I have preserved some faint echo of the words he used, but I can give no conception of the dignity and earnestness of his manner, or the intense pathos of his tones.
The scene pa.s.sed before me again as I looked at him, while he lingered over Eric"s verses, and seemed lost in a reverie of thought.
At last he looked up and sighed. "Poor Eric!--But no, I will not call him poor; after all he is happier now than we. You loved him well," he continued; "why do you not try and preserve some records of his life?"
The suggestion took me by surprise, but I thought over it, and at once began to accomplish it. My own reminiscences of Eric were numerous and vivid, and several of my old schoolfellows and friends gladly supplied me with other particulars, especially the Bishop of Roslyn, Mr. Rose, Montagu, and Wildney. So the story of Eric"s ruin has been told, and told as he would have wished it done, with simple truth. n.o.ble Eric! I do not fear that I have wronged your memory, and you I know would rejoice to think how sorrowful hours have lost something of their sorrow, as I wrote the scenes in so many of which we were engaged together in our school-boy days.
I visited Roslyn a short time ago, and walked for hours along the sands, picturing in my memory the pleasant faces, and recalling the joyous tones of the many whom I had known and loved. Other boys were playing by the sea-side, who were strangers to me and I to them; and as I marked how wave after wave rolled up the sh.o.r.e, with its murmur and its foam, each sweeping farther than the other, each effacing the traces of the last, I saw an emblem of the pa.s.sing generations, and was content to find that my place knew me no more.
Ah me the golden time!-- But its hours have pa.s.sed away, With the pure and bracing clime, And the bright and merry day.
And the sea still laughs to the rosy sh.e.l.ls ash.o.r.e, And the sh.o.r.e still shines in the l.u.s.tre of the wave; But the joyaunce and the beauty of the boyish days is o"er, And many of the beautiful lie quiet in the grave;-- And he who comes again Wears a brow of toil and pain, And wanders sad and silent by the melancholy main.