Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

“ What learn we from the Past? the same Dull course of glory, guilt, and gloom— I ask’d the Future, and there came No voice from its unfathom’d womb. The Sun was silent, and the wave; The air but answer’d with its breath But Earth was kind; and from the grave Arose the eternal answer—Death! And this was all! We need no sage To teach us Nature’s only truth! O fools! o’er Wisdom’s idle page To waste the hours of golden youth! In Science wildly do we seek What only withering years should bring The languid pulse—the feverish cheek The spirits drooping on their wing! ”

“ They preach that passion fades each hour, That nought will pall like pleasure; My bee, if Love’s so frail a flower, Oh, haste to hive its treasure. 5. Wait not the hour, when all the mind Shall to the crowd be given; For links, which to the million bind, Shall from the one be riven. 6. But let us love while yet we may Our summer is decaying; And woe to hearts which, in their gray December, go a-maying.
The next day Emily rose ill and feverish. In the absence of Falkland, her mind always awoke to the full sense of the guilt she had incurred. ”

“ It is past twelve; I always write to you at night. It is then, my own love, that my imagination can be the more readily transport me to you: it is then that my spirit holds with you a more tender and undivided commune. In the day the world can force itself upon my thoughts, and its trifles usurp the place which “I love to keep for only thee and Heaven;” but in the night all things recall you the more vividly: the stillness of the gentle skies,—the blandness of the unbroken air,—the stars, so holy in their loveliness, all speak and breathe to me of you. ”

“ Fool that I was! the fever, the fever was within! But it is not thus, my adored and beautiful friend, that I should console and support you. Even as I write, passion melts into tenderness, and pours itself in softness over your remembrance. The virtue so gentle, yet so strong; the feelings so kind, yet so holy; the tears which wept over the decision your lips proclaimed—these are the recollections which come over me like dew. Let your own heart, my Emily, be your reward; and know that your lover only forgets that he adores, to remember that he respects you. ”

“ Never, indeed, since her death, till he met Emily, had his heart been unfaithful to her memory. Alas! none but those who have cherished in their souls an image of the death; who have watched over it for long and bitter years in secrecy and gloom; who have felt that it was to them as a holy and fairy spot which no eye but theirs could profane; who have filled all things with recollections as with a spell, and made the universe one wide mausoleum of the lost;—none but those can understand the mysteries of that regret which is shed over every after passion, though it be more burning and intense ”

“ Emily!—Emily!—how I love to repeat and to linger over that beautiful name! If to see, to address, and, more than all, to touch you, has been a rapture, what word can I find in the vocabulary of happiness to express the realisation of that hope which now burns within me—to mingle our youth together into one stream, wheresoever it flows; to respire the same breath; to be almost blent in the same existence; to grow, as it were, on one stem, and knit into a single life the feelings, the wishes, the being of both! ”

“ The Bird may rove, and still regain With spotless wings, her wonted rest, But home, once lost, is ne’er again Restored to Woman’s erring breast! 3. If wandering o’er a world of flowers, The heart at times would ask repose; But thou wouldst lose the only bowers Of rest amid a world of woes. 4. Recall thy youth’s unsullied vow The past which on thee smile so fair; Then turn from thence to picture now The frowns thy future fate must wear! 5. No hour, no hope, can bring relief To her who hides a blighted name; For hearts unbow’d by stormiest grief Will break beneath one breeze of shame! ”

“ No man, in whom the mind has not been broken by the decay of the body, has approached death in full consciousness as Falkland did that moment, and not thought intensely on the change he was about to undergo; and yet what new discoveries upon that subject has any one bequeathed us? There the wildest imaginations are driven from originality into triteness: there all minds, the frivolous and the strong, the busy and the idle, are compelled into the same path and limit of reflection. Upon that unknown and voiceless gulf of inquiry broods an eternal and impenetrable gloom ”

