ANALOGIES. V.—Tsx SHADE.
"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the had of the trees."
Jackson had been long delirious from his terrible wounds— those rapid orders were, of course, nothing but " the last words of Marmion," the breath of a martial spirit hovering over the fighting-line, so long its home, before it took flight. But we have always been convinced that his final words welled from the clear spring of his own unclouded mind. Often does Death, listening, "dull cold-eared" legatee, for his assured entail—often does he hear his own undoing in the very signal of his inheritance. That last faint whisper sometimes carries the Parthian shot of his escaping enemy, the soul. He hears his very victim triumph, he bath indeed no victory, perishing himself, like the lion, on the horn of the stricken deer•. And to those who remain these final utterances of great nice often enlighten with a radiant flash, " bursting through the gloom," the whole of the obscure life before. In human affairs there is much in that often-ridiculed trick of novel-reading school girls of turning to the end of the volume first, for it may happen that nothing else can colour so truly the middle and beginning. Nelson, for instance, died with his very synonym and summary upon his lips. Southey could do no more than paraphrase the phrase in which the hero epake his own history at the moment of his entering History. But illuminative death-bed speeches are numberless ; collected, they form a Book of Revelations, valuable rather that they show in what spirit the speakers had lived than how they died. Death and his procurer Danger are both alike bold starers into the " bright countenance of Truth." With this couple hunting behind, men who remain sane (and we are concerned with none other) cannot lie. Then, perhaps for the only time in their lives, they are themselves, astonishing us by their nobility or the reverse, at any rate indefeasibly true.
The deep interest of Stonewall Jackson's dying words, however, lies not in their individual application, though that in his case is unexpected enough, but in their general. The passing warrior whispered not only his own bet a universal yearning. For one instant of time all the pain and passion of the world, all its weakness, its inherent humility, its beast- like sense of burden, found voice in those most unlikely lips, the thin soldier's lips still ruled rigid and straight, not by death, though within a tick of death, but by the utterance of orders of battle.
For all the world wants rest, and shade, wants it more every day ; not only the old world, moreover, not only the scorched toiler lumbering into the "labourer's sweet sleep," but the happy shepherd boy himself, shouting on the wold, has caught sight of that immortal sea which will bear him hence, and he, too, cries " Thalassa!" We look forward now, not like Wordsworth back, for our " perpetual benediction." Young poets and young painters, dropping retrospect, that old convention, as a child's dream, are inspired by that sleep and forgetting which are to come. It is not merely the ideal but the creed of their art. The Grail has been seen at
• &Outman Jackson. By the late Colonel Henderson.
last, and it holds a draught of Lethe. And, as artists must do in any age, they, the heralds on the peaks, do but give voice and utterance to the enormous silence of the under- world. For Demos, too, would rest. Like Bottom, he has "an exposition of sleep come upon him," and modern states- men, those watchful elves, giving, giving always (yet none the less busy taking 0 are all agog to feed him with the apricocks and dewberries" of poppy-concocted legislation. For he is becoming dangerously vocal on the subject, leaving no longer to professional singers the dreeing of his weird. The humming within a hive is never so deep as when in late autumn the bees stay indoors, pining for the unconsciousness of hibernation, after the labours of the long summer. The perpetual and apparently baseless strikes which infuriate the logician over his morning coffee are nothing but the claims and tentative attempts of hereditary doers of much now to do nothing. There is rough knocking heard at the gates of Nirvana.
Universal repose is, of course, impossible. The very desire for it on a universal scale probably presages a dying world. It is the first faint tap of paralysis, feeling first, as usual, about the unconscious feet, as lightly as the touch of a child, merely a little numbness, but as fatal as the crash of a battle- axe to him who feels its caress. On and on it creeps, up and up ; the walking-stick, jaunty accessory, becomes first useful, then essential ; bath-chair succeeds to walking-stick, bed to bath-chair, the winding sheet to all. Ah 1 poets ; ye are either very wise or very wicked to unsluice a single tear over mean flowers and harvested fields when so many "to human suffering are due." Would that we prosers, too, could be blinded by those pretty drops of yours, instead of by the salter rain "which every woe can claim." But, after all, we hold you exempt. We could ill do without your most " foppish lamentations," for they are often " so like a prophet's words " that it is necessary to remember that ye, too, are but the insensate Urim and Thummim, the mere reflectors and not the source of divine Truth.
