Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846
How clear, simple, yet most thrilling, is the enunciation of those words! and mark the superb harmony with which, proceeding in the sacred service, the single plaintively modulated voice of the officiating minister is answered by the choral supplications of the assembled worshippers – swelling out in joyous exulting tones, and dying away in sorrowful minor cadence, as though the shadow of sin and suffering fell on those pathways to the highest heaven, clouding the radiance unmeet for mortal eye! And if rude tremulous notes, from some of the lowly ones who, still habited in their garb of daily toil, kneel by our side – for, in that house, distinctions are there none – mingle with the harmony, they mingle not harshly, for there is melody in the heart, and it is the voice of a brother; not the less "bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh," that the blessings of this life have been more sparingly bestowed on him – perchance to crown him more abundantly with glory and honour in that which is to come. Succeeding each other, the antiphonal chant – venerable with the port of near eighteen centuries; yea, with the hoar of Jewish, as well as Christian antiquity – the exuberant anthem with its ponderous chorus, and again, the joyous, melancholy, choral response, wherein blend the voices of childish innocence, strong manhood, and plaintive age, hear us on to the close; – that threefold blessing which none may hear unmoved, and whose magnitude seems to transcend our poor belief, as we reverently bow, in awed silence, musing on its unfathomable import; while the deep, mellow voice that pronounced it still lingers on the ear.
How imposing is the sight! One kneeling throng around – the indistinct light, that clothes with mysterious grace the beautiful lineaments of the Gothic structure – the bright gleam on the white and flowing vestments; – and the stillness! broken at length by a low, sad melody, in accordance with the subdued tone resting on all, gradually rising into the more swelling chords of the solemn organ, that, earthly strains though they be, seen not unmeet to mingle with those exalted ones that have gone before – rousing the heart from its more celestial contemplations, and by gentle transition – like a descending dove – bringing it down from its heavenward flight to that earth with which its present daily and active duties are concerned, the more fitly and cheerfully performed when thus hallowed; for, be it remembered, the preparation for that unseen world to which we are tending, is the best preparation for our continuance in this.
But the last wave of harmony has died away in the sounding aisles; one by one the lights are extinguished, throwing the varied beauty of arch, and niche, and pillar, into indistinguishable and fast deepening shade; and, last of the train, we, with heart tranquillized and elevated by the service of that evening hour, slowly follow the departing worshippers into the still, clear night.
M. J.
MARTHA BROWN
By an Ancient Contributor
TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE
Sir, – It is twenty years since I first contributed to your Magazine; – it was rather a brief article, and was not inserted in the early part of the work. In short, it consisted of a few lines in the Obituary at the end of the Number, and was as follows: – "Died at Bunderjumm, in the East Indies, Thomas Sneezum, Esq., much and justly regretted by a numerous circle of friends and acquaintances." He was my uncle, sir, and I was his heir, – a highly respectable man, and a remarkable judge of bullocks. He was in the Commissariat, and died worth forty thousand pounds. If you saw his monument, on the wall of our parish church, and read his character, you would know what a beautiful sympathy exists between a dead uncle and a grateful nephew. I took the name of Sneezum in addition to my own – bought an estate, and an immense number of books – and cultivated my land and literature with the greatest care. I planted trees – I drained meadows – and wrote books. The trees grew – the meadows flourished – but the books never came to an end. Something always interfered. I never could get the people in my novels disposed of. When they began talking, they talked for ever; when they fought duels, they were always killed; and, by the time I had got them into the middle of a scrape, I always forgot how I had intended to get them out of it. In history, it was very nearly the same. Centuries jostled against each other like a railway collision. I confused Charlemagne with Frederick Barbarossa, and the Cardinal Richelieu with M. Thiers. So, with the exception of the article I alluded to, in your Magazine, and a few letters on the present potato disease in the Gardener's Guide, I am a Great Unpublished – in the same way as I understand there are a number of extraordinary geniuses in the dramatic line, who have called themselves the Great Unacted. I can only hope that advancing civilization will bring better days to us both – types for me – actors for them.
