Part 2 (1/2)
CORNELIA, daughter of Scipio Africa.n.u.s, and wife of Tiberius Gracchus, was left a widow, with a large family of young children.
She refused all subsequent offers of marriage, even when Ptolemy of Egypt wished to share his throne with her. Her two sons, Tiberius and Caius, the tribunes who achieved such greatness and fame, owed every thing to her judicious training, to her wise and unwearied pains in educating them, guarding them, and inspiring them to high deeds. She was almost idolized by the Roman people, and occupied, indeed, the proudest position of any woman in the history of her country. Her two sons venerated, and invariably took counsel with their mother.
It is evident that their inner lives were shared with her. One of them was known to have dropped, at her request, a law which he meant to urge through the Senate. Cicero says that Catulus p.r.o.nounced a public panegyric on his mother, Popilia, the first time such a thing was done in Rome. In a less formal manner, Caius Gracchus often publicly spoke the praises of his mother, Cornelia. When her sons were murdered, she bore the cruel affliction with imposing magnanimity. Departing from Rome, she took up her abode at Misenum, where, in the exercise of a queenly hospitality, she lived, surrounded by ill.u.s.trious men of letters, as well as by others of the highest rank and distinction. Universally honored and respected, she reached a good old age, and finally received at the hands of the Roman people a statue inscribed, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi.
Notwithstanding her somewhat meddlesome and despotic temper, Queen Olympias seems to have maintained an intimate friends.h.i.+p with her son, Alexander the Great. He omitted no occasion, we are told, of showing his esteem and affection for her. When absent on his campaigns, he kept up a constant correspondence with her, highly valuing her letters, and in return concealing nothing from her. Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, a sublime example of this friends.h.i.+p, sit on the sh.o.r.e of fame, side by side; the face of the mother a little above that of the son; both of them worn with care, full of lofty pathos and love, looking at us out of the night of time; the sea of mortal pa.s.sion far beneath their feet; the eternal stars hanging silent above, even as Ary Scheffer reveals in his solemn picture of them sitting in the window at Ostia, and gazing together over the ocean.
Thirty years after the death of Monica, Augustine said in one of his sermons, ”Ah! The dead do not come back; for, had it been possible, there is not a night when I should not have seen my mother, she who could not live apart from me, and who, in all my wanderings, never forsook me. For G.o.d forbid that in heaven her affection should cease, or that she should not, if she could, have come to console me when I suffered! She who loved me more than words can express.” The example, in American history, of a valued and fruitful friends.h.i.+p between a mother and a son, given by Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams, is stamped with prominence by the exceptional fact of the publication of her letters to him. These letters breathe wisdom and virtue, with incitement to all worthy aims, no less than strong mental companions.h.i.+p and fervent maternal sympathy. They have been edited by her grandson, who pays her a deserved tribute in the memoir he has prefixed. The wife of the elder President Adams can never lose the exalted place she holds, in the honoring remembrance of the American people, among those exemplary women whose powerful talents and virtues did so much to mould the destinies of the nascent Republic.
Madame Goethe said to Bettine, ”My Wolfgang and I were so nearly of an age, that we grew up together more as playmates than as mother and child.” And, when the great Wolfgang was an old man, he said that his mother, as yet quite a child, grew up to consciousness first with, then in, himself and his sister Cornelia. Her intercourse with him is prominent through a large part of his life: her influence on him is visible through the whole of it. The union of the ill.u.s.trious brothers Humboldt with their mother was especially full and tender.
While she lived, they shared souls; and, after her departure, the sons idolized her memory. Long years had pa.s.sed, when William, expiring in the arms of his elder brother, said, ”I shall soon be with our mother.” And Alexander said, ”I did not think my old eyes had so many tears.” The relation of Guizot, the distinguished French statesman and author, with his mother, was one of the deepest, fullest, and n.o.blest friends.h.i.+ps that ever conjoined mother and son.
Madame Guizot went through the horror and tragedy of the Revolution, to which her husband was one of the choicest victims, with a heroism and a dignity unsurpa.s.sed; and devoted herself to her maternal duties with a calm energy and wisdom whose proper fruits she lived long to enjoy. Her character revealed the purest feminine qualities in conspicuous perfection. Her honored old age showed all that is lovely and all that is august united, in her history, her spirit, her manners, her acquirements, and her presence, to attract confidence and to command respect. Indissolubly joined, through more than sixty years, with her brilliant and high-souled son, she was not more proud and fond of him than he was of her.
FRIENDs.h.i.+PS OF DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS.
CICERO and his daughter, Tullia, enjoyed an extraordinary friends.h.i.+p.
From all the hints left us, it is to be gathered that Tullia was a woman of sweet and n.o.ble character. It is certain that she was most affectionately devoted to her father; and that she had accomplishments of knowledge and taste, qualifying her to be his companion and his delight in his age and grief. It is affecting to read how eagerly, on his recall from exile, she hurried to Brundusium to throw herself into his arms. She died at about thirty-two. He was thrown into a state of lamentable prostration. Turn where he would in his inconsolable sorrow, engage in whatever he might, tears constantly overtook him. His friends, Atticus, Csar, Brutus, Sulpicius, and others, wrote letters of sympathy to him. He retired to one of country-seats. Seeking the solace of solitude, he buried himself every morning in the thickest of the wood, and came not out till evening. In his former reverses, he says he could turn to one place for shelter and peace. ”A daughter I had, in whose sweet conversation I could drop all my cares and troubles.
But now every thing is changed.” ”It is all over with me, Atticus: I feel it more than ever now that I have lost the only being who still bound me to life.” He purposed to erect on a commanding site, as a monument to his dear Tullia, a splendid temple, which, as though dedicated to some G.o.d, should survive all the changes of owners.h.i.+p, and bear to distant futurity the memory of her worth, and of his sorrow for her. For a long time, he could think of nothing but the details of this plan, on which he intended to lavish the bulk of his fortune. He avoided society for almost a year, and never recovered from the wound which the loss of her gave his heart. Margaret Roper was the pride and darling of her father, Sir Thomas More, whom in return she venerated and loved with the whole depth of her heart. The beauty of their relation cannot be forgotten by those who have read the life of the great English martyr. It was by her brave duteousness that his mutilated body was buried in the chancel of Chelsea Church.
His head, exposed upon a pole on London Bridge for fourteen days, was ordered to be thrown into the Thames; but Margaret rescued it, preserved it in a leaden box, and directed that, after her death, it should be placed with her in the grave.
One of the loveliest examples of this cla.s.s of friends.h.i.+ps is unveiled by William Wirt in the exquisite memoir he wrote of his daughter, Agnes, after her death at the early age of sixteen. The example is closely parallel to that of the famous and good John Evelyn, who, apostrophizing his daughter, Mary, in mournful memory, says, ”Thy affection, duty, and love to me was that of a friend as well as of a child.” So Wirt writes of his Agnes: ”To me she was not only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside me.” Not many fathers and daughters have been fonder or faster friends than Aaron and Theodosia Burr. The character and memory of Burr, in the popular imagination, have been blackened beyond the hope of bleaching. Of course, he was a man mixed of good and bad; and was not such an unmitigated devil as some would paint him. But his selfishness, sensuality, recklessness, and degradation give, in one respect, a peculiar interest and instructiveness to the enthusiastic friends.h.i.+p subsisting between him and his daughter. It is no disproof of the need of the great virtues to serve as the basis of a true and enduring friends.h.i.+p. It proves that a sincere love, even in an unclean and depraved soul, purges it, and adorns it with meritorious charms and real worth in that relation. However bad Burr may have been in other relations, to his daughter he was ever good, gentle, and wise, unwearied in his devotion, and clothed with many fascinations. Good persons may sometimes be ill-consorted and odious to each other, their intercourse full of jars and frictions. Bad persons may sometimes be so related as to show each other only their good qualities, and be happy friends, while all around are detesting them. In one of her letters to her father, Theodosia speaks of his wonderful fort.i.tude, and goes on to say, ”Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so elevated above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little superst.i.tion would be necessary to make me wors.h.i.+p you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My vanity would be greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is in our relations.h.i.+p. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man.” Burr, on the evening before his duel with Hamilton, wrote to his daughter a long letter, in which he said, ”I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped, or even wished.” Unhappily he slew his antagonist, and himself survived to carry a load of deadly and universal obloquy which would have crushed to the earth almost any other man.
