He is
emphatically
the son of Man.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v21 - Rab to Rus
Through the hid furrows lisp in murmurous flow
The thaw's shy ministers; and hark! the height
Of heaven grows weird and loud with unseen flight
Of strong hosts prophesying as they go!
High through the drenched and hollow night their wings
Beat northward hard on winter's trail. The sound
Of their confused and solemn voices, borne
Athwart the dark to their long arctic morn,
Comes with a sanction and an awe profound,
A boding of unknown, foreshadowed things.
## p. 12304 (#350) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12304
BESIDE THE WINTER SEA
From Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
S ONE who sleeps and hears across his dream
The cry of battles ended long ago,
Inland I hear the calling of the sea.
I hear its hollow voices, though between
AⓇ
My wind-worn dwelling and thy wave-worn strand
How many miles, how many mountains are!
And thou beside the winter sea alone
Art walking with thy cloak about thy face.
Bleak, bleak the tide, and evening coming on;
And gray the pale, pale light that wans thy face.
Solemnly breaks the long wave at thy feet;
And sullenly in patches clings the snow
Upon the low, red rocks worn round with years.
I see thine eyes, I see their grave desire,
Unsatisfied and lonely as the sea's,-
Yet how unlike the wintry sea's despair!
For could my feet but follow thine, my hands
But reach for thy warm hands beneath thy cloak,
What summer joy would lighten in thy face,
What sunshine warm thy eyes, and thy sad mouth
Break to a dewy rose and laugh on mine!
THE DESERTED CITY
From 'Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
HERE lies a little city leagues away;
Its wharves the green sea washes all day long,
Its busy sun-bright wharves with sailor's song
And clamor of trade ring loud the livelong day.
Into the happy harbor hastening gay
With press of snowy canvas, tall ships throng.
The peopled streets to blithe-eyed Peace belong,
Glad housed beneath these crowding roofs of gray.
THER
'Twas long ago the city prospered so;
For yesterday a woman died therein,
Since when the wharves are idle fallen, I know,
And in the streets is hushed the pleasant din;
The thronging ships have been, the songs have been.
Since yesterday it is so long ago.
## p. 12305 (#351) ##########################################
12305
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
(1816-1853)
MONG the souls which refused the haven where Newman had
found peace, because they dreamed of longer voyages and
of undiscovered lands, few so suffered in the lonelier seas
of their choice as did Frederick William Robertson. His short intense
life was spent in a spiritual isolation from his fellows, which was
partly the result of temperament, partly of his ability to see clearer
and farther than most men into the mysteries of existence. He never
found home. It seemed, indeed, as if a divine nostalgia drew him
out of the world. He left it still young,
struggling, the questions upon his lips,
the desire in his heart; faring forth into
the lands of God as one who could not mis-
trust the divine Lover, and would fain learn
of himself the meaning of the confused
earthly existence, which had only deepened
his dejection. He was indeed the embodi-
ment of the religious spirit of the end of
the century. He exhibited its most strik-
ing characteristics: its dependence upon
conduct rather than emotion; its glorifi-
cation of morality; its humanism, its hun-
ger for God, hidden under a pantheistic
composure; its adoration of Jesus, as the
one wholly comforting figure in the bleak perspectives of human
history; finally, he held its conception of Christianity as a life, not a
creed. The man who wrote, "The religion of Christ is not a law
but a spirit, not a creed but a life," had felt within him the forces
of a new realization of religion as yet unperceived by his generation.
He suffered in consequence the pangs of those who travail to bring
forth the new which will supplant the old.
His short life of thirty-seven years was lived in a transitional
period of England's spiritual development, when through the pray-
ers of both ritualist and evangelical might be heard strange voices
speaking of strange things,-of a universe emptied of God, of man
without a soul.
XXI-770
F. W. ROBERTSON
## p. 12306 (#352) ##########################################
12306
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Robertson was born in 1816, in London. His father was a captain
in the Royal Artillery; the boy grew up therefore in the atmosphere
of the military life, and imbibed not a few of its nobler ideals. Until
he was five years old he was at Leith Fort, where his father was
stationed. In 1821 the latter retired to Beverley; there Robertson
attended the grammar school, going later to Tours for the sake of
learning the French tongue. After a year he returned home, contin-
uing his education at the Edinburgh Academy and then at the Uni-
versity. His elevation of character, his nobility of mind, led to a
proposal from his father that he should enter the church; but he re-
fused on the ground of his unworthiness. At the age of eighteen he
was articled to a solicitor in Bury St. Edmunds; but a year's study
so undermined his health that he was obliged to give up the project
of studying the law. His name was then entered on the list of the
3d Dragoons. He spent two years in preparation for military service;
but on the eve of receiving his commission, in 1837, he matriculated
at Brasenose College, Oxford. There he read extensively, coming
under the influence of Plato and Aristotle, of Butler and Jonathan
Edwards. With the Tractarian movement he seems to have had
little sympathy, his temper at that stage of his development being
evangelical. He was being drawn gradually into the church: in July
1840, he was ordained by the Bishop of Winchester, and immediately
entered upon ministerial work in that place. His enthusiasm led
him, however, into excesses of self-denial and of religious exercises,
so that his health being undermined, he was obliged to go abroad
within a year.