At the time of the lamented death of my uncle, I was about thirty years of age, and for ten years before that, had been sleeping partner in a house in Liverpool; and I can honestly say I did my part of the duty to the perfect satisfaction of all concerned. I slept incessantly – not exactly in a house in Liverpool but in a very comfortable one – the drawing-room floor, near the Regent's Park. Twice a-year a balance-sheet came in, and a little ready money. I put the money carefully away in a drawer, and threw the balance-sheet in the fire. It was a very happy life, for I subscribed to a circulating library, and wrote the beginnings of books continually.
One day, about six months after I was in possession of the fortune, I heard a ring at the bell. There was something in the ring different from any I had ever heard before – a sort of sweet, modest tingling kind of a ring. I felt as if somebody was shaking my hand all the time; and, on looking back on the event, I think there must be something in mesmerism and every thing else – homœopathy and the water cure included; for it was certainly quite unaccountable on ordinary principles – but so it was. The maid was very slow in answering the bell. There was another pull. The same mysterious effects – a sort of jump – a tremor as it were, not at all unpleasant, but very odd – so I went to the door myself; and there fixed on me, in the most extraordinary manner, were two of the blackest eyes I ever saw – illuminating cheeks of a dark yellow colour, and increasing the whiteness of the most snowy teeth – the brightest, glistenest, shiningest, teeth that can possibly be imagined. She wore – for I may as well tell you it was a woman – she wore a flowing white veil upon her head, the queerest petticoats, and funniest shoes – at that time I had not seen the Chinese Collection and thought it was Desdemona (whom I had seen Mr Kean put to death a few nights before) "walking" in some of Othello's clothes. What she said, or if she said any thing, I was too much astonished to make out; but she walked into my room, smiling with her wonderful teeth, and curtsying with the extraordinary petticoats down to the very floor – and calling me "Massa Sib."
"My good woman," I said, "I am afraid you make a mistake. I don't know any one of the name of Sib;" but I checked myself, for I thought she perhaps mistook me – I wore prodigious whiskers at that time – for a gallant colonel, whose name begins with that euphonious syllable.
"No, no – no colonel," she said; "me wants you– me no care for colonels." What could she possibly want with me? I had never seen the woman before, or any body like her, except a picture of the Queen of Sheba when she was on a visit to Solomon. Could this woman come from Sheba? Could she take me for – no, no – she couldn't possibly take me for Solomon. So I was quite non-plussed.
"You no get no letter, Massa Sib, to tell you we was to come – eh?"
A letter? a letter? – I had had a hundred and fifty letters, but put them all into a box. How was it possible for me to read such a number? and who did she mean by us? How many more of then were coming?
"Massa Sib vill be so fond of him's babba – him vill" —
A dreadful thought came into my head – a conspiracy to extort money – a declaration at Bow Street – a weekly allowance. "Woman!" I said, "what, in heaven's name, do you mean by babba?"
"Dee little babb; it is so pretty – so like him papa."
"And whose baby is it? for I suppose it's a baby you mean, by your chatter about a babb."
"Your's. Oh! you will so lubb it."
"Mine? you detestable impostor, I never had such a thing in all my life."
"And here it is – oh, dee pretty dear!"
And at that moment, another woman, dressed in the same outlandish style as herself, brought up a little round parcel, that looked like a bundle of clothes, and, before I had time to say a word, or shut the door, or fly, placed it in my arms; and then both the women showed their glistening teeth, stretching from ear to ear, and screamed out in chorus, "You vill so lubb dee babba – it is such a pretty dear!"
I stood in a state of stupefaction for some time, but the dark-visaged visitors by no means shared my inactivity; they ran, and screamed, and bustled; trotted down stairs, jumped up again, and filled the whole passage; then the drawing-room; then the little bedroom behind it, with trunks, and bags, and band-boxes, and bird-cages full of parrots, and cloaks, and shawls; till at last, when I started from my trance – in doing which, nearly let the baby fall – I found my whole house taken possession of, and the two women apparently as much at home as if they had lived with me twenty years.
I unrolled the shawls and things from the baby's face. It was an infant about a year old, and opened its eyes as I was looking at it, and looked so wisely and sagaciously at me in return, that I could almost believe it knew as much of the proceeding as I did – and this it might very easily have done, without being a miracle of premature information, for I had not the remotest conception of what the whole thing was about. So I laid the child on the sofa, and went to the bell to ring for a policeman.
"Oh, don't ring him bell, ve are so comfitable here!" said one of the women. "Yesha vill go home 'gain, and I vill habb little bed in t'oder room, and vill sleep vid dee babb – so nice!"
"Oh, you will – will you? We'll see about that," I answered, astonished at the woman's impudence. "I will get you and your little lump of Newcastle" – this was an allusion to her colour – "turned out into the street."
"Oh, Massa Moggan vill soon be here! Him wrote letter a veek since; but him vill come to-day."
"Oh!" —
So I did not pull the bell, but looked at the two intruders just as Macready looks at the witches in Macbeth; for Mr Morgan was my legal adviser, and had been my uncle's agent, and transacted all the business connected with the succession; and I had such confidence in him that I never opened his letters, and had of course thrown the note they talked of into the great wooden box that was the receptacle of all my correspondence.
In the mean time, the baby began to squall.
"Take the brat away, and I'll tell a little bit of my mind to Mr Morgan," I said, grinding my teeth in a horrible passion; and, in a moment, the two women disappeared with the child, roaring and screaming, as if they had stuck pins into it on purpose to drive me mad.
If I had been a man of a tragic turn of mind, and fond of giving vent to the passion of a scene, I would have walked up and down the room, striking myself on the brow or breast, and shouting, "Confusion! distraction!" and other powerful words which Mr Kean used to deliver with astonishing emphasis; but I had no talent for the intense, and threw myself on the sofa, exclaiming, "Here's a pretty go!"
And a pretty go it undoubtedly was – two black women and a saffron-coloured baby established with me, as if I had been married to a Hottentot; and my sister-in-law, as is very often the case, had come to attend to her nieces' morals and education.
"So! Mr Morgan, what is the meaning of all this?"
But before I had time for further exclamations, my friend Mr Morgan, who had come quietly into the room, interrupted me —
"Hush, my dear Sneezum – you are delighted, I'm sure. A most interesting incident – eh, Sneezum?"
"Oh! these things do all very well in a book," I began; "but, by jingo, sir, it's a very different thing in real life; and I tell you very fairly, I'd sooner be married at once than have all the troubles of bringing up a set of children that I have nothing to do with."
"Children! my dear Sneezum?"
"To be sure; how do I know that some more black women mayn't come – with some more children – till my house grows like a gallery of bronzed figures; but I'll sell them – see if I don't; I'll pack them all on an Italian boy's head-board, and sell them to the doctors – every one."
"You labour under a mistake, my dear Sneezum. You've got my letter?"
"Yes – I got it – but" —
"Oh, then, of course you are too happy to show such respect to the wishes of the defunct."
"What defunct?"
"Your uncle."
"What! uncle Sneezum?" and a wonderful light seemed to break in upon my mind. – "He sent this baby here?"
Mr Morgan nodded his head; and, being a man of great caution, he only put his finger in a mysterious manner alongside of his nose, and said —
"Secrets in all families, Sneezum."
"Oho! well – but the women – they're ugly customers, both of them; uncle Sneezum was no judge of beauty."
"The women! what do you mean?" said Mr Morgan.
"Ay, which of them is it? but you need hardly tell, for I should never know which of them you meant; they're a great deal liker each other than any two peas I ever saw. Are we to call her Mrs Sneezum?"
Here Mr Morgan burst into a great laugh.
"My dear Sneezum, you are always trying to find out some wonderful scene or other to put into one of your books. No, no – these are two nurses; one will remain in charge of the child, the other returns immediately to Calcutta."
"And where will the one that is to remain – where will she live?" I asked with a fearful presentiment of something shockingly unpleasant. But before he had time to answer, the black visage of the nurse herself appeared at the door, smiling with more blindingly white teeth than ever.
"We have took dee room below dis – dee babb is in dee beautiful bed, and ve vill never leave Massa Sib – never no more – so nice!"
So I was booked, and felt it useless to complain.
