SEWARD.
We are made better, nobler, sir, by the society of the good and the noble. Perhaps of ourselves unable to think high thoughts, and without the bold warmth that dares generously, we catch by degrees something of the mounting spirit, and of the ardour proper to the stronger souls with whom we live familiarly, and become sharers and imitators of virtues to which we could not have given birth. The devoted courage of a leader turns his followers into heroes – the patient death of one martyr inflames in a thousand slumbering bosoms a zeal answerable to his own. And shall Perfect Goodness contemplated move no goodness in us? Shall His Holiness and Purity raise in us no desire to be holy and pure? – His infinite Love towards His creatures kindle no spark of love in us towards our fellow-creatures!
NORTH.
God bless you, my dear Seward – but you speak well. Our fellow-creatures! The name, the binding title, dissolves in air, if He be not our common Creator. Take away that bond of relationship among men, and according to circumstances they confront one another as friends or foes – but Brothers no longer – if not children of one celestial Father.
TALBOYS.
And if they no longer have immortal souls!
NORTH.
Oh! my friends – if this winged and swift life be all our life, what a mournful taste have we had of possible happiness? We have, as it were, from some dark and cold edge of a bright world, just looked in and been plucked away again! Have we come to experience pleasure by fits and glimpses; but intertwined with pain, burdensome labour, with weariness, and with indifference? Have we come to try the solace and joy of a warm, fearless, and confiding affection, to be then chilled or blighted by bitterness, by separation, by change of heart, or by the dread sunderer of loves – Death? Have we found the gladness and the strength of knowledge, when some rays of truth have flashed in upon our souls, in the midst of error and uncertainty, or amidst continuous, necessitated, uninstructive avocations of the Understanding – and is that all? Have we felt in fortunate hour the charm of the Beautiful, that invests, as with a mantle, this visible Creation, or have we found ourselves lifted above the earth by sudden apprehension of sublimity? Have we had the consciousness of such feelings, which have seemed to us as if they might themselves make up a life – almost an angel's life – and were they "instant come and instant gone?" Have we known the consolation of Doing Right, in the midst of much that we have done wrong? and was that also a corruscation of a transient sunshine? Have we lifted up our thoughts to see Him who is Love, and Light, and Truth, and Bliss, to be in the next instant plunged into the darkness of annihilation? Have all these things been but flowers that we have pulled by the side of a hard and tedious way, and that, after gladdening us for a brief season with hue and odour, wither in our hands, and are like ourselves – nothing?
BULLER.
I love you, sir, better and better every day.
NORTH.
We step the earth – we look abroad over it, and it seems immense – so does the sea. What ages had men lived – and knew but a small portion. They circumnavigate it now with a speed under which its vast bulk shrinks. But let the astronomer lift up his glass and he learns to believe in a total mass of matter, compared with which this great globe itself becomes an imponderable grain of dust. And so to each of us walking along the road of life, a year, a day, or an hour shall seem long. As we grow older, the time shortens; but when we lift up our eyes to look beyond this earth, our seventy years, and the few thousands of years which have rolled over the human race, vanish into a point; for then we are measuring Time against Eternity.
TALBOYS.
And if we can find ground for believing that this quickly-measured span of Life is but the beginning – the dim daybreak of a Life immeasurable, never attaining to its night – what weight shall we any longer allow to the cares, fears, toils, troubles, afflictions – which here have sometimes bowed down our strength to the ground – a burden more than we could bear?
NORTH.
They then all acquire a new character. That they are then felt as transitory must do something towards lightening their load. But more is disclosed in them; for they then appear as having an unsuspected worth and use. If this life be but the beginning of another, then it may be believed that the accidents and passages thereof have some bearing upon the conditions of that other, and we learn to look on this as a state of Probation. Let us out, and look at the sky.
THE ISLAND OF SARDINIA. 1
The opinion of Nelson with regard to the importance of Sardinia, – that it is "worth a hundred Maltas," is well known; and that he strongly recommended its purchase to our government, thinking it might be obtained for £500,000. We can scarcely believe that Nelson failed to make an impression on the government, and conjecture rather that it was with the King of Sardinia the precious inheritance of a Naboth's vineyard. We do not remember to have met with a Sardinian tourist. Travellers as we are, with our ready "Hand-Books" for the remote corners of the earth, we seem, by a general consent, to have cut Sardinia from the map of observable countries. "Nos numerus sumus" – we plead guilty to this ignorance and neglect, and should have remained unconcerned about Sardinia still, had we not, in the work of Mr Tyndale, dipped into a few extracts from Lord Nelson's letters. Extending our reading, we find in these three volumes so much research, learning, historical speculation, and interesting matter, interspersed with amusing narrative, that we think a notice in Maga of this valuable and agreeable work may be not unacceptable.
The very circumstance that Sardinia is little known, renders it an agreeable speculation. The ignotum makes the charm. Our pleasure is in the fabulous, the dubious, the unexplained. In the ecstacy of ignorance the reader stands by the side of Mr Layard, watching the exhumation of the unknown gods or demons of Nineveh. "Ignorance is bliss," – for the subject-matter of ignorance is fact – fact isolated – or the broken links in time's long chain. The mind longs to fabricate, and connect. Were it possible that other sibylline books should be offered for sale, it would be preferable that Mr Murray should act the part of Tarquin than publish them as "Hand-Books." In truth, curiosity, that happy ingredient in the clay of the human mind, if so material an expression be allowed, is fed by ignorance, but dies under a surfeit of knowledge. Now, to apply this to our subject – Sardinia. The island is full of monuments, as mysterious to us as the Pyramids. There is sufficient obscurity to make a "sublime." It is happy for the reader, who has not lost his natural propensity to wonder, that there is so little known respecting them, and yet such grounds for conjecture; for he may be sure that, if any documents existed anywhere, Mr Tyndale would have discovered them, for he is the most indefatigable of authors in exploring in all the mines of literature. But he has to treat of things that were before literature was. The traveller who should first discover a Stonehenge – one who, walking on a hitherto untrodden plain, should come suddenly upon two such great sedate sitting images in stone as look over Egyptian sands – is he not greatly to be envied? We, who peer about our cities and villages, raking out decayed stone and mortar for broken pieces of antique art or memorial, as we facetiously term the remnants of a few hundred years, and of whose "whereabouts," from the beginning, we can receive some tolerable assurance, have but a slight glimpse of the delight experienced by the first finder of a monument of the Pelasgi, or even Cyclopean walls. But to make conjecture upon monuments beyond centuries – to count by thousands of years, and make out of them a dream that shall, like an Arabian magician, take the dreamer back to the Flood – is a happiness enjoyed by few. We never envied traveller more than we once did that lady who came suddenly upon the Etrurian monument, in which there was just aperture enough to see for a moment only a sitting figure, with its look and drapery of more than thousands of years; who just saw it for a few seconds, preserved only in the stillness of antiquity, and falling to dust at her very breathing. Not so ancient the monument, but of like character the discovery of him who, digging within the walls of his own house at Portici, came upon marble steps that led him down and down, till he found before him, in the obscure, a white marble equestrian statue the size of life. If one could be made a poet, these two incidents were enough. The interior of Sardinia has been hitherto a kind of "terra