The desire for rest, universal, we assert, in a world now obviously nearing bedtime, comes to individuals at different times and in different guises. We confess that it descended on ourselves when so young that we had scarcely got over the fatigue of our entry into the world. The phrase "born tired" is no oxymoron; it is a bittersweet verity, a malady as incurable as birth itself. Like many other ailments, and like certain crimes, it hears different names in different circles of society. He of low degree is the "incorrigible idler" of the police courts, the "weary Willy" of the comic papers. It is vain to argue with brisk stipendiaries or fox- hunting J.P.'s that the drooping figure in the dock, having no means for play, is literally incapable of work ; that his cure is a doctor or an income rather than a summary conviction. But we have so hearty a sympathy for him that, for the cleanliness of the countryside, we can never accept peace on the Commission of the Peace. More fortunate lotus-eaters escape with an epithet; they pass for " dreamy " or " thoughtful " amongst their fellows— the delicious phrase "temperamental languor" (it makes us drowsy as we record it) was recently coined by a leader-writer anent an eminent specimen—and they acquire actual kudos instead of a " week's hard" for their lounging. They are commonly great readers (0 subtlest sloth !), long sitters in arm-chairs under the light of green- shaded hand-lamps, when it is assumed that they are revolving mighty matters. Often, indeed, they experience the exquisite pleasure of being begged to "stop working now" for their eyes or health's sake, and Melanchthon himself, after days and nights of intense study, never rose from his bench more crampedly than they, for they are really tired. The world holds no such hero as he, who, thus afflicted, conquers his very nature and ivories. Such a one was the late Duke of Devon-
shire. His first draught, too, from the pap of Nature, bad been a draught of Lethe; yet when Ease, Peace, and Leisure
came smiling to him for judgment; he denied the award and kept the apple of discord himself. He was the Bassanio of our English life, aye, and better than Bassanio, for the leaden casket not only gave him nothing, but robbed him of much that he had, of nearly all that he desired. And, like Stonewall Jackson, only with his last breath did he confess how stern had been the captaincy of his soul. " The game is ever and I am glad of it," he is reported to have murmured as he passed away. Not more eloquent was the " let me sleep now " of those two incandeseents, Mirabeau and Byron, or "the farce is over " of the bubbling Rabelais. Are not some men sane for the first time in their last moment P
With ourselves, we repeat, the longing for the shade came early. We recollect the precise time and place. The scene was the old " fourth-form room " at Harrow, on a bench exactly beneath (did no drowsy ichor distil therefrom 13) the deeply cut signature of the said sleep-longing Byron. The moment was that in which we discovered that the Latin securus—grass-covered pitfall of a word—meant not "safe" but "free from care." With not more joy did it suddenly strike Frank Buckland—he records his ecstasy—that when Vergil's rowers eased oars against stream the autees with which they began to retrogress could only signify "instantly" instead of the " therefore " accorded it by the smarter of his schoolfellows and the " moreover " by the jackasses. Free from care! "Nature's soft nurse" had her arms around us in a trice. We became instanter a "weary Willy." Where could we be aecurus—free from care 11 Hard on the heels of the question—we have not the remotest idea. why, we only relate the fact—a vision hung suspended in mid-air, a vision so real that it blurred the old Elizabethan oriel behind it. It was a long, low, rosy-brick mansion of Palladian architecture, pillared porch beneath a depressed gable, many windows white-edged and cross-barred, roof grey and lichened as Ben Cruachan, the whole set on an autumn day like a garnet in the green enamel of immense lawns, shaven and cedared down a midland hillside to the edge of valley woodlands from which arose the smoke of hidden cottages and the faint chatter of children. There was much more than this: the detail was wonderfully manifold and clear, and still it is, for that mansion still hangs in the air, and in it there are old oak, old silver, old pictures, old china, old memories, and old benedictions, but not a single young care, though a beautiful woman stands like "the Mother of all living" on the edge of the ha-ha, with four little bands holding her back from the dizzy two-foot drop. There it was, and is, in mid-air; and there, we fear, must hang each man's ideal until, the world receding, he mounts and flies clean through his earthly vision of delight, taking with him nothing of it but its essence, its
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