Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845

Then came the funeral. I, as a point of decorum, was carried thither. I was put into a carriage with some gentlemen whom I did not know. They were kind to me; but naturally they talked of things disconnected with the occasion, and their conversation was a torment. At the church, I was told to hold a white handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy! What need had he of masques or mockeries, whose heart died within him at every word that was uttered? During that part of the service which passed within the church, I made an effort to attend, but I sank back continually into my own solitary darkness, and I heard little consciously, except some fugitive strains from the sublime chapter of St Paul, which in England is always read at burials. And here I notice a profound error of our present illustrious Laureate. When I heard those dreadful words – for dreadful they were to me – "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory;" such was the recoil of my feelings, that I could even have shrieked out a protesting – "Oh, no, no!" if I had not been restrained by the publicity of the occasion. In after years, reflecting upon this revolt of my feelings, which, being the voice of nature in a child, must be as true as any mere opinion of a child might probably be false, I saw at once the unsoundness of a passage in The Excursion. The book is not here, but the substance I remember perfectly. Mr Wordsworth argues, that if it were not for the unsteady faith which people fix upon the beatific condition after death of those whom they deplore, nobody could be found so selfish, as even secretly to wish for the restoration to earth of a beloved object. A mother, for instance, could never dream of yearning for her child, and secretly calling it back by her silent aspirations from the arms of God, if she were but reconciled to the belief that really it was in those arms. But this I utterly deny. To take my own case, when I heard those dreadful words of St Paul applied to my sister – viz. that she should be raised a spiritual body – nobody can suppose that selfishness, or any other feeling than that of agonizing love, caused the rebellion of my heart against them. I knew already that she was to come again in beauty and power. I did not now learn this for the first time. And that thought, doubtless, made my sorrow sublimer; but also it made it deeper. For here lay the sting of it, viz. in the fatal words – "We shall be changed." How was the unity of my interest in her to be preserved, if she were to be altered, and no longer to reflect in her sweet countenance the traces that were sculptured on my heart? Let a magician ask any woman whether she will permit him to improve her child, to raise it even from deformity to perfect beauty, if that must be done at the cost of its identity, and there is no loving mother but would reject his proposal with horror. Or, to take a case that has actually happened, if a mother were robbed of her child at two years old by gipsies, and the same child were restored to her at twenty, a fine young man, but divided by a sleep as it were of death from all remembrances that could restore the broken links of their once-tender connexion, would she not feel her grief unhealed, and her heart defrauded? Undoubtedly she would. All of us ask not of God for a better thing than that we have lost; we ask for the same, even with its faults and its frailties. It is true that the sorrowing person will also be changed eventually, but that must be by death. And a prospect so remote as that, and so alien from our present nature, cannot console us in an affliction which is not remote but present – which is not spiritual but human.

Lastly came the magnificent service which the English church performs at the side of the grave. There is exposed once again and for the last time, the coffin. All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from earth – records how useless! and dropped into darkness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its home; it has disappeared from the eye. The sacristan stands ready with his shovel of earth and stones. The priest's voice is heard once more —earth to earth, and the dread rattle ascends from the lid of the coffin; ashes to ashes, and again the killing sound is heard; dust to dust, and the farewell volley announces that the grave – the coffin – the face are sealed up for ever and ever.

Oh, grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is, that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. Among the very foremost of mine was morbid sensibility to shame. And ten years afterwards, I used to reproach myself with this infirmity, by supposing the case, that, if it were thrown upon me to seek aid for a perishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that aid only by facing a vast company of critical or sneering faces, I might perhaps shrink basely from the duty. It is true, that no such case had ever actually occurred, so that it was a mere romance of casuistry to tax myself with cowardice so shocking. But to feel a doubt, was to feel condemnation; and the crime which might have been, was in my eyes the crime which had been. Now, however, all was changed; and for any thing which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of love – yes, slough it as completely, as ever serpent sloughed his skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced boldly, bleating clamorously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. Not less was the change in myself. Fifty thousand sneering faces would not have troubled me in any office of tenderness to my sister's memory. Ten legions would not have repelled me from seeking her, if there was chance that she could be found. Mockery! it was lost upon me. Laugh at me, as one or two people did! I valued not their laughter. And when I was told insultingly to cease "my girlish tears", that word "girlish" had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart – that a girl was the sweetest thing I, in my short life, had known – that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world, I was to drink no more.

