94 GREAT NATURAL bridge. 44. SCENE AT THE "GREAT NATURAL BRIDGE." THE HE scene opens with a view of the Great Natural Bridge in Virginia. Two or three lads are standing in the channel below. They see the names of hundreds cut in the limestone abutments. A new feeling comes over their young hearts. "What man hath done, man can do," is their watchword; and fired with this noble spirit, they draw themselves up, and carve their names above those of a hundred fullgrown mẹn, who have been there before them. They are all satisfied with this exploit, except one. This ambitious youth sees a name just above his reach the name of Washington. It was a gloriname side by ous thought of the boy to write his side with the great Father of his country. Ile grasps his knife with a firmer hand; cuts again into the limestone abutment, about a foot above where he stands; draws himself carefully up to his full length; and finds himself above every name that was ever chronicled in that mighty wall. His knife is still in his hand, and strength in his sinews, and a new-created aspiration in his heart. He cuts another niche, and again he carves his name in large capitals. Heedless of the entreaties of his companions, he cuts and climbs again and again. The voices of his friends grow weaker and weaker, until they are finally lost on his ear. He now, for the first time, casts a look beneath him. Had that glance lasted but a moment, that moment would have been his last. What a meagre chance to escape destruc GREAT NATURAL BRIDGE. 95 tion! He is too high, too faint, to ask for his father and mother, his brother and sister, to come and witness or avert his destruction. But one of his com panions anticipates his desire. Swift as the wind, he bounds down the channel, and the situation of the fated boy is told upon his father's hearthstone. Minutes of almost eternal length roll on, and there are hundreds in the rocky channel below and on the heights above, all holding their breath, and awaiting the affecting catastrophe. The poor boy hears the hum of new and numerous voices, both above and below. He can just distinguish the tones of his father, who is shouting with all the energy of despair, "William ! William! don't look down! Your mother, and Henry, and Harriet, are all here, praying for you. Keep your eye towards the top." The boy did not look down. His eye is fixed as a flint towards heaven, and his young heart on Him who reigns there. He grasps again his knife. He cuts another niche, and another foot is added to the hundreds that remove him from human help from below. Now the blade is worn up to the last half inch. The boy's head reels; his eyes seem starting from their sockets; his last hope is dying in his breast. His life must hang upon the next niche he cuts. At the last faint gash he makes, his knife, his faithful knife, drops from his little, nerveless hand, and ringing along down the precipice, falls at his mother's feet. voluntary groan of horror runs through the channel below, and then all is still as the grave. At the height of nearly a thousand feet, the devoted 'boy lifts his hopeless heart, and closing his eyes, commends his soul to God. An in 96 INFLUENCE AFTER DEATH. While he thus stands for a moment, reeling, trembling, toppling over into eternity, a shout from above falls on his ear. The man who is lying with half his body projecting over the precipice has caught a glimpse of the boy's head and shoulders. Quick as thought the noosed rope is within reach of the sinking youth. No one breathes. Half unclosing his eyes, and with a faint, convulsive effort, the boy drops. his arms through the noose. Darkness comes over him, and with the words God and mother on his lips, just loud enough to be heard in heaven, the tightening rope lifts him out of his last shallow niche up into sunlight, and life, and gladness, safe to his mother's arms! W 45. INFLUENCE AFTER DEATH. E die, but leave an influence behind us that survives. The sun sets behind the western hills; but the trail of light he leaves behind him guides the pilgrim to his distant home. The tree falls in the forest; but in the lapse of ages it is turned into coal, and our fires burn now the brighter because it grew and fell. The coral insect dies, but the reef it raised breaks the surges on the shores of a great continent, or has formed an isle in the bosom of the ocean to wave with harvests for the good of man. We live, and we die; but the good or evil that we do lives after us, and is not "buried with our bones." Mohammed still lives in his practical and disastrous influence in the East. Napoleon still is France, and France is almost Napoleon. Martin Luther's dead INFLUENCE AFTER DEATH. 97 dust sleeps at Wittenberg; but Martin Luther's accents still ring through the churches of Christendom. Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, all live in their influence for good or evil. The apostle from his chair, the minister from his pulpit, the martyr from his flame-shroud, the statesman from his cabinet, the soldier in the field, the sailor on the deck, all who have passed away to their graves, still live in the practical deeds that they did, in the lives they lived, and in the powerful lessons that they left behind them. "None of us liveth to himself; 19 others are affected by that life, or "dieth to himself; others are interested in that death. The king's crown may moulder; but he who wore it will act upon the ages which are yet to come. Dignity, and rank, and riches, are all corruptible and worthless; but moral character has an immortality that no sword-point can destroy - that ever walks the world and leaves lasting influences behind. What we do is transacted on a stage of which all the universe are spectators. What we say is transmitted in echoes that will never cease. What we are is influencing and acting on the rest of mankind. Neutral we cannot be. Living, we act; and dead, we speak; and the whole universe is the mighty company forever looking, forever listening, and all nature the tablets, forever recording the words, the deeds, the thoughts, the passions of mankind. 7 98 POOR RICHARD'S SAYINGS. A 46. POOR RICHARD'S SAYINGS, WITH ANNOTATIONS BY LORD DUNDREARY. FELLAII once told me that another fellah wote a book before he was born - I mean before the first fellah was born (of course the fellah who wote it must have been born, else how could he have witten it?) that is a long time ago to pwove that a whole lot of pwoverbs and things that fellahs are in the habit of quoting were all nousense. I should vewy much like to get that book. I-I think if I could get it at one of those spherical -no — globular — no, that's not the word circle circular-yes, that's it circulating libwawies (I knew it was something that went round) I think if I could just borrow that book from a circulating libwawy -I'd yes, upon my word now -I'd twy and wead it. A doothed good sort of book that, I'm sure. I -I always did hate pwoverbs. I remoleckt I mean remember — when I was quite a little fellah-in pinafores -- and liked wasbewwy jam, and and a lot of howwid things for tea- there was a sort of collection of illustwated pwoverbs hanging up in our nursery at home. They belonged to our old nurse Sarah I think — and she had 'em fwamed and glazed. "Poor - Richard's," I think she called 'em - and she used to say poor dear—that if evewy fellah attended to evewything Poor Richard wote, that he'd get vewy wich, and 1-live and die. However happy ever after. it-it's vewy clear to me that he couldn't have attended to them-himself, else how did the fellah |