Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850

"Seven or eight days afterward, while I was chatting with my usual evening circle, the sound of the clock striking eleven was followed by the report of a gun fired at one of the windows. We all heard the noise, we all saw the fire, yet the window was undamaged. We concluded that some one sought my life, and that it was necessary to take precautions again another attempt. The Intendant des Menus Plaisirs, who was present, flew to the house of his friend, M. de Marville, the Lieutenant of Police. The houses opposite mine were instantly searched, and for several days were guarded from top to bottom. My house was closely examined; the street was filled with spies in all possible disguises. But, notwithstanding all this vigilance, the same explosion was heard and seen for three whole months always at the same hour, and at the same window-pane, without any one being able to discover from whence it proceeded. This fact stands recorded in the registers of the police.

"Nothing was heard for some days; but having been invited by Mademoiselle Dumesnil[2 - The celebrated tragedian.] to join a little evening party at her house near the Barrière blanche, I got into a hackney-coach at eleven o'clock with my maid. It was clear moonlight as we passed along the Boulevards, which were then beginning to be studded with houses. While we were looking at the half-finished buildings, my maid said, 'Was it not in this neighborhood that M. de S – died?' 'From what I have heard,' I answered, 'I think it should be there' – pointing with my finger to a house before us. From that house came the same gun-shot that I had heard before. It seemed to traverse our carriage, and the coachman set off at full speed, thinking we were attacked by robbers. We arrived at Mademoiselle Dumesnil's in a state of the utmost terror; a feeling I did not get rid of for a long time."

[Mademoiselle Clairon gives some further details similar to the above, and adds that the noises finally ceased in about two years and a half. After this, intending to change her residence, she put up a bill on the house she was leaving; and many people made the pretext of looking at the apartments an excuse for gratifying their curiosity to see, in her every-day guise, the great tragedian of the Théâtre Français.]

"One day I was told that an old lady desired to see my rooms. Having always had a great respect for the aged, I went down to receive her. An unaccountable emotion seized me on seeing her, and I perceived that she was moved in a similar manner. I begged her to sit down, and we were both silent for some time. At length she spoke, and, after some preparation, came to the subject of her visit.

"'I was, mademoiselle, the best friend of M. de S – , and the only friend whom he would see during the last year of his life. We spoke of you incessantly; I urging him to forget you, – he protesting that he would love you beyond the tomb. Your eyes which are full of tears allow me to ask you why you made him so wretched; and how, with such a mind and such feelings as yours, you could refuse him the consolation of once more seeing and speaking to you?'

"'We can not,' I answered, 'command our sentiments. M. de S – had merit and estimable qualities; but his gloomy, bitter, and overbearing temper made me equally afraid of his company, his friendship, and his love. To make him happy, I must have renounced all intercourse with society, and even the exercise of my talents. I was poor and proud; I desire, and hope I shall ever desire, to owe nothing to any one but myself. My friendship for him prompted me to use every endeavor to lead him to more just and reasonable sentiments: failing in this, and persuaded that his obstinacy proceeded less from the excess of his passion than from the violence of his character, I took the firm resolution to separate from him entirely. I refused to see him in his last moments, because the sight would have rent my heart; because I feared to appear too barbarous if I remained inflexible, and to make myself wretched if I yielded. Such, madame, are the motives of my conduct – motives for which, I think, no one can blame me.'

"'It would indeed,' said the lady, 'be unjust to condemn you. My poor friend himself in his reasonable moments acknowledged all that he owed you. But his passion and his malady overcame him, and your refusal to see him hastened his last moments. He was counting the minutes, when at half-past ten, his servant came to tell him that decidedly you would not come. After a moment's silence, he took me by the hand with a frightful expression of despair. Barbarous woman! he cried; but she will gain nothing by her cruelty. As I have followed her in life, I shall follow her in death! I endeavored to calm him; he was dead.'

"I need scarcely tell you, my dear friend, what effect these last words had upon me. Their analogy to all my apparitions filled me with terror, but time and reflection calmed my feelings. The consideration that I was neither the better nor the worse for all that had happened to me, has led me to ascribe it all to chance. I do not, indeed, know what chance is; but it can not be denied that the something which goes by that name has a great influence on all that passes in the world.

"Such is my story; do with it what you will. If you intend to make it public, I beg you to suppress the initial letter of the name, and the name of the province."

This last injunction was not, as we see, strictly complied with; but, at the distance of half a century, the suppression of a name was probably of little consequence.

There is no reason to doubt the entire truth of Mademoiselle Clairon's narrative. The incidents which she relates made such a deep and enduring impression on her mind, that it remained uneffaced during the whole course of her brilliant career, and, almost at the close of a long life spent in the bustle and business of the world, inspired her with solemn and religious thoughts. Those incidents can scarcely be ascribed to delusions of her imagination; for she had a strong and cultivated mind, not likely to be influenced by superstitious credulity; and besides, the mysterious sounds were heard by others as well as herself, and had become the subject of general conversation in Paris. The suspicion of a trick or conspiracy never seems to have occurred to her, though such a supposition is the only way in which the circumstances can be explained; and we are convinced that this explanation, though not quite satisfactory in every particular, is the real one. Several portentous occurrences, equally or more marvelous, have thus been accounted for.

Our readers remember the history of the Commissioners of the Roundhead Parliament for the sequestration of the royal domains, who were terrified to death, and at last fairly driven out of the Palace of Woodstock, by a series of diabolical sounds and sights, which were long afterward discovered to be the work of one of their own servants, Joe Tomkins by name, a loyalist in the disguise of a puritan. The famous "Cocklane Ghost," which kept the town in agitation for months, and baffled the penetration of multitudes of the divines, philosophers, and literati of the day, was a young girl of some eleven or twelve years old, whose mysterious knockings were produced by such simple means, that their remaining so long undetected is the most marvelous part of the story. This child was the agent of a conspiracy formed by her father, with some confederates, to ruin the reputation of a gentleman by means of pretended revelations from the dead. For this conspiracy these persons were tried, and the father, the most guilty party, underwent the punishment of the pillory.

A more recent story is that of the "Stockwell Ghost," which forms the subject of a volume published in 1772, and is shortly told by Mr. Hone in the first volume of his "Every Day Book." Mrs. Golding, an elderly lady residing at Stockwell, in Surrey, had her house disturbed by portents, which not only terrified her and her family, but spread alarm through the vicinity. Strange noises were heard proceeding from empty parts of the house, and heavy articles of furniture, glass, and earthenware, were thrown down and broken in pieces before the eyes of the family and neighbors. Mrs. Golding, driven by terror from her own dwelling, took refuge, first in one neighboring house, and then in another, and thither the prodigies followed her. It was observed that her maid-servant, Ann Robinson, was always present when these things took place, either in Mrs. Golding's own house, or in those of the neighbors. This girl, who had lived only about a week with her mistress, became the subject of mistrust and was dismissed, after which the disturbances entirely ceased. But the matter rested on mere suspicion. "Scarcely any one," says Mr. Hone, "who lived at that time listened patiently to the presumption, or without attributing the whole to witchcraft." At length Mr. Hone himself obtained a solution of the mystery from a gentleman who had become acquainted with Ann Robinson many years after the affair happened, and to whom she had confessed that she alone had produced all these supernatural horrors, by fixing wires or horse-hairs to different articles, according as they were heavy or light, and thus throwing them down, with other devices equally simple, which the terror and confusion of the spectators prevented them from detecting. The girl began these tricks to forward some love affair, and continued them for amusement when she saw the effect they produced.

Remembering these cases, we can have little doubt that Mademoiselle Clairon's maid was the author of the noises which threw her mistress and her friends into such consternation. Her own house was generally the place where these things happened; and on the most remarkable occasions where they happened elsewhere, is expressly mentioned that the maid was present. At St. Cloud it was to the maid, who was her bed-fellow, that Clairon was congratulating herself on being out of the way of the cry, when it suddenly was heard in the very room. She had her maid in the carriage with her on the Boulevards, and it was immediately after the girl had asked her a question about the death of M. de S – that the gun-shot was heard, which seemed to traverse the carriage. Had the maid a confederate – perhaps her fellow-servant on the box – to whom she might have given the signal? When Mademoiselle Clairon went a-shopping to the Rue St. Honoré, she probably had her maid with her, either in or outside the carriage; and, indeed, in every instance the noises took place when the maid would most probably have been present, or close at hand. In regard to the unearthly cry, she might easily have produced it herself without any great skill in ventriloquism, or the art of imitating sounds; a supposition which is rendered the more probable, as its realization was rendered the more easy, by the fact of no words having been uttered – merely a wild cry. Most of the common itinerant ventriloquists on our public race-courses can utter speeches for an imaginary person without any perceptible motion of the lips; the utterance of a mere sound in this way would be infinitely less difficult.

