Much which the world doth quite forget
Lay in his faithful memory yet.
Lay in his faithful memory yet.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v21 - Rab to Rus
Their love-tale
forms the subject of poems by several eminent Persian poets.
## p. 12490 (#548) ##########################################
12490
JALAL-AD-DIN RÜMİ
In the eye of the covetous man it would not be full. If the
shell lay not contented in its bed, it would never be filled with
the pearl.
He whose garment is rent by Love Divine - he only is
cleansed from avarice, and the multitude of sins.
Hail to thee, Love, our sweet insanity! O thou, the physician
of all our ills!
Thou, our Plato and our Galen, the medicine of our pride and
our self-estimation!
By Love the earthly eye is raised to heaven, the hills begin
to dance, and the mountains are quickened.
Could I join my lip to that of one who breatheth my breath,
I would utter words as melodious as my reed.
When the rose-garden is withered, and the rose is gone, thou
wilt hear no longer news of the nightingale.
How should I be able any longer to retain my understanding,
when the light of my beloved one no longer shineth upon me?
If the lover no longer receiveth his nourishment, he must
perish like a bird deprived of its food.
Translation of S. Robinson.
THE MERCHANT AND THE PARROT
From the Masnavi
T
HERE was a merchant owned a parrot which was kept shut
up in a cage, the paroquet's world.
On a certain occasion the merchant made preparations
for a journey, beginning with Hindustan.
Calling each of his man-servants and his maid-servants, he
said: "What am I to bring back to you? Let me know. "
Each expressed a wish according to his own choice; and the
good man promised something to every one.
Turning to the poll-parrot, he said: "And what gift am I to
bring you from the land of Hindustan ? »
Polly replied: "When you see those parrots there, make my
situation known to them, and
say:
There is a certain parrot who is longing for you, but is
confined from the free vault of heaven, shut up in a cage.
<< < He sends you his greetings, and he asks of you direction
and some means of deliverance. '
--
## p. 12491 (#549) ##########################################
JALAL-AD-DIN RŪMI
12491
"And add: 'Does it seem fair for me to be wasting my life
in longing and to die here far away?
"Am I to be allowed to continue in durance vile, while you
are in green nooks among the boughs?
"Is this to be the loyalty of friends-for me to be in a
cage, and you out in the gardens?
"Recall to memory that grieving bird, O ye grandees, in
the morning draft amid your delightsome nooks. '»
[The parrot proceeds then to expatiate upon love, and upon the union
existing between souls. ]
The merchant received the message, with its salutation, to
Ideliver to the bird's kindred.
And when he came to the far-off land of Hindustan, he saw
in the desert parrots, many a one.
Stopping his beast and raising his voice, he delivered his sal-
utation and his message.
Then, wonderful to relate, one of the parrots began a great
fluttering, and down it fell, dead, and breathed its last.
The merchant sore repented of telling his message, and said:
Tis only for the death of a living creature I am come.
<<
"There was perchance a connection between these parrots,
two bodies with but a single soul.
"Ah, why did I do it! Why did I carry out my commission!
I am helplessly grieved at telling this. "
[The merchant moralizes at some length upon life, and upon the soul and
its relation to God. ]
When the merchant had finished up his business abroad, he
returned to his glad home.
And to every man-servant he presented some gift, and to
each maid-servant he handed out a gift.
Then up spake the Polly: "What gift for the prisoner?
What did you see and what did you say? Tell me that. "
Said the merchant: "Ah me! That whereof I repent me,
for which I could bite my hand and gnaw my fingers.
and
"Why did I, through ignorance and folly, vainly carry that
idle message? "
Said Poll: "Merchant, what's this repentance about? And
what has brought about this passion and grief? "
## p. 12492 (#550) ##########################################
12492
JALĀL-AD-DÎN RŪMI
He replied: “I told that plaintive story of yours to a flock of
parrots that looked just like you.
"And a certain parrot felt so keenly for your distress that its
heart broke in twain, and it fluttered and dropped dead.
"I felt deep regret. What was this I had said? But what
does regret help, whatever I said? "
[The merchant moralizes at some length. ]
As soon as the parrot heard what that bird had done, he too
fluttered and dropped down and grew cold.
When the merchant observed it thus fallen, he started up and
flung down his turban upon the ground.
And when he saw the bird in such plight and condition, he
started to tear the very clothes at his throat,
Saying: "O Polly, my pretty creature, what is this, alas, that
has happened thee? Why art thou thus?
"Ah, alas, my sweet-voiced bird! Ah, alas, my companion
and confidant!
"Ah, alas, my sweet-note bird; my spirit of joy and angel of
the garden! "
[He continues to lament over the departed bird. But it must have fallen
in accordance with the Divine Will. Man's dependence upon God. ]
Thereupon the merchant tossed the bird out of the cage; but
the paroquet instantly flew up on a high bough. The merchant
was dumbfounded at the bird's conduct; amazed and at a loss, he
marveled at the mystery of the bird.
And looking upward he said: "My nightingale, give some
explanation of what you have done!
>>>
Said the parrot: "That bird it was gave me counsel how I
should act; in effect, this: 'Rid yourself of your speech, voice,
and talking;
"For it is your voice that has brought you into captivity. '
And then to prove its counsel it died itself. "
[The parrot dilates further in religious manner upon the changes and
chances of mortal life. ]
Then Polly gave one or two bits more of guileless advice, and
now said:-
"Adieu, good-by! Farewell, my merchant; you have done a
mercy to me: you have set me free from bonds and oppression.
## p. 12493 (#551) ##########################################
JALAL-AD-DIN RŪMI
12493
"Farewell, O merchant: I am now going home; and one day.
mayest thou become free just like me. "
The merchant responded: "To God's keeping go thou; thou
hast taught me from this instant a new path of life. "
Version by A. V. W. Jackson.
THE CHINESE AND ROMAN ARTISTS; OR, THE MIRROR OF
THE HEART
HIS contest heed, of Chinaman's and Roman's art.
THIS
The Chinese urged they had the greater painters'
skill;
The Romans pleaded they of art the throne did fill.
The sovereign heard them both: decreed a contest fair;
Results the palm should give the worthiest of the pair.
The parties twain a wordy war waged in debate;
The Romans' show of science did predominate.
The Chinamen then asked to have a house assigned
For their especial use; and one for Rome designed.
Th' allotted houses stood on either side one street;
In one the Chinese, one the Roman artists meet.
The Chinese asked a hundred paints for their art's use:
The sovereign his resources would not them refuse.
Each morning from the treasury, rich colors' store
Was served out to the Chinese till they asked no more.
The Romans argued, "Color or design is vain:
We simply have to banish soil and filth amain. "
They closed their gate. To burnish then they set them-
selves;
As heaven's vault, simplicity filled all their shelves:
Vast difference there is 'twixt colors and not one.
The colors are as clouds; simplicity's the moon.
Whatever tinge you see embellishing the clouds,
You know comes from the sun, the moon, or stars in
crowds.
At length the Chinamen their task had quite fulfilled;
With joy intense their hearts did beat, their bosoms
thrilled.
The sovereign came, inspected all their rich designs,
And lost his heart with wonder at their talents' signs.
## p. 12494 (#552) ##########################################
12494
JALĀL-AD-DİN RŪMİ
He then passed to the Romans, that his eyes might see;
The curtains were withdrawn to show whate'er might be.
The Chinese paintings all, their whole designs in full,
Reflected truly were on that high-burnished wall.
Whatever was depicted by the Chinese art
Was reproduced by mirrors, perfect every part.
Those Romans are our mystics, know, my worthy friend:
No art, no learning; study, none: but gain their end.
They polish well their bosoms, burnish bright their hearts,
Remove all stain of lust, of self, pride, hate's deep smarts.
That mirror's purity prefigures their hearts' trust;
With endless images reflections it incrust.
Translation of J. W. Redhouse.
## p. 12495 (#553) ##########################################
12495
YOCK
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
(1804-1877)
BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
HE Grand Duchy of Finland, "torn like a bloody shield from
the heart of Sweden" in 1809, by the ruthless despot who
was then all-powerful in Europe, and who now, by the irony
of fate, lies buried in Paris beneath a sarcophagus of Finnish por-
phyry, has not become Russianized to any considerable extent, and still
looks to the old mother-country for its social and intellectual ideals.
This fact is due in part to the force of his-
torical association upon the mind of a sim-
ple and conservative race, and in part to
the fact that the Russian treatment of the
conquered province has been fairly lenient,
and most strikingly contrasted with the
repressive policy pursued toward Russian
Poland. It is not, then, as surprising as
might at first sight appear, that the greatest
name in Swedish literature should belong
to a native of Finland, who was but five
years of age at the time of the Russian
annexation.
JOHAN RUNEBERG
Johan Ludvig Runeberg was born Febru-
ary 5th, 1804, at Jakobsstad, a small sea-
port town on the Gulf of Bothnia. He was the oldest of the six
children of a merchant captain in reduced circumstances. He went
to school at Vasa, and in 1822 to the university at Åbo, supporting
himself in part by tutoring. He was so poor that he literally lived on
potatoes for months at a time. He took his doctor's degree in 1827,
and soon thereafter was betrothed to Fredrika Tengström, a woman
who afterwards attained some celebrity as a writer on her own
account. The year that Runeberg left the university was also the
year of the great fire that destroyed the greater part of the capital,
and led to the transfer of both university and seat of government to
Helsingfors. The years immediately following were decisive for the
poet's development, since they took him to Sarkijarvi, a town far to
the north in the heart of Finland, where he came into close contact
## p. 12496 (#554) ##########################################
12496
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
with the purest type of the Finnish peasantry.
In this poverty-
stricken wilderness, where men toiled incessantly for a subsistence so
precarious that those were deemed fortunate who did not have to live
upon bread made in large part from the bark of trees, the young
scholar learned really to know his fellow-countrymen, to enter inti-
mately into their humble lives, and to collect a wealth of first-hand
impressions that were afterwards to be turned to literary account.
The years at Sarkijarvi were devoted to earnest study, and to the com-
position of poems that showed his powers to be steadily ripening; so
that when, in 1830, he received a university appointment at Helsing-,
fors, he was able to bring back with him to civilization the material
for the volume of poems that saw the light in that year.
The publication of this volume was coincident with a stirring of
the Finnish national consciousness that promised much for the future.
