Part 2

CROMWELL. So The young man dreamed; and oft-times he hath said When after battle he hath wiped his sword, Oft hath he sighing said, ‘These sinful wars— Brother with brother, father against son, Strife with her country, victory o'er her children— How shall they end? If to the hollow word Of this unhappy king no truth is bound, Shall the day come when he, worn out with blood, Will yield his crown to his yet guiltless son, And we made sure of freedom by firm laws, Chain the calm'd lion to a peaceful throne?’

IRETON. The father's leaven still! most foolish hope To plaster with cool prudence jarring atoms, And reconcile the irreconcileable— The rushing present with the mouldering past!

CROMWELL. Thou say'st it, Ireton! But the boy was young And fond of heart; the times that harden us, Make soft less thoughtful natures. (_enter a Puritan Soldier_)

SOLDIER. Lo! your worship, The youth hight Hubert Cecil waits thy pleasure!

CROMWELL. Friend, let him enter. Henry, leave us now! At eight, remember! (_exit Ireton_) It hath lamely chanced That Cecil should return upon the heat And newness of these fierce events; a month Had robbed him of their horror! While we breathe Passion glides on to Memory:—and dread things, That scared our thoughts but yesterday, take hues, That smooth their sternness, from the silent morrow. (_Enter Cecil—Cromwell leaning on his sword at the farther end of the stage, regards him with a steadfast look and majestic mien_) Well, sir, good day! What messages from Spain? (_Cecil presents him despatches—Cromwell glances over them, looking, from time to time, at Cecil_)

CECIL. (_aside_) What is there in this man that I should fear him? Hath he some spell to witch us from ourselves, And make our natures minion to his own?

CROMWELL. Plead they so warm for Stuart? 'tis too late!

CECIL. It is too late!

CROMWELL. Since last we parted, Hubert, He, the high author of our civil wars, Hath been their victim. 'Twas an evil, Hubert; But so is justice ever when it falls Upon a human life!

CECIL. God's mercy!—justice! Why justice is a consequence of law— Founded on law—begotten but by law! By what law, Cromwell, fell the King?

CROMWELL. By all The laws he left us! Prithee silence, Cecil! Sir, I might threaten, but I will not:—hold! And let us, with a calm and sober eye, Look on the spectre of this ghastly deed. Who spills man's blood, his blood by man be shed! 'Tis Heaven's first law—to that law we had come— None other left us. Who, then, caused the strife, That crimsoned Naseby's field, and Marston's moor? It was the Stuart:—so the Stuart fell! A victim, in the pit himself had digged! He died not, Sir, as hated kings have died, In secret and in shade—no eye to trace The one step from their prison to their pall; He died i' the eyes of Europe—in the face Of the broad Heaven—amidst the sons of England, Whom he had outraged—by a solemn sentence, Passed by a solemn court. Does this seem guilt? (It might be error—mortal men will err!) But _Guilt_ not thus unrobes it to the day; Its deeds are secret, as _our_ act was public. You pity Charles! 'tis well; but pity more The tens of thousand honest humble men, Who, by the tyranny of Charles compelled To draw the sword, fell butchered in the field! Good Lord—when one man dies who wears a crown, How the earth trembles—how the nations gape, Amazed and awed!—but when that one man's victims, Poor worms uncloth'd in purple, daily die, In the grim cell, or on the groaning gibbet, Or on the civil field, ye pitying souls Drop not one tear from your indifferent eyes: Ye weep the ravening vulture when he bleeds, And coldly gaze upon the countless prey He gorged at one fell meal. Be still young man; Your time for speech will come. So much for justice; Now for yet larger duties: to our hands The peace and weal of England were consigned; These our first thought and duty. Should we loose Charles on the world again, 'twere to unleash Once more the Fiend of Carnage: should we guard {610} His person in our prison, still his name Would float, a wizard's standard, in the air, Rallying fresh war on Freedom; a fit theme To wake bad pity in the breasts of men; A focus for all faction here at home, And in the lewd courts of his brother kings. So but one choice remained: it was that choice Which (you are skilled methinks in classic lore, And prize such precedent,) the elder Brutus Made when he judged his children: such the choice Of his descendant—when, within the senate He sought to crush, the crafty Cæsar fell.

