صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني
[graphic]

motionless and torturing horizon. Faith triumphs skies brighten, the sun goes higher, salvation is nea the Desire cometh. . . . But the wind wailed, and waves thundered, and the sun sank, and the heaver darkened above me.

mphs, the

is nearing, d, and the

heaven was

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM.

BOOK II.

I Residence at one of the British Universities (let me say Oxford) immediately followed the journey which, in a single main element, had raised my thoughts to a level worthier manhood. By the pages preceding, the writer has given proof that he does not hold a child's love in itself merely childish, far less deserving of the ridicule it meets often from critics [whose own true capacity for passion, a gift not universal, may be justly doubted. The derision of a whole insulting world, to me at least, would be silenced before remembrance of the lifelong fascination and empire exerted by this phase of feeling (not to seek more distant and romantic examples) over some of Europe's manliest men; of the transports of Dante, of the agonies of Byron. Those who laugh here will be shallow in their best seriousness, and with such I hold no argument. Yet there is a truth in such contempt; this love must lie within the limitations of the immature mind-must partake in what Wordsworth would almost authorize me to call childhood's more perfect, while evanescent, imperfection. There is ignorance in its purity, in its

E...

[graphic]

abandonment, even in its constancy. We hav experienced the stings of the Sense, are not capa reserve, cannot even for an instant then conceive th world and friends and the vital power itself by wh love, will one day, after many, set themselves a fidelity. A sure gain, I therefore judge it, that no borrow Goethe's exquisite line) the interspace 'Zuleika to Zuleika', was no longer the limit of my and of my retrospection; that the world without be work on the world within me; that Hope and Fea added to Delight, to render it henceforth more de ful. This was a true step forwards. But it sha be concealed that my mind's advance was not in all or in many ways, commensurate. Backward in chi I suspect I was certainly in youth. God had app me six years of happiness from the period now res but although not I trust utterly barren, the first bore little fruit worthy garnering. Why this was s the soul gained strength by simple submission to and the voice of living friends, and those (hardly less who spoke from Greece and Italy and other lands Studies passed into Thought, and Thought, daily sadly serious, found a far more than compensating titude in the all-in-all of Désirée's dear presenc believing that the sincere avowal of one soul's strug not impertinent or valueless, aim now at narrating.

II If the narrator profited little by this earlier 1 his university life (and friends and tutors mig regrets to know, illustrate, confirm, and enforce the ment), assuredly it was not from any scantiness favours of time and circumstance. A member dominant college, and this, (by common confession) a in respect of students and of instructors, exercised a

[graphic]

have not capable of ve that the y which we es against

at now (to
ace 'from
f my desire

it began to
Fear were
re delight-
tshall not
in all ways,
childhood
appointed
w reached;
first three
how
vas so,
to Nature
less living)
ands; how
daily more
ating bea-
esence,-I
truggles is
ng.

lier half of
might, he
the state-
ess in the

er of the on) at once sed already

[graphic]

applauded them. Thus at first every preformed o gained force from that enlarged intercourse with which should have corrected it. I despised and ce at will and random: I prided myself on narrown mind, when so many friendly hearts, the bright, the and the thoughtful, were satisfied to be narrow wit I submitted with alacrity to other claims from aut than the one authority of truth. Meanwhile, by a st and concealed contrast, college studies silently fille mind with what I may venture to call the brute mate ideas, the inert and seemingly lifeless seeds of an inne absolutely irreconcileable with the judgments consc formed and enunciated with the petulant arrogance of matic youth. Little by little also, (a change perhaps important yet in human life), the larger-hearted f began to draw me in my folly towards them, comp with wise love to audience of the manlier music, the spiritual utterances I had heard at first, and de Strangers visit that city and walk the windings glorious street, and esteem it a metropolis of warmt fertility and blooming youth, and all faults the exces life too exuberant; but to the wiser educators how must Oxford seem a chilling waste wilderness, where voice sounds unechoed; where the bread they give be a stone in the receiver's hand, to be cast, perhaps, fi at the Socrates of the day for mockery or martyrdom they felt thus, I was one of the guilty then.

III Often, as I afterwards saw the young arrivals, of step and swift of motion, at once rash and confi each in his turn appeared to me like one who from a cliff, and after run and leap, and eyes closed, plunges an unknown sea, and whether he can swim or n unknown also until after trial: until he has in fact sur

« السابقةمتابعة »