AUSTRALIA

My second meeting with my cousin was in August of 1875, when he spent a week with us at a cottage my mother had taken at Dunoon, then one of the most charming villages on the Clyde.

I remember vividly the impression he made on me when I saw the tall, thin figure pass through our garden gateway at sunset—he had come down by the evening steamer from Glasgow—and stride swiftly up the path. He was six feet one inch in height, very thin, with slightly sloping shoulders. He was good-looking, with a fair complexion and high colouring; gray-blue eyes, brown hair closely cut, a sensitive mouth, and winning smile. He looked delicate, but full of vitality. He spoke very rapidly, and when excited his words seemed to tumble one over the other, so that it was not always easy to understand him.

In September my sister and I visited our Uncle and Aunt at 16 Rosslyn Terrace, Glasgow, and before the close of that month their son and I were secretly plighted to one another. Then began a friendship that lasted unbrokenly for thirty years.

It was then he confided to me that his true ambition lay not in being a scientific man, as it was supposed, but a poet: that his desire was to write about Mother Nature and her inner mysteries, but that as yet he had not sufficient mastery of his art to be able to put his message into adequate form. After much persuasion he read to me several of his early attempts, and promised to send me a copy of whatever he should write.

We were very anxious to meet again before I returned to London, as we should of necessity be separated till the following autumn. A few days later in Edinburgh came the desired opportunity. But how and where to meet? No one must know, lest our secret should be discovered—for we well knew all our relations would be unanimous in disapproval.

Instead of going to the Lawyer’s office one morning my cousin took an early train into Edinburgh—and I left my sister to make the necessary excuses for my absence at luncheon. But where to meet? We knew we should run the risk of encountering relations and acquaintances in the obvious places that suggested themselves. At last a brilliant idea came to my betrothed, and we spent several hours in—the secluded Dean Cemetery, and were not found out! We talked and talked—about his ambitions, his beliefs and visions, our hopeless prospects, the coming lonely months, my studies—and parted in deep dejection.

The immediate outcome of the day was a long poem of no less than fifty-seven verses addressed to me: “In Dean Cemetery”—a pantheistic dream, as its author described it; and in a note to one of the verses he wrote: “I hold to the rest of the poem, for there are spirits everywhere. We are never alone, though we are rarely conscious of other presences.”

The poem is too long and too immature to quote from. It was one of a series, never of course published, that he wrote about this time; all very serious, for his mind was absorbed in psychic and metaphysical speculation.

And the reason why he chose such serious types of poems to dedicate to the girl to whom he was engaged was that she was the first friend he had found who to some extent understood him, understood the inner hidden side of his nature, sympathised with and believed in his visions, dreams, and aims.

Immediately on my return to London he sent me three long poems written in 1873 under the influence of Shelley—then to him the poet of poets. Very faulty in their handling, they are to me significant, inasmuch as they strike the keynote of all his subsequent intimate writings. “To the Pine Belt” begins with these lines:

To-day amid the pines I went
In a wonderment,
For the ceaseless song
Of lichened branches long
In measures free
Said to me
Strange things of another life
Than woodland strife.

In The Blue Peaks he sings of the Quest of the beckoning dim blue hills, of which he wrote again many years later in The Divine Adventure. And the third, “The River t? ?a???,” is an ecstatic chant to Beauty:

O Spirit fair
Who dwelleth where
The heart of Beauty is enshrined.

