Page images
PDF
EPUB

FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON, M.A.*

THIS justly esteemed minister had a large brain, with a very active mental temperament. There was great susceptibility, owing to the exquisite quality and high culture of the whole organization. Besides an intellect of most comprehensive power, he was blessed with a farreaching imagination, intense sympathies, and remarkable capability to receive and impart impressions. He was evidently ambitious to excel, anxious about consequences, true to his perceptions of duty, and strong in faith. He was deeply devotional, but broad and liberal, simply conforming to what he deemed right and proper.

There was no biogtry, no superstition, no idolatry in him. If less sectarian than his brother clergymen, it was because of his broader views and sympathies, his meekness and his simplicity. His intuitions and thorough naturalness were no less remarkable than his rare conceptions and grand mental and spiritual gifts. What an artist he could have made! We can almost see even the cold marble breathe under his touch, while in painting and poetry he would repeat and echo nature and the highest human sentiment. In literature, he would describe in vivid light the past, the present, and the future. His was a mind akin to the prophetic-it was illuminated; and if he were not what is popularly termed a clairvoyant, he was certainly most impressible by psychological influences.

His faults grew out of a preponderance of the brain over the body. There was too much mentality, too much nervous intensity for the vitality. He was precocious, and his calling tended to develop his brain at the expense of the body. He was also extremely sensitive and diffident, distrusting his own abilities, which but increased the intensity of his feeling, and served still further to exhaust him. He was not adapted to pioneer life; his right place would have been in a position of tolerable quietness, where he could teach the teachers, evolving thought, inspiring the dormant natures of men, and

Life and Letters of Rev. F. W. Robertson, M.A., Incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, 1847-'53. Edited by Stopford A. Brooke, M.A., Late Chaplain to the Embassy at Berlin. 2 vols. 12mo. $8 50. Rev. F. W. Robertson's Sermons. Five series. 5 vols. 12mo. Each $1 25. Rev. F. W. Robertson's Lectures and Addresses on Social and Literary Topics. 1 vol. 12mo. $1 50.

[ocr errors][subsumed]

PORTRAIT OF F. W. ROBERTSON, M.A.

lifting them up spiritually to a higher plane by his own precept and example. Such a nature could never descend to counting coppers or driving sharp bargains, but needed an ample income to supply its wants, and the wants of those dependent upon it. Like many other shining lights in theology and literature, he drooped and died from over-mental exertion.

BIOGRAPHY.

REV. FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON was born in London, February 3d, 1816, his father being a captain in the English army. Of his early life little is known, except that he displayed an intense passion for study. When only four years of age he is said to have derived. his chief pleasure from books, and to have perused volume after volume with insatiable avidity. He received the rudiments of his education in a grammar-school at Beverley, Yorkshire, and when little more than nine years of age his parents removed to France, where he took advantage of the opportunity afforded him of acquiring a perfect knowledge of the French language and of devoting himself to the classics. On the return of his father to England in 1831, he entered the New Academy in Edinburgh, where he distinguished himself in Greek and Latin verse. After spending one year only at the New Academy, he attended the philosophical classes of that city, and prepared himself for the study of the law. The profession was uncongenial, however, and in a few months it was abandoned.

Being of an ardent and enthusiastic disposition, the army next suggested itself; but owing to delay in receiving a commission, and the deep conviction of those who were fondly attached to him that for one of his extreme intellectual refinement, moral purity, and re

ligious convictions, the army would not prove the most congenial sphere of action, and that there was a higher and nobler cause to which his rare talents might be dedicated with better promise of promoting his own happiness and the welfare of his fellow-men, the young man left it entirely to his father to decide what course he should pursue, and the result was that he was sent to Brazenose College, Oxford. Only four days after, the long-looked-for commission arrived, but he had resolved to become a minister of the Church of England. He was at this time in the twenty-first year of his age. In college he acquired the reputation of possessing abilities which would enable him to excel in any department of learning, art, or science to which he might devote himself, and his subsequent life fully corroborated this opinion.

Immediately after leaving college he was ordained, and accepted a curacy at Manchester for twelve months, at the expiration of which period his health began to decline, and he went on the Continent to recruit it. There he took out-of-door exercises, and traveled much on foot. He made a pedestrian tour to the Tyrol, the wild, magnificent scenery of which made a vivid impression upon his sensitive mind at the time, and was the source from which he drew many of those beautiful images and apposite illustrations which abound in his sermons and letters. His letters written from that place are magnificent specimens of descriptive writing, not only for their poetry of expression, but for their fidelity of description.

While at Geneva, where he paused in the course of his travels, he was married to Helen, third daughter of Sir George Denys, an English baronet, and shortly afterward returned with his young bride to England, when he became curate of Christ Church, Cheltenham. Here he remained four years, during which period he succeeded by his cloquence and originality of thought, as well as by the amiable qualities of his heart, in gaining a large and increasing circle of friends and admirers, among whom was the Bishop of Calcutta. The latter happening to hear Mr. Robertson preach, sent to him, offering him a canonship in the cathedral of Calcutta, but he declined, as it would have involved separation from his children. In 1847 he returned to St. Ebbs, Oxfordshire, where he officiated for two months during the indisposition of the rector of that place, on a miserably inadequate allowance. At this time the incumbency of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, became vacant. The income attached to it was comparatively a good one; yet when it was mentioned to him, he expressed a willingness to sacrifice his own personal convenience and emolument for the cause in which he labored, and desired the Bishop of Oxford to send him wherever his lordship thought he would be

[graphic]
[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

England. Mr. Robertson was pre-eminently intellectual. He was earnest, too; and in his earnestness he grew eloquent. The chapel was crowded every Sabbath, and his success was established. But "What is ministerial success?" he asks; "Crowded churches-full aislesattentive congregations-the approval of the religious world-much impression produced? Elijah thought so; and when he found out his mistake, and discovered that the applause on Carmel subsided into hideous stillness, his heart well-nigh broke with disappointment. Ministerial success lies in altered lives and obedient, humble hearts; unseen work recognized in the judgment day." That success was abundantly vouchsafed to him. While he charmed his hearers by the intellectual brilliancy of his sermons, he also sympathized with his fellow-men. He sought the wicked in their dens of vice; he strove to elevate them

intellectually and morally; he looked with pity and compassion upon their errors, their weaknesses, and upon the spiritual degradation into which they had sunk; he taught them truths, read to them; he reassured them in their doubts and misgivings; sympathized with their sufferings and strivings; and by a profound intuitive knowledge of the human mind, conquered the

hearts and consciences of thousands of stubborn men and women, and made them devoted followers of Christ.

Thus did he work for his Master, ever widening his sphere of influence, until the close of the year 1852, when ill health came upon him. As time passed on, increasing debility and a lack of physical energy became painfully apparent. During the early months of 1853 he delivered a lecture before the Brighton Athenæum, on the "Poetry of Wordsworth." But it was the last of his public lectures. The temporary flush which it produced as he dilated upon his favorite theme, lulled into an alarming pallor. Spring came, and he was obliged to relinquish his pastoral duties. Cheltenham was selected for a change of air and a temporary cessation from mental exertion. Two weeks of rest made a manifest improvement in his health, and on the following week he returned to Brighton and resumed the duties of his office. A fatal act of self-devotion. From this period he sank rapidly, and on Sunday the 15th of August-the anniversary of the day upon which, six years before, the minister had entered upon his duties in Brighton-the painful tragedy drew to its close. His agony was great, and his last words were, "I can not bear it. Let me rest. I must die. Let God do his work."

One of Mr. Robertson's favorite axioms was, "Uselessness is crime;" and it was his constant endeavor, not only in the pulpit, but in the relations of private life, to devote his energies to the welfare of those around him. He labored constantly for the improvement, both morally and intellectually, of the working classes of England. He sympathized with them, and as a consequence won them to him. W When a monument was being erected to the memory of the reverend gentleman in Brighton Cemetery, they sought to have a share in it, and begged permission to keep his grave free from weeds and supply it with fresh flowers.

cance of time, will not be long in learning any lesson that this world has to teach him. Have you ever felt it? Have you ever realized how your own little streamlet is gliding away, and bearing you along with it toward that other awful world, of which all things here are but the thin shadows, down into that eternity toward which the confused wreck of all earthly things is bound? Let us realize that, until that sensation of time, and the infinite meaning which is wrapped up in it, has taken possession of our souls, there is no chance of our ever feeling strongly that it is worse than madness to sleep that time away. Every day in this world has its work; and every day, as it rises out of eternity, keeps putting to each of us the question afresh, What will you do before to-day has sunk into eternity and nothingness again? Men seem to do with it through life, just what the Apostles did for one precious and irreparable hour of it in the garden of Gethsemane

Gifted with reasoning powers of the highest order, his discourses were pregnant with thought. His intense love of truth, however, did not lead him into the chaos of rationalism or infidelity, but direct to the fountain of Divine Truth. He had no narrow or sectarian opinions. He was broad, liberal, and intelligent; ever enunciating the great truths of Christianity in-they go to sleep. their fullest and noblest acceptation. Though Have you ever seen those marble statues in a minister of the Church of England, and attached to her institutions, he was not bigoted in that attachment. It was his aim to convert the mere nominal Christianity of the age into a vital principle of action. Christianity, as he understood and expounded it, was a great agent of man's earthly regeneration and eternal happiness.

His inmost feelings are fully expressed in the following words, uttered on the first Sunday in the year 1852: "The motto on every Christian banner is, Forward!-there is no resting-place in the present, no satisfaction in the past." The thorough earnestness for which Mr. Robertson was so remarkable is strikingly shown in that sentence. "Forward!" His sermons in the following year seem to be pervaded with a foreboding of the end. Perhaps this may be attributable to a "deficiency of Hope," which as he himself said "is the great fault of my character." How sad yet sympathetic is the following:

“Not one of us but has felt his heart aching for want of sympathy. We have had our lonely hours, our days of disappointment, and our moments of hopelessness; times when our highest feelings have been misunderstood, and our purest met with ridicule; days when our heavy secret was lying unshared, like ice upon the heart. And then the spirit gives way; we have wished that all were over, that we could lie down tired, and rest, like the children, from life."

We shall close our sketch of this admirable man and Christian by an extract from one of his beautiful sermons

THE IRREPARABLE PAST.

It is true, first of all, with respect to time, that it is gone by. Time is the solemn inheritance to which every man is born heir, who has a life-rent of this world; a little section cut out of eternity and given us to do our work in; an eternity before, an eternity behind; and the small stream between floating swiftly from the one into the vast bosom of the other. The man who has felt with all his soul the signifi

1

some public square or garden, which art has so fashioned into a perennial fountain, that through the lips, or through the hands, the clear water flows in a perpetual stream, on and on forever, and the marble stands therepassive, cold-making no effort to arrest the gliding water? It is so that time flows through the hands of men-swift, never pausing, till it has run itself out-and there is the man petrified into a marble sleep, not feeling what it is which is passing away forever.

It is so, just so, that the destiny of nine men out of ten accomplishes itself; slipping away from them aimless, useless, till it is too late. And this passage asks us, with all the solemn thoughts which crowd around an approaching eternity, what has been our life, and what do we intend it shall be? Yesterday, last week, last year-they are gone. Yesterday, for example, was such a day as never was before, and never can be again. Out of darkness and eternity it was born, a new, fresh day; into darkness and eternity it sank again forever. It had a voice calling to us of its own-its own work, its own duties. What were we doing yesterday? Idling? whiling away the time in light and luxurious literature? contriving how to spend the day most pleasantly? Was that your day? And now let us remember this: there is a day coming when sleep will be rudely broken with a shock; there is a day in our future lives when our time will be counted, not by years, nor by months, nor yet by hours, but by minutes-the day when unmistakable symptoms shall announce that the messengers of death have come to take us.

The startling moment will come which it is vain to attempt to realize now, when it will be felt that it is all over at last-that our chance and our trial are past. The moment that we have tried to think of, shrunk from, put away from us, here it is going, too, like all other moments that have gone before it; and then, with eyes unsealed at last, you look back on the life which is gone by. And now, from the

undone eternity, the boom of whose waves is distinctly audible upon your soul-a solemn, sad voice-"You may go to sleep." It is too late to wake; there is no science in earth or heaven to recall time that once has fled.

