Spare Hours

10

This sofa, which was henceforward sacred in the house, he had always beside him. He used to tell us he set her down upon it when he brought her home to the manse.

11

I have been told that once in the course of the sermon his voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down.

12

There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her “neebor,” “Jean, what think ye o’ the lad?” “It’s maist o’t tinsel wark,” said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother’s death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first word, “It’s a’ gowd noo.”

13

On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years my mother’s parasol, by his orders – I daresay, for long, the only one in Biggar.

14

His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson could not have given

better; and to hear him sounding the depths and cadences of the Living Temple, “bearing on its front this doleful inscription, ‘Here God once dwelt,’” was like listening to the recitative of Handel. But Isaiah was his masterpiece; and I remember quite well his startling us all when reading at family worship, “His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God,” by a peremptory, explosive sharpness, as of thunder overhead, at the words “the mighty God,” similar to the rendering now given to Handel’s music, and doubtless so meant by him; and then closing with “the Prince of Peace,” soft and low. No man who wishes to feel Isaiah, as well as understand him, should be ignorant of Handel’s “Messiah.” His prelude to “Comfort ye” – its simple theme, cheerful and infinite as the ripple of the unsearchable sea – gives a deeper meaning to the words. One of my father’s great delights in his dying months was reading the lives of Handel and of Michael Angelo, then newly out. He felt that the author of “He was despised,” and “He shall feed his flock,” and those other wonderful airs, was a man of profound religious feeling, of which they were the utterance; and he rejoiced over the warlike airs and choruses of “Judas Maccabæus.” You have recorded his estimate of the religious nature of him of the terribile via; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such a mighty genius walked humbly with his God.

15

With the practices of this last worthy, when carried on moderately, and for the sport’s sake, he had a special sympathy.

16

I believe this was the true though secret source of much of my father’s knowledge of the minute personal history of every one in his region, which, – to his people, knowing his reserved manner and his devotion to his studies, and his so rarely meeting them or speaking to them except from the pulpit, or at a diet of visitation, was a perpetual wonder, and of which he made great use in his dealings with his afflicted or erring “members.”

17

He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show; like the cactus in the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in the Repository and Monitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitled Calm Answers to Angry Questions, and was the author of a capital bit of literary banter – a Congratulatory Letter to the Minister of Liberton, who had come down upon my father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on “There remaineth much land to be possessed.” It is a mixture of Swift and Arbuthnot. I remember one of the flowers he culls from him he is congratulating, in which my father is characterized as one of those “shallow, sallow souls that would swallow the bait, without perceiving the cloven foot!” But a man like this never is best in a book; he is always greater than his work.

18

Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of Smailholm standing erect like a warder turned to stone, defying time and change his bursting into that noble ballad —

and pointing out the “Watchfold height,” “the eiry Beacon Hill,” and “Brotherstone.”

19

After a tight discussion between these two attached friends, Dr. Wardlaw said, “Well, I can’t answer you, but fish I must and shall.”

20

He gave us all the education we got at Biggar.

21

One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes – married to James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his time, for long the only Whig and Seceder laird in Peeblesshire, and with whom my father shared the Edinburgh Review from its beginning – the two sisters who were, the one to the other, as Martha was to Mary, sat talking of their household doings; my aunt was great upon some things she could do; my father looked up from his book, and said, “There is one thing, Mrs. Aitken, you cannot do – you cannot turn the heel of a stocking;” and he was right, he had noticed her make over this “kittle” turn to her mother.

22

In his own words, “A personal Deity is the soul of Natural Religion; a personal Saviour – the real living Christ – is the soul of Revealed Religion.”

23

David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature he knew thoroughly, and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; “It’s all there, if you will think it out.”