Wherewith he invokes “Nature, or Beauty, or God” to help him to realise the poignant dream of beauty, which haunted him in diverse ways throughout his life. When he sent them to me he realised how youthful and faulty was the presentment, and he wrote: “If I had not promised to send these poems I should certainly not do so now. They are very poor every way, and the only interest they may have for you is to show you the former current of my thoughts—I did indeed put Beauty in the place of God, and Nature in that of his Laws. Now that I see more clearly (and that is not saying much), these appear trash. Still there is some good here and there. I am glad I have written them, for they helped me to arrive at clearer convictions. The verse and rhythm are purposely uneven and irregular—it admitted of easier composition to write so.” While at the University he had made an eager study of comparative religions, their ethics and metaphysics, being then in active revolt against the religious teachings in which he had been brought up. This mental conflict, this weighing of metaphysical problems, found expression in the first Book of a projected Epic on Man, to be called Upland, Woodland, Cloudland. “Amid the Uplands” only was finished, and consists of two thousand lines in blank verse; the leading idea is fairly suggested in these lines from the Proem:

“And I have written in the love of God
And in a sense of man’s proud destiny.

And I have striven to point out harmony,
An inner harmony in all things fair,
Flow’rs, tree, and cloudlet, wind, and ocean wave,
Wold, hill, and forest, with the heart of man,
And with the firmament and universe,
And thence with God. All things are part of Him.”

Scattered through the many pages of philosophic exhortation and speculation, of descriptions of nature, of psychical visions, are lines that are suggestive of later development, of later trend of thought, and from them the following are selected:

“There is in everything an undertone ...
Those clear in soul are also clear in sight,
And recognise in a white cascade’s flash,
The roar of mountain torrents, and the wail
Of multitudinous waves on barren sands,
The song of skylark at the flush of dawn,
A mayfield all ablaze with king-cups gold,
The clamour musical of culver wings
Beating the soft air of a dewy dusk,
The crescent moon far voyaging thro’ dark skies,
And Sirius throbbing in the distant south,
A something deeper than mere audible
And visible sensations; for they see
Not only pulsings of the Master’s breath,
The workings of inevitable Law,
But also the influences subordinate
And spirit actors in life’s unseen side.
One glint of nature may unlock a soul.”

“Our Evil is too finite to disturb
The infinite of good.”

“We all are wind-harps casemented on Earth,
And every breath of God that falls may fetch
Some dimmest echo of a faint refrain
From even the worst strung of all of us.”

“Oh, I have lain upon a river’s brink
And drank deep, deep of all the glory near,
Until my soul in unison did beat
With all things round me: I was at the root,
The common root of life from which all flow,
And when thus far could enter unto all;
I look’d upon a rose and seemed to grow
A bud into a bloom, I watched a tree
And was the life that quicken’d the green leaves,
I saw the waters swirling and became
The law of their wild course, and in the clouds
I felt my spirit wand’ring over heaven.
I did identify myself with aught
That rose before me, and communion held.

Death is not only change, or sleep; it is
God’s seal to sanctify the soul’s advance.”

In the beginning of 1875 he made various experiments in rhymed metre, all equally serious in subject and stiff in handling; but in the latter part of the year he wrote several little songs in a lighter vein and happier manner.

The following year brought a fresh change in his circumstances, and placed him face to face with the serious questions of practical means of living. His father had been in bad health for some months, and he himself developed disquieting symptoms of chest trouble. I had been in Italy during the three spring months, and was overjoyed on my return to hear that we and my uncle’s family were to spend August at Dunoon in neighbouring houses. On arriving there we found my uncle in an alarming condition and his son looking extremely delicate. Nevertheless there were many happy days spent there—and rambling over the hills, boating and sailing on the lochs, in talking over our very vague prospects, in reading and discussing his poems. Of these he had several more to show me, chief among them being an idyll “Beatrice,” dedicated to me, and a lyrical drama “Ariadne in Naxos” which excited in me the greatest admiration and pride. Toward the middle of the month my uncle’s condition grew hopeless, and on the 20th he died. His death was a great shock to his son, whose health gave way: consumption was feared (as it proved, causelessly) and in the autumn he was ordered a voyage to Australia.

In September I was taken by my mother to Aberdeenshire, and thus I had no opportunity of seeing William again, and the last thing I heard of him, when he had left Scotland in a sailing ship, was a gloomy prediction made by an old relative to my mother: “Ah, that poor nephew of yours, Willie Sharp, he’ll never live to reach Australia.”

