She stood breast-high amid the corn, On her cheek an autumn flush, Round her eyes her tresses fell, And her hat, with shady brim, Sure, I said, Heav'n did not mean, 80 - 89 8 12 16 Of battles or the last new bonnets, By candlelight, at twelve o'clock, To me it mattered not a tittle; If those bright lips had quoted Locke," I might have thought they murmured Little. Through sunny May, through sultry June, I loved her with a love eternal; I spoke her praises to the moon, I wrote them to the Sunday Journal: My mother laughed; I soon found out That ancient ladies have no feeling: My father frowned; but how should gout See any happiness in kneeling? 1 3 20 31 40 2 a writer on law a philosopher, cf. p. 238 a pseudonym of Thomas Moore, writer of love songs THE VICTORIAN AGE THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) SARTOR RESARTUS BOOK II, CHAPTER VII THE EVERLASTING NO Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has now shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless progressive, and growing: for how can the "Son of Time," in any case, stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state of crisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solution into aimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation; wherefrom, the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself? Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash-off the old one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raving within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how could there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed, bemocked of Destiny, through. long years? All that the young heart might desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance, offered and then snatched away. Ever an "excellent Passivity"; but of useful, reasonable Activity, essential to the former as Food to Hunger, nothing granted: till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize for himself an Activity, though useless, unreasonable. Alas, his cup of bitterness, which had been filling drop by drop, ever since the first "ruddy morning" in the Hinterschlag Gymnasium,1 was at the very lip; and then with that poison-drop, of the Towgood-and 1 Smite-behind Highschool (Annan Academy, where Carlyle went to school) Blumine business, it runs over, and even hisses over in a deluge of foam. He himself says once, with more justice than originality: "Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope." What then was our Pro'fessor's possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all around into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. says Alas, shut-out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief,' he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, "that, for man's wellbeing, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury": to such, it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything. Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship, and of false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its lifewarmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: "Is there no God, 1 Towgood, a friend of Teufelsdröckh's; Blumine (from Ger. Blume, a flower), the girl whom both loved |