beasts of the desert were in motion, and on every hand were heard the mingled howls of rage and fear, and ravage and expiration; all the horrors of the darkness and solitude surrounded him; the winds roared in the woods, and the torrents tumbled from the hills. Work'd into sudden rage by wint'ry show'rs, Down the steep hill the roaring torrent pours; The mountain shepherd hears the distant noise. Thus forlorn and distressed, he wandered through the wild, without knowing whither he was going, or whether he was every moment drawing near to safety or to destruction. At length, not fear, but labour, began to overcome him; his breath grew short, and his knees trembled, and he was on the point of lying down in resignation to his fate, when he beheld through the brambles the glimmer of a taper. He advanced towards the light, and finding that it proceeded from the cottage of a hermit, he called humbly at the door, and obtained admission. The old man set before him such provisions as he had collected for himself, on which Obidah fed with eagerness and gratitude. When the repast was over, "Tell me," said the hermit, "by what chance thou hast been brought hither; I have been now twenty years an inhabitant of the wilderness, in which I never saw a man before." Obidah then related the occurrences of his journey, without any concealment or palliation. "Son," said the hermit, let the errors and follies, the dangers and escapes of this day, sink deep into thy heart. Remember, my son, that human life is the journey of a day. We rise in the morning of youth, full of vigour, and full of expectation; we set forward with spirit and hope, with gaiety and with diligence, and travel on a while in the strait road of piety towards the mansions of rest. In a short time we remit our fervour, and endeavour to find some mitigation of our duty, and some more easy means of obtaining the same end. We then relax our vigour, and resolve no longer to be terrified with crimes at a distance, but rely upon our own constancy, and venture to approach what we resolved never to touch. We thus enter the bowers of ease, and repose in the shades of security. Here the heart softens, and vigilance subsides; we are then willing to enquire whether another advance cannot be made, and whether we may not, at least, turn our eyes upon the gardens of pleasure. We approach them with scruple and hesitation; we enter them, but enter timorous and trembling, and always hope to pass through them without losing the road of virtue, which we, [ for a while, keep in our sight, and to which Rambler. unas SAMUEL JOHNSON. ANDREA DEL SARTO. TO HIS WIFE. But do not let us quarrel any more, Let us try. To-morrow how you shall be glad for this! And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. -You at the point of your first pride in me There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. How strange, now, looks the life He makes us lead: So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! I feel He laid the fetter: let it lie! This chamber for example-turn your head- But you can hear at least when people speak; I can do with my pencil what I know, No sketches first, no studies, that's long past- In their vexed, beating, stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, then goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. I know both what I want and what might gain- Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt The Urbinate who died five years ago. In this world, who can do a thing, will not- Yet the will's somewhat-somewhat, too, the power- God, I conclude, compensates, punishes. "Tis safer for me, if the award be strict, That I am something underrated here, Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. I surely then could sometimes leave the ground, In that humane great monarch's golden look,- Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, You called me, and I came home to your heart. Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, To Rafael... I have known it all these years... (When the young man was flaming out his thoughts Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see, Too lifted up in heart because of it) As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings Give the chalk here-quick, thus the line should go! Is, whether you're-not grateful-but more pleased. Well let me think so. And you smile indeed! We built to be so gay with. God is just. If he demurs; the whole should prove enough Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. I regret little, I would change still less. I took his coin, was tempted and complied, For Leonard, Rafael, Angelo and me ROBERT BROWNING. THE STORM AND SHIPWRECK. FROM DAVID COPPERFIELD. about the roads and fields. Still there was no abatement in the storm, but it blew harder. As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which the mighty wind was blowing dead on shore, its force became more and more terrific. Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When It was a murky confusion-here and there we came within sight of the sea, the waves blotted with a color like the color of the on the horizon, caught at intervals above the smoke from damp fuel-of flying clouds toss-rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another ed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting shore with towers and buildings. When at greater heights in the clouds than there last we got into the town, the people came were depths below them to the bottom of the out to their doors, all aslant, and with streamdeepest hollows in the earth, through which ing hair, making a wonder of the mail that the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, had come through such a night. as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinarily great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew hard. But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times in the dark part of the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not short), the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehensions that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel; and, at those times, when there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle. I put up at the old inn and went down to look at the sea; staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of seafoam; afraid of falling slates and tiles, and holding by people I met, at angry corners. Coming near the beach, I saw, not only