CECIL. Cæsar may find his type amidst the living; And by that name our sons may christen Cromwell.

CROMWELL. Men's deeds are fair enigmas—let man solve them! But men's dark motives are i' the Books of God. (_In a milder tone_) Cecil! thou wert as my adopted son. Hast thou not still fought by my proper person— Eat'n at my board—slept in my tent—conceived From me thy rudiments and lore of war— Hath not my soul yearned to thee—have I not Brought thee, yet beardless, into mark and fame— Given thee trust and honor—nay, to bind Still closer to my sheltering heart thine own— Have I not smiled upon thy love for Edith, (For I, too, once was young,) and bid thee find Thy plighted bride in my familiar kin— And wilt thou, in this crisis of my fate, When my good name stands trembling in the balance, And one friend wanting may abase the scale, Wilt thou thus judge me harshly—take no count Of the swift eddies of the whirlpool time, Which urge us on to any port for peace, And set the brand of thy austere rebuke Upon the heart that loved thee so? Fie! fie!

CECIL. Arouse thine anger, Cromwell! rate me, vent Thy threats on this bare front—thy kindness kills me!

CROMWELL. Bear with me, son, as I would bear with thee! Add not to these grim cares that press upon me. Eke thou not out the evils of the time; They are enow to grind my weary soul. Restrain the harsher thoughts, that would reprove, Until a calmer season, when 'tis given To talk of what hath been with tempered minds; And part we now in charity.

CECIL. O Cromwell, If now we part, it is forever. Here I do resign my office in thy hands; Lay down my trust and charge,—

CROMWELL. [_hastily_] I'll not receive them; Another time for this.

CECIL. There is no other. I came to chide thee, Cromwell; ay, to chide, Girt as thou art with power: but thou hast ta'en The sternness from my soul, and made the voice Of duty sound so grating to my ear, That, for mine honor, I, who fear thee not, Do fear my frailty, and will trust no more My conscience to our meeting.

CROMWELL. Wouldst thou say That thou wilt leave me?

CECIL. Yes.

CROMWELL. And whither bound?

CECIL. The king's no more; and in his ashes sleep His faults. His son as yet hath wronged us not: That son is now our king!

CROMWELL. Do I hear right? Know'st thou, rash boy, those words are deadly? Know'st thou, It is proclaimed “whoever names a king In any man, by Parliament unsanctioned, Is criminal of treason?”

CECIL. So 'tis said; And those who said it, were themselves the traitors.

CROMWELL. This, and to me!—beware; on that way lies My limit of forbearance.

CECIL. Call thy guards; Ordain the prison; bring me to the bar; Prepare the scaffold. This, great Cromwell, were A milder doom than that which I adjudge Unto myself. 'Tis worse than death to leave The flag which waved above our dreams of freedom— The Chief our reverence honored as a god— The bride whose love rose-colored all the world— But worse than many deaths—than hell itself, To sin against what we believe the right.

CROMWELL. [_moved and aside_] And this bold soul I am about to lose! [_Aloud_] If me thou canst forget, and all my love, Remember Edith! Is she thy betrothed, And wilt thou leave her too? Thou hid'st thy face. Stay, Hubert, stay; I, who could order, stoop And pray thee stay.

CECIL. No—no!

CROMWELL. [_with coldness and dignity_] Then have thy will. Desert the cause of freedom at her need,— False to thy chief, and perjured to thy love. I do repent me that I have abased Myself thus humbly. Go, Sir, you have leave; I would not have one man in honest Israel Whose soul hath hunger for the flesh of Egypt.

