The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 483, April 2, 1831

Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,
The swallow wanders fast and free:
Oh! happy bird, were I like thee,
I, too, would fly beyond the sea.

Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,
Are kindly hearts and social glee;
But here for me they may not be:
My heart is gone beyond the sea.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

THE AUTOCRAT’S PRAYER

Europe! hear the voice that rose
From the chief of Freedom’s foes—
When he bade war’s thunders roll
O’er the country of the Pole—
To his Cossacks on parade
Thus the Calmuck robber said:

“Mine the might, and mine the right,
Stir ye, spur ye to the fight—
Bare the blade, and strike the blow
To the heart’s core of the foe—
Slaughter all the rebel bands
Found with weapons in their hands;
On! the holy work of fate
Russia’s God will consecrate.

“’Tis decreed that they shall bleed
For their dark and trait’rous deed.
Poles! to us by conquest given,
Ye provoke the wrath of Heaven:
Therefore, purging sword and shot
Use we must, and spare you not.
Guardian of our northern faith,
Guide us to the field of death!

“Ere we’ve done, many a one
Shall weep they ever saw the sun.
Rouse the noble in his hall
To a fiery festival;
Dash the stubborn peasant’s mirth—
Drown in blood his alien hearth;
Babe or mother, never falter—
Spear the priest before the altar.
Onward, and avenge our wrong!
God is good, and Russia strong!”

    Englishman’s Magazine, No 1.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

From a paper on the Fine Arts of old in England, in Blackwood’s Magazine.

The sex and character of Elizabeth herself was no weak ingredient in the poetic spirit of the time. Loyalty and gallantry blended in the adoration paid her; and the supremacy which she claimed and exercised over the church, invested her regality with a sacred unction that pertained not to feudal sovereigns. It is scarce too much to say, that the virgin-queen appropriated the Catholic honours of the Virgin Mary. She was as great as Diana of the Ephesians. The moon shone but to furnish a type of her bright and stainless maidenhood. To magnify her greatness, the humility of courtly adulation merged in the ecstasies of Platonic love. She was charming by indefeasible right;—a jure divino beauty. Her fascinations multiplied with her wrinkles, and her admirers might have anticipated the conceit of Cowley,

“The antipevistoisis of age
More inflamed their amorous rage.”

It is easy for a Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative blockhead, to cry out against all this as nauseous flattery, and assert that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise—a coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia’s sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex or rank—ours are addressed to the person. There is no flattery where there is no falsehood—no falsehood where there is no deception. Loyalty of old was a passion, and passion has a truth of its own—and as language does not always furnish expressions exactly adapted, or native to the feeling, what can the loyal poet do, but take the most precious portion of the currency, and impress it with the mint-mark of his own devoted fancy? Perhaps there never was a more panegyrical rhymer than Spenser, and yet, so fine and ethereal is his incense, that the breath of morning is not more cool and salutary:—

“It falls me here to write of Chastity
That fayrest virtue, far above the rest.
For which what needs me fetch from Faery,
Forreine ensamples it to have exprest,
Sith it is shrined in my soveraine’s brest,
And form’d so lively on each perfect part,
That to all ladies, who have it protest,
Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part,
If pourtray’d it might be by any living art;
But living art may not least part expresse,
Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint,
All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles—
His dædale hand would faile and greatly faynt,
And her perfections with his error taynt;
Ne poet’s wit that passeth painter farre—
In picturing the parts of beauty daynt,” &c.

