Delia Salter Bacon

“ In its rich and kindly humour there is no sneer, no satire. It is the loving eye of nature's own great pupil—it is the kindly human eye, that comes near enough to point those jests, and paint so truly; there is a great human heart here in the scene embracing the lowly. It was the heart that was putting forth then its silent but resistless energies into the ages of the human advancement, to take up the despised and rejected masses of men from their misery, and make of them truly one kind and kindred. ”

“ In the lovely summer twilight shall her burial be, and thus; in all her bridal array, with the glory of the crimson sunset shining through the trees;—see what a fearful glow is kindling on her cheek, and that faint breeze—or, is it life that stirs these curls? Stay!—whose young brow is this?—Ha!—whose smile is this? Who is this they would hurry away into the darkness of death? The grave! Could you fold the rosy and all-speading beauty of heaven in the narrow grave? Helen, is it thee?—my heaven, my long-lost heaven ”

“ The copies and exemplars of good,—that vision of heaven,—that idea of felicity, and beauty, and goodness that the human soul brings with it, like a memory,—those celestial shapes that the thought and heart of man, by a law in nature, project,—that garden of delights that all men remember, and yearn for, and aspire to, and will have, in one form or another, in delicate air patterns, or gross deceiving images,—that large, intense, ideal good which men desire—that perfection and felicity, so far above the rude mocking realities which experience brings them,—that, that has had its poets. ”

“ You had forgotten, Helen, that in that army's pay, nay, all around us even now are hordes and legions.
Helen. I know it,—I know it all. I do indeed.
Mrs. G. Helen, will you place yourself defenceless amidst that savage race, whose very name from your childhood upwards, has filled you with such strange fear? Yesterday I chid you for those fancies,—I was wrong,—they were warnings, heaven-sent, to save you from this doom. What was that dream you talked of then?
Helen. Dreams are nothing. Will you unsay a life's lessons now when most I need them? ”

“ The wisest statesmen, the most judicious that the world has ever known were here, with their new science, weighing in exactest scales those issues. We must not quarrel with their concessions to tyranny on the one hand, nor with their determination to effect changes on the other, until we are able to command entirely the position they occupied, and the opposing dangers they had always to consider. We must not judge them till they have had their hearing. What freedom and what hope there is of it upon the earth to-day, is the legacy of their perseverance and endurance. ”

“ Yes, there in that dark cradle, calmly sleeping, all flashing with gold and jewels, like some bright vision of olden time, methought there lay—a lady,—a girl, young and lovely as a dream;—the white plume in her bonnet soiled and broken, and the long bright hair streaming heavily on her mantle,—and yet with all its loveliness, such a face of utter sorrow saw I never. I saw her, I saw her, as I see you now,—the proud young form with such a depth of grace, in its strange repose, and—where are you going?—what are you doing, Maitland? ”

“ Science is the word that unlocks the books of this School, its gravest and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately allegory, and its Book of Sports and Riddles. Science is the clue that still threads them, that never breaks, in all their departures from the decorums of literature, in their lowest descents from the refinements of society. The vulgarity is not the vulgarity of the vulgar—the inelegancy is not the spontaneous rudeness of the ill-bred—any more than its doctrine of nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. ”

“ G. A girl!—Helen, yesterday an army's strength, the armies of the nation, the love of mother, and brothers, and sisters, all seemed nothing for protection to your timid and foreboding thought; and now, when the enemy are all around us,—do you talk of a single girl? Why, the spirit of some strange destiny is struggling with your nature, and speaks within you, but we will not yield to it.
Helen. You have spoken truly, mother. There is one tie in these hearts of ours, whose strength makes destiny, and where that leads, there lie those iron ways that are of old from everlasting. ”

“ There is a new rallying-place on the earth for those who seek truly the higher good; at the foot of the new symbol they recognise each other, they join hand in hand, and the bands of those who wait and watch amid the earth's darkness for the promise, cheer us with their songs. Truths out of the Eternal Book, truths that all hearts lean on in their need, are spoken. Words that shall never pass away, sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are always in our ears. ”

“ Helen. It is this war that has parted us; and so, this is but my part in these noble and suffering times, and that great thought reaches overall my anguish. But for this war I might have been—hath this world such flowers, and do they call it a wilderness?—I might have been, even now, you know it, Annie, his wife, his wife, his. But our hearts are cunningly made, many-stringed; and often much good music is left in them when we count them broken. ”

