SLIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES. SIR WALTER SCOTT, walking one day along the banks of Yarrow, where Mungo Park was born, saw the traveller throwing stones into the water, and anxiously watching the bubbles that succeeded. Scott inquired the object of his occupation: "I was thinking," answered Park, "how often I had thus tried to sound the rivers in Africa, by calculating how long a time. had elapsed before the bubbles rose to the surface." It was a slight circumstance, but the traveller's safety frequently depended upon it. In a watch, the mainspring forms a small portion of the works, but it impels and governs the whole. So it is in the machinery of human life; a slight circumstance is permitted by the Divine Ruler to derange or to alter it; a giant falls by a pebble; a girl, at the door of an inn, changes the fortune of an empire. If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, said Pascal in his epigrammatic and brilliant manner, the condition of the world would have been different. The Mohamedans have a tradition, that when their Prophet concealed himself in Mount Shur, his pursuers were deceived by a spider's web, which covered the mouth of the cave. Luther might have been a lawyer, had his friend and companion, Alexis, escaped the thunder-storm at Erfurt; Scotland had wanted her stern reformer, if the appeal of the preacher had not startled him in the chapel of St. Andrew's Castle; if Mr. Grenville had not carried, in 1764, his memorable resolution, as to the expediency of charging "certain stamp duties" on the plantations in America, the western world might still have bowed to the British sceptre. Cowley might never have been a poet, if he had not found the Fairy Queen in his mother's parlour; Opie might have perished in mute obscurity, if he had not looked over the shoulder of his young companion, Mark Otes, while he was drawing a butterfly; Giotto, one of the early Florentine painters, might have continued a rude shepherd boy, if a sheep, drawn by him upon a stone, had not attracted the notice of Cimabue, as he went that way. The Spaniards owed the mines of Potosi to the accidental up-rooting of a shrub. An Indian, pursuing deer, to save himself from slipping over a rock, seized a bush with his hand; the violence of the shock loosened the earth round the root, and a small piece of silver attracted his eye. He carried it home, and soon returned for more: the discovery of the mines followed. In that science which relieves the sufferings of our bodies, for how much are we indebted to what appear to us to be Slight Circumstances! A sick man sleeps in a room in which bark had been kept, and a wonderful medicine is given to the world. To the employment of bells in our churches, about the tenth century, has been traced, with probable justice, the introduction of towers; built in the beginning from necessity, they gradually rose into beauty and grace; and the church-going bell called into existence those wonderful steeples and spires, which, Bentham says, have always been considered the pride and ornament of our churches.† * Modern Universal History, t. i. + History of the Cathedral of Ely. Sect, v. Edit. 1771. In the lives of eminent persons, we frequently find ourselves turning aside from the exploits that dazzle us, or the productions of genius that charm us, to contemplate some little incident in their histories-some fleeting expression of feeling-which seems to possess peculiar beauty to our eyes. How delightful is it, for example, to behold Warren Hastings, during his residence in India, surrounded with the pageantry of Oriental pomp, and apparently absorbed in the politics of the hour, and yet keeping perpetually before his sight a little wood at Dalesford. Amid all the glory of that Eastern vegetation, he beheld, in fancy, the chequered shade of English meadows, and the glimmering walk of lime-trees; the village landscape glittered with its bloom and dew. Or turn to Cuvier, directed by the accidental dissection of a species of cuttle fish to study the anatomy of mollusca, which gradually unfolded to him the whole animal kingdom. Or join Fox, walking in the garden at St. Anne's Hill, as described by Rogers, with Dryden or Horace in his hand, reading to his companion, In his grand and melancholy tone, Some splendid passage, not to him unknown. These are Slight Circumstances, but they give us glimpses into the economy of the mind; they resemble little apertures in a forest, that let in the sunshine upon the scene. A slight circumstance in our public conduct often stamps its impression on the character. Perhaps the reader has already met with the following passage in the Journal of Bishop Heber; it illustrates my argument very happily. "Why do you not go thither?" asked the bishop of the Indians, pointing to an unoccupied hut, a little out of repair. "We like to sleep together," was the answer. "But why not bring the branches here, and make your own hut larger? See, I will show you the way." They started up, says Heber, immediately, in apparent delight; every man brought a bough, and the work was completed in a few minutes. The only interruption was occasioned by the frequent exclamation of the rejoicing Indians, "Good, good, poor man's provider!" Could religion, working by love, be more sweetly displayed? To Slight Circumstances we owe some of the most admirable treasures of literature. Milton retires to Chalfont; and that refuge from the plague gives us Paradise Regained. An accidental allusion to a sofa calls up the various scenery of the Task. A dispute about placing a music-desk awakens the humour of the Lutrin. An apothecary's quarrel produces the Dispensary. Gray was waiting in some anxiety to compose his ode for the installation of the chancellor at Cambridge, but he could not make a satisfactory beginning. Fortunately, a friend unexpectedly calls upon him at Pembroke, and is received with the startling exclamation, Hence, avaunt! 