Again, this principle applies to a misspent youth. Youth is one of the precious opportunities of life, rich in blessing if you choose to make it so, but having in it the materials of undying remorse if you suffer it to pass unimproved. You can suffer your young days to pass idly and uselessly away; you can live as if you had nothing to do but to enjoy yourselves; you can let others think for you, and not try to become thoughtful yourselves, till the business and the difficulties of life come upon you unprepared, and you find yourselves, like men waking from sleep, hurried, confused, scarcely able to stand, with all the faculties bewildered, not knowing right from wrong, led headlong to evil, just because you have not given yourselves time to learn what is good. All that is sleep. And now, let us mark it. You can not repair it in after-life. Oh! remember, every period of human life has its own lesson, and you can not learn that lesson in the next period. The boy has one set of lessons to learn, and the young man another, and the grown-up man another. Let us consider one single instance. The boy has to learn docility, gentleness of temper, reverence, submission. All those feelings which are to be transferred afterward in full cultivation to God, like plants nursed in a hot-bed and then planted out, are to be cultivated first in youth. Afterward, those habits which have been merely habits of obedience to an carthly parent are to become religious submission to a heavenly Parent. Our parents stand to us in the place of God. Veneration for our parents is intended to become afterward adoration for something higher. Take that single instance; and now suppose that that is not learned in boyhood. Suppose that the boy sleeps to the duty of veneration, and learns only flippancy, insubordination, and the habit of deceiving his father-can that be repaired afterward? Humanly speaking, no. Life is like the transition from class to class in a school. The schoolboy who has not learned arithmetic in the earlier classes can not secure it when he comes to mechanics in the higher; each section has its own sufficient work. He may be a good philosopher or a good historian, but a bad arithmetician he remains for life; for he can not lay the foun lation at the moment when he must be building the superstructure. The regiment which has not perfected itself in its maneuvers on the parade-ground can not learn them before the guns of the enemy. And, just in the same way, the young person who has slept his youth away, and become idle and selfish and hard, can not make up for that afterward. He may do something; he may be religious. Yes, but he can not be what he might have been. There is a part of his heart which will remain uncultivated to the end. Youth has its irreparable past.

And therefore, my young friends, let it be sure was only the merest beginning-only apimpressed upon you; Now is a time, infinite in plies to suicide resulting from disappointments its value for eternity, which will never return in life He does not include the case of suicide again; learn that there is a very solemn work to escape infamy otherwise unavoidable, or inof heart which must be done while the stillness tense physical suffering, which must (humanly of the garden of your Gethsemane gives you speaking) persist until death, and perhaps time. Now, or never. The treasures at your cause it. His inquiries partake of this nature command are infinite-treasures of time-trea- -Might not a victim of the Inquisition kill sures of youth, treasures of opportunity that himself to avoid the nameless horrors of its grown-up men would sacrifice everything they torturers? Might not an Englishman kill his have to possess. Oh, for ten years of youth wife or his daughter and himself, in the Sepoy back again, with the added experience of age! | rebellion, to avoid enduring the lust and cruBut it can not be; they must be content to elty of the maddened heathen soldiery? Might sleep on now, and take their rest. not a victim helplessly jammed under some There is a Past which is gone forever. But beam, pinned down in the middle of a burning there is a Future which is still our own.

On Psychology.

The soul, the mother of deep fears, of high hopes infinite,
Of glorious dreams, mysterious tears, of sleepless inner sight ;
Lovely, but solemn it arose,

Unfolding what no more might close.--Mrs. Hemans.

NAPOLEON ON SUICIDE.

[THE paragraphs below are translations of a fragment dictated by Napoleon at St. Helena, in 1820, to his faithful follower General Marchand, and of two passages from his "Outline of the Wars of Caesar," in the same line of thought. They are interesting in themselves, as being the opinions of one of the two or three greatest men who ever lived-many believe him unconditionally the greatest-on a subject which has been often debated, and which admits of much subtile and strong reasoning. They are also interesting as throwing a reflex light upon the mental character of the Great Emperor.

Napoleon's reasoning, it will be observed, is exclusively Pagan, or such as might be Pagan. It contains no reference to the Christian religion, and, in fact, no argument which implies any religion at all. It appeals simply to the sentiments of Adhesiveness, Self-Esteem, and Conscientiousness, and to that general balance and conclusion of the practical judgment which we call common sense. This is in exact accordance with the indications of the Emperor's head, which was rather flat than high in the region of Veneration, and not remarkably full at Conscientiousness. It may be added that many other occurrences in his life show the same trait, which might be called non-religiousness. He did not feel, for instance, any great difference between the intrinsic excellence and the binding force of Christianity and Mohammedanism, as he showed by his compliments to the Egyptian imams about their religion.

This omission does not, however, weaken those which the Emperor uses, and which are remarkably clear, direct, and strong. They amount to this: that suicide makes sure of whatever bad fortune there is, and effectually destroys all the chances of future good fortune, which chances always exist.

His discussion of the subject-which to be

house, and about to be roasted alive, shoot himself, to avoid the more inevitable and more agonizing death? And if such suicides-which are a hastening of the coming end by a few moments-are wrong, what shall we say of the excellent men, and especially the delicate women, who go away year after year into jungles and swamps as missionaries, with a moral certainty that they are shortening their lives, not by minutes, but by years? Was Arnold Winkelried wicked in gathering the sheaf of Austrian spears into his bosom to let in the fatal Swiss swordsmen to hew liberty from among the otherwise impregnable host of Leopold? But that was suicide, as much as Judas' hanging himself. So was the action of the steamboat pilot who broiled to death at his post in order to lay the boat ashore and enable all the rest of the ship's company to escape. Or, if such suicides are right, will it be found that the motive with which we kill ourselves gives the death its moral character, and that suicide in itself is neither right nor wrong? If Christianity does not forbid taking the lives of others if the cause be sufficient, why should it restrict our control of ourselves, more than our control of others?

It will not do to make a distinction between suicide by actually laying violent hands on one's self, or flinging one's self into fatal places on the one hand, and merely doing things that will necessarily cause our death on the other hand. It is purposely causing our own death which constitutes suicide, whether directly or indirectly. Does Christianity or the Bible prohibit all purposeful causation of one's own death? The saying of Christ, in the fifteenth chapter of John, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," seems to imply that a person in spirit of self-devotion or sacrifice might properly put himself in a fatal position.]

THE EMPEROR ON SUICIDE.

Has a man the right to kill himself? Yes: provided that his doing so will not wrong any other person, and provided life is an evil to him.

But when is a man's life an evil to him? When it offers him only suffering and pain. But, since suffering and pain are changing every instant, there is no moment of life when one has the right of killing himself. That mo

ment only comes at the hour of his death; for it is only then that it becomes proved that his life is only a tissue of evils and sufferings.

There is no one who has not more than once yielded to mental distress and wished to kill himself; and who has not within a few days been diverted from that wish by changes within his own mind, or in the circumstances around him. He who killed himself Monday would the next Saturday have desired to live; but a man can kill himself only once.

Life consists of the past, the present, and the fnture; it must therefore have become an evil, if not for all the three, at least for the present and the future. If it is an evil only for the present, suicide throws away the future. The evils of one day do not justify the sacrifice of all the rest of life. It is only he whose life is an evil now, and who is certain (which is impossible) that it will always continue so-that there will be no change in his position or in his own will, resulting from modified circumstances and situation, or from habit and the lapse of time-an impossibility again-only such a man would be justified in killing himself.

One who sinks under the weight of present evils and commits suicide is guilty of an injustice to himself; he obeys, out of despair and weakness, a momentary fantasy, and sacrifices to it the whole of his future.

The comparison of a gangrened arm amputated in order to save the whole body, is not a valid one; for when the surgeon cuts off the arm, it is a certainty that it would occasion death. This consequence is not a sentiment, it is a reality; whereas, when a man's sufferings drive him to suicide, he not only puts an end to the sufferings, but destroys his future life too. One would never repent, in the case supposed, of having had an arm amputated, but he might repent, and almost always would, of having killed himself.

