1891/1/12: Ebenezer to Agnes

Ebenezer and Agnes have been writing to each for a few months after spending time together only twice, once in August, 1890, in Toronto and once that fall in Calgary, where Ebenezer is now.

Calgary, N.W.T.

12, January : 1891.

My dear Comrade,

Frank brought me your letter of the 6th--which you must have been writing when I was writing my last letter to you--early this morn::ing, as I was sitting by my desk at the window of my room, chin on hand, looking out and Eastward, watching the sun rising over the painted gables, and dreaming of you and the Future. Ay, dreaming, my comrade!--but do not be angry with me. Is not dreaming the wine of life, if not the elixir, sus::taining us in act and labour? Living is dreaming; “We are such stuff as dreams are made of”¹. Great deeds are all self-promised in making dreams. In the grave only will we be done with them.

Two courses are open to me for the immediate future. Before I take the one or the other, I must tell of them to you, and you will write me, faith::fully and frankly, what you think of them. Would that I could but run down the board-walk to the “other house”, and find you before the corner fire there, and talk with you about them!--but you are two thousand miles away.

Which of the two shall it be?--(or is there a third that suggests itself to that practical head of yours?) to return to Edinburgh, and, instead of depending wholly on literature, to patiently lecture in the schools and colleges, with my eye on the University, attaching myself to the libraries and devoting all available time to research and original work in Literature; or, once more to plunge into the mael-strom of literary London, with its infinite possibilities for good and evil. Que voulez-vous?²

There is a fascination about the London alternative which the Edinburgh scheme with its days and nights of toil lacks, but, like other fascinations, it may be born of Evil rather than of Good. But, my comrade, write me fully and unreservedly of all this and aught³ else that occurs to you with regard to this, and I shall, with bowed head, listen to all you say and I promise you to ponder it well.

To the idyllic life at Liddelbank⁴ I shall return no more. That way lie lyric poetry and moonlight dreams of sweet phantasy, but, as you suggest in your splendid letter that I received this morning, prose of fact and earnest thoughts and life has to be written now, and what poetry comes will be rather of the epic or dramatic character, dashed more with tragedy than comedy! What time or money I have devoted to that fair Border how that I love so well, I shall cheerfully resign to my sister and her dear children, in the affectionate hope that all may yet be well with them there in spite of the last unfortunate years⁵. But I cannot but wonder if the Kindly Fates will allow me to take you there for a little while, and to Liddesdale, to its woods and glens, haunted of primroses + hyacinths, to its hedge-rows + hill-sides, loud with the voices of birds. What happy pleasure to stand with you in Greena⁶, sweetest of hills shone on by the sun!--and to show you from its rounded summit all the valley of the Liddell⁷, fabulous as Hydaspes⁸, swung like a hammock among the hills and garlanded with woods, from the heights of bonnie Tevintdale⁹ to the gleaming Solway¹⁰; to show you from that Pisgah-height¹¹ all the Border-land from green Selkirk¹² to dark Northumberland¹³ and all its storied hills and mountains to Criffell¹⁴ with its memories of Burns¹⁵, to Hel::vellyn, Skiddaw and Blencathra¹⁶, with their memories of Words::worth, the Delectable Mountains of my childhood, all tremulous with legend, story, + romance, the very house of Poesie! There for fifty long years lived my saintly Father; there that dark, December dawn eleven years ago he died, and it seemed as if the sun had gone out of the heavens--as if the light of my life had gone out; and there, beneath an aged ash-tree in the lonely churchyard far up a hill-side that is first touched of the rising sun, he sleeps well--

“his part in all the pomp

That fills the circuit of the summer hills

Is that his grave is green.”¹⁷

What you write of your brother’s criticism on “Lear’s Fool”¹⁸ and of co-working and studying with me fills me with strange thoughts and my eyes with strange tears. Surely it cannot be amiss to cherish the thought labouring together somewhere, somehow, sometime--acting and re-acting on each other in the truest and highest sense, each supplying what the other most needs, each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. In that stern fight that we have now to go out to, sweet assistance of some kind will be needed lest alone we become too grim and self-contained. There is not much fear, I think, of our constituting ourselves into a mutual-admiration and mutual-adulation society! Alas, my comrade, may it not be too much the other way?--and in this connexion let us not for::get how our Valley¹⁹ got its mystic name. The earnestness of our feelings for each other’s well::being, the intensity of our emotions, should save us from that. Of mere admiration and adulation alas! We can get plenty anywhere if we wish it, if we lay ourselves open for it. And if any are satisfied with these things, verily let them have them for their reward. But what is all the applause of the world, the idiot gabble of the crowd of poor mortals, when once we have heard the sphere-music of the eternal verities pealing through our beings, and our souls have caught but a glimpse of the “light that never was on land or sea”²⁰ except perhaps on that immortal sea

“which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither--

And see the children sport

upon the shore

And hear the mighty waters

rolling evermore.”²¹

When I began this letter I fully intended to tell you of some of the social doings in Calgary--I am a pen hand at that sort of thing, but I should have done my best to interest you in some of these things--but I have got far enough away surely, to Liddesdale and Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality! But you shall have the letter with the gossip too some of these days.

I have quite got over my cold and my accident, and last night I delivered in the Presbyterian Church an oration in support of the Sabbath School²² and other organisations of the church to an immense audience that packed the building. From personal congratulations and news::paper notices I fancy I got on all right; but I shrink from speaking in a church, and how much rather I would at all times be silent than speak!

I regret that Chambers’s Journal²³ procrastinates; perhaps a scolding will do the senders off the good they so much need.

With affectionate regards,

I remain,

Your Faithful Comrade,

Charlton.

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