day, he literally starved himself, in order to cover the extravagance of his heart-expenses. For a bouquet dropped in at her carriage-window, as she drove from the Italiens—for a perfume to put upon his own handkerchief, that she should inhale, he constantly observed a four-and-twenty hours’ fast, broken only by a crust of bread and a glass of water.

There were days, it cannot be denied, when the fair Blanche de Vouvray admitted to herself that it might have been better for her never to have seen M. de Candolles. His strange adoration captivated and preoccupied her by its very strangeness, probably far more than if it had followed the ordinary method in such cases.

One day, after saving during three weeks, and Heaven only knows with what pains, the sum of fifteen francs, Ferdinand therewith secured the loan of a really handsome horse, from one of the dealers in the Champs ElysÉes. When the carriage came in view—than which there was no other in the world for him—he made his steed execute certain evolutions gracefully enough, for he was a remarkably good horseman, darted off upon the road to the Bois de Boulogne, crossed once or twice the path of the calÈche he was pursuing, received one look of recognition, one sign from a small gloved hand, and was over-paid! That evening, they met in the same salon: a lady—who was standing by the piano whereon Blanche had just been playing a new waltz—asked Ferdinand whether she had not seen him on horseback in the Champs ElysÉes.

“I thought I would try how it might suit me now,” was his reply: “but I find it will not do; the exercise is too strong, and I am unequal to it.” Blanche de Vouvray grew pale, and bent down to look over some music.

“If riding is too much for his nerves,” observed—later in the evening, to his neighbor—one of the beardless lions who happened to be present, “I should imagine such a monstrous quantity of cake must be equally so!” and jumping forward to Ferdinand’s side—

“Halte lÀ, mon vieux!” he exclaimed, with all the elegance and atticism of Mabille in his intonation. “Leave a little of that Savarin for me, will you? Que diable! why, one would swear you hadn’t eaten since yesterday!”

Ferdinand turned round suddenly upon the ill-bred youth, and in his haggard glance there was a flash of positive ferocity: it was but a flash, but to an observer it would have sufficed to testify the truth of the horrid words uttered in jest. An instant after, the impression was chased away, and a laugh was the only visible result of the incident; but any one who could have decyphered what was engraven on M. de Candolles’ countenance that night, would have seen that a convulsion so violent had passed over his whole being; that reason was almost shaken from its throne.

The constant recurrence of these violent emotions acted more and more visibly each day upon Ferdinand’s wasted frame; and, at last, a moment came when he disappeared altogether from his habitual haunts. Few marked his absence, except a few women, in whose albums he wrote bad verses, and for whom he procured autographs from great theatrical celebrities. Upward of ten days passed, and M. de Candolles had not yet been heard of. His old friend, Madame de Guesvillers, drove herself to his door, and the answer at first was—as usual—that he was “out.” Two days later, however, the porter admitted that he was in reality very ill, but that the doctor had forbidden any one from visiting him, as the slightest agitation or exertion might produce the worst effects. That very evening, whilst her circle of habituÉs was around her, Madame de Guesvillers received a note from Ferdinand, expressing his gratitude for her inquiries, but saying that his illness was little or nothing—a cold—and that he hoped in a few days to be able to resume his place at her tea-table. Blanche was present, heard the contents of the note, and if it had been any one’s interest—which it luckily was not—to watch her, would have betrayed by many little signs, her involuntary joy. But, on returning home, that joy was turned to dismay. There was a letter, too, for her—such a letter—it was written from a death-bed, and contained a last farewell! She dismissed her maid, and sat through the first hours of the night, with the letter lying before her. Every feeling of commiseration, of womanly sympathy was touched, and the true womanly wish to comfort and console aroused.

When she arose the next morning, it was with the determination to afford the last sad alleviation in her power to the sufferings she had caused. She accordingly, after attiring herself as modestly as possible, sallied forth, and, on foot, reached M. de Candolles’ abode. Here, for a moment, she paused, and her courage began to fail.

It was a bright, sunny morning, and it would have seemed that all the shopkeepers in the street were determined to take their part of air and light, for Blanche thought they were all congregated upon their respective thresholds to see her pass. She blushed at every step, and felt so confused, that more than once she had nearly stumbled. Before entering the porte cochere she stood an instant still, all the blood rushed to her heart, and she was ready to faint, lest she should be too late! When she had mastered this first strong emotion she began to reflect upon the means of gaining the sufferer’s presence.

Blanche commenced her ascent, but when she reached the topmost stair of the fifth flight, and saw before her the narrow, winding, dirty steps that led to the last story, she paused, and began to wonder whither she was going. How strange that M. de Candolles should live in such a place! M. de Candolles, who was “one of her set,” and whom she had pictured to herself surrounded by the same elegancies of life which, to the small number of individuals she called every body were indispensable!—what could it mean, and where was she going?

She mounted the flight of stairs, and found herself in a long, winding corridor, lighted by skylights placed at stated distances. Doors were on either hand, and they were numbered. Blanche de Vouvray drew her silk dress and her cachemire shawl closely around her, to avoid the contact of the greasy looking wall. She was hesitating whether she would not return at once, when a low moan, followed by a short, hollow cough, struck her ear—all the woman’s pitying sympathy was instantaneously re-awakened, and she advanced, her hand raised in order to knock.

But, reader, let us in a few words depict to you the scene that is yet hidden by that closed door. On a miserable bed stretched upon a paillasse of straw, lies the invalid, upon whose pallid features a ray of light falls mournfully after having filtered through a ragged piece of green calico hung up before the dim pane of the roof-window. The walls are dingy and bare; in one corner only hangs something in the form of clothing, covered by an old square of ticking. On a broken-backed straw chair at the bed-head, rests a broken tea-pot, apparently filled with tisane; whilst upon a small table near the door are crowded together papers and perfume-bottles, inkstands and soiled gloves, a wash-hand basin and a candlestick, a hair-brush and two or three books—the heterogeneous symbols of all the wretched inmate’s wants, vanities and toil!

The night had been a bad one, and the morning sun brought but small alleviation to Ferdinand’s sufferings, whilst the malady itself held him prisoner in its clutches; the want of proper sustenance so weakened his frame that it could oppose no resistance to disease. The brain, without as yet precisely wandering, still from time to time created for itself fair illusions, gentle dreams. One form ever floated before Ferdinand’s mental vision—far, far off, as in another sphere—and he would stretch forth his arms toward the image, and longing, cry to it for a look, a sign of recognition.

A knock came at his door, uncertain, timid, loud; why did they disturb him?—Another knock!—He groaned forth the word to enter, and a hand was laid upon the key.

“Come in,” he again peevishly repeated. The door opened!

To describe what passed in the minds of the two thus suddenly face to face to one another, is impossible. All the squalid, ugly, poverty and apparent degradation we have tried to depict, flashed like lightning over Blanche de Vouvray’s comprehension—she stood aghast, but the involuntary scream that escaped her was drowned in the violence of the exclamation that burst from M. de Candolles’ lips. With one hand drawing over him convulsively the blanket which was his only covering, and waving the other imperiously—“Depart hence, depart,” he shrieked in bitter agony, and with eyes that started with horror from their sockets.

The terror was mutual; and she who had come to console fled in dismay, and he, who would have paid with his heart’s blood a touch of her hand, drove her from him as ruthlessly as though she had been his deadliest foe!

Ferdinand de Candolles did not die then; he went raving mad, was confined at Charenton for many years, grew to be a harmless maniac, and died in the year 1848. Blanche de Vouvray is still a reigning beauty in the salons of Paris, universally respected, and only known by a very few as the heroine of this sad tale.

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THE GHOST-RAISER.

My Uncle Beagley, who commenced his commercial career very early in the present century as a bagman, will tell stories. Among them, he tells his Single Ghost story so often, that I am heartily tired of it. In self-defense, therefore, I publish the tale in order that when next the good, kind old gentleman offers to bore us with it, every body may say they know it. I remember every word of it.

One fine autumn evening, about forty years ago, I was traveling on horseback from Shrewsbury to Chester. I felt tolerably tired, and was beginning to look out for some snug way-side inn, where I might pass the night, when a sudden and violent thunder-storm came on. My horse, terrified by the lightning, fairly took the bridle between his teeth, and started off with me at full gallop through lanes and cross-roads, until at length I managed to pull him up just near the door of a neat-looking country inn.

“Well,” thought I, “there was wit in your madness, old boy, since it brought us to this comfortable refuge.” And alighting, I gave him in charge to the stout farmer’s boy who acted as ostler. The inn-kitchen, which was also the guest-room, was large, clean, neat and comfortable, very like the pleasant hostelry described by Izaak Walton. There were several travelers already in the room—probably, like myself, driven there for shelter—and they were all warming themselves by the blazing fire while waiting for supper. I joined the party. Presently, being summoned by the hostess, we all sat down, twelve in number, to a smoking repast of bacon and eggs, corned beef and carrots, and stewed hare.

The conversation turned naturally on the mishaps occasioned by the storm, of which every one seemed to have had his full share. One had been thrown off his horse; another, driving in a gig, had been upset into a muddy dyke; all had got a thorough wetting, and agreed unanimously that it was dreadful weather—a regular witches’ sabbath!

“Witches and ghosts prefer for their sabbath a fine moonlight night to such weather as this!”

These words were uttered in a solemn tone, and with strange emphasis, by one of the company. He was a tall, dark-looking man, and I had set him down in my own mind as a traveling merchant or pedler. My next neighbor was a gay, well-looking, fashionably-dressed young man, who, bursting into a peal of laughter, said:

“You must know the manners and customs of ghosts very well, to be able to tell that they dislike getting wet or muddy.”

The first speaker giving him a dark, fierce look, said:

“Young man, speak not so lightly of things above your comprehension.”

“Do you mean to imply that there are such things as ghosts?”

“Perhaps there are, if you had courage to look at them.”

The young man stood up, flushed with anger. But presently resuming his seat, he said calmly:

“That taunt should cost you dear if it were not such a foolish one.”

“A foolish one!” exclaimed the merchant, throwing on the table a heavy leathern purse. “There are fifty guineas. I am content to lose them, if, before the hour is ended, I do not succeed in showing you, who are so obstinately prejudiced, the form of any one of your deceased friends; and if, after you have recognized him, you allow him to kiss your lips.”

We all looked at each other, but my young neighbor, still in the same mocking manner, replied:

“You will do that, will you?”

“Yes,” said the other—“I will stake these fifty guineas, on condition that you will pay a similar sum if you lose.”

After a short silence, the young man said, gayly:

“Fifty guineas, my worthy sorcerer, are more than a poor college sizar ever possessed; but here are five, which, if you are satisfied, I shall be most willing to wager.”

The other took up his purse, saying, in a contemptuous tone:

“Young gentleman, you wish to draw back?”

“I draw back!” exclaimed the student. “Well! if I had the fifty guineas, you should see whether I wish to draw back!”

“Here,” said I, “are four guineas, which I will stake on your wager.”

No sooner had I made this proposition than the rest of the company, attracted by the singularity of the affair, came forward to lay down their money; and in a minute or two the fifty guineas were subscribed. The merchant appeared so sure of winning, that he placed all the stakes in the student’s hands, and prepared for his experiment. We selected for the purpose a small summer-house in the garden, perfectly isolated, and having no means of exit but a window and a door, which we carefully fastened, after placing the young man within. We put writing materials on a small table in the summer-house, and took away the candles. We remained outside, with the pedler amongst us. In a low, solemn voice he began to chant the following lines:

“What riseth slow from the ocean caves

And the stormy surf?

The phantom pale sets his blackened foot

On the fresh green turf.”

Then raising his voice solemnly, he said:

“You asked to see your friend, Francis Villiers, who was drowned, three years ago, off the coast of South America—what do you see?”

“I see,” replied the student, “a white light arising near the window; but it has no form; it is like an uncertain cloud.”

We—the spectators—remained profoundly silent.

“Are you afraid?” asked the merchant, in a loud voice.

“I am not,” replied the student, firmly.

After a moment’s silence, the pedler stamped three times on the ground, and sang:

Once more the solemn question:

“You, who would see revealed the mysteries of the tomb—what do you see now?”

The student answered in a calm voice, but like that of a man describing things as they pass before him:

“I see the cloud taking the form of a phantom; its head is covered with a long veil—it stands still!”

“Are you afraid?”

“I am not!”

We looked at each other in horror-stricken silence, while the merchant, raising his arms above his head, chanted in a sepulchral voice:

“What do you see?” said he.

