collections of poetry, principally Elizabethan, from 1559 to about 1680. Poems follow from some of these, particularly from England's Helicon, England's Parnassus, Wit's Recreations, Churchyard's Jane Shore-"very fine" and W. Browne. Their subjects are mostly either love and friendship, or the freedom, and simple, natural delights of country life. Among these, unnamed, are Herrick's charming lines beginning "Sweet country life, to such unknown, Whose lives are others, not their own!" To one beautiful poem, "A Hymn for a Widower," from G. Withers' Hallelujah, altered to suit his own case by the second Earl of Bridgewater, "worthily recorded for his deep love for his good wife," Fitzgerald appends this comment: "Lord Bridgewater did as he had prayed to do, and he left written upon his tomb that he had sorrowfully worn out a widowhood of twenty-three years." It contains these lines: "Yet neither life nor death should end Fitzgerald had previously quoted from Montrose's "Song to his Lady," its "golden law" "True love begun shall never end; Love one, and love no more." He seems to have sympathised with such expressions of romantic, passionate affection, and, bearing in mind his statement to his correspondent, Allen, "My friendships are more likes loves, I think," it is easy to believe that he found in the beautiful passage on Perfect Love in the facsimile the embodiment of his own secret creed. From several passages, particularly from Owen Feltham and Dr. Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, one conjectures that Fitzgerald had a haunting sense of Time's continual speed, of the slipping from our grasp of day after day, of the shortness and insecurity of life, brooding over which gives such a feeling of unrest, and comes at length to paralyse effort. It is this mood which finds utterance, so despairing in E. A. Poe's "Dream Within a Dream," so splendid in this passage of De Quincey's which I copy from the Commonplace Book : "The English Country Dance was still in estimation at the Courts of Princes. Now of all dances, this is the only one, as a class, of which you can truly describe the motion to be continuous, that is, not intermitting or fitful, but unfolding its fine magic with the equality of light in its diffusion through free space. And the reader may comprehend, if he should not happen experimentally to have felt, that a spectacle of young men and women flowing through the mazes of such an intricate dance under a full volume of music, taken with all the circumstantial adjuncts of such a scene in rich men's hallsthe blaze of lights and jewels, the life, the motion, the sea-like undulation of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the self-revolving both of the dance and of the music, never ending, still beginning, and the continual regeneration of order upon a system of motions which seem for ever to approach the brink of confusion; that such a spectacle with such circumstances may happen to be capable of exciting and sustaining the very grandest emotions of philosophic melancholy to which the human mind is open. The reason is in part, that such a scene presents a sort of masque of human life, with its whole equipage, of pomps and glories, its luxury of sights and sounds, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation treading over the flying footsteps of the other: whilst all the while the overruling music attempers the mind to the spectacle, the subject (as a German would say) to the object, the beholder to the vision." On the next page is another passage from De Quincey, in which he speaks of the years in which he was a slave to opium : . "Years through which a shadow as of sad Eclipse sate and rested on my faculties, years through which I was careless of all but those who lived within my inner circle, within my heart of hearts . as much abstracted from all which concerned the world outside as though I had lived with the darlings of my heart in the centre of Canadian forests, and all men else in the centre of Hindostan." In the Letters (p. 54) Fitzgerald writes to Bernard Bar ton: "I found here a number of Tait's Magazine for August last" (1839) "containing a paper on Southey, Wordsworth, etc., by De Quincey. Incomplete and disproportioned like his other papers; but containing two noble passages, one on certain years of his own life when opium shut him out of the world, the other on Southey's style." Three closely-written pages are filled with sentences from Owen Feltham, who seems to have been a favourite writer of Fitzgerald's. The following is perhaps the best : "Whatsoever is rare and passionate carries the soule to the thought of Eternitie. And by Contemplation, gives it some glimpse of more absolute perfection, than here 'tis capable of. When I see the Royaltie of a Stateshow, at some unwonted Solemnitie, my thoughts present me something more Royall than this. When I see the most enchanting beauties that earth can shew mee, I yet thinke there is something farre more glorious; methinkes I see a kind of higher perfection peeping through the frailty of a face. When I hear the ravishing straines of a sweet-tuned Voice, married to the Warbles of the Artfull Instrument; I apprehend by this a higher Diapason; and doe almost believe I hear a little Deity whispering through the pory substance of the tongue. But this I can but grope after: I can neither finde, nor say, what it is." He occasionally adds a brief remark, such as :— "The Essay on Poverty is very fine, teaching deep consideration for the miseries and temptations of the poor." This "He is twice an asse that is a Riming one. He is sometimes the less unwise, that is unwise but in Prose" he calls "very acute." (I fancy I hear each Young Author exclaim: "Let the galled jade wince: my withers are unwrung!") The remaining sentences consist mostly of maxims, such as one might choose as a guide to conduct. There are two quotations from Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. In the first, Taylor says that he has examined the reasoning of his book with all severity; yet, should he be found to be mistaken, that will be but evidence in his defence, and a further argument for the necessity of mutual toleration, if one so confident as he of the truth and justice of his case can have been deceived. The second is the passage which Hallam quotes as showing Taylor's fearless mode of grappling with his argu ment: "Since no churches believe themselves infallible, that only excepted which all other churches say is most of all deceived, it were strange if in so many articles which make up their several bodies of confessions, they had not mistaken in something or other." Two more passages deal with religion. The first, from Rowland Hill, on Prayer, breathes a spirit of sweet and childlike trust in a Heavenly Father. The second, the last in the book, and the last we shall quote, seems, from Fitzgerald's care in noting the exact time of writing, to have been invested with special interest for him. "DEEDS WITHOUT WORDS. "One secret act of self-denial, one sacrifice of inclination to duty, is worth all the mere good thoughts, warm feelings, passionate prayers, in which idle people indulge themselves. It will give us more comfort on our death-bed to reflect on one deed of self-denying mercy, purity, or humility, than to recollect the shedding of many tears, and the recurrence of frequent transports, and much spiritual exultation. These latter feelings come and go; they may, or may not, accompany hearty obedience; they are never tests of it; but good actions are the fruits of faith and assure us that we are Christ's; they comfort us as an evidence of the Spirit working in us' (Newman's Paroch. Serm., vol. i., 218). Geldestone, April 26, 1840. Sunday evening, half-past nine o'clock." |