The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and n.o.ble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Sh.e.l.ley called
The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame Over his living head, like heaven, is bent-- An early but enduring monument.
Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady l.u.s.tre as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England.
With what convulsive grat.i.tude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he has expressed with that pa.s.sionate richness of power which no other could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew drear and dark," he says,
When fortune changed, and love fled far, And hatred"s shafts flew thick and fast, Thou wert the solitary star Which rose, and set not to the last.
The wonderful verses commencing,
Though the day of my destiny"s over, And the star of my fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find,
wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into language of such vigor and such melody.
From the wreck of the past, which hath perished, Thus much I at least may recall: It hath taught me that what I most cherished Deserved to be dearest of all.
In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of thee.
To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father"s son and most affectionate brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,
The castled crag of Drachenfels Frowns o"er the wide and winding Rhine;
and ending,
Nor could on earth a spot be found To nature and to me so dear, Could thy dear eyes, In following mine, Still sweeten more These banks of Rhine,
expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty, that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them, and repeat them over and over.
One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in thought and in pa.s.sion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.
My sister, my sweet sister! if a name Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim No tears, but tenderness to answer mine.
Go where I will, to me thou art the same, A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny, A world to roam through, and a home with thee.
I feel almost, at times, as I have felt In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks, Which do remember me of where I dwelt Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books; Come as of yore upon me, and can melt My heart with recognition of their looks; And even, at moments, I could think I see Some living thing to love, but none like thee.
Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow The fool of my own wishes, and forget The solitude which I have vaunted so Has lost its praise in this but one regret.
The last intelligible words of Byron were, "Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."
It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister,"
composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of insanity.
Thou to me didst ever show Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend An ear to the desponding love-sick lay, Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.
Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in Talfourd"s "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a mother"s care, a sister"s tenderness, and a friend"s fervent sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fort.i.tude, which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and h.e.l.l, with me. She lives but for me." Their hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious at the time of her brother"s death, and the blow was mercifully deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:
Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow, The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.
Her only mate is now the minstrel lark, Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed A sister"s tears.
Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.
The union of Felix and f.a.n.n.y Mendelssohn was something wonderful, like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them both. Such pure, tender, and n.o.ble souls are made for each other. The more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions, too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London, sent to f.a.n.n.y a letter composed in notes, she translated it first with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth.
Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous region of life. For, when f.a.n.n.y died in her German home, Felix, amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the a.s.sembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.
One of the n.o.blest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave, and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his.
They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together, had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in his land:
As one who held herself a part Of all she saw, and let her heart Gainst the household bosom lean, Upon the motley-braided mat Our youngest and our dearest sat, Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes, Now bathed within the fadeless green And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh! looking from some heavenly hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where"er I went, With dark eyes full of love"s content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills The air with sweetness; all the hills Stretch green to June"s unclouded sky; But still I wait with ear and eye For something gone which should be nigh, A loss in all familiar things, In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life"s late afternoon, Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, I cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall I not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a sister and it is one of the most interesting that history reveals to us shall close this list. Maurice de Guerin was born in Languedoc, in France, in the year 1811; and there also, in 1839, he died. Although s.n.a.t.c.hed away at twenty-eight, his fascinating personality and genius left an indelible impression on all appreciative persons who had come in contact with him. His writings, few and unelaborate as they are, have won admiring praise from the judges whose verdict is fame. His sister Eugenie, six years older than himself, took the place of mother as well as that of sister to the orphan boy. He was not more extraordinary for winsomeness and talent than she was for combined power of intelligence, tenacity of affection, and religiousness of principle. They became ardent friends, in the most emphatic meaning of the term. Maurice went to Paris to try his fortune as a writer.
Eugenie"s yearning and anxious heart followed him in rapid letters.
She tells him how they whom he has left all love him, encourages him with virtue and piety, adjures him to be true to his best self. She says to him, with the irresistible eloquence of the heart, "We see things with the same eyes: what you find beautiful, I find beautiful.
G.o.d has made our souls of one piece." Maurice"s replies were shorter and rarer. It is evident, the reader feels it with a pang of regret, that Eugenie was much less to Maurice than he was to her; and yet he loved her well. But man"s love is usually poor compared with woman"s; and he was in the throngs of Paris, she in the solitude of a country home. He fell away from his original purity and constancy, lost his religious faith for a season, and seemed almost to forget those who idolized him with such deep fondness. Was he not one of the charmers, who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return comparatively so little?
Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections, unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugenie went to him in Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair.
After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal, "My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your sister"s portion! Only in the direction of G.o.d shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has the power of loving."
Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of a rapid consumption, in his father"s house, ministered to by his wife and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he to dying." The shock came upon Eugenie with crushing severity. Ever after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face,"
"his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day I see pa.s.s and repa.s.s before me that dear, pale face: that beautiful head a.s.sumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling, eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so short, your repose so rare, O G.o.d! uphold me. How we have gazed at him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other again on earth?"
Five years previous to her brother"s death, Eugenie had begun a journal, which she forwarded to him from time to time. After the funeral, she tried to continue this, addressing it still to him: "To Maurice dead, to Maurice in heaven. He was the pride and joy of my heart. Oh, how sweet a name, and how full of tenderness, is that of brother!" She persevered for five months, when it became too painful, and she abandoned it. From this time till death overtook her, in the year 1848, she seemed to have but one purpose; namely, to secure Maurice"s fame by the publication of his literary remains. Poverty and various other obstacles baffled all her efforts. But, in 1858, M.
