How blank and desolate, ye cannot tell. My life is gone from me - claims not a care Untended and unowned. Dun. Think of the passing hour, think of the peril Perpetual liar in your temples? — No, To share the vision. Elfrida comes in, having received from the king the password which gives authority over the guards. By every plea she appeals to her husband's heart. Elf. Condemn me not unheard. My lord, my lord, I do entreat thee, hear me ! I was weak I was a very child - my trial came, Surprised, and overthrew me. Would to Heaven On my first wavering thought, had you but deigned To reason with me, and my weak chagrin To soothe with kinder speech, deigned but a little, Oh, you have flattered when there was less need I was a child, and you - you met my anger The woman that is beautiful ye love, But wrong as much by that high estimate Which makes and leaves her weakest of her sex. Say, Athelwold, will you condemn forever For one brief hour of weakness? But Athelwold is inexorable. We feel that if her sin alone were in question, he might relent; but to have forfeited his own honor for a prize which has proved so poor a thing seals up in him all fountains of tenderness. He scornfully bids her back to Edgar. She eagerly offers to share with him poverty and exile, it is all in vain. Driven desperate she proposes to slay Edgar and share his throne with Athelwold. Either that, or for he is still immovable his own death! He throws her off; she calls the guard, and with a gesture gives the signal for his instant death. Dunstan, returning with the king to save Athelwold, comes too late. The miserable woman cares nothing for his rebukes, her heart is with the man she has murdered; she will seize all earth now has for her, the throne; but she speaks her own sentence. Oh, ye wise priests that have one constant song And weigh its penance out—but of the sinner The malice of the world could say no worse; - peruse and ponder well Oh, ye 'll not find it there. As the nobles approach to do homage to the new queen, she falls with a shriek on Athelwold's body- and the curtain drops. CHAPTER XII. THE TRAVELLER. (From the Memoir.) In the summer of 1842 a great grief befell him. His dear mother died at the age of seventy-five, having survived her husband nineteen years. I have spoken of the peculiar tenderness between the mother and son. Some friends who remember her well have described her to me in her later years, placid and smiling in her arm-chair, knitting away, with William seated on a footstool beside her, kissing her hand, interrupting her work by his playful and tender raillery, she pretending to chide, she, so proud, so fond! Into his intellectual nature, his thoughtlife, the dear mother did not and could not enter, but she had a boundless love for him; his comforts, his tastes, were paramount with her he was her first object always; and his sister, Mrs. Walker, the "dear Esther" of the early Glasgow letter, writes to me: "I shall never forget the desolation of heart William expressed when the grave closed over our mother." Later, his wife and he held it as a treasure in common that both were the youngest and peculiarly loved children of their mothers, and never felt their hearts more closely knit together than when speaking of them. I believe that he spent the winter of that first orphan year with a married sister. Afterwards the dreary London lodging life to which Mr. Lewes refers must have set in. The autumn of 1843 was spent by my husband in Paris, where the lectures at the Sorbonne were his especial interest. I have before me a note to his sister, Mrs. Weigall, characteristically describing his position in a French boarding-house: "Stuttering out my broken sentences of French, thinking it a great good fortune if the simplest thing I utter is understood, and a great honour if the dullest person in the company will condescend to talk with me." I know that for a time William Smith went the Western Circuit, but to him it proved "so expensive and profitless he had to relinquish it." Probably he had already done so at this time, for in the summer of 1845 he made a tour in Switzerland. How intensely he enjoyed it appears in a paper, "The Mountain and the Cloud," written on his return, and published in "Blackwood's Magazine." The winter following was spent in Brussels at the house of his eldest brother Frederick (who had for some years lived in Belgium), where William had the cheerful companionship of young nieces. It was there that he wrote "Sir William Crichton," 1 which appeared, with a reprint of "Athelwold" and of his two early poems, in a small, a very small, unpretending volume, published by Pickering towards the end of 1846. This small volume was never 1 Sir William Crichton ranks with Athelwold in power and beauty. Serjeant Talfourd, indeed, gives it the preference, though such a judgment seems questionable in consideration of the unrelieved gloom which darkens the later drama. Its most impressive and terrible figure is a monk who, while blameless in conduct, is haunted by a profound scepticism, which makes him seem to himself and to others the guiltiest of men, and who voices the most melancholy sense of the nothingness to which life is reduced when faith is destroyed. The other elements of the story are scarcely less tragic, including a conflict between public and private duty, in which either choice gives but a maimed virtue; while Fate at last whelms all in irremediable disaster. The contrast is wonderful between that side of the author's personality which his wife depicts in these pages -equable, sweet-tempered, joy-giving and that aspect of gloomiest contemplation which this drama displays, a gloom which seems the heavier and more unescapable because expressed with such composure. widely circulated, but it met with cordial recognition from a few. Walter Savage Landor was one of those who estimated it highly. It is to Mr. Weigall that I owe this knowledge. He writes thus: "About eighteen years ago I saw a great deal of Landor. On one occasion I men tioned William's works. He said immediately: 'I know Mr. Smith, and everything he has published. I have a great respect for him, sir. There are things in his works quite equal to anything that Shakespeare ever wrote.' I said I was much gratified to hear him say so, and wished the world thought so too. He replied, "The world does not think so now, because it is chiefly composed of fools; but I know it, and I believe some day the world will agree with me.' It was in the spring of 1846 that my husband visited Italy. He travelled, as usual, alone, and with eager, unresting haste. I have heard him say that he spoke to no one; that the excitement the marvels of ancient art occasioned was inexpressible; that he went on from place to place regardless of fatigue. On his homeward way he became ill, and had to make a halt at his eldest brother's house in Brussels. By him William was, as I have often heard the latter recall, most tenderly nursed. In many particulars there was a family likeness between the two men. Both had the faculty of inspiring intense affection in those who knew them best, both the same refined courtesy in domestic life. Their cast of mind was indeed dissimilar, but the elder brother fully appreciated the nature of the younger. I shall never forget his looking at William with moistened eyes, on the 1 I think it must have been before this that the bust given as frontispiece was taken. The sculptor, Mr. Weigall, writes of it as follows: "I saw then in William the profound philosopher, the penetrating, calm, judicious critic, and the tender, passionate poet; and I believe, to those who have eyes to see such things, all these phases of his character may be found in the bust."- L. C. S. |