It was during his sojourn in Switzerland that he met and married
Helen, third daughter of Sir George William Denys. Upon his return
to England in 1842 he accepted the curacy of Cheltenham, where he
remained for four years; a period of great importance in his life, for
his religious views were gradually undergoing a radical change. Of
a temperament characterized by its reasonableness and by its sen-
sitiveness to reality, what he considered the extravagance and the
cant of the extreme evangelical party filled him with repugnance.
Moreover he had come under the influence of Carlyle and Emerson,
and was beginning to think that dogma occupied too large a place
in religion. He himself was too much of a man of the world in the
best sense, to remain long fettered by what he believed to be pro-
vincial in a church party. He cut loose therefore from his moorings,
and ventured out upon that sea which stretches beyond the limits
of the world. At first he was to encounter only night and the terror
of the unknown.
"It is an awful moment," he writes, "when the soul begins to find that the
props on which it has blindly rested so long are many of them rotten, and
## p. 12307 (#353) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12307
begins to suspect them all; when it begins to feel the nothingness of many of
the traditionary opinions which have been received with implicit confidence, and
in that horrible insecurity begins also to doubt whether there be anything to
believe at all. It is an awful hour-let him who has passed through it say
how awful - when this life has lost its meaning, and seems shriveled into a
span; when the grave appears to be the end of all, human goodness nothing
but a name, and the sky above this universe a dead expanse, black with the
void from which God himself has disappeared.
I know of but one
way in which a man may come forth from his agony scathless; it is by hold-
ing fast to those things which are certain still,- the grand, simple landmarks
of morality. If there be no God and no future state, yet even then it is bet-
ter to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be
true than false, better to be brave than a coward. »
Like many other noble spirits of the time, he found in right con-
duct, in the keeping of the commandments, that "upon which his soul
might assuredly rest and depend"; despite the suffering incident upon
his growth, he entered through this new hope into a conception of
Christianity as being primarily not a theological system but a life,
not a religion of emotion but one of principle. He believed that
under this aspect of it only could it become a universal religion,
making its appeal not to the changing intellect but to the eternal
conscience of the race.
―――
These new phases in Robertson's development led to his giving up
the curacy of Cheltenham, and after a short residence abroad, and
a few subsequent months at Oxford - to entrance upon his famous min-
istry at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. There he preached sermons which
attracted the attention of all England, and there he endeavored to
realize his new conception of Christianity, which seemed little short
of heretical to his generation. He founded a workingman's institute,
and was called a socialist; he preached the religion of holiness, and
was accused of heresy: yet his sermons seem wholly reasonable and
beautiful to this generation. They exhibit a remarkable clearness of
spiritual insight, profound knowledge of human nature, and a sweet-
ness, born of strength, most winning in its warm humanity. Never-
theless his teachings were misunderstood; in obscure ways he was
persecuted. His sensitive spirit, which could expand only in the at-
mosphere of sympathy, drew into itself in pain. He suffered likewise
from religious doubt and terror. He had chosen the eternal rather
than the finite; but its vastness struck a chill to a nature made for
the uses of love, for the intimacy and definiteness of affection.
He died on the 15th of August, 1853, knowing that his unfinished
life could be completed only in the lives of his spiritual children,
breathing the air of a time more friendly to a wider interpretation
of the gospel.
## p. 12308 (#354) ##########################################
12308
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CHRIST
From Sermons Preached in Trinity Chapel'
IN
N THE case of all rare excellence that is merely human, it is the
first object of the biographer of a marvelous man to seek for
surprising stories of his early life. The appetite for the mar-
velous in this matter is almost instinctive and invariable. All
men, almost, love to discover the early wonders which were pro-
phetic of after greatness. Apparently the reason is that we
are unwilling to believe that wondrous excellence was attained by
slow, patient labor. We get an excuse for our own slowness and
stunted growth, by settling it, once for all, that the original dif-
ferences between such men and us were immeasurable. There-
fore it is, I conceive, that we seek so eagerly for anecdotes of
early precocity.
In this spirit the fathers of the primitive Church collected
legends of the early life of Christ, stories of superhuman infancy,
what the Infant and the Child said and did. Many of these
legends are absurd; all, as resting on no authority, are rejected.
Very different from this is the spirit of the Bible narra-
tive. It records no marvelous stories of infantine sagacity or
miraculous power, to feed a prurient curiosity. Both in what
it tells and in what it does not tell, one thing is plain, that the
human life of the Son of God was natural. There was first the
blade, then the ear, then the full corn. In what it does not
say; because, had there been anything preternatural to record,
no doubt it would have been recorded. In what it does say; be-
cause that little is all unaffectedly simple. One anecdote, and two
verses of general description,- that is all which is told us of the
Redeemer's childhood.
