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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, Sr., by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2004 [EBook #3252]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PG WORKS OF O.W. HOLMES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger and Several Other Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENTIRE PROJECT GUTENBERG WORKS OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table
+The Professor at the Breakfast-table
+The Poet at the Breakfast Table
+Over the Teacups
+Elsie Venner
+The Guardian Angel
+A Mortal Antipathy
+Pages from an Old Volume of Life
+ Bread and the Newspaper
+ My Hunt after "The Captain"
+ The Inevitable Trial
+ Cinders from Ashes
+ The Pulpit and the Pew
+Medical Essays
+ Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions
+ The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
+ Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science
+ Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science
+ Scholastic and Bedside Teaching
+ The Medical Profession in Massachusetts
+ The Young Practitioner
+ Medical Libraries
+ Some of My Early Teachers
+A Memoir of John Lothrop Motley
+A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson
+Our Hundred Days in Europe
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE
+
+
+THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+
+The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of
+these papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.
+
+Two articles entitled "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" will be
+found in the "New England Magazine," formerly published in Boston
+by J. T. and E. Buckingham. The date of the first of these
+articles is November 1831, and that of the second February 1832.
+When "The Atlantic Monthly" was begun, twenty-five years
+afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the
+recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary
+boyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curious experiment
+to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were
+better or worse than the early windfalls.
+
+So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those
+earlier attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who
+were idle enough to read them at the time of their publication.
+The man is father to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it
+seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine. If I
+find it hard to pardon the boy's faults, others would find it
+harder. They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I
+hope, anywhere.
+
+But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and
+with these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still
+breathes, will be contented.
+
+
+--"It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you
+find yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation."--
+
+--"When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary.
+The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences.
+The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and
+luftre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the
+fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I
+will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more
+accurate, and a more eloquent analogy."--
+
+--"Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people in
+the world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So
+the projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years. Some
+thousand fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the
+selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For
+a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful
+noise that was to be made on the great occafion. When the time
+came, everybody had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal
+ejaculation of BOO,--the word agreed upon,--that nobody spoke
+except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in
+Pekin, so that the world was never so ftill fince the creation."--
+
+
+There was nothing better than these things and there was not a
+little that was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and
+twenty has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in
+learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his
+hat-full of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an
+ELEGANT like Brummel to point to an armful of failures in the
+attempt to achieve a perfect tie. This son of mine, whom I have
+not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a
+self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised
+fancies. He, like too many American young people, got the spur
+when he should have had the rein. He therefore helped to fill the
+market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these
+papers abounds in the marts of his native country. All these
+by-gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure
+that very few of his readers know anything about them. In taking
+the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had
+uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that
+his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years
+have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should
+live to double them again and become his own grandfather.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+BOSTON. Nov. 1st 1858.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the
+many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical
+and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is
+an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula:
+2+2=4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general
+character of the expression a+b=c. We are mere operatives,
+empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead
+of figures.
+
+They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us
+to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to
+take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or
+pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this
+occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same
+observation.--No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty
+good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and
+you found it, NOT IN THE ORIGINAL, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid.
+I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.
+
+--If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?--I blush to say
+that I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was
+the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a
+body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired
+their teacher, and to some extent each other. Many of them
+deserved it; they have become famous since. It amuses me to hear
+the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray--
+
+
+"Letters four do form his name"--
+
+
+about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage
+of civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors,
+philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of
+Mutual Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is
+not debarred from admiring the same quality in another, nor the
+other from returning his admiration. They may even associate
+together and continue to think highly of each other. And so of a
+dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so
+many. The being referred to above assumes several false premises.
+First, that men of talent necessarily hate each other. Secondly,
+that intimate knowledge or habitual association destroys our
+admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
+Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine
+and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to
+glorify themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the
+human race not belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an
+outrage that he is not asked to join them.
+
+Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who
+sits opposite said, "That's it! that's it!"
+
+I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people's
+hating each other, I think a LITTLE extra talent does sometimes
+make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts
+and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions.
+Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak
+flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It
+spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the
+rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water.
+No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this
+class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by
+the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing
+together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting. With
+them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise
+each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined
+verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply
+a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.
+
+If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that
+alters the question. But if they are men with noble powers and
+qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family
+affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which
+unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And what would
+literature or art be without such associations? Who can tell what
+we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and
+Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of
+which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the
+Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and
+Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all
+admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that
+the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable
+cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and
+as many more as they chose to associate with them?
+
+The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he
+abuses this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries
+through the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a
+medium for his popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary
+metropolis; if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good
+feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a
+man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish people hate
+and dread and envy such an association of men of varied powers and
+influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the
+necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the
+title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors put together.
+
+--All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called
+"facts." They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
+Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact
+or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many
+bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or
+convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts"
+at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and
+necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe
+while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a
+hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten
+thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my
+speech?
+
+[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar
+mind. The reader will of course understand the precise amount of
+seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of
+the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility
+for its abuse in incompetent hands.]
+
+This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are
+men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's
+fasting would do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as
+good as a working professional man's advice, and costs you nothing:
+It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have a
+nerve tapped. Nobody measures your nervous force as it runs away,
+nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.
+
+There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some
+people. They are the talkers who have what may be called JERKY
+minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence.
+They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags
+rack you to death. After a jolting half-hour with one of these
+jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief.
+It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.
+
+What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times!
+A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to
+our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.
+
+"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady-boarders,--the
+same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a
+few original stanzas, not remembering that "The Pactolian" pays me
+five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.
+
+"Madam," said I, (she and the century were in their teens
+together,) "all men are bores, except when we want them. There
+never was but one man whom I would trust with my latch-key."
+
+"Who might that favored person be?"
+
+"Zimmermann."
+
+--The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the
+cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney,
+the great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his
+neck would swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he
+seemed on the verge of apoplexy. The hydraulic arrangements for
+supplying the brain with blood are only second in importance to its
+own organization. The bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when
+they are at work are the men that draw big audiences and give us
+marrowy books and pictures. It is a good sign to have one's feet
+grow cold when he is writing. A great writer and speaker once told
+me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this,
+ALL his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury
+sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.
+
+--You don't suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so
+many postage-stamps, do you,--each to be only once uttered? If you
+do, you are mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does not
+often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of
+advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again
+during the course of a protracted existence! Why, the truths a man
+carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter
+is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board
+with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail?
+I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall
+use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same
+stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered
+it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new
+and express train of associations.
+
+Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech
+twice over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer,
+after performing in an inland city, where dwells a Litteratrice of
+note, was invited to meet her and others over the social teacup.
+She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings in his new
+occupation. "Yes," he replied, "I am like the Huma, the bird that
+never lights, being always in the cars, as he is always on the
+wing."--Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same place once
+more for the same purpose. Another social cup after the lecture,
+and a second meeting with the distinguished lady. "You are
+constantly going from place to place," she said.--"Yes," he
+answered, "I am like the Huma,"--and finished the sentence as
+before.
+
+What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine
+speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the
+lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished
+his conversation with the Huma daily during that whole interval of
+years. On the contrary, he had never once thought of the odious
+fowl until the recurrence of precisely the same circumstances
+brought up precisely the same idea. He ought to have been proud of
+the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given certain factors, and
+a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the
+certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.
+
+--What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere
+mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and
+without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results
+like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it
+grind a thousand bushels of them!
+
+I have an immense respect for a man of talents PLUS "the
+mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem to be
+the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of
+reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three
+or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes I
+have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension
+of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering
+hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels
+clicking in a calculator's brain. The power of dealing with
+numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put
+into a mighty poor watch--I suppose it is about as common as the
+power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
+endowment.
+
+--Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
+knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about.
+Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many
+small talents and little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk
+about conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what
+salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable.
+Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's
+plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and
+the wave in which he dips. When one has had ALL his conceit taken
+out of him, when he has lost ALL his illusions, his feathers will
+soon soak through, and he will fly no more.
+
+"So you admire conceited people, do you?" said the young lady who
+has come to the city to be finished off for--the duties of life.
+
+I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It
+does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a
+salt-water plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as
+natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But
+little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five
+minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine
+their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect
+does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the
+third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest
+thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not
+obviously imply any individual centre.
+
+Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing.
+What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have
+authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did! What fine speeches
+are those two: "Non omnis mortar," and "I have taken all knowledge
+to be my province"! Even in common people, conceit has the virtue
+of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his
+house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is
+almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be
+tedious at times.
+
+--What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want
+of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you
+think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found
+spoil more good talks than anything else;--long arguments on
+special points between people who differ on the fundamental
+principles upon which these points depend. No men can have
+satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on
+certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary
+conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the
+secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their
+source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to
+the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary
+condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like
+playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the
+strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out
+their music.
+
+--Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in
+your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and
+language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide--that is,
+violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate
+meaning, which is its life--are alike forbidden. Manslaughter,
+which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter,
+which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to
+the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to
+or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I
+speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the
+subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by
+talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but
+cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological
+convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark;
+also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern
+inundation.
+
+A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow
+were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be
+judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter
+were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable
+homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe
+presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of
+suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a
+top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence.
+Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." Doe then--and not till
+then--struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of
+the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification
+ensued, with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of
+the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest
+so." The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being
+punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted,
+and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume
+was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.
+
+People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the
+railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but
+their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for
+the sake of a battered witticism.
+
+I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will
+mark the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may
+say that this boy, our land-lady's youngest, is called BENJAMIN
+FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly
+merited compliment.)
+
+I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to
+listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary
+which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the
+currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the
+sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the
+paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn
+without an indigestion."
+
+And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated puns.
+The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal
+carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its
+Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen
+Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord
+of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent
+their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared
+himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip
+Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought
+him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier,
+who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the
+blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason,' replied
+a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a
+two-legged animal WITH feathers.' The fatal habit became universal.
+The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national
+conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal
+double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
+Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was
+levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in
+the age of the Stuarts."
+
+Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the
+Macaulay-flowers of literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said
+calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a
+hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If _I_
+have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show
+up a drunken helot. We have done with them.
+
+--If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?--I
+should say that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum
+over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a
+structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove
+anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show
+that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was
+ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, which
+couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other.
+Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these
+are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary
+relations with truth, as I understand truth,--not for any secondary
+artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in
+argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust
+the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good
+chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not
+necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.
+
+The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer
+lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth,
+as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and
+said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense
+was good enough for him.
+
+Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, AS YOU
+UNDERSTAND IT. We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our
+own minds, either of things or persons. A man who is willing to
+take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice
+of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of
+things for one's self. On the whole, I had rather judge men's
+minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of
+thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do one or the other.
+It does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another
+man's thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not
+necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy
+of every superior mind that held a different one. How many of our
+most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the
+ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our
+hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have
+sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of mora, in
+which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and
+the other gives the number if he can. I show my thought, another
+his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest
+common factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about
+remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an
+instrument is to playing on it.
+
+--What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a
+copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the
+company can retire that like.
+
+
+ALBUM VERSES.
+
+
+When Eve had led her lord away,
+And Cain had killed his brother,
+The stars and flowers, the poets say,
+Agreed with one another
+
+To cheat the cunning tempter's art,
+And teach the race its duty,
+By keeping on its wicked heart
+Their eyes of light and beauty.
+
+A million sleepless lids, they say,
+Will be at least a warning;
+And so the flowers would watch by day,
+The stars from eve to morning.
+
+On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
+Their dewy eyes upturning,
+The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
+Till western skies are burning.
+
+Alas! each hour of daylight tells
+A tale of shame so crushing,
+That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
+And some are always blushing.
+
+But when the patient stars look down
+On all their light discovers,
+The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown,
+The lips of lying lovers,
+
+They try to shut their saddening eyes,
+And in the vain endeavour
+We see them twinkling in the skies,
+And so they wink forever.
+
+
+What do YOU think of these verses my friends?--Is that piece an
+impromptu? said my landlady's daughter. (Aet. 19 +. Tender-eyed
+blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain.
+Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads
+Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes
+the puddings. Says "Yes?" when you tell her anything.)--Oui et
+non, ma petite,--Yes and no, my child. Five of the seven verses
+were written off-hand; the other two took a week,--that is, were
+hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as
+long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C'est le
+DERNIER pas qui coute. Don't you know how hard it is for some
+people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They
+want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know
+how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your
+parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have
+contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors,
+which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them
+down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their "native
+element," the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems
+as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in
+glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, DAY, RAY, BEAUTY, DUTY,
+SKIES, EYES, OTHER, BROTHER, MOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, and the like; and
+so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the
+wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get
+sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of
+a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I
+suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as
+the above.--Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration
+which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been
+highly commanded. "Madam," I said, "you can pour three gills and
+three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less
+than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter
+of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the
+vessel upside down for a thousand years.
+
+One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in
+that copy of verses,--which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise
+either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new
+top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am
+fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.
+
+ . . . . youth
+. . . . . morning
+. . . . . truth
+. . . . . warning
+
+Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above
+musical and suggestive coincidences.
+
+"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.
+
+I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from
+her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it
+softly to my next neighbour.
+
+When a young female wears a flat circular side--curl, gummed on
+each temple,--when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his
+arm against the back of hers,--and when she says "Yes?" with the
+note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what
+wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.
+
+"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house,
+moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.
+
+"I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+--It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
+implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The
+young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a
+sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest
+spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl
+over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that
+the Indian had learned before me. A BLANKET-shawl we call it, and
+not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the
+Highlanders.
+
+--We are the Romans of the modern world,--the great assimilating
+people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents
+with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of
+weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the
+Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to
+meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an
+axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:-
+
+
+The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.
+
+
+Corollary. It was the Polish LANCE that left Poland at last with
+nothing of her own to bound.
+
+
+"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the SHATTERED SPEAR!"
+
+
+What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a
+fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If
+she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and
+come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but
+it would have spoiled the best passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."
+
+--Self-made men?--Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and
+respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in
+that way than not to be made at all. Are any of you younger people
+old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at
+Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with
+his own hands? It took him a good many years to build it, and one
+could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in
+outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A
+regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was
+a very good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people
+praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had
+succeeded. They never thought of praising the fine blocks of
+houses a little farther on.
+
+Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife,
+deserves more credit, if that is all, than the regular
+engine-turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, and
+French-polished by society and travel. But as to saying that one is
+every way the equal of the other, that is another matter. The right
+of strict social discrimination of all things and persons, according
+to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious
+republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say,
+that, OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, in most relations of life I prefer a
+man of family.
+
+What do I mean by a man of family?--O, I'll give you a general idea
+of what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us
+nothing.
+
+Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a
+member of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so,
+one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later
+than the time of top-boots with tassels.
+
+Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The
+great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his
+arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him,
+to show the range of his commercial transactions, and letters with
+large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The
+Honourable etc. etc. Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown
+satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish,
+but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging
+sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb
+full-blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory blood in
+his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother,
+and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one
+flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom
+with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after
+it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the
+Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants.
+2. Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of
+Empire; bust a la Josephine; wisps of curls, like celery-tips, at
+sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial.
+As for the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the
+gallery.
+
+Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,--family
+names;--you will find them at the head of their respective classes
+in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from their
+parents' condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of
+youthful progenitors, and Hic liber est meus on the title-page. A
+set of Hogarth's original plates. Pope, original edition, 15
+volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio.
+Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-decimos.
+
+Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms
+of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden
+aunt.
+
+If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in,
+furnished with claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, and
+tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit
+is complete.
+
+No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man
+who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at
+least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he
+should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of
+books, who have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our
+dear didascalos over there ever read Poli Synopsis, or consulted
+Castelli Lexicon, while he was growing up to their stature? Not
+he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and
+leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs
+sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story. I tell you
+he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of
+Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true,
+have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a
+shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for
+councils and courts. Then let them change places. Our social
+arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and
+down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by
+layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic
+liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family
+portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype,
+unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.
+
+--I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had
+thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not
+mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up,
+which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing. If
+certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had
+come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven't.
+Perhaps you would like to hear my
+
+
+LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.
+
+
+When legislators keep the law,
+When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
+When berries, whortle--rasp--and straw--
+Grow bigger DOWNWARDS through the box,--
+
+When he that selleth house or land
+Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,--
+When haberdashers choose the stand
+Whose window hath the broadest light,--
+
+When preachers tell us all they think,
+And party leaders all they mean,--
+When what we pay for, that we drink,
+From real grape and coffee-bean,--
+
+When lawyers take what they would give,
+And doctors give what they would take,--
+When city fathers eat to live,
+Save when they fast for conscience' sake,--
+
+When one that hath a horse on sale
+Shall bring his merit to the proof,
+Without a lie for every nail
+That holds the iron on the hoof,--
+
+When in the usual place for rips
+Our gloves are stitched with special care,
+And guarded well the whalebone tips
+Where first umbrellas need repair,--
+
+When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
+The power of suction to resist,
+And claret-bottles harber not
+Such dimples as would hold your fist,--
+
+When publishers no longer steal,
+And pay for what they stole before,--
+When the first locomotive's wheel
+Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore;--
+
+TILL then let Cumming a blaze away,
+And Miller's saints blow up the globe;
+But when you see that blessed day,
+THEN order your ascension robe!
+
+
+The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read
+others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course
+they would not expect it every morning. Neither must the reader
+suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one
+breakfast-time. I have not taken the trouble to date them, as
+Raspail, pere, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but
+they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good
+many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time
+or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.
+
+I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor,
+of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by. The Professor read
+them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our
+great Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.
+
+
+Yes, we knew we must lose him,--though friendship may claim
+To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
+Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
+'Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
+
+As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,--
+As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,--
+As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
+He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
+
+What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
+Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
+While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
+That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
+
+In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
+Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
+There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
+There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
+
+Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed
+From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
+Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
+Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
+
+* * * * *
+
+The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
+On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,
+To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
+With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
+
+So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
+When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed:
+THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING,--the world holds him dear,--
+Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being
+too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring
+friend said the other day to one that was talking good things,
+--good enough to print? "Why," said he, "you are wasting
+mechantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I
+can tell, of fifty dollars an hour." The talker took him to the
+window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.
+
+"Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a
+sprinkling-machine through it."
+
+"Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would
+be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our
+THOUGHT-SPRINKLERS through them with the valves open, sometimes?
+
+"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you
+forget. It shapes our thoughts for us;--the waves of conversation
+roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me
+modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an
+artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,--you can pat
+and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick
+on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is
+nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you
+turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to
+write such. Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing
+is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or
+miss it;--but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an
+engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't
+help hitting it."
+
+The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior
+excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, "Fust-rate." I
+acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression.
+"Fust-rate," "prime," "a prime article," "a superior piece of
+goods," "a handsome garment," "a gent in a flowered vest,"--all
+such expressions are final. They blast the lineage of him or her
+who utters them, for generations up and down. There is one other
+phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social
+STATUS, if it is not already: "That tells the whole story." It
+is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly
+affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from
+them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous
+question in the General Court. Only it doesn't; simply because
+"that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole
+story.
+
+--It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a
+professional education. To become a doctor a man must study some
+three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how
+much study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not
+more than this. Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures
+or sermons (discourses) on theology every year,--and this, twenty,
+thirty, fifty years together. They read a great many religious
+books besides. The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons except
+what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be conceived,
+therefore, to lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply for
+want of religious instruction. And on the other hand, an attentive
+and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers,
+might become actually better educated in theology than any one of
+them. We are all theological students, and more of us qualified as
+doctors of divinity than have received degrees at any of the
+universities.
+
+It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often
+find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed
+upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought
+vigorously about for years, and heard able men discuss scores of
+times. I have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly dull
+discourse acts INDUCTIVELY, as electricians would say, in
+developing strong mental currents. I am ashamed to think with what
+accompaniments and variations and fioriture I have sometimes
+followed the droning of a heavy speaker,--not willingly,--for my
+habit is reverential,--but as a necessary result of a slight
+continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both
+in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon.
+If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an
+image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable
+plumage flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while the
+other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back
+again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never
+losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the
+same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops
+and knots and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully working
+from one end of his straight line to the other.
+
+[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary
+boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than
+middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little
+"frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold
+beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in
+basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have
+been very virulent about what I said. So I went to my good old
+minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember
+them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
+considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell when people's
+minds were wandering, by their looks. In the earlier years of his
+ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching;
+--very little of late years. Sometimes, when his colleague was
+preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it
+was not so very unnatural. I will say, by the way, that it is a
+rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my
+minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]
+
+--I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody
+has made before me. You know very well that I write verses
+sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The
+company assented,--two or three of them in a resigned sort of way,
+as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and
+was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)--I
+continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are
+better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be
+called relatively excellent. It is in the nature of things that I
+should consider these relatively excellent lines or passages as
+absolutely good. So much must be pardoned to humanity. Now I
+never wrote a "good" line in my life, but the moment after it was
+written it seemed a hundred years old. Very commonly I had a
+sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may
+have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that
+I ever once detected any historical truth in these sudden
+convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have
+learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me
+out of a thought or line.
+
+This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was
+diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly
+emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of
+thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance
+among the recognized growths of our intellect. Any crystalline
+group of musical words has had a long and still period to form in.
+Here is one theory.
+
+But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts.
+It is this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories
+is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their
+apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as
+they increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for instance, is as
+old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains
+backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of
+life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we
+are turning. For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed
+in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the
+"dissolving views" of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it;
+all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the
+first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as
+a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again,--old as
+eternity.
+
+[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known
+better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was
+looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All
+at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops
+from a broken barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat
+like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not have brought her down
+better. God forgive me!
+
+After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained
+balancing teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or
+tilting upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads
+reached the wall, where they left gratuitous advertisements of
+various popular cosmetics.]
+
+When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of
+trial, he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for
+it. He has committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to
+the State Prison. The traditions, prescriptions, limitations,
+privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp
+themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax;--a
+single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image a little.
+Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed
+steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and
+forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a
+ring. The engine lays one of ITS fingers calmly, but firmly, upon
+a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and
+tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over
+with twenty centuries. So it is that a great silent-moving misery
+puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment,--as sharp an
+impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.
+
+It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional
+dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a
+moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were living
+into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machinery. Do the
+worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of,
+you find yourself in a category of humanity that stretches back as
+far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow who has studied your
+case all out beforehand, and is waiting for you with his implements
+of hemp or mahogany. I believe, if a man were to be burned in any
+of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would be found a master of
+ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were necessary, and the
+best way of arranging the whole matter.
+
+--So we have not won the Goodwood cup; au contraire, we were a "bad
+fifth," if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third
+time, has not yet bettered the matter. Now I am as patriotic as
+any of my fellow-citizens,--too patriotic in fact, for I have got
+into hot water by loving too much of my country; in short, if any
+man, whose fighting weight is not more than eight stone four
+pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss the point with him. I
+should have gloried to see the stars and stripes in front at the
+finish. I love my country, and I love horses. Stubbs's old
+mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and Herring's portrait of
+Plenipotentiary,--whom I saw run at Epsom,--over my fireplace. Did
+I not elope from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and Little
+John, and Peacemaker run over the race-course where now yon
+suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen hundred and
+ever-so-few? Though I never owned a horse, have I not been the
+proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest
+little "Morgin" that ever stepped? Listen, then, to an opinion I
+have often expressed long before this venture of ours in England.
+Horse-RACING is not a republican institution; horse-TROTTING is.
+Only very rich persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows
+they are kept mainly as gambling implements. All that matter about
+blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all that; useful,
+very,--OF course,--great obligations to the Godolphin "Arabian,"
+and the rest. I say racing horses are essentially gambling
+implements, as much as roulette tables. Now I am not preaching at
+this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning;
+but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not
+republican. It belongs to two phases of society,--a cankered
+over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the
+reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism
+of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real
+Republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of
+government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows
+out of it. This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice
+or stocks, but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively
+quiet. But horse-racing is the most public way of gambling, and
+with all its immense attractions to the sense and the feelings,--to
+which I plead very susceptible,--the disguise is too thin that
+covers it, and everybody knows what it means. Its supporters are
+the Southern gentry,--fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans
+exactly, as we understand the term,--a few Northern millionnaires
+more or less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real
+people, and the mob of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly
+idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a
+crowd, or to meet in a dark alley. In England, on the other hand,
+with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth
+enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes,
+from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled
+corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise
+the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down
+on his office-stool the next day without wincing.
+
+Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The
+racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet
+upon, as much as the thimble-rigger's "little joker." The trotter
+is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for
+sporting men.
+
+What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most
+cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that
+the trotting horses of America beat the world? And why should we
+have expected that the pick--if it was the pick--of our few and
+far-between racing stables should beat the pick of England and
+France? Throw over the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing
+to show for it but a natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we
+all have, with a thoroughly provincial conceit, which some of us
+must plead guilty to.
+
+We may beat yet. As an American, I hope we shall. As a moralist
+and occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it. Wherever
+the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses,
+lively bakers' carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher's
+wagon, the cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive with wife
+and child,--all the forms of moral excellence, except truth, which
+does not agree with any kind of horse-flesh. The racer brings with
+him gambling, cursing, swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters,
+and a distaste for mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues.
+
+And by the way, let me beg you not to call a TROTTING MATCH a RACE,
+and not to speak of a "thoroughbred" as a "BLOODED" horse, unless
+he has been recently phlebotomized. I consent to your saying
+"blood horse," if you like. Also, if, next year, we send out
+Posterior and Posterioress, the winners of the great national
+four-mile race in 7 18.5, and they happen to get beaten, pay your
+bets, and behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know how.
+
+[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper
+condensed in the above paragraph. To brag little,--to show well,
+--to crow gently, if in luck,--to pay up, to own up, and to shut up,
+if beaten, are the virtues of a sporting man, and I can't say that
+I think we have shown them in any great perfection of late.]
+
+--Apropos of horses. Do you know how important good jockeying is
+to authors? Judicious management; letting the public see your
+animal just enough, and not too much; holding him up hard when the
+market is too full of him; letting him out at just the right buying
+intervals; always gently feeling his mouth; never slacking and
+never jerking the rein;--this is what I mean by jockeying.
+
+--When an author has a number of books out a cunning hand will keep
+them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching
+each one up, as it begins to "wabble," by an advertisement, a puff,
+or a quotation.
+
+--Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast
+in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new
+edition coming. The extracts are GROUND-BAIT.
+
+--Literary life is fun of curious phenomena. I don't know that
+there is anything more noticeable than what we may call
+CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS. There is a tacit understanding in every
+community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular
+fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There
+are various reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich;
+one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it
+would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The
+venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile
+faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in
+general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating
+and imploring a man to stay with you with the implied compact
+between you that he shall by no means think of doing it. A poor
+wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these
+bandbox reputations. A Prince-Rupert's-drop, which is a tear of
+unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling
+hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves itself
+into powder. These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's
+drops of the learned and polite world. See how the papers treat
+them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can
+be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service!
+How kind the "Critical Notices"--where small authorship comes to
+pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy--always are to
+them! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and other
+fictions; so let them pass current. Don't steal their chips; don't
+puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their
+pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and
+unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names
+will be household words a thousand years from now.
+
+"A thousand years is a good while," said the old gentleman who sits
+opposite, thoughtfully.
+
+--Where have I been for the last three or four days? Down at the
+Island, deer-shooting.--How many did I bag? I brought home one
+buck shot.--The Island is where? No matter. It is the most
+splendid domain that any man looks upon in these latitudes. Blue
+sea around it, and running up into its heart, so that the little
+boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are
+stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-
+sails banging and flying in ribbons. Trees, in stretches of miles;
+beeches, oaks, most numerous;--many of them hung with moss, looking
+like bearded Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed
+grape-vines. Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep,
+and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as soft as
+swan's down. Rocks scattered about,--Stonehenge-like monoliths.
+Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary's lake, crystal-clear, full of
+flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like tigers in the
+jungle. Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for breakfast.
+EGO fecit.
+
+The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my
+Latin. No, sir, I said,--you need not trouble yourself. There is
+a higher law in grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and
+Stoddard. Then I went on.
+
+Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the
+like of in these our New England sovereignties. There is nothing
+in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful,
+which has not found its home in that ocean-principality. It has
+welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman
+who came to breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine,
+to the great statesman who turned his back on the affairs of
+empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white
+teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the
+keenest and his story the best.
+
+[I don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world. I
+don't believe _I_ talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting
+one's conversation, one cannot help BLAIR-ing it up more or less,
+ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping
+and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at
+the looking-glass.]
+
+--How can a man help writing poetry in such a place? Everybody
+does write poetry that goes there. In the state archives, kept in
+the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of
+unpublished verse,--some by well-known hands, and others quite as
+good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers,--men who
+could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy ten
+acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had
+left. Of course I had to write my little copy of verses with the
+rest; here it is, if you will hear me read it. When the sun is in
+the west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction look bright or
+dark to one who observes them from the north or south, according to
+the tack they are sailing upon. Watching them from one of the
+windows of the great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and
+moralized thus:-
+
+
+SUN AND SHADOW.
+
+
+As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green,
+To the billows of foam-crested blue,
+Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
+Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
+Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
+As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
+Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
+The sun gleaming bright on her sail.
+
+Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,--
+Of breakers that whiten and roar;
+How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
+They see him that gaze from the shore!
+He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
+To the rock that is under his lee,
+As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
+O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
+
+Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
+Where life and its ventures are laid,
+The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
+May see us in sunshine or shade;
+Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
+We'll trim our broad sail as before,
+And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
+Nor ask how we look from the shore!
+
+
+--Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good
+mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if
+anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or
+reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough
+to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad. We
+frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in
+consequence of what are called RELIGIOUS mental disturbances. I
+confess that I think better of them than of many who hold the same
+notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life very well,
+outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go mad, if he
+really holds such or such opinions. It is very much to his
+discredit in every point of view, if he does not. What is the use
+of my saying what some of these opinions are? Perhaps more than
+one of you hold such as I should think ought to send you straight
+over to Somerville, if you have any logic in your heads or any
+human feeling in your hearts. Anything that is brutal, cruel,
+heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and
+perhaps for entire races,--anything that assumes the necessity of
+the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated,
+--no matter by what name you call it,--no matter whether a fakir, or
+a monk, or a deacon believes it,--if received, ought to produce
+insanity in every well-regulated mind. That condition becomes a
+normal one, under the circumstances. I am very much ashamed of
+some people for retaining their reason, when they know perfectly
+well that if they were not the most stupid or the most selfish of
+human beings, they would become non-compotes at once.
+
+[Nobody understood this but the theological student and the
+schoolmistress. They looked intelligently at each other; but
+whether they were thinking about my paradox or not, I am not
+clear.--It would be natural enough. Stranger things have happened.
+Love and Death enter boarding-houses without asking the price of
+board, or whether there is room for them. Alas, these young people
+are poor and pallid! Love SHOULD be both rich and rosy, but MUST
+be either rich or rosy. Talk about military duty! What is that to
+the warfare of a married maid-of-all-work, with the title of
+mistress, and an American female constitution, which collapses just
+in the middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized India-rubber,
+if it happen to live through the period when health and strength
+are most wanted?]
+
+--Have I ever acted in private theatricals? Often. I have played
+the part of the "Poor Gentleman," before a great many audiences,
+--more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a
+stage-costume, nor a wig, nor moustaches of burnt cork; but I was
+placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper
+hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my
+countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my
+name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself
+in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober
+literary essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced
+as the most desperate of buffos,--one who was obliged to restrain
+himself in the full exercise of his powers, from prudential
+considerations. I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses,
+in the pursuit of my histrionic vocation. I have travelled in cars
+until the conductors all knew me like a brother. I have run off
+the rails, and stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind
+females that would have the window open when one could not wink
+without his eyelids freezing together. Perhaps I shall give you
+some of my experiences one of these days;--I will not now, for I
+have something else for you.
+
+Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country
+lyceum-halls, are one thing,--and private theatricals, as they may be
+seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are
+another. Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who do
+not think it necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of
+our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters which show off their
+graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled,
+high bred young maiden, with a lithe figure, and a pleasant voice,
+acting in those love-dramas which make us young again to look upon,
+when real youth and beauty will play them for us.
+
+--Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write. I did not
+see the play, though. I knew there was a young lady in it, and
+that somebody was in love with her, and she was in love with him,
+and somebody (an old tutor, I believe) wanted to interfere, and,
+very naturally, the young lady was too sharp for him. The play of
+course ends charmingly; there is a general reconciliation, and all
+concerned form a line and take each others' hands, as people always
+do after they have made up their quarrels,--and then the curtain
+falls,--if it does not stick, as it commonly does at private
+theatrical exhibitions, in which case a boy is detailed to pull it
+down, which he does, blushing violently.
+
+Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my caesuras
+and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or
+iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear
+it
+
+
+THIS IS IT.
+
+A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know;--
+I have my doubts. No matter,--here we go!
+What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach:
+Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech.
+'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings,
+The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings;--
+Prologues in metre are to other pros
+As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.
+
+"The world's a stage," as Shakspeare said, one day;
+The stage a world--was what he meant to say.
+The outside world's a blunder, that is clear;
+The real world that Nature meant is here.
+Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
+Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
+Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid,
+The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
+One after one the troubles all are past
+Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
+When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all,
+Join hands, SO happy at the curtain's fall.
+--Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
+And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
+--When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
+And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
+Cries, "Help, kyind Heaven!" and drops upon her knees
+On the green--baize,--beneath the (canvas) trees,--
+See to her side avenging Valor fly:-
+"Ha! Villain! Draw! Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!"
+--When the poor hero flounders in despair,
+Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire,--
+Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
+Sobs on his neck, "MY BOY! MY BOY!! MY BOY!!!"
+
+Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
+Of love that conquers in disaster's spite.
+Ladies, attend! While woful cares and doubt
+Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
+Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
+One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!
+
+Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule,--
+The world's great masters, when you're out of school,--
+Learn the brief moral of our evening's play:
+Man has his will,--but woman has her way!
+While man's dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
+Woman's swift instinct threads the electric wire,--
+The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
+Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
+All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
+But that one rebel,--woman's wilful heart.
+All foes you master; but a woman's wit
+Lets daylight through you ere you know you're hit.
+So, just to picture what her art can do,
+Hear an old story made as good as new.
+
+Rudolph, professor of the headsman's trade,
+Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
+One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
+Knelt at the block to test the artist's skill.
+Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed,
+Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
+His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
+As the pike's armor flashes in the stream.
+He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go;
+The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
+"Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous act,"
+The prisoner said. (His voice was slightly cracked.)
+"Friend I HAVE struck," the artist straight replied;
+"Wait but one moment, and yourself decide."
+
+He held his snuff-box,--"Now then, if you please!"
+The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze,
+Off his head tumbled,--bowled along the floor,--
+Bounced down the steps;--the prisoner said no more!
+
+Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye;
+If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die!
+Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
+We die with love, and never dream we're dead!
+
+
+The prologue went off very well, as I hear. No alterations were
+suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know.
+Sometimes people criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest
+all sorts of improvements. Who was that silly body that wanted
+Burns to alter "Scots wha hae," so as to lengthen the last line,
+thus
+
+
+"EDWARD!" Chains and slavery!
+
+
+Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee for
+a certain celebration. I understood that it was to be a festive
+and convivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly. It seems
+the president of the day was what is called a "teetotaller." I
+received a note from him in the following words, containing the
+copy subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it.
+
+"Dear Sir,--your poem gives good satisfaction to the committee.
+The sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are not, however,
+those generally entertained by this community. I have therefore
+consulted the clergyman of this place, who has made come slight
+changes, which he thinks will remove all objections, and keep the
+valuable portions of the poem. Please to inform me of your charge
+for said poem. Our means are limited, etc., etc., etc.
+
+Yours with respect,"
+
+
+HERE IT IS--WITH THE SLIGHT ALTERATIONS!
+
+Come! fill a fresh bumper,--for why should we go
+While the [nectar] [logwood] still reddens our cups as they flow?
+Pour out the [rich juices] [decoction] still bright with the sun,
+Till o'er the brimmed crystal the [rubies] [dye-stuff] shall run.
+
+The [purple glebed clusters] [half-ripened apples] their life-dews
+have bled;
+How sweet is the [breath] [taste] of the [fragrance they shed]
+[sugar of lead]!
+For summer's [last roses] [rank poisons] lie hid in the [wines]
+[WINES!!!]
+That were garnered by [maidens who laughed through the vines.]
+[stable-boys smoking long-nines.]
+
+Then a [smile] [scowl], and a [glass] [howl], and a [toast]
+[scoff], and a [cheer] [sneer],
+For all [the good wine, and we've some of it here] [strychnine and
+whiskey, and ratsbane and beer]
+In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
+[Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all!] [Down, down,
+with the tyrant that masters us all!]
+
+
+The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised me to
+charge the committee double,--which I did. But as I never got my
+pay, I don't know that it made much difference. I am a very
+particular person about having all I write printed as I write it.
+I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double
+re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions,
+especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An
+intentional change of his text murders him. No wonder so many poets
+die young!
+
+I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces of
+advice I gave to the young women at table. One relates to a
+vulgarism of language, which I grieve to say is sometimes heard
+even from female lips. The other is of more serious purport, and
+applies to such as contemplate a change of condition,--matrimony,
+in fact.
+
+--The woman who "calculates" is lost.
+
+--Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+[The "Atlantic" obeys the moon, and its LUNIVERSARY has come round
+again. I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks made
+since the last high tides, which I respectfully submit. Please to
+remember this is TALK; just as easy and just as formal as I choose
+to make it.]
+
+--I never saw an author in my life--saving, perhaps, one--that did
+not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (Felis Catus,
+LINN.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful
+hand.
+
+But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell an
+author he is DROLL. Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does,
+be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will. Say you
+CRIED over his romance or his verses, and he will love you and send
+you a copy. You can laugh over that as much as you like--in
+private.
+
+--Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?--Why,
+there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown
+knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with
+Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion
+never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a
+procession.
+
+If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to
+tell it. There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit
+--using that term in its general sense--that its essence consists in
+a partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches. It throws a
+single ray, separated from the rest,--red, yellow, blue, or any
+intermediate shade,--upon an object; never white light; that is the
+province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit,--all the
+prismatic colors,--but never the object as it is in fair daylight.
+A pun, which is a kind if wit, is a different and much shallower
+trick in mental optics throwing the SHADOWS of two objects so that
+one overlies the other. Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special
+effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest white
+light of truth.--Will you allow me to pursue this subject a little
+further?
+
+[They didn't allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape
+the floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all
+must have noticed, has the instantaneous effect that the cutting of
+the yellow hair by Iris had upon infelix Dido. It broke the charm,
+and that breakfast was over.]
+
+--Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say
+disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer
+you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact
+and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare,
+leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they
+are ready enough to tell them. Good-breeding NEVER forgets that
+amour-propre is universal. When you read the story of the
+Archbishop and Gil Blas, you may laugh, if you will, at the poor
+old man's delusion; but don't forget that the youth was the greater
+fool of the two, and that his master served such a booby rightly in
+turning him out of doors.
+
+--You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find
+everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can't possibly
+mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I
+once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for
+its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken
+ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should
+have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in
+his feeble way. But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves
+easily enough, and they are not worth the trouble of putting them
+in the pillory. I doubt the entire novelty of my remarks just made
+on telling unpleasant truths, yet I am not conscious of any
+larceny.
+
+Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements. Some
+persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly
+stated propositions, is all that conversation admits. This is
+precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing but
+perfect chords and simple melodies,--no diminished fifths, no flat
+sevenths, no flourishes, on any account. Now it is fair to say,
+that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must have
+its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths.
+It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal
+element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little
+too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of
+esprit.--"Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's
+nonsense? Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!"
+--Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox,--if he is flighty and
+empty,--if, instead of striking those fifths and sevenths, those
+harmonious discords, often so much better than the twinned octaves,
+in the music of thought,--if, instead of striking these, he jangles
+the chords, stick a fact into him like a stiletto. But remember
+that talking is one of the fine arts,--the noblest, the most
+important, and the most difficult,--and that its fluent harmonies
+may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note. Therefore
+conversation which is suggestive rather than argumentative, which
+lets out the most of each talker's results of thought, is commonly
+the pleasantest and the most profitable. It is not easy, at the
+best, for two persons talking together to make the most of each
+other's thoughts, there are so many of them.
+
+[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]
+
+When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is
+natural enough that among the six there should be more or less
+confusion and misapprehension.
+
+[Our landlady turned pale;--no doubt she thought there was a screw
+loose in my intellects,--and that involved the probable loss of a
+boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a
+sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I
+understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring
+theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down
+of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to
+Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe
+the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the
+carving-knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, as it were
+carelessly.]
+
+I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here,
+that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be
+recognized as taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas.
+
+Three Johns.
+
+1. The real John; known only to his Maker.
+2. John's ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike
+him.
+3. Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor John's John, but
+often very unlike either.
+
+Three Thomas.
+
+1. The real Thomas.
+2. Thomas's ideal Thomas.
+3. John's ideal Thomas.
+
+
+Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
+platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
+conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and
+ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men
+the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly
+conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks
+from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him
+to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as
+Thomas's attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful
+rogue, though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply
+to the three Thomases. It follows, that, until a man can be found
+who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as
+others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every
+dialogue between two. Of these, the least important,
+philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real
+person. No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are
+six of them talking and listening all at the same time.
+
+[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made
+by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me
+at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little
+known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered
+Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket,
+remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him
+that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the
+mean time he had eaten the peaches.]
+
+--The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers are very commonly
+of little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their
+own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are
+quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the
+habit of considering like themselves. The advent of genius is like
+what florists style the BREAKING of a seedling tulip into what we
+may call high-caste colors,--ten thousand dingy flowers, then one
+with the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the coming up in
+old Jacob's garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the
+seckel pear, which I have sometimes seen in shop-windows. It is a
+surprise,--there is nothing to account for it. All at once we find
+that twice two make FIVE. Nature is fond of what are called
+"gift-enterprises." This little book of life which she has given into
+the hands of its joint possessors is commonly one of the old
+story-books bound over again. Only once in a great while there is a
+stately poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the glories of
+art, or they enfold a draft for untold values signed by the
+million-fold millionnaire old mother herself. But strangers are
+commonly the first to find the "gift" that came with the little book.
+
+It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own
+flavor. Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still
+more eloquently silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of
+any personal peculiarity, may well be doubted. No man knows his
+own voice; many men do not know their own profiles. Every one
+remembers Carlyle's famous "Characteristics" article; allow for
+exaggerations, and there is a great deal in his doctrine of the
+self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes under the great law just
+stated. This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often found
+in the family as well as in the individual. So never mind what
+your cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say
+about that fine poem you have written, but send it (postage-paid)
+to the editors, if there are any, of the "Atlantic,"--which, by the
+way, is not so called because it is A NOTION, as some dull wits
+wish they had said, but are too late.
+
+--Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has
+mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute,
+peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them
+are apt to get a bullying habit of mind;--not of manners, perhaps;
+they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet
+assertion in it, such as the Champion of the Heavy Weights,
+commonly the best-natured, but not the most diffident of men, wears
+upon what he very inelegantly calls his "mug." Take the man, for
+instance, who deals in the mathematical sciences. There is no
+elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it
+never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that
+comes in collision with it. What the mathematician knows being
+absolute, unconditional, incapable of suffering question, it should
+tend, in the nature of things, to breed a despotic way of thinking.
+So of those who deal with the palpable and often unmistakable facts
+of external nature; only in a less degree. Every probability--and
+most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities--is provided
+with BUFFERS at both ends, which break the force of opposite
+opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has no
+spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of yielding. All this
+must react on the minds which handle these forms of truth.
+
+--Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most
+gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet preeminent in the
+ranges of science I am referring to. I know that as well as you.
+But mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not
+force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half
+dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think
+only in single file from this day forward. A rash man, once
+visiting a certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to
+express the sentiment, that man is a rational being. An old woman
+who was an attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the
+statement, and appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove
+it. The rash man stuck to his hasty generalization,
+notwithstanding.
+
+[--It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated
+in my daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine art
+of music in company with our landlady's daughter, who, as I
+mentioned before, is the owner of an accordion. Having myself a
+well-marked barytone voice of more than half an octave in compass,
+I sometimes add my vocal powers to her execution of
+
+
+"Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom."
+
+
+not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is
+present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken
+a good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to,
+sometimes called B. F., or more frequently Frank, in imitation of
+that felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience,
+adopted by some of his betters. My acquaintance with the French
+language is very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but
+in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F. devotes himself to it with the
+peculiar advantage of an Alsacian teacher. The boy, I think, is
+doing well, between us, notwithstanding. The following is an
+UNCORRECTED French exercise, written by this young gentleman. His
+mother thinks it very creditable to his abilities; though, being
+unacquainted with the French language, her judgment cannot be
+considered final.
+
+
+LE RAT DIES SALONS A LECTURE.
+
+
+Ce rat ci est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de
+derriere sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il
+fait usage pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau noire
+pour le plupart, et porte un cerele blanchatre autour de son cou.
+On le trouve tous les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure, digere,
+s'il y a do quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue,
+dort, et renfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de lire.
+On ne sait pas s'il a une autre gite que cela. Il a l'air d'une
+bete tres stupide, mais il est d'une sagacite et d'une vitesse
+extraordinaire quand il s'agit de saisir un journal nouveau. On ne
+sait pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ'il ne parait pas avoir des idees.
+Il vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux
+divers. Il porte un crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec
+lequel il fait des marques sur les bords des journaux et des
+livres, semblable aux suivans: !!!--Bah! Pooh! Il ne faut pas
+cependant les prendre pour des signes d'intelligence. Il ne vole
+pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement meme des echanges de
+parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours un
+caractere specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se
+nourrit. Feu Cuvier etait d'avis que c'etait de l'odeur du cuir
+des reliures; ce qu'on dit d'etre une nourriture animale fort
+saine, et peu chere. Il vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en
+laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a Lecture on il avait
+existe pendant sa vie. On pretend qu'il revient toutes les nuits,
+apres la mort, visiter le Salon. On peut le voir, dit on, a
+minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et
+ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des
+caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le
+spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de
+Cambridge sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.
+
+
+I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be
+touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You observe that
+he is acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same time that he is
+learning French. Fathers of families in moderate circumstances
+will find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode
+of instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy's
+exercise. The passage was originally taken from the "Histoire
+Naturelle des Betes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipedes et Autres,"
+lately published in Paris. This was translated into English and
+published in London. It was republished at Great Pedlington, with
+notes and additions by the American editor. The notes consist of
+an interrogation-mark on page 53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to
+another book "edited" by the same hand. The additions consist of
+the editor's name on the title-page and back, with a complete and
+authentic list of said editor's honorary titles in the first of
+these localities. Our boy translated the translation back into
+French. This may be compared with the original, to be found on
+Shelf 13, Division X, of the Public Library of this metropolis.]
+
+--Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don't write a
+story, or a novel, or something of that kind. Instead of answering
+each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the
+wholesale department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by
+the piece and by the bale.
+
+That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for
+ONE novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a
+cherished belief. It has been maintained, on the other hand, that
+many persons cannot write more than one novel,--that all after that
+are likely to be failures.--Life is so much more tremendous a thing
+in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be, that
+all records of human experience are as so many bound herbaria to
+the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing,
+fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling
+leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies. All we can do
+with books of human experience is to make them alive again with
+something borrowed from our own lives. We can make a book alive
+for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form
+to our own experience. Now an author's first novel is naturally
+drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is,
+is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises. But
+the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the
+creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in
+order to tell a living story; and this is rare.
+
+Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall
+clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives,
+though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial
+waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along.
+Oftentimes a single CRADLING gets them all, and after that the poor
+man's labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which
+proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write
+one novel or story at any rate, if I would.
+
+--Why don't I, then?--Well, there are several reasons against it.
+In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain
+that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and
+rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the
+fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness
+of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in
+the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A
+beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the
+glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms
+and shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain
+calico, she would be unendurable--in the opinion of the ladies.
+
+Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. I
+should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I am
+afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they
+have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I
+am pretty certain would come out. Of all that have told stories
+among us there is hardly one I can recall who has not drawn too
+faithfully some living portrait that might better have been spared.
+
+Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull
+to write such a story as I should wish to write.
+
+And finally, I think it very likely I SHALL write a story one of
+these days. Don't be surprised at any time, if you see me coming
+out with "The Schoolmistress," or "The Old Gentleman Opposite."
+[OUR schoolmistress and OUR old gentleman that sits opposite had
+left the table before I said this.] I want my glory for writing
+the same discounted now, on the spot, if you please. I will write
+when I get ready. How many people live on the reputation of the
+reputation they might have made!
+
+--I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being
+too dull to write a good story. I don't pretend to know what you
+meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark which may
+hereafter prove of value to some among you.--When one of us who has
+been led by native vanity or senseless flattery to think himself or
+herself possessed of talent arrives at the full and final
+conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the
+most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a
+mortal's mind. All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange
+disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our
+bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian's pack, at the feet of
+that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of
+high intelligence,--with which one look may overflow us in some
+wider sphere of being.
+
+--How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, "I hate
+books!" A gentleman,--singularly free from affectations,--not
+learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so much
+better than learning,--by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge
+of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the
+arts or sciences,--his company is pleasing to all who know him. I
+did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so
+distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless
+acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think
+there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark
+to keep their place, that really "hate books," but never had the
+wit to find it out, or the manliness to own it. [Entre nous, I
+always read with a mark.]
+
+We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intellectual
+man" was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or
+thereabouts, of book-learning, and one-tenth himself. But even if
+he is actually so compounded, he need not read much. Society is a
+strong solution of books. It draws the virtue out of what is best
+worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves. If
+_I_ were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot,
+in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised
+well. The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre.
+You understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should
+be to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to.
+I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive
+fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books
+about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts
+and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and
+the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in
+new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet
+and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for
+the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big
+wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and
+unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and
+reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,--that is, of a
+new influx of truth or beauty,--as a nun over her missal. In
+short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to
+make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal
+compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would push up another
+pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would
+of course take--to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally
+provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive
+phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him
+sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be
+able to lay on his talk when I liked,--with the privilege of
+shutting it off at will.
+
+A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with
+about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord
+of the macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in a while.
+A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of
+civilization over barbarism. Nature and art combine to charm the
+senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by
+well-studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into
+their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a
+short jacket.
+
+The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take
+for granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out;
+nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies
+their dull apprehensions. But look at two masters of that noble
+game! White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red
+says, Mate in six moves;--White looks,--nods;--the game is over.
+Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are
+good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table. That
+blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them,
+--that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the
+reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to
+get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a
+festive garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus,--that
+carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms
+bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional
+mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored
+fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody
+that shows himself,--the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is
+one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce
+in their--
+
+--"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the young fellow whom they call John,--"that
+is from one of your lectures!"
+
+I know it, I replied,--I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.
+
+
+"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"
+
+
+All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and
+grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually
+sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still
+June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum
+of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere
+beyond? Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back
+Bay,--where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating
+the "Metropolitan" boat-clubs,--find yourself in a tepid streak, a
+narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little
+underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to
+bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just
+so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one
+not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the
+conversation. The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street
+door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings
+itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and
+bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes,
+like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of
+early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile,
+--you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!--Nothing
+but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.--As when, at some
+unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the
+air before the astonished passer-by,--silver-footed, diamond-
+crowned, rainbow-scarfed,--from the bosom of that fair sheet,
+sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams
+of a less amiable and less elevated order of reptilia in other
+latitudes.
+
+--Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
+that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with
+the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in
+India,--a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-skinned,
+inferior, but still "Caucasian" race,--and where are English and
+American sympathies? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful
+questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come
+out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that
+the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does
+the same nature in the inferior animals,--tame it or crush it. The
+India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and
+murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers.
+England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with
+empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] Dele. The civilized
+world says, Amen.
+
+--Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly,
+that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them
+and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college
+themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric
+heroes did with their melas oinos,--that black sweet, syrupy wine
+(?) which they used to alloy with three parts or more of the
+flowing stream. [Could it have been melasses, as Webster and his
+provincials spell it,--or Molossa's, as dear old smattering,
+chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in
+the "Magnalia"? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make
+barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries!"--ye
+Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too,
+ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!--ye
+Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of
+native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest
+fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made
+a Golgotha" of your pages!--ponder thereon!]
+
+--Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses.
+You will understand by the title that they are written in an
+imaginary character. I don't doubt they will fit some family-man
+well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on a
+priori grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There is
+no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes that a
+soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and
+nurtured it; that its mysterious compages or frame-work has
+survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity;
+that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to
+the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial
+clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select
+the very locality where this audacious generalization has been
+acted upon. It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and
+trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is
+a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.
+--Now hear the verses.
+
+
+THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
+
+
+O for one hour of youthful joy!
+Give back my twentieth spring!
+I'd rather laugh a bright-haired boy
+Than reign a gray-beard king!
+
+Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
+Away with learning's crown!
+Tear out life's wisdom-written page,
+And dash its trophies down!
+
+One moment let my life-blood stream
+From boyhood's fount of flame!
+Give me one giddy, reeling dream
+Of life all love and fame!
+
+--My listening angel heard the prayer,
+And calmly smiling, said,
+"If I but touch thy silvered hair,
+Thy hasty wish hath sped.
+
+"But is there nothing in thy track
+To bid thee fondly stay,
+While the swift seasons hurry back
+To find the wished-for day?"
+
+--Ah, truest soul of womankind!
+Without thee, what were life?
+One bliss I cannot leave behind:
+I'll take--my--precious wife!
+
+--The angel took a sapphire pen
+And wrote in rainbow dew,
+"The man would be a boy again,
+And be a husband too!"
+
+--"And is there nothing yet unsaid
+Before the change appears?
+Remember, all their gifts have fled
+With those dissolving years!"
+
+Why, yes; for memory would recall
+My fond paternal joys;
+I could not bear to leave them all;
+I'll take--my--girl--and--boys!
+
+The smiling angel dropped his pen,--
+"Why this will never do;
+The man would be a boy again,
+And be a father too!"
+
+And so I laughed,--my laughter woke
+The household with its noise,--
+And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
+To please the gray-haired boys.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to
+remain there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great
+many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of
+different tone and on different subjects. The talks are like the
+breakfasts,--sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must
+take them as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me
+to? No. 1. want serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter
+smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a
+"good storey" which he has copied out for me. (I suppose two
+letters before the word "good" refer to some Doctor of Divinity who
+told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand)--more poetry. No. 4.
+wants something that would be of use to a practical man.
+(Prahctical mahn he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged,
+sweet-scented)--"more sentiment,"--"heart's outpourings."--
+
+My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such
+remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their
+character will depend on many accidents,--a good deal on the
+particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It
+so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the
+divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I
+need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in
+the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of
+course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect
+all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of
+what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather
+like this vein,--possibly prefer it to a livelier one,--serious
+young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis
+from--years of age to--inclusive.
+
+Another privilege of talking is to misquote.--Of course it wasn't
+Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,--but Iris. (As I
+have since told you) it was the former lady's regular business, but
+Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on
+the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here--Juno, in Latin
+--sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one
+of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated
+"Oceanic Miscellany" misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse.
+"Waft us HOME the MESSAGE" of course it ought to be. Will he be
+duly grateful for the correction?]
+
+--The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to
+be governed, not by, but ACCORDING TO laws, such as we observe in
+the larger universe.--You think you know all about WALKING,--don't
+you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to
+your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, ("cotyloid"
+--cup-like--cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and
+longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward
+at such a rate as your will determines, don't you?--On the
+contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed
+rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular
+power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it
+move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same
+mechanism as the movements of the solar system.
+
+[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to
+certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the
+facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I
+appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this,
+when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?
+
+The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
+universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost
+nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had
+got it already.--Why,--said the Professor,--they might have hired
+an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]
+
+Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the
+bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its
+regular cycles. Such or such a thought comes round periodically,
+in its turn. Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere
+with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond
+our power of recognition. Take all this for what it is worth, but
+at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular
+thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that
+a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through
+your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
+Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of
+assent in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often
+been struck by it.
+
+ALL AT ONCE A CONVICTION FLASHES THROUGH US THAT WE HAVE BEEN IN
+THE SAME PRECISE CIRCUMSTANCES AS AT THE PRESENT INSTANT, ONCE OR
+MANY TIMES BEFORE.
+
+O, dear, yes!--said one of the company,--everybody has had that
+feeling.
+
+The landlady didn't know anything about such notions; it was an
+idee in folks' heads, she expected.
+
+The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew
+the feeling well, and didn't like to experience it; it made her
+think she was a ghost, sometimes.
+
+The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he
+had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous
+conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that
+same thing ever so many times before. I looked severely at him,
+and his countenance immediately fell--ON THE SIDE TOWARD ME; I
+cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either
+half of his face without the other half's knowing it.
+
+--I have noticed--I went on to say--the following circumstances
+connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition
+which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very
+trivial,--one that might have presented itself a hundred times.
+Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is
+rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after
+any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to
+record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce
+the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the
+duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it
+was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the
+same convictions in my dreams.
+
+How do I account for it?--Why, there are several ways that I can
+mention, and you may take your choice. The first is that which the
+young lady hinted at;--that these flashes are sudden recollections
+of a previous existence. I don't believe that; for I remember a
+poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one
+day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever
+lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.
+
+Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double
+organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
+for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
+small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
+sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
+second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
+But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
+no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
+time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most
+likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
+that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
+occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of
+circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it
+as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally,
+mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing
+perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the
+outward circumstances.
+
+--Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have
+said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with
+something like it in books,--somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I think,
+and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.
+
+MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE
+READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER
+CHANNEL.
+
+Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's
+susceptibilities differ.--O, yes! I will tell you some of mine.
+The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them. During a year or two of
+adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as
+about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like
+another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:
+orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and
+transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks;--eheu!
+
+
+"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"
+
+
+but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of
+eighteen hundred and--spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus
+fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors
+with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me
+in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory." Only the confounded
+Vienna matches, ohne phosphor-geruch, have worn my sensibilities a
+little.
+
+Then there is the MARIGOLD. When I was of smallest dimensions, and
+wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we
+would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop
+opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage. Out of it would
+come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself,
+shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would
+gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies
+in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-
+crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage,
+garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,
+--stateliest of vegetables,--all are gone, but the breath of a
+marigold brings them all back to me.
+
+Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn
+fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
+dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions
+that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling
+flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had
+been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain
+on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality
+in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless
+petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
+carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border
+the River of Life.
+
+--I should not have talked so much about these personal
+susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I
+believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason
+for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.
+The olfactory nerve--so my friend, the Professor, tells me--is the
+only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the
+parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the
+intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the
+olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the
+brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether
+this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have
+mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth
+remembering. Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of
+suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor
+assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate
+connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of
+the spinal cord.
+
+[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to
+this hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense
+of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in
+getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a
+little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last
+extricated an ample round snuff-box. I looked as he opened it and
+felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying
+therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use
+the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the
+long unused stimulus--O boys,--that were,--actual papas and
+possible grandpapas,--some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,
+--some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled,--do
+you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the
+Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the
+dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria? Then
+it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering
+in its straw cradle. And one among you,--do you remember how he
+would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
+against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he
+was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the
+deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry
+pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]
+
+Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
+my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I
+was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
+pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were
+stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
+there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;
+there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
+lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in
+their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The
+odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
+recesses.
+
+--Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"?
+--To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
+the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves
+us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the
+folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and
+finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up
+in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on
+these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in
+the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and
+the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
+promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the
+Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic
+the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
+Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust
+so long--even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry--are
+alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils,
+and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of
+heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!
+
+--I will thank you for that pie,--said the provoking young fellow
+whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and
+put his hands to his eyes as if moved.--I was thinking,--he said
+indistinctly--
+
+--How? What is't?--said our landlady.
+
+--I was thinking--said he--who was king of England when this old
+pie was baked,--and it made me feel bad to think how long he must
+have been dead.
+
+[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; cela
+va sans dire. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of
+corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize
+itself by a special narrative. There was the wooing and the
+wedding,--the start in life,--the disappointments,--the children
+she had buried,--the struggle against fate,--the dismantling of
+life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts,--the
+broken spirits,--the altered character of the one on whom she
+leaned,--and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain
+between her and all her earthly hopes.
+
+I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but
+I often cried,--not those pattering tears that run off the eaves
+upon our neighbors' grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious
+sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits
+until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those
+tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;--such I did
+shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno
+tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]
+
+Young man,--I said,--the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but
+courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of
+the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. May I
+recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you
+are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet--if you are
+handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice. I take
+it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain
+pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand;
+Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: "Quoiqu'elle soit
+tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas BRUTALISER la machine."--I
+will thank you for the pie, if you please.
+
+[I took more of it than was good for me--as much as 85 degrees, I
+should think,--and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was
+suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a
+theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation.
+When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by
+as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my
+shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as
+they have great names on their title-pages,--Doctors of Divinity,
+some of them,--it wouldn't do.]
+
+--My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or
+twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some
+of the journals of his calling. I told him that I didn't doubt he
+deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse
+occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody
+could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without
+being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have
+their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing
+something of the kind.--The Professor smiled.--Now, said I, hear
+what I am going to say. It will not take many years to bring you
+to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing
+and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and
+pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. I
+don't know what it is,--whether a spontaneous change, mental or
+bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness
+of critical honesty,--but it is a fact, that most writers, except
+sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the
+time when they are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I
+would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he
+is himself an author, over fifty years of age. At thirty we are
+all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this
+tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up
+our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less
+to hinder any, because nobody's elbows are in our way. So I am
+glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in
+a few years.
+
+--Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me
+very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just
+now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you
+know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the
+harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are
+gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but I
+cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain,
+Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age. An
+old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
+used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to
+him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years
+describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I
+remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became
+remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of
+his life.
+
+And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their
+way of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human
+Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon
+over. Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn
+kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some, that,
+like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the
+rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after
+the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware
+of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
+be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath
+the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
+windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
+Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
+Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were
+swelling when he ripened.
+
+--There is no power I envy so much--said the divinity-student--as
+that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don't
+understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling
+thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
+other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you
+wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
+of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.
+
+[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
+the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and
+training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,
+--give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to
+speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
+contains lifeless albumen.]
+
+You call it MIRACULOUS,--I replied,--tossing the expression with my
+facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.--Two men are walking by
+the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with
+which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the
+other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all,
+--and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean
+that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than
+that all things are in all things, and that just according to the
+intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many
+in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he
+was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean,--the child and
+the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a
+pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its
+compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had
+grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all
+the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by
+invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A
+body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the
+entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne
+of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the
+rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!
+
+So,--to return to OUR walk by the ocean,--if all that poetry has
+dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics
+have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed
+in the fancies of women,--if the dreams of colleges and convents
+and boarding-schools,--if every human feeling that sighs, or
+smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their
+innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat,
+--the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
+would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and
+analogies that rolls through the universe.
+
+[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he
+received this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he
+reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried
+it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at
+his leisure.]
+
+--Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.--There is a
+natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together
+in TRIADS, as I have heard them called,--thus: He was honorable,
+courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.
+Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you
+could separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays.
+Many of our writers show the same tendency,--my friend, the
+Professor, especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of
+Johnson,--some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.
+I don't think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an
+instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought
+or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid,--an
+unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and
+thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
+and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But
+mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the
+range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind,
+and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining
+conscious movement.
+
+--I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such
+strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted
+to laugh at them. "Where did our friends pick up all these fine
+ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself. Then I would remember My
+Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how
+affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own.
+But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at
+my window. By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe
+his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and
+waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing
+side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should
+like to ask, WHO taught him all this?--and me, through him, that
+the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side
+and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was
+passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made
+of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its
+shoulders?
+
+--Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
+principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable
+restrictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may
+see such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little fluid
+particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!
+
+--Weaken moral obligations?--No, not weaken, but define them. When
+I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay
+down some principles not fully recognized in some of your
+text-books.
+
+I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You
+saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in
+which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very
+apt to be fools and cowards. But a great many of the clergyman's
+patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.
+
+[Immense sensation at the table.--Sudden retirement of the angular
+female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion--as they say in
+the Chamber of Deputies--on the part of the young fellow they call
+John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw
+--(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.) Our landlady
+to Benjamin Franklin, briskly,--Go to school right off, there's a
+good boy! Schoolmistress curious,--takes a quick glance at
+divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his
+shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood--or truth--had hit
+him in the forehead. Myself calm.]
+
+--I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having
+pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit
+should be disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin,
+(for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a
+small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?
+
+[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,
+vellum-papered 32mo. "DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami.
+Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650." Various names written on
+title-page. Most conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn.
+Anim. 1725. Oxon.
+
+--O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford,--then writing
+as I now write,--now in the dust, where I shall lie,--is this line
+all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at
+least once more spoken by living men;--is it a pleasure to thee?
+Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality,--its
+week, its month, its year,--whatever it may be,--and then we will
+go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion's Uncatalogued
+Library!]
+
+--If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to
+read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty
+scholar,--the great Erasmus,--who "laid the egg of the Reformation
+which Luther hatched." Oh, you never read his Naufragium, or
+"Shipwreck," did you? Of course not; for, if you had, I don't
+think you would have given me credit--or discredit--for entire
+originality in that speech of mine. That men are cowards in the
+contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the extraordinary
+antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they are fools, by
+their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits of wood from
+the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense; that they are
+fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story: I will put
+it into rough English for you.--"I couldn't help laughing to hear
+one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure to be heard, a
+promise to Saint Christopher of Paris--the monstrous statue in the
+great church there--that he would give him a wax taper as big as
+himself. 'Mind what you promise!' said an acquaintance that stood
+near him, poking him with his elbow; 'you couldn't pay for it, if
+you sold all your things at auction.' 'Hold your tongue, you
+donkey!' said the fellow,--but softly, so that Saint Christopher
+should not hear him,--'do you think I'm in earnest? If I once get
+my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him so much as a tallow
+candle!'"
+
+Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in
+their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have
+not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the
+contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the
+qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many
+doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call
+foolish, cowardly, and false.
+
+--So you would abuse other people's beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell
+us your own creed!--said the divinity-student, coloring up with a
+spirit for which I liked him all the better.
+
+--I have a creed,--I replied;--none better, and none shorter. It
+is told in two words,--the two first of the Paternoster. And when
+I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will
+to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral
+obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to
+express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings
+is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief
+planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
+education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the
+will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
+mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to
+nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
+Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but "Give me
+neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
+reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in
+getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these
+every-day working forces into account. The great theological
+question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is
+this:-
+
+No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be
+repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what
+personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business
+has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-
+table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the
+Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto
+"Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand
+theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not
+at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
+time to express an opinion on theological matters.
+
+I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
+rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of
+thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two
+letters a week, requesting him to. . . . ,--on the strength of some
+youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent
+constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?
+
+--Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like
+to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this:
+if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible
+nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he
+had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head
+of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels
+of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the
+other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor
+talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest illustration of
+the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts
+are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children;
+and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the
+transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake
+play JESSE RURAL.
+
+It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love
+for the ridiculous. People laugh WITH him just so long as he
+amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have
+their laugh, and so they laugh AT him. There is in addition,
+however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear. Do
+you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you
+laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you
+have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so
+far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your
+royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a
+dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is
+exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!--first-rate
+performance!--and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at
+once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and,
+stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,--ah, that
+wasn't in the programme!
+
+I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith--who, as
+everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman,
+every inch of him--ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of
+Royalty. The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon
+him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a
+"diner-out of the first water," in one of his own phrases; sneering
+at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking
+behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a
+man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even.--If I
+were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three
+facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit
+in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more
+solid qualities. And so to an actor: Hamlet first, and Bob Logic
+afterwards, if you like; but don't think, as they say poor Liston
+used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do
+anything great with Macbeth's dagger after flourishing about with
+Paul Pry's umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men
+look upon all who challenge their attention,--for a while, at
+least,--as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as
+cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a
+literary man--pardon the forlorn pleasantry!--is the FUNNY-bone.
+That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and
+makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.
+
+--Oh, indeed, no!--I am not ashamed to make you laugh,
+occasionally. I think I could read you something I have in my desk
+which would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of
+these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and
+reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the
+universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas,
+illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long
+before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we
+always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and
+encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of
+those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call
+BLESSED! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be
+preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look
+forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all
+joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street
+not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who
+gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look
+of recognition,--something as if he were one of Heaven's assessors,
+come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met,--that I have
+sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent
+cold, dating from that instant. I don't doubt he would cut his
+kitten's tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell
+me, who taught her to play with it?
+
+No, no!--give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and
+you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about
+entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my
+serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in
+English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment
+of Sir Thomas Browne "EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS
+NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF."
+
+I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
+as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven,
+we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,--but
+we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very
+sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really moving
+onward. It is this: that one cannot help using his early friends
+as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress. Every now and
+then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a string of
+thought tied to him, and look--I am afraid with a kind of luxurious
+and sanctimonious compassion--to see the rate at which the string
+reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow!
+and we are dashing along with the white foam and bright sparkle at
+our bows;--the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a
+sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the sentimental
+side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow all that we
+love.
+
+Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you.
+It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring
+our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the
+habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary,
+we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see
+just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the
+balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now.
+No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we change our last
+simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the
+harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get
+what we want out of it. There is one of our companions;--her
+streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea,
+then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another,
+the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a
+seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at
+dawn she is still in sight,--it may be in advance of us. Some deep
+ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent,--yes,
+stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they are
+swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the
+black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the mist
+sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off
+panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all
+wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride,
+may never come.
+
+So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships,
+because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present
+and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but
+are not what we are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of
+life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the
+course. "Commencement day" always reminds me of the start for the
+"Derby," when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season
+are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the
+race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just "graduating."
+Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit;
+step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:-
+
+
+"HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
+SOCII MOERENTES."
+
+
+But this is the start, and here they are,--coats bright as silk,
+and manes as smooth as eau lustrale can make them. Some of the
+best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show
+their paces. What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old
+lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their
+eyes for? Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on
+the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do
+anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these
+next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that
+comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered
+rings of the arcus senilis!
+
+TEN YEARS GONE. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or
+three bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. CASSOCK, a
+black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts
+commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first
+quarter. METEOR has pulled up.
+
+TWENTY YEARS. Second corner turned. CASSOCK has dropped from the
+front, and JUDEX, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they
+have thinned out! Down flat,--five,--six,--how many? They lie
+still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very
+sure! And the rest of them, what a "tailing off"! Anybody can see
+who is going to win,--perhaps.
+
+THIRTY YEARS. Third corner turned. DIVES, bright sorrel, ridden
+by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is
+getting to be the favourite with many. But who is that other one
+that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows
+close up to the front? Don't you remember the quiet brown colt
+ASTEROID, with the star in his forehead? That is he; he is one of
+the sort that lasts; look out for him! The black "colt," as we
+used to call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a
+gentle trot. There is one they used to call THE FILLY, on account
+of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is
+not to be despised my boy!
+
+FORTY YEARS. More dropping off,--but places much as before.
+
+FIFTY YEARS. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in
+at a walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the
+winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that
+turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory!
+Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure
+that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they
+knew how!
+
+--Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in
+an ocean of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, or
+Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were
+suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower
+or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object,
+suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells
+to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus. We need not trouble
+ourselves about the distinction between this and the Paper
+Nautilus, the Argonauta of the ancients. The name applied to both
+shows that each has long been compared to a ship, as you may see
+more fully in Webster's Dictionary, or the "Encyclopedia," to which
+he refers. If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, you
+will find a figure of one of these shells, and a section of it.
+The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments
+successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which
+is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?
+
+
+THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.
+
+This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
+Sails the unshadowed main,--
+The venturous bark that flings
+On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
+In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
+And coral reefs lie bare,
+Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair
+
+Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
+Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
+And every clambered cell,
+Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
+As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
+Before thee lies revealed,--
+Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
+
+Year after year beheld the silent toil
+That spread his lustrous coil;
+Still, as the spiral grew,
+He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
+Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
+Built up its idle door,
+Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
+
+Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
+Child of the wandering sea,
+Cast from her lap forlorn!
+From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
+Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
+While on mine ear it rings,
+Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-
+
+Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
+As the swift seasons roll!
+Leave thy low-vaulted past!
+Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
+Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
+Till thou at length art free,
+Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+A lyric conception--my friend, the Poet, said--hits me like a
+bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my
+cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death.
+Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine,
+--then a gasp and a great jump of the heart,--then a sudden flush and
+a beating in the vessels of the head,--then a long sigh,--and the
+poem is written.
+
+It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,
+--I replied.
+
+No,--said he,--far from it. I said written, but I did not say
+COPIED. Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body
+of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul
+of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul. It comes to him a
+thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words,--words that
+have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have
+never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody
+itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain;
+but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale
+with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot
+thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those
+parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging
+along in their regular sequences of association. No wonder the
+ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. [Greek text
+which cannot be reproduced]. Goddess,--Muse,--divine afflatus,
+--something outside always. _I_ never wrote any verses worth
+reading. I can't. I am too stupid. If I ever copied any that
+were worth reading, I was only a medium.
+
+[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand,
+--telling them what this poet told me. The company listened rather
+attentively, I thought, considering the literary character of the
+remarks.]
+
+The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read
+anything better than Pope's "Essay on Man"? Had I ever perused
+McFingal? He was fond of poetry when he was a boy,--his mother
+taught him to say many little pieces,--he remembered one beautiful
+hymn;--and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud voice, for his
+years,--
+
+
+"The spacious firmament on high,
+With all the blue ethereal sky,
+And spangled heavens,"--
+
+
+He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up
+beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked
+round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum,--the
+Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it. The old man's sudden
+breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each
+kept his posture as if changed to stone. Our Celtic Bridget, or
+Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a
+sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-
+shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are
+known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop
+forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk,--the
+waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy
+footfall. Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was
+about to deposit a plate heaped with something upon the table, when
+I saw the coarse arm stretched by my shoulder arrested,--motionless
+as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn't set the plate
+down while the old gentleman was speaking!
+
+He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on
+his cheek. Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man
+because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him
+when his hand trembles! If they ever WERE there, they ARE there
+still!
+
+By and by we got talking again.--Does a poet love the verses
+written through him, do you think, Sir?--said the divinity-student.
+
+So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal
+heat about them, _I_ KNOW he loves them,--I answered. When they
+have had time to cool, he is more indifferent.
+
+A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes,--said the young fellow
+whom they call John.
+
+The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized
+female in black bombazine .--Buckwheat is skerce and high,--she
+remarked. [Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady,--pays
+nothing,--so she must stand by the guns and be ready to repel
+boarders.]
+
+I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things
+I wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again.--I
+don't think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly
+appreciated, given to you as they are in the green state.
+
+--You don't know what I mean by the GREEN STATE? Well, then, I
+will tell you. Certain things are good for nothing until they have
+been kept a long while; and some are good for nothing until they
+have been long kept and USED. Of the first, wine is the
+illustrious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and
+used I will name three,--meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems. The
+meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand
+offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without
+complexion or flavor,--born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but
+colorless as pallida Mors herself. The fire is lighted in its
+central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of
+the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a
+drachm are diffused through its thirsting pores. First a
+discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing, umber
+tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her old
+brown autumnal hue, you see,--as true in the fire of the meerschaum
+as in the sunshine of October! And then the cumulative wealth of
+its fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a
+thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it without
+awakening the old joys that hang around it as the smell of flowers
+clings to the dresses of the daughters of the house of Farina!
+
+[Don't think I use a meerschaum myself, for _I_ DO NOT, though I
+have owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict
+(of the Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk
+and beaded knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on
+his right check. On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest
+silver-mounted tobacco-stopper you ever saw. It is a little
+box-wood Triton, carved with charming liveliness and truth; I have
+often compared it to a figure in Raphael's "Triumph of Galatea."
+It came to me in an ancient shagreen case,--how old it is I do not
+know,--but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh's time.
+If you are curious, you shall see it any day. Neither will I
+pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable smoking
+contrivance that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a
+ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that
+fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous
+incombustibles, the CIGAR, so called, of the shops,--which to
+"draw" asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to
+relish, the leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise
+you, young man, even if my illustration strike your fancy, to
+consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe,
+for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic
+may strike deeper than you think for. I have seen the green leaf
+of early promise grow brown before its time under such Nicotian
+regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at
+the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]
+
+Violins, too,--the sweet old Amati!--the divine Stradivarius!
+Played on by ancient maestros until the bow-hand lost its power and
+the flying fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate, young
+enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his
+inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his
+monotonous despair. Passed from his dying hand to the cold
+virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till,
+when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the
+stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of
+their lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident
+artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy
+hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies
+in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were
+shut up in it; then again to the gentle dilettante who calmed it
+down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days
+of the old maestros. And so given into our hands, its pores all
+full of music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through,
+with the concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which
+have kindled and faded on its strings.
+
+Now I tell you a poem must be kept AND USED, like a meerschaum, or
+a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;--the more
+porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is
+capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own
+humanity,--its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its
+aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine
+secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must take
+time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature,
+by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can
+penetrate.
+
+Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
+anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from
+the maker's hands? Now you know very well that there are no less
+than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are
+strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to
+make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in
+harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were
+a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona,
+or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty
+years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets
+tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.
+
+Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting
+each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of
+verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words
+together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first.
+But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's
+muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit
+together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a
+syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for
+meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying
+process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a
+violin. Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its
+hundredth birthday,--(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)--the sap
+is pretty well out of it. And here is the song of an old poet whom
+Neaera cheated.--
+
+
+"Nox erat, et coelo fulgebat Luna sereno
+Inter minora sidera,
+Cum tu magnorum numen laesura deorum
+In verba jurabas mea."
+
+
+Don't you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin
+phrases? Now I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary
+brings with it a certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the
+sheets of the "Pactolian," in which, as I told you, I sometimes
+print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those
+words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, that, while the
+sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can't
+fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true
+stuff, they will ring better after a while.
+
+[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate
+exposition of these self-evident analogies. Presently A PERSON
+turned towards me--I do not choose to designate the individual--and
+said that he rather expected my pieces had given pretty good
+"sahtisfahction."--I had, up to this moment, considered this
+complimentary phrase as sacred to the use of secretaries of
+lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by a small
+pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this
+moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm. But
+as a reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a
+little below that blood-heat standard which a man's breath ought to
+have, whether silent, or vocal and articulate. I waited for a
+favorable opportunity, however, before making the remarks which
+follow.]
+
+--There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that
+fix a man's position for you before you have done shaking hands
+with him. Allow me to expand a little. There are several things,
+very slight in themselves, yet implying other things not so
+unimportant. Thus, your French servant has devalise your premises
+and got caught. Excusez, says the sergent-de-ville, as he politely
+relieves him of his upper garments and displays his bust in the
+full daylight. Good shoulders enough,--a little marked,--traces of
+smallpox, perhaps,--but white. . . . . Crac! from the sergent-de-
+ville's broad palm on the white shoulder! Now look! Vogue la
+galere! Out comes the big red V--mark of the hot iron;--he had
+blistered it out pretty nearly,--hadn't he?--the old rascal VOLEUR,
+branded in the galleys at Marseilles! [Don't! What if he has got
+something like this?--nobody supposes I INVENTED such a story.]
+
+My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females
+which I told you I had owned,--for, look you, my friends, simple
+though I stand here, I am one that has been driven in his
+"kerridge,"--not using that term, as liberal shepherds do, for any
+battered old shabby-genteel go-cart which has more than one wheel,
+but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle WITH A POLE,--my man
+John, I say, was a retired soldier. He retired unostentatiously,
+as many of Her Majesty's modest servants have done before and
+since. John told me, that when an officer thinks he recognizes one
+of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really been in
+the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful
+country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, "Strap!"
+If he has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the
+reprimand for its ill adjustment. The old word of command flashes
+through his muscles, and his hand goes up in an instant to the
+place where the strap used to be.
+
+[I was all the time preparing for my grand coup, you understand;
+but I saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued,
+--always in illustration of the general principle I had laid down.]
+
+Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of. There was
+a legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the
+English coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape
+of Saxons, who would not let them go,--on the contrary, insisted on
+their staying, and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo
+treated Marsyas, or an Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in
+his title-page, and, having divested them of the one essential and
+perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in the mildest climates,
+nailed the same on the church-door as we do the banns of marriage,
+in terrorem.
+
+[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I
+looked at our landlady, I saw that "the water stood in her eyes,"
+as it did in Christiana's when the interpreter asked her about the
+spider, and I fancied, but wasn't quite sure that the
+schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy did in the same conversation, as
+you remember.]
+
+That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story,--said the young fellow whom
+they call John. I abstained from making Hamlet's remark to
+Horatio, and continued.
+
+Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying
+an old Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other
+things thought the doors should be attended to. One of them
+particularly, the front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it
+were, and as if it would be all the better for scraping. There
+happened to be a microscopist in the village who had heard the old
+pirate story, and he took it into his head to examine the crust on
+this door. There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine
+historical document, of the Ziska drum-head pattern,--a real cutis
+humana, stripped from some old Scandinavian filibuster, and the
+legend was true.
+
+My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and
+financial question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute
+fragment of a similar document. Behind the pane of plate-glass
+which bore his name and title burned a modest lamp, signifying to
+the passers-by that at all hours of the night the slightest favors
+(or fevers) were welcome. A youth who had freely partaken of the
+cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, following a moth-like
+impulse very natural under the circumstances, dashed his fist at
+the light and quenched the meek luminary,--breaking through the
+plate-glass, of course, to reach it. Now I don't want to go into
+minutiae at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go
+through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle,
+to say the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a
+sausage-machine without looking the worse for it. The Professor
+gathered up the fragments of glass, and with them certain very
+minute but entirely satisfactory documents which would have
+identified and hanged any rogue in Christendom who had parted with
+them.--The historical question, WHO DID IT? and the financial
+question, WHO PAID FOR IT? were both settled before the new lamp
+was lighted the next evening.
+
+You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives,
+our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
+insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and
+forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you
+want to know about a person. Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly
+pronounced haalth)--instead of, How do you do? or, How are you?
+Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety
+one-horse wagon a "kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying
+to please you that he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction."
+Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing, or that you have
+been "stoppin"' at Deacon Somebody's,--and other such expressions.
+One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the
+parlor of his country-house,--bow, arrows, wings, and all complete.
+A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the
+figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her
+deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous
+biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief
+question!
+
+[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in
+the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my
+fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual
+at whose door it lay.]
+
+That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, Ex pede
+Herculem. He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you
+may judge of the barrel." Ex PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, Ex
+ungue minimi digiti pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos
+et proavos, filios, nepotes et pronepotes! Talk to me about your
+[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]! Tell me about Cuvier's
+getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a
+portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O"
+revealed Giotto,--as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford
+atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,--so all a man's antecedents and
+possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at
+once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.
+
+Possibilities, Sir?--said the divinity-student; can't a man who
+says Haow? arrive at distinction?
+
+Sir,--I replied,--in a republic all things are possible. But the
+man WITH A FUTURE has almost of necessity sense enough to see that
+any odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of. Doesn't
+Sydney Smith say that a public man in England never gets over a
+false quantity uttered in early life? OUR public men are in little
+danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in the habit of
+introducing Latin into their speeches,--for good and sufficient
+reasons. But they are bound to speak decent English,--unless,
+indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or
+General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian's head are
+pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a
+constituency of thirty empires is not at all particular, provided
+they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.
+
+However, it is not for me to talk. I have made mistakes enough in
+conversation and print. I never find them out until they are
+stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me. I have no
+doubt I shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is
+over, and remember them all before another. How one does tremble
+with rage at his own intense momentary stupidity about things he
+knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays himself open to the
+impertinences of the captatores verborum, those useful but humble
+scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what
+might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as
+they go! I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal
+critics;--how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and
+vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those
+clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better,
+and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is
+unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or
+broadcloth.
+
+[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making
+this record of the date that nobody may think it was written in
+wrath, on account of any particular grievance suffered from the
+invasion of any individual scarabaeus grammaticus.]
+
+--I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this
+table when it is repeated? I hope they do, I am sure. I should be
+very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they
+did not.
+
+Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat
+stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found
+it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round
+it, close to its edges,--and have you not, in obedience to a kind
+of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough,
+insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge
+and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to
+herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"? What an odd
+revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a
+small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected,
+until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced
+by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened
+down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and
+ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
+horny-shelled,--turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them
+softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine
+watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a
+joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her
+flat-pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy
+crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of
+four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young
+larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in
+the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned
+and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded
+community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury
+of legs--and some of them have a good many--rush round wildly,
+butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general
+stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by
+sunshine. NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing tall and green
+where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle
+had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and
+the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden
+disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate
+through their glorified being.
+
+--The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very
+familiar way,--at which I do not choose to take offence, but which
+I sometimes think it necessary to repress,--that I was coming it
+rather strong on the butterflies.
+
+No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images,--the
+butterfly as well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The
+grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by
+it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that
+thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it.
+He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to
+the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious
+face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time.
+Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in
+its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall God's
+minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.
+Then shall beauty--Divinity taking outlines and color--light upon
+the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit
+rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub,
+which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.
+
+You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a
+terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population
+that dwells under it.
+
+--Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of
+somebody or other. As soon as his breath comes back, he very
+probably begins to expend it in hard words. These are the best
+evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to
+say. Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his
+pamphlets. "I think I have not been attacked enough for it," he
+said;--"attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard
+unless it rebounds."
+
+--If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I.
+Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long
+ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY?
+
+Don't know what that means?--Well, I will tell you. You know,
+that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a
+pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would
+stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy
+equalizes fools and wise men in the same way,--AND THE FOOLS KNOW
+IT.
+
+--No, but I often read what they say about other people. There are
+about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like
+the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the
+bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows.
+If you get one, you get the whole lot.
+
+What are they?--Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and
+longitude. Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately.
+Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial,
+witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished,
+celebrated, illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first
+writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow,
+ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and disgrace
+to civilization.
+
+What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets?--Well, I
+should say a set of influences something like these:---1st.
+Relationships, political, religious, social, domestic. 2d.
+Oyster, in the form of suppers given to gentlemen connected with
+criticism. I believe in the school, the college, and the clergy;
+but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion--which means
+commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry--is the
+following MAJOR PROPOSITION. Oysters au naturel. Minor
+proposition. The same "scalloped." Conclusion. That--(here
+insert entertainer's name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant,--and
+the rest.
+
+--No, it isn't exactly bribery. One man has oysters, and another
+epithets. It is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a "spread"
+on linen, and the other on paper,--that is all. Don't you think
+you and I should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical
+line? I am sure I couldn't resist the softening influences of
+hospitality. I don't like to dine out, you know,--I dine so well
+at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is
+so pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the
+boarders]; but if I did partake of a man's salt, with such
+additions as that article of food requires to make it palatable, I
+could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I suppose I
+should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string of
+sleigh-bells. Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of
+us,--not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that
+its sharp corners get terribly rounded. I love truth as chiefest
+among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never
+be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it. I might
+write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that is
+another matter.
+
+--Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for you, and such others of
+tender age as you may tell it to.
+
+When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those
+two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to
+us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and
+in his left spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless
+ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold--TRUTH. The
+spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark
+crimson flush above, where the light falls on them, and in a
+certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three
+letters L, I, E. The child to whom they are offered very probably
+clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in
+the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the
+child would have them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a
+great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up.
+But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so
+easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out
+of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to
+find the others, which stay where they are left. Thus he learns
+--thus we learn--to drop the streaked and speckled globes of
+falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But
+then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all
+Polite-behavior, all insisting that truth must ROLL, or nobody can
+do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the
+second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve,
+do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of
+truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes
+hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.
+
+The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased
+with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next
+day. But she should tell the children, she said, that there were
+better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of
+its convenience and the inconvenience of lying.
+
+Yes,--I said,--but education always begins through the senses, and
+works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing
+the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is
+unprofitable,--afterwards, that it is against the peace and dignity
+of the universe.
+
+--Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in
+newspapers, under the title, "From our Foreign Correspondent," does
+any harm?--Why, no,--I don't know that it does. I suppose it
+doesn't really deceive people any more than the "Arabian Nights" or
+"Gulliver's Travels" do. Sometimes the writers compile TOO
+carelessly, though, and mix up facts out of geographies, and
+stories out of the penny papers, so as to mislead those who are
+desirous of information. I cut a piece out of one of the papers,
+the other day, which contains a number of improbabilities, and, I
+suspect, misstatements. I will send up and get it for you, if you
+would like to hear it.--Ah, this is it; it is headed
+
+
+"OUR SUMATRA CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+"This island is now the property of the Stamford family,--having
+been won, it is said, in a raffle, by Sir--Stamford, during the
+stock-gambling mania of the South-Sea Scheme. The history of this
+gentleman may be found in an interesting series of questions
+(unfortunately not yet answered) contained in the 'Notes and
+Queries.' This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which
+here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallizing in
+cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its
+surface, during calm weather, the rainbow tints of the celebrated
+South-Sea bubbles. The summers are oppressively hot, and the
+winters very probably cold; but this fact cannot be ascertained
+precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the mercury in these
+latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, and thus the
+thermometer is rendered useless in winter.
+
+"The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper
+tree and the bread-fruit tree. Pepper being very abundantly
+produced, a benevolent society was organized in London during the
+last century for supplying the natives with vinegar and oysters, as
+an addition to that delightful condiment. [Note received from Dr.
+D. P.] It is said, however, that, as the oysters were of the kind
+called NATIVES in England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience to
+a natural instinct, refused to touch them, and confined themselves
+entirely to the crew of the vessel in which they were brought over.
+This information was received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a
+native himself, and exceedingly fond of missionaries. He is said
+also to be very skilful in the CUISINE peculiar to the island.
+
+"During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons employed
+are subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent
+and long-continued sternutation, or sneezing. Such is the
+vehemence of these attacks, that the unfortunate subjects of them
+are often driven backwards for great distances at immense speed, on
+the well-known principle of the aeolipile. Not being able to see
+where they are going, these poor creatures dash themselves to
+pieces against the rocks or are precipitated over the cliffs and
+thus many valuable lives are lost annually. As, during the whole
+pepper-harvest, they feed exclusively on this stimulant, they
+become exceedingly irritable. The smallest injury is resented with
+ungovernable rage. A young man suffering from the PEPPER-FEVER as
+it is called, cudgelled another most severely for appropriating a
+superannuated relative of trifling value, and was only pacified by
+having a present made him of a pig of that peculiar species of
+swine called the Peccavi by the Catholic Jews, who, it is well
+known, abstain from swine's flesh in imitation of the Mahometan
+Buddhists.
+
+"The bread-tree grows abundantly. Its branches are well known to
+Europe and America under the familiar name of maccaroni. The
+smaller twigs are called vermicelli. They have a decided animal
+flavor, as may be observed in the soups containing them.
+Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very
+dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being
+boiled. The government of the island, therefore, never allows a
+stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston
+with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out.
+These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives
+among us. It therefore always contains many of these insects,
+which, however, generally die of old age in the shops, so that
+accidents from this source are comparatively rare.
+
+"The fruit of the bread-tree consists principally of hot rolls.
+The buttered-muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the
+cocoa-nut palm, the cream found on the milk of the cocoa-nut
+exuding from the hybrid in the shape of butter, just as the ripe
+fruit is splitting, so as to fit it for the tea-table, where it is
+commonly served up with cold"--
+
+--There,--I don't want to read any more of it. You see that many
+of these statements are highly improbable.--No, I shall not mention
+the paper.--No, neither of them wrote it, though it reminds me of
+the style of these popular writers. I think the fellow who wrote
+it must have been reading some of their stories, and got them mixed
+up with his history and geography. I don't suppose HE lies;--he
+sells it to the editor, who knows how many squares off "Sumatra"
+is. The editor, who sells it to the public--By the way, the papers
+have been very civil haven't they?--to the--the what d'ye call it?
+--"Northern Magazine,"--isn't it?--got up by some of those
+Come-outers, down East, as an organ for their local peculiarities.
+
+--The Professor has been to see me. Came in, glorious, at about
+twelve o'clock, last night. Said he had been with "the boys." On
+inquiry, found that "the boys," were certain baldish and grayish
+old gentlemen that one sees or hears of in various important
+stations of society. The Professor is one of the same set, but he
+always talks as if he had been out of college about ten years,
+whereas. . . [Each of these dots was a little nod, which the
+company understood, as the reader will, no doubt.] He calls them
+sometimes "the boys," and sometimes "the old fellows." Call him by
+the latter title, and see how he likes it.--Well, he came in last
+night glorious, as I was saying. Of course I don't mean vinously
+exalted; he drinks little wine on such occasions, and is well known
+to all the Peters and Patricks as the gentleman who always has
+indefinite quantities of black tea to kill any extra glass of red
+claret he may have swallowed. But the Professor says he always
+gets tipsy on old memories at these gatherings. He was, I forget
+how many years old when he went to the meeting; just turned of
+twenty now,--he said. He made various youthful proposals to me,
+including a duet under the landlady's daughter's window. He had
+just learned a trick, he said, of one of "the boys," of getting a
+splendid bass out of a door-panel by rubbing it with the palm of
+his hand. Offered to sing "The sky is bright," accompanying
+himself on the front-door, if I would go down and help in the
+chorus. Said there never was such a set of fellows as the old boys
+of the set he has been with. Judges, mayors, Congress-men, Mr.
+Speakers, leaders in science, clergymen better than famous, and
+famous too, poets by the half-dozen, singers with voices like
+angels, financiers, wits, three of the best laughers in the
+Commonwealth, engineers, agriculturists,--all forms of talent and
+knowledge he pretended were represented in that meeting. Then he
+began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he
+could "furnish out creation" in all its details from that set of
+his. He would like to have the whole boodle of them, (I
+remonstrated against this word, but the Professor said it was a
+diabolish good word, and he would have no other,) with their wives
+and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see how
+splendidly they would reorganize society. They could build a
+city,--they have done it; make constitutions and laws; establish
+churches and lyceums; teach and practise the healing art; instruct
+in every department; found observatories; create commerce and
+manufactures; write songs and hymns, and sing 'em, and make
+instruments to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a
+journal almost as good as the "Northern Magazine," edited by the
+Come-outers. There was nothing they were not up to, from a
+christening to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never be called
+for, unless some stranger got in among them.
+
+--I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn't make much
+difference to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of
+pale Sherry and similar elements. All at once he jumped up and
+said,--
+
+Don't you want to hear what I just read to the boys?
+
+I have had questions of a similar character asked me before,
+occasionally. A man of iron mould might perhaps say, No! I am not
+a man of iron mould, and said that I should be delighted.
+
+The Professor then read--with that slightly sing-song cadence which
+is observed to be common in poets reading their own verses--the
+following stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about two
+feet and a half, with an occasional movement back or forward for
+better adjustment, the appearance of which has been likened by some
+impertinent young folks to that of the act of playing on the
+trombone. His eyesight was never better; I have his word for it.
+
+
+MARE RUBRUM.
+
+
+Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!--
+For I would drink to other days;
+And brighter shall their memory shine,
+Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
+The roses die, the summers fade;
+But every ghost of boyhood's dream
+By Nature's magic power is laid
+To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.
+
+It filled the purple grapes that lay
+And drank the splendors of the sun
+Where the long summer's cloudless day
+Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
+It pictures still the bacchant shapes
+That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,--
+The maidens dancing on the grapes,--
+Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.
+
+Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
+In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
+Those flitting shapes that never die,
+The swift-winged visions of the past.
+Kiss but the crystal's mystic rim,
+Each shadow rends its flowery chain,
+Springs in a bubble from its brim
+And walks the chambers of the brain.
+
+Poor Beauty! time and fortune's wrong
+No form nor feature may withstand,--
+Thy wrecks are scattered all along,
+Like emptied sea-shells on the sand;--
+Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,
+The dust restores each blooming girl,
+As if the sea-shells moved again
+Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.
+
+Here lies the home of school-boy life,
+With creaking stair and wind-swept hall,
+And, scarred by many a truant knife,
+Our old initials on the wall;
+Here rest--their keen vibrations mute--
+The shout of voices known so well,
+The ringing laugh, the wailing flute,
+The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.
+
+Here, clad in burning robes, are laid
+Life's blossomed joys, untimely shed;
+And here those cherished forms have strayed
+We miss awhile, and call them dead.
+What wizard fills the maddening glass
+What soil the enchanted clusters grew?
+That buried passions wake and pass
+In beaded drops of fiery dew?
+
+Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine,--
+Our hearts can boast a warmer grow,
+Filled from a vantage more divine,--
+Calmed, but not chilled by winter's snow!
+To-night the palest wave we sip
+Rich as the priceless draught shall be
+That wet the bride of Cana's lip,--
+The wedding wine of Galilee!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
+
+--I think, Sir,--said the divinity-student,--you must intend that
+for one of the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were
+speaking of the other day.
+
+I thank you, my young friend,--was my reply,--but I must say
+something better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the
+number.
+
+--The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there
+were on record, and what, and by whom said.
+
+--Why, let us see,--there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, "the
+great Bostonian," after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he
+said a great many wise things,--and I don't feel sure he didn't
+borrow this,--he speaks as if it were old. But then he applied it
+so neatly!--
+
+"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
+another than he whom you yourself have obliged."
+
+Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my
+friend, the Historian, in one of his flashing moments:-
+
+"Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
+necessaries."
+
+To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the
+wittiest of men:-
+
+"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."--
+
+The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.
+
+The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn't think the wit
+meant any irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is
+a heavenly place after New York or Boston.
+
+A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they
+call John,--evidently a stranger,--said there was one more wise
+man's saying that he had heard; it was about our place, but he
+didn't know who said it.--A civil curiosity was manifested by the
+company to hear the fourth wise saying. I heard him distinctly
+whispering to the young fellow who brought him to dinner, SHALL I
+TELL IT? To which the answer was, GO AHEAD!--Well,--he said,--this
+was what I heard:-
+
+"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't
+pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation
+straightened out for a crowbar."
+
+Sir,--said I,--I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with
+pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with
+malignant dulness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of
+Boston,--and of all other considerable--and inconsiderable--places
+with which I have had the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys
+think London is the only place in the world. Frenchmen--you
+remember the line about Paris, the Court, the World, etc.---I
+recollect well, by the way, a sign in that city which ran thus:
+"Hotel l'Univers et des Etats Unis"; and as Paris IS the universe
+to a Frenchman, of course the United States are outside of it.
+--"See Naples and then die."--It is quite as bad with smaller places.
+I have been about, lecturing, you know, and have found the
+following propositions to hold true of all of them.
+
+1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of
+each and every town or city.
+
+2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it
+is affectionately styled by the inhabitants the "GOOD OLD town of"
+--(whatever its name may happen to be.)
+
+3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to
+listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a "remarkably
+intelligent audience."
+
+4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to
+longevity.
+
+5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the
+world. (One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember,
+sent short pieces to the "Pactolian" some time since, which were
+"respectfully declined.")
+
+Boston is just like other places of its size;--only perhaps,
+considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department,
+superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the
+English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of
+cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the
+real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its
+intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send
+away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no
+offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always
+proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which
+the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in
+this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of
+their talent and wealth.--I have observed, by the way, that the
+people who really live in two great cities are by no means so
+jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated
+within the intellectual basin, or suction-range, of one large one,
+of the pretensions of any other. Don't you see why? Because their
+promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have
+been drained off to the neighboring big city,--their prettiest girl
+has been exported to the same market; all their ambition points
+there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I
+hate little toad-eating cities.
+
+--Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?--Oh,--an
+example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn't
+you like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the
+highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.
+
+Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an
+old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here
+and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for
+the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door
+with their tomahawks,)--if they have, scattered about, those mighty
+square houses built something more than half a century ago, and
+standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium
+of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its monument,--if
+they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push their branches
+over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the side-walk,
+--if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to betoken
+quiet without proclaiming decay,--I think I could go to pieces,
+after my life's work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as
+sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in.
+I visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the
+Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the
+imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of
+these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is
+kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and,
+as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the
+stars by night.
+
+--Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
+towns?--I don't believe there is much difference. You know how
+they read Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of
+Massachusetts?--Well, they read it
+
+
+"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"
+
+
+--Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by
+which they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some
+keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some,
+bolted,--with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in;
+and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold. This
+front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and
+this into the inferior apartments. The side-door opens at once
+into the sacred chambers.
+
+There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is
+carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers,
+sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
+duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas,
+if none is given with it!
+
+If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
+person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly
+pronounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,
+--THE LORD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL! You will probably go mad within
+a reasonable time,--or, if you are a man, run off and die with your
+head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Francisco,--or, if you
+are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a pale,
+jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play
+some real life-tragedy or other.
+
+Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the
+side-door. The fact of possessing one renders those even who are
+dear to you very terrible at times. You can keep the world out from
+your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are ready for
+them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades of
+intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any hour and
+in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system,
+and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones,
+--touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his
+instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this
+nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of
+performance. Married life is the school in which the most
+accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman
+is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of
+sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on
+the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste
+are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other
+instrument possesses. A few exercises on it daily at home fit a man
+wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he
+returns from them. No stranger can get a great many notes of torture
+out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,--parent,
+child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a
+side-door key; too many have them already.
+
+--You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed
+a frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became
+thawed? If we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better
+that it should sting us and we should die than that its chill
+should slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never can! I have
+seen faces of women that were fair to look upon, yet one could see
+that the icicles were forming round these women's hearts. I knew
+what freezing image lay on the white breasts beneath the laces!
+
+A very simple INTELLECTUAL mechanism answers the necessities of
+friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a
+watch tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry
+it about with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and
+is not a repeater, nor a musical watch,--though it is not enamelled
+nor jewelled,--in short, though it has little beyond the wheels
+required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a
+pair of useful hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a
+brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of
+exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very
+nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises
+which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive
+natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.--Observe, I am
+talking about MINDS. I won't say, the more intellect, the less
+capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding
+and reason;--but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away
+with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of
+wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart
+happy, I have no question.
+
+If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share
+all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
+Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books.
+After all, if we think of it, most of the world's loves and
+friendships have been between people that could not read nor spell.
+
+But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs
+all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of
+smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,--this is the great martyrdom
+of sensitive beings,--most of all in that perpetual auto da fe
+where young womanhood is the sacrifice.
+
+--You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and
+friendships of illiterate persons,--that is, of the human race,
+with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,--I was born
+and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into
+their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think
+I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. But I
+can't help remembering that the world's great men have not commonly
+been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. The Hebrew
+patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent
+to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think,
+if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next
+Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.
+
+What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in
+which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.
+
+--I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,--said the
+divinity-student,--who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any
+time.
+
+My young friend,--I replied,--the man who is never conscious of a
+state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond
+expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of
+language. I can hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think
+for a moment of the power of music. The nerves that make us alive
+to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive
+region of the marrow just where it is widening to run upwards into
+the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of sense rather
+than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were,
+logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how
+different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the
+reach of symbols!--Think of human passions as compared with all
+phrases! Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by the reading
+of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because Desdemona
+was maligned? There are a good many symbols, even, that are more
+expressive than words. I remember a young wife who had to part
+with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem;
+indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word
+about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with
+jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of
+rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,--namely, to waste away
+and die. When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.
+When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold.--You talk
+about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the
+highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be
+so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text
+which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's reading of
+Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of
+him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs from
+that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind
+which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
+much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
+to rise above--not the author, but the reader's mental version of
+the author, whoever he may be.
+
+I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown
+into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then
+they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought
+without words. We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and
+probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the
+contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of
+spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in
+vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.
+
+--I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
+to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes
+it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the
+mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have
+thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, STRIKE
+IN, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.
+
+I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every
+day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more
+of births,--with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its
+pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books
+that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers
+growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was
+ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.
+
+--Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
+elsewhere?--No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you
+my rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind,
+and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but
+recently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they
+are seasoned.
+
+--Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned
+a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the
+mind. Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an
+hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.
+When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when
+acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,--become at
+home,--entered into relations with your other thoughts, and
+integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind.--Or take a
+simple and familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it. You
+forget a name, in conversation,--go on talking, without making any
+effort to recall it,--and presently the mind evolves it by its own
+involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another
+train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.
+
+There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
+mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.
+
+--I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
+something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked
+that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I
+should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a
+remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their
+portraits.
+
+--Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether
+the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as
+Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his
+description. At any rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to
+turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would
+sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was
+meant to have some local bearing or other,--which the author, of
+course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with
+anything on this side of the water.
+
+ [The above remarks were addressed to the school-mistress, to whom
+I handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student
+came and read over her shoulder,--very curious, apparently, but his
+eyes wandered, I thought. Fancying that her breathing was somewhat
+hurried and high, or thoracic, as my friend, the Professor, calls
+it, I watched her a little more closely.--It is none of my
+business.--After all, it is the imponderables that move the world,
+--heat, electricity, love. Habet?]
+
+This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school
+French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;--the mistakes
+give a relish to it, I think.
+
+
+LES SOCIETES POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.
+
+Ces Societes la sont une Institution pour suppleer aux besoins
+d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survecu a leurs
+emotions a l'egard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de
+l'habitude de boire.
+
+Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Societes, on doit avoir le moins
+de cheveux possible. S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux
+depilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques
+connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre. Des le moment qu'on
+ouvre la porte de la Societe, on a un grand interet dans toutes les
+choses dont on ne sait rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste demontre un
+nouveau FLEXOR du TARSE d'un MELOLONTHA VULGARIS. Douze savans
+improvises, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des
+insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du CULEX, se precipitent sur
+l'instrument, et voient--une grande bulle d'air, dont ils
+s'emerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est un spectacle plein
+d'instruction--pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Societe. Tous
+les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air
+d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours
+d'une demiheure que O6 N3 H5 C6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est
+bonne a rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur tres desagreable,
+selon l'habitude des produits chimiques. Apres cela vient un
+mathematicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin
+un x+y, dont vous n'avex pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos
+relations avec la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations
+speciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez
+jamais soupconne l'existence. Ainsi il vous decrit les FOLLICULES
+de L'APPENDIX VERMIFORMIS d'un DZIGGUETAI. Vous ne savez pas ce
+que c'est qu'un FOLLICULE. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un
+APPENDIX UERMIFORMIS. Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du
+DZIGGUETAI. Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaisances a la fois,
+qui s'attachent a votre esprit comme l'eau adhere aux plumes d'un
+canard. On connait toutes les langues EX OFFICIO en devenant
+membre d'une de ces Societes. Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai
+sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout cela de suite, et
+s'instruit enormement.
+
+Il y a deux especes d'individus qu'on trouve toujours a ces
+Societes: 1 (degree) Le membre a questions; 2 (degree) Le membre a
+"Bylaws."
+
+La QUESTION est une specialite. Celui qui en fait metier ne fait
+jamais des reponses. La question est une maniere tres commode de
+dire les choses suivantes: "Me voila! Je ne suis pas fossil,
+moi,--je respire encore! J'ai des idees,--voyez mon intelligence!
+Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de
+cela! Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacite, voyez vous! Nous ne
+sommes nullement la bete qu'on pense!"--LE FAISEUR DE QUESTIONS
+DONNE PEU D'ATTENTION AUX REPONSES QU'ON FAIT; CE N'EST PAS LA DANS
+SA SPECIALITE.
+
+Le membre a "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les emotions
+mousseuses et genereuses qui se montrent dans la Societe. C'est un
+empereur manque,--un tyran a la troiseme trituration. C'est un
+esprit dur, borne, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les
+grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l'aime pas dans
+la Societe, mais on le respecte et on le craint. Il n'y a qu'un
+mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce
+que l'Om est aux Hundous. C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audela.
+Ce mot la c'est la CONSTITUTION!
+
+Lesdites Societes publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les
+trouve abandonnes a sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunes,
+faute de membrane cutanee, ou meme papyracee. Si on aime la
+botanique, on y trouve une memoire sur les coquilles; si on fait
+des etudes zoologiques, on square trouve un grand tas de q' [square
+root of minus one], ce qui doit etre infiniment plus commode que
+les encyclopedies. Ainsi il est clair comme la metaphysique qu'on
+doit devenir membre d'une Societe telle que nous decrivons.
+
+Recette pour le Depilatoire Physiophilosophique
+Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.
+Depilez avec. Polissez ensuite.
+
+
+I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to
+him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the
+piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as
+well as I could, on the spot.
+
+The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that a
+depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific
+accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she
+might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't
+think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get
+into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he
+played a part in a tabullo.
+
+No,--said I,--I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll
+tell you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in
+a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to
+hit. What if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?--that makes
+no difference. Everybody in those cities, or almost everybody, has
+his counterpart here, and in all large places.--You never studied
+AVERAGES as I have had occasion to.
+
+I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was
+one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the
+week, through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most
+speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to
+keep several in hand.
+
+--Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?--said the landlady's
+daughter,--who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for
+conversation.
+
+I was going to talk about averages,--I said,--but I have no
+objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.
+
+A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
+delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his
+mind. After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then
+disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the
+disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a
+hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or
+hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is
+on one condition,--that he never lays the lecture down and lets it
+cool. If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is
+intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad
+as sea-sickness.
+
+A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a
+while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to
+touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no
+longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the
+calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the
+novelty and get the blisters.--The story is often quoted of
+Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had
+been preached forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old until
+it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have
+doubled, if not quadrupled, that number. These old lectures are a
+man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also,--like the pipes,
+fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day. One learns to make
+the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones,
+--to take out the really good things which don't tell on the
+audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades
+him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.