Chapter II
Fifteen years passed on most happily. I established myself, or rather old Morgan established me, in my present house; he paid £25,000 for the estate; and I have gone on, as I told you at the beginning of this letter, cultivating my farm and my talents with the utmost care. The little girl grew and grew till I thought she would never stop; and by the time she was sixteen she was at least an inch taller than I was. Many people like those prodigious women of five feet six – I'm only five feet five myself, which I believe was the exact measurement of Napoleon; and I must confess that when I looked on Martha Brown – that was her name – a sort of compliment I always thought to the complexion of her Hindoo mother – I could not imagine how she could be the child of such a curious old-fashioned looking individual as I had heard my uncle Sneezum was. Well, she grew tall – and grew stout – and grew clever; and if old Morgan had been her father himself, he could not have taken more care of her. He was always down at Goslingbury, (that's the name of my place – I sometimes put "Park" after it; but the lawn is now in turnips, and not the least like Blenheim,) and his wife, and his two daughters, and his little boy – in fact, the whole family; and though, I confess, they were always most friendly and attentive to me, their principal cares were bestowed on Martha Brown. I never push myself where I perceive my company is not greatly desired; so I went out to see the planting, or thin the copses, or make new fences, or superintend the ploughing, or betook myself to my study, and gave full way to the wildest flights of fancy in my everlasting first chapters of a novel or romance.
Sir, – It was at that time – now nearly four years ago – that I began a work which I don't believe the most hostile criticism – but I will not boast; it will be enough to say that I consider it equal to any two introductory chapters I ever read. The whole of the first consists in a description of my own house – the name of course changed, and the locality removed to another county. I give the number of the rooms, the width of the passages, the height of ceilings, and a description of the new lifting-hinges to the dining-room door, that raise it over the turkey carpet, without sacrificing, as is usual, an inch of the lower part, and leaving a great interval at the sill. The fields are also very particularly described, and in some instances the exact measurement given; it gives such an appearance of reality, as may be seen in Ainsworth and others; and the second chapter is devoted, or meant to be devoted, to the living interests of the story – the dramatis personæ, as it were – with hopes, fears, griefs, and the other passions alluded to in Collins's ode.
Mystery has an indescribable charm, which is the thing that makes me so fond of riddles; and so I determined to have a hero or a heroine, I did not care which, of a most unexampled kind. But how to invent an unexampled hero, I could not imagine. Some disgusting fellow had always done it before: even a blackamoor had been taken up – for there was that horrid Othello; a Jew – there was Sheva; a puppy – there was Pelham; a pickpocket – there was Jack Sheppard; and at last, as the sweet source of mystery, and the pleasantest one to unravel, I thought I would take myself. Yes, I would be the hero of my own book; and as to a heroine, why, one of the Misses Morgan, or Martha Brown, or old Mrs Morgan, or the Indian nurse, (whose name was Ayah, which is Sanscrit or Cherokee for her situation,) any body would do. I was not at all particular; so I began my own description.
It is amazing how little difference there is between man and man. A very few touches judiciously applied, would make Roebuck into Wellington, especially if Roebuck held the brush himself. Involuntarily I found my height increasing, my embonpoint diminishing, my eyes brightening, my hair disporting in wavy ringlets over a majestic brow, till at the end of the second page I was Theodore Fitzhedingham, twenty-five years of age, with several grandfathers and grandmothers distinguished in history before the Norman conquest, and a clear rent-roll of forty thousand a-year. And yet, after all, it was my own individual self, Thomas Smith Sneezum – not, perhaps, exactly as I was at that moment – but as I had often and often fancied myself when I had gone through a course of Thaddeus of Warsaws, and other chronicles of the brave and beautiful. For, I confess, I was no wiser than other people, and it is well known they have an amazing tendency to identify themselves with the characters of the books they read, which perhaps accounts for the contempt that Doctors' or Clergymen's wives in country villages entertain for any body of the name of Snookes; and gives them so prodigious an opinion of their own importance, that they wouldn't visit a stockbroker or flannel manufacturer for the world. But there I was, stuck in the third page of the second chapter – Theodore Fitzhedingham – blessed with all that handsomeness, and rolling in all that money, and not able to move hand or foot, or in short make the least progress towards the dénouement of the story. For, with all my study, I could not manufacture a heroine out of any of the girls around me. Miss Letitia Morgan had false teeth – I found it quite impossible to make a heroine of her; and besides, I was not even sure of the genuineness of the