Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7

THE LOST CHILD

If any chanced to go astray,
Moaning in fear of coming harms,
Hope brought the wanderer back alway,
Safe nestled in her snowy arms.

From that soft nest the happy one
Looked up at me and calmly smiled;
Its hair shone golden in the sun,
And made it seem a heavenly child.

Dear Hope’s blue eyes smiled mildly down.
And blest it with a love so deep,
That, like a nursling of her own,
It clasped her neck and fell asleep.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

After learning his letters and other simple things at an elementary school, Lowell was sent when about nine years old to a higher school, where he was thoroughly taught Latin, and otherwise prepared for his entrance into Harvard College in 1834. He was then only fifteen years of age, yet he had such decided tastes in his studies that he was not always willing to give attention to the work required in his college courses, but would follow his own inclinations in his reading. The result was, that though he gained such a reputation among his class-mates for appreciation of literature and ability in original composition that he was made one of the editors of Harvardiana, the college paper, and was chosen in his senior year to write the class poem, yet he was looked upon with growing disapproval by his instructors, because of his irregular ways. At length, it is told, he completely disgraced himself, on the day he was chosen class poet, by rising at the close of the evening prayer service and bowing solemnly to right and left. As punishment for this and all preceding misconduct, he was sent to Concord to continue his studies under a private teacher, and was not allowed to return to Harvard until after classday. Nevertheless, he wrote his poem and later had it printed, for his friends, in a little pamphlet.

After receiving his degree from Harvard in 1838, Lowell decided upon the law as the profession most suitable for him to follow, for at that time a literary career in the United States held out no assurance of a living, even to the best writers. In the preceding year he had written to his intimate friend Shackford: “I thought your brother Charles was studying law. I intend to study that myself, and probably shall be Chief Justice of the United States.” This modest prediction, however, was not to be fulfilled, for after completing a course at the Harvard Law School in 1840 and practicing with but slight interest and success for two years, he gave up the law for a more congenial occupation.

His letters to his confidants “Shack” and Loring during the years at college show his aspiration to become a poet. He reports from time to time his progress in verse making and comments more or less favorably on his “effusions.” This writing of pottery—as it pleased him to call it—continued with more serious interest after his graduation, so that in 1840 he was ready to publish a volume of verse entitled “A Year’s Life.”

The same year was marked by another event of special importance,—his engagement to Maria White, a young woman who was herself a poet and who was deeply interested in all the movements of thought that were making toward freedom and justice before the Civil War. Her influence upon Lowell was to strengthen greatly his confidence in his own best powers as a man and a poet and to help develop in him the broad, kind democratic feeling for his fellow-men that most endears him to his readers. This growth of the poet’s character seems the more remarkable when it is considered that his father, a Unitarian minister, was a man who, though most generous and well-meaning in his regard for others, was well enough content with conditions in his country to feel little sympathy with the reforms then being urged for securing fuller liberty and equality. In his new enthusiasm Lowell turned away from the influence of his younger days and became devoted to the cause of abolition.

In 1842, after abandoning the law, he founded a magazine, The Pioneer, which, however, was issued only three times. After this unsuccessful venture he went back to his poetry, and late in 1843 published a second volume of verse. In the following year appeared his first critical studies in prose, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. This work, like most of the first book of poems, Lowell found in later life to be unworthy of reprinting.

The income from his writings, though small, was sufficient for him to marry in 1844; and not long after this event he became a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard. In this appeared the first series of the Biglow Papers, in which, through vigorous prose and verse, largely in the Yankee dialect of Hosea Biglow, he protested against the evils that brought on the Mexican War. The collected numbers of the series were published in 1848 and shared the popularity of two other of Lowell’s greatest works, produced in the same year,—the Fable for Critics and The Vision of Sir Launfal, a beautiful narrative poem filled with the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

It was not long after this that Lowell began to feel that his work as a writer for the abolitionist cause was narrowing in its effect. For “red-hot” reform he had no liking. It seemed to him that the hope of his cause lay not so much in treating others harshly as in living according to the high principles that the reformers professed. “The longer I live,” he wrote, “the more am I convinced that the world must be healed by degrees. I see why Jesus came eating meat and drinking wine and companying with publicans and sinners. He preached the highest doctrine, but he lived the life of other men.... Let us sow the best seed we have ... and convert other men by our crops, not by drubbing them with our hoes or putting them under our harrows.” He decided, then, to take life in a more leisurely way and let the poetic power that he considered his best gift express itself freely.