+A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
+hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.
+
+--No, indeed,--I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful
+of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may
+occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the AVERAGE
+intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very
+high. It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not
+very rapid or profound. A lecture ought to be something which all
+can understand, about something which interests everybody. I
+think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different
+account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or
+forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their
+manner, whatever they talk about,--even when they don't talk very
+well.
+
+But an AVERAGE, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of
+the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is
+awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two
+communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions,
+so far as we can see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each,
+are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in
+many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place
+and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent
+audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England
+town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has
+come in, as in those special associations of young men which are
+common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage.
+But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows
+pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
+in. Front seats: a few old folk,--shiny-headed,--slant up best
+ear towards the speaker,--drop off asleep after a while, when the
+air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright
+women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but
+toward the front--(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.)
+Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen
+pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs
+of young people,--happy, but not always very attentive. Boys, in
+the background, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,--in
+how many places! I don't say dull PEOPLE, but faces without a ray
+of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the
+lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony
+lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the
+chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.
+They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our
+minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on
+our hearts.
+
+Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,--a
+great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen
+as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each
+audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your
+lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even
+those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes
+cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his
+ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture
+always. I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture
+in the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living tenants were
+the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I have
+sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
+unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
+ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I
+fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the
+same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last
+drowsy incantation!
+
+--Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces
+that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow
+melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose
+roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not
+ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and
+intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to
+which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading a
+string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch
+in their strings of horses--Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who
+sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if,
+because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore
+sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick. In
+the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
+the logs in one's fireplace at home.
+
+
+"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--
+
+
+if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million
+roosts for a man, but only one nest.
+
+--It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always
+made in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim
+silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the
+consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a
+revolver gives the individual thus armed. When a person is really
+full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation,
+his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
+accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.
+
+--What do I mean by the real talkers?--Why, the people with fresh
+ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in.
+Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts
+about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger
+on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have
+known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always
+formidable,--and one of them was tyrannical.
+
+--Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
+occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
+never made mistakes.--He? Veneers in first-rate style. The
+mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the
+cheap light stuff--I found--very fine in conversational
+information, the other day when we were in company. The talk ran
+upon mountains. He was wonderfully well acquainted with the
+leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians;
+he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and
+various other mountains that were mentioned. By and by some
+Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity
+with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to
+Major Andre. A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave
+an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes. He was very
+full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the
+conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion.
+So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but
+did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was
+something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge,
+that I suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and
+waited till I got an opportunity.--Have you seen the "New American
+Cyclopaedia?" said I.--I have, he replied; I received an early
+copy.--How far does it go?--He turned red, and answered,--To
+Araguay.--Oh, said I to myself,--not quite so far as Ararat;--that
+is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must have read all
+the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in this
+volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will know
+more than I ever thought he would.
+
+Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related
+a similar story. I didn't borrow it, for all that.--I made a
+comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted
+and received many compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot
+to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it
+contracts. The simile is a very obvious, and, I suppose I may now
+say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it occurs in a
+Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore's published long
+before my remark was repeated. When a person of fair character for
+literary honesty uses an image, such as another has employed before
+him, the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently,
+or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.
+
+It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a
+comparison which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a
+recollection. I told you the other day that I never wrote a line
+of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old
+at once, and often as if it had been borrowed. But I confess I
+never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from the
+fact of its obviousness. It is proper, however, that I proceed by
+a formal instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an
+idea given to the world at about the time when I had just joined
+the class in which Master Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced
+scholar.
+
+I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing
+the liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for
+that reason feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing
+it, do hereby renounce all claim to being considered the FIRST
+person who gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison
+referred to in the accompanying documents, and relating to the
+pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on the
+other. I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially
+all claims to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my
+supposed property in the above comparison,--knowing well, that,
+according to the laws of literature, they who speak first hold the
+fee of the thing said. I do also agree that all Editors of
+Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of
+Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at
+liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the
+supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above
+comparison. But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison
+aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and
+wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that I had never
+seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well
+known that different persons may independently utter the same
+idea,--as is evinced by that familiar line from Donatus,--
+
+"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt,"--
+
+now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all
+well-disposed persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I
+am open to any accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison,
+and, if they have so asserted or implied, that they will have the
+manliness forthwith to retract the same assertion or insinuation.
+
+
+I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than
+myself. If I had even suspected that the idea in question was
+borrowed, I should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the
+coincidence, as I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on
+an idea of Swift's.--But what shall I do about these verses I was
+going to read you? I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me
+of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them. I am convinced that
+several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life,
+will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through
+your consciousness at some time. I can't help it,--it is too late
+now. The verses are written, and you must have them. Listen,
+then, and you shall hear
+
+
+WHAT WE ALL THINK.
+
+That age was older once than now,
+In spite of locks untimely shed,
+Or silvered on the youthful brow;
+That babes make love and children wed.
+
+That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
+Which faded with those "good old days,"
+When winters came with deeper snow,
+And autumns with a softer haze.
+
+That--mother, sister, wife, or child--
+The "best of women" each has known.
+Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
+How young the grandpapas have grown,
+
+That BUT FOR THIS our souls were free,
+And BUT FOR THAT our lives were blest;
+That in some season yet to be
+Our cares will leave us time to rest.
+
+Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
+Some common ailment of the race,--
+Though doctors think the matter plain,--
+That ours is "a peculiar case."
+
+That when like babes with fingers burned
+We count one bitter maxim more,
+Our lesson all the world has learned,
+And men are wiser than before.
+
+That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
+The angels hovering overhead
+Count every pitying drop that flows
+And love us for the tears we shed.
+
+That when we stand with tearless eye
+And turn the beggar from our door,
+They still approve us when we sigh,
+"Ah, had I but ONE THOUSAND MORE!"
+
+That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
+In half the slips our youth has known;
+And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
+That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.
+
+Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
+O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
+Their tablets bold with WHAT WE THINK,
+Their echoes dumb to WHAT WE KNOW;
+
+That one unquestioned text we read,
+All doubt beyond, all fear above,
+Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
+Can burn or blot it: GOD IS LOVE!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+[This particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a
+paper by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or
+intercalated. I would suggest to young persons that they should
+pass over it for the present, and read, instead of it, that story
+about the young man who was in love with the young lady, and in
+great trouble for something like nine pages, but happily married on
+the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I take it for granted, will
+be contained in the periodical where this is found, unless it
+differ from all other publications of the kind. Perhaps, if such
+young people will lay the number aside, and take it up ten years,
+or a little more, from the present time, they may find something in
+it for their advantage. They can't possibly understand it all
+now.]
+
+My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary
+sort of way. I couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while,
+but at last it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old
+man.--He didn't mind his students calling him THE old man, he said.
+That was a technical expression, and he thought that he remembered
+hearing it applied to himself when he was about twenty-five. It
+may be considered as a familiar and sometimes endearing
+appellation. An Irishwoman calls her husband "the old man," and he
+returns the caressing expression by speaking of her as "the old
+woman." But now, said he, just suppose a case like one of these.
+A young stranger is overheard talking of you as a very nice old
+gentleman. A friendly and genial critic speaks of your green old
+age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered with
+reference to that period of life. What _I_ call an old man is a
+person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white
+hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,
+bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,
+smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits;
+one that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps
+a little night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the
+lamp is not upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it
+to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That's
+what I call an old man.
+
+Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to tell me that I have got
+to that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time
+when--[I knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from laughing;
+twenty years ago he used to quote it as one of those absurd
+speeches men of genius will make, and now he is going to argue from
+it]--several years short of the time when Balzac says that men are
+--most--you know--dangerous to--the hearts of--in short, most to be
+dreaded by duennas that have charge of susceptible females.--What
+age is that? said I, statistically.--Fifty-two years, answered the
+Professor.--Balzac ought to know, said I, if it is true that Goethe
+said of him that each of his stories must have been dug out of a
+woman's heart. But fifty-two is a high figure.
+
+Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.---The
+Professor took up the desired position.--You have white hairs, I
+said.--Had 'em any time these twenty years, said the Professor.
+--And the crow's-foot,--pes anserinus, rather.--The Professor smiled,
+as I wanted him to, and the folds radiated like the ridges of a
+half-opened fan, from the outer corner of the eyes to the temples.
+--And the calipers said I.--What are the calipers? he asked,
+curiously.--Why, the parenthesis, said I.--Parenthesis? said the
+Professor; what's that?--Why, look in the glass when you are
+disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn't framed in a couple
+of crescent lines,--so, my boy ( ).--It's all nonsense, said the
+Professor; just look at my BICEPS;--and he began pulling off his
+coat to show me his arm. Be careful, said I; you can't bear
+exposure to the air, at your time of life, as you could once.--I
+will box with you, said the Professor, row with you, walk with you,
+ride with you, swim with you, or sit at table with you, for fifty
+dollars a side.--Pluck survives stamina, I answered.
+
+The Professor went off a little out of humor. A few weeks
+afterwards he came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a
+paper, which I have here, and from which I shall read you some
+portions, if you don't object. He had been thinking the matter
+over, he said,--had read Cicero "De Senectute," and made up his
+mind to meet old age half way. These were some of his reflections
+that he had written down; so here you have.
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.
+
+
+There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace
+which keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less. It
+burns about three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other
+fuel,) when in fair working order, according to a great chemist's
+estimate. When the fire slackens, life declines; when it goes out,
+we are dead.
+
+It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the
+amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year,
+remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This
+last is the point where old age starts from. The great fact of
+physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the
+fire is the measure of it.
+
+About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,--for
+that, you know, regulates matrimony,--you may be expecting to find
+yourself a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic
+felicity that gives one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as
+among the not remotely possible events.
+
+I don't mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,
+telling her about life's declining from THIRTY-FIVE; the furnace is
+in full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. The Romans
+came very near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from
+seventeen to forty-six years.
+
+What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or
+the movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of
+life that flows through us? We are old fellows from the moment the
+fire begins to go out. Let us always behave like gentlemen when we
+are introduced to new acquaintance.
+
+
+Incipit Allegoria Senectutis.
+
+
+Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.
+
+Old Age.--Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you
+for some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk
+down the street together?
+
+Professor (drawing back a little).--We can talk more quietly,
+perhaps, in my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be
+acquainted with everybody you are introduced to, though he
+evidently considers you an entire stranger?
+
+Old Age.--I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person's
+recognition until I have known him at least FIVE YEARS.
+
+Professor.--Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as
+that?
+
+Old Age. I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I
+am afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.
+
+Professor.--Where?
+
+Old Age.--There, between your eyebrows,--three straight lines
+running up and down; all the probate courts know that token,--"Old
+Age, his mark." Put your forefinger on the inner end of one
+eyebrow, and your middle finger on the inner end of the other
+eyebrow; now separate the fingers, and you will smooth out my
+sign-manual; that's the way you used to look before I left my card
+on you.
+
+Professor.--What message do people generally send back when you
+first call on them?
+
+Old Age.--Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I
+call; get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or
+six,--sometimes ten years or more. At last, if they don't let me
+in, I break in through the front door or the windows.
+
+We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said
+again,--Come, let us walk down the street together,--and offered me
+a cane, an eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes.--No, much
+obliged to you, said I. I don't want those things, and I had a
+little rather talk with you here, privately, in my study. So I
+dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked out alone;--got a
+fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had time to
+think over this whole matter.
+
+
+Explicit Allegoria Senectutis.
+
+
+We have settled when old age begins. Like all Nature's processes,
+it is gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions,
+and all its little griefs soothed by natural sedatives. But the
+iron hand is not less irresistible because it wears the velvet
+glove. The button-wood throws off its bark in large flakes, which
+one may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off,
+by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be
+seen, but too powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but
+one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us,
+--scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and
+immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the
+changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and
+indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne
+has called "the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature."
+
+
+My lady's cheek can boast no more
+The cranberry white and pink it wore;
+And where her shining locks divide,
+The parting line is all too wide--
+
+
+No, no,--this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but
+spare the poor women.
+
+We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably
+good observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it,
+yet I have been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural
+analysis into no less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the
+five primary divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old
+age, each of these has its own three periods of immaturity,
+complete development, and decline. I recognize on OLD baby at
+once,--with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a
+porringer,)--so does everybody; and an old child shedding its
+milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
+permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it
+were, of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his
+late suppers now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen
+stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make
+twenty-five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.
+
+The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
+ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as
+the first stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great
+delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and
+exceptional which is universal and according to law. A person is
+always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man
+for the first time.
+
+Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
+board of vessels,--in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into
+maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have
+drifted far away from port before we awake out of our illusions.
+But to carry us out of maturity into old age, without our knowing
+where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we
+stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until snow
+enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains out of
+their stupid trances.
+
+There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the
+physical ones;--I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who
+shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as
+much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were
+governed by clock-work. The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists
+call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of
+deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them,
+to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement. Every
+man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)
+has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose
+BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their
+brains, have a systole and diastole as regular as that of the heart
+itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the
+organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest function of
+being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view
+of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in
+present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a vis
+a tergo for the evolution of living force.
+
+When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a
+year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he
+must economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving
+invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,--that is
+all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am
+writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to
+you. Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it wood, or coal,
+or bread and cheese. A reverend gentleman demurred to this
+statement,--as if, because combustion is asserted to be the sine
+qua non of thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely
+chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one thing, I told him,
+and facts of consciousness another. It can be proved to him, by a
+very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that every
+Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more
+phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But
+then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it,
+and save his phosphorus and other combustibles.
+
+It follows from all this that THE FORMATION OF HABITS ought
+naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As
+for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the
+time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the
+experience of the ring. A man is "stale," I think, in their
+language, soon after thirty,--often, no doubt, much earlier, as
+gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep
+their vital fire burning WITH THE BLOWER UP.
+
+--So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading
+the treatise, "De Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely
+performance. The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when
+he addressed it to his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person
+of distinction, some two or three years older. We read it when we
+are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take
+it up again by a natural instinct,--provided always that we read
+Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us
+who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.
+
+Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is
+what would be called in vulgar phrase "slow." It unpacks and
+unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look
+at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole. I think ancient
+classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind
+of expansion.
+
+An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
+contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the
+patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull
+work to sit with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious
+inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.
+He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various
+works that might amuse the weary hour. I remember only three,--Don
+Quixote, Tom Jones, and WATTS ON THE MIND.
+
+It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as
+a lyceum lecture, (concio popularis,) at the Temple of Mercury.
+The journals (papyri) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana,"--"Tribuinus
+Quirinalis,"--"Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave abstracts of it,
+one of which I have translated and modernized, as being a
+substitute for the analysis I intended to make.
+
+IV. Kal. Mart. . . . .
+
+The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well
+attended by the elite of our great city. Two hundred thousand
+sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house. The
+doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,)
+who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat
+roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker was the well-known
+Mark Tully, Eq.,--the subject Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and
+scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal
+feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by
+some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may
+remark, that his outer garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and
+somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress
+and manner (habitus, vestitusque) were somewhat provincial.
+
+The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and
+Laelius. We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a
+few moments for refreshment (pocula quaedam vini).--All want to
+reach old age, says Cato, and grumble when they get it; therefore
+they are donkeys.--The lecturer will allow us to say that he is the
+donkey; we know we shall grumble at old age, but we want to live
+through youth and manhood, IN SPITE of the troubles we shall groan
+over.--There was considerable prosing as to what old age can do and
+can't.--True, but not new. Certainly, old folks can't jump,--break
+the necks of their thigh-bones, (femorum cervices,) if they do;
+can't crack nuts with their teeth; can't climb a greased pole
+(malum inunctum scandere non possunt); but they can tell old
+stories and give you good advice; if they know what you have made
+up your mind to do when you ask them.--All this is well enough, but
+won't set the Tiber on fire (Tiberim accendere nequaquam potest.)
+
+There were some clever things enough, (dicta hand inepta,) a few of
+which are worth reporting.--Old people are accused of being
+forgetful; but they never forget where they have put their money.
+--Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year.--The lecturer
+quoted an ancient maxim,--Grow old early, if you would be old
+long,--but disputed it.--Authority, he thought, was the chief
+privilege of age.--It is not great to have money, but fine to
+govern those that have it.--Old age begins at FORTY-SIX years,
+according to the common opinion.--It is not every kind of old age
+or of wine that grows sour with time.--Some excellent remarks were
+made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited to
+Plato.--Several pleasing anecdotes were told.--Old Milo, champion
+of the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and whimpered,
+"They are dead." Not so dead as you, you old fool,--says Cato;
+--you never were good for anything but for your shoulders and
+flanks.--Pisistratus asked Solon what made him dare to be so
+obstinate. Old age, said Solon.
+
+The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our
+culture and civilization.--The reporter goes on to state that there
+will be no lecture next week, on account of the expected combat
+between the bear and the barbarian. Betting (sponsio) two to one
+(duo ad unum) on the bear.
+
+
+--After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise,
+"De Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new
+occupations when growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in
+the extreme period of life. Cato learned Greek when he was old,
+and speaks of wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such instrument,
+(fidibus,) after the example of Socrates. Solon learned something
+new, every day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim. Cyrus
+pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he had planted with
+his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the Duke of Northumberland's
+estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words, if not the
+same. That, like other country pleasures, never wears out. None
+is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy
+it.] There is a New England story I have heard more to the point,
+however, than any of Cicero's. A young farmer was urged to set out
+some apple-trees.--No, said he, they are too long growing, and I
+don't want to plant for other people. The young farmer's father
+was spoken to about it, but he, with better reason, alleged that
+apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting. At last some one
+mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer. He had
+nothing else to do,--so he stuck in some trees. He lived long
+enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on
+those trees.
+
+As for myself, after visiting a friend lately,--[Do remember all
+the time that this is the Professor's paper.]--I satisfied myself
+that I had better concede the fact that--my contemporaries are not
+so young as they have been,--and that,--awkward as it is,--science
+and history agree in telling me that I can claim the immunities and
+must own the humiliations of the early stage of senility. Ah! but
+we have all gone down the hill together. The dandies of my time
+have split their waistbands and taken to high-low shoes. The
+beauties of my recollections--where are they? They have run the
+gantlet of the years as well as I. First the years pelted them
+with red roses till their cheeks were all on fire. By and by they
+began throwing white roses, and that morning flush passed away. At
+last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and after that no year let
+the poor girls pass without throwing snow-balls. And then came
+rougher missiles,--ice and stones; and from time to time an arrow
+whistled, and down went one of the poor girls. So there are but
+few left; and we don't call those few GIRLS, but--
+
+Ah, me! Here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed Ai, ai!
+and the old Roman, Eheu! I have no doubt we should die of shame
+and grief at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that
+we see so many others as badly or worse off than ourselves. We
+always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.
+
+[I was interrupted in my reading just here. Before I began at the
+next breakfast, I read them these verses;--I hope you will like
+them, and get a useful lesson from them.]
+
+
+THE LAST BLOSSOM.
+
+
+Though young no more, we still would dream
+Of beauty's dear deluding wiles;
+The leagues of life to graybeards seem
+Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.
+
+Who knows a woman's wild caprice?
+It played with Goethe's silvered hair,
+And many a Holy Father's "niece"
+Has softly smoothed the papal chair.
+
+When sixty bids us sigh in vain
+To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
+We think upon those ladies twain
+Who loved so well the tough old Dean.
+
+We see the Patriarch's wintry face,
+The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,
+And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
+As April violets fill with snow.
+
+Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile
+His lotus-loving Memphian lies,--
+The musky daughter of the Nile
+With plaited hair and almond eyes.
+
+Might we but share one wild caress
+Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,
+And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress
+The long cold kiss that waits us all!
+
+My bosom heaves, remembering yet
+The morning of that blissful day
+When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
+And gave my raptured soul away.
+
+Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
+A lasso, with its leaping chain
+Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
+O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.
+
+Thou com'st to cheer my waning age,
+Sweet vision, waited for so long!
+Dove that would seek the poet's cage
+Lured by the magic breath of song!
+
+She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid,
+Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told!
+O'er girlhood's yielding barricade
+Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!
+
+Come to my arms!--love heeds not years
+No frost the bud of passion knows.--
+Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
+A voice behind me uttered,--Rose!
+
+Sweet was her smile,--but not for me;
+Alas, when woman looks TOO kind,
+Just turn your foolish head and see,--
+Some youth is walking close behind!
+
+
+As to GIVING UP because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that
+it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such
+thing. I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I
+see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit,
+effete, la levre inferieure deja pendante, with what little life
+they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as
+the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and
+everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to
+say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the
+malady in my own case.
+
+First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less
+time for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my
+attention more thoroughly, and use my time more economically than
+ever before; so that I can learn anything twice as easily as in my
+earlier days. I am not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study.
+I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with good
+success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.
+
+Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected
+privileges and pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a
+little courage to enjoy them. You may well suppose it pleased me
+to find that old Cato was thinking of learning to play the fiddle,
+when I had deliberately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied
+myself that I could get much comfort, if not much music, out of it.
+
+Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which
+are commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed
+at a much later period.
+
+A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of
+the journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies." Approving of
+his general doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal
+experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experimental confirmation
+of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and
+amusement, namely, BOATING. For the past nine years, I have rowed
+about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water.
+My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three row-boats.
+1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept
+mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy "dory" for two pairs of sculls,
+in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My own
+particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat,
+twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with
+ten-foot sculls,--alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him
+out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around
+the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and
+Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of
+steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon;
+I linger under the bridges,--those "caterpillar bridges," as my
+brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black
+sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern
+of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the
+sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,--just as if I should hurt her
+by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the
+water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,--till all at once
+I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall
+drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old
+State-house,--plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home,
+but no chair drawn up at the table,--all the dear people waiting,
+waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into
+the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't
+want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with
+devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached
+crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings for home.
+When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get
+through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,--though I
+have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught
+once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones
+(the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of
+Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off
+with the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return
+to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at
+my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of
+my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a
+huge recumbent chair.
+
+When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-
+calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my
+fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when
+I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I
+feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to
+him at my leisure.
+
+I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient
+city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an
+old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who,
+in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue
+called Myrtle Street, stretching in one long line from east of the
+Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down
+on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a
+promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with
+glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with
+its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding
+back and forward over it,--so delightfully closing at its western
+extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and
+beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants,
+--so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the
+words of Dr. Watts,--
+
+"Alike unknowing and unknown,"--
+
+that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal
+the secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is
+an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly
+to avail itself.
+
+Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather.
+The principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you
+may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for
+nothing. One's hepar, or, in vulgar language, liver,--a ponderous
+organ, weighing some three or four pounds,--goes up and down like
+the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements,
+at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up
+like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that are
+born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as
+much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they
+hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with
+calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which
+it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day
+and night.
+
+Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this
+empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of
+them in a more scientific form.
+
+The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical
+impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first
+source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the
+state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount
+and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action. In all forms
+of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in
+action,--the will, the muscles, and the intellect. Each of these
+predominates in different kinds of exercise. In walking, the will
+and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their
+task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is
+left comparatively free. The mental pleasure in walking, as such,
+is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery. But in
+riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will,
+and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his
+four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this
+extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal,
+my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at
+once gratified. When the horse ceases to have a will of his own
+and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you
+may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take
+naps, as you like. But you will observe, that, in riding on
+horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not
+you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the
+satisfaction from being complete.
+
+Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won't suppose you
+to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging
+in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to
+bestriding an Arab. You know the Esquimaux kayak, (if that is the
+name of it,) don't you? Look at that model of one over my door.
+Sharp, rather?--On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and
+I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I
+will tell you about.--Our boat, then, is something of the shape of
+a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the
+sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the
+lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant pod, as one may say,--tight
+everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit.
+Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from
+sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand
+why you want those "outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the
+rowlocks in which the oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart;
+double the greatest width of the boat.
+
+Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with
+arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more
+than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending
+as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre
+strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as
+the broad blades of your oars,--oars of spruce, balanced,
+leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in
+sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever
+made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping
+his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most
+luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. But
+if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river,
+which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen
+minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion
+scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little
+warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you
+can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just
+as you like. It has been long agreed that there is no way in which
+a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing.
+It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of
+his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of
+them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he
+shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks
+he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well
+as in his easy-chair.
+
+I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that
+intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay
+are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping
+it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after
+me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam
+still shining for many a long rood behind me. To lie still over
+the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling
+and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat,--to
+rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil
+creek,--to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the
+thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades,
+crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles,
+and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and
+thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing
+to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,--lying there
+moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor
+in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,--the cool
+breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the
+half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I
+should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened
+with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots
+we must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and
+wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with
+skaters!
+
+I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed,
+soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our
+Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon
+lineage. Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not
+here speak. I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this
+matter a good while ago. Of course, if you heard it, you know my
+belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a
+number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an
+improvement on the old model. Clipper-built, sharp in the bows,
+long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship,
+which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a
+reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon
+its builder. All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of
+these influences, such as they are. We have a few good boatmen,
+--no good horsemen that I hear of,--I cannot speak for cricketing,
+--but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in
+these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the
+Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick
+players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is
+rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything
+is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all
+tend.
+
+I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening.
+It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and
+youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case
+of emergency. It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving
+himself into the primitive constituents of his humanity. Here is a
+delicate young man now, with an intellectual countenance, a slight
+figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming deportment, a
+mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from between
+the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease.
+Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles! Ah, he is
+divesting himself of his cravat! Why, he is stripping off his
+coat! Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and
+with two things that look like batter puddings in the place of his
+fists. Now see that other fellow with another pair of batter
+puddings,--the big one with the broad shoulders; he will certainly
+knock the little man's head off, if he strikes him. Feinting,
+dodging, stopping, hitting, countering,--little man's head not off
+yet. You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit
+the little man's intellectual features. He needn't have taken off
+the gold-bowed spectacles at all. Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble,
+cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach,
+till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter
+puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into
+the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping,
+collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous
+bundle.--If my young friend, whose excellent article I have
+referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence
+among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should have better sermons
+and an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant. A bout with
+the gloves would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion,
+which, united, have embroiled their subject in a bitter
+controversy. We should then often hear that a point of difference
+between an infallible and a heretic, instead of being vehemently
+discussed in a series of newspaper articles, had been settled by a
+friendly contest in several rounds, at the close of which the
+parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled.
+
+But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid. I was for a
+moment tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last
+evening, to try the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a
+friend to the noble art; but remembering that he had twice my
+weight and half my age, besides the advantage of his training, I
+sat still and said nothing.
+
+There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference
+to old age. I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the
+diminished refracting power of the humors of the eye,--in other
+words, spectacles. I don't use them. All I ask is a large, fair
+type, a strong daylight or gas-light, and one yard of focal
+distance, and my eyes are as good as ever. But if YOUR eyes fail,
+I can tell you something encouraging. There is now living in New
+York State an old gentleman who, perceiving his sight to fail,
+immediately took to exercising it on the finest print, and in this
+way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish habit of taking
+liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout. And now this old
+gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen,
+showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should be
+afraid to say to you how much he writes in the compass of a
+half-dime,--whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms
+AND the Gospels, I won't be positive.
+
+But now let rue tell you this. If the time comes when you must lay
+down the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff,
+and drop the ten-foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and,
+after dallying awhile with eye-glasses, come at last to the
+undisguised reality of spectacles,--if the time comes when that
+fire of life we spoke of has burned so low that where its flames
+reverberated there is only the sombre stain of regret, and where
+its coals glowed, only the white ashes that cover the embers of
+memory,--don't let your heart grow cold, and you may carry
+cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your second
+century, if you can last so long. As our friend, the Poet, once
+said, in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his which he keeps
+for his private reading,--
+
+Call him not old, whose visionary brain
+Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.
+For him in vain the envious seasons roll
+Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
+If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,
+Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
+Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art
+Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,--
+Turn to the record where his years are told,--
+Count his gray hairs,--they cannot make him old!
+
+End of the Professor's paper.
+
+
+[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several
+instalments, and accompanied by various comments from different
+persons at the table. The company were in the main attentive, with
+the exception of a little somnolence on the part of the old
+gentleman opposite at times, and a few sly, malicious questions
+about the "old boys" on the part of that forward young fellow who
+has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, in these
+reports.
+
+On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of,
+I have always tried to give a more appropriate character to our
+conversation. I have never read them my sermon yet, and I don't
+know that I shall, as some of them might take my convictions as a
+personal indignity to themselves. But having read our company so
+much of the Professor's talk about age and other subjects connected
+with physical life, I took the next Sunday morning to repeat to
+them the following poem of his, which I have had by me some time.
+He calls it--I suppose, for his professional friends--THE
+ANATOMIST'S HYMN, but I shall name it--]
+
+
+THE LIVING TEMPLE.
+
+Not in the world of light alone,
+Where God has built his blazing throne,
+Nor yet alone in earth below,
+With belted seas that come and go,
+And endless isles of sunlit green,
+Is all thy Maker's glory seen:
+Look in upon thy wondrous frame,--
+Eternal wisdom still the same!
+
+The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
+Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
+Whose streams of brightening purple rush
+Fired with a new and livelier blush,
+While all their burden of decay
+The ebbing current steals away,
+And red with Nature's flame they start
+From the warm fountains of the heart.
+
+No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
+Forever quivering o'er his task,
+While far and wide a crimson jet
+Leaps forth to fill the woven net
+Which in unnumbered crossing tides
+The flood of burning life divides,
+Then kindling each decaying part
+Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
+
+But warmed with that uchanging flame
+Behold the outward moving frame,
+Its living marbles jointed strong
+With glistening band and silvery thong,
+And linked to reason's guiding reins
+By myriad rings in trembling chains,
+Each graven with the threaded zone
+Which claims it as the master's own.
+
+See how yon beam of seeming white
+Is braided out of seven-hued light,
+Yet in those lucid globes no ray
+By any chance shall break astray.
+Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
+Arches and spirals circling round,
+Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
+With music it is heaven to hear.
+
+Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
+All thought in its mysterious folds,
+That feels sensation's faintest thrill
+And flashes forth the sovereign will;
+Think on the stormy world that dwells
+Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
+The lightning gleams of power it sheds
+Along its hollow glassy threads!
+
+O Father! grant thy love divine
+To make these mystic temples thine!
+When wasting age and wearying strife
+Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
+When darkness gathers over all,
+And the last tottering pillars fall,
+Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
+And mould it into heavenly forms!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+[Spring has come. You will find some verses to that effect at the
+end of these notes. If you are an impatient reader, skip to them
+at once. In reading aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and
+seventh verses. These are parenthetical and digressive, and,
+unless your audience is of superior intelligence, will confuse
+them. Many people can ride on horseback who find it hard to get on
+and to get off without assistance. One has to dismount from an
+idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.]
+
+--The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had
+fairly come, mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the
+street. It seems to have been a premature or otherwise
+exceptionable exhibition, not unlike that commemorated by the late
+Mr. Bayly. When the old gentleman came home, he looked very red in
+the face, and complained that he had been "made sport of." By
+sympathizing questions, I learned from him that a boy had called
+him "old daddy," and asked him when he had his hat whitewashed.
+
+This incident led me to make some observations at table the next
+morning, which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this
+record.
+
+--The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument. I
+learned this in early boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of
+Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were
+usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native
+town which lies nearest to this metropolis. On my way I was met by
+a "Port-chuck," as we used to call the young gentlemen of that
+locality, and the following dialogue ensued.
+
+The Port-chuck. Hullo, You-sir, joo know th' wuz gon-to be a race
+to-morrah?
+
+Myself. No. Who's gon-to run, 'n' wher's't gon-to be?
+
+The Port-chuck. Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o'
+your hat.
+
+These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at
+that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question,
+the Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his
+cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has
+been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article of
+dress ever since. Here is an axiom or two relating to it.
+
+A hat which has been POPPED, or exploded by being sat down upon, is
+never itself again afterwards.
+
+It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the
+contrary.
+
+Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There
+is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome
+gloss, suggestive of a wet brush.
+
+The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its
+dilapidated castor. The hat is the ULTIMUM MORIENS of
+"respectability."
+
+--The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very
+pleasantly, saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his
+French except the word for potatoes,--pummies de tare.---Ultimum
+moriens, I told him, is old Italian, and signifies LAST THING TO
+DIE. With this explanation he was well contented, and looked quite
+calm when I saw him afterwards in the entry with a black hat on his
+head and the white one in his hand.
+
+
+--I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for
+my intimates. We are so much together, that we no doubt think and
+talk a good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects
+individual and peculiar. You know me well enough by this time. I
+have not talked with you so long for nothing and therefore I don't
+think it necessary to draw my own portrait. But let me say a word
+or two about my friends.
+
+The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful
+and worthy kind of drudge. I think he has a pride in his small
+technicalities. I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and
+though I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand
+airs "Science" puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting
+on, while the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating,--yet
+I am sure he has a liking for his specially, and a respect for its
+cultivators.
+
+But I'll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other
+day.--My boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you,
+because I keep all my goods in the lower story. You have to hoist
+yours into the upper chambers of the brain, and let them down again
+to your customers. I take mine in at the level of the ground, and
+send them off from my doorstep almost without lifting. I tell you,
+the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he
+works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle.
+Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary
+man to have a profession.
+
+--Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the
+other. After a while I get tired of both. When a fit of
+intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have
+found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other
+amusements which I have spoken of,--that is, working at my
+carpenter's-bench. Some mechanical employment is the greatest
+possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to
+tire. When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work
+immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick,
+and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I
+"regained my freedom with a sigh," because my toy was unfinished.
+
+There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and
+others when I give myself wholly up to the Poet. Now that my
+winter's work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn
+to the Poet's company. I don't know anybody more alive to life
+than he is. The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he
+says,--yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he
+can sing least.
+
+Then a fit of despondency comes over him.--I feel ashamed,
+sometimes,--said he, the other day,--to think how far my worst
+songs fall below my best. It sometimes seems to me, as I know it
+does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be ALL
+BEST,--if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive. I
+am grateful--he continued--for all such criticisms. A man is
+always pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the
+highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.
+
+Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must
+change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or
+losing their voices. You know, I suppose,--he said,--what is meant
+by complementary colors? You know the effect, too, which the
+prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina. If you
+close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, you see a
+GREEN image.
+
+It is so with many minds,--I will not say with all. After looking
+at one aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or
+truth, when they turn away, the COMPLEMENTARY aspect of the same
+object stamps itself irresistibly and automatically upon the mind.
+Shall they give expression to this secondary mental state, or not?
+
+When I contemplate--said my friend, the Poet--the infinite
+largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence,
+how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and
+ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to
+change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest
+condition,--never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon
+what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a
+chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second
+floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their
+splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their
+holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry--simple
+adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them--show
+themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they ought
+to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and
+perishable?
+
+--I don't know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or
+other, and let him speak for himself. Still I think I can tell you
+what he says quite as well as he could do it.--Oh,--he said to me,
+one day,--I am but a hand-organ man,--say rather, a hand-organ.
+Life turns the winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the stops. I
+come under your windows, some fine spring morning, and play you one
+of my adagio movements, and some of you say,--This is good,--play
+us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop
+sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in
+another. How easily this or that tune flows!--you say,--there must
+be no end of just such melodies in him.--I will open the poor
+machine for you one moment, and you shall look.--Ah! Every note
+marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. It is easy to
+grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make
+it was the painful task of time.
+
+I don't like to say it,--he continued,--but poets commonly have no
+larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them
+piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect.
+The more stops, the better. Do let them all be pulled out in their
+turn!
+
+So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest
+songs, and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams.
+All true,--he said,--all flowers of his soul; only one with the
+corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the
+third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two
+showing its tip through the calyx. The water-lily is the type of
+the poet's soul,--he told me.
+
+--What do you think, Sir,--said the divinity-student,--opens the
+souls of poets most fully?
+
+Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus.
+Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark,
+and a fern will not flower anywhere.
+
+What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's
+corolla?--I don't like to say. They spoil a good many, I am
+afraid; or at least they shine on a good many that never come to
+anything.
+
+Who are THEY?--said the schoolmistress.
+
+Women. Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his
+best reward.
+
+The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased.--Did I
+really think so?--I do think so; I never feel safe until I have
+pleased them; I don't think they are the first to see one's
+defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of
+a true poem. Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a
+bow-string,--to a woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile and
+resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of
+the air about her.--Ah, me!--said my friend, the Poet, to me, the
+other day,--what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and
+what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's
+praises! I should have grown like Marvell's fawn,--
+
+"Lilies without; roses within!"
+
+But then,--he added,--we all think, IF so and so, we should have
+been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those
+rhymes of yours.
+
+--I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but
+of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in
+soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and
+sorrows, every literature is full. Nature carves with her own
+hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts
+the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.
+
+There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of
+blondes. [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table.--Please
+to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] Why,
+there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of coloring
+matter,--NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature on the way
+to become albinesses. There are others that are shot through with
+golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree,
+--POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as
+unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike
+a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil and a
+sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an opaline
+fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match with her
+quick glittering glances.
+
+Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations,
+and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
+moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
+nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive
+to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at
+all. Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with
+melancholy. There is no more beautiful illustration of the
+principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than
+the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest
+songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for
+the rougher duties of life. When one reads the life of Cowper, or
+of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson,--of so many gentle,
+sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before their
+time,--one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
+singing, like the swan in the old story. The French poet, Gilbert,
+who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine,--(killed by
+a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in
+consequence of a fall,)--this poor fellow was a very good example
+of the poet by excess of sensibility. I found, the other day, that
+some of my literary friends had never heard of him, though I
+suppose few educated Frenchmen do not know the lines which he
+wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed in the great
+hospital of Paris.
+
+
+"Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive,
+J'apparus un jour, et je meurs;
+Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive,
+Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."
+
+At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
+One day I pass, then disappear;
+I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
+No friend shall come to shed a tear.
+
+
+You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke
+White's poems. It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all
+these sweet albino-poets. "I shall die and be forgotten, and the
+world will go on just as if I had never been;--and yet how I have
+loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!" And so singing,
+their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner
+and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and,
+still singing, they drop it and pass onward.
+
+
+--Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them
+up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the
+hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
+
+Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop
+them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness
+only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case,
+and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart,
+silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have
+carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.
+
+If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count
+the dead beats of thought after thought and image after image
+jarring through the overtired organ! Will nobody block those
+wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those
+weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a
+passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest!--that this
+dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
+embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but
+one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off
+from beams in hempen lassos?--that they jump off from parapets into
+the swift and gurgling waters beneath?--that they take counsel of
+the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory
+monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is
+dashed upon a marble floor? Under that building which we pass
+every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar,
+nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may
+be shattered, shall by any chance be seen. There is nothing for
+it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but
+to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash.
+Ah, they remembered that,--the kind city fathers,--and the walls
+are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes
+without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable
+upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever
+that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton
+and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world
+give for the discovery?
+
+--From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place
+and the quality of the liquor,--said the young fellow whom they
+call John.
+
+You speak trivially, but not unwisely,--I said. Unless the will
+maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot
+stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to
+get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other.
+They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the
+maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It
+is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement
+directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice,
+by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of
+going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.
+
+Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work
+independently of the will,--poets and artists, for instance, who
+follow their imagination in their creative moments, instead of
+keeping it in hand as your logicians and practical men do with
+their reasoning faculty,--such men are too apt to call in the
+mechanical appliances to help them govern their intellects.
+
+--He means they get drunk,--said the young fellow already alluded
+to by name.
+
+Do you think men of true genius are apt to indulge in the use of
+inebriating fluids? said the divinity-student.
+
+If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,
+--I replied,--I will talk to you about this. But mind, now, these
+are the things that some foolish people call DANGEROUS subjects,
+--as if these vices which burrow into people's souls, as the
+Guinea-worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would
+be more mischievous when seen than out of sight. Now the true way to
+deal with those obstinate animals, which are a dozen feet long, some
+of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a piece of silk
+round their HEADS, and pull them out very cautiously. If you only
+break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill the
+person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them. Whence it is
+plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head lies.
+
+Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of
+intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For
+you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has
+not a head of its own,--an intelligence,--a meaning,--a certain
+virtue, I was going to say,--but that might, perhaps, sound
+paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians
+lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority
+of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all,
+but was all body and tail. So I have found a very common result of
+their method to be that the string slipped, or that a piece only of
+the creature was broken off, and the worm soon grew again, as bad
+as ever. The truth is, if the Devil could only appear in church by
+attorney, and make the best statement that the facts would bear him
+out in doing on behalf of his special virtues, (what we commonly
+call vices,) the influence of good teachers would be much greater
+than it is. For the arguments by which the Devil prevails are
+precisely the ones that the Devil-queller most rarely answers. The
+way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it,--to say that
+it has no attractions, when everybody knows that it has,--but
+rather to let it make out its case just as it certainly will in the
+moment of temptation, and then meet it with the weapons furnished
+by the Divine armory. Ithuriel did not spit the toad on his spear,
+you remember, but touched him with it, and the blasted angel took
+the sad glories of his true shape. If he had shown fight then, the
+fair spirits would have known how to deal with him.
+
+That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil is not perfectly
+clear. Men get fairly intoxicated with music, with poetry, with
+religious excitement, oftenest with love. Ninon de l'Enclos said
+she was so easily excited that her soup intoxicated her, and
+convalescents have been made tipsy by a beef-steak.
+
+There are forms and stages of alcoholic exaltation which, in
+themselves, and without regard to their consequences, might be
+considered as positive improvements of the persons affected. When
+the sluggish intellect is roused, the slow speech quickened, the
+cold nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, the flagging
+spirit kindled,--before the trains of thought become confused or
+the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed,--just at the moment
+when the whole human zoophyte flowers out like a full-blown rose,
+and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution-box,--it
+would be hard to say that a man was, at that very time, worse, or
+less to be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his
+meaner wits about him. The difficulty is, that the alcoholic
+virtues don't wash; but until the water takes their colors out, the
+tints are very much like those of the true celestial stuff.
+
+[Here I was interrupted by a question which I am very unwilling to
+report, but have confidence enough in those friends who examine
+these records to commit to their candor.
+
+A PERSON at table asked me whether I "went in for rum as a steady
+drink?"--His manner made the question highly offensive, but I
+restrained myself, and answered thus:-]
+
+Rum I take to be the name which unwashed moralists apply alike to
+the product distilled from molasses and the noblest juices of the
+vineyard. Burgundy "in all its sunset glow" is rum. Champagne,
+"the foaming wine of Eastern France," in rum. Hock, which our
+friend, the Poet, speaks of as
+
+
+"The Rhine's breastmilk, gushing cold and bright,
+Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light,"
+
+
+is rum. Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to
+the first miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion! I
+address myself to the company.--I believe in temperance, nay,
+almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people. I trust that I
+practice both. But let me tell you, there are companies of men of
+genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect
+and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I
+thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.
+
+Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by
+drinking. My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined
+before they became drunkards. The habit of drinking is often a
+vice, no doubt,--sometimes a misfortune,--as when an almost
+irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it,--but
+oftenest of all a PUNISHMENT.
+
+Empty heads,--heads without ideas in wholesome variety and
+sufficient number to furnish food for the mental clockwork,
+--ill-regulated heads, where the faculties are not under the control
+of the will,--these are the ones that hold the brains which their
+owners are so apt to tamper with, by introducing the appliances we
+have been talking about. Now, when a gentleman's brain is empty or
+ill-regulated, it is, to a great extent, his own fault; and so it
+is simple retribution, that, while he lies slothfully sleeping or
+aimlessly dreaming, the fatal habit settles on him like a vampyre,
+and sucks his blood, fanning him all the while with its hot wings
+into deeper slumber or idler dreams! I am not such a hard-souled
+being as to apply this to the neglected poor, who have had no
+chance to fill their heads with wholesome ideas, and to be taught
+the lesson of self-government. I trust the tariff of Heaven has an
+ad valorem scale for them--and all of us.
+
+But to come back to poets and artists;--if they really are more
+prone to the abuse of stimulants,--and I fear that this is true,
+--the reason of it is only too clear. A man abandons himself to a
+fine frenzy, and the power which flows through him, as I once
+explained to you, makes him the medium of a great poem or a great
+picture. The creative action is not voluntary at all, but
+automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and
+wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it.
+Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or
+dreaming. If mind and body were both healthy and had food enough
+and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than
+the imaginative classes. But body and mind often flag,--perhaps
+they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas,
+overworked, or abused in some way. The automatic action, by which
+genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only one thing which
+can rouse the machine; not will,--that cannot reach it; nothing but
+a ruinous agent, which hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats out
+the heart of the mechanism. The dreaming faculties are always the
+dangerous ones, because their mode of action can be imitated by
+artificial excitement; the reasoning ones are safe, because they
+imply continued voluntary effort.
+
+I think you will find it true, that, before any vice can fasten on
+a man, body, mind, or moral nature must be debilitated. The mosses
+and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious
+parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is
+already enfeebled. Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that
+he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to
+stick to it, and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face
+which was of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy
+there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the
+lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative
+natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds
+untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the
+germination of the seeds of intemperance.
+
+Whenever the wandering demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift,
+--no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its
+course,--he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight for
+the maelstrom.
+
+
+--I wonder if you know the TERRIBLE SMILE? [The young fellow whom
+they call John winked very hard, and made a jocular remark, the
+sense of which seemed to depend on some double meaning of the word
+SMILE. The company was curious to know what I meant.]
+
+There are persons--I said--who no sooner come within sight of you
+than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth,
+which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and
+thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about
+themselves,--and so look at you with a wretched mixture of
+self-consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both,
+which are betrayed by the cowardly behaviour of the eye and the
+tell-tale weakness of the lips that characterize these unfortunate
+beings.
+
+--Why do you call them unfortunate, Sir?--asked the divinity-
+student.
+
+Because it is evident that the consciousness of some imbecility or
+other is at the bottom of this extraordinary expression. I don't
+think, however, that these persons are commonly fools. I have
+known a number, and all of them were intelligent. I think nothing
+conveys the idea of UNDERBREEDING more than this self-betraying
+smile. Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of
+MEANINGLESS BLUSHING may be fallen into by very good people who met
+often, or sit opposite each other at table. A true gentleman's
+face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness,--calm-eyed,
+firm-mouthed. I think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as
+well as anybody that ever lived. The portrait of a young man
+holding a glove in his hand, in the Gallery of the Louvre, if any
+of you have seen that collection, will remind you of what I mean.
+
+--Do I think these people know the peculiar look they have?--I
+cannot say; I hope not; I am afraid they would never forgive me, if
+they did. The worst of it is, the trick is catching; when one
+meets one of these fellows, he feels a tendency to the same
+manifestation. The Professor tells me there is a muscular slip, a
+dependence of the platysma myoides, which is called the risorius
+Santorini.
+
+--Say that once more,--exclaimed the young fellow mentioned above.
+
+The Professor says there is a little fleshy slip called Santorini's
+laughing muscle. I would have it cut out of my face, if I were
+born with one of those constitutional grins upon it. Perhaps I am
+uncharitable in my judgment of those sour-looking people I told you
+of the other day, and of these smiling folks. It may be that they
+are born with these looks, as other people are with more generally
+recognized deformities. Both are bad enough, but I had rather meet
+three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.
+
+--There is another unfortunate way of looking, which is peculiar to
+that amiable sex we do not like to find fault with. There are some
+very pretty, but, unhappily, very ill-bred women, who don't
+understand the law of the road with regard to handsome faces.
+Nature and custom would, no doubt, agree in conceding to all males
+the right of at least two distinct looks at every comely female
+countenance, without any infraction of the rules of courtesy or the
+sentiment of respect. The first look is necessary to define the
+person of the individual one meets so as to avoid it in passing.
+Any unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient
+apology for a second,--not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but
+an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may
+inoffensively yield to a passing image. It is astonishing how
+morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to the slightest
+demonstration of this kind. When a lady walks the streets, she
+leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well
+enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces
+framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a
+right to see them.
+
+--When we observe how the same features and style of person and
+character descend from generation to generation, we can believe
+that some inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities.
+Little snapping-turtles snap--so the great naturalist tells us
+--before they are out of the egg-shell. I am satisfied, that, much
+higher up in the scale of life, character is distinctly shown at
+the age of--2 or--3 months.
+
+--My friend, the Professor, has been full of eggs lately. [This
+remark excited a burst of hilarity which I did not allow to
+interrupt the course of my observations.] He has been reading the
+great book where he found the fact about the little snapping-
+turtles mentioned above. Some of the things he has told me have
+suggested several odd analogies enough.
+
+There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the
+OVARIAN EGGS of the next generation's or century's civilization.
+These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet;
+some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But
+as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and
+these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are
+not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual
+ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the
+minds of others. One must be in the HABIT of talking with such
+persons to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their
+development is necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new
+patterns, which must be long and closely studied. But these are
+the men to talk with. No fresh truth ever gets into a book.
+
+--A good many fresh lies get in, anyhow,--said one of the company.
+
+I proceeded in spite of the interruption.--All uttered thought, my
+friend, the Professor, says, is of the nature of an excretion. Its
+materials have been taken in, and have acted upon the system, and
+been reacted on by it; it has circulated and done its office in one
+mind before it is given out for the benefit of others. It may be
+milk or venom to other minds; but, in either case, it is something
+which the producer has had the use of and can part with. A man
+instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in
+print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it
+lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his
+intellect.
+
+--Where are the brains that are fullest of these ovarian eggs of
+thought?--I decline mentioning individuals. The producers of
+thought, who are few, the "jobbers" of thought, who are many, and
+the retailers of thought, who are numberless, are so mixed up in
+the popular apprehension, that it would be hopeless to try to
+separate them before opinion has had time to settle. Follow the
+course of opinion on the great subjects of human interest for a few
+generations or centuries, get its parallax, map out a small arc of
+its movement, see where it tends, and then see who is in advance of
+it or even with it; the world calls him hard names, probably; but
+if you would find the ova of the future, you must look into the
+folds of his cerebral convolutions.
+
+[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled at this suggestion,
+as if he did not see exactly where he was to come out, if he
+computed his arc too nicely. I think it possible it might cut off
+a few corners of his present belief, as it has cut off martyr-
+burning and witch-hanging;--but time will show,--time will show, as
+the old gentleman opposite says.]
+
+--Oh,--here is that copy of verses I told you about.
+
+
+SPRING HAS COME.
+
+Intra Muros.
+
+The sunbeams, lost for half a year,
+Slant through my pane their morning rays
+For dry Northwesters cold and clear,
+The East blows in its thin blue haze.
+
+And first the snowdrop's bells are seen,
+Then close against the sheltering wall
+The tulip's horn of dusky green,
+The peony's dark unfolding ball.
+
+The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
+The long narcissus-blades appear;
+The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
+And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.
+
+The willow's whistling lashes, wrung
+By the wild winds of gusty March,
+With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
+Are swaying by the tufted larch.
+
+The elms have robed their slender spray
+With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
+Wide o'er the clasping arch of day
+Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.
+
+--[See the proud tulip's flaunting cup,
+That flames in glory for an hour,--
+Behold it withering,--then look up,--
+How meek the forest-monarch's flower!--
+
+When wake the violets, Winter dies;
+When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
+When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
+"Bud, little roses! Spring is here!"]
+
+The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
+Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
+The radish all its bloom displays,
+Pink as Aurora's finger-tips.
+
+Nor less the flood of light that showers
+On beauty's changed corolla-shades,--
+The walks are gay as bridal bowers
+With rows of many-petalled maids.
+
+The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
+In the blue barrow where they slide;
+The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
+Creeps homeward from his morning ride.
+
+Here comes the dealer's awkward string,
+With neck in rope and tail in knot,--
+Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
+In lazy walk or slouching trot.
+
+--Wild filly from the mountain-side,
+Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
+Lend me thy long, untiring stride
+To seek with thee thy western hills!
+
+I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
+The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
+Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
+That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
+
+Oh for one spot of living green,--
+One little spot where leaves can grow,--
+To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
+To dream above, to sleep below!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+[Aqui esta encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias.
+
+If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I
+hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the
+above sentence for a motto on the title-page. But I want it now,
+and must use it. I need not say to you that the words are Spanish,
+nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to "Gil
+Blas," nor that they mean, "Here lies buried the soul of the
+licentiate Pedro Garcias."
+
+I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes
+referring to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now.
+They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons
+from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which
+latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one
+youthful reader. You know well enough what I mean by youth and
+age;--something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color
+of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the
+grass a thousand feet above it.
+
+I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only
+youth, but genius, to read this paper. I don't mean to imply that
+it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.
+It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the
+English tongue as is given by a common school education. So much I
+do claim. But here I have related, at length, a string of
+trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet to
+transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the
+windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull
+and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
+glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.
+
+My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come
+bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this
+poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless.
+And yet--and yet--it is something better than flowers; it is a
+SEED-CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
+blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of
+his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
+
+It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very
+probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
+not for individual experiences which differ from those of others
+only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty
+thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best
+of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
+particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which
+the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a
+red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a
+fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
+little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the
+low-"studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled
+over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have
+known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.
+
+Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that
+white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and
+just so of my special relationships with other things and with my
+rice. One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere
+fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having
+thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than
+single waves in the ocean;--but the accidents or trivial marks
+which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory
+our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.
+
+Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause
+at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself
+seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to
+follow. For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals
+such as poets offer you,--nothing but a dry shell, containing, if
+you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems. You
+may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never tell you what I
+think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of
+these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
+to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and
+can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
+life,--which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
+your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.
+
+May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your
+own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
+it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance,--may I beg
+of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
+enclose certain paragraphs? I want my "asides," you see, to
+whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page
+or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our
+boarders. You will find a very long "aside" to you almost as soon
+as you begin to read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at once,
+taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn
+them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet,
+why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
+some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the
+Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and
+count her ocean-pulses.]
+
+I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating
+especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear
+them.
+
+[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her
+face directed partly towards me.--Half-mourning now;--purple
+ribbon. That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her
+mother's, no doubt;--I remember our landlady's daughter telling me,
+soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she had
+lately "buried a payrent." That's what made her look so pale,
+--kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood. Ah! long
+illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after
+one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young
+creature at one's bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as
+cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out
+an angel.--God bless all good women!--to their soft hands and
+pitying hearts we must all come at last!--The schoolmistress has a
+better color than when she came.--Too late! "It might have been."
+--Amen!--How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!
+There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company,
+but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just
+given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the
+crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the
+creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and
+left in its blind rage.
+
+I don't deny that there was a pang in it,--yes, a stab; but there
+was a prayer, too,--the "Amen" belonged to that.--Also, a vision of
+a four-story brick house, nicely furnished,--I actually saw many
+specific articles,--curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could
+draw the patterns of them at this moment,--a brick house, I say,
+looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts
+and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the
+window, looking on the water, two of us.--"Male and female created
+He them."--These two were standing at the window, when a smaller
+shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look
+that I----poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then
+continued.]
+
+I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people
+commonly never tell, about my early recollections. Should you like
+to hear them?
+
+Should we LIKE to hear them?--said the schoolmistress;--no, but we
+should love to.
+
+[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very
+pleasant in its tone, just then.--The four-story brick house, which
+had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is
+quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts,
+flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete,--and the figures as before.]
+
+We are waiting with eagerness, Sir,--said the divinity-student.
+
+[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had
+struck it.]
+
+If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing--I said--is to
+know whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say
+that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such
+things. _I_ think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree
+with me.
+
+Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable
+of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or
+sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:
+that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable
+spiritual cowards--that is, if they have any imagination--that they
+will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more
+which they teach themselves.
+
+I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books
+and those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed
+in things temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable
+maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have
+been superhuman beings. The central doctrine of the prevalent
+religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized
+in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual
+life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.--Why did I not ask?
+you will say.--You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive
+children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures
+is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes,
+and terrors. I am uncovering one of these CACHES. Do you think I
+was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?
+
+I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked
+frightfully tall,--but they were not so tall as the steeple of our
+old yellow meeting-house. At any rate I used to hide my eyes from
+the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the
+bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted
+very long.--One other source of alarm had a still more fearful
+significance. There was a great wooden HAND,--a glove-maker's
+sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a
+pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.
+Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a
+little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,
+--whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his
+half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.
+
+As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to
+think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but
+I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the
+same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of
+OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That
+trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue
+to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more
+biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain
+particular things or spots--Dr. Johnson's especial weakness I got
+the habit of at a very early age.--I won't swear that I have not
+some tendency to these not wise practices even at this present
+date. [How many of you that read these notes can say the same
+thing!]
+
+With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I
+would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to
+put a momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help
+telling you.
+
+The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at
+the place where I was born and lived. "There is a ship of war come
+in," they used to say, when they heard them. Of course, I supposed
+that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of
+absence,--suddenly as falling stones; and that the great guns
+roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old
+war-ship splitting the bay with her cutwater. Now, the sloop-of-
+war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the
+Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean,
+and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of
+course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard
+from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I
+pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste
+of waters she was still floating, and there were YEARS during which
+I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the
+Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost
+thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water
+before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and
+threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.
+This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me
+make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have
+outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood,
+when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have
+started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight,
+and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the
+mind's dumb whisper, THE WASP HAS COME!
+
+--Yes, children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of
+you have had the pocket-book fever when you were little?--What do I
+mean? Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that
+bank-bills to an immense amount were hidden in them.--So, too, you
+must all remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or
+other, which fed you with hopes perhaps for years, and which left a
+blank in your life which nothing has ever filled up.--O. T. quitted
+our household carrying with him the passionate regrets of the more
+youthful members. He was an ingenious youngster; wrote wonderful
+copies, and carved the two initials given above with great skill on
+all available surfaces. I thought, by the way, they were all gone;
+but the other day I found them on a certain door which I will show
+you some time. How it surprised me to find them so near the
+ground! I had thought the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well, O.
+T., when he went, made a solemn promise to two of us. I was to
+have a ship, and the other a marTIN-house (last syllable pronounced
+as in the word TIN). Neither ever came; but, oh, how many and many
+a time I have stolen to the corner,--the cars pass close by it at
+this time,--and looked up that long avenue, thinking that he must
+be coming now, almost sure, as I turned to look northward, that
+there he would be, trudging toward me, the ship in one hand and the
+marTIN-house in the other!
+
+[You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I
+have said, was told to the whole company. The young fellow whom
+they call John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a
+cheroot, the fumes of which came in, not ungrateful, through the
+open window. The divinity-student disappeared in the midst of our
+talk. The poor relation in black bombazine, who looked and moved
+as if all her articulations were elbow-joints, had gone off to her
+chamber, after waiting with a look of soul-subduing decorum at the
+foot of the stairs until one of the male sort had passed her and
+ascended into the upper regions. This is a famous point of
+etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between ourselves, they
+make such an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had a great deal
+rather have them simple enough not to think of such matters at all.
+Our landlady's daughter said, the other evening, that she was going
+to "retire"; whereupon the young fellow called John took up a lamp
+and insisted on lighting her to the foot of the staircase. Nothing
+would induce her to pass by him, until the schoolmistress, saying
+in good plain English that it was her bed-time, walked straight by
+them both, not seeming to trouble herself about either of them.
+
+I have been led away from what I meant the portion included in
+these brackets to inform my readers about. I say, then, most of
+the boarders had left the table about the time when I began telling
+some of these secrets of mine,--all of them, in fact, but the old
+gentleman opposite and the schoolmistress. I understand why a
+young woman should like to hear these simple but genuine
+experiences of early life, which are, as I have said, the little
+brown seeds of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves of azure
+and gold; but when the old gentleman pushed up his chair nearer to
+me, and slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking
+of some trifling, tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with
+such a tremor in it that a little more and it would have been a
+sob, why, then I felt there must be something of nature in them
+which redeemed their seeming insignificance. Tell me, man or woman
+with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of
+recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the
+dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of
+fast-returning winters,--a few such recollections, which, if you
+should write them all out, would be swept into some careless
+editor's drawer, and might cost a scanty half-hour's lazy reading
+to his subscribers,--and yet, if Death should cheat you of them,
+you would not know yourself in eternity?]
+
+--I made three acquaintances at a very early period of life, my
+introduction to whom was never forgotten. The first unequivocal
+act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this:
+refusing a small favor asked of me,--nothing more than telling what
+had happened at school one morning. No matter who asked it; but
+there were circumstances which saddened and awed me. I had no
+heart to speak;--I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant
+excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost. What
+remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there, to the best of
+my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned
+my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more
+leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is
+infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, oh
+if I had but won that battle!
+
+The great Destroyer, whose awful shadow it was that had silenced
+me, came near me,--but never, so as to be distinctly seen and
+remembered, during my tender years. There flits dimly before me
+the image of a little girl, whose name even I have forgotten, a
+schoolmate, whom we missed one day, and were told that she had
+died. But what death was I never had any very distinct idea, until
+one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground and
+mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long,
+narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown
+loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was
+an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man
+seen through an opening at one end of it. When the lid was closed,
+and the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in
+black, who was crying and wringing her hands, went off with the
+other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death,
+and should never forget him.
+
+One other acquaintance I made at an earlier period of life than the
+habit of romancers authorizes.--Love, of course.--She was a famous
+beauty afterwards.--I am satisfied that many children rehearse
+their parts in the drama of life before they have shed all their
+milk-teeth.--I think I won't tell the story of the golden blonde.
+--I suppose everybody has had his childish fancies; but sometimes
+they are passionate impulses, which anticipate all the tremulous
+emotions belonging to a later period. Most children remember
+seeing and adoring an angel before they were a dozen years old.
+
+[The old gentleman had left his chair opposite and taken a seat by
+the schoolmistress and myself, a little way from the table.--It's
+true, it's true,--said the old gentleman.--He took hold of a steel
+watch-chain, which carried a large, square gold key at one end and
+was supposed to have some kind of time-keeper at the other. With
+some trouble he dragged up an ancient-looking, thick, silver,
+bull's-eye watch. He looked at it for a moment,--hesitated,
+--touched the inner corner of his right eye with the pulp of his
+middle finger,--looked at the face of the watch,--said it was
+getting into the forenoon,--then opened the watch and handed me the
+loose outside case without a word.--The watch-paper had been pink
+once, and had a faint tinge still, as if all its tender life had
+not yet quite faded out. Two little birds, a flower, and, in small
+school-girl letters, a date,--17 . .--no matter.--Before I was
+thirteen years old,--said the old gentleman.--I don't know what was
+in that young schoolmistress's head, nor why she should have done
+it; but she took out the watch-paper and put it softly to her lips,
+as if she were kissing the poor thing that made it so long ago.
+The old gentleman took the watch-paper carefully from her, replaced
+it, turned away and walked out, holding the watch in his hand. I
+saw him pass the window a moment after with that foolish white hat
+on his head; he couldn't have been thinking what he was about when
+he put it on. So the schoolmistress and I were left alone. I drew
+my chair a shade nearer to her, and continued.]
+
+And since I am talking of early recollections, I don't know why I
+shouldn't mention some others that still cling to me,--not that you
+will attach any very particular meaning to these same images so
+full of significance to me, but that you will find something
+parallel to them in your own memory. You remember, perhaps, what I
+said one day about smells. There were certain SOUNDS also which
+had a mysterious suggestiveness to me,--not so intense, perhaps, as
+that connected with the other sense, but yet peculiar, and never to
+be forgotten.
+
+The first was the creaking of the wood-sleds, bringing their loads
+of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen
+trailed them along over the complaining snow, in the cold, brown
+light of early morning. Lying in bed and listening to their dreary
+music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that
+which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by
+one "who hath no friend, no brother there."
+
+There was another sound, in itself so sweet, and so connected with
+one of those simple and curious superstitions of childhood of which
+I have spoken, that I can never cease to cherish a sad sort of love
+for it.--Let me tell the superstitious fancy first. The Puritan
+"Sabbath," as everybody knows, began at "sundown" on Saturday
+evening. To such observance of it I was born and bred. As the
+large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a
+somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to
+cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life
+passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun
+should sink again beneath the horizon.
+
+It was in this stillness of the world without and of the soul
+within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to
+make itself most distinctly heard,--so that I well remember I used
+to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled
+with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamp, WAS PECULIAR
+TO SATURDAY EVENINGS. I don't know that anything could give a
+clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit
+of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange,
+childish fancy.
+
+Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn
+cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was
+heard only at times,--a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell,
+not loud, but vast,--a whistling boy would have drowned it for his
+next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a
+hundred square miles. I used to wonder what this might be. Could
+it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand
+footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring
+city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and
+fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this
+to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves,
+after a high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant.
+I should really like to know whether any observing people living
+ten miles, more or less, inland from long beaches,--in such a town,
+for instance, as Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the Territory
+of the Massachusetts,--have ever observed any such sound, and
+whether it was rightly accounted for as above.
+
+Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of
+memory, are the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare
+intervals. I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have not
+generally agreeable voices. The marrowy organisms, with skins that
+shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly
+padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not
+so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular
+outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous
+covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color,
+and voices at once thin and strenuous,--acidulous enough to produce
+effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets
+with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as
+sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young
+persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great
+industrial centres, for instance,--young persons of the female sex,
+we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud
+strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two
+or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat
+apples and hand round daguerreotypes,--I say, I think the
+conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not
+be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition,
+were he getting up a new temptation of St. Anthony.
+
+There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not
+musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet
+sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some
+warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful
+harmonies we hope to enjoy.--But why should I tell lies? If my
+friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth. I never
+heard but two voices in my life that frightened me by their
+sweetness.
+
+--Frightened you?--said the schoolmistress.--Yes, frightened me.
+They made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with
+such a chord in her voice to some string in another's soul, that,
+if she but spoke, he would leave all and follow her, though it were
+into the jaws of Erebus. Our only chance to keep our wits is, that
+there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this
+string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred
+a little by and by come into harmony with it.--But I tell you this
+is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a
+fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who
+followed him?
+
+--Whose were those two voices that bewitches me so?--They both
+belonged to German women. One was a chambermaid, not otherwise
+fascinating. The key of my room at a certain great hotel was
+missing, and this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information
+respecting it. The simple soul was evidently not long from her
+mother-land, and spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect. But to
+hear her wonder and lament and suggest, with soft, liquid
+inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full of serious
+tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child
+that had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her
+features and figure been as delicious as her accents,--if she had
+looked like the marble Clytie, for instance,--why, all can say is--
+
+[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]
+
+I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself. For
+Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept
+asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a
+mesalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes
+along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of
+boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were
+only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through
+the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you
+have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la
+Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said
+"Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a
+single moment.
+
+The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have
+said, that of another German woman.--I suppose I shall ruin myself
+by saying that such a voice could not have come from any
+Americanized human being.
+
+--What was there in it?--said the schoolmistress,--and, upon my
+word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had
+said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic
+remark above reported.--Oh, I said, it had so much WOMAN in it,
+--MULIEBRITY, as well as FEMINEITY;--no self-assertion, such as free
+suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous
+nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but
+subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture
+of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil,
+independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things
+for the larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us,--I have
+known families famous for them,--but ask the first person you meet
+a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic,
+matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that
+produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people
+connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with
+such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire
+at once from the precincts.
+
+--Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard
+in a French hospital. Between two and three years old. Fell out
+of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient,
+gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking
+fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still. I
+spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a
+voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it
+which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at
+this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards.
+--C'est tout comme un serin, said the French student at my side.
+
+These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as
+to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall
+enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl. There must be
+other things besides aerolites that wander from their own spheres
+to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may
+be nearer the literal truth than we dream. If mankind generally
+are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set
+adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more
+trial to reach the shore,--as some grave theologians have
+maintained,--if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead
+devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from
+Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts
+three or four score summers,--why, there must have been a few good
+spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak
+of must belong to them.
+
+--I wish you could once hear my sister's voice,--said the
+schoolmistress.
+
+If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one,--said I.
+
+I never thought mine was anything,--said the schoolmistress.
+
+How should you know?--said I.--People never hear their own voices,
+--any more than they see their own faces. There is not even a
+looking-glass for the voice. Of course, there is something audible
+to us when we speak; but that something is not our own voice as it
+is known to all our acquaintances. I think, if an image spoke to
+us in our own tones, we should not know them in the least.--How
+pleasant it would be, if in another state of being we could have
+shapes like our former selves for playthings,--we standing outside
+or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to us just what we
+used to be to others!
+
+--I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call "play," after
+our earthly toys are broken,--said the schoolmistress.
+
+Hush,--said I,--what will the divinity-student say?
+
+[I thought she was hit, that time;--but the shot must have gone
+over her, or on one side of her; she did not flinch.]
+
+Oh,--said the schoolmistress,--he must look out for my sister's
+heresies; I am afraid he will be too busy with them to take care of
+mine.
+
+Do you mean to say,--said I,--that it is YOUR SISTER whom that
+student--
+
+[The young fellow commonly known as John, who had been sitting on
+the barrel, smoking, jumped off just then, kicked over the barrel,
+gave it a push with his foot that set it rolling, and stuck his
+saucy-looking face in at the window so as to cut my question off in
+the middle; and the schoolmistress leaving the room a few minutes
+afterwards, I did not have a chance to finish it.
+
+The young fellow came in and sat down in a chair, putting his heels
+on the top of another.
+
+Pooty girl,--said he.
+
+A fine young lady,--I replied.
+
+Keeps a first-rate school, according to accounts,--said he,
+--teaches all sorts of things,--Latin and Italian and music. Folks
+rich once,--smashed up. She went right ahead as smart as if she'd
+been born to work. That's the kind o' girl I go for. I'd marry
+her, only two or three other girls would drown themselves, if I
+did.
+
+I think the above is the longest speech of this young fellow's
+which I have put on record. I do not like to change his peculiar
+expressions, for this is one of those cases in which the style is
+the man, as M. de Buffon says. The fact is, the young fellow is a
+good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of his jokes,--and if
+it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of his face,
+I should not mind his fun much.]
+
+
+[Some days after this, when the company were together again, I
+talked a little.]
+
+--I don't think I have a genuine hatred for anybody. I am well
+aware that I differ herein from the sturdy English moralist and the
+stout American tragedian. I don't deny that I hate THE SIGHT of
+certain people; but the qualities which make me tend to hate the
+man himself are such as I am so much disposed to pity, that, except
+under immediate aggravation, I feel kindly enough to the worst of
+them. It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow, so much
+worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I
+sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may
+use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not
+waste on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital
+incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled,
+not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. But as we
+cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of
+physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from our
+society,--we love them, but open the window and let them go. By
+the time decent people reach middle age they have weeded their
+circle pretty well of these unfortunates, unless they have a taste
+for such animals; in which case, no matter what their position may
+be, there is something, you may be sure, in their natures akin to
+that of their wretched parasites.
+
+--The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities,
+as well as of antipathies; did I believe in love at first sight?
+
+Sir,--said I,--all men love all women. That is the prima-facie
+aspect of the case. The Court of Nature assumes the law to be,
+that all men do so; and the individual man is bound to show cause
+why he does not love any particular woman. A man, says one of my
+old black-letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, as thus:
+He hath not seen the person named in the indictment; she is of
+tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain personal
+disqualifications,--as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath
+an ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being
+limited, his affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so
+of other conditions. Not the less is it true that he is bound by
+duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman.
+Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show
+cause why he doth not love her. This is not by written document,
+or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk,
+gold, and other materials, which say to all men,--Look on me and
+love, as in duty bound. Then the man pleadeth his special
+incapacity, whatsoever that may be,--as, for instance,
+impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many wives in his household,
+or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity; of which reasons
+it may be noted, that the first is, according to late decisions, of
+chiefest authority.--So far the old law-book. But there is a note
+from an older authority, saying that every woman doth also love
+each and every man, except there be some good reason to the
+contrary; and a very observing friend of mine, a young unmarried
+clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experience goes, he has
+reason to think the ancient author had fact to justify his
+statement.
+
+I'll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love
+with at first sight.
+
+--We a'n't talking about pictures,--said the landlady's daughter,
+--we're talking about women.
+
+I understood that we were speaking of love at sight,--I remarked,
+mildly.--Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is
+just what a picture as big as a copper, or a "nickel," rather, at
+the bottom of his eye can teach him, I think I am right in saying
+we are talking about the pictures of women.--Well, now, the reason
+why a man is not desperately in love with ten thousand women at
+once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly
+seen upon that wall. They all ARE painted there by reflection from
+our faces, but because ALL of them are painted on each spot, and
+each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time,
+no one is seen as a picture. But darken a chamber and let a single
+pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on
+the wall. We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from
+women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and
+then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the
+image in our mental camera-obscura.
+
+--My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
+anniversaries come round.
+
+What's the difficulty?--Why, they all want him to get up and make
+speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he
+doesn't want to do. He is an old story, he says, and hates to show
+on these occasions. But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do
+without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get
+their fingers on the fontanelle, (the Professor will tell you what
+this means,--he says the one at the top of the head always remains
+open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating
+spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.
+
+There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before
+going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and
+clutch up a handful of what grows there,--weeds and violets
+together,--not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots
+with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. That's his
+idea of a post-prandial performance. Look here, now. These verses
+I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots
+just in that way, the other day.--Beautiful entertainment,--names
+there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
+familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry
+and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted,
+modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his
+countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the
+better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will
+turn into the prose of common life. My friend, the Poet, says you
+must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed
+it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he likes
+to keep them, and a little of the soil clinging to them.
+
+This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our
+friend, the Poet:-
+
+
+A GOOD TIME GOING!
+
+Brave singer of the coming time,
+Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
+Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
+The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant,
+Good-bye! Good-bye!--Our hearts and hands,
+Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
+Cry, God be with him, till he stands
+His feet among the English daisies!
+
+'Tis here we part;--for other eyes
+The busy deck, the flattering streamer,
+The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
+The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
+The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
+The cloudy pillar gliding o'er him,
+The deep blue desert, lone and drear,
+With heaven above and home before him!
+
+His home!--the Western giant smiles,
+And twirls the spotty globe to find it;--
+This little speck the British Isles?
+'Tis but a freckle,--never mind it!--
+He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
+Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
+And ridges stretched from pole to pole
+Heave till they crack their iron knuckles!
+
+But memory blushes at the sneer,
+And Honor turns with frown defiant,
+And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
+Laughs louder than the laughing giant:-
+"An islet is a world," she said,
+"When glory with its dust has blended,
+And Britain kept her noble dead
+Till earth and seas and skies are rended!"
+
+Beneath each swinging forest-bough
+Some arm as stout in death reposes,--
+From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
+Her valor's life-blood runs in roses;
+Nay, let our brothers of the West
+Write smiling in their florid pages,
+One-half her soil has walked the rest
+In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!
+
+Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp,
+From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
+The British oak with rooted grasp
+Her slender handful holds together;--
+With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
+And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
+And hills and threaded streams between,--
+Our little mother isle, God bless her!
+
+In earth's broad temple where we stand,
+Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
+We hold the missal in our hand,
+Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
+Where'er its blazoned page betrays
+The glistening links of gilded fetters,
+Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
+Her rubric stained in crimson letters!
+
+Enough! To speed a parting friend
+'Tis vain alike to speak and listen;--
+Yet stay,--these feeble accents blend
+With rays of light from eyes that glisten.
+Good-bye! once more,--and kindly tell
+In words of peace the young world's story,--
+And say, besides,--we love too well
+Our mother's soil, our father's glory!
+
+When my friend, the Professor, found that my friend, the Poet, had
+been coming out in this full-blown style, he got a little excited,
+as you may have seen a canary, sometimes, when another strikes up.
+The Professor says he knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write
+verses. At any rate, he has often tried, and now he was determined
+to try again. So when some professional friends of his called him
+up, one day, after a feast of reason and a regular "freshet" of
+soul which had lasted two or three hours, he read them these
+verses. He introduced them with a few remarks, he told me, of
+which the only one he remembered was this: that he had rather
+write a single line which one among them should think worth
+remembering than set them all laughing with a string of epigrams.
+It was all right, I don't doubt; at any rate, that was his fancy
+then, and perhaps another time he may be obstinately hilarious;
+however, it may be that he is growing graver, for time is a fact so
+long as clocks and watches continue to go, and a cat can't be a
+kitten always, as the old gentleman opposite said the other day.
+
+You must listen to this seriously, for I think the Professor was
+very much in earnest when he wrote it.
+
+
+THE TWO ARMIES.
+
+As Life's unending column pours,
+Two marshalled hosts are seen,--
+Two armies on the trampled shores
+That Death flows black between.
+
+One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
+The wide-mouthed clarion's bray,
+And bears upon a crimson scroll,
+"Our glory is to slay."
+
+One moves in silence by the stream,
+With sad, yet watchful eyes,
+Calm as the patient planet's gleam
+That walks the clouded skies.
+
+Along its front no sabres shine,
+No blood-red pennons wave;
+Its banner bears the single line,
+"Our duty is to save."
+
+For those no death-bed's lingering shade;
+At Honor's trumpet-call,
+With knitted brow and lifted blade
+In Glory's arms they fall.
+
+For these no clashing falchions bright,
+No stirring battle-cry;
+The bloodless stabber calls by night,--
+Each answers, "Here am I!"
+
+For those the sculptor's laurelled bust,
+The builder's marble piles,
+The anthems pealing o'er their dust
+Through long cathedral aisles.
+
+For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
+That floods the lonely graves,
+When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
+In flowery-foaming waves.
+
+Two paths lead upward from below,
+And angels wait above,
+Who count each burning life-drop's flow,
+Each falling tear of Love.
+
+Though from the Hero's bleeding breast
+Her pulses Freedom drew,
+Though the white lilies in her crest
+Sprang from that scarlet dew,--
+
+While Valor's haughty champions wait
+Till all their scars are shown,
+Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
+To sit beside the Throne!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,--a fresh
+June rose. She has been walking early; she has brought back two
+others,--one on each cheek.
+
+I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the
+occasion. Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a
+couple of damasks. I suppose all this went through my mind, for
+this was what I went on to say:-]
+
+I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and
+sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our
+eaves and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If
+the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly
+vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I'll tell
+you what drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use
+them. Imagine yourself reading a number of the Houyhnhnm Gazette,
+giving an account of such an experiment.
+
+"MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.
+
+"THE soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
+the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
+assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely
+confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of
+shoulder-hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the
+utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.
+
+"The operator took a handful of BUDDING LILAC-LEAVES, and crushing
+them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
+fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
+towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,--it
+drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with
+its soft split hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject,
+the operator proceeded to tie a BLUE HYACINTH to the end of the
+pole and held it out towards the wild animal. The effect was
+magical. Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips
+trembled as it pressed them to the flower. After this it was
+perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer,
+without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or
+hit from the shoulder."
+
+
+That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette.--Do you ever wonder why
+poets talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who
+did not talk about them? Don't you think a poem, which, for the
+sake of being original, should leave them out, would be like those
+verses where the letter A or E or some other is omitted? No,--they
+will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer fields, to
+the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more
+shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or
+the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying
+over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,
+--in the dust where men lie, dust also,--on the mounds that bury
+huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-heap,--still that
+same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a
+flower.
+
+Are you tired of my trivial personalities,--those splashes and
+streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which
+you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a
+tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot
+whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It
+is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will
+listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments,--not
+with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but
+by the same hand and from the same palette.
+
+I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
+the blue hyacinth which I have,--very certainly not for the crushed
+lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You
+love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't
+doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young
+memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask
+roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I
+like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old
+homely sounds that are better than music to me. However, I suppose
+it's foolish to tell such things.
+
+--It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the
+divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead
+languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and
+therefore do not bear quotation as such.
+
+Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking
+countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any
+huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my
+soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the
+wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad
+hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries,
+and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they
+tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the
+resounding metal beneath.--I won't say that this rushing
+huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil
+Chorus."
+
+--I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.
+
+--Where are your great trees, Sir?--said the divinity-student.
+
+Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have
+put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham
+Young has human ones.
+
+--One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has
+never been identified.
+
+They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John.
+
+[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
+landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
+putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]
+
+Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I,--I
+have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New
+England elms and other big trees.--Don't you want to hear me talk
+trees a little now? That is one of my specialities.
+
+[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about
+trees.]
+
+I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most
+intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had
+several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now,
+if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my
+tree-loves,--to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and
+describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,--you are an
+anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will
+discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover
+who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of
+science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;
+Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
+Formula
+
+ 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3
+i---c---p---m---
+ 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'
+
+and so on?
+
+No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them,
+adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green
+sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred
+thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet
+meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms,--which one
+sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture,
+the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast
+beings endowed with life, but not with soul,--which outgrow us and
+outlive us, but stand helpless,--poor things!--while Nature dresses
+and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-witted
+children.
+
+Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of
+English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a
+sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to
+make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very
+proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and
+orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I
+like in the study of Nature,--a little less observation than White
+of Selborne, but a little more poetry.--Just think of applying the
+Linnaean system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils
+that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have
+to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the
+expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.
+
+There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if
+well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
+Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a
+type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of
+the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all
+our other forest-trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of
+resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses the
+horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may
+tell,--and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the
+strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. You will find,
+that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of
+the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of
+the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At 90 degrees the oak
+stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of
+purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization. The American
+elm betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts
+on a certain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.
+
+It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is
+hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting
+place for it. I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions
+and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of
+a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round. A native of
+that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a
+fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate
+himself and any incidental relatives who might be "stopping" or
+"tarrying" with him,--also laboring under the delusion that human
+life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable
+existence,--had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to say,
+"It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living
+cone than to build a granite obelisk!
+
+I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period
+of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode
+Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of
+Pawtucket. The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had
+leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect
+the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating
+studies of physiognomy. I heard some talk of a great elm a short
+distance from the locality just mentioned. "Let us see the great
+elm,"--I said, and proceeded to find it,--knowing that it was on a
+certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly. I
+shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great
+Johnston elm.
+
+I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the
+first time. Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or
+vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when
+it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for
+Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and
+that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when
+she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.
+Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and
+shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men
+stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's
+fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many
+hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful
+ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.
+
+As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object
+of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time
+at the road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the
+rest, I asked myself,--"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they
+grew smaller,--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line
+had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once,
+when I was not thinking of it,--I declare to you it makes my flesh
+creep when I think of it now,--all at once I saw a great, green
+cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such
+Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser
+forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs
+as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me,
+without need of uttering the words,--"This is it!"
+
+You will find this tree described, with many others, in the
+excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The
+author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his
+measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a
+grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular
+development,--one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
+class of New England elms.
+
+The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the
+ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of
+the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield.
+But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union
+of two trunks growing side by side.
+
+The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong
+also to the first class of trees.
+
+There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to
+spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or
+more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This
+is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.
+
+The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of
+form. I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County,
+and few to compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember
+any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.
+
+--What makes a first-class elm?--Why, size, in the first place, and
+chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above
+the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across,
+may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the
+questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to,
+stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or
+twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread.
+
+Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to
+eighteen feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is
+that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield.
+Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise. The "great tree"
+on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at
+Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as
+round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of
+others which might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been
+over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor
+old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A wig of false
+leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.
+
+[I don't doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating
+green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which
+only wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your
+measurements,--(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible
+imposition,)--circumference five feet from soil, length of line
+from bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for
+you.]
+
+--I wish somebody would get us up the following work:-
+
+
+SYLVA NOVANGLICA.
+
+Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the
+Same Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a
+Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston & Co. 185..
+
+
+The same camera should be used,--so far as possible,--at a fixed
+distance. Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures
+in his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades
+his province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be
+a pretty complement to his large work, which, so far as published,
+I find excellent. If my plan were carried out, and another series
+of a dozen English trees photographed on the same scale the
+comparison would be charming.
+
+It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the
+Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of
+their various types of organization. We should begin with man, of
+course; institute a large and exact comparison between the
+development of la pianta umana, as Alfieri called it, in different
+sections of each country, in the different callings, at different
+ages, estimating height, weigh, force by the dynamometer and the
+spirometer, and finishing off with a series of typical photographs,
+giving the principal national physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has
+given us some excellent English data to begin with.
+
+Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel
+forms of life in the two continents. Our naturalists have often
+referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the animus of
+Nature in the two half globes of the planet is so momentous a point
+of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of
+express and elaborate study. Go out with me into that walk which
+we call THE MALL, and look at the English and American elms. The
+American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if
+from languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its
+branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own
+native tree.
+
+Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the
+ocean, or not? Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole
+realm of life can answer this question.
+
+There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable
+life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in
+an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many
+ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just
+so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the
+same ideal, embody it with various modifications. Inventive power
+is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be
+economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the
+divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind
+which exercises it. As the same patterns have very commonly been
+followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and
+determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the
+movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality. We
+should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove
+that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by
+fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons
+have maintained. It may turn out the other way, as I have heard
+one of our literary celebrities argue,--and though I took the other
+side, I liked his best,--that the American is the Englishman
+reinforced.
+
+--Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after
+breakfast?--I said to the schoolmistress.
+
+[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,
+--as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of
+gallantry as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she
+turned a little pale,--but smiled brightly and said,--Yes, with
+pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.--She went for her
+bonnet.--The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and
+said he wished he was a young fellow. Presently she came down,
+looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a
+school-book in her hand.]
+
+
+MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
+
+
+This is the shortest way,--she said, as we came to a corner.--Then
+we won't take it,--said I.--The schoolmistress laughed a little,
+and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.
+
+We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. The gray
+squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them
+came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was
+close to the rail of the burial-ground. He was on a grave with a
+broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it. The
+stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an
+Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more.
+--Oh, yes, DIED,--with a small triangular mark in one breast, and
+another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's
+rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on
+the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the
+night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.
+
+Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave,--said I.--His bones
+lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says
+they lie,--which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of
+this and several other burial-grounds.
+
+[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my
+knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at
+least of our city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the
+city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of
+the perpetrators. Many years ago, when this disgraceful process
+was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance
+to a leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in literary
+elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of
+it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face
+of daylight. I have never got over it. The bones of my own
+ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the
+upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing
+short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any
+of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as
+sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame!--that is all
+I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of
+authority, that this infamy was enacted. The red Indians would
+have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would
+have had more respect for their ancestors. I should like to see
+the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the
+ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never
+famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here LIES" never had
+such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places,
+where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]
+
+Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor
+Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and
+out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool
+of that old July evening;--yes, there must have been love at the
+bottom of it.
+
+The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through
+the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her
+comment upon what I told her.--How women love Love! said I;--but
+she did not speak.
+
+We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from
+the main street.--Look down there,--I said,--My friend the
+Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further
+corner, for years and years. He died out of it, the other day.
+--Died?--said the schoolmistress.--Certainly,--said I.--We die out of
+houses, just as we die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills
+a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their
+mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of
+houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body
+when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been called "the
+house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body we live in.
+Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the other day?
+--Do!--said the schoolmistress.
+
+A man's body,--said the Professor,--is whatever is occupied by his
+will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote
+those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my
+body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of
+his.
+
+The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it,
+like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes.
+First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his
+artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their
+cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments.
+Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion.
+And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as
+in a loose outside wrapper.
+
+You shall observe,--the Professor said,--for, like Mr. John Hunter
+and other great men, he brings in that SHALL with great effect
+sometimes,--you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of
+envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his
+individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always
+reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost.
+We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with
+all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes
+a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head,--a little
+loosely,--shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it.
+Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals,
+all find it different, according to the eyes with which they
+severally look.
+
+But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
+natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.
+There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells
+into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have
+crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our
+own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant
+is.
+
+I had no idea,--said the Professor,--until I pulled up my domestic
+establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I
+had been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there
+wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way
+into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to
+shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.
+
+There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,
+and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
+aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past
+await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called
+out and fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great
+fact on a very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long
+standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there
+was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its
+portions. But in the midst of this picture was another,--the
+precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the
+bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the map
+until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as
+some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over
+and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before
+the wall of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.
+
+The Professor lived in that house a long time,--not twenty years,
+but pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided
+over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed
+through it for the last time,--and one of the shadows was claimed
+by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in
+that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his;
+children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away,
+threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that
+stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his,
+and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling.
+Peace be to those walls, forever,--the Professor said,--for the
+many pleasant years he has passed within them!
+
+The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
+with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in
+imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.--In that little
+court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,--
+
+--in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes
+loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord,
+swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it
+goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious
+oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows
+the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford
+and all along its lower shores,--up in that caravansary on the
+banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the
+jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions,
+--where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the
+hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the
+opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the
+Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old
+"Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of
+sight,--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried
+them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in
+cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the
+terminus of their harmless stroll,--the patulous fage, in the
+Professor's classic dialect,--the spreading beech, in more familiar
+phrase,--[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not
+done yet, and we have another long journey before us,]--
+
+--and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
+amber-flowing Housatonic,--dark stream, but clear, like the lucid
+orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
+demi-blondes,--in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
+smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the
+tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the
+winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North,
+the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy
+region,--suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried
+Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden
+away beneath the leaves of the forest,--in that home where seven
+blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven
+golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer,--
+
+--in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious,
+yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,--full of
+great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,--in all these
+summer or winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.
+
+This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,--this calenture which
+shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-
+circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling
+their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as
+blind men's busy fingers,--is for that friend of mine who looks
+into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same
+visions which paint themselves for me in the green depths of the
+Charles.
+
+--Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?--Why, no,--of
+course not. I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last
+ten minutes. You don't think I should expect any woman to listen
+to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to
+put in a word?
+
+--What did I say to the schoolmistress?--Permit me one moment. I
+don't doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular
+case, as I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very
+interesting young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the
+classic version of a familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin
+Franklin, it is nullum tui negotii.
+
+When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the
+damask roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by
+exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a
+stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her
+to let me join her again.
+
+
+EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.
+(To be burned unread.)
+
+
+I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself
+to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age
+which invites confidence and expansive utterance. I have been
+low-spirited and listless, lately,--it is coffee, I think,
+--(I observe that which is bought READY-GROUND never affects the
+head,)--and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am
+downhearted.
+
+There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton
+Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.
+
+There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest
+ocean-buried inscription!
+
+--Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!--Yet what is this which has
+been shaping itself in my soul?--Is it a thought?--is it a dream?
+--is it a PASSION?--Then I know what comes next.
+
+--The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed
+corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are
+iron bars to all the windows. When it is fair, some of us can
+stroll outside that very high fence. But I never see much life in
+those groups I sometimes meet;--and then the careful man watches
+them so closely! How I remember that sad company I used to pass on
+fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy!--B., with his arms full of
+yellow weeds,--ore from the gold mines which he discovered long
+before we heard of California,--Y., born to millions, crazed by too
+much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,--made a
+Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a
+stick,--(the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to
+buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I
+don't doubt the good people made him easy for life,)--how I
+remember them all!
+
+I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in
+"Vathek," and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its
+breast, showed its heart,--a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis
+stands on yonder summit. Go there on the next visiting-day, and
+ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those
+Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture,
+to lift its hand,--look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but
+ashes.--No, I must not think of such an ending! Dying would be a
+much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will
+and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little
+financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping
+school.--I wonder what nice young man's feet would be in my French
+slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man
+really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the
+world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she
+could by any possibility marry.
+
+--It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.--It
+is the merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be
+married. She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so
+far, I will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her
+and her husband, sometimes. No coffee, I hope, though,--it
+depresses me sadly. I feel very miserably;--they must have been
+grinding it at home.--Another morning walk will be good for me, and
+I don't doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh air
+before school.
+
+
+--The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been
+coming over me from time to time of late. Did you ever see that
+electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through
+letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or
+legend springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?
+
+There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if
+the flash might pass through them,--but the fire must come down
+from heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion
+has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of
+dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumulus of sluggish
+satiety? I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom
+living ones no longer worship,--the immortal maid, who, name her
+what you will,--Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,--sits by the
+pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead
+until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his
+dreams.
+
+
+MUSA.
+
+O my lost Beauty!--hast thou folded quite
+Thy wings of morning light
+Beyond those iron gates
+Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
+And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
+To chill our fiery dreams,
+Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?
+
+Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
+Whose flowers are silvered hair!--
+Have I not loved thee long,
+Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
+And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
+Ah, wilt thou yet return,
+Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?
+
+Come to me!--I will flood thy silent shine
+With my soul's sacred wine,
+And heap thy marble floors
+As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
+In leafy islands walled with madrepores
+And lapped in Orient seas,
+When all their feathery palm toss, plume-like, in the breeze.
+
+Come to me!--thou shalt feed on honied words,
+Sweeter than song of birds;--
+No wailing bulbul's throat,
+No melting dulcimer's melodious note,
+When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
+Thy ravished sense might soothe
+With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.
+
+Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
+Sought in those bowers of green
+Where loop the clustered vines
+And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,--
+Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
+And Summer's fruited gems,
+And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.
+
+Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,--
+Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
+Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
+Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns,
+Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones
+Still slumbering where they lay
+While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.
+
+Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!
+Still let me dream and sing,--
+Dream of that winding shore
+Where scarlet cardinals bloom,--for me no more,--
+The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
+And clustering nenuphars
+Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!
+
+Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!--
+Come while the rose is red,--
+While blue-eyed Summer smiles
+On the green ripples round you sunken piles
+Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
+And on the sultry air
+The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!
+
+Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
+With thrills of wild sweet pain!--
+On life's autumnal blast,
+Like shrivelled leaves, youth's, passion-flowers are cast,--
+Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!--
+Behold thy new-decked shrine,
+And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+[The company looked a little flustered one morning when I came in,
+--so much so, that I inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-student,)
+what had been going on. It appears that the young fellow whom they
+call John had taken advantage of my being a little late (I having
+been rather longer than usual dressing that morning) to circulate
+several questions involving a quibble or play upon words,--in
+short, containing that indignity to the human understanding,
+condemned in the passages from the distinguished moralist of the
+last century and the illustrious historian of the present, which I
+cited on a former occasion, and known as a PUN. After breakfast,
+one of the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some
+of the questions and their answers. I subjoin two or three of
+them, to show what a tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless
+talk in young persons of a certain sort, when not restrained by the
+presence of more reflective natures.--It was asked, "Why tertian
+and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects." Some
+interesting physiological relation would be naturally suggested.
+The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry
+equivocation, that they SKIP a day or two.--"Why an Englishman must
+go to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch." The answer
+proves to have no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as
+no better reason is given than that island--(or, as it is absurdly
+written, ILE AND) water won't mix.--But when I came to the next
+question and its answer, I felt that patience ceased to be a
+virtue. "Why an onion is like a piano" is a query that a person of
+sensibility would be slow to propose; but that in an educated
+community an individual could be found to answer it in these
+words,--"Because it smell odious," quasi, it's melodious,--is not
+credible, but too true. I can show you the paper.
+
+Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things. I know
+most conversations reported in books are altogether above such
+trivial details, but folly will come up at every table as surely as
+purslain and chickweed and sorrel will come up in gardens. This
+young fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know perfectly
+well; but he didn't,--he made jokes.]
+
+I am willing,--I said,--to exercise your ingenuity in a rational
+and contemplative manner.--No, I do not proscribe certain forms of
+philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd
+or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio
+of the Reverend Father Thomas Sanchez, in his famous Disputations,
+"De Sancto Matrimonio." I will therefore turn this levity of yours
+to profit by reading you a rhymed problem, wrought out by my friend
+the Professor.
+
+
+THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE:
+OR THE WONDERFUL "ONE-HOSS-SHAY."
+A LOGICAL STORY.
+
+Have you heard of the wonderful one-shay,
+That was built in such a logical way
+It ran a hundred years to a day,
+And then, of a sudden, it--ah, but stay,
+I'll tell you what happened without delay,
+Scaring the parson into fits,
+Frightening people out of their wits,--
+Have you ever heard of that, I say?
+
+Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
+Georgius Secundus was then alive,--
+Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
+That was the year when Lisbon-town
+Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
+And Braddock's army was done so brown,
+Left without a scalp to its crown.
+It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
+That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.
+
+Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
+There is always SOMEWHERE a weakest spot,--
+In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
+In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
+In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace,--lurking still
+Find it somewhere you must and will,--
+Above or below, or within or without,--
+And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,
+A chaise BREASTS DOWN, but doesn't WEAR OUT.
+
+But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
+With an "I dew vum," or an "I tell YEOU,")
+He would build one shay to beat the taown
+'n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun';
+It should be so built that it COULDN' break daown--
+--"Fur," said the Deacon, "'t's mighty plain
+Thut the weakes' place mus' stan the strain;
+'n' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain,
+Is only jest
+T' make that place uz strong uz the rest."
+
+So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
+Where he could find the strongest oak,
+That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke,--
+That was for spokes and floor and sills;
+He sent for lancewood to make the thills;
+The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;
+The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
+But lasts like iron for things like these;
+The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"--
+Last of its timber,--they couldn't sell 'em,
+Never an axe had seen their chips,
+And the wedges flew from between their lips,
+Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
+Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
+Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
+Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
+Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;
+Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
+Found in the pit when the tanner died.
+That was the way he "put her through."--
+"There!" said the Deacon, "naow she'll dew."
+
+Do! I tell you, I father guess
+She was a wonder, and nothing less!
+Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
+Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
+Children and grand-children--where were they?
+But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
+As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!
+
+EIGHTEEN HUNDRED;--it came and found
+The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound.
+Eighteen hundred increased by ten;--
+"Hahnsum kerridge" they called it then.
+Eighteen hundred and twenty came;--
+Running as usual; much the same.
+Thirty and forty at last arrive,
+And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.
+
+Little of all we value here
+Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
+Without both feeling and looking queer.
+In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,
+So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
+(This is a moral that runs at large;
+Take it.--You're welcome.--No extra charge.)
+
+FIRST OF NOVEMBER,--the Earthquake-day.--
+There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay.
+A general flavor of mild decay,
+But nothing local, as one may say.
+There couldn't be,--for the Deacon's art
+Had made it so like in every part
+That there wasn't a chance for one to start.
+For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
+And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
+And the panels just as strong as the floor,
+And the whippletree neither less nor more,
+And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,
+And spring and axle and hub encore.
+And yet, AS A WHOLE, it is past a doubt
+In another hour it will be WORN OUT!
+
+First of November, 'Fifty-five!
+This morning the parson takes a drive.
+Now, small boys, get out of the way!
+Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay,
+Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
+"Huddup!" said the parson.--Off went they.
+
+The parson was working his Sunday's text,--
+Had got to FIFTHLY, and stopped perplexed
+At what the--Moses--was coming next.
+All at once the horse stood still,
+Close by the meet'n-house on the hill.
+--First a shiver, and then a thrill,
+Then something decidedly like a spill,--
+And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
+At half-past nine by the meet'n-house clock,--
+Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
+--What do you think the parson found,
+When he got up and stared around?
+The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
+As if it had been to the mill and ground!
+You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
+How it went to pieces all at once,--
+All at once, and nothing first,--
+Just as bubbles do when they burst.
+
+End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
+Logic is logic. That's all I say.
+
+
+--I think there is one habit,--I said to our company a day or two
+afterwards--worse than that of punning. It is the gradual
+substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly
+characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel
+idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen
+expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,
+--FAST or SLOW. Man's chief end was to be a BRICK. When the great
+calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken
+of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP. Nine-tenths of human existence
+were summed up in the single word, BORE. These expressions come to
+be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or
+indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of
+intellectual bankruptcy;--you may fill them up with what idea you
+like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the
+treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing
+smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi
+spring up most luxuriantly. Don't think I undervalue the proper
+use and application of a cant word or phrase. It adds piquancy to
+conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no better
+than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the
+intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and
+youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear flash
+phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of
+English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a
+three-volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the
+pictured urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial
+climate.
+
+--The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was
+"rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang
+line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.
+
+--I replied with my usual forbearance.--Certainly, to give up the
+algebraic symbol, because A or B is often a cover for ideal
+nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to
+express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed
+sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been
+sufficiently explained by the participle--BORED. I have seen a
+country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse
+vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely,
+in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which
+would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped
+sophomore in the one word--SLOW. Let us discriminate, and be shy
+of absolute proscription. I am omniverbivorous by nature and
+training. Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow
+most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.
+
+Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something.
+They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank
+checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists
+may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them. They
+are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but
+for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would
+have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art. Yes, I
+like dandies well enough,--on one condition.
+
+--What is that, Sir?--said the divinity-student.
+
+--That they have pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true
+dandyism. A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger
+in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him,
+looks very silly. But if he turns red in the face and knotty in
+the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants,
+throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if
+necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery
+takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened
+Astyanax. You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were
+his best officers. The "Sunday blood," the super-superb sartorial
+equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous.
+But such fellows as Brummel and D'Orsay and Byron are not to be
+snubbed quite so easily. Look out for "la main de fer sous le gant
+de velours," (which I printed in English the other day without
+quotation-marks, thinking whether any scarabaeus criticus would add
+this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers,
+--which he didn't do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London
+language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the
+same.) A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a
+decided dash of dandyism about them. There was Alcibiades, the
+"curled son of Clinias," an accomplished young man, but what would
+be called a "swell" in these days. There was Aristoteles, a very
+distinguished writer, of whom you have heard,--a philosopher, in
+short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and
+is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again.
+Regular dandy, he was. So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost
+his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn't his dandyism that
+spoiled his chance. Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar
+or a poet, but he was one of the same sort. So was Sir Humphrey
+Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful.
+Yes,--a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I
+was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle,--aye,
+and left it swinging to this day.--Still, if I were you, I wouldn't
+go to the tailor's, on the strength of these remarks, and run up a
+long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your next
+suit. Elegans "nascitur, non fit." A man is born a dandy, as he
+is born a poet. There are heads that can't wear hats; there are
+necks that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can't fill out
+collars--(Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier
+ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are tournures nothing can
+humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity
+or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different
+styles of dandyism.
+
+We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this
+country,--not a gratia-Dei, nor a juredivino one,--but a de-facto
+upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of
+common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading
+over the water about our wharves,--very splendid, though its origin
+may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous
+commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and,
+transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself
+tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But
+now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations
+transforms a race,--I don't mean merely in manners and hereditary
+culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in
+which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back
+streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy
+summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef
+and mutton. When the spring-chickens come to market--I beg your
+pardon,--that is not what I was going to speak of. As the young
+females of each successive season come on, the finest specimens
+among them, other things being equal, are apt to attract those who
+can afford the expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character
+of the next generation rises in consequence. It is plain that
+certain families have in this way acquired an elevated type of face
+and figure, and that in a small circle of city-connections one may
+sometimes find models of both sexes which one of the rural counties
+would find it hard to match from all its townships put together.
+Because there is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and
+waste of life, among the richer classes, you must not overlook the
+equally obvious fact I have just spoken of,--which in one or two
+generations more will be, I think, much more patent than just now.
+
+The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded
+to in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its
+high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of
+its windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its
+coach-panels. It is very curious to observe of how small account
+military folks are held among our Northern people. Our young men
+must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal
+division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above
+the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element
+of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to
+count heroism among its virtues. Still I don't believe in any
+aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when
+the time comes, if it ever does come.
+
+--These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual
+GREEN FRUIT of all the places in the world. I think so, at any
+rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the
+market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like
+unripe gooseberries,--get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a
+country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial
+Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been
+buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun
+until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such
+hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?
+Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins
+and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among
+its fruits. There are literary green-groceries at every corner,
+which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. It
+takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
+writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
+people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.----
+we won't say who,--editor of the--we won't say what, offered me the
+sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my
+young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating
+vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its
+wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to
+be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal
+expression of past fact or present intention.
+
+--Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
+virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from
+all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads
+to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the
+more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
+
+--I don't believe one word of what you are saying,--spoke up the
+angular female in black bombazine.
+
+I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,--I said, and added softly to
+my next neighbor,--but you prove it.
+
+The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
+said, in an undertone,--Optime dictum.
+
+Your talking Latin,--said I,--reminds me of an odd trick of one of
+my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English
+half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in
+pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of
+city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to have
+published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if
+you want to hear them.--You, Sir, (addressing myself to the
+divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or,
+what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will
+understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal
+to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one
+might say, to hibernation. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in
+summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or
+semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the
+last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:-
+
+
+AESTIVATION.
+
+An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor
+
+In candent ire the solar splendor flames;
+The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
+His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
+And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
+
+How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
+Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
+Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
+And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
+
+To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
+Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum,--
+No concave vast repeats the tender hue
+That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!
+
+Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades
+Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
+Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,--
+Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!
+
+
+--I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains.--No, I am not
+going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the
+best for you. But this difference there is: you can domesticate
+mountains, but the sea is ferae naturae. You may have a hut, or
+know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light
+half-way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home,
+and you might share it. You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you
+know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in
+October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs
+and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that
+hang round the walls of your memory's chamber.--The sea remembers
+nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet,--its huge flanks purr
+very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you,
+for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if
+nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children
+berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die.
+The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea
+has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie
+about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon,
+but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you
+cannot see their joints,--but their shining is that of a snake's
+belly, after all.--In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a
+difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the
+procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity
+and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to
+eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and
+ever.
+
+Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should
+love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of
+my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see
+it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its
+smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show
+its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its
+mad, but, to me, harmless fury.--And then,--to look at it with that
+inward eye,--who does not love to shuffle off time and its
+concerns, at intervals,--to forget who is President and who is
+Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which
+golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system
+is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats
+its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of
+human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human
+chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?
+
+--What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence?
+--Constitution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an
+hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is
+essential to enjoyment. All sensitive people should remember that
+persons in easy circumstances suffer much more cold in summer--that
+is, the warm half of the year--than in winter, or the other half.
+You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as your
+clothing to your shape. After this, consult your taste and
+convenient. But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry
+mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must
+have an ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominos with you; you
+must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.
+
+--The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she
+was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they
+took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.
+
+Have you ever read the little book called "The Stars and the
+Earth?"--said I.--Have you seen the Declaration of Independence
+photographed in a surface that a fly's foot would cover? The forms
+or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing
+in themselves,--only our way of looking at things. You are right,
+I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being
+quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world. Every man of
+reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle
+which is drawn about his intellect. He has a perfectly clear sense
+that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of
+many other minds of which he is cognizant. He often recognizes
+these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius.
+On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside
+of our own, we say it INTERSECTS ours, but are very slow to confess
+or to see that it CIRCUMSCRIBES it. Every now and then a man's
+mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks
+back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt
+that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its
+elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I
+had to spread these to fit it.
+
+--If I thought I should ever see the Alps!--said the
+schoolmistress.
+
+Perhaps you will, some time or other,--I said.
+
+It is not very likely,--she answered.--I have had one or two
+opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a
+rich family.
+
+[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! Well, I can't say I
+like you any the worse for it. How long will school-keeping take
+to kill you? Is it possible the poor thing works with her needle,
+too? I don't like those marks on the side of her forefinger.
+
+Tableau. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the
+foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman
+of--oh,--ah,--yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on
+his shoulder.--The ingenuous reader will understand that this was
+an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one
+instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished
+into black nonentity by the first question which recalled me to
+actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which
+I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some
+poor but honest shop-boy's head, just taken off by its sudden and
+unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come
+down in front of it "by the run."]
+
+--Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to
+at last? I used to be very ambitious,--wasteful, extravagant, and
+luxurious in all my fancies. Read too much in the "Arabian
+Nights." Must have the lamp,--couldn't do without the ring.
+Exercise every morning on the brazen horse. Plump down into
+castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of
+young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.--Charming idea of
+life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all
+this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,--almost,
+perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must
+not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear
+some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of my
+maturity.
+
+
+CONTENTMENT.
+
+"Man wants but little here below."
+
+Little I ask, my wants are few;
+I only wish a hut of stone,
+(A VERY PLAIN brown stone will do,)
+That I may call my own;--
+And close at hand is such a one,
+In yonder street that fronts the sun.
+
+Plain food is quite enough for me;
+Three courses are as good as ten;--
+If Nature can subsist on three,
+Thank heaven for three. Amen!
+I always thought cold victual nice;--
+My CHOICE would be vanilla-ice.
+
+I care not much for gold or land;--
+Give me a mortgage here and there,--
+Some good bank-stock,--some note of hand,
+Or trifling railroad share;--
+I only ask that Fortune send
+A LITTLE more than I shall spend.
+
+Honors are silly toys, I know,
+And titles are but empty names;--
+I would, PERHAPS, be Plenipo,--
+But only near St. James;--
+I'm very sure I should not care
+To fill our Gubernator's chair.
+
+Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin
+To care for such unfruitful things;--
+One good-sized diamond in a pin,--
+Some, NOT SO LARGE, in rings,--
+A ruby and a pearl, or so,
+Will do for me;--I laugh at show.
+
+My dame should dress in cheap attire;
+(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)--
+I own perhaps I MIGHT desire
+Some shawls of true cashmere,--
+Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
+Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.
+
+I would not have the horse I drive
+So fast that folks must stop and stare
+An easy gait--two, forty-five--
+Suits me; I do not care;--
+Perhaps, for just a SINGLE SPURT,
+Some seconds less would do no hurt.
+
+Of pictures, I should like to own
+Titians and Raphaels three or four,--
+I love so much their style and tone,--
+One Turner, and no more,--
+(A landscape,--foreground golden dirt
+The sunshine painted with a squirt.)
+
+Of books but few,--some fifty score
+For daily use, and bound for wear;
+The rest upon an upper floor;--
+Some LITTLE luxury THERE
+Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
+And vellum rich as country cream.
+
+Busts, cameos, gems,--such things as these,
+Which others often show for pride,
+_I_ value for their power to please,
+And selfish churls deride;--
+ONE Stradivarius, I confess,
+TWO Meerschaums, I would fain possess.
+
+Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
+Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;--
+Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
+But ALL must be of buhl?
+Give grasping pomp its double share,--
+I ask but ONE recumbent chair.
+
+Thus humble let me live and die,
+Nor long for Midas' golden touch,
+If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
+I shall not miss them MUCH,--
+Too grateful for the blessing lent
+Of simple tastes and mind content!
