Littell's Living Age

Adventures of Baron Munchauson; for in Frances Browne's youth there was no bookseller's shop within three counties of Stranorlar, and circulating libraries were things undreamt of.

"I leave the spring-time by thy streams, with dreams that will not part,

And on thy hills what kindred names without one kindred heart!

They will not miss my steps at heart, or shrine, or social band;

Oh, free the homeless heart goes forth-yet fare-thee-well, my land !

Edinburgh was the city selected for her residence. There her genius, worth, and industry procured her the means of life, and made her many friends, among others Christopher North, and the proprietors of this Journal, to which the second piece of prose composition she ever attempted was contributed. She wrote tales and sketches, essays and reviews, leaders and songs, for various newspapers and magazines; refusing no employment, however uncongenial, and acquitting herself as conscientiously in a storybook for children, as in writing for the entertainment of their elders. During her residence in the northern capital, she published a volume of Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems, which she dedicated to the late Sir Robert Peel, in grateful recollection of his lib

About the end of her fifteenth year, having heard much of the Iliad, she obtained the loan of Pope's translation. "It was like the discovery of a new world," she writes to a friend, "and effected a total change in my ideas on the subject of poetry. There was at the time a considerable manuscript of my own productions in existence, which of course I regarded with some partiality; but Homer had awakened me, and in a fit of sovereign contempt, I committed the whole to the flames. After Homer's, the work that produced the greatest impression on my mind was Byron's Childe Harold. The one had induced me to burn my first manuscript, and the other made me resolve against verse-making in future.” In this resolution she persevered for nearly ten years, till, in the summer of 1840, having heard a volume of Irish songs read, she could no longer keep silence, and a poem was com-erality and kindness; a series of Legends of posed, called The Songs of our Land, which was first printed in the Irish Penny Journal, and may still be found in Duffy's Ballad Poetry of Ireland. Then followed contributions to the Athenæum, Hood's Magazine, and Lady Blessington's Keepsake. Her verses were copied into the journals of the day; and she felt herself a poetess. At length the thought came to her in the long, sleepless nights, could she not, though sightless and friendless, make her own way in the world? | Alas! the golden age had gone by, when, like Blind Harry, she could earn food and shelter by reciting the productions of her muse to chiefs and dames. Yet there were other walks in literature where bread might be got as well as fame. She would leave her native hills-but not Parnassus-and make the venture, though clouds and darkness rested on it. This purpose was carried into effect in the spring of 1847, when the terrible famine which made such devastation in her country began. Having no re-plied: sources but a pension of twenty pounds, granted from the Royal Bounty Fund by Sir Robert Peel, and no companion but her sister, she crossed the channel for the land of Burns, and as she went, she sang :

Ulster, her native province; and The Ericksons, a tale for the young. She found her abilities for prose-writing gradually strengthen and improve, but her fortunes did not brighten in equal proportion. Sometimes ill-health, sometimes a dishonest publisher, was the drawback to her prosperity. Yet when things were at their best, there were two to be maintained; and ever mindful of the claims of kindred, Frances, out of her poverty, contributed to the support of her mother, as she has done for seventeen years past. No wonder if at times she felt the burden of life heavy, and mourned in the bitterness of her soul," that the waters of her lot were often troubled, though not by angels."

In 1852, after a residence of five years in Edinburgh, she removed to London. Her sister married soon after, and returned to Scotland; and upon a friend condoling with Frances on her loneliness, she smilingly re

Oh, you know, in the absence of other relatives, an author may manage very well with the help of the relative pronouns." Since that period, she has had the assistance

"The Lost New-year's Gift," March 8, 1845, No. 62, 2d Series.

of a secretary for a few hours every day, her lengthened service to literature not yet enabling her to have one entirely at her command. In those hours she has written songs which have pleased many who little guessed under what circumstances they were dictated.

"An arrow sent from the hunter's string,
When the moorland sky was gray,

Had smote the strength of the wild swan's
wing,

On his far and upward way;
Pinion and plume of vigor reft,
Drooped like boughs by the tempest cleft

On some green forest tree,

And never might that wild swan soar
To the purple heights of morning more;
Or westward o'er the hill-tops cleave
His course through the cloudy isles of eve,
And the sunset's golden sea.

"The light of the lovely lakes that lie
Among green woods was gone
From all his days, but the years went by,
And the lonely swan lived on,

Frances Browne's poems are, in truth, her best biography, for they show us her energy of mind, her resolution of character, her scorn of mean and soulless men, her love of the brave, the wise, and the good. Unlike the poems of Blacklock, which abound with complaints of the difficulties and distresses of his situation, his "rueful darkness" and "gloomy vigils," her lyrics contain little allusion to her outward life, and are altogether silent on the subject of her great calamity. With Voltaire, when some one was holding forth on De la Motte's blindness, she thinks that the public is concerned only with the powers of the author's mind, and not with the misfortunes of his body. But the circumstances of her life have given her a color to, if they have never formed the burden of, her song. Poverty having been her portion from the cradle, her sympathies are with the poor, "the wearers of the world's old clothes." Years of loneliness have made her look longingly forward to that better time when "none will lead a stranger's life," and to that happier shore, "where hearts will find their own." She deems this age but a material" one, wherein the statesman's notion of the highest good is, that

"The sun of the priest's millennial views, Is no dissent, and all the dues; "

and the trader's, that

"There will be no Gazette to fear,

But profits quite surprising;
With wages falling every year,
And the markets always rising."

In such an age, the poet is, she complains,
out of place. "Tis a cruel fate, which ban-
ishes him from his native heaven, and binds
him to the clay-cruel as that which brings
the wild swan from the purple heights of
morn, to the dust and dulness of earth.
This thought is beautifully expressed in the
following touching poem, called

A captive, bound to the dull earth then,
With wingless creatures, and weary men
Who could not quit the clay;
He grew like them, as a dweller must,
At home with the dulness and the dust,
Till faded from his memory's hold
The life and the liberty of old,

Like a far forgotten day.

"Yet ever as from wood and wave

The smile of the summer went,
And his kindred's march passed south, above
The spot where he was pent,

With their wavy lines, and their wings of snow,
And their trumpet's notes sent far below
To bid that lingerer rise,

The swan would gaze as the host swept by,
And a wild regret was in his cry,
As if for the nobler part and place
He lost, in the freedom of his race-
In the joy of streams and skies.
Falls not that wild swan's fortune oft

On souls that scorn the ground,
Whose outspread wings the deadly shaft
Of an earthward fate hath found;
And narrowed down to some dusty scope
The tameless strength and the tireless hope
That for the skies were born;
Till in the lore of that lifeless lot
Their glorious birthright seems forgot,
As dimness deepens and grayness grows,
And year by year with its burden goes
To the night that knows no morn?

"Yet over the prison-house at times,
Great thoughts and voices go,

That wake with the mind-world's mighty
chimes,

Their buried life below

And the bowed of bondage lift their view
To the heaven that lies so far and blue
In its boundless beauty yet,
But never can they that realm regain,
The wing is withered, the cry is vain-
So downward turn they, eye and heart,
And learn, but not with a ready heart,

Of that wild swan-' Forget!'”

But wherever our poet finds heroism, honesty, worth, there she reverently bows

down; and never did preacher convey more beautiful a lesson on the brotherhood of all good men, however their lots may differ, than is contained in the poem of Mark's Mother.

"Mark, the miner, is full fourscore,

But blithe he sits at his cottage door,
Smoking the trusty pipe of clay,
Which hath been his comfort many a day,
In spite of work and weather;
It made his honest heart amends

For the loss of strength and the death of friends;

It cheered his spirit through the lives
And management of three good wives-
But now those trying times are done,
And there they sit in the setting sun,

Mark and his pipe together.

"From harvest-field and from pasture-ground,
The peasant people have gathered round:
The times are rusty, the news is scant,
And something like a tale they want
From Mark's unfailing store;
For he is the hamlet's chronicle,
And when so minded, wont to tell
Where their great-uncles used to play-

How their grandames looked on their wedding-
day-

With all that happened of chance and change,
And all that had passed of great or strange,
For seventy years before.

"But on this evening, it is plain,

Mark's mind is not in the telling vein,
He sits in silence and in smoke,
With his thoughts about him like a cloak

Wrapped tight against the blast;
And his eye upon the old church spire,
Where falls the sunset's fading fire-
And all the friends his youth had known
Lie round beneath the turf and stone,
While a younger generation try
To touch the keys of his memory
With questions of the past.

"Good Mark! how looked the Lady Rose
Whose bower so green in our forest grows,
Whom old men name with a blessing still

For the torrent's bridge, and the village mill,

And the traveller's wayside well?' 'Like my good mother, neighbors dear, How long she lies in the churchyard here!' Well, Mark, that bishop of kindly rule, Who burned the stocks, and built the school, How looked his Grace when the church was

new?'

'Neighbors, like my good mother, too,

As those who saw could tell.'

Then, Mark, the prince who checked his train,

When the stag passed through your father's grain?'

'Good neighbors, as I live, his look The light of my blessed mother's took, As he bade them spare the corn.'

Loud laugh the peasants with rustic shout:

Now, Mark, thy wits are wearing out.