“I see the phantom advance; he lifts his veil—’tis Francis Villiers! he approaches the table—he writes!—’tis his signature!”

“Are you afraid?”

A fearful moment of silence ensued; then the student replied, but in an altered voice:

“I am not.”

With strange and frantic gestures the merchant then sang:

“What do you see?”

“He comes—he approaches—he pursues me—he is stretching out his arms—he will have me! Help! help! Save me!”

“Are you afraid, now?” asked the merchant in a mocking voice.

A piercing cry, and then a stifled groan, were the only reply to this terrible question.

“Help that rash youth!” said the merchant, bitterly. “I have, I think, won the wager; but it is sufficient for me to have given him a lesson. Let him keep his money and be wiser for the future.”

He walked rapidly away. We opened the door of the summer-house and found the student in convulsions. A paper, signed with the name “Francis Villiers,” was on the table. As soon as the student’s senses were restored, he asked vehemently where was the vile sorcerer who had subjected him to such a horrible ordeal—he would kill him! He sought him throughout the inn in vain; then, with the speed of a madman, he dashed off across the fields in pursuit of him—and we never saw either of them again.

That, children, is my Ghost Story!

“And how is it, good uncle, that after that, you don’t believe in ghosts?” said I, the first time I heard it.

“Because, my boy,” replied my uncle, “neither the student or the merchant ever returned; and the forty-five guineas, belonging to me and the other travelers, continued equally invisible. Those two swindlers carried them off, after having acted a farce, which we, like ninnies, believed to be real.”

———

BY CAROLINE F. ORNE.

———

———

BY BON GAULTIER.

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The celebrated poet of the Irish Melodies—so long a member of that glorious company of British bards which, a perfect galaxy of genius, illuminated the first quarter of the present century—is no more. He saw them all run their high careers, and pass away—and now he, too, is gone. For the last couple of years, his brilliant and active mind had given way—the soul had sunk before its “dark cottage,” and his life was second childishness and mere oblivion. None of his old cotemporaries remain, at present, but the last among them—Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, now between 80 and 90 years of age—who, seeing that his poems are not likely to descend to posterity, has, at least, resolved to go a good part of the way himself. We do not mention Montgomery—he was never ranked in the peerage of Parnassus, to which Moore belonged.

It was time for Thomas Moore to depart; he had seen star after star decay:—many a glorious head stoop to the dust, many a soaring spirit extinguished—the passionate and wayward Byron, dying in a barrack, alone, at Missolonghi—an old, worn-out man at thirty-seven; and the delicate and sensuous Keats, in the morning of his days, exhaled into the clear blue sky of Rome; and “the pard-like spirit” of Shelley, passing, ere the noon, through the portals of his familiar haunt, the sea, to mingle with the elements which he so fearfully, so fearlessly worshiped in the world; and the Cervantic and fine-hearted Sir Walter—noblest of Scottish Chiefs; and the consummate lyric poet of Hope and Poland and, “by Susquehanna’s side, fair Wyoming;” and the three kings of bardish Cumberland—the weird and metaphysical Coleridge, as magnificent as Skiddaw—and as misty, for the most part—Thalaba, Southey, the library hermit—and Wordsworth, the consecrated hermit of the Mere and the Mountain; and, along with these “dead kings of melody,” the Shepherd of Ettrick, Allan Cunningham, Motherwell, the stormy, metallurgic soul of Ebenezer Elliott, and the swan-like music of Hemans. He saw them all pass away into the world of shadows—a more goodly and powerful troop of poets than any other age of British literature could boast—and he himself was not unworthy of that splendid and memorable brotherhood.

Moore was born in May, 1779, at Aungier street in the city of Dublin, of Catholic parents. His father was a highly respectable grocer and spirit-dealer. Young Moore was sent to the school of Mr. Samuel Whyte, a man who enjoyed a high reputation as pedagogue in the metropolis. He had a very refined and dignified notion of his own vocation and literature, and was, withal, a good and kind-hearted man. He greatly encouraged the habits of public reading and elocution in his school; and the fashion of private theatricals being then very prevalent in the aristocratic families of Ireland, he was often called to superintend them at various houses. He encouraged his scholars to act scenes from plays, and was a great hand at furnishing prologues and epilogues for stage “pieces de circonstance.” Mr. Whyte was no common man; for it is, in all human probability, to his peculiar mode of training that English literature is indebted for two of its most brilliant ornaments. His encouragement of theatricals and songs, among the boys, gave Richard Brinsley Sheridan a tendency to the drama, and Moore a turn for lyrical composition and high-life; for we firmly and potently believe in the truth of the old hexameter embalmed in the Lindley Murray of our childhood—

About a quarter of a century before Moore entered the school, Mr. Whyte had the teaching of young Sheridan, whom, curiously enough, he pronounced “an incorrigible dunce,” after a year’s instruction of the boy! A dunce he was, perhaps, at the methodical “branches,” taught in a methodic way by Mr. Whyte; but we venture to say quick enough, when the fit was on him, at the gay work of tinkering or acting plays, or pieces of plays—thus taking unconsciously the bias which had its results in the School for Scandal and the Duenna. As for Tommy Moore, he was always a spry, vivacious, black-eyed little chap, who took at once to the business of the boards, and recited and performed to the great satisfaction of his master. The latter, whenever he went to the houses of the nobility and gentry to get up plays, would usually take with him his smart show-actor—the precocious little Catholic boy, and give him parts to sustain in the representations. In this way the plebeian youngster was introduced—greatly to his pride and satisfaction—into the highest families of Dublin and its vicinity, where the circumstances of gayety and splendor, contrasting with the exclusions generally operating against those of his class and creed, heightened the zest with which he enjoyed his privileges, and thus early created those feelings and sentiments of pleasure and brilliancy which influenced his subsequent career in the world.

From reciting and acting, the transition to writing verses was a very natural thing, and Moore showed himself as apt at rhyme as at every thing else. Indeed, like Pope and Ovid, “he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.” He himself gives us from memory, part of a juvenile effusion on resuming school tasks after the business of the stage was over:

And he says: “I have thus been led back, step by step, from an early date to one still earlier, with the view of ascertaining, for those who may take any interest in literary biography, at what period I first showed an aptitude for the now common craft of verse-making, and the result is—so far back in childhood lies the epoch—that I am really unable to say at what age I first began to act, sing, and rhyme.” At the age of twelve he wrote a Masque, in which he adapted verses to Haydn’s “Spirit-Song,” and this was performed by himself, his sister, and some young friends in his father’s house in Aungier street. There have been few instances of a healthy precocity of mind beyond that of Thomas Moore.

In 1793, at which time the French Revolution was suggesting to the kings of Europe a little leniency to their people, Moore was permitted by the repeal of a penal statute, to enter Trinity College Dublin—a Protestant University. Here, being always anxious to distinguish himself, he gave in a specimen of English verse at one of the examinations, and was gratified by the praise of the examiners and a copy of the Voyage of Anacharsis—a book which must have greatly helped to Orientalize the genius of Moore. His first step in regular authorship was the publication of the Translation of Anacreon the Greek poet. His sprightly facility of weaving verse had been exercised during his stay in College, on this congenial task; and in 1799, when nineteen years old, he went to London to keep his terms as a barrister at the Middle Temple, and to bring out his English Anacreontics. These last he was permitted, through the interest of some of his aristocratic Irish patrons, to dedicate to George, the Prince Regent—against whom, nevertheless, at a future period, Moore discharged some of his sharpest arrows of personal and political satire. After the publication of the lyrics, this young poet gradually gave up his idea of becoming a lawyer. Themis and her Courts were relinquished for Musa lyrÆ solers et cantor Apollo; law was completely driven out of his head by the gay society into which his poetical and musical qualities introduced him, and he seems to have looked more to the patronage of his titled friends and the trade of authorship than to any settled walk or profession. The Earl of Moira was his great patron, and the influence of this nobleman raised the young Irishman to a companionship with the highest and most refined societies of the land. And certainly, the son of a Dublin grocer—a Catholic, too—must have possessed, in a very wonderful degree, the accomplishments and amenities of the head and heart which could thus win the favor and friendship of a very exclusive and fastidious class. Moore’s temperament was, in fact, a happy one, and counseled as well by prudence as his love of pleasure, he exerted himself to the utmost to conciliate the partiality of the aristocracy and to live at ease among them.

About this time, 1801-2, he spent a good deal of his time at Donington Park, the seat of the Earl of Moira, “under whose princely roof,” as he says himself—(and great was the charm which these princely roofs ever had for the poet!) “I used often and long in those days find a hospitable home.” Here the young Irishman became somewhat intimate with kings and princes—members of Bourbon and Orleans families of France; for whom he was in the habit of playing and singing, and with whom he could bandy courtesies and converse. These were the Count of Provence, afterward Charles X.; Louis Philippe and his brothers Montpensier and Beaujolais—“all dismounted cavalry,” as Curran called them, in a whisper, when he first found himself sitting among them; and with these the Duke de Lorge, the Baron de Rolle, and many others of the emigrant noblesse. No wonder Moore’s ideas should be so redolent of sparkling wines, exquisite shapes of beauty, and all the perfume and rose-color of life. He lived at Donington in the happiest and most luxurious manner; and the range of a magnificent library was not wanting to complete the aristocratic charm of his existence at that period. Shut up in it for whole days he has felt, in the midst of his schemes of authorship, like Prospero in his enchanted island. How different was the fate of his old friend, Robert Emmett! At that very time the latter was plotting desperately against the English government, and preparing that rebellious uprising in which he perished.

In 1803, at the early age of 23, Moore began to reap some of the solid fruits of his connection with the English aristocracy. He got the place of Registrar of the Court of Admiralty at Bermuda, through the interest of the Earl of Moira, and went to the island to take possession of his office. But instead of doing the duties of it, he procured a deputy, and went rambling and rhyming over the islands and on the continent of America. He highly enjoyed the natural softness and beauty of the Summer Islands; but many a song and poetical epistle proved that “his heart was in Albion—his heart was not there”—that he was sighing for what he called

the splendid hospitalities of Donington and the pays de cocagne of the British aristocracy in general.

Passing from Bermuda, he came to Norfolk in Virginia, and thence made a pretty lengthened tour through the States, by Washington, Philadelphia, Buffalo and the lakes. The young votary of the Anacreontic muses—the musical pet of the higher English circles—did not like the American Democracy at all, and has left on record about as unfavorable an opinion and prophecy concerning the republic as has been written at any time since. Every thing seemed tough and unrefined; and when he made his bow to President Thomas Jefferson, he felt a mental shock from the sight of that simple man, wearing “Connemara stockings and slippers,” at the head of a nation. To be sure the society of British officers and Federal Whigs among whom he chose his friends and acquaintances was not calculated to impress him with any favorable idea of the democratic party. But, every allowance made, Moore said enough to show that, Catholic as he was, and come of plebeian forefathers (at least in an immediate manner; for the name O’Moore is high on the old rolls of Irish peerage and rebellion) he never had any hearty sympathy with republicanism and the cause of the people. He was all for the glorious distinctions of rank and historic prestige—the pride, pomp and circumstance of lordly life; and, in fact, looked on America as a sort of moral wilderness. He had no hopes of it, indeed. He said society here was rotten to the core; and he wrote poetical prophecies of its speedy decay and disappearance from among the nations of the earth!

And yet there were many things here to conciliate the fastidiousness of the young traveler. Among the other tokens of an exceptional civilization, was one which he himself recalls with an evident feeling of gratified pride. The American master of the packet in which he crossed Ontario—knowing that the young gentleman was a poet—the author of “Anacreon Translated,” and “Juvenile Poems and Songs”—refused to accept any money for his passage—would thus show his sense of what was due to literature! We believe very few ship-masters in any of the old countries would have done so courteously magnanimous a thing as that; and Moore himself probably thought so too. The poet was, in fact, much better pleased with the natural scenery than the people of the continent; and scattered through the verses occasioned by his visit will be found many tributes to the picturesque wildernesses he passed through. Speaking of Niagara and other grand scenes he says—

Moore, as well as hundreds of others, has left us his first impressions on the sight of Niagara Falls. He says, “When we arrived at length at the inn, in the neighborhood of the Falls, it was too late to think of visiting them that evening, and I lay awake almost the whole night with the sound of the cataract in my ears. The day following I consider a sort of era in my life: and the first glimpse I got of that wonderful cataract gave me a feeling which nothing in this world can ever awaken again. It was through an opening among the trees, as we approached the spot where a full view of the Falls was to burst upon us, that I caught this glimpse of the mighty mass of waters folding smoothly over the edge of the precipice, and so overwhelming was the notion it gave me of the awful spectacle I was approaching, that during the short interval that followed, imagination had far outrun the reality; and vast and wonderful as was the scene that then opened upon me my first feeling was that of disappointment... But in spite of the start thus got by imagination the triumph of the reality was, in the end, but the greater; for the gradual glory of the scene that opened upon me soon took possession of my whole mind, presenting from day to day, some new beauty or wonder, and like all that is most sublime in nature or art, awakening sad as well as elevating thoughts... I should find it difficult to say on which occasion I felt most deeply affected, when looking on the Falls of Niagara, or when standing by moonlight among the ruins of the Coliseum.”