“ Falkland stooped to kiss him; and Mrs. St. John said, in a low voice which just reached his ear, “Judas, too, kissed before he betrayed.” Falkland’s colour changed: he felt the sting the words were intended to convey. On that child, now so innocently caressing him, he was indeed about to inflict a disgrace and injury the most sensible and irremediable in his power. But who ever indulges reflection in passion? He banished the remorse from his mind as instantaneously as it arose; and, seating himself by Emily, endeavoured to inspire her with a portion of the joy and hope which animated himself. ”

“ The heart may survive the decay or rupture of an innocent and lawful affection—“la marque reste, mais la blessure guerit”—but the love of darkness and guilt is branded in a character ineffaceable—eternal! The one is, like lightning, more likely to dazzle than to destroy, and, divine even in its danger, it makes holy what it sears; but the other is like that sure and deadly fire which fell upon the cities of old, graving in the barrenness of the desert it had wrought the record and perpetuation of a curse. A low and thrilling voice stole upon Emily’s ear. She turned—Falkland stood beside her. ”

“ I suffer one moment to glide into another, without the remembrance that the next must be filled up by some laborious pleasure, or some wearisome enjoyment. It is here that I feel all the powers, and gather together all the resources, of my mind. I recall my recollections of men; and, unbiassed by the passions and prejudices which we do not experience alone, because their very existence depends upon others, I endeavour to perfect my knowledge of the human heart. He who would acquire that better science must arrange and analyse in private the experience he has collected in the crowd. ”

“ Night came on again, with her pomp of light and shade—the night that for Falkland had no morrow. One solitary lamp burned in the chamber where he lay alone with God and his own heart. He had desired his couch to be placed by the window and requested his attendants to withdraw. The gentle and balmy air stole over him, as free and bland as if it were to breathe for him for ever; and the silver moonlight came gleaming through the lattice and played upon his wan brow, like the tenderness of a bride that sought to kiss him to repose. ”

“ He is come back-here! Good heavens! how very imprudent! I am so agitated that I can write no more.
Sunday.—I have seen him! Let me repeat that sentence—I have seen him. Oh that moment! did it not atone for all that I have suffered? I dare not write everything he said, but he wished me to fly with him—him—what happiness, yet what guilt, in the very thought! Oh! this foolish heart—would that it might break! I feel too well the sophistry of his arguments, and yet I cannot resist them. He seems to have thrown a spell over me, which precludes even the effort to escape. ”

“ One can scarce feel extremes for mediocrity. The few years Lady Emily had been married had but little altered her character. Quick in feeling, though regulated in temper; gay less from levity, than from that first spring-tide of a heart which has never yet known occasion to be sad; beautiful and pure, as an enthusiast’s dream of heaven, yet bearing within the latent and powerful passion and tenderness of earth: she mixed with all a simplicity and innocence which the extreme earliness of her marriage, and the ascetic temper of her husband, had tendered less to diminish than increase. ”

“ If I can persuade Falkland to aid us, it will be by the influence of his name, his talents, and his wealth. It is not of him that we can ask the stern and laborious devotion to which we have consecrated ourselves. The perfidy of friends, the vigilance of foes, the rashness of the bold, the cowardice of the wavering; strife in the closet, treachery in the senate, death in the field; these constitute the fate we have pledged ourselves to bear. Little can any, who do not endure it, imagine of the life to which those who share the contests of an agitated and distracted country are doomed ”

“ I will not dwell upon my adventures abroad: there is little to interest others in a recital which awakens no interest in one’s self. I sought for wisdom, and I acquired but knowledge. I thirsted for the truth, the tenderness of love, and I found but its fever and its falsehood. Like the two Florimels of Spenser, I mistook, in my delirium, the delusive fabrication of the senses for the divine reality of the heart; and I only awoke from my deceit when the phantom I had worshipped melted into snow. Whatever I pursued partook of the energy, yet fitfulness of my nature ”

