FullReads

It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch–my couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrooke,–he discoursed of marvellous escapes–by carelessness of nurses–by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy–by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics–by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke–by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance–by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head.–Anon, he would burst out into little fragments of chaunting–of songs long ago–ends of deliverance-hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was made tender as a child’s–for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers.

Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton–what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river–liquid artifice–wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?–Ye have no swans–no Naiads–no river God–or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters?

Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture?–or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?

And could such spacious virtue find a grave
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave?

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again–no, not by daylight–without a sufficient pair of spectacles–in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years’ after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only!

I have nothing but water in my head o’ nights since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me), “I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah.” Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow–a mournful procession–suicidal faces, saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue-constrained Lazari–Pluto’s half-subjects–stolen fees from the grave-bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion–or is it G.D.?–in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death.

And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at death’s door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.

A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G.D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts-poet, or historian–of Grecian or of Roman lore–to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected–him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter–him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth[1], with newest airs prepared to greet —-; and, patron of the gentle Christ’s boy,–who should have been his patron through life–the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable AEsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered.

[Footnote 1: Graium tantum vidit.]