Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863

Quick! unbraid the heavy tresses of my coroneted hair —
Let its gold fall in free ringlets such as I was wont to wear.

I am going back to nature. I no more will school my heart
To stifle its best feelings, play an idle puppet's part.

I will seek my banished mother, nestle closely on her breast;
Noble, faithful, kind, and loving, there the tortured one may rest.

We will turn the Poets' pages, learn the noblest deeds to act,
Till the fictions in their beauty shall be lived as simple fact.

I will mould a living statue, make it generous, strong, and high,
Humble, meek, self-abnegating, formed to meet the Master's eye.

Oh, the glow of earnest culture! Oh, the joy of sacrifice!
The delight to help another! o'er all selfish thoughts to rise!

Farewell, cold and haughty splendor – how you chilled me when a bride!
Hollow all your mental efforts; meanness all your dazzling pride!

Put the diamonds in their caskets! pearls and rubies, place them there!
I shall never sigh to wear them with the violets in my hair.

Freedom! with no eye upon me freezing all my fiery soul;
Free to follow nature's dictates; free from all save God's control.

I am going to the cottage, with its windows small and low,
Where the sweetbrier twines its roses and the Guelder rose its snow.

I will climb the thymy mountains where the pines in sturdy might
Follow nature's holy bidding, growing ever to the light;

Tracking down the leaping streamlet till the willows on it rise,
Watch its broad and faithful bosom strive to mirror back the skies.

Through the wicker gate at evening with my mother I will come,
With a little book, the Poet's, to read low at set of sun.

'Tis a gloomy, broken record of a love poured forth in death,
Generous, holy, and devoted, sung with panting, dying breath.

By the grassy mound we'll read it where he calmly sleeps in God, —
My gushing tears may stream above – they cannot pierce the sod!

Hand in hand we'll sit together by the lowly mossy grave —
Oh, God! I blazed with jewels, but the noble dared not save!

I am going to the cottage, there to sculpture my own soul,
Till it fill the high ideal of the Poet's glowing roll.

* * *

Stay, lovely dream! I waken! hear the clanking of my chain!
Feel a hopeless vow is on me – I can ne'er be free again!

His wife! I've sworn it truly! I must bear his freezing eye,
Feel his blighting breath upon me while all nobler instincts die!

Feel the Evil gain upon me as the weary moments glide,
Till I hiss, a jewelled serpent, fit companion, at his side.

Vain is struggle – vain is writhing – vain are sobs and stifled gasps —
I must wear my brilliant fetters though my life-blood stain their clasps!

Hark! he calls! tear out the violets! quick! the diamonds in my hair!
There's a ball to-night at Travers' – 'tis his will I should be there.

Splendid victim in his pageant, though my tortured head should ache,
Yet I must be brilliant, joyous, if my throbbing heart should break!

I shudder! quick! my dress of rose, my tunic of point lace —
If fine enough, he will not read the anguish in my face!

I know one place he dare not look – it is so still and deep —
He dare not lift the winding sheet that veils my last, long sleep!

He dreads the dead! the coffin lid will shield me from his breath —
His eye no more will torture – Joy! I shall be free in death!

Free to rest beside the Poet. He will shun the lowly grave:
There my mother soon will join us, and the violets o'er us wave.

THE SKEPTICS OF THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

It is remarkable that while, in a republic, which is the mildest form of government, respect for law and order are most highly developed, there is in an aristocracy (which is always the most deeply based form of tyranny) a constant revolt against all law. Puritanism in England, Pietism in Germany, and Huguenotism in France, were all directly and strongly republican and law-abiding in their social relations; while for an example of the contrary we need only glance at our own South. Aristocracy – a regularly ordered system of society into ranks – is the dream of the slaveholder, and experience is showing us how extremely difficult it is to uproot the power of a very few wicked men who have fairly mudsilled the majority; and yet, despite this strength, there was never yet a country claiming to be civilized, in which the wild caprices and armed outrages of the individual were regarded with such toleration.

