Paschal Beverly Randolph - His Early Days-- The Strange Legend lyrics

And there sat the man at the side of the road—sat there mournfully, silently weeping—the strange man!—as if his heart would break, and not from slight cause was he sorrowing. Not from present want of food, shelter, or raiment, but because his heart was full, and its fountains overflowing. The world had called him a genius, and as such had petted, praised, admired, and starved him all at once; but not one grain of true sympathy all the while; not a single spark of true disinterested friendship. The great multitude had gathered about him as city sight-seers gather round the last new novelty in the museum—a child with two heads, a dog with two tails, or the Japanese mermaid—duly compounded of codfish and monkey—and then, satisfied with their inspection, they turned from, and left him in all his deep loneliness and misery, all the more bitter for the transient light of sympathy thrown momentarily upon him. Genius must be sympathetically treated, else it eats its own heart, and daily dies a painful, lingering d**h. Throwing aside all his theories about preëxistence, and triple life, as being too recondite for either my readers or myself, we come at once to his natural, matter-of-fact history. At eight years of age he had been christened in the Roman Catholic Church, by the name of Beverly. From his father our hero inherited little save a lofty spirit, an ambitious, restless nature, and a susceptibility to pa**ional emotions, so great that it was a permanent and positive influence during his entire life. His fifth year began and completed the only school education the boy ever had, and for all his subsequent attainments in that direction he was indebted to his own unaided exertions. His father loved him little; his mother loved him as the apple of her eye—and all the more because being born with a full and complete set of teeth, old gossips and venerable grey-beards augured a strange and eventful career; beside which, certain singular spectral visitations and experiences of his mother, ere, and shortly after the young eyes opened on the world, convinced her that he was born to no common destiny—much of which has already been detailed at length in “Dhoula Bel: or the Magic Globe.” Two or three and twenty years prior to the opening of this tale, there lived at what then was No. 70 Can*l street, New York city, a woman whose complexion was that of a Mississippi octoroon. She was a native of Vermont, had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in the State, if indeed she was surpa**ed anywhere. Her mind was as rich in its stores and resources as her person was in feminine graces. Her life up to that time had been a checkered, and in the main, a very unhappy one, for her refinement, nature, education, character and acquirements, were such as to demand a broader, higher, better social sphere than what, from pecuniary want, she now occupied and moved in. Another cause of unrest was that she was maritally mismatched altogether, for her husband, after years of absence, during which she had deemed him dead, and contracted a second alliance with the father of her boy, had suddenly returned, and never from that moment did she receive one particle of what her heart yearned for—that domestic love and sympathy, ever the matron's due, and which alone can render life a blessing, and smooth the rugged, thorny pathway to the tomb. Flora Beverly claimed immediate kindred with the red-skinned sons of the northern wilderness, but that blood in her veins mingled with the finer current derived from her ancestor, the Cid—a strain of royal blood that in the foretime had nerved noble-souled men to deeds of valor, and fired the souls of Spanish poets to lofty achievements in the rosy fields of immortal song. She had been tenderly reared—perhaps too much so—for her strange and wonderful beauty, flashing out upon the world from her large and lustrous eyes, and beaming forth from every feature and movement, had been such that she had become marked in community from early childhood, and her parents, looking upon her as a special providence to them, had unwisely cultured qualities in her that had better have been held in abeyance. By over-care and morbid solicitude they had nearly spoiled God's handiwork, and she grew up an imperious, self-willed, exacting, and sensitive queen. She married, and expected to find herself the centre of a realm of unalloyed joy and delight, wherein her reign would be undisputed. The man she wedded took her for her beauty, expecting to realize a perfect heaven in its possession. Both were bitterly disappointed. The man could appreciate only the external and superficial qualities and excellences of his wife, while her inner, higher, better self—her soul, was a terra incognita to him, which, like so many other husbands, he never even once dreamed of exploring; he had no idea whatever of the inestimable qualities of her heart, intellect, or spirit, and he had never found out that her body is the least a woman gives away—that she has gifts so regal for the man she loves, that glittering diamonds are sparkless, insipid, valueless