away-wherein the despairing poet, in an hour of tearless anguish, traced a semblance to his own God-abandoned misery in the fate of the manforsaken sailor: "He was nearly broken-hearted when he wrote that poem, and it almost breaks one's heart to read it. But he found relief in writing it-I know he did; and that gift of poetry-the most divine bestowed on man-was, I believe, granted to allay emotions when their strength threatens harm." "Depend upon it," we read further on, “no tear blistered the manuscript of The Castaway;' I hear in it no sob of sorrow, only the cry of despair; but that cry uttered, I believe the deadly spasm passed from his heart; that he wept abundantly, and was comforted."*

The anonymous author of a clever essay on Talking of Self, rules that by all means this else objectionable kind of talk must be allowed to invalids and persons of weak nerves and spirits, whom pain, weariness, and seclusion throw upon their inner consciousness. And he holds it needless to add that persons under some immediate shock, unhinging to the whole being, must be not only allowed but encouraged to talk of themselves; for a personal grief put into words is infinitely lighter and more bearable than trouble pressing on the heart. "There is something in every effort at expression which brings relief; and when sorrow can be brought to describe itself, the worst is over."+ Sancho Panza had rather renounce the service of an endeared master, and the contingency of an island to govern, than be restrained from free and full complaint, whenever there was cause for it-which in Don Quixote's service was often enough, and oftener. "For it is very hard, and not to be borne with patience, for a man to ramble about all his life in quest of adventures, and to meet with nothing but kicks and cuffs, tossings in a blanket, and bangs with stones, and, with all this, to have his mouth sewed up, not daring to utter what he has in his heart, as if he were dumb." The model chaplain in Mr. Reade's matter-of-fact romance of prison-life, invites Susan Merton's confidence by a word for word quotation of Shakspeare's text on giving sorrow words; and no sooner has he repeated it than the simple girl exclaims, sobbing: "Oh! that is a true word, that is very true. Why, a little of the lead seems to have dropped off my heart now I have spoken to you, sir."§ One might apply some lines of Mr. Chauncy Hare Townshend's

And why not then have told thee this before?

I know not. Silence binds the hopeless debtor.
Hours are there when in speechless pain we wring;
And there are hours when the heart bursts its fetter,
Like mountain ice before the breath of spring.

In Mr. Dickens's description of the home-life of now brotherless Florence
Dombey, in the presence and under the ungenial supervision of relatives
in name, strangers as to sympathy, there is a passage which relates how,
on one occasion, she broke out involuntarily into the irrepressible lament,
"Oh my
brother! oh my brother!"-a natural emotion, not to be re-
pressed, which "would make way, even between the fingers of the hands
with which she covered her face. The overcharged and heavy-laden

* Shirley, ch. xii.

Essays on Social Subjects: First Series, p. 280.

Don Quixote, ch. xxv.

§ It is Never too Late to Mend, ch. vii.

The Three Gates: The Law of Love.

breast must sometimes have that vent, or the poor wounded solitary heart within it would have fluttered like a bird with broken wings, and sunk down in the dust."* The impulse is all one au fond with that which prompts the outburst of Virginius in the play:

-Man, I must speak, or else go mad!

And if I do go mad, what then will hold me

From speaking? Were't not better, brother, think you,
To speak and not go mad, than to go mad
And then to speak ?+

Beware, the most distinguished of America's literary physicians bids us,-beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy inner life either in word or song! So long as a woman can talk, there is nothing, he asserts, she cannot bear. But if she cannot have a companion to listen to her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or instrumental—then, says the doctor, "if she is of the real woman sort, and has a few heartfuls of wild blood in her, and you have done her a wrong-double-bolt the door by which she may enter on noiseless slipper at midnight; look twice before you taste of any cup whose draught the shadow of her hand may have darkened.

"But let her talk, and, above all, cry; or, if she is one of the coarsergrained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives in the language, and let her blister her lips with them until she is tired, she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of coffee from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment."+

Mournful Enone, wandering forlorn of Paris, once her playmate on the hills-the roses gone from her cheek, and her hair floating round her neck-thus opens out her sense of grief to "mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida," and Earth, and Hills, and Caves that house the cold crowned snake:

Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all
My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls
Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed,
A cloud that gather'd shape: for it may be
That, while I speak of it, a little while

My heart may wander from its deeper woe.§

Fruitless might be her plaint-hopeless the restoration of her peace: still she must speak out of the bitterness and fulness of her heart. Like latter-day poet in his valedictory stanzas:

But 'tis done-all words are idle-
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way without the will.||

Where the heart is full, it seeks, for a thousand reasons, says Mr. Carlyle, and in a thousand ways, to impart itself. "How sweet, indispensable, in such cases, is fellowship; soul mystically strengthening soul!" Charlotte

* Dombey and Son, ch. xviii. Elsie Venner, ch. xxiii.

Byron: "Fare-thee-well."

† Virginius, Act IV. Sc. 2. § Tennyson: Enone.

Carlyle, History of the French Revolution, part ii. book i. ch. v.

say.

Bronte, in the depression of bereavement and lonely despondency, writes to her dearest friend how she is haunted by day and night with a sense of sickening distress; and adds: "I tell you these things, because it is absolutely necessary for me to have some relief. You will forgive me, and not trouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than I It is quite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is better now. I think so, because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief is at its worst.”* As sage as kindly is Rose Flammock, the Flemish handmaiden in Scott's so-called tale of the Crusades, when she implores her mistress, the Lady Eveline, to confide her griefs: "Only disburden your mind with one word"t-and in another place: "methinks, the bearing in your solitary bosom such a fearful secret will only render the weight more intolerable."+

Mr. Hawthorne depicts in Miriam one who passionately yearns for a confidant to whom she may freely breathe her secret trouble. ❝ Oh, my friend," she one day cries, to Kenyon the sculptor, "will you be my friend indeed? I am lonely, lonely, lonely. There is a secret in my heart that burns me that tortures me! Sometimes I fear to go mad of it,—sometimes I hope to die of it; but neither of the two happens. Ah, if I could but whisper it to only one human soul!" There is a certain reserve and alarm perceptible to Miriam in Kenyon's frank and kind expression of readiness to listen; for in his heart he doubts whether it were well for her to give, or for him to receive, this confidence. What he says to himself is, that if there were any active duty of friendship to be performed, then, indeed, he would have joyfully come forward to do his best. But if it were only a pent-up heart that sought an outlet? in that case it was by no means so certain that a confession would do good. For, "unless he could give her all the sympathy, and just the kind of sympathy that the occasions required, Miriam would hate him by-and-by, and herself still more if he let her speak.-And she, recovering herself, and mastering her own agitation, bids him keep his sympathy for sorrows that admit of such solace, and "forget this foolish scene." Yet when they have parted, she regrets having lost what she had asked for, and was not refused.§ In an after chapter, Donatello is the unobserved witness of a frenzy fit of Miriam, under the dusky arches of the Coliseum, where, believing herself alone, she throws off her self-control, and acts like a mad woman, concentrating the elements of a long insanity in that instant. She gesticulates extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly abroad, stamping with her foot. "It was as if she had stepped aside for an instant, solely to snatch the relief of a brief fit of madness. Persons in acute trouble, or labouring under strong excitement, with a necessity for concealing it, are prone to relieve their nerves in this wild way; although, when practicable, they find a more effectual solace in shrieking aloud." In the next chapter she takes a more legitimate mode of venting her pent-up emotion, by bursting out into song, that moonlight night when, from the Forum and the Via Sacra, from beneath the arches of the Temple of Peace on one side, and the acclivity of the Palace of the Cæsars on the other, the air was full of melodies from

* Life of Charlotte Bronte, vol. ii. ch. viii. Ibid., ch. xv.

§ Transformation, ch. xiv.

†The Betrothed, ch. xiv. Ibid., ch. xvii.

the voices of strollers about the Eternal City. "Suddenly, she threw out such a swell and gush of sound, that it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other voices, and then to rise above thein all, and become audible in what would else have been the silence of an upper region. That volume of melodious voice was one of the tokens of a great trouble. There had long been an impulse upon her amounting, at last, to a necessity—to shriek aloud; but she had struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave her an opportunity to relieve her heart by a great cry."* Her innocent friend, Hilda, who involuntarily becomes the witness of a dark deed in which Miriam is concerned, is for a long while tortured by the possession of this secret, which she dare not divulge. But one day, earnest Protestant though she be, the sight of the confessional, and a few words from a poor simple devout woman who comes away from it radiant with a sense of relief, impel Hilda to fling herself down in the penitent's place, and tremulously, passionately, with sobs, tears, and the turbulent overflow of emotion too long repressed, to pour out the dark story which had infused its poison into her till then healthy and tranquil life." She revealed the whole of her terrible secret! The whole, except that no name escaped her lips. And, ah, what a relief! When the hysteric gasp, the strife between words and sobs, had subsided, what a torture had passed away from her soul!" It need not be said that Mr. Hawthorne noway intends all this to have a theological bearing. Indeed, when the father-confessor adverts to absolution as the sequel of confession, Hilda at once starts and shrinks back. She had never dreamed of that, and repudiates it with fervour. She has simply opened out her heart under the seal of confession, because the terrible crime she has just revealed seemed to thrust itself between her and her Maker-so that she found Him not in the darkness; found nothing but a dreadful solitude, and this crime in the midst of it. "I could not bear it. It seemed as if I made the awful guilt my own, by keeping it hidden in my heart. I grew a fearful thing to myself. I was going mad!" The confessor, hopeful of an ingenuous proselyte, expresses his trust that the relief will prove greater than she yet knows of. And she, missing his meaning, and looking up gratefully in his face, declares it to be already immense: "I have told the hideous secret; told it under the sacred seal of the confessional; and now it will burden my poor heart no more." What ensues during that strange confidence is not here to the purpose. What has been quoted avails to illustrate vividly enough the relief poor human nature feels in confiding, and so disburthening itself of, a secret oppression of heavy trouble.

Sir Walter Scott's poems furnish plural instances of this sense of relief, under various conditions. There is Don Roderick, for example, to whose "sad confession" Toledo's Prelate lends an ear of fearful wonder:

For Roderick told of many a hidden thing,
Such as are lothly utter'd to the air,

When Fear, Remorse, and Shame the bosom wring,
And Guilt his secret burthen cannot bear,

And Conscience seeks in speech a respite from Despair.‡

* Transformation, ch. xviii.

† Ch. xxxix.

The Vision of Don Roderick.

Marmion, again, becomes, malgré lui, the avower of a troubled secret to Lindesay:

He staid,

And seem'd to wish his words unsaid;
But, by that strong emotion press'd,
Which prompts us to unload our breast,
Ev'n when discovery's pain,* &c.

Something of a parallel passage occurs in Bertram's similar confidence to
Wilfrid, when

The power within the guilty breast,
Oft vanquish'd, never quite suppress'd,
That unsubdued and lurking lies
To take the felon by surprise,
And force him, as by magic spell,
In his despite his guilt to tell,-

That power in Bertram's breast awoke.†

THE CRY OF THE UNRESIGNED.

BY NICHOLAS MICHELL.

COME back! come back! my lost, my loved, my own!
Too soon hath cruel death

Stopp'd my young darling's breath,

Too soon her heavenly soul to heaven hath flown:
The flowers so prized by thee,

The softly-chiming sea,

The brook whose voice was dear,

The birds you loved to hear,

Singing in noon's white rays, to me now black-
Join with my soul, and cry, "Come back! come back!"

It may be impious, may be cruel, too,

But from the bowers above,

Where thou, like some white dove,

Dost sit in purity amidst the blue,

To earth I'd bring thee down,

Nor heed thine amaranth crown;
Anything in my madness,

Anything in my sadness,

So I could have thee near,

Fold thee, and kiss thee, dear:

O angels, hear me! bear her down yon track

Of luminous stars-lost child, come back! come back!

* Marmion, canto iv.

† Rokeby, canto ii.