In 1806 Moore republished his Juvenile Poems, along with the translations and those poems written at Bermuda and in America. But the Edinburgh Review came down upon the book with the sharpest force of sarcasm and severity. The first publication of his licentious love-songs, it said, might have been excused by the great youth of the poet, but the republication was atrociously prepense and unpardonable. The poor lyric butterfly was broken terribly upon the wheel; but not so much as to disable him (—we mean the poet—changing the figure) from challenging the Auld Reekie editor; and the bard and critic—Francis Jeffrey—met at Chalk Farm, to settle their differences by the duello. But the police officers were too quick for them, and arrested both; whereupon it was reported, amidst much laughter of the press and public, that there were no balls in the pistols! Moore went to the trouble of denying that he knew the state of his adversary’s engine or his own. In this violent business the poet’s feelings were sorely tried. But his publisher managed to thrive upon the business. The book had, of course, received a very unexpected advertisement. Moore’s vexations did not terminate with the foregoing. Over two years afterward, when young Lord Byron, then in his twentieth year, charged gallantly down upon all the poets, poetasters and critics of the English Parnassus, he laughed at the duel, among the other matters, and “Little’s leadless pistol.” Here was another outrage; and out came our poet once more with a challenge to the peer. But his lordship had gone off to make material for his Giaours and Childe Harolds in the East, and the letter remained unread till his return, near two years after. By this time, his “sensitive and surly” feelings had gone off, and he wrote to Moore a frank and good-natured reply. The latter, who had, in the interim, married his wife—Miss Dyke—and thus given hostages to fortune, felt how much pleasanter it would be to have the young baron’s friendship than his bullet in the body, and therefore wrote a very warm Irish letter in return, which paved the way to their mutual friendship. On this occasion Rogers got Byron, Moore and Campbell together round his mahogany, and there they became acquainted with one another, and shook hands all round, for the first time.

In 1808 and 1809 Moore published his poems, “Intolerance” and “Corruption,” satires; one on the English Constitution, and the other on the English Church. They are fluent, but want vigor, and are read no longer. In the “Skeptic” he writes like a good Catholic who prefers ignorant obedience in all matters of Faith to the philosophy of Locke. But he now prepared to sing a loftier strain. His next publication was the First and Second Numbers of the Irish Melodies—a work which will secure to him whatever immortality awaits his name. The melodies became popular, at once, in England and Ireland alike. The sparkling grace and flexibility of his verse presented an agreeable contrast to the generality of songs sung at that period. The mixture of vivacity, pathos, and epigrammatic point in their composition placed their author at the head of modern song-writers; and, if the politics of poor Ireland were doomed to be disastrous, the poetry of her beautiful music now found itself vindicated and triumphant in the halls and palaces of the British aristocracy. There was a savor of rebellion in some of these songs which wonderfully took the fashionable fancy of the English; while in Ireland the repeated allusions to the ancient glories of the land, and the graceful sorrow which seemed to weep its many misfortunes, touched the popular heart, and led the people—(we mean the reading people)—to look on Moore as the genuine poet of Erin, and to applaud him accordingly.

As for the poet himself, it would seem that his sympathy with his native land was more a matter of sentiment than of practical reality. He could excite the finest feelings of drawing-room rebellion. But he was not a TyrtÆus to rouse up that deeper and more daring sentiment which prompts people to rush into the field. He was the friend and college-mate of Emmett and other disaffected spirits; and attended the Debating and Historic Societies in which these ardent and enlightened young men, mostly Protestants, spoke of the rights of man and the liberty of Ireland. They were members of United Irish Societies; but Moore never belonged to the last. The influence of his parents and relations was exercised against the malcontent spirit of the time; and when the unhappy rebellion was crushed, the young bard went to seek his fortune in the very heart of the English aristocracy. There Moore’s patriotism was subdued and refined; and it ever afterward delighted to exhibit itself in the language of polemics and lyric poetry. The Irish sentiment of the Irish Melodies is not strong enough to nourish any sort of rebellion upon. It is remarkable that, in all Moore’s historic allusions, he seldom or never speaks of the prowess of the Irish against the English—the struggles of the Desmonds, O’Neills, O’Moores, and so forth, against the Henries, Elizabeth, or the Stuarts. He goes back into the indistinct times of Milesian sway, the palace of Tara, and the stand of Brian or Malachi against the Danes. He passes over the recent and authentic, such as would come more home to the present period, and weeps or flushes, with remarkable prudence, among the legends and the whole Irish apocrypha. But it would be too much, perhaps, to expect that the little Catholic boy, whose early impressions were formed in the midst of the aristocratic societies of Dublin, to which he was admitted on sufferance, a gratified guest, could ever grow up a democrat or a rebel.

Indeed it is not difficult to discover from the tone of Moore’s writings that he had formed a low opinion of Irish nationality—entertained a poor notion of its past glories of all sorts, and little hope that Ireland would ever do any thing to right herself. Indeed, if Ireland had not her beautiful melodies, to suggest the weaving of lyric verse, and to give it some promise of immortality, we should not probably have had so much Irish reminiscence from Moore. It is, in fact, by a sort of poetic licence, that he allows himself, in some of his songs, to sing with an air of heroism or pathos, of those ancient men and things, in which he himself, as may be gathered from the pages of his History of Ireland, and from other places, had a very slender historical faith. But, after all, the Melodies are beautiful things, and deserve the fame they have won. They are full of felicities, and the hearts have been cold indeed that have been able to resist the fascination they exercise, in congenial moments, whether spoken or sung. The charm of an exquisite phraseology sparkles everywhere, and the feelings with which we hear them sung, seem incapable of more apt and musical expression.