The Russian yoke turned out to be no very heavy burden, since Fin-
land was left a considerable degree of autonomy, and since the Rus-
sian censorship was disposed to deal very leniently with the literary
expressions of national aspiration, and even with the most passionate
assertions of spiritual allegiance to the Swedish tradition.
This was
also the time when the consciousness of Finland was quickened by
the restoration of the 'Kalevala. ' Dr. Lönnrot, a physician and pro-
fessor at the university, had been traveling through the country for
the purpose of collecting fragments of folk-song and popular tradi-
tion, and had made the great discovery that there still existed on
the lips of the people a popular epic that had been transmitted from
generation to generation through the centuries,- an epic which was
comparable with, let us say, the 'Nibelungenlied,' and which the dis-
coverer pieced together and reconstructed into substantial unity.
This was clearly an opportune time for the appearance of a na-
tional poet; and in Runeberg the man of the hour was found. For-
tunately for the history of culture, he realized that the aspirations of
Finland were best to be furthered by an adherence to the Swedish
tongue, and so it came about that Sweden as well as Finland gained
a new poet of the first rank. The influence of Runeberg's appear-
ance upon Swedish literature in the narrower sense was also of the
utmost importance. Swedish poetry up to this time had been
divided into the two camps of Phosphorists and Gothics. The former
were the torch-bearers of the German romantic movement; and had,
if anything, made its mysticism more exaggerated and its extrava-
gance more unreal. If they had lived in New England, they would
have been called transcendentalists. The Gothics, on the other
hand, had sought to bring about a more strictly national revival of
letters; and as represented by Geijer and Tegnér, had endeavored to
reproduce the spirit of the past. But even Tegnér, great and true
## p. 12497 (#555) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12497
poet as he was, could not escape from the prevailing artificiality of
an essentially rhetorical age; and so the work of Runeberg, with its
vivid realism, its direct simplicity, and its fidelity to the facts of
nature and human life, came into Swedish poetry with a new note,
and helped to accomplish a sort of Wordsworthian revolution in lit-
erary standards.
The 'Poems' of 1830 were well received, and were followed in
the same year by a collection of Servian folk-songs, translated from
Goetze's German version. A certain kinship between the popular
poetry of Finland and Servia has been more than once pointed out.
In both cases the utterance of races that failed to reach the front in
the struggle for existence, the resemblance of the two bodies of folk-
song is noticeable when we consider their spirit alone, and is made
still more noticeable by their common employment of an unrhymed
trochaic verse. This work in Servian poetry is also significant be-
cause it was the direct inspiration of Runeberg's 'Idyll och Epigram,'
a collection of short original pieces in the same manner. In 1831 the
poet received a prize from the Swedish Academy for an epic com-
position called 'Grafven i Perrho' (The Grave in Perrho), and in
the same year married the woman to whom he had so long been
engaged. A university promotion also came to him, and he felt him-
self to be on the high-road to success. He soon became editor of a
newspaper as well; and for it he wrote most of the critical essays
and prose tales that occupy an honorable place among his collected
writings. His stay in Helsingfors lasted until 1837; and during this.
period he published, besides the works already mentioned, 'Elgskyt-
tarne (The Elk Hunters),-a beautiful epic in hexameters, which
more than once suggests Goethe's 'Hermann and Dorothea'; a sec-
ond collection of 'Poems'; a comedy in verse entitled 'Friaren från
Landet' (The Country Suitor); and the village idyl Hanna,' a love
story in hexameters, with an exquisitely beautiful dedication to
"the first love. " In 1837, Runeberg's friends obtained for him a pro-
fessorial appointment at the gymnasium of Borgå, a quiet country.
town on the Gulf of Finland, about thirty miles from Helsingfors.
Here he remained for the last forty years of his life, and his biogra-
phy from this time on is little more than an account of his successive
publications. Externally, there is almost nothing to record beyond.
the promotions which finally gave to him the rectorship of the gym-
nasium (followed after a few years of service by a pension for life),
and the trip to Sweden in 1851, which was the only occasion upon
which the poet ever left his native Finland. He died May 6th, 1877,
after having been in precarious health for several years.
Four years after his removal to Borgå, Runeberg published Jul-
qvällen (Christmas Eve), the last of his hexameter narratives,—a
XXI-782
## p. 12498 (#556) ##########################################
12498
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
somewhat less successful idyl than its predecessors. A more import-
ant work, also produced in 1841, is the narrative poem 'Nadeschda,'
a study of Russian character and manners. It is written in a variety
of unrhymed measures, and tells of the love of a nobleman for a
beautiful serf. In this work, and those that follow, the powers of
the poet have outgrown the somewhat close limitations of the idyl,
and seek to bring deeper and more tragic themes within their grasp.
In 'Nadeschda' we have for essential subject-matter the struggle
between the institution of serfdom and the freedom of the individ-
ual. In a still nobler poem, 'Kung Fjalar' (1845), we have the conflict
between the will of man and the inscrutable purposes of the gods,
presented in the spirit, although not in the form, of a Greek tragedy:
an 'Antigone' or an Edipus Rex. ' It is a poem in five cantos of
four-line unrhymed stanzas, telling how the king, defiant of the gods,
orders his infant daughter to be thrown into the sea, that he may
avert the doom that has been prophesied to come upon his race
through the child. But the child is rescued, and taken to the Ossi-
anic kingdom of Morven, where she grows to be a beautiful woman.
Twenty years later, King Fjalar's son conquers Morven, and bears
away the maiden as his bride. On the voyage homeward she tells
him the story of her rescue from the sea: and he, filled with horror
when he realizes that his bride is his sister, slays both her and him-
self. The old king, conquered at last by fate, puts an end to his life,
finally recognizing the existence of a power higher than his own.
"
The poems thus far described, together with a third volume of
short pieces, bring us to the year 1848, when was published the first
part of 'Fänrik Stål's Sägner' (the Tales of Ensign Stål), Runeberg's
greatest work. The second part bears the date of 1860. This collec-
tion of poems, thirty-four in number (besides one that was suppressed
for personal reasons), deals with episodes of the war which ended
with the annexation of Finland to Russia. The several poems are
supposed to be related by a veteran of the war to an eager youth
who comes day after day and hangs upon the lips of the story-teller.
They are tales of a heroic age still fresh in the recollection of the
poet's hearers, tales of famous battles and individual exploits, of his-
torical personages and obscure peasants united by a common devotion
and a common sacrifice, of the maiden who is consoled for her lover's
death by the thought that his life was given for his fatherland, and
of the boy who is impatient to grow up that he too may give him-
self to his country's cause. The poems are dramatic, pathetic, even
humorous by turn; breathing a strain of the purest patriotism, and
flowing in numbers so musical that they fix themselves forever in the
memory.
And besides all this, they are so simple in form and vocab-
ulary that they reach the heart of the unlettered as well as of the
## p. 12499 (#557) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12499
cultured; so deep in their sympathy with the elementary joys and
griefs of human-kind that they found a widely responsive echo from
the beginning, and still constitute the most treasured possession of
Swedish literature. Indeed, the first poem of them all, Vårt Land'
(Our Country) became at once, and has ever since remained, the
national song of both Finn and Swede, bound together by the gen-
ius of the poet in a closer union than the old political tie. A close
reproduction of the form of this poem, and perhaps something of
its beauty as well, may be found in the following translation of its
closing stanzas:-
-
"Here all about us lies this land,
Our eyes may see it here;
We have but to stretch forth our hand,
And blithely point to sea and strand,
And say, Behold this land so near,
Our fatherland so dear.
"And were we called to dwell on high,
Of heaven's own blue made free,
To dance with stars that deck the sky,
Where falls no tear, and breathes no sigh,—
We still should yearn, poor though it be,
This land of ours to see.
"O land! thou thousand-lakèd land,
•
With song and virtue clad,
On life's wild sea our own safe strand,
Land of our past, our future's land,
If thou art poor, yet be not sad,—
Be joyous, blithe, and glad.
"Yet shall thy flower in beauty ope
Its petals without stain;
Our love shall with thy darkness cope,
And be thy light, thy joy, thy hope,
And this our patriotic strain
To nobler heights attain. "
This song Mr. Gosse declares to be "one of the noblest strains of
patriotic verse ever indited; it lifts Runeberg at once to the level
of Callinus or Campbell,-to the first rank of poets in whom art
and ardor, national sentiment and power of utterance, are equally
blended. "
The works remaining to be mentioned include a volume of
'Smärre Berättelser (Short Stories: 1854), the sixty-odd hymns writ-
ten for the official Lutheran hymn-book of Finland, and the two
plays, 'Kan Ej' (Cannot: 1862) and 'Kungarne på Salamis' (The
## p. 12500 (#558) ##########################################
12500
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
Kings at Salamis: 1863). The former of these plays is a senti-
mental domestic comedy in two acts, and in rhymed verse. The lat-
ter is a five-act tragedy written upon a Greek theme in the classical
manner, and in iambic hexameter verse. It was the last work of any
importance published by Runeberg, and one of the noblest of all
his works, worthily crowning a great career.
Etta laye
ENSIGN STÅL
I
TOOK such books as first I found,
Merely to while the time along;
Which written by no name renowned,
Treated of Finland's war and wrong;·
'Twas simply stitched, and as by grace,
Had 'mid bound volumes found a place; -
And in my room, with little heed,
The pages carelessly surveyed,
And all by chance began to read
Of noble Savolak's Brigade.
I read a page, then word by word,
My heart unto its depths was stirred.
I saw a people who could hold
The loss of all, save honor, light;
A troop, 'mid hunger-pangs and cold,
Yet still victorious in the fight.
On, on from page to page I sped,
I could have kissed the words I read.
In danger's hour, in battle's scathe,
What courage showed this little band;
What patriot love, what matchless faith
Didst thou inspire, poor native land;
What generous, steadfast love was born
In those thou fed'st on bark and corn!
Into new realms my fancy broke
Where all a magic influence bore,
And in my heart a life awoke
Whose rapture was unknown before.
·
## p. 12501 (#559) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12501
As if on wings the day careered,
But oh! how short the book appeared!
With close of day the book was done,
Yet was my spirit all aglow:
Much yet remained to ponder on,
Much to inquire about and know,
Much yet of darkness wrapped the whole;
I went to seek old Cornet Stål.
He sat, as oft he sat before,
Busily bending o'er his net
And at the opening of the door,
A glance displeased my coming met;
It seemed as though his thought might say,
"Is there no peace by night or day! "
But mischief from my mind was far,-
I came in very different mood:
"I've read of Finland's latest war-
-
And in my veins runs Finnish blood!
To hear yet more I am on fire:
Pray can you tell what I desire ? »
Thus spoke I, and the aged man
Amazed his netting laid aside;
A flush passed o'er his features wan
As if of ancient martial pride:
"Yes," said he, "I can witness bear,
If so you will, for I was there! »
His bed of straw my seat became,
And he began with joy to tell
Of Malm and Duncker's soul of flame,
And even deeds which theirs excel.
Bright was his eye and clear his brow,
His noble look is with me now.
Full many a bloody day he'd seen;
Had shared much peril and much woe;
In conquest, in defeat, had been,-
Defeat whose wounds no cure can know.
Much which the world doth quite forget
Lay in his faithful memory yet.
I listening sat, but naught I said,
And every word fell on my heart;
## p. 12501 (#560) ##########################################
12500
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
Kings at Salamis: 1863). The former of these plays
mental domestic comedy in two acts, and in rhymed ve
ter is a five-act tragedy written upon a Greek theme
manner, and in iambic hexameter verse. It was the
importance published by Runeberg, and one
his works, worthily crowning a great career.
ENSIGN
TOOK such books
Merely to wh
Which writte
Treated
'Twas simply
Had 'mid b
And in m
The
And a'
Of
ht or day! "
my coming met;
thought might say,
was far,-
I re
M▾
of the door,
६
sat before,
ser his net
of
t remained to ponder on,
was my spirit all aglow:
inquire about and know,
close of day the book was done,
old Cornet Stål.
darkness wrapped the whole;
But oh! how short the book appeared!
As if on wings the day careered,
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
newly;
une forth to fight,
e fall of night.
uly!
day long the hard hot strife was raging,
ue stood, half-desolate and aging;
w steps there sat a silent girl, and mused
ne troop come slowly by, in weary line confused.
aed like one who sought a friend,- she scanned each man's
face nearly;
high burned the color in her cheek, too high for sunset merely;
She sat so quiet, looked so warm, so flushed with secret heat,
It seemed she listened as she gazed, and felt her own heart beat.
## p. 12501 (#561) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12503
|
rt the book appeared!
the day careered,
HAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
Her on,
aglow:
book was done,
know,
whole;
aw the troop march by, and darkness round them steal-
g.
› every man, her anxious eye appealing
g in a shy distress a question without speech,
sigh itself, too anguished to beseech.
12501
d all gone
re failed
past, and not a word was spoken,
at last, and all her strength was
her hand her weary forehead fell,
e by one as from a burning well.
hope may break just where the gloom
ice: a needless tear thou weepest;
for, whose face thou couldst not
nd still he lives for thee.
shield himself from danger;
ve them like a stranger;
--but weep not, rave not
'fe and us. "
awful dreams awaken,—
ul in her had shaken:
place where late had raged the fight,
ued and vanished out of sight.
other hour; the night had closed around her;
clouds were silver-white, but darkness hung below
chem.
gers long: O daughter, come; thy toil is all in vain :
norrow, ere the dawn is red, thy bridegroom's here again! »
The daughter came; with silent steps she came to meet her mother:
The pallid eyelids strained no more with tears she fain would
smother;
But colder than the wind at night the hand that mother pressed,
And whiter than a winter cloud the maiden's cheek and breast.
"Make me a grave, O mother dear: my days on earth are over!
The only man that fled to-day-that coward - was my lover:
He thought of me and of himself, the battle-field he scanned,
And then betrayed his brothers' hope and shamed his father's land.
## p. 12502 (#562) ##########################################
12502
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
And half the night away had fled,
Before rose from him to part.
The threshold reached, he made a stand,
And pressed with joy my willing hand.
Since then, no better joy he had,
Than when he saw me by his side;
Together mourned we or were glad,
Together smoked as friends long tried.
He was in years, I in life's spring;
A student I, he more than king!
The tales which now I tell in song,
Through many a long and silent night,
Fell from the old man's faltering tongue
Beside the peat-fire's feeble light.
They speak what all may understand:
Receive them, thou dear native land.
Howitt's Translation.
THE VILLAGE GIRL
From Fänrik Ståls Sägner >
TH
HE sun went down and evening came, the quiet summer even;
A mass of glowing purple lay between the farms and heaven;
A weary troop of men went by, their day's hard labor done,-
Tired and contented, towards their home they wended one by one.
Their work was done, their harvest reaped, a goodly harvest truly!
A well-appointed band of foes all slain or captured newly;
At dawn against this armèd band they had gone forth to fight,
And all had closed in victory before the fall of night.
Close by the field where all day long the hard hot strife was raging,
A cottage by the wayside stood, half-desolate and aging;
And on its worn low steps there sat a silent girl, and mused
And watched the troop come slowly by, in weary line confused.
She looked like one who sought a friend,—she scanned each man's
face nearly;
High burned the color in her cheek, too high for sunset merely;
She sat so quiet, looked so warm, so flushed with secret heat,
It seemed she listened as she gazed, and felt her own heart beat.
## p. 12503 (#563) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12503
But as she saw the troop march by, and darkness round them steal-
ing,
To every file, to every man, her anxious eye appealing
Seemed muttering in a shy distress a question without speech,
More silent than a sigh itself, too anguished to beseech.
But when the men had all gone past, and not a word was spoken,
The poor girl's courage failed at last, and all her strength was
broken.
She wept not loud, but on her hand her weary forehead fell,
And large tears followed one by one as from a burning well.
"Why dost thou weep? For hope may break just where the gloom.
is deepest!
O daughter, hear thy mother's voice: a needless tear thou weepest;
He whom thy eyes were seeking for, whose face thou couldst not
see,
He is not dead: he thought of love, and still he lives for thee.
"He thought of love: I counseled him to shield himself from danger;
I taught him how to slip the fight, and leave them like a stranger;
By force they made him march with them,- but weep not, rave not
thus:
I know he will not choose to die from happy life and us. "
Shivering the maiden rose like one whom awful dreams awaken,—
As if some grim foreboding all her soul in her had shaken:
She lingered not; she sought the place where late had raged the fight,
And stole away and swiftly fled and vanished out of sight.
An hour went by, another hour; the night had closed around her;
The moon-shot clouds were silver-white, but darkness hung below
them.
"She lingers long: O daughter, come; thy toil is all in vain:
To-morrow, ere the dawn is red, thy bridegroom's here again! "
The daughter came; with silent steps she came to meet her mother:
The pallid eyelids strained no more with tears she fain would
smother;
But colder than the wind at night the hand that mother pressed,
And whiter than a winter cloud the maiden's cheek and breast.
"Make me a grave, O mother dear: my days on earth are over!
The only man that fled to-day-that coward—was my lover:
He thought of me and of himself, the battle-field he scanned,
And then betrayed his brothers' hope and shamed his father's land.
## p. 12504 (#564) ##########################################
12504
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
"When past our door the troop marched by, and I their ranks had
numbered,
I wept to think that like a man among the dead he slumbered;
I sorrowed, but my grief was mild-it had no bitter weight—
I would have lived a thousand years to mourn his noble fate.
"O mother, I have looked for him where'er the dead are lying,
But none of all the stricken bears his features, calm in dying.
Now will I live no more on earth in shame to sit and sigh;
He lies not there among the dead, and therefore I will die. "
Translation of Edmund W. Gosse.
THE OLD MAN'S RETURN
LIK
IKE birds of passage, after winter's days returning
To lake-land home and rest,
I come now unto thee, my foster-valley, yearning
For long-lost childhood's rest.
Full many a sea since then from thy dear strands has torn me,
And many a chilly year;
Full many a joy since then those far-off lands have borne me,
And many a bitter tear.
Here am I back once more. - Great heaven! there stands the
dwelling
Which erst my cradle bore,
The selfsame sound, bay, grove, and hilly range upswelling:
My world in days of yore.
All as before.
Trees in the selfsame verdant dresses
With the same crowns are crowned;
The tracts of heaven, and all the woodland's far recesses
With well-known songs resound.
There with the crowd of flower-nymphs still the wave is playing,
As erst so light and sweet;
And from dim wooded aits I hear the echoes straying
Glad youthful tones repeat.
All as before. But my own self no more remaineth,
Glad valley! as of old;
My passion quenched long since, no flame my cheek retaineth,
My pulse now beateth cold.
## p. 12505 (#565) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12505
I know not how to prize the charms that thou possessest,
Thy lavish gifts of yore;
What thou through whispering brooks or through thy flowers
expressest,
I understand no more.
Dead is mine ear to harp-strings which thy gods are ringing
From out thy streamlet clear;
No more the elfin hosts, all frolicsome and singing,
Upon the meads appear.
I went so rich, so rich from thee, my cottage lowly,
So full of hopes untold;
And with me feelings, nourished in thy shadows holy,
That promised days of gold.
The memory of thy wondrous springtimes went beside me,
And of thy peaceful ways,
And thy good spirits, borne within me, seemed to guide me,
E'en from my earliest days.
And what have I brought back from yon world wide and dreary?
A snow-incumbered head,
A heart with sorrow sickened and with falsehood weary,
And longing to be dead.
I crave no more of all that once was in my keeping,
Dear mother! but one thing:
Grant me a grave, where still thy fountain fair is weeping,
And where thy poplars spring!
So shall I dream on, mother! to thy calm breast owing
A faithful shelter then,
And live in every floweret, from mine ashes growing,
A guiltless life again.
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
THE SWAN
F
ROM cloud with purple-sprinkled rim,
A swan, in calm delight,
Sank down upon the river's brim,
And sang in June, one night.
Of Northlands' beauty was his song,
How glad their skies, their air;
## p. 12506 (#566) ##########################################
12506
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
How day forgets, the whole night long,
To go to rest out there;
How shadows there, both rich and deep,
'Neath birch and alder fall;
How gold-beams o'er each inlet sweep,
How cool the billows all;
How fair it is, how passing fair,
To own there one true friend!
How faithfulness is home-bred there,
And thither longs to wend!
When thus from wave to wave his note,
His simple praise-song rang,
Swift fawned he on his fond mate's throat,
And thus, methought, he sang:-
What more? though of thy life's short dream
No tales the ages bring,
Yet hast thou loved on Northlands' stream,
And sung songs there in spring!
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
THE WORK-GIRL
Ο"
H, IF with church bells ringing clear,
I did but stand in feast-day gear,
And saw the night and darkness fly,
And Sunday's lovely dawn draw nigh!
