XII. OTTERBURN 459

give here this one passage of his childhood. His father was a young pastor, crowned in perfectness of faithful service, together with his “modest, calm, thrifty, reasonable, happy-hearted” wife, his student-love; this their son, five years old,-just at the age when I look back to the creation of the world, for me, in Friar’s Crag, of Derwent-water;¹ my mother, thrifty and reasonable also, meantime taking care that not more than two plums should be in my pie for dinner; my father, also thrifty and reasonable, triumphing in his travel at Whitehaven, a “wanderer,” like the pedlar in the Excursion,² selling sherry instead of bobbins;-all of us as happy as cicadas (and a little more).

228. Now hear Dr. John Brown:³-

“On the morning of the 28th May, 1816, my eldest sister Janet and I were sleeping in the kitchen-bed with Tibbie Meek, our only servant. We were all three awakened by a cry of pain-sharp, insufferable, as if one were stung. Years after we two confided to each other, sitting by the burnside, that we thought that ‘great cry’ which arose at midnight in Egypt must have been like it. We all knew whose voice it was, and, in our night-clothes, we ran into the passage, and into the little parlour to the left hand, in which was a closet-bed. We found my father standing before us, erect, his hands clenched in his black hair, his eyes full of misery and amazement, his face white as that of the dead. He frightened us. He saw this, or else his intense will had mastered his agony, for, taking his hands from his head, he said, slowly and gently, ‘Let us give thanks,’ and turned to a little sofa* in the room; there lay our mother, dead. She had long been ailing. I remember her sitting in a shawl,-an Indian one with little dark green spots on a light ground,-and watching her growing pale with what I afterwards knew must have been strong pain. She had, being feverish, slipped out of bed, and ‘grandmother,’ her mother, seeing her ‘change come,’ had called my father, and they two saw her open her blue, kind, and true eyes, ‘comfortable’ to us all ‘as the day’-I remember them better than those of any one I saw yesterday-and, with one faint look of recognition to him, close them till the time of the restitution of all things.”

* “This sofa, which was henceforward sacred in the house, he had always beside him. He used to tell us he set her down upon it when he brought her home to the manse.”

¹ [See above, i. § 107 (p. 94).]

² [See book i. (“The Wanderer”).]

³ [Supplementary Chapter to the Life of Rev. John Brown, D.D. A Letter to Rev. John Cairns, D.D., by John Brown, M.D., 1860, pp. 413-415.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]