He was offered the position of editor of a Westmoreland newspaper. He aroused from his life of indulgence and opium dreams and became connected with the magazines.
His connection with Blackwood drew him to Edinburgh, where he was often a guest at the home of his old friend “Christopher North.” He became acquainted here with Carlyle.
At length, in 1830, he took his family to Edinburgh, which was his home until his death in December of 1859.
JOANNA, as we in England should call her, but, according to her own statement, Jeanne D’Arc, was born at Domremy, a village on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne. Here lay two roads, not so much for travelers that were few, as for armies that were too many by half.
[Illustration: After the painting by Guizard.
The situation of Joanna was full of profound suggestions to a heart that listened for the stealthy steps of change and fear that too surely were in motion. But, if the place were grand, the time, the burden of the time, was far more so. The air overhead in its upper chambers was hurtling with the obscure sound; was dark with sullen fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred and thirty years.
It was not wonderful that in such a haunted solitude, with such a haunted heart, Joanna should see angelic visions and hear angelic voices. These voices whispered to her forever the duty, self-imposed, of delivering France. Five years she listened to these monitory voices with internal struggles. At length she could resist no longer. Doubt gave way, and she left her home forever in order to present herself at the dauphin’s court.
Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests, and hills, and fountains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and consecrated oratories. This peasant girl was self-educated through her own meditativeness. If the reader turns to that divine passage in “Paradise Regained,” which Milton has put into the mouth of Christ when first entering the wilderness,--
Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once Awakened in me swarm, while I consider What from within I feel myself, and hear What from without comes often to my ears, Ill sorting with my present state compared! When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know, and thence to do What might be public good; myself I thought Born to that end--