For then my weekly toil were past;
To matins I might go at last,
And meet him by the church-yard, too,
Who missed his friend the whole week through.
There long beforehand does he bide
Alone upon the church bank's side,
And scans across the marshes long
The sledges' and the people's throng.
And she for whom he looks am I;
The crowds increase, the troop draws nigh,
When 'midst them I am seen to stand,
And gladly reach to him my hand.
## p. 12507 (#567) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12507
Now, merry cricket, sing thy lay
Until the wick is burnt away,
And I may to my bed repair
And dream about my sweetheart there.
I sit and spin, but cannot get
Half through the skein of wool as yet;
When I shall spin it out, God knows,
Or when the tardy eve will close!
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
MY LIFE
TRUGGLING o'er an open grave,
S Sailing o'er an angry wave,
Toiling on with aimless aim,
Oh, my life, I name thy name!
Longing fills the sailor's soul,
Seas before his eyesight roll,-
"Lo, behind yon purple haze
Higher sights shall meet my gaze.
"I shall near a better strand,
Light and freedom's happy land. ”.
Swelled the sail, expectance laughed,
Towards the boundless sped the craft.
Struggling o'er an open grave,
Sailing o'er an angry wave,
Toiling on with aimless aim,—
O my life, I name thy name!
Ah, the haven calm and clear,
Peace of heart in bygone year,
Hope's gold coast, ah! hidden spot,
Never reached, and ne'er forgot!
Billows check the sailor's course,
Overhead the tempest hoarse:
Still is yonder purple haze
Far as ever from his gaze!
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
## p. 12508 (#568) ##########################################
12508
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
IDYLL
H
OME the maid came from her lover's meeting,
Came with reddened hands. The mother questioned,
"Wherewith have thy hands got reddened, Maiden? »
Said the maiden, "I have plucked some roses,
And upon the thorns my hands have wounded. "
She again came from her lover's meeting,
Came with crimson lips. The mother questioned.
"Wherewith have thy lips got crimson, Maiden ? »
Said the maiden, “I have eaten strawberries,
And my lips I with their juice have painted. "
She again came from her lover's meeting,
Came with pallid cheeks. The mother questioned,
"Wherewith are thy cheeks so pallid, Maiden ? »
Said the maiden, “Make a grave, O mother!
Hide me there, and place a cross thereover,
And cut on the cross what now I tell thee:-
-
"Once she came home, and her hands were reddened,
For betwixt her lover's hands they reddened.
Once she came home, and her lips were crimson,
'Neath her lover's lips they had grown crimson.
Last she came home, and her cheeks were pallid,
For they blanched beneath her lover's treason. "
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
COUNSELS
C
OUNSELS three the mother gave her daughter:
Not to sigh, and not be discontented,
And to kiss no young man whatsoever.
Mother, if thy daughter trespass never,
Trespass never 'gainst your last-named counsel,
She will trespass 'gainst the first two, surely.
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
## p. 12509 (#569) ##########################################
12509
JOHN RUSKIN
(1819-)
BY JOHN C. VAN DYKE
T IS not given every man to date an epoch from himself, to'
turn aside old conceptions, and to swing the whole current
of thought into a new channel. The epoch-making men are
few in any century; they themselves seldom realize the value of the
work they are doing, and the public recognizes it perhaps last of all.
Each one of them, as he appears, undergoes the usual misunderstand-
ing at the hands of both friends and foes. There are assertions and
denials, attacks and defenses, adulation and abuse; until at last it has
passed into a proverb that a man cannot be summed up justly by
contemporary thought. Perhaps no one in the nineteenth century has
suffered so much from misunderstanding and indiscriminate criticism
as John Ruskin. His work is done, though he himself is living out a
quiet old age at Brantwood; but the value of that work and the place
of the worker are far from being accurately estimated. The world
persists in considering him only as an art critic; while he himself
thought his best endeavor to have been in the field of political econ-
omy. It is not impossible that both of these conclusions are wide of
the mark. One may venture to think that his greatest service to
mankind has been his revelation of the beauties of nature; and that
his enduring fame will rest upon no theories of art or of human
well-being, but upon his masterful handling of the English language.
Whatever feature of his activity may be thought the best, it cannot
be denied that he has been a powerful force in many departments:
a prophet with a denunciatory and enunciatory creed, a leader who
has counted his followers by the thousands, a writer who has left
a deeper stamp upon the language than almost any Englishman of
this century.
Mr. Ruskin's parentage, early training, and education are recorded
in 'Præterita' (1885-9),- his fascinating but incomplete autobiogra-
phy. In his childhood his Scotch mother made him read the Bible
again and again; and to this he thinks was due his habit of taking
pains, and his literary taste. Peace, obedience, and faith, with fixed
attention in both mind and eye, were the virtues inculcated by his
early training. The defects of that training he puts down as-
## p. 12510 (#570) ##########################################
12510
JOHN RUSKIN
nothing to love, nothing to endure of either pain, patience, or misery,
nothing taught him in a social way, no independence of action, and
no responsibility. At fourteen Mr. Telford, one of his father's part-
ners in the wine trade, gave him a copy of Rogers's 'Italy' with
Turner's illustrations; and his parents forever after held Mr. Telford
personally responsible for the art tastes of the son. They had pre-
destined him to the Church. "He might have been a bishop," was
the elder Ruskin's sigh.
His study of art practically began with an admiration for Turner.
He knew a great deal about nature, and had met his great passion,
the Alps, before he was twenty; and he had also studied drawing
under Runciman, Copley Fielding, and Harding. His earliest writings
were poetical; and as an Oxford student he wrote the pretty story,
'The King of the Golden River' (1841), besides making some contri-
butions to magazine literature: but his first important effort was when
as the Oxford graduate he put forth the first volume of 'Modern
Painters (1843). Ostensibly this was an inquiry into the object and
means of landscape painting, the spirit which should govern its pro-
duction, the appearances of nature, the discussion of what is true in
art as revealed by nature; but in reality it was a defense of Turner
at the expense of almost every other landscape painter, ancient or
modern. It came at a time when people knew very little about art,
and thought it a mystery understood only by the priests of the craft;
but Mr. Ruskin burst the door wide open, and talked about the con-
tents of the high altar in a language that any one could understand.
It was an energetic and eloquent statement of what he believed to
be truth. From his studies of nature he came to think that truth was
the one and only desideratum in art; and the whole argument and
illustration of 'Modern Painters' is hinged upon nature-truth and its
appearance in the works of Turner. It was nearly twenty years
before the five volumes of the work were completed, and during that
time Mr. Ruskin's views had broadened and changed, so that there is
something of contradiction in the volumes; but it to-day stands as his
most forceful work. Philosophical it is not, because lacking in sys-
tem; scientific it is not, because lacking in fundamental principles.
The logic of it is often weak, the positiveness of statement often
annoying, the digressions and side issues often wearisome; yet with
all this it contains some of his keenest observations on nature, his
most suggestive conceits, and his most brilliant prose passages. It
made something of a sensation, and Mr. Ruskin came into prominence
at once.
While 'Modern Painters' was being written, he made frequent
journeys to Switzerland to study the Alps, and to Italy to study the
old Italian masters. From being at first a naturalist and a prophet
## p. 12511 (#571) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12511
art.
of modernity, he soon became an admirer of Gothic and Renaissance
Turner and Fra Angelico were almost antithetical. He tried to
reconcile them on the principle of their truthfulness; but one had put
forth an individual truth, the other a symbolic truth, and Mr. Ruskin
never brought them together without the appearance of incongruity.
The more he studied Italian painting, the more he became impreg-
nated with the moral and the religious in art. In a letter he puts it
down that what is wanted in English art is a "total change of char-
acter. It is Giotto and Ghirlandajo and Angelico that you want and
must want until this disgusting nineteenth century has—I can't say
breathed, but steamed, its last. " The moral element and the sincerity
of fifteenth-century work quite captivated him, and he began to fail
in sympathy for modern products. He started the hopeless task of
turning the art world backward, and reviving the truth and faith of
the early Italians. But the world never turns backward successfully.
Italian art was good art because it did not turn backward; because it
revealed its own time and people, and was imbued with the spirit of
its age.
That spirit died with the Renaissance. The nineteenth cen-
tury could not revive it. It had a spirit of its own which it revealed,
and which Mr. Ruskin opposed all his life. It was not moral enough
or reverent enough or true enough; in short, it was not like the old,
and therefore it was wrong.
About 1850 the Pre-Raphaelites began to attract attention. They
were not followers of Mr. Ruskin, though they were a part of the
new movement which he more than any other man had started.
His advice to go to nature-selecting nothing, rejecting nothing,
scorning nothing-had been accepted by many landscapists, and it
undoubtedly somewhat affected the Pre-Raphaelites. He defended
their work against popular ridicule in his spirited 'Pre-Raphaelitism'
(1851); and tried to show that they and Turner were on the same
naturalistic basis, and that his old ideas of nature and his new ideas
of Italian art were not contradictory. In principle he seemed to have
eliminated the personal equation (the dominant factor in nineteenth-
century art); and what really attracted him in Pre-Raphaelitism was
the combination of literal detail with the imitated sincerity of the
early Italians. The Pre-Raphaelites as a body soon drifted apart;
and Mr. Ruskin's teaching, as regards their work, was condemned as
impractical and impossible. It did not reckon with the nineteenth-
century spirit.
Painting alone was not sufficient to occupy so active and many-
sided an intellect; and Mr. Ruskin's first twenty years of authorship
produced many books on many subjects. He wrote on the Alps,
published his 'Poems (1850), reviewed books, issued 'Notes on the
Construction of Sheepfolds' (1851), — the misleading title of a plea for
## p. 12512 (#572) ##########################################
12512
JOHN RUSKIN
church unity in England, and wrote his 'Seven Lamps of Archi-
tecture' (1849) and his 'Stones of Venice' (1850-53). The last-named
work is not a manual of history or a traveler's guide; but the expres-
sion of Mr. Ruskin's ideas of life, society, and nationality as shown
in architecture. The ideas are somewhat smothered by beautiful
language, and many side issues in parenthesis; but they are at least
original, and the result of his own observations. He spent much
time and labor in Venice taking measurements and trying to recon-
cile conflicting styles on a single basis; but the task was too colossal.
