FullReads

“HE sets the bright procession on its way,
And marshals all the order of the year;
And ere one flowery season fades and dies,
Designs the blooming wonders of the next.”

Then as we came slowly in, the moon shone behind Craiglockhart hill among the old Scotch firs; he pulled up again, and gave me Collins’ Ode to Evening, beginning–

“If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Thy springs, and dying gales;”

repeating over and over some of the lines, as

“Thy modest ear,
Thy springs, and dying gales.”
“–And marks o’er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.”

And when she looked out on us clear and full, “Yes–

“The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth.”

As we passed through Slateford, he spoke of Dr. Belfrage, his great-hearted friend, of his obligations to him, and of his son, my friend, both lying together in Colinton churchyard; and of Dr. Dick, who was minister before him, of the Coventrys, and of Stitchel and Sprouston, of his mother, and of himself,–his doubts of his own sincerity in religion, his sense of sin, of God–reverting often to his dying friend. Such a thing only occurred to me with him once or twice all my life; and then when we were home, he was silent, shut up, self-contained as before. He was himself conscious of this habit of reticence, and what may be called selfism to us, his children, and lamented it. I remember his saying in a sort of mournful joke, “I have a well of love; I know it; but it is a well, and a draw-well, to your sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, but,” looking with that strange power of tenderness as if he put his voice and his heart into his eyes, “you may always come hither to draw;” he used to say he might take to himself Wordsworth’s lines,–

“I am not one who much or oft delights
To season my fireside with personal talk.”

And changing “though” into “if:”

“A well of love it may be deep,
I trust it is, and never dry;
What matter, though its waters sleep
In silence and obscurity?”

The expression of his affection was more like the shock of a Leyden jar, than the continuous current of a galvanic circle.

There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother’s death, to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home felt it much. The blood was thrown in upon the centre, and went forth in energetic and victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and saving souls; but his social faculty never recovered that shock! it was blighted; he was always desiring to be alone and at his work. A stranger who saw him for a short time, bright, animated, full of earnest and cordial talk, pleasing and being pleased, the life of the company, was apt to think how delightful he must always be,–and so he was; but these times of bright talk were like angels’ visits; and he smiled with peculiar benignity on his retiring guest, as if blessing him not the less for leaving him to himself. I question if there ever lived a man so much in the midst of men, and in the midst of his own children,[12] in whom the silences, as Mr. Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, his whole mind; he was then communicative and frank enough: all the week, before and after, he would not unwillingly have never opened his mouth. Of many people we may say that their mouth is always open except when it is shut; of him that his mouth was always shut except when it was opened. Every one must have been struck with the seeming inconsistency of his occasional brilliant, happy, energetic talk, and his habitual silentness–his difficulty in getting anything to say. But, as I have already said, what we lost, the world and the church gained.