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destroying the creed which the clergy do believe, however badly they may have acted upon it.”

“It is all true enough–bitterly true. But yet, why do we need the help of the clergy?”

“Because you need the help of the whole nation; because there are other classes to be considered beside yourselves; because the nation is neither the few nor the many, but the all; because it is only by the co-operation of all the members of a body, that any one member can fulfil its calling in health and freedom; because, as long as you stand aloof from the clergy, or from any other class, through pride, self-interest, or wilful ignorance, you are keeping up those very class distinctions of which you and I too complain, as ‘hateful equally to God and to his enemies;’ and, finally, because the clergy are the class which God has appointed to unite all others; which, in as far as it fulfils its calling, and is indeed a priesthood, is above and below all rank, and knows no man after the flesh, but only on the ground of his spiritual worth, and his birthright in that kingdom which is the heritage of all.”

“Truly,” I answered, “the idea is a noble one–But look at the reality! Has not priestly pandering to tyrants made the Church, in every age, a scoff and a byword among free men?”

“May it ever do so,” she replied, “whenever such a sin exists! But yet, look at the other side of the picture. Did not the priesthood, in the first ages, glory not in the name, but, what is better, in the office, of democrats? Did not the Roman tyrants hunt them down as wild beasts, because they were democrats, proclaiming to the slave and to the barbarian a spiritual freedom and a heavenly citizenship, before which the Roman well knew his power must vanish into naught? Who, during the invasion of the barbarians, protected the poor against their conquerors? Who, in the middle age, stood between the baron and his serfs? Who, in their monasteries, realized spiritual democracy,–the nothingness of rank and wealth, the practical might of co-operation and self-sacrifice? Who delivered England from the Pope? Who spread throughout every cottage in the land the Bible and Protestantism, the book and the religion which declares that a man’s soul is free in the sight of God? Who, at the martyr’s stake in Oxford, ‘lighted the candle in England that shall never be put out?’ Who, by suffering, and not by rebellion, drove the last perjured Stuart from his throne, and united every sect and class in one of the noblest steps in England’s progress? You will say these are the exceptions; I say nay; they are rather a few great and striking manifestations of an influence which has been, unseen though not unfelt, at work for ages, converting, consecrating, organizing, every fresh invention of mankind, and which is now on the eve of christianizing democracy, as it did Mediaeval Feudalism, Tudor Nationalism, Whig Constitutionalism; and which will succeed in christianizing it, and so alone making it rational, human, possible; because the priesthood alone, of all human institutions, testifies of Christ the King of men, the Lord of all things, the inspirer of all discoveries; who reigns, and will reign, till He has put all things under His feet, and the kingdoms of the world have become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ. Be sure, as it always has been, so will it be now. Without the priesthood there is no freedom for the people. Statesmen know it; and, therefore, those who would keep the people fettered, find it necessary to keep the priesthood fettered also. The people never can be themselves without co-operation with the priesthood; and the priesthood never can be themselves without co-operation with the people. They may help to make a sect-Church for the rich, as they have been doing, or a sect-Church for paupers (which is also the most subtle form of a sect-Church for the rich), as a party in England are trying now to do–as I once gladly would have done myself: but if they would be truly priests of God, and priests of the Universal Church, they must be priests of the people, priests of the masses, priests after the likeness of Him who died on the cross.”

“And are there any men,” I said, “who believe this? and, what is more, have courage to act upon it, now in the very hour of Mammon’s triumph?”