Venetian architecture is a medley of all styles. Mr. Ruskin did what
he could, and the 'Stones of Venice' was the result.
forms the subject of poems by several eminent Persian poets.
## p. 12490 (#548) ##########################################
12490
JALAL-AD-DIN RÜMİ
In the eye of the covetous man it would not be full. If the
shell lay not contented in its bed, it would never be filled with
the pearl.
He whose garment is rent by Love Divine - he only is
cleansed from avarice, and the multitude of sins.
Hail to thee, Love, our sweet insanity! O thou, the physician
of all our ills!
Thou, our Plato and our Galen, the medicine of our pride and
our self-estimation!
By Love the earthly eye is raised to heaven, the hills begin
to dance, and the mountains are quickened.
Could I join my lip to that of one who breatheth my breath,
I would utter words as melodious as my reed.
When the rose-garden is withered, and the rose is gone, thou
wilt hear no longer news of the nightingale.
How should I be able any longer to retain my understanding,
when the light of my beloved one no longer shineth upon me?
If the lover no longer receiveth his nourishment, he must
perish like a bird deprived of its food.
Translation of S. Robinson.
THE MERCHANT AND THE PARROT
From the Masnavi
T
HERE was a merchant owned a parrot which was kept shut
up in a cage, the paroquet's world.
On a certain occasion the merchant made preparations
for a journey, beginning with Hindustan.
Calling each of his man-servants and his maid-servants, he
said: "What am I to bring back to you? Let me know. "
Each expressed a wish according to his own choice; and the
good man promised something to every one.
Turning to the poll-parrot, he said: "And what gift am I to
bring you from the land of Hindustan ? »
Polly replied: "When you see those parrots there, make my
situation known to them, and
say:
There is a certain parrot who is longing for you, but is
confined from the free vault of heaven, shut up in a cage.
<< < He sends you his greetings, and he asks of you direction
and some means of deliverance. '
--
## p. 12491 (#549) ##########################################
JALAL-AD-DIN RŪMI
12491
"And add: 'Does it seem fair for me to be wasting my life
in longing and to die here far away?
"Am I to be allowed to continue in durance vile, while you
are in green nooks among the boughs?
"Is this to be the loyalty of friends-for me to be in a
cage, and you out in the gardens?
"Recall to memory that grieving bird, O ye grandees, in
the morning draft amid your delightsome nooks. '»
[The parrot proceeds then to expatiate upon love, and upon the union
existing between souls. ]
The merchant received the message, with its salutation, to
Ideliver to the bird's kindred.
And when he came to the far-off land of Hindustan, he saw
in the desert parrots, many a one.
Stopping his beast and raising his voice, he delivered his sal-
utation and his message.
Then, wonderful to relate, one of the parrots began a great
fluttering, and down it fell, dead, and breathed its last.
The merchant sore repented of telling his message, and said:
Tis only for the death of a living creature I am come.
<<
"There was perchance a connection between these parrots,
two bodies with but a single soul.
"Ah, why did I do it! Why did I carry out my commission!
I am helplessly grieved at telling this. "
[The merchant moralizes at some length upon life, and upon the soul and
its relation to God. ]
When the merchant had finished up his business abroad, he
returned to his glad home.
And to every man-servant he presented some gift, and to
each maid-servant he handed out a gift.
Then up spake the Polly: "What gift for the prisoner?
What did you see and what did you say? Tell me that. "
Said the merchant: "Ah me! That whereof I repent me,
for which I could bite my hand and gnaw my fingers.
and
"Why did I, through ignorance and folly, vainly carry that
idle message? "
Said Poll: "Merchant, what's this repentance about? And
what has brought about this passion and grief? "
## p. 12492 (#550) ##########################################
12492
JALĀL-AD-DÎN RŪMI
He replied: “I told that plaintive story of yours to a flock of
parrots that looked just like you.
"And a certain parrot felt so keenly for your distress that its
heart broke in twain, and it fluttered and dropped dead.
"I felt deep regret. What was this I had said? But what
does regret help, whatever I said? "
[The merchant moralizes at some length. ]
As soon as the parrot heard what that bird had done, he too
fluttered and dropped down and grew cold.
When the merchant observed it thus fallen, he started up and
flung down his turban upon the ground.
And when he saw the bird in such plight and condition, he
started to tear the very clothes at his throat,
Saying: "O Polly, my pretty creature, what is this, alas, that
has happened thee? Why art thou thus?
"Ah, alas, my sweet-voiced bird! Ah, alas, my companion
and confidant!
"Ah, alas, my sweet-note bird; my spirit of joy and angel of
the garden! "
[He continues to lament over the departed bird. But it must have fallen
in accordance with the Divine Will. Man's dependence upon God. ]
Thereupon the merchant tossed the bird out of the cage; but
the paroquet instantly flew up on a high bough. The merchant
was dumbfounded at the bird's conduct; amazed and at a loss, he
marveled at the mystery of the bird.
And looking upward he said: "My nightingale, give some
explanation of what you have done!
>>>
Said the parrot: "That bird it was gave me counsel how I
should act; in effect, this: 'Rid yourself of your speech, voice,
and talking;
"For it is your voice that has brought you into captivity. '
And then to prove its counsel it died itself. "
[The parrot dilates further in religious manner upon the changes and
chances of mortal life. ]
Then Polly gave one or two bits more of guileless advice, and
now said:-
"Adieu, good-by! Farewell, my merchant; you have done a
mercy to me: you have set me free from bonds and oppression.
## p. 12493 (#551) ##########################################
JALAL-AD-DIN RŪMI
12493
"Farewell, O merchant: I am now going home; and one day.
mayest thou become free just like me. "
The merchant responded: "To God's keeping go thou; thou
hast taught me from this instant a new path of life. "
Version by A. V. W. Jackson.
THE CHINESE AND ROMAN ARTISTS; OR, THE MIRROR OF
THE HEART
HIS contest heed, of Chinaman's and Roman's art.
THIS
The Chinese urged they had the greater painters'
skill;
The Romans pleaded they of art the throne did fill.
The sovereign heard them both: decreed a contest fair;
Results the palm should give the worthiest of the pair.
The parties twain a wordy war waged in debate;
The Romans' show of science did predominate.
The Chinamen then asked to have a house assigned
For their especial use; and one for Rome designed.
Th' allotted houses stood on either side one street;
In one the Chinese, one the Roman artists meet.
The Chinese asked a hundred paints for their art's use:
The sovereign his resources would not them refuse.
Each morning from the treasury, rich colors' store
Was served out to the Chinese till they asked no more.
The Romans argued, "Color or design is vain:
We simply have to banish soil and filth amain. "
They closed their gate. To burnish then they set them-
selves;
As heaven's vault, simplicity filled all their shelves:
Vast difference there is 'twixt colors and not one.
The colors are as clouds; simplicity's the moon.
Whatever tinge you see embellishing the clouds,
You know comes from the sun, the moon, or stars in
crowds.
At length the Chinamen their task had quite fulfilled;
With joy intense their hearts did beat, their bosoms
thrilled.
The sovereign came, inspected all their rich designs,
And lost his heart with wonder at their talents' signs.
## p. 12494 (#552) ##########################################
12494
JALĀL-AD-DİN RŪMİ
He then passed to the Romans, that his eyes might see;
The curtains were withdrawn to show whate'er might be.
The Chinese paintings all, their whole designs in full,
Reflected truly were on that high-burnished wall.
Whatever was depicted by the Chinese art
Was reproduced by mirrors, perfect every part.
Those Romans are our mystics, know, my worthy friend:
No art, no learning; study, none: but gain their end.
They polish well their bosoms, burnish bright their hearts,
Remove all stain of lust, of self, pride, hate's deep smarts.
That mirror's purity prefigures their hearts' trust;
With endless images reflections it incrust.
Translation of J. W. Redhouse.
## p. 12495 (#553) ##########################################
12495
YOCK
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
(1804-1877)
BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
HE Grand Duchy of Finland, "torn like a bloody shield from
the heart of Sweden" in 1809, by the ruthless despot who
was then all-powerful in Europe, and who now, by the irony
of fate, lies buried in Paris beneath a sarcophagus of Finnish por-
phyry, has not become Russianized to any considerable extent, and still
looks to the old mother-country for its social and intellectual ideals.
This fact is due in part to the force of his-
torical association upon the mind of a sim-
ple and conservative race, and in part to
the fact that the Russian treatment of the
conquered province has been fairly lenient,
and most strikingly contrasted with the
repressive policy pursued toward Russian
Poland. It is not, then, as surprising as
might at first sight appear, that the greatest
name in Swedish literature should belong
to a native of Finland, who was but five
years of age at the time of the Russian
annexation.
JOHAN RUNEBERG
Johan Ludvig Runeberg was born Febru-
ary 5th, 1804, at Jakobsstad, a small sea-
port town on the Gulf of Bothnia. He was the oldest of the six
children of a merchant captain in reduced circumstances. He went
to school at Vasa, and in 1822 to the university at Åbo, supporting
himself in part by tutoring. He was so poor that he literally lived on
potatoes for months at a time. He took his doctor's degree in 1827,
and soon thereafter was betrothed to Fredrika Tengström, a woman
who afterwards attained some celebrity as a writer on her own
account. The year that Runeberg left the university was also the
year of the great fire that destroyed the greater part of the capital,
and led to the transfer of both university and seat of government to
Helsingfors. The years immediately following were decisive for the
poet's development, since they took him to Sarkijarvi, a town far to
the north in the heart of Finland, where he came into close contact
## p. 12496 (#554) ##########################################
12496
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
with the purest type of the Finnish peasantry.
In this poverty-
stricken wilderness, where men toiled incessantly for a subsistence so
precarious that those were deemed fortunate who did not have to live
upon bread made in large part from the bark of trees, the young
scholar learned really to know his fellow-countrymen, to enter inti-
mately into their humble lives, and to collect a wealth of first-hand
impressions that were afterwards to be turned to literary account.
The years at Sarkijarvi were devoted to earnest study, and to the com-
position of poems that showed his powers to be steadily ripening; so
that when, in 1830, he received a university appointment at Helsing-,
fors, he was able to bring back with him to civilization the material
for the volume of poems that saw the light in that year.
The publication of this volume was coincident with a stirring of
the Finnish national consciousness that promised much for the future.
The Russian yoke turned out to be no very heavy burden, since Fin-
land was left a considerable degree of autonomy, and since the Rus-
sian censorship was disposed to deal very leniently with the literary
expressions of national aspiration, and even with the most passionate
assertions of spiritual allegiance to the Swedish tradition.
This was
also the time when the consciousness of Finland was quickened by
the restoration of the 'Kalevala. ' Dr. Lönnrot, a physician and pro-
fessor at the university, had been traveling through the country for
the purpose of collecting fragments of folk-song and popular tradi-
tion, and had made the great discovery that there still existed on
the lips of the people a popular epic that had been transmitted from
generation to generation through the centuries,- an epic which was
comparable with, let us say, the 'Nibelungenlied,' and which the dis-
coverer pieced together and reconstructed into substantial unity.
This was clearly an opportune time for the appearance of a na-
tional poet; and in Runeberg the man of the hour was found. For-
tunately for the history of culture, he realized that the aspirations of
Finland were best to be furthered by an adherence to the Swedish
tongue, and so it came about that Sweden as well as Finland gained
a new poet of the first rank. The influence of Runeberg's appear-
ance upon Swedish literature in the narrower sense was also of the
utmost importance. Swedish poetry up to this time had been
divided into the two camps of Phosphorists and Gothics. The former
were the torch-bearers of the German romantic movement; and had,
if anything, made its mysticism more exaggerated and its extrava-
gance more unreal. If they had lived in New England, they would
have been called transcendentalists. The Gothics, on the other
hand, had sought to bring about a more strictly national revival of
letters; and as represented by Geijer and Tegnér, had endeavored to
reproduce the spirit of the past. But even Tegnér, great and true
## p. 12497 (#555) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12497
poet as he was, could not escape from the prevailing artificiality of
an essentially rhetorical age; and so the work of Runeberg, with its
vivid realism, its direct simplicity, and its fidelity to the facts of
nature and human life, came into Swedish poetry with a new note,
and helped to accomplish a sort of Wordsworthian revolution in lit-
erary standards.
The 'Poems' of 1830 were well received, and were followed in
the same year by a collection of Servian folk-songs, translated from
Goetze's German version. A certain kinship between the popular
poetry of Finland and Servia has been more than once pointed out.
In both cases the utterance of races that failed to reach the front in
the struggle for existence, the resemblance of the two bodies of folk-
song is noticeable when we consider their spirit alone, and is made
still more noticeable by their common employment of an unrhymed
trochaic verse. This work in Servian poetry is also significant be-
cause it was the direct inspiration of Runeberg's 'Idyll och Epigram,'
a collection of short original pieces in the same manner. In 1831 the
poet received a prize from the Swedish Academy for an epic com-
position called 'Grafven i Perrho' (The Grave in Perrho), and in
the same year married the woman to whom he had so long been
engaged. A university promotion also came to him, and he felt him-
self to be on the high-road to success. He soon became editor of a
newspaper as well; and for it he wrote most of the critical essays
and prose tales that occupy an honorable place among his collected
writings. His stay in Helsingfors lasted until 1837; and during this.
period he published, besides the works already mentioned, 'Elgskyt-
tarne (The Elk Hunters),-a beautiful epic in hexameters, which
more than once suggests Goethe's 'Hermann and Dorothea'; a sec-
ond collection of 'Poems'; a comedy in verse entitled 'Friaren från
Landet' (The Country Suitor); and the village idyl Hanna,' a love
story in hexameters, with an exquisitely beautiful dedication to
"the first love. " In 1837, Runeberg's friends obtained for him a pro-
fessorial appointment at the gymnasium of Borgå, a quiet country.
town on the Gulf of Finland, about thirty miles from Helsingfors.
Here he remained for the last forty years of his life, and his biogra-
phy from this time on is little more than an account of his successive
publications. Externally, there is almost nothing to record beyond.
the promotions which finally gave to him the rectorship of the gym-
nasium (followed after a few years of service by a pension for life),
and the trip to Sweden in 1851, which was the only occasion upon
which the poet ever left his native Finland. He died May 6th, 1877,
after having been in precarious health for several years.
Four years after his removal to Borgå, Runeberg published Jul-
qvällen (Christmas Eve), the last of his hexameter narratives,—a
XXI-782
## p. 12498 (#556) ##########################################
12498
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
somewhat less successful idyl than its predecessors. A more import-
ant work, also produced in 1841, is the narrative poem 'Nadeschda,'
a study of Russian character and manners. It is written in a variety
of unrhymed measures, and tells of the love of a nobleman for a
beautiful serf. In this work, and those that follow, the powers of
the poet have outgrown the somewhat close limitations of the idyl,
and seek to bring deeper and more tragic themes within their grasp.
In 'Nadeschda' we have for essential subject-matter the struggle
between the institution of serfdom and the freedom of the individ-
ual. In a still nobler poem, 'Kung Fjalar' (1845), we have the conflict
between the will of man and the inscrutable purposes of the gods,
presented in the spirit, although not in the form, of a Greek tragedy:
an 'Antigone' or an Edipus Rex. ' It is a poem in five cantos of
four-line unrhymed stanzas, telling how the king, defiant of the gods,
orders his infant daughter to be thrown into the sea, that he may
avert the doom that has been prophesied to come upon his race
through the child. But the child is rescued, and taken to the Ossi-
anic kingdom of Morven, where she grows to be a beautiful woman.
Twenty years later, King Fjalar's son conquers Morven, and bears
away the maiden as his bride. On the voyage homeward she tells
him the story of her rescue from the sea: and he, filled with horror
when he realizes that his bride is his sister, slays both her and him-
self. The old king, conquered at last by fate, puts an end to his life,
finally recognizing the existence of a power higher than his own.
"
The poems thus far described, together with a third volume of
short pieces, bring us to the year 1848, when was published the first
part of 'Fänrik Stål's Sägner' (the Tales of Ensign Stål), Runeberg's
greatest work. The second part bears the date of 1860. This collec-
tion of poems, thirty-four in number (besides one that was suppressed
for personal reasons), deals with episodes of the war which ended
with the annexation of Finland to Russia. The several poems are
supposed to be related by a veteran of the war to an eager youth
who comes day after day and hangs upon the lips of the story-teller.
They are tales of a heroic age still fresh in the recollection of the
poet's hearers, tales of famous battles and individual exploits, of his-
torical personages and obscure peasants united by a common devotion
and a common sacrifice, of the maiden who is consoled for her lover's
death by the thought that his life was given for his fatherland, and
of the boy who is impatient to grow up that he too may give him-
self to his country's cause. The poems are dramatic, pathetic, even
humorous by turn; breathing a strain of the purest patriotism, and
flowing in numbers so musical that they fix themselves forever in the
memory.
And besides all this, they are so simple in form and vocab-
ulary that they reach the heart of the unlettered as well as of the
## p. 12499 (#557) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12499
cultured; so deep in their sympathy with the elementary joys and
griefs of human-kind that they found a widely responsive echo from
the beginning, and still constitute the most treasured possession of
Swedish literature. Indeed, the first poem of them all, Vårt Land'
(Our Country) became at once, and has ever since remained, the
national song of both Finn and Swede, bound together by the gen-
ius of the poet in a closer union than the old political tie. A close
reproduction of the form of this poem, and perhaps something of
its beauty as well, may be found in the following translation of its
closing stanzas:-
-
"Here all about us lies this land,
Our eyes may see it here;
We have but to stretch forth our hand,
And blithely point to sea and strand,
And say, Behold this land so near,
Our fatherland so dear.
"And were we called to dwell on high,
Of heaven's own blue made free,
To dance with stars that deck the sky,
Where falls no tear, and breathes no sigh,—
We still should yearn, poor though it be,
This land of ours to see.
"O land! thou thousand-lakèd land,
•
With song and virtue clad,
On life's wild sea our own safe strand,
Land of our past, our future's land,
If thou art poor, yet be not sad,—
Be joyous, blithe, and glad.
"Yet shall thy flower in beauty ope
Its petals without stain;
Our love shall with thy darkness cope,
And be thy light, thy joy, thy hope,
And this our patriotic strain
To nobler heights attain. "
This song Mr. Gosse declares to be "one of the noblest strains of
patriotic verse ever indited; it lifts Runeberg at once to the level
of Callinus or Campbell,-to the first rank of poets in whom art
and ardor, national sentiment and power of utterance, are equally
blended. "
The works remaining to be mentioned include a volume of
'Smärre Berättelser (Short Stories: 1854), the sixty-odd hymns writ-
ten for the official Lutheran hymn-book of Finland, and the two
plays, 'Kan Ej' (Cannot: 1862) and 'Kungarne på Salamis' (The
## p. 12500 (#558) ##########################################
12500
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
Kings at Salamis: 1863). The former of these plays is a senti-
mental domestic comedy in two acts, and in rhymed verse. The lat-
ter is a five-act tragedy written upon a Greek theme in the classical
manner, and in iambic hexameter verse. It was the last work of any
importance published by Runeberg, and one of the noblest of all
his works, worthily crowning a great career.
Etta laye
ENSIGN STÅL
I
TOOK such books as first I found,
Merely to while the time along;
Which written by no name renowned,
Treated of Finland's war and wrong;·
'Twas simply stitched, and as by grace,
Had 'mid bound volumes found a place; -
And in my room, with little heed,
The pages carelessly surveyed,
And all by chance began to read
Of noble Savolak's Brigade.
I read a page, then word by word,
My heart unto its depths was stirred.
I saw a people who could hold
The loss of all, save honor, light;
A troop, 'mid hunger-pangs and cold,
Yet still victorious in the fight.
On, on from page to page I sped,
I could have kissed the words I read.
In danger's hour, in battle's scathe,
What courage showed this little band;
What patriot love, what matchless faith
Didst thou inspire, poor native land;
What generous, steadfast love was born
In those thou fed'st on bark and corn!
Into new realms my fancy broke
Where all a magic influence bore,
And in my heart a life awoke
Whose rapture was unknown before.
·
## p. 12501 (#559) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12501
As if on wings the day careered,
But oh! how short the book appeared!
With close of day the book was done,
Yet was my spirit all aglow:
Much yet remained to ponder on,
Much to inquire about and know,
Much yet of darkness wrapped the whole;
I went to seek old Cornet Stål.
He sat, as oft he sat before,
Busily bending o'er his net
And at the opening of the door,
A glance displeased my coming met;
It seemed as though his thought might say,
"Is there no peace by night or day! "
But mischief from my mind was far,-
I came in very different mood:
"I've read of Finland's latest war-
-
And in my veins runs Finnish blood!