Theodosia set sail from Charleston in a little vessel, which was never heard of again. It was supposed to have foundered off Cape Hatteras. The loss of his daughter, Burr said, ”severed him from the human race.” Certainly, from that time to the end of his prolonged and dishonored life, he never was wholly what he had been before. An inner spring had been broken, and the purest contents of his heart had escaped through the breach. Parton very fitly dedicates to the memory of Theodosia his highly readable and charitable life of her father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays to virtue, not even the affectation of a n.o.ble sentiment. But we may claim with justice, that the friends.h.i.+p with his daughter is one bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, among those whose union as father and daughter, was merged in a superior fellows.h.i.+p as friends, in a more intimate and delightful junction of ideas, sentiments, and labors. Their united lives, their mutual devotion, their shared counsels, pleasures, and tasks, form one of the finest of domestic pictures, a model of a Christian household. In the preface to the life of himself which he left for Maria to complete and publish, he says, ”If my daughter should perceive any extenuation or any exaggeration, it would wound her feelings, she would be obliged to alter or omit, and her affection for me would be diminished: can the public have a better surety than this for the accuracy of these memoirs?” And Maria says, ”Few, I believe, have ever enjoyed such happiness, or such advantages, as I have had in the instructions, society, and unbounded confidence and affection of such a father and such a friend. He was, in truth, ever since I could think or feel, the first object and motive of my mind.” One of the most remarkable friends.h.i.+ps of this sort was that of Madame de Stael and her father. Necker was a kind, good, and able man, who occupied a distinguished position and played a prominent part in his time. But the genius of his impa.s.sioned daughter transfigured him into a hero and a sage. Her attachment to him was, in personal relations, the dominant sentiment of her life.
With distinct comprehension and glowing sympathy, she entered into his thoughts and fortunes. She was to him an invaluable source of strength, counsel, and consolation.
An instance, partly ludicrous, ill.u.s.trates her tender solicitude for him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, ”My G.o.d! had M.
Necker been in it, he might have been killed,” she rushed to the luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations, mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her father died, Madame de Stael was plunged into despairing grief, from which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy, which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often said, ”My father is waiting for me on the other sh.o.r.e.” The touching words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed over, in which she summed up her life, were these: ”I have always been the same, intense and sad. I have loved G.o.d, my father, and liberty.” The unhappy Let.i.tia Landon found a congenial friend in her father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her misfortunes. She closes her poem of ”The Troubadour” with an affecting tribute to his memory:
My heart hath said no name but thine Shall be on this last page of mine.
Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy the friends.h.i.+p of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the conditions of so blessed an experience.
FRIENDs.h.i.+PS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS.
THE next cla.s.s of friends.h.i.+ps consists of those formed between brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common, are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a rich friends.h.i.+p spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the author of ”Counterparts” and ”Charles Auchester,” who, devoured by the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat extravagantly, ”O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood!
Surpa.s.sing all other friends.h.i.+p, leavening with angel solicitude the purest love of earth. No lovers.h.i.+p like that of the brother and the sister, however pa.s.sionate their spirits, when they truly love.”
Narcissus, in the cla.s.sic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other.
It was only when death had s.n.a.t.c.hed her from his side, that, pining under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.
Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the friends.h.i.+p of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friends.h.i.+p of Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon.
Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother, prays to the G.o.ddess for pity and help:
For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee, And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn Thy virgin face to his eternal light.
A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their retreats on Mount Ca.s.sino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had previously prepared for himself. The friends.h.i.+p of Ta.s.so and his sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song.
When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection, were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.
The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing, restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her nursing, restored him. She then formed a friends.h.i.+p with the sister of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, ”she went every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, ”Ah whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother, though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom.”
Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know that the love of Francis to her was not a t.i.the of hers to him. He loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name and dedication which the brother gave to his princ.i.p.al work are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, ”The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.” Spenser refers to her as ”most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear.” She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them.