But neither Zeuxis nor Praxiteles was called from the dead to mar her perfections, nor record her negative charms. Poetry was the only art that flourished in the Virgin reign. The pure Gothic, after attaining its full efflorescence under Henry VII., departed, never to return. The Grecian orders were not only absurdly jumbled together, but yet more outrageously conglomerated with the Gothic and Arabesque. “To gild refined gold—to paint the lily,” was all the humour of it. A similar inconsistency infected literature. The classic and the romantic (to use those terms, which, though popular, are not logically exact) were interwoven. The Arcadia and the Fairy Queen are glorious offences, which “make defect perfection.” Perhaps, Shakspeare’s “small Latin and less Greek,” preserved him from worse anachronisms than any that he has committed. Queen Bess’s patronage was of the national breed: she loved no pictures so well as portraits of herself. As, however, her painters have not flattered her, it may not uncharitably be concluded that they were no great deacons in their craft. It is a much easier thing to assure a homely female, in prose or rhyme, that she is beautiful, than to represent her so upon canvass. Her effigies are, I believe, pretty numerous, varying in ugliness, but none that I have seen even handsome—prettiness, of course, is out of the question. She was fond of finery, but had no taste in dress. Her ruff is downright odious; and the liberal exposure of her neck and bosom anything but alluring. With all her pearls about her, she looks like a pawnbroker’s lady bedizened for an Easter ball, with all the unredeemed pledges from her husband’s shop. She seems to have patronized that chimera in the ideal or allegorical portrait, at which Reubens and Sir Joshua were so often doomed to toil. She would not allow a shadow in her picture, arguing, like a Chinese, or a chop-logic, that shade is only an accident, and no true property of body. Like Alexander, who forbade all sculptors but Lysippus to carve his image, she prohibited all but special cunning limners from drawing her effigy. This was in 1563, anno regni 5, while, though no chicken, she still was not clean past her youth. This order was probably intended to prevent caricatures. At last she quarrelled with her looking-glass as well as her painters, and her maids of honour removed all mirrors from her apartments, as carefully as Ministers exclude opposition papers (we hope not Maga) from the presence of our most gracious sovereign. It is even said, that those fair nettles of India took advantage of her weakness, to dress her head awry, and to apply the rouge to her nose, instead of her cheeks. So may the superannuated eagle be pecked at by daws. But the tale is not probable. After all, it is but the captious inference of witlings and scoffers, that attributes to mere sexual vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the wisest are not always free. It may be, that they shrink from the reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution. In rosy youth, while yet the brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven’s own tint, and the dark tresses turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the throbbing of a heart at ease. “So like, so very like, is day to day,”—one primrose scarce more like another. Whoever saw their first grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that youth is flown for ever? None but the blessed few that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal blossoms, a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near. It is a frailty, almost an instance of humanity, to aim at concealing that from others, of which ourselves are painfully conscious. The herculean Johnson keenly resented the least allusion to the shortness of his sight. So entirely is man a social animal, so dependent are all his feelings for their very existence upon communication and sympathy, that the “fee griefs,” which none but ourselves are privy to, are forgotten as soon as they are removed from the senses. The artifices to which so many have recourse to conceal their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves, than to impose on others. This aversion to growing old is specially natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless. The borrowed curls, the pencilled eyebrows,

“The steely-prison’d shape,
So oft made taper, by constraint of tape,”

the various cosmetic secrets, well-known to the middle ages, not only of the softer sex, are not unseemly in a spinster, so long as they succeed in making her look young. They are intolerable in a mother of any age. But we, my dear Christopher, resigned and benevolent old bachelors as we are, can well appreciate the vanity of the aged heart, that sees not its youth renewed in any growing dearer self. Nothing denotes the advances of life, at once so surely and so pleasantly as children springing up around a good man’s table. Perhaps our famous Queen, in her latter days, though full of honours as of years, would gladly have changed places with the wife of any yeoman that had a child to receive her last blessing, whose few acres were not to pass away to the hungry expecting son of a hated rival. Her virginity was not like that of Jephthah’s daughter, a free-will offering to the Lord. Pride, and policy, and disappointment, and, it may be, hopeless, self-condemned affection, conspired to perpetuate it. Probably it was well for England that no offspring of hers inherited her throne. By some strange ordinance of nature, it generally happens that these wonderful clever women produce idiots or madmen.—Witness Semiramis, Agrippina, Catherine de Medicis, Mary de Medicis, Catherine of Russia, and Lady Wortley Montague. One miniature of Elizabeth I have seen, which, though not beautiful, is profoundly interesting: it presents her as she was in the days of her danger and captivity, when the same wily policy, keeping its path, even while it seemed to swerve, was needful to preserve her life, that afterwards kept her firm on a throne. Who was the artist that produced it? I know not; but it bears the strongest marks of authenticity, if to be exactly what a learned spirit would fancy Elizabeth—young, a prisoner, and in peril—be evidence of true portraiture. There is pride, not aping humility, but wearing it as a well-beseeming habit;—there is passion, strongly controlled by the will, but not extinct, neither dead nor sleeping, but watchful and silent; brows sternly sustaining a weight of care, after which a crown could be but light; a manly intellect, allied with female craft;—but nonsense! it will be said; no colours whatever could represent all this, and that, too, in little, for the picture was among Bone’s enamels. Well, then, it suggested it all. Perhaps the finest Madonna ever painted would be no more than a meek, pious, pretty woman, and an innocent child, if we knew not whom it was meant for.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

(By Mrs. Hemans.)

I seem like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he, departed.

    MOORE.