In 1851, accompanied by his wife and his two children, Lowell visited Europe. The months spent abroad gave him much wished-for opportunities for study and observation, but they were darkened by the death of his son Walter. Close upon this sorrow came the death of Mrs. Lowell in the following year (1853), after the return of the family to Elmwood. From that time for many months the poet could find relief from his keen sense of loss only in his literary work, and in the companionship of his daughter Mabel, the only one of his four children who had lived.

Some lectures on the English poets given at the Lowell institute in 1854-55 found so much favor with the authorities at Harvard College that soon afterward he was appointed to succeed Longfellow as professor of foreign languages and literatures. After a period of study in Europe, he assumed charge of classes at Harvard in 1856, and for sixteen years continued in this work, bringing to it with most remarkable success all the warmth and sincerity and broad scope of his own interest in the subjects that he taught. Not many months afterward he was still further honored by being given the editorship of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly, a position that he held until 1861. The year 1857 was made memorable also by his marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap, a much-valued friend and the governess of his daughter. In 1864 he became joint editor of the North American Review, and in this magazine continued the second series of the Biglow Papers, begun in the Atlantic Monthly, the series in which is expressed his finest power as a poet-patriot. Of the same excellence is the famous Commemoration Ode written for memorial ceremonies held at Harvard College in honor of the students who had fallen during the war. Among other contributions to these periodicals were numerous studies of poets and poetry—essays that rank among the best of their kind. Thus did Lowell prove himself to possess a rare combination of the powers of original composition and of criticism.

So ably had he served the best interests of his country through his writings, that in 1877 he was appointed Minister of the United States to Spain, and served here until 1880, when he was sent as Minister to England. These high trusts, it proved, had not been wrongly placed. Lowell’s devotion to the truest American principles, together with his large experience in public affairs, made him a most successful diplomat. He was given high honors by British universities, and he made many friends in England.

After his return to America in 1885 he withdrew gradually from his former active life. Occasionally he wrote and lectured, and several times he made trips to England where he always received a cordial welcome. It was in his much loved Elmwood that death came to him August 12, 1891.

Lowell was a man of wide learning, and has a prominent place in American literature for his exceptional critical ability and delightful wit, and for the artistic excellence of both his prose and poetry; but the secret of his power lies not so much in these things as in the sincerity and vigor of thought that rise above all bookishness, and in the warm human feeling that reached out for the love of his fellow-men rather than for fame and distinction. Probably that which most endears him to his countrymen is the quality he attributes to others in these words of admiration: “I am sure that both the President (Hayes) and his wife have in them that excellent new thing we call Americanism, which, I suppose, is that ‘dignity of human nature’ which the philosophers of the last century were always seeking and never finding, and which, after all, consists, perhaps, in not thinking yourself either better or worse than your neighbors by reason of any artificial distinction. As I sat behind them at the concert the other night, I was profoundly touched by the feelings of this kingship without mantle and crown from the property-room of the old world. Their dignity was in their very neighborliness, instead of in their distance.” Certainly in the realm of American literature, there is no one better entitled than Lowell to this “kingship without mantle and crown.”

A CHILD’S THOUGHT OF GOD

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Of all the brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was her father’s favorite, and he encouraged her constantly in her precocious studies and in her childish attempts at composition. Long before she was able to read Homer in the original, she came upon Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and it took a rare hold upon her. She showed its influence and her own bent toward poetry by composing, before she was fourteen, an epic on the “Battle of Marathon,” of which her father, to whom it was dedicated, thought so highly that he had it printed and circulated it among his friends. But she also showed the influence of her beloved Iliad in a much more childish way, of which she has written delightfully in a poem called Hector in the Garden. A great flower bed, roughly shaped like a man and bordered about with turf, was made for her, and this she named after Hector, the Trojan hero and her great favorite.

“Eyes of gentianellas azure,
Staring, winking at the skies;
Nose of gillyflowers and box;
Scented grasses put for locks,
Which a little breeze at pleasure
Set a-waving round his eyes.”

“Brazen helm of daffodillies,
With a glitter toward the light;
Purple violets for the mouth,
Breathing perfumes west and south;
And a sword of flashing lilies,
Holden ready for the fight.”

“And a breastplate made of daisies,
Closely fitting, leaf on leaf;
Periwinkles interlaced
Drawn for belt about the waist;
While the brown bees, humming praises,
Shot their arrows round the chief.”

It was natural enough that Elizabeth should have wanted to begin the study of Greek; and with the help of her father and of Mr. Boyd, a blind friend of her father’s, she became a most proficient Greek scholar.

