As I peer into the darkness, not a being of my name Yet your presence, O my parents, in my inmost self I find, Each with his unuttered secret down the common road you went, Your long-silent generations first in me have found a tongue, Hence this love for all that 's human, the strange sympathies I feel, Now I also, in my season, walk beneath the sun and moon, To each little life its moment! We are sparkles of the sea: Here I joy and sing and suffer, in this moment fleeting fast, Clouds of ancestors, ascending from this sublunary coast, Children's children, I salute you! From this hour and from this land, To your far-off generations I uplift the signal hand! Well contented, I resign you to the vision which I see, O fraternity of nations! O republics yet to be! Yours the full-blown flower of freedom, which in struggle we have sown; You, in turn, will look with wonder, from a more enlightened time, Half our virtues will seem vices by your broader, higher right, J. T. Trowbridge. Pensively I turn the pages, pausing, curious and aghast: What commingled, unknown currents, mighty passions of the past, I put by the book: in vision rise the gray ancestral ghosts, From the home of modern culture, to the cave uncouth and dim, I was molded in that far-off time of ignorance and wrong, When the world was to the crafty, to the ravenous and strong; Wild forefathers, I salute you! Though your times were fierce and rude, Now I see I have exacted too much justice of my race, Man's great passions are coeval with the vital breath he draws, Still the darker age will linger in the slowly brightening present, Wrong and insult find me weaponed for a more heroic strife; Somehow hidden in the slayer was the singer yet to be, O my fathers, in whose bosoms slowly dawned the later light, In whom grew the thirst for knowledge, in whom burned the love of right, I once more take up the volume, but I turn the leaves in vain. Not a voice, of all your voices, comes to me from out the vast; 1 grim! ude, As I peer into the darkness, not a being of my name Yet your presence, O my parents, in my inmost self I find, Each with his unuttered secret down the common road you went, Your long-silent generations first in me have found a tongue, Hence this love for all that's human, the strange sympathies I feel, Now I also, in my season, walk beneath the sun and moon, To each little life its moment! We are sparkles of the sea: Here I joy and sing and suffer, in this moment fleeting fast, Clouds of ancestors, ascending from this sublunary coast, Children's children, I salute you! From this hour and from this land, Well contented, I resign you to the vision which I see, O fraternity of nations! O republics yet to be! Yours the full-blown flower of freedom, which in struggle we have sown; You, in turn, will look with wonder, from a more enlightened time, Half our virtues will seem vices by your broader, higher right, J. T. Trowbridge. THE LATEST SONGS OF CHIVALRY. THE English adjective chivalrous has retained a somewhat finer shade of meaning than the corresponding epithet in either of the other chief modern languages. Both chevaleresque and ritterlich are more restricted, and chevaleresque, at least, is decidedly historical rather than ethical in its associations. But chivalrous describes a type of character, and there are not many isolated words in any tongue suggestive of so many admirable and agreeable human qualities. Hidden, it may be, from the eyes of the "churl in spirit, up or down the scale of ranks," they are entirely familiar to all souls of gentler quality, and subject to little dispute as the last results of selected temper and moral refinement. Valor, veracity, loyalty, selfacrifice and mildness of manners, the protection of weakness and innocence, and the punishment of wrong were always theoretically enjoined by the laws of the romantic institution - if institution it were which gave our word its birth; but as planted in different soils, and adopted by different races, the code or system in question assimilated different elements, and took on slightly varying shapes; and it is perhaps only natural that we, who are English born, should regard the English type of chivalry as finer than the Latin on the one hand, or the Teutonic on the other. But if it were indeed, as we fondly fancy, less fantastic and more manly than the one, less rude and vengeful than the other, there is no mystery whatever about the superior dignity of the English derivative term. And that we may see for ourselves what the fruits of the spirit of English knighthood really were, the reader is invited to revisit for an hour the pleasant field of literature where that spirit first found full and untrammeled expression, the smiling gardenground of old English lyrical poetry. The early chivalric romances, however enthusiastically adopted and nobly ed ited and amplified by insular writers, were almost all of Continental origin. Sidney, alas, did not live to execute the congenial purpose which Tennyson inherited, and transform his Arcadia into a purely English romance, with Arthur for its hero. But in the songs of the predecessors and compeers of Sidney, as in all song, we have simple and spontaneous emotions, the loves, hates, hopes, fears, and faiths of him who sings. It is not so much as literary models that we would recur just now to these delightsome lays, although in the matter of pure and apt expression they have never been surpassed, and they are particularly well worth the study of our own hazy and wordy generation, — but as illustrations of character. We desire to learn from their own lips what manner of men these singers were, in their private rather than their civic relations, as lovers, friends, and mourners; and how they regarded what must ever remain the supreme subjects of human interest, life and its conduct, love and its delight, and death. ury, brief but full, of Provençal song. This side the limits of the same prolific period come other fragments, less familiar than the first, in which the lilt of the Romance measures seems to have been fully apprehended, and almost acquired. The themes are still the everlasting two of all the Troubadours and Minnesingers, love and spring. They seem to have had no confidence in any other chord. But for all the prevailing formality of subject and treatment, there is already a perceptible difference between these rather shrill warblings and the last languid sighs of Languedocian melody, even then, in the earliest years of the thirteenth century, dying away in the distracted South. Our English staves are louder, more buoyant, and at the same time more natural and heartfelt. The first fair day of modern song was done, and shadow and silence were gaining for the time the world over; but we feel as if a fresher breeze had begun to blow after night-fall, scattering foul exhalations, and replacing the sultriness of sensuous passion. Even from the few and fragmentary notes of these "smalle foulés" who thus that Robert de Brunne, in the year 1300, or thereabouts, describes his ideal of womanhood: "Nothing is to man so dear As woman's love in good manner. As a good woman that loveth true; This is excruciating to the ear, but suggestive and edifying to the mind. No troubadour, from William of Poitiers down, ever praised a lady in such homely, hobbling lines, but also no troubadour ever praised, for none ever imagined, just such a lady. For this is the typical English wife, loving, loyal, modest, Perand soft-spoken, above all pure. sonal beauty is neither allowed nor denied her: she may have it, or she may have it not; it is not an indispensable addition to her charms. The fact that the author of these lines was a monk, and described an ideal helpmeet, does not render his conception less remarkable. Chaucer, with his strong dramatic instincts, and his wide experience of life, saw and appreciated and portrayed many different types of womanhood, but none so fondly as one almost identical with this: "Lo, here, what gentleness these women have, It is in Chaucer, too, in lines which are usually marked as his latest, and which therefore were probably written about the year 1400, that we first find embodied, in a singularly noble hymn, a theory of life, and of the temper in which it is to be both received and resigned, which plainly foreshadows the sane and joyous piety of the Elizabethan time, a theory which is, in fact, one with the best religion and the best philosophy of every age, as these are identical with one another. We give the last verse only. |