24

This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits, especially of men whose works he had and liked. He often put portraits into his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of realizing their authors; and in exhibitions of pictures he was more taken up with what is usually and justly the most tiresome departments, the portraits, than with all else. He was not learned in engravings, and made no attempt at collecting them, so that the following list of portraits in his rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for the art which delineated them. Of course they by no means include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they all were his friends: —

Robert Hall – Dr. Carey – Melancthon – Calvin – Pollok – Erasmus (very like “Uncle Ebenezer”) – John Knox – Dr. Waugh – John Milton (three all framed) – Dr. Dick – Dr. Hall – Luther (two) – Dr. Heugh – Dr. Mitchell – Dr. Balmer – Dr. Henderson – Dr. Wardlaw – Shakspeare (a small oil painting which he had since ever I remember) – Dugald Stewart – Dr. Innes – Dr. Smith, Biggar – the two Erskines and Mr. Fisher – Dr. John Taylor of Toronto – Dr. Chalmers – Mr. William Ellis – Rev. James Elles – J. B. Patterson – Vinet – Archibald M’Lean – Dr. John Erskine – Tholuck – John Pym – Gesenius – Professor Finlayson – Richard Baxter – Dr. Lawson – Dr. Peddie (two, and a copy of Joseph’s noble bust); and they were thus all about him for no other reason than that he liked to look at and think of them through their countenances.

25

In a copy of Baxter’s Life and Times, which he picked up at Maurice Ogle’s shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to Anna, Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a most affecting and interesting note in that venerable lady’s handwriting. It occurs on the page where Baxter brings a charge of want of veracity against her eldest and name-daughter who was perverted to Popery. They are in a hand tremulous with age and feeling: – “I can say w^t truth I neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as y^t she wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy took hir, alles! from me who never did sie her mor. The minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in the convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, which made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded.”

The following is Lord Lindsay’s letter, on seeing this remarkable marginal note: —

My Dear Sir, – I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness in favoring me with a sight of the volume of Baxter’s Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it respecting her daughter is extremely interesting. I had always been under the impression that the daughter had died very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary appears from Lady Argyll’s memorandum. That memorandum throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna, and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned it, the book having been printed as late as 1696.

I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this new and very interesting information. – Believe me, my dear Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,

John Brown, Esq. M.D.

26

This earnestness of nature pervaded all his exercises. A man of great capacity and culture, with a head like Benjamin Franklin’s, an avowed unbeliever in Christianity, came every Sunday afternoon, for many years, to hear him. I remember his look well, as if interested, but not impressed. He was often asked by his friends why he went when he didn’t believe one word of what he heard. “Neither I do, but I like to hear and to see a man earnest once a week, about anything.” It is related of David Hume, that having heard my great-grandfather preach, he said, “That’s the man for me, he means what he says, he speaks as if Jesus Christ was at his elbow.”

27

The following note from the pen to which we owe “St. Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh” is admirable, both for its reference to my father, and its own beauty and truth.

“One instance of his imperfect discernment of associations of thought that were not of a purely logical character was afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost contemptuous manner in which he always rejected the theory of what is called the double interpretation of prophecy. This, of course, is not the place to discuss whether he was absolutely right or wrong in his opinion. The subject, however, is one of somewhat curious interest, and it has also a strictly literary as well as a theological aspect, and what we have to say about it shall relate exclusively to the former. When Dr. Brown then said, as he was accustomed in his strong way to do, that ‘if prophecy was capable of two senses, it was impossible it could have any sense at all,’ it is plain, we think, that he forgot the specific character of prophetic literature, viz., its being in the highest degree poetic. Now every one knows that poetry of a very elevated cast almost invariably possesses great breadth, variety, we may say multiplicity of meaning. Its very excellence consists in its being capable of two, three, or many meanings and applications. Take, for example, these familiar lines in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream:’ —

We remember once quoting these lines to a lady, and being rather taken aback by her remark, ‘They are very beautiful, but I don’t, think they are true.’ We really had forgot for the moment the straightforward, matter-of-fact sense of which they are capable, and were not adverting to the possibility of their being understood to mean that – nothing but love-crosses are going, and that no tolerable amount of comfort or happiness is to be found in the life matrimonial, or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent student of Shakspeare’s, however, will at once feel that the poet’s mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in the disenchantment to which all lofty imaginations are liable, the disappointment to which all extravagant earthly hopes and wishes are doomed. This, in fact, is distinctly expressed in the last line, and in this sense alone can the words he regarded as at all touching or impressive. Sudden expansions and transitions of thought, then, are nothing more than what is common to all poetry; and when we find the Hebrew bards, in their prophetic songs, mingling in the closest conjunction the anticipations of the glories of Solomon’s reign, or the happy prospects of a return from Babylon, with the higher glory and happiness of Messiah’s advent, such transitions of thought are in perfect accordance with the ordinary laws of poetry, and ought not to perplex even the most unimaginative student of the Bible.”

