As my mental horizon widened, my Father followed the direction of my spiritual eyes with some bewilderment, and knew not at what Igazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor can I even now define, the visions which held my vague and timid attention. As a child develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience are seldom even approximately correct in their analysis of its intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of mentality I must now mention, because it took a considerable part in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather in the formation of my thinking habits. But neither my Father nor my stepmother knew what to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know what to make of it myself.
Among the books which my new mother had brought with her were certain editions of the poets, an odd assortment. Campbell was there, and Burns, and Keats, and the 'Tales' of Byron. Each of these might have been expected to appeal to me; but my emotion was too young, and I did not listen to them yet. Their imperative voices called me later. By the side of these romantic classics stood a small, thick volume, bound in black morocco, and comprising four reprinted works of the eighteenth century, gloomy, funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date as are the crossbones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a country churchyard. The four--and in this order, as I never shall forget--were 'The Last Day' of Dr Young, Blair's 'Grave', 'Death' by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and 'The Deity' of Samuel Boyse. These lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for elegant piety in the reign of George II.
How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the Lord's Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk, nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in furious feats of water-colour painting. The Plymouth-Brother theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of verses, and observing its religious character, I asked 'May Iread that?' and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents, received '0h certainly--if you can!'
The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and polished garden they then remained--they were soon afterwards cut down--rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough turf. Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who shall explain the rapture withwhich I followed their austere morality?
Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume Ican no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society Ivalued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes' On the Pentateuch or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled The Javelin of Phineas, which lay smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table. Idipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up strange things. I brought up out of the depths of' The Last Day' the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of resurrection:
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of thee, And animate a clod with misery?
I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense Isuppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. Ialso read in the same piece the surprising description of how Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all The various bones, obsequious to the call, Self-mov'd, advance--the neck perhaps to meet The distant head, the distant legs the feet, but rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of Scripture. I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of Young's verse were pleasant to me. Beilby Porteus I discarded from the first as impenetrable. In 'The Deity',--I knew nothing then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author,--Itook a kind of persistent, penitential pleasure, but it was Blair's 'Grave' that really delighted me, and I frightened myself with its melodious doleful images in earnest.
About this time there was a great flow of tea--table hospitality in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster, to faint little entertainments where those sang who were ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a rich tea. My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to whether I should or should not accept these glittering invitations. There hovered before him a painful sense of danger in resigning the soul to pleasures which savoured of 'the world'.