“ Wealth—honour—happiness—every object of ambition or desire, exist not for us without the circle of our arms! But the bower that surrounds us shall not be unworthy of your beauty or our love. Amidst the myrtle and the vine, and the valleys where the summer sleeps and “the rivers that murmur the memories and the legends of old amidst the hills and the glossy glades,” and the silver fountains, still as beautiful as if the Nymph and Spirit yet held and decorated an earthly home; amidst these we will make the couch of our bridals, and the moon of Italian skies shall keep watch on our repose. ”

“ The air of heaven is not purer in its wanderings—its sunshine not more holy in its warmth. Oh! why should it deteriorate in its nature, even while it increases in its degree? Why should the step which prints, sully also the snow? How often, when Falkland met that guiltless yet thrilling eye, which revealed to him those internal secrets that Emily was yet awhile too happy to discover; when, like a fountain among flowers, the goodness of her heart flowed over the softness of her manner to those around her, and the benevolence of her actions to those beneath ”

“ What is so wavering as passion? When, at last, Mrs. St. John ceased, and Emily shed upon her bosom the hot tears of her anguish and repentance, she imagined that her resolution was taken, and that she could almost have vowed an eternal separation from her lover; Falkland came that evening, and she loved him more madly than before.
Mrs. St. John was not in the saloon when Falkland entered. Lady Margaret was reading the well-known story of Lady T——- and the Duchess of —-, in which an agreement had been made and kept, that the one who died first should return once more to the survivor. ”

“ I listen to her voice when it melts in endearment over her birds, her flowers, or, in a deeper devotion, over her child; but my heart does not thrill at the tenderness of the sound. I touch her hand, and the pulses of my own are as calm as before. Satiety of the past is our best safeguard from the temptations of the future; and the perils of youth are over when it has acquired that dulness and apathy of affection which should belong only to the insensibility of age.
Such were Falkland’s opinions at the time he wrote. Ah! what is so delusive as our affections? ”

“ She was not doomed to wither beneath the blight of shame, nor the coldness of estranged affection. From him whom she had so worshipped, she was not condemned to bear wrong nor change. She died while his passion was yet in its spring—before a blossom, a leaf, had faded; and she sank to repose while his kiss was yet warm upon her lip, and her last breath almost mingled with his sigh. For the woman who has erred, life has no exchange for such a death. Falkland stood mute and motionless: not one word of grief or horror escaped his lips. ”

“ The passion concealed in darkness was revealed in danger; and the love, which in life was forbidden, was our comfort amidst the terrors of death! And that long and holy kiss, the first, the only moment in which our lips shared the union of our souls!—do not tell me that it is wrong to recall it!—do not tell me that I sin, when I own to you the hours I sit alone, and nurse the delirium of that voluptuous remembrance. The feelings you have excited may render me wretched, but not guilty; for the love of you can only hallow the heart—it is a fire which consecrates the altar on which it burns. ”

“ Alas, Monkton, when you have expressed surprise at the gloom which is so habitual to my temper, did it never occur to you that my acquaintance—with the world would alone be sufficient to account for it?—that knowledge is neither for the good nor the happy. Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled? Who can look upon the workings of grief and rejoice, or associate with guilt and be pure? It has been by mingling with men, not only in their haunts but their emotions, that I have learned to know them. ”

“ If I die on the scaffold to-morrow, I shall have nothing of martyrdom but its doom; not the triumph—the incense—the immortality of popular applause: I should have no hope to support me at such a moment, gleaned from the glories of the future—nothing but one stern and prophetic conviction of the vanity of that tyranny by which my sentence will be pronounced.” Riego paused for a moment before he resumed, and his pale and death-like countenance received an awful and unnatural light from the intensity of the feeling that swelled and burned within him. ”