When she was fifteen years old she met with an accident which deprived her in part of the out-of-door life and rambles which she had loved, and threw her more than ever upon her books for company. Impatient because a horse which she desired to ride was not ready just when she wanted it, she went out into the field and attempted to saddle it herself. She fell, with the saddle on top of her; and while this did not leave her the invalid she later became, it weakened her and made her an easy prey to the troubles which afterward came upon her.

That Pope, as well as Homer, left his mark on Miss Barrett was shown by her first published volume, which was brought out when she was about twenty. It was entitled An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems, and the poem which gave its name to the book was quite after the manner of Pope. This poem, while remarkable for a girl of Miss Barrett’s age, contained little freshness or originality, and she spoke of it afterwards as having been “long repented of as worthy of all repentance.”

In 1828 Mrs. Barrett died, and left Elizabeth, the eldest of the ten children, with much of the responsibility of the family. Since her death came before her daughter reached fame or began that voluminous correspondence from which have been gathered most of the facts of her life, little can be known of the mother’s character, or of her influence on her daughter. That Miss Barrett was devotedly attached to her mother, however, is to be seen from a sentence in one of her letters. “Her memory,” she says, “is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind!”

The beloved home at Hope End was sold in 1832, owing, apparently to some fall in the family fortunes, and the Barretts removed to Sidmouth, in Devonshire. The life there was uneventful, as the life at Hope End had been. Miss Barrett, in writing later of herself, declared that “a bird in a cage would have as good a story.” But she was by no means idle, for her Greek studies and her writing kept her busy and happy. While at Sidmouth, she brought out a translation of the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, a version with which she was so dissatisfied that she later replaced it, in her collected works, with another.

For three years the Barretts lived at Sidmouth, and their removal to London, in 1835, made important changes in Elizabeth’s life. Her health, never good since her fifteenth year, broke down, and from some date shortly after the arrival in London she became an apparently hopeless invalid, confined to her room and often to her bed. Some compensation for this confinement, however, she found in the new friends, few, indeed, but devoted and congenial, who were admitted to her sick room. Chief among these friends of her earlier London years were John Kenyon, a distant cousin, and Mary Russell Mitford, author of Our Village. Miss Mitford made the acquaintance of Miss Barrett in one of the latter’s rare appearances in society, and she has left an account of the meeting and a description of Miss Barrett which is famous.

“She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend ... that the translatress of the Prometheus of Æschylus, the authoress of the Essay on Mind, was old enough to be introduced into company,—in technical language, was ‘out.’”

Although Miss Mitford was nineteen years older than Miss Barrett, the friendship which sprang up between them was most close, and lasted until Miss Mitford’s death in 1855. Their correspondence was constant and voluminous, as was that, in fact, of Miss Barrett with all of her intimate friends. These letters of hers from her sick room are no more remarkable for number than for brightness and vivacity. Little mention is made of her ailments, except when her friends have specifically demanded news of her health, and the letters deal rather with literary than with other subjects. This was, of course, most natural; the invalid could have little news to communicate from her couch to her friends in the outer world. Her literary activity, too, increased, and she began to contribute to magazines poems of various kinds, which attracted much attention. Not all comment on them was favorable; the people declared that some of them were Sphinx-like—too difficult, if not impossible, of interpretation. But every one realized that here was a real poet, one of striking individuality, and, for a woman, most remarkable learning.

By the autumn of 1838, her health had become so much worse that the doctor ordered removal to a warmer climate, and she was taken to Torquay, where she remained for three years. Her father and her brothers and sisters visited her there from time to time, but her constant companion was her brother Edward, who had all her life been her favorite. What little good Torquay seemed to be doing her was more than overbalanced by a tragedy which occurred in the summer of 1840. Her brother, with two of his friends, went for a sail in a small boat, intending to be absent only until evening. When they did not return, inquiry was set on foot, and it was learned that a small boat had been seen to founder in Babbicombe Bay. The fears caused by this report became certainty three days later, on the recovery of the bodies. The effect on Miss Barrett may be partially imagined. Not only had she lost her best-loved companion, but she was haunted by the morbid feeling that she had caused his death, since he had come to Torquay only to be with her. Twelve years afterward she wrote: “I have lived heart to heart with my husband these five years. I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips.”

Naturally her health suffered greatly from the shock, and it was thought that she could not possibly live more than a few months. Quite unexpectedly, however, she began to improve; it seemed that the desire to quit Torquay, which had grown unendurable to her since the tragedy, gave her strength of body. During the spring and summer of 1841 she was able to resume work on translations, compositions, plans for new poems. Indeed, it was this which saved her, for she wrote some time later to a friend—“I do believe I should be mad at this moment, if I had not forced back the current of rushing recollections by work, work, work.”