CECIL. [_approaching Cromwell slowly_] Canst thou yet make the doubtful past appear Done but in sorrowing justice?—canst thou yet Cement these jarring factions—join in peace The friends alike of royalty and freedom, And give the state, secured by such good laws As now we may demand, once more a king?

CROMWELL. A king! Why name that word? A head—a chief, Perchance, the Commonwealth may yet decree! Speak on!

CECIL. I care not, Cromwell, for the name; But he who bears the orb and sway of power Must, if for peace we seek, be chosen from The Stuarts' lineage. Charles the First is dead: Wilt thou proclaim his son?

CROMWELL. [_laughing bitterly_] An Exile, yes! A Monarch, never!

CECIL. Cromwell, fare thee well! As friends we meet no more. May God so judge As I now judge, believing thee as one Whom a bold heart, and the dim hope of power, And the blind wrath of faction, and the spur Of an o'ermastering Fate, impel to what {611} The Past foretells already to the Future. Dread man, farewell. [_exit Cecil_]

CROMWELL. [_after a pause_] So from my side hath gone An upright heart; and in that single loss, Methinks more honesty hath said farewell, Than if a thousand had abjured my banners. Charles sleeps, and feels no more the grinding cares, The perils and the doubts that wait on POWER. For him, no more the uneasy day,—the night At war with sleep,—for him are hushed, at last, Loud Hate and hollow Love. Reverse thy Law, O blind compassion of the human heart! And let not death which feels not, sins not—weeps not— Rob Life of all that Suffering asks from Pity. [_He paces to and fro the scene, and pauses at last opposite the doors at the back of the stage_] Lo! what a slender barrier parts in twain The presence of the breathing and the dead— The vanquisher and victim—the firm foot Of lusty strength, and the unmoving mass Of what all strength must come to. Yet once more, Ere the grave closes on that solemn dust, Will I survey what men have feared to look on. [_He opens the doors—the coffin of the king on the back ground lighted by tapers—Cromwell approaches it slowly, lifts the pall, and gazes, as if on the corpse within_] 'Tis a firm frame; the sinews strongly knit; The chest deep set and broad; save some grey hairs Saddening those locks of love, no sign of age. Had nature been his executioner _He would have outlived me!_ and to this end— This narrow empire—this unpeopled kingdom— This six feet realm—the overlust of sway Hath been the guide! He would have stretched his will O'er that unlimited world which men's souls are! Fettered the earth's pure air—for freedom is That air to honest lips;—and here he lies, In dust most eloquent—to after time A never silent oracle for kings! Was this the hand that strained within its grasp So haught a sceptre? this the shape that wore Majesty like a garment? Spurn that clay— It can resent not; speak of royal crimes, And it can frown not: schemeless lies the brain Whose thoughts were sources of such fearful deeds. What things are we, O Lord, when at thy will A worm like this could shake the mighty world! A few years since, and in the port was moored A bark to far Columbia's forests bound; And I was one of those indignant hearts Panting for exile in the thirst for freedom; Then, that pale clay (poor clay that was a king!) Forbade my parting, in the wanton pride Of vain command, and with a fated sceptre Waved back the shadow of the death to come. Here stands that baffled and forbidden wanderer, Loftiest amid the wrecks of ruined empire, Beside the coffin of a headless king! He thrall'd my fate—I have prepared his doom: He made me captive—lo! his narrow cell! [_Advancing to the front of the stage_] So hands unseen do fashion forth the earth Of our frail schemes into our funeral urns; So, walking dream-led in life's sleep, our steps Move blindfold to the scaffold or the throne!— Ay, to the _Throne!_ From that dark thought I strike The light which cheers me onward to my goal. Wild though the night, and angry though the winds, High o'er the billows of the battling sea My Spirit, like a bark, sweeps on to Fortune!

MEMOIRS OF MRS. HEMANS.[1]

[Footnote 1: From the Memoirs of Mrs. Hemans, by Chorley—now in the press of Messieurs Saunders and Otley, to whom we are indebted for some of the sheets.]