in comparison. And so, the first delirious joy-month over, they both began to awaken—the man to the fact that to him his wife was a “very pretty doll,” the woman that her husband was—a brute, whose soul slept soundly beneath the coverlets of sense, and herself its victim and minister. It was horrible; she lost heart, she despised this surface man, and sunk and lost bloom beneath the terrible weight of the discovery and its fearful results. Married, she had expected to move in a sphere very far above that which, by the laws of moral and mental gravity, she was compelled to occupy. Her horizon was henceforth to be bounded by that of her master and his a**ociates. Her husband was vain of his conquest, and one of his greatest joys was found in parading and showing off her beauty to the best advantage, like a jockey does a fine horse—and feeling, jockey-like the while, “all this is mine!” Neither himself nor his a**ociates in life could appreciate that more than royal loveliness which dwells within the breasts of educated and refined women—a beauty which eye hath never seen, which eye can never see, but which, like soft and delicate perfume, radiates from such to all who are fine enough to perceive it. As a matter of course, she soon grew weary and disgusted with this surface-life. Feeling that she was unappreciated by the living thousands around her, she, with the true instinct of the Indian, spurned their contact, fell back upon herself, and then, with every tendril of her soul, turned and yearned toward the teeming millions of the dead. She invoked them to her aid, and religiously believed her prayers answered—as I do—and delivering herself up wholly to their weird care and guidance, thenceforward lived a double life—a shadow-life in the world, a real life in the phantom land. True to the natural instinct of the human heart, just in proportion as she withdrew from the world, so did she approach that awful veil which is only uplifted for the sons and daughters of sorrow and the starbeam. She became a seeress, a dreamer, and, in what to her was an actual, positive communion with the lordly ghosts of the dead nations, whereof, in both lines, her forefathers had been chiefs, she sought that sympathy in her sorrows, and in her strange internal joys—that mysterious balm of healing, which the red man in his religion—or superstition, if you will—believes can only thus and there be had. And she found what she sought, or what to the spontaneous and impulsive soul amounts to the same thing, believed that she had found it. At first she had some difficulty in correctly translating into her human language of heart and word that which she took to be the low whisperings of the aërial dwellers of the viewless kingdom of Manatou. She ardently longed for a more open intercourse with the dead, and, as herein stated, as well as in “Dhoula Bel,” was gratified. Poor Flora! half-child of Nature and of Art, was destined to bear a child, and that child the man of these volumes—in the very midst of the conditions here sketched, under these conditions he was born. As already stated, beneath this woman's heart there slumbered the fires of a volcano, intense, fervent, quenchless, the result alike of her peculiar ancestry and peculiar training. Her full soul became re-incarnate in the son she bore; and with it she endowed the child with her own intense desire to love and be loved; all her mystic spirit, her love of mystery; all her unearthly aspiration toward unearthly a**ociation; all her resolute, yet half-desponding, quick, impulsive, pa**ionate, generous nature; all, all, found in him a local habitation and a name, and that name was Genius. Thus moulded came he into the world, doomed from birth to strange and bitter experiences—to face alone and unfriended the bitter blasts of wintry storms, and the burning heats of summer suns; to cling to the hope of speedy d**h, all the while grasping existence with ten-fold the tenacity of others, yet daily pleading for life—strange contradiction!—dear life, at the world's stern bar; pleading daily, yet as often losing his suit, and being by that world sentenced to be utterly cast adrift on the fickle tide of Fate and Chance, and that too with a mind and body acutely sensitive, and constantly at war with each other. Compensation is a universal principle. While so alive to pain, he was equally so to the jouissant emotions, and his delights, when they came, were keen, fine, exquisite, to a remarkable degree. As throwing some light on the character of this man—who is not a myth, but an actual existence—I will here repeat the substance of an account himself gave of his early life and weird and ghostly experiences. He had been questioned in regard to certain powers of an unusual kind attributed to him, and the following reply was elicited: “When I was a very young child, my mother dwelt in a large, sombre and gloomy old stone house on Manhattan Island. At that time New York was about one quarter as large as at present, and that house was a long way out of town. It still stands in the same place, but the city has grown miles beyond it. The building, in times of pestilence, fever, smallpox, and