After her return to London in the autumn of 1841, her life went on as before—or rather, stood still as before. From her couch she continued to send forth the poems which were bringing her ever-increasing fame, and the letters which were binding her friends closer to her. But an event was drawing nearer, which was from the first an event and not an episode in Miss Barrett’s life. In January, 1845, we find her writing “And I had a letter from Browning the poet last night, which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, and the king of mystics;” and a little later she says, “I am getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic, and we are growing to be the truest friends.”

Robert Browning had felt and expressed great admiration for Miss Barrett’s poems and an allusion to himself in her Lady Geraldine’s Courtship gave him an excuse for addressing her. Their correspondence flourished, and they rapidly passed from regarding each other as mere acquaintances, to looking upon each other as friends. In fact, there seems to have been from the very first an almost mystical attraction between them. Miss Barrett might have contented herself all her life with this delightfully personal and literary correspondence, but Browning soon grew impatient and expressed his desire to see her. The admission of a new friend to Miss Barrett’s room was at no time a thing to be undertaken lightly, so hedged about was she by the care of her family; and in this case she herself seems to have hesitated long before allowing Browning to call, for the very feminine reason that “there is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me.” Had she known Browning better, she would have realized that his determination would carry him past all obstacles; and so, indeed, it did.

On May 20, 1845, they met for the first time, and within a short time his friendship for her had ripened into love, and he asked her to marry him. She herself told, in a letter to a friend after her marriage, the story of her courtship.

“He came, and with our personal acquaintance began his attachment for me, a sort of infatuation call it, which resisted the various denials which were my plain duty at the beginning, and has persisted past them all. I began with the grave assurance that I was in an exceptional position and saw him just in consequence of it, and that if he ever recurred to that subject again, I never could see him again while I lived; and he believed me and was silent. To my mind, indeed, it was a bare impulse—a generous man of quick sympathies taking up a sudden interest with both hands.”

Browning was, as she said, silent, but he was not discouraged, and his letters, his visits, his flowers, at length convinced Miss Barrett that his feeling was something more than a “bare impulse.”

“So then,” she continued, “I showed him how he was throwing into the ashes his best affections—how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me—how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life—everything I told him and showed him. ‘Look at this—and this—and this,’ throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide; but that he loved me, and should to his last hour.* * * He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world.”

What Robert Browning wanted so much, it was a foregone conclusion that he would have; and Miss Barrett was at last brought to consent to an engagement. But the difficulties were just begun. Mr. Barrett, adored as he was by his daughter, was more than a little tyrannical, especially with his favorite daughter. His family all well knew that he would never under any circumstances be brought to consent to the marriage of any of his children; and he had, moreover, in the case of Elizabeth, the appearance of reason on his side, in that she was, in the opinion of her family and of most of her medical advisers, a hopeless invalid, unfit to be moved. “A life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth.” Browning believed otherwise, and events showed that he was right.

In the autumn of 1845, the doctors advised that Miss Barrett be taken to Italy, declaring, in fact, that her life depended upon it. Some of her brothers or sisters could easily have accompanied her; there was no lack of money, and the journey was actually planned. For no apparent reason, however, Mr. Barrett refused his consent—said that his daughter should not leave his house. In vain the family argued; in vain a generous friend offered to accompany Miss Barrett, paying all expenses. He was brutally firm. Much hurt by this selfishness and disregard for her life, Miss Barrett promised Browning that if she lived through the winter and were no worse in the following year, she would marry him without her father’s consent, for which they knew it was useless to ask. Accordingly, on September 12, 1846, she walked out of her father’s house, accompanied only by her maid, was married and returned home. One week later she joined her husband, and they set out for Italy, their future home. Mr. Barrett never forgave his daughter, and his unrelenting anger was a deep sorrow to her, in the midst of her great life happiness.

The Brownings went first to Pisa, and from there to Florence, which they afterward regarded as their home, though they made many excursions and spent seasons elsewhere. Mrs. Browning grew so much better that a friend said to her, “You are not improved, you are transformed;” and while she was never strong and was often very ill, she never again sank back to the state in which she had been before her marriage. The happiness which shows in her letters is wonderful. “As for me,” she writes, “when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection, which is worthy of all adoration.” And again, “If I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness.”

Mrs. Browning, like her husband, loved Italy, and especially Florence, and many of her poems, notably the Casa Guidi Windows, deal with Italian subjects. Of the poems published after her marriage, however, none are more exquisite than the series of Sonnets from the Portuguese. These sonnets, which are not translations, and to which the name From the Portuguese was given simply as a blind, describe her uncertainty and her joy in the love which was hers.