Republicanism is Christian. When will the world see this tremendous truth as it should, and realize that as there is a present and a future, so did the Saviour lay down one law whereby man might progress in this life, and another for the attainment of happiness in the next, and that the two are mutually sustaining? There was no real republicanism before the Gospels, and there has been no real addition to the doctrine since. The instant that religion or any great law of truth falls into the hands of a high caste, and puts on its livery, it becomes – ridiculous. What think you of a shepherd's crook of gold blazing with diamonds?

It is interesting to trace an excellent illustration of the natural affinity between the fondness for feudalism and the love of law-breaking in Sir Walter Scott. Whatever his head and his natural common sense dictated (and as he was a canny Scot and a shrewd observer, they dictated many wise truths), his heart was always with the men of bow and brand; with dashing robbers, moss troopers, duellists, wild-eagle barons, wild-wolf borderers, and the whole farrago of autocratic scoundrelism. With his soul devoted to dreams of feudalism, his fond love of its romance was principally based on the constant infractions of law and order to which a state of society must always be subject in which certain men acquire power out of proportion to their integrity. The result of this always is a lurking sympathy with rascality, a secret relish for bold selfishness, which is in every community the deadliest poison of the rights of the poor, and all the disinherited by fortune.

It is very remarkable that Walter Scott, a Tory to the soul, should, by his apparently contradictory yet still most consistent love of the outré, have had a keen amateur sympathy for outlaws. It is much more remarkable, however, that, still retaining his faith in king and nobles, Church and State, he should have pushed his appreciation of such men to the degree of marvellously comprehending – nay, enjoying – certain types of skepticism which sprang up in fiercest opposition to authority; urged into existence by its abuses, as germs of plants have been thought to be electrified into life by sharp blows. And it is most remarkable of all, that he did this at a time when none among his English readers seem to have had any comprehension whatever of these characters, or to have surmised the fact that to merely understand and depict them, the writer must have ventured into fearful depths of reflection and of study. In treating these characters, Walter Scott seems to become positively subjective– and I will venture to say that it is the only instance of the slightest approach to anything of the kind to be found in all his writings. Unlike Byron, who was painfully conscious, not of the nature of his want in this respect, but of something wanting, Scott nowhere else betrays the slightest consciousness of his continual life under limitations, when, plump! we find him making a headlong leap right into the very centre of that terrible pool whose waters feed the forbidden-fruit tree of good and of evil.

The characters to which I particularly refer in Sir Walter Scott's novels are those of the Templar, Brian de Bois Guilbert, in 'Ivanhoe;' of the gypsy Hayraddin Maugrabin in 'Quentin Durward;' of Dryfesdale, the steward, in 'The Abbot;' and of the 'leech' Henbane Dwining, in 'The Fair Maid of Perth.' There are several others which more or less resemble these, as, for instance, Ranald Mac Eagh, the Child of the Mist, in 'Montrose,' and Rashleigh, in 'Rob Roy;' but the latter, considered by themselves, are only partly developed. In fact, if Scott had given to the world only one of these outlaws of faith, there would have been but little ground for inferring that his mind had ever taken so daring a range as I venture to claim for him. It is in his constant, wistful return, in one form or the other, to that terrible type of humanity – the man who, as a matter of intensely sincere faith, has freed himself from all adherence to the laws of man or God – that we find the clue to the real nature of the author's extraordinary sympathy for the most daring, yet most subtle example of the law-breaker. In comparing these characters carefully, we find that each by contrast appears far more perfect than when separate – as the bone, which, however excellent its state of preservation may be, never seems to the eye of the physiologist so complete as when in its place in the complete skeleton. And through this contrast we learn that Scott, having by sympathy and historical-romantic study, comprehended the lost secret of all illuminée mysteries – that of human dependence on nought save the laws of a mysterious and terrible Nature – could not refrain from ever and anon whispering the royal secret, though it were only to the rustling reeds and rushes of fashionable novels. Having learned, though in an illegitimate way, that the friend of Pan, the great king of the golden touch, had ass's ears, he must tell it again, though in murmurs and whispers:

'Qui cum ne prodere visum
Dedecus auderet, cupiens efferre sub auras,
Nec posset reticere tamen, secedit, humumque
Effodit: et domini quales aspexerit aures,