“There are those who are willing, who are determined, whatever it may cost them, to fraternize with those whom they take shame to themselves for having neglected; to preach and to organize, in concert with them, a Holy War against the social abuses which are England’s shame; and, first and foremost, against the fiend of competition. They do not want to be dictators to the working men. They know that they have a message to the artizan, but they know, too, that the artizan has a message to them; and they are not afraid to hear it. They do not wish to make him a puppet for any system of their own; they only are willing, if he will take the hand they offer him, to devote themselves, body and soul, to the great end of enabling the artizan to govern himself; to produce in the capacity of a free man, and not of a slave; to eat the food he earns, and wear the clothes he makes. Will your working brothers co-operate with these men? Are they, do you think, such bigots as to let political differences stand between them and those who fain would treat them as their brothers; or will they fight manfully side by side with them in the battle against Mammon, trusting to God, that if in anything they are otherwise minded, He will, in His own good time, reveal even that unto them? Do you think, to take one instance, the men of your own trade would heartily join a handful of these men in an experiment of associate labour, even though there should be a clergyman or two among them?”

“Join them?” I said. “Can you ask the question? I, for one, would devote myself, body and soul, to any enterprise so noble. Crossthwaite would ask for nothing higher, than to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to an establishment of associate workmen. But, alas! his fate is fixed for the New World; and mine, I verily believe, for sickness and the grave. And yet I will answer for it, that, in the hopes of helping such a project, he would give up Mackaye’s bequest, for the mere sake of remaining in England; and for me, if I have but a month of life, it is at the service of such men as you describe.”

“Oh!” she said, musingly, “if poor Mackaye had but had somewhat more faith in the future, that fatal condition would perhaps never have been attached to his bequest. And yet, perhaps, it is better as it is. Crossthwaite’s mind may want quite, as much as yours does, a few years of a simpler and brighter atmosphere to soften and refresh it again. Besides, your health is too weak, your life, I know, too valuable to your class, for us to trust you on such a voyage alone. He must go with you.”

“With me?” I said. “You must be misinformed; I have no thought of leaving England.”

“You know the opinion of the physicians?”

“I know that my life is not likely to be a long one; that immediate removal to a southern, if possible to a tropical climate, is considered the only means of preserving it. For the former I care little; _non est tanti vivere_. And, indeed, the latter, even if it would succeed, is impossible. Crossthwaite will live and thrive by the labour of his hands; while, for such a helpless invalid as I to travel, would be to dissipate the little capital which Mackaye has left me.

“The day will come, when society will find it profitable, as well as just, to put the means of preserving life by travel within the reach of the poorest. But individuals must always begin by setting the examples, which the state too slowly, though surely (for the world is God’s world after all), will learn to copy. All is arranged for you. Crossthwaite, you know, would have sailed ere now, had it not been for your fever. Next week you start with him for Texas, No; make no objections. All expenses are defrayed–no matter by whom.”

“By you! By you! Who else?”

“Do you think that I monopolize the generosity of England? Do you think warm hearts beat only in the breasts of working men? But, if it were I, would not that be only another reason for submitting? You must go. You will have, for the next three years, such an allowance as will support you in comfort, whether you choose to remain stationary, or, as I hope, to travel southward into Mexico. Your passage-money is already paid.”

Why should I attempt to describe my feelings? I gasped for breath, and looked stupidly at her for a minute or two.–The second darling hope of my life within my reach, just as the first had been snatched from me! At last I found words.

“No, no, noble lady! Do not tempt me! Who am I, the slave of impulse, useless, worn out in mind and body, that you should waste such generosity upon me? I do not refuse from the honest pride of independence; I have not man enough left in me even for that. But will you, of all people, ask me to desert the starving suffering thousands, to whom my heart, my honour are engaged; to give up the purpose of my life, and pamper my fancy in a luxurious paradise, while they are slaving here?”

“What? Cannot God find champions for them when you are gone? Has he not found them already? Believe me, that Tenth of April, which you fancied the death-day of liberty, has awakened a spirit in high as well as in low life, which children yet unborn will bless.”

“Oh, do not mistake me! Have I not confessed my own weakness? But if I have one healthy nerve left in me, soul or body, it will retain its strength only as long as it thrills with devotion to the people’s cause. If I live, I must live among them, for them. If I die, I must die at my post. I could not rest, except in labour. I dare not fly, like Jonah, from the call of God. In the deepest shade of the virgin forests, on the loneliest peak of the Cordilleras, He would find me out; and I should hear His still small voice reproving me, as it reproved the fugitive patriot-seer of old–What doest thou here, Elijah?”