Thy mother was but a homely dame,
With a wrinkled face and a toil-worn frame;
No earthly semblance could she bear
To a bishop learned, and a lady fair,

And a prince to kingdoms born.' "Nay,' saith the pastor, passing by,

As the stars came out in the evening sky-
'That homely dame hath a place and part
Time cannot wear from the old man's heart,
Nor many winters wither;

And know ye, friends, that the wise and good
Are all of one gracious brotherhood;
Howe'er their fortunes on earth may stand,
They take the look of their promised land-
So bounteous lady, and bishop kind,
And prince with that royalty of mind,

Were like Mark's blessed mother.'"

With the above-which would be a sufficient answer to those critics who imagine that, like her own Ben Ezra, she only "sees of each soul the losing side "--we must conclude our notice of Frances Browne's poetry, and take a rapid glance at the prose work already referred to as her latest effort, My Share of the World.

This book is the autobiography of Frederick Favoursham of Liverpool, by turns artist, tutor, phrenologist, writer for the daily press, private secretary, holder of a government office, and finally of a large estate and many thousands. The scenes to which the author thus introduces us are various, showing considerable knowledge of men and things. The characters that play their part in the story are numerous-perhaps too numerous-but some of them are undoubtedly original. There is a young gentleman of fifteen, who despises Jack the Giant-killer and Robinson Crusoe, and considers the learning of his letters just a waste of time, but who dotes upon Foxe's Martyrology and The Inquisition Displayed, and will at any time lay down his knife and fork to hear about eternal punishment, or to meditate upon a tract he is composing on The Fall of Man. There is an old lady who is haunted at the full of the moon by the fear of the Jesuits, and goes shouting through the house: "Down with the pope!" There is a female phrenologist, who proves to be one of the women whom our hero's father had wheedled into a pretended marriage, who advises Frederick "to take care of his conscientiousness," and evinces her own by employing him as her assistant at the rate" of sixpence for every single, and a shilling for all double characters." There is

a newspaper contributor who grumbles that his talents are not appreciated by editor or proprietor, and promises to revenge his wrongs by "pillorying the whole staff to all posterity in his great poem, The Guild of the Giftless;" solacing himself mealtime by ascribing all the misfortunes of his life to his wedding-day, which "furnishes him with satisfactory reasons why he is not rich, wise, and celebrated-even the shortcomings of his previous life being laid at its door. Mr. Favoursham,' he would say, in moments of extraordinary confidence, how could I succeed, with that fate hanging over me? It cast a shadow on my prospects, though I did not know it: a man never does well who has something looming in the distance.'"

Nor are actors of a higher type and finer mould wanting in the drama. There is Frederick's mother, who is so lonely and heartbroken under her husband's desertion and profligacy, yet whose dying injunction to her son is, "Never forget he is your father, and do not let him want in his old days; and if you marry, be a good man to your wife, for women have a poor turn in this world; and if you don't, live like the holy virgins, that will come in white to the gates of heaven." There is Frederick's first and only love, a fine ideal nature, "with a born relationship to the arts and the muses," whom the fates join to a reckoner of sums and manufacturer of ginghams, surround by savers of candle-ends and makers of economical puddings, and consign at last to "the night-duty in this inglorious campaign of ours." There is her grandfather, a kindly old squire, with good word and hearty greeting for peasant and retainer, but who has never been himself since the murder of his only son, and who is quite bowed down by the suicide of his granddaughter, the sole comfort of his age. There is a brave and gifted Frenchman, whose love for the memory of the first Napoleon is greater than his love of friends or kindred, of fame or fortune; who has led a life almost

as wandering and full of adventure as Candide's; who turns up in Frederick's painting-days, and befriends him in various emergencies, gets his father off a trial for bigamy, and our hero himself off a platform when he breaks down in a lecture, consoles him on the marriage of his first love with the remark: "You have missed Lucy somehow, but not the dream of your youth: you will never frown upon her because the joint is overdone, or the linen not mended;" who sings him the finest of songs, and gives him the wisest of counsel-except on the subject of astrology, and the partiality of Providence for red-haired people.

Then we have quaint pictures of the goings on of an "unco righteous" family, startling pictures of lives of blood and darkness, comic pictures of the whims and caprices, the failings and follies of men of the brush and men of the pen. We have glimpses of the homes of two brothers who had made their fortune in the slave-trade, one of whom turns to the deaconship of a chapel, the other to rum and limes, for cousolation in his old days. We have sketches of mercenary love, hypocritical love, revengeful love, love to the wrong person. We have the portrait of a son unconsciously engaged in taking down his father's trial for bigamy. We have-but type and paper fail us to tell more than that we have the promise of another novel from the author, who, in the person of Frederick Favoursham, thus addresses the reader: "Having told my own tale, it would please me to tell some other people's whom I have mentioned in the course of it, thus taking a hint from the lady of the Arabian Knights, to prolong my literary life."