To quote his own words:

“So to Australia I went by sailing ship, relinquishing my idea of becoming a formidable rival to Swinburne (whose Atalanta in Calydon had inspired me to a lyrical drama named Ariadne in Naxos), to Tennyson (whose example I had deigned to accept for an idyll called ‘Beatrice’), and to the author of Festus, whose example was responsible for a meditative epic named ‘Amid the Uplands.’ Alas! ‘subsequent events’ make it unlikely that these masterpieces will ever see the light.

“In Australia I had friends with whom I stayed, and from them I joined an eminent colonist whose tragic end cast a cloud over a notable career as an explorer. With him I saw much of the then wild country in Gippsland, beyond the Buffalo and Bogong Mountains, across the Murray River into the desert region of lower New South Wales.”

So to Australia he sailed, not only in search of health but to look about and see if he would care to settle there, supposing that he should find work that he could do, as it was now imperative he should provide for his future. In The Sport of Chance, and in an article “Through Bush and Fern,” he has given graphic descriptions of the memorable ride which afforded the newcomer a unique opportunity of seeing something of the interior of the colony; and from these the following selections are taken:

“It was the full tide of summer when my friend and I started one morning in continuance of our ride south through the ranges that rise and swell and slope away in mighty hollows, sweeping like immense green waves around the bases of those lofty Australian Alps, of which Mounts Hotham, Kosciusko, and Feathertop are the chief glories. Although early, the heat of the sun was already very powerful; but its effect was more bracing than enervating, owing to the clearness and dryness of the atmosphere.... Across the rugged mountains we rode, by difficult passes over desolate plains, along sweeping watercourses marked by the long funeral procession of lofty blue-gums, and mournful, stringy bark. Day by day we saw the sun rise above the hills. We slept, while our horses stood by panting with heat, under what shade we could get, and arose when the sky had lost its look of molten copper and had taken on once more its intense ultramarine. At night as we rode across the plains we heard the howling of the wild dogs as they scoured afar off, or sent flying in all directions startled kangaroos, which leaped across the moonlit wastes like ghosts of strange creatures in pre-Adamite times.... At last we had come to Albury to join a friend who promised us some swan shooting, and it thus came about that early one morning, about an hour before dawn, we found ourselves crouching under the shelter of some wattles growing close to the Murray lagoons. Not a sound was to be heard save the monotonous swish of the river as it swept slowly onward, except when at rare intervals some restless parrot or cockatoo made a transient disturbance somewhere in the forest. The stillness, the semi-darkness, the sound of the rushing water, our expectancy, all rendered the hour one of mingled solemnity and excited tension; and it was with difficulty that at least one of our small party repressed some sound when within a few feet a venomous-looking snake wriggled away with a faint hiss from a bunch of knotted grass.”

At this juncture, unfortunately the writer was carried away by his interest in snakes ... in rare water birds and “Murray-cod,” and quite forgot to finish his account of the swan shooting. It is obviously unnecessary to explain that shooting, as a sport, had no attraction for him; whereas observing birds and bats, fish, etc., was always a preoccupying interest.

“What a day of intense heat followed that morning! When at last we reached our previous night’s shelter, a shepherd station known as Bidgee Bend, we were nearly exhausted.

“While resting on a rough shake-down and lazily smoking, my eye happened to glance at my saddle, which was lying close at hand, and right in the midst thereof I saw a large scorpion with its tail raised in that way which is known to signify a vicious state of mind. Hearing my exclamation, the stockman looked round, and without a word reached for a long-lashed whip, and with a blow of the shaft put an end to the possibly dangerous intentions of our unwelcome visitor. Of an extremely laconic nature, our shepherd friend never uttered a word he felt to be unnecessary, and when, after having asked him if he saw scorpions frequently hereabouts, and received a monosyllabic reply in the affirmative, I added, ‘Any other kind of vermin?’ he muttered sleepily, with his pipe in his mouth, ‘Bull-dog ants, hairy spiders, centipedes, bugs.’”