+
+
+MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
+(A Parenthesis.)
+
+I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together before
+this one. I found the effect of going out every morning was
+decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleasing dimples, the
+places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy,
+in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to
+me from the school-house-steps.
+
+I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if
+I should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen
+walks we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint
+from my friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own
+risk and expense, would be the proper method of bringing them
+before the public.
+
+--I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie
+which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly
+chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a
+governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over
+again, even to her bones and marrow.--Whether gifted with the
+accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the
+rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving
+mortal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I
+think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it
+belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them.--Proud
+she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the
+sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the
+two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
+punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy.--She who nips off the end
+of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to
+bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize,
+proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of
+bad blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people
+gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with
+her real equals, she has something about herself or her family she
+is ashamed of, or ought to be. Middle, and more than middle-aged
+people, who know family histories, generally see through it. An
+official of standing was rude to me once. Oh, that is the maternal
+grandfather,--said a wise old friend to me,--he was a boor.--Better
+too few words, from the woman we love, than too many: while she is
+silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is working
+for herself.--Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men;
+therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech
+can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.
+
+--Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress,
+or not,--whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,--whether I cribbed
+them from Balzac,--whether I dipped them from the ocean of
+Tupperian wisdom,--or whether I have just found them in my head,
+laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my
+observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I
+cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things,--and foolish
+men, I don't doubt, have said as wise things. Anyhow, the
+schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of
+which I do not feel bound to report.
+
+--You are a stranger to me, Ma'am.--I don't doubt you would like to
+know all I said to the schoolmistress.--I sha'n't do it;--I had
+rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested in
+this. Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it. I shall tell
+only what I like of what I remember.
+
+--My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque
+spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes. I
+know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company
+with my young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in the
+Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his
+granite foot upon them. Then there are certain small seraglio-
+gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high
+fences,--one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it,--here and there
+one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex
+Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in
+Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head,
+(as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were
+whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!"--and the
+rest of that benediction. Nay, there are certain patches of
+ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always
+has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has
+covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with
+each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and
+you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have
+disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The
+Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street,
+which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation,
+beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as
+ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing
+pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their
+teacher at their head.
+
+But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and
+puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way
+about everything. I hold any man cheap,--he said,--of whom nothing
+stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.--How is
+that, Professor?--said I;--I should have set you down for one of
+that sort.--Sir,--said he,--I am proud to say, that Nature has so
+far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck without seeing
+in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the garden of the
+Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes
+devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.
+
+I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
+through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap
+up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
+which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and
+ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe,--"What are these people
+about?" And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper
+back,--"We will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up
+in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
+them at night and whispers, "Come with me." Then they go softly
+with it into the great city,--one to a cleft in the pavement, one
+to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
+gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
+nothing but a man is buried,--and there they grow, looking down on
+the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
+the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
+railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
+stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other,--"Wait
+awhile!" The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
+lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
+the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
+other,--"Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the streets
+ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants--the smaller tribes always in
+front--saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
+tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
+other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to
+be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees
+take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have
+encamped in the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find
+an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow
+underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House. Oh,
+so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!
+
+--Let us cry!--
+
+But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
+schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something
+about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I
+ought to, probably. We never tell our secrets to people that pump
+for them.
+
+Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know
+something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat
+more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her
+reading and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a
+library. The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman
+goes to work softly with a cloth. She does not raise half the
+dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it,--but she goes into
+all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers.
+--Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive
+the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest
+lines are reproduced. A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after
+a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her
+gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.
+
+But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together.
+I thought I knew something about that,--that I could speak or write
+about it somewhat to the purpose.
+
+To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
+water,--to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills
+its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit,--to have winnowed every
+wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through
+the flume upon its float-boards,--to have curled up in the keenest
+spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-
+sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or
+four score years,--to have fought all the devils and clasped all
+the angels of its delirium,--and then, just at the point when the
+white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our
+experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or
+other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of
+spring and temper in it. All this I thought my power and province.
+
+The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets
+with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes
+before it. As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken
+eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a
+balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which
+this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble in the
+palm of their slender hands. This was one of them. Fortune had
+left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the
+loneliness of almost friendless city-life were before her. Yet, as
+I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness
+which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various
+matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and
+lip and every shifting lineament were made for love,--unconscious
+of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty
+with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing
+less than the Great Passion.
+
+--I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the
+course of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of
+everything but love on that particular morning. There was,
+perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I
+have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house. In
+fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but,
+somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual.
+The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer
+which was to leave at noon,--with the condition, however, of being
+released in case circumstances occurred to detain me. The
+schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.
+
+It was on the Common that we were walking. The MALL, or boulevard
+of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
+different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy
+Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston
+Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it.
+
+I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we
+came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I
+tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible. At
+last I got out the question,--Will you take the long path with me?
+--Certainly,--said the schoolmistress,--with much pleasure.--Think,
+--I said,--before you answer; if you take the long path with
+me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more!--The
+schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow
+had struck her.
+
+One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,--the one
+you may still see close by the Gingko-tree.--Pray, sit down,--I
+said.--No, no, she answered, softly,--I will walk the LONG PATH
+with you!
+
+--The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm,
+about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly,
+--"Good morning, my dears!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more
+talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much
+as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you
+will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to
+tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them
+habitually at our breakfast-table.--We're very free and easy, you
+know; we don't read what we don't like. Our parish is so large,
+one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once. One can't be
+all the time trying to do the best of one's best if a company works
+a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves
+all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash
+some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no
+use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get
+through this paper.]
+
+--Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond
+to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am
+thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially
+in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes
+it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it
+without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a
+story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,--such
+as these:--He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.
+--To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's
+revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of
+Dr. Gould's private planets.--Every traveller is a self-taught
+entomologist.--Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old
+joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,--which
+shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than
+increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to your
+pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows--on the road from
+Milan to Venice.--Caelum, non animum,--travellers change their
+guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating
+dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans
+in Beacon Street.--Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for
+"establishing raws" upon each other.--A man shall sit down with his
+friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the
+question they had been talking about under "the great elm," and
+forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all
+fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that
+his argument was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly
+admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase "reductio ad
+absurdum;" the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.
+Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "a river
+broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal
+led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their
+trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat
+was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
+
+--Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
+annexed, or implied.
+
+Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
+obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often
+affects us more than one in full costume.
+
+
+"Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?"
+
+
+says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my
+soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the
+fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken
+masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle--alta
+maenia Romae--rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale
+shadow as never before or since.
+
+I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one
+of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old
+church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve,
+surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the
+mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a
+noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken
+shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous
+staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory,
+but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription
+on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how
+this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year
+16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls
+of the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery,
+carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but
+by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but
+real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came
+fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
+sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at Carlyle's article on
+Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson
+talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but
+these two "filles de la paroisse,"--gone as utterly as the dresses
+they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and
+meat that were in the market on that day.
+
+Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that
+call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or
+struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne,
+over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse
+sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in
+the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild
+youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten
+the famous bears, and all else.--I remember the Percy lion on the
+bridge over the little river at Alnwick,--the leaden lion with his
+tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,--and why? Because
+of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden
+tail, standing out over the water,--which breaking, he dropped into
+the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of
+his life.
+
+Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-
+axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow,
+and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily
+than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock
+that defies hatchet and hammer. "The Royal George" went down with
+all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it;
+but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the
+lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.
+
+My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the
+same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is
+still young. You remember the monument in Devizes market to the
+woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but
+it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned;--if any
+of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.
+Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach
+when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of
+considerable size and pretensions.--What is that?--I said.--That,
+--answered the coachman,--is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR. Then he told me
+how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He
+caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head,
+and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped,
+caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was
+found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the
+other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument
+to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than
+virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall
+first set me right about this column and its locality.
+
+And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something
+which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I
+once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the
+highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work,
+frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to
+keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
+think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
+twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense
+inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire
+was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a
+cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it
+to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
+forward,--I think he said some feet.
+
+Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will
+intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of
+Dumeril's in an old journal,--the "Magazin Encyclopedique" for l'an
+troisieme, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the
+vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it
+so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly
+seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like
+that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden
+spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone
+churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell
+the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a
+wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a
+stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like
+a blade of grass? I suppose so.
+
+You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;--perhaps we
+will have some philosophy by and by;--let me work out this thin
+mechanical vein.--I have something more to say about trees. I have
+brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in
+my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair
+girth;--nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a
+wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of
+apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about
+eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its
+rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings.
+Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells
+the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was
+slow,--then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550
+it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy
+years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then
+for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew
+pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when
+it seems to have got on sluggishly.
+
+Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods
+of its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's.
+The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches
+when he died. A little less than ten inches when Milton was born;
+seventeen when he died. Then comes a long interval, and this
+thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased
+from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the
+span of Napoleon's career;--the tree doesn't seem to have minded
+it.
+
+I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this
+section. I have seen many wooden preachers,--never one like this.
+How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings
+of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on
+earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the
+stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history
+as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!
+
+I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there
+is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some
+recollections of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder
+if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My
+room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling
+deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore
+--(ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt
+to handle them carelessly)--that the children were dying by the
+dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in
+recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the
+clock got through striking.] At the foot of "the hill," down in
+town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been
+hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (Credat
+Hahnemannus,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in
+its wood. Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.
+
+Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut,
+telling me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town.
+One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end!
+What do you say to that? And gentle ladies beneath it, that love
+it and celebrate its praises! And that in a town of such supreme,
+audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich!--Only the dear people
+there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere
+accident of spelling.
+
+NorWICH.
+PorCHmouth.
+CincinnatAH.
+
+What a sad picture of our civilization!
+
+I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the
+Colman farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for
+many years, and did not like to trust my recollection. But I had
+it in memory, and even noted down, as one of the finest trees in
+symmetry and beauty I had ever seen. I have received a document,
+signed by two citizens of a neighboring town, certified by the
+postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated,
+reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary
+college-class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the
+Professor to belong, who, though he has FORMERLY been a member of
+Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree
+"girts" eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is
+a real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we
+don't have "youth at the prow," we will have "pleasure at the 'elm."
+
+And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows
+in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for
+anything but thanks.
+
+[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
+communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these
+notes. The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and
+brief poem, from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public,
+though sometimes requested to do so. Some of them have given me
+great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose
+faces I had never seen. If you are pleased with anything a writer
+says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a
+pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring
+you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr very loud over a good,
+honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
+
+--Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
+forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to
+have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public,
+and of themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young
+folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not
+fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are
+hundreds that are in need of it.
+
+
+Dear Sir,--You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser
+than I was at your age. I don't wish to be understood as saying
+too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on
+my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of
+development.
+
+You long to "leap at a single bound into celebrity." Nothing is so
+common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to
+those who are thinking about something else,--very rarely to those
+who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated
+individual!" The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in
+notoriety;--that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to the
+pillory which is crowded with fools who could not hold their
+tongues and rogues who could not hide their tricks.
+
+If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it.
+The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true
+originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and
+newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the
+ripe apples and pears are. Produce anything really good, and an
+intelligent editor will jump at it. Don't flatter yourself that
+any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame.
+Nothing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having
+from a new hand. There is always a dearth of really fine articles
+for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety
+are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head;
+some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full
+reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb.
+
+You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is
+not demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you
+want it. It has not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark
+of genius that shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in
+our national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one,
+among his friends, and no takers, that he is the real, genuine,
+no-mistake Osiris.
+
+Qu'est ce qu'il a fait? What has he done? That was Napoleon's
+test. What have you done? Turn up the faces of your picture-
+cards, my boy! You need not make mouths at the public because it
+has not accepted you at your own fancy-valuation. Do the prettiest
+thing you can and wait your time.
+
+For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I
+dare not affirm that they show promise. I am not an editor, but I
+know the standard of some editors. You must not expect to "leap
+with a single bound" into the society of those whom it is not
+flattery to call your betters. When "The Pactolian" has paid you
+for a copy of verses,--(I can furnish you a list of alliterative
+signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe
+Zenith,)--when "The Rag-bag" has stolen your piece, after carefully
+scratching your name out,--when "The Nut-cracker" has thought you
+worth shelling, and strung the kernel of your cleverest poem,
+--then, and not till then, you may consider the presumption against
+you, from the fact of your rhyming tendency, as called in question,
+and let our friends hear from you, if you think it worth while.
+You may possibly think me too candid, and even accuse me of
+incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half so
+plain-spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. If you prefer the
+long jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try
+it like a man. Only remember this,--that, if a bushel of potatoes is
+shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes
+always get to the bottom. Believe me, etc., etc.
+
+
+I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these
+are by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless,
+querulous, unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with.
+Is a young man in the habit of writing verses? Then the
+presumption is that he is an inferior person. For, look you, there
+are at least nine chances in ten that he writes POOR verses. Now
+the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them
+is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of
+feebleness and a debilitating agent. A young man can get rid of
+the presumption against him afforded by his writing verses only by
+convincing us that they are verses worth writing.
+
+All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed
+to any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of
+these pages. I would always treat any given young person passing
+through the meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of
+adolescence with great tenderness. God forgive us if we ever speak
+harshly to young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths,
+and so sooner or later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on
+the lips who might have sung the world into sweet trances, had we
+not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings! Just as
+my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for
+the ungifted who are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived
+self-estimate. I have always tried to be gentle with the most
+hopeless cases. My experience, however, has not been encouraging.
+
+--X. Y., aet. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and
+broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls
+in his village, and "got the mitten" (pronounced mittIn) two or
+three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and
+truthing, in the newspapers. Sends me some strings of verses,
+candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I
+learn for the millionth time one of the following facts: either
+that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about
+time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with
+time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with
+time or with a chime. Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice
+as to his future course.
+
+What shall I do about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a
+ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded
+Youth? One doesn't like to be cruel,--and yet one hates to lie.
+Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism,
+--recommends study of good models,--that writing verse should be an
+incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the
+needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,--and, above all that there
+should be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least use
+in all this. The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is
+like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He
+feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very
+bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy. One of these
+young brains is like a bunch of India crackers; once touch fire to
+it and it is best to keep hands off until it has done popping,--if
+it ever stops. I have two letters on file; one is a pattern of
+adulation, the other of impertinence. My reply to the first,
+containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous
+language, had brought out the second. There was some sport in
+this, but Dulness is not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after
+he is struck. You may set it down as a truth which admits of few
+exceptions, that those who ask your OPINION really want your
+PRAISE, and will be contented with nothing less.
+
+There is another kind of application to which editors, or those
+supposed to have access to them, are liable, and which often proves
+trying and painful. One is appealed to in behalf of some person in
+needy circumstances who wishes to make a living by the pen. A
+manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication. It
+is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient. If
+Rachel's saying is true, that "fortune is the measure of
+intelligence," then poverty is evidence of limited capacity which
+it too frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception
+here and there. Now an editor is a person under a contract with
+the public to furnish them with the best things he can afford for
+his money. Charity shown by the publication of an inferior article
+would be like the generosity of Claude Duval and the other
+gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much they robbed the
+rich to have the means of relieving them.
+
+Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the
+trials to which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to
+develope enormous calluses at every point of contact with
+authorship. Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of
+intellect. They must reject the unfit productions of those whom
+they long to befriend, because it would be a profligate charity to
+accept them. One cannot burn his house down to warm the hands even
+of the fatherless and the widow.
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.
+
+--You haven't heard about my friend the Professor's first
+experiment in the use of anaesthetics, have you?
+
+He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his
+about the chaise. He spoke to me once or twice about another poem
+of similar character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would
+listen to and criticize.
+
+One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking
+very red in the cheeks and heavy about the eyes.--Hy'r'ye?--he
+said, and made for an arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat
+and then his person, going smack through the crown of the former as
+neatly as they do the trick at the circus. The Professor jumped at
+the explosion as if he had sat down on one of those small CALTHROPS
+our grandfathers used to sow round in the grass when there were
+Indians about,--iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a
+half long,--stick through moccasins into feet,--cripple 'em on the
+spot, and give 'em lockjaw in a day or two.
+
+At the same time he let off one of those big words which lie at the
+bottom of the best man's vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in
+his life,--just as every man's hair MAY stand on end, but in most
+men it never does.
+
+After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript,
+together with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just
+been writing an introduction or prelude to the main performance. A
+certain suspicion had come into my mind that the Professor was not
+quite right, which was confirmed by the way he talked; but I let
+him begin. This is the way he read it:-
+
+Prelude.
+
+I'm the fellah that tole one day
+The tale of the won'erful one-hoss-shay.
+Wan' to hear another? Say.
+--Funny, wasn'it? Made ME laugh,--
+I'm too modest, I am, by half,--
+Made me laugh'S THOUGH I SH'D SPLIT,--
+Cahn' a fellah like fellah's own wit?--
+--Fellahs keep sayin',--"Well, now that's nice;
+Did it once, but cahn' do it twice."--
+Don' you b'lieve the'z no more fat;
+Lots in the kitch'n 'z good 'z that.
+Fus'-rate throw, 'n' no mistake,--
+Han' us the props for another shake;--
+Know I'll try, 'n' guess I'll win;
+Here sh' goes for hit 'm ag'in!
+
+Here I thought it necessary to interpose.--Professor,--I said,--you
+are inebriated. The style of what you call your "Prelude" shows
+that it was written under cerebral excitement. Your articulation
+is confused. You have told me three times in succession, in
+exactly the same words, that I was the only true friend you had in
+the world that you would unbutton your heart to. You smell
+distinctly and decidedly of spirits.--I spoke, and paused; tender,
+but firm.
+
+Two large tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor's lids,--in
+obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that
+delicious bit of bladdery bathos, "The very law that moulds a
+tear," with which the "Edinburgh Review" attempted to put down
+Master George Gordon when that young man was foolishly trying to
+make himself conspicuous.
+
+One of these tears peeped over the edge of the lid until it lost
+its balance,--slid an inch and waited for reinforcements,--swelled
+again,--rolled down a little further,--stopped,--moved on,--and at
+last fell on the back of the Professor's hand. He held it up for
+me to look at, and lifted his eyes, brimful, till they met mine.
+
+I couldn't stand it,--I always break down when folks cry in my
+face,--so I hugged him, and said he was a dear old boy, and asked
+him kindly what was the matter with him, and what made him smell so
+dreadfully strong of spirits.
+
+Upset his alcohol lamp,--he said,--and spilt the alcohol on his
+legs. That was it.--But what had he been doing to get his head
+into such a state?--had he really committed an excess? What was
+the matter?--Then it came out that he had been taking chloroform to
+have a tooth out, which had left him in a very queer state, in
+which he had written the "Prelude" given above, and under the
+influence of which he evidently was still.
+
+I took the manuscript from his hands and read the following
+continuation of the lines he had begun to read me, while he made up
+for two or three nights' lost sleep as he best might.
+
+
+PARSON TURELL'S LEGACY:
+OR THE PRESIDENT'S OLD ARM-CHAIR.
+A MATHEMATICAL STORY.
+
+Facts respecting an old arm-chair.
+At Cambridge. Is kept in the College there.
+Seems but little the worse for wear.
+That's remarkable when I say
+It was old in President Holyoke's day.
+(One of his boys, perhaps you know,
+Died, AT ONE HUNDRED, years ago.)
+HE took lodging for rain or shine
+Under green bed-clothes in '69.
+
+Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.--
+Born there? Don't say so! I was, too.
+(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof,--
+Standing still, if you must have proof.--
+"Gambrel?--Gambrel?"--Let me beg
+You'll look at a horse's hinder leg,--
+First great angle above the hoof,--
+That's the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.)
+--Nicest place that ever was seen,--
+Colleges red and Common green,
+Sidewalks brownish with trees between.
+Sweetest spot beneath the skies
+When the canker-worms don't rise,--
+When the dust, that sometimes flies
+Into your mouth and ears and eyes.
+In a quiet slumber lies,
+NOT in the shape of unbaked pies
+Such as barefoot children prize.
+
+A kind of harber it seems to be,
+Facing the flow of a boundless sea.
+Rows of gray old Tutors stand
+Ranged like rocks above the sand;
+Rolling beneath them, soft and green,
+Breaks the tide of bright sixteen,--
+One wave, two waves, three waves, four,
+Sliding up the sparkling floor;
+Then it ebbs to flow no more,
+Wandering off from shore to shore
+With its freight of golden ore!
+--Pleasant place for boys to play;--
+Better keep your girls away;
+Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
+Which countless fingering waves pursue,
+And every classic beach is strown
+With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.
+
+But this is neither here nor there;--
+I'm talking about an old arm-chair.
+You've heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELL?
+Over at Medford he used to dwell;
+Married one of the Mathers' folk;
+Got with his wife a chair of oak,--
+Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
+Sharp behind and broad front edge,--
+One of the oddest of human things,
+Turned all over with knobs and rings,--
+But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand,--
+Fit for the worthies of the land,--
+Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in,
+Or Cotton Mather to sit--and lie--in.
+--Parson Turell bequeathed the same
+To a certain student,--SMITH by name;
+These were the terms, as we are told:
+"Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde;
+When he doth graduate, then to passe
+To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe.
+On Payment of"--(naming a certain sum)--
+"By him to whom ye Chaire shall come;
+He to ye oldest Senior next,
+And soe forever,"--(thus runs the text,)--
+"But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime,
+That being his Debte for use of same."
+
+SMITH transferred it to one of the BROWNS,
+And took his money,--five silver crowns.
+BROWN delivered it up to MOORE,
+Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four.
+MOORE made over the chair to LEE,
+Who gave him crowns of silver three.
+LEE conveyed it unto DREW,
+And now the payment, of course, was two.
+DREW gave up the chair to DUNN,--
+All he got, as you see, was one.
+DUNN released the chair to HALL,
+And got by the bargain no crown at all.
+--And now it passed to a second BROWN,
+Who took it, and likewise CLAIMED A CROWN.
+When BROWN conveyed it unto WARE,
+Having had one crown, to make it fair,
+He paid him two crowns to take the chair;
+And WARE, being honest, (as all Wares be,)
+He paid one POTTER, who took it, three.
+Four got ROBINSON; five got DIX;
+JOHNSON primus demanded six;
+And so the sum kept gathering still
+Till after the battle of Bunker's Hill
+--When paper money became so cheap,
+Folks wouldn't count it, but said "a heap,"
+
+A certain RICHARDS, the books declare,
+(A. M. in '90? I've looked with care
+Through the Triennial,--NAME NOT THERE.)
+This person, Richards, was offered then
+Eight score pounds, but would have ten;
+Nine, I think, was the sum he took,--
+Not quite certain,--but see the book.
+--By and by the wars were still,
+But nothing had altered the Parson's will.
+The old arm-chair was solid yet,
+But saddled with such a monstrous debt!
+Things grew quite too bad to bear,
+Paying such sums to get rid of the chair!
+But dead men's fingers hold awful tight,
+And there was the will in black and white,
+Plain enough for a child to spell.
+What should be done no man could tell,
+For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse,
+And every season but made it worse.
+
+As a last resort, to clear the doubt,
+They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out.
+The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop
+And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop;
+Halberds glittered and colors flew,
+French horns whinnied and trumpets blew,
+The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth
+And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath;
+So he rode with all his band,
+Till the President met him, cap in hand.
+--The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said,--
+"A will is a will, and the Parson's dead."
+The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he,--
+"There is your p'int. And here's my fee.
+These are the terms you must fulfil,--
+On such conditions I BREAK THE WILL!"
+The Governor mentioned what these should be.
+(Just wait a minute and then you'll see.)
+The President prayed. Then all was still,
+And the Governor rose and BROKE THE WILL!
+--"About those conditions?" Well, now you go
+And do as I tell you, and then you'll know.
+Once a year, on Commencement-day,
+If you'll only take the pains to stay,
+You'll see the President in the CHAIR,
+Likewise the Governor sitting there.
+The President rises; both old and young
+May hear his speech in a foreign tongue,
+The meaning whereof, as lawyers swear,
+Is this: Can I keep this old arm-chair?
+And then his Excellency bows,
+As much as to say that he allows.
+The Vice-Gub. next is called by name;
+He bows like t'other, which means the same.
+And all the officers round 'em bow,
+As much as to say that THEY allow.
+And a lot of parchments about the chair
+Are handed to witnesses then and there,
+And then the lawyers hold it clear
+That the chair is safe for another year.
+
+God bless you, Gentlemen! Learn to give
+Money to colleges while you live.
+Don't be silly and think you'll try
+To bother the colleges, when you die,
+With codicil this, and codicil that,
+That Knowledge may starve while Law grows fat;
+For there never was pitcher that wouldn't spill,
+And there's always a flaw in a donkey's will!
+
+
+--Hospitality is a good deal a matter of latitude, I suspect. The
+shade of a palm-tree serves an African for a hut; his dwelling is
+all door and no walls; everybody can come in. To make a morning
+call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long
+tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an
+apple with a worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace a
+regular gradation between these two extremes. In cities where the
+evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors,
+where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the
+interchange of civilities. A good deal, which in colder regions is
+ascribed to mean dispositions, belongs really to mean temperature.
+
+Once in a while, even in our Northern cities, at noon, in a very
+hot summer's day, one may realize, by a sudden extension in his
+sphere of consciousness, how closely he is shut up for the most
+part.--Do you not remember something like this? July, between 1
+and 2, P. M., Fahrenheit 96 degrees, or thereabout. Windows all
+gaping, like the mouths of panting dogs. Long, stinging cry of a
+locust comes in from a tree, half a mile off; had forgotten there
+was such a tree. Baby's screams from a house several blocks
+distant;--never knew there were any babies in the neighborhood
+before. Tinman pounding something that clatters dreadfully,--very
+distinct, but don't remember any tinman's shop near by. Horses
+stamping on pavement to get off flies. When you hear these four
+sounds, you may set it down as a warm day. Then it is that one
+would like to imitate the mode of life of the native at Sierra
+Leone, as somebody has described it: stroll into the market in
+natural costume,--buy a water-melon for a halfpenny,--split it, and
+scoop out the middle,--sit down in one half of the empty rind, clap
+the other on one's head, and feast upon the pulp.
+
+--I see some of the London journals have been attacking some of
+their literary people for lecturing, on the ground of its being a
+public exhibition of themselves for money. A popular author can
+print his lecture; if he deliver it, it is a case of quaestum
+corpore, or making profit of his person. None but "snobs" do that.
+Ergo, etc. To this I reply,--Negatur minor. Her Most Gracious
+Majesty, the Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part of the
+service for which she is paid. We do not consider it low-bred in
+her to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it so to hearing
+it from any other person, or reading it. His Grace and his
+Lordship exhibit themselves very often for popularity, and their
+houses every day for money.--No, if a man shows himself other than
+he is, if he belittles himself before an audience for hire, then he
+acts unworthily. But a true word, fresh from the lips of a true
+man, is worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, or
+even of fifty dollars a lecture. The taunt must be an outbreak of
+jealousy against the renowned authors who have the audacity to be
+also orators. The sub-lieutenants (of the press) stick a too
+popular writer and speaker with an epithet in England, instead of
+with a rapier, as in France.--Poh! All England is one great
+menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded
+cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the
+talking-bird's and the nightingale's being willing to become a part
+of the exhibition!
+
+
+THE LONG PATH.
+(Last of the Parentheses.)
+
+
+Yes, that was my last walk with the SCHOOLMISTRESS. It happened to
+be the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young
+woman, who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor,
+and she was provided for elsewhere. So it was no longer the
+schoolmistress that I walked with, but--Let us not be in unseemly
+haste. I shall call her the schoolmistress still; some of you love
+her under that name.
+
+When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
+had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side,
+there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I
+pitied our landlady. It took her all of a suddin,--she said. Had
+not known that we was keepin company, and never mistrusted anything
+particular. Ma'am was right to better herself. Didn't look very
+rugged to take care of a femily, but could get hired haalp, she
+calc'lated.--The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her
+soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her
+daughter.
+
+--No, poor, dear woman,--that could not have been. But I am
+dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile
+on my face all the time.
+
+The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out
+of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of
+oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific
+cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as
+that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump
+and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick
+performed. Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human
+beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the
+atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is
+that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman
+who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The
+element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her
+crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;--her
+bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle,
+compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of
+Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that
+frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as
+slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we
+call Civilization!
+
+Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain,
+overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young
+person, whoever you may be, now reading this,--little thinking you
+are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are
+destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such
+multitudes worthier than yourself. But it is only my surface-
+thought which laughs. For that great procession of the UNLOVED,
+who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the
+locks of brown or gray,--under the snowy cap, under the chilling
+turban,--hide it even from themselves,--perhaps never know they
+wear it, though it kills them,--there is no depth of tenderness in
+my nature that Pity has not sounded. Somewhere,--somewhere,--love
+is in store for them,--the universe must not be allowed to
+fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small,
+half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek
+to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear
+sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-given
+instincts!
+
+Read what the singing-women--one to ten thousand of the suffering
+women--tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken! Nature
+is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough
+lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue
+slate-stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true
+that "all sounds of life assumed one tone of love," as for Letitia
+Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give words
+to her grief, and they could not.--Will you hear a few stanzas of
+mine?
+
+
+THE VOICELESS.
+
+We count the broken lyres that rest
+Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,--
+But o'er their silent sister's breast
+The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
+A few can touch the magic string,
+And noisy Fame is proud to win them;--
+Alas for those that never sing,
+But die with all their music in them!
+
+Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
+Whose song has told their hearts' sad story,--
+Weep for the voiceless, who have known
+The cross without the crown of glory!
+Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
+O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
+But where the glistening night-dews weep
+On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.
+
+O hearts that break and give no sign
+Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
+Till Death pours out his cordial wine
+Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,--
+If singing breath or echoing chord
+To every hidden pang were given,
+What endless melodies were poured,
+As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!
+
+
+I hope that our landlady's daughter is not so badly off, after all.
+That young man from another city who made the remark which you
+remember about Boston State-house and Boston folks, has appeared at
+our table repeatedly of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive
+to this young lady. Only last evening I saw him leaning over her
+while she was playing the accordion,--indeed, I undertook to join
+them in a song, and got as far as "Come rest in this boo-oo," when,
+my voice getting tremulous, I turned off, as one steps out of a
+procession, and left the basso and soprano to finish it. I see no
+reason why this young woman should not be a very proper match for a
+man that laughs about Boston State-house. He can't be very
+particular.
+
+The young fellow whom I have so often mentioned was a little free
+in his remarks, but very good-natured.--Sorry to have you go,--he
+said.--School-ma'am made a mistake not to wait for me. Haven't
+taken anything but mournin' fruit at breakfast since I heard of
+it.--MOURNING fruit,--said I,--what's that?--Huckleberries and
+blackberries,--said he;--couldn't eat in colors, raspberries,
+currants, and such, after a solemn thing like this happening.--The
+conceit seemed to please the young fellow. If you will believe it,
+when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it
+out as follows. You know those odious little "saas-plates" that
+figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns,
+into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre
+of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel
+homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery
+tea-spoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub,
+--(not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are
+of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean
+bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or "lucent syrups tinct
+with cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the
+Tower-stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy,--as people in the green
+stage of millionism will have them,--I can dally with their amber
+semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,)--you know these
+small, deep dishes, I say. When we came down the next morning, each
+of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf. On
+lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black
+huckleberries. But one of those plates held red currants, and was
+covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was
+covered with a white rose. There was a laugh at this at first, and
+then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the
+old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna
+handkerchief
+
+--"What was the use in waiting? We should be too late for
+Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer."--The hand I
+held trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed
+herself before the feet of Ahasuerus.--She had been reading that
+chapter, for she looked up,--if there was a film of moisture over
+her eyes there was also the faintest shadow of a distant smile
+skirting her lips, but not enough to accent the dimples,--and said,
+in her pretty, still way,--"If it please the king, and if I have
+found favor in his sight, and the thing seem right before the king,
+and I be pleasing in his eyes"--
+
+I don't remember what King Ahasuerus did or said when Esther got
+just to that point of her soft, humble words,--but I know what I
+did. That quotation from Scripture was cut short, anyhow. We came
+to a compromise on the great question, and the time was settled for
+the last day of summer.
+
+In the mean time, I talked on with our boarders, much as usual, as
+you may see by what I have reported. I must say, I was pleased
+with a certain tenderness they all showed toward us, after the
+first excitement of the news was over. It came out in trivial
+matters,--but each one, in his or her way, manifested kindness.
+Our landlady, for instance, when we had chickens, sent the LIVER
+instead of the GIZZARD, with the wing, for the schoolmistress.
+This was not an accident; the two are never mistaken, though some
+landladies APPEAR as if they did not know the difference. The
+whole of the company were even more respectfully attentive to my
+remarks than usual. There was no idle punning, and very little
+winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the
+reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question
+or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant,--except when
+the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the
+landlady's daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until
+she would ask what he was pokin' his fun at her for, and if he
+wasn't ashamed of himself. In fact, they all behaved very
+handsomely, so that I really felt sorry at the thought of leaving
+my boarding-house.
+
+I suppose you think, that, because I lived at a plain widow-woman's
+plain table, I was of course more or less infirm in point of
+worldly fortune. You may not be sorry to learn, that, though not
+what GREAT MERCHANTS call very rich, I was comfortable,
+--comfortable,--so that most of those moderate luxuries I described
+in my verses on CONTENTMENT--MOST of them, I say--were within our
+reach, if we chose to have them. But I found out that the
+schoolmistress had a vein of charity about her, which had hitherto
+been worked on a small silver and copper basis, which made her
+think less, perhaps, of luxuries than even I did,--modestly as I
+have expressed my wishes.
+
+It is a rather pleasant thing to tell a poor young woman, whom one
+has contrived to win without showing his rent-roll, that she has
+found what the world values so highly, in following the lead of her
+affections. That was an enjoyment I was now ready for.
+
+I began abruptly:--Do you know that you are a rich young person?
+
+I know that I am very rich,--she said.--Heaven has given me more
+than I ever asked; for I had not thought love was ever meant for
+me.
+
+It was a woman's confession, and her voice fell to a whisper as it
+threaded the last words.
+
+I don't mean that,--I said,--you blessed little saint and seraph!
+--if there's an angel missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her
+at this boarding house!--I don't mean that! I mean that I--that
+is, you--am--are--confound it!--I mean that you'll be what most
+people call a lady of fortune. And I looked full in her eyes for
+the effect of the announcement.
+
+There wasn't any. She said she was thankful that I had what would
+save me from drudgery, and that some other time I should tell her
+about it.--I never made a greater failure in an attempt to produce
+a sensation.
+
+So the last day of summer came. It was our choice to go to the
+church, but we had a kind of reception at the boarding-house. The
+presents were all arranged, and among them none gave more pleasure
+than the modest tributes of our fellow-boarders,--for there was not
+one, I believe, who did not send something. The landlady would
+insist on making an elegant bride-cake, with her own hands; to
+which Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add certain embellishments
+out of his private funds,--namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done in
+white sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars and stripes,
+which had a very pleasing effect, I assure you. The landlady's
+daughter sent a richly bound copy of Tupper's Poems. On a blank
+leaf was the following, written in a very delicate and careful
+hand:-
+
+
+Presented to . . . by . . .
+On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony.
+May sunshine ever beam o'er her!
+
+
+Even the poor relative thought she must do something, and sent a
+copy of "The Whole Duty of Man," bound in very attractive
+variegated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled. From the
+divinity-student came the loveliest English edition of "Keble's
+Christian Year." I opened it, when it came, to the FOURTH SUNDAY
+IN LENT, and read that angelic poem, sweeter than anything I can
+remember since Xavier's "My God, I love thee."--I am not a
+Churchman,--I don't believe in planting oaks in flower-pots,--but
+such a poem as "The Rosebud" makes one's heart a proselyte to the
+culture it grows from. Talk about it as much as you like,--one's
+breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion. A man
+should be a gentleman in his hymns and prayers; the fondness for
+"scenes," among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that--
+
+
+"God only and good angels look
+Behind the blissful scene,"-
+
+
+and that other,--
+
+
+"He could not trust his melting soul
+But in his Maker's sight,"--
+
+
+that I hope some of them will see this, and read the poem, and
+profit by it.
+
+My laughing and winking young friend undertook to procure and
+arrange the flowers for the table, and did it with immense zeal. I
+never saw him look happier than when he came in, his hat saucily on
+one side, and a cheroot in his mouth, with a huge bunch of
+tea-roses, which he said were for "Madam."
+
+One of the last things that came was an old square box, smelling of
+camphor, tied and sealed. It bore, in faded ink, the marks,
+"Calcutta, 1805." On opening it, we found a white Cashmere shawl
+with a very brief note from the dear old gentleman opposite, saying
+that he had kept this some years, thinking he might want it, and
+many more, not knowing what to do with it,--that he had never seen
+it unfolded since he was a young supercargo,--and now, if she would
+spread it on her shoulders, it would make him feel young to look at
+it.
+
+Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid of all work! What must
+she do but buy a small copper breast-pin and put it under
+"Schoolma'am's" plate that morning, at breakfast? And Schoolma'am
+would wear it,--though I made her cover it, as well as I could,
+with a tea-rose.
+
+It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and I could not leave them
+in utter silence.
+
+Good-by,--I said,--my dear friends, one and all of you! I have
+been long with you, and I find it hard parting. I have to thank
+you for a thousand courtesies, and above all for the patience and
+indulgence with which you have listened to me when I have tried to
+instruct or amuse you. My friend the Professor (who, as well as my
+friend the Poet, is unavoidably absent on this interesting
+occasion) has given me reason to suppose that he would occupy my
+empty chair about the first of January next. If he comes among
+you, be kind to him, as you have been to me. May the Lord bless
+you all!--And we shook hands all round the table.
+
+Half an hour afterwards the breakfast things and the cloth were
+gone. I looked up and down the length of the bare boards over
+which I had so often uttered my sentiments and experiences--and
+--Yes, I am a man, like another.
+
+All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of these old friends of
+mine, whom you know, and others a little more up in the world,
+perhaps, to whom I have not introduced you, I took the
+schoolmistress before the altar from the hands of the old gentleman
+who used to sit opposite, and who would insist on giving her away.
+
+And now we two are walking the long path in peace together. The
+"schoolmistress" finds her skill in teaching called for again,
+without going abroad to seek little scholars. Those visions of
+mine have all come true.
+
+I hope you all love me none the less for anything I have told you.
+Farewell!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+
+PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+
+The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
+quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements which
+were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the
+trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of the year
+when the fastest time to that date was given must be very considerably
+altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the
+"Autocrat." No doubt many other statements and opinions might be more or
+less modified if I were writing today instead of having written before
+the war, when the world and I were both more than a score of years
+younger.
+
+These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat." They had
+to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a
+formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise
+Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough to
+warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the
+danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the selfsame flight."
+
+There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
+itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes of
+the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow betrays
+the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the original idea
+of the work, if there is any individuality in the method or style of a
+new author, or of an old author on a new track, it will have lost much of
+its first effect when repeated. Still, there have not been wanting
+readers who have preferred this second series of papers to the first.
+The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that
+reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper
+antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks
+they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
+temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as if
+they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required the
+exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
+
+How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
+line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
+when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when
+I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom Jones,"
+and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
+opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I remember it,
+and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently." How many
+times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
+vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
+threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
+calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in them
+and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin
+considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and
+prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such
+papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies have
+become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too
+commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear
+so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when these
+papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our
+fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
+unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
+
+But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these papers
+to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index Expurgatorius; and
+if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas or antidogmas, the
+public has become used to so much rougher treatments, that what was once
+an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader may nod over pages
+which, when they were first written, would have waked him into a paroxysm
+of protest and denunciation.
+
+November, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades, and
+if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten years. The
+first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apologetic, in
+the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the book is in some
+points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that the writer should
+try to smooth the way to the reception of his more or less aggressive
+ideas. He wishes to convince, not to offend,--to obtain a hearing for
+his thought, not to stir up angry opposition in those who do not accept
+it. There is commonly an anxious look about a first Preface. The author
+thinks he shall be misapprehended about this or that matter, that his
+well-meant expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those
+whom he looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
+questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the conservatives
+and reproached for his timidity by the noisier radicals. The first
+Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest part of a work containing
+the thoughts of an honest writer.
+
+After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
+over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still read,
+and that he must write a new Preface. He comes smiling to his task. How
+many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty or thirty
+years since he came before his untried public in those almost plaintive
+paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his readers,--for the
+Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he may prove, comes on
+to the stage with his shield on his right arm and his sword in his left
+hand.
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic Monthly"
+and introduced itself without any formal Preface. A quarter of a century
+later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had laid before him,
+was written. There is no mark of worry, I think, in that. Old opponents
+had come up and shaken hands with the author they had attacked or
+denounced. Newspapers which had warned their subscribers against him
+were glad to get him as a contributor to their columns. A great change
+had come over the community with reference to their beliefs. Christian
+believers were united as never before in the feeling that, after all,
+their common object was to elevate the moral and religious standard of
+humanity. But within the special compartments of the great Christian
+fold the marks of division have pronounced themselves in the most
+unmistakable manner. As an example we may take the lines of cleavage
+which have shown themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational
+and the Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in
+the transplanted Anglican church of this country. Recent circumstances
+have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic communities
+which has been going on silently but surely. The licensing of a
+missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one department to another,
+the election of a Bishop,--each of these movements furnishes evidence
+that there is no such thing as an air-tight reservoir of doctrinal
+finalities.
+
+The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+religious organizations. We may demand the credentials of every creed
+and catechise all the catechisms. So we may discuss the gravest
+questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our evening tea-cups.
+There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives up his legendary
+anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.
+
+It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+controversy. The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed beliefs
+dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip the pages
+which look as if they would disturb his complacency. "Faith" is the most
+precious of possessions, and it dislikes being meddled with. It means,
+of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in the value of our, own
+opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a religion, of a Being, a belief
+quite independent of any evidence that we can bring to convince a jury of
+our fellow beings. Its roots are thus inextricably entangled with those
+of self-love and bleed as mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as
+weeds. Some persons may even at this late day take offence at a few
+opinions expressed in the following pages, but most of these passages
+will be read without loss of temper by those who disagree with them, and
+by-and-by they may be found too timid and conservative for intelligent
+readers, if they are still read by any.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.
+O. W. H.
+
+ THE PROFESSOR
+
+ AT THE
+ BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+ What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a universal
+formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It would have
+had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a certain
+divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few phrases, and
+then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of being.--I will thank
+you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a dependent creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed the
+sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram of
+the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of great
+things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with a
+pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great bundle of
+great things,--he said.
+
+(NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....
+
+Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be John,
+and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold on! the
+Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about
+the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait and
+hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it exposes
+an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so full of
+spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have not been
+able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and that the
+colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch them, and
+especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes on, to
+cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
+the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it
+I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted
+on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough for
+him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I felt
+for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull him down
+presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or some other
+wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose the first
+of his sentence, but what I heard began so:
+
+--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to come
+down from the tents on section and Independence days with their pails to
+get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to school in Boston
+as long as the boys would let me.--The little man groaned, turned, as if
+to look around, and went on.--Ran away from school one day to see
+Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger-head. That was in flip
+days, when there were always two three loggerheads in the fire. I'm a
+Boston boy, I tell you,--born at North End, and mean to be buried on
+Copp's Hill, with the good old underground people,--the Worthylakes, and
+the rest of 'em. Yes,--up on the old hill, where they buried Captain
+Daniel Malcolm in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the
+red-coats, in those old times when the world was frozen up tight and
+there was n't but one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil
+all,--and black enough it looked, I tell you! There 's where my bones
+shall lie, Sir, and rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard
+opposite! You can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full crooked
+little streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
+
+--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but thinking
+in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got kinked up,
+turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear what was said, but
+went on,--
+
+--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and
+kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free
+speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,--I
+don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples!
+
+--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black whiskers
+and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too massive, and a
+diamond pin so very large that the most trusting nature might confess an
+inward suggestion,--of course, nothing amounting to a suspicion. For
+this is a gentleman from a great city, and sits next to the landlady's
+daughter, who evidently believes in him, and is the object of his
+especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the stairs
+that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so
+still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
+this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
+might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
+it.)
+
+--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-eyed,
+sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress, appearing as if
+it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as a bit of
+economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say. "He who would bring back the wealth of the
+Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." What you bring away
+from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.--Benjamin
+Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
+small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under
+the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large bite, which left a very
+perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and departed
+on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to sustain him
+on the way.]
+
+--Here it is. "Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J.
+Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858."
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
+delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the
+conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.
+You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back
+from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if it
+is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to
+humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
+he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that "good
+old men" may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of
+maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities
+which are found at an earlier period of life. He has followed your
+precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, "all
+abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I left her to
+recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
+beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having her
+argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.--I
+don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
+fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
+would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying, "No!"
+is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F. came to
+me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for "a lady,"--one of the
+boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
+relieved of.
+
+--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the
+faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of
+all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with
+its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in
+favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it.
+Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a
+convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in the
+mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+
+--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
+divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a
+change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
+becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
+which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
+represents, is polarized.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
+consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
+language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
+behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
+priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his
+ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What
+do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his
+religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words for
+him. The argument for and against new translations of the Bible really
+turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarized
+words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think, myself, if
+every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and
+put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of
+reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we
+do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
+fair man and lover of truth should do. When society has once fairly
+dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will perhaps
+crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
+
+I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
+young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
+--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get the
+distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two observations
+from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer and midwinter, for
+instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you must take an
+observation from the position of the laity as well as of the clergy.
+Teachers and students of theology get a certain look, certain
+conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional neckcloth,
+and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They are
+scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the "idols of the
+tribe" are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men that follow
+one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played the part
+of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never suffered it
+to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when other moving
+powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes,
+too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were
+like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for
+the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the
+world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of
+men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not
+the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on
+its source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
+or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time since,
+must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard College
+yard.
+
+--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert Calef's
+book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
+old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader
+of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of
+fools and worse than fools they were--
+
+Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it, as
+long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it
+wears. There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it falls
+off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
+and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a
+little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
+lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he took
+a few steps from his place,--his motions and the deadbeat of the
+misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
+which is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted club-foot.
+
+Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with an
+ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair. I
+walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right
+hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and
+could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings
+which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of
+persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a
+death's head. Engraved on one side of this, "L. B. AEt. 22,"--on the
+other, "Ob. 1692"
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a witch.
+It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and loved
+her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall
+hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was Salem,
+though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
+merchant, it was that blew them all to--
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was getting
+red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in its
+shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking over
+texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of praying
+rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has found out,
+by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the Deity which can
+be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the Deity of the
+firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of throbbing human
+life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's
+being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament connecting the
+negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity
+that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is
+to this larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the
+films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
+ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
+that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some things
+into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of Divinity."
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round their
+close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom of
+which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
+look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
+across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty nearly
+worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into
+senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes
+as plagues come, from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, "curing"
+patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
+at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
+people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
+hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
+that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
+eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
+bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios
+in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor, of a
+"Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
+Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know a
+little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a simpleton
+as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads among them
+would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great plague came
+on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
+incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in
+erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded
+the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you see,---you can
+help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
+effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
+good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
+produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
+that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
+routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived by
+selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had to
+recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
+would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
+on them.
+
+--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of theology?
+I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are crying out
+against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing at it as an
+hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of
+interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining
+the traditional ideas of the future state which have been and are still
+accepted,--not merely in those who believe in it, but in the general
+sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most good people seem
+to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any more than
+Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some pretty
+strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly handled by
+theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in
+a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and
+ending with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in
+all the ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you cannot have people
+of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
+large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of science,
+professing to be in communication with the spiritual world and keeping up
+constant intercourse with it, without its gradually reacting on the whole
+conception of that other life. It is the folly of the world, constantly,
+which confounds its wisdom. Not only out of the mouths of babes and
+sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools and cheats, we may often get
+our truest lessons. For the fool's judgment is a dog-vane that turns
+with a breath, and the cheat watches the clouds and sets his weathercock
+by them,--so that one shall often see by their pointing which way the
+winds of heaven are blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers
+of what we call the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the
+compass.
+
+--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the watch.
+Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up their left
+foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.
+His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was
+simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness,
+that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet
+horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to
+get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with
+slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a sharp
+short whinny,--by no means intending to put their heels through the
+dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar
+word, frisky. This, I think, is the physiological condition of the young
+person, John. I noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm,
+affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended
+for the facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a
+disposition to be satirical on his part.
+
+--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
+Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to its
+tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as a
+Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
+off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain
+of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once find
+yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop your
+Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher than in
+the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of facts and
+swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in a
+profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
+India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge
+will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses of
+sheepskin diplomas.
+
+By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
+common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people,
+Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and
+some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like
+air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of
+nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them--like Aaron's
+calf.
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and
+keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the east and
+the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the
+moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace
+before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus is bred out of our neglect,
+and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a
+bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a
+conservative.
+
+--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager and
+excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to be
+born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can come and
+live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science and the
+American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis, the father of
+American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes awhile, but
+he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough. Joe Warren, the first
+bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here. Parson
+Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and stayed here. Pity old
+Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear,
+good old Christian heathen! There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby,
+in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the slab many a time. Meant
+well,--meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put a little oil on one
+linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about
+it was the wheel of that side was down. T' other fellow's at work now,
+but he makes more noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his
+side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the old
+cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which
+may get hurt. Hope not,--hope not. But this is the great Macadamizing
+place,--always cracking up something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin, whom,
+for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
+used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went by
+cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and foreign vermin
+included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if the
+Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
+distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
+E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be
+interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-bladeful of
+something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with the
+reply he would have made.
+
+--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
+small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
+to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially. I
+won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in company
+with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of the same
+kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I maintain,
+that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell me a fact
+which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought, I am as
+receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.
+If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good
+story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to
+the fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
+of the "Old Sailor" says. I had rather hear one of those grand elemental
+laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names, Sir or Madam,)
+glisten to one of those old playbills of our College days, in which "Tom
+and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old Greek Professor was said to
+call it) was announced to be brought on the stage with whole force of the
+Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no such person, of course,) than say the
+best things I might by any chance find myself capable of saying. Of
+course, if I come across a real thinker, a suggestive, acute,
+illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a
+while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it would n't
+be talking, but "speaking my piece." Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the risk of
+an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it escapes, but
+just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of never saying a
+foolish thing.
+
+--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
+do,--and that is to let him talk when he will. The day of the
+"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
+
+--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
+boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,
+--and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you may
+have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge, when they
+show how they would punish an adversary, themselves protected by this
+rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime, thumb-supported, fiercely
+prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you know
+anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would not
+hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by Nature to
+be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to others, I could
+wish that you might not employ a term which implies contempt for what
+should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak. It's all
+right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I understand
+the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,--it is a
+conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was speaking,
+until it became as blank of vivid significance as the countenance of a
+gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of eyes. He had not
+taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink, as
+he answered,--Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's the
+way to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man struck up
+that well-known song which I think they used to sing at Masonic
+festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left you
+Chrononhotonthologos?"
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved or
+injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a natural
+dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as of the
+individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode spoken
+of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations. This is the
+final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have in common with
+the herds.
+
+--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I thought
+I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up, where there are
+such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat this poor man fairly,
+and not call him names. Do you know what his name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They call
+him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a place
+where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the young
+fellow.
+
+"L. B. Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him. The
+ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the little man,
+or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked, crotchety old town.
+Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin, won't you?--I said to the
+young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term. Don't call him so any more, if
+you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
+little--
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among the
+Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or given to
+rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane words; why, it
+is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street by those who speak
+of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house. First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right, looking
+down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit. At the further end sits the
+Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-noor, or the
+gentleman with the diamond. Opposite me is a Venerable Gentleman with a
+bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little. The Divinity Student is
+my neighbor on the right,--and further down, that Young Fellow of whom I
+have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's Daughter sits near the
+Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near the Landlady. At the
+right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of whose name and history I
+have as yet learned nothing. Next the further left-hand corner, near the
+lower end of the table, sits the deformed person. The chair at his side,
+occupying that corner, is empty. I need not specially mention the other
+boarders, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son,
+who sits near his mother. We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference
+enough and likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something
+wanting. The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of
+feminine attractions. I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.
+She wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
+than I care to see on a person in her position. Her voice is strident,
+her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish way of dancing
+and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting the hook below it,
+which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons of more pretensions.
+I can't help hoping we shall put something into that empty chair yet
+which will add the missing string to our social harp. I hear talk of a
+rare Miss who is expected. Something in the schoolgirl way, I believe.
+We shall see.
+
+--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution which I
+am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of all
+concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run dry
+before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow? Let me
+tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into a bank, and
+bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in sums to
+suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was as
+easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a
+dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of
+happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot. A check came back to
+me at last with these two words on it,--NO FUNDS. My check-book was a
+volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank, you
+know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency
+without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO FUNDS,--and then
+where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your gold and
+your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break up
+and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin
+thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if one
+shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a
+June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
+those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and
+full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or
+rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as
+a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with a
+brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which we
+call "asleep," because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking points;
+presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to
+finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy
+threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for
+the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities,
+but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in
+knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving
+better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow
+artesian well; finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the
+markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the
+movement of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
+Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for me,
+the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had
+his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on, whether
+he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes. As to
+catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,--the
+gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
+respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a favorable
+intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting receptacle.--I sow more
+thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel over the desert-sand along
+which my lonely consciousness paces day and night, than I shall throw
+into soil where it will germinate, in a year. All sorts of bodily and
+mental perturbations come between us and the due projection of our
+thought. The pulse-like "fits of easy and difficult transmission" seem
+to reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are seen.
+We know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell a
+revolving light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring
+obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever
+delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had
+told all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his most
+famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first
+line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at
+him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit
+himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the
+clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited,
+by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer slip
+through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
+"Ah!" said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, "if it hadn't
+been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had a
+coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left-the store." A
+passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required to
+persuade the accidental human being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth,
+A.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe
+for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a
+library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with the crystals of
+all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought
+with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there is an
+end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and hissing
+tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting alkaline
+unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets covered with
+lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them, first into
+clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out when
+I have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that Nature,
+when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to
+make critics out of the chips that were left! Painful as the task is,
+they never fail to warn the author, in the most impressive manner, of the
+probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. Sad as the necessity
+is to their delicate sensibilities, they never hesitate to advertise him
+of the decline of his powers, and to press upon him the propriety of
+retiring before he sinks into imbecility. Trusting to their kind
+offices, I shall endeavor to fulfil--
+
+--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+
+--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the premium
+offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns Centenary, (so
+called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because there will be nary a
+cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce and dear. Consumers may,
+consequently, be glad to take the present article, which, by the aid of a
+Latin tutor--and a Professor of Chemistry, will be found intelligible to
+the educated classes.
+
+
+
+ DE SAUTY
+
+ AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+ Professor. Blue-Nose.
+
+ PROFESSOR.
+
+ Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+ Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you,
+ Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+ Holding talk with nations?
+
+ Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+ Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+ Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+ Three times daily patent?
+
+ Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+ Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"
+ --Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+ Romulus and Remus?
+
+ Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+ Or a living product of galvanic action,
+ Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+ Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+
+ BLUE-NOSE.
+
+ Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+ Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+ Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+ Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+ When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+ At the polar focus of the wire electric
+ Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+ Called himself "DE SAUTY."
+
+ As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+ Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+ So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+ Sucking in the current.
+
+ When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+ Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+ And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+ Said, "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+ From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+ Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+ Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+ Of "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+ When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+ Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+ Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+ Of disintegration.
+
+ Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+ Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+ Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+ There was no De Sauty.
+
+ Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+ C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor. Flu. Sil. Potassa,
+ Calc. Sod. Phosph. Mag. Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+ Such as man is made of.
+
+ Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished!
+ There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+ Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+ Cry, "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell; but
+if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it. So the boys
+say.
+
+It is a libel on the turtle. He grows to his shell, and his shell is in
+his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think there is one
+of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am. Nothing but a combination
+of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the turtle's back, could
+have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace; and after memorable
+interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and huge influx
+of patriotic pride,--for every American owns all America,--
+
+ "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"
+
+his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+resume his skeleton.
+
+Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
+Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral of
+Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art
+(repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me from the walls of
+my sacred cell! Vesalius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed,
+thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentleman, with book and
+carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper,
+commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years
+besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters, cut in copper by
+Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris quais; and ye
+Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of light; and
+thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of
+Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for
+unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius
+Visscher; welcome once more to my eyes! The old books look out from the
+shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something asides their
+titles,--a kind of solemn greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm
+under my feet. The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with
+me, as if it were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil
+stretches itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
+stretches in after-dinner laughter.
+
+The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back. One
+of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I believed
+what I said.--This was apparently considered something unusual, by its
+being mentioned.
+
+One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
+himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of bluntness,
+like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness.
+What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give
+as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as
+the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt to run to
+mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good stories
+about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long
+talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it. Something like
+this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The best
+Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to
+time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave, and
+never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or a
+highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully, that
+we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the coals and
+fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something very odd, though, about
+this mechanical talk.
+
+You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was
+detached a long way from the station you were approaching? Well, you
+have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the
+locomotive were drawing them? Indeed, you would not have suspected that
+you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen
+the engine running away from you on a side-track. Upon my conscience, I
+believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely,
+sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that we never know the
+difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers
+would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit turns
+the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of music into
+notes.--Well, they govern the world for all that, these sweet-lipped
+women,--because beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
+
+--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+
+Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the
+promise of the future.
+
+--All this, however, is not what I was going to say. Here am I, suppose,
+seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an intelligent
+Englishman. We look in each other's faces,--we exchange a dozen words.
+One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each other,--to be perfectly
+courteous,--more than courteous; for we are the entertainer and the
+entertained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings, to each other.
+The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a little with its warm
+crimson, we are none the less kind for it.
+
+I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+
+The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words had
+been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my time used
+to call a hit like this a "side-winder."
+
+--I must finish this woman.--
+
+Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking as
+he sat at meat. Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off place,
+you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real dinners,
+where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a very
+miscellaneous company. Probably there was a great deal of loose talk
+among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may believe.
+
+Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--and I
+for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water, and, I
+blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its being the
+grand specific against dull dinners. A score of people come together in
+all moods of mind and body. The problem is, in the space of one hour,
+more or less, to bring them all into the same condition of slightly
+exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,--talk,
+alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works
+up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their
+maximum receptivity, is now just where it was when
+
+ The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+
+--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to more
+than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine. I once wrote a
+song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that I was afraid some
+would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it was composed in the
+bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing domestic influences.
+
+--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can you
+tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration once,
+of which the following is a verse?
+
+ Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+ The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+ Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+ And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+
+I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell you
+another line I wrote long ago:--
+
+ Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.
+
+The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the
+truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many
+facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them;
+secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us
+down to a single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this
+grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance. Better eternal and
+universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made wives
+and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they should
+have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches! Yet better
+even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all our tables,
+let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social tendency, so far
+as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and pretend not to
+know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner! I think you will find
+that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves
+much more rarely than those who try to be "consistent." But a great many
+things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply because they
+are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a
+front view of a face and its profile often do.
+
+Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I owe
+him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he has
+often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the
+"Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the
+very word which gives it its significance,--the word fluid, intended to
+typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds it up, I say, as if it
+attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of
+illustrating its limitations by an image. Now I will not explain any
+farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote a
+few lines from one of my friend's poems, printed more than ten years ago,
+and ask the distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more
+strongly or absolutely the independent will of the "subcreative centre,"
+as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man.
+
+ --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+ He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+ --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+ The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+ --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+ Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+
+If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the
+full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent!
+
+Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
+with the intelligent Englishman. We begin skirmishing with a few light
+ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty,
+if there were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little
+litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies,
+as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking at
+the shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like to keep
+in shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;--in short,
+seeing what we have to deal with. If the Englishman gets his H's pretty
+well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the British social
+order, and we shall find him a good companion.
+
+But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two
+different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we
+are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to talk
+through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow,
+incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out
+the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks. They are
+children to us in certain points of view. They are playing with toys we
+have done with for whole-generations.
+
+--------FOOTNOTE:
+The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me the
+field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a special
+relation between the ego and the conditions before it. But no man knows
+what forces are at work in the determination of his ego. The bias which
+decides his choice between two or more motives may come from some
+unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows nothing at all. He is
+automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time
+having the feeling that he is self-determining. The Story of Elsie
+Yenner, written-soon after this book was published, illustrates the
+direction in which my thought was moving. 'The imaginary subject of the
+story obeyed her will, but her will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal
+poisoning influence.
+--------
+
+That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and
+the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have
+not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly than
+they do. Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and
+lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh at
+honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World
+puppet-shows. I don't think we on our part ever understand the
+Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence. But then we
+do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about
+race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,)
+than any people that ever lived did think of him. Our reverence is a
+great deal wider, if it is less intense. We have caste among us, to some
+extent; it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog
+such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust,
+hearty individuality.
+
+This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me;
+it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim
+into each other's laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out
+the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a
+personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he
+talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you
+get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+
+How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man
+tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as
+the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+
+---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow a
+slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own
+beneath it. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a
+third train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to
+write out a Mental movement in three parts.
+
+A.---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman talking.
+
+B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
+
+C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate
+self-repeating idea.
+
+A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of
+apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers--
+
+B.--Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out of
+window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it were all
+written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady! (Eye catches
+picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family nose! Came over in
+the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face. Why don't they wear a ring
+in it?
+
+C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late--
+
+I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
+through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
+currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
+them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--Oh,
+there! I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought which
+had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite, and
+articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an unpleasant
+recollection.
+
+The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+this, that they are both brimful. There is no space between consecutive
+thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions. All pack tight,
+and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run
+there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts and
+actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded all become hexagonal
+prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular polyhedra.
+
+Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no
+man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him. So,
+to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of
+thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among thoughts or events,
+like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses. He can
+mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he
+cannot stop it. So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can
+stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk,
+trot, or gallop. He can only take his foot from the saddle of one
+thought and put it on that of another.
+
+--What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.--Twenty years
+after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you through
+the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round all that
+time without a rider.
+
+The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
+such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought
+upon that of another.
+
+--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are getting
+into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in contact,
+and how you can admit time, if it is always now to something?
+
+--I thought it best not to hear this question.
+
+--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or elsewhere.
+One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an unfortunate
+truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--as helpless,
+apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian mummy. He
+then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off the
+bandages. Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it. But
+as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and
+smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have
+seen before. At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts
+out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom
+we have known in the streets all our lives. The fact is, the philosopher
+has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or
+course it is not very hard for him to take them off. Still, a great many
+people like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!
+
+Dear! dear! I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how
+those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are
+abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself. How they spar for
+wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+
+--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!--he
+said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave palm
+of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You small boy there,
+hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"
+
+The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked the
+propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words, of
+which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the first was an
+emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot myself. But let
+us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any. I don't believe in
+clipping the coin of the realm, Sir! If I put a weathercock on my house,
+Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows up aloft,--off from the
+prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean to the prairies, or any way
+it wants to blow! I don't want a weathercock with a winch in an old
+gentleman's study that he can take hold of and turn, so that the vane
+shall point west when the great wind overhead is blowing east with all
+its might, Sir! Wait till we give you a dictionary; Sir! It takes
+Boston to do that thing, Sir!
+
+--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+--remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
+say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods made
+the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for 'em.--Mr.
+Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at any rate, he
+did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of some
+copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have inherited
+from our English fathers. Language!--the blood of the soul, Sir! into
+which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know what a word
+is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at
+Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and
+Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second,
+and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to
+spell a word that was n't in the Colonial dictionaries! R-e, re, s-i-s,
+sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance! That was in '43, and it was a good
+many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with their
+muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old
+bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes,
+yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
+class so far along that it could spell those two hard words, Independence
+and Union! I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand lives, aye,
+sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is worth
+speaking. We know what language means too well here in Boston to play
+tricks with it. We never make a new word til we have made a new thing or
+a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this continent, we
+had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated the primal
+curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The cutwater of this
+great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--this thirty-wasted
+wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little spray over the human
+vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world's destiny!
+
+He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
+human proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his
+high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
+
+Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders call
+John.
+
+The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he
+remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him
+take the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting
+on the fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a
+glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common.
+Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the
+bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
+
+Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.--I
+know the trick. Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an' he
+downs the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as
+big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day. That's the way
+to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the 'lection dinner.
+
+Salem! Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin
+Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+
+The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a
+boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if
+it ought to shriek. It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.
+
+--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out of its
+agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language is a
+temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined. Because
+time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its cornices,
+shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell you what comes of
+meddling with things that can take care of themselves.--A friend of mine
+had a watch given him, when he was a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose
+silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from its contents; you
+know them,--the cases that you hang on your thumb, while the core, or the
+real watch, lies in your hand as naked as a peeled apple. Well, he began
+with taking off the case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he
+got it fairly open, and there were the works, as good as if they were
+alive,--crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest. All right except
+one thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
+balance-wheel. So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and caught
+hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without touching
+any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ! and the watch had done up
+twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!--The English
+language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
+everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
+grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-spring,
+and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many
+other dialects have done before it. I can't stand this meddling any
+better than you, Sir. But we have a great deal to be proud of in the
+lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we must n't be ungrateful.
+Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--the war of the dictionaries is
+only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of
+publishers. After all, it is likely that the language will shape itself
+by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade
+up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you
+can,--but the moon will still lead the tides, and the winds will form
+their surface.
+
+--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
+divinity-student.
+
+Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my face a
+twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the mouth,
+(zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from making a little
+movement on its own account.
+
+It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown colt.
+Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,--but
+caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of
+life. Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives,
+return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours.
+Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by
+surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they
+knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,--but it lay
+there under all their culture. That is one way you may know the
+country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the
+odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which
+the good old people have saddled them with.
+
+--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+
+I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
+intonations arrested me. The voice was youthful, but full of
+character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the
+matter of voice.--Hear this.
+
+Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in her
+father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston. She overheard a
+little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of
+her voice. Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl
+come and live in her father's house. So the child came, being then nine
+years old. Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with the
+young lady. Her children became successively inmates of the lady's
+dwelling; and now, seventy years, or thereabouts, since the young lady
+heard the child singing, one of that child's children and one of her
+grandchildren are with her in that home, where she, no longer young,
+except in heart, passes her peaceful days.--Three generations linked
+together by so light a breath of accident!
+
+I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+came to observe him a little more closely. His complexion had something
+better than the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;--it had
+that diffused tone which is a sure index of wholesome, lusty life. A
+fine liberal style of nature seemed to be: hair crisped, moustache
+springing thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as is
+commonly sees them in gentlemen's families, a pupil well contracted, and
+a mouth that opened frankly with a white flash of teeth that looked as if
+they could serve him as they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their
+owner,--to draw nails with. This is the kind of fellow to walk a
+frigate's deck and bowl his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb,"
+or any forty-port-holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons
+of iron compliments.--I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
+not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in the
+naval school at Annapolis. Something had happened to change his plan of
+life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in Boston.
+
+When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him, the
+little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at him.
+
+Good for the Boston boy!--he said.
+
+I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.
+
+I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--said
+the little gentleman. Pray, what part of Maryland did you come from, and
+how shall I call you?
+
+The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-hand
+corner. His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly, telling
+who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right to ask any
+questions he wanted to.
+
+Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman, pointing to
+the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+
+You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till
+to-morrow,--said the landlady to him.
+
+He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color. It can't be
+that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young lady!
+It can't be that he has had experiences which make him sensitive! Nature
+could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart throbbing in that poor
+little cage of ribs! There is no use in wasting notes of admiration. I
+must ask the landlady about him.
+
+These are some of the facts she furnished.--Has not been long with her.
+Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it upstairs.
+Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies. The Bombazine (whom
+she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to enter into conversation
+with him, but retired with the impression that he was indifferent to
+ladies' society. Paid his bill the other day without saying a word about
+it. Paid it in gold,--had a great heap of twenty-dollar pieces. Hires
+her best room. Thinks he is a very nice little man, but lives dreadful
+lonely up in his chamber. Wants the care of some capable nuss. Never
+pitied anybody more in her life--never see a more interestin' person.
+
+--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them consist
+principally of conversations between myself and the other boarders. So
+they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited about this little
+boarder of ours, and my reader must not be disappointed, if I sometimes
+interrupt a discussion to give an account of whatever fact or traits I
+may discover about him. It so happens that his room is next to mine, and
+I have the opportunity of observing many of his ways without any active
+movements of curiosity. That his room contains heavy furniture, that he
+is a restless little body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to
+himself, and keeps mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.
+
+One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without drawing
+an absolute inference. Being at the studio of a sculptor with whom I am
+acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of a left arm. On my
+asking where the model came from, he said it was taken direct from the
+arm of a deformed person, who had employed one of the Italian moulders to
+make the cast. It was a curious case, it should seem, of one beautiful
+limb upon a frame otherwise singularly imperfect--I have repeatedly
+noticed this little gentleman's use of his left arm. Can he have
+furnished the model I saw at the sculptor's?
+
+--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow. I hope there will be
+something pretty and pleasing about her. A woman with a creamy voice,
+and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
+boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than our
+landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of whom are
+of the turkey-drumstick style of organization. I don't mean that these
+are our only female companions; but the rest being conversational
+non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in their food as
+locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither away from the table
+like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have not yet referred to them
+as individuals.
+
+I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+to-morrow!
+
+--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning. It
+was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.
+
+
+
+ THE BOYS.
+
+ Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+ If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+ Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+ Old Time is a liar! We're twenty to-night!
+
+ We're twenty! We're twenty! Who says we are more?
+ He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!
+ --"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes! white, if we please;
+ Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+ Was it snowing I spoke of? Excuse the mistake!
+ Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
+ We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+ And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+ We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+ Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+ That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)
+ --It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.
+
+ That fellow's the Speaker, (3)--the one on the right;
+ Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+ That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
+ There's the "Reverend" (6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!
+
+ That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+ Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+ And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+ So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+ There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
+ That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+ When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+ We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)
+
+ And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+ Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+ But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+ --Just read on his medal,--"My country,--of thee!"
+
+ You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
+ But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+ The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+ And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+ Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,
+ --And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
+ Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+ Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+ Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+ The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+ And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+ Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+ 1 Francis Thomas.
+ 2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+ 3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+ 4 G. W. Richardson.
+ 5 George Thomas Davis.
+ 6 James Freeman Clarke.
+ 7 Benjamin Peirce.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+[The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story.]
+
+When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making
+of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of
+one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our
+first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation of
+our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no means
+doctrinally or polemically.
+
+The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman
+whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few weeks
+ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present day.
+So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island,
+in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and
+bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander,
+ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you would find
+him walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
+
+Where would she come from?
+
+Oh, that 's the miracle!
+
+--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at the
+upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some
+fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,
+seeing it all beforehand.
+
+--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to the
+sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry,
+Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes
+like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the flesh
+of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling
+overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times! Harry,
+champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered,
+bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots
+of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed
+bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who forgets the great
+muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?
+The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good
+weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words from Harry,
+the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
+talking, if there is any, afterwards. No words, but, in the place
+thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank like
+the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves down a
+sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so that both
+rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of those
+inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a general melee,
+which make our native fistic encounters so different from such
+admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair,
+where everything was done decently and in order; and the fight began and
+ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have
+hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over,
+dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+
+I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though it
+is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a
+little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just a
+speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we
+should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled
+aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I
+suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention.
+See whether this sounds true or not.
+
+Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking
+of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet
+breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in English
+stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great
+perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and some
+of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some
+skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken out
+of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out somebody.
+So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief,
+emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any
+classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for
+his attentions. I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
+would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so much
+more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the
+Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
+crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring
+away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it had
+been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and senseless, so
+that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of hitting
+is the great trick of the French gavate, which is not commonly thought
+able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science. These are
+old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except, perhaps, a
+dash of life, which may be worth a little something.
+
+The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled
+to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both
+have been long dead. How often we see these great red-flaring flambeaux
+of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,--and the little,
+single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated
+invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out
+one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the
+generation to which it belonged!
+
+I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
+match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+
+There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident
+could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of
+course, to be sitting. One of the "positive" blondes, as my friend, you
+may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed,
+full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me,
+not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as a
+Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress, there
+is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye over her
+and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture. I can't
+help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine in
+feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild,
+if she were trifled with. It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody
+can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a
+week.
+
+Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the
+good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as a
+three-volume novel.
+
+The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of
+having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his
+silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were
+thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that
+ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly
+Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any
+rate. I made several conversational openings for him, but he did not
+fire up as he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in, a fling
+at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing
+structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general
+effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He
+said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon
+of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
+reddened a little,--so I thought. I don't think it right to watch
+persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.
+
+I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
+table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort. A
+well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,
+--pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,
+--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on
+the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is a
+blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to
+make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to
+appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance
+before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected
+with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have
+been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote
+facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from
+ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked
+breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a
+crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
+mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
+fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of
+her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a
+widow.
+
+Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
+sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for
+them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and
+events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if
+there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar
+occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case
+for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence
+among the Comfortable Classes. There are about as many twins in the
+births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you
+learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week,
+that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if
+it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the
+blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible
+connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the
+fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
+
+One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders,
+which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young
+fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to
+utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank
+interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a
+geode.
+
+ Aphorism by the Professor.
+
+In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of
+different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at
+any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and
+you might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit a
+fishing-party as to change these periods. The crucial experiment is this.
+Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes
+before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of
+youth is established. If the subject of the question starts back and
+expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in
+earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.
+
+--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young fellows
+being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the
+evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of
+meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath
+the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that
+guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
+kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one,
+if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting
+so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned a
+second time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the
+present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and
+to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these
+twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+
+I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
+an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
+subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
+thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our
+attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
+enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
+until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
+and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make
+up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of
+you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight
+separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming glands"--solid,
+organized, regularly formed, rounded disks taking an active part in all
+your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your
+corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a
+stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A
+noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the
+microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a
+calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have,
+my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet
+livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
+sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions. Errors
+excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am the
+Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will blow me
+through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know what I am
+talking about and whom I am quoting.
+
+Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
+saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
+waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
+that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have
+been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The
+number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the
+incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
+accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in
+the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the
+world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at
+our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of
+us may remember, is the special example which led me through this
+labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of
+this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt
+the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without
+wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
+IRIS.
+
+You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem
+written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb amo, I love, as
+all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary for
+him at the word filia, a daughter. The poor man was greatly perplexed in
+choosing a name for her. Lucretia and Virginia were the first that he
+thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of Titus Livius,
+which he could never read without crying, though he had read them a
+hundred times.
+
+--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs
+briefly. Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of herself.
+Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She slides
+from her seat, and falls dying. "Her husband and her father cry
+aloud."--No, not Lucretia.
+
+-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged to
+a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to
+her,--must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments
+in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter. There used to
+be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right. There are two
+sides to everything. Audi alteram partem. The legal gentleman has no
+opinion,--he only states the evidence.--A doubtful case. Let the young
+lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be
+looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.
+Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this
+way. That is the explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched
+from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia.
+
+The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the
+original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he
+came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged
+to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and
+carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing,
+and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that was
+what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his
+accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at
+the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his
+child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a
+knife sticking in her bosom.
+
+Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the
+founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest
+of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius Maro," as he
+called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So he
+took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of
+Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It would
+n't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to
+an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,
+
+ "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"
+
+but when he came to the lines,
+
+ "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+ Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"
+
+he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
+hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+
+"Iris shall be her name!"--he said. So her name was Iris.
+
+--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a
+question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These
+all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or
+stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths
+that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated
+starvation. They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin,
+watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but means
+little to those who know that it is only debility settling on the head.
+Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various
+pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent
+appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the
+institution where they have passed through the successive stages of
+inanition.
+
+In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the process
+in question. You see they do get food and clothes and fuel, in
+appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of
+books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if they
+had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water of
+crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till the
+poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor
+breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk watered to the
+verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the moment
+when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen, sulphurous
+anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in the shallow
+grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too thick for
+summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from
+the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he undergoes a
+process of gentle and gradual starvation.
+
+--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old
+story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she
+gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English one,
+and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of
+Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter
+forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated
+with her companion at the chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed
+forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black
+Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down
+upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.
+
+The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,--a smaller one at her
+feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and snowed
+on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished
+tenderly.
+
+About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into a
+slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black trousers a
+little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.
+His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his cheeks
+more vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him, and he was
+tired, and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of stairs. Then
+came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste, which he spoke
+of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental
+causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as if it had not
+been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in temperate
+climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something new. As the
+doctor went out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.
+Accommodation train. A good many stops, but will get to the station by
+and by." So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of
+Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader,
+as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed,
+saying he would look in occasionally. After this, the Latin tutor began
+the usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
+his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines showed
+at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a muffled whisper,
+and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest porcelain,
+--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he--might be
+able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was recommended not to
+expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having
+anything to do, his bed. The unmarried sister with whom he lived took
+care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable and even
+useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played, about.
+
+Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face was
+sunken and his hands were very, very cold. He was "better," he
+whispered, but sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and
+seemed a little wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back
+on the Latin grammar.
+
+"Iris!" he said,--"filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my dear
+little daughter as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!" for he
+would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and his lips
+went on automatically, and murmured, "vel venito!"--The child came and
+sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but which
+shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she sat,
+looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and
+whispered, "Moribundus." She did not know what that meant, but she saw
+that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently
+remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and
+brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. "Open it," he
+said,--"I will read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!
+hoeret lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the
+Lord take care of my child! Domine, audi--vel audito!" His face whitened
+suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth. He had taken his
+last degree.
+
+--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very brilliant
+rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited wardrobe of
+man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books, principally
+classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the Pantheon, with some
+pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these, and a child's heart
+full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and questions,
+alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of childish
+grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I forgot. With that
+kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's first
+children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season, the old tutor's
+students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying
+with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain crib
+in which his alter egg, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang over the
+little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute, red,
+downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that
+unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and which
+gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the character
+of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is
+one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys had remembered
+the old man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
+There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical figures,
+and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono pupillorum. The handle
+on its side showed what use the boys had meant it for; and a kind letter
+in it, written with the best of feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed
+delicately to its destination. Out of this silver vessel, after a long,
+desperate, strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the
+realities of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and
+their children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
+bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence and
+partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the
+blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as compared with that
+of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.
+
+But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater. An air-plant
+will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that
+overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the
+air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a
+foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds
+the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves
+has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the
+spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
+
+Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the
+shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
+that,--this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them
+with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as
+the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended
+her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to "raise"
+her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought
+there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
+
+A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth,
+sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven
+months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular
+persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very
+shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks
+and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live
+through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it distressed her
+tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should
+be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the natural
+cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a
+dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has
+strewed its downward path.
+
+The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might have
+added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have been as
+cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the best
+intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious students
+of science.
+
+Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin
+tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother
+of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily
+nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a
+tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough
+vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight
+her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from
+her other parent.
+
+--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It
+seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another
+blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is represented in
+the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original
+line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a loss of vitality
+hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable
+intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+
+So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental
+probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical
+learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like
+her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction
+of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines
+of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary
+horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to
+Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs,
+which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable
+bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,--an old man with a face
+looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a
+rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all
+their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget
+those saddle-bags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used
+to shake those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that
+find heaven in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had
+better stop. Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him
+coming. On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat
+and white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
+stories concerning the death of various little children about her age, to
+encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral
+Byng. Then she would take her pencil, and with a few scratches there
+would be the outline of a child, in which you might notice how one sudden
+sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots darted at the paper looked like
+real eyes.
+
+By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
+leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
+with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
+children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
+heads thrown back in ecstasy. This was at about twelve years old, as the
+dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before
+she came among us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take
+the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in her
+drawing-books in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.
+
+It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old
+spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this;
+for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of
+weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or
+other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this
+flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober,
+human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and counsel.
+
+In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat
+past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated
+tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more than
+common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white
+neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her,
+after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea,
+with certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, "The Model
+of all the Virtues."
+
+She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really
+bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done;
+I should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take
+hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a
+billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had
+been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced
+from every human contact, and "caromed" from one relation to another, and
+rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact and
+perfect angular movements, that the Enemy's corps of Reporters had long
+given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for their
+master.
+
+What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly
+self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like
+a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One
+of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute
+and strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she
+was as true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all the
+relations of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more
+conversation, as well as more goodness, than all the partners you have
+waltzed with this winter put together.
+
+Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered himself
+to her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious to
+vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by
+accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
+
+You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting to
+the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of mind
+in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the vital
+powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of the
+proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch us,
+virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been
+drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown
+human torpedo.
+
+"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear as
+Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her
+features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but
+never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult
+of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features;--and
+propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the
+brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand, and
+an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she was an
+admirable judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory of tests
+and reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into her
+intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on
+litmus-paper. I think there has rarely been a more admirable woman.
+Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately attached
+to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,
+--grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
+wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch of
+such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+
+We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
+much. People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than is
+good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
+subjects for biographies. But we don't always care most for those
+flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
+
+This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two? Is n't
+there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of
+saintly perfection? Does n't she carry a lump of opium in her pocket?
+Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use
+would require? It would be such a comfort!
+
+Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words
+escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the
+bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
+presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits
+between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as the
+black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.
+
+--Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to make
+way this time for what he saw and heard.
+
+-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle souls
+who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with something like
+a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where these musical friends
+had gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or not, you can
+guess better after you have read them.
+
+
+ THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+ In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+ With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+ At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+ Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+ Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+ What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+ When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+ With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+ Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+ For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+ Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+ But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."
+
+ For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+ She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+ In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+ Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+ So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+ Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
+ Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+ As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."
+
+ --Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+ (Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
+ Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+ Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+ Just as the "Jubilate" in threaded whisper dies,
+ --"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
+ (For she thought 't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+ "Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more amiable
+than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is out of
+fashion among them. This could never be, if they were in the habit of
+secret anonymous puffing of each other. That is the kind of underground
+machinery which manufactures false reputations and genuine hatreds. On
+the other hand, I should like to know if we are not at liberty to have a
+good time together, and say the pleasantest things we can think of to
+each other, when any of us reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth
+or eightieth birthday.
+
+We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions. No "surprise"
+parties! You understand these, of course. In the rural districts, where
+scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in the city, at the
+expense of a quarter and a white pocket-handkerchief, emotional
+excitement has to be sought in the dramas of real life. Christenings,
+weddings, and funerals, especially the latter, are the main dependence;
+but babies, brides, and deceased citizens cannot be had at a day's
+notice. Now, then, for a surprise-party!
+
+A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a basket of
+apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of lemonade, a purse
+stuffed with bills of the more modest denominations, may, perhaps, do
+well enough for the properties in one of these private theatrical
+exhibitions. The minister of the parish, a tender-hearted, quiet,
+hard-working man, living on a small salary, with many children, sometimes
+pinched to feed and clothe them, praying fervently every day to be blest
+in his "basket and store," but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge
+by the small returns, has the first role,--not, however, by his own
+choice, but forced upon him. The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed,
+unsentimental body, is first lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the
+family. If they only had a playbill, it would run thus:
+
+ ON TUESDAY NEXT
+ WILL BE PRESENTED
+ THE AFFECTING SCENE
+ CALLED
+
+ THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+ OR
+
+ THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+
+WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+
+ The Rev. Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+ Mrs. Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+ Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+ Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+ interesting children.
+ Peggy, by the female help.
+
+The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
+relief. He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
+chokes,--and bursts into tears. That is the great effect of the evening.
+The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and counts the
+strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the other. The
+children stand ready for a spring at the apples. The female help weeps
+after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+
+Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+remember they get their money's worth. If you pay a quarter for dry
+crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for real
+hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not acting,
+but sobbing in earnest?
+
+All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-party
+where I read these few lines that follow:
+
+ We will not speak of years to-night;
+ For what have years to bring,
+ But larger floods of love and light
+ And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+ We will not drown in wordy praise
+ The kindly thoughts that rise;
+ If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+ He reads it in our eyes.
+
+ We need not waste our schoolboy art
+ To gild this notch of time;
+ Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+ Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+ Enough for him the silent grasp
+ That knits us hand in hand,
+ And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+ That locks our circling band.
+
+ Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+ Peace to his starlit dreams!
+ Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+ The music-haunted streams!
+
+ Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+ The sunshine on his lips,
+ And faith, that sees the ring of light
+ Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I am
+almost afraid to report it. However, as he seems to be really honest and
+is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't believe anybody will
+be very angry with him.
+
+It is here, Sir! right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--in
+this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
+provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and was
+fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are dead and
+gone,--please God! The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying which
+proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next to that,
+the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each individual immortal
+soul! The three-hilled city against the seven-hilled city! That is it,
+Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you know what that means, I don't
+think you'll ask for anything more. I swear to you, Sir, I believe that
+these two centres of civilization are just exactly the two points that
+close the circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And I
+believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen
+Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran,
+and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the
+distance that we call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what
+organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion,
+the accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
+stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
+three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
+city!
+
+--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
+--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch. Let him blow her
+off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+
+The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
+there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and a
+charge of cavalry.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if to
+speak.
+
+Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name. And then,
+in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am Allen!
+
+But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with rage,
+that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen against it.
+He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have
+thrown it or its contents at the speaker. The young Marylander fixed his
+clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on his arm, carelessly
+almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that he could not move it. It
+was of no use. The youth was his master in muscle, and in that deadly
+Indian hug in which men wrestle with their eyes;--over in five seconds,
+but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore years and
+ten;--one trial enough,--settles the whole matter,--just as when two
+feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come
+together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks, there
+is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten party
+in all the social relations for all the rest of his days.
+
+I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath. For though
+a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom reference was
+made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly asserted in
+respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see no reason why
+he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he was indebted to it
+or its authoress.
+
+I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which
+the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in
+variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence, (including the
+inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been
+boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in
+little pellets of the size of marrow-fat peas. One of my own classmates
+has undergone a singular change of late years,--his hair losing its
+original tint, and getting a remarkable discolored look; and another has
+ceased to cultivate any hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.
+So I am perfectly willing to believe that the purple-black of the
+Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.
+But I can't think why he got so angry.
+
+The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was
+all over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
+disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
+resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he struck. So
+you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was not, interrupted
+during the time implied by these ex-post-facto remarks of mine, but for
+some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+
+He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again.
+The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than
+anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking
+with some imaginary opponent.
+
+--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is
+full-grown!
+
+He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of his
+high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his little
+figure to the view of the boarders.
+
+It was next to impossible to keep from laughing. The commentary was so
+strange an illustration of the text! I thought it was time to put in a
+word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
+cosmopolitan.
+
+I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in
+England,---I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and
+politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did,
+and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+
+Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and where
+and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel striking
+sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a
+tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he
+lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is
+not freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the soul
+of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it
+antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is congenital
+and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element blended
+with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of his breath
+or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing. You may teach a
+quadruped to walk on his hind legs, but he is always wanting to be on all
+fours. Nothing that can be taught a growing youth is like the
+atmospheric knowledge he breathes from his infancy upwards. The American
+baby sucks in freedom with the milk of the breast at which he hangs.
+
+--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
+commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+
+I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked, as if
+he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did when the
+wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc. If he winked,
+however, he did not dodge.
+
+A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked the
+blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir! The Milesian wet-nurse
+is only a convenient vessel through which the American infant gets the
+life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making man over again, on
+the sunset pattern! You don't think what we are doing and going to do
+here. Why, Sir, while commentators are bothering themselves with
+interpretation of prophecies, we have got the new heavens and the new
+earth over us and under us! Was there ever anything in Italy, I should
+like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+
+--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost smiled.
+
+Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places, but
+I know 'em best here. Anyhow, the American skies are different from
+anything they see in the Old World. Yes, and the rocks are different,
+and the soil is different, and everything that comes out of the soil,
+from grass up to Indians, is different. And now that the provisional
+races are dying out--
+
+--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the
+divinity-student, interrupting him.
+
+Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
+sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
+manhood were ready.
+
+I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.--Cheaper
+to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can
+get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened
+commonwealth of Indians. A provisional race, Sir,--nothing more.
+Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation, kept down the bears and
+catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping and being scalped, and then
+passed away or are passing away, according to the programme.
+
+Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate himself.
+It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-and-by, Sir,--as
+sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!
+
+A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of 'em
+for wash-basins! A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born
+human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any
+time these hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston,--that it is
+the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet.
+
+--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a little
+mischievously.
+
+Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I 'm
+past that! There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston,
+from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it tore
+into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't thought very
+indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of
+commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often as
+this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over it.--No,
+Sir,--show me any other place that is, or was since the megalosaurus has
+died out, where wealth and social influence are so fairly divided between
+the stationary and the progressive classes! Show me any other place
+where every other drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with
+papas and mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the
+"dry pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!
+
+--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said the
+young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't forgive it for
+always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of numbers,--tell the
+truth now. Are we not the centre of something?
+
+Ah, indeed, to be sure you are. You are the gastronomic metropolis of
+the Union. Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
+Washington column? Why don't you get that lady off from Battle Monument
+and plant a terrapin in her place? Why will you ask for other glories
+when you have soft crabs? No, Sir,--you live too well to think as hard
+as we do in Boston. Logic comes to us with the salt-fish of Cape Ann;
+rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but you--if you open your
+mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat oyster, or offers a slice
+of the breast of your divine bird, and silences all your aspirations.
+
+And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.
+
+Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;
+--Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
+orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
+antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
+generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
+Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological section
+of social strata, go to The Club.--Good place to live in,--first-rate
+market,--tip-top peaches.--What do we know about Philadelphia, except
+that the engine-companies are always shooting each other?
+
+And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
+splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
+permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San
+Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
+sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York, in
+all our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many
+elements of civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for aught
+we know.--The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
+architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical
+art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were scholars too, made
+Venice renowned for it. Journalism, which is the accident of business
+and crowded populations, in great perfection. Venice got as far as Titian
+and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great colorists, mark you, magnificent
+on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,--but look over to Florence and see
+who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask out of whose loins Dante sprung!
+
+Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of St.
+Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and Venice
+had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden Book, in which
+all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but all that did not
+make Venice the brain of Italy.
+
+I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
+civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
+donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,
+--something in the councils of the nation. Plenty of Art, I grant you,
+Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and thinkers
+and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population is to
+ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing attraction as
+the alleged metropolis, and not call our people provincials, and have to
+come begging to us to write the lives of Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur
+Morris!
+
+--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+expense of every other place. I have my doubts if he had been in either
+of the cities he had been talking about. I was just going to say
+something to sober him down, if I could, when the young Marylander spoke
+up.
+
+Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons? Did n't I
+hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns all
+America? If you have really got more brains in Boston than other folks,
+as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of scribbling
+fools? If I like Broadway better than Washington Street, what then? I
+own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an American,--and
+wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes overhead, that is home
+to me!
+
+He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
+over him in the breeze. We all looked up involuntarily, as if we should
+see the national flag by so doing. The sight of the dingy ceiling and
+the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the illusion.
+
+Bravo! bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
+little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a copy of
+the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon. Why don't
+they now? Why don't they now? I saw enough of hating each other in the
+old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--let's love each
+other, and not try to make it out that there is n't any place fit to live
+in except the one we happen to be born in.
+
+It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism. The
+full stature of manhood is shrivelled--
+
+The color burst up into my cheeks. What was I saying,--I, who would not
+for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an allusion?
+
+I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
+himself down from his high chair.
+
+No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice next
+him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+
+Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents that
+might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with very
+little flavor of grace.
+
+She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that lasted
+some seconds. For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown womanhood,
+and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with
+Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.
+
+Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.
+Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached into her
+soul as these did. It was not that they were in themselves
+supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them that flames up
+from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope, but,
+alas! not without emotion. To him it seemed as if those amber gates had
+been translucent as the brown water of a mountain brook, and through them
+he had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise
+of a great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring
+with melody.
+
+That is my image, of course,--not his. It was not a simile that was in
+his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of wordless
+passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+
+A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
+slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never
+leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one
+little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged
+pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well;
+and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always
+hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for
+a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be
+ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked
+in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but
+still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with
+their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that
+with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the
+land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
+Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning
+tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after all, but
+cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when it was the
+worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his
+stuff and so did the mischief.
+
+Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating
+man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second
+by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by our own hearth-stones,
+with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is easy. But when we
+come to real life, the poker is in the fore, and, ten to one, if we would
+grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;--lucky for us, if it is not
+white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our hands sticking to
+it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or silent cry!
+
+--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character
+and feeling I am winding. I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in a
+few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for me from
+day to day. Chance has thrown together at the table with me a number of
+persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look on them, but,
+if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's secret, whose
+sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look patiently on
+them long enough. Nature is always applying her reagents to character,
+if you will take the pains to watch her. Our studies of character, to
+change the image, are very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a
+geographical province. We get a base-line in organization, always; then
+we get an angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
+aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
+another;--and so we construct our first triangle. Once fix a man's
+ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy. A wants to die worth
+half a million. Good. B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive him.
+All right. Minor details at our leisure.
+
+What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your
+misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of
+consciousness which make up your past life? What should you most dislike
+to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for a brief space,
+and shut the volume you hold with your finger between the pages.--Oh,
+that is it!
+
+What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
+soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants came
+back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy bills!
+
+At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those
+stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were not rare in
+prosperous families during the last century. It had held the clothes and
+the books and the papers of generation after generation. The hands that
+opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been
+folded in death. The children that played with the lower handles had got
+tall enough to open the desk, to reach the upper shelves behind the
+folding-doors,--grown bent after a while,--and then followed those who
+had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new
+generation.
+
+A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a
+quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the
+smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk. Prying about
+with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing
+which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-place. It had never been
+opened but by the maker. The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it
+as when the artisan closed it,--and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if
+that day finished.
+
+Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no
+hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you seem
+to have suspected? What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not. What a
+strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of the soul
+is! Must it some time or other be moistened with tears, until it comes
+to life again and begins to stir in our consciousness,--as the dry
+wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of dust, becomes alive, if it is
+wet with a drop of water?
+
+Or is it a passion? There are plenty of withered men and women walking
+about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts, which, if
+it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they were in the flush
+of youth and its first trembling emotions.
+
+What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and gone,
+and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the fossil
+footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+
+There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
+young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could only
+get the secret drawer open. Even this arid female, whose armor of black
+bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any cuirass of
+triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not mistaken. I
+will tell you my reason for suspecting it.
+
+Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and restlessness
+whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class of subjects which
+can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men as their strictly
+private property,--not even to the clergy, or the newspapers commonly
+called "religious." Now, although it would be a great luxury to me to
+obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a professional man, and
+although I have a constitutional kindly feeling to all sorts of good
+people which would make me happy to agree with all their beliefs, if that
+were possible, still I must have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning
+of life; and though the only condition of peace in this world is to have
+no ideas, or, at least, not to express them, with reference to such
+subjects, I can't afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.
+
+I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the
+shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish, which have
+been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and dried, are the
+only proper and allowable food for reasonable people. I maintain, on the
+other hand, that there are a number of live fish still swimming in it,
+and that every one of us has a right to see if he cannot catch some of
+them. Sometimes I please myself with the idea that I have landed an
+actual living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and silvery
+scales. Then I find the consumers of nothing but the salted and dried
+article insist that it is poisonous, simply because it is alive, and cry
+out to people not to touch it. I have not found, however, that people
+mind them much.
+
+The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer. I try every
+questionable proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for
+an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by
+saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if
+you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox
+as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was to cure
+me of that error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been
+opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day, but a small
+heart-shaped paper, containing a lock of that straight, coarse, brown
+hair which sets off the sharp faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed
+bumpkins! I read upon the paper the name "Hiram."--Love! love!
+love!--everywhere! everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids'
+"jewelry,"--lifting the marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black
+bombazine!--No, no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young
+once, and wore bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos. We shall find
+that the poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will
+be in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!
+
+Romance! Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
+seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where
+you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving
+sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions?
+You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor,
+and no more think of the real life that underlies this despoiled and
+dismantled womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite as having once
+been full of the juices and the nervous thrills of throbbing and
+self-conscious being. There is a wild creature under that long yellow
+pin which serves as brooch for the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature,
+which I venture to say would leap in his cage, if I should stir him,
+quiet as you think him. A heart which has been domesticated by matrimony
+and maternity is as tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which
+has never been fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think
+time has tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day,
+which could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic
+flings against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get
+a little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind the
+wires or his keeper's handling. I will tell you my wicked, but half
+involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded bombazine.
+
+Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch
+the infirm spot? I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this
+thing. If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it.
+If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him,
+limping.
+
+I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
+Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I use
+rarely in my common talk.
+
+I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct,
+which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian
+anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was not
+answerable. It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like
+endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted. A thin film of
+politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought from
+the stream of conversation. After a time one begins to soak through and
+mingle with the other.
+
+We were talking about names, one day.--Was there ever anything,--I
+said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time of
+Praise-God Barebones? I heard a country-boy once talking of another whom
+he called Elpit, as I understood him. Elbridge is common enough, but
+this sounded oddly. It seems the boy was christened Lord Pitt,--and
+called for convenience, as above. I have heard a charming little girl,
+belonging to an intelligent family in the country, called Anges
+invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes. Names are cheap. How can a man
+name an innocent new-born child, that never did him any harm, Hiram?--The
+poor relation, or whatever she is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I
+was stupid, and went on.--To think of a man going through life saddled
+with such an abominable name as that!--The poor relation grew very
+uneasy.--I continued; for I never thought of all this till afterwards.--I
+knew one young fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of
+Hiram--What's got into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look
+so?--There! you 've upset your teacup!
+
+It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
+woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the "hysteric
+ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous women often
+complain of. What business had I to be trying experiments on this
+forlorn old soul? I had a great deal better be watching that young girl.
+
+Ah, the young girl! I am sure that she can hide nothing from me. Her
+skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats by the
+flushes they send into her cheeks. She does not seem to be shy, either.
+I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid. She seems to me
+like one of those birds that travellers tell of, found in remote,
+uninhabited islands, who, having never received any wrong at the hand of
+man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular consciousness of his
+presence.
+
+The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed gentleman
+get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side by side. The
+next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the "Model" and so
+forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her. The intention of that
+estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and leave her. I suppose
+there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this young lady knows how to
+take care of herself, but I do not like to see young girls turned loose
+in boarding-houses. Look here now! There is that jewel of his race, whom
+I have called for convenience the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite
+out of the question for me to use the family names of our boarders,
+unless I want to get into trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the
+diamond is looking very often and very intently, it seems to me, down
+toward the farther corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.
+The landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
+nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as I
+have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person. The landlady
+made a communication to me, within a few days after the arrival of Miss
+Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my remembrance.
+
+He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be kinder
+hankerin' round after that young woman. It had hurt her daughter's
+feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin' company with
+should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents to them that he'd
+never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he as good as merried, so
+fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable a young lady, if she did
+say so, as any there was round, whosomever they might be.
+
+Tickets! presents!--said I.--What tickets, what presents has he had the
+impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+
+Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady. There is them that's glad
+enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of 'em
+ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must be
+offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she is,
+that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth. But it a'n't
+her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of hers, or
+whatever she is, served him right enough.
+
+Why, what did she do?
+
+Do? Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+
+Dropped? dropped what?--I said.
+
+Why, the soap,--said the landlady.
+
+It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a delicate
+expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that, after having
+met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was picked up by
+Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it, rejoicing, and indulged in
+most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions in consequence, so that his
+hands were a frequent subject of maternal congratulation, and he smelt
+like a civet-cat for weeks after his great acquisition.
+
+After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the young
+lady. She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being interested
+in. If he was her crippled child, instead of being more than old enough
+to be her father, she could not treat him more kindly. The landlady's
+daughter said, the other day, she believed that girl was settin' her cap
+for the Little Gentleman.
+
+Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there is
+them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs enough. I
+don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's kinder
+childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls to play
+with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook to see to
+her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+
+I could not help overhearing this conversation. "Board her and clothe
+her!"--speaking of such a young creature! Oh, dear!--Yes,--she must be
+fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this establishment.
+Somebody must pay for it. Somebody has a right to watch her and see how
+much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her, if she has too good an
+appetite. Somebody has a right to keep an eye on her and take care that
+she does not dress too prettily. No mother to see her own youth over
+again in these fresh features and rising reliefs of half-sculptured
+womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness, forget her lessons of
+neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases that hold her own ornaments
+to find for her a necklace or a bracelet or a pair of ear-rings,--those
+golden lamps that light up the deep, shadowy dimples on the cheeks of
+young beauties,--swinging in a semi-barbaric splendor that carries the
+wild fancy to Abyssinian queens and musky Odalisques! I don't believe
+any woman has utterly given up the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as
+she wears ear-rings.
+
+I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk. She smiles
+sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him. When he
+speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him. This may be
+only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth noticing. I
+have often observed that vulgar persons, and public audiences of inferior
+collective intelligence, have this in common: the least thing draws off
+their minds, when you are speaking to them. I love this young creature's
+rapt attention to her diminutive neighbor while he is speaking.
+
+He is evidently pleased with it. For a day or two after she came, he was
+silent and seemed nervous and excited. Now he is fond of getting the
+talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has at least
+one interested listener. Once or twice I have seen marks of special
+attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one day, and a
+diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's, but more
+lustrous. I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his right hand.
+I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or carbuncle or
+something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the other day. It is a
+handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the cast mentioned was
+taken from his arm. After all, this is just what I should expect. It is
+not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or one of them, running away
+with the whole strength, and, therefore, with the whole beauty, which we
+should never have noticed, if it had been divided equally between all
+four extremities. If it is so, of course he is proud of his one strong
+and beautiful arm; that is human nature. I am afraid he can hardly help
+betraying his favoritism, as people who have any one showy point are apt
+to do,--especially dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to
+their last molars.
+
+Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the calm
+lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their relations to each
+other.
+
+That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat alone
+at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I hate her.
+
+Of course, I begged an explanation.
+
+An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks like a
+sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty with all
+her might. I hate her because her voice sounds as if it never trembled
+and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to cry. Besides, she
+looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted to get an image of me
+for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't love to be looked at in this
+way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate her,--her eyes kill me,--it is
+like being stabbed with icicles to be looked at so,--the sooner she goes
+home, the better. I don't want a woman to weigh me in a balance; there
+are men enough for that sort of work. The judicial character is n't
+captivating in females, Sir. A woman fascinates a man quite as often by
+what she overlooks as by what she sees. Love prefers twilight to
+daylight; and a man doesn't think much of, nor care much for, a woman
+outside of his household, unless he can couple the idea of love, past,
+present, or future, with her. I don't believe the Devil would give half
+as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those of one of
+these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them
+unpleasing.--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and
+give her a chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.
+
+He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the red
+stone ring upon it.--Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+
+Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--
+
+ THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+ Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+ That marks the old remembered spot,
+ --The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,
+ --The crooked path across the lot.
+
+ It left the road by school and church,
+ A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+ That parted from the silver birch
+ And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+ No line or compass traced its plan;
+ With frequent bends to left or right,
+ In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+ But always kept the door in sight.
+
+ The gabled porch, with woodbine green,
+ --The broken millstone at the sill,
+ --Though many a rood might stretch between,
+ The truant child could see them still.
+
+ No rocks, across the pathway lie,
+ --No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,
+ --And yet it winds, we know not why,
+ And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+ Perhaps some lover trod the way
+ With shaking knees and leaping heart,
+ --And so it often runs astray
+ With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+ Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+ From some unholy banquet reeled,
+ --And since, our devious steps maintain
+ His track across the trodden field.
+
+ Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
+ Could ever trace a faultless line;
+ Our truest steps are human still,
+ --To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+ Truants from love, we dream of wrath;
+ --Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+ Through all the wanderings of the path,
+ We still can see our Father's door!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+
+I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading to
+some of my young and vivacious friends. I don't know, however, that any
+of them have entered into a contract to read all that I write, or that I
+have promised always to write to please them. What if I should sometimes
+write to please myself?
+
+Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest me,
+to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be totally
+indifferent. I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts, affections,
+dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--virtu in all its
+eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter volumes and yellow
+manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains not yet imbedded in the
+snows of age. I love the generous impulses of the reformer; but not less
+does my imagination feed itself upon the old litanies, so often warmed by
+the human breath upon which they were wafted to Heaven that they glow
+through our frames like our own heart's blood. I hope I love good men
+and women; I know that they never speak a word to me, even if it be of
+question or blame, that I do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with
+a reasonable amount of human kindness.
+
+I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which I
+have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its direction,
+and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
+representatives. It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted fear.
+Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no heart so
+insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no intellect so virile
+that it does not own a certain deference to the claims of age, of
+childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when they plead with it not to
+look at those sacred things by the broad daylight which they see in
+mystic shadow. How grateful would it be to make perpetual peace with
+these pleading saints and their confessors, by the simple act that
+silences all complainings! Sleep, sleep, sleep! says the
+Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her dark and potent anodyne,
+distilled over the fires that consumed her foes,--its large, round drops
+changing, as we look, into the beads of her convert's rosary! Silence!
+the pride of reason! cries another, whose whole life is spent in
+reasoning down reason.
+
+I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own. And most
+assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me into an act
+of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent class of men who
+make it their calling to teach goodness and their duty to practise it, I
+should feel that I had done myself an injury rather than them. Go and
+talk with any professional man holding any of the medieval creeds,
+choosing one who wears upon his features the mark of inward and outward
+health, who looks cheerful, intelligent, and kindly, and see how all your
+prejudices melt away in his presence! It is impossible to come into
+intimate relations with a large, sweet nature, such as you may often find
+in this class, without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of
+being and believing. But does it not occur to you that one may love
+truth as he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
+sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better than
+sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the repetition of
+an effete Confession of Faith?
+
+The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state of
+quasi-barbarism. None of them like too well to be told of it, but it
+must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs. When a man has
+taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place him between
+two persons who shall make him walk up and down incessantly; and if he
+still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they say that a lash or two
+over his back is of great assistance.
+
+So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not yet
+shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown by the
+form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of silver, which
+turns epileptics into Ethiopians. If that is not enough, they must be
+given over to the scourgers, who like their task and get good fees for
+it. A few score years ago, sick people were made to swallow burnt toads
+and powdered earthworms and the expressed juice of wood-lice. The
+physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed abominations not to be named.
+Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or Ashantee. Traces of this barbarism
+linger even in the greatly improved medical science of our century. So
+while the solemn farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the
+harlequin pseudo-science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with
+half-a-dozen somersets, and begins laying about him.
+
+In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was unrepealed,
+and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous, clown, Abraham
+Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied the appellant to
+lift the other which he threw down. It was not until the reign of George
+II. that the statutes against witchcraft were repealed. As for the
+English Court of Chancery, we know that its antiquated abuses form one of
+the staples of common proverbs and popular literature. So the laws and
+the lawyers have to be watched perpetually by public opinion as much as
+the doctors do.
+
+I don't think the other profession is an exception. When the Reverend
+Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished scientific
+brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it rather slow and
+painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of religious barbarism.
+The dogmas of such people about the Father of Mankind and his creatures
+are of no more account in my opinion than those of a council of Aztecs.
+If a man picks your pocket, do you not consider him thereby disqualified
+to pronounce any authoritative opinion on matters of ethics? If a man
+hangs my ancient female relatives for sorcery, as they did in this
+neighborhood a little while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing
+as he does, I care no more for his religious edicts than I should for
+those of any other barbarian.
+
+Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the ideas of
+the healing art, of the administration of justice, of Christian love,
+could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial duelling, and murder for
+opinion's sake, I do not see how we can trust the verdict of that time
+relating to any subject which involves the primal instincts violated in
+these abominations and absurdities.--What if we are even now in a state
+of semi-barbarism?
+
+[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-barbarism":
+invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather than
+prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith in minute
+differences between control and treated groups; statistical manipulation
+to prove a prejudice. Medicine has a good deal to answer for! D.W.]
+
+Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.--I
+am not so sure of that. Religion and government appear to me the two
+subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of people
+who enjoy the blessings of freedom. Think, one moment. The earth is a
+great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives
+fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked up
+more or less completely. There must be somewhere a population of two
+hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many,
+earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge
+of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings. In this
+view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so interesting,
+as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our
+fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one
+of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we
+have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and
+phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house. In point of
+fact, it is one of the many results of Spiritualism to make the permanent
+destiny of the race a matter of common reflection and discourse, and a
+vehicle for the prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the
+subject. I cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations
+my friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
+if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
+that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for the
+dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
+ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know the
+opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
+woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this matter with one of
+our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the conversation.
+
+The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more serious
+than usual. He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered after the
+others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table, found myself alone
+with him.
+
+When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine, and
+began.
+
+I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
+most important class of subjects. Is there not danger in introducing
+discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+discourse?
+
+Danger to what?--I asked.
+
+Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.
+
+I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.--How long is it since
+she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a gentleman in a
+black coat on the box? Let me tell you a story, adapted to young
+persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+
+--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may have
+seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string to keep
+them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own account. This
+little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one day,--Brother,
+pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and take hold of it.
+Then the little boy pulled it down. Now the naughty brother had a sharp
+pin in his hand, and he thrust it into the balloon, and all the gas oozed
+out, so that there was nothing left but a shrivelled skin.
+
+One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see the
+moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--Father, do
+not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my naughty brother will
+prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we shall not see it any
+more.
+
+Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
+good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we could do
+was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get too thick on
+them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we could not pull
+the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.--Mind you this,
+too, the moon is no man's private property, but is seen from a good many
+parlor-windows.
+
+--Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you
+may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full
+at evening. Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is run
+over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her
+finger? [Would that this was so:--error, superstition, mysticism,
+authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives
+inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for
+the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear
+of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great
+sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is a mark of
+weakness.
