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sion is said to have been that it was a thousand pities a man with so good a case, and so good a head for business, should not have the art of stating it better; but they felt that they must not allow themselves to be biassed by his mere defects in art, or to be misled by his opponent's brilliant display; and they would go away priding themselves on their power of distinguishing solid truth from wordy show, and perhaps too on having proved themselves sympathetically anxious to help the struggle of the honest advocate of a sound cause against the disadvantages of his own oratorical defects. Addison's Goodman Fact is allowed by everybody to be a plainspoken person, and a man of very few words; tropes and figures are his aversion; he affirms everything roundly, without any art, rhetoric, or circumlocution; yet so great is his natural eloquence, that he cuts down the finest orator, and destroys the best-contrived argument, as soon as ever he gets himself to be heard. "I promise you that plain truth, clothed in plain language," says the parliamentary baronet in Self, "brings conviction to my mind, far before the finest oration, studded with classical quotations, and coloured with historical allusions." Never lost upon such ears are such words, fit though fewer, and perhaps the fewer the fitter, as come from one of Miles Standish's make,

"a blunt old Captain, a man not of words but of actions . . Truly a maker of war, and not a maker of phrases,"—

one who, having a message to deliver,

"Did not embellish the theme, nor array it in beautiful phrases,

But came straight to the point, and blurted it out like a schoolboy."

§ VI.

LIFE ONLY IN ANOTHER LIFE.*

Othello, Act iv., Sc. 2.

BUT that it is immeasurable, the agony of Othello at the loss of Desdemona-for in believing her false he has lost her-may best be measured by the passionate intensity of the line,

"Where either I must live, or bear no life."

Had it pleased Heaven to try him with affliction in any other respect, to have rained all kinds of sores and shames on his bare head, to have steeped him in poverty to the very lips, or given to captivity himself and his utmost hopes, he could, he would have found in some part of his soul a drop of patience. Nay, he could even have borne the being pointed at and talked about and despised as a betrayed husband. The mere thought of this last degradation made him wince and writhe,—

"Yet could I bear that too; well, very well:

But there, where I have garner'd up my heart;
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current flows,
Or else dries up,”-

to lose this treasure was to lose all; he lived only in that other life. He lived only for another, and that other had failed him. Live for himself he could not, would not. In Desdemona's life and love he must live, or not live at all. And she had willed it, he believed, in his desolating despair, that life for him should henceforth be no more. Not only was Othello's occupation gone, but his very life, all that made him and kept him a living soul.

* The same fundamental thought has been made the ground-plot of (prave 'orts! might Fluellen or Parson Hugh mutter) a similar superstructure of illustrations, in a previous volume, Traits of Character in Bible Story, pp. 44-56. "A Life bound up in a Life" is the title of the chapter in question.

It is with him as with the miserable father in Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse:

"Non, je t'aime,

Voilà tout. N'es-tu pas ma vie et mon sang même ?

Si je ne t'avais point, qu'est-ce que je ferais,

Mon Dieu !"

Or as the apprehensive lover in Terence words it, Quod si fit, pereo funditus. Or we may take other words of Shakspeare's own, in the Sonnets:

"And life no longer than thy love will stay,

For it depends upon that love of thine."

And he would further offer us the melancholy musings, somewhat fantastical or "conceited" withal, of the only real Gentleman of the Two of Verona:

"To die, is to be banish'd from myself;
And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her,
Is self from self; a deadly banishment !
What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? . . .
She is my essence, and I leave [cease] to be,
If I be not by her fair influence

Foster'd, illumined, cherish'd, kept alive."

Florizel is none the less hearty for being less artificial in his protestations to Perdita,

"I cannot be

Mine own, or anything to any, if

I be not thine."