We think that that capricious calif, the Public, will be as pleased to listen to Frances Browne's stories as she will be to relate them; and as one of the ministers of his royal pleasure, we promise, when his majesty next yawns, to clap our hands, and usher in for his diversion the author of My Share of the World.

From Black wood's Magazine.
SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION.

and although, when we come to examine the data on which it is founded, and the IN the year 1725 the Sieur Millet of gross violation of chemical and physiological Rheims rejoiced, or sorrowed, in a wife laws which it implies, the value of that auwho was almost daily intoxicated. One thority will disappear, yet the fact that such evening, as he deposed, he retired to bed authority can be cited for so preposterous a at eight o'clock, leaving her in the kitchen. hypothesis is in itself instructive, and justiAbout two in the morning he was awakened fies our particular consideration of it. We by a stench: he ran down to the kitchen, give below a list of authorities. * It is unand there found the body of his wife, or necessary to cite authorities against the hyrather the remains of her body, lying at a pothesis: we shall have the far higher aufoot and a half's distance from the fire. A thority of positive laws to adduce, and will part of the head, a few of the vertebræ, and only mention, in passing, that no chemist of the lower extremities, were all that remained any eminence now sanctions the possibility unconsumed. A foot and a half of the floor- of the phenomenon. Indeed, chemistry must ing was burned, but a kneading tub and relinquish her best-established truths before trough, which were very near the body, were the hypothesis can be accepted. But as this untouched. This was Millet's statement on kind of argument is more satisfactory to the his trial; for (owing to his having a very scientific world than to the general public, pretty servant-maid in the house, for whom we shall reserve it till the evidence of the he was thought to have an attachment) a alleged "cases" has been disposed of. In suspicion had fallen on him of having mur- minds not long familiarized with the cerdered his wife, and burned the body to avert tainties of science, and the grounds upon suspicion. The defence set up for him was, which its conclusions are established, there that the woman died of "spontaneous com- is always a lurking distrust with regard to bustion;" and this was the verdict returned. the conclusions of science, and a proportionIn the year 1847 the Countess of Görlitz ate readiness to reject them in favor of the was found burned in her private apartment, observations of some "eye-witness." There and two medical men reported, on evidence, is in general but little appreciation of evithat the cause of death was spontaneous dence, and none at all of the thousands of combustion. Suspicion having fallen on observations, scrutinized and verified with one of the servants, Stauff, he was brought anxious care, upon which a scientific gento trial; and in 1850 the long investigation eralization, or law of nature, is founded. ceased with the conviction of Stauff, who There is also a great readiness to believe in subsequently confessed his guilt, and was the marvellous. Our first object will thereexecuted. fore be to examine the evidence.

*Alberti: Ob ein Mensch von selbst lebendig entzündet, 1755; Philosophical Transactions, 1774. Lecat: Relation de trois cas de combustion humaine (Precis des Travaux de l'Acad. de Rouen, ii.). Dupont: Diss. de corporis humani incendiis sponta

Between 1725 and 1850 the condition of scientific knowledge had been much changed; yet even in 1850 the laws of nature and the laws of evidence were so little understood by the mass of men, that Spontaneous Com-neis, 1763. bustion continued to find believers, and continues to find them still. We propose, therefore, to lay before our readers a full account of the evidence, and the arguments adduced by those who believe in the phenomenon; and to examine these by the light of positive knowledge. There are few subjects that better illustrate the facility with which theories are formed and accepted, even by men whose scientific training ought to have taught them more circumspection and a truer appreciation of evidence. For the belief is not merely a vulgar error, it is an error countenanced by many scientific authorities;

Lair: Essai sur les combustions humaines produites par un long abus des liqueurs spiritueuses, 1800. Kopp: Diss. de causis combustionis spontaneæ in corp. hum. factæ, 1800. Koester: Diss. Considerations sur la combust. humaine (Thèses de de combustione corpor. hum. spont., 1804. Chirac: Paris, An. xii.). Charpentier: Recherches physcomb. humaine (Bulletins de la Fac. de Med. de iol. pathol. et chimiques sur les phénomènes de la Paris, vii.). Fontenelle: Recherches chimiques et med. sur les combust. humaines spontanées, 1828. Fodéré: Medicine Légale, iii. Orfila et Devergie: Comb. humaine (Encyclopédie Moderne, vii.). Breschet: Combustion humaine (Nouveau Dict. de Médicine). Marc: Comb. humaine (Dict. des Scitical Medicine. Hooper's Medical Dictionary, by ences Médicales). Apjohn in Cyclopædia of PracGrant, 1848. Beck: Medical Jurisprudence. Strubel: Die Selbstverbrennung des Menschlichen Körpers, 1848. Briand et Chaudé: Manuel Complet de Medicine Légale, 1858.

« Previous Continue »

Books

Littell's Living Age, Volume 69