Trebutien, a loving and faithful friend, edited and published, in a single volume, the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guerin;" and, five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal and Letters of Eugenie de Guerin." The striking original genius and worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them, insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother"s; so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I can do is to strain my gaze into it."
FRIENDSHIPS OF WIVES AND HUSBANDS.
THE friendships between persons of opposite s.e.x, thus far considered, spring up under the primary impulse of consanguinity, and embroider themselves around the fostering relations of natural duty. Based on affiliation of descent, organic community of circ.u.mstances, and mixture of experience, and sanctioned by the most authoritative seals of social opinion, they are, when not impoverished or poisoned by any evil interference, warm, precious, and sacred. The strongest preventives of their frequency and the commonest drawbacks from their power are the dullness which creeps over all emotions under the dominion of pa.s.sive habit, and the tendency to look elsewhere for more vivid attachments, more exciting a.s.sociations.
But there is another cla.s.s of friendships, more important in influence, if not in number, having also the highest sanctions both of law and of custom, and marked by such peculiarities that they const.i.tute a species by themselves. It consists of the friendships which grow up between husbands and wives, within the shielded enclosure of matrimony. The community of interests between those united in wedlock if they are married in truth as well as in form is the most intimate and entire that can exist.
Their unqualified surrender and blending of lives, unreserved confidence and conjunction of hearts, afford, on the one hand, the most hazardous, on the other hand, the most propitious, conditions for a perfect mutual reflection of souls with all their contents.
Nowhere else has knowledge such free scope, have the inducements for esteem or contempt such unhampered range, as in this relation. The inmost secrets of the parties are always exposed to revelation or to betrayal. Hypocrisy and deception are reduced to the narrowest limits. Accordingly, both the most absolute antagonism and misery, and the most absolute sympathy and happiness, are known in the conjugal union. Milton puts in the mouth of Samson a fearful expression of the former:
To wear out miserable days, Intangled with a poisonous bosom snake.
Of the latter we have an affecting instance in the historic narrative of that Italian Countess del Verme, who, losing her husband after an elysian union for eight years, was so shocked on learning his death, that she threw herself on his body in a convulsion of grief which broke her heart, and she instantly died beside him.
Are the parties selfish, unfeeling, ungenuine? Every possible opportunity is afforded for the base and alien qualities to recognize each other, and clash or effervesce. Is one wise, aspiring, magnanimous? the other, foolish, vulgar, revengeful? The yoke, pulled contrary ways, must gall and irritate. Then the fellowship of husband and wife is like that of acid and alkali. But, if they are filled with consecrating tenderness, sweet patience, and earnest purposes, all possible motives urge them to adjust their characters and conduct to each other; to tune their intercourse by heavenly laws; to mingle their experience in one blessed current; to soothe, support, and beautify each other"s being. Then there results a union, including every faculty, satisfying every want, unparalleled for its integrity and its blessedness. In such cases as this, it may truly be said, marriage is the queen of all friendships.
A beautiful example of such a union is unveiled, in the tribute paid to his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh. He says, "I found an intelligent companion and a tender friend, a prudent monitress, the most faithful of wives, and a mother as tender as children ever had the misfortune to lose. I met a woman, who, by tender management of my weaknesses, gradually corrected the most pertinacious of them. She became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous nature, she was taught frugality and economy by her love for me. She gently reclaimed me from dissipation, propped my weak and irresolute nature, urged my indolence to all the exertion that has been useful and creditable to me, and was perpetually at hand to admonish my heedlessness or improvidence. In her solicitude for my interest, she never for a moment forgot my feelings or character. Even in her occasional resentment, for which I but too often gave her cause, (would to G.o.d I could recall those moments!) she had no sullenness or acrimony. Such was she whom I have lost, when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years" struggle and distress had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other; when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, and before age had deprived it of much of its original ardor."
It is to be presumed that those who enter into a relation with each other on which so much of their destiny is staked, take the step under the influence of love. And by love the love which looks to a conjugal union is to be understood a general movement of personal sympathy, imparting a special richness and intensity to the imagination in its action toward the individuals concerned, and thus giving each of them a genial and generous idea of the other to govern their mutual references; the whole operation being animated and emphasized, more or less prominently, by the impulse of s.e.x. The idea of each other with which the wedded pair begin their union, an idea enn.o.bled and vivified by imagination, and serving as the basis and stimulus of their love, may be largely made up of illusions, or may be sound, though inadequate. In the former case, one of three results will follow, either, as the poetic illusions are dispelled, and the fancied charms of the soul are replaced by barren poverty or haggard ugliness, the ardor of affection will be reversed by disappointment and friction into antipathy, engendering a chronic state, sometimes of fierce hatred, sometimes of sullen dislike; or that affection, robbed of its moral supports, admiration, grat.i.tude, faith, and desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the s.e.xual element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will degenerate into l.u.s.t. These three results depict the real union subsisting between three cla.s.ses of husbands and wives, when the hymeneal glow has pa.s.sed, and fixed realities a.s.sert their sway. The first is a hideous a.s.sociation of enemies, a yoked animosity; the second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, an external partnership; the third, a convenient alliance of pleasure seekers, an animal cohabitation.