САТО.

The conduct of Cato has been approved by his cotemporaries and admired by history; but who gained by his death? Cæsar. Who was pleased at it? Cæsar. And who lost by it? Cato's own party at Rome. But, it may be argued, he died rather than boy before Cæsar. But who would have made him bow? Why could he not have gone with the cavalry, or with those of his party who fled by sea from the port of Utica? They rallied the party in Spain. What would not have been the influence of his name, his counsels, and his presence with those ten legions which in the following year held the balance of destiny on the field of Munda! And even after that defeat, what would have prevented him from following over sea the younger Pompey, who survived Cæsar, and long sustained with glory the eagles of the republic?

Cassius and Brutus, the nephew and the pupil of Cato, killed themselves on the field of battle at Philippi, Cassius when Brutus was victorious. Under a misunderstanding, these desperate actions, inspired by a false courage

and false ideas of greatness, gave the victory to the triumvirate. Marius, abandoned by fortune, showed himself superior to her. When cut off from the sea, he hid himself in the marshes of Minturnae, and his constancy was rewarded by re-entering Rome and becoming a seventh time consul. When old, broken in strength, and at the highest point of prosperity, he killed himself, in order to escape from the vicissitudes of human fortune; but at a time when his party was triumphant.

If Cato could have read in the book of destiny that in four years Cæsar was to fall in the senate-chamber at the foot of Pompey's statue, pierced with twenty-three dagger wounds, while Cicero would still occupy the tribune and make the air re-echo with the philippics against Antony, then would Cato have stabbed himself? No. He killed himself from mortification-from despair. His suicide was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a stoic, but a blot upon his life.

CÆSAR.

It is said that during the battle of Munda, Cæsar was on the point of killing himself. This would have been destructive to his party; he would have been vanquished as Brutus and Cassius were. May a magistrate, the leader of a party, voluntarily desert his friends? Is such a resolution virtue, courage, strength of mind? Is not death the end of all evils, of all disappointments, of all sufferings, of all toils? Does not the neglect of life constitute the habitual virtue of every soldier? Is it right to desire suicide, to commit it? Yes, say some, when one is without hope. But when or how can any human being be without hope, in this shifting scene of life, where the natural or violent death of one single man may instantaneously change the whole condition and appearance of affairs?

TRAINED.

THE IDIOTIC
CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH'S PROTÉGÉ JACK.

THE story of Kaspar Hauser, the unfortunate being who for some reason was doomed to unmerited confinement from infancy, has always excited great interest on account of the physiological questions that came up when, just bordering on manhood, he was released from the dungeon he had so long inhabited. In the character of John T, the subject of the present sketch, there are questions quite as curious and much more difficult to solve. Kaspar Hauser's was a confined body and an undeveloped mind; John T seemed to have a mind as acute and strong in many respects as the average, but its expression was almost entirely prevented-he was deaf and dumb. He was considered an idiot, and probably that impression would never have been removed had he not come under the care of a woman who made it one of the objects of her life to disentangle from its uncouth wrappings the clear intelligence which she discerned in him. That woman was Charlotte Elizabeth, a

writer who thirty or forty years ago was well known and widely read. John T was about eight years of age when she first knew him, and after living in her house for eleven years he died of consumption.

The boy was deaf and dumb, and of so contracted intellect that his parents, who were Irish peasants, could find no way either to remove or to mitigate his ignorance. His mother had undertaken dreadful penances for his sake: walking on her bare knees over a road strewn with pebbles, broken glass, and quicklime, to make her own sufferings sufficiently great to overtop the Divine wrath which she supposed was the cause of her son's affliction, and thus to obtain the bestowal of speech and hearing upon her boy. But her efforts had so little success, that when a stranger and a Protestant offered to take him away she gladly consented.

Jack, as the boy was called, was a pigmy in stature, and his features and aspect corresponded with the dullness of his mind. His bristly hair hung in an uncouth mass over his eyes, and it was not until his teacher one day lifted it away from his forehead that she began to have any hope of teaching him. But his brow once disclosed, proved to be high and expansive, and the thought at once struck her, that under such a forehead must lie an intelligence that could be awakened if she would only have patience. That idea and a little subsequent progress, sure, if small, gave her courage to persevere for seven years in the effort to give life to the dead intellect. When the first attempts were made to teach him the alphabet, he thought it great fun, but the unmeaning grin which spread over his face showed that he received no higher notion of the lesson.

[ocr errors]

The first intelligence that he manifested came so suddenly, that though long watched for, it was a real surprise. Standing before the house-dog, he pointed first to the animal, then to himself, and with his hand alphabet asked What." He had to repeat the action many times before his teacher understood that he was asking what the difference was between himself and the dog. From that time he began to show an inordinate curiosity which nothing could satisfy. Nor was he contented with asking the names of furniture, dogs, and the like, and examining their nature. He entered the field of speculative philosophy at once. Pointing to the sun, he asked if the teacher made it. No. Then he asked the same question about each one of the four or five persons for whom he had a sign. When he found that none of these had made it, he made his "what-what" with fretful impatience and a stamp of the foot. The answer was a gesture upward and the word God. He then explained a system of astronomy he had formed.

The sun he could not understand, because it was too bright to be looked at; but the moon was like a dumpling, and somebody sent it rolling over the tops of the trees, just as he rolled his marble over the table. The stars were cut out of paper with a large pair of

scissors and stuck in the sky with the end of the thumb. Having thus arranged the order of the universe, he looked very happy, and patted himself on the breast, evidently as much pleased as some more pretentious philosophers who have been quite as far from the truth.

And like those philosophers, too, he was very critical about other explanations than his own. The next day he came in a great wrath and said that "Mam's" tongue ought to be pulled out, which was his way of saying that she had told a lie. When she looked very innocent and said "what,” he explained that He had he had looked everywhere for God. been down the street, over the bridge, into the church yard, through the fields; had even looked into the castle grounds and the soldiers' barracks, and at night had popped his head out of the window; but he could not find God. There was nobody anywhere who was big enough to put up his hand and stick the stars in the sky. "Mam" was bad, and must have her tongue pulled out. For "God—no, God— No," he repeated, with great finger-volubility.

The difficulty of inculcating an impression of a character so abstracted from anything material as the unseen God can be imagined. But the method was as ingenious as the task was puzzling. As "Mam" and her pupil sat on opposite sides of the fire, she shrugged her shoulders and seemed to acknowledge her delinquency, at which Jack shook his head at her to show how much he was offended. Presently she seized a pair of bellows, and first blowing the fire for a time, she turned the blast on his hand. He snatched it away scowling, and shivered to show how much he disliked it. The teacher looked very innocent, and repeated the puff, which made him still more angry. But she looked at the nozzle of the bellows, and then all around, as if searching for what offended him, and then said "Wind-no," and told him his tongue must be cut out. The effect of this was curious. He opened his eyes very wide, panted, and turned very red; while his face shone with more intelligence than it had ever before exhibited, and instantly catching her meaning he repeated many timesshouting silently with his fingers—“ God—wind, God-wind," holding two fingers out to show that they were equal and like, for he had no other expression for "like."

When it is remembered that both teacher and scholar were totally deaf, and that one was dumb, this success in communicating an idea so difficult to conceive was wonderful. But undoubtedly the infirmity which compelled Charlotte Elizabeth to obtain all her impressions of the world by the use of sight, smell, touch, and motion, prepared her all the better for a task so perplexing as the instruction of the clumsy understanding of this boy.

As we have seen, this first grasp his mind made of the infinite had the physical character of a pang. Every fiber of his body helped his mind in the mysterious process by which memory and inquisitiveness combined in this befogged nature to comprehend the most ab

struse question which is presented to man. But from this time he learned steadily and mysteriously truths which no one had taught him. He followed out with perfect correctness deductions from this simple beginning, which led him to obtain a very clear idea of God. He discovered that God was like the sun, in that he had to shut his eyes when he looked at either, an illustration of the glory of God which is of common use among larger intellects, but which was new and original with Jack.