In the intervals of several numbers of the Melodies Moore employed himself on other things. In 1812, he began to think of his great romance—his Opus Magnum—Lalla Rookh. Moore gives us the history of this poem, manufacture, sale and all; but the sale of it (in MS.) went before the manufacture. It was sold to the Messrs. Longman for 3000 guineas—not pounds: literary payments in England having been and being still made, by respectable publishers, in the more aristocratic coin. Mr. Perry, proprietor of the Morning Chronicle, made the bargain for his friend, the bard, and we suspect that without his influence and shrewdness, Moore would not have got that sum. For poets, and people of refined feelings, are the worst hands at a bargain in the world, as everybody knows. Perry said the poet of the Melodies should have the highest price ever given for any poetic work; and that being 3000 guineas, he held out for it and got it. The Longmans bought their pig in a poke, as the saying is. They were to take whatever poem Moore was pleased to write, and also to wait till it was written. This was a very pleasant sort of trade for the poet, and he went to work with that inspiration and cheerfulness of spirit which publishers, for their own sake, should do every thing to encourage in their writers. Moore retired to Mayfield Cottage, in Derbyshire, a little way from Donington Park and its library, and began to seclude himself from mankind. Having resolved that his romance should be Oriental, he crammed himself with every thing written about the East that he could, in any way, lay hands on—its manners, customs, history, religion, languages, geography, and so forth. He then began to write a long story called the “Peri’s Daughter;” but, after going a little way in it, his Pegasus stuck fast, and the attempt was put aside. He tried other ideas; but to little purpose. At last, an Irish idea struck him—that of poor Catholics persecuted and kept down for their religion. By a happy dexterity he metamorphosed them into Guebres, and so, setting up the frame-work of the “Fire-Worshipers,” and clothing his Hibernian sentiments—half romance half religion—in all the sparkling phraseology of the East, he got on swimmingly. The monster, “Prophet of the Khorassan,” “Paradise and the Peri,” and the “Light of the Harem,” followed favorably; and in 1816, after three years’ incubation, he gave Lalla Rookh to the purchasers of the manuscript. To Moore’s honor, it must be said, that seeing the monetary and other embarrassments of that year, he offered to release the Longmans from their engagement, if they desired it. But they stuck manfully to their bargain; and it is pleasant to add, made handsomely by it.

Moore was now very famous. Lalla and the Melodies gave him a reputation only second to that of the noble young “Childe Buron” himself. His “Fire-Worshipers” was quoted with fervor in Ireland; the songs in his “Light of the Harem” had charmed all the world; a herd of imitators sprang up like mushrooms, and bulbuls, peris, roses, flashing swords, and sparkling goblets, were the general order of the day. In the meantime, Moore went with Mr. Rogers to Paris. There he gathered the materials of the Fudge Family, which he published on his return.

In 1819 he traveled again to Paris, in company with Lord John Russell; and both went thence to Italy. Lord John passed on to Genoa, and Moore proceeded to visit Lord Byron at Venice, where the noble exile lived in a very savage condition, drinking gin and water o’nights, and writing his heart out. There the poets passed some agreeable days together, riding along the Lido together, and going over the lagoons in a gondola. It was on this occasion that Byron confided to Moore his “Memoirs,” to be used as the latter should think fit. Moore afterward sold them to Murray for 2000 guineas. But when Byron died, his widow and family interfered, and induced Moore to withdraw and burn the manuscript—forfeiting the money, of course. Moore has been blamed for consenting to this sacrifice. But it is very likely he has preserved in his Life of Byron every thing of interest contained in the papers, and that very little was lost, except certain scandalous particulars, which the world would very willingly let die—though the offal-eating scandal-mongers of the day groaned horribly under the privation at the time. After leaving Venice, Moore went to Rome. He confesses that, in the midst of the ruins and splendors of past Roman civilization and art, he was painfully conscious of his own want of artistic taste and enthusiasm. He says that a sunset on the Simplon touched him with more admiration than any thing he had seen in the Italian galleries of art. This would hardly have been expected from Moore, who has been termed the poet of artificial things. After his return from this tour, he published his Rhymes on the Road and the Fables of the Holy Alliance.

But his return did not extend to England. He knew that country was no place for him, just then. He had made a blunder in his business of the Bermuda registrarship, the consequences of which had now reached him. He had taken no security of the deputy he had appointed to do the duties of that office. The latter, in the course of time and trade, fell into temptation—the easy carelessness of Moore led him, perhaps, into it—and he made way with the proceeds of some American cargoes, and then, with himself—leaving the unprophetic little bard, in the heyday of his glory, to be responsible for near six thousand pounds. The terrible Court of Admiralty now issued a law process against “the smiling bard of pleasure,” which the latter did not think it wise to confront in person, and so stopped short at Paris, where—along with his family, which had joined him—he remained till the close of 1822. His friends, in the mean time, came forward to the rescue; and if, for a moment, he wronged his better genius by hard thoughts against the honor or honesty of his fellows, he was soon brought round to the nobler and better human creed, by generous offers of gifts, loans, etc. Thus, sustained in his exile, he passed his time pleasantly enough, at La Butte Coaslin, near Paris, singing Spanish songs to the guitar in the evening, in company with Madame V——, a neighbor, and spending the mornings of the two summers he remained in France, wandering through the noble park of St. Cloud, spinning and polishing verses and jotting down new ideas in his memorandum-book. His exile was, certainly, pleasanter than that of his erotic, erratic brother, Ovid, lamenting his frost-bitten muses, long ago, on the inhospitable shores of the Black Sea. Moore had a great many visitors at Coaslin, among them our Washington Irving, “who still, I trust,” he says, “recollects his reading to me some parts of his then forthcoming work, ‘Bracebridge Hall,’ as we sat together on the grass walk that leads to the Rocher, at La Butte.” To meet his awkward liabilities, Moore had agreed with Messrs. Murray and Wilkie to write a Life of Sheridan; but finding himself too distant from documents and authorities, he went on with his customary business of verse, and projected an epistolary romance, with Egyptian characters. But this romance was postponed: and it appeared afterward, done in prose, as the “Epicurean.” He also took up the allegory of “The Loves of the Angels,” and working away with his usual octosyllabic facility, he had soon woven it into shape. For this poem he was allowed one thousand guineas by his publisher.