-
The child, it is written, grew. Two pregnant facts: He was
a child, and a child that grew in heart, in intellect, in size, in
grace, in favor with God. Not a man in child's years. No hot-
bed precocity marked the holiest of infancies. The Son of Man
grew up in the quiet valley of existence,-in shadow, not in sun-
shine,—not forced. No unnatural, stimulating culture had devel-
oped the mind or feelings; no public flattery, no sunning of
infantine perfections in the glare of the world's show, had brought
the Temptation of the Wilderness, with which his manhood grap-
pled, too early on his soul. We know that he was childlike, as
## p. 12309 (#355) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12309
other children; for in after years his brethren thought his fame
strange, and his townsmen rejected him. They could not be-
lieve that that one who had gone in and out, ate and drank and
worked, was He whose Name is Wonderful. The proverb, true
of others, was true of him: "A prophet is not without honor
but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own
house. " You know him in a picture at once, by the halo round
his brow: there was no glory in his real life to mark him. He
was in the world, and the world knew him not. Gradually and
gently he woke to consciousness of life and its manifold mean-
ing; found himself in possession of a self; by degrees opened his
eyes upon this outer world, and drank in its beauty. Early he
felt the lily of the field discourse to him of the Invisible Love-
liness, and the ravens tell of God his Father. Gradually, and not
at once, he embraced the sphere of human duties, and woke to
his earthly relationships one by one,-the Son, the Brother, the
Citizen, the Master.
It is a very deep and beautiful and precious truth that the
Eternal Son had a human and progressive childhood. Happy the
Ichild who is suffered to be and content to be what God meant
it to be, a child while childhood lasts. Happy the parent who
does not force artificial manners, precocious feeling, premature
religion. Our age is one of stimulus and high pressure. We live,
as it were, our lives out fast. Effect is everything,— results
produced at once; something to show and something that may
tell. The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet
that stirs men's curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.
"Plain living and high thinking" are no more. The town with
its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind,
has spread over the country; and there is no country-scarcely
home. To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend
only a portion of the year in one place, "home" is becoming a
vocable of past ages. The result is that heart and brain, which
were given to last for seventy years, wear out before their time.
We have our exhausted men of twenty-five, and our old men of
forty. Heart and brain give way: the heart hardens and the
brain grows soft.
Brethren, the Son of God lived till thirty in an obscure vil-
lage of Judea unknown, then came forth a matured and perfect
Man,—with mind, and heart, and frame, in perfect balance of
humanity. It is a divine lesson! I would I could say as strongly
## p. 12310 (#356) ##########################################
12310
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
as I feel deeply. Our stimulating artificial culture destroys depth.
Our competition, our nights turned into days by pleasure, leave
no time for earnestness. We are superficial men. Character in
the world wants root. England has gained much; she has lost
also much. The world wants what has passed away (and which
until we secure, we shall remain the clever, shallow men we are),
a childhood and a youth spent in shade a home.
Now, this growth took place in three particulars.
I. In spiritual strength. "The child waxed strong in spirit. "
Spiritual strength consists of two things,-power of will, and
power of self-restraint. It requires two things, therefore, for its
existence, strong feelings, and strong command over them.
Now it is here we make a great mistake: we mistake strong
feelings for strong character. A man who bears all before him,—
before whose frown domestics tremble, and whose bursts of fury
make the children of the house quake,- because he has his will
obeyed, and his own way in all things, we call him a strong man.
The truth is, that is the weak man: it is his passions that are
strong; he, mastered by them, is weak. You must measure the
strength of a man by the power of the feelings which he subdues,
not by the power of those which subdue him.
And hence composure is very often the highest result of
strength. Did we never see a man receive a flagrant insult, and
only grow a little pale, and then reply quietly? That was a man
spiritually strong. Or did we never see a man in anguish stand
as if carved out of solid rock, mastering himself? or one bear-
ing a hopeless daily trial, remain silent, and never tell the world
what it was that cankered his home peace? That is strength.
He who with strong passions remains chaste,—he who, keenly
sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can be pro-
voked and yet refrain himself and forgive,- these are strong
men, spiritual heroes.
-
The child waxed strong: spiritual strength is reached by
successive steps. Fresh strength is got by every mastery of self.
