Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 | Page 9

but in this circle Jeffrey was adored by men, women, and children alike, on account of his extreme kindliness of disposition. He was almost, to a ridiculous degree, dependent on the love of his friends; and the terms in which he addresses some of them, particularly ladies, sound odd in this commonsense world. Thus, the wife of one of his friends is, 'My sweet, gentle, and long-suffering Sophia.' He pours out his very heart to his correspondents, and with an effect which would reconcile to him the most irascible author he ever scarified. Thus, to his daughter, who had just left him with her husband:--'I happened to go up stairs, and passing into our room, saw the door open of that little one where you used to sleep, and the very bed waiting there for you, so silent and desolate, that all the love, and the miss of you, which fell so sadly on my heart the first night of your desertion, came back upon it so heavily and darkly, that I was obliged to shut myself in, and cry over the recollection, as if all the interval had been annihilated, and that loss and sorrow were still fresh and unsubdued before me; and though the fit went off before long, I feel still that I must vent my heart by telling you of it, and therefore sit down now to write all this to you, and get rid of my feelings, that would otherwise be more likely to haunt my vigils of the night.' Thus, on the death of a sister in his early days:--'A very heavy blow upon us all, and much more so on me than I had believed possible. The habit of seeing her almost every day, and of living together intimately since our infancy, had wound so many threads of affection round my heart, that when they were burst at once, the shock was almost overwhelming. Then, the unequalled gentleness of her disposition, the unaffected worth of her affections, and miraculous simplicity of character and manners, which made her always appear as pure and innocent as an infant, took so firm, though gentle a hold on the heart of every one who approached her, that even those who have been comparatively strangers to her worth, have been greatly affected by her loss.... During the whole of her illness, she looked beautiful; and when I gazed upon her the moment after she had breathed her last, as she lay still, still, and calm, with her bright eyes half closed, and her red lips half open, I thought I had never seen a countenance so lovely. A statuary might have taken her for a model. Poor, dear love! I kissed her cold lips, and pressed her cold, wan, lifeless hand, and would willingly at that moment have put off my own life too, and followed her. When I came here, the sun was rising, and the birds were singing gaily, as I sobbed along the empty streets.'
The sensibility of Jeffrey to all fine expression that comes to us through the medium of literature was intense, most so in his latter days, when his whole character seems to have undergone a mellowing process. While pining under his greatness as Lord Advocate, and an authority in parliament (1833), he says: 'If it were not for my love of beautiful nature and poetry, my heart would have died within me long ago. I never felt before what immeasurable benefactors these same poets are to their kind, and how large a measure, both of actual happiness and prevention of misery, they have imparted to the race. I would willingly give up half my fortune, and some little fragments of health and bodily enjoyment that yet remain to me, rather than that Shakspeare should not have lived before me.' Who that had only read his lively, acute articles in the formal Review, could have believed him to be so deeply sympathetic with an unfortunate poet, as he shews in the following fine passage in one of his letters (1837)? 'In the last week, I have read all Burns's Life and Works--not without many tears, for the life especially. What touches me most, is the pitiable poverty in which that gifted being (and his noble-minded father) passed his early days--the painful frugality to which their innocence was doomed, and the thought how small a share of the useless luxuries in which we (such comparatively poor creatures) indulge, would have sufficed to shed joy and cheerfulness in their dwellings, and perhaps to have saved that glorious spirit from the trials and temptations under which he fell so prematurely. Oh! my dear Empson, there must be something terribly wrong in the present arrangements of the universe, when those things can happen, and be thought natural.