cholera, had been used as a pest-house, or lazaretto, and in it thousands have died of those diseases, and from there, in my fifth year, the soul of my mother took its everlasting flight. “Scores of people there were ready to testify on oath that the old house was haunted by ghosts, who strode grimly and silently through the solemn, stately halls of that ma**ive island castle. But it generally happened that the witnesses of these spectral visitants had neither time nor inclination to cultivate their acquaintance—save one, an apothecary named Banker, who cursed and swore at one of them on a certain occasion, whereupon the ghost slapped his face, and completely turned and withered his lower jaw by way of punishment for the leze majeste. With this exception, those who met one of these ghosts, invariably had urgent business in an opposite direction, and it was quite surprising with what wonderful speed lame persons got over the ground whenever a ghost was declared to be around, by those who being born with a ‘caul' over the face, were thereby endowed with the spectre-seeing faculty; and as such gifted ones could see, I used often to wish I could meet some who had been born with two cauls, so that they might speak to as well as see them. “Some people do not believe in ghosts. I do, ghosts of various kinds. I. It is possible to project an image of one's self, which image may be seen by another however distant. II. The phantasmal projections of heated fancy—spectral illusion—the results of cerebral fever, as in drunken delirium, opium and other fantasies. III. The spirits of dead men. IV. Spiritual beings from other planets. V. Beings from original worlds, who have not died, but who, nevertheless, are of so fine texture as to defy the material laws which we are compelled to obey, and who, coming under the operation of those that govern disembodied men, are enabled to do all that they do. VI. I believe that human beings, by the action of desperate, wicked wills, frequently call into being spectral harpies—the horrible embodiment of their evil thoughts. These are demons, subsisting so long as their creators are under the domination of the evil. VII. I believe in a similar creation emanating from good thoughts of good people, lovely out-creations of aspiring souls. Remember these seven. This is a clear statement of the Rosicrucian doctrine of the higher order of their temple. In the lower, these seven pa** under the names of Gnomes, Dwarfs, Sylphs, Salamanders, Nereiads, Driads and Fays. “One day, when I was about five years old, I returned from school, and found the clayey vestment—the fleshly form of the only friend I ever had, my mother, cold and prone in the arms of icy cold, unrelenting d**h. Ah! what a shock was that to my poor little childish heart! She had that morning grown weary of earth, had serenely, trustingly closed her darling eyes, and I was left alone to battle single-handed against four mighty and powerful enemies—Prejudice, Poverty and Organization were three of them. The fourth is almost too terrible, too wild and fanciful to be credited, yet I will state it: THE LEGEND. “Many, very many centuries ago, there lived on the soil where in subsequent ages stood Babylon and Nineveh the first, a mighty king, whose power was great and undisputed. He was wise, well-learned and eccentric. He had a daughter lovely beyond all description. She was as learned as she was beautiful. Kings and princes sought her hand in vain; for her father had sworn to give her to no man save him who should solve a riddle which the king himself would propound, and solve it at the first trial, under penalty of decapitation on failure. The riddle was this, ‘What are the three most desirable things beneath the sun, that are not the sun, yet which dwell within the sun?' Thousands of the gay, the grave, the sage and ambitious who essayed the solution, and failed, left the presence to mount the horse of d**h. “In the meantime, proclamation was made far and wide, declaring that robes of crimson, chains of gold, the first place in the kingdom and the princess should be the reward of the lucky man. “One day there came to the court a very rich and royal emba**y from the King of the South, seeking an alliance, and propounding new treaties; and among the suite was a young Basinge poet, who acted as interpreter to the emba**y. This youth heard of the singular state of things, learned the conditions, and got the riddle by heart. For four long months did he ponder upon and study it, revolving in his mind all sorts of answers, but without finding any that fulfilled the three requisites. “In order to study more at his ease, the youth was in the habit of retiring to a grotto behind the palace, and there repeating to himself the riddle and all sorts of possible responses thereto. The princess hearing of this, determined to watch him, and did so. Now, poets must sing, and this one was particularly addicted to that sort of exercise; and he made it a point to imagine all sorts of perfections as residing in the princess, and he sung his songs daily in the grotto—sung himself desperately in love with his ideal, and so inflamed the girl