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So she chained herself to her desk, and finished her romance, which in its later chapters gained intensity of pathos and dramatic insight from the constant immolation of her own heart as she imagined the martyrdoms and sacrifices of others. The story which was to make her famous had been conceived in sorrow, and it became associated with the greatest sufferings of her life.
James Russell Lowell, in one of his shorter poems, claims for the present age some of the privileges of that happy realm. Addressing the Past, he says, "Whatever of true life there was in thee, Leaps in our age's veins. . . . . . . "Here, 'mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, Float the green 'Fortunate Isles, Where all thy hero-spirits dwell and share Our martyrdoms and toils.
The subjects of the Venetian painters are mostly such as give them an opportunity of introducing a great number of figures, such as feasts, marriages, and processions, public martyrdoms, or miracles.
The king's mandate to stay the New England persecutors was effectual in preventing further martyrdoms; but the colonial authorities, trusting in the remoteness of their situation, and perhaps in the supposed instability of the royal government, shortly renewed their severities in all other respects.
The season embraces and surpasses those old men, even the finest. To-day, as I walked, the magnificence of the closing year, so steadfast and sure, sparing no sunshine nor rain, passing quietly out to be renewed nevermore, quite reproved the solemn martyrdoms of men, upon which we hang our hopes. Nature is great that she does not suffer us to define her influence upon ourselves.
"The total disregard of truth and probability in the representations of these primitive martyrdoms was occasioned by a very natural mistake.
Her young heart quivered at the thought of their sacrifices, their martyrdoms, their sense of duty. An exaltation, morbid perhaps, superstitious and overwhelming, took possession of her mind; also, perhaps, far back in the innermost recesses of her heart, a pride in her own importance, her mission in life, her individuality: for she was a girl after all, a mere child, about to become a woman.
We will not attempt to enumerate the martyrdoms which had to be undergone by the persevering Reformers in France between 1529 and 1547, from the death of Louis de Berquin to that of Francis I.; the task would be too long and intermingled with too many petty questions of dates or proper names; we will confine ourselves to quoting some local computations and to conning over the great historic facts which show to what extent the persecution was general and unrelenting, though it was ineffectual, in the end, to stifle the Reformation and to prevent the bursting out of those religious wars which, from the death of Francis I. to the accession of Henry IV., smothered France in disaster, blood, and crime.
He knew the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of distance an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering.
When we have considered his attachment to the hermitage, we can appreciate the virtue which made him among the most active citizens in the great world; when we have considered the natural selfishness of grief, the pride of philosophy, the indolence of meditation, the eloquence of wealth, which says, "Rest, and toil not," and the temptation within, which says, "Obey the voice," when we have considered these, we can perhaps do justice to the man who, sometimes on foot and in the coarsest attire, travelled from inn to inn and from hut to hut; who made human misery the object of his search and human happiness of his desire; who, breaking aside an aversion to rude contact, almost feminine in its extreme, voluntarily sought the meanest companions, and subjected himself to the coarsest intrusions; for whom the wail of affliction or the moan of hunger was as a summons which allowed neither hesitation nor appeal; who seemed possessed of a ubiquity for the purposes of good almost resembling that attributed to the wanderer in the magnificent fable of Melmoth for the temptations to evil; who, by a zeal and labour that brought to habit and inclination a thousand martyrdoms, made his life a very hour-glass, in which each sand was a good deed or a virtuous design.
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