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Authors: Laurence Lerner
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have been a consideration, perhaps the main one.
There is so much enthusiasm for living, learning, and observing in her journal, and she was so obviously a fluent and relaxed writer, that the occasional gloomy entries come with a real shock. The first of these occurs less than a year before the end:
Journalizing has lost its interest with me. I am dreary, dispirited, and ill. The only occupation I pursue with any interest is that of increasing my knowledge of chronology. I have in the last few days learned perfectly a hundred dates.
The gloom did not last: on the very next day she is reading Nichol's book on the solar system with obvious interest, and by the following week she records that in reading Nichol, "astonishment, delight, admiration, almost overpowered my imagination and thoughts." On 29 January 1839 she writes:
While they went to church in the morning, I was as usual left alone, and sank into a long melancholy reverie on subjects which will intrude themselves whenever I am alone. I ought to esteem myself happy; but all the enjoyment of happiness is gone, and cannot return . There is nothing in Madiera which is dear to me; the land, the people, are new and unknown and strange. Nay, it makes no little difference to me that in every room of the house I look round on strange furniture, which belongs to another, instead of our own, which I remember from earliest childhood. Oh there are moments when visions start up before me of sweet well-known spotswoods where the anemone and bluebell grow; streams shaded with ash-trees and hawthorn, where I have wandered alone in early spring mornings, on violets and primroses and grass drenched with dew, myself the happiest of the happy, listening to the songs of the birds, and shaking over me a shower of bright drops, as I gathered the branches of the willow or bullace. Oh, how many happy hours, which seem to me but as yesterday, start up in contrast with the present! I live it all over again, and I cannot avoid weeping. There is no language to describe the sharp pain of past and regretted happiness. I was much happier as a child than I am now, or ever shall be.
Page 35
That is the most moving passage in her journal, yet perhaps nothing in it has the bleakness of that account of her learning a hundred dates because a purely mechanical, even pointless, task, is all she can bring herself to perform. This passage was written six months before her death on July 7, andd though she went on writing until a fortnight before the end, there is nothing as extended or powerful as this. It surely owes much of its impact to the fact that it is less about impending death than about actual illness: future experience can (obviously) never be as real as present experience. At times, indeed, it hardly seems to be about illness but simply about growing up, about the nostalgic vision of lost childhood, the "meadow grove and stream apparelled in celestial lightthe glory and the freshness of a dream." We could even claim that Wordsworth's celestial light is less immediate than the shower of bright drops that falls from a very earthly tree on the young Emily.
As befits a clergyman's dutiful daughter, there are elements of piety, but there is very little about a future life. She asks God to be merciful to her a sinner, she praises God for "giving me such excellent parents," but she does not seem to anticipate union with God, and no light is shining on her as she goes. Her final entry, after a few brief, telling details, looks forward not to her own future, but to being remembered:
I suppose I am beginning to sink; still I can at times take up my pen. I have had my long back hair cut off. Dear Papa wears a chain of it. Mamma will have one too.
In one sense at least, this is the most actual of all the child deaths. Emily was no longer a child, but at nineteen she remembered her childhood with such intensity that we can feel that the Emily who is dying is not the young adult who is writing the journal;
There is so much enthusiasm for living, learning, and observing in her journal, and she was so obviously a fluent and relaxed writer, that the occasional gloomy entries come with a real shock. The first of these occurs less than a year before the end:
Journalizing has lost its interest with me. I am dreary, dispirited, and ill. The only occupation I pursue with any interest is that of increasing my knowledge of chronology. I have in the last few days learned perfectly a hundred dates.
The gloom did not last: on the very next day she is reading Nichol's book on the solar system with obvious interest, and by the following week she records that in reading Nichol, "astonishment, delight, admiration, almost overpowered my imagination and thoughts." On 29 January 1839 she writes:
While they went to church in the morning, I was as usual left alone, and sank into a long melancholy reverie on subjects which will intrude themselves whenever I am alone. I ought to esteem myself happy; but all the enjoyment of happiness is gone, and cannot return . There is nothing in Madiera which is dear to me; the land, the people, are new and unknown and strange. Nay, it makes no little difference to me that in every room of the house I look round on strange furniture, which belongs to another, instead of our own, which I remember from earliest childhood. Oh there are moments when visions start up before me of sweet well-known spotswoods where the anemone and bluebell grow; streams shaded with ash-trees and hawthorn, where I have wandered alone in early spring mornings, on violets and primroses and grass drenched with dew, myself the happiest of the happy, listening to the songs of the birds, and shaking over me a shower of bright drops, as I gathered the branches of the willow or bullace. Oh, how many happy hours, which seem to me but as yesterday, start up in contrast with the present! I live it all over again, and I cannot avoid weeping. There is no language to describe the sharp pain of past and regretted happiness. I was much happier as a child than I am now, or ever shall be.
Page 35
That is the most moving passage in her journal, yet perhaps nothing in it has the bleakness of that account of her learning a hundred dates because a purely mechanical, even pointless, task, is all she can bring herself to perform. This passage was written six months before her death on July 7, andd though she went on writing until a fortnight before the end, there is nothing as extended or powerful as this. It surely owes much of its impact to the fact that it is less about impending death than about actual illness: future experience can (obviously) never be as real as present experience. At times, indeed, it hardly seems to be about illness but simply about growing up, about the nostalgic vision of lost childhood, the "meadow grove and stream apparelled in celestial lightthe glory and the freshness of a dream." We could even claim that Wordsworth's celestial light is less immediate than the shower of bright drops that falls from a very earthly tree on the young Emily.
As befits a clergyman's dutiful daughter, there are elements of piety, but there is very little about a future life. She asks God to be merciful to her a sinner, she praises God for "giving me such excellent parents," but she does not seem to anticipate union with God, and no light is shining on her as she goes. Her final entry, after a few brief, telling details, looks forward not to her own future, but to being remembered:
I suppose I am beginning to sink; still I can at times take up my pen. I have had my long back hair cut off. Dear Papa wears a chain of it. Mamma will have one too.
In one sense at least, this is the most actual of all the child deaths. Emily was no longer a child, but at nineteen she remembered her childhood with such intensity that we can feel that the Emily who is dying is not the young adult who is writing the journal;
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