The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-07-12 00:00:00

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HENRY MELTON

CHAPTER V

It is a sad and yet an instructive office to contemplate
such objects of fallen humanity as my poor friend Melton,
in their mental struggles ; and yet how seldom are we per-
mitted to do more than gaze upon the outside wreck—how
little do we understand of the jarring chords, the tuneless
and broken wires, which fill the hollowness of that shell
which, to the ordinary observer, is man in his perfectness !

There stands the once noble form, shattered, yet still the
best work of the God who made him. The ample forehead
still displays the power of a mind formed to comprehend all
nature ; the eyes still gleam with intellectual firer the lip
still retains its proud curve ; the very tread is still that of a
being destined from the beginning to walk with angels " the
star-paved courts of heaven." And yet all within is weak-
ness—all is discord—all is wretchedness. The spirit which
inhabits the majestic or graceful external mocks itself—
spurns at its own grovelling sympathy with mere earthly
passions—laughs in bitterness at its own conscious and
crawling prostration. In such a state of fallen power, the
spirit of poor Melton was laid bare before me in bursts of
passionate reminiscences. The path to such a state he per-

mitted me, as I sate daily by his bedside, to contemplate
step by step. I was enabled to trace, with almost microsco-
pic distinctness, the wearing of his once noble mind as he
sunk from stage to stage of feeling—from the condition of

one hoping and trusting in a happy future, to that of a being
living only the dull and passionless life of one without hope
or fear or love to animate him in his contact with the world,
until he became a mere living automaton, a thing of mere
animal wants, a creature sentient yet scarcely reflective,
with less of heaven in its composition than of the mere
earthy nature of the worm whose food is human corruption

and decay.
To such degradation the spirit of man does occasionally
sink, and the most sentient spirit the most readily. To such
degradation the spirit of Henry Melton—revelling in the con-

sciousness of its eclipse, clutching the evidences, hugging
the bitter reality of its sad change, gloating upon its isolation
from sympathy, rejoicing in its absolute abandonment to
shame—had at one time fallen ; and oh, how painful must
have been the task, to one who had known and loved him in
his better days, to contemplate the obscuration of a soul
once so bright, so full of radiant hope, so replete with con-
fident assurances of happiness and solid worth !
And yet his had been no voluntary fall. He had not em-
braced dissipation and moral abandonment from a love of
the sensual gratifications which they afford. He had not
sunk down into the embrace of vice with the love and the
beauty of virtue (which had once dwelt within him) banished
and forgotten things. No : he had striven, from the first
hour of that shock which reft him of the brighest dream of
his boyhood, to be something nobler and better than the
reckless being he had nevertheless become. When impelled
to yield up the thought of entering that sacred office for
which he had been designed from his very childhood, he had
still looked forward to a career in which the mental powers,
of which he could not but be conscious, might enable him to
shine. " I will still achieve something worthy of me," was
his constant mental resolve. " They shall not yet be per-
mitted to despise or to mourn for me ; "—and imagination
would picture to him the fond looks of a revered parent, the
exulting smiles of an affectionate sister, and can we doubt
that, in such moments, would shoot upon his dreamy vision
the admiring, perhaps also the still loving, gaze of another
fair being—of her who had cast him from her heart, and was
now the bride of another? Such a dream did come ; it clung
to him through years of alternate struggle and self-abandon-
ment ; it never left him until it was reft from him by the
relentless hand of death itself, and the world became to him 1
a very desert:

On resigning the thoughts of the church as a profession,
Melton had turned his attention to the bar, and entered

himself at one of the inns of court. For nearly four years
he had read, at times, with incontrollable ardour; but his
was not naturally the mind or the temperament suited for
that profession, and time, though it had skinned over the
wound inflicted upon his spirit in his earlier years, had failed
in restoring its even poise. "My hours," he remarked of
this period of his career, " were half of study and half of
dreams. I read, inspired by passionate longings for distinc-
tion ; but the recoil of my overtasked energies was dreadful.
Then it was that I sunk into the lethargy of despair ; then
it was that my better angel abandoned me, and I became—
need I say what, to one who knows already the weaknesses
of my nature? Remorse preyed upon my awakening hours,
and, to still the goadings of conscience, I fell again and
again, and was alternately the studious anchorite and the
maddened hunter after oblivion of self and the world."

Still it is probable that even in this profession Melton
might have ultimately succeeded to the utmost of his ambi-
tious dreamings ; but fate had a darker lot in store for him.
He was summoned from the scene of his struggles and his
errors to attend the bedside of a dying parent ; and he ar-
rived at the home of his youth only to stand by and weep
over the lifeless remains of that beloved one, and to know
that, with a pale and feeble girl, worn with watching and
scarcely a week removed from that last sleep enjoyed by him
whose parting hours she had tended so assiduously, he was
now alone in the world.

r The presence of death is ever a stern and certain monitor
that we live amidst the realities of an exacting, though a
fleeting world. Can the dreamer !ook upon the pallid cheek
and the speechless lips of a cherisbul object and still dream
on 7 Can the worldling hug his pleasures, the lover cling to
his love, the miser gloat upon his hoard, whilst his gaze is
upon that curdling evidence of the vanity of all things ? No,
no At such an hour, the vainest, the most thoughtless,
the most reckless amongst us, is ever stirred, as if the icy
hand of the pale monarch were busy tracing his warnings
upon that seared heart ; and Henry Melton, as he gazed upon
that form around which he had hung in childhood and in
boyhood—upon those lips which had so often breathed words
of love, of counsel, of hope, and of warning upon his young
ear—upon those closed eyes which had beamed upon him in
gladness and affection—upon that form once glowing in
health and strength, and yet now so shrunk, so strangely
still—felt in that one moment the goading memoirs, the wild
dreams, which had haunted him for years, pass from him,
like guilty spirits from the bursting light of the judgment-
seat, and stood up before his own soul an awakened, a
thoughtful, though a suffering man.
" If ever," he told me in one of our interviews—" if ever,
during ten years of a chequered, a wearisome, and I fear, a
guilty career, there was a hope for me in the world, it was
when, standing by the cold remains of that good old man, I
felt that I had at once become a father and a protector to the
frail being who knelt by his bedside, and bathed his wasted
cheeks with her blinding tears. I could have led an honour-
able career to shelter that dear sister in her almost etherial
beauty. Her blue eyes beam upon me now with the same
appealling look which they wore when we returned at last
from the grave of the departed, and in our lone dwelling,
she murmured that we were then to be every thing to each
other

Her form is still before me as she trod for a time
those loved scenes which her calm, quiet smile made a heaven
to one passion-tossed as I had been. But the dream—and it
was but a dream—an oasis in the desert of my existence—
passed by, melted from my grasp. But why describe its
passing.? A month, a short month, beheld her borne to her
last sleep, with the loved ones who had gone before, and I
was abandoned to the world, and oh—worse than all!—to
myself."

Melton returned to London with the wreck of the humble
home, which was now become desolate, his only patrimony.

The prospect—the actual pressure of poverty—was now
added to the other difficulties with which he had to struggle ;
and, his profession necessarily abandoned, he became—A
LITERARY MAN