“ Till now there has been no man to claim this new and magnificent collection in natural science: it is a legacy that came to us without a donor;—this new and vast collection in natural history, which is put down here, all along, as that which is wanting—as that which is wanting to the science of man, to the science of his advancement to his place in nature, and to the perfection of his form,—as that which is wanting to the science of the larger wholes, and the art of their conservation. ”

“ You have counted all, Helen? The anguish that will bring tears into your proud brother's eyes, your sister's comfortless sorrow?—did you think of her lonely and saddened youth? You counted the wild suffering of this bitter moment,—did you think of the weary years, the long sleepless nights of grief, the days of tears; did you count the anguish of a mother's broken heart, Helen? God only can count that. ”

“ They are but the natural guards with which great Nature, working in the instinct of the philosophic genius, protects her choicest growth,—the husk of that grain which must have times, and a time to grow in,—the bark which the sap must stop to build, ere its delicate works within are safe. They are like the sheaths with which she hides through frost and wind and shower, until their hour has come, her vernal patterns, her secret toils, her magic cunning, her struggling aspirations, her glorious successes, her celestial triumphs. ”

“ Let Burgoyne look to it that he rouse it not himself for us. Let him look to it. For every outrage of those fiendish legions, thank God.—It lays a finger on the spring of our only strength. What will he offer us? I will tell you.—A chance to live, or to die,—men,—ay, to leave a sample of manhood on the earth, that shall wring tears from the selfish of unborn ages, as they feel for once the depths of the slumbering and godlike nature within them. And Burgoyne,—oh! a coat and a pair of shoes, he offers, and—how many pounds?—Are you men? ”

“ It is there that the true hero speaks out for a moment from the lips of that old military heroism, of a greatness which does not cease when the wings of state drop off from it, of an honour that takes no stain though all the human voices join to sully it,—the dignity that rises and soars and gains the point of immutability, when all the world would have it under foot. But in that nobility men need training,—scientific training. ”

“ Helen. If they were but human, I could move them—and yet it is the human in them that is so dreadful. To die were sad enough—to die by violence, by the power of the innocent elements, were dreadful, or to be torn of beasts; to meet the wild, fierce eye, with its fixed and deadly purpose, more dreadful; but ah, to see the human soul, from the murderers eye glaring on you, to encounter the human will in its wickedness, amid that wild struggle—Oh God! ”

“ In one way or another he will make war on that peace; he will kindle the revolutionary fires against that conservation. In one way or another, in one age or another, he will silence that war with all its pomp and circumstance, with all the din of its fifes, and drums, and trumpets. He will make over to the ignominy of ignorant and barbaric ages,—'for we call a nettle but a nettle,' he will turn into a forgotten pageant of the rude, early, instinctive ages, the yet brutal ages of an undeveloped humanity, that triumphant reception at home, of the Conqueror of Foreign States. ”

“ What loathsome thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with the human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature has expired. These are murderers,—count them—they are all murderers, wholesale murderers, perhaps,—but of what? Of their own helpless, tender, loving, trusting little ones. The wretched children of our time,—alone in wretchedness,—alone in the universe of nature,—who found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel agonizing drug of death. ”

“ There is no danger. It must have been those soldiers that we heard,—or the cry of some wild animal roaming through yonder woods—it might have been,—how many strange sounds we hear from them. At another time we should never have thought of it. I think we should have heard that signal though, ere this,—I do, indeed.
Helen. What is it to die? Nor wood nor meadow, nor winding stream, nor the blue sky, do they see; nor the voice of bird or insect do they hear; nor breeze, nor sunshine, nor fragrance visits them. ”

“ Even here, on this sad and tragic ground of a subdued and debased common-weal, he will not cramp its utterance—he will give it leave to speak, in all its tenderness and beauty, in its own sweet native dialect, all its poetic wildness, its mad verities, its sober impossibilities, even at the moment in which he asks in statesmanship for the rational motive, undrenched in humours and affections—for the motive of the weal that is common, and not for the motive of that which is private and exclusive.
In vain the hero struggles with his yielding passion, and seeks to retain it. ”