+
+--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as for
+the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed to judge
+wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+
+Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from the
+society of people who come together habitually?
+
+I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines
+these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children
+in the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had
+them baptized into the Christian fold and give them what they consider
+proper religious instruction, do not think fit for them. One would say
+it was fair enough to talk about matters thus forced upon people's
+attention.
+
+The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be called
+opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+
+But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have not
+made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak on such
+subjects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions on
+medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he was going beyond
+his province?
+
+I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and supplication,"
+and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with
+medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule, with
+a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of
+admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
+thinking of their certificates to patent medicines. Let us look at this
+matter.
+
+If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty
+or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,--if he
+had been constantly reading and hearing read the most approved text-books
+on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually practised according to
+different methods, daily, for the same length of time,--I should think,
+that if a person of average understanding, he was entitled to express an
+opinion on the subject of medicine, or else that his instructors were a
+set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.
+
+If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in a
+considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I should
+think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same, and my
+ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+
+Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us an
+opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in a
+certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the first:
+
+I. All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or caries,
+and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is extracted and
+a new set is inserted according to the principles of dentistry adopted by
+this Society.
+
+I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it, and
+I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true. There are a good many bad
+teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones. You must n't trust
+the dentists; they are all the time looking at the people who have bad
+teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache. The idea that you must
+pull out every one of every nice young man and young woman's natural
+teeth! Poh, poh! Nobody believes that. This tooth must be
+straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this other perhaps
+extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are all so bad as to
+require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the poor soul for it!
+Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that everybody not only
+always has every tooth in his head good for nothing, but that he ought to
+have his head cut off as a punishment for that misfortune! No, I can't
+sign Number One. Give us Number Two.
+
+II. We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our views of
+the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of it prescribed
+in our tables, as there directed.
+
+To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer the
+two following:
+
+III. Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed by
+us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease from
+head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously affected
+with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with
+Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and
+Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona,
+with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make
+up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not take
+freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our
+authorized agents.
+
+IV. No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not
+give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the
+following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to
+certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine
+whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted
+according to our regulations.
+
+Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any rhubarb,
+if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we
+express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off from
+our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the
+propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down a
+little too strong!
+
+If we understand them, why can't we discuss them? If we can't understand
+them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the Father of Lies
+do they ask us to sign them for?
+
+Just so with the graver profession. Every now and then some of its
+members seem to lose common sense and common humanity. The laymen have
+to keep setting the divines right constantly. Science, for instance,--in
+other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then
+religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the antagonist of
+school-divinity.
+
+Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines. Come
+down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant prelate,
+tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third of
+October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.
+Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years B.
+C. Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
+tortoise. One statement is as near the truth as the other.
+
+Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.
+I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to his
+four stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend divines and
+others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little
+more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very
+angry it made them to have him meddle.
+
+The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical
+processes as Babbage's calculating machine. The commentary of the laymen
+on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after
+twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty
+to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.
+A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence,
+compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have
+sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is
+worth.
+
+In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many men
+can do this. But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately
+left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them. A hundred
+more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of
+course, have disappeared like witch-hanging. But people are sensitive
+now, as they were then. You will see by this extract that the Rev.
+Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.
+
+"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he says,
+"and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up against them.
+I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be
+true. The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had
+occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest
+Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of
+some good Book unto 'em. This Honest, whom they ever counted also a
+Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading a
+Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one
+of his own. For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not
+Prophecyings'; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy
+of the Clergy in the Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's
+People to be Prophets, and call forth Private Brethren publickly to
+prophesie. While he was thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him
+with horrible Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were
+forc'd with violent Hands to carry him home. I will not mention his
+Name: He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
+"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and the
+next cases referred to are the Judgments on the "Abominable Sacrilege" of
+not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+
+This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young friend!
+We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a coarse
+outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought. The
+President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat
+in the first-class cars behind him.
+
+--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;
+--and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
+doctrines of religion should not be introduced. You would not attack a
+church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for instance?
+
+Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But, mind
+you, at this table I think it is very different. I shall express my
+ideas on any subject I like. The laws of the lecture-room, to which my
+friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold here. I shall not
+often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I trust with courtesy and
+propriety, but, at any rate, with such natural forms of expression as it
+has pleased the Almighty to bestow upon me.
+
+A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+arguments. These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case with
+paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--brain,
+heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has shaped for
+us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+
+--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished to
+speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
+depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly. May
+I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+
+Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
+questions. I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and will be
+laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to go and lay
+it. But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of Scripture
+depolarized in and out of the pulpit. I heard the Rev. Mr. F. once
+depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street Church. Many
+years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a similar depolarized
+version in Rome, New York. I heard an admirable depolarization of the
+story of the young man who "had great possessions" from the Rev. Mr. H.
+in another pulpit, and felt that I had never half understood it before.
+All paraphrases are more or less perfect depolarizations. But I tell you
+this: the faith of our Christian community is not robust enough to bear
+the turning of our most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.
+You have only to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse
+and remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
+satisfy yourself on this point. Time, time only, can gradually wean us
+from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the
+thing signified. Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by nature,
+which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all his local
+and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the golden
+calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones. Rough work,
+iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth. It is, indeed, as that
+quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath it, "no
+doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation; veritas
+odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he that will be
+busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram nobas."
+
+The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think
+what we like and say what we think.
+
+--Think what we like!--said the divinity-student;--think what we like!
+What! against all human and divine authority?
+
+Against all human versions of its own or any other authority. At our own
+peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk of being
+hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green fagots for
+ecclesiastical treason! Nay, we have got so far, that the very word
+heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among us.
+
+And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+which we will not make a quarrel. I trust you know, or will learn, a
+great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
+know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop talking
+politics and theology, it will be because they have got an Emperor to
+teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+
+That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student. The
+next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
+good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+
+You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
+democratic notions get into print. You will be fired into from all
+quarters.
+
+If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!--I said.--I
+can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+
+Right, Sir! right!--said the Little Gentleman. The scamps! I know the
+fellows. They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes, but they
+must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the way, till it
+reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the water out of the
+fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but when it comes to
+anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's mouths, and then
+advertising those people through the country as the authors of them,--oh,
+then it is that they let not their left hand know what their right hand
+doeth!
+
+I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir. He comes along with a
+very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto thee," and his
+"message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his hidden knife with
+that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little Gentleman lifted his clenched
+left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)--and runs it,
+blade and haft, into a man's stomach! Don't meddle with these fellows,
+Sir. They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach, if you
+were to write ever so much. Let 'em alone. A man whose opinions are not
+attacked is beneath contempt.
+
+I hope so,--I said.--I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs flung
+at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former years.
+When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the professional
+public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from
+one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing which humble office I
+desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good should
+ever come of my life,--I had to bear the sneers of those whose position I
+had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so that nothing
+but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.--What would you do, if
+the folks without names kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to
+your shoulders that would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or
+would you give a kick now and then?
+
+Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite! It makes 'em
+hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and
+twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names,
+as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the quintaan. You run
+full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand
+on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch it;
+and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back
+of your neck. "Ananias," for instance, pitches into your lecture, we
+will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your
+servants get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names,
+they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling
+potatoes. So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you
+think is going to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know
+enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells
+lies. Now you think you 've got him! Not so fast. "Ananias" keeps still
+and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
+take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow. If
+you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
+"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what
+good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--keep your
+temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left fist and looked
+at it as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most pernicious
+punch with it.
+
+Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after
+seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+
+--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects,
+about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and
+to live with.
+
+--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among the
+men, in every denomination.
+
+--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+
+ 1. The comfortably rich.
+ 2. The decently comfortable.
+ 3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+ 4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+
+--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+clinch.
+
+--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute were
+two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+
+--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
+
+--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
+belief of a large one.
+
+The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while
+all this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point.
+
+I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a
+heathen.
+
+I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.--Dying
+for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for
+it; and the history of heathen races is full of instances where men have
+laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country, of
+truth, nay, even for simple manhood's sake, or to show their obedience or
+fidelity. What would not such beings have done for the souls of men, for
+the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in
+days of larger light? Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates
+drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old
+New England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
+his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in his
+own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?
+
+I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
+
+It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that. In another
+hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we sometimes
+hear them now.
+
+Pectus est quod facit theologum. The heart makes the theologian. Every
+race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its own or a new
+interpretation of an old one. Democratic America, has a different
+humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new divinity. See, for
+one moment, how intelligence reacts on our faiths. The Bible was a
+divining-book to our ancestors, and is so still in the hands of some of
+the vulgar. The Puritans went to the Old Testament for their laws; the
+Mormons go to it for their patriarchal institution. Every generation
+dissolves something new and precipitates something once held in solution
+from that great storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+
+You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
+their organizations. So true is this, that I have doubts whether a large
+proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than offended, if
+they could have overheard our, talk. For, look you, I think there is
+hardly a professional teacher who will not in private conversation allow
+a large part of what we have said, though it may frighten him in print;
+and I know well what an under-current of secret sympathy gives vitality
+to those poor words of mine which sometimes get a hearing.
+
+I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira worth
+from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his own
+premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he muddles his
+brains. But as for the good and true and intelligent men whom we see all
+around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful, helpful,--men who know that
+the active mind of the century is tending more and more to the two poles,
+Rome and Reason, the sovereign church or the free soul, authority or
+personality, God in us or God in our masters, and that, though a man may
+by accident stand half-way between these two points, he must look one way
+or the other,--I don't believe they would take offence at anything I have
+reported of our late conversation.
+
+But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look over
+these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not agree
+with most of these things that were said amongst us. If he agrees with
+most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept, or
+an expression or illustration a little too vivacious. I don't know that I
+shall report any more conversations on these topics; but I do insist on
+the right to express a civil opinion on this class of subjects without
+giving offence, just when and where I please,---unless, as in the
+lecture-room, there is an implied contract to keep clear of doubtful
+matters. You did n't think a man could sit at a breakfast-table doing
+nothing but making puns every morning for a year or two, and never give a
+thought to the two thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into
+another state during every hour that he sits talking and laughing. Of
+course, the one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going
+to become of them and of him. And the plain truth is, that a good many
+people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+
+--How do I know that? Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+remember. Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women much
+more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our
+souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the "sentimental"
+religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The
+sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the
+paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into
+existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the
+one and the weakness and ignorance of the other,--these are the
+"sentiments" that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to
+die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the
+Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a
+falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion.
+
+I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose creed
+many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond all
+praise. When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken against her
+faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask
+to leave their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which
+this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,--and, far worse
+than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps
+be possible that one who so believed should be accepted of the
+Creator,--and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through all
+her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect
+how thousands of women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a
+murmur, to earthly life, die to their own names even, that they may know
+nothing but their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing
+their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
+hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to
+rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
+nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
+revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+
+--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
+divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
+jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that one on
+whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our moments of
+trial. But we are false to our new conditions of life, if we do not
+resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political freedom, in
+the face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain men will, of
+course, say two things, if we do not take their views: first, that we
+don't know anything about these matters; and, secondly, that we are not
+so good as they are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these
+things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in
+the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes
+and sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a
+mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of
+the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to
+build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have
+sticks enough left to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+
+As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
+talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of managing
+it, if you like. I don't believe it will hurt you or anybody. Besides,
+I had a great deal rather finish our talk with pleasant images and gentle
+words than with sharp sayings, which will only afford a text, if anybody
+repeats them, for endless relays of attacks from Messrs. Ananias,
+Shimei, and Rabshakeh.
+
+[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the hands
+of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for the rights
+of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women, to whom this
+version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and tender anxieties is
+dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+
+
+
+ A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+ How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
+ In my slight verse such holy things are named
+ --Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+ Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+ Ave, Maria! Pardon, if I wrong
+ Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+ The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+ Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+ And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+ Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+ They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+ They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+ Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+ Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+ And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+ Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+ Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+ To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+ So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+ That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+ At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+ They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+ No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+ On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+ One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+ In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+ The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+ Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+ Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+ Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+ "Joy, joy to earth! Behold the hallowed morn!
+ In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+ 'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+ 'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"
+
+ They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+ Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+ No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+ One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+ Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+ But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+ Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+ Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+ The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+ Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+ The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+ Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+ No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+ Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+ In the meek, studious child they only saw
+ The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+ So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+ When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+ Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+ Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+ Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+ Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+ A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+ Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+ Then Joseph spake: "Thy boy hath largely grown;
+ Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+ Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+ Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"
+
+ And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+ Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+ The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+ From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+ Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+ Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!
+
+ They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+ To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+ At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+ Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+ All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+ In devious trails along the winding road,
+ (For many a step their homeward path attends,
+ And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+ Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
+ Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"
+
+ O weary hour! O aching days that passed
+ Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+ The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
+ The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+ The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+ The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+ Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+ Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+ Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+ Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+ At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+ The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+ They found him seated with the ancient men,
+ The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+ Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+ Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+ Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+ That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+ And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
+ Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+ "What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+ Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!"
+ Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+ Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+ Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+ To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+ The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+ And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+ The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+ The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+ It passed around among the listening friends,
+ With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+ Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+ Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+ But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+ Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+ Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+ And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+ Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+ A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+Bloated some, I expect.
+
+This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the
+Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+
+Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to
+continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly
+unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was
+surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a
+small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the
+chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very
+young pea somewhat overboiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama
+flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a
+station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on,
+sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and
+lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and
+thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor,
+who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving
+themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off
+your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers;
+undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who
+plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter,
+who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since
+the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the
+grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the
+mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but
+you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
+without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright
+column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it
+could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin
+and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come
+down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor
+conveniences for taking the sitting posture.
+
+And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian were
+only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless and
+position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread themselves
+out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came confusedly
+into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a part of the
+picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments, and sometimes
+only single severed stones.
+
+They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance. On
+the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have said;
+and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned him
+green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as if it
+were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet half-read,
+and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He coughed a mild
+short cough, as if to point the direction in which his downward path was
+tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances
+went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out in the cold,
+take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give
+it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in
+your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by its little
+bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you find it is a
+wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the breast
+where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said that
+somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a bad
+way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by
+cherry-pictorial.
+
+Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch, cold
+at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time. I'll come up 'n' show you how to mix
+it. Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin' down in
+Hanover Street?
+
+Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where
+the fat man was exhibitin'. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man
+at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old.
+
+It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah was
+exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton. Whiskey--that's what did
+it,--real Burbon's the stuff. Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice; take it
+off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on the
+sides of their foreheads.
+
+But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
+tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
+fellow had just drawn.
+
+He took up his hat and went out.
+
+I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.--I
+don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too much
+principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he looks
+as if his mind were made up to something.
+
+I followed him at a reasonable distance. He walked doggedly along,
+looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street, and
+made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office. Luckily, the doctor was
+there and overhauled him on the spot. There was nothing the matter with
+him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one. He came
+out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+
+This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+well-bred and ill-bred people.
+
+I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to
+say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+Good-breeding is surface-Christianity. Every look, movement, tone,
+expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason
+why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.
+
+--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet and
+severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin Tutor's
+daughter.
+
+I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the quality.
+
+Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like ours?
+
+I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
+--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great
+gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and
+mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic;
+mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-presidents are
+nothing to them. How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a
+distinct expression! Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and
+I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines
+of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own true
+laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth; and
+there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the
+stratification of society.
+
+Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
+there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of
+social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of all
+the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for
+the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a
+regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to
+all else.
+
+Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
+this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
+everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
+European monarchies. Only there position is more absolutely
+hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.
+
+--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and who
+are the electors?--said the Model.
+
+Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal vote.
+The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well what is
+presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the
+critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a
+ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred tone, an angular movement,
+everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general
+thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the
+soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes,--quite as good, no
+doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on
+their heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their
+descent through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose
+veins have held "base" fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+
+Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.
+
+Almost. And with good reason. For though there are numerous exceptions,
+rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most agreeable
+companions. The influence of a fine house, graceful furniture, good
+libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and, above all, a position
+so secure that one becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony and
+refinement to the character and manners which we feel, if we cannot
+explain their charm. Yet we can get at the reason of it by thinking a
+little.
+
+All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences.
+In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as the
+hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft
+gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like
+the quality ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones.
+They have n't read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you
+when you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up for
+it in tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less
+self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don't know where you will
+find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of
+King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
+her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable person
+than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of Sisera. The
+wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an
+elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+
+Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest
+fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the truest and best
+things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its extremities
+and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the feather in its
+bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and the rosette on
+its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it
+is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule, that society where
+flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.
+Don't you see why? Attention and deference don't require you to make
+fine speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
+all the compliments paid you. This is one reason.
+
+--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the Model.
+
+[My reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married. Served you
+right.] My remark. Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery telling
+people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are
+not. But a woman who does not carry about with her wherever she goes a
+halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented,--an
+atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which
+wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her presence,
+and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she is rather glad
+he is alive than otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a
+woman; she may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+
+--I don't think the Model exactly liked this. She said,--a little
+spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little praise,
+but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the habit of
+getting much.
+
+Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco. It is notorious
+how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+
+--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my cigars
+and burnt 'em all up.
+
+I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were all
+disposed of in the same way.
+
+So do I,--said the young fellow John.
+
+Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those odious
+instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have consumed your
+own?
+
+I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.
+
+It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American woman
+would be grateful to you. Let us burn them all in a heap out in the
+yard.
+
+That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
+time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+
+--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when it
+should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior apprehension, as
+a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he has dropped into a well.
+But before it had fairly reached the water, poor Iris, who had followed
+the conversation with a certain interest until it turned this sharp
+corner, (for she seems rather to fancy the young fellow John,) laughed
+out such a clear, loud laugh, that it started us all off, as the
+locust-cry of some full-throated soprano drags a multitudinous chorus
+after it. It was plain that some dam or other had broken in the soul of
+this young girl, and she was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of
+which she had been cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept
+all before it. So we had a great laugh all round, in which the
+Model--who, if she had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel,
+all compacted with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet
+wanted that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
+important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--had
+not the tact to join. She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as the young
+fellow John said. In fact, I was afraid the joke would have cost us both
+our new lady-boarders. It had no effect, however, except, perhaps, to
+hasten the departure of the elder of the two, who could, on the whole, be
+spared.
+
+--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+axioms on the matter of breeding. But it so happened, that, exactly at
+this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom several
+of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt many of my
+readers follow habitually, treated this matter of manners. Up to this
+point, if I have been so fortunate as to coincide with him in opinion,
+and so unfortunate as to try to express what he has more felicitously
+said, nobody is to blame; for what has been given thus far was all
+written before the lecture was delivered. But what shall I do now? He
+told us it was childish to lay down rules for deportment,--but he could
+not help laying down a few.
+
+Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry. True, but hard of
+application. People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization: quick
+pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought, excitable
+temper. Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks
+of good-breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or, at least, they
+must work their limbs or features.
+
+Talking of one's own ails and grievances.--Bad enough, but not so bad as
+insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-looks, or
+appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+
+Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured. Apology
+is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a
+man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is
+mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so
+much consequence that you must make a talk about them.
+
+Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and
+eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in certain
+intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation, to have ideas,
+but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them,--to belong to
+the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to have nothing in your
+dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil it and get
+another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies, throughout your person
+and--dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of manners to
+begin with.
+
+Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts
+its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton,
+you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
+village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
+Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions and
+become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are
+fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men who
+have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to
+the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized
+his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing
+can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed,
+gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
+corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green
+herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens
+the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one
+of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man,
+whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess.
+He wore no shirt-collar,--he had on black gloves,--and was flourishing a
+red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud children of poverty,
+who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other! Virtue in humble
+life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in
+pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before
+the social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
+foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have wept
+with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and
+vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+
+I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which political
+chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of our
+fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
+knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
+what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
+future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that
+lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
+happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of
+coming political possibilities,--an unpresentable boor sucked into office
+by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry
+straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of
+the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf
+of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze
+of good society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in
+one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in fiery
+torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern! No,--there
+will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free
+institutions from himself and from his torturers. I can fancy a lovely
+woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he would abuse by making it
+an instrument for the conveyance of food,--or, failing in this kind
+artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating his use of that implement; how
+much harder than to plunge it into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see
+her studying in his provincial dialect until she becomes the Champollion
+of New England or Western or Southern barbarisms. She has learned that
+haow means what; that think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has
+found out the meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no
+single-tongued phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of
+the Hudson and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they
+think they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
+means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
+enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know,
+comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
+admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the
+same thing.
+
+If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
+see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little
+older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
+complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact to
+you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
+divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of
+the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate them; the distinction
+is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you find such
+people; they are clowns.
+
+The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a lady
+as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when she has
+to say something which offends her natural sense of good manners, has a
+hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old Milesian
+kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned by two hundred years
+of potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to drag down the
+generations that are made of it to the earth from which it came, and,
+filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of human
+vegetable.
+
+I say, if you like such people, go with them. But I am going to make a
+practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular
+record, which some young people who are going to choose professional
+advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for. If you are making
+choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful
+and serene countenance. A physician is not--at least, ought not to
+be--an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a
+warrant for execution signed by the Governor. As a general rule, no man
+has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die. It
+may be necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last
+extreme of impertinence which one human being can offer to another. "You
+have killed me," said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told
+him he was incurable. He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead
+in six' weeks. If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
+persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to
+know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of
+recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is
+comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at
+least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready to
+let fall.
+
+Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance
+of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time
+is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people. As you go
+down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk
+in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual
+vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable
+sufferer.
+
+And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the
+one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get
+along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their
+goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children
+cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in
+the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
+
+After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
+gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
+right.
+
+This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which could not
+be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made of them by
+those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage ceremony,
+once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead of,
+Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you think
+the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you, Miss So and
+So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!
+What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have
+thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her
+bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
+
+I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these
+monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the ludicrous
+surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon
+many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a sudden flash of
+light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking
+pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so inherent in their
+whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude
+its impertinences,--the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice
+over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism. Any persons whom it
+could please could have no better notion of what the words referred to
+signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
+
+MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
+undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before
+that.
+
+ "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+ Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
+finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below a
+certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful
+ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances
+and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social
+scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last
+pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where
+they do not flourish greatly.
+
+--I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the
+Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason
+we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a
+good person. Therefore we like her.--Only we don't.
+
+This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle
+which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in
+the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this syllogism, I
+say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and
+demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for the Model.
+"Pious and painefull." Why has that excellent old phrase gone out of
+use? Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons proved
+to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word "painefull" came,
+before people thought of it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
+
+--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
+
+Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
+
+Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+petticoats.
+
+--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young rascals
+very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with their eyes
+shut. A real woman does a great many things without knowing why she does
+them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects with everything
+they do, just like men. They can't help it, no doubt; but we can't help
+getting sick of them, either. Intellect is to a woman's nature what her
+watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and
+embroideries, but not to show itself too staringly on the outside.---You
+don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all
+the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the
+brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from
+the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
+
+The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up one
+more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a statement,
+that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no visits, as
+is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+
+Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did anybody
+any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay, a
+particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to inspire
+interest, love, and devotion? Because of the reversed current in the
+flow of thought and emotion. The red heart sends all its instincts up to
+the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and so become pure
+reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of woman as woman. The
+current should run the other-way. The nice, calm, cold thought, which in
+women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought,
+should always travel to the lips via the heart. It does so in those
+women whom all love and admire. It travels the wrong way in the Model.
+That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
+her." That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
+fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable. That
+is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces with scalpel
+and forceps. That is the reason why the young girl whom she has
+befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and respect, rather than
+with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie sleeping beneath the
+calmness of her amber eyes. I can see her, as she sits between this
+estimable and most correct of personages and the misshapen, crotchety,
+often violent and explosive little man on the other side of her, leaning
+and swaying towards him as she speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as
+if she found some fountain in them at which her soul could quiet its
+thirst.
+
+Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high
+culture. It is not
+
+ "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+ Zephyr with Aurora playing,"
+
+when the two meet
+
+ "---on beds of violets blue,
+ And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"
+
+that claim such women as their offspring. It is rather the east wind, as
+it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry
+noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.--Don't throw
+up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything, and
+turning against the best growth of our latitudes,--the daughters of the
+soil. The brain-women never interest us like the heart women; white
+roses please less than red. But our Northern seasons have a narrow green
+streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a
+glowing band of summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their
+many-colored wardrobe; and women are born to us that wear all these hues
+of earth and heaven in their souls. Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no more.
+Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those babbling,
+chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know enough even to
+keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only as specimens of
+arrest of development for our psychological cabinets.
+
+Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues! We can spare you now. A little
+clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way. Go! be
+useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure
+reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic
+understanding. Goodbye! Where is my Beranger? I must read a verse or
+two of "Fretillon."
+
+Fair play for all. But don't claim incompatible qualities for anybody.
+Justice is a very rare virtue in our community. Everything that public
+sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's digester, and boiled under
+high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very
+bones give up their jelly. What are all the strongest epithets of our
+dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially the
+philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of
+syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+
+Justice! A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
+arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by
+accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the
+first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust
+many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious
+anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human
+dispositions. Why doesn't a man always strike out the first of the two
+words, to gratify his diabolical love of injustice?
+
+So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer. They
+are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the world of
+thought through them. But the rose and purple tints of richer natures
+they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.
+
+Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one
+would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things,
+sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the
+laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant life, opulent and
+showy organizations,--the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of
+female architecture,--plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical
+voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale
+beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women
+you will ever meet,--women whom dress and flattery and the round of city
+gayeties cannot spoil,--talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and
+laces,--and around whom all the nice details of elegance, which the
+cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one
+harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of
+a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
+
+There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or
+wealth. Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty, I
+think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of
+perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of accumulation.
+
+But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous
+class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about.
+Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social
+intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the
+beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to a
+set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their doors,
+would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the names of
+their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex
+Vaticanus?
+
+Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish trivialities
+about it! Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain tenure and
+transitory character. In old times, when men were all the time fighting
+and robbing each other,--in those tropical countries where the Sabeans
+and the Chaldeans stole all a man's cattle and camels, and there were
+frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough
+that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a very
+unexpected way. But, with common prudence in investments, it is not so
+now. In fact, there is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole,
+as money. A man's learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of
+remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children
+live and keep his memory green.
+
+I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance
+to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional
+trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to
+feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of
+that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous
+power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one,
+nor the meanness which often degrades the other.
+
+A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is not
+generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of common-sense
+and commonplace people. So, if any of my young friends should be tempted
+to waste their substance on white kids and "all-rounds," or to insist on
+becoming millionaires at once, by anything I have said, I will give them
+references to some of the class referred to, well known to the public as
+providers of literary diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there
+is not an old woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
+
+I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean to
+flatter them. I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness. But there
+is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which, of course, draw
+a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people into the glare of
+their candelabra, but which have a real respectability and meaning, if we
+will only look at them stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,)
+that I thought it a duty to speak a few words for them. Why can't
+somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says,
+and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+
+Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
+these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
+following lesson for the day.
+
+ THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+ Behold the rocky wall
+ That down its sloping sides
+ Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+ In rushing river-tides!
+
+ Yon stream, whose sources run
+ Turned by a pebble's edge,
+ Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+ Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+ The slender rill had strayed,
+ But for the slanting stone,
+ To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+ Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+ So from the heights of Will
+ Life's parting stream descends,
+ And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+ Each widening torrent bends,
+
+ From the same cradle's side,
+ From the same mother's knee,
+ --One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+ One to the Peaceful Sea!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to gentility.
+She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is known by all to be a
+mark of high breeding. She wears her trains very long, as the great
+ladies do in Europe. To be sure, their dresses are so made only to sweep
+the tapestried floors of chateaux and palaces; as those odious
+aristocrats of the other side do not go draggling through the mud in
+silks and satins, but, forsooth, must ride in coaches when they are in
+full dress. It is true, that, considering various habits of the American
+people, also the little accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are
+liable to, a lady who has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a
+condition that one would care to be her neighbor. But then there is no
+need of being so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women
+as our little deformed gentleman was the other day.
+
+--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said. Forty-two
+degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir! They had grand women in
+old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children as never the world
+saw before. And so it was here, Sir. I tell you, the revolution the
+Boston boys started had to run in woman's milk before it ran in man's
+blood, Sir!
+
+But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
+streets!--where do they come from? Not out of Boston parlors, I trust.
+Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail through the
+dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses. Because a queen or a
+duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a maid-of-all-work or a
+factory-girl thinks she must make herself a nuisance by trailing through
+the street, picking up and carrying about with her pah!--that's what I
+call getting vulgarity into your bones and marrow. Making believe be
+what you are not is the essence of vulgarity. Show over dirt is the one
+attribute of vulgar people. If any man can walk behind one of these women
+and see what she rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got
+a tough stomach. I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving
+'em as David served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his
+skirts, Sir! cut off his skirts!
+
+I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended in
+the way he condemned.
+
+Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman.--Don't tell me
+that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all about her sweet
+and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show. I won't believe it of a
+lady. There are some things that no fashion has any right to touch, and
+cleanliness is one of those things. If a woman wishes to show that her
+husband or her father has got money, which she wants and means to spend,
+but doesn't know how, let her buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her
+dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes
+into the house;--there may be poor women that will think it worth
+disinfecting. It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such
+things into a house for her to deal with. I don't like the Bloomers any
+too well,--in fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob
+of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
+a-----
+
+The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked round
+with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of any bodily
+misfortune are very apt to cast round them. His eye wandered over the
+company, none of whom, excepting myself and one other, had, probably,
+noticed the movement. They fell at last on Iris,--his next neighbor, you
+remember.
+
+--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that person's
+eyes have been fixed on us.
+
+Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the person.
+Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak
+out in this way. There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine's reflection in
+the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our backs.
+We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that some
+mischief or other is going-on. A young girl betrays, in a moment, that
+her eyes have been feeding on the face where you find them fixed, and
+not merely brushing over it with their pencils of blue or brown light.
+
+A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also observe, to
+that upon which we look. Roses redden the cheeks of her who stoops to
+gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins yellow. When we
+look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if we would enlarge to
+fill it. When we examine a minute object, we naturally contract, not
+only our foreheads, but all our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling, I
+wrestle too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes
+upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the
+bumpkin expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach
+this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its special
+mark upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent
+resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.
+Husband and wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.
+It is a common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have
+often fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
+movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of its
+handle.
+
+All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention that the
+Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him with her soul in
+her eyes, when his glance rested on her after wandering round the
+company. What he thought, it is hard to say; but the shadow of suspicion
+faded off from his face, and he looked calmly into the amber eyes,
+resting his cheek upon the hand that wore the red jewel.
+
+--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures! Is
+there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them? Just
+see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like
+one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root
+that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated
+below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he is--out of it. I
+should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla,
+that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
+
+--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child! Do you
+know how Art brings all ages together? There is no age to the angels and
+ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares their youth
+until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim. The youthful painter talks
+of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and the veteran
+forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of patriarchal
+antiquity.
+
+But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom Nature
+has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain. Pity, I suppose. They say
+that leads to love.
+
+--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
+going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
+drifting. I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can
+look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness
+of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is
+only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in
+readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder. He will
+leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.
+
+One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house and
+the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is on
+fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but
+very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible.
+There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting
+shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings
+one's eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do
+you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is
+born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red
+manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes
+glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues
+lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
+warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat
+that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life! leap!
+or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would
+take for the wreck of a human being!
+
+If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison,
+I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was, that we need
+not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of
+combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I don't pretend to say
+or know what it is that brings these two persons together;--and when I
+say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind
+or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant,
+as that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other. When the
+young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly
+shocked the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the
+lion-tamer's secret. She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
+of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that
+he makes a baby of.
+
+One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on the
+part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may
+laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think
+have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has
+thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it
+fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose
+fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
+disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should
+stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of
+the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with
+a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the
+shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
+
+--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course. I should think the
+chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she
+to marry him.
+
+There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
+her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
+glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements run
+to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth. An
+electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar
+of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into
+a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I should
+like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch
+if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the
+love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
+
+Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"? This
+boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the
+hooting of the owls, who would answer him
+
+ "with quivering peals,
+ And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+ Redoubled and redoubled."
+
+When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their
+voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant
+waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new
+force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if you please;--it is
+Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in
+description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely
+suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an
+actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce the
+principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest,
+there is no knowing who will come in next.
+
+--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the
+drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a
+perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her
+drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in,
+where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her
+thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.
+
+I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's chamber.
+How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess. His hours
+are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night, I see the
+light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the house
+opposite. If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be afraid
+to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such strange
+noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor,
+that makes me shiver to hear it,--it sounds so like what people that
+kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very
+sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a
+human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but
+through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard a
+woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die
+laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess
+it--I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in
+my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that
+so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
+sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman in
+old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
+neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+
+Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about
+the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that
+nonsense out of any man's head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us
+half so much as our fancies. A man not only believes, but knows he runs
+a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n't worry him
+much. On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way
+from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there
+were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly
+spots on the walls,--the old man hung himself in the garret, that is
+certain, and ever since the country-people have called it "the haunted
+house,"--the owners have n't been able to let it since the last tenants
+left on account of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the
+moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have
+turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear,
+and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,
+--take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
+house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
+alone,--how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word of
+ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his
+imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is
+not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but
+what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not
+mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little
+Gentleman's chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to
+sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or
+mysterious way. The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head
+was one that was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of
+gold; it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
+gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious and
+afford a pretext for plundering them. As for the sound like a woman
+laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for, in the
+first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may have
+an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what they call the vox
+humana stop. If he moves his bed round to get away from the window, or
+for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in that simple
+operation. Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in some such
+simple way. And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the
+other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and then
+footsteps, and then the dragging sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite
+sure,--I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in
+Keats's terrible poem of "Lamia."
+
+There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
+awake and get listening for sounds. Just keep your ears open any time
+after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark
+night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will
+hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things
+seem to be alive. Crack! That is the old chest of drawers; you never
+hear it crack in the daytime. Creak! There's a door ajar; you know you
+shut them all.
+
+Where can that latch be that rattles so? Is anybody trying it softly?
+or, worse than any body, is----? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust that
+jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does not seem to be any wind
+about that it belongs to. When it stops, you hear the worms boring in
+the powdery beams overhead. Then steps outside,--a stray animal, no
+doubt. All right,--but a gentle moisture breaks out all over you; and
+then something like a whistle or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps;
+that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart roll over and
+tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a
+part of your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
+over, very likely----Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are damp and
+cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so that the
+death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+
+No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings. Who
+ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that
+Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and owls, and
+crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny
+nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead
+fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach? Our old mother Nature
+has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress
+of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us
+up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every
+creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery and
+fear.
+
+You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is anything
+about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it should not be.
+Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that has puzzled me, and
+make me laugh at the notions which began, I suppose, in nightmares, and
+ended by keeping my imagination at work so as almost to make me
+uncomfortable at times. But it is not so easy to visit him as some of
+our other boarders, for various reasons which I will not stop to mention.
+I think some of them are rather pleased to get "the Professor" under
+their ceilings.
+
+The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and try
+some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1. On asking him what was the
+number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven, sky-parlor
+floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go ahead to show me
+the way. I followed him to his habitat, being very willing to see in
+what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I might pick up something
+about the boarders who had excited my curiosity.
+
+Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed himself
+and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a bureau, a
+trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and "vests,"--as he was
+in the habit of calling waist-coats and pantaloons or trousers,--hanging
+up as if the owner had melted out of them. Several prints were pinned up
+unframed,--among them that grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum
+presenting Ossian E. Dodge to Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous
+trot, in which I admired anew the cabalistic air of that imposing array
+of expressions, and especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h.
+Major Slocum," and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith." "Best three
+in five. Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."
+
+That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is, as
+an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living mechanism.
+I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26. Flora Temple has trotted close
+down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less. Many horses have trotted
+their mile under 2.30; none that I remember in public as low down as
+2.20. From five to ten seconds, then, in about a hundred and sixty is
+the whole range of the maxima of the present race of trotting horses.
+The same thing is seen in the running of men. Many can run a mile in
+five minutes; but when one comes to the fractions below, they taper down
+until somewhere about 4.30 the maximum is reached. Averages of masses
+have been studied more than averages of maxima and minima. We know from
+the Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
+from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot water
+out of spouts of teakettles. We know, that, among suicides, women and
+men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms. A woman who has made
+up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or a gun. Or is it that
+the explosion would derange her costume?
+
+I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe to the
+sporting men more than to the philosophers. The lesson their experience
+teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per saltum. The
+greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a small fraction of an
+idea ahead of the second best. Just look at the chess-players. Leaving
+out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice shades that separate the skilful
+ones show how closely their brains approximate,--almost as closely as
+chronometers. Such a person is a "knight-player,"--he must have that
+piece given him. Another must have two pawns. Another, "pawn and two,"
+or one pawn and two moves. Then we find one who claims "pawn and move,"
+holding himself, with this fractional advantage, a match for one who
+would be pretty sure to beat him playing even.--So much are minds alike;
+and you and I think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould
+after shaping our cerebral convolutions. So I reflected, standing and
+looking at the picture.
+
+--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11 stay
+jest as well, if you'll only set down. I've had 'em this year, and they
+haven't stirred.--He spoke, and handed the chair towards me,--seating
+himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
+
+You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
+interrogation at the end of the statement.
+
+Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question by
+another.
+
+No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the bountifully
+furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so liberally for the
+company that meets around her hospitable board."
+
+[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by a
+friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement. This
+impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment and
+its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a couple of
+new boarders made a brief appearance at the table. One of them was of
+the class of people who grumble if they don't get canvas-backs and
+woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week. The other was subject to
+somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he ought to have been asleep
+in his bed. In this state he walked into several of the boarders'
+chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual with somnambulists, and, from
+some odd instinct or other, wishing to know what the hour was, got
+together a number of their watches, for the purpose of comparing them, as
+it would seem. Among them was a repeater, belonging to our young
+Marylander. He happened to wake up while the somnambulist was in his
+chamber, and, not knowing his infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him
+a dreadful shaking, after which he tied his hands and feet, and so left
+him till morning, when he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking
+care of such cases of somnambulism.]
+
+If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this parenthesis,
+you will come to our conversation, which it has interrupted.
+
+It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's looks
+when a fellah lays it in too strong. The feed's well enough. After geese
+have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's got old, 'n'
+veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin' tall 'n' slim 'n'
+scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are gettin' so big 'n' hard
+they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of a revolver, we get hold of
+all them delicacies of the season. But it's too much like feedin' on
+live folks and devourin' widdah's substance, to lay yourself out in the
+eatin' way, when a fellah 's as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was
+too much for one 'n' not enough for two. I can't help lookin' at the old
+woman. Corned-beef-days she's tolerable calm. Roastin'-days she worries
+some, 'n' keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves. But when there's
+anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to see the
+knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces, that there's no
+comfort in eatin'. When I cut up an old fowl and help the boarders, I
+always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you have a slice of
+widdah?--instead of chicken.
+
+The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in his
+producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston folks
+call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as being A 1.
+
+Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+communicative.
+
+It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who had
+excited my curiosity.
+
+What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
+
+Fust-rate little filly;-he said.--Pootiest and nicest little chap I've
+seen since the schoolma'am left. Schoolma'am was a brown-haired
+one,--eyes coffee-color. This one has got wine-colored eyes,--'n' that
+'s the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+
+This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette. Which
+style do you like best?
+
+Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young man
+John. Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the goodness. I
+'ve been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away. Used to like to look
+at her. I never said anything particular to her, that I remember, but--
+
+I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the young
+fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing that had not
+had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+
+I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--but I
+come pretty near tryin'. If she had said, Yes, though, I shouldn't have
+known what to have done with her. Can't marry a woman now-a-days till
+you're so deaf you have to cock your head like a parrot to hear what she
+says, and so longsighted you can't see what she looks like nearer than
+arm's-length.
+
+Here is another chance for you,--I said.--What do you want nicer than
+such a young lady as Iris?
+
+It's no use,--he answered.--I look at them girls and feel as the fellah
+did when he missed catchin' the trout.--'To'od 'a' cost more butter to
+cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah.--Takes a whole piece o' goods
+to cover a girl up now-a-days. I'd as lief undertake to keep a span of
+elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as to marry one of 'em.
+What's the use? Clerks and counter-jumpers ain't anything. Sparragrass
+and green peas a'n't for them,--not while they're young and tender.
+Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--except once a year, on Fast-day. And
+marryin' a'n't for them. Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like
+to have a nice young woman, to tell her how lonely he feels. And
+sometimes a fellah,--here the young man John looked very confidential,
+and, perhaps, as if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah
+would like to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and
+push about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
+odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little articles,
+except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything, and the folks
+that are so poor they don't want anything. It makes nice boys of us
+young fellahs, no doubt! And it's pleasant to see fine young girls
+sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods, waitin', and waitin', and
+waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men lingerin' round and lookin' at
+the goods, like folks that want to be customers, but have n't the money!
+
+Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I said.
+
+What! Little Boston ask that girl to marry him! Well, now, that's
+cumin' of it a little too strong. Yes, I guess she will marry him and
+carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he said,
+mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman comes to see
+him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'. I should like to
+know what he's about in that den of his. He lays low 'n' keeps
+dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the boarders would like to
+get into his chamber, but he don't seem to want 'em. Biddy could tell
+somethin' about what she's seen when she 's been to put his room to
+rights. She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but she knows enough to keep her
+tongue still. All I know is, I saw her crossin' herself one day when she
+came out of that room. She looked pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin'
+somethin' or other about the Blessed Virgin. If it had n't been for the
+double doors to that chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before
+this; but, somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both
+open at once.
+
+What do you think he employs himself about? said I.
+
+The young man John winked.
+
+I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the blossom,
+to come to fruit in words.
+
+I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.
+
+Nor I.
+
+We were both silent for a few minutes.
+
+--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said, presently.
+
+All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show it.
+Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking of the
+gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into it one day
+when she left it on the sideboard. "If you please," says she,--'n' took
+it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl up like a caterpillar
+on a hot shovel. I only wished he had n't, and had jest given her a
+little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way
+of counterin' I want to try on to somebody.
+
+--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's room,
+feeling that there were two principal things that I had to live for, for
+the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so long. These were,
+to get a sight of the young girl's drawing-book, which I suspected had
+her heart shut up in it, and to get a look into the Little Gentleman's
+room.
+
+I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble myself
+about these matters. You tell me, with some show of reason, that all I
+shall find in the young girl's--book will be some outlines of angels with
+immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural sketches, and caricatures,
+among which I shall probably have the pleasure of seeing my own features
+figuring. Very likely. But I'll tell you what I think I shall find. If
+this child has idealized the strange little bit of humanity over which
+she seems to have spread her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of
+those wild vagaries that passionate natures are so liable to, she has
+fairly sprung upon him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold
+about the first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
+depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
+hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I would
+not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he is
+just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery about
+him.
+
+The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and many
+more reflections. It was about two o'clock in the morning,--bright
+starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
+alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist. It was the heavy
+dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me. Presently a
+window was softly closed. I had just begun to get over the agitation
+with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard the sound
+which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the clearest, purest soprano
+which one could well conceive of. It was not loud, and I could not
+distinguish a word, if it was a woman's voice; but there were recurring
+phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which suggested
+the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and
+despair. It died away at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door,
+followed by a low, monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the
+closing of a door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall
+disappeared and all was still for the night.
+
+By George! this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for a
+change of night-clothes.
+
+I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
+it at our celebration. So I read it to the boarders instead, and
+print it to finish off this record with.
+
+
+ ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+ He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+ His wandering flock had gone before,
+ But he, the shepherd, might not share
+ Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+ Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+ Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+ While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+ The pastor spake, and thus he said:--
+
+ "Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+ God calls you hence from over sea;
+ Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+ Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+ "Ye go to bear the saving word
+ To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+ Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+ From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+ "Yet think not unto them was lent
+ All light for all the coming days,
+ And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+ In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+ "The living fountain overflows
+ For every flock, for every lamb,
+ Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+ With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."
+
+ He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+ With tears of love and partings fond,
+ They floated down the creeping Maas,
+ Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+ They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+ The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
+ And grated soon with lifting keel
+ The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+ No home for these!--too well they knew
+ The mitred king behind the throne;
+ The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+ And westward ho! for worlds unknown.
+
+ --And these were they who gave us birth,
+ The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+ Who won for us this virgin earth,
+ And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+ The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,
+ --In alien earth the exiles lie,
+ --Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+ His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+ Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+ Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+ Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+ Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
+boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going
+on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect of
+things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly playing
+and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface of
+every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some fine
+morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been
+watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You may
+laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble
+myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like ours.
+Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a
+beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to
+Nature's women, turned loose among live men.
+
+-Terrible fact?
+
+Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost
+heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women
+who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If
+jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that
+waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping
+melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities,
+then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I
+love to look at this "Rainbow," as her father used sometimes to call her,
+of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the very
+picture, as it seems to me, of that "golden blonde" my friend whose book
+you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember,
+no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her
+beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my
+fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she
+has for me.
+
+It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
+there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they get
+hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years. These
+hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling
+flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the waking state,
+which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped
+short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of
+these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what kind of a
+secret this is, but I think of it as a disclosure of certain relations of
+our personal being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the
+procession of events, and to their First Great Cause. This secret seems
+to be broken up, as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word
+and there a syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
+written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life. I do
+not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs about
+such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of an
+enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an expectation
+to be fulfilled for most of us in this life. Persons, however, have
+fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William Tennent, among many
+others,--and learned some things which they could not tell in our human
+words.
+
+Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this infinite
+secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are those that
+carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery. There are
+women's faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something in them
+that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a
+revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I remember two faces
+of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I
+just now came across a print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something
+of the same quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world
+above ours. No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
+Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no women to
+be worshipped.
+
+But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret
+to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.
+Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain
+countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman,
+not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and
+wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But this young girl has at
+once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. Can
+she tell me anything?
+
+Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which I
+have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired of,
+and through--Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in
+these curious boarding-houses.
+
+You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of
+and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road,
+suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a
+deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,--a huge
+unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living rock,
+it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding
+galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been
+swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk
+and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
+
+So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding
+over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--now and then
+jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round
+as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment, but
+still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating and
+jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the smoothest-rolling
+vehicle. Suddenly we hear the deep underground reverberation that
+reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought or passion beneath
+us.
+
+I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I
+cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to
+know,--something that she was made to tell and I to hear,--lying there
+ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a
+saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the
+truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry
+stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an
+hour of passion.
+
+It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The
+Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set
+your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could give you which
+settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however, that you confounded the
+Great Secret with the Three Words.
+
+I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell.
+When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the
+fifth of July. And just as that little patriotic implement is made with
+a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp
+eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or
+lip to the "I love you" in her heart. But the Three Words are not the
+Great Secret I mean. No, women's faces are only one of the tablets on
+which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies
+deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I
+think,--Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
+certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I can
+mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem to me to
+come near the region where I think it lies. I have known two persons who
+pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,--all wrong evidently,
+but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search for it until they
+got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to visions of things
+that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings, and so they died.
+The vulgar called them drunkards.
+
+I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this young
+girl's face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a friend of
+mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices. I
+cannot translate it into words,--only into feelings; and these I have
+attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of
+something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are
+looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of the next.
+
+You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of
+my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget what
+a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce
+our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick. From the
+light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless
+scribbler's impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest
+utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need,
+is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of
+clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to
+tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I could
+shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young
+girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt
+your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there is
+here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk
+about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on
+some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should
+see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There are
+dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a certainty
+of being understood;--
+
+ That moment that his face I see,
+ I know the man that must hear me
+ To him my tale I teach.
+
+--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for
+this August number, so that they will never see it.
+
+--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt,
+which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you
+will make the change.
+
+This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again
+seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That
+slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each
+other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is
+a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all
+the men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if all
+their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely
+placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to
+look.
+
+That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
+opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some
+mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a
+sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another
+by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
+
+--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in his
+button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings. Very fine
+performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions, truly elegant!--Had
+seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in the year (eighteen hundred
+and little or nothing, I think he said,)--patronized by the nobility and
+gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant, truly elegant productions, very fine
+performances; these drawings reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance
+to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine
+pictures that he remembered seeing when he was a boy. Used to remember
+some lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+
+ "Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
+ With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
+
+And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of
+his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking,
+not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead young
+mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him
+so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream, his
+eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they
+ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the
+glimmering light through which he saw them.--What is there quite so
+profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his
+earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows
+to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he
+looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he
+caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.
+
+If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words with
+which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.
+
+--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.--All
+gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her
+great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little
+picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you
+don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so as
+to shade his eyes. I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of memory,
+and turned from him to Iris.
+
+How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to take
+lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was here; and it
+was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size she had
+covered with drawings.
+
+I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies,
+principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
+forth. Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb
+drawing of an arm! I don't remember it among the figures from Michel
+Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I
+think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!
+
+--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up the
+drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like to see
+her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in it worth
+showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved to
+be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven't the least doubt. I
+think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what her
+fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they were
+bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her
+thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else.
+The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I
+think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady's daughter calls
+bo-kays of flowers,--somebody has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had,
+which must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary
+title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the
+author,--a face from memory, apparently,--one of those faces that small
+children loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward
+disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear
+that these are "good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The
+gentleman with the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not
+encouraged, I think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He
+pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would
+have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his
+corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I wish
+you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--which would,
+perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing
+comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding
+out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.
+
+Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made an
+attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber. For this
+purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just ready
+to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed him as he
+toiled back to his room. He rested on the landing and faced round toward
+me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there! So we
+finished our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered
+assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.--No
+answer.--Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and
+locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled,
+misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were
+unfastened,--with unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the
+passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at
+which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as "Mr.
+Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a
+quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long
+enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company
+in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
+
+I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
+schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up
+such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark! What the deuse is that
+odd noise in his chamber?
+
+--I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
+a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
+apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
+neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks
+called the "Devil's footsteps." These were patches of sand in the
+pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the
+"dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more
+Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers,--where even
+the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could not grow, but all was bare
+and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near
+my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do
+not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little
+having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very
+desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the
+northwest corner, and on the level of the third or fourth story, there
+are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be
+mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried
+away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not
+care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
+things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
+variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the
+chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the
+building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where the
+mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible. The
+queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had never attracted
+attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had not
+existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a "Goody," so
+called, or sweeper, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange
+horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know
+something.--I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of
+impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with
+untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with the
+"Devil's footsteps" in the fields behind the house and in front of it the
+patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which
+startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of
+them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
+season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for his
+ascetic sanctity.
+
+There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced by
+these two singular facts I have just mentioned. There was a dark
+storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly see a
+heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which seemed to
+me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their fright to have
+huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs,--as the people did
+in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of
+Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady's portrait, up-stairs, with the
+sword-thrusts through it,--marks of the British officers' rapiers,--and
+the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,--confound
+them for smashing its mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in
+which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a
+gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the
+silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room
+downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the
+hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the study" in
+my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed
+men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you
+the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With
+all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those
+awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with
+them;--of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be
+found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly
+round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)--of dreams
+coming true,--of death-signs,--of apparitions, no wonder that my
+imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.
+
+Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see
+a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world
+will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such
+circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That is the
+only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which I
+watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake
+whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.
+
+But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for
+the present. You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were
+turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy full
+of material images,--faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so forth,--in
+such a way that I should have no chance in this number to gratify any
+curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.
+
+Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time.
+It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I should
+sit to him for my portrait. When a soul draws a body in the great
+lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize, such as it is, the
+said soul inspects the said body with the same curious interest with
+which one who has ventured into a "gift enterprise" examines the "massive
+silver pencil-case" with the coppery smell and impressible tube, or the
+"splendid gold ring" with the questionable specific gravity, which it has
+been his fortune to obtain in addition to his purchase.
+
+The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself proprietor,
+thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well. But there is this
+difference between its view and that of a person looking at us:--we look
+from within, and see nothing but the mould formed by the elements in
+which we are incased; other observers look from without, and see us as
+living statues. To be sure, by the aid of mirrors, we get a few glimpses
+of our outside aspect; but this occasional impression is always modified
+by that look of the soul from within outward which none but ourselves can
+take. A portrait is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us. The artist
+looks only from without. He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our
+faces we are never likely to see. No genuine expression can be studied
+by the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+
+More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are conscious
+of, we have a special face for each friend. For, in the first place,
+each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on the principle of
+assimilation you found referred to in my last record, if you happened to
+read that document. And secondly, each of our friends is capable of
+seeing just so far, and no farther, into our face, and each sees in it
+the particular thing that he looks for. Now the artist, if he is truly
+an artist, does not take any one of these special views. Suppose he
+should copy you as you appear to the man who wants your name to a
+subscription-list, you could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to
+recognize the likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at
+his board. Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which
+the rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation. The
+artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the two, or
+something different from either. What the daguerreotype and photograph
+do is to give the features and one particular look, the very look which
+kills all expression, that of self-consciousness. The artist throws you
+off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose, puts your face
+through its exercises, observes its transitions, and so gets the whole
+range of its expression. Out of all this he forms an ideal portrait,
+which is not a copy of your exact look at any one time or to any
+particular person. Such a portrait cannot be to everybody what the
+ungloved call "as nat'ral as life." Every good picture, therefore, must
+be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.
+
+There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes
+your features from his outline. It is that you resemble so many
+relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness
+in your countenance.
+
+He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:
+
+There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never
+thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye,
+those I knew I had. But there is a something which recalls a smile that
+faded away from my sister's lips--how many years ago! I thought it so
+pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.
+
+Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The
+artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging
+outwards from the eye over the temple. Five years.--The artist draws one
+tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the
+eyebrows. Ten years.--The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth,
+so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and
+recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the
+same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.--Hold on! Stop
+that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of
+that interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc.,
+etc., etc.?
+
+There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
+getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the wrongs
+of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye and the
+reflection of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET that painted
+us?
+
+ "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
+ COWPER.
+
+--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with
+any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation,
+and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole
+individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As soon as we
+are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in
+hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual
+in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with
+fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face
+into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the
+very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it
+brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space
+when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
+servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
+wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all the
+traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after feature, from
+the slight outline to the finished portrait.
+
+--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+identified with ourselves. In early years, while the child "feels its
+life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a very
+great extent. It ought to be so. There have been many very interesting
+children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth
+and an extraordinary development of the spiritual nature. There is a
+perfect literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials;
+the same "disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood "; the same
+remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same conscientiousness; in
+short, an almost uniform character, marked by beautiful traits, which we
+look at with a painful admiration. It will be found that most of these
+children are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living,
+the most frequent of which I need not mention. They are like the
+beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time because
+its core is gnawed out. They have their meaning,--they do not-live in
+vain,--but they are windfalls. I am convinced that many healthy children
+are injured morally by being forced to read too much about these little
+meek sufferers and their spiritual exercises. Here is a boy that loves
+to run, swim, kick football, turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish,
+tear his clothes, coast, skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut
+his name on fences, read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat
+the widest-angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts
+with his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
+with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names, throw
+stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut behind"
+anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth, "holler" Fire!
+on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an engine-company, or,
+in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or whatever it may be;--isn't
+that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though he has not got anything the
+matter with him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you
+put into such a hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's
+hand a sad-looking volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin,
+white-faced child, whose life is really as much a training for death as
+the last month of a condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in
+common between his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
+experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes
+when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of
+resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those
+who die before their time, in humble hope and trust. But it is not until
+he has worked his way through the period of honest hearty animal
+existence, which every robust child should make the most of,--not until
+he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first
+duty,--that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to
+read these tearful records of premature decay. I have no doubt that
+disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early
+surfeits of pathological piety. I do verily believe that He who took
+children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and most
+playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous
+virtues. I know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in
+this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
+fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the sanctity
+which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most beautiful
+instances of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine
+benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures out of
+the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we Professors
+call "bad practice"; and I know by experience that there are worthy
+people who not only try it on their own children, but actually force it
+on those of their neighbors.
+
+--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or
+done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note from
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their
+Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to
+that scientific Golgotha.
+
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
+woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden arm
+suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the other
+retires backwards, and vice versa. The more particular speciality of one
+is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of the other to polish you
+off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment. Suppose
+yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of
+books with taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is there,
+"approved" by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the
+Professor's, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra
+convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which
+was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very
+liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
+"organs." Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,
+--horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
+life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe
+Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his
+cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a stripped twig of
+willow.
+
+The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
+horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+antechamber.
+
+Tape round the head,--22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you think
+you are the better man!)
+
+Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those horrid old
+women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision-stalls at
+the Quincy Market. Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or something or other.
+Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some other number equally
+significant.
+
+Mild champooing of head now commences. 'Extraordinary revelations!
+Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6 +! Paediphilous, 5! Deipniphilous,
+6! Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5!
+Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on. Meant for a linguist.--Invaluable
+information. Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately.--I
+have nothing against the grand total of my phrenological endowments.
+
+I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs. Bumpus and
+Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did, especially
+considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion. Much obliged to them
+for their politeness. They have been useful in their way by calling
+attention to important physiological facts. (This concession is due to
+our immense bump of Candor.)
+
+A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+Breakfast-Table.
+
+I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science. A
+Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative
+practical application. Its professors and practitioners are usually
+shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh
+a good deal among themselves. The believing multitude consists of women
+of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who
+always get cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on
+hurrying up the millennium, and others of this class, with here and there
+a clergyman, less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and
+almost never a horse-jockey or a member of the detective police.--I do
+not say that Phrenology was one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+
+A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may
+contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts
+with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the
+strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one.
+The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that common minds, after
+they have been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest
+rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us,
+we are very apt to supply the next out of our own imagination. (How many
+persons can read Judges xv. 16 correctly the first time?) The
+Pseudo-sciences take advantage of this.--I did not say that it was so
+with Phrenology.
+
+I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed,
+promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a huge hind-head
+back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have as rarely met an
+unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in the bumps. It is
+observed, however, that persons with what the Phrenologists call "good
+heads" are more prone than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine.
+
+It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that the
+moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance of
+the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be
+puzzled. But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar cheese, I call
+on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of our satellite, before
+I purchase.
+
+It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement.
+It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot be,
+by the common course of argument. The walls of the head are double, with
+a great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most closely
+crowded "organs." Can you tell how much money there is in a safe, which
+also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your fingers? So
+when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of
+Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of
+the outside of my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or
+a ten-dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet. Perhaps there is;
+only he does n't know anything about at. But this is a point that I, the
+Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly, better than
+you do. The next argument you will all appreciate.
+
+I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences. An
+example will show it most conveniently.
+
+A. is a notorious thief. Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and find a
+good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for Phrenology.
+Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump does not lose in
+the act of copying.--I did not say it gained.--What do you look so for?
+(to the boarders.)
+
+Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But B. has no bump at all
+over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.--Not a
+bit of it. Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is? That's the
+reason B. stole.
+
+And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--used
+to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own pockets and
+put its contents in another, if he could find no other way of committing
+petty larceny. Unfortunately, C. has a hollow, instead of a bump, over
+Acquisitiveness. Ah, but just look and see what a bump of
+Alimentiveness! Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread, when a boy, with
+the money he stole? Of course you see why he is a thief, and how his
+example confirms our noble science.
+
+At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there is a
+little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of Byron, for
+instance. Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which covers
+everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
+Phrenologist. "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an organ,
+which determines its degree of power."
+
+Oh! oh! I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose." Well, that's convenient.
+
+It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to the
+Pseudo-sciences. I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+
+I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed at
+the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had read
+their characters written upon their skulls. Of course the Professor
+acquires his information solely through his cranial inspections and
+manipulations.--What are you laughing at? (to the boarders.)--But let us
+just suppose, for a moment, that a tolerably cunning fellow, who did not
+know or care anything about Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake
+to read off people's characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece. Let
+us see how well he could get along without the "organs."
+
+I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one hundred
+dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other
+matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to
+begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor
+Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer.
+My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,--ask him a
+question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him,
+I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his skull, dictating as
+follows: SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+
+
+LIST OF FACULTIES FOR PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+ CUSTOMER.
+ Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+Amativeness, 7. Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+ men love to be told they do.
+
+Alimentiveness, 8. Don't you see that he has burst off his
+ lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
+
+Acquisitiveness, 8. Of course. A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+Approbativeness 7+. Hat well brushed. Hair ditto. Mark the
+ effect of that plus sign.
+
+Self-Esteem 6. His face shows that.
+
+Benevolence 9. That'll please him.
+
+Conscientiousness 8 1/2 That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+Mirthfulness 7 Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+Ideality 9 That sounds well.
+
+Form, Size, Weight, 4 to 6. Average everything that Color, Locality,
+ cannot be guessed. Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+ And so of the other faculties.
+
+
+Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do. They go
+only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for? (to the boarders.)
+I only said that is the way I should practise "Phrenology" for a living.
+
+ End of my Lecture.
+
+
+--The Reformers have good heads, generally. Their faces are commonly
+serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse, even though
+their voices may be like
+
+ The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+
+when heard from the platform. Their greatest spiritual danger is from
+the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed. These lines
+are meant to caution them.
+
+
+ SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+ HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+ No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+ We know how cheaply that is won;
+ The idle homage of the crowd
+ Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+ A surface-smile may pay the toil
+ That follows still the conquering Right,
+ With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+ That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+ Sing the sweet song of other days,
+ Serenely placid, safely true,
+ And o'er the present's parching ways
+ Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+ But speak in words of living power,
+ --They fall like drops of scalding rain
+ That plashed before the burning shower
+ Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+ Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,
+ --Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+ And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+ Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+ If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+ Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+ Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+ Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
+
+ Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+ Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+ When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+ And Meekness calls to disobey,--
+
+ Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+ The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+ Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+ In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent in
+some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of them are,
+I felt bound to answer.
+
+1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+single page?
+
+To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had but
+half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send through
+the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper (crosswise,
+lengthwise, and diagonally).
+
+2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+
+To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+questioners.
+
+a. Not trying to be a gentleman.
+
+b. Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+
+c. Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+intercourse.
+
+d. f. s. d. (as many suppose.)
+
+3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+
+Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+
+ Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
+ It is her figure pleases me."
+ "What may her figure be?" I cried.
+ "One hundred thousand!" he replied.
+
+When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he should
+like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the girl was one
+of the right sort.
+
+The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the blessin'
+of a good wife. Money was a great thing when them that had it made a
+good use of it. She had seen better days herself, and knew what it was
+never to want for anything. One of her cousins merried a very rich old
+gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he lived ten year longer than
+if he'd staid by himself without anybody to take care of him. There was
+nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick folks and them that couldn't take
+care of themselves.
+
+The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
+thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed to
+think this speech was intended.
+
+If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was. Indeed,
+he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the conversation falls
+upon one of those larger topics that specially interest him, and then he
+grows excited, speaks loud and fast, sometimes almost savagely,--and, I
+have noticed once or twice, presses his left hand to his right side, as
+if there were something that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that
+region.
+
+While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is interrupted, and
+we all listen to him. Iris looks steadily in his face, and then he will
+turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes with his own melancholy
+gaze. I do believe that they have some kind of understanding together,
+that they meet elsewhere than at our table, and that there is a mystery,
+which is going to break upon us all of a sudden, involving the relations
+of these two persons. From the very first, they have taken to each
+other. The one thing they have in common is the heroic will. In him, it
+shows itself in thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for
+"free trade and no right of search" on the high seas of religious
+controversy, and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old
+city. In her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most
+queenly disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette. People may
+say or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
+of hers.
+
+The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little Gentleman
+says anything that interferes with her own infallibility. She seems to
+think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she had the
+toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter the wind blows
+from, she will catch her "death o' cold."
+
+The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and tried
+to persuade him to hold his tongue.--The boarders was gettin'
+uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
+talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to settle.
+She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all her livin'
+depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't any of 'em she
+set so much by as she did by him; but there was them that never liked to
+hear about sech things, except on Sundays.
+
+The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled even
+more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an unconscious
+movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time, when she had
+smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her mate by these and
+other bird-like graces.--My dear Madam,--he said,--I will remember your
+interests, and speak only of matters to which I am totally
+indifferent.--I don't doubt he meant this; but a day or two after,
+something stirred him up, and I heard his voice uttering itself aloud,
+thus:
+
+-It must be done, Sir!--he was saying,--it must be done! Our religion
+has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been Orientalized, it
+has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when it must be
+AMERICANIZED! Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in politics;--it
+means that a man shall have a vote because he is a man,--and shall vote
+for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's interference. If he chooses
+to vote for the Devil, that is his lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil
+is better than the other candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right,
+Sir. Just so a man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it
+doesn't do, Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and
+"heretic" and those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors
+have left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!
+
+As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or pull
+him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron through his
+tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board at the top of a
+stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the fire kindled round it,
+there was some sense in these words; they led to something. But since we
+have done with those tools, we had better give up those words. I should
+like to see a Yankee advertisement like this!--(the Little Gentleman
+laughed fiercely as he uttered the words,--)
+
+--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
+
+--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+
+--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six inches in
+twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves unsatisfactory.
+
+I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir! Now, what's the
+use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and the
+Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves and
+bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the things
+themselves, Sir? What's the use of painting the fire round a poor
+fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as they did
+at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+
+--What story is that?--I said.
+
+Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or somewhere
+there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing traveller he
+is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the statutes provided
+for the crime of private opinion. They could n't quite make up their
+minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a hogshead painted all over
+with flames!
+
+No, Sir! when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-box and
+vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is your opinion,
+he forgets in which half of the world he was born, Sir! It won't be
+long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as we have Americanized
+government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends into the world will be
+good in the face of all men for just so much of His "inspiration" as
+"giveth him understanding"!--None of my words, Sir! none of my words!
+
+--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look like
+when one sees it? She follows him with her eyes, she leans over toward
+him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of his speech, so
+that one might think it was with her as with Christabel,--
+
+ That all her features were resigned
+ To this sole image in her mind.
+
+But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when he
+says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+
+Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that. Whether
+they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might be
+questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex hardly
+seems to be a matter of praise or blame. But in all common aspects they
+are so much above us that we get most of our religion from them,--from
+their teachings, from their example,--above all, from their pure
+affections.
+
+Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her childhood.
+Especially she had been told that she hated all good things,--which every
+sensible parent knows well enough is not true of a great many children,
+to say the least. I have sometimes questioned whether many libels on
+human nature had not been a natural consequence of the celibacy of the
+clergy, which was enforced for so long a period.
+
+The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements as
+to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle of
+spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do. If all she did
+was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or else the
+disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or "wrong"? No
+"shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child with its logic. Why,
+I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery and settling questions
+which all that I have heard since and got out of books has never been
+able to raise again. If a child does not assert itself in this way in
+good season, it becomes just what its parents or teachers were, and is no
+better than a plastic image.--How old was I at the time?--I suppose
+about 5823 years old,--that is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of
+the Creation, and adding the life of the race, whose accumulated
+intelligence is a part of my inheritance, to my own. A good deal older
+than Plato, you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and
+most of the world's teachers.--Old books, as you well know, are books of
+the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age. How many of all
+these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels! The gold has
+passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of the dross with
+which it was mingled.
+
+And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only fetters,
+but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give themselves up
+trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer, who has them by the
+windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself, in which love of the
+neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first article, and love of the
+Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of this as its natural
+development, being necessarily second in order of time to the first
+unselfish emotions which we feel for the fellow-creatures who surround us
+in our early years.
+
+The child must have some place of worship. What would a young girl be
+who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose all
+around her with every returning day of rest? And Iris was free to
+choose. Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry her to
+this or that place of worship; and when the doors were hospitably opened,
+she would often go meekly in by herself. It was a curious fact, that two
+churches as remote from each other in doctrine as could well be divided
+her affections.
+
+The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman Catholic
+chapel. I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to the
+ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but there
+were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and there were
+reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other elegant arrangements.
+Then there were boys to sing alternately in choirs responsive to each
+other, and there was much bowing, with very loud responding, and a long
+service and a short sermon, and a bag, such as Judas used to hold in the
+old pictures, was carried round to receive contributions. Everything was
+done not only "decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a
+certain air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
+clergymen, often two or three in number. The music and the free welcome
+were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the door of the
+chapel. For this was a church with open doors, with seats for all
+classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous worshippers after
+their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and women, one that took
+care of its children and never forgot its poor, and whose people were
+much more occupied in looking out for their own souls than in attacking
+the faith of their neighbors. In its mode of worship there was a union
+of two qualities,--the taste and refinement, which the educated require
+just as much in their churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness,
+almost of pomp, which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not
+without its effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of
+little value. Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
+cheerful religious spirit. The artistic sense, which betrayed itself in
+the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with her taste. The
+mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those rhythmic phrases, so
+simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every tenth heart-beat, instead of
+its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as "Good Lord, deliver us! "--the
+sweet alternation of the two choirs, as their holy song floated from side
+to side, the keen young voices rising like a flight of singing-birds that
+passes from one grove to another, carrying its music with it back and
+forward,--why should she not love these gracious outward signs of those
+inner harmonies which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of
+her fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
+Polycarp?
+
+The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship, had
+introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for such of our
+boarders as were not otherwise provided for. I saw them looking over the
+same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help thinking that two such
+young and handsome persons could hardly worship together in safety for a
+great while. But they seemed to mind nothing but their prayer-book.
+By-and-by the silken bag was handed round.--I don't believe she will; so
+awkward, you know;--besides, she only came by invitation. There she is,
+with her hand in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of
+silver tinkled as it struck the coin beneath. God bless her! she has n't
+much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is all
+Heaven asks.--That was the first time I noticed these young people
+together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with them,
+whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good behavior. A
+day or two after this I noticed that the young gentleman had left his
+seat, which you may remember was at the corner diagonal to that of Iris,
+so that they have been as far removed from each other as they could be at
+the table. His new seat is three or four places farther down the table.
+Of course I made a romance out of this, at once. So stupid not to see
+it! How could it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam? I beg your
+pardon. (To my lady-reader.)
+
+I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
+treats her little deformed neighbor. If he were in the way of going to
+church, I know she would follow him. But his worship, if any, is not
+with the throng of men and women and staring children.
+
+I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer. I should
+go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy enough to
+find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes, whether I can
+accept all their creeds or not. One place of worship comes nearer than
+the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was that I carried our
+young girl.
+
+The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in outside
+pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp. Like that, it is open to
+all comers. The stranger who approaches it looks down a quiet street and
+sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden tent, that owes whatever
+grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roofs--traces,
+both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which soared
+aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of a
+flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.
+This suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which
+a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was
+all of outward show the small edifice could boast. Within there was very
+little that pretended to be attractive. A small organ at one side, and a
+plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it was a church
+reduced to its simplest expression:
+
+Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne, in
+all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of the navy
+of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple chapel in its
+Sunday garniture. For the lilies of the field, in their season, and the
+fairest flowers of the year, in due succession, were clustered every
+Sunday morning over the preacher's desk. Slight, thin-tissued blossoms
+of pink and blue and virgin white in early spring, then the full-breasted
+and deep-hearted roses of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and
+yellow flowers of autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew
+under skies of glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without
+knowing that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
+the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year told
+its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple desk. There
+was always at least one good sermon,--this floral homily. There was at
+least one good prayer,--that brief space when all were silent, after the
+manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+
+Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love. The same gentle,
+thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit, the same
+quiet, the same life of active benevolence. But in all else how
+different from the Church of Saint Polycarp! No clerical costume, no
+ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs. A liturgy they have, to
+be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from the time-honored manuals
+of devotion, but also does not hesitate to change its expressions to its
+own liking.
+
+Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they are apt
+to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper before the
+minister came in. But it is a relief to get rid of that old
+Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the first day of
+the week is commemorative of some most mournful event. The truth is,
+these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family does for its
+devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least, considering it on
+the whole quite a delightful matter to come together for prayer and song
+and good counsel from kind and wise lips. And if they are freer in their
+demeanor than some very precise congregations, they have not the air of a
+worldly set of people. Clearly they have not come to advertise their
+tailors and milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging criticisms on the
+literary character of the sermon they may hear. There is no
+restlessness and no restraint among these quiet, cheerful worshippers.
+One thing that keeps them calm and happy during the season so evidently
+trying to many congregations is, that they join very generally in the
+singing. In this way they get rid of that accumulated nervous force
+which escapes in all sorts of fidgety movements, so that a minister
+trying to keep his congregation still reminds one of a boy with his hand
+over the nose of a pump which another boy is working,--this spirting
+impatience of the people is so like the jets that find their way through
+his fingers, and the grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a
+wonderful likeness to the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his
+hand away, with immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the
+officiating youngster.
+
+How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one common
+song of praise! Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and now and then
+an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in advance, or an
+enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and place in the luxury of a
+closing cadence that he holds on to the last semi-breve upon his private
+responsibility; but how much more of the spirit of the old Psalmist in
+the music of these imperfectly trained voices than in the academic
+niceties of the paid performers who take our musical worship out of our
+hands!
+
+I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is not
+laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint Polycarp.
+Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of those churches had
+met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature, or for the promotion of
+any charitable object, they would have found they had more in common than
+all the special beliefs or want of beliefs that separated them would
+amount to. There are always many who believe that the fruits of a tree
+afford a better test of its condition than a statement of the composts
+with which it is dressed, though the last has its meaning and importance,
+no doubt.
+
+Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her affections.
+But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either with more devotion
+than she does to her little neighbor when he talks of these matters.
+
+What does he believe? In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very bitter
+against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private judgment. Over
+this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity in general, bred out
+of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply streaked with fiery lines
+of wrath at various individual acts of wrong, especially if they come in
+an ecclesiastical shape, and recall to him the days when his mother's
+great-grandmother was strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old
+Testament for her halter. With all this, he has a boundless belief in
+the future of this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny
+of the free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+
+--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of Boston
+State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all the
+pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the world! No
+smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer Light and the
+sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains! Yes, Sir,--and there are
+great truths that are higher than mountains and broader than seas, that
+people are looking for from the tops of these hills of ours;--such as the
+world never saw, though it might have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes
+had been open!--Where do they have most crazy people? Tell me that, Sir!
+
+I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England than
+in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+
+Very good, Sir,--he answered.--When have there been most people killed
+and wounded in the course of this century?
+
+During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.
+
+That's it! that's it!--said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle of
+intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken! We're
+battling for a faith here, Sir.
+
+The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the world's
+history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+
+I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new, it
+can't help being different here in this American mind of ours from
+anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and that makes
+the difference. One load of corn goes to the sty, and makes the fat of
+swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes the muscle that
+clothes the right arms of heroes. It is n't where a pawn stands on the
+board that makes the difference, but what the game round it is when it is
+on this or that square.
+
+Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now doing,
+and how they are governed, and what is the general condition of society,
+without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which the world sails,
+and not the rudder that steers its course? No, Sir! There was a great
+raft built about two thousand years ago,--call it an ark, rather,--the
+world's great ark! big enough to hold all mankind, and made to be
+launched right out into the open waves of life,--and here it has been
+lying, one end on the shore and one end bobbing up and down in the water,
+men fighting all the time as to who should be captain and who should have
+the state-rooms, and throwing each other over the side because they could
+not agree about the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting
+afloat with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
+is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters sailing
+out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say now, and they
+mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water, shovel over your loads
+of idle ballast, get out your old rotten cargo, and we will carry it out
+into deep waters and sink it where it will never be seen again; so shall
+the ark of the world's hope float on the ocean, instead of sticking in
+the dock-mud where it is lying!"
+
+It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched. The Jordan was
+n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the Rhone was n't
+deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and perhaps the Charles
+is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of that, Sir, and I love to
+hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks of tradition and making the
+ways smooth with the oil of the Good Samaritan. I don't know, Sir,--but
+I do think she stirs a little,--I do believe she slides;--and when I
+think of what a work that is for the dear old three-breasted mother of
+American liberty, I would not take all the glory of all the greatest
+cities in the world for my birthright in the soil of little Boston!
+
+--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local patriotism,
+especially when it finished with the last two words.
+
+And Iris smiled, too. But it was the radiant smile of pleasure which
+always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets excited on the
+great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and especially on the
+part which, as he pleases himself with believing, his own city is to take
+in that consummation of human development to which he looks forward.
+
+Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
+anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+
+You are not well,--she said.
+
+I am never well,--he answered.--His eyes fell mechanically on the
+death's-head ring he wore on his right hand. She took his hand as if it
+had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it should be out of
+sight. One slight, sad, slow movement of the head seemed to say, "The
+death-symbol is still there!"
+
+A very odd personage, to be sure! Seems to know what is going on,
+--reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him, they
+tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday affairs of
+the world, too. Whether he hears everything that is said with
+preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend visits him
+in a quiet way, is more than I can tell. I can make nothing more of the
+noises I hear in his room than my old conjectures. The movements I
+mention are less frequent, but I often hear the plaintive cry,--I observe
+that it is rarely laughing of late;--I never have detected one articulate
+word, but I never heard such tones from anything but a human voice.
+
+There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on the
+part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned. This is
+doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have saddened his
+look of late. Either some passion is gnawing at him inwardly, or some
+hidden disease is at work upon him.
+
+--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to me
+one day.--There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he looks
+peakeder than ever. The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n' wants a
+puss to take care of him. Them pusses that take care of old rich folks
+marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a great while after
+that. No, Sir! I don't see what he wants to die for, after he's taken
+so much trouble to live in such poor accommodations as that crooked body
+of his. I should like to know how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's
+goin' to get out. What business has he to die, I should like to know?
+Let Ma'am Allen (the gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be
+(this is a family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'. Not
+by a great sight. Can't do without him anyhow. A'n't it fun to hear him
+blow off his steam?
+
+I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if the
+Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table for a
+better world.
+
+--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our young
+lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I have found
+myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well acquainted with Miss
+Iris. There is a certain frankness and directness about her that perhaps
+belong to her artist nature. For, you see, the one thing that marks the
+true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction
+from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the
+feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or
+in stone. A true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp,
+well-defined mental physiognomy. Besides this, many young girls have a
+strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy. Even in
+physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will find
+few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who do not
+confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity. One of these
+young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to the top of a
+jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly height to get up,
+and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young fellow of sixteen.
+Another was in the way of climbing tall trees for crows' nests,--and
+crows generally know about how far boys can "shin up," and set their
+household establishments above that high-water mark. Still another of
+these young ladies I saw for the first time in an open boat, tossing on
+the ocean ground-swell, a mile or two from shore, off a lonely island.
+She lost all her daring, after she had some girls of her own to look out
+for.
+
+Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+unelastic. But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
+through them, are often full of character. They come, probably enough,
+from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed in such
+strong colors. The negative blondes, or those women whose tints have
+faded out as their line of descent has become impoverished, are of
+various blood, and in them the soul has often become pale with that
+blanching of the hair and loss of color in the eyes which makes them
+approach the character of Albinesses.
+
+I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which,
+when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany
+this combination of active and passive capacity, we call genius. She is
+not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always an air
+in every careless figure she draws, as it were of upward aspiration,--the
+elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--a lift to them, as if they had on
+winged sandals, like the herald of the Gods. I hear her singing
+sometimes; and though she evidently is not trained, yet is there a wild
+sweetness in her fitful and sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can
+come only from the inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough,
+reminding me of those long passages I have heard from my little
+neighbor's room, yet of different tone, and by no means to be mistaken
+for those weird harmonies.
+
+I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl. Alone,
+unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-houses,
+the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table, watched with
+jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that poor relation of
+our landlady, who belongs to the class of women that like to catch others
+in mischief when they themselves are too mature for indiscretions, (as
+one sees old rogues turn to thief-catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie,
+clad in a complete suit of wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against
+the shafts of the great little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this
+commonplace household-life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the
+rainbow, whose name she borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its
+feeding flocks and herds of indifferent animals.
+
+These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as they
+will. The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally. The sitting-room
+has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who wish to meet may come
+together accidentally, (accidentally, I said, Madam, and I had not the
+slightest intention of Italicizing the word,) and discuss the social or
+political questions of the day, or any other subject that may prove
+interesting. Many charming conversations take place at the foot of the
+stairs, or while one of the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in
+the shadow of porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which
+some of our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
+the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles are
+in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never mention
+it.
+
+On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris. We were
+on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,--my left
+arm, of course. That leaves one's right arm free to defend the lovely
+creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish her from your
+side. Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a little, its mute
+language will not be without its meaning, as you will perceive when the
+arm you hold begins to tremble, a circumstance like to occur, if you
+happen to be a good-looking young fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to
+yourselves.
+
+We had it to ourselves that evening. The Koh-inoor, as we called him,
+was in a corner with our landlady's daughter. The young fellow John was
+smoking out in the yard. The gendarme was afraid of the evening air, and
+kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door, looked out and saw us
+walking together, gave his hat a pull over his forehead and stalked off.
+I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the arm I held, and saw the girl's
+head turn over her shoulder for a second. What a kind creature this is!
+She has no special interest in this youth, but she does not like to see a
+young fellow going off because he feels as if he were not wanted.
+
+She had her locked drawing-book under her arm.--Let me take it,--I said.
+
+She gave it to me to carry.
+
+This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.
+
+She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.
+
+I was there, of course?
+
+Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.
+
+Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+
+She would think of it.
+
+Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed it to
+me. This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see it. I am
+not afraid of you.
+
+I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me. At any rate, I
+took the book and hurried with it to my room. I opened it, and saw, in a
+few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+
+--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines suggested
+by the season.
+
+
+ MIDSUMMER.
+
+ Here! sweep these foolish leaves away,
+ I will not crush my brains to-day!
+ Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+ Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+ Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+ Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+ Its breath is heated;--I would swing
+ The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.
+
+ I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+ Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+ A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+ Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+ Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+ And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+ And spread some book not overwise
+ Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+ --Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
+ Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+ The pulse that flutters faint and low
+ When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+ O Nature! bare thy loving breast
+ And give thy child one hour of rest,
+ One little hour to lie unseen
+ Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+ So, curtained by a singing pine,
+ Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+ Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+ In sweeter music dies away.
+
+
+
+X
+
+ IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+ I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+ By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+ Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+ For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+ Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+ Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+ She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+ Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+ Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+ Yet lived, wrought, suffered. Lo, the pictured token!
+ Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+ Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+ She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+ Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+ And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+ Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+ Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+ Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+ Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+ What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+ Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+ And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+ Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+ Save me! oh, save me! Shall I die forgiven?
+
+ And then--Ah, God! But nay, it little matters
+ Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+ The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+ If she had--Well! She longed, and knew not wherefore
+ Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+ No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+ She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+ Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+ Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+ Vain? Let it be so! Nature was her teacher.
+ What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+ Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+ Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
+ And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+ And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+ --This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+ Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+ With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+ In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+ Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+ May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+ Sweet sister! Iris, who shall never name thee,
+ Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+ Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+ Spare her, I pray thee! If the maid is sleeping,
+ Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+ No more! She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+
+These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume. As I
+turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment. Is it quite fair to take
+advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of
+a young girl's nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers
+tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent
+waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might
+strive to pierce in vain? Why has the child trusted me with such artless
+confessions,--self-revelations, which might be whispered by trembling
+lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I
+cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred
+confidence?
+
+To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought. She
+did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was too
+profoundly innocent. Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes
+that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness. Having
+nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she said in her verses, no
+musical instrument to laugh and cry with her,--nothing, in short, but the
+language of pen and pencil,--all the veinings of her nature were
+impressed on these pages as those of a fresh leaf are transferred to the
+blank sheets which inclose it. It was the same thing which I remember
+seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had one
+day at our boarding-house. The child was a deaf mute. But its soul had
+the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which
+through natural organs realizes itself in words. Only it had to talk
+with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
+feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its face, I
+have never seen in any other human countenance.
+
+I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in the
+golden-blonde organization. There are a great many little
+creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
+transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs. The
+heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal. The
+central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through the
+whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body. Other little
+creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their
+surface. Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black, beady-eyes
+and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the model of them all.
+
+However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like this
+of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so transparent that the
+heart itself could be seen beating through it. I should say there never
+could have been such a book, but for one recollection, which is not
+peculiar to myself, but is shared by a certain number of my former
+townsmen. If you think I over-color this matter of the young girl's
+book, hear this, which there are others, as I just said, besides myself,
+will tell you is strictly true.
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+
+In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which dwelt
+Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a house
+inhabited by three maidens. They left no near kinsfolk, I believe;
+whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them; for they lived
+and died in all good report and maidenly credit. The house they lived in
+was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage pattern, after the shape of
+Esquires' houses, but after the size of the dwellings of handicraftsmen.
+The lower story was fitted up as a shop. Specially was it provided with
+one of those half-doors now so rarely met with, which are to whole doors
+as spencers worn by old folk are to coats. They speak of limited
+commerce united with a social or observing disposition--on the part of
+the shopkeeper,--allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping
+off such as have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold. On
+the door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
+perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has hanging
+among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some pairs of
+thick woollen stockings. More articles, but not very many, were stored
+inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's books, out of
+which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented with handsome
+cuts. This was the only purchase I ever knew to be made at the shop kept
+by the three maiden ladies, though it is probable there were others. So
+long as I remember the shop, the same scarf and, I should say, the same
+stockings hung on the door-posts.--You think I am exaggerating again, and
+that shopkeepers would not keep the same article exposed for years. Come
+to me, the Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in
+this city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
+where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it of the
+present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass alembic, which hung
+up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner of Cambridge and Chambers
+streets.]
+
+The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had claims
+to be considered a Beauty. When I saw them in the old meeting-house on
+Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in silks and satins, not
+gay, but more than decent, as I remember them, I thought of My Lady
+Bountiful in the history of "Little King Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize
+of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must have taken the hint of it from a
+pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in
+the collection of French songs before me). There was some story of an
+old romance in which the Beauty had played her part. Perhaps they all
+had had lovers; for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages,
+as I remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
+berry at the time of my first recollections.
+
+One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
+attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost nothing, and
+nobody to inherit it. Not absolutely nothing, of course. There must
+have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits of furniture, a Bible, and
+the spectacles the good old souls read it through, and little keepsakes,
+such as make us cry to look at, when we find them in old drawers;--such
+relics there must have been. But there was more. There was a manuscript
+of some hundred pages, closely written, in which the poor things had
+chronicled for many years the incidents of their daily life. After their
+death it was passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands. How I
+have cried and laughed and colored over it! There was nothing in it to
+be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such a
+picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do believe
+was never drawn before. And there were all the smallest incidents
+recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which die out of all
+mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the Egyptians or the Athenians
+lived crumble and leave only their temples standing. I know, for
+instance, that on a given day of a certain year, a kindly woman, herself
+a poor widow, now, I trust, not without special mercies in heaven for her
+good deeds,--for I read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a
+week ago,--sent a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden
+Sisters, who, I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description,
+were fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time. I know
+who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one of
+them compared to those huge barges to which we give the ungracious name
+of mudscows. But why should I illustrate further what it seems almost a
+breach of confidence to speak of? Some kind friend, who could challenge
+a nearer interest than the curious strangers into whose hands the book
+might fall, at last claimed it, and I was glad that it should be
+henceforth sealed to common eyes. I learned from it that every good and,
+alas! every evil act we do may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly
+record. I got a new lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds
+it so hard to learn. The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe
+and educate her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens. I
+remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and I felt
+sure that it was remembered elsewhere. I know there are prettier words
+than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went upon the record, I
+feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the treasury by that other
+poor widow whose deed the world shall remember forever, and with the
+coats and garments which the good women cried over, when Tabitha, called
+by interpretation Dorcas, lay dead in the upper chamber, with her
+charitable needlework strewed around her.
+
+--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters. You will believe me more
+readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one that
+lay open before me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes a
+drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic symbol of
+which I could make nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I remember,
+with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as naturally
+as a crack runs through a China bowl. On the next page a dead
+bird,--some little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a
+special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in
+my life I have had a letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is
+slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are
+somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with
+emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often she
+introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
+seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too
+little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her artist eye
+and pencil. By the side of the garden-flowers,--of Spring's curled
+darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of
+flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay, oftener than these, and more
+tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,--were those
+common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and
+our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that
+we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+
+Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we see
+them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling
+sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to
+the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes,
+with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the
+tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one after
+another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of
+decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the
+red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the
+white man's foot," as the Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of
+that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its
+life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as
+it clings to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many
+more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the
+pages were some musical notes. I touched them from curiosity on a piano
+belonging to one of our boarders. Strange! There are passages that I
+have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they
+were gasping for words to interpret them. She must have heard the
+strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor's
+chamber. The illuminated border she had traced round the page that held
+these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for.
+Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded
+and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side
+an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the
+other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops
+had a strange look,--one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she
+did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey,
+with his wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very next page
+a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of
+Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty every
+boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
+caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and one
+other.
+
+I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
+girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is a
+left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting Gladiator," the
+"Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the broad ring of the
+shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts of the
+"Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light,
+almost slender,--such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I
+never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on
+that statue.]--Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all
+the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when
+she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty
+or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A
+dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the
+"ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy
+in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion of
+the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough collar,
+echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. And here are
+twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves in their bowed
+necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white feathers; and
+grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot like cripples, and
+looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.--A
+very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist,
+and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own
+comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize
+what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the
+light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
+beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
+though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the
+circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise
+of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her
+friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.--That is nothing to
+another transcendental fancy of mine. I believe her soul thinks itself
+in his little crooked body at times,--if it does not really get freed or
+half freed from her own. Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? You know
+what I mean,--transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs
+taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to a
+lay-figure. She had been talking with him and listening to him one day
+when the boarders moved from the table nearly all at once. But she sat
+as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and
+still. I went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was
+beating naturally enough,--but she did not answer. I bent her arm; it
+was as plastic as softened wax, and kept the place I gave it.--This will
+never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead.
+She started and looked round.--I have been in a dream,--she said;--I
+feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me your hand!--She
+took my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough,
+but--Good Heaven! I believe she will crack my bones! All the nervous
+power in her body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a
+crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she who could hardly glove
+herself when in her common health. Iris turned pale, and the tears came
+to her eyes;--she saw she had given pain. Then she trembled, and might
+have fallen but for me;--the poor little soul had been in one of those
+trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly
+those of women.
+
+To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other
+which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the
+left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single
+bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be
+soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such
+as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have seen
+those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his
+nightmare vision, described by another as "cemeteries of departed
+greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining
+their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and
+mutilated inscriptions." Such a black dungeon faced the page that held
+the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was
+coiled,--what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not
+make out.
+
+I told you the young girl's soul was in this book. As I turned over the
+last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces
+among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran
+round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or
+manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed
+to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to
+me; there were features that did not seem new.--Can it be so? Was there
+ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's
+secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being
+questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in scores
+from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them
+accomplished and virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact. I
+began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret
+of a real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
+ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+
+Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the
+far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for
+scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's
+insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. I have frequently seen
+children, long exercised by pain and exhaustion, whose features had a
+strange look of advanced age. Too often one meets such in our charitable
+institutions. Their faces are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few
+summers were threescore years and ten.
+
+And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool and
+saddening as that of evening in more common lives. The profound
+melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
+
+ "I could lie down like a tired child
+ And weep away the life of care
+ Which I have borne and yet must bear."
+
+came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
+years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+
+I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this gift
+of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in
+words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and
+imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I
+am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I
+owe it to my--Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first
+calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+
+--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down. The world is always
+ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what
+to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly
+while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like
+a lamb. It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of
+the whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood
+makes it hard to train.
+
+Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely, that
+it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and therefore
+more distinctly human in its character. Genius, on the other hand, is
+much more like those instincts which govern the admirable movements of
+the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of the lower
+or animal character. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal
+Geographical Society could not mend. A poet, like the goose, sails
+without visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which
+philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his
+track by observation; the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the
+straighter and swifter line.
+
+And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest instinct
+more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the suggestion of
+reason? What is a bee's architecture but an unobstructed divine
+thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule but an obstructed
+thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect copy of some absolute
+rule Divine Wisdom has established, transmitted through a human soul as
+an image through clouded glass?
+
+Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but
+rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius
+very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of
+dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual
+insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's
+vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private
+truth.
+
+--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making their
+way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius, and very
+likely do not want to know any more. For a divine instinct, such as
+drives the goose southward and the poet heavenward, is a hard thing to
+manage, and proves too strong for many whom it possesses. It must have
+been a terrible thing to have a friend like Chatterton or Burns. And
+here is a being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and
+artist in tendency, if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and
+genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as
+you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot
+keep pace with its evolution.
+
+I think now you know something of this young person. She wants nothing
+but an atmosphere to expand in. Now and then one meets with a nature for
+which our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly
+incompetent. It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by accident in one
+of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow into flower among
+the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that surround it. There is no
+question that certain persons who are born among us find themselves many
+degrees too far north. Tropical by organization, they cannot fight for
+life with our eastern and northwestern breezes without losing the color
+and fragrance into which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude
+of myrtles and oranges. Strange effects are produced by suffering any
+living thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
+intended for it. A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
+water in the dark. Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they did
+not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth, and so
+become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles. I have seen
+a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or embryos; nay, I am
+afraid we Protestants should look on a considerable proportion of the
+Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-nine millions as spiritual larvae,
+sculling about in the dark by the aid of their caudal extremities,
+instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of
+taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it. Of
+course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear
+they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool
+where they have been bred and fed! Never! Never. Never?
+
+Now to go back to our plant. You may know, that, for the earlier stages
+of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air, water, light,
+and warmth. But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles
+as a part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil;--your
+pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron,--your
+asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do. Just at the period of
+adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to
+set its fruit. Then it is that many young natures, having exhausted the
+spiritual soil round them of all it contains of the elements they demand,
+wither away, undeveloped and uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
+
+Pray for these dear young souls! This is the second natural birth;--for
+I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which form the
+point of transition in many lives between the consciousness of a general
+relation to the Divine nature and a special personal relation. The
+litany should count a prayer for them in the list of its supplications;
+masses should be said for them as for souls in purgatory; all good
+Christians should remember them as they remember those in peril through
+travel or sickness or in warfare.
+
+I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will. She
+should ripen under an Italian sun. She should walk under the frescoed
+vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of Venetian
+beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with the Greek
+marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil. Has she not exhausted
+this lean soil of the elements her growing nature requires?
+
+I do not know. The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on Cape
+Ann, many degrees out of its proper region. I was riding once along that
+delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we passed a thicket
+where there seemed to be a chance of finding it. In five minutes I had
+fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet,
+resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern
+Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored,
+unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions,"
+looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all
+trodden out and the colored fringe worn from all its border.
+
+If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet
+or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the
+gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs
+up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much
+reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it
+hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold
+atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity?
+
+Take the poet. On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
+poetical faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of
+sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky,
+the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope and vision
+of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in poetry in every
+soul which has anything of the divine gift.
+
+On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life, in
+distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New England
+life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some things I
+think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not unpatriotic
+to mention them in this point of view as they come before us in so many
+other aspects.
+
+There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
+grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
+Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
+Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
+arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows? who
+cares? There is no history to the red race,--there is hardly an
+individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk--there
+is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all
+red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life
+that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our
+southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe or
+fly in; he meets
+
+ "A vast vacuity! all unawares,
+ Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+ Ten thousand fathom deep."
+
+But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of ancient
+civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in
+the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and
+beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In
+Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,--Rome, under
+her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as we contemplate her in the
+shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man
+human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in
+step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead
+man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them. There is nothing like the
+dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us
+into the solemn flow of the life of our race. Rousseau came out of one
+of his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
+old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+
+I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad
+village. The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses, the spacious
+brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of youthful and leggy
+trees before it, are exhilarating. They speak of progress, and the time
+when there shall be a city, with a His Honor the Mayor, in the place of
+their trim but transient architectural growths. Pardon me, if I prefer
+the pyramids. They seem to me crystals formed from a stronger solution
+of humanity than the steeple of the new meeting-house. I may be wrong,
+but the Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons
+Alius, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying
+round the piles of West Boston Bridge.
+
+Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
+migratory race. A poet wants a home. He can dispense with an
+apple-parer and a reaping-machine. I feel this more for others than for
+myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet exempted
+from the change which has invaded almost everything around it.
+
+--Pardon me a short digression. To what small things our memory and our
+affections attach themselves! I remember, when I was a child, that one
+of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner
+of our front-yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered in other
+lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people. But after
+many years, as I looked on the little front-yard again, it occurred to me
+that there used to be some Star-of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.
+The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like
+grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and
+brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked
+the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
+monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in
+her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there
+still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the
+elms and rooted in the matted turf.
+
+Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as
+that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
+remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a
+whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard,
+insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This intussusception
+of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among
+the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the
+thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where
+Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I
+have seen it in the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline
+matter.
+
+But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling. Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling
+of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I
+saw in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long as
+I remember the sky and stars. That clump of peonies, butting their
+purple heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and
+by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough to
+make a double handful of leaves, has come up in just that place, Neighbor
+Walrus tells me, for more years than I have passed on this planet. It is
+a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood
+and its immediate neighborhood thus unchanged. Many born poets, I am
+afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too
+often transplanted.
+
+Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
+voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
+without elasticity or oil. I wish it were fair to print a letter a young
+girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since. "I am *** ***
+***," she says, and tells her whole name outright. Ah!--said I, when I
+read that first frank declaration,--you are one of the right sort!--She
+was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired
+the poor girl was of the dull life about her,--the old woman's "skeleton
+hand" at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,--"Ma'am shooing away
+the hens,"--the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country eyes
+can stare,--a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's
+half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for
+her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so
+hard to give a soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the
+fullest and sweetest human affections! Too often they fling their hearts
+away on unworthy objects. Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth. The
+immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's heart
+ache. How many women are born too finely organized in sense and soul for
+the highway they must walk with feet unshod! Life is adjusted to the
+wants of the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in
+its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the stride of man,
+and not of woman.
+
+Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the
+great medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used to
+find their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New
+England,--but not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it. I will not
+believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way. Providence will
+find her some great happiness, or affliction, or duty,--and which would
+be best for her, I cannot tell. One thing is sure: the interest she
+takes in her little neighbor is getting to be more engrossing than ever.
+Something is the matter with him, and she knows it, and I think worries
+herself about it.
+
+I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
+fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant. He accounts for it in
+his own way.
+
+The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.--Used
+up, Sir,--breathed over and over again. You must come to this side, Sir,
+for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays. Did not worthy Mr. Higginson
+say that a breath of New England's air is better than a sup of Old
+England's ale? I ought to have died when I was a boy, Sir; but I could
+n't die in this Boston air,--and I think I shall have to go to New York
+one of these days, when it's time for me to drop this bundle,--or to New
+Orleans, where they have the yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where
+they have so many doctors.
+
+This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before said,
+to be ailing. An experienced eye, such as I think I may call mine, can
+tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long before he or
+his friends are alarmed about him. I don't like it.
+
+Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed look
+upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the
+degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It
+is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. Luckily for
+our friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school
+ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or look.
+
+Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to me
+that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and darker over
+his countenance. Nature is struggling with something, and I am afraid
+she is under in the wrestling-match. You do not care much, perhaps, for
+my particular conjectures as to the nature of his difficulty. I should
+say, however, from the sudden flushes to which he is subject, and certain
+other marks which, as an expert, I know how to interpret, that his heart
+was in trouble; but then he presses his hand to the right side, as if
+there were the centre of his uneasiness.
+
+When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances
+than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality. I mean some
+actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and
+painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time for
+a single shriek,--as when the shot broke through the brave Captain
+Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with a
+loud cry he dropped dead from his saddle.
+
+I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to some who
+were entitled to be warned. The landlady's face fell when I mentioned my
+fears.
+
+Poor man!--she said.--And will leave the best room empty! Has n't he got
+any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he should be
+took away? Such a sight of cases, full of everything! Never thought of
+his failin' so suddin. A complication of diseases, she expected.
+Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+
+After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to be
+poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
+taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--after
+this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement of
+curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of the
+complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who may
+happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better feelings
+struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed invalid,
+until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a channel worn
+for them since the early days of her widowhood.
+
+Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil! Of all
+the trials which those who take charge of others' health and lives have
+to undergo, this is the most painful. It is all so plain to the
+practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting mother, who has
+never suspected anything, or at least has clung always to the hope which
+you are just going to wrench away from her!--I must tell Iris that I
+think her poor friend is in a precarious state. She seems nearer to him
+than anybody.
+
+I did tell her. Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still face,
+except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.--Could I be certain that
+there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not be certain; but it
+looked alarming to me.--He shall have some of my life,--she said.
+
+I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic power
+she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she wills her
+strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and color from that
+day. I have sometimes thought he gained the force she lost; but this may
+have been a whim, very probably.
+
+One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale. Her lips moved, as
+if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a word. Her hair
+looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes were full of wild
+light. She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was falling into one of her
+trances. Something had frozen her blood with fear; I thought, from what
+she said, half audibly, that she believed she had seen a shrouded figure.
+
+That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the Little
+Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill. Bridget, the servant, went before
+me with a light. The doors were both unfastened, and I found myself
+ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the mysterious
+apartment I had so longed to enter.
+
+I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others. I give
+them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+
+
+ UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+ Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+ No more her pulses come and go;
+ Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+ Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+ And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+ But not beneath a graven stone,
+ To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+ A slender cross of wood alone
+ Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+ In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+ And gray old trees of hugest limb
+ Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+ To make the scorching sunlight dim
+ That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+ And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+ When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+ And through their leaves the robins call,
+ And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+ The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+ Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+ For her the morning choir shall sing
+ Its matins from the branches high,
+ And every minstrel voice of spring,
+ That trills beneath the April sky,
+ Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+ When, turning round their dial-track,
+ Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+ Her little mourners, clad in black,
+ The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+ Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+ At last the rootlets of the trees
+ Shall find the prison where she lies,
+ And bear the buried dust they seize
+ In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+ So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+ If any, born of kindlier blood,
+ Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+ Say only this: A tender bud,
+ That tried to blossom in the snow,
+ Lies withered where the violets blow.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading, what has
+been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months. I cannot tell, of
+course, whether you are a nervous person or not. If, however, you are
+such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all the rest of the household
+have gone off to bed,--if the wind is shaking your windows as if a human
+hand were rattling the sashes,--if your candle or lamp is low and will
+soon burn out,--let me advise you to take up some good quiet sleepy
+volume, or attack the "Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave
+this to be read by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near
+by who would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a
+lump on the floor.
+
+I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+confess, when I entered the dim chamber. Did I not tell you that I was
+sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with thinking what
+were the strange movements and sounds which I heard late at night in my
+little neighbor's apartment? It had come to that pass that I was truly
+unable to separate what I had really heard from what I had dreamed in
+those nightmares to which I have been subject, as before mentioned. So,
+when I walked into the room, and Bridget, turning back, closed the door
+and left me alone with its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a
+nutmeg on my skin, such a "goose-flesh" shiver ran over it. It was not
+fear, but what I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as
+when, for instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count
+fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes doubtful
+whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely flurried, and his
+imagination pictures life and death and heaven and hell as the issues
+depending on the completion or non-completion of the fifty he is
+counting. Extreme curiosity will excite some people as much as fear, or
+what resembles fear, acts on some other less impressible natures.
+
+I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little conjurer's
+room. Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor invalid's chamber but
+some old furniture, such as they say came over in the Mayflower. All
+this is just what I mean to, find out while I am looking at the Little
+Gentleman, who has suddenly become my patient. The simplest things turn
+out to be unfathomable mysteries; the most mysterious appearances prove
+to be the most commonplace objects in disguise.
+
+I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are ever
+moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the rocks and
+fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities. I have my
+suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a brickbat," composed
+of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any more tearful or
+philosophical contemplations than boys of less favored regions expend on
+the same performance. Yet a lump of puddingstone is a thing to look at,
+to think about, to study over, to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat
+one's brains out against. Look at that pebble in it. From what cliff was
+it broken? On what beach rolled by the waves of what ocean? How and
+when imbedded in soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was
+lifted into bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on
+Meetinghouse-Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces
+left when the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the
+continent with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks
+out of it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+
+Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any
+bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little
+worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the
+stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks
+magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its
+centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and
+by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,--life
+beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with
+the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source of
+life and light.
+
+A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their
+mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag,
+or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common
+enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think of
+"brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.
+
+But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain,
+when we can get at them so as to turn them over. How many ghosts that
+"thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung out to dry! How
+many mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have
+horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
+
+--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter
+with the patient. That is what I say to myself, as I draw a chair to the
+bedside. The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany four-poster. It was
+never that which made the noise of something moving. It is too heavy to
+be pushed about the room.--The Little Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up
+by pillows, with his hands clasped and their united palms resting on the
+back of the head, one of the three or four positions specially affected
+by persons whose breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or
+other causes.
+
+Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down! I have come to the hill Difficulty,
+Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was laborious and
+interrupted.
+
+Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I proceeded to
+"prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which you know is at the
+bottom of all these attacks, though we do not always find it. I suppose
+I go to work pretty much like other professional folks of my temperament.
+Thus:
+
+Wrist, if you please.--I was on his right side, but he presented his left
+wrist, crossing it over the other.--I begin to count, holding watch in
+left hand. One, two, three, four,--What a handsome hand! wonder if that
+splendid stone is a carbuncle.--One, two, three, four, five, six,
+seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark, except one white object.--One,
+two, three, four,--Hang it! eighty or ninety in the minute, I
+guess.--Tongue, if you please.--Tongue is put out. Forget to look at it,
+or, rather, to take any particular notice of it;--but what is that white
+object, with the long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just
+as Vesalius and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their
+skeletons? I don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what
+should he have it in his chamber for? As I had found his pulse irregular
+and intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
+for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over the
+place where the heart beats. I missed the usual beat of the organ.--How
+is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He took the stethoscope
+and shifted it across to the right side; there was a displacement of the
+organ.--I am ill-packed,--he said;--there was no room for my heart in its
+place as it is with other men.--God help him!
+
+It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the desire
+for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his condition. I must
+look at this patient's chest, and thump it and listen to it. For this is
+a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--displacement of the heart; and it is
+n't every day you get a chance to overhaul such an interesting
+malformation. And so I managed to do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at
+the same time. The torso was slight and deformed; the right arm
+attenuated,--the left full, round, and of perfect symmetry. It had run
+away with the life of the other limbs,--a common trick enough of
+Nature's, as I told you before. If you see a man with legs withered from
+childhood, keep out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with
+him. He has the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it
+is an arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+haunch, where it should have started from.
+
+Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search all
+parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
+before.--Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral valves
+(professional terms you need not attend to).--What the deuse is that long
+case for? Got his witch grandmother mummied in it? And three big
+mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came over me which I had
+had once before,--that he might be one of our modern alchemists,--you
+understand, make gold, you know, or what looks like it, sometimes with
+the head of a king or queen or of Liberty to embellish one side of the
+piece.--Don't I remember hearing him shut a door and lock it once? What
+do you think was kept under that lock? Let's have another look at his
+hand, to see if there are any calluses.
+
+One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by just
+taking a look at his open hand. Ah! Four calluses at the end of the
+fingers of the right hand. None on those of the left. Ah, ha! What do
+those mean?
+
+All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in fact.
+While I was making these observations of the objects around me, I was
+also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which I had to deal.
+
+There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
+followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute and out go all
+three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the
+fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is soon
+stagnation, cold, and darkness. The "tripod of life" a French
+physiologist called these three organs. It is all clear enough which leg
+of the tripod is going to break down here. I could tell you exactly what
+the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible and amusing as a
+watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper to a ploughman. It is
+enough to say, that I found just what I expected to, and that I think
+this attack is only the prelude of more serious consequences,--which
+expression means you very well know what.
+
+And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely come
+out. If I have made a mystery where there was none, my suspicions will
+be shamed, as they have often been before. If there is anything strange,
+my visits will clear it up.
+
+I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed, after
+giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove, which an
+imaginative French professor has called the "Opium of the Heart." Under
+their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy, half-waking slumber,
+the body fighting hard for every breath, and the mind wandering off in
+strange fancies and old recollections, which escaped from his lips in
+broken sentences.
+
+--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God! And the
+grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been straight. Dig
+it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as long as other folks'
+graves. And mind you get the sods flat, old man,--flat as ever a
+straight-backed young fellow was laid under. And then, with a good tall
+slab at the head, and a foot-stone six foot away from it, it'll look just
+as if there was a man underneath.
+
+A man! Who said he was a man? No more men of that pattern to bear his
+name!--Used to be a good-looking set enough.--Where 's all the manhood
+and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the strongest man
+that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah there the handsomest
+woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+
+--Give me some light,--he said,--more light. I want to see the picture.
+
+He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie. I was not
+unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had lighted
+an astral lamp that stood on a table.--He pointed to a portrait hanging
+against the wall.--Look at her,--he said,--look at her! Wasn't that a
+pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+
+The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years old,
+perhaps. There were few pictures of any merit painted in New England
+before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what artist could
+have taken this half-length, which was evidently from life. It was
+somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure and the sweetness of
+the expression reminded me of the angels of the early Florentine
+painters. She must have been of some consideration, for she was dressed
+in paduasoy and lace with hanging sleeves, and the old carved frame
+showed how the picture had been prized by its former owners. A proud eye
+she had, with all her sweetness.--I think it was that which hanged her,
+as his strong arm hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been
+a little mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
+rather than a deformity. You know, I suppose, that nursling imps addict
+themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these little
+excrescences. "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young woman was
+one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen you make fun
+of them in those days!--Then she had a brooch in her bodice, that might
+have been taken for some devilish amulet or other; and she wore a ring
+upon one of her fingers, with a red stone in it, that flamed as if the
+painter had dipped his pencil in fire;--who knows but that it was given
+her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and licensed for
+a season to leave his couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of
+earthly maidens and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching
+kisses?
+
+She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she and I
+are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go. They never painted
+me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me with chalk on the
+board-fences. They said the doctors would want my skeleton when I was
+dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor,--a'n't you?
+
+I just gave him my hand. I had not the heart to speak.
+
+I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
+yonder. Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over the
+first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to keep the
+wolves from digging them up? I never slept easy over the sod;--I should
+like to lie quiet under it. And besides,--he said, in a kind of scared
+whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared at, as my body has been.
+I don't doubt I was a remarkable case; but, for God's sake, oh, for God's
+sake, don't let 'em make a show of the cage I have been shut up in and
+looked through the bars of for so many years.
+
+I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted and
+indifferent to human suffering. I am willing to own that there is often
+a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
+theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last. It does not
+commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of thrusting
+knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with red-hot irons, any
+more than it improves them to hold the blinding-white cantery of Gehenna
+by its cool handle and score and crisp young souls with it until they are
+scorched into the belief of--Transubstantiation or the Immaculate
+Conception. And, to say the plain truth, I think there are a good many
+coarse people in both callings. A delicate nature will not commonly
+choose a pursuit which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so
+readily as some gentler office. Yet, while I am writing this paragraph,
+there passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
+though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval glass of
+his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and standing, so
+friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways, that, if he had
+not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one would have said he was
+of too kindly a mould to be the minister of pain, even if he were saving
+pain.
+
+You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the task
+of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and
+truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience. They become
+less nervous, but more sympathetic. They have a truer sensibility for
+others' pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of
+science. I have said this without claiming any special growth in
+humanity for myself, though I do hope I grow tenderer in my feelings as I
+grow older. At any rate, this was not a time in which professional
+habits could keep down certain instincts of older date than these.
+
+This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
+rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if his
+ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones to
+be laid in the dust, touched my heart. But I felt bound to speak
+cheerily.
+
+--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust we
+can help it. But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see that
+your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and buttercups blow
+over you.
+
+He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a vague
+consciousness that he might have been saying more than he meant for
+anybody's ears.--I have been talking a little wild, Sir, eh? he
+said.--There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops of yours, and
+I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than I would have it,
+Sir. But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's the truth of the matter,
+and it does rather please me to think that fifty years from now nobody
+will know that the place where I lie does n't hold as stout and straight
+a man as the best of 'em that stretch out as if they were proud of the
+room they take. You may get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it
+worth while to try; but I tell you there has been no time for this many a
+year when the smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the
+flowers that grow out of it. There's no anodyne like your good clean
+gravel, Sir. But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to
+try, you may show your skill upon me, if you like. There is a pleasure
+or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not far
+off, at best.--I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me, and come,
+if you like, in the morning.
+
+Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment. The
+beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often do, with
+a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes. The drapery fluttered on
+the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the window;--a crack
+of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind stirred the hanging
+folds. In my excited state, I seemed to see something ominous in that
+arm pointing to the heavens. I thought of the figures in the Dance of
+Death at Basle, and that other on the panels of the covered Bridge at
+Lucerne, and it seemed to me that the grim mask who mingles with every
+crowd and glides over every threshold was pointing the sick man to his
+far home, and would soon stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag
+him on the unmeasured journey towards it.
+
+The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+entered the chamber. The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
+these two objects. They were enough. The house was deadly still, and
+the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as from a field
+of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking corridor. As I turned
+into the common passage, a white figure, holding a lamp, stood full
+before me. I thought at first it was one of those images made to stand
+in niches and hold a light in their hands. But the illusion was
+momentary, and my eyes speedily recovered from the shock of the bright
+flame and snowy drapery to see that the figure was a breathing one. It
+was Iris, in one of her statue-trances. She had come down, whether
+sleeping or waking, I knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her
+she was wanted,--or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the
+sound of our movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant
+that there was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand. I sometimes
+think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom they
+cannot see or hear, are in suffering. How surely we find them at the
+bedside of the dying! How strongly does Nature plead for them, that we
+should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh away our last upon
+their faithful breasts!
+
+With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the starlight
+knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save that she had
+twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still as a stone before
+me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of waxtaper, and in the other a
+silver goblet. I held my own lamp close to her, as if she had been a
+figure of marble, and she did not stir. There was no breach of propriety
+then, to scare the Poor Relation with and breed scandal out of. She had
+been "warned in a dream," doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and
+the sounds which had reached her exalted sense. There was nothing more
+natural than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and
+lighted her taper, and found the silver goblet with "Ex dono pupillorum"
+on it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her
+childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
+bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay, unknowing
+whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank eyes seeing
+nothing but the vision that beckoned her along.--Well, I must wake her
+from her slumber or trance.--I called her name, but she did not heed my
+voice.
+
+The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl
+before I died, and now was my chance. She never would know it, and I
+should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose
+perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in memory
+of that immortal moment! Would it wake her from her trance? and would
+she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise me
+ever after? Or should I carry off my trophy undetected, and always from
+that time say to myself, when I looked upon her in the glory of youth and
+the splendor of beauty, "My lips have touched those roses and made their
+sweetness mine forever"? You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my
+eyes were glittering with this midnight flash of opportunity. On the
+contrary, I believe I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.
+Ah, it is the pale passions that are the fiercest,--it is the violence of
+the chill that gives the measure of the fever! The fighting-boy of our
+school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with the
+bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his bloodless cheeks
+meant,--the blood was all in his stout heart,--he was a slight boy, and
+there was not enough to redden his face and fill his heart both at once.
+
+Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the internal
+conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more than juvenile and
+something less than senile, as to whether he should be guilty of an
+impropriety, and, if he were, whether he would get caught in his
+indiscretion. And yet the memory of the kiss that Margaret of Scotland
+gave to Alain Chartier has lasted four hundred years, and put it into the
+head of many an ill-favored poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do
+as much by him, if she happened to pass him when he was asleep. And have
+we ever forgotten that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled
+under the lips of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not
+think to leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
+bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time? The sound
+of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal
+longer.
+
+There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind
+suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is taking an
+enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance
+slip through his fingers. Iris woke up, of her own accord, before I had
+made up my mind what I was going to do about it.
+
+When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at all
+for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the impulse,
+I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it. She did not know
+what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in such guise, and me
+staring at her. She looked down at her white robe and bare feet, and
+colored,--then at the goblet she held in her hand, then at the taper; and
+at last her thoughts seemed to clear up.
+
+I know it all,--she said.--He is going to die, and I must go and sit by
+him. Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody else to care
+for.
+
+I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest, and
+persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do harm.
+Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the morning.
+There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority; and the young
+girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her own chamber.
+
+The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in my
+cheeks. The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded gradually
+from my imagination, and I returned to the still perplexing mysteries of
+my little neighbor's chamber.
+
+All was still there now. No plaintive sounds, no monotonous murmurs, no
+shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if something or
+somebody were coming in or going out, or there was something to be hidden
+in those dark mahogany presses. Is there an inner apartment that I have
+not seen? The way in which the house is built might admit of it. As I
+thought it over, I at once imagined a Bluebeard's chamber. Suppose, for
+instance, that the narrow bookshelves to the right are really only a
+masked door, such as we remember leading to the private study of one of
+our most distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
+library to that little silent cell. If this were lighted from above, a
+person or persons might pass their days there without attracting
+attention from the household, and wander where they pleased at night,--to
+Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I said to myself, laughing,
+and pulling the bed-clothes over my head. There is no logic in
+superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams. A she-ghost wouldn't want
+an inner chamber to herself. A live woman, with a valuable soprano
+voice, wouldn't start off at night to sprain her ankles over the old
+graves of the North-End cemetery.
+
+It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page
+in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine
+unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my head.
+I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it is
+reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think
+about, in the dark, and when he is alone, and his whole body seems but
+one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the phosphorescent flashes of his
+own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in the direction of the last strange
+noise,--what he actually does think about, as he lies and recalls all the
+wild stories his head is full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming
+conjectures to account for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense
+laughing them to scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to
+them, under one shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish,
+and remembers how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and tuck
+him up and go and sit within call, so that she could hear him at any
+minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her. Old babies that we
+are!
+
+Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful. I longed
+for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever. So, between my
+fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of it, and came down
+tired to the breakfast-table. My visit was not to be made until after
+this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so the servant was ordered
+to tell me.
+
+It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of Iris
+had been unoccupied.--You might jest as well take away that chair,--said
+our landlady,--he'll never want it again. He acts like a man that 's
+struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever come out of his
+chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a corpse.--These good women
+do put things so plainly! There were two or three words in her short
+remark that always sober people, and suggest silence or brief moral
+reflections.
+
+--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled in her
+social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of human
+history.
+
+--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John, so
+called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple like
+that. He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a turtle
+that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people that know
+how to lift better than I do. Ask him if he don't want any watchers. I
+don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl. I was up all night twice
+last month.
+
+[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch absorbed
+on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the time];--but the
+offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question how he would like
+sitting up without the punch and the company and the songs and smoking.
+He means what he says, and it would be a more considerable achievement
+for him to sit quietly all night by a sick man than for a good many other
+people. I tell you this odd thing: there are a good many persons, who,
+through the habit of making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault
+with all their cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to
+comfort in general, even in their own persons. The correlative to loving
+our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.
+Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants, and then
+themselves. So I think it more for a lively young fellow to be ready to
+play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn martyrs who have
+taken a spite against themselves and love to gratify it by fasting and
+watching.
+
+--The time came at last for me to make my visit. I found Iris sitting by
+the Little Gentleman's pillow. To my disappointment, the room was
+darkened. He did not like the light, and would have the shutters kept
+nearly closed. It was good enough for me; what business had I to be
+indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to do but to exercise such
+skill as I possessed for the benefit of my patient? There was not much
+to be said or done in such a case; but I spoke as encouragingly as I
+could, as I think we are always bound to do. He did not seem to pay any
+very anxious attention, but the poor girl listened as if her own life and
+more than her own life were depending on the words I uttered. She
+followed me out of the room, when I had got through my visit.
+
+How long?--she said.
+
+Uncertain. Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.--One
+of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be sudden or
+slow.
+
+The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble. But
+Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she, and kept
+her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted that she'd be
+killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to give up, if she
+didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+
+At the table we were graver than common. The high chair was set back
+against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl and her
+nearest neighbor's on the right. But the next morning, to our great
+surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very quietly moved his
+own chair to the vacant place. I thought he was creeping down that way,
+but I was not prepared for a leap spanning such a tremendous parenthesis
+of boarders as this change of position included. There was no denying
+that the youth and maiden were a handsome pair, as they sat side by side.
+But whatever the young girl may have thought of her new neighbor she
+never seemed for a moment to forget the poor little friend who had been
+taken from her side. There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of
+no use to talk. One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of
+his cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest,
+as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own
+work. It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by any
+special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of a nurse.
+She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this matter. And it
+so proved that it called for much patience and long endurance to carry
+through the duties, say rather the kind offices, the painful pleasures,
+which she had chosen as her share in the household where accident had
+thrown her. She had that genius of ministration which is the special
+province of certain women, marked even among their helpful sisters by a
+soft, low voice, a quiet footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a
+ready self-surrender to the objects of their care, which such trifles as
+their own food, sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere
+with. Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
+she kept her place by the pillow.
+
+That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little Gentleman
+to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't call in all the
+resources of your art to get me off as soon as may be. I shall wear her
+out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber and watching when she ought
+to be sleeping, if you leave me to the care of Nature without dosing me.
+
+This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances. But there
+are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with the larger
+laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life becomes to them as
+death and death as life.--How am I getting along?--he said, another
+morning. He lifted his shrivelled hand, with the death's-head ring on
+it, and looked at it with a sad sort of complacency. By this one
+movement, which I have seen repeatedly of late, I know that his thoughts
+have gone before to another condition, and that he is, as it were,
+looking back on the infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.
+For, when he was well, one might see him often looking at the handsome
+hand with the flaming jewel on one of its fingers. The single
+well-shaped limb was the source of that pleasure which in some form or
+other Nature almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.
+Handsome hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant
+voice, strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that
+have not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
+good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite forgotten
+them! But now he was thinking of that other state, where, free from all
+mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden should be only as
+that of the case he has shed to the insect whose "deep-damasked wings"
+beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers, as he flutters in the
+ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown summer glories.
+
+No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium, where the
+desire to live and that to depart just balance each other. If one has a
+house, which he has lived and always means to live in, he pleases himself
+with the thought of all the conveniences it offers him, and thinks little
+of its wants and imperfections. But once having made up his mind to move
+to a better, every incommodity starts out upon him, until the very
+ground-plan of it seems to have changed in his mind, and his thoughts and
+affections, each one of them packing up its little bundle of
+circumstances, have quitted their several chambers and nooks and migrated
+to the new home, long before its apartments are ready to receive their
+coming tenant. It is so with the body. Most persons have died before
+they expire,--died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is
+only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted
+mansion. The fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of
+dying persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
+airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first cry,
+is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness the last
+period of life. Almost always there is a preparation made by Nature for
+unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there is for the removal
+of a milktooth. The roots which hold human life to earth are absorbed
+before it is lifted from its place. Some of the dying are weary and want
+rest, the idea of which is almost inseparable in the universal mind from
+death. Some are in pain, and want to be rid of it, even though the
+anodyne be dropped, as in the legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.
+Some are stupid, mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without
+long tossing about. And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as
+they draw near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the
+caravan moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send
+word along the file that water is in sight. Though each little party
+that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to
+which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it
+been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed which
+recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by their march
+through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of Life, and thought
+they heard its murmurs as they lay dying.
+
+The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
+future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and not
+insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by illness, on
+the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted by science,
+before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we call death, has
+set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of sickness. There is a
+singular sagacity very often shown in a patient's estimate of his own
+vital force. His physician knows the state of his material frame well
+enough, perhaps,--that this or that organ is more or less impaired or
+disintegrated; but the patient has a sense that he can hold out so much
+longer,--sometimes that he must and will live for a while, though by the
+logic of disease he ought to die without any delay.
+
+The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that his
+remaining days were few. I told the household what to expect. There was
+a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders, in various
+modes, according to their characters and style of sympathy. The landlady
+was urgent that he should try a certain nostrum which had saved
+somebody's life in jest sech a case. The Poor Relation wanted me to
+carry, as from her, a copy of "Allein's Alarm," etc. I objected to the
+title, reminding her that it offended people of old, so that more than
+twice as many of the book were sold when they changed the name to "A Sure
+Guide to Heaven." The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has
+come to the time of life when many old men cry easily, and forget their
+tears as children do.--He was a worthy gentleman,--he said,--a very
+worthy gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate. Sadly deformed
+about the spine and the feet. Had an impression that the late Lord Byron
+had some malformation of this kind. Had heerd there was something the
+matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man of
+talents. This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents. Could not always
+agree with his statements,--thought he was a little over-partial to this
+city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry to lose him,--and
+if--there was anything--he--could--. In the midst of these kind
+expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-noor, as we called
+him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how the old boy was likely
+to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was going to leave behind.
+
+The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a diabolish
+snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead.--To this the
+Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult him. Whereto
+the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r intentions one way
+or t'other.-The Kohi-noor then suggested the young man's stepping out
+into the yard, that he, the speaker, might "slap his chops."--Let 'em
+alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon be over, and they won't hurt
+each other much.--So they went out.
+
+The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one quarrels
+with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man down, and there
+is the end of it. Now those who have watched such encounters are aware
+of two things: first, that it is not so easy to knock a man down as it is
+to talk about it; secondly, that, if you do happen to knock a man down,
+there is a very good chance that he will be angry, and get up and give
+you a thrashing.
+
+So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into the
+yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung his arm
+round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in the noble art,
+expecting the young fellow John to drop when his fist, having completed a
+quarter of a circle, should come in contact with the side of that young
+man's head. Unfortunately for this theory, it happens that a blow struck
+out straight is as much shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the
+rustic's swinging blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a
+circle. The mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the
+Koh-i-noor felt something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye,
+which something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
+sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
+young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow had
+nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit he got and
+the blow he missed, he tripped and "went to grass," so far as the
+back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that vegetable. It was
+a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so frequent in young and
+ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and negative pectorals, that
+they can settle most little quarrels on the spot by "knocking the man
+down."
+
+We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
+blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
+unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of
+seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor,
+half-sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
+and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies. A person
+not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover from this
+surprise. The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and still a little
+confused by the smart hit he had received, but furious, and confident of
+victory over a young fellow a good deal lighter than himself, made a
+desperate rush to bear down all before him and finish the contest at
+once. That is the way all angry greenhorns and incompetent persons
+attempt to settle matters. It does n't do, if the other fellow is only
+cool, moderately quick, and has a very little science. It didn't do this
+time; for, as the assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere,
+like the vans of a windmill, he ran a prominent feature of his face
+against a fist which was travelling in the other direction, and
+immediately after struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a
+severe blow with the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one
+branch of science and the bread-basket to another. This second round
+closed the battle. The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases is
+more than as good as a feast. The young fellow asked him if he was
+satisfied, and held out his hand. But the other sulked, and muttered
+something about revenge.--Jest as ye like,--said the young man
+John.--Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours 'n' 't'll
+take down the swellin'. (Mouse is a technical term for a bluish, oblong,
+rounded elevation occasioned by running one's forehead or eyebrow against
+another's knuckles.) The young fellow was particularly pleased that he
+had had an opportunity of trying his proficiency in the art of
+self-defence without the gloves. The Koh-i-noor did not favor us with
+his company for a day or two, being confined to his chamber, it was said,
+by a slight feverish, attack. He was chop-fallen always after this, and
+got negligent in his person. The impression must have been a deep one;
+for it was observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and
+whiskers had turned visibly white about the roots. In short, it
+disgraced him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to
+drinking, of which he had been for some time suspected. This, and the
+disgust which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has
+been "licked by a fellah not half his size," induced the landlady's
+daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
+programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.
+
+I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting to
+sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston. After a man
+begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
+Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him. Poor Edgar Poe
+died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of talking; and so
+sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to this pass, you had
+better begin praying for him, and stop lending him money, for he is on
+his last legs. Remember poor Edgar! He is dead and gone; but the
+State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and the Frog-Pond has got a
+fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into the air and glorifies that
+humble sheet with a fine display of provincial rainbows.
+
+--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number. I expected to gratify your
+curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these puzzles, doubts,
+fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call them, of mine. Next month
+you shall hear all about it.
+
+--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber. As I paused
+at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing. It was
+not the wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was
+the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word. I had seen
+the verses in her book; the melody was new to me. Let me finish my
+page with them.
+
+
+ HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+ O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+ Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+ On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+ We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+ Though long the weary way we tread,
+ And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+ No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+ Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+ When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+ And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+ The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+ Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+ On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+ O Love Divine, forever dear,
+ Content to suffer, while we know,
+ Living and dying, Thou art near!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without taking
+away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good opening in some
+honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our private satellite has
+had the opportunity of inspecting on the planet to which she belongs. In
+some respects it was better to be a young Greek. If we may trust the old
+marbles, my friend with his arm stretched over my head, above there, (in
+plaster of Paris,) or the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal
+sculpture gallery of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were of
+supreme beauty. Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like
+necks, straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
+flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we ever
+see. It may well be questioned whether the human shape will ever present
+itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry. But the life of the
+youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that of the young American.
+He had a string of legends, in place of our Gospels. He had no printed
+books, no newspaper, no steam caravans, no forks, no soap, none of the
+thousand cheap conveniences which have become matters of necessity to our
+modern civilization. Above all things, if he aspired to know as well as
+to enjoy, he found knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a
+day's labor would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held
+in private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for only
+as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of brawling
+streams. Never, since man came into this atmosphere of oxygen and azote,
+was there anything like the condition of the young American of the
+nineteenth century. Having in possession or in prospect the best part of
+half a world, with all its climates and soils to choose from; equipped
+with wings of fire and smoke than fly with him day and night, so that he
+counts his journey not in miles, but in degrees, and sees the seasons
+change as the wild fowl sees them in his annual flights; with huge
+leviathans always ready to take him on their broad backs and push behind
+them with their pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the
+continent or separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations,
+founder of that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart
+are not lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space
+from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right grows
+out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity with
+mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he inherits as
+his national birthright; free to form and express his opinions on almost
+every subject, and assured that he will soon acquire the last franchise
+which men withhold from man,--that of stating the laws of his spiritual
+being and the beliefs he accepts without hindrance except from clearer
+views of truth,--he seems to want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble,
+beneficent life. In fact, the chief danger is that he will think the
+whole planet is made for him, and forget that there are some
+possibilities left in the debris of the old-world civilization which
+deserve a certain respectful consideration at his hands.
+
+The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
+measure done for him by those who have gone before. Society has
+subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent. Thus,
+if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a painter, for
+instance, he finds the means of education and a demand for his services.
+Even a man who knows nothing but science will be provided for, if he does
+not think it necessary to hang about his birthplace all his days,--which
+is a most unAmerican weakness. The apron-strings of an American mother
+are made of India-rubber. Her boy belongs where he is wanted; and that
+young Marylander of ours spoke for all our young men, when he said that
+his home was wherever the stars and stripes blew over his head.
+
+And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who made
+that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
+record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to put
+himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had left vacant
+at the side of Iris. When a young man is found habitually at the side of
+any one given young lady,--when he lingers where she stays, and hastens
+when she leaves,--when his eyes follow her as she moves and rest upon her
+when she is still,--when he begins to grow a little timid, he who was so
+bold, and a little pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds
+them alone,--when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and
+names her very seldom,--
+
+What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet science
+in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of qualifications?
+
+--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has a
+generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means proving
+that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned inside out when
+we opened that sealed book of hers.
+
+Ah, my dear young friend! When your mamma then, if you will believe it,
+a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came and told
+her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she could n't say
+it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!--guessed it all
+without another word!--When your mother, I say, came and told her mother
+she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather, how much did
+they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to whom she had
+pledged her existence? I will not be so hard as to ask how much your
+respected mamma knew at that time of the intimate nature of your
+respected papa, though, if we should compare a young girl's
+man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him,
+I have my doubts as to whether the second would be a facsimile of the
+first in most cases.
+
+The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or she
+finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was meant for
+him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is pretty enough,
+only it is not Nature's way. It is not at all essential that all pairs
+of human beings should be, as we sometimes say of particular couples,
+"born for each other." Sometimes a man or a woman is made a great deal
+better and happier in the end for having had to conquer the faults of the
+one beloved, and make the fitness not found at first, by gradual
+assimilation. There is a class of good women who have no right to marry
+perfectly good men, because they have the power of saving those who would
+go to ruin but for the guiding providence of a good wife. I have known
+many such cases. It is the most momentous question a woman is ever
+called upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond
+remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his
+earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
+
+A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not
+herd with genius. The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in
+company. They don't care for strange scents,--they like plain animals
+better than perfumed ones. Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice,
+Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by
+which her lord is so widely known.
+
+Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt to
+think character has the best of the bargain. A brilliant woman marries a
+plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism;--we have all
+seen such cases. The world often stares a good deal and wonders. She
+should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery.
+She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance,
+with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with
+the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.
+She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+
+Let her alone! She knows what she is about. Genius has an infinitely
+deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius. To be
+sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible
+product, to be bought, or had for nothing. It bribes the common voice to
+praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or whatever
+it can please with. Character evolves its best products for home
+consumption; but, mind you, it takes a deal more to feed a family for
+thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice
+in our lives. You talk of the fire of genius. Many a blessed woman, who
+dies unsung and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat
+that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
+humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen
+theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so many
+men of genius. It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a philosophical
+expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms
+them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly warms her thin
+fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out of the hearts of those young
+Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her youthful heroes. We
+are always valuing the soul's temperature by the thermometer of public
+deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams
+upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and
+floating toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the
+thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first
+drop trickled down its side.
+
+How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law
+that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as
+low as the earth will let it! That is genius. But what is this
+transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to
+that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday,
+to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)--the great outspread
+hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and
+keeping them there? Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of
+character to the fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been
+linked to each other in many a household, where one name was historic,
+and the other, let me say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint
+reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion.
+
+Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of the
+Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle in which I
+love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall ship glide by
+against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible towline, with a hundred
+strong arms pulling it. Her sails hung unfilled, her streamers were
+drooping, she had neither side-wheel nor stern-wheel; still she moved on,
+stately, in serene triumph, as if with her own life. But I knew that on
+the other side of the ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so
+majestically, there was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire
+and arms of iron, that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on;
+and I knew, that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the
+tall ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
+and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither. And so I have
+known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-sailed,
+gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and brave, warm,
+beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled close in his
+shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could part them, and
+dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance, would soon have gone
+down the stream and been heard of no more.--No, I am too much a lover of
+genius, I sometimes think, and too often get impatient with dull people,
+so that, in their weak talk, where nothing is taken for granted, I look
+forward to some future possible state of development, when a gesture
+passing between a beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as
+much as the complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled
+to the time when its sun was burned out. And yet, when a strong brain is
+weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble against
+a wedge of gold.
+
+--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not
+embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a brilliant
+pattern already worked in its texture. But as the very essence of genius
+is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which are always ideas behind
+shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible as falsehood and
+pretence in its eyes. Now it is not easy to find a perfectly true woman,
+and it is very hard to find a perfectly true man. And a woman of genius,
+who has the sagacity to choose such a one as her companion, shows more of
+the divine gift in so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant
+work of letters or of art.
+
+I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
+prepare you before telling it. I think there is a kindly feeling growing
+up between Iris and our young Marylander. Not that I suppose there is
+any distinct understanding between them, but that the affinity which has
+drawn him from the remote corner where he sat to the side of the young
+girl is quietly bringing their two natures together. Just now she is all
+given up to another; but when he no longer calls upon her daily thoughts
+and cares, I warn you not to be surprised, if this bud of friendship open
+like the evening primrose, with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and
+lo! the flower of full-blown love lies unfolded before you.
+
+And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits, to
+make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple than to
+the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he who has borne
+the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly pilgrimage. At this
+point, under most circumstances, I would close the doors and draw the
+veil of privacy before the chamber where the birth which we call death,
+out of life into the unknown world, is working its mystery. But this
+friend of ours stood alone in the world, and, as the last act of his life
+was mainly in harmony with the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the
+force of the objection commonly lying against that death-bed literature
+which forms the staple of a certain portion of the press. Let me explain
+what I mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a little, before
+they accuse me of hasty expressions.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying children, to
+which almost all of them attach the greatest importance. There is hardly
+a criminal so abandoned that he is not anxious to receive the
+"consolations of religion" in his last hours. Even if he be senseless,
+but still living, I think that the form is gone through with, just as
+baptism is administered to the unconscious new-born child. Now we do not
+quarrel with these forms. We look with reverence and affection upon all
+symbols which give peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures. But the
+value of the new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as
+testimony to the truth of a doctrine. The automatic closing of a dying
+man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of the Real
+Presence, or any other dogma. And, speaking generally, the evidence of
+dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with great caution.
+
+They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt. A
+dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence. But it
+is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when he is changed
+by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks when he is truly and
+wholly himself. Most murderers die in a very pious frame of mind,
+expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man believes he shall meet a
+larger average of pirates and cut-throats in the streets of the New
+Jerusalem than of honest folks that died in their beds.
+
+Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital of
+various kinds out of dying men's speeches. The lies that have been put
+into their mouths for this purpose are endless. The prime minister,
+whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a
+magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison
+gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or somebody makes
+the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green
+fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would
+think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing they
+could,--to make their rhetorical point,--and then bow themselves
+politely out of the world.
+
+Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their evidence in
+favor of this or that favorite belief. The camp-followers of proselyting
+sects have come in at the close of every life where they could get in, to
+strip the languishing soul of its thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.
+The Roman Catholic or other priest who insists on the reception of his
+formula means kindly, we trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the
+acquiescence of the subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us
+take the testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form
+opinions as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.
+A lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much. A poor fellow who
+can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains, whose
+flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is gasping for
+breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly of human life, which in all
+its main adjustments is intended for men in a normal, healthy condition.
+It is a remark I have heard from the wise Patriarch of the Medical
+Profession among us, that the moral condition of patients with disease
+above the great breathing-muscle, the diaphragm, is much more hopeful
+than that of patients with disease below it, in the digestive organs.
+Many an honest ignorant man has given us pathology when he thought he was
+giving us psychology. With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to
+the story of the Little Gentleman's leaving us.
+
+When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not likely to
+remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender conscience and
+kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his behalf. It was
+undeniable that on several occasions the Little Gentleman had expressed
+himself with a good deal of freedom on a class of subjects which,
+according to the divinity-student, he had no right to form an opinion
+upon. He therefore considered his future welfare in jeopardy.
+
+The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people. If I,
+the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine, there
+shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am competent to
+judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as evidence of its truth,
+while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as testimony in its behalf.
+But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-Muggletonian sentiment, then I
+become incompetent to form any opinion on the matter. This, you cannot
+fail to observe, is exactly the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as
+explained in my Lecture on Phrenology. Now I hold that he whose
+testimony would be accepted in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a
+right to be heard against it. Whoso offers me any article of belief for
+my signature implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and
+if my positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
+testimony against it is also of value.
+
+I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that of
+the Muggletonians. I also remarked a singular timidity on his part lest
+somebody should "unsettle" somebody's faith,--as if faith did not require
+exercise as much as any other living thing, and were not all the better
+for a shaking up now and then. I don't mean that it would be fair to
+bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice Heth, the centenarian, or
+any other intellectual non-combatant; but all persons who proclaim a
+belief which passes judgment on their neighbors must be ready to have it
+"unsettled," that is, questioned, at all times and by anybody,--just as
+those who set up bars across a thoroughfare must expect to have them
+taken down by every one who wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+
+Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against the
+questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension of our
+new conditions. If to question everything be unlawful and dangerous, we
+had better undeclare our independence at once; for what the Declaration
+means is the right to question everything, even the truth of its own
+fundamental proposition.
+
+The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
+where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding the
+upper waters at their level; but the system under which the young
+republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of life to
+the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the continent
+settle their own level in obedience to the laws that govern the planet
+and the spheres that surround it.
+
+The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the commonwealth, as
+our young friend the Marylander, for instance, understood it. He could
+not get rid of that notion of private property in truth, with the right
+to fence it in, and put up a sign-board, thus:
+
+ ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+ GROUNDS!
+
+He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+
+I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit. I love
+my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think it has
+educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its highest
+teachings. I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any of you can
+tell what that means.
+
+I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some say
+the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+denominations. Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that a
+church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+organization at all. They think that men will eventually come together
+on the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form a
+great unity. Do they see what this amounts to? It means an equal
+division of intellect! It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never was
+and never will be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have
+ceased to exist. The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one
+belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for the
+sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on its
+front, "Deo erexit Voltaire." A church is a garden, I have heard it
+said, and the illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no such
+thing as a broad garden. It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in
+is narrow. You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
+in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece of
+business. You can't make a village or a parish or a family think alike,
+yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs or pad them
+to a single pattern! Why, the very life of an ecclesiastical
+organization is a life of induction, a state of perpetually disturbed
+equilibrium kept up by another charged body in the neighborhood. If the
+two bodies touch and share their respective charges, down goes the index
+of the electrometer!
+
+Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself?
+Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of
+knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has
+from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to
+anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of
+knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot do it, any more than a
+pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be filled by a pint. Iron is
+essentially the same everywhere and always; but the sulphate of iron is
+never the same as the carbonate of iron. Truth is invariable; but the
+Smithate of truth must always differ from the Brownate of truth.
+
+The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in which
+its knowledge is embodied. The inferior race, the degraded and enslaved
+people, the small-minded individual, live in the details which to larger
+minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce themselves to axioms and
+laws. As races and individual minds must always differ just as sulphates
+and carbonates do, I cannot see ground for expecting the Broad Church to
+be founded on any fusion of intellectual beliefs, which of course implies
+that those who hold the larger number of doctrines as essential shall
+come down to those who hold the smaller number. These doctrines are to
+the negative aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the
+positive orders of nobility.
+
+The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that requires
+the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a church, and a
+brother is known and cared for in a strange land where no word of his can
+be understood. The apostle of this church may be a deaf mute carrying a
+cup of cold water to a thirsting fellow-creature. The cup of cold water
+does not require to be translated for a foreigner to understand it. I am
+afraid the only Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the
+heart, and not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their
+fruits, and not by their words. If you say this communion of well-doers
+is no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their
+limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and
+thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an
+organization that shall include all Christendom.
+
+Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow Church,
+however. The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats of humanity,
+in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's gig, lying off the
+poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe, and reckoning how soon
+the hulk containing the mass of their fellow-creatures will go down. The
+Broad Church is on board, working hard at the pumps, and very slow to
+believe that the ship will be swallowed up with so many poor people in
+it, fastened down under the hatches ever since it floated.
+
+--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+matters. I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do very
+well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about outsiders and
+insiders!
+
+After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+regularly to the Church of the Galileans. Still they could not keep away
+from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint Polycarp on the
+great Church festival-days; so that, between the two, they were so much
+together, that the boarders began to make remarks, and our landlady said
+to me, one day, that, though it was noon of her business, them that had
+eyes couldn't help seein' that there was somethin' goin', on between them
+two young people; she thought the young man was a very likely young man,
+though jest what his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought
+he must be doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care
+of a femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his
+wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;--but
+then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of bein'
+married this five year. They was good boarders, both of 'em, paid
+regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+
+--To come back to what I began to speak of before,--the divinity-student
+was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and, in the
+kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in the strength
+of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he and his crowd
+were right, and other folks and their crowd were wrong,--he determined to
+bring the Little Gentleman round to his faith before he died, if he
+could. So he sent word to the sick man, that he should be pleased to
+visit him and have some conversation with him; and received for answer
+that he would be welcome.
+
+The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman. He
+found him weak, but calm. Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+
+After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind way,
+that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt concerned
+for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making preparations for
+the great change awaiting him.
+
+I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you, what
+makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do anything
+to help me, Sir?
+
+I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
+therefore a fellow-sinner.
+
+I am not a man, Sir!--said the Little Gentleman.--I was born into this
+world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race to which
+I do not belong. Look at this!--he said, and held up his withered
+arm.--See there!--and he pointed to his misshapen extremities.--Lay your
+hand here!--and he laid his own on the region of his misplaced heart.--I
+have known nothing of the life of your race. When I first came to my
+consciousness, I found myself an object of pity, or a sight to show. The
+first strange child I ever remember hid its face and would not come near
+me. I was a broken-hearted as well as broken-bodied boy. I grew into
+the emotions of ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank
+from my presence. I became a man in years, and had nothing in common
+with manhood but its longings. My life is the dying pang of a worn-out
+race, and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of men
+and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the love of
+the other. I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat. If another
+state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have had a long
+apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it. I don't believe
+it, Sir! I have too much faith for that. God has not left me wholly
+without comfort, even here. I love this old place where I was born;--the
+heart of the world beats under the three hills of Boston, Sir! I love
+this great land, with so many tall men in it, and so many good, noble
+women.--His eyes turned to the silent figure by his pillow.--I have
+learned to accept meekly what has been allotted to me, but I cannot
+honestly say that I think my sin has been greater than my suffering. I
+bear the ignorance and the evil-doing of whole generations in my single
+person. I never drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a
+punishment for another's fault. I may have had many wrong thoughts, but
+I cannot have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one,
+and I have paced it alone. I have looked through the bars and seen the
+great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their doings. I
+have known what it was to dream of the great passions; but since my
+mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have pressed my
+cheek,--nor ever will.
+
+--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost without
+a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up into her face
+with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him. It was the
+sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of bitterness, and I
+should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her. The Little Gentleman
+repaid her with the only tear any of us ever saw him shed.
+
+The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the sick
+man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his head and
+was still. All the questions he had meant to ask had faded from his
+memory. The tests he had prepared by which to judge of his
+fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their virtue.
+He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite Parent. The
+kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from heaven, that
+angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a moment before to
+summon before the tribunal of his private judgment. Shall I pray with
+you?--he said, after a pause. A little before he would have said, Shall
+I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as taught by its Founder, is
+full of sentiment. So we must not blame the divinity-student, if he was
+overcome by those yearnings of human sympathy which predominate so much
+more in the sermons of the Master than in the writings of his successors,
+and which have made the parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of
+mankind, as it has been the stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.
+
+Pray!--said the Little Gentleman.
+
+The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+
+Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant lying
+helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his long years
+of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with the bruised reed.
+Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon this their child. Oh,
+turn away from him the penalties of his own transgressions! Thou hast
+laid upon him, from infancy, the cross which thy stronger children are
+called upon to take up; and now that he is fainting under it, be Thou his
+stay, and do Thou succor him that is tempted! Let his manifold
+infirmities come between him and Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!
+If his eyes are not opened to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten
+the darkness that rests upon him, even as it came through the word of thy
+Son to blind Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!
+
+Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
+tenderness. In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the
+fast-darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making a
+proselyte of him.
+
+This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever listened.
+Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last hour of which I
+have been speaking. The excitement of pleading his cause before his
+self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which overcame him, when the
+young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her feelings and pressed her lips
+to his cheek,--the thoughts that mastered him while the divinity-student
+poured out his soul for him in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable
+moment. When the divinity-student had uttered his last petition,
+commending him to the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to
+look upon him before leaving his chamber. His face was changed.--There
+is a language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
+interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever
+stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the
+sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the
+fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
+contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon
+to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and
+putting out its fires.--Such was the aspect of the face upon which the
+divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed his
+prayer. The change had been rapid, though not that abrupt one which is
+liable to happen at any moment in these cases.--The sick man looked
+towards him.--Farewell,--he said,--I thank you. Leave me alone with her.
+
+When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
+himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took from
+it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking key,--the
+same key I had once seen him holding. He gave this to her, and pointed
+to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those that had so attracted
+my curious eyes and set me wondering as to what it might contain.
+
+Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp.--The young girl walked to the
+cabinet and unlocked the door. A deep recess appeared, lined with black
+velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory crucifix. A silver
+lamp hung over it. She lighted the lamp and came back to the bedside.
+The dying man fixed his eyes upon the figure of the dying Saviour.--Give
+me your hand, he said; and Iris placed her right hand in his left. So
+they remained, until presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they
+still remained vacantly fixed upon the white image. Yet he held the
+young girl's hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some
+deep-shadowed valley and it was all he could cling to. But presently an
+involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible dying
+grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of torture.
+She pressed her lips together and sat still. The inexorable hand held
+her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if her own slender fingers
+would be crushed in its gripe. It was one of the tortures of the
+Inquisition she was suffering, and she could not stir from her place.
+Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast her eyes upon that dying
+figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands and feet and side and
+lacerated forehead, she felt that she also must suffer uncomplaining. In
+the moment of her sharpest pain she did not forget the duties of her
+under office, but dried the dying man's moist forehead with her
+handkerchief, even while the dews of agony were glistening on her own.
+How long this lasted she never could tell. Time and thirst are two
+things you and I talk about; but the victims whom holy men and righteous
+judges used to stretch on their engines knew better what they meant than
+you or I!--What is that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness
+de Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.--For you to
+drink,--said the torturer to the little woman.--She could not think that
+it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her
+alive for her confession. The torturer knew better than she.
+
+After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,
+--without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
+face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes over
+their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris, released at
+once from her care for the sufferer and from his unconscious grasp, fell
+senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only utterance of her long agony.
+
+Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's Hill
+burial-ground. You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each
+other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit. You love to lean
+on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,--to read
+the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser of Sorry Persons and little
+Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look
+upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by
+the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and
+young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the
+subject of a moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen
+in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple
+gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless the
+stone is wrong.
+
+Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit to
+hold a well-grown man. I will not tell you the inscription upon the
+stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure of the
+resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he should be known
+as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at so long among the
+living. There is one sign, it is true, by which, if you have been a
+sagacious reader of these papers, you will at once know it; but I fear
+you read carelessly, and must study them more diligently before you will
+detect the hint to which I allude.
+
+The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old names and
+the old bones of the old Boston people. At the foot of his resting-place
+is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of its colossal
+water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships, and the heavy guns,
+which, when they roar, shake the soil in which he lies; and in the
+steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet chimes which are the
+Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes follow him all the world over.
+
+ In Pace!
+
+I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do a
+better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to the
+young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him. He did
+not, however. A considerable bequest to one of our public institutions
+keeps his name in grateful remembrance. The telescope through which he
+was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the movements of which had
+been the source of such odd fancies on my part, is now the property of a
+Western College. You smile as you think of my taking it for a fleshless
+human figure, when I saw its tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was
+an arm, under the white drapery thrown over it for protection. So do I
+smile now; I belong to the numerous class who are prophets after the
+fact, and hold my nightmares very cheap by daylight.
+
+I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities. Some thought
+there was no question that he had a second apartment, in which he had
+made an asylum for a deranged female relative. Others were of opinion
+that he was, as I once suggested, a "Bluebeard" with patriarchal
+tendencies, and I have even been censured for introducing so Oriental an
+element into my record of boarding-house experience.
+
+Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing else
+to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as one
+of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius. The vox humana of the great
+Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ of the
+Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a human
+voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the cry of a
+prima donna as the A string and the E string of this instrument. A
+single fact will illustrate the resemblance. I was executing some tours
+de force upon it one evening, when the policeman of our district rang the
+bell sharply, and asked what was the matter in the house. He had heard a
+woman's screams,--he was sure of it. I had to make the instrument sing
+before his eyes before he could be satisfied that he had not heard the
+cries of a woman. The instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little
+Gentleman. Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I heard coming
+from his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no other
+conjecture to offer. It is not true that a second apartment with a
+secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
+invention of one of the Reporters.
+
+Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic. She had
+seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees before it.
+The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed, there was a spot
+worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which might be thus accounted
+for. Why he, whose whole life was a crucifixion, should not love to look
+on that divine image of blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the
+contrary, it seems to me the most natural thing in the world that he
+should. But there are those who want to make private property of
+everything, and can't make up their minds that people who don't think as
+they do should claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed
+in the central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.
+
+The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he should
+meet him in heaven.--The question is, whether he'll meet you,--said the
+young fellow John, rather smartly. The divinity-student had n't thought
+of that.
+
+However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+kindly and respectful light. He will get a parish by-and-by; and, as he
+is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the Schoolmistress, whom
+some of us remember,--and as all sorts of expensive accidents happen to
+young married ministers, he will be under bonds to the amount of his
+salary, which means starvation, if they are forfeited, to think all his
+days as he thought when he was settled,--unless the majority of his
+people change with him or in advance of him. A hard ease, to which
+nothing could reconcile a man, except that the faithful discharge of
+daily duties in his personal relations with his parishioners will make
+him useful enough in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist
+before he has reached middle age.
+
+--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman. Although, as I have
+said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public institution,
+he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various pieces of property as
+tokens of kind remembrance. It was in this way I became the possessor of
+the wonderful instrument I have spoken of, which had been purchased for
+him out of an Italian convent. The landlady was comforted with a small
+legacy. The following extract relates to Iris: "in consideration of her
+manifold acts of kindness, but only in token of grateful remembrance, and
+by no means as a reward for services which cannot be compensated, a
+certain messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in
+______ Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the
+same being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several
+families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix, the
+portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral or death's-head ring
+was buried with him.
+
+It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness. There was a flavor in
+his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while we smiled at
+them. It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away among useless
+lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the picture of Leah, the
+handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the massive shelves that held the
+books he loved, to pack up the tube through which he used to study the
+silent stars, looking down at him like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a
+kind of stupid half-consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes
+of men and women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to
+which his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
+inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain. It was hard, but
+it had to be done.
+
+And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+something of its old look. The Koh-i-noor, as we named the gentleman
+with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that "little mill," as the
+young fellow John called it, where he came off second best. His
+departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter,
+inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of
+affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed,"
+speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next
+morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that
+held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation,
+each of them asserting, on its word of honor as a bottle, that its former
+contents were "not a dye," were all that was left to us of the
+Koh-i-noor.
+
+From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders. She
+abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl. She left off various
+articles of "jewelry." She began to help her mother in some of her
+household duties. She became a regular attendant on the ministrations of
+a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to his meetin' by
+witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a man and a woman a
+"gentleman" and a "lady,"--a stroke of gentility which quite overcame
+her. She even took a part in what she called a Sabbath school, though it
+was held on Sunday, and by no means on Saturday, as the name she intended
+to utter implied. All this, which was very sincere, as I believe, on her
+part, and attended with a great improvement in her character, ended in
+her bringing home a young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as
+to stand up steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green
+spectacles, and dressed in black broadcloth. His personal aspect, and a
+certain solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman;
+and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us
+boarders, one day, that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the
+prospect of her becoming a minister's wife. On inquiry, however, I found
+that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a
+professional one, but not clerical. He was a young undertaker, who had
+just succeeded to a thriving business. Things, I believe, are going on
+well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the landlady's daughter
+and her mother. Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest people in
+the world at home, as comedians and circus-clowns are the most melancholy
+in their domestic circle.
+
+As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at liberty
+to give too minute a statement of the present condition of each and all
+of its inmates. I am happy to say, however, that they are all alive and
+well, up to this time. That amiable old gentleman who sat opposite to me
+is growing older, as old men will, but still smiles benignantly on all
+the boarders, and has come to be a kind of father to all of them,--so
+that on his birthday there is always something like a family festival.
+The Poor Relation, even, has warmed into a filial feeling towards him,
+and on his last birthday made him a beautiful present, namely, a very
+handsomely bound copy of Blair's celebrated poem, "The Grave."
+
+The young man John is still, as he says, "in fustrate fettle." I saw him
+spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do himself great
+credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a professional gentleman
+of celebrity. I am pleased to say that he has been promoted to an upper
+clerkship, and, in consequence of his rise in office, has taken an
+apartment somewhat lower down than number "forty-'leven," as he
+facetiously called his attic. Whether there is any truth, or not, in the
+story of his attachment to, and favorable reception by, the daughter of
+the head of an extensive wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not
+venture an opinion; I may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in
+company with a very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I
+understand, is the daughter of the house in question.
+
+Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander. Instead of
+fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
+Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own. They often
+went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course, supposes
+there is any relation between religious sympathy and those wretched
+"sentimental" movements of the human heart upon which it is commonly
+agreed that nothing better is based than society, civilization,
+friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of parent and child,
+and which many people must think were singularly overrated by the Teacher
+of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said before, was full of sentiment,
+loving this or that young man, pardoning this or that sinner, weeping
+over the dead, mourning for the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps
+kissing, the little children, so that the Gospels are still cried over
+almost as often as the last work of fiction!
+
+But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
+outside. It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the same who
+had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all the Virtues."
+Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather formal hand, but full
+of good advice, to her young charge. And now she had come to carry her
+away, thinking that she had learned all she was likely to learn under her
+present course of teaching. The Model, however, was to stay awhile,--a
+week, or more,--before they should leave together.
+
+Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be. She was respectful, grateful,
+as a child is with a just, but not tender parent. Yet something was
+wrong. She had one of her trances, and became statue-like, as before,
+only the day after the Model's arrival. She was wan and silent, tasted
+nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced effort, and often looked
+vaguely away from those who were looking at her, her eyes just glazed
+with the shining moisture of a tear that must not be allowed to gather
+and fall. Was it grief at parting from the place where her strange
+friendship had grown up with the Little Gentleman? Yet she seemed to
+have become reconciled to his loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of
+gratitude that she had been permitted to care for him in his last weary
+days.
+
+The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
+headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room alone.
+Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to the Church
+of the Galileans. They said but little going,--"collecting their
+thoughts" for the service, I devoutly hope. My kind good friend the
+pastor preached that day one of his sermons that make us all feel like
+brothers and sisters, and his text was that affectionate one from John,
+"My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in
+deed and in truth." When Iris and her friend came out of church, they
+were both pale, and walked a space without speaking.
+
+At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children, Iris!
+
+She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
+something strange in the tone of his voice. She smiled faintly, but
+spoke never a word.
+
+In deed and in truth, Iris,----
+
+What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his speech
+before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand to finish
+his broken sentence?
+
+The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
+his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly and
+suffered so patiently.
+
+The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to his
+lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently with
+them, and said, "It is mine!"
+
+Iris did not contradict him.
+
+The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much has
+happened since these events I was describing. Those two young people
+would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
+notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted that
+the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young lady
+should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc. Long before
+Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young Maryland engineer,
+directing some of the vast constructions of his native State,--where he
+was growing rich fast enough to be able to decline that famous Russian
+offer which would have made him a kind of nabob in a few years. Iris
+does not write verse often, nowadays, but she sometimes draws. The last
+sketch of hers I have seen in my Southern visits was of two children, a
+boy and girl, the youngest holding a silver goblet, like the one she held
+that evening when I--I was so struck with her statue-like beauty. If in
+the later, summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around
+that grave on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it,
+you may be sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of her
+childhood and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that Nature had
+written out her list of virtues an ruled paper, and forgotten to rub out
+the lines.
+
+One thing more I must mention. Being on the Common, last Sunday, I was
+attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and somewhat
+youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage containing a stout
+baby. A buxom young lady watched them from one of the stone seats, with
+an interest which could be nothing less than maternal. I at once
+recognized my old friend, the young fellow whom we called John. He was
+delighted to see me, introduced me to "Madam," and would have the lusty
+infant out of the carriage, and hold him up for me to look at.
+
+Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you hit
+from the shoulder. Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist straight
+into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+
+Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa.--Chip of the old block. Regl'r
+little Johnny, you know.
+
+I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+pushing about one of "them little articles" he had seemed to want so
+much, that I took my "punishment" at the hands of the infant pugilist
+with great equanimity.--And how is the old boarding-house?--I asked.
+
+A 1,--he answered.--Painted and papered as good as new. Gabs in all the
+rooms up to the skyparlors. Old woman's layin' up money, they say.
+Means to send Ben Franklin to college. Just then the first bell rang for
+church, and my friend, who, I understand, has become a most exemplary
+member of society, said he must be off to get ready for meetin', and told
+the young one to "shake dada," which he did with his closed fist, in a
+somewhat menacing manner. And so the young man John, as we used to call
+him, took the pole of the miniature carriage, and pushed the small
+pugilist before him homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by
+his pleasant-looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after
+him.
+
+That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round by the
+old boarding-house. The "gahs" was lighted, but the curtains, or more
+properly, the painted shades; were not down. And so I stood there and
+looked in along the table where the boarders sat at the evening
+meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us feel as if we knew so
+well. There were new faces at it, but also old and familiar ones.--The
+landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap, looking young, comparatively
+speaking, and as if half the wrinkles had been ironed out of her
+forehead.--Her daughter, in rather dressy half-mourning, with a vast
+brooch of jet, got up, apparently, to match the gentleman next her, who
+was in black costume and sandy hair,--the last rising straight from his
+forehead, like the marble flame one sometimes sees at the top of a
+funeral urn.--The Poor Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff
+with specks of white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more
+Hirams left to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her
+despair, through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
+--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
+splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features were
+seen to disadvantage for the moment.--The good old gentleman was sitting
+still and thoughtful. All at once he turned his face toward the window
+where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me, smiled his benignant
+smile. It was a recollection of some past pleasant moment; but it fell
+upon me like the blessing of a father.
+
+I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer darkness;
+and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around it faded into
+the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+
+ ---------------------
+
+And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less than
+his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more. Thanks to all those
+friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly
+recognition and fellow-feeling! Peace to all such as may have been vexed
+in spirit by any utterance these pages have repeated! They will,
+doubtless, forget for the moment the difference in the hues of truth we
+look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this
+hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us, and the warmth
+which alone can make us all brothers.
+
+
+ A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+ Lord of all being! throned afar,
+ Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+ Centre and soul of every sphere,
+ Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+ Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+ Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+ Star of our hope, thy softened light
+ Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+ Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+ Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+ Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+ All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+ Lord of all life, below, above,
+ Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+ Before thy ever-blazing throne
+ We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+ Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+ And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+ Till all thy living altars claim
+ One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+ One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+In this, the third series of Breakfast-Table conversations, a slight
+dramatic background shows off a few talkers and writers, aided by certain
+silent supernumeraries. The machinery is much like that of the two
+preceding series. Some of the characters must seem like old
+acquaintances to those who have read the former papers. As I read these
+over for the first time for a number of years, I notice one character;
+presenting a class of beings who have greatly multiplied during the
+interval which separates the earlier and later Breakfast-Table papers,--I
+mean the scientific specialists. The entomologist, who confines himself
+rigidly to the study of the coleoptera, is intended to typify this class.
+The subdivision of labor, which, as we used to be told, required fourteen
+different workmen to make a single pin, has reached all branches of
+knowledge. We find new terms in all the Professions, implying that
+special provinces have been marked off, each having its own school of
+students. In theology we have many curious subdivisions; among the rest
+eschatology, that is to say, the geography, geology, etc., of the
+"undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the surgeon who deals with
+dislocations of the right shoulder declines to meddle with a displacement
+on the other side, we are not surprised, but ring the bell of the
+practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the left shoulder.
+
+On the other hand, we have had or have the encyclopaedic intelligences
+like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert Spencer, who take all
+knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their province. The author of
+"Thoughts on the Universe" has something in common with these, but he
+appears also to have a good deal about him of what we call the humorist;
+that is, an individual with a somewhat heterogeneous personality, in
+which various distinctly human elements are mixed together, so as to form
+a kind of coherent and sometimes pleasing whole, which is to a
+symmetrical character as a breccia is to a mosaic.
+
+As for the Young Astronomer, his rhythmical discourse may be taken as
+expressing the reaction of what some would call "the natural man" against
+the unnatural beliefs which he found in that lower world to which he
+descended by day from his midnight home in the firmament.
+
+I have endeavored to give fair play to the protest of gentle and
+reverential conservatism in the letter of the Lady, which was not copied
+from, but suggested by, one which I received long ago from a lady bearing
+an honored name, and which I read thoughtfully and with profound respect.
+
+December, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+It is now nearly twenty years since this book was published. Being the
+third of the Breakfast-Table series, it could hardly be expected to
+attract so much attention as the earlier volumes. Still, I had no reason
+to be disappointed with its reception. It took its place with the
+others, and was in some points a clearer exposition of my views and
+feelings than either of the other books, its predecessors. The poems
+"Homesick in Heaven" and the longer group of passages coming from the
+midnight reveries of the Young Astronomer have thoughts in them not so
+fully expressed elsewhere in my writings.
+
+The first of these two poems is at war with our common modes of thought.
+In looking forward to rejoining in a future state those whom we have
+loved on earth,--as most of us hope and many of us believe we shall,--we
+are apt to forget that the same individuality is remembered by one
+relative as a babe, by another as an adult in the strength of maturity,
+and by a third as a wreck with little left except its infirmities and its
+affections. The main thought of this poem is a painful one to some
+persons. They have so closely associated life with its accidents that
+they expect to see their departed friends in the costume of the time in
+which they best remember them, and feel as if they should meet the spirit
+of their grandfather with his wig and cane, as they habitually recall him
+to memory.
+
+The process of scientific specialization referred to and illustrated in
+this record has been going on more actively than ever during these last
+twenty years. We have only to look over the lists of the Faculties and
+teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out
+as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it
+exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction,
+with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of
+partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is
+idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian."
+We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme
+authority on anything is a satisfaction to self-love next door to the
+precious delusions of dementia. I have never pictured a character more
+contented with himself than the "Scarabee" of this story.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 1, 1891.
+O. W. H.
+
+ THE POET
+
+ AT THE
+
+ BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+I
+
+The idea of a man's "interviewing" himself is rather odd, to be sure. But
+then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half the time
+to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out
+to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal
+property he had forgotten in his inventory.
+
+--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said the
+"Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.
+
+--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
+I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
+head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
+House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
+places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I think
+about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves they
+are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf and the
+book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the matter in
+question.
+
+--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.
+
+--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk out
+of. The library comparison does n't exactly hit it. You stow away some
+idea and don't want it, say for ten years. When it turns up at last it
+has got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other ideas packed with
+it, that it is no more like what it was than a raisin is like a grape on
+the vine, or a fig from a drum like one hanging on the tree. Then,
+again, some kinds of thoughts breed in the dark of one's mind like the
+blind fishes in the Mammoth Cave. We can't see them and they can't see
+us; but sooner or later the daylight gets in and we find that some cold,
+fishy little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the
+brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and
+under and butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we
+thought the whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old
+beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat,
+or get poisoned as the case may be. And so, you see, you can't tell what
+the thoughts are that you have got salted down, as one may say, till you
+run a streak of talk through them, as the market people run a butterscoop
+through a firkin.
+
+Don't talk, thinking you are going to find out your neighbor, for you
+won't do it, but talk to find out yourself. There is more of you--and
+less of you, in spots, very likely--than you know.
+
+--The Member gave a slight but unequivocal start just here. It does seem
+as if perpetual somnolence was the price of listening to other people's
+wisdom. This was one of those transient nightmares that one may have in
+a doze of twenty seconds. He thought a certain imaginary Committee of
+Safety of a certain imaginary Legislature was proceeding to burn down his
+haystack, in accordance with an Act, entitled an Act to make the Poor
+Richer by making the Rich Poorer. And the chairman of the committee was
+instituting a forcible exchange of hats with him, to his manifest
+disadvantage, for he had just bought him a new beaver. He told this
+dream afterwards to one of the boarders.
+
+There was nothing very surprising, therefore, in his asking a question
+not very closely related to what had gone before.
+
+--Do you think they mean business?
+
+--I beg your pardon, but it would be of material assistance to me in
+answering your question if I knew who "they" might happen to be.
+
+--Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our
+beds. Political firebugs we call 'em up our way. Want to substitoot the
+match-box for the ballot-box. Scare all our old women half to death.
+
+--Oh--ah--yes--to be sure. I don't believe they say what the papers put
+in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the letter
+about Worcester's and Webster's Dictionaries, that he had to disown the
+other day. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up
+their reports at two or three o'clock in the morning, and fill out the
+speeches to suit themselves. I do remember some things that sounded
+pretty bad,--about as bad as nitro-glycerine, for that matter. But I
+don't believe they ever said 'em, when they spoke their pieces, or if
+they said 'em I know they did n't mean 'em. Something like this, wasn't
+it? If the majority didn't do something the minority wanted 'em to, then
+the people were to burn up our cities, and knock us down and jump on our
+stomachs. That was about the kind of talk, as the papers had it; I don't
+wonder it scared the old women.
+
+--The Member was wide awake by this time.
+
+--I don't seem to remember of them partickler phrases, he said.
+
+--Dear me, no; only levelling everything smack, and trampling us under
+foot, as the reporters made it out. That means FIRE, I take it, and
+knocking you down and stamping on you, whichever side of your person
+happens to be uppermost. Sounded like a threat; meant, of course, for a
+warning. But I don't believe it was in the piece as they spoke
+it,--could n't have been. Then, again, Paris wasn't to blame,--as much
+as to say--so the old women thought--that New York or Boston would n't be
+to blame if it did the same thing. I've heard of political gatherings
+where they barbecued an ox, but I can't think there 's a party in this
+country that wants to barbecue a city. But it is n't quite fair to
+frighten the old women. I don't doubt there are a great many people
+wiser than I am that would n't be hurt by a hint I am going to give them.
+It's no matter what you say when you talk to yourself, but when you talk
+to other people, your business is to use words with reference to the way
+in which those other people are like to understand them. These pretended
+inflammatory speeches, so reported as to seem full of combustibles, even
+if they were as threatening as they have been represented, would do no
+harm if read or declaimed in a man's study to his books, or by the
+sea-shore to the waves. But they are not so wholesome moral
+entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not touch off their
+squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine. This kind of speech
+does n't help on the millennium much.
+
+--It ain't jest the thing to grease your ex with ile o' vitrul, said the
+Member.
+
+--No, the wheel of progress will soon stick fast if you do. You can't
+keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to make it.
+Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced ashes,
+you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of years or so, out of
+the trade in potash. In the mean time, what is the use of setting the
+man with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the
+man without any watch against them both?
+
+--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member
+
+--You speak truly. Here we are travelling through desert together like
+the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails
+than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do;
+that will always be so until we come back to primitive Christianity, the
+road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just now; but we don't want
+the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night
+to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don't want a Moses who
+will smite rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to
+burn us all up with.
+
+--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny speaker,
+Rev. Petroleum V. What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous boarder.
+
+--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet, who
+was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have been
+listening. If so, you were mistaken. It was the old man in the
+spectacles with large round glasses and the iron-gray hair. He does a
+good deal of the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I rather
+like to hear him. He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various
+ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one can
+rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual
+irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you
+remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides
+against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to these so
+particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-tree as brown
+and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's ribs). I think they
+begin rubbing in cold blood, and then, you know, l'appetit vient en
+mangeant, the more they rub the more they want to. That is the way to use
+your friend's prejudices. This is a sturdy-looking personage of a good
+deal more than middle age, his face marked with strong manly furrows,
+records of hard thinking and square stand-up fights with life and all its
+devils. There is a slight touch of satire in his discourse now and then,
+and an odd way of answering one that makes it hard to guess how much more
+or less he means than he seems to say. But he is honest, and always has
+a twinkle in his eye to put you on your guard when he does not mean to be
+taken quite literally. I think old Ben Franklin had just that look. I
+know his great-grandson (in pace!) had it, and I don't doubt he took it
+in the straight line of descent, as he did his grand intellect.
+
+The Member of the Haouse evidently comes from one of the lesser inland
+centres of civilization, where the flora is rich in checkerberries and
+similar bounties of nature, and the fauna lively with squirrels,
+wood-chucks, and the like; where the leading sportsmen snare patridges,
+as they are called, and "hunt" foxes with guns; where rabbits are
+entrapped in "figgery fours," and trout captured with the unpretentious
+earth-worm, instead of the gorgeous fly; where they bet prizes for butter
+and cheese, and rag-carpets executed by ladies more than seventy years of
+age; where whey wear dress-coats before dinner, and cock their hats on
+one side when they feel conspicuous and distinshed; where they say--Sir
+to you in their common talk and have other Arcadian and bucolic ways
+which are highly unobjectionable, but are not so much admired in cities,
+where the people are said to be not half so virtuous.
+
+There is with us a boy of modest dimensions, not otherwise especially
+entitled to the epithet, who ought be six or seven years old, to judge by
+the gap left by his front milk teeth, these having resigned in favor of
+their successors, who have not yet presented their credentials. He is
+rather old for an enfant terrible, and quite too young to have grown into
+the bashfulness of adolescence; but he has some of the qualities of both
+these engaging periods of development, The member of the Haouse calls him
+"Bub," invariably, such term I take to be an abbreviation of "Beelzeb,"
+as "bus" is the short form of "omnibus." Many eminently genteel persons,
+whose manners make them at home anywhere, being evidently unaware of true
+derivation of this word, are in the habit of addressing all unknown
+children by one of the two terms, "bub" and "sis," which they consider
+endears them greatly to the young people, and recommends them to the
+acquaintance of their honored parents, if these happen to accompany them.
+The other boarders commonly call our diminutive companion That Boy. He
+is a sort of expletive at the table, serving to stop gaps, taking the
+same place a washer does that makes a loose screw fit, and contriving to
+get driven in like a wedge between any two chairs where there is a
+crevice. I shall not call that boy by the monosyllable referred to,
+because, though he has many impish traits at present, he may become
+civilized and humanized by being in good company. Besides, it is a term
+which I understand is considered vulgar by the nobility and gentry of the
+Mother Country, and it is not to be found in Mr. Worcester's Dictionary,
+on which, as is well known, the literary men of this metropolis are by
+special statute allowed to be sworn in place of the Bible. I know one,
+certainly, who never takes his oath on any other dictionary, any
+advertising fiction to the contrary, notwithstanding.
+
+I wanted to write out my account of some of the other boarders, but a
+domestic occurrence--a somewhat prolonged visit from the landlady, who is
+rather too anxious that I should be comfortable broke in upon the
+continuity of my thoughts, and occasioned--in short, I gave up writing
+for that day.
+
+--I wonder if anything like this ever happened. Author writing, jacks?"
+
+ "To be, or not to be: that is the question
+ Whether 't is nobl--"
+
+--"William, shall we have pudding to-day, or flapjacks?"
+
+--"Flapjacks, an' it please thee, Anne, or a pudding, for that matter; or
+what thou wilt, good woman, so thou come not betwixt me and my thought."
+
+--Exit Mistress Anne, with strongly accented closing of the door and
+murmurs to the effect: "Ay, marry, 't is well for thee to talk as if thou
+hadst no stomach to fill. We poor wives must swink for our masters,
+while they sit in their arm-chairs growing as great in the girth through
+laziness as that ill-mannered fat man William hath writ of in his books
+of players' stuff. One had as well meddle with a porkpen, which hath
+thorns all over him, as try to deal with William when his eyes be rolling
+in that mad way."
+
+William--writing once more--after an exclamation in strong English of the
+older pattern,--
+
+ "Whether 't is nobler--nobler--nobler--"
+
+To do what? O these women! these women! to have puddings or flapjacks!
+Oh!--
+
+ "Whether 't is nobler--in the mind--to suffer
+ The slings--and arrows--of--"
+
+Oh! Oh! these women! I will e'en step over to the parson's and have a
+cup of sack with His Reverence for methinks Master Hamlet hath forgot
+that which was just now on his lips to speak.
+
+So I shall have to put off making my friends acquainted with the other
+boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and describing. I have
+something else of a graver character for my readers. I am talking, you
+know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve the name, but I have taken it,
+and if you consider me at all it must be in that aspect. You will,
+therefore, be willing to run your eyes over a few pages read, of course
+by request, to a select party of the boarders.
+
+ THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK.
+
+ A PANORAMA, WITH SIDE-SHOWS.
+
+My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood,
+has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into the
+hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her youth,
+and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I last
+revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania of the
+old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy clock-dial, "Harvard" with the
+garrulous belfry, little "Holden" with the sculptured unpunishable cherub
+over its portal, and the rest of my early brick-and-mortar acquaintances,
+I could not help saying to myself that I had lived to see the peaceable
+establishment of the Red Republic of Letters.
+
+Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
+fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often
+read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him
+which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house is
+dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and
+wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay for
+the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its
+threshold while it was still living for me.
+
+We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of other
+birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who
+carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel's arrow sticking
+in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the same one, I suppose) in the
+New Forest, from that day to this. I don't quite understand Mr. Ruskin's
+saying (if he said it) that he couldn't get along in a country where
+there were no castles, but I do think we lose a great deal in living
+where there are so few permanent homes. You will see how much I parted
+with which was not reckoned in the price paid for the old homestead.
+
+I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader might find fault
+with as personal. I should not dare to call myself a poet if I did not;
+for if there is anything that gives one a title to that name, it is that
+his inner nature is naked and is not ashamed. But there are many such
+things I shall put in words, not because they are personal, but because
+they are human, and are born of just such experiences as those who hear
+or read what I say are like to have had in greater or less measure. I
+find myself so much like other people that I often wonder at the
+coincidence. It was only the other day that I sent out a copy of verses
+about my great-grandmother's picture, and I was surprised to find how
+many other people had portraits of their great-grandmothers or other
+progenitors, about which they felt as I did about mine, and for whom I
+had spoken, thinking I was speaking for myself only. And so I am not
+afraid to talk very freely with you, my precious reader or listener. You
+too, Beloved, were born somewhere and remember your birthplace or your
+early home; for you some house is haunted by recollections; to some roof
+you have bid farewell. Your hand is upon mine, then, as I guide my pen.
+Your heart frames the responses to the litany of my remembrance. For
+myself it is a tribute of affection I am rendering, and I should put it
+on record for my own satisfaction, were there none to read or to listen.
+
+I hope you will not say that I have built a pillared portico of
+introduction to a humble structure of narrative. For when you look at
+the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending mansion, such
+as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any rate such a place
+of residence as your minister or some of your well-to-do country cousins
+find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. We have stately old
+Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving
+one,--square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar highway,
+with folded arms, as it were; social fortresses of the time when the
+twilight lustre of the throne reached as far as our half-cleared
+settlement, with a glacis before them in the shape of a long broad
+gravel-walk, so that in King George's time they looked as formidably to
+any but the silk-stocking gentry as Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a
+visitor without the password. We forget all this in the kindly welcome
+they give us to-day; for some of them are still standing and doubly
+famous, as we all know. But the gambrel-roofed house, though stately
+enough for college dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of
+those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors
+opens directly upon the green, always called the Common; the other,
+facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the
+other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and
+syringas. The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible,
+companionable, holding its hand out to all, comfortable, respectable, and
+even in its way dignified, but not imposing, not a house for his
+Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not
+where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it
+has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like
+the leaves of the forest. I passed some pleasant hours, a few years
+since, in the Registry of Deeds and the Town Records, looking up the
+history of the old house. How those dear friends of mine, the
+antiquarians, for whose grave councils I compose my features on the too
+rare Thursdays when I am at liberty to meet them, in whose human
+herbarium the leaves and blossoms of past generations are so carefully
+spread out and pressed and laid away, would listen to an expansion of the
+following brief details into an Historical Memoir!
+
+The estate was the third lot of the eighth "Squadron" (whatever that
+might be), and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of
+undivided lands to "Mr. ffox," the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it may
+be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan Hastings;
+from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward; from him in the
+year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Hebrew and
+other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large personality swam
+into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens; from him the
+progenitors of my unborn self.
+
+I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
+with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me.
+His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me
+that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have
+pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat
+of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo
+et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find one's self
+in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days, I am
+afraid, after that entry in his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall was chosen
+President, for his Piety."
+
+There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
+more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable
+countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown
+older. Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-olds
+three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale; but age
+magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old people are a
+kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it
+may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved
+features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details, like
+so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be. The
+middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint impressions in my
+memory, but how grandly the procession of the old clergymen who filled
+our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof, marches
+before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood,
+the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy
+over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of
+Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth,
+which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect;
+and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of
+Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first living
+person ever pointed out to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason Harris of
+Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand,
+being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was
+adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring
+of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in
+decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as
+if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and that
+other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so
+long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it
+almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the
+resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little
+Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated,
+reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in
+wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family always
+loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Coverdale's
+Version, and the Bishop's Bible, and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac
+(Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he
+was very much pleased with the contents of his letter, and so on about
+Sir Isaac, ad libitum,--for the admiral was his old friend, and he was
+proud of him. The kindly little old gentleman was a collector of Bibles,
+and made himself believe he thought he should publish a learned
+Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked for it only in the
+Greek Calends,--say on the 31st of April, when that should come round, if
+you would modernize the phrase. I recall also one or two exceptional and
+infrequent visitors with perfect distinctness: cheerful Elijah Kellogg, a
+lively missionary from the region of the Quoddy Indians, with much
+hopeful talk about Sock Bason and his tribe; also poor old
+Poor-house-Parson Isaac Smith, his head going like a China mandarin, as
+he discussed the possibilities of the escape of that distinguished
+captive whom he spoke of under the name, if I can reproduce phonetically
+its vibrating nasalities of "General Mmbongaparty,"--a name suggestive to
+my young imagination of a dangerous, loose-jointed skeleton, threatening
+us all like the armed figure of Death in my little New England Primer.
+
+I have mentioned only the names of those whose images come up pleasantly
+before me, and I do not mean to say anything which any descendant might
+not read smilingly. But there were some of the black-coated gentry whose
+aspect was not so agreeable to me. It is very curious to me to look back
+on my early likes and dislikes, and see how as a child I was attracted or
+repelled by such and such ministers, a good deal, as I found out long
+afterwards, according to their theological beliefs. On the whole, I
+think the old-fashioned New England divine softening down into
+Arminianism was about as agreeable as any of them. And here I may
+remark, that a mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to
+contemplate than a tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32
+Fahrenheit is much more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to the
+same temperature. The least pleasing change is that kind of mental
+hemiplegia which now and then attacks the rational side of a man at about
+the same period of life when one side of the body is liable to be
+palsied, and in fact is, very probably, the same thing as palsy, in
+another form. The worst of it is that the subjects of it never seem to
+suspect that they are intellectual invalids, stammerers and cripples at
+best, but are all the time hitting out at their old friends with the well
+arm, and calling them hard names out of their twisted mouths.
+
+It was a real delight to have one of those good, hearty, happy, benignant
+old clergymen pass the Sunday, with us, and I can remember some whose
+advent made the day feel almost like "Thanksgiving." But now and then
+would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice,
+which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up stairs, who
+took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad
+way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his
+woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other
+direction. I remember one in particular, who twitted me so with my
+blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black
+children who, like the "Little Vulgar Boy," "had n't got no supper and
+hadn't got no ma," and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished for the
+moment I was a little black boy!) that he did more in that one day to
+make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian
+out of an infant Hottentot. What a debt we owe to our friends of the
+left centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the Summer street
+ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded, cheerful-spirited
+men, who have taken the place of those wailing poitrinaires with the
+bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats and a funeral service
+in their forlorn physiognomies! I might have been a minister myself, for
+aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an
+undertaker.
+
+All this belongs to one of the side-shows, to which I promised those who
+would take tickets to the main exhibition should have entrance gratis.
+If I were writing a poem you would expect, as a matter of course, that
+there would be a digression now and then.
+
+To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of
+Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Fifteen years he lived with his
+family under its roof. I never found the slightest trace of him
+until a few years ago, when I cleaned and brightened with pious hands
+the brass lock of "the study," which had for many years been covered
+with a thick coat of paint. On that I found scratched; as with a
+nail or fork, the following inscription:
+ E PE
+
+Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself. Master Edward
+Pearson, then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize
+himself in monumental brass, and had got so far towards it, when a sudden
+interruption, probably a smart box on the ear, cheated him of his fame,
+except so far as this poor record may rescue it. Dead long ago. I
+remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a later period; and, for
+some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes,
+standing full before a generous wood-fire, not facing it, but quite the
+contrary, a perfect picture of the content afforded by a blazing hearth
+contemplated from that point of view, and, as the heat stole through his
+person and kindled his emphatic features, seeming to me a pattern of
+manly beauty. What a statue gallery of posturing friends we all have in
+our memory! The old Professor himself sometimes visited the house after
+it had changed hands. Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly
+trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be
+found among the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia. (See Plates, Vol.
+IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.)
+
+And now let us return to our chief picture. In the days of my earliest
+remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western
+side of the old mansion. Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest
+the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their
+tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills,
+whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their closely
+swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in
+their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to me to give an of
+sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries. Not so with
+the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the western
+entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale
+of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout
+as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the
+strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.
+
+The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of
+a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves
+against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the
+classic green. You know the "Washington elm," or if you do not, you had
+better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells
+you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the
+head of an American army. In a line with that you may see two others:
+the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to that
+beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along. I have
+heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that the
+difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the
+Washington elm being lower than either of the others. There is a row of
+elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the
+one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs
+and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its
+symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second
+thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the
+lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the
+axe finished what the lightning had begun.
+
+The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and of
+clayey ground. The Common and the College green, near which the old
+house stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four curses are the local
+inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think
+that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in
+it. I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I could
+find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and muddy-witted
+and "cantankerous,"--disposed to get my back up, like those other natives
+of the soil.
+
+I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind of
+natural theology for him. I fell into Manichean ways of thinking from
+the teaching of my garden experiences. Like other boys in the country, I
+had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, I entrusted the
+seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their resurrection and
+glorification in the better world of summer. But I soon found that my
+lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the
+gauntlet of as many foes and dials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would
+not Blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their cone demned caps,
+without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with
+monstrous protrusions through their very centres,--something that looked
+like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and
+cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked
+like centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both
+sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a professional
+specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert,
+whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help order the
+whole attempt at vegetation. Such experiences must influence a child
+born to them. A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes but weeds and evil
+beasts of small dimensions, must breed different qualities in its human
+offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots which the wit whom I
+have once before noted described so happily that, if I quoted the
+passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as a diamond
+breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who might have
+passed for a gentleman without it. Your arid patch of earth should seem
+to the natural birthplace of the leaner virtues and the abler vices,--of
+temperance and the domestic proprieties on the one hand, with a tendency
+to light weights in groceries and provisions, and to clandestine
+abstraction from the person on the other, as opposed to the free
+hospitality, the broadly planned burglaries, and the largely conceived
+homicides of our rich Western alluvial regions. Yet Nature is never
+wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it
+was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses
+sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces
+unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's
+delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy,--self-sowing marigolds,
+hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs
+and syringas,--all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some
+caressing presence was around me.
+
+Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast domain of four acres or
+thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a
+fathomless chasm,--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era
+jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren
+enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its
+drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where
+all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by
+the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which make it look
+like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I looked round, were the Colleges, the
+meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished; the
+burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their weary bones under
+epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty
+church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks; the
+district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so
+called in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses scattered near
+and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance,
+and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as
+I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have
+called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy:
+
+But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape. The worst of a
+modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. I watched
+one building not long since. It had no proper garret, to begin with,
+only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where a spirit could
+not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like Ravel, Brother,
+after the millstone had fallen on him. There was not a nook or a corner
+in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part was
+as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition, his
+figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her)
+Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through his (or her) subjects'
+keyholes.
+
+Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always
+scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting
+family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold
+slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the
+garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white
+potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the
+daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding
+up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a century and
+more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges
+rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones
+connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might
+have been, for it was just the place to look for them. It had a garret;
+very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us has described in one
+of his books; but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from
+memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up
+between them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy
+on you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges
+of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.
+Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may
+see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of
+the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it
+came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of
+darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs and dead things they
+wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks
+are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old
+man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he
+died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow
+in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both
+arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left
+to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old
+deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled
+it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of
+troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like
+stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with
+which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass
+andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry
+substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the
+fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn, with
+its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their
+comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good
+purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which was running, it
+may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem witches.
+
+Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
+had histories. On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these
+names:
+
+"John Tracy," "Robert Roberts," "Thomas Prince;" "Stultus" another hand
+had added. When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for
+the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find
+them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students. I found
+them all under the years 1771 and 1773. Does it please their thin ghosts
+thus to be dragged to the light of day? Has "Stultus" forgiven the
+indignity of being thus characterized?
+
+The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should
+have a book infirmary attached his library. There should find a
+peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are
+sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but
+unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored
+sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the
+school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
+battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart; these
+and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose
+(which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic
+leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of
+Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children and
+grandchildren come along. What would I not give for that dear little
+paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of
+which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out
+with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as once
+tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the very name
+of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.
+
+I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the southeast
+attic. The "Negro Plot" at New York helped to implant a feeling in me
+which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. "Thinks I to
+Myself," an old novel, which has been attributed to a famous statesman,
+introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the
+shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Coelebs in Search of a
+Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class, as the young doctor that
+sits on the other side of the table would probably call them. I always,
+from an early age, had a keen eye for a story with a moral sticking out
+of it, and gave it a wide berth, though in my later years I have myself
+written a couple of "medicated novels," as one of my dearest and
+pleasantest old friends wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if
+she had read the last of my printed performances. I forgave the satire
+for the charming esprit of the epithet. Besides the works I have
+mentioned, there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
+annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had a
+vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
+Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the
+Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew
+of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all
+manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book
+before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke
+of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and the fingering of
+bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the
+shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it will be three centuries old,
+and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its eye
+(Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a
+prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the old
+open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St.
+Sulpice. I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold
+of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it
+is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical
+statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall
+kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and
+exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I
+was then aware of. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found in
+the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works
+up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over
+again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment semi-emotional
+belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or that fantastic
+system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the
+ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic-chamber.
+
+The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are
+sacred to silent memories.
+
+Let us go down to the ground-floor. I should have begun with this, but
+that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently
+told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our local
+history. I retain my doubts about those "dents" on the floor of the
+right-hand room, "the study" of successive occupants, said to have been
+made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was
+the cause to which the story told me in childhood laid them. That
+military consultations were held in that room when the house was General
+Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other
+men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of
+Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the
+battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and
+prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody
+expedition,--all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them
+need be doubted.
+
+But now for fifty years and more that room has been a meeting-ground for
+the platoons and companies which range themselves at the scholar's word
+of command. Pleasant it is to think that the retreating host of books is
+to give place to a still larger army of volumes, which have seen service
+under the eye of a great commander. For here the noble collection of him
+so freshly remembered as our silver-tongued orator, our erudite scholar,
+our honored College President, our accomplished statesman, our courtly
+ambassador, are to be reverently gathered by the heir of his name,
+himself not unworthy to be surrounded by that august assembly of the wise
+of all ages and of various lands and languages.
+
+Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half and
+not have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering legends
+to the after-time? There are other names on some of the small
+window-panes, which must have had young flesh-and-blood owners, and there
+is one of early date which elderly persons have whispered was borne by a
+fair woman, whose graces made the house beautiful in the eyes of the
+youth of that time. One especially--you will find the name of Fortescue
+Vernon, of the class of 1780, in the Triennial Catalogue--was a favored
+visitor to the old mansion; but he went over seas, I think they told me,
+and died still young, and the name of the maiden which is scratched on
+the windowpane was never changed. I am telling the story honestly, as I
+remember it, but I may have colored it unconsciously, and the legendary
+pane may be broken before this for aught I know. At least, I have named
+no names except the beautiful one of the supposed hero of the romantic
+story.
+
+It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by
+such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with
+fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast
+territory of four or five acres around it to give a child the sense that
+he was born to a noble principality. It has been a great pleasure to
+retain a certain hold upon it for so many years; and since in the natural
+course of things it must at length pass into other hands, it is a
+gratification to see the old place making itself tidy for a new tenant,
+like some venerable dame who is getting ready to entertain a neighbor of
+condition. Not long since a new cap of shingles adorned this ancient
+mother among the village--now city--mansions. She has dressed herself
+in brighter colors than she has hitherto worn, so they tell me, within
+the last few days. She has modernized her aspects in several ways; she
+has rubbed bright the glasses through which she looks at the Common and
+the Colleges; and as the sunsets shine upon her through the flickering
+leaves or the wiry spray of the elms I remember from my childhood, they
+will glorify her into the aspect she wore when President Holyoke, father
+of our long since dead centenarian, looked upon her in her youthful
+comeliness.
+
+The quiet corner formed by this and the neighboring residences has
+changed less than any place I can remember. Our kindly, polite, shrewd,
+and humorous old neighbor, who in former days has served the town as
+constable and auctioneer, and who bids fair to become the oldest
+inhabitant of the city, was there when I was born, and is living there
+to-day. By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant
+itself on this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung
+so tenaciously and fondly to the place and its habitations will have died
+with those who cherished them.
+
+Shall they ever live again in the memory of those who loved them here
+below? What is this life without the poor accidents which made it our
+own, and by which we identify ourselves? Ah me! I might like to be a
+winged chorister, but still it seems to me I should hardly be quite happy
+if I could not recall at will the Old House with the Long Entry, and the
+White Chamber (where I wrote the first verses that made me known, with a
+pencil, stans pede in uno, pretty, nearly), and the Little Parlor, and
+the Study, and the old books in uniforms as varied as those of the
+Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used to be, if my memory serves
+me right, and the front yard with the Star-of-Bethlehems growing,
+flowerless, among the grass, and the dear faces to be seen no more there
+or anywhere on this earthly place of farewells.
+
+I have told my story. I do not know what special gifts have been granted
+or denied me; but this I know, that I am like so many others of my
+fellow-creatures, that when I smile, I feel as if they must; when I cry,
+I think their eyes fill; and it always seems to me that when I am most
+truly myself I come nearest to them and am surest of being listened to by
+the brothers and sisters of the larger family into which I was born so
+long ago. I have often feared they might be tired of me and what I tell
+them. But then, perhaps, would come a letter from some quiet body in
+some out-of-the-way place, which showed me that I had said something
+which another had often felt but never said, or told the secret of
+another's heart in unburdening my own. Such evidences that one is in the
+highway of human experience and feeling lighten the footsteps
+wonderfully. So it is that one is encouraged to go on writing as long as
+the world has anything that interests him, for he never knows how many of
+his fellow-beings he may please or profit, and in how many places his
+name will be spoken as that of a friend.
+
+In the mood suggested by my story I have ventured on the poem that
+follows. Most people love this world more than they are willing to
+confess, and it is hard to conceive ourselves weaned from it so as to
+feel no emotion at the thought of its most sacred recollections, even
+after a sojourn of years, as we should count the lapse of earthly
+time,--in the realm where, sooner or later, all tears shall be wiped
+away. I hope, therefore, the title of my lines will not frighten those
+who are little accustomed to think of men and women as human beings in
+any state but the present.
+
+ HOMESICK IN HEAVEN.
+
+ THE DIVINE VOICE.
+
+ Go seek thine earth-born sisters,--thus the Voice
+ That all obey,--the sad and silent three;
+ These only, while the hosts of heaven rejoice,
+ Smile never: ask them what their sorrows be:
+
+ And when the secret of their griefs they tell,
+ Look on them with thy mild, half-human eyes;
+ Say what thou wast on earth; thou knowest well;
+ So shall they cease from unavailing sighs.
+
+ THE ANGEL.
+
+ --Why thus, apart,--the swift-winged herald spake,
+ --Sit ye with silent lips and unstrung lyres
+ While the trisagion's blending chords awake
+ In shouts of joy from all the heavenly choirs?
+
+ THE FIRST SPIRIT.
+
+ --Chide not thy sisters,--thus the answer came;
+ --Children of earth, our half-weaned nature clings
+ To earth's fond memories, and her whispered name
+ Untunes our quivering lips, our saddened strings;
+
+ For there we loved, and where we love is home,
+ Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts,
+ Though o'er us shine the jasper-lighted dome:--
+
+ The chain may lengthen, but it never parts!
+
+ Sometimes a sunlit sphere comes rolling by,
+ And then we softly whisper,--can it be?
+ And leaning toward the silvery orb, we try
+ To hear the music of its murmuring sea;
+
+ To catch, perchance, some flashing glimpse of green,
+ Or breathe some wild-wood fragrance, wafted through
+ The opening gates of pearl, that fold between
+ The blinding splendors and the changeless blue.
+
+ THE ANGEL.
+
+ --Nay, sister, nay! a single healing leaf
+ Plucked from the bough of yon twelve-fruited tree,
+ Would soothe such anguish,--deeper stabbing grief
+ Has pierced thy throbbing heart--
+
+ THE FIRST SPIRIT.
+
+ ---Ah, woe is me!
+ I from my clinging babe was rudely torn;
+ His tender lips a loveless bosom pressed
+ Can I forget him in my life new born?
+ O that my darling lay upon my breast!
+
+ THE ANGEL.
+
+ --And thou?
+
+ THE SECOND SPIRIT.
+
+ I was a fair and youthful bride,
+
+ The kiss of love still burns upon my cheek,
+ He whom I worshipped, ever at my side,
+ --Him through the spirit realm in vain I seek.
+
+ Sweet faces turn their beaming eyes on mine;
+ Ah! not in these the wished-for look I read;
+ Still for that one dear human smile I pine;
+ Thou and none other!--is the lover's creed.
+
+ THE ANGEL.
+
+ --And whence thy sadness in a world of bliss
+ Where never parting comes, nor mourner's tear?
+ Art thou, too, dreaming of a mortal's kiss
+ Amid the seraphs of the heavenly sphere?
+
+ THE THIRD SPIRIT.
+
+ --Nay, tax not me with passion's wasting fire;
+ When the swift message set my spirit free,
+ Blind, helpless, lone, I left my gray-haired sire;
+ My friends were many, he had none save me.
+
+ I left him, orphaned, in the starless night;
+ Alas, for him no cheerful morning's dawn!
+ I wear the ransomed spirit's robe of white,
+ Yet still I hear him moaning, She is gone!
+
+ THE ANGEL.
+
+ --Ye know me not, sweet sisters?--All in vain
+ Ye seek your lost ones in the shapes they wore;
+ The flower once opened may not bud again,
+ The fruit once fallen finds the stem no more.
+
+ Child, lover, sire,--yea, all things loved below,
+ Fair pictures damasked on a vapor's fold,
+ Fade like the roseate flush, the golden glow,
+ When the bright curtain of the day is rolled.
+
+ I was the babe that slumbered on thy breast.
+ --And, sister, mine the lips that called thee bride.
+ --Mine were the silvered locks thy hand caressed,
+ That faithful hand, my faltering footstep's guide!
+
+ Each changing form, frail vesture of decay,
+ The soul unclad forgets it once hath worn,
+ Stained with the travel of the weary day,
+ And shamed with rents from every wayside thorn.
+
+ To lie, an infant, in thy fond embrace,
+ To come with love's warm kisses back to thee,
+ To show thine eyes thy gray-haired father's face,
+ Not Heaven itself could grant; this may not be!
+
+ Then spread your folded wings, and leave to earth
+ The dust once breathing ye have mourned so long,
+ Till Love, new risen, owns his heavenly birth,
+ And sorrow's discords sweeten into song!
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+I am going to take it for granted now and henceforth, in my report of
+what was said and what was to be seen at our table, that I have secured
+one good, faithful, loving reader, who never finds fault, who never gets
+sleepy over my pages, whom no critic can bully out of a liking for me,
+and to whom I am always safe in addressing myself. My one elect may be
+man or woman, old or young, gentle or simple, living in the next block or
+on a slope of Nevada, my fellow-countryman or an alien; but one such
+reader I shall assume to exist and have always in my thought when I am
+writing.
+
+A writer is so like a lover! And a talk with the right listener is so
+like an arm-in-arm walk in the moonlight with the soft heartbeat just
+felt through the folds of muslin and broadcloth! But it takes very
+little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover. There are a great
+many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the
+soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is
+easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless,
+slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all round
+it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed
+ministering spirit with the vessel of oil may keep it bright in spite of
+the stream of cold water on the other side doing its best to put it out.
+
+I suppose, if any writer, of any distinguishable individuality, could
+look into the hearts of all his readers, he might very probably find one
+in his parish of a thousand or a million who honestly preferred him to
+any other of his kind. I have no doubt we have each one of us,
+somewhere, our exact facsimile, so like us in all things except the
+accidents of condition, that we should love each other like a pair of
+twins, if our natures could once fairly meet. I know I have my
+counterpart in some State of this Union. I feel sure that there is an
+Englishman somewhere precisely like myself. (I hope he does not drop his
+h's, for it does not seem to me possible that the Royal Dane could have
+remained faithful to his love for Ophelia, if she had addressed him as
+'Amlet.) There is also a certain Monsieur, to me at this moment unknown,
+and likewise a Herr Von Something, each of whom is essentially my double.
+An Arab is at this moment eating dates, a mandarin is just sipping his
+tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with undeveloped possibilities) drinking
+the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one of whom, if he had been born in the
+gambrel-roofed house, and cultivated my little sand-patch, and grown up
+in "the study" from the height of Walton's Polyglot Bible to that of the
+shelf which held the Elzevir Tacitus and Casaubon's Polybius, with all
+the complex influences about him that surrounded me, would have been so
+nearly what I am that I should have loved him like a brother,--always
+provided that I did not hate him for his resemblance to me, on the same
+principle as that which makes bodies in the same electric condition repel
+each other.
+
+For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not the
+person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
+complementary. Just as a particular soil wants some one element to
+fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of
+famine--for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not
+always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as
+peremptory as the salt-sick sailor's call for a lemon or a raw potato,
+or, if you will, as those capricious "longings," which have a certain
+meaning, we may suppose, and which at any rate we think it reasonable to
+satisfy if we can.
+
+I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I got
+run away with by my local reminiscences. I wish you to understand that
+we have a rather select company at the table of our boarding-house.
+
+Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days, of
+course,--all landladies have,--but has also, I feel sure, seen a good
+deal worse ones. For she wears a very handsome silk dress on state
+occasions, with a breastpin set, as I honestly believe, with genuine
+pearls, and appears habitually with a very smart cap, from under which
+her gray curls come out with an unmistakable expression, conveyed in the
+hieratic language of the feminine priesthood, to the effect that while
+there is life there is hope. And when I come to reflect on the many
+circumstances which go to the making of matrimonial happiness, I cannot
+help thinking that a personage of her present able exterior, thoroughly
+experienced in all the domestic arts which render life comfortable, might
+make the later years of some hitherto companionless bachelor very
+endurable, not to say pleasant.
+
+The condition of the Landlady's family is, from what I learn, such as to
+make the connection I have alluded to, I hope with delicacy, desirable
+for incidental as well as direct reasons, provided a fitting match could
+be found. I was startled at hearing her address by the familiar name of
+Benjamin the young physician I have referred to, until I found on
+inquiry, what I might have guessed by the size of his slices of pie and
+other little marks of favoritism, that he was her son. He has recently
+come back from Europe, where he has topped off his home training with a
+first-class foreign finish. As the Landlady could never have educated
+him in this way out of the profits of keeping boarders, I was not
+surprised when I was told that she had received a pretty little property
+in the form of a bequest from a former boarder, a very kind-hearted,
+worthy old gentleman who had been long with her and seen how hard she
+worked for food and clothes for herself and this son of hers, Benjamin
+Franklin by his baptismal name. Her daughter had also married well, to a
+member of what we may call the post-medical profession, that, namely,
+which deals with the mortal frame after the practitioners of the healing
+art have done with it and taken their leave. So thriving had this
+son-in-law of hers been in his business, that his wife drove about in her
+own carriage, drawn by a pair of jet-black horses of most dignified
+demeanor, whose only fault was a tendency to relapse at once into a walk
+after every application of a stimulus that quickened their pace to a
+trot; which application always caused them to look round upon the driver
+with a surprised and offended air, as if he had been guilty of a grave
+indecorum.
+
+The Landlady's daughter had been blessed with a number of children, of
+great sobriety of outward aspect, but remarkably cheerful in their inward
+habit of mind, more especially on the occasion of the death of a doll,
+which was an almost daily occurrence, and gave them immense delight in
+getting up a funeral, for which they had a complete miniature outfit.
+How happy they were under their solemn aspect! For the head mourner, a
+child of remarkable gifts, could actually make the tears run down her
+cheeks,--as real ones as if she had been a grown person following a rich
+relative, who had not forgotten his connections, to his last unfurnished
+lodgings.
+
+So this was a most desirable family connection for the right man to step
+into,--a thriving, thrifty mother-in-law, who knew what was good for the
+sustenance of the body, and had no doubt taught it to her daughter; a
+medical artist at hand in case the luxuries of the table should happen to
+disturb the physiological harmonies; and in the worst event, a sweet
+consciousness that the last sad offices would be attended to with
+affectionate zeal, and probably a large discount from the usual charges.
+
+It seems as if I could hardly be at this table for a year, if I should
+stay so long, without seeing some romance or other work itself out under
+my eyes; and I cannot help thinking that the Landlady is to be the
+heroine of the love-history like to unfold itself. I think I see the
+little cloud in the horizon, with a silvery lining to it, which may end
+in a rain of cards tied round with white ribbons. Extremes meet, and who
+so like to be the other party as the elderly gentleman at the other end
+of the table, as far from her now as the length of the board permits? I
+may be mistaken, but I think this is to be the romantic episode of the
+year before me. Only it seems so natural it is improbable, for you never
+find your dropped money just where you look for it, and so it is with
+these a priori matches.
+
+This gentleman is a tight, tidy, wiry little man, with a small, brisk
+head, close-cropped white hair, a good wholesome complexion, a quiet,
+rather kindly face, quick in his movements, neat in his dress, but fond
+of wearing a short jacket over his coat, which gives him the look of a
+pickled or preserved schoolboy. He has retired, they say, from a
+thriving business, with a snug property, suspected by some to be rather
+more than snug, and entitling him to be called a capitalist, except that
+this word seems to be equivalent to highway robber in the new gospel of
+Saint Petroleum. That he is economical in his habits cannot be denied,
+for he saws and splits his own wood, for exercise, he says,--and makes
+his own fires, brushes his own shoes, and, it is whispered, darns a hole
+in a stocking now and then,--all for exercise, I suppose. Every summer
+he goes out of town for a few weeks. On a given day of the month a wagon
+stops at the door and takes up, not his trunks, for he does not indulge
+in any such extravagance, but the stout brown linen bags in which he
+packs the few conveniences he carries with him.
+
+I do not think this worthy and economical personage will have much to do
+or to say, unless he marries the Landlady. If he does that, he will play
+a part of some importance,--but I don't feel sure at all. His talk is
+little in amount, and generally ends in some compact formula condensing
+much wisdom in few words, as that a man, should not put all his eggs in
+one basket; that there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of
+it; and one in particular, which he surprised me by saying in pretty good
+French one day, to the effect that the inheritance of the world belongs
+to the phlegmatic people, which seems to me to have a good deal of truth
+in it.
+
+The other elderly personage, the old man with iron-gray hair and large
+round spectacles, sits at my right at table. He is a retired college
+officer, a man of books and observation, and himself an author. Magister
+Artium is one of his titles on the College Catalogue, and I like best to
+speak of him as the Master, because he has a certain air of authority
+which none of us feel inclined to dispute. He has given me a copy of a
+work of his which seems to me not wanting in suggestiveness, and which I
+hope I shall be able to make some use of in my records by and by. I said
+the other day that he had good solid prejudices, which is true, and I
+like him none the worse for it; but he has also opinions more or less
+original, valuable, probable, fanciful; fantastic, or whimsical, perhaps,
+now and then; which he promulgates at table somewhat in the tone of
+imperial edicts. Another thing I like about him is, that he takes a
+certain intelligent interest in pretty much everything that interests
+other people. I asked him the other day what he thought most about in
+his wide range of studies.
+
+--Sir,--said he,--I take stock in everything that concerns anybody.
+Humani nihil,--you know the rest. But if you ask me what is my
+specialty, I should say, I applied myself more particularly to the
+contemplation of the Order of Things.
+
+--A pretty wide subject,--I ventured to suggest.
+
+--Not wide enough, sir,--not wide enough to satisfy the desire of a mind
+which wants to get at absolute truth, without reference to the empirical
+arrangements of our particular planet and its environments. I want to
+subject the formal conditions of space and time to a new analysis, and
+project a possible universe outside of the Order of Things. But I have
+narrowed myself by studying the actual facts of being. By and by--by and
+by--perhaps--perhaps. I hope to do some sound thinking in heaven--if I
+ever get there,--he said seriously, and it seemed to me not irreverently.
+
+--I rather like that,--I said. I think your telescopic people are, on
+the whole, more satisfactory than your microscopic ones.
+
+--My left-hand neighbor fidgeted about a little in his chair as I said
+this. But the young man sitting not far from the Landlady, to whom my
+attention had been attracted by the expression of his eyes, which seemed
+as if they saw nothing before him, but looked beyond everything, smiled a
+sort of faint starlight smile, that touched me strangely; for until that
+moment he had appeared as if his thoughts were far away, and I had been
+questioning whether he had lost friends lately, or perhaps had never had
+them, he seemed so remote from our boarding-house life. I will inquire
+about him, for he interests me, and I thought he seemed interested as I
+went on talking.
+
+--No,--I continued,--I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind
+fenced in. I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and the
+awful hollow that holds them. We have done with those hypaethral
+temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and
+skylights to them. Minds with skylights,--yes,--stop, let us see if we
+can't get something out of that.
+
+One-story intellects, two--story intellects, three story intellects with
+skylights. All fact--collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are
+one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the
+labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men
+idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above,
+through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can
+store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who
+know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make
+much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class. Your
+great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because
+his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so
+that he can get at them,--facts below, principles above, and all in
+ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear
+statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of
+light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture, in the attics.
+
+--The old Master smiled. I think he suspects himself of a three-story
+intellect, and I don't feel sure that he is n't right.
+
+--Is it dark meat or white meat you will be helped to?--said the
+Landlady, addressing the Master.
+
+--Dark meat for me, always,--he answered. Then turning to me, he began
+one of those monologues of his, such as that which put the Member of the
+Haouse asleep the other day.
+
+--It 's pretty much the same in men and women and in books and
+everything, that it is in turkeys and chickens. Why, take your poets,
+now, say Browning and Tennyson. Don't you think you can say which is the
+dark-meat and which is the white-meat poet? And so of the people you
+know; can't you pick out the full-flavored, coarse-fibred characters from
+the delicate, fine-fibred ones? And in the same person, don't you know
+the same two shades in different parts of the character that you find in
+the wing and thigh of a partridge? I suppose you poets may like white
+meat best, very probably; you had rather have a wing than a drumstick, I
+dare say.
+
+--Why, yes,--said I,--I suppose some of us do. Perhaps it is because a
+bird flies with his white-fleshed limbs and walks with the dark-fleshed
+ones. Besides, the wing-muscles are nearer the heart than the
+leg-muscles.
+
+I thought that sounded mighty pretty, and paused a moment to pat myself
+on the back, as is my wont when I say something that I think of superior
+quality. So I lost my innings; for the Master is apt to strike in at the
+end of a bar, instead of waiting for a rest, if I may borrow a musical
+phrase. No matter, just at this moment, what he said; but he talked the
+Member of the Haouse asleep again.
+
+They have a new term nowadays (I am speaking to you, the Reader) for
+people that do a good deal of talking; they call them "conversationists,"
+or "conversationalists "; talkists, I suppose, would do just as well. It
+is rather dangerous to get the name of being one of these phenomenal
+manifestations, as one is expected to say something remarkable every time
+one opens one's mouth in company. It seems hard not to be able to ask for
+a piece of bread or a tumbler of water, without a sensation running round
+the table, as if one were an electric eel or a torpedo, and couldn't be
+touched without giving a shock. A fellow is n't all battery, is he? The
+idea that a Gymnotus can't swallow his worm without a coruscation of
+animal lightning is hard on that brilliant but sensational being. Good
+talk is not a matter of will at all; it depends--you know we are all
+half-materialists nowadays--on a certain amount of active congestion of
+the brain, and that comes when it is ready, and not before. I saw a man
+get up the other day in a pleasant company, and talk away for about five
+minutes, evidently by a pure effort of will. His person was good, his
+voice was pleasant, but anybody could see that it was all mechanical
+labor; he was sparring for wind, as the Hon. John Morrissey, M. C., would
+express himself. Presently,--
+
+Do you,--Beloved, I am afraid you are not old enough,--but do you
+remember the days of the tin tinder-box, the flint, and steel? Click!
+click! click!--Al-h-h! knuckles that time! click! click! CLICK! a spark
+has taken, and is eating into the black tinder, as a six-year-old eats
+into a sheet of gingerbread.
+
+Presently, after hammering away for his five minutes with mere words, the
+spark of a happy expression took somewhere among the mental combustibles,
+and then for ten minutes we had a pretty, wandering, scintillating play
+of eloquent thought, that enlivened, if it did not kindle, all around it.
+If you want the real philosophy of it, I will give it to you. The chance
+thought or expression struck the nervous centre of consciousness, as the
+rowel of a spur stings the flank of a racer. Away through all the
+telegraphic radiations of the nervous cords flashed the intelligence that
+the brain was kindling, and must be fed with something or other, or it
+would burn itself to ashes.
+
+And all the great hydraulic engines poured in their scarlet blood, and
+the fire kindled, and the flame rose; for the blood is a stream that,
+like burning rock-oil, at once kindles, and is itself the fuel. You can't
+order these organic processes, any more than a milliner can make a rose.
+She can make something that looks like a rose, more or less, but it takes
+all the forces of the universe to finish and sweeten that blossom in your
+button-hole; and you may be sure that when the orator's brain is in a
+flame, when the poet's heart is in a tumult, it is something mightier
+than he and his will that is dealing with him! As I have looked from one
+of the northern windows of the street which commands our noble
+estuary,--the view through which is a picture on an illimitable canvas
+and a poem in innumerable cantos,--I have sometimes seen a pleasure-boat
+drifting along, her sail flapping, and she seeming as if she had neither
+will nor aim. At her stern a man was laboring to bring her head round
+with an oar, to little purpose, as it seemed to those who watched him
+pulling and tugging. But all at once the wind of heaven, which had
+wandered all the way from Florida or from Labrador, it may be, struck
+full upon the sail, and it swelled and rounded itself, like a white bosom
+that had burst its bodice, and--
+
+--You are right; it is too true! but how I love these pretty phrases! I
+am afraid I am becoming an epicure in words, which is a bad thing to be,
+unless it is dominated by something infinitely better than itself. But
+there is a fascination in the mere sound of articulated breath; of
+consonants that resist with the firmness of a maid of honor, or half or
+wholly yield to the wooing lips; of vowels that flow and murmur, each
+after its kind; the peremptory b and p, the brittle k, the vibrating r,
+the insinuating s, the feathery f, the velvety v, the bell-voiced m, the
+tranquil broad a, the penetrating e, the cooing u, the emotional o, and
+the beautiful combinations of alternate rock and stream, as it were, that
+they give to the rippling flow of speech,--there is a fascination in the
+skilful handling of these, which the great poets and even prose-writers
+have not disdained to acknowledge and use to recommend their thought.
+What do you say to this line of Homer as a piece of poetical full-band
+music? I know you read the Greek characters with perfect ease, but
+permit me, just for my own satisfaction, to put it into English
+letters:--
+
+ Aigle pamphanoosa di' aitheros ouranon ike!
+
+as if he should have spoken in our poorer phrase of
+
+ Splendor far shining through ether to heaven ascending.
+
+That Greek line, which I do not remember having heard mention of as
+remarkable, has nearly every consonantal and vowel sound in the language.
+Try it by the Greek and by the English alphabet; it is a curiosity. Tell
+me that old Homer did not roll his sightless eyeballs about with delight,
+as he thundered out these ringing syllables! It seems hard to think of
+his going round like a hand-organ man, with such music and such thought
+as his to earn his bread with. One can't help wishing that Mr. Pugh
+could have got at him for a single lecture, at least, of the "Star
+Course," or that he could have appeared in the Music Hall, "for this
+night only."
+
+--I know I have rambled, but I hope you see that this is a delicate way
+of letting you into the nature of the individual who is, officially, the
+principal personage at our table. It would hardly do to describe him
+directly, you know. But you must not think, because the lightning
+zigzags, it does not know where to strike.
+
+I shall try to go through the rest of my description of our boarders with
+as little of digression as is consistent with my nature. I think we have
+a somewhat exceptional company. Since our Landlady has got up in the
+world, her board has been decidedly a favorite with persons a little
+above the average in point of intelligence and education. In fact, ever
+since a boarder of hers, not wholly unknown to the reading public,
+brought her establishment into notice, it has attracted a considerable
+number of literary and scientific people, and now and then a politician,
+like the Member of the House of Representatives, otherwise called the
+Great and General Court of the State of Massachusetts. The consequence
+is, that there is more individuality of character than in a good many
+similar boardinghouses, where all are business-men, engrossed in the same
+pursuit of money-making, or all are engaged in politics, and so deeply
+occupied with the welfare of the community that they can think and talk
+of little else.
+
+At my left hand sits as singular-looking a human being as I remember
+seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show. His black coat shines
+as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the wearer's
+back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum attrition are
+particularly smooth and bright. Round shoulders,--stooping over some
+minute labor, I suppose. Very slender limbs, with bends like a
+grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if he might
+straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead of walking. Wears
+goggles very commonly; says it rests his eyes, which he strains in
+looking at very small objects. Voice has a dry creak, as if made by some
+small piece of mechanism that wanted oiling. I don't think he is a
+botanist, for he does not smell of dried herbs, but carries a camphorated
+atmosphere about with him, as if to keep the moths from attacking him. I
+must find out what is his particular interest. One ought to know
+something about his immediate neighbors at the table. This is what I
+said to myself, before opening a conversation with him. Everybody in our
+ward of the city was in a great stir about a certain election, and I
+thought I might as well begin with that as anything.
+
+--How do you think the vote is likely to go tomorrow?--I said.
+
+--It isn't to-morrow,--he answered,--it 's next month.
+
+--Next month!--said I.---Why, what election do you mean?
+
+--I mean the election to the Presidency of the Entomological Society,
+sir,--he creaked, with an air of surprise, as if nobody could by any
+possibility have been thinking of any other. Great competition, sir,
+between the dipterists and the lepidopterists as to which shall get in
+their candidate. Several close ballotings already; adjourned for a
+fortnight. Poor concerns, both of 'em. Wait till our turn comes.
+
+--I suppose you are an entomologist?--I said with a note of
+interrogation.
+
+-Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on
+the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an
+Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as
+that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a
+dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist,
+sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.
+
+--May I venture to ask,--I said, a little awed by his statement and
+manner,--what is your special province of study?
+
+I am often spoken of as a Coleopterist,--he said,--but I have no right to
+so comprehensive a name. The genus Scarabaeus is what I have chiefly
+confined myself to, and ought to have studied exclusively. The beetles
+proper are quite enough for the labor of one man's life. Call me a
+Scarabaeist if you will; if I can prove myself worthy of that name, my
+highest ambition will be more than satisfied.
+
+I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him the
+Scarabee. He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures,--the
+beetles, I mean,---by being so much among them. His room is hung round
+with cases of them, each impaled on a pin driven through him, something
+as they used to bury suicides. These cases take the place for him of
+pictures and all other ornaments. That Boy steals into his room
+sometimes, and stares at them with great admiration, and has himself
+undertaken to form a rival cabinet, chiefly consisting of flies, so far,
+arranged in ranks superintended by an occasional spider.
+
+The old Master, who is a bachelor, has a kindly feeling for this little
+monkey, and those of his kind.
+
+--I like children,--he said to me one day at table,--I like 'em, and I
+respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the
+world is done by them. Do you know they play the part in the household
+which the king's jester, who very often had a mighty long head under his
+cap and bells, used to play for a monarch? There 's no radical club like
+a nest of little folks in a nursery. Did you ever watch a baby's
+fingers? I have, often enough, though I never knew what it was to own
+one.---The Master paused half a minute or so,--sighed,--perhaps at
+thinking what he had missed in life,--looked up at me a little vacantly.
+I saw what was the matter; he had lost the thread of his talk.
+
+--Baby's fingers,--I intercalated.
+
+-Yes, yes; did you ever see how they will poke those wonderful little
+fingers of theirs into every fold and crack and crevice they can get at?
+That is their first education, feeling their way into the solid facts of
+the material world. When they begin to talk it is the same thing over
+again in another shape. If there is a crack or a flaw in your answer to
+their confounded shoulder-hitting questions, they will poke and poke
+until they have got it gaping just as the baby's fingers have made a rent
+out of that atom of a hole in his pinafore that your old eyes never took
+notice of. Then they make such fools of us by copying on a small scale
+what we do in the grand manner. I wonder if it ever occurs to our
+dried-up neighbor there to ask himself whether That Boy's collection of
+flies is n't about as significant in the Order of Things as his own
+Museum of Beetles?
+
+--I couldn't help thinking that perhaps That Boy's questions about the
+simpler mysteries of life might have a good deal of the same kind of
+significance as the Master's inquiries into the Order of Things.
+
+--On my left, beyond my next neighbor the Scarabee, at the end of the
+table, sits a person of whom we know little, except that he carries about
+him more palpable reminiscences of tobacco and the allied sources of
+comfort than a very sensitive organization might find acceptable. The
+Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,--perhaps
+he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco. As his forefinger
+shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him
+by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find out more about him.
+
+--The Young Girl who sits on my right, next beyond the Master, can hardly
+be more than nineteen or twenty years old. I wish I could paint her so
+as to interest others as much as she does me. But she has not a
+profusion of sunny tresses wreathing a neck of alabaster, and a cheek
+where the rose and the lily are trying to settle their old quarrel with
+alternating victory. Her hair is brown, her cheek is delicately pallid,
+her forehead is too ample for a ball-room beauty's. A single faint line
+between the eyebrows is the record of long--continued anxious efforts to
+please in the task she has chosen, or rather which has been forced upon
+her. It is the same line of anxious and conscientious effort which I saw
+not long since on the forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers
+who has visited us; the same which is so striking on the masks of singing
+women painted upon the facade of our Great Organ,--that Himalayan home of
+harmony which you are to see and then die, if you don't live where you
+can see and hear it often. Many deaths have happened in a neighboring
+large city from that well-known complaint, Icterus Invidiosorum, after
+returning from a visit to the Music Hall. The invariable symptom of a
+fatal attack is the Risus Sardonicus.--But the Young Girl. She gets her
+living by writing stories for a newspaper. Every week she furnishes a
+new story. If her head aches or her heart is heavy, so that she does not
+come to time with her story, she falls behindhand and has to live on
+credit. It sounds well enough to say that "she supports herself by her
+pen," but her lot is a trying one; it repeats the doom of the Danaides.
+The "Weekly Bucket" has no bottom, and it is her business to help fill
+it. Imagine for one moment what it is to tell a tale that must flow on,
+flow ever, without pausing; the lover miserable and happy this week, to
+begin miserable again next week and end as before; the villain scowling,
+plotting, punished; to scowl, plot, and get punished again in our next;
+an endless series of woes and busses, into each paragraph of which the
+forlorn artist has to throw all the liveliness, all the emotion, all the
+graces of style she is mistress of, for the wages of a maid of all work,
+and no more recognition or thanks from anybody than the apprentice who
+sets the types for the paper that prints her ever-ending and
+ever-beginning stories. And yet she has a pretty talent, sensibility, a
+natural way of writing, an ear for the music of verse, in which she
+sometimes indulges to vary the dead monotony of everlasting narrative,
+and a sufficient amount of invention to make her stories readable. I
+have found my eyes dimmed over them oftener than once, more with thinking
+about her, perhaps, than about her heroes and heroines. Poor little
+body! Poor little mind! Poor little soul! She is one of that great
+company of delicate, intelligent, emotional young creatures, who are
+waiting, like that sail I spoke of, for some breath of heaven to fill
+their white bosoms,--love, the right of every woman; religious emotion,
+sister of love, with the same passionate eyes, but cold, thin, bloodless
+hands,--some enthusiasm of humanity or divinity; and find that life
+offers them, instead, a seat on a wooden bench, a chain to fasten them to
+it, and a heavy oar to pull day and night. We read the Arabian tales and
+pity the doomed lady who must amuse her lord and master from day to day
+or have her head cut off; how much better is a mouth without bread to
+fill it than no mouth at all to fill, because no head? We have all round
+us a weary-eyed company of Scheherezades! This is one of them, and I may
+call her by that name when it pleases me to do so.
+
+The next boarder I have to mention is the one who sits between the Young
+Girl and the Landlady. In a little chamber into which a small thread of
+sunshine finds its way for half an hour or so every day during a month or
+six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other times obliged to content
+itself with ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, without wronging
+any others of our company, I may call, as she is very generally called in
+the household, The Lady. In giving her this name it is not meant that
+there are no other ladies at our table, or that the handmaids who serve
+us are not ladies, or to deny the general proposition that everybody who
+wears the unbifurcated garment is entitled to that appellation. Only
+this lady has a look and manner which there is no mistaking as belonging
+to a person always accustomed to refined and elegant society. Her style
+is perhaps a little more courtly and gracious than some would like. The
+language and manner which betray the habitual desire of pleasing, and
+which add a charm to intercourse in the higher social circles, are liable
+to be construed by sensitive beings unused to such amenities as an odious
+condescension when addressed to persons of less consideration than the
+accused, and as a still more odious--you know the word--when directed to
+those who are esteemed by the world as considerable person ages. But of
+all this the accused are fortunately wholly unconscious, for there is
+nothing so entirely natural and unaffected as the highest breeding.
+
+From an aspect of dignified but undisguised economy which showed itself
+in her dress as well as in her limited quarters, I suspected a story of
+shipwrecked fortune, and determined to question our Landlady. That
+worthy woman was delighted to tell the history of her most distinguished
+boarder. She was, as I had supposed, a gentlewoman whom a change of
+circumstances had brought down from her high estate.
+
+--Did I know the Goldenrod family?--Of course I did.---Well, the Lady,
+was first cousin to Mrs. Midas Goldenrod. She had been here in her
+carriage to call upon her,--not very often.---Were her rich relations
+kind and helpful to her?--Well, yes; at least they made her presents now
+and then. Three or four years ago they sent her a silver waiter, and
+every Christmas they sent her a boquet,--it must cost as much as five
+dollars, the Landlady thought.
+
+--And how did the Lady receive these valuable and useful gifts?
+
+--Every Christmas she got out the silver waiter and borrowed a glass
+tumbler and filled it with water, and put the boquet in it and set it on
+the waiter. It smelt sweet enough and looked pretty for a day or two,
+but the Landlady thought it wouldn't have hurt 'em if they'd sent a piece
+of goods for a dress, or at least a pocket-handkercher or two, or
+something or other that she could 'a' made some kind of use of; but
+beggars must n't be choosers; not that she was a beggar, for she'd sooner
+die than do that if she was in want of a meal of victuals. There was a
+lady I remember, and she had a little boy and she was a widow, and after
+she'd buried her husband she was dreadful poor, and she was ashamed to
+let her little boy go out in his old shoes, and copper-toed shoes they
+was too, because his poor little ten--toes--was a coming out of 'em; and
+what do you think my husband's rich uncle,--well, there now, it was me
+and my little Benjamin, as he was then, there's no use in hiding of
+it,--and what do you think my husband's uncle sent me but a plaster of
+Paris image of a young woman, that was,--well, her appearance wasn't
+respectable, and I had to take and wrap her up in a towel and poke her
+right into my closet, and there she stayed till she got her head broke
+and served her right, for she was n't fit to show folks. You need n't
+say anything about what I told you, but the fact is I was desperate poor
+before I began to support myself taking boarders, and a lone woman
+without her--her--
+
+The sentence plunged into the gulf of her great remembered sorrow, and
+was lost to the records of humanity.
+
+--Presently she continued in answer to my questions: The Lady was not
+very sociable; kept mostly to herself. The Young Girl (our Scheherezade)
+used to visit her sometimes, and they seemed to like each other, but the
+Young Girl had not many spare hours for visiting. The Lady never found
+fault, but she was very nice in her tastes, and kept everything about her
+looking as neat and pleasant as she could.
+
+---What did she do?--Why, she read, and she drew pictures, and she did
+needlework patterns, and played on an old harp she had; the gilt was
+mostly off, but it sounded very sweet, and she sung to it sometimes,
+those old songs that used to be in fashion twenty or thirty years ago,
+with words to 'em that folks could understand.
+
+Did she do anything to help support herself?--The Landlady couldn't say
+she did, but she thought there was rich people enough that ought to buy
+the flowers and things she worked and painted.
+
+All this points to the fact that she was bred to be an ornamental rather
+than what is called a useful member of society. This is all very well so
+long as fortune favors those who are chosen to be the ornamental
+personages; but if the golden tide recedes and leaves them stranded, they
+are more to be pitied than almost any other class. "I cannot dig, to beg
+I am ashamed."
+
+I think it is unpopular in this country to talk much about gentlemen and
+gentlewomen. People are touchy about social distinctions, which no doubt
+are often invidious and quite arbitrary and accidental, but which it is
+impossible to avoid recognizing as facts of natural history. Society
+stratifies itself everywhere, and the stratum which is generally
+recognized as the uppermost will be apt to have the advantage in easy
+grace of manner and in unassuming confidence, and consequently be more
+agreeable in the superficial relations of life. To compare these
+advantages with the virtues and utilities would be foolish. Much of the
+noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed, awkward, ungainly persons;
+but that is no more reason for undervaluing good manners and what we call
+high-breeding, than the fact that the best part of the sturdy labor of
+the world is done by men with exceptionable hands is to be urged against
+the use of Brown Windsor as a preliminary to appearance in cultivated
+society.
+
+I mean to stand up for this poor lady, whose usefulness in the world is
+apparently problematical. She seems to me like a picture which has
+fallen from its gilded frame and lies, face downward, on the dusty floor.
+The picture never was as needful as a window or a door, but it was
+pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be pleasant to see it there
+again, and I, for one, should be thankful to have the Lady restored by
+some turn of fortune to the position from which she has been so cruelly
+cast down.
+
+--I have asked the Landlady about the young man sitting near her, the
+same who attracted my attention the other day while I was talking, as I
+mentioned. He passes most of his time in a private observatory, it
+appears; a watcher of the stars. That I suppose gives the peculiar look
+to his lustrous eyes. The Master knows him and was pleased to tell me
+something about him.
+
+You call yourself a Poet,--he said,--and we call you so, too, and so you
+are; I read your verses and like 'em. But that young man lives in a
+world beyond the imagination of poets, let me tell you. The daily home
+of his thought is in illimitable space, hovering between the two
+eternities. In his contemplations the divisions of time run together, as
+in the thought of his Maker. With him also,--I say it not
+profanely,--one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one
+day.
+
+This account of his occupation increased the interest his look had
+excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out
+more about him. Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he looks so
+pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him
+with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who
+sleep in it. At such times he seems more like one who has come from a
+planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us
+terrestrial creatures. His home is truly in the heavens, and he
+practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that
+of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he
+spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is of that
+strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost superhuman. He
+knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor knows a garden-plot
+he has measured. He watches the snows that gather around the poles of
+Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at the moment when its
+faint stain of diffused light first shows itself; he analyzes the ray
+that comes from the sun's photosphere; he measures the rings of Saturn;
+he counts his asteroids to see that none are missing, as the shepherd
+counts the sheep in his flock. A strange unearthly being; lonely,
+dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of the planet on which he
+lives,--an enthusiast who gives his life to knowledge; a student of
+antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist are modern pages in the
+great volume of being, and the pyramids a memorandum of yesterday, as the
+eclipse or occultation that is to take place thousands of years hence is
+an event of to-morrow in the diary without beginning and without end
+where he enters the aspect of the passing moment as it is read on the
+celestial dial.
+
+In very marked contrast with this young man is the something more than
+middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried looking
+personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the other belongs
+to the firmament. His movements are as mechanical as those of a
+pendulum,--to the office, where he changes his coat and plunges into
+messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his coat again, back to
+our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years gradually gathering
+around him as it does on the old folios that fill the shelves all round
+the great cemetery of past transactions of which he is the sexton.
+
+Of the Salesman who sits next him, nothing need be said except that he is
+good-looking, rosy, well-dressed, and of very polite manners, only a
+little more brisk than the approved style of carriage permits, as one in
+the habit of springing with a certain alacrity at the call of a customer.
+
+You would like to see, I don't doubt, how we sit at the table, and I will
+help you by means of a diagram which shows the present arrangement of our
+seats.
+
+ 4 3 2 1 14 13
+ ----------------------------------
+ | O O O O O O |
+ | |
+ 5 | O Breakfast-Table O |12
+ | |
+ | O O O O O O |
+ ----------------------------------
+ 6 7 8 9 10 11
+
+ 1. The Poet.
+ 2. The Master Of Arts.
+ 3. The Young Girl (Scheherezade).
+ 4. The Lady.
+ 5. The Landlady.
+ 6. Dr. B. Franklin.
+ 7. That Boy.
+ 8. The Astronomer.
+ 9. The Member of the Haouse.
+ 10. The Register of Deeds.
+ 11. The Salesman.
+ 12. The Capitalist.
+ 13. The Man of Letters(?).
+ 14. The Scarabee.
+
+Our young Scheherezade varies her prose stories now and then, as I told
+you, with compositions in verse, one or two of which she has let me look
+over. Here is one of them, which she allowed me to copy. It is from a
+story of hers, "The Sun-Worshipper's Daughter," which you may find in the
+periodical before mentioned, to which she is a contributor, if your can
+lay your hand upon a file of it. I think our Scheherezade has never had
+a lover in human shape, or she would not play so lightly with the
+firebrands of the great passion.
+
+ FANTASIA.
+
+ Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn,
+ Blushing into life new-born!
+ Lend me violets for my hair,
+ And thy russet robe to wear,
+ And thy ring of rosiest hue
+ Set in drops of diamond dew!
+
+ Kiss my cheek, thou noontide ray,
+ From my Love so far away!
+ Let thy splendor streaming down
+ Turn its pallid lilies brown,
+ Till its darkening shades reveal
+ Where his passion pressed its seal!
+
+ Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light,
+ Kiss my lips a soft good night!
+ Westward sinks thy golden car;
+ Leave me but the evening star,
+ And my solace that shall be,
+ Borrowing all its light from thee!
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The old Master was talking about a concert he had been to hear.--I don't
+like your chopped music anyway. That woman--she had more sense in her
+little finger than forty medical societies--Florence Nightingale--says
+that the music you pour out is good for sick folks, and the music you
+pound out isn't. Not that exactly, but something like it. I have been
+to hear some music-pounding. It was a young woman, with as many white
+muslin flounces round her as the planet Saturn has rings, that did it.
+She--gave the music-stool a twirl or two and fluffed down on to it like a
+whirl of soap-suds in a hand-basin. Then she pushed up her cuffs as if
+she was going to fight for the champion's belt. Then she worked her
+wrists and her hands, to limber 'em, I suppose, and spread out her
+fingers till they looked as though they would pretty much cover the
+key-board, from the growling end to the little squeaky one. Then those
+two hands of hers made a jump at the keys as if they were a couple of
+tigers coming down on a flock of black and white sheep, and the piano
+gave a great howl as if its tail had been trod on. Dead stop,--so still
+you could hear your hair growing. Then another jump, and another howl,
+as if the piano had two tails and you had trod on both of 'em at once,
+and, then a grand clatter and scramble and string of jumps, up and down,
+back and forward, one hand over the other, like a stampede of rats and
+mice more than like anything I call music. I like to hear a woman sing,
+and I like to hear a fiddle sing, but these noises they hammer out of
+their wood and ivory anvils--don't talk to me, I know the difference
+between a bullfrog and a woodthrush and--
+
+Pop! went a small piece of artillery such as is made of a stick of elder
+and carries a pellet of very moderate consistency. That Boy was in his
+seat and looking demure enough, but there could be no question that he
+was the artillery-man who had discharged the missile. The aim was not a
+bad one, for it took the Master full in the forehead, and had the effect
+of checking the flow of his eloquence. How the little monkey had learned
+to time his interruptions I do not know, but I have observed more than
+once before this, that the popgun would go off just at the moment when
+some one of the company was getting too energetic or prolix. The Boy
+isn't old enough to judge for himself when to intervene to change the
+order of conversation; no, of course he isn't. Somebody must give him a
+hint. Somebody.--Who is it? I suspect Dr. B. Franklin. He looks too
+knowing. There is certainly a trick somewhere. Why, a day or two ago I
+was myself discoursing, with considerable effect, as I thought, on some
+of the new aspects of humanity, when I was struck full on the cheek by
+one of these little pellets, and there was such a confounded laugh that I
+had to wind up and leave off with a preposition instead of a good
+mouthful of polysyllables. I have watched our young Doctor, however, and
+have been entirely unable to detect any signs of communication between
+him and this audacious child, who is like to become a power among us, for
+that popgun is fatal to any talker who is hit by its pellet. I have
+suspected a foot under the table as the prompter, but I have been unable
+to detect the slightest movement or look as if he were making one, on the
+part of Dr. Benjamin Franklin. I cannot help thinking of the flappers in
+Swift's Laputa, only they gave one a hint when to speak and another a
+hint to listen, whereas the popgun says unmistakably, "Shut up!"
+
+--I should be sorry to lose my confidence in Dr. B. Franklin, who seems
+very much devoted to his business, and whom I mean to consult about some
+small symptoms I have had lately. Perhaps it is coming to a new
+boarding-house. The young people who come into Paris from the provinces
+are very apt--so I have been told by one that knows--to have an attack of
+typhoid fever a few weeks or months after their arrival. I have not been
+long enough at this table to get well acclimated; perhaps that is it.
+Boarding-House Fever. Something like horse-ail, very likely,--horses get
+it, you know, when they are brought to city stables. A little "off my
+feed," as Hiram Woodruff would say. A queer discoloration about my
+forehead. Query, a bump? Cannot remember any. Might have got it against
+bedpost or something while asleep. Very unpleasant to look so. I wonder
+how my portrait would look, if anybody should take it now! I hope not
+quite so badly as one I saw the other day, which I took for the end man
+of the Ethiopian Serenaders, or some traveller who had been exploring the
+sources of the Niger, until I read the name at the bottom and found it
+was a face I knew as well as my own.
+
+I must consult somebody, and it is nothing more than fair to give our
+young Doctor a chance. Here goes for Dr. Benjamin Franklin.
+
+The young Doctor has a very small office and a very large sign, with a
+transparency at night big enough for an oyster-shop. These young doctors
+are particularly strong, as I understand, on what they call
+diagnosis,--an excellent branch of the healing art, full of satisfaction
+to the curious practitioner, who likes to give the right Latin name to
+one's complaint; not quite so satisfactory to the patient, as it is not
+so very much pleasanter to be bitten by a dog with a collar round his
+neck telling you that he is called Snap or Teaser, than by a dog without
+a collar. Sometimes, in fact, one would a little rather not know the
+exact name of his complaint, as if he does he is pretty sure to look it
+out in a medical dictionary, and then if he reads, This terrible disease
+is attended with vast suffering and is inevitably mortal, or any such
+statement, it is apt to affect him unpleasantly.
+
+I confess to a little shakiness when I knocked at Dr. Benjamin's office
+door. "Come in!" exclaimed Dr. B. F. in tones that sounded ominous and
+sepulchral. And I went in.
+
+I don't believe the chambers of the Inquisition ever presented a more
+alarming array of implements for extracting a confession, than our young
+Doctor's office did of instruments to make nature tell what was the
+matter with a poor body.
+
+There were Ophthalmoscopes and Rhinoscopes and Otoscopes and
+Laryngoscopes and Stethoscopes; and Thermometers and Spirometers and
+Dynamometers and Sphygmometers and Pleximeters; and Probes and Probangs
+and all sorts of frightful inquisitive exploring contrivances; and scales
+to weigh you in, and tests and balances and pumps and electro-magnets and
+magneto-electric machines; in short, apparatus for doing everything but
+turn you inside out.
+
+Dr. Benjamin set me down before his one window and began looking at me
+with such a superhuman air of sagacity, that I felt like one of those
+open-breasted clocks which make no secret of their inside arrangements,
+and almost thought he could see through me as one sees through a shrimp
+or a jelly-fish. First he looked at the place inculpated, which had a
+sort of greenish-brown color, with his naked eyes, with much corrugation
+of forehead and fearful concentration of attention; then through a
+pocket-glass which he carried. Then he drew back a space, for a
+perspective view. Then he made me put out my tongue and laid a slip of
+blue paper on it, which turned red and scared me a little. Next he took
+my wrist; but instead of counting my pulse in the old-fashioned way, he
+fastened a machine to it that marked all the beats on a sheet of
+paper,--for all the world like a scale of the heights of mountains, say
+from Mount Tom up to Chimborazo and then down again, and up again, and so
+on. In the mean time he asked me all sorts of questions about myself and
+all my relatives, whether we had been subject to this and that malady,
+until I felt as if we must some of us have had more or less of them, and
+could not feel quite sure whether Elephantiasis and Beriberi and
+Progressive Locomotor Ataxy did not run in the family.
+
+After all this overhauling of myself and my history, he paused and looked
+puzzled. Something was suggested about what he called an "exploratory
+puncture." This I at once declined, with thanks. Suddenly a thought
+struck him. He looked still more closely at the discoloration I have
+spoken of.
+
+--Looks like--I declare it reminds me of--very rare! very curious! It
+would be strange if my first case--of this kind--should be one of our
+boarders!
+
+What kind of a case do you call it?--I said, with a sort of feeling that
+he could inflict a severe or a light malady on me, as if he were a judge
+passing sentence.
+
+--The color reminds me,--said Dr. B. Franklin,--of what I have seen in a
+case of Addison's Disease, Morbus Addisonii.
+
+--But my habits are quite regular,--I said; for I remembered that the
+distinguished essayist was too fond of his brandy and water, and I
+confess that the thought was not pleasant to me of following Dr.
+Johnson's advice, with the slight variation of giving my days and my
+nights to trying on the favorite maladies of Addison.
+
+--Temperance people are subject to it!--exclaimed Dr. Benjamin, almost
+exultingly, I thought.
+
+--But I had the impression that the author of the Spectator was afflicted
+with a dropsy, or some such inflated malady, to which persons of
+sedentary and bibacious habits are liable. [A literary swell,--I thought
+to myself, but I did not say it. I felt too serious.]
+
+--The author of the Spectator!--cried out Dr. Benjamin,--I mean the
+celebrated Dr. Addison, inventor, I would say discoverer, of the
+wonderful new disease called after him.
+
+---And what may this valuable invention or discovery consist in?--I
+asked, for I was curious to know the nature of the gift which this
+benefactor of the race had bestowed upon us.
+
+--A most interesting affection, and rare, too. Allow me to look closely
+at that discoloration once more for a moment. Cutis cenea, bronze skin,
+they call it sometimes--extraordinary pigmentation--a little more to the
+light, if you please--ah! now I get the bronze coloring admirably,
+beautifully! Would you have any objection to showing your case to the
+Societies of Medical Improvement and Medical Observation?
+
+[--My case! O dear!] May I ask if any vital organ is commonly involved
+in this interesting complaint?--I said, faintly.
+
+--Well, sir,--the young Doctor replied,--there is an organ which is
+--sometimes--a little touched, I may say; a very curious and ingenious
+little organ or pair of organs. Did you ever hear of the Capsulae,
+Suprarenales?
+
+--No,--said I,--is it a mortal complaint?--I ought to have known better
+than to ask such a question, but I was getting nervous and thinking about
+all sorts of horrid maladies people are liable to, with horrid names to
+match.
+
+--It is n't a complaint,--I mean they are not a complaint,--they are two
+small organs, as I said, inside of you, and nobody knows what is the use
+of them. The most curious thing is that when anything is the matter with
+them you turn of the color of bronze. After all, I didn't mean to say I
+believed it was Morbus Addisonii; I only thought of that when I saw the
+discoloration.
+
+So he gave me a recipe, which I took care to put where it could do no
+hurt to anybody, and I paid him his fee (which he took with the air of a
+man in the receipt of a great income) and said Good-morning.
+
+--What in the name of a thousand diablos is the reason these confounded
+doctors will mention their guesses about "a case," as they call it, and
+all its conceivable possibilities, out loud before their patients? I
+don't suppose there is anything in all this nonsense about "Addison's
+Disease," but I wish he hadn't spoken of that very interesting ailment,
+and I should feel a little easier if that discoloration would leave my
+forehead. I will ask the Landlady about it,--these old women often know
+more than the young doctors just come home with long names for everything
+they don't know how to cure. But the name of this complaint sets me
+thinking. Bronzed skin! What an odd idea! Wonder if it spreads all
+over one. That would be picturesque and pleasant, now, wouldn't it? To
+be made a living statue of,--nothing to do but strike an attitude. Arm
+up--so--like the one in the Garden. John of Bologna's Mercury--thus on
+one foot. Needy knife-grinder in the Tribune at Florence. No, not
+"needy," come to think of it. Marcus Aurelius on horseback. Query. Are
+horses subject to the Morbus Addisonii? Advertise for a bronzed living
+horse--Lyceum invitations and engagements--bronze versus brass.---What 's
+the use in being frightened? Bet it was a bump. Pretty certain I bumped
+my forehead against something. Never heard of a bronzed man before.
+Have seen white men, black men, red men, yellow men, two or three blue
+men, stained with doctor's stuff; some green ones, from the country; but
+never a bronzed man. Poh, poh! Sure it was a bump. Ask Landlady to look
+at it.
+
+--Landlady did look at it. Said it was a bump, and no mistake.
+Recommended a piece of brown paper dipped in vinegar. Made the house
+smell as if it were in quarantine for the plague from Smyrna, but
+discoloration soon disappeared,--so I did not become a bronzed man after
+all,--hope I never shall while I am alive. Should n't mind being done in
+bronze after I was dead. On second thoughts not so clear about it,
+remembering how some of them look that we have got stuck up in public;
+think I had rather go down to posterity in an Ethiopian Minstrel
+portrait, like our friend's the other day.
+
+--You were kind enough to say, I remarked to the Master, that you read my
+poems and liked them. Perhaps you would be good enough to tell me what
+it is you like about them?
+
+The Master harpooned a breakfast-roll and held it up before me.--Will you
+tell me,--he said,--why you like that breakfast-roll?--I suppose he
+thought that would stop my mouth in two senses. But he was mistaken.
+
+--To be sure I will,--said I.---First, I like its mechanical consistency;
+brittle externally,--that is for the teeth, which want resistance to be
+overcome; soft, spongy, well tempered and flavored internally, that is
+for the organ of taste; wholesome, nutritious,--that is for the internal
+surfaces and the system generally.
+
+--Good,--said the Master, and laughed a hearty terrestrial laugh.
+
+I hope he will carry that faculty of an honest laugh with him wherever he
+goes,--why shouldn't he? The "order of things," as he calls it, from
+which hilarity was excluded, would be crippled and one-sided enough. I
+don't believe the human gamut will be cheated of a single note after men
+have done breathing this fatal atmospheric mixture and die into the ether
+of immortality!
+
+I did n't say all that; if I had said it, it would have brought a pellet
+from the popgun, I feel quite certain.
+
+The Master went on after he had had out his laugh.--There is one thing I
+am His Imperial Majesty about, and that is my likes and dislikes. What
+if I do like your verses,--you can't help yourself. I don't doubt
+somebody or other hates 'em and hates you and everything you do, or ever
+did, or ever can do. He is all right; there is nothing you or I like
+that somebody does n't hate. Was there ever anything wholesome that was
+not poison to somebody? If you hate honey or cheese, or the products of
+the dairy,--I know a family a good many of whose members can't touch
+milk, butter, cheese, and the like, why, say so, but don't find fault
+with the bees and the cows. Some are afraid of roses, and I have known
+those who thought a pond-lily a disagreeable neighbor. That Boy will
+give you the metaphysics of likes and dislikes. Look here,--you young
+philosopher over there,--do you like candy?
+
+That Boy.---You bet! Give me a stick and see if I don't.
+
+And can you tell me why you like candy?
+
+That Boy.--Because I do.
+
+--There, now, that is the whole matter in a nutshell. Why do your teeth
+like crackling crust, and your organs of taste like spongy crumb, and
+your digestive contrivances take kindly to bread rather than toadstools--
+
+That Boy (thinking he was still being catechised).--Because they do.
+
+Whereupon the Landlady said, Sh! and the Young Girl laughed, and the Lady
+smiled; and Dr. Ben Franklin kicked him, moderately, under the table, and
+the Astronomer looked up at the ceiling to see what had happened, and the
+Member of the Haouse cried, Order! Order! and the Salesman said, Shut
+up, cash-boy! and the rest of the boarders kept on feeding; except the
+Master, who looked very hard but half approvingly at the small intruder,
+who had come about as nearly right as most professors would have done.
+
+--You poets,--the Master said after this excitement had calmed down,
+--you poets have one thing about you that is odd. You talk about
+everything as if you knew more about it than the people whose business it
+is to know all about it. I suppose you do a little of what we teachers
+used to call "cramming" now and then?
+
+--If you like your breakfast you must n't ask the cook too many
+questions,--I answered.
+
+--Oh, come now, don't be afraid of letting out your secrets. I have a
+notion I can tell a poet that gets himself up just as I can tell a
+make-believe old man on the stage by the line where the gray skullcap
+joins the smooth forehead of the young fellow of seventy. You'll confess
+to a rhyming dictionary anyhow, won't you?
+
+--I would as lief use that as any other dictionary, but I don't want it.
+When a word comes up fit to end a line with I can feel all the rhymes in
+the language that are fit to go with it without naming them. I have
+tried them all so many times, I know all the polygamous words and all the
+monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones,--the whole lot that have no
+mates,--as soon as I hear their names called. Sometimes I run over a
+string of rhymes, but generally speaking it is strange what a short list
+it is of those that are good for anything. That is the pitiful side of
+all rhymed verse. Take two such words as home and world. What can you
+do with chrome or loam or gnome or tome? You have dome, foam, and roam,
+and not much more to use in your pome, as some of our fellow-countrymen
+call it. As for world, you know that in all human probability somebody
+or something will be hurled into it or out of it; its clouds may be
+furled or its grass impearled; possibly something may be whirled, or
+curled, or have swirled, one of Leigh Hunt's words, which with lush, one
+of Keats's, is an important part of the stock in trade of some dealers in
+rhyme.
+
+--And how much do you versifiers know of all those arts and sciences you
+refer to as if you were as familiar with them as a cobbler is with his
+wax and lapstone?
+
+--Enough not to make too many mistakes. The best way is to ask some
+expert before one risks himself very far in illustrations from a branch
+he does not know much about. Suppose, for instance, I wanted to use the
+double star to illustrate anything, say the relation of two human souls
+to each other, what would I--do? Why, I would ask our young friend there
+to let me look at one of those loving celestial pairs through his
+telescope, and I don't doubt he'd let me do so, and tell me their names
+and all I wanted to know about them.
+
+--I should be most happy to show any of the double stars or whatever else
+there might be to see in the heavens to any of our friends at this
+table,--the young man said, so cordially and kindly that it was a real
+invitation.
+
+--Show us the man in the moon,--said That Boy.---I should so like to see
+a double star!--said Scheherezade, with a very pretty air of smiling
+modesty.
+
+--Will you go, if we make up a party?--I asked the Master.
+
+--A cold in the head lasts me from three to five days,--answered the
+Master.--I am not so very fond of being out in the dew like
+Nebuchadnezzar: that will do for you young folks.
+
+--I suppose I must be one of the young folks, not so young as our
+Scheherezade, nor so old as the Capitalist,--young enough at any rate to
+want to be of the party. So we agreed that on some fair night when the
+Astronomer should tell us that there was to be a fine show in the skies,
+we would make up a party and go to the Observatory. I asked the Scarabee
+whether he would not like to make one of us.
+
+--Out of the question, sir, out of the question. I am altogether too
+much occupied with an important scientific investigation to devote any
+considerable part of an evening to star-gazing.
+
+--Oh, indeed,--said I,--and may I venture to ask on what particular point
+you are engaged just at present?
+
+-Certainly, sir, you may. It is, I suppose, as difficult and important a
+matter to be investigated as often comes before a student of natural
+history. I wish to settle the point once for all whether the Pediculus
+Mellitae is or is not the larva of Meloe.
+
+[--Now is n't this the drollest world to live in that one could imagine,
+short of being in a fit of delirium tremens? Here is a fellow-creature
+of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories of the firmament
+brought close to him, and he is too busy with a little unmentionable
+parasite that infests the bristly surface of a bee to spare an hour or
+two of a single evening for the splendors of the universe! I must get a
+peep through that microscope of his and see the pediculus which occupies
+a larger space in his mental vision than the midnight march of the solar
+systems.---The creature, the human one, I mean, interests me.]
+
+--I am very curious,--I said,--about that pediculus melittae,--(just as
+if I knew a good deal about the little wretch and wanted to know more,
+whereas I had never heard him spoken of before, to my knowledge,)--could
+you let me have a sight of him in your microscope?
+
+--You ought to have seen the way in which the poor dried-up little
+Scarabee turned towards me. His eyes took on a really human look, and I
+almost thought those antennae-like arms of his would have stretched
+themselves out and embraced me. I don't believe any of the boarders had
+ever shown any interest in--him, except the little monkey of a Boy, since
+he had been in the house. It is not strange; he had not seemed to me
+much like a human being, until all at once I touched the one point where
+his vitality had concentrated itself, and he stood revealed a man and a
+brother.
+
+--Come in,--said he,--come in, right after breakfast, and you shall see
+the animal that has convulsed the entomological world with questions as
+to his nature and origin.
+
+--So I went into the Scarabee's parlor, lodging-room, study, laboratory,
+and museum,--a--single apartment applied to these various uses, you
+understand.
+
+--I wish I had time to have you show me all your treasures,--I said,
+--but I am afraid I shall hardly be able to do more than look at the
+bee-parasite. But what a superb butterfly you have in that case!
+
+--Oh, yes, yes, well enough,--came from South America with the beetle
+there; look at him! These Lepidoptera are for children to play with,
+pretty to look at, so some think. Give me the Coleoptera, and the kings
+of the Coleoptera are the beetles! Lepidoptera and Neuroptera for little
+folks; Coleopteras for men, sir!
+
+--The particular beetle he showed me in the case with the magnificent
+butterfly was an odious black wretch that one would say, Ugh! at, and
+kick out of his path, if he did not serve him worse than that. But he
+looked at it as a coin-collector would look at a Pescennius Niger, if the
+coins of that Emperor are as scarce as they used to be when I was
+collecting half-penny tokens and pine-tree shillings and battered bits of
+Roman brass with the head of Gallienus or some such old fellow on them.
+
+--A beauty!--he exclaimed,--and the only specimen of the kind in this
+country, to the best of my belief. A unique, sir, and there is a
+pleasure in exclusive possession. Not another beetle like that short of
+South America, sir.
+
+--I was glad to hear that there were no more like it in this
+neighborhood, the present supply of cockroaches answering every purpose,
+so far as I am concerned, that such an animal as this would be likely to
+serve.
+
+--Here are my bee-parasites,--said the Scarabee, showing me a box full of
+glass slides, each with a specimen ready mounted for the microscope. I
+was most struck with one little beast flattened out like a turtle,
+semi-transparent, six-legged, as I remember him, and every leg terminated
+by a single claw hooked like a lion's and as formidable for the size of
+the creature as that of the royal beast.
+
+--Lives on a bumblebee, does he?--I said. That's the way I call it.
+Bumblebee or bumblybee and huckleberry. Humblebee and whortleberry for
+people that say Woos-ses-ter and Nor-wich.
+
+--The Scarabee did not smile; he took no interest in trivial matters like
+this.
+
+--Lives on a bumblebee. When you come to think of it, he must lead a
+pleasant kind of life. Sails through the air without the trouble of
+flying. Free pass everywhere that the bee goes. No fear of being
+dislodged; look at those six grappling-hooks. Helps himself to such
+juices of the bee as he likes best; the bee feeds on the choicest
+vegetable nectars, and he feeds on the bee. Lives either in the air or
+in the perfumed pavilion of the fairest and sweetest flowers. Think what
+tents the hollyhocks and the great lilies spread for him! And wherever he
+travels a band of music goes with him, for this hum which wanders by us
+is doubtless to him a vast and inspiring strain of melody.--I thought all
+this, while the Scarabee supposed I was studying the minute characters of
+the enigmatical specimen.
+
+--I know what I consider your pediculus melittae, I said at length.
+
+Do you think it really the larva of meloe?
+
+--Oh, I don't know much about that, but I think he is the best cared for,
+on the whole, of any animal that I know of; and if I wasn't a man I
+believe I had rather be that little sybarite than anything that feasts at
+the board of nature.
+
+--The question is, whether he is the larva of meloe,--the Scarabee said,
+as if he had not heard a word of what I had just been saying.----If I
+live a few years longer it shall be settled, sir; and if my epitaph can
+say honestly that I settled it, I shall be willing to trust my posthumous
+fame to that achievement.
+
+I said good morning to the specialist, and went off feeling not only
+kindly, but respectfully towards him. He is an enthusiast, at any rate,
+as "earnest" a man as any philanthropic reformer who, having passed his
+life in worrying people out of their misdoings into good behavior, comes
+at last to a state in which he is never contented except when he is
+making somebody uncomfortable. He does certainly know one thing well,
+very likely better than anybody in the world.
+
+I find myself somewhat singularly placed at our table between a minute
+philosopher who has concentrated all his faculties on a single subject,
+and my friend who finds the present universe too restricted for his
+intelligence. I would not give much to hear what the Scarabee says about
+the old Master, for he does not pretend to form a judgment of anything
+but beetles, but I should like to hear what the Master has to say about
+the Scarabee. I waited after breakfast until he had gone, and then asked
+the Master what he could make of our dried-up friend.
+
+--Well,--he said,--I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all
+his tribe. These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef.
+By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a
+continent. But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself. I had rather be
+a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and
+sails over the seas where they have as yet built up nothing. I am a
+little afraid that science is breeding us down too fast into
+coral-insects. A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller used to paint a
+picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand, and stand back and
+look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel; but nowadays you have a
+Society, and they come together and make a great mosaic, each man
+bringing his little bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up
+with his petty fragment that he never thinks of looking at the picture
+the little bits make when they are put together. You can't get any talk
+out of these specialists away from their own subjects, any more than you
+can get help from a policeman outside of his own beat.
+
+--Yes,--said I,--but why should n't we always set a man talking about the
+thing he knows best?
+
+--No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once; but what are you going to do
+with him if you meet him every day? I travel with a man and we want to
+make change very often in paying bills. But every time I ask him to
+change a pistareen, or give me two fo'pencehappennies for a ninepence, or
+help me to make out two and thrippence (mark the old Master's archaisms
+about the currency), what does the fellow do but put his hand in his
+pocket and pull out an old Roman coin; I have no change, says he, but
+this assarion of Diocletian. Mighty deal of good that'll do me!
+
+--It isn't quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency would
+be, but you can pump him on numismatics.
+
+--To be sure, to be sure. I've pumped a thousand men of all they could
+teach me, or at least all I could learn from 'em; and if it comes to
+that, I never saw the man that couldn't teach me something. I can get
+along with everybody in his place, though I think the place of some of my
+friends is over there among the feeble-minded pupils, and I don't believe
+there's one of them, I couldn't go to school to for half an hour and be
+the wiser for it. But people you talk with every day have got to have
+feeders for their minds, as much as the stream that turns a millwheel
+has. It isn't one little rill that's going to keep the float-boards
+turning round. Take a dozen of the brightest men you can find in the
+brightest city, wherever that may be,--perhaps you and I think we
+know,--and let 'em come together once a month, and you'll find out in the
+course of a year or two the ones that have feeders from all the
+hillsides. Your common talkers, that exchange the gossip of the day,
+have no wheel in particular to turn, and the wash of the rain as it runs
+down the street is enough for them.
+
+--Do you mean you can always see the sources from which a man fills his
+mind,--his feeders, as you call them?
+
+-I don't go quite so far as that,--the Master said.---I've seen men whose
+minds were always overflowing, and yet they did n't read much nor go much
+into the world. Sometimes you'll find a bit of a pond-hole in a pasture,
+and you'll plunge your walking-stick into it and think you are going to
+touch bottom. But you find you are mistaken. Some of these little
+stagnant pond-holes are a good deal deeper than you think; you may tie a
+stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country
+boys will tell you they have no bottom, but that only means that they are
+mighty deep; and so a good many stagnant, stupid-seeming people are a
+great deal deeper than the length of your intellectual walking-stick, I
+can tell you. There are hidden springs that keep the little pond-holes
+full when the mountain brooks are all dried up. You poets ought to know
+that.
+
+--I can't help thinking you are more tolerant towards the specialists
+than I thought at first, by the way you seemed to look at our dried-up
+neighbor and his small pursuits.
+
+--I don't like the word tolerant,--the Master said.---As long as the Lord
+can tolerate me I think I can stand my fellow-creatures. Philosophically,
+I love 'em all; empirically, I don't think I am very fond of all of 'em.
+It depends on how you look at a man or a woman. Come here, Youngster,
+will you? he said to That Boy.
+
+The Boy was trying to catch a blue-bottle to add to his collection, and
+was indisposed to give up the chase; but he presently saw that the Master
+had taken out a small coin and laid it on the table, and felt himself
+drawn in that direction.
+
+Read that,--said the Master.
+
+U-n-i-ni United States of America 5 cents.
+
+The Master turned the coin over. Now read that.
+
+In God is our t-r-u-s-t--trust. 1869.
+
+--Is that the same piece of money as the other one?
+
+--There ain't any other one,--said the Boy, there ain't but one, but it's
+got two sides to it with different reading.
+
+--That 's it, that 's it,--said the Master,--two sides to everybody, as
+there are to that piece of money. I've seen an old woman that wouldn't
+fetch five cents if you should put her up for sale at public auction; and
+yet come to read the other side of her, she had a trust in God Almighty
+that was like the bow anchor of a three-decker. It's faith in something
+and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at. I don't
+think your ant-eating specialist, with his sharp nose and pin-head eyes,
+is the best every-day companion; but any man who knows one thing well is
+worth listening to for once; and if you are of the large-brained variety
+of the race, and want to fill out your programme of the Order of Things
+in a systematic and exhaustive way, and get all the half-notes and flats
+and sharps of humanity into your scale, you'd a great deal better shut
+your front door and open your two side ones when you come across a fellow
+that has made a real business of doing anything.
+
+--That Boy stood all this time looking hard at the five-cent piece.
+
+--Take it,--said the Master, with a good-natured smile.
+
+--The Boy made a snatch at it and was off for the purpose of investing
+it.
+
+--A child naturally snaps at a thing as a dog does at his meat,--said the
+Master.---If you think of it, we've all been quadrupeds. A child that
+can only crawl has all the instincts of a four-footed beast. It carries
+things in its mouth just as cats and dogs do. I've seen the little
+brutes do it over and over again. I suppose a good many children would
+stay quadrupeds all their lives, if they didn't learn the trick of
+walking on their hind legs from seeing all the grown people walking in
+that way.
+
+--Do you accept Mr. Darwin's notions about the origin of the race?--said
+I.
+
+The Master looked at me with that twinkle in his eye which means that he
+is going to parry a question.
+
+--Better stick to Blair's Chronology; that settles it. Adam and Eve,
+created Friday, October 28th, B. C. 4004. You've been in a ship for a
+good while, and here comes Mr. Darwin on deck with an armful of sticks
+and says, "Let's build a raft, and trust ourselves to that."
+
+If your ship springs a leak, what would you do?
+
+He looked me straight in the eyes for about half a minute.---If I heard
+the pumps going, I'd look and see whether they were gaining on the leak
+or not. If they were gaining I'd stay where I was.---Go and find out
+what's the matter with that young woman.
+
+I had noticed that the Young Girl--the storywriter, our Scheherezade, as
+I called her--looked as if she had been crying or lying awake half the
+night. I found on asking her,--for she is an honest little body and is
+disposed to be confidential with me for some reason or other,--that she
+had been doing both.
+
+--And what was the matter now, I questioned her in a semi-paternal kind
+of way, as soon as I got a chance for a few quiet words with her.
+
+She was engaged to write a serial story, it seems, and had only got as
+far as the second number, and some critic had been jumping upon it, she
+said, and grinding his heel into it, till she couldn't bear to look at
+it. He said she did not write half so well as half a dozen other young
+women. She did n't write half so well as she used to write herself. She
+hadn't any characters and she had n't any incidents. Then he went to
+work to show how her story was coming out, trying to anticipate
+everything she could make of it, so that her readers should have nothing
+to look forward to, and he should have credit for his sagacity in
+guessing, which was nothing so very wonderful, she seemed to think.
+Things she had merely hinted and left the reader to infer, he told right
+out in the bluntest and coarsest way. It had taken all the life out of
+her, she said. It was just as if at a dinner-party one of the guests
+should take a spoonful of soup and get up and say to the company, "Poor
+stuff, poor stuff; you won't get anything better; let's go somewhere else
+where things are fit to eat."
+
+What do you read such things for, my dear? said I.
+
+The film glistened in her eyes at the strange sound of those two soft
+words; she had not heard such very often, I am afraid.
+
+--I know I am a foolish creature to read them, she answered,--but I can't
+help it; somebody always sends me everything that will make me wretched
+to read, and so I sit down and read it, and ache all over for my pains,
+and lie awake all night.
+
+--She smiled faintly as she said this, for she saw the sub-ridiculous
+side of it, but the film glittered still in her eyes. There are a good
+many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are
+the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples. "Somebody always sends
+her everything that will make her wretched." Who can those creatures be
+who cut out the offensive paragraph and send it anonymously to us, who
+mail the newspaper which has the article we had much better not have
+seen, who take care that we shall know everything which can, by any
+possibility, help to make us discontented with ourselves and a little
+less light-hearted than we were before we had been fools enough to open
+their incendiary packages? I don't like to say it to myself, but I
+cannot help suspecting, in this instance, the doubtful-looking personage
+who sits on my left, beyond the Scarabee. I have some reason to think
+that he has made advances to the Young Girl which were not favorably
+received, to state the case in moderate terms, and it may be that he is
+taking his revenge in cutting up the poor girl's story. I know this very
+well, that some personal pique or favoritism is at the bottom of half the
+praise and dispraise which pretend to be so very ingenuous and
+discriminating. (Of course I have been thinking all this time and
+telling you what I thought.)
+
+--What you want is encouragement, my dear, said I,--I know that as well,
+as you. I don't think the fellows that write such criticisms as you tell
+me of want to correct your faults. I don't mean to say that you can
+learn nothing from them, because they are not all fools by any means, and
+they will often pick out your weak points with a malignant sagacity, as a
+pettifogging lawyer will frequently find a real flaw in trying to get at
+everything he can quibble about. But is there nobody who will praise you
+generously when you do well,--nobody that will lend you a hand now while
+you want it,--or must they all wait until you have made yourself a name
+among strangers, and then all at once find out that you have something in
+you? Oh,--said the girl, and the bright film gathered too fast for her
+young eyes to hold much longer,--I ought not to be ungrateful! I have
+found the kindest friend in the world. Have you ever heard the Lady--the
+one that I sit next to at the table--say anything about me?
+
+I have not really made her acquaintance, I said. She seems to me a
+little distant in her manners and I have respected her pretty evident
+liking for keeping mostly to herself.
+
+--Oh, but when you once do know her! I don't believe I could write
+stories all the time as I do, if she didn't ask me up to her chamber, and
+let me read them to her. Do you know, I can make her laugh and cry,
+reading my poor stories? And sometimes, when I feel as if I had written
+out all there is in me, and want to lie down and go to sleep and never
+wake up except in a world where there are no weekly papers,--when
+everything goes wrong, like a car off the track,--she takes hold and sets
+me on the rails again all right.
+
+--How does she go to work to help you?
+
+--Why, she listens to my stories, to begin with, as if she really liked
+to hear them. And then you know I am dreadfully troubled now and then
+with some of my characters, and can't think how to get rid of them. And
+she'll say, perhaps, Don't shoot your villain this time, you've shot
+three or four already in the last six weeks; let his mare stumble and
+throw him and break his neck. Or she'll give me a hint about some new
+way for my lover to make a declaration. She must have had a good many
+offers, it's my belief, for she has told me a dozen different ways for me
+to use in my stories. And whenever I read a story to her, she always
+laughs and cries in the right places; and that's such a comfort, for
+there are some people that think everything pitiable is so funny, and
+will burst out laughing when poor Rip Van Winkle--you've seen Mr.
+Jefferson, haven't you?--is breaking your heart for you if you have one.
+Sometimes she takes a poem I have written and reads it to me so
+beautifully, that I fall in love with it, and sometimes she sets my
+verses to music and sings them to me.
+
+--You have a laugh together sometimes, do you?
+
+--Indeed we do. I write for what they call the "Comic Department" of the
+paper now and then. If I did not get so tired of story-telling, I
+suppose I should be gayer than I am; but as it is, we two get a little
+fun out of my comic pieces. I begin them half-crying sometimes, but
+after they are done they amuse me. I don't suppose my comic pieces are
+very laughable; at any rate the man who makes a business of writing me
+down says the last one I wrote is very melancholy reading, and that if it
+was only a little better perhaps some bereaved person might pick out a
+line or two that would do to put on a gravestone.
+
+--Well, that is hard, I must confess. Do let me see those lines which
+excite such sad emotions.
+
+--Will you read them very good-naturedly? If you will, I will get the
+paper that has "Aunt Tabitha." That is the one the fault-finder said
+produced such deep depression of feeling. It was written for the "Comic
+Department." Perhaps it will make you cry, but it was n't meant to.
+
+--I will finish my report this time with our Scheherezade's poem, hoping
+that--any critic who deals with it will treat it with the courtesy due to
+all a young lady's literary efforts.
+
+ AUNT TABITHA.
+
+ Whatever I do, and whatever I say,
+ Aunt Tabitha tells me that isn't the way;
+ When she was a girl (forty summers ago)
+ Aunt Tabitha tells me they never did so.
+
+ Dear aunt! If I only would take her advice!
+ But I like my own way, and I find it so nice!
+ And besides, I forget half the things I am told;
+ But they all will come back to me--when I am old.
+
+ If a youth passes by, it may happen, no doubt,
+ He may chance to look in as I chance to look out;
+ She would never endure an impertinent stare,
+ It is horrid, she says, and I mustn't sit there.
+
+ A walk in the moonlight has pleasures, I own,
+ But it is n't quite safe to be walking alone;
+ So I take a lad's arm,--just for safety, you know,
+ But Aunt Tabitha tells me they didn't do so.
+
+ How wicked we are, and how good they were then!
+ They kept at arm's length those detestable men;
+ What an era of virtue she lived in!--But stay
+ Were the men all such rogues in Aunt Tabitha's day?
+
+ If the men were so wicked, I'll ask my papa
+ How he dared to propose to my darling mamma;
+ Was he like the rest of them? Goodness! Who knows
+ And what shall I say if a wretch should propose?
+
+ I am thinking if aunt knew so little of sin,
+ What a wonder Aunt Tabitha's aunt must have been!
+ And her grand-aunt--it scares me--how shockingly sad.
+ That we girls of to-day are so frightfully bad!
+
+ A martyr will save us, and nothing else can;
+ Let me perish--to rescue some wretched young man!
+ Though when to the altar a victim I go,
+ Aunt Tabitha'll tell me she never did so!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The old Master has developed one quality of late for which I am afraid I
+hardly gave him credit. He has turned out to be an excellent listener.
+
+--I love to talk,--he said,--as a goose loves to swim. Sometimes I think
+it is because I am a goose. For I never talked much at any one time in
+my life without saying something or other I was sorry for.
+
+--You too!--said I--Now that is very odd, for it is an experience I have
+habitually. I thought you were rather too much of a philosopher to
+trouble yourself about such small matters as to whether you had said just
+what you meant to or not; especially as you know that the person you talk
+to does not remember a word of what you said the next morning, but is
+thinking, it is much more likely, of what she said, or how her new dress
+looked, or some other body's new dress which made--hers look as if it had
+been patched together from the leaves of last November. That's what
+she's probably thinking about.
+
+--She!--said the Master, with a look which it would take at least half a
+page to explain to the entire satisfaction of thoughtful readers of both
+sexes.
+
+--I paid the respect due to that most significant monosyllable, which, as
+the old Rabbi spoke it, with its targum of tone and expression, was not
+to be answered flippantly, but soberly, advisedly, and after a pause long
+enough for it to unfold its meaning in the listener's mind. For there
+are short single words (all the world remembers Rachel's Helas!) which
+are like those Japanese toys that look like nothing of any significance
+as you throw them on the water, but which after a little time open out
+into various strange and unexpected figures, and then you find that each
+little shred had a complicated story to tell of itself.
+
+-Yes,--said I, at the close of this silent interval, during which the
+monosyllable had been opening out its meanings,--She. When I think of
+talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an
+inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness;
+and where will you find this but in woman?
+
+The Master laughed a pleasant little laugh,--not a harsh, sarcastic one,
+but playful, and tempered by so kind a look that it seemed as if every
+wrinkled line about his old eyes repeated, "God bless you," as the
+tracings on the walls of the Alhambra repeat a sentence of the Koran.
+
+I said nothing, but looked the question, What are you laughing at?
+
+--Why, I laughed because I couldn't help saying to myself that a woman
+whose mind was taken up with thinking how she looked, and how her pretty
+neighbor looked, wouldn't have a great deal of thought to spare for all
+your fine discourse.
+
+--Come, now,--said I,--a man who contradicts himself in the course of two
+minutes must have a screw loose in his mental machinery. I never feel
+afraid that such a thing can happen to me, though it happens often enough
+when I turn a thought over suddenly, as you did that five-cent piece the
+other day, that it reads differently on its two sides. What I meant to
+say is something like this. A woman, notwithstanding she is the best of
+listeners, knows her business, and it is a woman's business to please. I
+don't say that it is not her business to vote, but I do say that a woman
+who does not please is a false note in the harmonies of nature. She may
+not have youth, or beauty, or even manner; but she must have something in
+her voice or expression, or both, which it makes you feel better disposed
+towards your race to look at or listen to. She knows that as well as we
+do; and her first question after you have been talking your soul into her
+consciousness is, Did I please? A woman never forgets her sex. She
+would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.
+
+--This frightful speech of mine reached the ear of our Scheherezade, who
+said that it was perfectly shocking and that I deserved to be shown up as
+the outlaw in one of her bandit stories.
+
+Hush, my dear,--said the Lady,--you will have to bring John Milton into
+your story with our friend there, if you punish everybody who says
+naughty things like that. Send the little boy up to my chamber for
+Paradise Lost, if you please. He will find it lying on my table. The
+little old volume,--he can't mistake it.
+
+So the girl called That Boy round and gave him the message; I don't know
+why she should give it, but she did, and the Lady helped her out with a
+word or two.
+
+The little volume--its cover protected with soft white leather from a
+long kid glove, evidently suggesting the brilliant assemblies of the days
+when friends and fortune smiled-came presently and the Lady opened
+it.---You may read that, if you like, she said,--it may show you that our
+friend is to be pilloried in good company.
+
+The Young Girl ran her eye along the passage the Lady pointed out,
+blushed, laughed, and slapped the book down as though she would have
+liked to box the ears of Mr. John Milton, if he had been a contemporary
+and fellow-contributor to the "Weekly Bucket."--I won't touch the
+thing,--she said.---He was a horrid man to talk so: and he had as many
+wives as Blue-Beard.
+
+--Fair play,--said the Master.---Bring me the book, my little fractional
+superfluity,--I mean you, my nursling,--my boy, if that suits your small
+Highness better.
+
+The Boy brought the book.
+
+The old Master, not unfamiliar with the great epic opened pretty nearly
+to the place, and very soon found the passage: He read, aloud with grand
+scholastic intonation and in a deep voice that silenced the table as if a
+prophet had just uttered Thus saith the Lord:--
+
+ "So spake our sire, and by his countenance seemed
+ Entering on studious thoughts abstruse; which Eve
+ Perceiving--"
+
+went to water her geraniums, to make a short story of it, and left the
+two "conversationists," to wit, the angel Raphael and the
+gentleman,--there was but one gentleman in society then, you know,--to
+talk it out.
+
+ "Yet went she not, as not with such discourse
+ Delighted, or not capable her ear
+ Of what was high; such pleasure she reserved,
+ Adam relating, she sole auditress;
+ Her husband the relater she preferred
+ Before the angel, and of him to ask
+ Chose rather; he she knew would intermix
+ Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
+ With conjugal caresses: from his lips
+ Not words alone pleased her."
+
+Everybody laughed, except the Capitalist, who was a little hard of
+hearing, and the Scarabee, whose life was too earnest for demonstrations
+of that kind. He had his eyes fixed on the volume, however, with eager
+interest.
+
+--The p'int 's carried,--said the Member of the Haouse.
+
+Will you let me look at that book a single minute?--said the Scarabee. I
+passed it to him, wondering what in the world he wanted of Paradise Lost.
+
+Dermestes lardarius,--he said, pointing to a place where the edge of one
+side of the outer cover had been slightly tasted by some insect.--Very
+fond of leather while they 're in the larva state.
+
+--Damage the goods as bad as mice,--said the Salesman.
+
+--Eat half the binding off Folio 67,--said the Register of Deeds.
+Something did, anyhow, and it was n't mice. Found the shelf covered with
+little hairy cases belonging to something or other that had no business
+there.
+
+Skins of the Dermestes lardaraus,--said the Scarabee,--you can always
+tell them by those brown hairy coats. That 's the name to give them.
+
+--What good does it do to give 'em a name after they 've eat the binding
+off my folios?--asked the Register of Deeds.
+
+The Scarabee had too much respect for science to answer such a question
+as that; and the book, having served its purposes, was passed back to the
+Lady.
+
+I return to the previous question,--said I,--if our friend the Member of
+the House of Representatives will allow me to borrow the phrase. Womanly
+women are very kindly critics, except to themselves and now and then to
+their own sex. The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is
+to be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best moment,--well dressed
+enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a show and
+a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set vibrating the
+harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has
+social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought
+and feeling with her that make an hour memorable? What can equal her
+tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel
+the changes of temperature as the warm and cool currents of talk blow by
+turns? At one moment she is microscopically intellectual, critical,
+scrupulous in judgment as an analyst's balance, and the next as
+sympathetic as the open rose that sweetens the wind from whatever quarter
+it finds its way to her bosom. It is in the hospitable soul of a woman
+that a man forgets he is a stranger, and so becomes natural and truthful,
+at the same time that he is mesmerized by all those divine differences
+which make her a mystery and a bewilderment to--
+
+If you fire your popgun at me, you little chimpanzee, I will stick a pin
+right through the middle of you and put you into one of this gentleman's
+beetle-cases!
+
+I caught the imp that time, but what started him was more than I could
+guess. It is rather hard that this spoiled child should spoil such a
+sentence as that was going to be; but the wind shifted all at once, and
+the talk had to come round on another tack, or at least fall off a point
+or two from its course.
+
+--I'll tell you who I think are the best talkers in all probability,
+--said I to the Master, who, as I mentioned, was developing interesting
+talent as a listener,--poets who never write verses. And there are a
+good many more of these than it would seem at first sight. I think you
+may say every young lover is a poet, to begin with. I don't mean either
+that all young lovers are good talkers,--they have an eloquence all
+their own when they are with the beloved object, no doubt, emphasized
+after the fashion the solemn bard of Paradise refers to with such
+delicious humor in the passage we just heard,--but a little talk goes a
+good way in most of these cooing matches, and it wouldn't do to report
+them too literally. What I mean is, that a man with the gift of musical
+and impassioned phrase (and love often deeds that to a young person for a
+while), who "wreaks" it, to borrow Byron's word, on conversation as the
+natural outlet of his sensibilities and spiritual activities, is likely
+to talk better than the poet, who plays on the instrument of verse. A
+great pianist or violinist is rarely a great singer. To write a poem is
+to expend the vital force which would have made one brilliant for an hour
+or two, and to expend it on an instrument with more pipes, reeds, keys,
+stops, and pedals than the Great Organ that shakes New England every time
+it is played in full blast.
+
+Do you mean that it is hard work to write a poem?--said the old
+Master.---I had an idea that a poem wrote itself, as it were, very often;
+that it came by influx, without voluntary effort; indeed, you have spoken
+of it as an inspiration rather than a result of volition.
+
+--Did you ever see a great ballet-dancer?--I asked him.
+
+--I have seen Taglioni,--he answered.---She used to take her steps rather
+prettily. I have seen the woman that danced the capstone on to Bunker
+Hill Monument, as Orpheus moved the rocks by music, the Elssler
+woman,--Fanny Elssler. She would dance you a rigadoon or cut a pigeon's
+wing for you very respectably.
+
+(Confound this old college book-worm,----he has seen everything!)
+
+Well, did these two ladies dance as if it was hard work to them?
+
+--Why no, I should say they danced as if they liked it and couldn't help
+dancing; they looked as if they felt so "corky" it was hard to keep them
+down.
+
+--And yet they had been through such work to get their limbs strong and
+flexible and obedient, that a cart-horse lives an easy life compared to
+theirs while they were in training.
+
+--The Master cut in just here--I had sprung the trap of a reminiscence.
+
+--When I was a boy,--he said,--some of the mothers in our small town, who
+meant that their children should know what was what as well as other
+people's children, laid their heads together and got a dancing-master to
+come out from the city and give instruction at a few dollars a quarter to
+the young folks of condition in the village. Some of their husbands were
+ministers and some were deacons, but the mothers knew what they were
+about, and they did n't see any reason why ministers' and deacons' wives'
+children shouldn't have as easy manners as the sons and daughters of
+Belial. So, as I tell you, they got a dancing-master to come out to our
+place,--a man of good repute, a most respectable man,--madam (to the
+Landlady), you must remember the worthy old citizen, in his advanced age,
+going about the streets, a most gentlemanly bundle of infirmities,--only
+he always cocked his hat a little too much on one side, as they do here
+and there along the Connecticut River, and sometimes on our city
+sidewalks, when they've got a new beaver; they got him, I say, to give us
+boys and girls lessons in dancing and deportment. He was as gray and as
+lively as a squirrel, as I remember him, and used to spring up in the air
+and "cross his feet," as we called it, three times before he came down.
+Well, at the end of each term there was what they called an "exhibition
+ball," in which the scholars danced cotillons and country-dances; also
+something called a "gavotte," and I think one or more walked a minuet.
+But all this is not what--I wanted to say. At this exhibition ball he
+used to bring out a number of hoops wreathed with roses, of the perennial
+kind, by the aid of which a number of amazingly complicated and startling
+evolutions were exhibited; and also his two daughters, who figured
+largely in these evolutions, and whose wonderful performances to us, who
+had not seen Miss Taglioni or Miss Elssler, were something quite
+bewildering, in fact, surpassing the natural possibilities of human
+beings. Their extraordinary powers were, however, accounted for by the
+following explanation, which was accepted in the school as entirely
+satisfactory. A certain little bone in the ankles of each of these young
+girls had been broken intentionally, secundum artem, at a very early age,
+and thus they had been fitted to accomplish these surprising feats which
+threw the achievements of the children who were left in the condition of
+the natural man into ignominious shadow.
+
+--Thank you,--said I,--you have helped out my illustration so as to make
+it better than I expected. Let me begin again. Every poem that is
+worthy of the name, no matter how easily it seems to be written,
+represents a great amount of vital force expended at some time or other.
+When you find a beach strewed with the shells and other spoils that
+belonged once to the deep sea, you know the tide has been there, and that
+the winds and waves have wrestled over its naked sands. And so, if I
+find a poem stranded in my soul and have nothing to do but seize it as a
+wrecker carries off the treasure he finds cast ashore, I know I have paid
+at some time for that poem with some inward commotion, were it only an
+excess of enjoyment, which has used up just so much of my vital capital.
+But besides all the impressions that furnished the stuff of the poem,
+there has been hard work to get the management of that wonderful
+instrument I spoke of,---the great organ, language. An artist who works
+in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man
+who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by
+everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling. I don't know that you
+must break any bones in a poet's mechanism before his thought can dance
+in rhythm, but read your Milton and see what training, what patient
+labor, it took before he could shape our common speech into his majestic
+harmonies.
+
+It is rather singular, but the same kind of thing has happened to me not
+very rarely before, as I suppose it has to most persons, that just when I
+happened to be thinking about poets and their conditions, this very
+morning, I saw a paragraph or two from a foreign paper which is apt to be
+sharp, if not cynical, relating to the same matter. I can't help it; I
+want to have my talk about it, and if I say the same things that writer
+did, somebody else can have the satisfaction of saying I stole them all.
+
+[I thought the person whom I have called hypothetically the Man of
+Letters changed color a little and betrayed a certain awkward
+consciousness that some of us were looking at him or thinking of him; but
+I am a little suspicious about him and may do him wrong.]
+
+That poets are treated as privileged persons by their admirers and the
+educated public can hardly be disputed. That they consider themselves so
+there is no doubt whatever. On the whole, I do not know so easy a way of
+shirking all the civic and social and domestic duties, as to settle it in
+one's mind that one is a poet. I have, therefore, taken great pains to
+advise other persons laboring under the impression that they were gifted
+beings, destined to soar in the atmosphere of song above the vulgar
+realities of earth, not to neglect any homely duty under the influence of
+that impression. The number of these persons is so great that if they
+were suffered to indulge their prejudice against every-day duties and
+labors, it would be a serious loss to the productive industry of the
+country. My skirts are clear (so far as other people are concerned) of
+countenancing that form of intellectual opium-eating in which rhyme takes
+the place of the narcotic. But what are you going to do when you find
+John Keats an apprentice to a surgeon or apothecary? Is n't it rather
+better to get another boy to sweep out the shop and shake out the powders
+and stir up the mixtures, and leave him undisturbed to write his Ode on a
+Grecian Urn or to a Nightingale? Oh yes, the critic I have referred to
+would say, if he is John Keats; but not if he is of a much lower grade,
+even though he be genuine, what there is of him. But the trouble is, the
+sensitive persons who belong to the lower grades of the poetical
+hierarchy do not--know their own poetical limitations, while they do feel
+a natural unfitness and disinclination for many pursuits which young
+persons of the average balance of faculties take to pleasantly enough.
+What is forgotten is this, that every real poet, even of the humblest
+grade, is an artist. Now I venture to say that any painter or sculptor of
+real genius, though he may do nothing more than paint flowers and fruit,
+or carve cameos, is considered a privileged person. It is recognized
+perfectly that to get his best work he must be insured the freedom from
+disturbances which the creative power absolutely demands, more absolutely
+perhaps in these slighter artists than in the great masters. His nerves
+must be steady for him to finish a rose-leaf or the fold of a nymph's
+drapery in his best manner; and they will be unsteadied if he has to
+perform the honest drudgery which another can do for him quite as well.
+And it is just so with the poet, though he were only finishing an
+epigram; you must no more meddle roughly with him than you would shake a
+bottle of Chambertin and expect the "sunset glow" to redden your glass
+unclouded. On the other hand, it may be said that poetry is not an
+article of prime necessity, and potatoes are. There is a disposition in
+many persons just now to deny the poet his benefit of clergy, and to hold
+him no better than other people. Perhaps he is not, perhaps he is not so
+good, half the time; but he is a luxury, and if you want him you must pay
+for him, by not trying to make a drudge of him while he is all his
+lifetime struggling with the chills and heats of his artistic
+intermittent fever.
+
+There may have been some lesser interruptions during the talk I have
+reported as if it was a set speech, but this was the drift of what I said
+and should have said if the other man, in the Review I referred to, had
+not seen fit to meddle with the subject, as some fellow always does, just
+about the time when I am going to say something about it. The old Master
+listened beautifully, except for cutting in once, as I told you he did.
+But now he had held in as long as it was in his nature to contain
+himself, and must have his say or go off in an apoplexy, or explode in
+some way.--I think you're right about the poets,--he said.--They are to
+common folks what repeaters are to ordinary watches. They carry music in
+their inside arrangements, but they want to be handled carefully or you
+put them out of order. And perhaps you must n't expect them to be quite
+as good timekeepers as the professional chronometer watches that make a
+specialty of being exact within a few seconds a month. They think too
+much of themselves. So does everybody that considers himself as having a
+right to fall back on what he calls his idiosyncrasy. Yet a man has such
+a right, and it is no easy thing to adjust the private claim to the fair
+public demand on him. Suppose you are subject to tic douloureux, for
+instance. Every now and then a tiger that nobody can see catches one
+side of your face between his jaws and holds on till he is tired and lets
+go. Some concession must be made to you on that score, as everybody can
+see. It is fair to give you a seat that is not in the draught, and your
+friends ought not to find fault with you if you do not care to join a
+party that is going on a sleigh-ride. Now take a poet like Cowper. He
+had a mental neuralgia, a great deal worse in many respects than tic
+douloureux confined to the face. It was well that he was sheltered and
+relieved, by the cares of kind friends, especially those good women, from
+as many of the burdens of life as they could lift off from him. I am
+fair to the poets,--don't you agree that I am?
+
+Why, yes,--I said,--you have stated the case fairly enough, a good deal
+as I should have put it myself.
+
+Now, then,--the Master continued,--I 'll tell you what is necessary to
+all these artistic idiosyncrasies to bring them into good square human
+relations outside of the special province where their ways differ from
+those of other people. I am going to illustrate what I mean by a
+comparison. I don't know, by the way, but you would be disposed to think
+and perhaps call me a wine-bibber on the strength of the freedom with
+which I deal with that fluid for the purposes of illustration. But I
+make mighty little use of it, except as it furnishes me an image now and
+then, as it did, for that matter, to the Disciples and their Master. In
+my younger days they used to bring up the famous old wines, the
+White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse, the Essex Junior, and the rest, in
+their old cobwebbed, dusty bottles. The resurrection of one of these old
+sepulchred dignitaries had something of solemnity about it; it was like
+the disinterment of a king; the bringing to light of the Royal Martyr
+King Charles I., for instance, that Sir Henry Halford gave such an
+interesting account of. And the bottle seemed to inspire a personal
+respect; it was wrapped in a napkin and borne tenderly and reverently
+round to the guests, and sometimes a dead silence went before the first
+gush of its amber flood, and
+
+ "The boldest held his breath
+ For a time."
+
+But nowadays the precious juice of a long-dead vintage is transferred
+carefully into a cut-glass decanter, and stands side by side with the
+sherry from a corner grocery, which looks just as bright and apparently
+thinks just as well of itself. The old historic Madeiras, which have
+warmed the periods of our famous rhetoricians of the past and burned in
+the impassioned eloquence of our earlier political demigods, have nothing
+to mark them externally but a bit of thread, it may be, round the neck of
+the decanter, or a slip of ribbon, pink on one of them and blue on
+another.
+
+Go to a London club,--perhaps I might find something nearer home that
+would serve my turn,--but go to a London club, and there you will see the
+celebrities all looking alike modern, all decanted off from their
+historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the every-day
+aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is Sir Coeur
+de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit;
+there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the leader of the
+House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the kind of thing
+you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not decanted off
+from yourself every few days or weeks, you will think it sacrilege to
+brush a cobweb from your cork by and by. O little fool, that has
+published a little book full of little poems or other sputtering tokens
+of an uneasy condition, how I love you for the one soft nerve of special
+sensibility that runs through your exiguous organism, and the one
+phosphorescent particle in your unilluminated intelligence! But if you
+don't leave your spun-sugar confectionery business once in a while, and
+come out among lusty men,--the bristly, pachydermatous fellows that hew
+out the highways for the material progress of society, and the
+broad-shouldered, out-of-door men that fight for the great prizes of
+life,--you will come to think that the spun-sugar business is the chief
+end of man, and begin to feel and look as if you believed yourself as
+much above common people as that personage of whom Tourgueneff says that
+"he had the air of his own statue erected by national subscription."
+
+--The Master paused and fell into a deep thinking fit, as he does
+sometimes. He had had his own say, it is true, but he had established
+his character as a listener to my own perfect satisfaction, for I, too,
+was conscious of having preached with a certain prolixity.
+
+--I am always troubled when I think of my very limited mathematical
+capacities. It seems as if every well-organized mind should be able to
+handle numbers and quantities through their symbols to an indefinite
+extent; and yet, I am puzzled by what seems to a clever boy with a turn
+for calculation as plain as counting his fingers. I don't think any man
+feels well grounded in knowledge unless he has a good basis of
+mathematical certainties, and knows how to deal with them and apply them
+to every branch of knowledge where they can come in to advantage.
+
+Our Young Astronomer is known for his mathematical ability, and I asked
+him what he thought was the difficulty in the minds that are weak in that
+particular direction, while they may be of remarkable force in other
+provinces of thought, as is notoriously the case with some men of great
+distinction in science.
+
+The young man smiled and wrote a few letters and symbols on a piece of
+paper.---Can you see through that at once?--he said.
+
+I puzzled over it for some minutes and gave it up.
+
+--He said, as I returned it to him, You have heard military men say that
+such a person had an eye for country, have n't you? One man will note
+all the landmarks, keep the points of compass in his head, observe how
+the streams run, in short, carry a map in his brain of any region that he
+has marched or galloped through. Another man takes no note of any of
+these things; always follows somebody else's lead when he can, and gets
+lost if he is left to himself; a mere owl in daylight. Just so some men
+have an eye for an equation, and would read at sight the one that you
+puzzled over. It is told of Sir Isaac Newton that he required no
+demonstration of the propositions in Euclid's Geometry, but as soon as he
+had read the enunciation the solution or answer was plain at once. The
+power may be cultivated, but I think it is to a great degree a natural
+gift, as is the eye for color, as is the ear for music.
+
+--I think I could read equations readily enough,--I said,--if I could
+only keep my attention fixed on them; and I think I could keep my
+attention on them if I were imprisoned in a thinking-cell, such as the
+Creative Intelligence shapes for its studio when at its divinest work.
+
+The young man's lustrous eyes opened very widely as he asked me to
+explain what I meant.
+
+--What is the Creator's divinest work?--I asked.
+
+--Is there anything more divine than the sun; than a sun with its planets
+revolving about it, warming them, lighting them, and giving conscious
+life to the beings that move on them?
+
+--You agree, then, that conscious life is the grand aim and end of all
+this vast mechanism. Without life that could feel and enjoy, the
+splendors and creative energy would all be thrown away. You know
+Harvey's saying, omnia animalia ex ovo,--all animals come from an egg.
+You ought to know it, for the great controversy going on about
+spontaneous generation has brought it into special prominence lately.
+Well, then, the ovum, the egg, is, to speak in human phrase, the
+Creator's more private and sacred studio, for his magnum opus. Now, look
+at a hen's egg, which is a convenient one to study, because it is large
+enough and built solidly enough to look at and handle easily. That would
+be the form I would choose for my thinking-cell. Build me an oval with
+smooth, translucent walls, and put me in the centre of it with Newton's
+"Principia" or Kant's "Kritik," and I think I shall develop "an eye for
+an equation," as you call it, and a capacity for an abstraction.
+
+But do tell me,--said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,--what there
+is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a
+mathematician or a metaphysician?
+
+--It is n't help I want, it is removing hindrances. I don't want to see
+anything to draw off my attention. I don't want a cornice, or an angle,
+or anything but a containing curve. I want diffused light and no single
+luminous centre to fix my eye, and so distract my mind from its one
+object of contemplation. The metaphysics of attention have hardly been
+sounded to their depths. The mere fixing the look on any single object
+for a long time may produce very strange effects. Gibbon's well-known
+story of the monks of Mount Athos and their contemplative practice is
+often laughed over, but it has a meaning. They were to shut the door of
+the cell, recline the beard and chin on the breast, and contemplate the
+abdominal centre.
+
+"At first all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and
+night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul
+discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and
+ethereal light." And Mr. Braid produces absolute anaesthesia, so that
+surgical operations can be performed without suffering to the patient,
+only by making him fix his eyes and his mind on a single object; and
+Newton is said to have said, as you remember, "I keep the subject
+constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by
+little and little into a full and clear light." These are different, but
+certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be done by attention.
+But now suppose that your mind is in its nature discursive, erratic,
+subject to electric attractions and repulsions, volage; it may be
+impossible for you to compel your attention except by taking away all
+external disturbances. I think the poets have an advantage and a
+disadvantage as compared with the steadier-going people. Life is so
+vivid to the poet, that he is too eager to seize and exhaust its
+multitudinous impressions. Like Sindbad in the valley of precious
+stones, he wants to fill his pockets with diamonds, but, lo! there is a
+great ruby like a setting sun in its glory, and a sapphire that, like
+Bryant's blue gentian, seems to have dropped from the cerulean walls of
+heaven, and a nest of pearls that look as if they might be unhatched
+angel's eggs, and so he hardly knows what to seize, and tries for too
+many, and comes out of the enchanted valley with more gems than he can
+carry, and those that he lets fall by the wayside we call his poems. You
+may change the image a thousand ways to show you how hard it is to make a
+mathematician or a logician out of a poet. He carries the tropics with
+him wherever he goes; he is in the true sense felius naturae, and Nature
+tempts him, as she tempts a child walking through a garden where all the
+finest fruits are hanging over him and dropping round him, where
+
+ The luscious clusters of the vine
+ Upon (his) mouth do crush their wine,
+ The nectarine and curious peach,
+ Into (his) hands themselves do reach;
+
+and he takes a bite out of the sunny side of this and the other, and,
+ever stimulated and never satisfied, is hurried through the garden, and,
+before he knows it, finds himself at an iron gate which opens outward,
+and leaves the place he knows and loves--
+
+--For one he will perhaps soon learn to love and know better,--said the
+Master.---But I can help you out with another comparison, not quite so
+poetical as yours. Why did not you think of a railway-station, where the
+cars stop five minutes for refreshments? Is n't that a picture of the
+poet's hungry and hurried feast at the banquet of life? The traveller
+flings himself on the bewildering miscellany of delicacies spread before
+him, the various tempting forms of ambrosia and seducing draughts of
+nectar, with the same eager hurry and restless ardor that you describe in
+the poet. Dear me! If it wasn't for All aboard! that summons of the
+deaf conductor which tears one away from his half-finished sponge-cake
+and coffee, how I, who do not call myself a poet, but only a questioner,
+should have enjoyed a good long stop--say a couple of thousand years--at
+this way-station on the great railroad leading to the unknown terminus!
+
+--You say you are not a poet,--I said, after a little pause, in which I
+suppose both of us were thinking where the great railroad would land us
+after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of which no man
+has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about it,--you say you
+are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some of the elements
+which go to make one.
+
+--I don't think you mean to flatter me,--the Master answered,--and, what
+is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don't think you do
+flatter me. I have taken the inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I
+were an appraiser. I have some of the qualities, perhaps I may say many
+of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and yet I am not one. And in
+the course of a pretty wide experience of men--and women--(the Master
+sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was mistaken)--I have met a good many
+poets who were not rhymesters and a good many rhymesters who were not
+poets. So I am only one of the Voiceless, that I remember one of you
+singers had some verses about. I think there is a little music in me, but
+it has not found a voice, and it never will. If I should confess the
+truth, there is no mere earthly immortality that I envy so much as the
+poet's. If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it
+live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that
+one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of
+logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes
+straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the
+sinner as well as the saint. The works of other men live, but their
+personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in
+his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with
+all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.
+We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it with
+its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects that
+flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept unchanging in
+the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho, the tenderness
+of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the lofty
+contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if they were
+living, in a few tears of amber verse. It seems, when one reads,
+
+ "Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,"
+
+or,
+
+ "The glories of our birth and state,"
+
+as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such an
+immortality at least as a perishable language can give. A single lyric
+is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect
+one of those jewels fit to sparkle "on the stretched forefinger of all
+time." A coin, a ring, a string of verses. These last, and hardly
+anything else does. Every century is an overloaded ship that must sink
+at last with most of its cargo. The small portion of its crew that get
+on board the new vessel which takes them off don't pretend to save a
+great many of the bulky articles. But they must not and will not leave
+behind the hereditary jewels of the race; and if you have found and cut a
+diamond, were it only a spark with a single polished facet, it will stand
+a better chance of being saved from the wreck than anything, no matter
+what, that wants much room for stowage.
+
+The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their
+builders' names. But the ring of Thothmes III., who reigned some
+fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the
+Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord
+Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more than
+three thousand years ago. The gold coins with the head of Alexander the
+Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than much
+of the silver currency we were lately handling. As we have been quoting
+from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and give some
+lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had written,
+but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals. Some of these lines have
+been lingering in my memory for a great many years, but I looked at the
+original the other day and was so pleased with them that I got them by
+heart. I think you will say they are singularly pointed and elegant.
+
+ "Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust
+ The faithless column and the crumbling bust;
+ Huge moles, whose shadows stretched from shore to shore,
+ Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
+ Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
+ And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
+ A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps,
+ Beneath her palm here sad Judaea weeps;
+ Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
+ And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
+ A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
+ And little eagles wave their wings in gold."
+
+It is the same thing in literature. Write half a dozen folios full of
+other people's ideas (as all folios are pretty sure to be), and you serve
+as ballast to the lower shelves of a library, about as like to be
+disturbed as the kentledge in the hold of a ship. Write a story, or a
+dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an oyster while it is
+freshly opened, and after tha--. The highways of literature are spread
+over with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at
+a mouthful by the public, and is done with. But write a volume of poems.
+No matter if they are all bad but one, if that one is very good. It will
+carry your name down to posterity like the ring of Thothmes, like the
+coin of Alexander. I don't suppose one would care a great deal about it
+a hundred or a thousand years after he is dead, but I don't feel quite
+sure. It seems as if, even in heaven, King David might remember "The
+Lord is my Shepherd" with a certain twinge of earthly pleasure. But we
+don't know, we don't know.
+
+--What in the world can have become of That Boy and his popgun while all
+this somewhat extended sermonizing was going on? I don't wonder you ask,
+beloved Reader, and I suppose I must tell you how we got on so long
+without interruption. Well, the plain truth is, the youngster was
+contemplating his gastric centre, like the monks of Mount Athos, but in a
+less happy state of mind than those tranquil recluses, in consequence of
+indulgence in the heterogeneous assortment of luxuries procured with the
+five-cent piece given him by the kind-hearted old Master. But you need
+not think I am going to tell you every time his popgun goes off, making a
+Selah of him whenever I want to change the subject. Occasionally he was
+ill-timed in his artillery practice and ignominiously rebuked, sometimes
+he was harmlessly playful and nobody minded him, but every now and then
+he came in so apropos that I am morally certain he gets a hint from
+somebody who watches the course of the conversation, and means through
+him to have a hand in it and stop any of us when we are getting prosy.
+But in consequence of That Boy's indiscretion, we were without a check
+upon our expansiveness, and ran on in the way you have observed and may
+be disposed to find fault with.
+
+One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our long
+talk of that day.
+
+--I have been tempted sometimes,--said he, to envy the immediate triumphs
+of the singer. He enjoys all that praise can do for him and at the very
+moment of exerting his talent. And the singing women! Once in a while,
+in the course of my life, I have found myself in the midst of a tulip-bed
+of full-dressed, handsome women in all their glory, and when some one
+among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and sat down before the piano, and
+then, only giving the keys a soft touch now and then to support her
+voice, has warbled some sweet, sad melody intertwined with the longings
+or regrets of some tender-hearted poet, it has seemed to me that so to
+hush the rustling of the silks and silence the babble of the buds, as
+they call the chicks of a new season, and light up the flame of romance
+in cold hearts, in desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,--like mine, I
+was going to say, but I won't, for it isn't so, and you may laugh to hear
+me say it isn't so, if you like,--was perhaps better than to be
+remembered a few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when your
+gravestone is standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a
+lichen as big as a militia colonel's cockade, and nobody knows or cares
+enough about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone
+upright again.
+
+--I said nothing in reply to this, for I was thinking of a sweet singer
+to whose voice I had listened in its first freshness, and which is now
+only an echo in my memory. If any reader of the periodical in which
+these conversations are recorded can remember so far back as the first
+year of its publication, he will find among the papers contributed by a
+friend not yet wholly forgotten a few verses, lively enough in their way,
+headed "The Boys." The sweet singer was one of this company of college
+classmates, the constancy of whose friendship deserves a better tribute
+than the annual offerings, kindly meant, as they are, which for many
+years have not been wanting at their social gatherings. The small
+company counts many noted personages on its list, as is well known to
+those who are interested in such local matters, but it is not known that
+every fifth man of the whole number now living is more or less of a
+poet,--using that word with a generous breadth of significance. But it
+should seem that the divine gift it implies is more freely dispensed than
+some others, for while there are (or were, for one has taken his Last
+Degree) eight musical quills, there was but one pair of lips which could
+claim any special consecration to vocal melody. Not that one that should
+undervalue the half-recitative of doubtful barytones, or the brilliant
+escapades of slightly unmanageable falsettos, or the concentrated efforts
+of the proprietors of two or three effective notes, who may be observed
+lying in wait for them, and coming down on them with all their might, and
+the look on their countenances of "I too am a singer." But the voice
+that led all, and that all loved to listen to, the voice that was at once
+full, rich, sweet, penetrating, expressive, whose ample overflow drowned
+all the imperfections and made up for all the shortcomings of the others,
+is silent henceforth forevermore for all earthly listeners.
+
+And these were the lines that one of "The Boys," as they have always
+called themselves for ever so many years, read at the first meeting after
+the voice which had never failed them was hushed in the stillness of
+death.
+
+ J. A.
+
+ 1871.
+
+ One memory trembles on our lips
+ It throbs in every breast;
+ In tear-dimmed eyes, in mirth's eclipse,
+ The shadow stands confessed.
+
+ O silent voice, that cheered so long
+ Our manhood's marching day,
+ Without thy breath of heavenly song,
+ How weary seems the way!
+
+ Vain every pictured phrase to tell
+ Our sorrowing hearts' desire;
+ The shattered harp, the broken shell,
+ The silent unstrung lyre;
+
+ For youth was round us while he sang;
+ It glowed in every tone;
+ With bridal chimes the echoes rang,
+ And made the past our own.
+
+ O blissful dream! Our nursery joys
+ We know must have an end,
+ But love and friendships broken toys
+ May God's good angels mend!
+
+ The cheering smile, the voice of mirth
+ And laughter's gay surprise
+ That please the children born of earth,
+ Why deem that Heaven denies?
+
+ Methinks in that refulgent sphere
+ That knows not sun or moon,
+ An earth-born saint might long to hear
+ One verse of "Bonny Doon";
+
+ Or walking through the streets of gold
+ In Heaven's unclouded light,
+ His lips recall the song of old
+ And hum "The sky is bright."
+
+ And can we smile when thou art dead?
+ Ah, brothers, even so!
+ The rose of summer will be red,
+ In spite of winter's snow.
+
+ Thou wouldst not leave us all in gloom
+ Because thy song is still,
+ Nor blight the banquet-garland's bloom
+ With grief's untimely chill.
+
+ The sighing wintry winds complain,
+ The singing bird has flown,
+ --Hark! heard I not that ringing strain,
+ That clear celestial tone?
+
+ How poor these pallid phrases seem,
+ How weak this tinkling line,
+ As warbles through my waking dream
+ That angel voice of thine!
+
+ Thy requiem asks a sweeter lay;
+ It falters on my tongue;
+ For all we vainly strive to say,
+ Thou shouldst thyself have sung!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+I fear that I have done injustice in my conversation and my report of it
+to a most worthy and promising young man whom I should be very sorry to
+injure in any way. Dr. Benjamin Franklin got hold of my account of my
+visit to him, and complained that I had made too much of the expression
+he used. He did not mean to say that he thought I was suffering from the
+rare disease he mentioned, but only that the color reminded him of it.
+It was true that he had shown me various instruments, among them one for
+exploring the state of a part by means of a puncture, but he did not
+propose to make use of it upon my person. In short, I had colored the
+story so as to make him look ridiculous.
+
+--I am afraid I did,--I said,--but was n't I colored myself so as to look
+ridiculous? I've heard it said that people with the jaundice see
+everything yellow; perhaps I saw things looking a little queerly, with
+that black and blue spot I could n't account for threatening to make a
+colored man and brother of me. But I am sorry if I have done you any
+wrong. I hope you won't lose any patients by my making a little fun of
+your meters and scopes and contrivances. They seem so odd to us outside
+people. Then the idea of being bronzed all over was such an alarming
+suggestion. But I did not mean to damage your business, which I trust is
+now considerable, and I shall certainly come to you again if I have need
+of the services of a physician. Only don't mention the names of any
+diseases in English or Latin before me next time. I dreamed about cutis
+oenea half the night after I came to see you.
+
+Dr. Benjamin took my apology very pleasantly. He did not want to be
+touchy about it, he said, but he had his way to make in the world, and
+found it a little hard at first, as most young men did. People were
+afraid to trust them, no matter how much they knew. One of the old
+doctors asked him to come in and examine a patient's heart for him the
+other day. He went with him accordingly, and when they stood by the
+bedside, he offered his stethoscope to the old doctor. The old doctor
+took it and put the wrong end to his ear and the other to the patient's
+chest, and kept it there about two minutes, looking all the time as wise
+as an old owl. Then he, Dr. Benjamin, took it and applied it properly,
+and made out where the trouble was in no time at all. But what was the
+use of a young man's pretending to know anything in the presence of an
+old owl? I saw by their looks, he said, that they all thought I used
+the, stethoscope wrong end up, and was nothing but a 'prentice hand to
+the old doctor.
+
+--I am much pleased to say that since Dr. Benjamin has had charge of a
+dispensary district, and been visiting forty or fifty patients a day, I
+have reason to think he has grown a great deal more practical than when I
+made my visit to his office. I think I was probably one of his first
+patients, and that he naturally made the most of me. But my second trial
+was much more satisfactory. I got an ugly cut from the carving-knife in
+an affair with a goose of iron constitution in which I came off second
+best. I at once adjourned with Dr. Benjamin to his small office, and put
+myself in his hands. It was astonishing to see what a little experience
+of miscellaneous practice had done for him. He did not ask me anymore
+questions about my hereditary predispositions on the paternal and
+maternal sides. He did not examine me with the stethoscope or the
+laryngoscope. He only strapped up my cut, and informed me that it would
+speedily get well by the "first intention,"--an odd phrase enough, but
+sounding much less formidable than cutis oenea.
+
+I am afraid I have had something of the French prejudice which embodies
+itself in the maxim "young surgeon, old physician." But a young
+physician who has been taught by great masters of the profession, in
+ample hospitals, starts in his profession knowing more than some old
+doctors have learned in a lifetime. Give him a little time to get the
+use of his wits in emergencies, and to know the little arts that do so
+much for a patient's comfort,--just as you give a young sailor time to
+get his sea-legs on and teach his stomach to behave itself,--and he will
+do well enough.
+
+The old Master knows ten times more about this matter and about all the
+professions, as he does about everything else, than I do. My opinion is
+that he has studied two, if not three, of these professions in a regular
+course. I don't know that he has ever preached, except as Charles Lamb
+said Coleridge always did, for when he gets the bit in his teeth he runs
+away with the conversation, and if he only took a text his talk would be
+a sermon; but if he has not preached, he has made a study of theology, as
+many laymen do. I know he has some shelves of medical books in his
+library, and has ideas on the subject of the healing art. He confesses
+to having attended law lectures and having had much intercourse with
+lawyers. So he has something to say on almost any subject that happens
+to come up. I told him my story about my visit to the young doctor, and
+asked him what he thought of youthful practitioners in general and of Dr.
+Benjamin in particular.
+
+I 'll tell you what,--the Master said,--I know something about these
+young fellows that come home with their heads full of "science," as they
+call it, and stick up their signs to tell people they know how to cure
+their headaches and stomach-aches. Science is a first-rate piece of
+furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the
+ground-floor. But if a man has n't got plenty of good common sense, the
+more science he has the worse for his patient.
+
+--I don't know that I see exactly how it is worse for the patient,--I
+said.
+
+--Well, I'll tell you, and you'll find it's a mighty simple matter. When
+a person is sick, there is always something to be done for him, and done
+at once. If it is only to open or shut a window, if it is only to tell
+him to keep on doing just what he is doing already, it wants a man to
+bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its
+immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just
+exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was
+before,--a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his
+business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as
+when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to
+send for him. He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just
+such mouths, but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his
+business is with that and no other person's,--with the features of the
+worthy father of a family before him, and not with the portraits he has
+seen in galleries or books, or Mr. Copley's grand pictures of the fine
+old Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the
+same thing with the patient. His disease has features of its own; there
+never was and never will be another case in all respects exactly like it.
+If a doctor has science without common sense, he treats a fever, but not
+this man's fever. If he has common sense without science, he treats this
+man's fever without knowing the general laws that govern all fevers and
+all vital movements. I 'll tell you what saves these last fellows. They
+go for weakness whenever they see it, with stimulants and strengtheners,
+and they go for overaction, heat, and high pulse, and the rest, with
+cooling and reducing remedies. That is three quarters of medical
+practice. The other quarter wants science and common sense too. But the
+men that have science only, begin too far back, and, before they get as
+far as the case in hand, the patient has very likely gone to visit his
+deceased relatives. You remember Thomas Prince's "Chronological History
+of New England," I suppose? He begins, you recollect, with Adam, and has
+to work down five thousand six hundred and twenty-four years before he
+gets to the Pilgrim fathers and the Mayflower. It was all very well,
+only it did n't belong there, but got in the way of something else. So
+it is with "science" out of place. By far the larger part of the facts
+of structure and function you find in the books of anatomy and physiology
+have no immediate application to the daily duties of the practitioner.
+You must learn systematically, for all that; it is the easiest way and
+the only way that takes hold of the memory, except mere empirical
+repetition, like that of the handicraftsman. Did you ever see one of
+those Japanese figures with the points for acupuncture marked upon it?
+
+--I had to own that my schooling had left out that piece of information.
+
+Well, I 'll tell you about it. You see they have a way of pushing long,
+slender needles into you for the cure of rheumatism and other complaints,
+and it seems there is a choice of spots for the operation, though it is
+very strange how little mischief it does in a good many places one would
+think unsafe to meddle with. So they had a doll made, and marked the
+spots where they had put in needles without doing any harm. They must
+have had accidents from sticking the needles into the wrong places now
+and then, but I suppose they did n't say a great deal about those. After
+a time, say a few centuries of experience, they had their doll all
+spotted over with safe places for sticking in the needles. That is their
+way of registering practical knowledge: We, on the other hand, study the
+structure of the body as a whole, systematically, and have no difficulty
+at all in remembering the track of the great vessels and nerves, and
+knowing just what tracks will be safe and what unsafe. It is just the
+same thing with the geologists. Here is a man close by us boring for
+water through one of our ledges, because somebody else got water
+somewhere else in that way; and a person who knows geology or ought to
+know it, because he has given his life to it, tells me he might as well
+bore there for lager-beer as for water.
+
+--I thought we had had enough of this particular matter, and that I
+should like to hear what the Master had to say about the three
+professions he knew something about, each compared with the others.
+
+What is your general estimate of doctors, lawyers, and ministers?--said
+I.
+
+--Wait a minute, till I have got through with your first question,--said
+the Master.---One thing at a time. You asked me about the young doctors,
+and about our young doctor. They come home tres biens chausses, as a
+Frenchman would say, mighty well shod with professional knowledge. But
+when they begin walking round among their poor patients, they don't
+commonly start with millionnaires,--they find that their new shoes of
+scientific acquirements have got to be broken in just like a pair of
+boots or brogans. I don't know that I have put it quite strong enough.
+Let me try again. You've seen those fellows at the circus that get up on
+horseback so big that you wonder how they could climb into the saddle.
+But pretty soon they throw off their outside coat, and the next minute
+another one, and then the one under that, and so they keep peeling off
+one garment after another till people begin to look queer and think they
+are going too far for strict propriety. Well, that is the way a fellow
+with a real practical turn serves a good many of his scientific wrappers,
+flings 'em off for other people to pick up, and goes right at the work of
+curing stomach-aches and all the other little mean unscientific
+complaints that make up the larger part of every doctor's business. I
+think our Dr. Benjamin is a worthy young man, and if you are in need of a
+doctor at any time I hope you will go to him; and if you come off without
+harm, I will recommend some other friend to try him.
+
+--I thought he was going to say he would try him in his own person, but
+the Master is not fond of committing himself.
+
+Now, I will answer your other question, he said. The lawyers are the
+cleverest men, the ministers are the most learned, and the doctors are
+the most sensible.
+
+The lawyers are a picked lot, "first scholars" and the like, but their
+business is as unsympathetic as Jack Ketch's. There is nothing
+humanizing in their relations with their fellow-creatures. They go for
+the side that retains them. They defend the man they know to be a rogue,
+and not very rarely throw suspicion on the man they know to be innocent.
+Mind you, I am not finding fault with them; every side of a case has a
+right to the best statement it admits of; but I say it does not tend to
+make them sympathetic. Suppose in a case of Fever vs. Patient, the
+doctor should side with either party according to whether the old miser
+or his expectant heir was his employer. Suppose the minister should side
+with the Lord or the Devil, according to the salary offered and other
+incidental advantages, where the soul of a sinner was in question. You
+can see what a piece of work it would make of their sympathies. But the
+lawyers are quicker witted than either of the other professions, and
+abler men generally. They are good-natured, or, if they quarrel, their
+quarrels are above-board. I don't think they are as accomplished as the
+ministers, but they have a way of cramming with special knowledge for a
+case which leaves a certain shallow sediment of intelligence in their
+memories about a good many things. They are apt to talk law in mixed
+company, and they have a way of looking round when they make a point, as
+if they were addressing a jury, that is mighty aggravating, as I once had
+occasion to see when one of 'em, and a pretty famous one, put me on the
+witness-stand at a dinner-party once.
+
+The ministers come next in point of talent. They are far more curious
+and widely interested outside of their own calling than either of the
+other professions. I like to talk with 'em. They are interesting men,
+full of good feelings, hard workers, always foremost in good deeds, and
+on the whole the most efficient civilizing class, working downwards from
+knowledge to ignorance, that is,--not so much upwards, perhaps,--that we
+have. The trouble is, that so many of 'em work in harness, and it is
+pretty sure to chafe somewhere. They feed us on canned meats mostly.
+They cripple our instincts and reason, and give us a crutch of doctrine.
+I have talked with a great many of 'em of all sorts of belief, and I
+don't think they are quite so easy in their minds, the greater number of
+them; nor so clear in their convictions, as one would think to hear 'em
+lay down the law in the pulpit. They used to lead the intelligence of
+their parishes; now they do pretty well if they keep up with it, and they
+are very apt to lag behind it. Then they must have a colleague. The old
+minister thinks he can hold to his old course, sailing right into the
+wind's eye of human nature, as straight as that famous old skipper John
+Bunyan; the young minister falls off three or four points and catches the
+breeze that left the old man's sails all shivering. By and by the
+congregation will get ahead of him, and then it must, have another new
+skipper. The priest holds his own pretty well; the minister is coming
+down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful
+citizen,--no oracle at all, but a man of more than average moral
+instincts, who, if he knows anything, knows how little he knows. The
+ministers are good talkers, only the struggle between nature and grace
+makes some of 'em a little awkward occasionally. The women do their best
+to spoil 'em, as they do the poets; you find it very pleasant to be
+spoiled, no doubt; so do they. Now and then one of 'em goes over the dam;
+no wonder, they're always in the rapids.
+
+By this time our three ladies had their faces all turned toward the
+speaker, like the weathercocks in a northeaster, and I thought it best to
+switch off the talk on to another rail.
+
+How about the doctors?--I said.
+
+--Theirs is the least learned of the professions, in this country at
+least. They have not half the general culture of the lawyers, nor a
+quarter of that of the ministers. I rather think, though, they are more
+agreeable to the common run of people than the men with black coats or
+the men with green bags. People can swear before 'em if they want to,
+and they can't very well before ministers. I don't care whether they
+want to swear or not, they don't want to be on their good behavior.
+Besides, the minister has a little smack of the sexton about him; he
+comes when people are in extremis, but they don't send for him every time
+they make a slight moral slip, tell a lie for instance, or smuggle a silk
+dress through the customhouse; but they call in the doctor when a child
+is cutting a tooth or gets a splinter in its finger. So it does n't mean
+much to send for him, only a pleasant chat about the news of the day; for
+putting the baby to rights does n't take long. Besides, everybody does
+n't like to talk about the next world; people are modest in their
+desires, and find this world as good as they deserve; but everybody loves
+to talk physic. Everybody loves to hear of strange cases; people are
+eager to tell the doctor of the wonderful cures they have heard of; they
+want to know what is the matter with somebody or other who is said to be
+suffering from "a complication of diseases," and above all to get a hard
+name, Greek or Latin, for some complaint which sounds altogether too
+commonplace in plain English. If you will only call a headache a
+Cephalgia, it acquires dignity at once, and a patient becomes rather
+proud of it. So I think doctors are generally welcome in most companies.
+
+In old times, when people were more afraid of the Devil and of witches
+than they are now, they liked to have a priest or a minister somewhere
+near to scare 'em off; but nowadays, if you could find an old woman that
+would ride round the room on a broomstick, Barnum would build an
+amphitheatre to exhibit her in; and if he could come across a young imp,
+with hoofs, tail, and budding horns, a lineal descendant of one of those
+"daemons" which the good people of Gloucester fired at, and were fired at
+by "for the best part of a month together" in the year 1692, the, great
+showman would have him at any cost for his museum or menagerie. Men are
+cowards, sir, and are driven by fear as the sovereign motive. Men are
+idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw
+themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you
+don't make it of wood, you must make it of words, which are just as much
+used for idols as promissory notes are used for values. The ministers
+have a hard time of it without bell and book and holy water; they are
+dismounted men in armor since Luther cut their saddle-girths, and you can
+see they are quietly taking off one piece of iron after another until
+some of the best of 'em are fighting the devil (not the zoological Devil
+with the big D) with the sword of the Spirit, and precious little else in
+the way of weapons of offence or defence. But we couldn't get on without
+the spiritual brotherhood, whatever became of our special creeds. There
+is a genius for religion, just as there is for painting or sculpture. It
+is half-sister to the genius for music, and has some of the features
+which remind us of earthly love. But it lifts us all by its mere
+presence. To see a good man and hear his voice once a week would be
+reason enough for building churches and pulpits. The Master stopped all
+at once, and after about half a minute laughed his pleasant laugh.
+
+What is it?--I asked him.
+
+I was thinking of the great coach and team that is carrying us fast
+enough, I don't know but too fast, somewhere or other. The D. D.'s used
+to be the leaders, but now they are the wheel-horses. It's pretty hard
+to tell how much they pull, but we know they can hold back like the----
+
+--When we're going down hill,--I said, as neatly as if I had been a
+High-Church curate trained to snap at the last word of the response, so
+that you couldn't wedge in the tail of a comma between the end of the
+congregation's closing syllable and the beginning of the next petition.
+They do it well, but it always spoils my devotion. To save my life, I
+can't help watching them, as I watch to see a duck dive at the flash of a
+gun, and that is not what I go to church for. It is a juggler's trick,
+and there is no more religion in it than in catching a ball on the fly.
+
+I was looking at our Scheherezade the other day, and thinking what a pity
+it was that she had never had fair play in the world. I wish I knew more
+of her history. There is one way of learning it,--making love to her. I
+wonder whether she would let me and like it. It is an absurd thing, and
+I ought not to confess, but I tell you and you only, Beloved, my heart
+gave a perceptible jump when it heard the whisper of that possibility
+overhead! Every day has its ebb and flow, but such a thought as that is
+like one of those tidal waves they talk about, that rolls in like a great
+wall and overtops and drowns out all your landmarks, and you, too, if you
+don't mind what you are about and stand ready to run or climb or swim.
+Not quite so bad as that, though, this time. I take an interest in our
+Scheherezade. I am glad she did n't smile on the pipe and the
+Bohemian-looking fellow that finds the best part of his life in sucking
+at it. A fine thing, isn't it; for a young woman to marry a man who will
+hold her
+
+ "Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse,"
+
+but not quite so good as his meerschaum? It is n't for me to throw
+stones, though, who have been a Nicotian a good deal more than half my
+days. Cigar-stump out now, and consequently have become very bitter on
+more persevering sinners. I say I take an interest in our Scheherezade,
+but I rather think it is more paternal than anything else, though my
+heart did give that jump. It has jumped a good many times without
+anything very remarkable coming of it.
+
+This visit to the Observatory is going to bring us all, or most of us,
+together in a new way, and it wouldn't be very odd if some of us should
+become better acquainted than we ever have been. There is a chance for
+the elective affinities. What tremendous forces they are, if two
+subjects of them come within range! There lies a bit of iron. All the
+dynamic agencies of the universe are pledged to hold it just in that
+position, and there it will lie until it becomes a heap of red-brown
+rust. But see, I hold a magnet to it,--it looks to you like just such a
+bit of iron as the other,--and lo! it leaves them all,--the tugging of
+the mighty earth; of the ghostly moon that walks in white, trailing the
+snaky waves of the ocean after her; of the awful sun, twice as large as a
+sphere that the whole orbit of the moon would but just girdle,--it leaves
+the wrestling of all their forces, which are at a dead lock with each
+other, all fighting for it, and springs straight to the magnet. What a
+lucky thing it is for well-conducted persons that the maddening elective
+affinities don't come into play in full force very often!
+
+I suppose I am making a good deal more of our prospective visit than it
+deserves. It must be because I have got it into my head that we are
+bound to have some kind of sentimental outbreak amongst us, and that this
+will give a chance for advances on the part of anybody disposed in that
+direction. A little change of circumstance often hastens on a movement
+that has been long in preparation. A chemist will show you a flask
+containing a clear liquid; he will give it a shake or two, and the whole
+contents of the flask will become solid in an instant. Or you may lay a
+little heap of iron-filings on a sheet of paper with a magnet beneath it,
+and they will be quiet enough as they are, but give the paper a slight
+jar and the specks of metal will suddenly find their way to the north or
+the south pole of the magnet and take a definite shape not unpleasing to
+contemplate, and curiously illustrating the laws of attraction,
+antagonism, and average, by which the worlds, conscious and unconscious,
+are alike governed. So with our little party, with any little party of
+persons who have got used to each other; leave them undisturbed and they
+might remain in a state of equilibrium forever; but let anything give
+them a shake or a jar, and the long-striving but hindered affinities come
+all at once into play and finish the work of a year in five minutes.
+
+We were all a good deal excited by the anticipation of this visit. The
+Capitalist, who for the most part keeps entirely to himself, seemed to
+take an interest in it and joined the group in the parlor who were making
+arrangements as to the details of the eventful expedition, which was very
+soon to take place. The Young Girl was full of enthusiasm; she is one of
+those young persons, I think, who are impressible, and of necessity
+depressible when their nervous systems are overtasked, but elastic,
+recovering easily from mental worries and fatigues, and only wanting a
+little change of their conditions to get back their bloom and
+cheerfulness. I could not help being pleased to see how much of the
+child was left in her, after all the drudgery she had been through. What
+is there that youth will not endure and triumph over? Here she was; her
+story for the week was done in good season; she had got rid of her
+villain by a new and original catastrophe; she had received a sum of
+money for an extra string of verses,--painfully small, it is true, but it
+would buy her a certain ribbon she wanted for the great excursion; and
+now her eyes sparkled so that I forgot how tired and hollow they
+sometimes looked when she had been sitting up half the night over her
+endless manuscript.
+
+The morning of the day we had looked forward to--promised as good an
+evening as we could wish. The Capitalist, whose courteous and bland
+demeanor would never have suggested the thought that he was a robber and
+an enemy of his race, who was to be trampled underfoot by the beneficent
+regenerators of the social order as preliminary to the universal reign of
+peace on earth and good-will to men, astonished us all with a proposal to
+escort the three ladies and procure a carriage for their conveyance. The
+Lady thanked him in a very cordial way, but said she thought nothing of
+the walk. The Landlady looked disappointed at this answer. For her part
+she was on her legs all day and should be glad enough to ride, if so be
+he was going to have a carriage at any rate. It would be a sight
+pleasanter than to trudge afoot, but she would n't have him go to the
+expense on her account. Don't mention it, madam,--r--said the
+Capitalist, in a generous glow of enthusiasm. As for the Young Girl, she
+did not often get a chance for a drive, and liked the idea of it for its
+own sake, as children do, and she insisted that the Lady should go in the
+carriage with her. So it was settled that the Capitalist should take the
+three ladies in a carriage, and the rest of us go on foot.
+
+The evening behaved as it was bound to do on so momentous an occasion.
+The Capitalist was dressed with almost suspicious nicety. We pedestrians
+could not help waiting to see them off, and I thought he handed the
+ladies into the carriage with the air of a French marquis.
+
+I walked with Dr. Benjamin and That Boy, and we had to keep the little
+imp on the trot a good deal of the way in order not to be too long behind
+the carriage party. The Member of the Haouse walked with our two
+dummies,--I beg their pardon, I mean the Register of Deeds and the
+Salesman.
+
+The Man of Letters, hypothetically so called, walked by himself, smoking
+a short pipe which was very far from suggesting the spicy breezes that
+blow soft from Ceylon's isle.
+
+I suppose everybody who reads this paper has visited one or more
+observatories, and of course knows all about them. But as it may
+hereafter be translated into some foreign tongue and circulated among
+barbarous, but rapidly improving people, people who have as yet no
+astronomers among them, it may be well to give a little notion of what
+kind of place an observatory is.
+
+To begin then: a deep and solid stone foundation is laid in the earth,
+and a massive pier of masonry is built up on it. A heavy block of
+granite forms the summit of this pier, and on this block rests the
+equatorial telescope. Around this structure a circular tower is built,
+with two or more floors which come close up to the pier, but do not touch
+it at any point. It is crowned with a hemispherical dome, which, I may
+remark, half realizes the idea of my egg-shell studio. This dome is
+cleft from its base to its summit by a narrow, ribbon-like opening,
+through which is seen the naked sky. It revolves on cannon-balls, so
+easily that a single hand can move it, and thus the opening may be turned
+towards any point of the compass. As the telescope can be raised or
+depressed so as to be directed to any elevation from the horizon to the
+zenith, and turned around the entire circle with the dome, it can be
+pointed to any part of the heavens. But as the star or other celestial
+object is always apparently moving, in consequence of the real rotatory
+movement of the earth, the telescope is made to follow it automatically
+by an ingenious clock-work arrangement. No place, short of the temple of
+the living God, can be more solemn. The jars of the restless life around
+it do not disturb the serene intelligence of the half-reasoning
+apparatus. Nothing can stir the massive pier but the shocks that shake
+the solid earth itself. When an earthquake thrills the planet, the
+massive turret shudders with the shuddering rocks on which it rests, but
+it pays no heed to the wildest tempest, and while the heavens are
+convulsed and shut from the eye of the far-seeing instrument it waits
+without a tremor for the blue sky to come back. It is the type of the
+true and steadfast man of the Roman poet, whose soul remains unmoved
+while the firmament cracks and tumbles about him. It is the material
+image of the Christian; his heart resting on the Rock of Ages, his eye
+fixed on the brighter world above.
+
+I did not say all this while we were looking round among these wonders,
+quite new to many of us. People don't talk in straight-off sentences
+like that. They stumble and stop, or get interrupted, change a word,
+begin again, miss connections of verbs and nouns, and so on, till they
+blunder out their meaning. But I did let fall a word or two, showing the
+impression the celestial laboratory produced upon me. I rather think I
+must own to the "Rock of Ages" comparison. Thereupon the "Man of
+Letters," so called, took his pipe from his mouth, and said that he did
+n't go in "for sentiment and that sort of thing. Gush was played out."
+
+The Member of the Haouse, who, as I think, is not wanting in that homely
+good sense which one often finds in plain people from the huckleberry
+districts, but who evidently supposes the last speaker to be what he
+calls "a tahlented mahn," looked a little puzzled. My remark seemed
+natural and harmless enough to him, I suppose, but I had been distinctly
+snubbed, and the Member of the Haouse thought I must defend myself, as is
+customary in the deliberative body to which he belongs, when one
+gentleman accuses another gentleman of mental weakness or obliquity. I
+could not make up my mind to oblige him at that moment by showing fight.
+I suppose that would have pleased my assailant, as I don't think he has a
+great deal to lose, and might have made a little capital out of me if he
+could have got a laugh out of the Member or either of the dummies,--I beg
+their pardon again, I mean the two undemonstrative boarders. But I will
+tell you, Beloved, just what I think about this matter.
+
+We poets, you know, are much given to indulging in sentiment, which is a
+mode of consciousness at a discount just now with the new generation of
+analysts who are throwing everything into their crucibles. Now we must
+not claim too much for sentiment. It does not go a great way in deciding
+questions of arithmetic, or algebra, or geometry. Two and two will
+undoubtedly make four, irrespective of the emotions or other
+idiosyncrasies of the calculator; and the three angles of a triangle
+insist on being equal to two right angles, in the face of the most
+impassioned rhetoric or the most inspired verse. But inasmuch as religion
+and law and the whole social order of civilized society, to say nothing
+of literature and art, are so founded on and pervaded by sentiment that
+they would all go to pieces without it, it is a word not to be used too
+lightly in passing judgment, as if it were an element to be thrown out or
+treated with small consideration. Reason may be the lever, but sentiment
+gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the
+world. Even "sentimentality," which is sentiment overdone, is better
+than that affectation of superiority to human weakness which is only
+tolerable as one of the stage properties of full-blown dandyism, and is,
+at best, but half-blown cynicism; which participle and noun you can
+translate, if you happen to remember the derivation of the last of them,
+by a single familiar word. There is a great deal of false sentiment in
+the world, as there is of bad logic and erroneous doctrine; but--it is
+very much less disagreeable to hear a young poet overdo his emotions, or
+even deceive himself about them, than to hear a caustic-epithet flinger
+repeating such words as "sentimentality" and "entusymusy,"--one of the
+least admirable of Lord Byron's bequests to our language,--for the
+purpose of ridiculing him into silence. An overdressed woman is not so
+pleasing as she might be, but at any rate she is better than the oil of
+vitriol squirter, whose profession it is to teach young ladies to avoid
+vanity by spoiling their showy silks and satins.
+
+The Lady was the first of our party who was invited to look through the
+equatorial. Perhaps this world had proved so hard to her that she was
+pained to think that other worlds existed, to be homes of suffering and
+sorrow. Perhaps she was thinking it would be a happy change when she
+should leave this dark planet for one of those brighter spheres. She
+sighed, at any rate, but thanked the Young Astronomer for the beautiful
+sights he had shown her, and gave way to the next comer, who was That
+Boy, now in a state of irrepressible enthusiasm to see the Man in the
+Moon. He was greatly disappointed at not making out a colossal human
+figure moving round among the shining summits and shadowy ravines of the
+"spotty globe."
+
+The Landlady came next and wished to see the moon also, in preference to
+any other object. She was astonished at the revelations of the powerful
+telescope. Was there any live creatures to be seen on the moon? she
+asked. The Young Astronomer shook his head, smiling a little at the
+question.--Was there any meet'n'-houses? There was no evidence, he said,
+that the moon was inhabited. As there did not seem to be either air or
+water on its surface, the inhabitants would have a rather hard time of
+it, and if they went to meeting the sermons would be apt to be rather
+dry. If there were a building on it as big as York minster, as big as
+the Boston Coliseum, the great telescopes like Lord Rosse's would make it
+out. But it seemed to be a forlorn place; those who had studied it most
+agreed in considering it a "cold, crude, silent, and desolate" ruin of
+nature, without the possibility, if life were on it, of articulate
+speech, of music, even of sound. Sometimes a greenish tint was seen upon
+its surface, which might have been taken for vegetation, but it was
+thought not improbably to be a reflection from the vast forests of South
+America. The ancients had a fancy, some of them, that the face of the
+moon was a mirror in which the seas and shores of the earth were imaged.
+Now we know the geography of the side toward us about as well as that of
+Asia, better than that of Africa. The Astronomer showed them one of the
+common small photographs of the moon. He assured them that he had
+received letters inquiring in all seriousness if these alleged lunar
+photographs were not really taken from a peeled orange. People had got
+angry with him for laughing at them for asking such a question. Then he
+gave them an account of the famous moon-hoax which came out, he believed,
+in 1835. It was full of the most bare-faced absurdities, yet people
+swallowed it all, and even Arago is said to have treated it seriously as
+a thing that could not well be true, for Mr. Herschel would have
+certainly notified him of these marvellous discoveries. The writer of it
+had not troubled himself to invent probabilities, but had borrowed his
+scenery from the Arabian Nights and his lunar inhabitants from Peter
+Wilkins.
+
+After this lecture the Capitalist stepped forward and applied his eye to
+the lens. I suspect it to have been shut most of the time, for I observe
+a good many elderly people adjust the organ of vision to any optical
+instrument in that way. I suppose it is from the instinct of protection
+to the eye, the same instinct as that which makes the raw militia-man
+close it when he pulls the, trigger of his musket the first time. He
+expressed himself highly gratified, however, with what he saw, and
+retired from the instrument to make room for the Young Girl.
+
+She threw her hair back and took her position at the instrument. Saint
+Simeon Stylites the Younger explained the wonders of the moon to
+her,--Tycho and the grooves radiating from it, Kepler and Copernicus with
+their craters and ridges, and all the most brilliant shows of this
+wonderful little world. I thought he was more diffuse and more
+enthusiastic in his descriptions than he had been with the older members
+of the party. I don't doubt the old gentleman who lived so long on the
+top of his pillar would have kept a pretty sinner (if he could have had
+an elevator to hoist her up to him) longer than he would have kept her
+grandmother. These young people are so ignorant, you know. As for our
+Scheherezade, her delight was unbounded, and her curiosity insatiable.
+If there were any living creatures there, what odd things they must be.
+They could n't have any lungs, nor any hearts. What a pity! Did they
+ever die? How could they expire if they didn't breathe? Burn up? No
+air to burn in. Tumble into some of those horrid pits, perhaps, and
+break all to bits. She wondered how the young people there liked it, or
+whether there were any young people there; perhaps nobody was young and
+nobody was old, but they were like mummies all of them--what an idea
+--two mummies making love to each other! So she went on in a rattling,
+giddy kind of way, for she was excited by the strange scene in which she
+found herself, and quite astonished the Young Astronomer with her
+vivacity. All at once she turned to him.
+
+Will you show me the double star you said I should see?
+
+With the greatest pleasure,--he said, and proceeded to wheel the
+ponderous dome, and then to adjust the instrument, I think to the one in
+Andromeda, or that in Cygnus, but I should not know one of them from the
+other.
+
+How beautiful!--she said as she looked at the wonderful object.---One is
+orange red and one is emerald green.
+
+The young man made an explanation in which he said something about
+complementary colors.
+
+Goodness!--exclaimed the Landlady.---What! complimentary to our party?
+
+Her wits must have been a good deal confused by the strange sights of the
+evening. She had seen tickets marked complimentary, she remembered, but
+she could not for the life of her understand why our party should be
+particularly favored at a celestial exhibition like this. On the whole,
+she questioned inwardly whether it might not be some subtle pleasantry,
+and smiled, experimentally, with a note of interrogation in the smile,
+but, finding no encouragement, allowed her features to subside gradually
+as if nothing had happened. I saw all this as plainly as if it had all
+been printed in great-primer type, instead of working itself out in her
+features. I like to see other people muddled now and then, because my
+own occasional dulness is relieved by a good solid background of
+stupidity in my neighbors.
+
+--And the two revolve round each other?--said the Young Girl.
+
+--Yes,--he answered,--two suns, a greater and a less, each shining, but
+with a different light, for the other.
+
+--How charming! It must be so much pleasanter than to be alone in such a
+great empty space! I should think one would hardly care to shine if its
+light wasted itself in the monstrous solitude of the sky. Does not a
+single star seem very lonely to you up there?
+
+--Not more lonely than I am myself,--answered the Young Astronomer.
+
+--I don't know what there was in those few words, but I noticed that for
+a minute or two after they, were uttered I heard the ticking of the
+clock-work that moved the telescope as clearly as if we had all been
+holding our breath, and listening for the music of the spheres.
+
+The Young Girl kept her eye closely applied to the eye-piece of the
+telescope a very long time, it seemed to me. Those double stars
+interested her a good deal, no doubt. When she looked off from the glass
+I thought both her eyes appeared very much as if they had been a little
+strained, for they were suffused and glistening. It may be that she
+pitied the lonely young man.
+
+I know nothing in the world tenderer than the pity that a kind-hearted
+young girl has for a young man who feels lonely. It is true that these
+dear creatures are all compassion for every form of human woe, and
+anxious to alleviate all human misfortunes. They will go to
+Sunday-schools through storms their brothers are afraid of, to teach the
+most unpleasant and intractable classes of little children the age of
+Methuselah and the dimensions of Og the King of Bashan's bedstead. They
+will stand behind a table at a fair all day until they are ready to drop,
+dressed in their prettiest clothes and their sweetest smiles, and lay
+hands upon you, like--so many Lady Potiphars,--perfectly correct ones, of
+course,--to make you buy what you do not want, at prices which you cannot
+afford; all this as cheerfully as if it were not martyrdom to them as
+well as to you. Such is their love for all good objects, such their
+eagerness to sympathize with all their suffering fellow-creatures! But
+there is nothing they pity as they pity a lonely young man.
+
+I am sure, I sympathize with her in this instance. To see a pale student
+burning away, like his own midnight lamp, with only dead men's hands to
+hold, stretched out to him from the sepulchres of books, and dead men's
+souls imploring him from their tablets to warm them over again just for a
+little while in a human consciousness, when all this time there are soft,
+warm, living hands that would ask nothing better than to bring the blood
+back into those cold thin fingers, and gently caressing natures that
+would wind all their tendrils about the unawakened heart which knows so
+little of itself, is pitiable enough and would be sadder still if we did
+not have the feeling that sooner or later the pale student will be pretty
+sure to feel the breath of a young girl against his cheek as she looks
+over his shoulder; and that he will come all at once to an illuminated
+page in his book that never writer traced in characters, and never
+printer set up in type, and never binder enclosed within his covers! But
+our young man seems farther away from life than any student whose head is
+bent downwards over his books. His eyes are turned away from all human
+things. How cold the moonlight is that falls upon his forehead, and how
+white he looks in it! Will not the rays strike through to his brain at
+last, and send him to a narrower cell than this egg-shell dome which is
+his workshop and his prison?
+
+I cannot say that the Young Astronomer seemed particularly impressed with
+a sense of his miserable condition. He said he was lonely, it is true,
+but he said it in a manly tone, and not as if he were repining at the
+inevitable condition of his devoting himself to that particular branch of
+science. Of course, he is lonely, the most lonely being that lives in
+the midst of our breathing world. If he would only stay a little longer
+with us when we get talking; but he is busy almost always either in
+observation or with his calculations and studies, and when the nights are
+fair loses so much sleep that he must make it up by day. He wants
+contact with human beings. I wish he would change his seat and come
+round and sit by our Scheherezade!
+
+The rest of the visit went off well enough, except that the "Man of
+Letters," so called, rather snubbed some of the heavenly bodies as not
+quite up to his standard of brilliancy. I thought myself that the
+double-star episode was the best part of it.
+
+I have an unexpected revelation to make to the reader. Not long after
+our visit to the Observatory, the Young Astronomer put a package into my
+hands, a manuscript, evidently, which he said he would like to have me
+glance over. I found something in it which interested me, and told him
+the next day that I should like to read it with some care. He seemed
+rather pleased at this, and said that he wished I would criticise it as
+roughly as I liked, and if I saw anything in it which might be dressed to
+better advantage to treat it freely, just as if it were my own
+production. It had often happened to him, he went on to say, to be
+interrupted in his observations by clouds covering the objects he was
+examining for a longer or shorter time. In these idle moments he had put
+down many thoughts, unskilfully he feared, but just as they came into his
+mind. His blank verse he suspected was often faulty. His thoughts he
+knew must be crude, many of them. It would please him to have me amuse
+myself by putting them into shape. He was kind enough to say that I was
+an artist in words, but he held himself as an unskilled apprentice.
+
+I confess I was appalled when I cast my eye upon the title of the
+manuscript, "Cirri and Nebulae."
+
+--Oh! oh!--I said,--that will never do. People don't know what Cirri
+are, at least not one out of fifty readers. "Wind-Clouds and
+Star-Drifts" will do better than that.
+
+--Anything you like,--he answered,--what difference does it make how you
+christen a foundling? These are not my legitimate scientific offspring,
+and you may consider them left on your doorstep.
+
+--I will not attempt to say just how much of the diction of these lines
+belongs to him, and how much to me. He said he would never claim them,
+after I read them to him in my version. I, on my part, do not wish to be
+held responsible for some of his more daring thoughts, if I should see
+fit to reproduce them hereafter. At this time I shall give only the
+first part of the series of poetical outbreaks for which the young
+devotee of science must claim his share of the responsibility. I may put
+some more passages into shape by and by.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ I
+
+ Another clouded night; the stars are hid,
+ The orb that waits my search is hid with them.
+ Patience! Why grudge an hour, a month, a year,
+ To plant my ladder and to gain the round
+ That leads my footsteps to the heaven of fame,
+ Where waits the wreath my sleepless midnights won?
+ Not the stained laurel such as heroes wear
+ That withers when some stronger conqueror's heel
+ Treads down their shrivelling trophies in the dust;
+ But the fair garland whose undying green
+ Not time can change, nor wrath of gods or men!
+
+ With quickened heart-beats I shall hear the tongues
+ That speak my praise; but better far the sense
+ That in the unshaped ages, buried deep
+ In the dark mines of unaccomplished time
+ Yet to be stamped with morning's royal die
+ And coined in golden days,--in those dim years
+ I shall be reckoned with the undying dead,
+ My name emblazoned on the fiery arch,
+ Unfading till the stars themselves shall fade.
+ Then, as they call the roll of shining worlds,
+ Sages of race unborn in accents new
+ Shall count me with the Olympian ones of old,
+ Whose glories kindle through the midnight sky
+ Here glows the God of Battles; this recalls
+ The Lord of Ocean, and yon far-off sphere
+ The Sire of Him who gave his ancient name
+ To the dim planet with the wondrous rings;
+ Here flames the Queen of Beauty's silver lamp,
+ And there the moon-girt orb of mighty Jove;
+ But this, unseen through all earth's aeons past,
+ A youth who watched beneath the western star
+ Sought in the darkness, found, and showed to men;
+ Linked with his name thenceforth and evermore!
+ So shall that name be syllabled anew
+ In all the tongues of all the tribes of men:
+ I that have been through immemorial years
+ Dust in the dust of my forgotten time
+ Shall live in accents shaped of blood-warm breath,
+ Yea, rise in mortal semblance, newly born
+ In shining stone, in undecaying bronze,
+ And stand on high, and look serenely down
+ On the new race that calls the earth its own.
+
+ Is this a cloud, that, blown athwart my soul,
+ Wears a false seeming of the pearly stain
+ Where worlds beyond the world their mingling rays
+ Blend in soft white,--a cloud that, born of earth,
+ Would cheat the soul that looks for light from heaven?
+ Must every coral-insect leave his sign
+ On each poor grain he lent to build the reef,
+ As Babel's builders stamped their sunburnt clay,
+ Or deem his patient service all in vain?
+ What if another sit beneath the shade
+ Of the broad elm I planted by the way,
+ --What if another heed the beacon light
+ I set upon the rock that wrecked my keel,
+ Have I not done my task and served my kind?
+ Nay, rather act thy part, unnamed, unknown,
+ And let Fame blow her trumpet through the world
+ With noisy wind to swell a fool's renown,
+ Joined with some truth be stumbled blindly o'er,
+ Or coupled with some single shining deed
+ That in the great account of all his days
+ Will stand alone upon the bankrupt sheet
+ His pitying angel shows the clerk of Heaven.
+ The noblest service comes from nameless hands,
+ And the best servant does his work unseen.
+ Who found the seeds of fire and made them shoot,
+ Fed by his breath, in buds and flowers of flame?
+ Who forged in roaring flames the ponderous stone,
+ And shaped the moulded metal to his need?
+ Who gave the dragging car its rolling wheel,
+ And tamed the steed that whirls its circling round?
+ All these have left their work and not their names,
+ Why should I murmur at a fate like theirs?
+ This is the heavenly light; the pearly stain
+ Was but a wind-cloud drifting oer the stars!
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+I find I have so many things in common with the old Master of Arts, that
+I do not always know whether a thought was originally his or mine. That
+is what always happens where two persons of a similar cast of mind talk
+much together. And both of them often gain by the interchange. Many
+ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one
+where they sprang up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes
+a flower in the other. A flower, on the other hand, may dwindle down to
+a mere weed by the same change. Healthy growths may become poisonous by
+falling upon the wrong mental soil, and what seemed a night-shade in one
+mind unfold as a morning-glory in the other.
+
+--I thank God,--the Master said,--that a great many people believe a
+great deal more than I do. I think, when it comes to serious matters, I
+like those who believe more than I do better than those who believe less.
+
+--Why,--said I,--you have got hold of one of my own working axioms. I
+should like to hear you develop it.
+
+The Member of the Haouse said he should be glad to listen to the debate.
+The gentleman had the floor. The Scarabee rose from his chair and
+departed;--I thought his joints creaked as he straightened himself.
+
+The Young Girl made a slight movement; it was a purely accidental
+coincidence, no doubt, but I saw That Boy put his hand in his pocket and
+pull out his popgun, and begin loading it. It cannot be that our
+Scheherezade, who looks so quiet and proper at the table, can make use of
+That Boy and his catapult to control the course of conversation and
+change it to suit herself! She certainly looks innocent enough; but what
+does a blush prove, and what does its absence prove, on one of these
+innocent faces? There is nothing in all this world that can lie and
+cheat like the face and the tongue of a young girl. Just give her a
+little touch of hysteria,--I don't mean enough of it to make her friends
+call the doctor in, but a slight hint of it in the nervous system,--and
+"Machiavel the waiting-maid" might take lessons of her. But I cannot
+think our Scheherezade is one of that kind, and I am ashamed of myself
+for noting such a trifling coincidence as that which excited my
+suspicion.
+
+--I say,--the Master continued,--that I had rather be in the company of
+those who believe more than I do, in spiritual matters at least, than of
+those who doubt what I accept as a part of my belief.
+
+--To tell the truth,--said I,--I find that difficulty sometimes in
+talking with you. You have not quite so many hesitations as I have in
+following out your logical conclusions. I suppose you would bring some
+things out into daylight questioning that I had rather leave in that
+twilight of half-belief peopled with shadows--if they are only
+shadows--more sacred to me than many realities.
+
+There is nothing I do not question,--said the Master;--I not only begin
+with the precept of Descartes, but I hold all my opinions involving any
+chain of reasoning always open to revision.
+
+--I confess that I smiled internally to hear him say that. The old
+Master thinks he is open to conviction on all subjects; but if you meddle
+with some of his notions and don't get tossed on his horns as if a bull
+had hold of you, I should call you lucky.
+
+--You don't mean you doubt everything?--I said.
+
+--What do you think I question everything for, the Master replied,--if I
+never get any answers? You've seen a blind man with a stick, feeling his
+way along? Well, I am a blind man with a stick, and I find the world
+pretty full of men just as blind as I am, but without any stick. I try
+the ground to find out whether it is firm or not before I rest my weight
+on it; but after it has borne my weight, that question at least is
+answered. It very certainly was strong enough once; the presumption is
+that it is strong enough now. Still the soil may have been undermined,
+or I may have grown heavier. Make as much of that as you will. I say I
+question everything; but if I find Bunker Hill Monument standing as
+straight as when I leaned against it a year or ten years ago, I am not
+very much afraid that Bunker Hill will cave in if I trust myself again on
+the soil of it.
+
+I glanced off, as one often does in talk.
+
+The Monument is an awful place to visit,--I said.---The waves of time are
+like the waves of the ocean; the only thing they beat against without
+destroying it is a rock; and they destroy that at last. But it takes a
+good while. There is a stone now standing in very good order that was as
+old as a monument of Louis XIV. and Queen Anne's day is now when Joseph
+went down into Egypt. Think of the shaft on Bunker Hill standing in the
+sunshine on the morning of January 1st in the year 5872!
+
+It won't be standing,--the Master said.---We are poor bunglers compared
+to those old Egyptians. There are no joints in one of their obelisks.
+They are our masters in more ways than we know of, and in more ways than
+some of us are willing to know. That old Lawgiver wasn't learned in all
+the wisdom of the Egyptians for nothing. It scared people well a couple
+of hundred years ago when Sir John Marsham and Dr. John Spencer ventured
+to tell their stories about the sacred ceremonies of the Egyptian
+priesthood. People are beginning to find out now that you can't study
+any religion by itself to any good purpose. You must have comparative
+theology as you have comparative anatomy. What would you make of a cat's
+foolish little good-for-nothing collar-bone, if you did not know how the
+same bone means a good deal in other creatures,--in yourself, for
+instance, as you 'll find out if you break it? You can't know too much
+of your race and its beliefs, if you want to know anything about your
+Maker. I never found but one sect large enough to hold the whole of me.
+
+--And may I ask what that was?--I said.
+
+--The Human sect,--the Master answered. That has about room enough for
+me,--at present, I mean to say.
+
+--Including cannibals and all?--said I.
+
+-Oh, as to that, the eating of one's kind is a matter of taste, but the
+roasting of them has been rather more a specialty of our own particular
+belief than of any other I am acquainted with. If you broil a saint, I
+don't see why, if you have a mind, you shouldn't serve him up at your--
+
+Pop! went the little piece of artillery. Don't tell me it was accident.
+I know better. You can't suppose for one minute that a boy like that one
+would time his interruptions so cleverly. Now it so happened that at
+that particular moment Dr. B. Franklin was not at the table. You may
+draw your own conclusions. I say nothing, but I think a good deal.
+
+--I came back to the Bunker Hill Monument.---I often think--I said--of
+the dynasty which is to reign in its shadow for some thousands of years,
+it may be.
+
+The "Man of Letters," so called, asked me, in a tone I did not exactly
+like, whether I expected to live long enough to see a monarchy take the
+place of a republic in this country.
+
+--No,--said I,--I was thinking of something very different. I was
+indulging a fancy of mine about the Man who is to sit at the foot of the
+monument for one, or it may be two or three thousand years. As long as
+the monument stands and there is a city near it, there will always be a
+man to take the names of visitors and extract some small tribute from
+their pockets, I suppose. I sometimes get thinking of the long, unbroken
+succession of these men, until they come to look like one Man; continuous
+in being, unchanging as the stone he watches, looking upon the successive
+generations of human beings as they come and go, and outliving all the
+dynasties of the world in all probability. It has come to such a pass
+that I never speak to the Man of the Monument without wanting to take my
+hat off and feeling as if I were looking down a vista of twenty or thirty
+centuries.
+
+The "Man of Letters," so called, said, in a rather contemptuous way, I
+thought, that he had n't got so far as that. He was n't quite up to
+moral reflections on toll-men and ticket-takers. Sentiment was n't his
+tap.
+
+He looked round triumphantly for a response: but the Capitalist was a
+little hard of hearing just then; the Register of Deeds was browsing on
+his food in the calm bovine abstraction of a quadruped, and paid no
+attention; the Salesman had bolted his breakfast, and whisked himself
+away with that peculiar alacrity which belongs to the retail dealer's
+assistant; and the Member of the Haouse, who had sometimes seemed to be
+impressed with his "tahlented mahn's" air of superiority to the rest of
+us, looked as if he thought the speaker was not exactly parliamentary.
+So he failed to make his point, and reddened a little, and was not in the
+best humor, I thought, when he left the table. I hope he will not let
+off any of his irritation on our poor little Scheherezade; but the truth
+is, the first person a man of this sort (if he is what I think him)
+meets, when he is out of humor, has to be made a victim of, and I only
+hope our Young Girl will not have to play Jephthah's daughter.
+
+And that leads me to say, I cannot help thinking that the kind of
+criticism to which this Young Girl has been subjected from some person or
+other, who is willing to be smart at her expense, is hurtful and not
+wholesome. The question is a delicate one. So many foolish persons are
+rushing into print, that it requires a kind of literary police to hold
+them back and keep them in order. Where there are mice there must be
+cats, and where there are rats we may think it worth our while to keep a
+terrier, who will give them a shake and let them drop, with all the
+mischief taken out of them. But the process is a rude and cruel one at
+best, and it too often breeds a love of destructiveness for its own sake
+in those who get their living by it. A poor poem or essay does not do
+much harm after all; nobody reads it who is like to be seriously hurt by
+it. But a sharp criticism with a drop of witty venom in it stings a
+young author almost to death, and makes an old one uncomfortable to no
+purpose. If it were my business to sit in judgment on my neighbors, I
+would try to be courteous, at least, to those who had done any good
+service, but, above all, I would handle tenderly those young authors who
+are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early
+appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already.
+Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's
+book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.
+
+Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina's
+stanzas,--the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will. Now go to
+your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-sheet of
+paper drop on the outside. How gently it falls through the soft air,
+always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side,
+wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a
+snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth! Just such would
+have been the fate of poor Angelina's fluttering effort, if you had left
+it to itself. It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly
+and softly that she would have never known when it reached that harmless
+consummation.
+
+Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from
+its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A
+Quarterly Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the
+critic's critic. A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's
+critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the
+performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical
+notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the
+critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea "has
+smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself cannot escape
+the common lot of being bitten. Whether all this is a blessing or a
+curse, like that one which made Pharaoh and all his household run to
+their toilet-tables, is a question about which opinions might differ.
+The physiologists of the time of Moses--if there were vivisectors other
+than priests in those days--would probably have considered that other
+plague, of the frogs, as a fortunate opportunity for science, as this
+poor little beast has been the souffre-douleur of experimenters and
+schoolboys from time immemorial.
+
+But there is a form of criticism to which none will object. It is
+impossible to come before a public so alive with sensibilities as this we
+live in, with the smallest evidence of a sympathetic disposition, without
+making friends in a very unexpected way. Everywhere there are minds
+tossing on the unquiet waves of doubt. If you confess to the same
+perplexities and uncertainties that torture them, they are grateful for
+your companionship. If you have groped your way out of the wilderness in
+which you were once wandering with them, they will follow your footsteps,
+it may be, and bless you as their deliverer. So, all at once, a writer
+finds he has a parish of devout listeners, scattered, it is true, beyond
+the reach of any summons but that of a trumpet like the archangel's, to
+whom his slight discourse may be of more value than the exhortations they
+hear from the pulpit, if these last do not happen to suit their special
+needs. Young men with more ambition and intelligence than force of
+character, who have missed their first steps in life and are stumbling
+irresolute amidst vague aims and changing purposes, hold out their hands,
+imploring to be led into, or at least pointed towards, some path where
+they can find a firm foothold. Young women born into a chilling
+atmosphere of circumstance which keeps all the buds of their nature
+unopened and always striving to get to a ray of sunshine, if one finds
+its way to their neighborhood, tell their stories, sometimes simply and
+touchingly, sometimes in a more or less affected and rhetorical way, but
+still stories of defeated and disappointed instincts which ought to make
+any moderately impressible person feel very tenderly toward them.
+
+In speaking privately to these young persons, many of whom have literary
+aspirations, one should be very considerate of their human feelings. But
+addressing them collectively a few plain truths will not give any one of
+them much pain. Indeed, almost every individual among them will feel
+sure that he or she is an exception to those generalities which apply so
+well to the rest.
+
+If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these
+inexperienced persons that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an
+ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment. The
+mechanism of breathing and that of swallowing are very wonderful, and if
+one had seen and studied them in his own person only, he might well think
+himself a prodigy. Everybody knows these and other bodily faculties are
+common gifts; but nobody except editors and school-teachers and here and
+there a literary than knows how common is the capacity of rhyming and
+prattling in readable prose, especially among young women of a certain
+degree of education. In my character of Pontiff, I should tell these
+young persons that most of them labored under a delusion. It is very
+hard to believe it; one feels so full of intelligence and so decidedly
+superior to one's dull relations and schoolmates; one writes so easily
+and the lines sound so prettily to one's self; there are such felicities
+of expression, just like those we hear quoted from the great poets; and
+besides one has been told by so many friends that all one had to do was
+to print and be famous! Delusion, my poor dear, delusion at least
+nineteen times out of twenty, yes, ninety-nine times in a hundred.
+
+But as private father confessor, I always allow as much as I can for the
+one chance in the hundred. I try not to take away all hope, unless the
+case is clearly desperate, and then to direct the activities into some
+other channel.
+
+Using kind language, I can talk pretty freely. I have counselled more
+than one aspirant after literary fame to go back to his tailor's board or
+his lapstone. I have advised the dilettanti, whose foolish friends
+praised their verses or their stories, to give up all their deceptive
+dreams of making a name by their genius, and go to work in the study of a
+profession which asked only for the diligent use of average; ordinary
+talents. It is a very grave responsibility which these unknown
+correspondents throw upon their chosen counsellors. One whom you have
+never seen, who lives in a community of which you know nothing, sends you
+specimens more or less painfully voluminous of his writings, which he
+asks you to read over, think over, and pray over, and send back an answer
+informing him whether fame and fortune are awaiting him as the possessor
+of the wonderful gifts his writings manifest, and whether you advise him
+to leave all,--the shop he sweeps out every morning, the ledger he posts,
+the mortar in which he pounds, the bench at which he urges the reluctant
+plane,--and follow his genius whithersoever it may lead him. The next
+correspondent wants you to mark out a whole course of life for him, and
+the means of judgment he gives you are about as adequate as the brick
+which the simpleton of old carried round as an advertisement of the house
+he had to sell. My advice to all the young men that write to me depends
+somewhat on the handwriting and spelling. If these are of a certain
+character, and they have reached a mature age, I recommend some honest
+manual calling, such as they have very probably been bred to, and which
+will, at least, give them a chance of becoming President of the United
+States by and by, if that is any object to them. What would you have
+done with the young person who called on me a good many years ago, so
+many that he has probably forgotten his literary effort,--and read as
+specimens of his literary workmanship lines like those which I will favor
+you with presently? He was an able-bodied, grown-up young person, whose
+ingenuousness interested me; and I am sure if I thought he would ever be
+pained to see his maiden effort in print, I would deny myself the
+pleasure of submitting it to the reader. The following is an exact
+transcript of the lines he showed me, and which I took down on the spot:
+
+ "Are you in the vein for cider?
+ Are you in the tune for pork?
+ Hist! for Betty's cleared the larder
+ And turned the pork to soap."
+
+Do not judge too hastily this sincere effort of a maiden muse. Here was
+a sense of rhythm, and an effort in the direction of rhyme; here was an
+honest transcript of an occurrence of daily life, told with a certain
+idealizing expression, recognizing the existence of impulses, mysterious
+instincts, impelling us even in the selection of our bodily sustenance.
+But I had to tell him that it wanted dignity of incident and grace of
+narrative, that there was no atmosphere to it, nothing of the light that
+never was and so forth. I did not say this in these very words, but I
+gave him to understand, without being too hard upon him, that he had
+better not desert his honest toil in pursuit of the poet's bays. This,
+it must be confessed, was a rather discouraging case. A young person
+like this may pierce, as the Frenchmen say, by and by, but the chances
+are all the other way.
+
+I advise aimless young men to choose some profession without needless
+delay, and so get into a good strong current of human affairs, and find
+themselves bound up in interests with a compact body of their fellow-men.
+
+I advise young women who write to me for counsel,--perhaps I do not
+advise them at all, only sympathize a little with them, and listen to
+what they have to say (eight closely written pages on the average, which
+I always read from beginning to end, thinking of the widow's cruse and
+myself in the character of Elijah) and--and--come now, I don't believe
+Methuselah would tell you what he said in his letters to young ladies,
+written when he was in his nine hundred and sixty-ninth year.
+
+But, dear me! how much work all this private criticism involves! An
+editor has only to say "respectfully declined," and there is the end of
+it. But the confidential adviser is expected to give the reasons of his
+likes and dislikes in detail, and sometimes to enter into an argument for
+their support. That is more than any martyr can stand, but what trials
+he must go through, as it is! Great bundles of manuscripts, verse or
+prose, which the recipient is expected to read, perhaps to recommend to a
+publisher, at any rate to express a well-digested and agreeably flavored
+opinion about; which opinion, nine times out of ten, disguise it as we
+may, has to be a bitter draught; every form of egotism, conceit, false
+sentiment, hunger for notoriety, and eagerness for display of anserine
+plumage before the admiring public;--all these come in by mail or
+express, covered with postage-stamps of so much more cost than the value
+of the waste words they overlie, that one comes at last to groan and
+change color at the very sight of a package, and to dread the postman's
+knock as if it were that of the other visitor whose naked knuckles rap at
+every door.
+
+Still there are experiences which go far towards repaying all these
+inflictions. My last young man's case looked desperate enough; some of
+his sails had blown from the rigging, some were backing in the wind, and
+some were flapping and shivering, but I told him which way to head, and
+to my surprise he promised to do just as I directed, and I do not doubt
+is under full sail at this moment.
+
+What if I should tell my last, my very recent experience with the other
+sex? I received a paper containing the inner history of a young woman's
+life, the evolution of her consciousness from its earliest record of
+itself, written so thoughtfully, so sincerely, with so much firmness and
+yet so much delicacy, with such truth of detail and such grace in the
+manner of telling, that I finished the long manuscript almost at a
+sitting, with a pleasure rarely, almost never experienced in voluminous
+communications which one has to spell out of handwriting. This was from
+a correspondent who made my acquaintance by letter when she was little
+more than a child, some years ago. How easy at that early period to have
+silenced her by indifference, to have wounded her by a careless epithet,
+perhaps even to have crushed her as one puts his heel on a weed! A very
+little encouragement kept her from despondency, and brought back one of
+those overflows of gratitude which make one more ashamed of himself for
+being so overpaid than he would be for having committed any of the lesser
+sins. But what pleased me most in the paper lately received was to see
+how far the writer had outgrown the need of any encouragement of mine;
+that she had strengthened out of her tremulous questionings into a
+self-reliance and self-poise which I had hardly dared to anticipate for
+her. Some of my readers who are also writers have very probably had more
+numerous experiences of this kind than I can lay claim to;
+self-revelations from unknown and sometimes nameless friends, who write
+from strange corners where the winds have wafted some stray words of
+theirs which have lighted in the minds and reached the hearts of those to
+whom they were as the angel that stirred the pool of Bethesda. Perhaps
+this is the best reward authorship brings; it may not imply much talent
+or literary excellence, but it means that your way of thinking and
+feeling is just what some one of your fellow-creatures needed.
+
+--I have been putting into shape, according to his request, some further
+passages from the Young Astronomer's manuscript, some of which the reader
+will have a chance to read if he is so disposed. The conflict in the
+young man's mind between the desire for fame and the sense of its
+emptiness as compared with nobler aims has set me thinking about the
+subject from a somewhat humbler point of view. As I am in the habit of
+telling you, Beloved, many of my thoughts, as well as of repeating what
+was said at our table, you may read what follows as if it were addressed
+to you in the course of an ordinary conversation, where I claimed rather
+more than my share, as I am afraid I am a little in the habit of doing.
+
+I suppose we all, those of us who write in verse or prose, have the
+habitual feeling that we should like to be remembered. It is to be awake
+when all of those who were round us have been long wrapped in slumber.
+It is a pleasant thought enough that the name by which we have been
+called shall be familiar on the lips of those who come after us, and the
+thoughts that wrought themselves out in our intelligence, the emotions
+that trembled through our frames, shall live themselves over again in the
+minds and hearts of others.
+
+But is there not something of rest, of calm, in the thought of gently and
+gradually fading away out of human remembrance? What line have we
+written that was on a level with our conceptions? What page of ours that
+does not betray some weakness we would fain have left unrecorded? To
+become a classic and share the life of a language is to be ever open to
+criticisms, to comparisons, to the caprices of successive generations, to
+be called into court and stand a trial before a new jury, once or more
+than once in every century. To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with
+the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the
+blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that
+shadow of a man which we call his reputation. The line which dying we
+could wish to blot has been blotted out for us by a hand so tender, so
+patient, so used to its kindly task, that the page looks as fair as if it
+had never borne the record of our infirmity or our transgression. And
+then so few would be wholly content with their legacy of fame. You
+remember poor Monsieur Jacques's complaint of the favoritism shown to
+Monsieur Berthier,--it is in that exquisite "Week in a French
+Country-House." "Have you seen his room? Have you seen how large it is?
+Twice as large as mine! He has two jugs, a large one and a little one.
+I have only one small one. And a tea-service and a gilt Cupid on the top
+of his looking-glass." The famous survivor of himself has had his
+features preserved in a medallion, and the slice of his countenance seems
+clouded with the thought that it does not belong to a bust; the bust
+ought to look happy in its niche, but the statue opposite makes it feel
+as if it had been cheated out of half its personality, and the statue
+looks uneasy because another stands on a loftier pedestal. But "Ignotus"
+and "Miserrimus" are of the great majority in that vast assembly, that
+House of Commons whose members are all peers, where to be forgotten is
+the standing rule. The dignity of a silent memory is not to be
+undervalued. Fame is after all a kind of rude handling, and a name that
+is often on vulgar lips seems to borrow something not to be desired, as
+the paper money that passes from hand to hand gains somewhat which is a
+loss thereby. O sweet, tranquil refuge of oblivion, so far as earth is
+concerned, for us poor blundering, stammering, misbehaving creatures who
+cannot turn over a leaf of our life's diary without feeling thankful that
+its failure can no longer stare us in the face! Not unwelcome shall be
+the baptism of dust which hides forever the name that was given in the
+baptism of water! We shall have good company whose names are left
+unspoken by posterity. "Who knows whether the best of men be known, or
+whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand
+remembered in the known account of time? The greater part must be
+content to be as though they had not been; to be found in the register of
+God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first
+story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one
+living century."
+
+I have my moods about such things as the Young Astronomer has, as we all
+have. There are times when the thought of becoming utterly nothing to
+the world we knew so well and loved so much is painful and oppressive; we
+gasp as if in a vacuum, missing the atmosphere of life we have so long
+been in the habit of breathing. Not the less are there moments when the
+aching need of repose comes over us and the requiescat in pace, heathen
+benediction as it is, sounds more sweetly in our ears than all the
+promises that Fame can hold out to us.
+
+I wonder whether it ever occurred to you to reflect upon another horror
+there must be in leaving a name behind you. Think what a horrid piece of
+work the biographers make of a man's private history! Just imagine the
+subject of one of those extraordinary fictions called biographies coming
+back and reading the life of himself, written very probably by somebody
+or other who thought he could turn a penny by doing it, and having the
+pleasure of seeing
+
+ "His little bark attendant sail,
+ Pursue the triumph and partake the gale."
+
+The ghost of the person condemned to walk the earth in a biography glides
+into a public library, and goes to the shelf where his mummied life lies
+in its paper cerements. I can see the pale shadow glancing through the
+pages and hear the comments that shape themselves in the bodiless
+intelligence as if they were made vocal by living lips.
+
+"Born in July, 1776!" And my honored father killed at the battle of
+Bunker Hill! Atrocious libeller! to slander one's family at the start
+after such a fashion!
+
+"The death of his parents left him in charge of his Aunt Nancy, whose
+tender care took the place of those parental attentions which should have
+guided and protected his infant years, and consoled him for the severity
+of another relative."
+
+--Aunt Nancy! It was Aunt Betsey, you fool! Aunt Nancy used to--she has
+been dead these eighty years, so there is no use in mincing matters--she
+used to keep a bottle and a stick, and when she had been tasting a drop
+out of the bottle the stick used to come off the shelf and I had to taste
+that. And here she is made a saint of, and poor Aunt Betsey, that did
+everything for me, is slandered by implication as a horrid tyrant.
+
+"The subject of this commemorative history was remarkable for a
+precocious development of intelligence. An old nurse who saw him at the
+very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as
+one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience.
+At school he was equally remarkable, and at a tender age he received a
+paper adorned with a cut, inscribed REWARD OF MERIT."
+
+--I don't doubt the nurse said that,--there were several promising
+children born about that time. As for cuts, I got more from the
+schoolmaster's rattan than in any other shape. Didn't one of my teachers
+split a Gunter's scale into three pieces over the palm of my hand? And
+didn't I grin when I saw the pieces fly? No humbug, now, about my
+boyhood!
+
+"His personal appearance was not singularly prepossessing. Inconspicuous
+in stature and unattractive in features"
+
+--You misbegotten son of an ourang and grandson of an ascidian (ghosts
+keep up with science, you observe), what business have you to be holding
+up my person to the contempt of my posterity? Haven't I been sleeping
+for this many a year in quiet, and don't the dandelions and buttercups
+look as yellow over me as over the best-looking neighbor I have in the
+dormitory? Why do you want to people the minds of everybody that reads
+your good-for-nothing libel which you call a "biography" with your
+impudent caricatures of a man who was a better-looking fellow than
+yourself, I 'll bet you ten to one, a man whom his Latin tutor called
+fommosus puer when he was only a freshman? If that's what it means to
+make a reputation,--to leave your character and your person, and the good
+name of your sainted relatives, and all you were, and all you had and
+thought and felt, so far as can be gathered by digging you out of your
+most private records, to be manipulated and bandied about and cheapened
+in the literary market as a chicken or a turkey or a goose is handled and
+bargained over at a provision stall, is n't it better to be content with
+the honest blue slate-stone and its inscription informing posterity that
+you were a worthy citizen and a respected father of a family?
+
+--I should like to see any man's biography with corrections and
+emendations by his ghost. We don't know each other's secrets quite so
+well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don't always know our own secrets
+as well as we might. You have seen a tree with different grafts upon it,
+an apple or a pear tree we will say. In the late summer months the fruit
+on one bough will ripen; I remember just such a tree, and the early
+ripening fruit was the Jargonelle. By and by the fruit of another bough
+will begin to come into condition; the lovely Saint Michael, as I
+remember, grew on the same stock as the Jargonelle in the tree I am
+thinking of; and then, when these have all fallen or been gathered,
+another, we will say the Winter Nelis, has its turn, and so out of the
+same juices have come in succession fruits of the most varied aspects and
+flavors. It is the same thing with ourselves, but it takes us a long
+while to find it out. The various inherited instincts ripen in
+succession. You may be nine tenths paternal at one period of your life,
+and nine tenths maternal at another. All at once the traits of some
+immediate ancestor may come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the
+branches of your character, just as your features at different periods of
+your life betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote
+relatives.
+
+But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the
+dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive representatives
+are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs, while the people shall
+come by hundreds and by thousands to visit the memorial shaft until the
+story of Bunker's Hill is as old as that of Marathon.
+
+Would not one like to attend twenty consecutive soirees, at each one of
+which the lion of the party should be the Man of the Monument, at the
+beginning of each century, all the way, we will say, from Anno Domini
+2000 to Ann. Dom. 4000,--or, if you think the style of dating will be
+changed, say to Ann. Darwinii (we can keep A. D. you see) 1872? Will
+the Man be of the Indian type, as President Samuel Stanhope Smith and
+others have supposed the transplanted European will become by and by?
+Will he have shortened down to four feet and a little more, like the
+Esquimaux, or will he have been bred up to seven feet by the use of new
+chemical diets, ozonized and otherwise improved atmospheres, and animal
+fertilizers? Let us summon him in imagination and ask him a few
+questions.
+
+Is n't it like splitting a toad out of a rock to think of this man of
+nineteen or twenty centuries hence coming out from his stony
+dwelling-place and speaking with us? What are the questions we should
+ask him? He has but a few minutes to stay. Make out your own list; I
+will set down a few that come up to me as I write.
+
+--What is the prevalent religious creed of civilization?
+
+--Has the planet met with any accident of importance?
+
+--How general is the republican form of government?
+
+--Do men fly yet?
+
+--Has the universal language come into use?
+
+--Is there a new fuel since the English coal-mines have given out?
+
+--Is the euthanasia a recognized branch of medical science?
+
+--Is the oldest inhabitant still living?
+
+--Is the Daily Advertiser still published?
+
+--And the Evening Transcript?
+
+--Is there much inquiry for the works of a writer of the nineteenth
+century (Old Style) by--the name of--of--
+
+My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. I cannot imagine the putting
+of that question without feeling the tremors which shake a wooer as he
+falters out the words the answer to which will make him happy or
+wretched.
+
+Whose works was I going to question him about, do you ask me? Oh, the
+writings of a friend of mine, much esteemed by his relatives and others.
+But it's of no consequence, after all; I think he says he does not care
+much for posthumous reputation.
+
+I find something of the same interest in thinking about one of the
+boarders at our table that I find in my waking dreams concerning the Man
+of the Monument. This personage is the Register of Deeds. He is an
+unemotional character, living in his business almost as exclusively as
+the Scarabee, but without any of that eagerness and enthusiasm which
+belong to our scientific specialist. His work is largely, principally, I
+may say, mechanical. He has developed, however, a certain amount of
+taste for the antiquities of his department, and once in a while brings
+out some curious result of his investigations into ancient documents. He
+too belongs to a dynasty which will last as long as there is such a thing
+as property in land and dwellings. When that is done away with, and we
+return to the state of villanage, holding our tenement-houses, all to be
+of the same pattern, of the State, that is to say, of the Tammany Ring
+which is to take the place of the feudal lord,--the office of Register of
+Deeds will, I presume, become useless, and the dynasty will be deposed.
+
+As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things
+and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much
+they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone
+twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of
+his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had
+recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden
+candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber. So it was the other day after my
+reminiscences of the old gambrel-roofed house and its visitors. They
+found an echo in the recollections of one of the brightest and liveliest
+of my suburban friends, whose memory is exact about everything except her
+own age, which, there can be no doubt, she makes out a score or two of
+years more than it really is. Still she was old enough to touch some
+lights--and a shadow or two--into the portraits I had drawn, which made
+me wish that she and not I had been the artist who sketched the pictures.
+Among the lesser regrets that mingle with graver sorrows for the friends
+of an earlier generation we have lost, are our omissions to ask them so
+many questions they could have answered easily enough, and would have
+been pleased to be asked. There! I say to myself sometimes, in an
+absent mood, I must ask her about that. But she of whom I am now
+thinking has long been beyond the reach of any earthly questioning, and I
+sigh to think how easily I could have learned some fact which I should
+have been happy to have transmitted with pious care to those who are to
+come after me. How many times I have heard her quote the line about
+blessings brightening as they take their flight, and how true it proves
+in many little ways that one never thinks of until it is too late.
+
+The Register of Deeds is not himself advanced in years. But he borrows
+an air of antiquity from the ancient records which are stored in his
+sepulchral archives. I love to go to his ossuary of dead transactions,
+as I would visit the catacombs of Rome or Paris. It is like wandering up
+the Nile to stray among the shelves of his monumental folios. Here
+stands a series of volumes, extending over a considerable number of
+years, all of which volumes are in his handwriting. But as you go
+backward there is a break, and you come upon the writing of another
+person, who was getting old apparently, for it is beginning to be a
+little shaky, and then you know that you have gone back as far as the
+last days of his predecessor. Thirty or forty years more carry you to
+the time when this incumbent began the duties of his office; his hand was
+steady then; and the next volume beyond it in date betrays the work of a
+still different writer. All this interests me, but I do not see how it
+is going to interest my reader. I do not feel very happy about the
+Register of Deeds. What can I do with him? Of what use is he going to
+be in my record of what I have seen and heard at the breakfast-table?
+The fact of his being one of the boarders was not so important that I was
+obliged to speak of him, and I might just as well have drawn on my
+imagination and not allowed this dummy to take up the room which another
+guest might have profitably filled at our breakfast-table.
+
+I suppose he will prove a superfluity, but I have got him on my hands,
+and I mean that he shall be as little in the way as possible. One always
+comes across people in actual life who have no particular business to be
+where we find them, and whose right to be at all is somewhat
+questionable.
+
+I am not going to get rid of the Register of Deeds by putting him out of
+the way; but I confess I do not see of what service he is going to be to
+me in my record. I have often found, however, that the Disposer of men
+and things understands much better than we do how to place his pawns and
+other pieces on the chess-board of life. A fish more or less in the
+ocean does not seem to amount to much. It is not extravagant to say that
+any one fish may be considered a supernumerary. But when Captain Coram's
+ship sprung a leak and the carpenter could not stop it, and the
+passengers had made up their minds that it was all over with them, all at
+once, without any apparent reason, the pumps began gaining on the leak,
+and the sinking ship to lift herself out of the abyss which was
+swallowing her up. And what do you think it was that saved the ship, and
+Captain Coram, and so in due time gave to London that Foundling Hospital
+which he endowed, and under the floor of which he lies buried? Why, it
+was that very supernumerary fish, which we held of so little account, but
+which had wedged itself into the rent of the yawning planks, and served
+to keep out the water until the leak was finally stopped.
+
+I am very sure it was Captain Coram, but I almost hope it was somebody
+else, in order to give some poor fellow who is lying in wait for the
+periodicals a chance to correct me. That will make him happy for a
+month, and besides, he will not want to pick a quarrel about anything
+else if he has that splendid triumph. You remember Alcibiades and his
+dog's tail.
+
+Here you have the extracts I spoke of from the manuscript placed in my
+hands for revision and emendation. I can understand these alternations
+of feeling in a young person who has been long absorbed in a single
+pursuit, and in whom the human instincts which have been long silent are
+now beginning to find expression. I know well what he wants; a great
+deal better, I think, than he knows himself.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ II
+
+ Brief glimpses of the bright celestial spheres,
+ False lights, false shadows, vague, uncertain gleams,
+ Pale vaporous mists, wan streaks of lurid flame,
+ The climbing of the upward-sailing cloud,
+ The sinking of the downward-falling star,
+ All these are pictures of the changing moods
+ Borne through the midnight stillness of my soul.
+
+ Here am I, bound upon this pillared rock,
+ Prey to the vulture of a vast desire
+ That feeds upon my life. I burst my bands
+ And steal a moment's freedom from the beak,
+ The clinging talons and the shadowing plumes;
+ Then comes the false enchantress, with her song;
+ "Thou wouldst not lay thy forehead in the dust
+ Like the base herd that feeds and breeds and dies!
+ Lo, the fair garlands that I weave for thee,
+ Unchanging as the belt Orion wears,
+ Bright as the jewels of the seven-starred Crown,
+ The spangled stream of Berenice's hair!"
+ And so she twines the fetters with the flowers
+ Around my yielding limbs, and the fierce bird
+ Stoops to his quarry,--then to feed his rage
+ Of ravening hunger I must drain my blood
+ And let the dew-drenched, poison-breeding night
+ Steal all the freshness from my fading cheek,
+ And leave its shadows round my caverned eyes.
+ All for a line in some unheeded scroll;
+ All for a stone that tells to gaping clowns,
+ "Here lies a restless wretch beneath a clod
+ Where squats the jealous nightmare men call Fame!"
+
+ I marvel not at him who scorns his kind
+ And thinks not sadly of the time foretold
+ When the old hulk we tread shall be a wreck,
+ A slag, a cinder drifting through the sky
+ Without its crew of fools! We live too long
+ And even so are not content to die,
+ But load the mould that covers up our bones
+ With stones that stand like beggars by the road
+ And show death's grievous wound and ask for tears;
+ Write our great books to teach men who we are,
+ Sing our fine songs that tell in artful phrase
+ The secrets of our lives, and plead and pray
+ For alms of memory with the after time,
+ Those few swift seasons while the earth shall wear
+ Its leafy summers, ere its core grows cold
+ And the moist life of all that breathes shall die;
+ Or as the new-born seer, perchance more wise,
+ Would have us deem, before its growing mass,
+ Pelted with stardust, atoned with meteor-balls,
+ Heats like a hammered anvil, till at last Man
+ and his works and all that stirred itself
+ Of its own motion, in the fiery glow
+ Turns to a flaming vapor, and our orb
+ Shines a new sun for earths that shall be born.
+
+ I am as old as Egypt to myself,
+ Brother to them that squared the pyramids
+ By the same stars I watch. I read the page
+ Where every letter is a glittering world,
+ With them who looked from Shinar's clay-built towers,
+ Ere yet the wanderer of the Midland sea
+ Had missed the fallen sister of the seven.
+ I dwell in spaces vague, remote, unknown,
+ Save to the silent few, who, leaving earth,
+ Quit all communion with their living time.
+ I lose myself in that ethereal void,
+ Till I have tired my wings and long to fill
+ My breast with denser air, to stand, to walk
+ With eyes not raised above my fellow-men.
+ Sick of my unwalled, solitary realm,
+ I ask to change the myriad lifeless worlds
+ I visit as mine own for one poor patch
+ Of this dull spheroid and a little breath
+ To shape in word or deed to serve my kind.
+
+ Was ever giant's dungeon dug so deep,
+ Was ever tyrant's fetter forged so strong,
+ Was e'er such deadly poison in the draught
+ The false wife mingles for the trusting fool,
+ As he whose willing victim is himself,
+ Digs, forges, mingles, for his captive soul?
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+I was very sure that the old Master was hard at work about something,--he
+is always very busy with something,--but I mean something particular.
+
+Whether it was a question of history or of cosmogony, or whether he was
+handling a test-tube or a blow-pipe; what he was about I did not feel
+sure; but I took it for granted that it was some crucial question or
+other he was at work on, some point bearing on the thought of the time.
+For the Master, I have observed, is pretty sagacious in striking for the
+points where his work will be like to tell. We all know that class of
+scientific laborers to whom all facts are alike nourishing mental food,
+and who seem to exercise no choice whatever, provided only they can get
+hold of these same indiscriminate facts in quantity sufficient. They
+browse on them, as the animal to which they would not like to be compared
+browses on his thistles. But the Master knows the movement of the age he
+belongs to; and if he seems to be busy with what looks like a small piece
+of trivial experimenting, one may feel pretty sure that he knows what he
+is about, and that his minute operations are looking to a result that
+will help him towards attaining his great end in life,--an insight, so
+far as his faculties and opportunities will allow, into that order of
+things which he believes he can study with some prospect of taking in its
+significance.
+
+I became so anxious to know what particular matter he was busy with, that
+I had to call upon him to satisfy my curiosity. It was with a little
+trepidation that I knocked at his door. I felt a good deal as one might
+have felt on disturbing an alchemist at his work, at the very moment, it
+might be, when he was about to make projection.
+
+--Come in!--said the Master in his grave, massive tones.
+
+I passed through the library with him into a little room evidently
+devoted to his experiments.
+
+--You have come just at the right moment,--he said.--Your eyes are better
+than mine. I have been looking at this flask, and I should like to have
+you look at it.
+
+It was a small matrass, as one of the elder chemists would have called
+it, containing a fluid, and hermetically sealed. He held it up at the
+window; perhaps you remember the physician holding a flask to the light
+in Gerard Douw's "Femme hydropique"; I thought of that fine figure as I
+looked at him. Look!--said he,--is it clear or cloudy?
+
+--You need not ask me that,--I answered. It is very plainly turbid. I
+should think that some sediment had been shaken up in it. What is it,
+Elixir Vitae or Aurum potabile?
+
+--Something that means more than alchemy ever did! Boiled just three
+hours, and as clear as a bell until within the last few days; since then
+has been clouding up.
+
+--I began to form a pretty shrewd guess at the meaning of all this, and
+to think I knew very nearly what was coming next. I was right in my
+conjecture. The Master broke off the sealed end of his little flask,
+took out a small portion of the fluid on a glass rod, and placed it on a
+slip of glass in the usual way for a microscopic examination.
+
+--One thousand diameters,--he said, as he placed it on the stage of the
+microscope.---We shall find signs of life, of course.--He bent over the
+instrument and looked but an instant.
+
+--There they are!--he exclaimed,--look in.
+
+I looked in and saw some objects:
+
+The straight linear bodies were darting backward and forward in every
+direction. The wavy ones were wriggling about like eels or water-snakes.
+The round ones were spinning on their axes and rolling in every
+direction. All of them were in a state of incessant activity, as if
+perpetually seeking something and never finding it.
+
+They are tough, the germs of these little bodies, said the Master.
+---Three hours' boiling has n't killed 'em. Now, then, let us see what
+has been the effect of six hours' boiling.
+
+He took up another flask just like the first, containing fluid and
+hermetically sealed in the same way.
+
+--Boiled just three hours longer than the other, he said,--six hours in
+all. This is the experimentum crucis. Do you see any cloudiness in it?
+
+--Not a sign of it; it is as clear as crystal, except that there may be a
+little sediment at the bottom.
+
+--That is nothing. The liquid is clear. We shall find no signs of
+life.---He put a minute drop of the liquid under the microscope as
+before. Nothing stirred. Nothing to be seen but a clear circle of
+light. We looked at it again and again, but with the same result.
+
+--Six hours kill 'em all, according to this experiment,--said the
+Master.---Good as far as it goes. One more negative result. Do you know
+what would have happened if that liquid had been clouded, and we had
+found life in the sealed flask? Sir, if that liquid had held life in it
+the Vatican would have trembled to hear it, and there would have been
+anxious questionings and ominous whisperings in the halls of Lambeth
+palace! The accepted cosmogonies on trial, sir!
+
+Traditions, sanctities, creeds, ecclesiastical establishments, all
+shaking to know whether my little sixpenny flask of fluid looks muddy or
+not! I don't know whether to laugh or shudder. The thought of an
+oecumenical council having its leading feature dislocated by my trifling
+experiment! The thought, again, of the mighty revolution in human
+beliefs and affairs that might grow out of the same insignificant little
+phenomenon. A wine-glassful of clear liquid growing muddy. If we had
+found a wriggle, or a zigzag, or a shoot from one side to the other, in
+this last flask, what a scare there would have been, to be sure, in the
+schools of the prophets! Talk about your megatherium and your
+megalosaurus,--what are these to the bacterium and the vibrio? These are
+the dreadful monsters of today. If they show themselves where they have
+no business, the little rascals frighten honest folks worse than ever
+people were frightened by the Dragon of Rhodes!
+
+The Master gets going sometimes, there is no denying it, until his
+imagination runs away with him. He had been trying, as the reader sees,
+one of those curious experiments in spontaneous generation, as it is
+called, which have been so often instituted of late years, and by none
+more thoroughly than by that eminent American student of nature
+(Professor Jeffries Wyman) whose process he had imitated with a result
+like his.
+
+We got talking over these matters among us the next morning at the
+breakfast-table.
+
+We must agree they couldn't stand six hours' boiling,--I said.
+
+--Good for the Pope of Rome!--exclaimed the Master.
+
+--The Landlady drew back with a certain expression of dismay in her
+countenance. She hoped he did n't want the Pope to make any more
+converts in this country. She had heard a sermon only last Sabbath, and
+the minister had made it out, she thought, as plain as could be, that the
+Pope was the Man of Sin and that the Church of Rome was--Well, there was
+very strong names applied to her in Scripture.
+
+What was good for the Pope was good for your minister, too, my dear
+madam,--said the Master. Good for everybody that is afraid of what
+people call "science." If it should prove that dead things come to life
+of themselves, it would be awkward, you know, because then somebody will
+get up and say if one dead thing made itself alive another might, and so
+perhaps the earth peopled itself without any help. Possibly the
+difficulty wouldn't be so great as many people suppose. We might perhaps
+find room for a Creator after all, as we do now, though we see a little
+brown seed grow till it sucks up the juices of half an acre of ground,
+apparently all by its own inherent power. That does not stagger us; I am
+not sure that it would if Mr. Crosses or Mr. Weekes's acarus should show
+himself all of a sudden, as they said he did, in certain mineral mixtures
+acted on by electricity.
+
+The Landlady was off soundings, and looking vacant enough by this time.
+
+The Master turned to me.---Don't think too much of the result of our one
+experiment. It means something, because it confirms those other
+experiments of which it was a copy; but we must remember that a hundred
+negatives don't settle such a question. Life does get into the world
+somehow. You don't suppose Adam had the cutaneous unpleasantness
+politely called psora, do you?
+
+--Hardly,--I answered.---He must have been a walking hospital if he
+carried all the maladies about him which have plagued his descendants.
+
+--Well, then, how did the little beast which is peculiar to that special
+complaint intrude himself into the Order of Things? You don't suppose
+there was a special act of creation for the express purpose of bestowing
+that little wretch on humanity, do you?
+
+I thought, on the whole, I would n't answer that question.
+
+--You and I are at work on the same problem, said the Young Astronomer to
+the Master.---I have looked into a microscope now and then, and I have
+seen that perpetual dancing about of minute atoms in a fluid, which you
+call molecular motion. Just so, when I look through my telescope I see
+the star-dust whirling about in the infinite expanse of ether; or if I do
+not see its motion, I know that it is only on account of its immeasurable
+distance. Matter and motion everywhere; void and rest nowhere. You ask
+why your restless microscopic atoms may not come together and become
+self-conscious and self-moving organisms. I ask why my telescopic
+star-dust may not come together and grow and organize into habitable
+worlds,--the ripened fruit on the branches of the tree Yggdrasil, if I
+may borrow from our friend the Poet's province. It frightens people,
+though, to hear the suggestion that worlds shape themselves from
+star-mist. It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres
+that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they
+are nothing but raindrops. But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop
+grows, why then--It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord
+Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters. Sir John
+Herschel would have told them that this made little difference in
+accounting for the formation of worlds by aggregation, but at any rate it
+was a comfort to them.
+
+--These people have always been afraid of the astronomers,--said the
+Master.--They were shy, you know, of the Copernican system, for a long
+while; well they might be with an oubliette waiting for them if they
+ventured to think that the earth moved round the sun. Science settled
+that point finally for them, at length, and then it was all right,--when
+there was no use in disputing the fact any longer. By and by geology
+began turning up fossils that told extraordinary stories about the
+duration of life upon our planet. What subterfuges were not used to get
+rid of their evidence! Think of a man seeing the fossilized skeleton of
+an animal split out of a quarry, his teeth worn down by mastication, and
+the remains of food still visible in his interior, and, in order to get
+rid of a piece of evidence contrary to the traditions he holds to,
+seriously maintaining that this skeleton never belonged to a living
+creature, but was created with just these appearances; a make-believe, a
+sham, a Barnum's-mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon
+his intelligent children! And now people talk about geological epochs
+and hundreds of millions of years in the planet's history as calmly as if
+they were discussing the age of their deceased great-grandmothers. Ten
+or a dozen years ago people said Sh! Sh! if you ventured to meddle with
+any question supposed to involve a doubt of the generally accepted Hebrew
+traditions. To-day such questions are recognized as perfectly fair
+subjects for general conversation; not in the basement story, perhaps, or
+among the rank and file of the curbstone congregations, but among
+intelligent and educated persons. You may preach about them in your
+pulpit, you may lecture about them, you may talk about them with the
+first sensible-looking person you happen to meet, you may write magazine
+articles about them, and the editor need not expect to receive
+remonstrances from angry subscribers and withdrawals of subscriptions, as
+he would have been sure to not a great many years ago. Why, you may go
+to a tea-party where the clergyman's wife shows her best cap and his
+daughters display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company
+discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if it
+were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster's
+lapdog. You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her
+genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his manifestations of
+reverence, who will talk over the anthropoid ape, the supposed founder of
+the family to which we belong, and even go back with you to the
+acephalous mollusk, first cousin to the clams and mussels, whose
+rudimental spine was the hinted prophecy of humanity; all this time never
+dreaming, apparently, that what she takes for a matter of curious
+speculation involves the whole future of human progress and destiny.
+
+I can't help thinking that if we had talked as freely as we can and do
+now in the days of the first boarder at this table,--I mean the one who
+introduced it to the public,--it would have sounded a good deal more
+aggressively than it does now.--The old Master got rather warm in
+talking; perhaps the consciousness of having a number of listeners had
+something to do with it.
+
+--This whole business is an open question,--he said,--and there is no use
+in saying, "Hush! don't talk about such things!" People do talk about
+'em everywhere; and if they don't talk about 'em they think about 'em,
+and that is worse,--if there is anything bad about such questions, that
+is. If for the Fall of man, science comes to substitute the RISE of man,
+sir, it means the utter disintegration of all the spiritual pessimisms
+which have been like a spasm in the heart and a cramp in the intellect of
+men for so many centuries. And yet who dares to say that it is not a
+perfectly legitimate and proper question to be discussed, without the
+slightest regard to the fears or the threats of Pope or prelate?
+
+Sir, I believe,--the Master rose from his chair as he spoke, and said in
+a deep and solemn tone, but without any declamatory vehemence,--sir, I
+believe that we are at this moment in what will be recognized not many
+centuries hence as one of the late watches in the night of the dark ages.
+There is a twilight ray, beyond question. We know something of the
+universe, a very little, and, strangely enough, we know most of what is
+farthest from us. We have weighed the planets and analyzed the flames of
+the--sun and stars. We predict their movements as if they were machines
+we ourselves had made and regulated. We know a good deal about the earth
+on which we live. But the study of man has been so completely subjected
+to our preconceived opinions, that we have got to begin all over again.
+We have studied anthropology through theology; we have now to begin the
+study of theology through anthropology. Until we have exhausted the
+human element in every form of belief, and that can only be done by what
+we may call comparative spiritual anatomy, we cannot begin to deal with
+the alleged extra-human elements without blundering into all imaginable
+puerilities. If you think for one moment that there is not a single
+religion in the world which does not come to us through the medium of a
+preexisting language; and if you remember that this language embodies
+absolutely nothing but human conceptions and human passions, you will see
+at once that every religion presupposes its own elements as already
+existing in those to whom it is addressed. I once went to a church in
+London and heard the famous Edward Irving preach, and heard some of his
+congregation speak in the strange words characteristic of their
+miraculous gift of tongues. I had a respect for the logical basis of
+this singular phenomenon. I have always thought it was natural that any
+celestial message should demand a language of its own, only to be
+understood by divine illumination. All human words tend, of course, to
+stop short in human meaning. And the more I hear the most sacred terms
+employed, the more I am satisfied that they have entirely and radically
+different meanings in the minds of those who use them. Yet they deal
+with them as if they were as definite as mathematical quantities or
+geometrical figures. What would become of arithmetic if the figure 2
+meant three for one man and five for another and twenty for a third, and
+all the other numerals were in the same way variable quantities? Mighty
+intelligent correspondence business men would have with each other! But
+how is this any worse than the difference of opinion which led a famous
+clergyman to say to a brother theologian, "Oh, I see, my dear sir, your
+God is my Devil."
+
+Man has been studied proudly, contemptuously, rather, from the point of
+view supposed to be authoritatively settled. The self-sufficiency of
+egotistic natures was never more fully shown than in the expositions of
+the worthlessness and wretchedness of their fellow-creatures given by the
+dogmatists who have "gone back," as the vulgar phrase is, on their race,
+their own flesh and blood. Did you ever read what Mr. Bancroft says
+about Calvin in his article on Jonathan Edwards?--and mighty well said it
+is too, in my judgment. Let me remind you of it, whether you have read
+it or not. "Setting himself up over against the privileged classes, he,
+with a loftier pride than theirs, revealed the power of a yet higher
+order of nobility, not of a registered ancestry of fifteen generations,
+but one absolutely spotless in its escutcheon, preordained in the council
+chamber of eternity." I think you'll find I have got that sentence
+right, word for word, and there 's a great deal more in it than many good
+folks who call themselves after the reformer seem to be aware of. The
+Pope put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his cohort crushed
+the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of Hosts.
+Now, you see, the point that people don't understand is the absolute and
+utter humility of science, in opposition to this doctrinal
+self-sufficiency. I don't doubt this may sound a little paradoxical at
+first, but I think you will find it is all right. You remember the
+courtier and the monarch,--Louis the Fourteenth, wasn't it?--never mind,
+give the poor fellows that live by setting you right a chance. "What
+o'clock is it?" says the king. "Just whatever o'clock your Majesty
+pleases," says the courtier. I venture to say the monarch was a great
+deal more humble than the follower, who pretended that his master was
+superior to such trifling facts as the revolution of the planet. It was
+the same thing, you remember, with King Canute and the tide on the
+sea-shore. The king accepted the scientific fact of the tide's rising.
+The loyal hangers-on, who believed in divine right, were too proud of the
+company they found themselves in to make any such humiliating admission.
+But there are people, and plenty of them, to-day, who will dispute facts
+just as clear to those who have taken the pains to learn what is known
+about them, as that of the tide's rising. They don't like to admit these
+facts, because they throw doubt upon some of their cherished opinions.
+We are getting on towards the last part of this nineteenth century. What
+we have gained is not so much in positive knowledge, though that is a
+good deal, as it is in the freedom of discussion of every subject that
+comes within the range of observation and inference. How long is it
+since Mrs. Piozzi wrote,--"Let me hope that you will not pursue geology
+till it leads you into doubts destructive of all comfort in this world
+and all happiness in the next"?
+
+The Master paused and I remained silent, for I was thinking things I
+could not say.
+
+--It is well always to have a woman near by when one is talking on this
+class of subjects. Whether there will be three or four women to one man
+in heaven is a question which I must leave to those who talk as if they
+knew all about the future condition of the race to answer. But very
+certainly there is much more of hearty faith, much more of spiritual
+life, among women than among men, in this world. They need faith to
+support them more than men do, for they have a great deal less to call
+them out of themselves, and it comes easier to them, for their habitual
+state of dependence teaches them to trust in others. When they become
+voters, if they ever do, it may be feared that the pews will lose what
+the ward-rooms gain. Relax a woman's hold on man, and her knee-joints
+will soon begin to stiffen. Self-assertion brings out many fine
+qualities, but it does not promote devotional habits.
+
+I remember some such thoughts as this were passing through my mind while
+the Master was talking. I noticed that the Lady was listening to the
+conversation with a look of more than usual interest. We men have the
+talk mostly to ourselves at this table; the Master, as you have found
+out, is fond of monologues, and I myself--well, I suppose I must own to a
+certain love for the reverberated music of my own accents; at any rate,
+the Master and I do most of the talking. But others help us do the
+listening. I think I can show that they listen to some purpose. I am
+going to surprise my reader with a letter which I received very shortly
+after the conversation took place which I have just reported. It is of
+course by a special license, such as belongs to the supreme prerogative
+of an author, that I am enabled to present it to him. He need ask no
+questions: it is not his affair how I obtained the right to give
+publicity to a private communication. I have become somewhat more
+intimately acquainted with the writer of it than in the earlier period of
+my connection with this establishment, and I think I may say have gained
+her confidence to a very considerable degree.
+
+MY DEAR SIR: The conversations I have had with you, limited as they have
+been, have convinced me that I am quite safe in addressing you with
+freedom on a subject which interests me, and others more than myself. We
+at our end of the table have been listening, more or less intelligently,
+to the discussions going on between two or three of you gentlemen on
+matters of solemn import to us all. This is nothing very new to me. I
+have been used, from an early period of my life, to hear the discussion
+of grave questions, both in politics and religion. I have seen gentlemen
+at my father's table get as warm over a theological point of dispute as
+in talking over their political differences. I rather think it has
+always been very much so, in bad as well as in good company; for you
+remember how Milton's fallen angels amused themselves with disputing on
+"providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate," and it was the same thing in
+that club Goldsmith writes so pleasantly about. Indeed, why should not
+people very often come, in the course of conversation, to the one subject
+which lies beneath all else about which our thoughts are occupied? And
+what more natural than that one should be inquiring about what another
+has accepted and ceased to have any doubts concerning? It seems to me
+all right that at the proper time, in the proper place, those who are
+less easily convinced than their neighbors should have the fullest
+liberty of calling to account all the opinions which others receive
+without question. Somebody must stand sentry at the outposts of belief,
+and it is a sentry's business, I believe, to challenge every one who
+comes near him, friend or foe.
+
+I want you to understand fully that I am not one of those poor nervous
+creatures who are frightened out of their wits when any question is
+started that implies the disturbance of their old beliefs. I manage to
+see some of the periodicals, and now and then dip a little way into a new
+book which deals with these curious questions you were talking about, and
+others like them. You know they find their way almost everywhere. They
+do not worry me in the least. When I was a little girl, they used to say
+that if you put a horsehair into a tub of water it would turn into a
+snake in the course of a few days. That did not seem to me so very much
+stranger than it was that an egg should turn into a chicken. What can I
+say to that? Only that it is the Lord's doings, and marvellous in my
+eyes; and if our philosophical friend should find some little live
+creatures, or what seem to be live creatures, in any of his messes, I
+should say as much, and no more. You do not think I would shut up my
+Bible and Prayer-Book because there is one more thing I do not understand
+in a world where I understand so very little of all the wonders that
+surround me?
+
+It may be very wrong to pay any attention to those speculations about the
+origin of mankind which seem to conflict with the Sacred Record. But
+perhaps there is some way of reconciling them, as there is of making the
+seven days of creation harmonize with modern geology. At least, these
+speculations are curious enough in themselves; and I have seen so many
+good and handsome children come of parents who were anything but virtuous
+and comely, that I can believe in almost any amount of improvement taking
+place in a tribe of living beings, if time and opportunity favor it. I
+have read in books of natural history that dogs came originally from
+wolves. When I remember my little Flora, who, as I used to think, could
+do everything but talk, it does not seem to me that she was much nearer
+her savage ancestors than some of the horrid cannibal wretches are to
+their neighbors the great apes.
+
+You see that I am tolerably liberal in my habit of looking at all these
+questions. We women drift along with the current of the times,
+listening, in our quiet way, to the discussions going on round us in
+books and in conversation, and shift the phrases in which we think and
+talk with something of the same ease as that with which we change our
+style of dress from year to year. I doubt if you of the other sex know
+what an effect this habit of accommodating our tastes to changing
+standards has upon us. Nothing is fixed in them, as you know; the very
+law of fashion is change. I suspect we learn from our dressmakers to
+shift the costume of our minds, and slip on the new fashions of thinking
+all the more easily because we have been accustomed to new styles of
+dressing every season.
+
+It frightens me to see how much I have written without having yet said a
+word of what I began this letter on purpose to say. I have taken so much
+space in "defining my position," to borrow the politicians' phrase, that
+I begin to fear you will be out of patience before you come to the part
+of my letter I care most about your reading.
+
+What I want to say is this. When these matters are talked about before
+persons of different ages and various shades of intelligence, I think one
+ought to be very careful that his use of language does not injure the
+sensibilities, perhaps blunt the reverential feelings, of those who are
+listening to him. You of the sterner sex say that we women have
+intuitions, but not logic, as our birthright. I shall not commit my sex
+by conceding this to be true as a whole, but I will accept the first half
+of it, and I will go so far as to say that we do not always care to
+follow out a train of thought until it ends in a blind cul de sac, as
+some of what are called the logical people are fond of doing.
+
+Now I want to remind you that religion is not a matter of intellectual
+luxury to those of us who are interested in it, but something very
+different. It is our life, and more than our life; for that is measured
+by pulse-beats, but our religious consciousness partakes of the Infinite,
+towards which it is constantly yearning. It is very possible that a
+hundred or five hundred years from now the forms of religious belief may
+be so altered that we should hardly know them. But the sense of
+dependence on Divine influence and the need of communion with the unseen
+and eternal will be then just what they are now. It is not the
+geologist's hammer, or the astronomer's telescope, or the naturalist's
+microscope, that is going to take away the need of the human soul for
+that Rock to rest upon which is higher than itself, that Star which never
+sets, that all-pervading Presence which gives life to all the least
+moving atoms of the immeasurable universe.
+
+I have no fears for myself, and listen very quietly to all your debates.
+I go from your philosophical discussions to the reading of Jeremy
+Taylor's "Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying" without feeling that I have
+unfitted myself in the least degree for its solemn reflections. And, as
+I have mentioned his name, I cannot help saying that I do not believe
+that good man himself would have ever shown the bitterness to those who
+seem to be at variance with the received doctrines which one may see in
+some of the newspapers that call themselves "religious." I have kept a
+few old books from my honored father's library, and among them is another
+of his which I always thought had more true Christianity in its title
+than there is in a good many whole volumes. I am going to take the book
+down, or up,--for it is not a little one,--and write out the title,
+which, I dare say, you remember, and very likely you have the book.
+"Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, showing the Unreasonableness of
+prescribing to other Men's Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting
+Different Opinions."
+
+Now, my dear sir, I am sure you believe that I want to be liberal and
+reasonable, and not to act like those weak alarmists who, whenever the
+silly sheep begin to skip as if something was after them, and huddle
+together in their fright, are sure there must be a bear or a lion coming
+to eat them up. But for all that, I want to beg you to handle some of
+these points, which are so involved in the creed of a good many
+well-intentioned persons that you cannot separate them from it without
+picking their whole belief to pieces, with more thought for them than you
+might think at first they were entitled to. I have no doubt you
+gentlemen are as wise as serpents, and I want you to be as harmless as
+doves.
+
+The Young Girl who sits by me has, I know, strong religious instincts.
+Instead of setting her out to ask all sorts of questions, I would rather,
+if I had my way, encourage her to form a habit of attending to religious
+duties, and make the most of the simple faith in which she was bred. I
+think there are a good many questions young persons may safely postpone
+to a more convenient season; and as this young creature is overworked, I
+hate to have her excited by the fever of doubt which it cannot be denied
+is largely prevailing in our time.
+
+I know you must have looked on our other young friend, who has devoted
+himself to the sublimest of the sciences, with as much interest as I do.
+When I was a little girl I used to write out a line of Young's as a copy
+in my writing-book,
+
+ "An undevout astronomer is mad";
+
+but I do not now feel quite so sure that the contemplation of all the
+multitude of remote worlds does not tend to weaken the idea of a personal
+Deity. It is not so much that nebular theory which worries me, when I
+think about this subject, as a kind of bewilderment when I try to
+conceive of a consciousness filling all those frightful blanks of space
+they talk about. I sometimes doubt whether that young man worships
+anything but the stars. They tell me that many young students of science
+like him never see the inside of a church. I cannot help wishing they
+did. It humanizes people, quite apart from any higher influence it
+exerts upon them. One reason, perhaps, why they do not care to go to
+places of worship is that they are liable to hear the questions they know
+something about handled in sermons by those who know very much less about
+them. And so they lose a great deal. Almost every human being, however
+vague his notions of the Power addressed, is capable of being lifted and
+solemnized by the exercise of public prayer. When I was a young girl we
+travelled in Europe, and I visited Ferney with my parents; and I remember
+we all stopped before a chapel, and I read upon its front, I knew Latin
+enough to understand it, I am pleased to say,--Deo erexit Voltaire. I
+never forgot it; and knowing what a sad scoffer he was at most sacred
+things, I could not but be impressed with the fact that even he was not
+satisfied with himself, until he had shown his devotion in a public and
+lasting form.
+
+We all want religion sooner or later. I am afraid there are some who
+have no natural turn for it, as there are persons without an ear for
+music, to which, if I remember right, I heard one of you comparing what
+you called religious genius. But sorrow and misery bring even these to
+know what it means, in a great many instances. May I not say to you, my
+friend, that I am one who has learned the secret of the inner life by the
+discipline of trials in the life of outward circumstance? I can remember
+the time when I thought more about the shade of color in a ribbon,
+whether it matched my complexion or not, than I did about my spiritual
+interests in this world or the next. It was needful that I should learn
+the meaning of that text, "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth."
+
+Since I have been taught in the school of trial I have felt, as I never
+could before, how precious an inheritance is the smallest patrimony of
+faith. When everything seemed gone from me, I found I had still one
+possession. The bruised reed that I had never leaned on became my staff.
+The smoking flax which had been a worry to my eyes burst into flame, and
+I lighted the taper at it which has since guided all my footsteps. And I
+am but one of the thousands who have had the same experience. They have
+been through the depths of affliction, and know the needs of the human
+soul. It will find its God in the unseen,--Father, Saviour, Divine
+Spirit, Virgin Mother, it must and will breathe its longings and its
+griefs into the heart of a Being capable of understanding all its
+necessities and sympathizing with all its woes.
+
+I am jealous, yes, I own I am jealous of any word, spoken or written,
+that would tend to impair that birthright of reverence which becomes for
+so many in after years the basis of a deeper religious sentiment. And
+yet, as I have said, I cannot and will not shut my eyes to the problems
+which may seriously affect our modes of conceiving the eternal truths on
+which, and by which, our souls must live. What a fearful time is this
+into which we poor sensitive and timid creatures are born! I suppose the
+life of every century has more or less special resemblance to that of
+some particular Apostle. I cannot help thinking this century has Thomas
+for its model. How do you suppose the other Apostles felt when that
+experimental philosopher explored the wounds of the Being who to them was
+divine with his inquisitive forefinger? In our time that finger has
+multiplied itself into ten thousand thousand implements of research,
+challenging all mysteries, weighing the world as in a balance, and
+sifting through its prisms and spectroscopes the light that comes from
+the throne of the Eternal.
+
+Pity us, dear Lord, pity us! The peace in believing which belonged to
+other ages is not for us. Again Thy wounds are opened that we may know
+whether it is the blood of one like ourselves which flows from them, or
+whether it is a Divinity that is bleeding for His creatures. Wilt Thou
+not take the doubt of Thy children whom the time commands to try all
+things in the place of the unquestioning faith of earlier and
+simpler-hearted generations? We too have need of Thee. Thy martyrs in
+other ages were cast into the flames, but no fire could touch their
+immortal and indestructible faith. We sit in safety and in peace, so far
+as these poor bodies are concerned; but our cherished beliefs, the hopes,
+the trust that stayed the hearts of those we loved who have gone before
+us, are cast into the fiery furnace of an age which is fast turning to
+dross the certainties and the sanctities once prized as our most precious
+inheritance. You will understand me, my dear sir, and all my solicitudes
+and apprehensions. Had I never been assailed by the questions that meet
+all thinking persons in our time, I might not have thought so anxiously
+about the risk of perplexing others. I know as well as you must that
+there are many articles of belief clinging to the skirts of our time
+which are the bequests of the ages of ignorance that God winked at. But
+for all that I would train a child in the nurture and admonition of the
+Lord, according to the simplest and best creed I could disentangle from
+those barbarisms, and I would in every way try to keep up in young
+persons that standard of reverence for all sacred subjects which may,
+without any violent transition, grow and ripen into the devotion of later
+years. Believe me,
+
+Very sincerely yours,
+
+I have thought a good deal about this letter and the writer of it lately.
+She seemed at first removed to a distance from all of us, but here I find
+myself in somewhat near relations with her. What has surprised me more
+than that, however, is to find that she is becoming so much acquainted
+with the Register of Deeds. Of all persons in the world, I should least
+have thought of him as like to be interested in her, and still less, if
+possible, of her fancying him. I can only say they have been in pretty
+close conversation several times of late, and, if I dared to think it of
+so very calm and dignified a personage, I should say that her color was a
+little heightened after one or more of these interviews. No! that would
+be too absurd! But I begin to think nothing is absurd in the matter of
+the relations of the two sexes; and if this high-bred woman fancies the
+attentions of a piece of human machinery like this elderly individual, it
+is none of my business.
+
+I have been at work on some more of the Young Astronomer's lines. I find
+less occasion for meddling with them as he grows more used to
+versification. I think I could analyze the processes going on in his
+mind, and the conflict of instincts which he cannot in the nature of
+things understand. But it is as well to give the reader a chance to find
+out for himself what is going on in the young man's heart and intellect.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ III
+
+ The snows that glittered on the disk of Mars
+ Have melted, and the planet's fiery orb
+ Rolls in the crimson summer of its year;
+ But what to me the summer or the snow
+ Of worlds that throb with life in forms unknown,
+ If life indeed be theirs; I heed not these.
+ My heart is simply human; all my care
+ For them whose dust is fashioned like mine own;
+ These ache with cold and hunger, live in pain,
+ And shake with fear of worlds more full of woe;
+ There may be others worthier of my love,
+ But such I know not save through these I know.
+
+ There are two veils of language, hid beneath
+ Whose sheltering folds, we dare to be ourselves;
+ And not that other self which nods and smiles
+ And babbles in our name; the one is Prayer,
+ Lending its licensed freedom to the tongue
+ That tells our sorrows and our sins to Heaven;
+ The other, Verse, that throws its spangled web
+ Around our naked speech and makes it bold.
+ I, whose best prayer is silence; sitting dumb
+ In the great temple where I nightly serve
+ Him who is throned in light, have dared to claim
+ The poet's franchise, though I may not hope
+ To wear his garland; hear me while I tell
+ My story in such form as poets use,
+ But breathed in fitful whispers, as the wind
+ Sighs and then slumbers, wakes and sighs again.
+
+ Thou Vision, floating in the breathless air
+ Between me and the fairest of the stars,
+ I tell my lonely thoughts as unto thee.
+ Look not for marvels of the scholar's pen
+ In my rude measure; I can only show
+ A slender-margined, unillumined page,
+ And trust its meaning to the flattering eye
+ That reads it in the gracious light of love.
+ Ah, wouldst thou clothe thyself in breathing shape
+ And nestle at my side, my voice should lend
+ Whate'er my verse may lack of tender rhythm
+ To make thee listen.
+
+ I have stood entranced
+ When, with her fingers wandering o'er the keys,
+ The white enchantress with the golden hair
+ Breathed all her soul through some unvalued rhyme;
+ Some flower of song that long had lost its bloom;
+ Lo! its dead summer kindled as she sang!
+ The sweet contralto, like the ringdove's coo,
+ Thrilled it with brooding, fond, caressing tones,
+ And the pale minstrel's passion lived again,
+ Tearful and trembling as a dewy rose
+ The wind has shaken till it fills the air
+ With light and fragrance. Such the wondrous charm
+ A song can borrow when the bosom throbs
+ That lends it breath.
+
+ So from the poet's lips
+ His verse sounds doubly sweet, for none like him
+ Feels every cadence of its wave-like flow;
+ He lives the passion over, while he reads,
+ That shook him as he sang his lofty strain,
+ And pours his life through each resounding line,
+ As ocean, when the stormy winds are hushed,
+ Still rolls and thunders through his billowy caves.
+
+ Let me retrace the record of the years
+ That made me what I am. A man most wise,
+ But overworn with toil and bent with age,
+ Sought me to be his scholar,--me, run wild
+ From books and teachers,--kindled in my soul
+ The love of knowledge; led me to his tower,
+ Showed me the wonders of the midnight realm
+ His hollow sceptre ruled, or seemed to rule,
+ Taught me the mighty secrets of the spheres,
+ Trained me to find the glimmering specks of light
+ Beyond the unaided sense, and on my chart
+ To string them one by one, in order due,
+ As on a rosary a saint his beads.
+
+ I was his only scholar; I became
+ The echo to his thought; whate'er he knew
+ Was mine for asking; so from year to year
+ We wrought together, till there came a time
+ When I, the learner, was the master half
+ Of the twinned being in the dome-crowned tower.
+
+ Minds roll in paths like planets; they revolve
+ This in a larger, that a narrower ring,
+ But round they come at last to that same phase,
+ That self-same light and shade they showed before.
+ I learned his annual and his monthly tale,
+ His weekly axiom and his daily phrase,
+ I felt them coming in the laden air,
+ And watched them laboring up to vocal breath,
+ Even as the first-born at his father's board
+ Knows ere he speaks the too familiar jest
+ Is on its way, by some mysterious sign
+ Forewarned, the click before the striking bell.
+
+ He shrivelled as I spread my growing leaves,
+ Till trust and reverence changed to pitying care;
+ He lived for me in what he once had been,
+ But I for him, a shadow, a defence,
+ The guardian of his fame, his guide, his staff,
+ Leaned on so long he fell if left alone.
+ I was his eye, his ear, his cunning hand,
+ Love was my spur and longing after fame,
+ But his the goading thorn of sleepless age
+ That sees its shortening span, its lengthening shades,
+ That clutches what it may with eager grasp,
+ And drops at last with empty, outstretched hands.
+
+ All this he dreamed not. He would sit him down
+ Thinking to work his problems as of old,
+ And find the star he thought so plain a blur,
+ The columned figures labyrinthine wilds
+ Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls
+ That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive
+ And struggle for a while, and then his eye
+ Would lose its light, and over all his mind
+ The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong
+ The darkness fell, and I was left alone.
+
+ Alone! no climber of an Alpine cliff,
+ No Arctic venturer on the waveless sea,
+ Feels the dread stillness round him as it chills
+ The heart of him who leaves the slumbering earth
+ To watch the silent worlds that crowd the sky.
+
+ Alone! And as the shepherd leaves his flock
+ To feed upon the hillside, he meanwhile
+ Finds converse in the warblings of the pipe
+ Himself has fashioned for his vacant hour,
+ So have I grown companion to myself,
+ And to the wandering spirits of the air
+ That smile and whisper round us in our dreams.
+ Thus have I learned to search if I may know
+ The whence and why of all beneath the stars
+ And all beyond them, and to weigh my life
+ As in a balance, poising good and ill
+ Against each other,-asking of the Power
+ That flung me forth among the whirling worlds,
+ If I am heir to any inborn right,
+ Or only as an atom of the dust
+ That every wind may blow where'er it will.
+
+ I am not humble; I was shown my place,
+ Clad in such robes as Nature had at hand;
+ Took what she gave, not chose; I know no shame,
+ No fear for being simply what I am.
+ I am not proud, I hold my every breath
+ At Nature's mercy. I am as a babe
+ Borne in a giant's arms, he knows not where;
+ Each several heart-beat, counted like the coin
+ A miser reckons, is a special gift
+ As from an unseen hand; if that withhold
+ Its bounty for a moment, I am left
+ A clod upon the earth to which I fall.
+
+ Something I find in me that well might claim
+ The love of beings in a sphere above
+ This doubtful twilight world of right and wrong;
+ Something that shows me of the self-same clay
+ That creeps or swims or flies in humblest form.
+ Had I been asked, before I left my bed
+ Of shapeless dust, what clothing I would wear,
+ I would have said, More angel and less worm;
+ But for their sake who are even such as I,
+ Of the same mingled blood, I would not choose
+ To hate that meaner portion of myself
+ Which makes me brother to the least of men.
+
+ I dare not be a coward with my lips
+ Who dare to question all things in my soul;
+ Some men may find their wisdom on their knees,
+ Some prone and grovelling in the dust like slaves;
+ Let the meek glow-worm glisten in the dew;
+ I ask to lift my taper to the sky
+ As they who hold their lamps above their heads,
+ Trusting the larger currents up aloft,
+ Rather than crossing eddies round their breast,
+ Threatening with every puff the flickering blaze.
+
+ My life shall be a challenge, not a truce!
+ This is my homage to the mightier powers,
+ To ask my boldest question, undismayed
+ By muttered threats that some hysteric sense
+ Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne
+ Where wisdom reigns supreme; and if I err,
+ They all must err who have to feel their way
+ As bats that fly at noon; for what are we
+ But creatures of the night, dragged forth by day,
+ Who needs must stumble, and with stammering steps
+ Spell out their paths in syllables of pain?
+
+ Thou wilt not hold in scorn the child who dares
+ Look up to Thee, the Father,--dares to ask
+ More than Thy wisdom answers. From Thy hand
+ The worlds were cast; yet every leaflet claims
+ From that same hand its little shining sphere
+ Of star-lit dew; thine image, the great sun,
+ Girt with his mantle of tempestuous flame,
+
+ Glares in mid-heaven; but to his noontide blaze
+ The slender violet lifts its lidless eye,
+ And from his splendor steals its fairest hue,
+ Its sweetest perfume from his scorching fire.
+
+I may just as well stop here as anywhere, for there is more of the
+manuscript to come, and I can only give it in instalments.
+
+The Young Astronomer had told me I might read any portions of his
+manuscript I saw fit to certain friends. I tried this last extract on
+the old Master.
+
+It's the same story we all have to tell,--said he, when I had done
+reading.---We are all asking questions nowadays. I should like to hear
+him read some of his verses himself, and I think some of the other
+boarders would like to. I wonder if he wouldn't do it, if we asked him!
+Poets read their own compositions in a singsong sort of way; but they do
+seem to love 'em so, that I always enjoy it. It makes me laugh a little
+inwardly to see how they dandle their poetical babies, but I don't let
+them know it. We must get up a select party of the boarders to hear him
+read. We'll send him a regular invitation. I will put my name at the
+head of it, and you shall write it.
+
+--That was neatly done. How I hate writing such things! But I suppose I
+must do it.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+The Master and I had been thinking for some time of trying to get the
+Young Astronomer round to our side of the table. There are many subjects
+on which both of us like to talk with him, and it would be convenient to
+have him nearer to us. How to manage it was not quite so clear as it
+might have been. The Scarabee wanted to sit with his back to the light,
+as it was in his present position. He used his eyes so much in studying
+minute objects, that he wished to spare them all fatigue, and did not
+like facing a window. Neither of us cared to ask the Man of Letters, so
+called, to change his place, and of course we could not think of making
+such a request of the Young Girl or the Lady. So we were at a stand with
+reference to this project of ours.
+
+But while we were proposing, Fate or Providence disposed everything for
+us. The Man of Letters, so called, was missing one morning, having
+folded his tent--that is, packed his carpet-bag--with the silence of the
+Arabs, and encamped--that is, taken lodgings--in some locality which he
+had forgotten to indicate.
+
+The Landlady bore this sudden bereavement remarkably well. Her remarks
+and reflections; though borrowing the aid of homely imagery and doing
+occasional violence to the nicer usages of speech, were not without
+philosophical discrimination.
+
+--I like a gentleman that is a gentleman. But there's a difference in
+what folks call gentlemen as there is in what you put on table. There is
+cabbages and there is cauliflowers. There is clams and there is oysters.
+There is mackerel and there is salmon. And there is some that knows the
+difference and some that doos n't. I had a little account with that
+boarder that he forgot to settle before he went off, so all of a suddin.
+I sha'n't say anything about it. I've seen the time when I should have
+felt bad about losing what he owed me, but it was no great matter; and if
+he 'll only stay away now he 's gone, I can stand losing it, and not cry
+my eyes out nor lay awake all night neither. I never had ought to have
+took him. Where he come from and where he's gone to is unbeknown to me.
+If he'd only smoked good tobacco, I wouldn't have said a word; but it was
+such dreadful stuff, it 'll take a week to get his chamber sweet enough
+to show them that asks for rooms. It doos smell like all possest.
+
+--Left any goods?--asked the Salesman.
+
+--Or dockermunts?--added the Member of the Haouse.
+
+The Landlady answered with a faded smile, which implied that there was no
+hope in that direction. Dr. Benjamin, with a sudden recurrence of
+youthful feeling, made a fan with the fingers of his right hand, the
+second phalanx of the thumb resting on the tip of the nose, and the
+remaining digits diverging from each other, in the plane of the median
+line of the face,--I suppose this is the way he would have described the
+gesture, which is almost a specialty of the Parisian gamin. That Boy
+immediately copied it, and added greatly to its effect by extending the
+fingers of the other hand in a line with those of the first, and
+vigorously agitating those of the two hands,--a gesture which acts like
+a puncture on the distended self-esteem of one to whom it is addressed,
+and cheapens the memory of the absent to a very low figure.
+
+I wish the reader to observe that I treasure up with interest all the
+words uttered by the Salesman. It must have been noticed that he very
+rarely speaks. Perhaps he has an inner life, with its own deep
+emotional, and lofty contemplative elements, but as we see him, he is the
+boarder reduced to the simplest expression of that term. Yet, like most
+human creatures, he has generic and specific characters not unworthy of
+being studied. I notice particularly a certain electrical briskness of
+movement, such as one may see in a squirrel, which clearly belongs to his
+calling. The dry-goodsman's life behind his counter is a succession of
+sudden, snappy perceptions and brief series of coordinate spasms; as
+thus:
+
+"Purple calico, three quarters wide, six yards."
+
+Up goes the arm; bang! tumbles out the flat roll and turns half a dozen
+somersets, as if for the fun of the thing; the six yards of calico hurry
+over the measuring nails, hunching their backs up, like six cankerworms;
+out jump the scissors; snip, clip, rip; the stuff is wisped up,
+brown--papered, tied, labelled, delivered, and the man is himself again,
+like a child just come out of a convulsion-fit. Think of a man's having
+some hundreds of these semi-epileptic seizures every day, and you need
+not wonder that he does not say much; these fits take the talk all out of
+him.
+
+But because he, or any other man, does not say much, it does not follow
+that he may not have, as I have said, an exalted and intense inner life.
+I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed thoroughly
+commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised everybody by
+telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly and dramatically
+than any playwright or novelist or poet could have told it for him. I
+will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by saying how he has told it.
+
+--We had been talking over the subjects touched upon in the Lady's
+letter.
+
+--I suppose one man in a dozen--said the Master--ought to be born a
+skeptic. That was the proportion among the Apostles, at any rate.
+
+--So there was one Judas among them,--I remarked.
+
+--Well,--said the Master,--they 've been whitewashing Judas of late. But
+never mind him. I did not say there was not one rogue on the average
+among a dozen men. I don't see how that would interfere with my
+proposition. If I say that among a dozen men you ought to find one that
+weighs over a hundred and fifty pounds, and you tell me that there were
+twelve men in your club, and one of 'em had red hair, I don't see that
+you have materially damaged my statement.
+
+--I thought it best to let the old Master have his easy victory, which
+was more apparent than real, very evidently, and he went on.
+
+--When the Lord sends out a batch of human beings, say a hundred--Did you
+ever read my book, the new edition of it, I mean?
+
+It is rather awkward to answer such a question in the negative, but I
+said, with the best grace I could, "No, not the last edition."
+
+--Well, I must give you a copy of it. My book and I are pretty much the
+same thing. Sometimes I steal from my book in my talk without mentioning
+it, and then I say to myself, "Oh, that won't do; everybody has read my
+book and knows it by heart." And then the other I says,--you know there
+are two of us, right and left, like a pair of shoes,--the other I says,
+"You're a--something or other--fool. They have n't read your confounded
+old book; besides, if they have, they have forgotten all about it."
+Another time, I say, thinking I will be very honest, "I have said
+something about that in my book"; and then the other I says, "What a
+Balaam's quadruped you are to tell 'em it's in your book; they don't care
+whether it is or not, if it's anything worth saying; and if it isn't
+worth saying, what are you braying for?" That is a rather sensible
+fellow, that other chap we talk with, but an impudent whelp. I never got
+such abuse from any blackguard in my life as I have from that No. 2 of
+me, the one that answers the other's questions and makes the comments,
+and does what in demotic phrase is called the "sarsing."
+
+--I laughed at that. I have just such a fellow always with me, as wise
+as Solomon, if I would only heed him; but as insolent as Shimei, cursing,
+and throwing stones and dirt, and behaving as if he had the traditions of
+the "ape-like human being" born with him rather than civilized instincts.
+One does not have to be a king to know what it is to keep a king's
+jester.
+
+--I mentioned my book,--the Master said, because I have something in it
+on the subject we were talking about. I should like to read you a
+passage here and there out of it, where I have expressed myself a little
+more freely on some of those matters we handle in conversation. If you
+don't quarrel with it, I must give you a copy of the book. It's a rather
+serious thing to get a copy of a book from the writer of it. It has made
+my adjectives sweat pretty hard, I know, to put together an answer
+returning thanks and not lying beyond the twilight of veracity, if one
+may use a figure. Let me try a little of my book on you, in divided
+doses, as my friends the doctors say.
+
+-Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,--I said, laughing at my own expense.
+I don't doubt the medicament is quite as good as the patient deserves,
+and probably a great deal better,--I added, reinforcing my feeble
+compliment.
+
+[When you pay a compliment to an author, don't qualify it in the next
+sentence so as to take all the goodness out of it. Now I am thinking of
+it, I will give you one or two pieces of advice. Be careful to assure
+yourself that the person you are talking with wrote the article or book
+you praise. It is not very pleasant to be told, "Well, there, now! I
+always liked your writings, but you never did anything half so good as
+this last piece," and then to have to tell the blunderer that this last
+piece is n't yours, but t' other man's. Take care that the phrase or
+sentence you commend is not one that is in quotation-marks. "The best
+thing in your piece, I think, is a line I do not remember meeting before;
+it struck me as very true and well expressed:
+
+"'An honest man's the noblest work of God.'
+
+"But, my dear lady, that line is one which is to be found in a writer of
+the last century, and not original with me." One ought not to have
+undeceived her, perhaps, but one is naturally honest, and cannot bear to
+be credited with what is not his own. The lady blushes, of course, and
+says she has not read much ancient literature, or some such thing. The
+pearl upon the Ethiop's arm is very pretty in verse, but one does not
+care to furnish the dark background for other persons' jewelry.]
+
+I adjourned from the table in company with the old Master to his
+apartments. He was evidently in easy circumstances, for he had the best
+accommodations the house afforded. We passed through a reception room to
+his library, where everything showed that he had ample means for
+indulging the modest tastes of a scholar.
+
+--The first thing, naturally, when one enters a scholar's study or
+library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his
+tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his bookshelves.
+
+Of course, you know there are many fine houses where the library is a
+part of the upholstery, so to speak. Books in handsome binding kept
+locked under plate-glass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to
+stylish establishments as servants in livery; who sit with folded arms,
+are to stylish equipages. I suppose those wonderful statues with the
+folded arms do sometimes change their attitude, and I suppose those books
+with the gilded backs do sometimes get opened, but it is nobody's
+business whether they do or not, and it is not best to ask too many
+questions.
+
+This sort of thing is common enough, but there is another case that may
+prove deceptive if you undertake to judge from appearances. Once in a
+while you will come on a house where you will find a family of readers
+and almost no library. Some of the most indefatigable devourers of
+literature have very few books. They belong to book clubs, they haunt
+the public libraries, they borrow of friends, and somehow or other get
+hold of everything they want, scoop out all it holds for them, and have
+done with it. When I want a book, it is as a tiger wants a sheep. I
+must have it with one spring, and, if I miss it, go away defeated and
+hungry. And my experience with public libraries is that the first volume
+of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second,
+when that is out.
+
+--I was pretty well prepared to understand the Master's library and his
+account of it. We seated ourselves in two very comfortable chairs, and I
+began the conversation.
+
+-I see you have a large and rather miscellaneous collection of books. Did
+you get them together by accident or according to some preconceived plan?
+
+--Both, sir, both,--the Master answered. When Providence throws a good
+book in my way, I bow to its decree and purchase it as an act of piety,
+if it is reasonably or unreasonably cheap. I adopt a certain number of
+books every year, out of a love for the foundlings and stray children of
+other people's brains that nobody seems to care for. Look here.
+
+He took down a Greek Lexicon finely bound in calf, and spread it open.
+
+Do you see that Hedericus? I had Greek dictionaries enough and to spare,
+but I saw that noble quarto lying in the midst of an ignoble crowd of
+cheap books, and marked with a price which I felt to be an insult to
+scholarship, to the memory of Homer, sir, and the awful shade of
+AEschylus. I paid the mean price asked for it, and I wanted to double
+it, but I suppose it would have been a foolish sacrifice of coin to
+sentiment: I love that book for its looks and behavior. None of your
+"half-calf" economies in that volume, sir! And see how it lies open
+anywhere! There is n't a book in my library that has such a generous way
+of laying its treasures before you. From Alpha to Omega, calm, assured
+rest at any page that your choice or accident may light on. No lifting
+of a rebellious leaf like an upstart servant that does not know his place
+and can never be taught manners, but tranquil, well-bred repose. A book
+may be a perfect gentleman in its aspect and demeanor, and this book
+would be good company for personages like Roger Ascham and his pupils the
+Lady Elizabeth and the Lady Jane Grey.
+
+The Master was evidently riding a hobby, and what I wanted to know was
+the plan on which he had formed his library. So I brought him back to
+the point by asking him the question in so many words.
+
+Yes,--he said,--I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library
+ought to be put together--no, I don't mean that, I mean ought to grow. I
+don't pretend to say that mine is a model, but it serves my turn well
+enough, and it represents me pretty accurately. A scholar must shape his
+own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for secretion is only
+separation, you know, of certain elements derived from the materials of
+the world about us. And a scholar's study, with the books lining its
+walls, is his shell. It is n't a mollusk's shell, either; it 's a
+caddice-worm's shell. You know about the caddice-worm?
+
+--More or less; less rather than more,--was my humble reply.
+
+Well, sir, the caddice-worm is the larva of a fly, and he makes a case
+for himself out of all sorts of bits of everything that happen to suit
+his particular fancy, dead or alive, sticks and stones and small shells
+with their owners in 'em, living as comfortable as ever. Every one of
+these caddice-worms has his special fancy as to what he will pick up and
+glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself, to make
+his case out of. In it he lives, sticking his head and shoulders out
+once in a while, that is all. Don't you see that a student in his
+library is a caddice-worm in his case? I've told you that I take an
+interest in pretty much everything, and don't mean to fence out any human
+interests from the private grounds of my intelligence. Then, again,
+there is a subject, perhaps I may say there is more than one, that I want
+to exhaust, to know to the very bottom. And besides, of course I must
+have my literary harem, my pare aux cerfs, where my favorites await my
+moments of leisure and pleasure,--my scarce and precious editions, my
+luxurious typographical masterpieces; my Delilahs, that take my head in
+their lap: the pleasant story-tellers and the like; the books I love
+because they are fair to look upon, prized by collectors, endeared by old
+associations, secret treasures that nobody else knows anything about;
+books, in short, that I like for insufficient reasons it may be, but
+peremptorily, and mean to like and to love and to cherish till death us
+do part.
+
+Don't you see I have given you a key to the way my library is made up, so
+that you can apriorize the plan according to which I have filled my
+bookcases? I will tell you how it is carried out.
+
+In the first place, you see, I have four extensive cyclopaedias. Out of
+these I can get information enough to serve my immediate purpose on
+almost any subject. These, of course, are supplemented by geographical,
+biographical, bibliographical, and other dictionaries, including of
+course lexicons to all the languages I ever meddle with. Next to these
+come the works relating to my one or two specialties, and these
+collections I make as perfect as I can. Every library should try to be
+complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads. I
+don't mean that I buy all the trashy compilations on my special subjects,
+but I try to have all the works of any real importance relating to them,
+old as well as new. In the following compartment you will find the great
+authors in all the languages I have mastered, from Homer and Hesiod
+downward to the last great English name.
+
+This division, you see, you can make almost as extensive or as limited as
+you choose. You can crowd the great representative writers into a small
+compass; or you can make a library consisting only of the different
+editions of Horace, if you have space and money enough. Then comes the
+Harem, the shelf or the bookcase of Delilahs, that you have paid wicked
+prices for, that you love without pretending to be reasonable about it,
+and would bag in case of fire before all the rest, just as Mr. Townley
+took the Clytie to his carriage when the anti-Catholic mob threatened his
+house in 1780. As for the foundlings like my Hedericus, they go among
+their peers; it is a pleasure to take them, from the dusty stall where
+they were elbowed by plebeian school-books and battered odd volumes, and
+give them Alduses and Elzevirs for companions.
+
+Nothing remains but the Infirmary. The most painful subjects are the
+unfortunates that have lost a cover. Bound a hundred years ago, perhaps,
+and one of the rich old browned covers gone--what a pity! Do you know
+what to do about it? I 'll tell you,--no, I 'll show you. Look at this
+volume. M. T. Ciceronis Opera,--a dozen of 'em,--one of 'em minus half
+his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six months ago,--now see him.
+
+--He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very
+decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not
+twins.
+
+-I 'll tell you what I did. You poor devil, said I, you are a disgrace
+to your family. We must send you to a surgeon and have some kind of a
+Taliacotian operation performed on you. (You remember the operation as
+described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was to find a subject
+of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of his members. So I
+went to Quidlibet's,--you know Quidlibet and that hieroglyphic sign of
+his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most prominent feature,--and
+laid my case before him. I want you, said I, to look up an old book of
+mighty little value,--one of your ten-cent vagabonds would be the sort of
+thing,--but an old beggar, with a cover like this, and lay it by for me.
+
+And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,--only he has insulted
+one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very low-bred and
+shamefully insufficient prices,--Quidlibet, I say, laid by three old
+books for me to help myself from, and did n't take the trouble even to
+make me pay the thirty cents for 'em. Well, said I to myself, let us
+look at our three books that have undergone the last insult short of the
+trunkmaker's or the paper-mills, and see what they are. There may be
+something worth looking at in one or the other of 'em.
+
+Now do you know it was with a kind of a tremor that I untied the package
+and looked at these three unfortunates, too humble for the companionable
+dime to recognize as its equal in value. The same sort of feeling you
+know if you ever tried the Bible-and-key, or the Sortes Virgiliance. I
+think you will like to know what the three books were which had been
+bestowed upon me gratis, that I might tear away one of the covers of the
+one that best matched my Cicero, and give it to the binder to cobble my
+crippled volume with.
+
+The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued.