It is the belief of the savage that the spirit of every enemy he
slays enters into him and becomes added to his own, accumu-
lating a warrior's strength for the day of battle; therefore he
slays all he can. It is true in the spiritual warfare. Every sin
you slay, the spirit of that sin passes into you transformed into
strength; every passion, not merely kept in abeyance by asceti-
cism, but subdued by a higher impulse, is so much character
## p. 12311 (#357) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12311
strengthened. The strength of the passion not expended is yours.
still. Understand, then, you are not a man of spiritual power
because your impulses are irresistible. They sweep over your
soul like a tornado,-lay all flat before them,-whereupon you
feel a secret pride of strength. Last week, men saw a vessel
on this coast borne headlong on the breakers, and dashing itself
with terrific force against the shore. It embedded itself, a mis-
erable wreck, deep in sand and shingle. Was that brig, in her
convulsive throes, strong? or was it powerless and helpless?
No, my brethren: God's spirit in the soul,—an inward power
of doing the same thing we will and ought,- that is strength,
nothing else. All other force in us is only our weakness,— the
violence of driving passion. "I can do all things through Christ,
who strengtheneth me," - that is Christian strength. "I cannot
do the things I would," - that is the weakness of an unredeemed
slave.
I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years
of Jesus: I find it in that calm, long waiting of thirty years be-
fore he began his work. And yet all the evils he was to redress
were there, provoking indignation, crying for interference,-the
hollowness of social life, the misinterpretations of Scripture, the
forms of worship and phraseology which had hidden moral truth,
the injustice, the priestcraft, the cowardice, the hypocrisies: he
had long seen them all.
All those years his soul burned within him with a divine
zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man-a weak, emotional
man of spasmodic feeling, a hot enthusiast would have spoken
out at once, and at once been crushed. The Everlasting Word
incarnate bided his own time,-"Mine hour is not yet come,"
matured his energies, condensed them by repression; and then
went forth to speak, and do, and suffer. His hour was come.
This is strength: the power of a Divine Silence; the strong will
to keep force till it is wanted; the power to wait God's time.
"He that believeth," said the wise prophet, "shall not make
haste. "
――――
-
## p. 12312 (#358) ##########################################
12312
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
THE UNIVERSAL NATURE OF CHRIST
From Sermons Preached in Trinity Chapel'
NOT
JOTHING, in the judgment of historians, stands out so sharply
distinct as race, national character; nothing is more
ineffaceable. The Hebrew was marked from all mankind.
The Roman was perfectly distinct from the Grecian character;
as markedly different as the rough English truthfulness is from
Celtic brilliancy of talent. Now, these peculiar nationalities are
seldom combined. You rarely find the stern old Jewish sense of
holiness going together with the Athenian sensitiveness of what
is beautiful. Not often do you find together severe truth and
refined tenderness. Brilliancy seems opposed to perseverance.
Exquisiteness of taste commonly goes along with a certain amount
of untruthfulness. By "humanity" as a whole, we mean the
aggregate of all these separate excellences. Only in two places
are they all found together,-—in the universal human race and in
Jesus Christ. He, having as it were a whole humanity in him-
self, combines them all.
Now, this is the universality of the nature of Jesus Christ.
There was in him no national peculiarity or individual idiosyn-
crasy. He was not the son of the Jew, nor the son of the car-
penter, nor the offspring of the modes of living and thinking
of that particular century. He was the son of Man. Once in
the world's history was born a MAN. Once in the roll of ages,
out of innumerable failures, from the stock of human nature one
bud developed itself into a faultless flower. One perfect speci-
men of humanity has God exhibited on earth.
The best and most catholic of Englishmen has his prejudices.
All the world over, our greatest writer would be recognized
as having the English cast of thought. The pattern Jew would
seem Jewish everywhere but in Judea. Take Abraham, St. John,
St. Paul, place them where you will,-in China or in Peru,-
they are Hebrews: they could not command all sympathies;
their life could not be imitable except in part. They are foreign-
ers in every land, and out of place in every century, but their
own. But Christ is the king of men, and "draws all men,"
because all character is in him, separate from nationalities and
limitations. As if the life-blood of every nation were in his
## p. 12313 (#359) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12313
veins, and that which is best and truest in every man, and that
which is tenderest and gentlest and purest in every woman, in
his character.
He is emphatically the son of Man.
Out of this arose two powers of his sacred humanity,— the
universality of his sympathies, and their intense particular per-
sonality.
The universality of his sympathies: for, compare him with
any one of the sacred characters of Scripture. You know how
intensely national they were-priests, prophets, and apostles-
in their sympathies. For example, the apostles "marveled that
he spake with a woman of Samaria"; just before his resurrec-
tion, their largest charity had not reached beyond this,— “Lord,
wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom unto Israel? » Or
to come down to modern times, when his spirit has been mold-
ing men's ways of thought for many ages: now, when we talk
of our philanthropy and catholic liberality, here in Christian Eng-
land, we have scarcely any fellow-feeling, true and genuine, with
other nations, other churches, other parties, than our own: we
care nothing for Italian or Hungarian struggles; we think of
Romanists as the Jew thought of Gentiles; we speak of Ger-
man Protestants in the same proud, wicked, self-sufficient way in
which the Jew spoke of Samaritans.