At the mere thought of being separated from Anzoleto, Consuelo cries, "How shall I be able to love anything when the half of my existence is taken away?" She felt, born artist though she was, that even art could not be a thing to live for, if the other love were gone. Like the lover in Lucile,

but reversing the position of the sexes,

"His whole being seem'd to cling to her, as though
He divined that, in some unaccountable way,

His happier destinies secretly lay

In the light of her dark eyes. And still, in his mind,
To the anguish of losing the woman was join'd
The terror of missing his life's destination,

Of which, as in mystical representation,
The love of the woman, whose aspect benign

Guided, starlike, his soul, seem'd the symbol and sign.

For he felt, if the light of that star it should miss,
That there lurk'd in his nature, conceal'd, an abyss
Into which all the current of being might roll,
Devastating a life, and submerging a soul."

When a tender affection, remarks George Eliot, has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.*

Even the self-absorbed Septimius of romance felt how sweet it might be to have one unchangeable companion; for, unless he strung the pearls and diamonds of life upon one unbroken affection, he sometimes thought that his life would have nothing to give it unity and identity; and so the longest life would be but an aggregate of insulated fragments, without relation to one another. And so it would be not one life, but many unconnected ones. Unless he could look into the same eyes, through the mornings of future time, opening and blessing him with the fresh gleam of love and joy; unless the same sweet voice could melt his thoughts together; unless some sympathy of a life side by side with his could knit. them into one; looking back upon the same things; looking forward to the same; the long, thin thread of an individual life, stretching onward and onward, would cease to be visible, cease to be felt, cease, by-and-by, to have any real bigness in proportion to its length-(length of life, be it remembered, preternatural length, was Septimius's craze)—and so be virtually non-existent, except in the "mere inconsiderable Now."

Eugénie de Guérin said quaintly and picturesquely, "Maurice and I were bound together in our inmost souls as if by ribands of rose-colour;" and when she had lost him, "Ah," she said, "my life will be a long mourning, with a widowed heart, and without any tie of intimate union." Crabbe's Jane had risked her happiness on a less worthy object,

"On him she had reposed each worldly view,

And when he fail'd, the world itself withdrew,

* "And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures."-Middlemarch, chap. lvii.

With all its prospects. Nothing could restore
To life its value; hope would live no more."

Constantine Palæologus in the tragedy is upbraidingly asked by Valeria if he has for her in fancy shaped a world and an existence where he is not? and falling on his neck, she exclaims, or declaims,

"Here is my world, my life, my land of refuge,
And to no other will I ever flee.

Here still is light and hope; turning from this,
All else is round me as a yawning tomb."

In a better known drama, Clifford's heart finds itself bankrupt, there, where most it coveted to be rich, and thought it

was so.

"O Julia, I have ventured for thy love,

Like the bold merchant, who, for only hope
Of some rich gain, all former gains will risk.
Before I ask'd a portion of thy heart,

I perill'd all my own; and now, all's lost."

Should Van Artevelde's cherished hope be blighted, should its blossom be coldly nipped, then were he desolate indeed! a man whom heaven would wean from earth, with nothing left. him on earth but care and quarrels, troubles and distraction, the heavy burthens and the broils of life.

"And still to each, some poor, obscurest life
Breathes all the bliss, or kindles all the strife.
Wake up the countless dead!—ask every ghost
Whose influence tortured or consoled the most:
How each pale spectre of the host would turn
From the fresh laurel and the glorious urn,
To point, where rots beneath a nameless stone,

Some heart in which had ebb'd and flow'd his own."

Je respire où tu palpites, is the strain of France's foremost living poet: "à quoi bon, helas! rester lá si tu me quittes, et vivre si tu t'en vas?" And again: "Il suffit que tu t'en ailles Pour qu'il ne reste plus rien.

"Tu m'entoures d'auréoles; te voir est mon seul souci.
Il suffit que tu t'envoles pour que je m'envole aussi . . .
De quoi puis-je avoir envie, de quoi puis-je avoir effroi,
Que ferai-je de la vie, si tu n'es plus près de moi?"

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