the boatman, but half the people of the town, lurking behind buildings; some, now and then braving the fury of the storm to look away to sea, and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get zigzag back. Joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose husbands were away in herring or oyster boats, which there was too much reason to think might have foundered before they could run in anywhere for safety. Grizzled old sailors were among the people, shaking their heads, as they looked from water to sky, and muttering to one another; shipowners, excited and uneasy; children, huddling together, and peering into older faces; even stout mariners, disturbed and anxious, leveling their glasses at the sea from behind places of shelter, as if they were surveying an enemy. When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I had been in Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had never known the like of this, or anything The tremendous sea itself, when I could approaching to it. We came to Ipswich- find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agivery late, having had to fight every inch of tation of the blinding wind, the flying stones ground since we were ten miles out of London: and sand, and the awful noise, confused me. and found a cluster of people in the market-As the high watery walls came rolling in, place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high churchtower, and flung into a bye-street, which they then blocked up. Others had to tell of country people, coming in from neighboring villages, who had seen great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out a deep cave in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of resolved to go back to the yard before I took my dinner, and ask the boat-builder if he thought his attempting to return by sea at all likely? If he gave me the least reason to think so, I would go over to Lowestoft and prevent it by bringing him with me. its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the com- lost. This grew so strong with me, that I position of another monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings rose and fell; the clouds flew fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature. Not finding Ham among the people whom this memorable wind-for it is still remembered down there, as the greatest ever known to blow upon that coast-had brought together, I made my way to his house. It was shut; and as no one answered to my knocking, I went, by backways and bye-lane, to the yard where he worked. I learned there that he had gone to Lowestoft, to meet some sudden exigency of ship-repairing in which his skill was required; but that he would be back to-morrow morning, in good time. I went back to the inn; and when I had washed and dressed, and tried to sleep, but in vain, it was five o'clock in the afternoon. I had not sat five minutes by the coffee-room fire, when the waiter coming to stir it, as an excuse for talking, told me that two colliers had gone down, with all hands, a few miles away; and that some other ships had been seen laboring hard in the Roads, and trying, in great distress, to keep off shore. Mercy on them, and on all poor sailors, said he, if we had another night like the last! I was very much depressed in spirits: very solitary; and felt an uneasiness in Ham's not being there, disproportionate to the occasion. I was seriously affected, without knowing how much, by late events; and my long exposure to the fierce wind had confused me. There was that jumble in my thoughts and recollections, that I had lost the clear arrangements of time and distance. Thus, if I had gone out into the town, I should not have been surprised, I think, to encounter some one who I knew must be then in London. So to speak, there was in these respects a curious inattention in my mind. Yet it was busy, too, with all the remembrances the place naturally awakened; and they were particularly distinct and vivid. In this state, the waiter's dismal intelligence about the ships immediately connected itself, without any effort of my volition, with my uneasiness about Ham. I was persuaded that I had an apprehension of his returning from Lowestoft by sea, and being I hastily ordered my dinner, and went back to the yard. I was none too soon; for the boat-builder, with a lantern in his hand, was locking the yard-gate. He quite laughed when I asked him the question, and said there was no fear; no man in his senses, or out of them, would put off in such a gale of wind, least of all Ham Peggotty, who had been born to seafaring. So sensible of this, beforehand, that I had really felt ashamed of doing what I was nevertheless impelled to do, I went back to the inn. If such a wind could rise, I think it was rising. The howl and roar, the rattling of the doors and windows, the rumbling in the chimneys, the apparent rocking of the very house that sheltered me, and the prodigious tumult of the sea, were more fearful than in the morning. But there was now a great darkness besides; and that invested the storm with new terrors, real and fanciful. I could not eat, I could not sit still, I could not continue steadfast to anything. Something within me faintly answering to the storm without, tossed up the depths of my memory, and made a tumult within them. Yet in all the hurry of my thoughts, wild running with the thundering sea-the storm and my uneasiness regarding Ham, were always in the foreground. My dinner went away almost untasted, and I tried to refresh myself with a glass or two of wine. In vain. I fell into a dull slumber before the fire, without losing my consciousness, either of the uproar out of doors, or of the place in which I was. Both became overshadowed by a new and indefinable horror; and when I awoke or rather when I shook off the lethargy that bound me in my chair-my whole frame thrilled with objectless and unintelligible fear. I walked to and fro; tried to read an old gazetteer; listened to the awful noises; looked at faces, scenes, and figures in the fire. At length, the steady ticking of the undisturbed clock on the wall tormented me to that degree that I resolved to go to bed. It was re-assuring, on such a night, to be told that some of the inn-servants had agreed together to sit up until morning. I went to bed exceedingly weary and heavy; but, on my lying down, all such sensations vanished as if by magic, and I was broad awake, with every sense refined. |