The noises resembling the report of fire-arms (very likely to have been unconsciously, and in perfect good faith, exaggerated by the terror of the hearers) may have been produced by a confederate fellow-servant, or a lover. It is to be observed, that the first time this seeming report was heard, the houses opposite were guarded by the police, and spies were placed in the street, but Mademoiselle Clairon's own house was merely "examined." It is evident that these precautions, however effectual against a plot conducted from without, could have no effect whatever against tricks played within her house by one or more of her own servants.

As to the maid-servant's motives for engaging in this series of deceptions, many may have existed and been sufficiently strong; the lightest, which we shall state last, would probably be the strongest. She may have been in communication with M. de S – 's relations for some hidden purpose which never was effected. How far this circumstance may be connected with the date of the first portent, the very night of the young man's death, or whether that coincidence was simply accidental, is matter for conjecture. The old lady, his relative, who afterward visited Clairon, and told her a tale calculated to fill her with superstitious dread, may herself have been the maid-servant's employer for some similar purpose; or (which is at least equally probable) the tale may have had nothing whatever to do with the sound, and may have been perfectly true. But all experience in such cases assures us that the love of mischief, or the love of power, and the desire of being important, would be sufficient motives to the maid for such a deception. The more frightened Clairon was, the more necessary and valuable her maid became to her, naturally. A thousand instances of long continued deception on the part of young women, begun in mere folly, and continued for the reasons just mentioned, though continued at an immense cost of trouble, resolution, and self-denial in all other respects, are familiar to most readers of strange transactions, medical and otherwise. There seem to be strong grounds for the conclusion that the maid was the principal, if not the sole agent in this otherwise supernatural part of this remarkable story.

THE REV. WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES

We must not allow a poet of the tender and manly feeling of Mr. Bowles to pass away from among us with a mere notice of his death amid the common gossip of the week. The peculiar excellence of his Sonnets and his influence on English poetry deserve a further notice at our hands.

The Rev. William Lisle Bowles, of an ancient family in the county of Wilts, was born in the village of King's Sutton, in Northamptonshire – a parish of which his father was vicar – on the 24th of September, 1762. His mother was the daughter of Dr. Richard Gray, chaplain to Nathaniel Crew, bishop of Durham. He was educated at Winchester School, under Dr. Joseph Warton, and rose to be the senior boy. Warton took much notice of him; and, on his removal to Oxford, in 1782, was the means, we have heard, of inducing him to enter at Trinity College, of which Tom Warton was then the senior Fellow. "Among my contemporaries at Trinity," he says, "were several young men of talents and literature – Headley, Kett, Benwell, Dallaway, Richards, Dornford." Of these Headley is still remembered by some beautiful pieces of poetry, distinguished for imagery, pathos, and simplicity.

Mr. Bowles became a poet in print in his twenty-seventh year – publishing in 1789 a very small volume in quarto, with the very modest title of "Fourteen Sonnets." His excellencies were not lost on the public; and in the same year appeared a second edition, with seven additional sonnets. "I had just entered on my seventeenth year," says Coleridge, in his "Biographia Literaria," "when the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty-one in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow [at Christ's Hospital] who had quitted us for the University. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions – as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." Coleridge was always consistent in his admiration of Mr. Bowles. Charlotte Smith and Bowles, he says – writing in 1797 – are they who first made the sonnet popular among the present generation of English readers; and in the same year in which this encomium was printed, his own volume of poetry contains "Sonnets attempted in the manner of Mr. Bowles." "My obligations to Mr. Bowles," he adds in another place, "were indeed important, and for radical good;" and that his approbation might not be confined to prose, he has said in verse:

"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles, for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring
Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring."

