The Portland daily press., 1880-04-03

And me, your lowliest follower, inspire
With such clear flame as long ago did ire
The mighty lips of Blackstone; so may l,
feeble trump of truth that cannot die,
Clearly proclaim, and on the roll OF fame
Inscrtbe, however humbly, my poor name.
Jack Harris before his conversion.
Come down to me, cling to me, lay thy red lips on
Let me down in thy beautiful beauty, glorious
Made fit for the vigil of Venus, made fair by the
Made fair in the form of maiden, a medley of
For the world grows giddy around us and swoons,
and the pale souls preach
Poor fables of sorrow and virtue and all that the
gray Gods teach;
But we clasp and we bite and we madden, and
worship your throat and your hair.
We have strayed in the cold sea places, we have
laughed on the altar stair,
We have eaten and drunken of love, and the lesson
of living is this.
That the high bends above us, and life is curse
and kiss.
Make me glad, o thou rare hand-maiden, with sound
of thy FASHIONED signs,
While sing of thy bodys white beauty and live in
the light of thine eyes,
For save me there is no man living made worthy to
utter thy praise,
Who art come as new moon to our night-tide, new
sun to our days.
Jack Harris after his conversion.
None of those who knew Jack Harris in
the days before his conversion seem to have
discovered any special marks of genius in
the man. To his nearest and most intimate
friends, as far as can be gathered, the idea
that the words "Jack Harris suggested
was, in all important respects, identical with
that aroused in the minds of those less
closely acquainted with Jack Harris at the
mention of his name. And yet one would
fain believe that even then there must have
been, or at least might have been, made
evident to some critical observer, if only in
some slisht play Of the mouth, some stray
glance of the eye, the presence of that gen.
Jus which has since astonished the world.
But the most diligent inquiry has failed to
discover. that to any one Jack Harris was
more than the well-meaning, fairly educated,
stupid young man we all thought him,
when we thought about him at all, which, /
now regret to say, was but rarely. Some
among us have, indeed, the audacity to pre-
tend that they predicted all along the future
greatness of Jack. But as such predictions
must have been reserved for the privacy of
their own dwellings, or communicated to
some now not forthcoming witness, they re-
ceive only that honor proverbially awarded
TO prophets.
Jack Harris was the son of very respect
able retired cloth merchant, who lived in
bourgeois felicity somewhere near the Re
gents Park, and Jack was reading for the
bar. Hehad been at public school, he had
been at Oxford, and had passed through both
ordeals well enough. At the university he
had been merely one of the units of his COL
lege muster-roll; his identity was in no way
rendered conspicuous by any display of men
| tai or bodily merits, and his name was I'M
known to the Proctor. He left Oxford
without making or receiving any distinct
impression; and, when his name astonishes
the world, it is ten to one that those who
meet him every day in Balliol will hear his
name eXtolled without having the slightest
idea that they ever shared the joys of stu
dentship with the great poet.
At the wish of Jacks father and mother
for Jack was dutiful son-he began to
study for the bar, and actually took cham
bers in one of the Inns of Court, where he
would pass most of the day working through
| the maZes of Roman law, or studying the
| pleasing pages of Coke: but he always re-
turned to Regents Park to dinner, and gen.
| orally spent the evening at some scientific
lecture of mildly instructive or destructive
nature, or at local concert, to which he
| had the pleasure of escorting his cousin
Maggie, of whom he considered himself to
be enamoured Jack was, in his gentle way,
kind of free-thinker, and occasionally hor-
rified his respectable dissenting parents by
| hazarding some reckless theory of existence
imperfectly recollected from the last meet
| ing of the Sunday Lecture Society. He
would freely introduce the names of Huxley,
| of Darwin and Of Mill into his discourse,
although he was but dimly acquainted with
| their works; and he was very fond of calling
himself a Nationalist, Unitarian, and a
brother of mankind in general Indeed, he
was very proud OF his position as reasoning
animal, and would sometimes startle his
cousin Maggie, who was sensible girl and
could see but small foundation for this pride,
by telling her all the conclusions to which
his reason led him-conclusions invariably
| at variance with the worn-out ideas of the
world. His reason always led him to sin
| cere pity for believers Of any kind, and he
was often heard to express kind of melan-
| choly regret at the lamentable weakness of
intellect evidenced by men like Newman or
Dean Stanley. That the common herd
| should follow where they were led was not
| to be wondered at, but that men of an intel
| lect almost equaling his own should go sofar
| astray did, indeed, sadden him. He was a
| good creature, however, for all this, and
| gave his father and mother very little
trouble, never even refusing to accompany
his mother to church on Sunday morning,
| and even going SO far as to admit to himself
| that to student and lover OF humanity all
| forms OF human weakness claimed at once his
| sympathy and his interest. He was fond of
| poetry, too, in harmless way; given to oc-
casionally pouring forth his soul in adj
| dresses to man his brother, and to destiny
| and futurity, all couched in blank verse, or
the rhymed couplets familiar to Dr. Darwin,
| of whose Botanical Garden as well as of
| Pollock's "Course OF Time," he was very
| fond.
Having discovered oneaday that Black
| stone. the great LAWYER, had at one time