Unless we bring such matters home, and away from vague
generalities, and consider what we and all men are, or rather are
not, we cannot comprehend with due wonder the mighty sympa-
thies of the heart of Christ. None of the miserable antipathies.
that fence us from all the world bounded the outgoings of that
Love, broad and deep and wide as the heart of God. Wherever
the mysterious pulse of human life was beating, wherever aught
human was in struggle, there to him was a thing not common or
unclean, but cleansed by God and sacred. Compare the daily,
almost indispensable, language of our life with his spirit. —"Com-
mon people"? point us out the passage where he called any
people that God his Father made, common. - "Lower orders"?
tell us when and where he, whose home was the workshop of
the carpenter, authorized you or me to know any man after the
flesh as low or high. - To him who called himself the Son of
Man, the link was manhood. And that he could discern even
when it was marred. Even in outcasts his eye could recognize
the sanctities of a nature human still. Even in the harlot, "one
of Eve's family; " a son of Abraham even in Zaccheus.
-
## p. 12314 (#360) ##########################################
12314
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Once more, out of that universal, catholic nature rose another
power, the power of intense, particular, personal affections. He
was the brother and savior of the human race; but this because
he was the brother and savior of every separate man in it.
Now, it is very easy to feel great affection for a country as a
whole; to have, for instance, great sympathies for Poland, or Ire-
land, or America, and yet not to care a whit for any single man
in Poland, and to have strong antipathies to every single indi-
vidual American. Easy to be a warm lover of England, and
yet not love one living Englishman. Easy to set a great value
on a flock of sheep, and yet have no particular care for any one
sheep or lamb. If it were killed, another of the same species
might replace it. Easy to have fine, large, liberal views about
the working classes, or the emancipation of the negroes, and yet
never have done a loving act to one. Easy to be a great philan-
thropist, and yet have no strong friendships, no deep personal
attachments.
For the idea of a universal Manlike sympathy was not new
when Christ was born. The reality was new. But before this,
in the Roman theatre, deafening applause was called forth by
this sentence:-"I am a man: nothing that can affect man is
indifferent to me. " A fine sentiment that was all. Every pre-
tense of realizing that sentiment, except one, has been a failure.
One, and but one, has succeeded in loving man and that by
loving men. No sublime high-sounding language in his lips
about educating the masses, or elevating the people. The char-
latanry of our modern sentiment had not appeared then; it is
but the parody of his love.
What was his mode of sympathy with men? He did not sit
down to philosophize about the progress of the species, or dream
about a millennium. He gathered round him twelve men. He
formed one friendship, special, concentrated, deep. He did not
give himself out as the leader of the publican's cause or the
champion of the rights of the dangerous classes: but he asso-
ciated with himselt Matthew, a publican called from the detested
receipt of custom; he went into the house of Zaccheus, and
treated him like a fellow-creature, a brother, and a son of Abra-
ham.
His catholicity, or philanthropy, was not an abstraction,
but an aggregate of personal attachments.
## p. 12315 (#361) ##########################################
12315
TOX
AGNES MARY FRANCES ROBINSON
(1857-)
HE poetry of culture-the poetry which smells of the lamp
and implies commerce with books - can be as genuine
and enjoyable as any other. All that is necessary is the
authentic impulse, and sufficient individuality to assimilate the many
influences to which the sensitive mind and soul of this order of
singer are subjected. It is a mistake to sneer at culture-verse as
derived and uninspired. As with any other kind of work, so in this,
the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The young Englishwoman whose verse is signed by the name
of A. Mary F. Robinson-and who in 1882 became the wife of the
brilliant French Orientalist, the late James Darmesteter-is of this
school of poets. Her polished and lovely verse indicates reading, and
the absorption of the riches of the literary past of her own and other
tongues especially that of the Romance peoples. But her talent is
independent; her note is distinct enough to justify all her contact
with the great spirits of literature; and the chastened classic quality
of some of her song in no wise detracts from the modernness of her
mind. For a certain refined melancholy and pure lyric musicalness
she is thoroughly a modern, the child of Pre-Raphaelite models,-
feeling some of the time's realistic tendencies, and yet showing too
a close affiliation with the Elizabethan song-makers.
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (Madame Darmesteter) was born at
Leamington, February 27th, 1857. Her father was an architect in
connection with the ecclesiastical buildings in the neighboring town
of Coventry. She was educated at Brussels, in Italy, and at Uni-
versity College, London, giving special attention to Greek. Her taste
for poetry showed itself very early: at thirteen she was writing on
history. Her first volume of verse, 'A Handful of Honeysuckle,'
appeared in 1878, when she was twenty-one. Following this came
'The Crowned Hippolytus (1880), containing a translation from
Euripides and pieces of her own; The New Arcadia and Other
Poems' (1884); 'An Italian Garden: A Book of Songs' (1886); Songs,
Ballads, and A Garden Play' (1888); and 'Retrospect' (1895).