Interesting it is to observe how certainly all deep feelings agree in this, that they seek for solitude, and are nursed by solitude. Deep grief, deep love, how naturally do these ally themselves with religious feeling; and all three, love, grief, religion, are haunters of solitary places. Love, grief, the passion of reverie, or the mystery of devotion – what were these without solitude? All day long, when it was not impossible for me to do so, I sought the most silent and sequestered nooks in the grounds about the house, or in the neighbouring fields. The awful stillness occasionally of summer noons, when no winds were abroad, the appealing silence of grey or misty afternoons – these were fascinations as of witchcraft. Into the woods or the desert air I gazed as if some comfort lay hid in them. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks. I tormented the blue depths with obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes and searching them for ever after one angelic face that might perhaps have permission to reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping images in the distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, aided by a slight defect in my eyes, grew upon me at this time. And I recal at the present moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient basis for this creative faculty. On Sunday mornings I was always taken to church: it was a church on the old and natural model of England, having aisles, galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long Litany, as often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so, where God is supplicated on behalf of "all sick persons and young children," and that he would "show his pity upon all prisoners and captives" – I wept in secret, and raising my streaming eyes to the windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The sides of the windows were rich with storied glass; through the deep purples and crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination mingling with the earthly emblazonries of what is grandest in man. There were the apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial love to man. There were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce insulting faces. There were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from an accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the window, where the glass was uncoloured, white fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the sky; were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped itself into a vision of beds with white lawny curtains; and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms descended from the heavens, that he and his young children whom in Judea, once and for ever, he had blessed, though they must pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The hint from the Litany, the fragment from the clouds, those and the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir – when it rose high in arches, as might seem, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into unity – sometimes I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those clouds which so recently I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate sorrow, and even as ministers of sorrow in its creations; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music I felt11 of grief itself as a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief.

I point so often to the feelings, the ideas, or the ceremonies of religion, because there never yet was profound grief nor profound philosophy which did not inosculate at many points with profound religion. But I request the reader to understand, that of all things I was not, and could not have been, a child trained to talk of religion, least of all to talk of it controversially or polemically. Dreadful is the picture, which in books we sometimes find, of children discussing the doctrines of Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the boundaries and distinctions between doctrine and doctrine. And it has often struck me with amazement, that the two things which God made most beautiful among his works, viz. infancy and pure religion, should, by the folly of man, (in yoking them together on erroneous principles,) neutralize each other's beauty, or even form a combination positively hateful The religion becomes nonsense, and the child becomes a hypocrite. The religion is transfigured into cant, and the innocent child into a dissembling liar.12

God, be assured, takes care for the religion of children wheresoever his Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a national church established, to which a child sees his friends resorting; wheresoever he beholds all whom he honours periodically prostrate before those illimitable heavens which fill to overflowing his young adoring heart; wheresoever he sees the sleep of death falling at intervals upon men and women whom he knows, depth as confounding to the plummet of his mind as those heavens ascend beyond his power to pursue —there take you no thought for the religion of a child, any more than for the lilies how they shall be arrayed, or for the ravens how they shall feed their young.

God speaks to children also in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal by the truths and services of a national church, God holds "communion undisturbed" with children. Solitude, though silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone– all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel into God's presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this world appals or fascinates a child's heart, is but the echo of a far deeper solitude through which already he has passed, and of another solitude deeper still, through which he has to pass: reflex of one solitude – prefiguration of another.

Oh, burthen of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his being – in his birth, which has been – in his life, which is– in his death, which shall be – mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and art, and art to be; – thou broodest, like the spirit of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the principles of all things, solitude for a child is the Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude in life of millions upon millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them. Deep is the solitude of those who, with secret griefs, have none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood, bringing before it at intervals the final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. Reader, I tell you a truth, and hereafter I will convince you of this truth, that for a Grecian child solitude was nothing, but for a Christian child it has become the power of God and the mystery of God. Oh, mighty and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be – thou, kindling under the torch of Christian revelations, art now transfigured for ever, and hast passed from a blank negation into a secret hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of infancy the very dimmest of his truths!

