Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 408, January 1849

"That hedge, papa? The pony will never do it."

"Then," said Lord Castleton, taking off his hat with politeness, "I fear you will deprive us of the pleasure of your company."

The boy laughed, and made gallantly for the hedge, though I saw by his change of colour that it a little alarmed him. The pony could not clear the hedge; but it was a pony of tact and resources, and it scrambled through like a cat, inflicting sundry rents and tears on a jacket of Raphael blue.

Lord Castleton said, smiling, "You see I teach them to get through a difficulty one way or the other. Between you and me," he added seriously, "I perceive a very different world rising round the next generation from that in which I first went forth and took my pleasure. I shall rear my boys accordingly. Rich noblemen must now-a-days be useful men; and if they can't leap over briars, they must scramble through them. Don't you agree with me?"

"Yes, heartily."

"Marriage makes a man much wiser," said the marquis, after a pause. "I smile now, to think how often I sighed at the thought of growing old. Now I reconcile myself to the gray hairs without dreams of a wig, and enjoy youth still – for" (pointing to his sons) "it is there !"

"He has very nearly found out the secret of the saffron bag now," said my father, pleased, and rubbing his hands, when I repeated this talk with Lord Castleton. "But I fear poor Trevanion," he added, with a compassionate change of countenance, "is still far away from the sense of Lord Bacon's receipt. And his wife, you say, out of very love for him, keeps always drawing discord from the one jarring wire."

"You must talk to her, sir."

"I will," said my father angrily; "and scold her too – foolish woman! I shall tell her Luther's advice to the Prince of Anhalt."

"What was that, sir?"

"Only to throw a baby into the river Maldon, because it had sucked dry five wet-nurses besides the mother, and must therefore be a changeling. Why, that ambition of hers would suck dry all the mothers' milk in the genus mammalian! And such a withered, rickety, malign little changeling too! She shall fling it into the river, by all that is holy!" cried my father; and, suiting the action to the word, away went the spectacles he had been rubbing indignantly for the last three minutes, into the pond. "Papæ!" faltered my father aghast, while the Ceprinidæ, mistaking the dip of the spectacles for an invitation to dinner, came scudding up to the bank. "It is all your fault," said Mr Caxton, recovering himself. "Get me the new tortoise-shell spectacles and a large slice of bread. You see that when fish are reduced to a pond they recognise a benefactor, which they never do when rising at flies, or groping for worms, in the waste world of a river. Hem! – a hint for the Ulverstones. Besides the bread and the spectacles, just look out and bring me the old black-letter copy of St Anthony's Sermon to Fishes ."

Some weeks now have passed since my return to the Tower: the Castletons are gone, and all Trevanion's gay guests. And since these departures, visits between the two houses have been interchanged often, and the bonds of intimacy are growing close. Twice has my father held long conversations apart with Lady Ulverstone, (my mother is not foolish enough to feel a pang now at such confidences,) and the result has become apparent. Lady Ulverstone has ceased all talk against the world and the public – ceased to fret the galled pride of her husband with irritating sympathy. She has made herself the true partner of his present occupations, as she was of those in the past; she takes interest in farming, and gardens, and flowers, and those philosophical peaches which come from trees academical that Sir William Temple reared in his graceful retirement. She does more – she sits by her husband's side in the library, reads the books he reads, or, if in Latin, coaxes him, into construing them. Insensibly she leads him into studies farther and farther remote from Blue Books and Hansard; and, taking my father's hint,

"Allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way."

They are inseparable. Darby-and-Joan-like, you see them together in the library, the garden, or the homely little pony-phaeton, for which Lord Ulverstone has resigned the fast-trotting cob, once identified with the eager looks of the busy Trevanion. It is most touching, most beautiful! And to think what a victory over herself the proud woman must have obtained! – never a thought that seems to murmur, never a word to recall the ambitious man back from the philosophy into which his active mind flies for refuge. And with the effort her brow has become so serene! That careworn expression, which her fine features once wore, is fast vanishing. And what affects me most, is to think that this change (which is already settling into happiness) has been wrought by Austin's counsels and appeals to her sense and affection. "It is to you," he said, "that Trevanion must look for more than comfort – for cheerfulness and satisfaction. Your child is gone from you – the world ebbs away – you two should be all in all to each other. Be so." Thus, after paths so devious, meet those who had parted in youth, now on the verge of age. There, in the same scenes where Austin and Ellinor had first formed acquaintance, he aiding her to soothe the wounds inflicted by the ambition that had separated their lots, and both taking counsel to insure the happiness of the rival she had preferred.

After all this vexed public life of toil, and care, and ambition, – to see Trevanion and Ellinor drawing closer and closer to each other, knowing private life and its charms for the first time, – verily it would have been a theme for an elegiast like Tibullus.

But all this while a younger love, with no blurred leaves to erase from the chronicle, has been keeping sweet account of the summer time. "Very near are two hearts that have no guile between them," saith a proverb, traced back to Confucius. O ye days of still sunshine, reflected back from ourselves – O ye haunts, endeared evermore by a look, tone, or smile, or rapt silence, when more and more with each hour, unfolded before me that nature, so tenderly coy, so cheerful though serious, so attuned by simple cares to affection, yet so filled, from soft musings and solitude, with a poetry that gave grace to duties the homeliest; – setting life's trite things to music. Here nature and fortune concurred alike: equal in birth and pretensions – similar in tastes and in objects, – loving the healthful activity of purpose, but content to find it around us – neither envying the wealthy, nor vying with the great; each framed by temper to look on the bright side of life, and find founts of delight, and green spots fresh with verdure, where eyes but accustomed to cities could see but the sands and the mirage. While afar (as man's duty) I had gone through the travail that, in wrestling with fortune, gives pause to the heart to recover its losses, and know the value of love, in its graver sense of life's earnest realities; heaven had reared, at the thresholds of home, the young tree that should cover the roof with its blossoms, and embalm with its fragrance the daily air of my being.

It had been the joint prayer of those kind ones I left, that such might be my reward; and each had contributed, in his or her several way, to fit that fair life for the ornament and joy of the one that now asked to guard and to cherish it. From Roland came that deep, earnest honour – a man's in its strength, and a woman's in its delicate sense of refinement. From Roland, that quick taste for all things noble in poetry, and lovely in nature – the eye that sparkled to read how Bayard stood alone at the bridge, and saved an army – or wept over the page that told how the dying Sidney put the bowl from his burning lips. Is that too masculine a spirit for some? Let each please himself. Give me the woman who can echo all thoughts that are noblest in man! And that eye, too – like Roland's, – could pause to note each finer mesh in the wonderful webwork of beauty. No landscape to her was the same yesterday and to-day, – a deeper shade from the skies could change the face of the moors – the springing up of fresh wild flowers, the very song of some bird unheard before, lent variety to the broad rugged heath. Is that too simple a source of pleasure for some to prize? Be it so to those who need the keen stimulants that cities afford. But if we were to pass all our hours in those scenes, it was something to have the tastes which own no monotony in Nature.