long curls at the side of her face. For, you will observe, that the beautifying process I have mentioned above; seems strictly confined to one's own particular case. No lying and swopping, and altering and amending, would make those long brown artificial incisors – you saw a roll of the gold wire every time she laughed – into a row of pearls encased in a casket of ruby. That is my description of white teeth in red lips, and I think it is far from bad. Then Miss Sophia was immensely tall, and immensely thin; and in the mornings when she appeared en negligée, as they say in the Morning Post, her clothes hung straight down in perpendicular descent, so that she looked exactly like the canvass air funnels that you see in a steam-boat: and there were no outs and ins, or ups and downs, about her figure from top to toe; and I found it impossible, for a particular reason, to supply these deficiencies by the exercise of my ingenuity in description And that particular reason was this, – that she did it herself. Lord! what a change took place on Miss Sophia as you saw her gliding about the room like a half emptied pillow-case in the morning, and the grand and distinguée (Morning Post again) individual that choked up all the doorways, and occupied whole sofas, when you met her at a party at night. Then there were such flounces and tucks, and furbelows, – she sailed through the room enveloped in such awful circumgyrations of muslin – so pulled in at the waist, and so inflated every where else, that she looked – as you saw only her neck and shoulders emerging from the enormous circle in which the rest of her was buried – like an intrepid æronaut who has fallen by some accident through a hole in the balloon, and you were lost in calculations of the length of darning-needle that would be needed to reach to the vera superficies. Now if I invent, I like to have the honour of the invention entirely to myself; and I found it impracticable to extract a heroine from seven or eight spring gauze petticoats, and a roll of millinery below the waist, that looked like a military cloak rolled up on the crupper of a life-guardsman's saddle. Then poor Martha Brown was too young, and at that time too bashful, for a heroine; and besides, there was no getting over the blot on her birth. Theodore Fitzhedingham could never think of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm. One day I had been at work in one of the plantations, and just as I was marking with my hand-axe a birch tree to be felled, a thought came into my head. I left the cross half executed, and threw the axe on the bank, hurried home, and locked myself in the study. Pen and paper were lying before me, and in a moment I had got deep into the introduction of my heroine. She was an orphan thrown on Fitzhedingham's care – young, beautiful, accomplished, but of unknown mysterious parentage – and the dénouement to consist in the discovery that her father was – but I won't mention it just now, for half the value of these things consists in the surprise. I will give you a page or two of it, only begging you to remark how entirely a man's style alters when he gets into a serious work. Here I go gabbling on and on to you, without much regard to style, or perhaps to grammar – (if there are any slips in it, have the kindness to correct them before you show this to any one) – but the instant I take up my pen to write a portion of my novel, I get dignified and heroic, perhaps you will say a little stiff, but I assure you I have formed myself on the best models. The passage I alluded to was this: —
"To all the graces of external beauty Maria Valentine de Courcy united all the captivations of the intellect – all the attractions of the understanding, – all the enchantments of the soul. Cast in the finest mould of earthly loveliness – radiant in all the charms of youth, of innocence, and of integrity – she was the loved of all approachers – the idol of all observers – the appropriator of all affections. A little more ethereal, she would have been a goddess – a little less celestial, she would have been a more ordinary woman than she was. For her nature was of too lofty a kind – her spirit of too sublimated a character – her disposition of too beatified a placidity, to allow her to be classed with the other individuals constituting the female sex. A period of many years had elapsed since she first took up her residence among the proud halls – the baronial corridors – the heraldic passages of Fitzhedingham Castle. Winter had found her wandering in the snowy lanes – Spring had noticed her careering in the budding meadows – Summer had beheld her perambulating through the flowery grove – and Autumn had kept his eye on her as she galloped her managed palfrey through the umbrageous orchard, or skimmed in her light bark over the pellucid bosom of the silver lake. For many years such had been her unvarying course; and if loveliness has a charm – if innocence has an attraction – if youth has a witchery – all – all – were concentrated in the noble figure and exquisitely-chiselled countenance of the subject of our sketch. The colouring of a Titian, the elasticity of a Rubens, the magnificence of a Michael Angelo Buonaparte." —
"Sneezum, Sneezum!" cried old Morgan, kicking with all his might at the study-door; and interrupting me before I could exactly settle how the sentence was to be properly ended – "Come and bid poor Billy good-bye."
"Billy? who's Billy?" I thought – a little perplexed, perhaps, with the labours of composition.
"Come; he's off this minute for Dublin, where he joins the Trigonometrical Survey – a great honour for a fellow not six months in the Engineers."
The old fool was talking about his son William Morgan, who had been at Goslingbury (Park, when I get the turnips up and the grass sown) for a month – a nice merry young man; and so clever at mathematics, and hydraulics, and other scientific pursuits, that he had won all the prizes at Addiscombe; and, though only a second lieutenant, was chosen to conduct a great survey of Ireland.
"I'm coming," I said; and bundled away my description of Maria Valentine de Courcy; and away old Morgan and I went to the lawn, where we expected to find the soldier. But no soldier, nor any body else, was to be seen.
"His mother and sisters are making fools of themselves, I daresay," said I, "blubbering and crying over the boy, as if he was going out to settle in New Zealand."
"I suspect there's a good deal of crying going on," replied old Morgan; "let us look into the summer-house at the top of the garden." So we hurried up the grass walk; and just as we got to the door, I was in the very act of stepping into the bower, and old Morgan close on my heels, when a man, with a handkerchief held to his eyes, rushed distractedly upon us, and rolled us both down the steps, as if we had been pushed by a bull; and in a minute or so, when I came to myself; I found my heels in a gooseberry bush, and my head tight-jammed into a flower-pot; old Morgan had rolled over into the next bed, which was prepared for celery, and he lay in one of the long troughs, with his hands folded across his breast, and evidently persuaded that he was his own effigy on the top of his own tomb. And this was all the leave-taking we had with the engineer; for, in an agony of grief at parting from his mother, and perhaps to hide his crying, he had hurried out blindfolded, and took no more notice of his host and his father than if we had been a couple of old cabbage-stalks. However, I got up as soon as I was able, and assisted Morgan once more upon his feet. This time we proceeded more cautiously into the summer-house; and on the bench we saw Martha Brown sitting and sobbing with all her might, with her head on Mrs Morgan's shoulder, and Miss Sophia holding a bottle of salts to her nose; while a tear, every now and then, rolled slowly over the tip of her own; and Miss Letitia chafing the sufferer's hands, and occasionally giving them a thump, as if to guard against a fit of hysterics.
Those Hindoos are certainly beautifully made. I never saw any thing more graceful than the recumbent figure of Martha Brown; and I think that was the first time I remarked that she was no longer a child. Up to that moment I had scarcely observed her size; but there she was – a regular full-grown woman – though, I must say, she was behaving rather like an infant, to keep whimpering and sobbing in such a ridiculous way, merely because I had fallen down-stairs.
"What is all this?" I said; "has any body hurt the child?"
"No, no, Mr Sneezum!" exclaimed Mrs Morgan, without looking at me; "leave her alone for a minute or two; it will soon be over."
"How do feel, dear?" enquired Miss Letitia.
"Are you any better, love?" asked Miss Sophia.
And it was very evident they gave themselves no concern about the nearly fatal accident we had met with, which had affected poor Martha so deeply; so I became a little warm.
"Very pretty – very pretty this – upon my word! What in heaven's name is the matter with you all? Here has been that blundering booby William, pushed his father and me down-stairs, and Martha seems the only one that would care a farthing if we had both been killed."
Upon this the girl made a great effort, and lifted up her head; but the moment her eyes rested on me she gave a great scream – wild laughter mixed with the most dreadful sobs; and she was fairly off in an hysterical attack.
"Why, she's worse than she was," I said; but old Morgan took me aside.
"Don't you see," he said, "that she's of a most affectionate, gentle nature, and that William's rushing off in the way he did" —
"Ay, to be sure, and upsetting me in such a dangerous manner. Poor thing! is it all for my sake do you think she's crying?" So I went and took her hand, and said – "Don't cry, Martha, don't cry – I'm not a bit hurt – so be a good girl, and don't vex yourself any more."
Upon this, Mrs Morgan looked at me as if she thought me deranged – so did Miss Letitia – and so did Miss Sophia; and even Martha, when she looked at me again, fell back in fresh fit, holloing "His head! his head" – and this time it was more laughter than sobs.