I was excited, and spoke, I am afraid, after my custom, somewhat too magniloquently. But she answered only with a quiet smile:

“So you are a Chartist still?”

“If by a Chartist you mean one who fancies that a change in mere political circumstances will bring about a millennium, I am no longer one. That dream is gone–with others. But if to be a Chartist is to love my brothers with every faculty of my soul–to wish to live and die struggling for their rights, endeavouring to make them, not electors merely, but fit to be electors, senators, kings, and priests to God and to His Christ–if that be the Chartism of the future, then am I sevenfold a Chartist, and ready to confess it before men, though I were thrust forth from every door in England.”

She was silent a moment.

“‘The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.’ Surely the old English spirit has cast its madness, and begins to speak once more as it spoke in Naseby fights and Smithfield fires!”

“And yet you would quench it in me amid the enervating climate of the tropics.”

“Need it be quenched there? Was it quenched in Drake, in Hawkins, in the conquerors of Hindostan? Weakness, like strength, is from within, of the spirit, and not of sunshine. I would send you thither, that you may gain new strength, new knowledge to carry out your dream and mine. Do not refuse me the honour of preserving you. Do not forbid me to employ my wealth in the only way which reconciles my conscience to the possession of it. I have saved many a woman already; and this one thing remained–the highest of all my hopes and longings–that God would allow me, ere I die, to save a man. I have longed to find some noble soul, as Carlyle says, fallen down by the wayside, and lift it up, and heal its wounds, and teach it the secret of its heavenly birthright, and consecrate it to its King in heaven. I have longed to find a man of the people, whom I could train to be the poet of the people.”

“Me, at least, you have saved, have taught, have trained! Oh that your care had been bestowed on some more worthy object!”

“Let me, at least, then, perfect my own work. You do not–it is a sign of your humility that you do not–appreciate the value of this rest. You underrate at once your own powers, and the shock which they have received.”

“If I must go, then, why so far? Why put you to so great expense? If you must be generous, send me to some place nearer home–to Italy, to the coast of Devon, or the Isle of Wight, where invalids like me are said to find all the advantages which are so often, perhaps too hastily, sought in foreign lands.”

“No,” she said, smiling; “you are my servant now, by the laws of chivalry, and you must fulfil my quest. I have long hoped for a tropic poet; one who should leave the routine imagery of European civilization, its meagre scenery, and physically decrepit races, for the grandeur, the luxuriance, the infinite and strongly-marked variety of tropic nature, the paradisiac beauty and simplicity of tropic humanity. I am tired of the old images; of the barren alternations between Italy and the Highlands. I had once dreamt of going to the tropics myself; but my work lay elsewhere. Go for me, and for the people. See if you cannot help to infuse some new blood into the aged veins of English literature; see if you cannot, by observing man in his mere simple and primeval state, bring home fresh conceptions of beauty, fresh spiritual and physical laws of his existence, that you may realize them here at home–(how, I see as yet but dimly; but He who teaches the facts will surely teach their application)–in the cottages, in the play-grounds, the reading-rooms, the churches of working men.”

“But I know so little–I have seen so little!”

“That very fact, I flatter myself, gives you an especial vocation for my scheme. Your ignorance of cultivated English scenery, and of Italian art, will enable you to approach with a more reverend, simple, and unprejudiced eye the primeval forms of beauty–God’s work, not man’s. Sin you will see there, and anarchy, and tyranny, but I do not send you to look for society, but for nature. I do not send you to become a barbarian settler, but to bring home to the realms of civilization those ideas of physical perfection, which as yet, alas! barbarism, rather than civilization, has preserved. Do not despise your old love for the beautiful. Do not fancy that because you have let it become an idol and a tyrant, it was not therefore the gift of God. Cherish it, develop it to the last; steep your whole soul in beauty; watch it in its most vast and complex harmonies, and not less in its most faint and fragmentary traces. Only, hitherto you have blindly worshipped it; now you must learn to comprehend, to master, to embody it; to show it forth to men as the sacrament of Heaven, the finger-mark of God!”