To hear yet more I am on fire:
Pray can you tell what I desire ? »
Thus spoke I, and the aged man
Amazed his netting laid aside;
A flush passed o'er his features wan
As if of ancient martial pride:
"Yes," said he, "I can witness bear,
If so you will, for I was there! »
His bed of straw my seat became,
And he began with joy to tell
Of Malm and Duncker's soul of flame,
And even deeds which theirs excel.
Bright was his eye and clear his brow,
His noble look is with me now.
Full many a bloody day he'd seen;
Had shared much peril and much woe;
In conquest, in defeat, had been,-
Defeat whose wounds no cure can know.
Much which the world doth quite forget
Lay in his faithful memory yet.
I listening sat, but naught I said,
And every word fell on my heart;
## p. 12501 (#560) ##########################################
12500
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
Kings at Salamis: 1863). The former of these plays
mental domestic comedy in two acts, and in rhymed ve
ter is a five-act tragedy written upon a Greek theme
manner, and in iambic hexameter verse. It was the
importance published by Runeberg, and one
his works, worthily crowning a great career.
ENSIGN
TOOK such books
Merely to wh
Which writte
Treated
'Twas simply
Had 'mid b
And in m
The
And a'
Of
ht or day! "
my coming met;
thought might say,
was far,-
I re
M▾
of the door,
६
sat before,
ser his net
of
t remained to ponder on,
was my spirit all aglow:
inquire about and know,
close of day the book was done,
old Cornet Stål.
darkness wrapped the whole;
But oh! how short the book appeared!
As if on wings the day careered,
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
newly;
une forth to fight,
e fall of night.
uly!
day long the hard hot strife was raging,
ue stood, half-desolate and aging;
w steps there sat a silent girl, and mused
ne troop come slowly by, in weary line confused.
aed like one who sought a friend,- she scanned each man's
face nearly;
high burned the color in her cheek, too high for sunset merely;
She sat so quiet, looked so warm, so flushed with secret heat,
It seemed she listened as she gazed, and felt her own heart beat.
## p. 12501 (#561) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12503
|
rt the book appeared!
the day careered,
HAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
Her on,
aglow:
book was done,
know,
whole;
aw the troop march by, and darkness round them steal-
g.
› every man, her anxious eye appealing
g in a shy distress a question without speech,
sigh itself, too anguished to beseech.
12501
d all gone
re failed
past, and not a word was spoken,
at last, and all her strength was
her hand her weary forehead fell,
e by one as from a burning well.
hope may break just where the gloom
ice: a needless tear thou weepest;
for, whose face thou couldst not
nd still he lives for thee.
shield himself from danger;
ve them like a stranger;
--but weep not, rave not
'fe and us. "
awful dreams awaken,—
ul in her had shaken:
place where late had raged the fight,
ued and vanished out of sight.
other hour; the night had closed around her;
clouds were silver-white, but darkness hung below
chem.
gers long: O daughter, come; thy toil is all in vain :
norrow, ere the dawn is red, thy bridegroom's here again! »
The daughter came; with silent steps she came to meet her mother:
The pallid eyelids strained no more with tears she fain would
smother;
But colder than the wind at night the hand that mother pressed,
And whiter than a winter cloud the maiden's cheek and breast.
"Make me a grave, O mother dear: my days on earth are over!
The only man that fled to-day-that coward - was my lover:
He thought of me and of himself, the battle-field he scanned,
And then betrayed his brothers' hope and shamed his father's land.
## p. 12502 (#562) ##########################################
12502
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
And half the night away had fled,
Before rose from him to part.
The threshold reached, he made a stand,
And pressed with joy my willing hand.
Since then, no better joy he had,
Than when he saw me by his side;
Together mourned we or were glad,
Together smoked as friends long tried.
He was in years, I in life's spring;
A student I, he more than king!
The tales which now I tell in song,
Through many a long and silent night,
Fell from the old man's faltering tongue
Beside the peat-fire's feeble light.
They speak what all may understand:
Receive them, thou dear native land.
Howitt's Translation.
THE VILLAGE GIRL
From Fänrik Ståls Sägner >
TH
HE sun went down and evening came, the quiet summer even;
A mass of glowing purple lay between the farms and heaven;
A weary troop of men went by, their day's hard labor done,-
Tired and contented, towards their home they wended one by one.
Their work was done, their harvest reaped, a goodly harvest truly!
A well-appointed band of foes all slain or captured newly;
At dawn against this armèd band they had gone forth to fight,
And all had closed in victory before the fall of night.
Close by the field where all day long the hard hot strife was raging,
A cottage by the wayside stood, half-desolate and aging;
And on its worn low steps there sat a silent girl, and mused
And watched the troop come slowly by, in weary line confused.
She looked like one who sought a friend,—she scanned each man's
face nearly;
High burned the color in her cheek, too high for sunset merely;
She sat so quiet, looked so warm, so flushed with secret heat,
It seemed she listened as she gazed, and felt her own heart beat.
## p. 12503 (#563) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12503
But as she saw the troop march by, and darkness round them steal-
ing,
To every file, to every man, her anxious eye appealing
Seemed muttering in a shy distress a question without speech,
More silent than a sigh itself, too anguished to beseech.
But when the men had all gone past, and not a word was spoken,
The poor girl's courage failed at last, and all her strength was
broken.
She wept not loud, but on her hand her weary forehead fell,
And large tears followed one by one as from a burning well.
"Why dost thou weep? For hope may break just where the gloom.
is deepest!
O daughter, hear thy mother's voice: a needless tear thou weepest;
He whom thy eyes were seeking for, whose face thou couldst not
see,
He is not dead: he thought of love, and still he lives for thee.
"He thought of love: I counseled him to shield himself from danger;
I taught him how to slip the fight, and leave them like a stranger;
By force they made him march with them,- but weep not, rave not
thus:
I know he will not choose to die from happy life and us. "
Shivering the maiden rose like one whom awful dreams awaken,—
As if some grim foreboding all her soul in her had shaken:
She lingered not; she sought the place where late had raged the fight,
And stole away and swiftly fled and vanished out of sight.
An hour went by, another hour; the night had closed around her;
The moon-shot clouds were silver-white, but darkness hung below
them.
"She lingers long: O daughter, come; thy toil is all in vain:
To-morrow, ere the dawn is red, thy bridegroom's here again! "
The daughter came; with silent steps she came to meet her mother:
The pallid eyelids strained no more with tears she fain would
smother;
But colder than the wind at night the hand that mother pressed,
And whiter than a winter cloud the maiden's cheek and breast.
"Make me a grave, O mother dear: my days on earth are over!
The only man that fled to-day-that coward—was my lover:
He thought of me and of himself, the battle-field he scanned,
And then betrayed his brothers' hope and shamed his father's land.
## p. 12504 (#564) ##########################################
12504
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
"When past our door the troop marched by, and I their ranks had
numbered,
I wept to think that like a man among the dead he slumbered;
I sorrowed, but my grief was mild-it had no bitter weight—
I would have lived a thousand years to mourn his noble fate.
"O mother, I have looked for him where'er the dead are lying,
But none of all the stricken bears his features, calm in dying.
Now will I live no more on earth in shame to sit and sigh;
He lies not there among the dead, and therefore I will die. "
Translation of Edmund W. Gosse.
THE OLD MAN'S RETURN
LIK
IKE birds of passage, after winter's days returning
To lake-land home and rest,
I come now unto thee, my foster-valley, yearning
For long-lost childhood's rest.
Full many a sea since then from thy dear strands has torn me,
And many a chilly year;
Full many a joy since then those far-off lands have borne me,
And many a bitter tear.
Here am I back once more. - Great heaven! there stands the
dwelling
Which erst my cradle bore,
The selfsame sound, bay, grove, and hilly range upswelling:
My world in days of yore.
All as before.
Trees in the selfsame verdant dresses
With the same crowns are crowned;
The tracts of heaven, and all the woodland's far recesses
With well-known songs resound.
There with the crowd of flower-nymphs still the wave is playing,
As erst so light and sweet;
And from dim wooded aits I hear the echoes straying
Glad youthful tones repeat.
All as before. But my own self no more remaineth,
Glad valley! as of old;
My passion quenched long since, no flame my cheek retaineth,
My pulse now beateth cold.
## p. 12505 (#565) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12505
I know not how to prize the charms that thou possessest,
Thy lavish gifts of yore;
What thou through whispering brooks or through thy flowers
expressest,
I understand no more.
Dead is mine ear to harp-strings which thy gods are ringing
From out thy streamlet clear;
No more the elfin hosts, all frolicsome and singing,
Upon the meads appear.
I went so rich, so rich from thee, my cottage lowly,
So full of hopes untold;
And with me feelings, nourished in thy shadows holy,
That promised days of gold.
The memory of thy wondrous springtimes went beside me,
And of thy peaceful ways,
And thy good spirits, borne within me, seemed to guide me,
E'en from my earliest days.
And what have I brought back from yon world wide and dreary?
A snow-incumbered head,
A heart with sorrow sickened and with falsehood weary,
And longing to be dead.
I crave no more of all that once was in my keeping,
Dear mother! but one thing:
Grant me a grave, where still thy fountain fair is weeping,
And where thy poplars spring!
So shall I dream on, mother! to thy calm breast owing
A faithful shelter then,
And live in every floweret, from mine ashes growing,
A guiltless life again.
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
THE SWAN
F
ROM cloud with purple-sprinkled rim,
A swan, in calm delight,
Sank down upon the river's brim,
And sang in June, one night.
Of Northlands' beauty was his song,
How glad their skies, their air;
## p. 12506 (#566) ##########################################
12506
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
How day forgets, the whole night long,
To go to rest out there;
How shadows there, both rich and deep,
'Neath birch and alder fall;
How gold-beams o'er each inlet sweep,
How cool the billows all;
How fair it is, how passing fair,
To own there one true friend!
How faithfulness is home-bred there,
And thither longs to wend!
When thus from wave to wave his note,
His simple praise-song rang,
Swift fawned he on his fond mate's throat,
And thus, methought, he sang:-
What more? though of thy life's short dream
No tales the ages bring,
Yet hast thou loved on Northlands' stream,
And sung songs there in spring!
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
THE WORK-GIRL
Ο"
H, IF with church bells ringing clear,
I did but stand in feast-day gear,
And saw the night and darkness fly,
And Sunday's lovely dawn draw nigh!