“ Do they levy armies against it, it presents to them no palpable object to oppose. Its camp is the universe; its asylum is the bosoms of their own soldiers. Let them depopulate, destroy as they please, to each extremity of the earth; but as long as they have a single supporter themselves—as long as they leave a single individual into whom that spirit can enter—so long they will have the same labours to encounter, and the same enemy to subdue.”
As Riego’s voice ceased, Falkland gazed upon him with a mingled pity and admiration. ”

“ Should these pages, at this moment, meet the eyes of one who has become the centre of a circle of disgrace—the contaminator of her house—the dishonour of her children,—no matter what the excuse for her crime—no matter what the exchange of her station—in the very arms of her lover, in the very cincture of the new ties which she has chosen—I call upon her to answer me if the fondest moments of rapture are free from humiliation, though they have forgotten remorse; and if the passion itself of her lover has not become no less the penalty than the recompense of her guilt? ”

“ Women, wine, the society of the gay, the commune of the wise, the lonely pursuit of knowledge, the daring visions of ambition, all have occupied me in turn, and all alike have deceived me; but, like the Widow in the story of Voltaire, I have built at last a temple to “Time, the Comforter:” I have grown calm and unrepining with years; and, if I am now shrinking from men, I have derived at least this advantage from the loneliness first made habitual by regret; that while I feel increased benevolence to others, I have learned to look for happiness only in myself. ”

“ This is a bitter feeling, and its worst bitterness is our ignorance how to remove it. My indolence I neither seek nor wish to defend, yet it is rather from necessity than choice: it seems to me that there is nothing in the world to arouse me. I only ask for action, but I can find no motive sufficient to excite it: let me then, in my indolence, not, like the world, be idle, yet dependent on others; but at least dignify the failing by some appearance of that freedom which retirement only can bestow.
My seclusion is no longer solitude ”

“ Is there not, my Emily, in the external nature which reigns over creation, and that human nature centred in ourselves, some secret and undefinable intelligence and attraction? Are not the impressions of the former as spells over the passions of the later? and in gazing upon the loveliness around us, do we not gather, as it were, and store within our hearts, an increase of the yearning and desire of love? What can we demand from earth but its solitudes—what from heaven but its unpolluted air? ”

“ Lady Margaret went to the library; Mrs. Dalton seated herself on the ottoman, dividing her attention between the last novel and her Italian greyhound; and Emily left the room in order to revisit her former and favourite haunts. Her young son was her companion, and she was not sorry that he was her only one. To be the instructress of an infant, a mother should be its playmate; and Emily was, perhaps, wiser than she imagined, when she ran with a laughing eye and a light foot over the grass, occupying herself almost with the same earnestness as her child in the same infantine amusements. ”

“ Amidst all the fictitious ties and fascinations of art, you cannot dismiss from your bosom the unconquerable impulse of nature. What is it you fear?—you will answer, disgrace! But can you feel it, Emily, when you share it with me? Believe me that the love which is nursed through shame and sorrow is of a deeper and holier nature than that which is reared in pride, fostered in joy. But, if not shame, it is guilt, perhaps, which you dread? Are you then so innocent now? The adultery of the heart is no less a crime than that of the deed ”

“ We are like children in the dark; we tremble in a shadowy and terrible void, peopled with our fancies! Life is our real night, and the first gleam of the morning, which brings us certainty, is death.
Falkland sat the remainder of that night by the window watching the clouds become gray as the dawn rose, and its earliest breeze awoke. He heard the trampling of the horses beneath: he drew his cloak round him, and descended. It was on a turning of the road beyond the lodge that he directed the carriage to wait, and he then proceeded to the place appointed. Emily was not yet there. ”

“ But there is one feeling which had its origin in the world, and which accompanies me still; which consecrates my recollections of the past; which contributes to take its gloom from the solitude of the present:-Do you ask me its nature, Monkton? It is my friendship for you.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
I wish that I could convey to you, dear Monkton, the faintest idea of the pleasures of indolence. You belong to that class which is of all the most busy, though the least active. Men of pleasure never have time for anything. ”