masterly and moving power, is what we may term the pathos of the retrospective. The very machinery she loves to employ for the evolution of her tales, involves something of this:—we hear "Two Old Men" recalling the deeds of the past, and the forms of the departed,
The voices of the dead, and songs of other years.
The aged address us on the events and friendships of their fervid youth, and describe the "blessed household countenances" then radiant with promise, now dim in memory—then beautcous with exuberant life, now mouldering amid the "dishonours of the grave." A pensive sadness suffuses every recollection; for it pertains so entirely to the "long ago," that as each brightsome maiden trips before us, we seem to view her as the heart-burdened seer might do, to whom the end is visible from the beginning, and whose accursed privilege it is to scan, with frightful telescopic range and telescopic accuracy of vision, the autumn and winter, as well as the spring and summer of her life, and to peer into the decaying decline as well as the joyous blossoming of the days of the years of her pilgrimage. She comes, "borne on airs of youth,"
Old days sing round her, old memorial days,
She crown'd with tears, they dress'd in flowers, all faded—
And the night fragrance is a harmony
All through the Old Man's soul. …
Soft, sweet regrets, like sunset
Lighting old windows with gleams day had not.
Ghosts of dead years, whispering old silent names
Through grass-grown pathways, by halls mouldering now,
Childhood—the fragrance of forgotten fields;
Manhood—the unforgotten fields whose fragrance
Pass'd like a breath.[1]
What, it has been asked, would be the heart of an old weather-beaten hollow stump, if the "leaves and blossoms of its youth were suddenly to spring up out of the mould around it, and to remind it how bright and blissful summer was in the years of its prime!" It is ever easy, comparatively, to wring the soul by a few touching "retrospective reviews" of this kind—for the images of yore
Which they awaken, glide from misty years
Dreamlike and solemn, and but half unfold
Their tale of glorious hopes, religious fears,
And visionary schemes of giant mould;
Whose dimmest trace the world-worn heart reveres,
And, with love's grasping weakness, strives to hold.[2]
But it is not so easy to sway the soul in its musings, and to sound its deep and desolate places in the manner characteristic of the "Two Old Men." There is a genuine, equable, underlying, vital force in their pathos—at once impassioned, and yet of ample power to chasten and subdue. With such qualities alone, had the novelist none others of value, she would justly challenge the interest and attention of all that are gentle and true of heart. A pre-eminent skill in the construction of womanly
- ↑ Sydney Yendys.
- ↑ Sir T. N. Talfourd (Sonnets).
