NEAR THE ROSE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 76, 30 March 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

NEAR THE ROSE.

REVERENCE FOR THE GREAT. The men who write great hooks or paint pictures of undying fame must be deeply grateful for the power of their hand and brain, but, still more, for the personal love and admiration which it wins for themselves. There is a peculiar reverence and glow of the heart which follows a hero, so that we instinctively look upon a man who has been the intimate of the great with a certain amount of awe, as if he carried always about with him the fragrance of the rose near which he had lived.

The famous George Augustus Sala knew an old citizen of Edinburgh who paid his debts with the greatest punctuality, but always insisted upon deducting fifteen per cent on the ground that he had been intimate with Sir Walter Scott. "I have seen Emerson," wrote George Eliot, to a friend. "I have seen Emerson, the first man I have ever seen." Thackeray, too, was a man who seemed to know what it was to worship the personality of a great soul. "I should like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack, just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped him, to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet, serene face," Thackeray declared. Such a man probably appreciated similar tributes paid to his own genius. How he must have smiled, and yet how touched and pleased he must have been, when, passing a group of dirty street Arabs, one of them called to another standing near: "Hi, Archie! d'ye know who him is? He's Becky Sharp." Perhaps, although they could not have clothed their thoughts in poetic diction, these little gamins may have felt, in after years, when they realised that they had actually seen "Becky Sharp," some- of that awe and reverence which Browning embodies in the stanza: — "Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you? And did you speak to him again ? How strange it seems, and new I"