MRS POOLE'S "ENGLISHWOMAN IN EGYPT." 13

An "Englishwoman in Egypt," thanks to the Mediterranean steamers and the overland route to India, is no longer so unusual or astounding a spectacle as it would appear to have been five-and-twenty years ago, when that dilettante traveller, Monsieur le Comte de Forbin, made a precipitate retreat from Thebes in consequence of the shock sustained by his nerves, from encountering among the ruins "une femme-de-chambre Anglaise, en petit spencer couleur de rose," in the person of the Countess of Belmore's lady's-maid; though the Quarterly Reviewers, who in those days had no mercy for a French misstatement, even in the colour of a soubrette's dress, triumphantly declared the offending garment to have been "a pale-blue pelisse;" and proceeded to demolish the hapless Count accordingly – (Quarterly Review, Vol. xxiii. p. 92.) Since the period of this rencontre, the ill-omened blue eyes,14 as well as blue pelisses, of our countrywomen, have been seen with sufficient frequency on the banks of the Nile to render the one, it is to be hoped, no longer an object of alarm to the natives, nor the latter to errant members of the Institute: but a narrative of the impressions produced on a cultivated female mind by a residence among the modern inhabitants of the land of the pyramids, was still a desideratum. The "Notes" (published in 1840 in the Asiatic Journal) of the late lamented Emma Roberts, than whom no one would have been better qualified to fill up the void, though replete with interest and information, are merely those of a traveller hastening through the country on her way to India; and, except the fugitive sketches of Mrs Dawson Damer, we cannot call to mind a single one among all the lady-tourists, with whose tours and voyages the press has lately teemed, who has touched on this hitherto unbroken ground. In such a dearth of information, we may deem ourselves doubly fortunate in finding the task undertaken by a lady possessing such peculiar advantages as must have been enjoyed by the sister of the well-known Orientalist, to whose pen we are indebted for perhaps the most comprehensive and accurate account ever published of the habits and manners of any nation, and under whose immediate superintendence, as we are informed, the work before us was prepared.

The title of the "Englishwoman in Cairo," would perhaps have more appropriately designated the character of Mrs Poole's volumes than that which she has adopted; since her opportunities of personal observation, after her arrival in the capital from Alexandria, were bounded by the environs of the city, her excursions from which do not appear to have extended further than the pyramids. A considerable portion of the first volume is occupied by an abstract of Egyptian history from the time of the Arab conquest, an account of the foundation of Cairo, an agricultural and general calendar for each month of the year, and various matters connected with the physical features, statistics, &c., of the country. These dissertations form a sort of supplement to the work of her brother, from whose MS. notes they are avowedly taken; being introduced (as Mrs Poole, with much naïveté, confesses) "in the hope of obtaining a more favourable reception for her letters, for the sake of the more solid matter with which they are interspersed;" but though they certainly convey much valuable additional information to the readers of the "Modern Egyptians," they are scarcely "germane to the matter," as interpolations in the work of a lady. The authoress can very well afford to rest her claim to popularity on her own merits; and we prefer to follow her, in her own peculiar sphere, into those mysterious recesses of an Oriental establishment, whither no male footstep can ever penetrate. Mrs Poole is probably the first English lady who has been admitted, not merely as a passing visitor, but as a privileged friend, into the hareems of those of the highest rank in the Egyptian capital. We find her threading the narrow and crowded thoroughfares of Cairo, borne aloft on the "high ass,"15 (the usual mode of conveyance for morning calls;) and are introduced to the wives and daughters of the viceroy, and even (in the hareem of Habeeb Effendi) to ladies of the imperial house of Othman, in the ease and disinvoltura of their domestic circles, amid that atmosphere of dolce far niente and graceful etiquette, in which the hours of an Oriental princess appear to be habitually passed. With the exception of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's piquant sketches of the Turkish hareems and their inmates, and the singular narrative of her personal experience of life in an Indian zenana, by Mrs Meer Hassan Ali,16 we know no female writer who has enjoyed such opportunities for the delineation of the scenes of domestic privacy of the East, and who has so well availed herself of them, as the sister of Mansoor Effendi, in the pages before us.