Besides verse, Madame Darmesteter has published a novel, 'Ar-
den' (1883); a couple of biographies,- one of Emily Bronté in the
Eminent Women Series (1883), the other on 'Margaret of Angoulême,
## p. 12316 (#362) ##########################################
12316
AGNES MARY FRANCES ROBINSON
Queen of Navarre' (1889); and a book of historical essays, 'The End
of the Middle Ages' (1888).
Her response to the realistic demand of the day is felt in 'The
New Arcadia,' which contains a number of narrative poems dealing
with the English peasant life, and sternly tragic in subject. The
work, though not without strength and skill, and commendable for
its yearning sympathy with the wrongs and sorrows of the working
folk, is not in the poet's most successful vein. A trip to Italy in
1880 revealed her truest source of inspiration. She sings most
sweetly when seized with the gentle spirit of sadness which wafts
from some old exotic garden where lovers, soon to be separated by
chance or change or death, wander with clasped hands and dimly
foreboding hearts. In 'An Italian Garden' are songs and lyrics of
great beauty, whose art is hidden by the simplicity and fervor of the
utterance. Here Madame Darmesteter gives unaffected expression to
her thoughts and imaginings on the grave things and the glad things
of life; and the delicacy of the music, the tender mournfulness of
the verse, together with its felicitous descriptive touches, make a
very lovely impression. The sequence of love lyrics which imitate
in form the Italian Rispetti are fairly Heinesque in their passionate
feeling and charm of phrase. Of all the chords in the diapason of
song, that most native to this poet is a tender dreamy minor that
lingers long on the ear. She is neither robust nor optimistic; but the
mysterious sweet sadness of life is of the very essence of poetry, and
few of the younger English singers have given it voice with more
attraction.
Since Madame Darmesteter's marriage and foreign residence she
has written several works in French. One of them, a sketch of the
chronicler Froissart, appeared in English translation in 1895. She
published in 1896 her husband's New English Studies,' a collection
of magazine papers and reviews,-furnishing an introduction to the
volume. There is no reason to conclude that her poetical activity
has ceased. In any case she has done sufficient work to secure her
a place among the minor lyric singers of England.
TUSCAN CYPRESS
(RISPETTI)
HAT good is there, ah me, what good in Love?
Since even if you love me, we must part:
And since for either, an you cared enough,
There's but division and a broken heart?
WHAT
## p. 12317 (#363) ##########################################
AGNES MARY FRANCES ROBINSON
12317
And yet, God knows, to hear you say - My dear!
I would lie down and stretch me on the bier.
And yet would I, to hear you say - My own!
With mine own hands drag down the burial stone.
I LOVE you more than any words can say,
And yet you do not feel I love you so;
And slowly I am dying day by day,-
You look at me, and yet you do not know.
You look at me, and yet you do not fear;
You do not see the mourners with the bier.
You answer when I speak, and wish me well,
And still you do not hear the passing-bell.
O LOVE, O Love, come over the sea, come here,
Come back and kiss me once when I am dead!
Come back and lay a rose upon my bier,
Come, light the tapers at my feet and head.
Come back and kiss me once upon the eyes,
So I, being dead, shall dream of Paradise;
Come, kneel beside me once and say a prayer,
So shall my soul be happy anywhere.
WHEN I am dead and I am quite forgot,
What care I if my spirit lives or dies?
To walk with angels in a grassy plot,
And pluck the lilies grown in Paradise?
Ah, no,- the heaven of all my heart has been
To hear your voice and catch the sighs between.
Ah, no,- the better heaven I fain would give,
But in a cranny of your soul to live.
AH ME, you well might wait a little while,
And not forget me, Sweet, until I die!
I had a home, a little distant isle,
With shadowy trees and tender misty sky.
I had a home! It was less dear than thou,
And I forgot, as you forget me now.
I had a home, more dear than I could tell,
And I forgot, but now remember well.
## p. 12318 (#364) ##########################################
12318
AGNES MARY FRANCES ROBINSON
LOVE me to-day and think not on to-morrow;
Come, take my hands, and lead me out of doors;
There in the fields let us forget our sorrow,
Talking of Venice and Ionian shores;-
Talking of all the seas innumerable
Where we will sail and sing when I am well;
Talking of Indian roses gold and red,
Which we will plait in wreaths- when I am dead.
TELL me a story, dear, that is not true,
Strange as a vision, full of splendid things:
Here will I lie and dream it is not you,
And dream it is a mocking-bird that sings.
For if I find your voice in any part,
Even the sound of it will break my heart;
For if you speak of us and of our love,
I faint and die to feel the thrill thereof.
LET us forget we loved each other much,
Let us forget we ever have to part;
Let us forget that any look or touch
Once let in either to the other's heart.