It will be yet more clearly seen, from further portions of Mrs. Hemans' correspondence, with what devotion and gratitude she regarded German literature; she spoke of its language as “rich and _affectionate_, in which I take much delight:”—how she gratefully referred to its study as having expanded her mind and opened to her new sources of intellectual delight and exercise. For a while, too, she may have been said to have written under the shadow of its mysticism; but this secondary influence had passed away some time before her death. It is not the lot of high minds, though they may pass through and linger in regions where thought loses itself in obscurity, to terminate their career there. The “Lays of many Lands,” most of which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then edited by Mr. Campbell, were, we are told by herself, suggested by Herder's “_Stimmen der Volker in Liedern_.” Her next volume was formed of a collection of these, preceded by “The Forest Sanctuary.”

Mrs. Hemans considered this poem as almost, if not altogether, the best of her works. She would sometimes say, that in proportion to the praise which had been bestowed upon others of her less carefully meditated and shorter compositions, she thought it had hardly met with its fair share of success: for it was the first continuous effort in which she dared to write from the fulness of her own heart—to listen to the promptings of her genius freely and fearlessly. The subject was suggested by a passage in one of the letters of Don Leucadio Doblado, and was wrought upon by her with that eagerness and fervor which almost _command_ corresponding results. I have heard Mrs. Hemans say, that the greater part of this poem was written in no more picturesque a retreat than a laundry, to which, as being detached from the house, she resorted for undisturbed quiet and leisure. When she read it, while in progress, to her mother and sister, they were surprised to tears at the increased power displayed in it. She was not prone to speak with self-contentment of her own works; but, perhaps, _the one_ favorite descriptive passage was that picture of a sea burial in the second canto.

... She lay a thing for earth's embrace, To cover with spring-wreaths. For earth's?—the wave That gives the bier no flowers, makes moan above her grave!

On the mid-seas a knell!—for man was there,— Anguish and love, the mourner with his dead! A long, low, tolling knell—a voice of prayer— Dark glassy waters, like a desert spread,— And the pale shining Southern Cross on high, {612} Its faint stars fading from a solemn sky, Where mighty clouds before the dawn grew red:— Were these things round me? Such o'er memory sweep Wildly when aught brings back that burial of the deep.

Then the broad lonely sunrise, and the plash Into the sounding waves!—around her head They parted, with a glancing moment's flash, Then shut—and all was still....

The whole poem, whether in its scenes of superstition—the Auto da Fe—the dungeon—the flight, or in its delineation of the mental conflicts of its hero—or in its forest pictures of the free west, which offer such a delicious repose to the mind, is full of happy thoughts and turns of expression. Four lines of peculiar delicacy and beauty recur to me as I write, too strongly to be passed by. They are from a character of one of the martyr sisters.

And if she mingled with the festive train, It was but as some melancholy star Beholds the dance of shepherds on the plain, In its bright stillness present, though afar.

But the entire episode of “Queen-like Teresa—radiant Inez”—is wrought up with a nerve and an impulse, which men of renown have failed to reach. The death of the latter, if, perhaps, it be a little too _romantic_ for the stern realities of the scene, is so beautifully told, that it cannot be read without strong feeling, nor carelessly remembered. And most beautiful, too, are the sudden out-bursts of thankfulness—of the quick, happy consciousness of liberty with which the narrator of this ghastly sacrifice, interrupts the tale, to reassure himself—

Sport on, my happy child! for thou art free!

The character of the convert's wife, Leonor,—devotedly clinging to his fortunes, without a reproach or a murmur, while her heart trembles before him, as though she were in the presence of a lost spirit,—is one of those, in which Mrs. Hemans' individual mode of thought and manner of expression are most happily impersonated. As a whole, she was hardly wrong in her own estimate of this poem: and on recently returning to it, I have been surprised to find, how well it bears the tests and trials with which it is only either fit or rational to examine works of the highest order of mind. But here, also, would criticism be impertinent.

