Diary And Notes Of Horace Templeton, Esq. Volume II. Lever Charles James
could have achieved any thing so lovely.
He had often remarked that the villagers, as they passed, would kneel down before it, and with bowed heads and crossed arms seem to do it reverence; and he himself, when they were gone, would try to imitate their gestures, some vague sentiment of worship struggling for utterance in his heart.
There was a little inscription in gilt letters beneath the picture; but these he could not read, and would gaze at their cabalistic forms for hours long, thinking how, if he could but decipher them, that the mystery might be revealed.
How he longed for the winter to be over and the spring to come, that he might lead the goats to the hills, and to the little glen of the shrine! He could read now. The letters would be no longer a secret; they would speak to him, and to his heart, like the voice of that beauteous image. How ardently did he wish to be there! and how, when the first faint sun of April sent its pale rays over the plain, and glittered with a sickly delicacy on the lake, how joyous was his spirit and how light his step upon the heather!
Many a little store of childish knowledge had Grettl’a opened to his mind in their winter evenings’ study; but somehow, he felt as if they were all as nothing compared to what the golden letters would reveal. The portrait, the lonely glen, the solemn reverence of the kneeling worshippers, had all conspired to create for him a mass of emotions indescribably pleasurable and thrilling. Who can say the secret of such imaginings, or bound their sway?
The wished-for hour came, and it was alone and unseen that he stood before the shrine and read the words, “Maria, Mutter Gottes, hulf uns.” If this mystery were unrevealed to his senses, a feeling of dependent helplessness was too familiar to his heart not to give the words a strong significance. He was poor, unfriended, and an orphan: who could need succour more than he did? Other children had lathers and mothers, who loved them and watched over them; their little wants were cared for, their wishes often gratified. His was an uncheered existence: who was there to “help him?”
Against the daily load of his duties he was not conscious of needing aid; his burden he was both able and willing to bear. It was against his thoughts in the long hours of solitude – against the gloomy visions of his own free-thinking spirit, he sought assistance; against the sad influence of memory, that brought up his childhood before him, when he had a father who loved him – against the dreary vista of an unloved future, he needed help. “And could she befriend him?” was the question he asked his heart.
“He must ask Grettl’a this; she would know it all!” Such were the reflections with which he bent his way homeward, as eagerly as in the morning he had sought the glen. Grettl’a did know it all, and more too, for she had a prayer-book, and a catechism, and a hymn-book, though hitherto these treasures had been unknown to Fritz, whose instructions were always given in a well-thumbed little volume of fairy tales, where “Hans Däumling” and “The Nutz-cracker” figured as heroes.
I am not able to say that Grettl’a’s religious instruction was of the most enlightened nature – not any more than it was commensurate with the wishes and requirements of him who sought it; it went, indeed, little further than an explanation of the “golden letters.” Still, slight and vague as it was, it comforted the poor heart it reached, as the most straggling gleam of sunlight will cheer the dweller in some dark dungeon, whose thoughts soar out upon its rays to the gorgeous luminary it flows from. Whatever the substance of his knowledge, its immediate effect upon his mind was to diffuse a hopeful trust and happiness through him he had never known till now. His loneliness in the world was no longer the solitary isolation of one bereft of friends. Not only with his own heart could he commune now. He felt there was One above who read these thoughts, and could turn them to his will. And in this trust his daily labour was lightened, and his lot more happy.
“Now,” thought he, one day, as he wandered onward among the hills, “now, I can teach thee something good – something that will bring us luck. Thou shalt learn the lesson of the golden letters, Starling – ay, truly, it will be hard enough at first. It cost me many a weary hour to learn to read, and thou hast only one little line to get off by heart – and such a pretty line, too! Come, Jacob, let’s begin at once.” And, as he spoke, he opened the cage and took out the bird, and patted his head kindly and smoothed down his feathers. Little flatteries, that Starling well understood were preparatory to some educational requirement; and he puffed out his chest proudly, and advanced one leg with an air of importance; and drawing up his head, seemed as though he could say, “Well, what now, Master Fritz? – what new scheme is this in thy wise head?”
Fritz understood him well, or thought he did so, which in such cases comes pretty much to the same thing; and so, without more ado, he opened his explanation, which perhaps, after all, was meant equally for himself as the Starling – at least I hope so, for I suspect he comprehended it better.
He told him that for a long time his education had been grossly neglected; that having originally been begun upon a wrong principle, the great function of his teacher had been to eradicate the evil, and, so to say, to clear the soil for the new and profitable seed. The ground, to carry out the illustration, had now lain long enough in fallow – the time had arrived to attend to its better culture.
It is more than probable Fritz had never heard of the great controversy in France upon the system of what is called the “Secondary Instruction,” nor troubled his head on the no less active schism in our own country between the enemies and advocates of National Education. So that he has all the merit, if it be one, of solving a very difficult problem for himself without aid or guidance; for he resolved that a religious education should precede all other.
“Now for it,” said he, at the close of a longer exposition of his intentions than was perhaps strictly necessary, “now for it, Starling! repeat after me – ‘Maria, Mutter Gottes, hülf uns!’”
The bird looked up in his face with an arch drollery that almost disconcerted the teacher. If a look could speak, that look said, as plainly as ever words could, —
“Why don’t you ask me to say the whole Litany, Fritz?”
“Ay, ay,” replied Fritz, for it was a reply, “I know that’s a great deal to learn all at once, and some of the words are hard enough, too; but with time, Star, time and patience – I had to use both one and the other before I learned to read; and many a thing that looks difficult and impossible even at first, seems quite easy afterwards. Come, then, just try it: begin with the first word – ‘Maria’.”
It was in vain Fritz spoke in his most coaxing accents, in vain did he modulate the syllables in twenty different ways; all his entreaties and petting», all his blandishments and caresses, were of no avail, Star remained deaf to them all. He even turned his back at last, and seemed as if no power on earth should make a Christian of him. Fritz had had too much experience of the efficacy of perseverance in his own case to abandon the game here; so he went to work again, and with the aid of a little lump of sugar returned to the lecture.
Had Star been a Chancery lawyer he could not have received the fee more naturally, though, for the honour of the equity bar, I would hope the similitude ends there, for he paid not the slightest heed to the “instructions.”
It would, perhaps, be rash in us “featherless bipeds” to condemn Star all at once; there is no saying on what grounds he may have resisted this educational attempt. How do we know that his reasoning ran not somewhat in this strain? —
“What better off shall I be when I have learned all your hard words? – or how is it that you, my teacher, knowing them so well, should be the poor, half-fed, half-naked thing I see there before me?”
These very conjectures would seem to have crossed Fritz’s mind, for he said, —
“It is not for a mere whim that I would have thee learn this; these words will bring us luck, Star! Ay, what I say is true, though thou mayst shake thy head and think otherwise. I tell thee, ‘Good words bring luck.’”
Whether it was that Star assumed an air of more than ordinary conceit and indifference, or that Fritz had come to the end of patience, I cannot affirm; but he hastily added, and in a voice much louder and more excited than was his wont, – “It is so; and thou shalt learn the words whether thou wilt