On his return to Melbourne the traveller realised that there was no immediate prospect of finding work. He had made inquiries in every available direction, but he did not make any great effort. He realised that life in the New World, under such conditions as would be open to him, would be very distasteful; and greatly as he had enjoyed the few months’ sojourn in Australia, owing chiefly to Mr. Turner’s friendliness, he had little regret when he went on board the Loch Tay for his homeward faring.

The return voyage, too, was eventful. The route lay round Cape Horn, and the ship was driven by contrary winds down into the Antarctic seas, where it encountered bitterly cold weather, and came close to drifting icebergs.

The Loch Tay reached England in June, and the wanderer came direct to my mother’s house in London and stayed with us there for several weeks. This first visit to London was uneventful, but full of quiet happiness for us both. He had, of course, much to see, and it was a delight to me to be his cicerone. It was, moreover, a much wished-for opportunity to introduce him to my special friends, while my mother made him known to whosoever she thought would be influential in helping her nephew to find some suitable post or occupation.

I had three friends in particular I wanted him to know; two were then in London; but the third, John Elder, was in New Zealand, and did not return till the following year. His sister, however, Miss Adelaide Elder, was in town. She and my sister had been my confidants during the preceding two years in the matter of our engagement, and I was naturally most wishful that she and my cousin should meet. We had known each other from childhood—our parents were old friends—and we had read and studied together, often in a quiet part of Kensington Gardens reading Tennyson, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Fichte, etc. The other friend was Miss Alison—afterward Mrs. Mona Caird—the novelist and essay writer. We three were friends with many tastes and interests in common, not the least being all questions relating to women. To my great satisfaction out of the meeting with my cousin there grew deeply attached friendships that lasted throughout his life.

In spite of all our efforts no work was found for the wanderer; he spent the remainder of the year in Scotland and devoted his time to writing. I have about two letters written to me about that time. In one, dated August 21st from Braemar, he says:

“I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out.... I am in no hurry to rush into print; I do not wish to write publicly until I can do so properly. It would be a great mistake to embody my message in such a poem as ‘Uplands,’ although a fifty times better poem than that is. People won’t be preached to. Truth can be inculcated far better by inference, by suggestion.... I am glad to see by your note you are in good spirits. I also now look on things in a different light; but, unfortunately, Lill, we poor mortals are more apt to be swayed by moods than by circumstances, and look on things through the mist of these moods.”

In the other letter he wrote:

“I am too worried about various things to settle to any kind of literary work in the meantime. The weather has been wretchedly wet, and the cold is intense. I do trust I shall get away from Scotland before the winter sets in, as I am much less able to stand it than I thought I was. Even with the strong air up here I can’t walk any distance without being much the worse for it.”

One cause of the “worry” was a candid letter of criticism he had received from Robert Buchanan, whose The Book of Orm had been one of his great favourites among books of modern verse. Its fine mysticism appealed to him, and to the author he sent a number of his poems, and asked for a criticism and hoping for a favourable one. But, alas, when it came it was uncompromisingly the reverse; and the older poet strongly advised the young aspirant not to dream of literature as a career. Many years ago, he explained, when he was struggling in London he tried in vain to get certain employment of the kind, but he had never succeeded and had had “to buffet the sharp sea of journalism.” It was a great blow. It produced a deep and prolonged depression, and it required all my powers of persuasion and reiterated belief in his possibilities to enable him to pull himself together and try again.

His hope was unfulfilled and he remained in Scotland throughout the winter, at Moffat, where his mother had taken a house. Despite the cold and the delay, he enjoyed the long rambles over the snow-clad hills and in the fir woods; and wrote a number of poems afterward published in The Human Inheritance; and so vivid were certain effects of sunglow in the winter woods, that he described them in one of his last writings included in Where the Forest Murmurs.