'tis holy ground! The visitor is astonished, but the poet has commenced his ode. That slight circumstance-a knock at a door-opened to the eye of Gray the plan of his noble lyric. The decline and fall of the Roman empire might have remained without its prose-epic, if Gibbon had not walked at night among the ruins of the Capitol. The history of sculpture would supply us with similar illustrations. Thorwaldsen sees a boy sitting on the steps of a house, and returns home to model Mercury. So also in painting: Perhaps some time-worn hanging's faded pride, The painter's vigorous impulse first supplied; With Hawke or Affleck flaring from on high.* Leonardo da Vinci advised artists to attend even to stains upon old walls; he thought that the imagination might learn something from the capriciousness of the tints. Not many years ago, we are told by Gilpin, in a note to his poem on landscape-painting, there was living an old Thames waterman, who remembered very well the younger Vandervelde, having often carried him in his boat up and down the river to study the appearances of the sky. Vandervelde went out in all weathers; in storm, rain, or sunshine. He took with him large sheets of blue paper, which he marked all over with black and white. These excursions he called, with his Dutch accent, going a skoying. How much of this artist's fame was owing to the slight circumstance of those blue sheets of paper! We trace the same happy influence of Slight Circumstances in the history of science. Pascal was born with a genius for mathematical discovery; no discouragement could repress his eager passion for scientific investigation; he heard a common dinner-plate ring, and immediately wrote a treatise upon sound. While Galileo was studying medicine in the University of Pisa, the regular oscillation of a lamp, suspended from the roof of the cathedral, attracted his observation, and led him to consider the vibrations of pendulums. Kepler, having married a second time, and resembling, perhaps, the great Florentine astronomer in his partiality to wine, determined to lay in a store from the Austrian vineyards; some difference, however, arose between himself and the seller with respect to the measurement, and Kepler produced a treatise, which has been placed among the "earliest specimens of what is now called the modern analysis." The slight circumstance of Newton's observing the different refrangibility of the rays of light, seen through a prism upon a wall, suggested the achromatic telescope, and led to the prodigious discoveries in astronomy. The motion of a speck of dust, it has been said, may illustrate causes adequate to generate worlds. The wonderful hypothesis, that the sun is surrounded by a nebulous atmosphere, has been nearly built up into certainty by Encke's observations on a comet. Thomson, in his poem on Sir Isaac Newton, has not lost sight of the influence of Slight Circumstances in science: Newton, he says, From motion's simple laws Could trace the secret hand of Providence If Slight Circumstances ought to encourage, they should never depress us. Sir M, A, Shee's Elements of Art. The hasty and ill-judging reproof of a Wesleyan minister, scrawled upon a window at Motcomb, near Shaftsbury, induced Adam Clarke to abandon all his classical studies. The person who inflicted upon him this mortification probably was impelled only by that narrow spirit of ignorance, from which he had not been released by a just and expanding education. It was a slight circumstance, but it impeded and nearly destroyed the usefulness and the happiness of Clarke. From 1782 to 1786, he gave up every learned book; even the perusal of the Greek Testament was relinquished. Throughout his life, he bewailed the irreparable loss of these four precious years. Burke, upon one occasion, rose to address the House, holding a very large roll of paper in his hand; a member, remarkable for nothing but presumption, interrupted him by expressing a hope that he did not intend to inflict that voluminous MS. upon the assembly. Burke, in mingled mortification and anger, rushed from the house. He who had battled all his antagonists night after night, with courage only surpassed by eloquence, was defeated by a sneer. A slight circumstance deprived him of his confidence and resolution. In our common hours of reading, we are affected by Slight Circumstances; a page, a line, a word, often touches us in a large volume. Frederic Schlegel was preparing at Dresden, in the winter of 1829, a lecture