For then my weekly toil were past;
To matins I might go at last,
And meet him by the church-yard, too,
Who missed his friend the whole week through.
There long beforehand does he bide
Alone upon the church bank's side,
And scans across the marshes long
The sledges' and the people's throng.
And she for whom he looks am I;
The crowds increase, the troop draws nigh,
When 'midst them I am seen to stand,
And gladly reach to him my hand.
## p. 12507 (#567) ##########################################
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
12507
Now, merry cricket, sing thy lay
Until the wick is burnt away,
And I may to my bed repair
And dream about my sweetheart there.
I sit and spin, but cannot get
Half through the skein of wool as yet;
When I shall spin it out, God knows,
Or when the tardy eve will close!
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
MY LIFE
TRUGGLING o'er an open grave,
S Sailing o'er an angry wave,
Toiling on with aimless aim,
Oh, my life, I name thy name!
Longing fills the sailor's soul,
Seas before his eyesight roll,-
"Lo, behind yon purple haze
Higher sights shall meet my gaze.
"I shall near a better strand,
Light and freedom's happy land. ”.
Swelled the sail, expectance laughed,
Towards the boundless sped the craft.
Struggling o'er an open grave,
Sailing o'er an angry wave,
Toiling on with aimless aim,—
O my life, I name thy name!
Ah, the haven calm and clear,
Peace of heart in bygone year,
Hope's gold coast, ah! hidden spot,
Never reached, and ne'er forgot!
Billows check the sailor's course,
Overhead the tempest hoarse:
Still is yonder purple haze
Far as ever from his gaze!
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
## p. 12508 (#568) ##########################################
12508
JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG
IDYLL
H
OME the maid came from her lover's meeting,
Came with reddened hands. The mother questioned,
"Wherewith have thy hands got reddened, Maiden? »
Said the maiden, "I have plucked some roses,
And upon the thorns my hands have wounded. "
She again came from her lover's meeting,
Came with crimson lips. The mother questioned.
"Wherewith have thy lips got crimson, Maiden ? »
Said the maiden, “I have eaten strawberries,
And my lips I with their juice have painted. "
She again came from her lover's meeting,
Came with pallid cheeks. The mother questioned,
"Wherewith are thy cheeks so pallid, Maiden ? »
Said the maiden, “Make a grave, O mother!
Hide me there, and place a cross thereover,
And cut on the cross what now I tell thee:-
-
"Once she came home, and her hands were reddened,
For betwixt her lover's hands they reddened.
Once she came home, and her lips were crimson,
'Neath her lover's lips they had grown crimson.
Last she came home, and her cheeks were pallid,
For they blanched beneath her lover's treason. "
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
COUNSELS
C
OUNSELS three the mother gave her daughter:
Not to sigh, and not be discontented,
And to kiss no young man whatsoever.
Mother, if thy daughter trespass never,
Trespass never 'gainst your last-named counsel,
She will trespass 'gainst the first two, surely.
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.
## p. 12509 (#569) ##########################################
12509
JOHN RUSKIN
(1819-)
BY JOHN C. VAN DYKE
T IS not given every man to date an epoch from himself, to'
turn aside old conceptions, and to swing the whole current
of thought into a new channel. The epoch-making men are
few in any century; they themselves seldom realize the value of the
work they are doing, and the public recognizes it perhaps last of all.
Each one of them, as he appears, undergoes the usual misunderstand-
ing at the hands of both friends and foes. There are assertions and
denials, attacks and defenses, adulation and abuse; until at last it has
passed into a proverb that a man cannot be summed up justly by
contemporary thought. Perhaps no one in the nineteenth century has
suffered so much from misunderstanding and indiscriminate criticism
as John Ruskin. His work is done, though he himself is living out a
quiet old age at Brantwood; but the value of that work and the place
of the worker are far from being accurately estimated. The world
persists in considering him only as an art critic; while he himself
thought his best endeavor to have been in the field of political econ-
omy. It is not impossible that both of these conclusions are wide of
the mark. One may venture to think that his greatest service to
mankind has been his revelation of the beauties of nature; and that
his enduring fame will rest upon no theories of art or of human
well-being, but upon his masterful handling of the English language.
Whatever feature of his activity may be thought the best, it cannot
be denied that he has been a powerful force in many departments:
a prophet with a denunciatory and enunciatory creed, a leader who
has counted his followers by the thousands, a writer who has left
a deeper stamp upon the language than almost any Englishman of
this century.
Mr. Ruskin's parentage, early training, and education are recorded
in 'Præterita' (1885-9),- his fascinating but incomplete autobiogra-
phy. In his childhood his Scotch mother made him read the Bible
again and again; and to this he thinks was due his habit of taking
pains, and his literary taste. Peace, obedience, and faith, with fixed
attention in both mind and eye, were the virtues inculcated by his
early training. The defects of that training he puts down as-
## p. 12510 (#570) ##########################################
12510
JOHN RUSKIN
nothing to love, nothing to endure of either pain, patience, or misery,
nothing taught him in a social way, no independence of action, and
no responsibility. At fourteen Mr. Telford, one of his father's part-
ners in the wine trade, gave him a copy of Rogers's 'Italy' with
Turner's illustrations; and his parents forever after held Mr. Telford
personally responsible for the art tastes of the son. They had pre-
destined him to the Church. "He might have been a bishop," was
the elder Ruskin's sigh.
His study of art practically began with an admiration for Turner.
He knew a great deal about nature, and had met his great passion,
the Alps, before he was twenty; and he had also studied drawing
under Runciman, Copley Fielding, and Harding. His earliest writings
were poetical; and as an Oxford student he wrote the pretty story,
'The King of the Golden River' (1841), besides making some contri-
butions to magazine literature: but his first important effort was when
as the Oxford graduate he put forth the first volume of 'Modern
Painters (1843). Ostensibly this was an inquiry into the object and
means of landscape painting, the spirit which should govern its pro-
duction, the appearances of nature, the discussion of what is true in
art as revealed by nature; but in reality it was a defense of Turner
at the expense of almost every other landscape painter, ancient or
modern. It came at a time when people knew very little about art,
and thought it a mystery understood only by the priests of the craft;
but Mr. Ruskin burst the door wide open, and talked about the con-
tents of the high altar in a language that any one could understand.
It was an energetic and eloquent statement of what he believed to
be truth. From his studies of nature he came to think that truth was
the one and only desideratum in art; and the whole argument and
illustration of 'Modern Painters' is hinged upon nature-truth and its
appearance in the works of Turner. It was nearly twenty years
before the five volumes of the work were completed, and during that
time Mr. Ruskin's views had broadened and changed, so that there is
something of contradiction in the volumes; but it to-day stands as his
most forceful work. Philosophical it is not, because lacking in sys-
tem; scientific it is not, because lacking in fundamental principles.
The logic of it is often weak, the positiveness of statement often
annoying, the digressions and side issues often wearisome; yet with
all this it contains some of his keenest observations on nature, his
most suggestive conceits, and his most brilliant prose passages. It
made something of a sensation, and Mr. Ruskin came into prominence
at once.
While 'Modern Painters' was being written, he made frequent
journeys to Switzerland to study the Alps, and to Italy to study the
old Italian masters. From being at first a naturalist and a prophet
## p. 12511 (#571) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12511
art.
of modernity, he soon became an admirer of Gothic and Renaissance
Turner and Fra Angelico were almost antithetical. He tried to
reconcile them on the principle of their truthfulness; but one had put
forth an individual truth, the other a symbolic truth, and Mr. Ruskin
never brought them together without the appearance of incongruity.
The more he studied Italian painting, the more he became impreg-
nated with the moral and the religious in art. In a letter he puts it
down that what is wanted in English art is a "total change of char-
acter. It is Giotto and Ghirlandajo and Angelico that you want and
must want until this disgusting nineteenth century has—I can't say
breathed, but steamed, its last. " The moral element and the sincerity
of fifteenth-century work quite captivated him, and he began to fail
in sympathy for modern products. He started the hopeless task of
turning the art world backward, and reviving the truth and faith of
the early Italians. But the world never turns backward successfully.
Italian art was good art because it did not turn backward; because it
revealed its own time and people, and was imbued with the spirit of
its age.
That spirit died with the Renaissance. The nineteenth cen-
tury could not revive it. It had a spirit of its own which it revealed,
and which Mr. Ruskin opposed all his life. It was not moral enough
or reverent enough or true enough; in short, it was not like the old,
and therefore it was wrong.
About 1850 the Pre-Raphaelites began to attract attention. They
were not followers of Mr. Ruskin, though they were a part of the
new movement which he more than any other man had started.
His advice to go to nature-selecting nothing, rejecting nothing,
scorning nothing-had been accepted by many landscapists, and it
undoubtedly somewhat affected the Pre-Raphaelites. He defended
their work against popular ridicule in his spirited 'Pre-Raphaelitism'
(1851); and tried to show that they and Turner were on the same
naturalistic basis, and that his old ideas of nature and his new ideas
of Italian art were not contradictory. In principle he seemed to have
eliminated the personal equation (the dominant factor in nineteenth-
century art); and what really attracted him in Pre-Raphaelitism was
the combination of literal detail with the imitated sincerity of the
early Italians. The Pre-Raphaelites as a body soon drifted apart;
and Mr. Ruskin's teaching, as regards their work, was condemned as
impractical and impossible. It did not reckon with the nineteenth-
century spirit.
Painting alone was not sufficient to occupy so active and many-
sided an intellect; and Mr. Ruskin's first twenty years of authorship
produced many books on many subjects. He wrote on the Alps,
published his 'Poems (1850), reviewed books, issued 'Notes on the
Construction of Sheepfolds' (1851), — the misleading title of a plea for
## p. 12512 (#572) ##########################################
12512
JOHN RUSKIN
church unity in England, and wrote his 'Seven Lamps of Archi-
tecture' (1849) and his 'Stones of Venice' (1850-53). The last-named
work is not a manual of history or a traveler's guide; but the expres-
sion of Mr. Ruskin's ideas of life, society, and nationality as shown
in architecture. The ideas are somewhat smothered by beautiful
language, and many side issues in parenthesis; but they are at least
original, and the result of his own observations. He spent much
time and labor in Venice taking measurements and trying to recon-
cile conflicting styles on a single basis; but the task was too colossal.
Venetian architecture is a medley of all styles. Mr. Ruskin did what
he could, and the 'Stones of Venice' was the result.
