The Friendships of Women. William Rounseville Alger
sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius, spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives." "Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness, imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves, and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages in his long autobiography.
Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and name.
The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,
The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears; A
heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love and thought and joy.
They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.
This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.
When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in hexameters, in which were these lines:
William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.
At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,
When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.
She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:
Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed, …
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.
Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company. His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her. And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will, better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.
Mine eyes did ne'er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.
The thought of her was like a flash of light,
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.
The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley called
The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head, like heaven, is bent—
An early but enduring monument.
Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England. With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew drear and dark," he says,
When fortune changed, and love fled far,
And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary star
Which rose, and set not to the last.
The wonderful verses commencing,
Though the day of my destiny's over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find,
wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into language of such vigor and such melody.
From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
Thus much I at least may recall: