Aytoun has adorned the margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and cross-bones, while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the author, and a lyric in doggerel. Surely this is, indeed, a literary curiosity. The sonnet runs thus:-"O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare, Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?
Seek'st thou for maggots such as have affinity With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink?
Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity?
Here is enough of genius to convert Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare, Then why transform the diamond into dirt, And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair, Into a medley of creations foul, As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?"No doubt Mr. Stoddart's other passion for angling, in which he used a Scottish latitude concerning bait, impelled him to search for "worms and maggots":-"Fire and faggots, Worms and maggots,"
as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of "The Death Wake."Then, why, some one may ask, write about "The Death Wake" at all?
Why rouse again the nightmare of a boy of twenty? Certainly I am not to say that "The Death Wake" is a pearl of great price, but it does contain passages of poetry--of poetry very curious because it is full of the new note, the new melody which young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken. It anticipates Beddoes, it coincides with Gautier and Les Chimeres of Gerard, it answers the accents, then unheard in England, of Poe. Some American who read out of the way things, and was not too scrupulous, recognised, and robbed, a brother in Tom Stoddart. Eleven years after "The Death Wake"appeared in England, it was published in Graham's Magazine, as "Agatha, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras," by Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro. Now Poe was closely connected with Graham's Magazine, and after "Arthur Gordon Pym," "Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro" does suggest Edgar Allen Poe. But Poe was not Tasistro.
So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.
The poem begins--Chimera I. begins:-
"An anthem of a sister choristry!
And, like a windward murmur of the sea, O'er silver shells, so solemnly it falls!"The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers towards a bier;"Agathe Was on the lid--a name. And who? No more!
'Twas only Agathe."
A solitary monk is prowling around in the moonlit cathedral; he has a brow of stony marble, he has raven hair, and he falters out the name of Agathe. He has said adieu to that fair one, and to her sister Peace, that lieth in her grave. He has loved, and loves, the silent Agathe. He was the son of a Crusader, "And Julio had fain Have been a warrior, but his very brain Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death, And to be stricken with a want of breath."On the whole he did well not to enter the service. Mr. Aytoun has here written--"A rum Cove for a hussar.""And he would say A curse be on their laurels.
And anon Was Julio forgotten and his line -No wonder for this frenzied tale of mine."How? asks Aytoun, nor has the grammatical enigma yet been unriddled.
"Oh! he was wearied of this passing scene!
But loved not Death; his purpose was between Life and the grave; and it would vibrate there Like a wild bird that floated far and fair Betwixt the sun and sea!"So "he became monk," and was sorry he had done so, especially when he met a pretty maid, "And this was Agathe, young Agathe, A motherless fair girl,"whose father was a kind of Dombey, for "When she smiled He bade no father's welcome to the child, But even told his wish, and will'd it done, For her to be sad-hearted, and a nun!"So she "took the dreary veil."
They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo:
"They met many a time In the lone chapels after vesper chime, They met in love and fear."Then, one day, "He heard it said:
Poor Julio, thy Agathe is dead."
She died "Like to a star within the twilight hours Of morning, and she was not! Some have thought The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught."Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes "Damn her!" (the Lady Abbess, that is) and suggests that thought must be read "thaft."Through "the arras of the gloom" (arras is good), the pale breezes are moaning, and Julio is wan as stars unseen for paleness.
However, he lifts the tombstone "as it were lightsome as a summer gladness." "A summer gladness," remarks Mr. Aytoun, "may possibly weigh about half-an-ounce." Julio came on a skull, a haggard one, in the grave, and Mr. Aytoun kindly designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying "Dust ho!"Now go, and give your poems to your friends!
Finally Julio unburies Agathe:-
"Thou must go, My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below, Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude, But where is light, and life, and one to brood Above thee, till thou wakest. Ha, I fear Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here, Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.
And Convent fathers, and a choristry Of sisters saying Hush! But I will sing Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering Down on the dews to hear me; I will tune The instrument of the ethereal moon, And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall In harmony and beauty musical."Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture of the distraught priest, setting forth to sail the seas with his dead lady, not an invention that Nanteuil might have illustrated, and the clan of Bousingots approved?
The Second Chimera opens nobly:-
"A curse! a curse! the beautiful pale wing Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering, And, on a sunny rock beside the shore, It stood, the golden waters gazing o'er;And they were nearing a brown amber flow Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below!"Julio appears with Agathe in his arms, and what ensues is excellent of its kind:-"He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed, Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste, The silent ladye, and he mutter'd wild, Strange words about a mother and no child.
