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AWAY.
Will not linger longer over this part of my history--already, I fear,
much too extended for the patience of my readers. My excuse is that, in
looking back, the events I have recorded appear large and prominent,
and that certainly they have a close relation with my after-history.
The time arrived when I had to leave England for Switzerland. I will
say nothing of my leave-taking. It was not a bitter one. Hope was
strong, and rooted in present pleasure. I was capable of much
happiness--keenly responsive to the smallest agreeable impulse from
without or from within. I had good health, and life was happiness in
itself. The blowing of the wind, the shining of the sun, or the glitter
of water, was sufficient to make me glad; and I had self-consciousness
enough to increase the delight by the knowledge that I was glad.
The fact is I was coming in for my share in the spiritual influences of
Nature, so largely poured on the heart and mind of my generation. The
prophets of the new blessing, Wordsworth and Coleridge, I knew nothing
of. Keats was only beginning to write. I had read a little of Cowper,
but did not care for him. Yet I was under the same spell as they all.
Nature was a power upon me. I was filled with the vague recognition of
a present soul in Nature--with a sense of the humanity everywhere
diffused through her and operating upon ours. I was but fourteen, and
had only feelings, but something lay at the heart of the feelings,
which would one day blossom into thoughts.
At the coach-office in the county-town, I first met my future
companion, with his father, who was to see us to our destination.
My uncle accompanied me no further, and I soon found myself on the
top of a coach, with only one thing to do--make the acquaintance
of Charles Osborne. His father was on the box-seat, and we two sat
behind; but we were both shy, and for some time neither spoke.
Charles was about my own age, rather like his sister, only that his
eyes were blue, and his hair a lightish brown. A tremulousness about
the mouth betrayed a nervous temperament. His skin was very fair and
thin, showing the blue veins. As he did not speak, I sat for a little
while watching him, without, however, the least speculation concerning
him, or any effort to discover his character. I had not even yet
reached the point of trying to find people out. I take what time and
acquaintance disclose, but never attempt to forestall, which may come
partly from trust, partly from want of curiosity, partly from a
disinclination to unnecessary mental effort. But as I watched his face,
half-unconsciously, I could not help observing that now and then it
would light up suddenly and darken again almost instantly. At last his
father turned round, and with some severity, said:
'You do not seem to be making any approaches to mutual acquaintance.
Charles, why don't you address your companion?'
The words were uttered in the slow tone of one used to matters too
serious for common speech. The boy cast a hurried glance at me, smiled
uncertainly, and moved uneasily on his seat. His father turned away and
made a remark to the coachman.
Mr Osborne was a very tall, thin, yet square-shouldered man, with a
pale face, and large features of delicate form. He looked severe, pure,
and irritable. The tone of his voice, although the words were measured
and rather stilted, led me to this last conclusion quite as much as the
expression of his face; for it was thin and a little acrid. I soon
observed that Charley started slightly, as often as his father
addressed him; but this might be because his father always did so with
more or less of abruptness. At times there was great kindness in his
manner, seeming, however, less the outcome of natural tenderness than a
sense of duty. His being was evidently a weight upon his son's, and
kept down the natural movements of his spirit. A number of small
circumstances only led me to these conclusions; for nothing remarkable
occurred to set in any strong light their mutual relation. For his side
Charles was always attentive and ready, although with a promptitude
that had more in it of the mechanical impulse of habit than of pleased
obedience. Mr Osborne spoke kindly to me--I think the more kindly that
I was not his son, and he was therefore not so responsible for me. But
he looked as if the care of the whole world lay on his shoulders; as if
an awful destruction were the most likely thing to happen to every one,
and to him were committed the toilsome chance of saving some. Doubtless
he would not have trusted his boy so far from home, but that the
clergyman to whom he was about to hand him over was an old friend, of
the same religious opinions as himself.
I could well, but must not, linger over the details of our journey,
full to me of most varied pleasure. The constant change, not so rapid
as to prevent the mind from reposing a little upon the scenes which
presented themselves; the passing vision of countries and peoples,
manners and modes of life, so different from our own, did much to
arouse and develop my nature. Those flashes of pleasure came upon
Charles's pale face more and more frequently; and ere the close of the
first day we had begun to talk with some degree of friendliness. But it
became clear to me that with his father ever blocking up our horizon,
whether he sat with his broad back in front of us on the coach-box, or
paced the deck of a vessel, or perched with us under the hood on the
top of a diligence, we should never arrive at any freedom of speech. I
sometimes wondered, long after, whether Mr Osborne had begun to
discover that he was overlaying and smothering the young life of his
boy, and had therefore adopted the plan, so little to have been
expected from him, of sending his son to foreign parts to continue his
education.
I have no distinct recollection of dates, or even of the exact season
of the year. I believe it was the early Summer, but in my memory the
whole journey is now a mass of confused loveliness and pleasure. Not
that we had the best of weather all the way. I well recollect pouring
rains, and from the fact that I distinctly remember my first view of an
Alpine height, I am certain we must have had days of mist and rain
immediately before. That sight, however, to me more like an individual
revelation or vision than the impact of an object upon the brain,
stands in my mind altogether isolated from preceding and following
impressions--alone, a thing to praise God for, if there be a God to
praise. If there be not, then was the whole thing a grand and lovely
illusion, worthy, for grandeur and loveliness, of a world with a God at
the heart of it. But the grandeur and the loveliness spring from the
operation of natural laws; the laws themselves are real and true--how
could the false result from them? I hope yet, and will hope, that I am
not a bubble filled with the mocking breath of a Mephistopheles, but a
child whom his infinite Father will not hardly judge because he could
not believe in him so much as he would. I will tell how the vision
came.
Although comparatively few people visited Switzerland in those days, Mr
Osborne had been there before, and for some reason or other had
determined on going round by Interlachen. At Thun we found a sail-boat,
which we hired to take us and our luggage. At starting, an incident
happened which would not be worth mentioning, but for the impression it
made upon me. A French lady accompanied by a young girl approached Mr
Osborne--doubtless perceiving he was a clergyman, for, being an
Evangelical of the most pure, honest, and narrow type, he was in
every point and line of his countenance marked a priest and apart from
his fellow-men--and asked him to allow her and her daughter to go in
the boat with us to Interlachen. A glow of pleasure awoke in me at
sight of his courtly behaviour, with lifted hat and bowed head; for I
had never been in the company of such a gentleman before. But the wish
instantly followed that his son might have shared in his courtesy. We
partook freely of his justice and benevolence, but he showed us no such
grace as he showed the lady. I have since observed that sons are
endlessly grateful for courtesy from their fathers.
The lady and her daughter sat down in the stern of the boat; and
therefore Charley and I, not certainly to our discomfiture, had to go
before the mast. The men rowed out into the lake, and then hoisted the
sail. Away we went careering before a pleasant breeze. As yet it blew
fog and mist, but the hope was that it would soon blow it away.
An unspoken friendship by this time bound Charley and me together,
silent in its beginnings and slow in its growth--not the worst pledges
of endurance. And now for the first time in our journey, Charley was
hidden from his father: the sail came between them. He glanced at me
with a slight sigh, which even then I took for an involuntary sigh of
relief. We lay leaning over the bows, now looking up at the mist blown
in never-ending volumed sheets, now at the sail swelling in the wind
before which it fled, and again down at the water through which our
boat was ploughing its evanescent furrow. We could see very little.
Portions of the shore would now and then appear, dim like reflections
from a tarnished mirror, and then fade back into the depths of cloudy
dissolution. Still it was growing lighter, and the man who was on the
outlook became less anxious in his forward gaze, and less frequent in
his calls to the helmsman. I was lying half over the gunwale, looking
into the strange-coloured water, blue dimmed with undissolved white,
when a cry from Charles made me start and look up. It was indeed a
God-like vision. The mist yet rolled thick below, but away up, far away
and far up, yet as if close at hand, the clouds were broken into a
mighty window, through which looked in upon us a huge mountain peak
swathed in snow. One great level band of darker cloud crossed its
breast, above which rose the peak, triumphant in calmness, and stood
unutterably solemn and grand, in clouds as white as its 0wn whiteness.
It had been there all the time! I sunk on my knees in the boat and
gazed up. With a sudden sweep the clouds curtained the mighty window,
and the Jungfrau withdrew into its Holy of Holies. I am painfully
conscious of the helplessness of my speech. The vision vanishes from
the words as it vanished from the bewildered eyes. But from the mind it
glorified it has never vanished. I have been more ever since that
sight. To have beheld a truth is an apotheosis. What the truth was I
could not tell; but I had seen something which raised me above my
former self and made me long to rise higher yet. It awoke worship, and
a belief in the incomprehensible divine; but admitted of being analysed
no more than, in that transient vision, my intellect could--ere dawning
it vanished--analyse it into the deserts of rock, the gulfs of green
ice and flowing water, the savage solitudes of snow, the mysterious
miles of draperied mist, that went to make up the vision, each and all
essential thereto.
I had been too much given to the attempted production in myself of
effects to justify the vague theories towards which my inborn
prepossessions carried me. I had felt enough to believe there was more
to be felt; and such stray scraps of verse of the new order as,
floating about, had reached me, had set me questioning and testing my
own life and perceptions and sympathies by what these awoke in me at
second-hand. I had often doubted, oppressed by the power of these,
whether I could myself see, or whether my sympathy with Nature was not
merely inspired by the vision of others. Ever after this, if such a
doubt returned, with it arose the Jungfrau, looking into my very soul.
'Oh Charley!' was all I could say. Our hands met blindly, and clasped
each other. I burst into silent tears.
When I looked up, Charley was staring into the mist again. His eyes,
too, were full of tears, but some troubling contradiction prevented
their flowing: I saw it by the expression of that mobile but now
firmly-closed mouth.
Often ere we left Switzerland I saw similar glories: this vision
remains alone, for it was the first.
I will not linger over the tempting delight of the village near which
we landed, its houses covered with quaintly-notched wooden scales like
those of a fish, and its river full to the brim of white-blue water,
rushing from the far-off bosom of the glaciers. I had never had such a
sense of exuberance and plenty as this river gave me--especially where
it filled the planks and piles of wood that hemmed it in like a trough.
I might agonize in words for a day and I should not express the
delight. And, lest my readers should apprehend a diary of a tour, I
shall say nothing more of our journey, remarking only that if
Switzerland were to become as common to the mere tourist mind as
Cheapside is to a Londoner, the meanest of its glories would be no whit
impaired thereby. Sometimes, I confess, in these days of overcrowded
cities, when, in periodical floods, the lonely places of the earth are
from them inundated, I do look up to the heavens and say to myself that
there at least, between the stars, even in thickest of nebulous
constellations, there is yet plenty of pure, unadulterated room--not
even a vapour to hang a colour upon; but presently I return to my
better mind and say that any man who loves his fellow will yet find he
has room enough and to spare.
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