28

On one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very odd man, in whom the ego was very strong, and who, if he had been a Spaniard, would, to adopt Coleridge’s story, have taken off or touched his hat whenever he spoke of himself, met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby of the Synod, and drawing himself up as he passed, he muttered, “high and michty!” “There’s a pair of us, Mr. Hall.”

29

Such an occasional paroxysm of eloquence is thus described by Dr. Cairns: – “At certain irregular intervals, when the loftier themes of the gospel ministry were to be handled, his manner underwent a transformation which was startling, and even electrical. He became rapt and excited as with new inspiration; his utterance grew thick and rapid; his voice trembled and faltered with emotion; his eye gleamed with a wild unearthly lustre, in which his countenance shared; and his whole frame heaved to and fro, as if each glowing thought and vivid figure that followed in quick succession were only a fragment of some greater revelation which he panted to overtake. The writer of this notice has witnessed nothing similar in any preacher, and numbers the effects of a passage which he once heard upon the scenes and exercises of the heavenly world among his most thrilling recollections of sacred oratory.” —Memoir prefixed to posthumous volume of Discourses.

30

James i. 15, 16. It is plain that “do not err” should have been in verse 15th.

31

“The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of a two years’ almost total want of exercise, which it was impossible to induce him to take.’ —Arnold’s Report to the Committee of Council on Education, 1860.

32

Edinburgh: printed privately, 1859.

33

Miss Graham’s genealogy in connection with Claverhouse – the same who was killed at Killiecrankie – is as follows: – John Graham of Claverhouse married the Honorable Jean Cochrane, daughter of William Lord Cochrane, eldest son of the first Earl of Dundonald. Their only son, an infant, died December 1689. David Graham, his brother, fought at Killiecrankie, and was outlawed in 1690 – died without issue – when the representation of the family devolved on his cousin, David Graham of Duntrune. Alexander Graham of Duntrune died 1782; and on the demise of his last surviving son, Alexander, in 1804, the property was inherited equally by his four surviving sisters, Anne, Amelia, Clementina, and Alison. Amelia, who married Patrick Stirling, Esq., of Pittendreich, was her mother. Clementina married Captain Gavin Drummond of Keltie; their only child was Clementina Countess of Airlie, and mother of the present Earl.

34

They are strange beings, these lexicographers. Richardson, for instance, under the word SNAIL, gives this quotation from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Wit at Several Weapons, —

Any one else knows of course that it is “‘s nails” – the contraction of the old oath or interjection —God’s nails.

35

Can the gifted author of these lines and of their music not be prevailed on to give them and others to the world, as well as to her friends?

36

The passage from Shakspeare prefixed to this paper, contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a record as In Memoriam is produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty’s mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child – “Fancy’s Child” – the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of it, and which may be enjoyed to the full without any wrong to its own original beauty and fitness. A dew-drop is not the less beautiful that it illustrates in its structure the law of gravitation which holds the world together, and by which “the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.” This is the passage. The Friar speaking of Claudio, hearing that Hero “died upon his word,” says, —

We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight, —

This is its simple meaning – the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance – it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathed upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. We have first the Idea of her Life– all he remembered and felt of her, gathered into one vague shadowy image, not any one look, or action, or time – then the idea of her life creeps– is in before he is aware, and SWEETLY creeps, – it might have been softly or gently, but it is the addition of affection to all this, and bringing in another sense – and now it is in his study of imagination– what a place! fit for such a visitor. Then out comes the Idea, more particular, more questionable, but still ideal, spiritual —every lovely organ of her life– then the clothing upon, the mortal putting on its immortal, spiritual body —shall come apparelled in more precious habit, more moving delicate– this is the transfiguring, the putting on strength, the poco più– the little more which makes immortal, —more full of life, and all this submitted to —the eye and prospect of the soul.