The narrative opens with the landing of the authoress and her companions at Alexandria in July 1842; but that city, with its double harbour, its quays crowded with a motley assemblage of every nation and language in Europe and the Levant, and the monuments of antiquity in its environs, has been too often described to present too much opportunity for novelty of remark. Passing over, therefore, the details given of these well-known objects, we find the party, after a rapid passage along the Mahmoodiyeh canal in an iron track-boat, drawn by four horses, and a vexatious delay of two days at the junction of the canal and the river, (during which the want of musquitto-curtains gave them an ample foretaste of the quantity and quality of the insect plagues of Egypt,) fairly embarked on the broad stream of the Nile. The voyage to Cairo was performed in a kanjeh, or passage-boat of the kind usual on the river – a long, narrow craft, with two masts, bearing large triangular sails; and Mrs Poole, in common with most travellers arriving for the first time in the East, was greatly impressed by the simple devotion with which the Reyyis (or Arab captain) and his crew commended themselves, on setting sail, to the protection of Providence, by reciting altogether, in a low voice, the short prayer of the Fathah, or opening chapter of the Koran. "The sight of the Muslim engaged in his devotions is, I think, most interesting; the attitudes are particularly striking and impressive; and the solemn demeanour of the worshipper, who, even in the busy market-place, appears wholly abstracted from the world, is very remarkable. The practice of praying in a public place is so general in the East, and attracts so little notice from Muslims, that we must not regard it as the result of hypocrisy or ostentation."

As the kanjeh lay to at night to avoid danger from sand-banks, the travellers were three days in reaching Cairo; and found little to interest them in the contemplation of the banks of the Nile, which at this season are destitute of the brilliant verdure which clothes them for some time after the inundation. On arriving at Boulak, the authoress for the first time shrouded herself in the cumbrous folds of a Turkish riding-dress, "an overwhelming covering of black silk, extending, in my idea, in every direction;" and mounted on a donkey, she followed her janissary guide through the dilapidated suburb, "and at length we fairly entered Cairo… The first impression on entering this celebrated city is, that it has the appearance of having been deserted for perhaps a century, and suddenly re-peopled by persons, unable, from poverty or some other cause, to repair it, and clear away its antiquated cobwebs… I wrote to you that the streets of Alexandria were narrow; they are wide compared to those of Cairo. The meshreebeyehs, or projecting windows, facing each other above the ground floor, literally touch in some instances, and in many, the opposite windows are within reach… After passing through several of the streets, into which it appeared as though the dwellings had turned out nearly all their inhabitants, we arrived at an agreeable house in the midst of gardens, in which we are to take up our temporary residence."

The plan of these gardens, however, intersected by parallel walks, with gutters on each side to convey water into the intermediate squares, was so much at variance with Mrs Poole's English notions of horticulture, that she was almost tempted to conclude, "that a garden in Egypt was not worth cultivation – so much for national prejudice!" As it was indispensable for the health of the children that their residence should be fixed in the outskirts of the city, some delay was experienced in finding a permanent abode; but at the end of a month they considered themselves fortunate in engaging a house "infinitely beyond the usual run," in the most healthy and cheerful quarter, for which the rent demanded by the landlady, (who bore the picturesque name of Lalah-Zar, or Bed of Tulips,) was only L.12 per annum. The arrangement of the apartments was nearly as described by Mr Lane in his account of the private houses in Cairo – (Modern Egyptians, i. p. 11:) on the ground-floor a court, open to the sky, round which were the rooms appropriated to the male inhabitants, while a gallery, running round the first floor, conducted to the hareem, consisting of two principal apartments, and "three small marble paved rooms, forming en suite an antechamber, a reclining chamber, and a bath. Above are four rooms, the principal one opening to a delightful terrace, considerably above most of the surrounding houses, and on this we enjoy our breakfast and supper under the clearest sky in the world." But scarcely had the establishment been removed into this new residence, when it became evident that something was not right. The two maid-servants, Amineh and Zeyneb, disappeared one after the other without giving warning – strange noises were heard, which were at first ascribed to the wedding rejoicings of a neighbour, but an explanation was at last elicited from the doorkeeper. The house was haunted by an 'Efreet, (ghost or evil spirit,) in consequence of the murder of a poor tradesman and two slave girls by the previous owner, who had bequeathed it to Lalah-Zar, with reversion (perhaps in hope of expiating his crimes) to a mosque. One of the victims had perished in the bath, and like Praed's17 Abbess of St Ursula, who