In 1849 another joy came to her. On March 9th of that year a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning was born, and from that time on her letters, quite like the letters of any unliterary mother, are full of the wonderful doings of this child. Not that her interest in things literary flagged in the least; she read everything which the libraries of Italy afforded, or which her friends could send to her—novels, for which she confessed to a great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, Aurora Leigh, was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals Mrs. Browning’s self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself most willing to be judged.

Broken by several trips to England and by excursions to the most beautiful parts of Italy, the years slipped by in uneventful happiness. Many friends visited the Brownings, and all came away wondering and delighted at the perfect family life they had been allowed to witness. Frail always, Mrs. Browning was spoken of by acquaintances in her later years as seeming “scarce embodied at all.”

In June, 1861, Mrs. Browning had an attack of bronchial trouble and on the night of the twenty-ninth, alone in the room with her husband, she died; and one writer says “none ever saw Browning upon earth again, but only a splendid surface.” Mrs. Browning was buried at Florence, the city she had loved. Upon the wall of Casa Guidi, the building in which she had lived, the citizens, grateful for her love and understanding of them, placed a marble tablet in her memory.

The wonderful thing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning is that from her weakness should have come poems of such strength. There was nothing morbid in the words which came from her hushed, darkened sick room. Indeed, her spirit was never tamed, and she herself confessed that one of her faults was “head-longness;” that she snatched parcels open instead of untying the string, and tore letters instead of cutting them. In Browning’s poems, which contain numerous beautiful allusions to her, there is nothing more beautiful and more descriptive than the lines—

“O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire.”

DON QUIXOTE

Cervantes had written verses before the beginning of his military career, but had won no name for himself. By 1583, however, he seems to have determined to devote the rest of his life to literature, and in that year he again began writing verses. For a number of years he earned his livelihood by writing for the stage, but few of his plays survive.

In 1605 there appeared the first part of the work which made Cervantes famous, and which has kept his name before the world ever since. This was the inimitable Don Quixote, which gives the burlesque adventures of the self-styled “Knight of the Rueful Countenance.” This book was not intended to satirize knight-errantry itself, for that had long before died out in Spain. What it did aim to do was to make ridiculous the romances of chivalry over which all Spain at the time of Cervantes seemed to have gone mad. How well Cervantes succeeded in his aim may be known from the fact that after the appearance of his masterpiece, no new romance of chivalry was published in Spain.

The hero of this great work, Don Quixote, is presented as the most courteous and affable of gentlemen, wise on all points except those pertaining to chivalry. It was not only, however, the masterly drawing of the characters of Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, which made the book popular; the inexhaustible fund of humor has made it to the present day a book which every one delights to read.

The following selections from Don Quixote describe some of the typical adventures of the gallant “Knight of the Rueful Countenance,” and will serve to give the reader an idea of the book.

DON QUIXOTE PREPARES TO SET OUT ON HIS ADVENTURES

In a village of La Mancha there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla433-1 of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of fine cloth, and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week days he made a brave figure in his best homespun. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook. The age of this gentlemen of ours was bordering on fifty, he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman. They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quixana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair’s breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardor and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage-land to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get.

* * * * * * * * * * *

In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honor as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armor and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion.434-2 This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus435-3 of Alexander or the Babieca of the Cid.435-4 Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he was now, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.436-5

Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself Don Quixote, whence, as has been already said, the authors of this veracious history have inferred that his name must have been beyond a doubt Quixada, and not Quesada as others would have it. Recollecting, however, that the valiant Amadis436-6 was not content to call himself curtly Amadis and nothing more, but added the name of his kingdom and country to make it famous, and called himself Amadis of Gaul, he, like a good knight, resolved to add on the name of his, and to style himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, whereby, he considered, he described accurately his origin and country, and did honor to it in taking his surname from it.

So then, his armor being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul. As he said to himself, “If, for my sins, or by my good fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue him, will it not be well to have some one I may send him to as a present, that he may come in and fall on his knees before my sweet lady, and in a humble, submissive voice say, ‘I am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania, vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure’?” Oh, how our good gentleman enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially when he had thought of some one to call his Lady! There was, so the story goes, in a village near his own a very good-looking farm girl with whom he had been at one time in love, though, so far as is known, she never knew it nor gave a thought to the matter. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name which should not be out of harmony with his own, and should suggest and indicate that of a princess and great lady, he decided upon calling her Dulcinea del Toboso—she being of El Toboso—a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE WINDMILLS

Upon the plain they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza,438-1 where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.

“Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.”

“Look, your worship,” said Sancho, “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.”

“It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou art not used to this business of adventures: those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.”