GREAT PROSE PASSAGES.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1144, 3 June 1911, Page 9

GREAT PROSE PASSAGES.

In an article reprinted on this page last week comparison was made by the writer (hi tho "Manchester Guardian") between \tho English of Addison, Carlyle, Patev, and de Quiuccy. The article concluded: "English prose as wo conceive of it now is a nobler instrument than Addison could havo thought possible, and one has only to compare'the final sentences of the paper on Westminster Abbey—ono of tho writer's high-water marks—with, say, De Quincey's 'Mater Lachrimarum,' or tho 'What thinks Bootes of them?' passages in "Sartor Resartus,' or the 'La Gioconda' page in Pater to understand its superiority." As those who know tho passages will be glad to re-read them, and those who do not know' them will experienco a new thrill, wo reprint them here. This is the passage in "Westminster Abbey":When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read.,the epitaphs of tho beautiful, every out; whenTmeet<ivji(;nUheMCi;fe| bfijjivr/ ents upon a tombstone/roy lie'art' melts' with compassion; When I see the tomb of tho parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those, whom we .must quickly'"'follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided tho world with their contests and dir putes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When 1 read tho several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us bo contemporaries, and make oiw appearance together. Tho Pater passage is this, from the essay on Leonardo: "The presence that thus roso so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is tho head upon which all 'tho ends of the world are come.' and the eyelids are a littlo weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, tho deposit, littlo cell by cell, of strango thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All tho thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they havo of power to refine and make expressive' to outward form, tho animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle ago vith its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, tho return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than tho locks among which she sits; like tho vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of tho grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; ami trafficked for strange wcl.'s with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Marv; and all this has been to her but as tho suund of lyres and flutes, and lives only in tho delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged tho eyelids and the hands." This is tho passage from do Quincey: "Tho eldest of the tlireo is named 'Mater Lachrymaium,' Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night ■ and day raves and moans, calling lor vanished laces. She stood in Kama, when a voico was heard of lamentation—Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlelem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and tho little feet were stiffened for cvei, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, wuko pulses ot iove in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. "Her eves are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepv by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds; oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that sho could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when sho beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than Papai at her girdle, which' open every cottago and every palace." We do not know what passage from Carlyle the "Manchester Guardian's" .contributor had in mind, .but Carlyle never wrote anything finer than this, the conclusion of the chapter in "Sartor Resartus," which is headed, "Natural Spiritualism": "0 Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! Thoso Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this. life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Mi;; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to bo revealed in tho Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, lire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force,

nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's:-' Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not. "So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Xight, on Heaven's mission ArrEAits. What Force and Fire is in each ho expends: one grinding in tho mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:—and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Tljus, like some wild flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, docs this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quicksucceeding grandeur, through tho unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from tho Inane; haste stormfully across tho astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can tho Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On tho hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped-in; tho last Rear of tho host will read traces of tho earliest Van. But whence? —0 Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mvsterv, from God and to God." It is strange that no mention was made of the famous passago on Oxford in the Preface. (1865) to "Essays in Criticism." It is Matthew Arnold's high-water mark: "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual lifo of our century, so serene 1 " 'Thorn aro our young barbarians, all at play!' "And yet, steeped.in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to tho moonlight, and whispering from her towers tho last enchantments of tho Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? —nearer, perhaps, than all tho science of Tubingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given theyself to mles and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! homo of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties I what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage, to which wo aro all prone, that bondago which Goethe, m his incomnarable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praiso (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight .behind him; —the bondago of 'was uns alio bandigt, das Gemo-mol'"