herself, who had managed to both see and hear him, herself unseen, that she loved him dearer than life. Here, then, were two people made wretched by a whim. “Love and song are very good in their places, but, for a steady diet, are not comparable to many other things; and, as this couple fed on little else, they both pined sadly and rapidly away. “At length, one day, the youth fell asleep in the grotto, and his head rested directly over a fissure in the rock through which there issued a very fine and subtle vapor, which had the effect of throwing the young man in a trance, during which he fancied he saw the princess herself, unveiled, and more lovely than the flowers that bloomed in the king's garden. He also thought he saw an inscription, which bade him despair not, but TRY! and, at the same time, there flowed into his mind this sentence, which subsequently became the watchword of the mystic fraternity which, for some centuries, has been known as that of the Rosie Cross—‘There is no difficulty to him who truly wills.' Along with this there came a solution of the king's riddle, which he remembered when he awoke, and instantly proclaimed his readiness to attempt that which had cost so many adventurers their lives. “Accordingly, the grandest preparations—including a man with a drawn blade ready to make the poet shorter by the head if he failed—were made, and, at an appointed hour, all the court, the princess included, convened in the largest hall of the palace. The poet advanced to the foot of the throne, and there knelt, saying, ‘O king, live for ever! What three things are more desirable than Life, Light and Love? What three are more inseparable? and what better cometh from the sun, yet is not the sun? O king! is thy riddle answered?' ‘True!' said the king; ‘you have solved it, and my word shall be kept!' And he straightway gave commands to have the marriage celebrated in royal style, albeit, through the influence of a high court official, he hated poets in general, and this one particularly so, because he thought the young man had foiled him in one of the treaties just made. Now, it so happened that the grand vizier had hoped by some means to get a solution of the riddle, and secure the great prizes for a young son of his own; and, as soon as the divan was closed, that very day, he hastened to the closet of the king, and there still further poisoned the mind of his master against the victor, by charging him with having succeeded through the aid of sorcery, which so enraged the king that he readily agreed to remove the claimant by means of a speedy, secret, and cruel d**h that very night, to which end the poet was drugged in his wine at the evening banquet, conveyed to a couch openly, and almost immediately thereafter removed to the chamber allotted to the refractory servants of the court. This apartment was under ground, and the youth, being thrown violently on the floor, revived, and was astonished to find himself bound hand and foot in presence of the king, his vizier, a few soldiers, and—d**h; for he saw at a glance that his days were numbered. He defended himself from the charge of sorcery, but in vain. He was doomed to die, and the order given, when, just as the blow was about to fall, there appeared the semblance of a gigantic hand, moving as if to stay the uplifted blade; but too late. The sword fell, and, as it reached the neck of the victim, he uttered the awful words, ‘I curse ye all who—' the rest of the sentence was spoken in eternity; but there came a clamor and a clangor as of a thousand protesting spectral voices, and one of them said, in tones of thunder, ‘This youth, by persistence of will, had unbarred the gates between this world and that of mystery. He was the first of his and thy race that ever achieved so great an honor. And ye have slain him, and he hath cursed thee, by reason of which thou, O king! and thou, O vizier! and the dead man, have all changed the human for another nature. The first shall go down the ages, transmigrating from form to form. Thou, O vizier! shall also exist till thou art forgiven;—DHOULA BEL shall be thy name; and thou shalt tempt the king through long ages, and be foiled whenever the youth—who shall be called the STRANGER—shall so will, for the sake of the love he bore thy daughter. This drama shall last and be until a son of Adam shall wed with a daughter of Ish, or thou, king, in one of the phases of thy being, shall love, and be truly, fully loved again, and for thyself alone. An eternity may elapse ere then!' ” “Ask me not,” said the young Beverly, “why, but believe me when I say that I know that ages ago I was that king; that the Stranger has been seen by my mother; that Dhoula Bel still haunts and tempts me for the sin of ages. I know the fate impending over me, and that in this my present form I am a neutral being, for whom there is no hope save through the union of myself, a son of Adam's race, with a daughter of Ish, one not of Adam's race.... This, then, is the dreadful fate to which I was left so pitilessly exposed on the morning that my mother died on Manhattan Island—left to pay the penalty of a crime committed thousands of years ago.”