Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

one) which so disfigure and falsify Shakspeare, are attributable to the carelessness of his transcribers! I take leave of this singular incident by stating, for the benefit and satisfaction of those who may be disposed to regard it as something more than a mere accidental coincidence, that no previous associations could possibly have given rise to the circumstance, since I knew no one who was acquainted with the partics, and had never made a single previous inquiry on the subject.

Little more remains to be told relative to this second act in the sentimental drama of my youth. The history of any one week is the history of the whole term of four years. Every Sunday I used to gaze myself into a fever of passion, which it required the tears of every night in the succeeding week to temper and cool. But these always had the desired effect; so that by the following Sunday I was sure to find myself ready to start afresh. To these regularly recurring intervals I attribute the long continuance of this singular intercourse. But for these it would doubtless have taken a very different turn, and come to a very different end. If I could have gazed my fill whenever I pleased, I should probably soon have had the sense to discover the error of my ways, and should speedily have brought matters to a close, one way or the other. But these perpetual alternations of heat and cold, wet and dry-this exact "balance of power" (I have hated the phrase ever since I found out the mischief it worked me, or rather the good it probably deprived me of, in this affair) kept me for ever swinging backwards and forwards, like a well-hung pendulum. I was a perfect eight-day clock, wound up regularly every Sunday, to go through the week till the Saturday night following. Probably if I had missed a single Sunday's gazing, my love would have broken the spell on the one hand, by dying in its cradle for want of food; and if, on the other hand, it could have had a single day's extra gazing during any given week of the whole period, it might, perhaps, have gained strength to start up from its cradle, and assert its right; for I cannot doubt that, long before the end of the four years, it must have been able to speak and go alone, if it had been stimulated to try. But while this constant equilibrium was kept up, things bade fair to go on in the same way for ever; for, on my part, there was no reason whatever why they should either advance or retrograde. There was never a Sunday passed without our exchanging looks together; and here, where our intercourse began, there (as before) it ended. I never seemed to think that I was entitled to expect more, or to feel that I wanted more; and as I saw no prospect of my ever meeting with less, I was content, for want of knowing better, to go on as I was.

The nearest approach to a personal communication that ever took place between this lady and me, was once that in going out of the meeting I found myself near enough to her to touch the hem of her garment. But it did not make me whole; on the contrary, I remember that it produced scarcely any particular effect on my feelings, either as they regarded her or myself. It is from the recollection of this fact I now judge that what I was loving, was, not a living creature, but the picture of one painted on the retina of my imagination by Memory, an artist accomplished in all things, except, like Sir Joshua, in the forming and mixing her colours; but they are so fugitive, that, in the case before us, I am convinced a single week passed without

retouching the picture, would have caused it to fade away into nothing; while on the other hand, a single extra sitting might perhaps have endued it with breath and motion, and caused it to step from its canvass into life, after the fashion of that in " My Grandmother." Inow feel that, if this consummation had happened, all might still have been well; for it was not then too late. But now, if the best I can hope for is sometimes to dream that it did happen, at all events the worst I need fear is, to awake and find that it did not.

We have now done with these toys of youth. As "it is the eye of childhood fears a painted devil," so none but that can love a painted angel. Manhood cannot be content without either more, or less. We have now done with mere impulses and feelings, and shall henceforth have to do with actions and passions-with thoughts and imaginations ―with hopes and fears. We have hitherto been floating on the calm surface of the stream, like the halcyon on its nest. We must now prepare to plunge, like Ladurlad, into the depths of the ocean of human life and I may venture to do so as fearlessly as he did-for, like him, I am gifted with a protecting curse, which shields me from all injuries but such as itself inflicts. May I not hope, too, that as, like Ladurlad, I am not conscious of having done any thing to deserve this curse, it may one day or other leave me suddenly and of itself, as his did?-Nay, more,-when "the fire in his heart, and the fire in his brain" had passed away,

66

"Ladurlad sunk to rest.

Blessed that sleep! more blessed was the waking!
For on that night a heavenly morning broke,
The light of heaven was round him when he woke,
And in the Swerga, in Yedillian's bower,

All whom he loved he met, to part no more."

