Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them,

Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode, and well; Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell,

Rode the six hundred.

Flashed all their sabers bare,
Flashed as they turned in air,
Sabering the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wondered:

Plunged in the battery-smoke, Right through the line they broke; Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the saber-stroke,

Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back - but not,
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade!
Oh, the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

6. THE EAGLE.

FRAGMENT.

He clasps the crag with hookéd hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

XIX. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

LIFE AND WORKS.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born July 18, 1811, at Calcutta, where his father resided as a civil servant of the British East India Company. His mother was Anne Becher, whose father was also in the Company's service. She married early, and was only nineteen when her son William Makepeace was born.

He was brought a child from India, and was sent early to the famous Charter House School in London. A schoolfellow speaks of him at this time as "a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy." Though he had afterwards a scholarlike knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction in the school. With the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular; but he had no skill in games, or taste for them. While still a schoolboy he became known for his skill in making verses, chiefly parodies. One of these was a parody on a poem of L. E. L.'s, about "Violets, dark blue violets." Thackeray's version was "Cabbages, bright green cabbages," and his classmates thought it very witty.

When eighteen years of age (1829), Thackeray was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. A little periodical called The Snob was, during that year, brought out in Cambridge, and Thackeray took a hand in editing it. Tennyson was at this time in his last year at Trinity; and it will be remembered, that, in our sketch of the poet, it was mentioned that Tennyson that year won the chancellor's medal for a prize poem on "Timbuc

too." In The Snob, Thackeray published some burlesque lines on the prize subject. In two of the stanzas there is fairly good fun; as,

[blocks in formation]

Men's skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled;
And somewhere there, unknown to public view,
A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.

I see her tribes the hill of glory mount,
And sell their sugars on their own account;

While round her throne the prostrate nations come,
Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum."

After a year's study at Cambridge, Thackeray was withdrawn from college; and he spent the next two years at Weimar and in Paris, studying drawing, it being the desire of his heart to become an artist.

Though he never learned to draw in the technical sense, he acquired a peculiar talent for making effective sketches. Later on, he illustrated his own books; and these plates, while very incorrect as delineations, are excellent as illustrations.

Dickens has informed us that he first met Thackeray in 1835, on which occasion the young artist aspirant, looking, no doubt, after profitable employment, "proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book." It is singular that such should have been the first interview between the two great novelists. The offer was rejected by "Boz."

When Thackeray came of age (1832), he inherited a considerable fortune; but in a year or two it all passed through his hands, partly from the failure of an India

bank, partly from losses incurred in trying to establish a newspaper in which he was concerned, partly from losses—at cards.

Thus early thrown on his own resources, he was fain to take up literature as a profession. His first regular employment was on Fraser's Magazine, in which he wrote under the invented name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. Such sketches as The Great Hoggarty Diamond revealed at once the hand of a great master. Yet Thackeray met but small appreciation at the time (1837-38) when Dickens, one year his junior, had taken the public by storm with Pickwick and Oliver Twist. Thackeray's fame was of slow growth, and in these early years he had to suffer coldness and rebuffs that sorely tried his sensitive soul.

In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe; and from this union came three daughters. His married life was grievously unhappy, but this was in no wise due to human fault. Says his biographer, Anthony Trollope,

There

"His wife became ill, and her mind failed her. was a period during which he would not believe that her illness was more than illness; and then he clung to her, and waited on her with an assiduity of affection which only made his task the more painful to him. At last it became evident that she should live in the companionship of some one with whom her life might be altogether quiet, and she has since been domiciled with a lady with whom she has been happy. Thus she was, after but a few years of married life, taken away from him, and he became, as it were, a widower till the end of his days."

« НазадПродовжити »