which he was to deliver on the following Wednesday; the subject was, The Extent of Knowledge to which the Mind of Man seems capable of attaining. It was between ten and eleven o'clock at night when he sat down to finish his manuscript. One sentence he had begun :— "But the consummate and the perfect knowledge" There the pen dropped from his fingers, and when the clock struck one, the philosopher, the orator, and the scholar, was no more. There is something solemn and even tremendous in that abrupt and mysterious termination-that dropping of the curtain upon the intellectual scenery, which he was about to display to the eyes of his audience. "The consummate and the perfect knowledge"-and lo! even while he is gazing through the glass darkly, the mirror of the intellect is clouded by a shadow, still blacker, and the Angel of Death conducts him into a world where the consummate and the perfect knowledge can alone be found! The Arabians have a precept that conveys a profitable moral :—“ Let him to whom the gate of good fortune is opened seize the opportunity, for he knows not how soon it may be shut." History furnishes some pleasing and some melancholy illustrations of the aphorism. Cardinal Bessarion might have been a pope, if, when the cardinals knocked at his door, his conclavist had not hesitated to interrupt his studies. "Nicholas," exclaimed Bessarion, in his disappointment, "thy respect has cost thee a hat, and me the tiara."† Let us turn to the life of Robert Bruce. His repeated defeats seemed to have annihilated all his resources. Now he determined to draw the sword once more for the crown of Scotland, and now to retreat to Palestine and find a grave among the armies of the Saracens. In this crisis of hope and * Autobiography, i. 185. ↑ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vi. 425, Edit, 1788. despondency, he looked up to the ceiling, and saw a spider endeavouring "to swing himself from one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line on which he meant to stretch his web." Six times the spider made the attempt, and six times it failed. Bruce had been defeated in an equal number of battles with the English; with an anxious superstition, not uncommon to great men in every age, he watched the result of the insect's perseverance. He was not kept long in suspense. The spider tried the seventh time to fasten the thread, and succeeded. Bruce accepted the omen; and the reader knows with what success. The story is related by Scott and other writers, upon the authority of a tradition which has been preserved in all the families of the name of Bruce. It is certainly a slight circumstance of great interest, and is scarcely exceeded in poetical beauty by that light which suddenly illuminated the head of the child Iulus, and altered immediately the resolution of Anchises not to abandon the smoking and desolate city of Troy. He acknowledges the omen, and we see him immediately hastening from the scene of terror upon the shoulders of his son. But the slight circumstance of the spider's thread would have availed nothing to the Scottish chieftain, if he had not possessed energy and vigour of mind to carry out the analogy. "The instant time is always the fittest time. In Nebuchadnezzar's image, the lower the members the coarser the mettle. The further off the time, the more unfit. To-day is the golden opportunity, to-morrow will be the silver season, next day the brazen one, till at last I shall come to the toes of clay, and be turned to dust."† What is called good fortune is often the effect of skill, confirmed and supported by decision of character. When Wicliffe was lying ill at Oxford, the friars vehemently urged him to recant his censure on the Mendicant Orders. The Reformer listened with tranquil attention to their threats and persuasions; then desiring his attendant to raise him on the pillow, and looking sternly at his persecutors, he replied:"I shall not die, but live, still further to declare the evil deeds of the friars." In the life of Wicliffe, this was but a slight circumstance, but it indicates the entire course of his courageous honesty and perseverance. Upon Slight Circumstances often depends the texture of our life; they are threads which diligence alone can weave into a beautiful and costly web. Genius may then display all its skill in embroidery and decoration. Fuseli has, indeed, ventured to assert, that intuition is the attendant of genius, while gradual improvement only accompanies talent. But the aphorism is contradicted by experience and by history. "The little talent that God has given to my assiduity in my profession"-such were the simple terms in which Galileo described his own discoveries in science. Newton expressed himself with the same humility. All I have done, he said, has been accomplished by steady and unwearied observation and study. I give the sentiments, not the words. In the closing hours of his life, he is known to have looked upon himself as a child who had gathered a few painted shells upon the shore of time. The examples of Galileo and Newton cannot be contemplated with too much closeness or attention. En. b. ii. 685. + Fuller's Personal Meditations. + Southey's Book of the Church, 4th edit. 205. |