Mr. Bowles's sonnets were descriptive of his personal feelings; and the manly tenderness which pervades them was occasioned, he tells us, by the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom

"Sperabat longos, heu! ducere soles,
Et fido acclinis consenuisse sinu."

An eighth edition appeared in 1802; and a ninth and a tenth have since been demanded.

While at Trinity – where he took his degree in 1792 – Mr. Bowles obtained the Chancellor's prize for a Latin poem. On leaving the University he entered into holy orders, and was appointed to a curacy in Wiltshire; from which he was preferred to a living in Gloucestershire – and in 1803 to a canonry in Salisbury Cathedral. His next step was to the rectory of Bremhill in Wiltshire – to which he was presented by Archbishop Moore. Here he remained till his death – beloved by his parishioners and by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. A volume of his sermons ("Paulus Parochialis"), designed for country congregations, was published in 1826.

The Sonnets were followed, at an Horatian interval, by other poems hardly of an inferior quality: such, for instance, as his "Hope, an Allegorical Sketch" – "St. Michael's Mount" – "Coombe Ellen" – and "Grave of Howard." His "Spirit of Discovery by Sea," the longest of his productions, was published in 1804, and is now chiefly remembered by the unhappy notoriety which Lord Byron obtained for it by asserting in his "English Bards" that the poet had made the woods of Madeira tremble to a kiss. Lord Byron subsequently acknowledged that he had mistaken Mr. Bowles's meaning: too late, however, to remove the injurious impression which his hasty reading had occasioned. Generally, Mr. Bowles's more ambitious works may be ranked as superior to the poems of Crowe and Carrington – both of which in their day commanded a certain reputation – and as higher in academical elegance than the verse of Mr. James Montgomery; while they have neither the nerve and occasional nobility of Cowper, nor that intimate mixture of fancy, feeling, lofty contemplations, and simple themes and images which have placed Wordsworth at the head of a school.

The school of the Wartons was not the school of Pope; and the comparatively low appreciation of the great poetical satirist, which Mr. Bowles entertained and asserted in print, was no doubt imbibed at Winchester under Joseph Warton, and strengthened at Oxford under Tom. Mr. Bowles's edition of Pope is a very poor performance. He had little diligence, and few indeed of the requirements of an editor. He undertook to traduce the moral character of Pope; and the line in which Lord Byron refers to him on that account

"To do for hate what Mallet did for hire"

will long be remembered to his prejudice. His so-called "invariable principles of poetry" maintained in his Pope and in his controversy with Byron and Campbell, are better based than critics hitherto have been willing to admit. Considering how sharply the reverend Pamphleteer was hit by the Peer's ridicule, it must be always remembered, to the credit of his Christianity, that possibly the most popular of all the dirges written on Lord Byron's death came from Mr. Bowles's pen; and the following tributary stanza is deepened in its music by the memory of the former war.

"I will not ask sad Pity to deplore
His wayward errors who thus sadly died,
Still less, Childe Harold, now thou art no more,
Will I say aught of Genius misapplied;
Of the past shadows of thy spleen or pride:
But I will bid th' Arcadian cypress wave,
Pluck the green laurel from the Perseus's side,
And pray thy spirit may such quiet have
That not one thought unkind be murmured o'er thy grave."

It only remains for us to add, that Mr. Bowles wrote a somewhat poor life of Bishop Ken – that he was famous for his Parson Adams-like forgetfulness – that his wife died in 1844, at the age of 72 – and that he himself at the time of his death was in his eighty-eighth year. —London Athenæum.

MORNING IN SPRING

(from the german of gustav solling.)

From the valleys to the hills
See the morning mists arise;
And the early dew distills
Balmy incense to the skies.

Purple clouds, with vapory grace,
Round the sun their soft sail fling;
Now they fade – and from his face
Beams the new-born bliss of Spring!

From the cool grass glitter bright
Myriad drops of diamond dew;
Bending 'neath their pressure light,
Waves the green corn, springing new

Nought but the fragrant wind is heard,
Whispering softly through the trees,
Or, lightly perched, the early bird
Chirping to the morning breeze

Dewy May-flowers to the sun
Ope their buds of varied hue.