The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford | Page 5

perfect and divine;
Alas! that dream dissolved in tears Before I'd counted twenty years.
For I was ever commonplace; Of genius never had a trace; My thoughts
the world have never fed, Mere echoes of the book last read.
Those whom I knew I cannot blame: If they are cold, I am the same:
How could they ever show to me More than a common courtesy?
There is no deed which I have done; There is no love which I have won,
To make them for a moment grieve That I this night their earth must
leave.
Thus, moaning at the break of day, A man upon his deathbed lay; A
moment more and all was still; The Morning Star came o'er the hill.
But when the dawn lay on his face, It kindled an immortal grace; As if
in death that Life were shown Which lives not in the great alone.
Orion sank down in the west Just as he sank into his rest; I closed in
solitude his eyes, And watched him till the sun's uprise.

CHAPTER I
--CHILDHOOD

Now that I have completed my autobiography up to the present year, I
sometimes doubt whether it is right to publish it. Of what use is it,
many persons will say, to present to the world what is mainly a record
of weaknesses and failures? If I had any triumphs to tell; if I could
show how I had risen superior to poverty and suffering; if, in short, I
were a hero of any kind whatever, I might perhaps be justified in
communicating my success to mankind, and stimulating them to do as I
have done. But mine is the tale of a commonplace life, perplexed by
many problems I have never solved; disturbed by many difficulties I
have never surmounted; and blotted by ignoble concessions which are a

constant regret.
I have decided, however, to let the manuscript remain. I will not
destroy it, although I will not take the responsibility of printing it.
Somebody may think it worth preserving; and there are two reasons
why they may think so, if there are no others. In the first place it has
some little historic value, for I feel increasingly that the race to which I
belonged is fast passing away, and that the Dissenting minister of the
present day is a different being altogether from the Dissenting minister
of forty years ago.
In the next place, I have observed that the mere knowing that other
people have been tried as we have been tried is a consolation to us, and
that we are relieved by the assurance that our sufferings are not special
and peculiar, but common to us with many others. Death has always
been a terror to me, and at times, nay generally, religion and
philosophy have been altogether unavailing to mitigate the terror in any
way. But it has been a comfort to me to reflect that whatever death may
be, it is the inheritance of the whole human race; that I am not singled
out, but shall merely have to pass through what the weakest have had to
pass through before me. In the worst of maladies, worst at least to me,
those which are hypochondriacal, the healing effect which is produced
by the visit of a friend who can simply say, "I have endured all that," is
most marked. So it is not impossible that some few whose experience
has been like mine may, by my example, be freed from that sense of
solitude which they find so depressing.
I was born, just before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was
opened, in a small country town in one of the Midland shires. It is now
semi-manufacturing, at the junction of three or four lines of railway,
with hardly a trace left of what it was fifty years ago. It then consisted
of one long main street, with a few other streets branching from it at
right-angles. Through this street the mail-coach rattled at night, and the
huge waggon rolled through it, drawn by four horses, which twice a
week travelled to and from London and brought us what we wanted
from the great and unknown city.
My father and mother belonged to the ordinary English middle class of
well-to-do shop-keepers. My mother's family came from a little
distance, but my father's had lived in those parts for centuries. I
remember perfectly well how business used to be carried on in those

days. There was absolutely no competition, and although nobody in the
town who was in trade got rich, except the banker and the brewer,
nearly everybody was tolerably well off, and certainly not pressed with
care as their successors are now. The draper, who lived a little way
above us, was a