37

This is a mistake, as his friend Dr. A. P. Stanley thus corrects: – “‘The long unlovely street’ was Wimpole Street, No. 67, where the Hallams lived; and Arthur used to say to his friends, You know you will always find us at sixes and sevens.’”

38

We had read these Lives, and had remarked them, before we knew whose they were, as being of rare merit. No one could suppose they were written by one so young. We give his estimate of the character of Burke. “The mind of this great man may perhaps be taken as a representation of the general characteristics of the English intellect. Its groundwork was solid, practical, and conversant with the details of business; but upon this, and secured by this, arose a superstructure of imagination and moral sentiment. He saw little, because it was painful to him to see anything beyond the limits of the national character. In all things, while he deeply reverenced principles, he chose to deal with the concrete rather than with abstractions. He studied men rather than man.” The words in italics imply an insight into the deepest springs of human action, the conjunct causes of what we call character such as few men of large experience can attain.

39

This will remind the reader of a fine passage in Edwin the Fair, on the specific differences in the sounds made by the ash, the elm, the fir, &c., when moved by the wind; and of some lines by Landor on flowers speaking to each other; and of something more exquisite than either, in Consuelo– the description of the flowers in the old monastic garden, at “the sweet hour of prime.”

40

Remains, vol. iii. p. 105.

41

“An unfortunate reference (Acts xiv. 15), for the apostle’s declaration is, that he and his brethren were of ‘like passions” (James v. 17); – liable to the same imperfections and mutations of thought and feeling as other men, and as the Lystrans supposed their gods to be; while the God proclaimed by him to them is not so. And that God is the God of the Jews as well as of the Christians; for there is but one God. Hallam’s thought is an important and just one, but not developed with his usual nice accuracy.”

For this note, as for much else, I am indebted to my father, whose powers of compressed thought I wish I had inherited.

42

Abraham “was called the friend of God;” “with him (Moses) will I (Jehovah) speak mouth to mouth, even apparently,” – “as a man to his friend;” David was “a man after mine own heart.”

43

his is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor’s delightful Notes from Life (“Essay on Wisdom”): —

“Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be ‘the deepest thing in our nature,’ so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within our knowledge. A great capacity of suffering belongs to genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind.” In his Notes from Books, p. 216, he recurs to it: – “‘Pain,’ says a writer whose early death will not prevent his being long remembered, ‘pain is the deepest thing that we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.’”

44

We are given to understand that peach-fed pork is a poor pork after all, and goes soon into decomposition. We are not sorry to know this.

45

We confess to being considerably affected when we look at this odd little fellow, as he sits there with his innocent upturned toes, and a certain forlorn dignity and meek sadness, as of “one who once had wings.” What is he? and whence? Is he a surface or a substance? is he smooth and warm? is he glossy, like a blackberry? or has he on him “the raven down of darkness,” like an unfledged chick of night? and if we smoothed him, would he smile? Does that large eye wink? and is it a hole through to the other side? (whatever that may be;) and is that a small crescent moon of darkness swimming in its disc? or does the eye disclose a bright light from within, where his soul sits and enjoys bright day? Is he a point of admiration whose head is too heavy, or a quaver or crotchet that has lost his neighbors, and fallen out of the scale? Is he an aspiring Tadpole in search of an idea? What have been and what will be the fortunes of this our small Nigel (Nigellus)? Think of “Elia” having him sent up from the Goblin Valley, packed in wool, and finding him lively! how he and “Mary” would doat upon him, feeding him upon some celestial, unspeakable pap, “sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, or Cytherea’s breath.” How the brother and sister would croon over him “with murmurs made to bless,” calling him their “tender novice” “in the first bloom of his nigritude,” their belated straggler from the “rear of darkness thin,” their little night-shade, not deadly, their infantile Will-o’-the-wisp caught before his sins, their “poor Blot,” “their innocent Blackness,” their “dim Speck.”