Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

Cheek touchin' cheek, loop locked in loop,
What our wee heads could think?
When baith ben doun ower ae braid page
Wi' ae buik on our knee,

Thy lips were on thy lesson, but

My lesson was in thee.

Oh mind ye how we hung our heads,
How cheeks brent red wi' shame,
Whene'er the schule-weans laughin' said
We clecked thegither hame ?
And mind ye o' the Saturdays,

(The scule then skail't at noon,) When we ran off to speel the braes, The broomy braes o' June ?

My head rins round and round about,
My heart flows like a sea,

As ane by ane the thochts rush back
O' schule-time and o' thee.

O mornin' life! O mornin' luve!
O lichtsome days and lang,

When hinnied hopes around our hearts
Like simmer blossoms sprang.

Oh, mind ye, luve, how oft we left
The deavin' dinsome toun,

To wander by the green burnside,
And hear its waters croon ?

The simmer leaves hung ower our heads,

The flowers burst round our feet,

And in the gloamin' o' the wood
The throssil whusslit sweet;

The throssil whusslit in the wood,

The burn sang to the trees,

And we with nature's heart in tune
Concerted harmonies;

And, on the knowe abune the burn,
For hours thegither sat

I' the silentness o' joy, till baith
Wi' very gladness grat.

Ay, ay, dear Jeanie Morrison,
Tears trinkled doun your cheek,
Like dew-beads on a rose, yet nane
Had ony power to speak!

That was a time, a blessed time,

When hearts were fresh and young,

When freely gushed all feelings forth
Unsyllabled, unsung!

I marvael, Jeanie Morrison,

Gin I hae been to thee

As closely twined wi' earliest thochts
As ye hae been to me?
Oh! tell me gin their music fills
Thine ear as it does mine?

Oh! say gin e'er your heart grows grit
Wi' dreamings o' lang syne?

I've wandered east, I've wandered west, I've borne a weary lot;

But in my wanderings, far or near,

Ye never were forgot.

The fount that first burst frae this heart
Still travels on its way;

And channels deeper, as it rins,
The luve o' life's young day.

Oh dear, dear Jeanie Morrison,
Since we were sindered young,
I've never seen your face nor heard
The music o' your tongue;

But I could hug all wretchedness,
And happy could I die,

Did I but ken your heart still dreamed
O' bygane days and me!

XLII.

GREAT PROSE WRITERS.

LORD BACON-JOHN MILTON-JEREMY TAYLOR-JOHN RUSKIN.

Or the many illustrious prose writers who adorned the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, Bacon is the one whose shrewdness, and power, and admirable good sense have left the deepest traces in our literature. His Essays are still read with avidity and delight, every fresh perusal bringing forth fresh proofs of his knowledge of human nature, and felicity of language. We can not but be grateful to the author, however we may dislike as a man the treacherous friend of Essex and the cringing parasite of James.

I do not know any single passage that more advantageously displays his fullness and richness of thought and of style than this on the use of study.

66

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament is in discourse; and for ability is in the judgment and disposition of business; for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots, and marshaling of affairs come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read, not to contradict and confute, nor to

believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and without diligence and attention. Some books, also, may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not."

I add one very fine illustration:

"If the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through the vast sea of Time, and make ages so distant participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other!"

In John Milton's grand and holy fame there is no alloy. The man was as great and pure as the author. I am not sure whether (always excepting the minor poems) I do not prefer the stately and weighty march of his prose, even to his lofty and resounding verse. I select some noble passages from his "Appeal for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing."

"I do not deny but it is of the greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and therefore to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a phial the purest efficacy and extraction of that which bred them. I know they are as lively, as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragons' teeth; and being sown up and down may chance to spring up armed men; and yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature,

God's image; but he who kills a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life: 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not often recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how spill that treasured life of man preserved and stored up in books, since we see what a homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a kind of martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and soft essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

"Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather. That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contempla

« ForrigeFortsæt »