The next work of Mrs. Hemans, and the one by which she is most universally known, was the “Records of Woman,” published in 1828. In this, to use her own words, “there is more of herself to be found” than in any preceding composition. But even the slightest analysis of these beautiful legends would be superfluous; suffice it to say, that they were not things of meditation, but imagined and uttered in the same breath; like every line that she wrote, as far as possible from being a studied exercise. It is true, that in some lyrics more than others, her individual feelings are eagerly put forth—in those, for instance, wherein aspirations after another world are expressed, or which breathe the weary pining language of home sickness, or in which she utters her abiding sense of the insufficiency of fame to satisfy a woman's heart, however its possession may gratify her vanity—or wherein she speaks with a passionate self-distrust of her own art, of the impossibility of performance to keep pace with desire. The fervor with which these were poured forth seriously endangered a frame already undermined by too ardent a spirit, whose consuming work had been aided by a personal self-neglect, childish to wilfulness. So perilously, indeed, was she excited by the composition of Mozart's Requiem, that she was prohibited by her physician from any further exercise of her art, for some weeks after it was written. Few more genuine out-bursts of feeling have been ever poured forth than the three following verses of that poem.

“Yet I have known it long: Too restless and too strong Within this clay hath been the o'ermastering flame; Swift thought that came and went, Like torrents o'er me sent Have shaken as a reed, my thrilling frame.

Like perfumes on the wind, Which none may stay or bind, The beautiful comes floating through my soul; I strive with yearning vain, The spirit to detain Of the deep harmonies that past me roll!

Therefore disturbing dreams Trouble the secret streams, And founts of music that o'erflow my breast; Something far more divine Than may on earth be mine, Haunts my worn heart, and will not let it rest.”

Most of the poems above referred to, were written at Rhyllon; the last and most favorite of Mrs. Hemans' residence at Wales. Some of them will be found colored by a shadow which had recently passed over her lot—the death of her mother. To this, which she always felt as an irreparable loss, will be found not a few touching allusions in many following letters.

A small woodland dingle, near Rhyllon, was her favorite retreat: here she would spend long summer mornings to read, and project, and compose, while her children played about her. “Whenever one of us brought her a new flower,” writes one of them, “she was sure to introduce it into her next poem.” She has unconsciously described this haunt over and over again with affectionate distinctness; it is the scene referred to in the “Hour of Romance,” and in the sonnet which is printed among her “Poetical Remains.”

“Still are the cowslips from thy bosom springing, O far off grassy dell?—And dost thou see, When southern winds first wake the vernal singing, The star-gleam of the wood anemone? Doth the shy ring-dove haunt thee yet—the bee Hang on thy flowers, as when I breathed farewell To their wild blooms? and round the beechen tree Still in green softness, doth the moss bank swell?”

Many of the imaginations which floated through her brain in this retirement, were lost in the more interrupted and responsible life, which followed Mrs. Hemans' departure from Wales; when the breaking up of her household, on the marriage of one of her family, and the removal of another into Ireland, threw her exclusively upon her own resources, and compelled her to make acquaintance with an “eating, drinking, buying, bargaining” world with which, from her disposition and habits, she was ill-fitted to cope. One of these unfinished works was the “Portrait Gallery,” of which one episode, “The lady of the Castle,” is introduced in the “Records.”

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CONCLUDING LECTURE

Of the Course on the Obstacles and Hindrances to Education, arising from the peculiar faults of Parents, Teachers and Scholars, and that portion of the Public immediately concerned in directing and controlling our Literary Institutions.

BY JAMES M. GARNETT.

Since the first lecture of the course on the obstacles to all correct education was delivered, so much time has elapsed, and so many of you, probably, have not heard the whole, that some farther recapitulation than was given when I last addressed you, seems necessary fully to understand what I still wish to say in conclusion.