On Moore’s return to England, he found that his friends had negotiated the Americans down to a thousand pounds; and that the uncle of the faithless deputy had been induced, in a grumbling way, to contribute £300 of that sum. A friend had deposited the balance in the bank to Moore’s credit, for the canceling of the Bermuda claim; and the poet was happy to hand him an order on his publisher for that amount. In this connection, Moore records (without naming the giver, but with a quotation from Ovid, to the effect that “gifts are agreeable which are made precious by him who makes them,”) a present of £300, made him at that time of difficulty—the proceeds of a maiden-work—a biography—which had been just published. The donor was Lord John Russel; the firm friend of the poet to the end of his life.

Mr. Moore now went to live at Sloperton, two miles from Devizes, and not far from the country seat of the Marquis of Lansdowne. His dwelling was at first a somewhat rude cottage, in a wooded lane. But, on taking it, the new occupants made it very comfortable and pleasant, by means of enlargements and other improvements. In 1824, Moore published his “Memoirs of Captain Rock,” in which he set forth the misgovernment of England since the conquest of the island by Strongbow. In this book he never forgets the manner for the matter: he is full of point and learned illustration, and festoons his deplorable facts with many felicities of metaphor and arguments of theology. But no Irishman, how hot-headed soever, could take the Memoirs as the text-book of rebellion, or feel his blood excited by them. Mr. Moore’s learning and imagery, in fact, weakened his theme, as the accompaniment of rich, heavy baggage used to obstruct the movements of the great historic armies, long ago. The “Memoirs” are obsolete, though the Irish sufferings seem to be much the same as usual.

At Sloperton, Moore wrote, also, his History of Ireland and the Biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Lord Byron—the last the best of the three, a biography ranking with Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Lockhart’s Life of Scott. After his “Captain Rock,” Moore published the “Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion,” in which he girds at all Protestant doctrine, with his usual power of theologic reading and pointed argument; and then gave to the world his “Epicurean;” in which he intertwines his favorite ethics of religion with the frame of a very dull story. Moore’s mind had a strong devotional tendency, and seems to revert—with a sense of its own insufficiency—to the problem of existence beyond the last scene of all that ends the strange eventful history of life. His doubtings, if he ever had any, seem to have taken ultimate refuge in Catholic orthodoxy. He was, in fact, a dutiful son of mother Church: and great was the uneasiness he exhibited, lest his friend, Lord Byron, should adopt, in all their force, the atheistical ideas of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom his lordship had become very intimate, in Italy. Moore earnestly expostulated with Byron on the project of the “Liberal” newspaper, got up by the restless Childe and supported by Hunt, Shelley, and Hazlitt. He told his lordship that such a conjunction, with such a radical purpose, was very far from respectable—not by any means respectable enough for an English nobleman to engage in.

The last productions of Moore were those light and satirical verses which appeared in the Morning Chronicle and other papers, up to 1837. They are the happiest things of their kind, in the world, and to those who can admire the gay dexterities of wit, woven into the tapestry work of rhyme, they possess an interest surviving the subjects of them. In the interweaving of pointed and witty things with the flow of colloquial phraseology, Moore has shown himself more skillful than any of his contemporaries, and no writer of the present day can match him.

A bright, sensuous, Celtic genius dies with Tom Moore. As a poet, he will be chiefly remembered for the undying melodies of his native land, with which his words are beautifully identified. His translations of Anacreon are clever school-boy exercises—very free versions and amplifications of the original, and contain many points and prettinesses which the old Cyclic bard never thought of. The juvenile and erotic songs which obtained for Moore the name of the modern Catullus, are very slight things—mere floating gossamers of literature—flashing a little in the light—“the purple light of love,” and then fading away from the general appreciation. But these songs were, nevertheless, greatly in vogue in their day, and the pathos or gayety of them found echoes in the hearts of ten thousand festive saloons. Never was the youth of any poet spent in the midst of greater incitements of love, friendship, and song, than those that solicited Moore on every side during the heyday of his years, in the high society of England. It was therefore morally impossible that his verse should be any thing but “brilliant and light,” full of all the levities and luxuries of sentiment. The real arduousness, effort, and pain of life find no expression at all in Moore. The poems respecting America and his West India voyage, exhibit his want of sympathy with republicanism, and his ceaseless longing after the grand associations and lordly homes of England. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that he found some congenial persons and things on this continent. He has recorded the enjoyment of his sojourn in our own city of “brotherly love,” where, in the society of Mr. Dennie’s family, he almost forgot he was in a republic. His recollections of Philadelphia were happy ones.

The “Canadian Boat Song,” composed on the St. Lawrence, is the most popular of the songs written at the earlier period of life—indeed, at any period of his life. It is more frequently heard in society than any thing else he has composed—the finest of the Melodies not excepted. As regards these last, it has been said they are not Irish. It is, indeed, true that Moore modified the native airs a good deal—retrenched most of the wild cadences and free modulations which indigenously belong to them. This, however, may not be such a very great loss after all, seeing that, if some of the melodies, with his arrangement, would not be intimately recognized at wakes and cow-milkings, etc., they were all the better liked, for the curtailment and polish, in the dining-rooms and drawing-rooms. Certainly no modern festive song-writer has produced the effects which usually accompanied the singing of Tom Moore’s lyrics. He was eminently the poet of the saloons. Burns was the lyrist of Love and the lowly hearts and homes of the people. But Moore’s songs were sung in the most splendid halls of English-speaking land, where he himself, of all guests or sojourners in lordly dwellings, was ever the most welcome and caressed. And when we consider the low birth, Irishism and uncompromised Catholicity of the man, we cannot possibly over-estimate those talents of graceful conviviality, good-humor and brilliant wit which could secure for him such social honors and triumphs through life. Well might Byron have called him “the poet of all circles and the idol of his own.” Moore had an exquisite musical taste, and sung some of his own melodies in the most delightful manner. His voice was rather low, and without compass, but it had great softness, and the expression with which he half-chaunted, half-recited, while accompanying himself at the piano, in “Go Where Glory Waits Thee,” “Fly Not Yet,” and others, was a thing to be enjoyed and remembered. On some occasions when he has gone to the piano, the servants of the house—Devonshire House, we believe—have been permitted to come and stand at the doors to listen, along with the delighted crowd of noble listeners. Moore’s performance was considered one of the best treats of the evening at such gay reunions; and Mr. N. P. Willis speaks of the little bard’s appearance, at Lady Blessington’s piano—for a singing-while—as if his singing in this way were an expected gratification which he was too well-bred or too good-natured to refuse to his friends. A touching instance of the effect he could produce on these occasions is given in a fact to which he himself alludes. The beautiful young daughter of Colonel Bainbridge, who was married at Ashbourne Church, in Derbyshire, in 1815, died, a few weeks afterward, of fever. During the delirium that accompanied her illness she sung several hymns from Moore’s collection of “Sacred Songs” which she had heard the poet himself sing in the course of the preceding summer. Alluding to her, he says, in the song “Weep not for Those”—