Who could resist such pleading from those lips? I at least could not.

CHAPTER XLI.

FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND BROTHERHOOD.

Before the same Father, the same King, crucified for all alike, we had partaken of the same bread and wine, we had prayed for the same spirit. Side by side, around the chair on which I lay propped up with pillows, coughing my span of life away, had knelt the high-born countess, the cultivated philosopher, the repentant rebel, the wild Irish girl, her slavish and exclusive creed exchanged for one more free and all-embracing; and that no extremest type of human condition might be wanting, the reclaimed Magdalene was there–two pale worn girls from Eleanor’s asylum, in whom I recognized the needlewomen to whom Mackaye had taken me, on a memorable night, seven years before. Thus–and how better?–had God rewarded their loving care of that poor dying fellow-slave.

Yes–we had knelt together: and I had felt that we were one–that there was a bond between us, real, eternal, independent of ourselves, knit not by man, but God; and the peace of God, which passes understanding, came over me like the clear sunshine after weary rain.

One by one they shook me by the hand, and quitted the room; and Eleanor and I were left alone.

“See!” she said, “Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood are come; but not as you expected.”

Blissful, repentant tears blinded my eyes, as I replied, not to her, but to Him who spoke by her–

“Lord! not as I will, but as thou wilt!”

“Yes,” she continued, “Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood are here. Realize them in thine own self, and so alone thou helpest to make them realities for all. Not from without, from Charters and Republics, but from within, from the Spirit working in each; not by wrath and haste, but by patience made perfect through suffering, canst thou proclaim their good news to the groaning masses, and deliver them, as thy Master did before thee, by the cross, and not the sword. Divine paradox!–Folly to the rich and mighty–the watchword of the weak, in whose weakness is God’s strength made perfect. ‘In your patience possess ye your souls, for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.’ Yes–He came then, and the Babel-tyranny of Rome fell, even as the more fearful, more subtle, and more diabolic tyranny of Mammon shall fall ere long–suicidal, even now crumbling by its innate decay. Yes–Babylon the Great–the commercial world of selfish competition, drunken with the blood of God’s people, whose merchandise is the bodies and souls of men–her doom is gone forth. And then–then–when they, the tyrants of the earth, who lived delicately with her, rejoicing in her sins, the plutocrats and bureaucrats, the money-changers and devourers of labour, are crying to the rocks to hide them, and to the hills to cover them, from the wrath of Him that sitteth on the throne–then labour shall be free at last, and the poor shall eat and be satisfied, with things that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, but which God has prepared for those who love Him. Then the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea, and mankind at last shall own their King–Him. in whom they are all redeemed into the glorious liberty of the Sons of God, and He shall reign indeed on earth, and none but His saints shall rule beside Him. And then shall this sacrament be an everlasting sign to all the nations of the world, as it has been to you this day, of freedom, equality, brotherhood, of Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good-will toward men. Do you believe?”

Again I answered, not her, but Him who sent her–

“Lord, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!”

“And now farewell. I shall not see you again before you start–and ere you return–My health has been fast declining lately.”

I started–I had not dared to confess to myself how thin her features had become of late. I had tried not to hear the dry and hectic cough, or see the burning spot on either cheek–but it was too true; and with a broken voice I cried:

“Oh that I might die, and join you!”

“Not so–I trust that you have still a work to do. But if not, promise me that, whatever be the event of your voyage, you will publish, in good time, an honest history of your life; extenuating nothing, exaggerating nothing, ashamed to confess or too proclaim nothing. It may perhaps awaken some rich man to look down and take pity on the brains and hearts more noble than his own, which lie struggling in poverty and misguidance among these foul sties, which civilization rears–and calls them cities. Now, once again, farewell!”