And may it not be so with me? I will at least hope that it may-for we cannot help our hopes"—as Juliana prettily says of her" dreams.” At all events, I have made one step towards the consummation of those hopes for I have discovered the spot where exists all I have loved in others met in one. Whether I am to be blessed with the possession of this one, remains to be seen. All I can be sure of is, that, if my deserts are less than those of others who pretend to this possession, my wants are greater; all the foundation I see on which to build my hopes is the possibility that this sole well-spring of future good now left open to me, in determining through what channel it shall flow, and what happy land it shall fertilise, may

[blocks in formation]

THE ELOQUENCE OF EYES.

Nor doth the eye itself,

That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eyes opposed
Salute each other with each others form-

SHAKSPEARE.

THE origin of language is a puzzling point, of which no satisfactory solution has yet been offered. Children could not originally have compounded it, for they would always want intelligence to construct any thing so complicated and difficult; and as it is known that after a certain age the organs of speech, if they have not been called into play, lose their flexibility, it is contended that adults possessing the faculties to combine a new language would want the power to express it Divine inspiration is the only clue that presents itself in this emergency; and we are then driven upon the incredibility of supposing that celestial ears and organs could ever have been instrumental in originating the Low Dutch, in which language an assailant of Voltaire drew upon himself the memorable retort from the philosopher-" that he wished him more wit and fewer consonants." No one, however, seems to have contemplated the possibility that Nature never meant us to speak, any more than the Parrot to whom she has given similar powers of articulation; or to have speculated upon the extent of the substitute she has provided, supposing that man had never discovered the process of representing appetites, feelings, and ideas by sound. Grief, joy, anger, and some of the simple passions, express themselves by similar intelligible exclamations in all countries; these, therefore, may be considered as the whole primitive language of Nature; but if she had left the rest of her vocabulary to be conveyed by human features and gestures, man, by addressing himself to the eyes instead of the ears, would have still possessed a medium of communication nearly as specific as speech, with the great advantage of its being silent as the telegraph. Talking with his features instead of his tongue, he would not only save all the time lost in unravelling the subtleties of the grammarians from Priscian to Lily and Lindley Murray, but he would instantly become a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, and might travel" from old Belerium to the northern main" without needing an interpreter.

We are not hastily to pronounce against the possibility of carrying this dumb eloquence to a certain point of perfection, for the experiment has never been fairly tried. We know that the exercise of cultivated reason and the arts of civilized life have eradicated many of our original instincts, and that the loss of any one sense invariably quickens the others; and we may therefore conjecture that many of the primitive conversational powers of our face have perished from disuse, while we may be certain that those which still remain would be prodigiously concentrated and exalted, did they form the sole medium by which our mind could develope itself. But we have no means of illustrating this notion, for the wild boys and men who have from time to time been caught in the woods, have been always solitaries, who, wanting the stimulus of communion, have never exercised their faculties; while the deaf and dumb born among ourselves, early instructed

to write and talk with their fingers, have never called forth their natural resources and instructive powers of expression.

Without going so far as the Frenchman who maintained that speech was given to us to conceal our thoughts, it is certain that we may, even now, convey them pretty accurately without the intervention of the tongue. To a certain extent every body talks with his own countenance, and puts faith in the indications of those which he encounters. The basis of physiognomy, that the face is the silent echo of the heart, is substantially true; and to confine ourselves to one feature-the eye -I would ask what language, what oratory can be more voluble and instinct with meaning than the telegraphic glances of the eye? So convinced are we of this property, that we familiarly talk of a man having an expressive, a speaking, an eloquent eye. I have always had a firm belief that the celestials have no other medium of conversation, but that, carrying on a colloquy of glances, they avoid all the wear and tear of lungs, and all the vulgarity of human vociferation. Nay, we frequently do this ourselves. By a silent interchange of looks, when listening to a third party, how completely may two people keep up a by-play of conversation, and express their mutual incredulity, anger, disgust, contempt, amazement, grief, or languor. Speech is a laggard and a sloth, but the eyes shoot out an electric fluid that condenses all the elements of sentiment and passion in one single emanation. Conceive what a boundless range of feeling is included between the two extremes of the look serene and the smooth brow, and the contracted frown with the glaring eye. What varieties of sentiment in the mere fluctuation of its lustre, from the fiery flash of indignation to the twinkle of laughter, the soft beaming of compassion, and the melting radiance of love. "Oculi sunt in amore duces," says Propertius, and certainly he who has never known the tender passion knows not half the copiousness of the ocular language, for it is in those prophetic mirrors that every lover first traces the reflection of his own attachment, or reads the secret of his rejection, long before it is promulgated by the tardy tongue. It required very little imagination to fancy a thousand Cupids perpetually hovering about the eyes of beauty, a conceit which is accordingly found among the earliest creations of the Muse. "Twas not the warrior's dart, says Anacreon, that made my bosom bleed,— No-from an eye of liquid blue A host of quiver'd Cupids flew, And now my heart all bleeding lies Beneath this army of the eyes.