Mourn not for her, the young bride of the vale,

Our gayest and loveliest, lost to us now,

Ere life’s early lustre had time to grow pale,

And the garland of love was yet fresh on her brow.

Lalla Rookh is a splendid and elaborate romance. Hazlitt said Moore should not have written it for three thousand guineas. This was Moore’s own affair, not Hazlitt’s; and we question if the latter would have refused such a sum, under such circumstances. Nevertheless, Lalla Rookh seems below the pretensions of the poet of the Melodies. Its themes and characters are oriental and the interest they excite is feeble. There is a forced and exotic air over the whole performance which fails to win our sympathies; and, in spite of the beauty of the imagery and all the sparkling artifice of the versification, no one, we believe, was every cordially disposed to read this romance a second time. The rythmus of the “Veiled Prophet” is eloquently rhetorical, but loosely constructed, and it offends our sense of what the heroic couplet is, in the hands of Dryden, Shelley, Goldsmith and Byron. Moore’s metre, in this grave mode, is a continuous outrage against the cÆsural canons, and reads with a certain prosaic effect—eloquent enough, to be sure; but prosaic, nevertheless: “The Fire-Worshipers” has been considered the best portion of Lalla Rookh. It contains a great deal of impassioned eloquence and shows great mastery and music of versification; but the impression it leaves is vague and uncongenial, and the catastrophe is painful, merely—like that of the “Veiled Prophet”—both with a melodramatic and impossible air about them. “Paradise and the Peri” has the merit of a more attractive human interest—though almost overlaid by ornament and orientalism. We think the “Light of the Harem” the most agreeable of all. It is perfectly in character—a picture of Eastern luxury from beginning to end—a feast of roses and a flow of fountains, in which we look for nothing but sighs and perfumes—and we find them in all customary Mooreish prodigality. The verse of this little poem is woven music. The portrait of Nourmahal is a piece of lyric gracefulness which aptly exemplifies the art of Moore’s sensuous and harmonic genius:

No wonder “the magnificent son of Acbar” should be set excessively beside himself on account of such a miracle of womanhood.

Moore shows himself very incapable of sustaining himself in any flights of imagination to compare at all with the soaring of Shelley or Byron. The sight of his mind is less keen and ardent than theirs, his thoughts feebler and his verse less vigorously constructed. But in his own genial sphere—on the lower sunny slopes of the mountain, he can snatch a thousand warbling graces beyond the art of these louder instruments.

Moore has happily expressed the pathetic morals, gayeties and tendernesses of sentiment. But we think he has been still more happy in those humorous, satirical, wit-elaborated performances in which it was his wont to assail the public men and things of English government and English society. His metrical onslaughts on the Tory party, the Prince Regent, the Church Establishment—individually or collectively—have been among the most genial and applauded things he has written. In the other walks of poetry he had overpowering rivals—in this he was unrivaled—“within this circle none durst walk but he.” He was well aware of the power of satire to influence the gravest argument in the world, and felt that

Much of his sarcasm was launched against the English Church Establishment. Its existence in Ireland has long been a just cause of popular complaint, and thousands of pamphlets have been written pro and con in the matter. The witty little poet took the hackneyed question, put it into his lyric mill, and having given it a few turns, brought it out in the following manner—intelligible to all comprehensions—answering as well the cause of his Catholic countrymen as the cause of simple truth and justice:

In spite of the prestige of Moore’s earlier poetry, the world has regarded him, and very justly, as a moral man and a good Catholic. In the domestic relations of life, as well as the social, he seems to have gone through the world blamelessly. For the last ten years or so of his life, he was in receipt of £300 a year from the British Government, procured for him by his friends the Marquis of Lansdowne and Lord John Russell.

Moore died on the 26th of last February, and was buried, according to his desire, in the church-yard of Bromham, between Devizes and Chippenham, where two of his children were buried before him—Anastasia Mary, who died in 1829 aged sixteen, and John Russell, who died in 1848 at the age of nineteen. Another son of the poet died in the French service at Algiers. He had, we believe, four children, all of whom passed away before himself. Doubly dark, indeed, was the close of a life begun so hopefully and enjoyed so much in its middle course.

If the poet had died in Ireland, he would have had a good funeral. As it was, but a single coach, containing four persons, went to the grave with the hearse which carried his remains. Byron reached Huckwell, in 1824, pretty much in the same way; but, we believe, with a somewhat larger attendance—not much, however. Moore attended his noble friend’s funeral to the bounds of London, as the slender cortÈge passed through, but went no farther.

Moore was of small stature. “He is a little, very little man,” says Sir Walter Scott, speaking of him in 1825. Hunt said of him in 1820: “His forehead is long and full of character, with bumps of wit large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist: his eyes are as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine-leaves.” The poet’s face was, in fact, very plain, and only redeemed by the brightness of his eyes. Irish festivity and enjoyment formed the prevailing expression of his aspect, in his better days when he was the delight and pride of every society he appeared in—the gayest, happiest, most appreciated wit of his time. Poor Tom Moore! He was always called Tom Moore; except in cotemporary criticisms of his poems or polemics, nobody thought of calling him Mr. Moore. We cannot fancy him a man of seventy-two! There is an incongruity in the idea which we cannot get over. Old and insane. Alas for the brightest vaunt of human intellect and glory! But Tom Moore will be ever freshly remembered with the undying melodies of his native land.

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BY G. P. R. JAMES.

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(Continued from page 494.)