Only we'll sit upon the daisied grass,
And hear the larks and see the swallows pass;
Only we'll live awhile, as children play,
Without to-morrow, without yesterday.
FAR, far away and in the middle sea,
So still I dream, although the dream is vain,
There lies a valley full of rest for me,
Where I shall live and you shall love again.
O ships that sail, O masts against the sky,
Will you not stop awhile in passing by?
O prayers that hope, O faith that never knew,
Will you not take me on to heaven with you?
AH, LOVE, I cannot die, I cannot go
Down in the dark and leave you all alone:
Ah, hold me fast, safe in the warmth I know,
And never shut me underneath a stone.
## p. 12319 (#365) ##########################################
AGNES MARY FRANCES ROBINSON
12319
Dead in the grave! And I can never hear
If you are ill or if you miss me, dear.
Dead, oh my God! and you may need me yet,
While I shall sleep, while I- while I-forget!
COME away, Sorrow, Sorrow come away-
Let us go sit in some cool, shadowy place;
There shall you sing and hush me all the day,
While I will dream about my lover's face.
Hush me, O Sorrow, like a babe to sleep,
Then close the lids above mine eyes that weep;
Rock me, O Sorrow, like a babe in pain,
Nor, when I slumber, wake me up again.
RED MAY
UT of the window the trees in the square
Are covered with crimson May:
You, that were all of my love and my care,
Have broken my heart to-day.
O
But though I have lost you, and though I despair
Till even the past looks gray,-
Out of the window the trees in the square
Are covered with crimson May.
-
## p. 12320 (#366) ##########################################
12320
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
(1613-1680)
HE 'Maxims' of La Rochefoucauld are perhaps most clearly
understood in the light of his life. He was a gentleman, a
soldier, a courtier, a cavalier, a lover, in one of the most
picturesque periods of French history,- one which afforded the man
of affairs unique opportunities for the study of human nature, espe-
cially of those weaknesses of human nature which the atmosphere
of courts seems to foster. The Maxims' are the very essence of a
luminous and seductive worldliness. They are the conclusions drawn
by a man whose intellect was always guided by his judgment; they
exhibit tact which amounts to genius. They might serve as rules
alike for courtiers and Christians.
La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris in 1613, in the reign of Louis
XIII. His family was ancient and noble; his father enjoyed the royal
favor. He himself, as Prince de Marcillac, became early a prominent
figure in the army and at court. Throughout his long life he was
peculiarly susceptible to the influence of women: it was through his
attachment to Madame de Chevreuse that he became the devoted
champion of the Queen, Anne of Austria, the neglected wife of Louis;
infusing into his devotion to her that romanticism which is some-
times discoverable in the Maxims,' under their brilliant world-
wisdom. Caballings against Richelieu engaged him until the great
statesman's death in 1642. He was then prominent in effecting a
reconcilement between the Queen and Condé, that they might league
together against Gaston of Orléans. Cardinal Mazarin, however, was
to thwart his plans as Richelieu had done.
From 1642 to 1652 his life was one of confusion and of intrigue,
with nothing better to steady it and to direct it than the fascinations
of the Duchesse de Longueville, for whose sake he became a Frondeur.
At the battle of the Faubourg St. Antoine in 1652, he was shot in
the head; this misfortune in his military career proved to be of most
happy significance in his career as a man of letters, for it forced him
into that semi-retirement from which issued his famous 'Maxims'
and Memoirs. ' The remainder of his life was spent chiefly in Paris,
in that brilliant and cultured society of which glimpses are obtained
in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, whose intimate friend he was.
La Rochefoucauld - the passionate soldier, the restless gallant, the
## p. 12320 (#367) ##########################################
C
C
HEFOUCAUS
A
## p. 12320 (#368) ##########################################
.
ויי
.
## p. 12320 (#369) ##########################################
อม
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
rera
Ope
## p. 12320 (#370) ##########################################
## p. 12321 (#371) ##########################################
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
12321
-
suave lover. - became in his old age the polished ornament of the
most exclusive and exacting of Parisian salons. His friendship for
Madame de Sévigné, for Madame de Sablé, for Madame de La Fayette,
mellowed his declining years. He died in 1680.
In his 'Memoirs' he says of himself, "I have talent, marred by
melancholy;" and again, "I extremely approve of exalted passion: it
shows a grandeur of soul. I who know all the delicacy and strength
of the lofty sentiments of love-if I ever love, it will assuredly be
after this fashion; but such as I am, I do not believe that this knowl-
edge which I have would ever pass from my head to my heart. "
The key to Rochefoucauld's character and to his writings may
perhaps be found in these passages. The melancholy of which he
speaks was genuine. It lurks in many of the 'Maxims,' as the nat-
ural sorrow of one disillusioned by his contact with the world, forced
to acknowledge the gulf between the ideal and the actual, and to
bow to the power of expediency. La Rochefoucauld has been accused
of supremest egotism; of teaching a mode of life which is little else
than the essence of selfishness. If so, it is a selfishness disguised in
a constant effort to put the world at its ease, to infuse all society
with the golden atmosphere of courts, in which everybody and every-
thing is assumed to be perfect. The 'Maxims' show, indeed, how
nearly the wisdom of the children of the world approaches the wis-
dom of the children of light. Their author knew the world as few
men have the opportunity to know it; and once for all, he gave to
worldly knowledge perfect literary embodiment. His loves for many
women gave to him likewise an almost perfect insight into woman
nature. "In their first love women love the lover; in the others they
love love. " The 'Maxims' are faultless in style and form: brief
complete sayings, forming doorways neither too strait nor too broad
into the House of Life, whose many chambers La Rochefoucauld had
explored.
His 'Memoirs' are equally famous, taking first rank in their class.
His letters are vistas into the highly colored picturesque life of the
time. He himself seems less a great figure in French literature than
a great figure in old French life. What he wrote has more the char-
acter of an afterthought than of a supreme intention,— the reflections
of one concerning the world after that world had ceased to be of vital
importance to him.
XXI-771
--
## p. 12322 (#372) ##########################################
12322
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
MAXIMS
PAS
ASSION often makes the cleverest man a fool, and often ren-
ders the most foolish clever.
Those great and brilliant feats which dazzle our eyes are
represented by politicians as the effects of great designs, where-
as they are usually only the effects of temper and of passions.
Thus the war between Augustus and Antony, which is ascribed
to their ambition to make themselves masters of the world, was
perhaps only an effect of jealousy.
The passions often beget their contraries. Avarice sometimes
produces prodigality, and prodigality avarice; we are often firm
from weakness, and daring from timidity.
Our self-love bears more impatiently the condemnation of our
tastes than of our opinions.
The moderation of prosperous people comes from the calm
which good fortune gives to their temper.
We have strength enough to bear the ills of others.
The steadfastness of sages is only the art of locking up their
uneasiness in their hearts.
Philosophy triumphs easily over troubles passed and troubles
to come; but present troubles triumph over it.
When great men allow themselves to be cast down by con-
tinued misfortunes, they show that they bore them only through
the strength of their ambition, and not through that of their
soul; and that, great vanity apart, heroes are made like other
men.
It requires greater virtue to bear good fortune than bad.
Neither sin nor death can be looked at steadily.
We often make a parade of passions,- even of the most crim-
inal; but envy is a timid and shameful passion which we never
dare to acknowledge.
Jealousy is in some measure just and reasonable, since it tends
only to retain a good which belongs to us, or which we think
belongs to us; whereas envy is a fury which cannot endure the
good of others.
We have more strength than will; and it is often to excuse
ourselves to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.
Pride has a greater share than goodness in our remonstrances
with those who commit faults; and we reprove not so much to
## p. 12323 (#373) ##########################################
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
12323
correct, as to persuade them that we ourselves are free from
them.
We promise according to our hopes, and we perform accord-
ing to our fears.
Interest speaks all sorts of languages, and plays all sorts of
parts, even that of disinterestedness.
Those who occupy themselves too much with small things
usually become incapable of great.
Strength and weakness of mind are misnamed: they are in
fact only the good or bad arrangement of the bodily organs.
The love or the indifference which the philosophers had for
life was only a taste of their self-love; which we should no more
argue about than about the taste of the tongue or the choice of
colors.
Happiness is in relish, and not in things: it is by having
what we like that we are happy, and not in having what others
find likable.
We are never so happy or so unhappy as we imagine.
Nothing ought to lessen the satisfaction we have in ourselves
so much as seeing that we disapprove at one time what we ap-
proved at another.
Contempt for riches was with the philosophers a hidden de-
sire to avenge their worth for the injustice of fortune, by con-
tempt for the good things of which she deprived them; it was a
secret to secure themselves from the degradation of poverty; it
was a byway to gain that consolation which they could not have
from wealth.
Sincerity is a frankness of heart. We find it in very few
people, and what we usually see is only a delicate dissimulation
to gain the confidence of others.
Grace is to the body what good sense is to the mind.
It is difficult to define love. What we may say of it is, that
in the soul it is a ruling passion; in the mind it is a sympathy;
and in the body it is a hidden and delicate desire to possess what
we love, after much mystery.
There is no disguise which can hide love long where it is, or
feign it where it is not.
There are few people who are not ashamed of having loved
each other when they no longer love each other.
We may find women who have never had a gallantry, but it
is rare to find any who have only had one.
## p. 12324 (#374) ##########################################
12324
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Love, as well as fire, cannot exist without constant motion;
and it ceases to live as soon as it ceases to hope or to fear.
It is of true love as of the apparition of spirits: all the world
talks of it, but few people have seen it.
The love of justice is in most men only the fear of suffering
injustice.