She held out her hand–I would have fallen at her feet, but the thought of that common sacrament withheld me. I seized her hand, covered it with adoring kisses–Slowly she withdrew it, and glided from the room–

What need of more words? I obeyed her–sailed–and here I am.

* * * * *

Yes! I have seen the land! Like a purple fringe upon the golden sea, “while parting day dies like the dolphin,” there it lay upon the fair horizon–the great young free new world! and every tree, and flower, and insect on it new!–a wonder and a joy–which I shall never see….

No,–I shall never reach the land. I felt it all along. Weaker and weaker, day by day, with bleeding lungs and failing limbs, I have travelled the ocean paths. The iron has entered too deeply into my soul….

Hark! Merry voices on deck are welcoming their future home. Laugh on, happy ones!–come out of Egypt and the house of bondage, and the waste and howling wilderness of slavery and competition, workhouses and prisons, into a good land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey, where you will sit every one under his own vine and his own fig-tree, and look into the faces of your rosy children–and see in them a blessing and not a curse! Oh, England! stern mother-land, when wilt thou renew thy youth?–Thou wilderness of man’s making, not God’s!… Is it not written, that the days shall come when the forest shall break forth into singing, and the wilderness shall blossom like the rose?

Hark! again, sweet and clear, across the still night sea, ring out the notes of Crossthwaite’s bugle–the first luxury, poor fellow, he ever allowed himself; and yet not a selfish one, for music, like mercy, is twice blessed–

“It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

There is the spirit-stirring marching air of the German workmen students

Thou, thou, thou, and thou,
Sir Master, fare thee well.–

Perhaps a half reproachful hint to the poor old England he is leaving. What a glorious metre! warming one’s whole heart into life and energy! If I could but write in such a metre one true people’s song, that should embody all my sorrow, indignation, hope–fitting last words for a poet of the people–for they will be my last words–Well–thank God! at least I shall not be buried in a London churchyard! It may be a foolish fancy–but I have made them promise to lay me up among the virgin woods, where, if the soul ever visits the place of its body’s rest, I may snatch glimpses of that natural beauty from which I was barred out in life, and watch the gorgeous flowers that bloom above my dust, and hear the forest birds sing around the Poet’s grave.

Hark to the grand lilt of the “Good Time Coming!”–Song which has cheered ten thousand hearts; which has already taken root, that it may live and grow for ever–fitting melody to soothe my dying ears! Ah! how should there not be A Good Time Coming?–Hope, and trust, and infinite deliverance!–a time such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive!–coming surely, soon or late, to those for whom a God did not disdain to die!

* * * * *

Our only remaining duty is to give an extract from a letter written by John Crossthwaite, and dated

“GALVESTON, TEXAS, _October, 1848_.

… “I am happy. Katie is happy, There is peace among us here, like ‘the clear downshining after rain.’ But I thirst and long already for the expiration of my seven years’ exile, wholesome as I believe it to be. My only wish is to return and assist in the Emancipation of Labour, and give my small aid in that fraternal union of all classes which I hear is surely, though slowly, spreading in my mother-land.

“And now for my poor friend, whose papers, according to my promise to him, I transmit to you. On the very night on which he seems to have concluded them–an hour after we had made the land–we found him in his cabin, dead, his head resting on the table as peacefully as if he had slumbered. On a sheet of paper by him were written the following verses; the ink was not yet dry:

“‘MY LAST WORDS.

“‘I.

“‘Weep, weep, weep, and weep,
For pauper, dolt, and slave;
Hark! from wasted moor and fen,
Feverous alley, workhouse den,
Swells the wail of Englishmen:
“Work! or the grave!”

“‘II.

“‘Down, down, down, and down,
With idler, knave, and tyrant;
Why for sluggards stint and moil
He that will not live by toil
Has no right on English soil;
God’s word’s our warrant!

“‘III.

“‘Up, up, up, and up,
Face your game, and play it!
The night is past–behold the sun!– The cup is full, the web is spun,
The Judge is set, the doom begun;
Who shall stay it?'”