But for the most part his mood was one of depression; under it he wrote the following sonnet:

THE GATE OF DEATH

I wonder if the soul upon that day
When Death’s gate opens to it, will with gaze
Rapt and bewilder’d tremble at the rays

Of God’s great glory—or if wild dismay

Will stun it with blank horror, while away
It watches the unguided world blaze
With speed relentless down the flowing ways

That end in nothing; while far off a gray

Wan shadow trembles ere it fades for aye?
Or if, half blinded still with death’s amaze,

Dimly and faintly it will somewhat see,
Some Shadow become substance and unroll

Until there looms one vast Humanity,
One awful, mighty, and resistless Whole?

In the late Spring of 1878 William Sharp settled in London. An opening had been found for him in the City of Melbourne Bank by Mr. Alexander Elder, the father of our friends, just in time to prevent him from carrying out his decision to go as a volunteer in the Turkish army during its conflict with Russia.

Neither the work nor the prospects offered were inviting, but he was thankful to have a chance of trying his fortunes in London. He bound himself as clerk in the Bank for three years, on a salary of £80, £90, and £100. As owing to the long idleness he had unavoidable debts to pay off, he determined to try what he could do with his pen to add to the slender income. He took a room in 19 Albert Street, Regent’s Park, whence he could walk to the Bank, yet sleep not far away from birds and trees; and he had the good fortune to fall in with a kindly, competent landlady. Now began a long, arduous struggle for the means of livelihood, for health, for a place among the literary writers of his day—a “schooling in the pains and impecuniosities of life” from which he learned so much. He had no influence to help him; and no friends other than those he had met at my mother’s house. Each week-end he came to 72 Inverness Terrace and stayed with us from Saturday till Monday. A serious difficulty now presented itself, one which threatened us both with temporary disaster. As long as my betrothed was in Scotland it was quite possible to preserve the secret of our engagement. Now that he was in London and a constant visitor at our house it was not so simple a matter. Moreover, to me it did not seem honourable toward my mother, and I wished her to know. He, however, was not of my opinion; not only would he lose much—we both believed we could not win my mother to our way of thinking—if he were forbidden to come to the house, but he also delighted in the very fact of the secrecy, of the mystery, and, indeed, mystification, which I did not then realise was a marked characteristic of his nature. For me such secrecy had no charm, but was fraught with difficulties and inconveniences. Many were our discussions, and at last he yielded an unwilling consent.

One Sunday afternoon in the late summer a dejected couple wandered about in Kensington Gardens, under the old trees, trying to forecast what seemed a mournful future. However, our fears were groundless. My mother, though she felt it her duty to point out to us the hopelessness and foolishness of the engagement from a worldly point of view, her strong objection to it on the score of our cousinship, his delicacy and lack of prospects, nevertheless realised the uselessness of opposing her daughter’s decision, accepted the inevitable, and from that moment treated her nephew as her son.

Two months later he wrote to me:

26: 8: 78.

... Thanks for your welcome note which I received a little ago. I, too, like you, was sitting at my open window last night (or rather this morning) with the stars for my companions: and I, too, took comfort from them and felt the peace hidden in their silent depths. I know of nothing that soothes the spirit more than looking on those awful skies at midnight. Some of our aspirations seem to have burnt into life there, and, tangled in some glory of starlight, to shine down upon us with beckoning hands.... I have told you before how that music, a beautiful line of poetry, and other cherished things of art so often bring you into close communion with myself. But there is one thing that does it infallibly and more than anything else: trees on a horizon, whether plain or upland, standing against a cloudless blue sky—more especially when there is a soft blue haze dimly palpitating between. Strange, is it not? I only half indefinitely myself know the cause of it. One cause certainly is the sense of music there is in that aspect—possibly also the fairness of an association so sympathetic with some gracious memory of the past.