He had always been given to teasing the dog and other inferior animals. But his obscure cogitations soon taught him that the works of God were to be treated with respect, and he became very careful and tender of all living things, passing his hand over them caressingly and saying "God made." At first he had a queer but natural idea that the worms were not made by God, saying that they came up out of the ground, while God was up in the sky. His teacher told him that God made the worms too, and then he set his mind to find out how this could be. At last he agreed that the worms might have been rolled up in the world when it was made, like meat in a pudding, and bite their way out. He had been very fond of fishing, but after this discovery his wrath was great when he found an angler looking for live bait.

His was a reasoning without words, and we are utterly confounded when we seek to discover whether his mind had a language, and if not, how it revolved thoughts and evolved ideas. The best explanation we can conceive of is that the impressions on his mind were hieroglyphic. We see a tree, a dog, a house, and our minds revert to certain little ink-marks which we learned in our youth to put for those things. In short, we reason in words. Jack must have dealt entirely with things. Perhaps that mind which we call darkened, was revolving problems of pure philosophy, intuitions, the hidden meaning of the phenomena of life, the mysterious correspondence of natural objects, with the highest ideas of man; things which are reserved for the most cultured and profound minds among more perfectly made mortals.

It was remarked that he could not always deal understandingly with words. He knew how to write, and spent a good deal of time copying out of the Bible. But though he would dwell on the words that he knew, he seemed to obtain no ideas from printed language. He would skip two pages without knowing it, and go right on with the copying: and among his papers were found pages of sentences and parts of sentences copied out of the Bible and put together without any sense or meaning. Very like he attached an arbitrary meaning to particular words, and these jumbling paragraphs may have been complete stories to him.

His language was peculiar, and mostly confined to nouns and a few verbs, which he arranged by rules of his own, the result being very like a dispatch by the present Atlantic telegraph cable. If his mistress wanted to send

[ocr errors]

him to the village for a small loaf of bread and pay for it, she would say: "Jack go village money bread small one." And he could not understand such a sentence as You must go to the village and buy me a small loaf of bread." He would perform his errand by going to the shop and writing down "Bread small one," at the same time holding out the money. He was once taken into a toy shop, and while his mistress was buying something a great commotion was heard. There was Jack, mounted on a rocking-horse driving away at full gallop, to the great danger of everything near by, and shouting and waving his arms. He gave a diverting account of how he cautiously approached the horse, found out that it was "bite-no; kick-no," and finally mounted him. He wanted to know if it was God-made, and how far he had ridden.

When a horse was bought by his master, Jack was very anxious to groom him. He told his mistress confidentially that men were very wicked; that a man servant would often shake hands with the devil (his way of saying that he would be a bad fellow). He also said that a man would eat a great deal and cost money, but Jack would only eat "small potato, small meat," because he loved Captain B. The captain finally consented to let Jack try, and the boy really did the grooming very well. His exultation was great. He went up to the horse, kissed it, and in great glee said, “No man; all Jack. Devil cry-Go devil;" for it was a part of his belief that the devil was always on the lookout to trip him up. A funnier scene still occurred when another horse and a cow were added to the establishment. It was thought that he could not do so much work, and a young woman was hired to milk the cow. But Jack considered himself outraged. He talked of his mother's Kilkenny cows and "cow's baby," and moreover treated the dairy maid with contumely. At length they let him have his way and he was happy. He never afterward referred to that time without saying that then he was "Hell Jack."

Education had a remarkable physical effect upon him. His stiff, bristly hair became silky, color came and went constantly in his cheeks, in sympathy with the flow of emotions in his mind, and the succession of new scenes and feelings which gradually increasing perceptions called up, lent the charm of childish freshness to his countenance. His large hazel eyes were peculiarly beautiful, for he used them to express his thoughts. He depended a great deal upon the manner of others to him, claiming a shake of the hand at morning and night, and suffering so much if it was omitted, that the denial of the kindness was resorted to only as a punishment for the gravest offenses. One of the latter was a habit of howling when anything offended him. Of course he could not hear his own noise, but he was capable of making a vast deal of it, and seemed to like the commotion it occasioned. This, however, he overcame in time. As he grew older, both mind and manners became gentle and delicate.

« PreviousContinue »