And we may take one specimen from innumerable others in the Greek Anthology.

Archer Love, though slily creeping,
Well I know where thou dost lie;
I saw thee from the curtain peeping
That fringes Zenophalia's eye.

The moderns have dallied with similar conceits till they have become so frivolous and threadbare as to be now pretty nearly abandoned to the inditers of Valentines, and the manufacturers of Vauxhall songs.

The old French author Bretonnayau, not content with lamenting,

like Milton, that so precious an organ as the eye should have been so
limited and vulnerable, considers it, in his "Fabrique de l'œil," as
a bodily sun possessing powers analogous to the solar orb, and treats it
altogether as a sublime mystery and celestial symbol. A short extract
may shew the profundity of his numerical and astronomical views:
"D'un-de trois-et de sept, à Dieu agréable,

Fut composé de l'œil la machine admirable.
Le nerf et le christal, l'eau et le verre pers,
Sont les quatre elemens du minime univers;

Les sept guimples luisans qui son rondeau contournent,
Ce sont les sept errans, qui au grand monde tournent,
Car le blanc qui recouvre et raffermit nos yeux,

Nous figure Saturne entre ces petits creux, &c. &c."

And yet all this mysticism is scarcely more extravagant than the power of witchcraft or fascination which was supposed to reside in the eyes, and obtained implicit credence in the past ages. This infection, whether malignant or amorous, was generally supposed to be conveyed in a slanting regard, such as that "jealous leer malign" with which Satan contemplated the happiness of our first parents.

Non istic obliquo oculo mea commoda quisquam
Limat, non odio obscuro, morsuque venenat,

says Horace; and Virgil makes the shepherd exclaim, in his third eclogue

"Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos."

Basilisks, cockatrices, and certain serpents were fabled not only to have the power of bewitching the birds from the air, but of killing men with a look—a mode of destruction which is now limited to the exaggerations of those modern fabulists yclept poets and lovers.

Every difference of shape is found in this variform organ, from the majestic round orb of Homer's ox-eyed Juno, to that thin slit from which the vision of a Chinese lazily oozes forth; but in this as in other instances, the happy medium is nearest to the line of beauty. If there be any deviation, it should be towards the full rotund eye, which although it be apt to convey an expression of sta..ng hauteur, is still susceptible of great dignity and beauty, while the contrary tendency approximates continually towards the mean and the suspicious.

As there is no standard of beauty, there is no pronouncing decisively upon the question of colour. The ancient classical writers assigned to Minerva, and other of the deities, eyes of heaven's own azure as more appropriate and celestial. Among the early Italian writers the beauties were generally blondes, being probably considered the most estimable on account of their rarity; and Tasso, describing the blue eyes of Armida, says with great elegance,

"Within her humid melting eyes

A brilliant ray of laughter lies,
Soft as the broken solar beam

That trembles in the azure stream."

Our own writer Collins, speaking of the Circassians, eulogises "Their eyes' blue languish, and their golden hair," with more beauty of language than fidelity as to fact; but our poets in general give the palm to that which is least common among ourselves, and are accord

« ElőzőTovább »