Even as thou sayest,
And how my heart beats, when thou stayest!
I cannot rest until my sight
Is satisfied with seeing thee.
What, then, if thou wert dead?[1]
Most sweetly, too, the maiden consoles her attendants, in the instant contemplation of death, with the words,
I shall not feel the pain, but shall be gone,
And you will have another friend in heaven.
Then start not at the creaking of the door
Through which I pass. I see what lies beyond it.
And so she bids her friends to have her in pleasant remembrance—to let her memory linger as something not to trouble and disturb, but to soothe and gladden—that if at times beside the evening fire they see her face among the other faces, it may not be regarded as a ghost that haunts the house, but as a guest that loves them—nay, even as one of their own family, without whose presence there were something wanting.
If Elsie and her history are full of pathos, there is a man-of-all-work in humour and almost farcical comedy in the person of—Lucifer! How art thou fallen, son of the morning! to be so void of dignity, so bereft of the tragic element, so shorn of the awful and the mysterious, as in this Mephistophelean merry-andrew. So sharp and caustic, so shrewd and versatile, so mercurial and jocose, so flippant and gaillard even, seems this Gentleman in Black, that we tacitly ignore his antecedents, and the bad character he is supposed to have from his last place. He seems innocent of sulphur. Horns, like growing pains, he has outgrown. That vestige of his natural history, the tail, is unobtrusive. We care not, in so jovial and débonnaire a presence, to "look down towards his feet,"—for "that's a fable." Altogether, he disarms apprehension, and though by no means transformed into an angel of light, he manages to make himself acceptable in most companies. His look would hardly have inspired Goethe's Margaret with the aversion she felt at the aspect of Faust's patron. There is a story of a Scottish pastor saying to an aged female parishioner, "I trust, Luckie, that you fear the Lord:"—to which the crone's candid reply was, "'Deed, sir, and I'll no say muckle o' that; but I'm unco' feared for the deil." Had she known him as impersonated in the "Golden Legend," probably this fear also had vanished. Seriously, the Lucifer of Mr. Longfellow's poem is calculated to dispel whatever remnant of dread may still attach to popular conceptions of the Evil One. Mephistopheles was a strange and significant decline from the Miltonic Satan, but Mephistopheles is grave, tragic, dignified, beside the humorist of this legend, who jests as mirthfully solus as when bent on entertaining others. For he is nothing if not comical.
There is a spice too much, again, of the flippant and irreverent, not to say the coarse and profane, in such descriptions as that of the Miracle Play at Strasburg, and the drinking-scene in the refectory. Not that the details are overcharged in point of historical truthfulness, but that they are somewhat too broadly given in a work of art. The smartness and quick sense of the ludicrous with which they are "shown up," are, nevertheless, so undeniable, and realise so amusingly the ways of the
- ↑ So Wordsworth:—"Absence and death how differ they!"—Maternal Grief.