P. S.—By-the-bye, have you noticed that my “Nocturne” is in the July number of Good Words?

This poem was of special interest to me because it had been written while I had played to him on the piano one evening. It was in the summer of 1878 also that he just met Mr. John Elder, whom I had known from childhood. John was a graduate of Cambridge, a thinker and man of fine tastes, and his new friend found a great stimulus in the keen mind of the older man. Owing to delicacy he could be but little in England, and till his death in 1883 the two men corresponded regularly with one another. From the letters of the younger man I have selected one or two to illustrate the trend of his mind at that date:

19 Albert St., Regent’s Park,

Oct., 1879.

My dear John,

23d October, 1880.

Lo, in a dream, I saw a vast dim sea
Whose sad waves broke upon a barren shore;
The name of this wan sea was Nevermore,

The land The Past, the shore Futility:

Thereon I spied three mighty Shadows; three
Weary and desolate Shades, of whom each wore
A crown whereon was writ Despair. To me

One spoke, and said, “Lo, I am He
In whom the countless millions of the East

Live, move, and hope. And all is vanity!”—
And I knew Buddha. Then the next: “The least
Am I, but once God’s mightiest Prophet-Priest”—

So spake Mahomet. And then pitifully

The third Shade moaned, “I am of Galilee!”

I also enclose the record of a vision I had lately:

Lo, in that Shadowy place wherein is found
The fruitage of the spirit men call dreams,
I wander’d. Ever underneath pale gleams

Of misty moonlight quivering all around,
And ever by the banks of sedgy streams
Swishing thro’ fallen rushes with slow sound

A spirit walked beside me. From a mound,

Rustling from poplar-leaves from top to base,

Some bird I knew not shrilled a cry of dole,

So bitter, I cried out to God for grace.
Whereat he by me slackened from his pace,

Turning upon me in my cold amaze
And saying, “While the long years onward roll

Thou shalt be haunted by this hateful face—“
And looking up, I looked on my own soul!

Nov. 20, 1880.

If this note does not reach you by New Year’s Day it will soon after—so let me wish you most heartily and sincerely all good wishes for the coming year. May the White Wings of Happiness and Peace and Health brush from your path all evil things. There is something selfish in the latter wish, for I hope so much to see you before long again. Don’t despise me when I say that in some things I am more a woman than a man—and when my heart is touched strongly I lavish more love upon the one who does so than I have perhaps any right to expect returned; and then I have so few friends that when I do find one I am ever jealous of his or her absence.

P. S.—I wonder if this late Kentish violet will retain its delicious scent till it looks at you in New Zealand. It is probably the last of its race.

Feb., 1881.

I may say in reference to the Religion of Humanity that my sympathy with Comtism is only limited, and that though I think it is and will yet be an instrument of great good, I see nothing in it of essential savingness. It is even in some of its ceremonial and practical details a decided retrogression—at least so it seems to me—and though I do not believe in a revealed God, I think such a belief higher and more precious and morally as salutary as a belief in abstract Humanity. Concrete humanity appeals more to my sympathy when filled with the breath of “God” than in its relation to its abstract Self. When I write again I will endeavour to answer your question as to whether I believe in a God or not. My friend, we are all in the hollow of some mighty moulding Hand. Every fibre in my body quivers at times with absolute faith and belief, yet I do not say that I believe in “God” when asked such a question by those whom I am conscious misinterpret me. You have some lines of mine called “The Redeemer”; they will hint something to you of that belief which buoys my soul up in the ocean of love that surrounds it. It were well for the soul, if annihilation rounds off the circle of life, to sink to final forgetfulness in the sea of precious human love; but it is far better if the soul can be borne along that sea of wonder and glory to distant ever-expanding goals, transcending in love, glory, life all that human imagination ever conceived....

Farewell for the present, dear friend.

W.