+
+No. I. An odd volume of The Adventurer. It has many interesting things
+enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne's famous
+Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal's "Christianity as old as
+the Creation." Simon Browne was the Man without a Soul. An excellent
+person, a most worthy dissenting minister, but lying under a strange
+delusion.
+
+Here is a paragraph from his Dedication:
+
+"He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his
+present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate
+hand of an avenging GOD, his very thinking substance has, for more than
+seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished
+out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing. None, no, not the least
+remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not the shadow of an idea is
+left, nor any sense that so much as one single one, perfect or imperfect,
+whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or was
+perceived by it."
+
+Think of this as the Dedication of a book "universally allowed to be the
+best which that controversy produced," and what a flood of light it pours
+on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose morbid reveries
+have been so often mistaken for piety! No. I. had something for me,
+then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed to have worth offering.
+
+No. II. was "A View of Society and Manners in Italy." Vol. III. By John
+Moore, M. D. (Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book. In this
+particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very spirited
+and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood
+of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour's mighty agreeable reading.
+So much for Number Two.
+
+No. III. was "An ESSAY On the Great EFFECTS of Even Languid and Unheeded
+LOCAL MOTION." By the Hon. Robert Boyle. Published in 1685, and, as
+appears from other sources, "received with great and general applause."
+I confess I was a little startled to find how near this earlier
+philosopher had come to the modern doctrines, such as are illustrated in
+Tyndall's "Heat considered as a Mode of Motion." He speaks of "Us, who
+endeavor to resolve the Phenomena of Nature into Matter and Local
+motion." That sounds like the nineteenth century, but what shall we say
+to this? "As when a bar of iron or silver, having been well hammered, is
+newly taken off of the anvil; though the eye can discern no motion in it,
+yet the touch will readily perceive it to be very hot, and if you spit
+upon it, the brisk agitation of the insensible parts will become visible
+in that which they will produce in the liquor." He takes a bar of tin,
+and tries whether by bending it to and fro two or three times he cannot
+"procure a considerable internal commotion among the parts "; and having
+by this means broken or cracked it in the middle, finds, as he expected,
+that the middle parts had considerably heated each other. There are many
+other curious and interesting observations in the volume which I should
+like to tell you of, but these will serve my purpose.
+
+--Which book furnished you the old cover you wanted?--said I.
+
+--Did he kill the owl?--said the Master, laughing. [I suppose you, the
+reader, know the owl story.]--It was Number Two that lent me one of his
+covers. Poor wretch! He was one of three, and had lost his two
+brothers. From him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.
+The Scripture had to be fulfilled in his case. But I couldn't help
+saying to myself, What do you keep writing books for, when the stalls are
+covered all over with 'em, good books, too, that nobody will give ten
+cents apiece for, lying there like so many dead beasts of burden, of no
+account except to strip off their hides? What is the use, I say? I have
+made a book or two in my time, and I am making another that perhaps will
+see the light one of these days. But if I had my life to live over again,
+I think I should go in for silence, and get as near to Nirvana as I
+could. This language is such a paltry tool! The handle of it cuts and
+the blade doesn't. You muddle yourself by not knowing what you mean by a
+word, and send out your unanswered riddles and rebuses to clear up other
+people's difficulties. It always seems to me that talk is a ripple and
+thought is a ground swell. A string of words, that mean pretty much
+anything, helps you in a certain sense to get hold of a thought, just as
+a string of syllables that mean nothing helps you to a word; but it's a
+poor business, it's a poor business, and the more you study definition
+the more you find out how poor it is. Do you know I sometimes think our
+little entomological neighbor is doing a sounder business than we people
+that make books about ourselves and our slippery abstractions? A man can
+see the spots on a bug and count 'em, and tell what their color is, and
+put another bug alongside of him and see whether the two are alike or
+different. And when he uses a word he knows just what he means. There
+is no mistake as to the meaning and identity of pulex irritans, confound
+him!
+
+--What if we should look in, some day, on the Scarabeeist, as he calls
+himself?--said I.---The fact is the Master had got agoing at such a rate
+that I was willing to give a little turn to the conversation.
+
+--Oh, very well,--said the Master,--I had some more things to say, but I
+don't doubt they'll keep. And besides, I take an interest in entomology,
+and have my own opinion on the meloe question.
+
+--You don't mean to say you have studied insects as well as solar systems
+and the order of things generally?
+
+--He looked pleased. All philosophers look pleased when people say to
+them virtually, "Ye are gods." The Master says he is vain
+constitutionally, and thanks God that he is. I don't think he has enough
+vanity to make a fool of himself with it, but the simple truth is he
+cannot help knowing that he has a wide and lively intelligence, and it
+pleases him to know it, and to be reminded of it, especially in an
+oblique and tangential sort of way, so as not to look like downright
+flattery.
+
+Yes, yes, I have amused a summer or two with insects, among other things.
+I described a new tabanus,--horsefly, you know,--which, I think, had
+escaped notice. I felt as grand when I showed up my new discovery as if
+I had created the beast. I don't doubt Herschel felt as if he had made a
+planet when he first showed the astronomers Georgium Sidus, as he called
+it. And that reminds me of something. I was riding on the outside of a
+stagecoach from London to Windsor in the year--never mind the year, but
+it must have been in June, I suppose, for I bought some strawberries.
+England owes me a sixpence with interest from date, for I gave the woman
+a shilling, and the coach contrived to start or the woman timed it so
+that I just missed getting my change. What an odd thing memory is, to be
+sure, to have kept such a triviality, and have lost so much that was
+invaluable! She is a crazy wench, that Mnemosyne; she throws her jewels
+out of the window and locks up straws and old rags in her strong box.
+
+[De profundis! said I to myself, the bottom of the bushel has dropped
+out! Sancta--Maria, ora pro nobis!]
+
+--But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach from
+London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me from my New
+England village childhood came upon me like a reminiscence rather than a
+revelation. It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts and spars and
+ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it
+might be a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the
+walls of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly
+towards the sky. Why, you blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I
+know you as well as I know my father's spectacles and snuff-box! And
+that same crazy witch of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels
+thirty-five hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight
+for an old house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks
+out a volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which
+this is the original. Sir William Herschel's great telescope! It was
+just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in the
+picture, not much different any way. Why should it be? The pupil of
+your eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than the eye of a
+sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you can see him.
+You look into a stereoscope and think you see a miniature of a building
+or a mountain; you don't, you 're made a fool of by your lying
+intelligence, as you call it; you see the building and the mountain just
+as large as with your naked eye looking straight at the real objects.
+Doubt it, do you? Perhaps you'd like to doubt it to the music of a
+couple of gold five-dollar pieces. If you would, say the word, and man
+and money, as Messrs. Heenan and Morrissey have it, shall be forthcoming;
+for I will make you look at a real landscape with your right eye, and a
+stereoscopic view of it with your left eye, both at once, and you can
+slide one over the other by a little management and see how exactly the
+picture overlies the true landscape. We won't try it now, because I want
+to read you something out of my book.
+
+--I have noticed that the Master very rarely fails to come back to his
+original proposition, though he, like myself, is fond of zigzagging in
+order to reach it. Men's minds are like the pieces on a chess-board in
+their way of moving. One mind creeps from the square it is on to the
+next, straight forward, like the pawns. Another sticks close to its own
+line of thought and follows it as far as it goes, with no heed for
+others' opinions, as the bishop sweeps the board in the line of his own
+color. And another class of minds break through everything that lies
+before them, ride over argument and opposition, and go to the end of the
+board, like the castle. But there is still another sort of intellect
+which is very apt to jump over the thought that stands next and come down
+in the unexpected way of the knight. But that same knight, as the chess
+manuals will show you, will contrive to get on to every square of the
+board in a pretty series of moves that looks like a pattern of
+embroidery, and so these zigzagging minds like the Master's, and I
+suppose my own is something like it, will sooner or later get back to the
+square next the one they started from.
+
+The Master took down a volume from one of the shelves. I could not help
+noticing that it was a shelf near his hand as he sat, and that the volume
+looked as if he had made frequent use of it. I saw, too, that he handled
+it in a loving sort of way; the tenderness he would have bestowed on a
+wife and children had to find a channel somewhere, and what more natural
+than that he should look fondly on the volume which held the thoughts
+that had rolled themselves smooth and round in his mind like pebbles on a
+beach, the dreams which, under cover of the simple artifices such as all
+writers use, told the little world of readers his secret hopes and
+aspirations, the fancies which had pleased him and which he could not
+bear to let die without trying to please others with them? I have a
+great sympathy with authors, most of all with unsuccessful ones. If one
+had a dozen lives or so, it would all be very well, but to have only a
+single ticket in the great lottery, and have that drawn a blank, is a
+rather sad sort of thing. So I was pleased to see the affectionate kind
+of pride with which the Master handled his book; it was a success, in its
+way, and he looked on it with a cheerful sense that he had a right to be
+proud of it. The Master opened the volume, and, putting on his large
+round glasses, began reading, as authors love to read that love their
+books.
+
+--The only good reason for believing in the stability of the moral order
+of things is to be found in the tolerable steadiness of human averages.
+Out of a hundred human beings fifty-one will be found in the long run on
+the side of the right, so far as they know it, and against the wrong.
+They will be organizers rather than disorganizers, helpers and not
+hinderers in the upward movement of the race. This is the main fact we
+have to depend on. The right hand of the great organism is a little
+stronger than the left, that is all.
+
+Now and then we come across a left-handed man. So now and then we find a
+tribe or a generation, the subject of what we may call moral
+left-handedness, but that need not trouble us about our formula. All we
+have to do is to spread the average over a wider territory or a longer
+period of time. Any race or period that insists on being left-handed
+must go under if it comes in contact with a right-handed one. If there
+were, as a general rule, fifty-one rogues in the hundred instead of
+forty-nine, all other qualities of mind and body being equally
+distributed between the two sections, the order of things would sooner or
+later end in universal disorder. It is the question between the leak and
+the pumps.
+
+It does not seem very likely that the Creator of all things is taken by
+surprise at witnessing anything any of his creatures do or think. Men
+have sought out many inventions, but they can have contrived nothing
+which did not exist as an idea in the omniscient consciousness to which
+past, present, and future are alike Now.
+
+We read what travellers tell us about the King of Dahomey, or the Fejee
+Island people, or the short and simple annals of the celebrities recorded
+in the Newgate Calendar, and do not know just what to make of these
+brothers and sisters of the race; but I do not suppose an intelligence
+even as high as the angelic beings, to stop short there, would see
+anything very peculiar or wonderful about them, except as everything is
+wonderful and unlike everything else.
+
+It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging
+the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without
+minding what somebody else has said, or how some old majority vote went
+in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics,--I say it is very curious to see
+how science is catching up with one superstition after another.
+
+There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who know
+anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of Teratology.
+It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be met with in
+living beings, and more especially in animals. It is found that what
+used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much
+subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.
+
+The rustic looks at the Siamese twins, and thinks he is contemplating an
+unheard-of anomaly; but there are plenty of cases like theirs in the
+books of scholars, and though they are not quite so common as double
+cherries, the mechanism of their formation is not a whit more mysterious
+than that of the twinned fruits. Such cases do not disturb the average
+arrangement; we have Changs and Engs at one pole, and Cains and Abels at
+the other. One child is born with six fingers on each hand, and another
+falls short by one or more fingers of his due allowance; but the glover
+puts his faith in the great law of averages, and makes his gloves with
+five fingers apiece, trusting nature for their counterparts.
+
+Thinking people are not going to be scared out of explaining or at least
+trying to explain things by the shrieks of persons whose beliefs are
+disturbed thereby. Comets were portents to Increase Mather, President of
+Harvard College; "preachers of Divine wrath, heralds and messengers of
+evil tidings to the world." It is not so very long since Professor
+Winthrop was teaching at the same institution. I can remember two of his
+boys very well, old boys, it is true, they were, and one of them wore a
+three-cornered cocked hat; but the father of these boys, whom, as I say,
+I can remember, had to defend himself against the minister of the Old
+South Church for the impiety of trying to account for earthquakes on
+natural principles. And his ancestor, Governor Winthrop, would probably
+have shaken his head over his descendant's dangerous audacity, if one may
+judge by the solemn way in which he mentions poor Mrs. Hutchinson's
+unpleasant experience, which so grievously disappointed her maternal
+expectations. But people used always to be terribly frightened by those
+irregular vital products which we now call "interesting specimens" and
+carefully preserve in jars of alcohol. It took next to nothing to make a
+panic; a child was born a few centuries ago with six teeth in its head,
+and about that time the Turks began gaining great advantages over the
+Christians. Of course there was an intimate connection between the
+prodigy and the calamity. So said the wise men of that day.
+
+--All these out-of-the-way cases are studied connectedly now, and are
+found to obey very exact rules. With a little management one can even
+manufacture living monstrosities. Malformed salmon and other fish can be
+supplied in quantity, if anybody happens to want them. Now, what all I
+have said is tending to is exactly this, namely, that just as the
+celestial movements are regulated by fixed laws, just as bodily
+monstrosities are produced according to rule, and with as good reason as
+normal shapes, so obliquities of character are to be accounted for on
+perfectly natural principles; they are just as capable of classification
+as the bodily ones, and they all diverge from a certain average or middle
+term which is the type of its kind. If life had been a little longer I
+would have written a number of essays for which, as it is, I cannot
+expect to have time. I have set down the titles of a hundred or more,
+and I have often been tempted to publish these, for according to my idea,
+the title of a book very often renders the rest of it unnecessary.
+"Moral Teratology," for instance, which is marked No. 67 on my list of
+"Essays Potential, not Actual," suggests sufficiently well what I should
+be like to say in the pages it would preface. People hold up their hands
+at a moral monster as if there was no reason for his existence but his
+own choice. That was a fine specimen we read of in the papers a few
+years ago, the Frenchman, it may be remembered, who used to waylay and
+murder young women, and after appropriating their effects, bury their
+bodies in a private cemetery he kept for that purpose. It is very
+natural, and I do not say it is not very proper, to hang such eccentric
+persons as this; but it is not clear whether his vagaries produce any
+more sensation at Headquarters than the meek enterprises of the mildest
+of city missionaries. For the study of Moral Teratology will teach you
+that you do not get such a malformed character as that without a long
+chain of causes to account for it; and if you only knew those causes, you
+would know perfectly well what to expect.
+
+You may feel pretty sure that our friend of the private cemetery was not
+the child of pious and intelligent parents; that he was not nurtured by
+the best of mothers, and educated by the most judicious teachers; and
+that he did not come of a lineage long known and honored for its
+intellectual and moral qualities. Suppose that one should go to the
+worst quarter of the city and pick out the worst-looking child of the
+worst couple he could find, and then train him up successively at the
+School for Infant Rogues, the Academy for Young Scamps, and the College
+for Complete Criminal Education, would it be reasonable to expect a
+Francois Xavier or a Henry Martyn to be the result of such a training?
+The traditionists, in whose presumptuous hands the science of
+anthropology has been trusted from time immemorial, have insisted on
+eliminating cause and effect from the domain of morals. When they have
+come across a moral monster they have seemed to think that he put himself
+together, having a free choice of all the constituents which make up
+manhood, and that consequently no punishment could be too bad for him.
+
+I say, hang him and welcome, if that is the best thing for society; hate
+him, in a certain sense, as you hate a rattlesnake, but, if you pretend
+to be a philosopher, recognize the fact that what you hate in him is
+chiefly misfortune, and that if you had been born with his villanous low
+forehead and poisoned instincts, and bred among creatures of the Races
+Maudites whose natural history has to be studied like that of beasts of
+prey and vermin, you would not have been sitting there in your gold-bowed
+spectacles and passing judgment on the peccadilloes of your
+fellow-creatures.
+
+I have seen men and women so disinterested and noble, and devoted to the
+best works, that it appeared to me if any good and faithful servant was
+entitled to enter into the joys of his Lord, such as these might be. But
+I do not know that I ever met with a human being who seemed to me to have
+a stronger claim on the pitying consideration and kindness of his Maker
+than a wretched, puny, crippled, stunted child that I saw in Newgate, who
+was pointed out as one of the most notorious and inveterate little
+thieves in London. I have no doubt that some of those who were looking
+at this pitiable morbid secretion of the diseased social organism thought
+they were very virtuous for hating him so heartily.
+
+It is natural, and in one sense is all right enough. I want to catch a
+thief and put the extinguisher on an incendiary as much as my neighbors
+do; but I have two sides to my consciousness as I have two sides to my
+heart, one carrying dark, impure blood, and the other the bright stream
+which has been purified and vivified by the great source of life and
+death,--the oxygen of the air which gives all things their vital heat,
+and burns all things at last to ashes.
+
+One side of me loves and hates; the other side of me judges, say rather
+pleads and suspends judgment. I think, if I were left to myself, I
+should hang a rogue and then write his apology and subscribe to a neat
+monument, commemorating, not his virtues, but his misfortunes. I should,
+perhaps, adorn the marble with emblems, as is the custom with regard to
+the more regular and normally constituted members of society. It would
+not be proper to put the image of a lamb upon the stone which marked the
+resting-place of him of the private cemetery. But I would not hesitate
+to place the effigy of a wolf or a hyena upon the monument. I do not
+judge these animals, I only kill them or shut them up. I presume they
+stand just as well with their Maker as lambs and kids, and the existence
+of such beings is a perpetual plea for God Almighty's poor, yelling,
+scalping Indians, his weasand-stopping Thugs, his despised felons, his
+murdering miscreants, and all the unfortunates whom we, picked
+individuals of a picked class of a picked race, scrubbed, combed, and
+catechized from our cradles upward, undertake to find accommodations for
+in another state of being where it is to be hoped they will have a better
+chance than they had in this.
+
+The Master paused, and took off his great round spectacles. I could not
+help thinking that he looked benevolent enough to pardon Judas Iscariot
+just at that moment, though his features can knot themselves up pretty,
+formidably on occasion.
+
+--You are somewhat of a phrenologist, I judge, by the way you talk of
+instinctive and inherited tendencies--I said.
+
+--They tell me I ought to be,--he answered, parrying my question, as I
+thought.---I have had a famous chart made out of my cerebral organs,
+according to which I ought to have been--something more than a poor
+Magister Artaum.
+
+--I thought a shade of regret deepened the lines on his broad,
+antique-looking forehead, and I began talking about all the sights I had
+seen in the way of monstrosities, of which I had a considerable list, as
+you will see when I tell you my weakness in that direction. This, you
+understand, Beloved, is private and confidential.
+
+I pay my quarter of a dollar and go into all the side-shows that follow
+the caravans and circuses round the country. I have made friends of all
+the giants and all the dwarfs. I became acquainted with Monsieur Bihin,
+le plus bel homme du monde, and one of the biggest, a great many years
+ago, and have kept up my agreeable relations with him ever since. He is
+a most interesting giant, with a softness of voice and tenderness of
+feeling which I find very engaging. I was on friendly terms with Mr.
+Charles Freeman, a very superior giant of American birth, seven feet
+four, I think, in height, "double-jointed," of mylodon muscularity, the
+same who in a British prize-ring tossed the Tipton Slasher from one side
+of the rope to the other, and now lies stretched, poor fellow! in a
+mighty grave in the same soil which holds the sacred ashes of Cribb, and
+the honored dust of Burke,--not the one "commonly called the sublime,"
+but that other Burke to whom Nature had denied the sense of hearing lest
+he should be spoiled by listening to the praises of the admiring circles
+which looked on his dear-bought triumphs. Nor have I despised those
+little ones whom that devout worshipper of Nature in her exceptional
+forms, the distinguished Barnum, has introduced to the notice of mankind.
+The General touches his chapeau to me, and the Commodore gives me a
+sailor's greeting. I have had confidential interviews with the
+double-headed daughter of Africa,--so far, at least, as her twofold
+personality admitted of private confidences. I have listened to the
+touching experiences of the Bearded Lady, whose rough cheeks belie her
+susceptible heart. Miss Jane Campbell has allowed me to question her on
+the delicate subject of avoirdupois equivalents; and the armless fair
+one, whose embrace no monarch could hope to win, has wrought me a
+watch-paper with those despised digits which have been degraded from
+gloves to boots in our evolution from the condition of quadrumana.
+
+I hope you have read my experiences as good-naturedly as the old Master
+listened to them. He seemed to be pleased with my whim, and promised to
+go with me to see all the side-shows of the next caravan. Before I left
+him he wrote my name in a copy of the new edition of his book, telling me
+that it would not all be new to me by a great deal, for he often talked
+what he had printed to make up for having printed a good deal of what he
+had talked.
+
+Here is the passage of his Poem the Young Astronomer read to us.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ IV
+
+ From my lone turret as I look around
+ O'er the green meadows to the ring of blue,
+ From slope, from summit, and from half-hid vale
+ The sky is stabbed with dagger-pointed spires,
+ Their gilded symbols whirling in the wind,
+ Their brazen tongues proclaiming to the world,
+ Here truth is sold, the only genuine ware;
+ See that it has our trade-mark!
+ You will buy Poison instead of food across the way,
+ The lies of--this or that, each several name
+ The standard's blazon and the battle-cry
+ Of some true-gospel faction, and again
+ The token of the Beast to all beside.
+ And grouped round each I see a huddling crowd
+ Alike in all things save the words they use;
+ In love, in longing, hate and fear the same.
+
+ Whom do we trust and serve? We speak of one
+ And bow to many; Athens still would find
+ The shrines of all she worshipped safe within
+ Our tall barbarian temples, and the thrones
+ That crowned Olympus mighty as of old.
+ The god of music rules the Sabbath choir;
+ The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine
+ To help us please the dilettante's ear;
+ Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave
+ The portals of the temple where we knelt
+ And listened while the god of eloquence
+ (Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised
+ In sable vestments) with that other god
+ Somnus, the son of Erebus and Nog,
+ Fights in unequal contest for our souls;
+ The dreadful sovereign of the under world
+ Still shakes his sceptre at us, and we hear
+ The baying of the triple-throated hound;
+ Eros-is young as ever, and as fair
+ The lovely Goddess born of ocean's foam.
+
+ These be thy gods, O Israel! Who is he,
+ The one ye name and tell us that ye serve,
+ Whom ye would call me from my lonely tower
+ To worship with the many-headed throng?
+ Is it the God that walked in Eden's grove
+ In the cool hour to seek our guilty sire?
+ The God who dealt with Abraham as the sons
+ Of that old patriarch deal with other men?
+ The jealous God of Moses, one who feels
+ An image as an insult, and is wroth
+ With him who made it and his child unborn?
+ The God who plagued his people for the sin
+ Of their adulterous king, beloved of him,
+ The same who offers to a chosen few
+ The right to praise him in eternal song
+ While a vast shrieking world of endless woe
+ Blends its dread chorus with their rapturous hymn?
+ Is this the God ye mean, or is it he
+ Who heeds the sparrow's fall, whose loving heart
+ Is as the pitying father's to his child,
+ Whose lesson to his children is, "Forgive,"
+ Whose plea for all, "They know not what they do"
+
+ I claim the right of knowing whom I serve,
+ Else is my service idle; He that asks
+ My homage asks it from a reasoning soul.
+ To crawl is not to worship; we have learned
+ A drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee,
+ Hanging our prayers on binges, till we ape
+ The flexures of the many-jointed worm.
+ Asia has taught her Aliabs and salaams
+ To the world's children,--we have grown to men!
+ We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feet
+ To find a virgin forest, as we lay
+ The beams of our rude temple, first of all
+ Must frame its doorway high enough for man
+ To pass unstooping; knowing as we do
+ That He who shaped us last of living forms
+ Has long enough been served by creeping things,
+ Reptiles that left their foot-prints in the sand
+ Of old sea-margins that have turned to stone,
+ And men who learned their ritual; we demand
+ To know him first, then trust him and then love
+ When we have found him worthy of our love,
+ Tried by our own poor hearts and not before;
+ He must be truer than the truest friend,
+ He must be tenderer than a woman's love,
+ A father better than the best of sires;
+ Kinder than she who bore us, though we sin
+ Oftener than did the brother we are told,
+ We-poor ill-tempered mortals-must forgive,
+ Though seven times sinning threescore times and ten.
+
+ This is the new world's gospel: Be ye men!
+ Try well the legends of the children's time;
+ Ye are the chosen people, God has led
+ Your steps across the desert of the deep
+ As now across the desert of the shore;
+ Mountains are cleft before you as the sea
+ Before the wandering tribe of Israel's sons;
+ Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan,
+ Its coming printed on the western sky,
+ A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame;
+ Your prophets are a hundred unto one
+ Of them of old who cried, "Thus saith the Lord";
+ They told of cities that should fall in heaps,
+ But yours of mightier cities that shall rise
+ Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,
+ Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;
+ The tree of knowledge in your garden grows
+ Not single, but at every humble door;
+ Its branches lend you their immortal food,
+ That fills you with the sense of what ye are,
+ No servants of an altar hewed and carved
+ From senseless stone by craft of human hands,
+ Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze,
+ But masters of the charm with which they work
+ To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!
+
+ Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit,
+ Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!
+ Ye are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods,
+ Each day ye break an image in your shrine
+ And plant a fairer image where it stood
+ Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed,
+ Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes?
+ Fit object for a tender mother's love!
+ Why not? It was a bargain duly made
+ For these same infants through the surety's act
+ Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven,
+ By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well
+ His fitness for the task,--this, even this,
+ Was the true doctrine only yesterday
+ As thoughts are reckoned,--and to-day you hear
+ In words that sound as if from human tongues
+ Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past
+ That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
+ As would the saurians of the age of slime,
+ Awaking from their stony sepulchres
+ And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!
+
+Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,--the
+Master and myself and our two ladies. This was the little party we got
+up to hear him read. I do not think much of it was very new to the
+Master or myself. At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is
+the kind of talk the "natural man," as the theologians call him, is apt
+to fall into.
+
+--I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used
+the term "natural man", I ventured to suggest.
+
+--I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?--said the
+Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if he can
+help himself.---But at any rate,--he continued,--the "natural man," so
+called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn't make his
+nature, and the Devil did n't make it; and if the Almighty made it, I
+never saw or heard of anything he made that wasn't worth attending to.
+
+The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound harshly
+in these crude thoughts of his. He had been taught strange things, he
+said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way
+out of many of his early superstitions. As for the Young Girl, our
+Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully tired (at
+which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he promised
+that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a lesson in
+astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar, at which
+she blushed deeper than before, and said something which certainly was
+not No.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the Master
+proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young Astronomer into
+our immediate neighborhood. The Scarabee was to move into the place of
+our late unlamented associate, the Man of Letters, so called. I was to
+take his place, the Master to take mine, and the young man that which had
+been occupied by the Master. The advantages of this change were obvious.
+The old Master likes an audience, plainly enough; and with myself on one
+side of him, and the young student of science, whose speculative turn is
+sufficiently shown in the passages from his poem, on the other side, he
+may feel quite sure of being listened to. There is only one trouble in
+the arrangement, and that is that it brings this young man not only close
+to us, but also next to our Scheherezade.
+
+I am obliged to confess that he has shown occasional marks of inattention
+even while the Master was discoursing in a way that I found agreeable
+enough. I am quite sure it is no intentional disrespect to the old
+Master. It seems to me rather that he has become interested in the
+astronomical lessons he has been giving the Young Girl. He has studied
+so much alone, that it is naturally a pleasure to him to impart some of
+his knowledge. As for his young pupil, she has often thought of being a
+teacher herself, so that she is of course very glad to acquire any
+accomplishment that may be useful to her in that capacity. I do not see
+any reason why some of the boarders should have made such remarks as they
+have done. One cannot teach astronomy to advantage, without going out of
+doors, though I confess that when two young people go out by daylight to
+study the stars, as these young folks have done once or twice, I do not
+so much wonder at a remark or suggestion from those who have nothing
+better to do than study their neighbors.
+
+I ought to have told the reader before this that I found, as I suspected,
+that our innocent-looking Scheherezade was at the bottom of the popgun
+business. I watched her very closely, and one day, when the little
+monkey made us all laugh by stopping the Member of the Haouse in the
+middle of a speech he was repeating to us,--it was his great effort of
+the season on a bill for the protection of horn-pout in Little Muddy
+River,--I caught her making the signs that set him going. At a slight
+tap of her knife against her plate, he got all ready, and presently I saw
+her cross her knife and fork upon her plate, and as she did so, pop! went
+the small piece of artillery. The Member of the Haouse was just saying
+that this bill hit his constitooents in their most vital--when a pellet
+hit him in the feature of his countenance most exposed to aggressions and
+least tolerant of liberties. The Member resented this unparliamentary
+treatment by jumping up from his chair and giving the small aggressor a
+good shaking, at the same time seizing the implement which had caused his
+wrath and breaking it into splinters. The Boy blubbered, the Young Girl
+changed color, and looked as if she would cry, and that was the last of
+these interruptions.
+
+I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for it
+answered all the purpose of "the previous question" in a deliberative
+assembly. No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in setting the little
+engine at work, but she cut short a good many disquisitions that
+threatened to be tedious. I find myself often wishing for her and her
+small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in company where I am supposed
+to be enjoying myself. When my friend the politician gets too far into
+the personal details of the quorum pars magna fui, I find myself all at
+once exclaiming in mental articulation, Popgun! When my friend the
+story-teller begins that protracted narrative which has often emptied me
+of all my voluntary laughter for the evening, he has got but a very
+little way when I say to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from
+that popgun! In short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a
+jaw-stopper and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party,
+without wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with
+his popgun.
+
+How clearly I see now into the mechanism of the Young Girl's audacious
+contrivance for regulating our table-talk! Her brain is tired half the
+time, and she is too nervous to listen patiently to what a quieter person
+would like well enough, or at least would not be annoyed by. It amused
+her to invent a scheme for managing the headstrong talkers, and also let
+off a certain spirit of mischief which in some of these nervous girls
+shows itself in much more questionable forms. How cunning these
+half-hysteric young persons are, to be sure! I had to watch a long time
+before I detected the telegraphic communication between the two
+conspirators. I have no doubt she had sedulously schooled the little
+monkey to his business, and found great delight in the task of
+instruction.
+
+But now that our Scheherezade has become a scholar instead of a teacher,
+she seems to be undergoing a remarkable transformation. Astronomy is
+indeed a noble science. It may well kindle the enthusiasm of a youthful
+nature. I fancy at times that I see something of that starry light which
+I noticed in the young man's eyes gradually kindling in hers. But can it
+be astronomy alone that does it? Her color comes and goes more readily
+than when the old Master sat next her on the left. It is having this
+young man at her side, I suppose. Of course it is. I watch her with
+great, I may say tender interest. If he would only fall in love with
+her, seize upon her wandering affections and fancies as the Romans seized
+the Sabine virgins, lift her out of herself and her listless and weary
+drudgeries, stop the outflow of this young life which is draining itself
+away in forced literary labor--dear me, dear me--if, if, if--
+
+ "If I were God
+ An' ye were Martin Elginbrod!"
+
+I am afraid all this may never be. I fear that he is too much given to
+lonely study, to self-companionship, to all sorts of questionings, to
+looking at life as at a solemn show where he is only a spectator. I dare
+not build up a romance on what I have yet seen. My reader may, but I
+will answer for nothing. I shall wait and see.
+
+The old Master and I have at last made that visit to the Scarabee which
+we had so long promised ourselves.
+
+When we knocked at his door he came and opened it, instead of saying,
+Come in. He was surprised, I have no doubt, at the sound of our
+footsteps; for he rarely has a visitor, except the little monkey of a
+boy, and he may have thought a troop of marauders were coming to rob him
+of his treasures. Collectors feel so rich in the possession of their
+rarer specimens, that they forget how cheap their precious things seem to
+common eyes, and are as afraid of being robbed as if they were dealers in
+diamonds. They have the name of stealing from each other now and then,
+it is true, but many of their priceless possessions would hardly tempt a
+beggar. Values are artificial: you will not be able to get ten cents of
+the year 1799 for a dime.
+
+The Scarabee was reassured as soon as he saw our faces, and he welcomed
+us not ungraciously into his small apartment. It was hard to find a
+place to sit down, for all the chairs were already occupied by cases and
+boxes full of his favorites. I began, therefore, looking round the room.
+Bugs of every size and aspect met my eyes wherever they turned. I felt
+for the moment as I suppose a man may feel in a fit of delirium tremens.
+Presently my attention was drawn towards a very odd-looking insect on the
+mantelpiece. This animal was incessantly raising its arms as if towards
+heaven and clasping them together, as though it were wrestling in prayer.
+
+Do look at this creature,--I said to the Master, he seems to be very hard
+at work at his devotions.
+
+Mantas religiosa,--said the Master,--I know the praying rogue. Mighty
+devout and mighty cruel; crushes everything he can master, or impales it
+on his spiny shanks and feeds upon it, like a gluttonous wretch as he is.
+I have seen the Mantis religiosa on a larger scale than this, now and
+then. A sacred insect, sir,--sacred to many tribes of men; to the
+Hottentots, to the Turks, yes, sir, and to the Frenchmen, who call the
+rascal prie dieu, and believe him to have special charge of children that
+have lost their way.
+
+Doesn't it seem as if there was a vein of satire as well as of fun that
+ran through the solemn manifestations of creative wisdom? And of
+deception too--do you see how nearly those dried leaves resemble an
+insect?
+
+They do, indeed,--I answered,--but not so closely as to deceive me. They
+remind me of an insect, but I could not mistake them for one.
+
+--Oh, you couldn't mistake those dried leaves for an insect, hey? Well,
+how can you mistake that insect for dried leaves? That is the question;
+for insect it is,--phyllum siccifolium, the "walking leaf," as some have
+called it.--The Master had a hearty laugh at my expense.
+
+The Scarabee did not seem to be amused at the Master's remarks or at my
+blunder. Science is always perfectly serious to him; and he would no
+more laugh over anything connected with his study, than a clergyman would
+laugh at a funeral.
+
+They send me all sorts of trumpery,--he said, Orthoptera and Lepidoptera;
+as if a coleopterist--a scarabeeist--cared for such things. This
+business is no boy's play to me. The insect population of the world is
+not even catalogued yet, and a lifetime given to the scarabees is a small
+contribution enough to their study. I like your men of general
+intelligence well enough,--your Linnwuses and your Buffons and your
+Cuviers; but Cuvier had to go to Latreille for his insects, and if
+Latreille had been able to consult me,--yes, me, gentlemen!--he would n't
+have made the blunders he did about some of the coleoptera.
+
+The old Master, as I think you must have found out by this time,--you,
+Beloved, I mean, who read every word,--has a reasonably good opinion, as
+perhaps he has a right to have, of his own intelligence and acquirements.
+The Scarabee's exultation and glow as he spoke of the errors of the great
+entomologist which he himself could have corrected, had the effect on the
+old Master which a lusty crow has upon the feathered champion of the
+neighboring barnyard. He too knew something about insects. Had he not
+discovered a, new tabanus? Had he not made preparations of the very
+coleoptera the Scarabee studied so exclusively,--preparations which the
+illustrious Swammerdam would not have been ashamed of, and dissected a
+melolontha as exquisitely as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it? So
+the Master, recalling these studies of his and certain difficult and
+disputed points at which he had labored in one of his entomological
+paroxysms, put a question which there can be little doubt was intended to
+puzzle the Scarabee, and perhaps,--for the best of us is human (I am
+beginning to love the old Master, but he has his little weaknesses, thank
+Heaven, like the rest of us),--I say perhaps, was meant to show that some
+folks knew as much about some things as some other folks.
+
+The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions
+as--perhaps, again--the Master may have thought he would. He looked a
+mild surprise, but remained as quiet as one of his own beetles when you
+touch him and he makes believe he is dead. The blank silence became
+oppressive. Was the Scarabee crushed, as so many of his namesakes are
+crushed, under the heel of this trampling omniscient?
+
+At last the Scarabee creaked out very slowly, "Did I understand you to
+ask the following question, to wit?" and so forth; for I was quite out of
+my depth, and only know that he repeated the Master's somewhat complex
+inquiry, word for word.
+
+--That was exactly my question,--said the Master,--and I hope it is not
+uncivil to ask one which seems to me to be a puzzler.
+
+Not uncivil in the least,--said the Scarabee, with something as much like
+a look of triumph as his dry face permitted,--not uncivil at all, but a
+rather extraordinary question to ask at this date of entomological
+history. I settled that question some years ago, by a series of
+dissections, six-and-thirty in number, reported in an essay I can show
+you and would give you a copy of, but that I am a little restricted in my
+revenue, and our Society has to be economical, so I have but this one.
+You see, sir,--and he went on with elytra and antennae and tarsi and
+metatarsi and tracheae and stomata and wing-muscles and leg-muscles and
+ganglions,--all plain enough, I do not doubt, to those accustomed to
+handling dor-bugs and squash-bugs and such undesirable objects of
+affection to all but naturalists.
+
+He paused when he got through, not for an answer, for there evidently was
+none, but to see how the Master would take it. The Scarabee had had it
+all his own way.
+
+The Master was loyal to his own generous nature. He felt as a peaceful
+citizen might feel who had squared off at a stranger for some supposed
+wrong, and suddenly discovered that he was undertaking to chastise Mr.
+Dick Curtis, "the pet of the Fancy," or Mr. Joshua Hudson; "the John Bull
+fighter."
+
+He felt the absurdity of his discomfiture, for he turned to me
+good-naturedly, and said,
+
+ "Poor Johnny Raw! What madness could impel
+ So rum a flat to face so prime a swell?"
+
+To tell the truth, I rather think the Master enjoyed his own defeat. The
+Scarabee had a right to his victory; a man does not give his life to the
+study of a single limited subject for nothing, and the moment we come
+across a first-class expert we begin to take a pride in his superiority.
+It cannot offend us, who have no right at all to be his match on his own
+ground. Besides, there is a very curious sense of satisfaction in
+getting a fair chance to sneer at ourselves and scoff at our own
+pretensions. The first person of our dual consciousness has been
+smirking and rubbing his hands and felicitating himself on his
+innumerable superiorities, until we have grown a little tired of him.
+Then, when the other fellow, the critic, the cynic, the Shimei, who has
+been quiet, letting self-love and self-glorification have their perfect
+work, opens fire upon the first half of our personality and overwhelms it
+with that wonderful vocabulary of abuse of which he is the unrivalled
+master, there is no denying that he enjoys it immensely; and as he is
+ourself for the moment, or at least the chief portion of ourself (the
+other half-self retiring into a dim corner of semiconsciousness and
+cowering under the storm of sneers and contumely,--you follow me
+perfectly, Beloved,--the way is as plain as the path of the babe to the
+maternal fount), as, I say, the abusive fellow is the chief part of us
+for the time, and he likes to exercise his slanderous vocabulary, we on
+the whole enjoy a brief season of self-depreciation and self-scolding
+very heartily.
+
+It is quite certain that both of us, the Master and myself, conceived on
+the instant a respect for the Scarabee which we had not before felt. He
+had grappled with one difficulty at any rate and mastered it. He had
+settled one thing, at least, so it appeared, in such a way that it was
+not to be brought up again. And now he was determined, if it cost him
+the effort of all his remaining days, to close another discussion and put
+forever to rest the anxious doubts about the larva of meloe.
+
+--Your thirty-six dissections must have cost you a deal of time and
+labor,--the Master said.
+
+--What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor?--answered
+the Scarabee.---It is my meat and drink to work over my beetles. My
+holidays are when I get a rare specimen. My rest is to watch the habits
+of insects, those that I do not pretend to study. Here is my muscarium,
+my home for house-flies; very interesting creatures; here they breed and
+buzz and feed and enjoy themselves, and die in a good old age of a few
+months. My favorite insect lives in this other case; she is at home, but
+in her private-chamber; you shall see her.
+
+He tapped on the glass lightly, and a large, gray, hairy spider came
+forth from the hollow of a funnel-like web.
+
+--And this is all the friend you have to love? said the Master, with a
+tenderness in his voice which made the question very significant.
+
+--Nothing else loves me better than she does, that I know of,--he
+answered.
+
+--To think of it! Not even a dog to lick his hand, or a cat to purr and
+rub her fur against him! Oh, these boarding-houses, these
+boarding-houses! What forlorn people one sees stranded on their desolate
+shores! Decayed gentlewomen with the poor wrecks of what once made their
+households beautiful, disposed around them in narrow chambers as they
+best may be, coming down day after day, poor souls! to sit at the board
+with strangers; their hearts full of sad memories which have no language
+but a sigh, no record but the lines of sorrow on their features; orphans,
+creatures with growing tendrils and nothing to cling to; lonely rich men,
+casting about them what to do with the wealth they never knew how to
+enjoy, when they shall no longer worry over keeping and increasing it;
+young men and young women, left to their instincts, unguarded, unwatched,
+save by malicious eyes, which are sure to be found and to find occupation
+in these miscellaneous collections of human beings; and now and then a
+shred of humanity like this little adust specialist, with just the
+resources needed to keep the "radical moisture" from entirely exhaling
+from his attenuated organism, and busying himself over a point of
+science, or compiling a hymn-book, or editing a grammar or a
+dictionary;--such are the tenants of boarding-houses whom we cannot think
+of without feeling how sad it is when the wind is not tempered to the
+shorn lamb; when the solitary, whose hearts are shrivelling, are not set
+in families!
+
+The Master was greatly interested in the Scarabee's Muscarium.
+
+--I don't remember,--he said,--that I have heard of such a thing as that
+before. Mighty curious creatures, these same house-flies! Talk about
+miracles! Was there ever anything more miraculous, so far as our common
+observation goes, than the coming and the going of these creatures? Why
+didn't Job ask where the flies come from and where they go to? I did not
+say that you and I don't know, but how many people do know anything about
+it? Where are the cradles of the young flies? Where are the cemeteries
+of the dead ones, or do they die at all except when we kill them? You
+think all the flies of the year are dead and gone, and there comes a warm
+day and all at once there is a general resurrection of 'em; they had been
+taking a nap, that is all.
+
+--I suppose you do not trust your spider in the Muscarium?--said I,
+addressing the Scarabee.
+
+--Not exactly,--he answered,--she is a terrible creature. She loves me,
+I think, but she is a killer and a cannibal among other insects. I wanted
+to pair her with a male spider, but it wouldn't do.
+
+-Wouldn't do?--said I,--why not? Don't spiders have their mates as well
+as other folks?
+
+-Oh yes, sometimes; but the females are apt to be particular, and if they
+don't like the mate you offer them they fall upon him and kill him and
+eat him up. You see they are a great deal bigger and stronger than the
+males, and they are always hungry and not always particularly anxious to
+have one of the other sex bothering round.
+
+--Woman's rights!--said I,--there you have it! Why don't those talking
+ladies take a spider as their emblem? Let them form arachnoid
+associations, spinsters and spiders would be a good motto.
+
+--The Master smiled. I think it was an eleemosynary smile, for my
+pleasantry seems to me a particularly basso rilievo, as I look upon it in
+cold blood. But conversation at the best is only a thin sprinkling of
+occasional felicities set in platitudes and commonplaces. I never heard
+people talk like the characters in the "School for Scandal,"--I should
+very much like to.---I say the Master smiled. But the Scarabee did not
+relax a muscle of his countenance.
+
+--There are persons whom the very mildest of faecetiae sets off into such
+convulsions of laughter, that one is afraid lest they should injure
+themselves. Even when a jest misses fire completely, so that it is no
+jest at all, but only a jocular intention, they laugh just as heartily.
+Leave out the point of your story, get the word wrong on the duplicity of
+which the pun that was to excite hilarity depended, and they still honor
+your abortive attempt with the most lusty and vociferous merriment.
+
+There is a very opposite class of persons whom anything in the nature of
+a joke perplexes, troubles, and even sometimes irritates, seeming to make
+them think they are trifled with, if not insulted. If you are fortunate
+enough to set the whole table laughing, one of this class of persons will
+look inquiringly round, as if something had happened, and, seeing
+everybody apparently amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed
+at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to
+hear. Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is
+nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people's
+laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known
+color-blindness with which many persons are afflicted as a congenital
+incapacity.
+
+I have never seen the Scarabee smile. I have seen him take off his
+goggles,--he breakfasts in these occasionally,--I suppose when he has
+been tiring his poor old eyes out over night gazing through his
+microscope,--I have seen him take his goggles off, I say, and stare about
+him, when the rest of us were laughing at something which amused us, but
+his features betrayed nothing more than a certain bewilderment, as if we
+had been foreigners talking in an unknown tongue. I do not think it was
+a mere fancy of mine that he bears a kind of resemblance to the tribe of
+insects he gives his life to studying. His shiny black coat; his rounded
+back, convex with years of stooping over his minute work; his angular
+movements, made natural to him by his habitual style of manipulation; the
+aridity of his organism, with which his voice is in perfect keeping;--all
+these marks of his special sedentary occupation are so nearly what might
+be expected, and indeed so much, in accordance with the more general fact
+that a man's aspect is subdued to the look of what he works in, that I do
+not feel disposed to accuse myself of exaggeration in my account of the
+Scarabee's appearance. But I think he has learned something else of his
+coleopterous friends. The beetles never smile. Their physiognomy is not
+adapted to the display of the emotions; the lateral movement of their
+jaws being effective for alimentary purposes, but very limited in its
+gamut of expression. It is with these unemotional beings that the
+Scarabee passes his life. He has but one object, and that is perfectly
+serious, to his mind, in fact, of absorbing interest and importance. In
+one aspect of the matter he is quite right, for if the Creator has taken
+the trouble to make one of His creatures in just such a way and not
+otherwise, from the beginning of its existence on our planet in ages of
+unknown remoteness to the present time, the man who first explains His
+idea to us is charged with a revelation. It is by no means impossible
+that there may be angels in the celestial hierarchy to whom it would be
+new and interesting. I have often thought that spirits of a higher order
+than man might be willing to learn something from a human mind like that
+of Newton, and I see no reason why an angelic being might not be glad to
+hear a lecture from Mr. Huxley, or Mr. Tyndall, or one of our friends at
+Cambridge.
+
+I have been sinuous as the Links of Forth seen from Stirling Castle, or
+as that other river which threads the Berkshire valley and runs, a
+perennial stream, through my memory,--from which I please myself with
+thinking that I have learned to wind without fretting against the shore,
+or forgetting cohere I am flowing,--sinuous, I say, but not jerky,--no,
+not jerky nor hard to follow for a reader of the right sort, in the prime
+of life and full possession of his or her faculties.
+
+--All this last page or so, you readily understand, has been my private
+talk with you, the Reader. The cue of the conversation which I
+interrupted by this digression is to be found in the words "a good
+motto;" from which I begin my account of the visit again.
+
+--Do you receive many visitors,--I mean vertebrates, not articulates?
+--said the Master.
+
+I thought this question might perhaps bring il disiato riso, the
+long-wished-for smile, but the Scarabee interpreted it in the simplest
+zoological sense, and neglected its hint of playfulness with the most
+absolute unconsciousness, apparently, of anything not entirely serious
+and literal.
+
+--You mean friends, I suppose,--he answered.--I have correspondents, but
+I have no friends except this spider. I live alone, except when I go to
+my subsection meetings; I get a box of insects now and then, and send a
+few beetles to coleopterists in other entomological districts; but
+science is exacting, and a man that wants to leave his record has not
+much time for friendship. There is no great chance either for making
+friends among naturalists. People that are at work on different things
+do not care a great deal for each other's specialties, and people that
+work on the same thing are always afraid lest one should get ahead of the
+other, or steal some of his ideas before he has made them public. There
+are none too many people you can trust in your laboratory. I thought I
+had a friend once, but he watched me at work and stole the discovery of a
+new species from me, and, what is more, had it named after himself.
+Since that time I have liked spiders better than men. They are hungry
+and savage, but at any rate they spin their own webs out of their own
+insides. I like very well to talk with gentlemen that play with my
+branch of entomology; I do not doubt it amused you, and if you want to
+see anything I can show you, I shall have no scruple in letting you see
+it. I have never had any complaint to make of amatoors.
+
+--Upon my honor,--I would hold my right hand up and take my Bible-oath,
+if it was not busy with the pen at this moment,--I do not believe the
+Scarabee had the least idea in the world of the satire on the student of
+the Order of Things implied in his invitation to the "amatoor." As for
+the Master, he stood fire perfectly, as he always does; but the idea that
+he, who had worked a considerable part of several seasons at examining
+and preparing insects, who believed himself to have given a new tabanus
+to the catalogue of native diptera, the idea that he was playing with
+science, and might be trusted anywhere as a harmless amateur, from whom
+no expert could possibly fear any anticipation of his unpublished
+discoveries, went beyond anything set down in that book of his which
+contained so much of the strainings of his wisdom.
+
+The poor little Scarabee began fidgeting round about this time, and
+uttering some half-audible words, apologetical, partly, and involving an
+allusion to refreshments. As he spoke, he opened a small cupboard, and
+as he did so out bolted an uninvited tenant of the same, long in person,
+sable in hue, and swift of movement, on seeing which the Scarabee simply
+said, without emotion, blatta, but I, forgetting what was due to good
+manners, exclaimed cockroach!
+
+We could not make up our minds to tax the Scarabee's hospitality, already
+levied upon by the voracious articulate. So we both alleged a state of
+utter repletion, and did not solve the mystery of the contents of the
+cupboard,--not too luxurious, it may be conjectured, and yet kindly
+offered, so that we felt there was a moist filament of the social
+instinct running like a nerve through that exsiccated and almost
+anhydrous organism.
+
+We left him with professions of esteem and respect which were real. We
+had gone, not to scoff, but very probably to smile, and I will not say we
+did not. But the Master was more thoughtful than usual.
+
+--If I had not solemnly dedicated myself to the study of the Order of
+Things,--he said,--I do verily believe I would give what remains to me of
+life to the investigation of some single point I could utterly eviscerate
+and leave finally settled for the instruction and, it may be, the
+admiration of all coming time. The keel ploughs ten thousand leagues of
+ocean and leaves no trace of its deep-graven furrows. The chisel scars
+only a few inches on the face of a rock, but the story it has traced is
+read by a hundred generations. The eagle leaves no track of his path, no
+memory of the place where he built his nest; but a patient mollusk has
+bored a little hole in a marble column of the temple of Serapis, and the
+monument of his labor outlasts the altar and the statue of the divinity.
+
+--Whew!--said I to myself,--that sounds a little like what we college
+boys used to call a "squirt."--The Master guessed my thought and said,
+smiling,
+
+--That is from one of my old lectures. A man's tongue wags along quietly
+enough, but his pen begins prancing as soon as it touches paper. I know
+what you are thinking--you're thinking this is a squirt. That word has
+taken the nonsense out of a good many high-stepping fellows. But it did
+a good deal of harm too, and it was a vulgar lot that applied it
+oftenest.
+
+I am at last perfectly satisfied that our Landlady has no designs on the
+Capitalist, and as well convinced that any fancy of mine that he was like
+to make love to her was a mistake. The good woman is too much absorbed
+in her children, and more especially in "the Doctor," as she delights to
+call her son, to be the prey of any foolish desire of changing her
+condition. She is doing very well as it is, and if the young man
+succeeds, as I have little question that he will, I think it probable
+enough that she will retire from her position as the head of a
+boarding-house. We have all liked the good woman who have lived with
+her,--I mean we three friends who have put ourselves on record. Her
+talk, I must confess, is a little diffuse and not always absolutely
+correct, according to the standard of the great Worcester; she is subject
+to lachrymose cataclysms and semiconvulsive upheavals when she reverts in
+memory to her past trials, and especially when she recalls the virtues of
+her deceased spouse, who was, I suspect, an adjunct such as one finds not
+rarely annexed to a capable matron in charge of an establishment like
+hers; that is to say, an easy-going, harmless, fetch-and-carry,
+carve-and-help, get-out-of-the-way kind of neuter, who comes up three
+times (as they say drowning people do) every day, namely, at breakfast,
+dinner, and tea, and disappears, submerged beneath the waves of life,
+during the intervals of these events.
+
+It is a source of genuine delight to me, who am of a kindly nature
+enough, according to my own reckoning, to watch the good woman, and see
+what looks of pride and affection she bestows upon her Benjamin, and how,
+in spite of herself, the maternal feeling betrays its influence in her
+dispensations of those delicacies which are the exceptional element in
+our entertainments. I will not say that Benjamin's mess, like his
+Scripture namesake's, is five times as large as that of any of the
+others, for this would imply either an economical distribution to the
+guests in general or heaping the poor young man's plate in a way that
+would spoil the appetite of an Esquimau, but you may be sure he fares
+well if anybody does; and I would have you understand that our Landlady
+knows what is what as well as who is who.
+
+I begin really to entertain very sanguine expectations of young Doctor
+Benjamin Franklin. He has lately been treating a patient of whose
+good-will may prove of great importance to him. The Capitalist hurt one
+of his fingers somehow or other, and requested our young doctor to take a
+look at it. The young doctor asked nothing better than to take charge of
+the case, which proved more serious than might have been at first
+expected, and kept him in attendance more than a week. There was one
+very odd thing about it. The Capitalist seemed to have an idea that he
+was like to be ruined in the matter of bandages,--small strips of worn
+linen which any old woman could have spared him from her rag-bag, but
+which, with that strange perversity which long habits of economy give to
+a good many elderly people, he seemed to think were as precious as if
+they had been turned into paper and stamped with promises to pay in
+thousands, from the national treasury. It was impossible to get this
+whim out of him, and the young doctor had tact enough to humor him in it.
+All this did not look very promising for the state of mind in which the
+patient was like to receive his bill for attendance when that should be
+presented. Doctor Benjamin was man enough, however, to come up to the
+mark, and sent him in such an account as it was becoming to send a man of
+ample means who had been diligently and skilfully cared for. He looked
+forward with some uncertainty as to how it would be received. Perhaps
+his patient would try to beat him down, and Doctor Benjamin made up his
+mind to have the whole or nothing. Perhaps he would pay the whole
+amount, but with a look, and possibly a word, that would make every
+dollar of it burn like a blister.
+
+Doctor Benjamin's conjectures were not unnatural, but quite remote from
+the actual fact. As soon as his patient had got entirely well, the young
+physician sent in his bill. The Capitalist requested him to step into
+his room with him, and paid the full charge in the handsomest and most
+gratifying way, thanking him for his skill and attention, and assuring
+him that he had had great satisfaction in submitting himself to such
+competent hands, and should certainly apply to him again in case he
+should have any occasion for a medical adviser. We must not be too
+sagacious in judging people by the little excrescences of their
+character. Ex pede Herculem may often prove safe enough, but ex verruca
+Tullium is liable to mislead a hasty judge of his fellow-men.
+
+I have studied the people called misers and thought a good deal about
+them. In former years I used to keep a little gold by me in order to
+ascertain for myself exactly the amount of pleasure to be got out of
+handling it; this being the traditional delight of the old-fashioned
+miser. It is by no means to be despised. Three or four hundred dollars
+in double-eagles will do very well to experiment on. There is something
+very agreeable in the yellow gleam, very musical in the metallic clink,
+very satisfying in the singular weight, and very stimulating in the
+feeling that all the world over these same yellow disks are the
+master-keys that let one in wherever he wants to go, the servants that
+bring him pretty nearly everything he wants, except virtue,--and a good
+deal of what passes for that. I confess, then, to an honest liking for
+the splendors and the specific gravity and the manifold potentiality of
+the royal metal, and I understand, after a certain imperfect fashion, the
+delight that an old ragged wretch, starving himself in a crazy hovel,
+takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen pots
+with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and fingering
+the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of earthly and
+angelic and diabolic energy. A miser pouring out his guineas into his
+palm and bathing his shrivelled and trembling hands in the yellow heaps
+before him, is not the prosaic being we are in the habit of thinking him.
+He is a dreamer, almost a poet. You and I read a novel or a poem to help
+our imaginations to build up palaces, and transport us into the emotional
+states and the felicitous conditions of the ideal characters pictured in
+the book we are reading. But think of him and the significance of the
+symbols he is handling as compared with the empty syllables and words we
+are using to build our aerial edifices with! In this hand he holds the
+smile of beauty and in that the dagger of revenge. The contents of that
+old glove will buy him the willing service of many an adroit sinner, and
+with what that coarse sack contains he can purchase the prayers of holy
+men for all succeeding time. In this chest is a castle in Spain, a real
+one, and not only in Spain, but anywhere he will choose to have it. If
+he would know what is the liberality of judgment of any of the straiter
+sects, he has only to hand over that box of rouleaux to the trustees of
+one of its educational institutions for the endowment of two or three
+professorships. If he would dream of being remembered by coming
+generations, what monument so enduring as a college building that shall
+bear his name, and even when its solid masonry shall crumble give place
+to another still charged with the same sacred duty of perpetuating his
+remembrance. Who was Sir Matthew Holworthy, that his name is a household
+word on the lips of thousands of scholars, and will be centuries hence,
+as that of Walter de Merton, dead six hundred years ago, is to-day at
+Oxford? Who was Mistress Holden, that she should be blessed among women
+by having her name spoken gratefully and the little edifice she caused to
+be erected preserved as her monument from generation to generation? All
+these possibilities, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, the
+pride of life; the tears of grateful orphans by the gallon; the prayers
+of Westminster Assembly's Catechism divines by the thousand; the masses
+of priests by the century;--all these things, and more if more there be
+that the imagination of a lover of gold is likely to range over, the
+miser hears and sees and feels and hugs and enjoys as he paddles with his
+lean hands among the sliding, shining, ringing, innocent-looking bits of
+yellow metal, toying with them as the lion-tamer handles the great
+carnivorous monster, whose might and whose terrors are child's play to
+the latent forces and power of harm-doing of the glittering counters
+played with in the great game between angels and devils.
+
+I have seen a good deal of misers, and I think I understand them as well
+as most persons do. But the Capitalist's economy in rags and his
+liberality to the young doctor are very oddly contrasted with each other.
+I should not be surprised at any time to hear that he had endowed a
+scholarship or professorship or built a college dormitory, in spite of
+his curious parsimony in old linen.
+
+I do not know where our Young Astronomer got the notions that he
+expresses so freely in the lines that follow. I think the statement is
+true, however, which I see in one of the most popular Cyclopaedias, that
+"the non-clerical mind in all ages is disposed to look favorably upon the
+doctrine of the universal restoration to holiness and happiness of all
+fallen intelligences, whether human or angelic." Certainly, most of the
+poets who have reached the heart of men, since Burns dropped the tear for
+poor "auld Nickie-ben" that softened the stony-hearted theology of
+Scotland, have had "non-clerical" minds, and I suppose our young friend
+is in his humble way an optimist like them. What he says in verse is
+very much the same thing as what is said in prose in all companies, and
+thought by a great many who are thankful to anybody that will say it for
+them,--not a few clerical as wall as "non-clerical" persons among them.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ V
+
+ What am I but the creature Thou hast made?
+ What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?
+ What hope I but Thy mercy and Thy love?
+ Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?
+ Whose hand protect me from myself but Thine?
+
+ I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,
+ Call on my sire to shield me from the ills
+ That still beset my path, not trying me
+ With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,
+ He knowing I shall use them to my harm,
+ And find a tenfold misery in the sense
+ That in my childlike folly I have sprung
+ The trap upon myself as vermin use
+ Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.
+ Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on
+ To sweet perdition, but the self-same power
+ That set the fearful engine to destroy
+ His wretched offspring (as the Rabbis tell),
+ And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs
+ In such a show of innocent sweet flowers
+ It lured the sinless angels and they fell?
+
+ Ah! He who prayed the prayer of all mankind
+ Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea
+ For erring souls before the courts of heaven,
+ Save us from being tempted,--lest we fall!
+ If we are only as the potter's clay
+ Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
+ And broken into shards if we offend
+ The eye of Him who made us, it is well;
+ Such love as the insensate lump of clay
+ That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel
+ Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,
+ --Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return
+ To the great Master-workman for his care,
+ Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay,
+ Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads
+ That make it conscious in its framer's hand;
+ And this He must remember who has filled
+ These vessels with the deadly draught of life,
+ Life, that means death to all it claims. Our love
+ Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven,
+ A faint reflection of the light divine;
+ The sun must warm the earth before the rose
+ Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.
+
+ He yields some fraction of the Maker's right
+ Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain;
+ Is there not something in the pleading eye
+ Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns
+ The law that bids it suffer? Has it not
+ A claim for some remembrance in the book
+ That fills its pages with the idle words
+ Spoken of men? Or is it only clay,
+ Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand,
+ Yet all his own to treat it as he will
+ And when he will to cast it at his feet,
+ Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?
+ My dog loves me, but could he look beyond
+ His earthly master, would his love extend
+ To Him who--Hush! I will not doubt that He
+ Is better than our fears, and will not wrong
+ The least, the meanest of created things!
+
+ He would not trust me with the smallest orb
+ That circles through the sky; he would not give
+ A meteor to my guidance; would not leave
+ The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand;
+ He locks my beating heart beneath its bars
+ And keeps the key himself; he measures out
+ The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood,
+ Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,
+ Each in its season; ties me to my home,
+ My race, my time, my nation, and my creed
+ So closely that if I but slip my wrist
+ Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,
+ Men say, "He hath a devil"; he has lent
+ All that I hold in trust, as unto one
+ By reason of his weakness and his years
+ Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee
+ Of those most common things he calls his own
+ And yet--my Rabbi tells me--he has left
+ The care of that to which a million worlds.
+ Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,
+ Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,
+ To the weak guidance of our baby hands,
+ Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,
+ Let the foul fiends have access at their will,
+ Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,
+ Our hearts already poisoned through and through
+ With the fierce virus of ancestral sin.
+ If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth,
+ Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?
+ Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,
+ And offer more than room enough for all
+ That pass its portals; but the underworld,
+ The godless realm, the place where demons forge
+ Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,
+ Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while
+ Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs
+ Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,
+ And all the erring instincts of their tribe,
+ Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin,"
+ Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail
+ To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay
+ And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!
+
+ Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;
+ Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.
+ He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,
+ But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain
+ At Error's gilded crest, where in the van
+ Of earth's great army, mingling with the best
+ And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud
+ The battle-cries that yesterday have led
+ The host of Truth to victory, but to-day
+ Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,
+ He leads his dazzled cohorts. God has made
+ This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;
+ With every breath I sigh myself away
+ And take my tribute from the wandering wind
+ To fan the flame of life's consuming fire;
+ So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,
+ And burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,
+ Where all the harvest long ago was reaped
+ And safely garnered in the ancient barns,
+ But still the gleaners, groping for their food,
+ Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,
+ While the young reapers flash their glittering steel
+ Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!
+
+We listened to these lines in silence. They were evidently written
+honestly, and with feeling, and no doubt meant to be reverential. I
+thought, however, the Lady looked rather serious as he finished reading.
+The Young Girl's cheeks were flushed, but she was not in the mood for
+criticism.
+
+As we came away the Master said to me--The stubble-fields are mighty slow
+to take fire. These young fellows catch up with the world's ideas one
+after another,--they have been tamed a long while, but they find them
+running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae naturae. They
+remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first feathers they see, and
+bring down a barnyard fowl. But the chicken may be worth bagging for all
+that, he said, good-humoredly.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Caveat Lector. Let the reader look out for himself. The old Master,
+whose words I have so frequently quoted and shall quote more of, is a
+dogmatist who lays down the law, ex cathedra, from the chair of his own
+personality. I do not deny that he has the ambition of knowing something
+about a greater number of subjects than any one man ought to meddle with,
+except in a very humble and modest way. And that is not his way. There
+was no doubt something of, humorous bravado in his saying that the actual
+"order of things" did not offer a field sufficiently ample for his
+intelligence. But if I found fault with him, which would be easy enough,
+I should say that he holds and expresses definite opinions about matters
+that he could afford to leave open questions, or ask the judgment of
+others about. But I do not want to find fault with him. If he does not
+settle all the points he speaks of so authoritatively, he sets me
+thinking about them, and I like a man as a companion who is not afraid of
+a half-truth. I know he says some things peremptorily that he may
+inwardly debate with himself. There are two ways of dealing with
+assertions of this kind. One may attack them on the false side and
+perhaps gain a conversational victory. But I like better to take them up
+on the true side and see how much can be made of that aspect of the
+dogmatic assertion. It is the only comfortable way of dealing with
+persons like the old Master.
+
+There have been three famous talkers in Great Britain, either of whom
+would illustrate what I say about dogmatists well enough for my purpose.
+You cannot doubt to what three I refer: Samuel the First, Samuel the
+Second, and Thomas, last of the Dynasty. (I mean the living Thomas and
+not Thomas B.)
+
+I say the last of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on the
+imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility. If he
+is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who
+knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any
+wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like to know. I
+find myself, at certain intervals, in the society of a number of experts
+in science, literature, and art, who cover a pretty wide range, taking
+them all together, of human knowledge. I have not the least doubt that
+if the great Dr. Samuel Johnson should come in and sit with this company
+at one of their Saturday dinners, he would be listened to, as he always
+was, with respect and attention. But there are subjects upon which the
+great talker could speak magisterially in his time and at his club, upon
+which so wise a man would express himself guardedly at the meeting where
+I have supposed him a guest. We have a scientific man or two among us,
+for instance, who would be entitled to smile at the good Doctor's
+estimate of their labors, as I give it here:
+
+"Of those that spin out life in trifles and die without a memorial, many
+flatter themselves with high opinion of their own importance and imagine
+that they are every day adding some improvement to human life."--"Some
+turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone, and
+find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some
+register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
+is changeable.
+
+"There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless
+liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will grow
+hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the effect
+expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again."
+
+I cannot transcribe this extract without an intense inward delight in its
+wit and a full recognition of its thorough half-truthfulness. Yet if
+while the great moralist is indulging in these vivacities, he can be
+imagined as receiving a message from Mr. Boswell or Mrs. Thrale flashed
+through the depths of the ocean, we can suppose he might be tempted to
+indulge in another oracular utterance, something like this:----A wise
+man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the
+authority of a particular fact. He who would bound the possibilities of
+human knowledge by the limitations of present acquirements would take the
+dimensions of the infant in ordering the habiliments of the adult. It is
+the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to
+listen. Will the Professor have the kindness to inform me by what steps
+of gradual development the ring and the loadstone, which were but
+yesterday the toys of children and idlers, have become the means of
+approximating the intelligences of remote continents, and wafting
+emotions unchilled through the abysses of the no longer unfathomable
+deep?
+
+--This, you understand, Beloved, is only a conventional imitation of the
+Doctor's style of talking. He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his
+conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk. He used very often
+to have it all his own way. If he came back to us we must remember that
+to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with the knowledge of
+our own time. But that knowledge is more specialized, a great deal, than
+knowledge was in his day. Men cannot talk about things they have seen
+from the outside with the same magisterial authority the talking dynasty
+pretended to. The sturdy old moralist felt grand enough, no doubt, when
+he said, "He that is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle
+wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war or
+peace." Benjamin Franklin was one of these idlers who were electrifying
+bottles, but he also found time to engage in the trifling prattle about
+war and peace going on in those times. The talking Doctor hits him very
+hard in "Taxation no Tyranny": "Those who wrote the Address (of the
+American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great extent or
+profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but they
+have been taught by some master of mischief how to put in motion the
+engine of political electricity; to attract by the sounds of Liberty and
+Property, to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; and to give the great
+stroke by the name of Boston." The talking dynasty has always been hard
+upon us Americans. King Samuel II. says: "It is, I believe, a fact
+verified beyond doubt, that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a
+copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the
+Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers or to
+assist in their genealogical researches I could never learn
+satisfactorily." As for King Thomas, the last of the monological
+succession, he made such a piece of work with his prophecies and his
+sarcasms about our little trouble with some of the Southern States, that
+we came rather to pity him for his whims and crotchets than to get angry
+with him for calling us bores and other unamiable names.
+
+I do not think we believe things because considerable people say them, on
+personal authority, that is, as intelligent listeners very commonly did a
+century ago. The newspapers have lied that belief out of us. Any man
+who has a pretty gift of talk may hold his company a little while when
+there is nothing better stirring. Every now and then a man who may be
+dull enough prevailingly has a passion of talk come over him which makes
+him eloquent and silences the rest. I have a great respect for these
+divine paroxysms, these half-inspired moments of influx when they seize
+one whom we had not counted among the luminaries of the social sphere.
+But the man who can--give us a fresh experience on anything that
+interests us overrides everybody else. A great peril escaped makes a
+great story-teller of a common person enough. I remember when a certain
+vessel was wrecked long ago, that one of the survivors told the story as
+well as Defoe could have told it. Never a word from him before; never a
+word from him since. But when it comes to talking one's common
+thoughts,--those that come and go as the breath does; those that tread
+the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an
+interminable procession of every hue and garb,--there are few, indeed,
+that can dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the
+breast and throw open the window, and let us look and listen. We are all
+loyal enough to our sovereign when he shows himself, but sovereigns are
+scarce. I never saw the absolute homage of listeners but once, that I
+remember, to a man's common talk, and that was to the conversation of an
+old man, illustrious by his lineage and the exalted honors he had won,
+whose experience had lessons for the wisest, and whose eloquence had made
+the boldest tremble.
+
+All this because I told you to look out for yourselves and not take for
+absolute truth everything the old Master of our table, or anybody else at
+it sees fit to utter. At the same time I do not think that he, or any of
+us whose conversation I think worth reporting, says anything for the mere
+sake of saying it and without thinking that it holds some truth, even if
+it is not unqualifiedly true.
+
+I suppose a certain number of my readers wish very heartily that the
+Young Astronomer whose poetical speculations I am recording would stop
+trying by searching to find out the Almighty, and sign the thirty-nine
+articles, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, at any rate slip his
+neck into some collar or other, and pull quietly in the harness, whether
+it galled him or not. I say, rather, let him have his talk out; if
+nobody else asks the questions he asks, some will be glad to hear them,
+but if you, the reader, find the same questions in your own mind, you
+need not be afraid to see how they shape themselves in another's
+intelligence. Do you recognize the fact that we are living in a new
+time? Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing
+as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in
+upon the shore. The courtiers of King Canute (I am not afraid of the old
+comparison), represented by the adherents of the traditional beliefs of
+the period, move his chair back an inch at a time, but not until his feet
+are pretty damp, not to say wet. The rock on which he sat securely
+awhile ago is completely under water. And now people are walking up and
+down the beach and judging for themselves how far inland the chair of
+King Canute is like to be moved while they and their children are looking
+on, at the rate in which it is edging backward. And it is quite too late
+to go into hysterics about it.
+
+The shore, solid, substantial, a great deal more than eighteen hundred
+years old, is natural humanity. The beach which the ocean of
+knowledge--you may call it science if you like--is flowing over, is
+theological humanity. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and the
+teachings of Saint Augustine sin was made a transferable chattel. (I
+leave the interval wide for others to make narrow.)
+
+The doctrine of heritable guilt, with its mechanical consequences, has
+done for our moral nature what the doctrine of demoniac possession has
+done in barbarous times and still does among barbarous tribes for
+disease. Out of that black cloud came the lightning which struck the
+compass of humanity. Conscience, which from the dawn of moral being had
+pointed to the poles of right and wrong only as the great current of will
+flowed through the soul, was demagnetized, paralyzed, and knew henceforth
+no fixed meridian, but stayed where the priest or the council placed it.
+There is nothing to be done but to polarize the needle over again. And
+for this purpose we must study the lines of direction of all the forces
+which traverse our human nature.
+
+We must study man as we have studied stars and rocks. We need not go, we
+are told, to our sacred books for astronomy or geology or other
+scientific knowledge. Do not stop there! Pull Canute's chair back fifty
+rods at once, and do not wait until he is wet to the knees! Say now,
+bravely, as you will sooner or later have to say, that we need not go to
+any ancient records for our anthropology. Do we not all hold, at least,
+that the doctrine of man's being a blighted abortion, a miserable
+disappointment to his Creator, and hostile and hateful to him from his
+birth, may give way to the belief that he is the latest terrestrial
+manifestation of an ever upward-striving movement of divine power? If
+there lives a man who does not want to disbelieve the popular notions
+about the condition and destiny of the bulk of his race, I should like to
+have him look me in the face and tell me so.
+
+I am not writing for the basement story or the nursery, and I do not
+pretend to be, but I say nothing in these pages which would not be said
+without fear of offence in any intelligent circle, such as clergymen of
+the higher castes are in the habit of frequenting. There are teachers in
+type for our grandmothers and our grandchildren who vaccinate the two
+childhoods with wholesome doctrine, transmitted harmlessly from one
+infant to another. But we three men at our table have taken the disease
+of thinking in the natural way. It is an epidemic in these times, and
+those who are afraid of it must shut themselves up close or they will
+catch it.
+
+I hope none of us are wanting in reverence. One at least of us is a
+regular church-goer, and believes a man may be devout and yet very free
+in the expression of his opinions on the gravest subjects. There may be
+some good people who think that our young friend who puts his thoughts in
+verse is going sounding over perilous depths, and are frightened every
+time he throws the lead. There is nothing to be frightened at. This is
+a manly world we live in. Our reverence is good for nothing if it does
+not begin with self-respect. Occidental manhood springs from that as its
+basis; Oriental manhood finds the greatest satisfaction in
+self-abasement. There is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm
+upon the Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie the growth of
+both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil,
+of climate. Whether the questions which assail my young friend have
+risen in my reader's mind or not, he knows perfectly well that nobody can
+keep such questions from springing up in every young mind of any force or
+honesty. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they
+are taught, with never a scruple or a query, Protestant or Catholic, Jew
+or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing in the
+intellectual life of the race. If the world had been wholly peopled with
+such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would have been a creed
+like that of Christendom.
+
+I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in
+this point at least, that a true man's allegiance is given to that which
+is highest in his own nature. He reverences truth, he loves kindness, he
+respects justice. The two first qualities he understands well enough.
+But the last, justice, at least as between the Infinite and the finite,
+has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and
+diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti
+who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations,
+that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as
+a human conception.
+
+As for power, we are outgrowing all superstition about that. We have not
+the slightest respect for it as such, and it is just as well to remember
+this in all our spiritual adjustments. We fear power when we cannot
+master it; but just as far as we can master it, we make a slave and a
+beast of burden of it without hesitation. We cannot change the ebb and
+flow of the tides, or the course of the seasons, but we come as near it
+as we can. We dam out the ocean, we make roses bloom in winter and water
+freeze in summer. We have no more reverence for the sun than we have for
+a fish-tail gas-burner; we stare into his face with telescopes as at a
+ballet-dancer with opera-glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms
+as if they were so many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not
+want his company and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant. The gods
+of the old heathen are the servants of to-day. Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus,
+and the bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their
+pedestals and put on our livery. We cannot always master them, neither
+can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle on
+the wildest natural agencies. The mob of elemental forces is as noisy
+and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it
+well under, except for an occasional outbreak.
+
+When I read the Lady's letter printed some time since, I could not help
+honoring the feeling which prompted her in writing it. But while I
+respect the innocent incapacity of tender age and the limitations of the
+comparatively uninstructed classes, it is quite out of the question to
+act as if matters of common intelligence and universal interest were the
+private property of a secret society, only to be meddled with by those
+who know the grip and the password.
+
+We must get over the habit of transferring the limitations of the nervous
+temperament and of hectic constitutions to the great Source of all the
+mighty forces of nature, animate and inanimate. We may confidently trust
+that we have over us a Being thoroughly robust and grandly magnanimous,
+in distinction from the Infinite Invalid bred in the studies of sickly
+monomaniacs, who corresponds to a very common human type, but makes us
+blush for him when we contrast him with a truly noble man, such as most
+of us have had the privilege of knowing both in public and in private
+life.
+
+I was not a little pleased to find that the Lady, in spite of her letter,
+sat through the young man's reading of portions of his poem with a good
+deal of complacency. I think I can guess what is in her mind. She
+believes, as so many women do, in that great remedy for discontent, and
+doubts about humanity, and questionings of Providence, and all sorts of
+youthful vagaries,--I mean the love-cure. And she thinks, not without
+some reason, that these astronomical lessons, and these readings of
+poetry and daily proximity at the table, and the need of two young hearts
+that have been long feeling lonely, and youth and nature and "all
+impulses of soul and sense," as Coleridge has it, will bring these two
+young people into closer relations than they perhaps have yet thought of;
+and so that sweet lesson of loving the neighbor whom he has seen may lead
+him into deeper and more trusting communion with the Friend and Father
+whom he has not seen.
+
+The Young Girl evidently did not intend that her accomplice should be a
+loser by the summary act of the Member of the Haouse: I took occasion to
+ask That Boy what had become of all the popguns. He gave me to
+understand that popguns were played out, but that he had got a squirt and
+a whip, and considered himself better off than before.
+
+This great world is full of mysteries. I can comprehend the pleasure to
+be got out of the hydraulic engine; but what can be the fascination of a
+whip, when one has nothing to flagellate but the calves of his own legs,
+I could never understand. Yet a small riding-whip is the most popular
+article with the miscellaneous New-Englander at all great
+gatherings,--cattle-shows and Fourth-of-July celebrations. If Democritus
+and Heraclitus could walk arm in arm through one of these crowds, the
+first would be in a broad laugh to see the multitude of young persons who
+were rejoicing in the possession of one of these useless and worthless
+little commodities; happy himself to see how easily others could purchase
+happiness. But the second would weep bitter tears to think what a
+rayless and barren life that must be which could extract enjoyment from
+the miserable flimsy wand that has such magic attraction for sauntering
+youths and simpering maidens. What a dynamometer of happiness are these
+paltry toys, and what a rudimentary vertebrate must be the freckled
+adolescent whose yearning for the infinite can be stayed even for a
+single hour by so trifling a boon from the venal hands of the finite!
+
+Pardon these polysyllabic reflections, Beloved, but I never contemplate
+these dear fellow-creatures of ours without a delicious sense of
+superiority to them and to all arrested embryos of intelligence, in which
+I have no doubt you heartily sympathize with me. It is not merely when I
+look at the vacuous countenances of the mastigophori, the whip-holders,
+that I enjoy this luxury (though I would not miss that holiday spectacle
+for a pretty sum of money, and advise you by all means to make sure of it
+next Fourth of July, if you missed it this), but I get the same pleasure
+from many similar manifestations.
+
+I delight in Regalia, so called, of the kind not worn by kings, nor
+obtaining their diamonds from the mines of Golconda. I have a passion
+for those resplendent titles which are not conferred by a sovereign and
+would not be the open sesame to the courts of royalty, yet which are as
+opulent in impressive adjectives as any Knight of the Garter's list of
+dignities. When I have recognized in the every-day name of His Very
+Worthy High Eminence of some cabalistic association, the inconspicuous
+individual whose trifling indebtedness to me for value received remains
+in a quiescent state and is likely long to continue so, I confess to
+having experienced a thrill of pleasure. I have smiled to think how
+grand his magnificent titular appendages sounded in his own ears and what
+a feeble tintinnabulation they made in mine. The crimson sash, the broad
+diagonal belt of the mounted marshal of a great procession, so cheap in
+themselves, yet so entirely satisfactory to the wearer, tickle my heart's
+root.
+
+Perhaps I should have enjoyed all these weaknesses of my infantile
+fellow-creatures without an afterthought, except that on a certain
+literary anniversary when I tie the narrow blue and pink ribbons in my
+button-hole and show my decorated bosom to the admiring public, I am
+conscious of a certain sense of distinction and superiority in virtue of
+that trifling addition to my personal adornments which reminds me that I
+too have some embryonic fibres in my tolerably well-matured organism.
+
+I hope I have not hurt your feelings, if you happen to be a High and
+Mighty Grand Functionary in any illustrious Fraternity. When I tell you
+that a bit of ribbon in my button-hole sets my vanity prancing, I think
+you cannot be grievously offended that I smile at the resonant titles
+which make you something more than human in your own eyes. I would not
+for the world be mistaken for one of those literary roughs whose brass
+knuckles leave their mark on the foreheads of so many inoffensive people.
+
+There is a human sub-species characterized by the coarseness of its fibre
+and the acrid nature of its intellectual secretions. It is to a certain
+extent penetrative, as all creatures are which are provided with stings.
+It has an instinct which guides it to the vulnerable parts of the victim
+on which it fastens. These two qualities give it a certain degree of
+power which is not to be despised. It might perhaps be less mischievous,
+but for the fact that the wound where it leaves its poison opens the
+fountain from which it draws its nourishment.
+
+Beings of this kind can be useful if they will only find their
+appropriate sphere, which is not literature, but that circle of
+rough-and-tumble political life where the fine-fibred men are at a
+discount, where epithets find their subjects poison-proof, and the sting
+which would be fatal to a literary debutant only wakes the eloquence of
+the pachydermatous ward-room politician to a fiercer shriek of
+declamation.
+
+The Master got talking the other day about the difference between races
+and families. I am reminded of what he said by what I have just been
+saying myself about coarse-fibred and fine-fibred people.
+
+--We talk about a Yankee, a New-Englander,---he said,-as if all of 'em
+were just the same kind of animal. "There is knowledge and knowledge,"
+said John Bunyan. There are Yankees and Yankees. Do you know two native
+trees called pitch pine and white pine respectively? Of course you know
+'em. Well, there are pitch-pine Yankees and white-pine Yankees. We
+don't talk about the inherited differences of men quite as freely,
+perhaps, as they do in the Old World, but republicanism doesn't alter the
+laws of physiology. We have a native aristocracy, a superior race, just
+as plainly marked by nature as of a higher and finer grade than the
+common run of people as the white pine is marked in its form, its
+stature, its bark, its delicate foliage, as belonging to the nobility of
+the forest; and the pitch pine, stubbed, rough, coarse-haired, as of the
+plebeian order. Only the strange thing is to see in what a capricious
+way our natural nobility is distributed. The last born nobleman I have
+seen, I saw this morning; he was pulling a rope that was fastened to a
+Maine schooner loaded with lumber. I should say he was about twenty
+years old, as fine a figure of a young man as you would ask to see, and
+with a regular Greek outline of countenance, waving hair, that fell as if
+a sculptor had massed it to copy, and a complexion as rich as a red
+sunset. I have a notion that the State of Maine breeds the natural
+nobility in a larger proportion than some other States, but they spring
+up in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. The young fellow I saw this
+morning had on an old flannel shirt, a pair of trowsers that meant hard
+work, and a cheap cloth cap pushed back on his head so as to let the
+large waves of hair straggle out over his forehead; he was tugging at his
+rope with the other sailors, but upon my word I don't think I have seen a
+young English nobleman of all those whom I have looked upon that answered
+to the notion of "blood" so well as this young fellow did. I suppose if
+I made such a levelling confession as this in public, people would think
+I was looking towards being the labor-reform candidate for President.
+But I should go on and spoil my prospects by saying that I don't think
+the white-pine Yankee is the more generally prevailing growth, but rather
+the pitch-pine Yankee.
+
+--The Member of the Haouse seemed to have been getting a dim idea that
+all this was not exactly flattering to the huckleberry districts. His
+features betrayed the growth of this suspicion so clearly that the Master
+replied to his look as if it had been a remark. [I need hardly say that
+this particular member of the General Court was a pitch-pine Yankee of
+the most thoroughly characterized aspect and flavor.]
+
+--Yes, Sir,--the Master continued,--Sir being anybody that listened,
+--there is neither flattery nor offence in the views which a
+physiological observer takes of the forms of life around him. It won't
+do to draw individual portraits, but the differences of natural groups of
+human beings are as proper subjects of remark as those of different
+breeds of horses, and if horses were Houyhnhnms I don't think they would
+quarrel with us because we made a distinction between a "Morgan" and a
+"Messenger." The truth is, Sir, the lean sandy soil and the droughts and
+the long winters and the east-winds and the cold storms, and all sorts of
+unknown local influences that we can't make out quite so plainly as
+these, have a tendency to roughen the human organization and make it
+coarse, something as it is with the tree I mentioned. Some spots and
+some strains of blood fight against these influences, but if I should say
+right out what I think, it would be that the finest human fruit, on the
+whole; and especially the finest women that we get in New England are
+raised under glass.
+
+--Good gracious!--exclaimed the Landlady, under glass!
+
+--Give me cowcumbers raised in the open air, said the Capitalist, who was
+a little hard of hearing.
+
+--Perhaps,--I remarked,--it might be as well if you would explain this
+last expression of yours. Raising human beings under glass I take to be
+a metaphorical rather than a literal statement of your meaning.
+
+--No, Sir!--replied the Master, with energy,--I mean just what I say,
+Sir. Under glass, and with a south exposure. During the hard season, of
+course,--for in the heats of summer the tenderest hot-house plants are
+not afraid of the open air. Protection is what the transplanted Aryan
+requires in this New England climate. Keep him, and especially keep her,
+in a wide street of a well-built city eight months of the year; good
+solid brick walls behind her, good sheets of plate-glass, with the sun
+shining warm through them, in front of her, and you have put her in the
+condition of the pine-apple, from the land of which, and not from that of
+the other kind of pine, her race started on its travels. People don't
+know what a gain there is to health by living in cities, the best parts
+of them of course, for we know too well what the worst parts are. In the
+first place you get rid of the noxious emanations which poison so many
+country localities with typhoid fever and dysentery, not wholly rid of
+them, of course, but to a surprising degree. Let me tell you a doctor's
+story. I was visiting a Western city a good many years ago; it was in
+the autumn, the time when all sorts of malarious diseases are about. The
+doctor I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the
+town, I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell
+me, but I'll tell you what he did say.
+
+"Look round," said the doctor. "There isn't a house in all the ten-mile
+circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one person, at
+least, shaking with fever and ague. And yet you need n't be afraid of
+carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is on a paved street
+you are safe."
+
+--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the doctor
+put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that while all the
+country round was suffering from intermittent fever, the paved part of
+the city was comparatively exempted. What do you do when you build a
+house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils pretty much everywhere?
+Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't you? Well, the soil of a
+city is cemented all over, one may say, with certain qualifications of
+course. A first-rate city house is a regular sanatorium. The only
+trouble is, that the little good-for-nothings that come of utterly
+used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die, to save their
+lives. So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race with skim-milk
+vitality. They would have died, like good children, in most average
+country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated temperature,
+in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to
+go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer and
+the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations--the
+worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look like--hang on to the
+boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be,
+a good many of 'em.
+
+--The Scarabee's ear was caught by that queer word of Swift's, and he
+asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon
+That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs! to his own immense amusement and the
+great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was one of
+those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made other people
+laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed, but not amused.
+
+I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this
+subject, and of course all these statements of his are more or less
+one-sided. But that some invalids do much better in cities than in the
+country is indisputable, and that the frightful dysenteries and fevers
+which have raged like pestilences in many of our country towns are almost
+unknown in the better built sections of some of our large cities is
+getting to be more generally understood since our well-to-do people have
+annually emigrated in such numbers from the cemented surface of the city
+to the steaming soil of some of the dangerous rural districts. If one
+should contrast the healthiest country residences with the worst city
+ones the result would be all the other way, of course, so that there are
+two sides to the question, which we must let the doctors pound in their
+great mortar, infuse and strain, hoping that they will present us with
+the clear solution when they have got through these processes. One of
+our chief wants is a complete sanitary map of every State in the Union.
+
+The balance of our table, as the reader has no doubt observed, has been
+deranged by the withdrawal of the Man of Letters, so called, and only the
+side of the deficiency changed by the removal of the Young Astronomer
+into our neighborhood. The fact that there was a vacant chair on the
+side opposite us had by no means escaped the notice of That Boy. He had
+taken advantage of his opportunity and invited in a schoolmate whom he
+evidently looked upon as a great personage. This boy or youth was a good
+deal older than himself and stood to him apparently in the light of a
+patron and instructor in the ways of life. A very jaunty, knowing young
+gentleman he was, good-looking, smartly dressed, smooth-checked as yet,
+curly-haired, with a roguish eye, a sagacious wink, a ready tongue, as I
+soon found out; and as I learned could catch a ball on the fly with any
+boy of his age; not quarrelsome, but, if he had to strike, hit from the
+shoulder; the pride of his father (who was a man of property and a civic
+dignitary), and answering to the name of Johnny.
+
+I was a little surprised at the liberty That Boy had taken in introducing
+an extra peptic element at our table, reflecting as I did that a certain
+number of avoirdupois ounces of nutriment which the visitor would dispose
+of corresponded to a very appreciable pecuniary amount, so that he was
+levying a contribution upon our Landlady which she might be inclined to
+complain of. For the Caput mortuum (or deadhead, in vulgar phrase) is
+apt to be furnished with a Venter vivus, or, as we may say, a lively
+appetite. But the Landlady welcomed the new-comer very heartily.
+
+--Why! how--do--you--do Johnny?! with the notes of interrogation and of
+admiration both together, as here represented.
+
+Johnny signified that he was doing about as well as could be expected
+under the circumstances, having just had a little difference with a young
+person whom he spoke of as "Pewter-jaw" (I suppose he had worn a
+dentist's tooth-straightening contrivance during his second dentition),
+which youth he had finished off, as he said, in good shape, but at the
+expense of a slight epistaxis, we will translate his vernacular
+expression.
+
+--The three ladies all looked sympathetic, but there did not seem to be
+any great occasion for it, as the boy had come out all right, and seemed
+to be in the best of spirits.
+
+-And how is your father and your mother? asked the Landlady.
+
+-Oh, the Governor and the Head Centre? A 1, both of 'em. Prime order
+for shipping,--warranted to stand any climate. The Governor says he
+weighs a hunderd and seventy-five pounds. Got a chin-tuft just like
+Ed'in Forrest. D'd y' ever see Ed'in Forrest play Metamora? Bully, I
+tell you! My old gentleman means to be Mayor or Governor or President or
+something or other before he goes off the handle, you'd better b'lieve.
+He's smart,--and I've heard folks say I take after him.
+
+--Somehow or other I felt as if I had seen this boy before, or known
+something about him. Where did he get those expressions "A 1" and
+"prime" and so on? They must have come from somebody who has been in the
+retail dry-goods business, or something of that nature. I have certain
+vague reminiscences that carry me back to the early times of this
+boardinghouse.---Johnny.---Landlady knows his father well.
+
+---Boarded with her, no doubt.---There was somebody by the name of John,
+I remember perfectly well, lived with her. I remember both my friends
+mentioned him, one of them very often. I wonder if this boy isn't a son
+of his! I asked the Landlady after breakfast whether this was not, as I
+had suspected, the son of that former boarder.
+
+--To be sure he is,--she answered,--and jest such a good-natur'd sort of
+creatur' as his father was. I always liked John, as we used to call his
+father. He did love fun, but he was a good soul, and stood by me when I
+was in trouble, always. He went into business on his own account after a
+while, and got merried, and settled down into a family man. They tell me
+he is an amazing smart business man,--grown wealthy, and his wife's
+father left her money. But I can't help calling him John,--law, we never
+thought of calling him anything else, and he always laughs and says,
+"That's right." This is his oldest son, and everybody calls him Johnny.
+That Boy of ours goes to the same school with his boy, and thinks there
+never was anybody like him,--you see there was a boy undertook to impose
+on our boy, and Johnny gave the other boy a good licking, and ever since
+that he is always wanting to have Johnny round with him and bring him
+here with him,--and when those two boys get together, there never was
+boys that was so chock full of fun and sometimes mischief, but not very
+bad mischief, as those two boys be. But I like to have him come once in
+a while when there is room at the table, as there is now, for it puts me
+in mind of the old times, when my old boarders was all round me, that I
+used to think so much of,--not that my boarders that I have now a'nt very
+nice people, but I did think a dreadful sight of the gentleman that made
+that first book; it helped me on in the world more than ever he knew
+of,--for it was as good as one of them Brandreth's pills advertisements,
+and did n't cost me a cent, and that young lady he merried too, she was
+nothing but a poor young schoolma'am when she come to my house, and
+now--and she deserved it all too; for she was always just the same, rich
+or poor, and she is n't a bit prouder now she wears a camel's-hair shawl,
+than she was when I used to lend her a woollen one to keep her poor dear
+little shoulders warm when she had to go out and it was storming,--and
+then there was that old gentleman,--I can't speak about him, for I never
+knew how good he was till his will was opened, and then it was too late
+to thank him....
+
+I respected the feeling which caused the interval of silence, and found
+my own eyes moistened as I remembered how long it was since that friend
+of ours was sitting in the chair where I now sit, and what a tidal wave
+of change has swept over the world and more especially over this great
+land of ours, since he opened his lips and found so many kind listeners.
+
+The Young Astronomer has read us another extract from his manuscript. I
+ran my eye over it, and so far as I have noticed it is correct enough in
+its versification. I suppose we are getting gradually over our
+hemispherical provincialism, which allowed a set of monks to pull their
+hoods over our eyes and tell us there was no meaning in any religious
+symbolism but our own. If I am mistaken about this advance I am very
+glad to print the young man's somewhat outspoken lines to help us in that
+direction.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ VI
+
+ The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour
+ Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth new-born
+ Looks a misshapen and untimely growth,
+ The terror of the household and its shame,
+ A monster coiling in its nurse's lap
+ That some would strangle, some would only starve;
+ But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand,
+ And suckled at a hundred half-clad breasts,
+ Comes slowly to its stature and its form,
+ Calms the rough ridges of its dragon-scales,
+ Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,
+ And moves transfigured into angel guise,
+ Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth,
+ And folded in the same encircling arms
+ That cast it like a serpent from their hold!
+
+ If thou wouldst live in honor, die in peace,
+ Have the fine words the marble-workers learn
+ To carve so well, upon thy funeral-stone,
+ And earn a fair obituary, dressed
+ In all the many-colored robes of praise,
+ Be deafer than the adder to the cry
+ Of that same foundling truth, until it grows
+ To seemly favor, and at length has won
+ The smiles of hard-mouthed men and light-upped dames,
+ Then snatch it from its meagre nurse's breast,
+ Fold it in silk and give it food from gold;
+ So shalt thou share its glory when at last
+ It drops its mortal vesture, and revealed
+ In all the splendor of its heavenly form,
+ Spreads on the startled air its mighty wings!
+
+ Alas! how much that seemed immortal truth
+ That heroes fought for, martyrs died to save,
+ Reveals its earth-born lineage, growing old
+ And limping in its march, its wings unplumed,
+ Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream!
+
+ Here in this painted casket, just unsealed,
+ Lies what was once a breathing shape like thine,
+ Once loved as thou art loved; there beamed the eyes
+ That looked on Memphis in its hour of pride,
+ That saw the walls of hundred-gated Thebes,
+ And all the mirrored glories of the Nile.
+ See how they toiled that all-consuming time
+ Might leave the frame immortal in its tomb;
+ Filled it with fragrant balms and odorous gums
+ That still diffuse their sweetness through the air,
+ And wound and wound with patient fold on fold
+ The flaxen bands thy hand has rudely torn!
+ Perchance thou yet canst see the faded stain
+ Of the sad mourner's tear.
+
+ But what is this?
+ The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast
+ Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize,
+ Give it a place among thy treasured spoils
+ Fossil and relic,--corals, encrinites,
+ The fly in amber and the fish in stone,
+ The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold,
+ Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,
+ --Place for the Memphian beetle with thine hoard!
+
+ Ah! longer than thy creed has blest the world
+ This toy, thus ravished from thy brother's breast,
+ Was to the heart of Mizraim as divine,
+ As holy, as the symbol that we lay
+ On the still bosom of our white-robed dead,
+ And raise above their dust that all may know
+ Here sleeps an heir of glory. Loving friends,
+ With tears of trembling faith and choking sobs,
+ And prayers to those who judge of mortal deeds,
+ Wrapped this poor image in the cerement's fold
+ That Isis and Osiris, friends of man,
+ Might know their own and claim the ransomed soul
+
+ An idol? Man was born to worship such!
+ An idol is an image of his thought;
+ Sometimes he carves it out of gleaming stone,
+ And sometimes moulds it out of glittering gold,
+ Or rounds it in a mighty frescoed dome,
+ Or lifts it heavenward in a lofty spire,
+ Or shapes it in a cunning frame of words,
+ Or pays his priest to make it day by day;
+ For sense must have its god as well as soul;
+ A new-born Dian calls for silver shrines,
+ And Egypt's holiest symbol is our own,
+ The sign we worship as did they of old
+ When Isis and Osiris ruled the world.
+
+ Let us be true to our most subtle selves,
+ We long to have our idols like the rest.
+ Think! when the men of Israel had their God
+ Encamped among them, talking with their chief,
+ Leading them in the pillar of the cloud
+ And watching o'er them in the shaft of fire,
+ They still must have an image; still they longed
+ For somewhat of substantial, solid form
+ Whereon to hang their garlands, and to fix
+ Their wandering thoughts, and gain a stronger hold
+ For their uncertain faith, not yet assured
+ If those same meteors of the day and night
+ Were not mere exhalations of the soil.
+
+ Are we less earthly than the chosen race?
+ Are we more neighbors of the living God
+ Than they who gathered manna every morn,
+ Reaping where none had sown, and heard the voice
+ Of him who met the Highest in the mount,
+ And brought them tables, graven with His hand?
+ Yet these must have their idol, brought their gold,
+ That star-browed Apis might be god again;
+ Yea, from their ears the women brake the rings
+ That lent such splendors to the gypsy brown
+ Of sunburnt cheeks,--what more could woman do
+ To show her pious zeal? They went astray,
+ But nature led them as it leads us all.
+
+ We too, who mock at Israel's golden calf
+ And scoff at Egypt's sacred scarabee,
+ Would have our amulets to clasp and kiss,
+ And flood with rapturous tears, and bear with us
+ To be our dear companions in the dust,
+ Such magic works an image in our souls!
+
+ Man is an embryo; see at twenty years
+ His bones, the columns that uphold his frame
+ Not yet cemented, shaft and capital,
+ Mere fragments of the temple incomplete.
+ At twoscore, threescore, is he then full grown?
+ Nay, still a child, and as the little maids
+ Dress and undress their puppets, so he tries
+ To dress a lifeless creed, as if it lived,
+ And change its raiment when the world cries shame!
+ We smile to see our little ones at play
+ So grave, so thoughtful, with maternal care
+ Nursing the wisps of rags they call their babes;
+ Does He not smile who sees us with the toys
+ We call by sacred names, and idly feign
+ To be what we have called them?
+ He is still The Father of this helpless nursery-brood,
+ Whose second childhood joins so close its first,
+ That in the crowding, hurrying years between
+ We scarce have trained our senses to their task
+ Before the gathering mist has dimmed our eyes,
+ And with our hollowed palm we help our ear,
+ And trace with trembling hand our wrinkled names,
+ And then begin to tell our stories o'er,
+ And see--not hear-the whispering lips that say,
+ "You know--? Your father knew him.--This is he,
+ Tottering and leaning on the hireling's arm,--"
+ And so, at length, disrobed of all that clad
+ The simple life we share with weed and worm,
+ Go to our cradles, naked as we came.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+I suppose there would have been even more remarks upon the growing
+intimacy of the Young Astronomer and his pupil, if the curiosity of the
+boarders had not in the mean time been so much excited at the apparently
+close relation which had sprung up between the Register of Deeds and the
+Lady. It was really hard to tell what to make of it. The Register
+appeared at the table in a new coat. Suspicious. The Lady was evidently
+deeply interested in him, if we could judge by the frequency and the
+length of their interviews. On at least one occasion he has brought a
+lawyer with him, which naturally suggested the idea that there were some
+property arrangements to be attended to, in case, as seems probable
+against all reasons to the contrary, these two estimable persons, so
+utterly unfitted, as one would say, to each other, contemplated an
+alliance. It is no pleasure to me to record an arrangement of this kind.
+I frankly confess I do not know what to make of it. With her tastes and
+breeding, it is the last thing that I should have thought of,--her
+uniting herself with this most commonplace and mechanical person, who
+cannot even offer her the elegances and luxuries to which she might seem
+entitled on changing her condition.
+
+While I was thus interested and puzzled I received an unexpected visit
+from our Landlady. She was evidently excited, and by some event which
+was of a happy nature, for her countenance was beaming and she seemed
+impatient to communicate what she had to tell. Impatient or not, she must
+wait a moment, while I say a word about her. Our Landlady is as good a
+creature as ever lived. She is a little negligent of grammar at times,
+and will get a wrong word now and then; she is garrulous, circumstantial,
+associates facts by their accidental cohesion rather than by their vital
+affinities, is given to choking and tears on slight occasions, but she
+has a warm heart, and feels to her boarders as if they were her
+blood-relations. She began her conversation abruptly.--I expect I'm a
+going to lose one of my boarders,--she said.
+
+--You don't seem very unhappy about it, madam,--I answered.---We all took
+it easily when the person who sat on our side of the table quitted us in
+such a hurry, but I do not think there is anybody left that either you or
+the boarders want to get rid of--unless it is myself,--I added modestly.
+
+--You! said the Landlady--you! No indeed. When I have a quiet boarder
+that 's a small eater, I don't want to lose him. You don't make trouble,
+you don't find fault with your vit--[Dr. Benjamin had schooled his parent
+on this point and she altered the word] with your food, and you know when
+you 've had enough.
+
+--I really felt proud of this eulogy, which embraces the most desirable
+excellences of a human being in the capacity of boarder.
+
+The Landlady began again.--I'm going to lose--at least, I suppose I
+shall--one of the best boarders I ever had,--that Lady that's been with
+me so long.
+
+--I thought there was something going on between her and the Register,--I
+said.
+
+--Something! I should think there was! About three months ago he began
+making her acquaintance. I thought there was something particular. I
+did n't quite like to watch 'em very close; but I could n't help
+overbearing some of the things he said to her, for, you see, he used to
+follow her up into the parlor, they talked pretty low, but I could catch
+a word now and then. I heard him say something to her one day about
+"bettering her condition," and she seemed to be thinking very hard about
+it, and turning of it over in her mind, and I said to myself, She does
+n't want to take up with him, but she feels dreadful poor, and perhaps he
+has been saving and has got money in the bank, and she does n't want to
+throw away a chance of bettering herself without thinking it over. But
+dear me,--says I to myself,--to think of her walking up the broad aisle
+into meeting alongside of such a homely, rusty-looking creatur' as that!
+But there 's no telling what folks will do when poverty has got hold of
+'em.
+
+--Well, so I thought she was waiting to make up her mind, and he was
+hanging on in hopes she'd come round at last, as women do half the time,
+for they don't know their own minds and the wind blows both ways at once
+with 'em as the smoke blows out of the tall chimlies,--east out of this
+one and west out of that,--so it's no use looking at 'em to know what the
+weather is.
+
+--But yesterday she comes up to me after breakfast, and asks me to go up
+with her into her little room. Now, says I to myself, I shall hear all
+about it. I saw she looked as if she'd got some of her trouble off her
+mind, and I guessed that it was settled, and so, says I to myself, I must
+wish her joy and hope it's all for the best, whatever I think about it.
+
+--Well, she asked me to set down, and then she begun. She said that she
+was expecting to have a change in her condition of life, and had asked me
+up so that I might' have the first news of it. I am sure--says I--I
+wish you both joy. Merriage is a blessed thing when folks is well
+sorted, and it is an honorable thing, and the first meracle was at the
+merriage in Canaan. It brings a great sight of happiness with it, as
+I've had a chance of knowing, for my hus--
+
+The Landlady showed her usual tendency to "break" from the conversational
+pace just at this point, but managed to rein in the rebellious diaphragm,
+and resumed her narrative.
+
+--Merriage!--says she,--pray who has said anything about merriage?--I
+beg your pardon, ma'am,--says I,--I thought you had spoke of changing
+your condition and I--She looked so I stopped right short.
+
+-Don't say another word, says she, but jest listen to what I am going to
+tell you.
+
+--My friend, says she, that you have seen with me so often lately, was
+hunting among his old Record books, when all at once he come across an
+old deed that was made by somebody that had my family name. He took it
+into his head to read it over, and he found there was some kind of a
+condition that if it was n't kept, the property would all go back to them
+that was the heirs of the one that gave the deed, and that he found out
+was me. Something or other put it into his head, says she, that the
+company that owned the property--it was ever so rich a company and owned
+land all round everywhere--hadn't kept to the conditions. So he went to
+work, says she, and hunted through his books and he inquired all round,
+and he found out pretty much all about it, and at last he come to me--it
+'s my boarder, you know, that says all this--and says he, Ma'am, says he,
+if you have any kind of fancy for being a rich woman you've only got to
+say so. I didn't know what he meant, and I began to think, says she, he
+must be crazy. But he explained it all to me, how I'd nothing to do but
+go to court and I could get a sight of property back. Well, so she went
+on telling me--there was ever so much more that I suppose was all plain
+enough, but I don't remember it all--only I know my boarder was a good
+deal worried at first at the thought of taking money that other people
+thought was theirs, and the Register he had to talk to her, and he
+brought a lawyer and he talked to her, and her friends they talked to
+her, and the upshot of it all was that the company agreed to settle the
+business by paying her, well, I don't know just how much, but enough to
+make her one of the rich folks again.
+
+I may as well add here that, as I have since learned, this is one of the
+most important cases of releasing right of reentry for condition broken
+which has been settled by arbitration for a considerable period. If I am
+not mistaken the Register of Deeds will get something more than a new
+coat out of this business, for the Lady very justly attributes her change
+of fortunes to his sagacity and his activity in following up the hint he
+had come across by mere accident.
+
+So my supernumerary fellow-boarder, whom I would have dispensed with as a
+cumberer of the table, has proved a ministering angel to one of the
+personages whom I most cared for.
+
+One would have thought that the most scrupulous person need not have
+hesitated in asserting an unquestioned legal and equitable claim simply
+because it had lain a certain number of years in abeyance. But before the
+Lady could make up her mind to accept her good fortune she had been kept
+awake many nights in doubt and inward debate whether she should avail
+herself of her rights. If it had been private property, so that another
+person must be made poor that she should become rich, she would have
+lived and died in want rather than claim her own. I do not think any of
+us would like to turn out the possessor of a fine estate enjoyed for two
+or three generations on the faith of unquestioned ownership by making use
+of some old forgotten instrument, which accident had thrown in our way.
+
+But it was all nonsense to indulge in any sentiment in a case like this,
+where it was not only a right, but a duty which she owed herself and
+others in relation with her, to accept what Providence, as it appeared,
+had thrust upon her, and when no suffering would be occasioned to
+anybody. Common sense told her not to refuse it. So did several of her
+rich friends, who remembered about this time that they had not called
+upon her for a good while, and among them Mrs. Midas Goldenrod.
+
+Never had that lady's carriage stood before the door of our
+boarding-house so long, never had it stopped so often, as since the
+revelation which had come from the Registry of Deeds. Mrs. Midas
+Goldenrod was not a bad woman, but she loved and hated in too exclusive
+and fastidious a way to allow us to consider her as representing the
+highest ideal of womanhood. She hated narrow ill-ventilated courts,
+where there was nothing to see if one looked out of the window but old
+men in dressing-gowns and old women in caps; she hated little dark rooms
+with air-tight stoves in them; she hated rusty bombazine gowns and last
+year's bonnets; she hated gloves that were not as fresh as new-laid eggs,
+and shoes that had grown bulgy and wrinkled in service; she hated common
+crockeryware and teaspoons of slight constitution; she hated second
+appearances on the dinner-table; she hated coarse napkins and
+table-cloths; she hated to ride in the horsecars; she hated to walk
+except for short distances, when she was tired of sitting in her
+carriage. She loved with sincere and undisguised affection a spacious
+city mansion and a charming country villa, with a seaside cottage for a
+couple of months or so; she loved a perfectly appointed household, a cook
+who was up to all kinds of salmis and vol-au-vents, a French maid, and a
+stylish-looking coachman, and the rest of the people necessary to help
+one live in a decent manner; she loved pictures that other people said
+were first-rate, and which had at least cost first-rate prices; she loved
+books with handsome backs, in showy cases; she loved heavy and richly
+wought plate; fine linen and plenty of it; dresses from Paris frequently,
+and as many as could be got in without troubling the customhouse; Russia
+sables and Venetian point-lace; diamonds, and good big ones; and,
+speaking generally, she loved dear things in distinction from cheap ones,
+the real article and not the economical substitute.
+
+For the life of me I cannot see anything Satanic in all this. Tell me,
+Beloved, only between ourselves, if some of these things are not
+desirable enough in their way, and if you and I could not make up our
+minds to put up with some of the least objectionable of them without any
+great inward struggle? Even in the matter of ornaments there is
+something to be said. Why should we be told that the New Jerusalem is
+paved with gold, and that its twelve gates are each of them a pearl, and
+that its foundations are garnished with sapphires and emeralds and all
+manner of precious stones, if these are not among the most desirable of
+objects? And is there anything very strange in the fact that many a
+daughter of earth finds it a sweet foretaste of heaven to wear about her
+frail earthly tabernacle these glittering reminders of the celestial
+city?
+
+Mrs. Midas Goldenrod was not so entirely peculiar and anomalous in her
+likes and dislikes; the only trouble was that she mixed up these
+accidents of life too much with life itself, which is so often serenely
+or actively noble and happy without reference to them. She valued
+persons chiefly according to their external conditions, and of course the
+very moment her relative, the Lady of our breakfast-table, began to find
+herself in a streak of sunshine she came forward with a lighted candle to
+show her which way her path lay before her.
+
+The Lady saw all this, how plainly, how painfully! yet she exercised a
+true charity for the weakness of her relative. Sensible people have as
+much consideration for the frailties of the rich as for those of the
+poor. There is a good deal of excuse for them. Even you and I,
+philosophers and philanthropists as we may think ourselves, have a
+dislike for the enforced economies, proper and honorable though they
+certainly are, of those who are two or three degrees below us in the
+scale of agreeable living.
+
+--These are very worthy persons you have been living with, my dear,
+--said Mrs. Midas--[the "My dear" was an expression which had flowered
+out more luxuriantly than ever before in the new streak of sunshine]
+--eminently respectable parties, I have no question, but then we shall
+want you to move as soon as possible to our quarter of the town, where we
+can see more of you than we have been able to in this queer place.
+
+It was not very pleasant to listen to this kind of talk, but the Lady
+remembered her annual bouquet, and her occasional visits from the rich
+lady, and restrained the inclination to remind her of the humble sphere
+from which she herself, the rich and patronizing personage, had worked
+her way up (if it was up) into that world which she seemed to think was
+the only one where a human being could find life worth having. Her cheek
+flushed a little, however, as she said to Mrs. Midas that she felt
+attached to the place where she had been living so long. She doubted,
+she was pleased to say, whether she should find better company in any
+circle she was like to move in than she left behind her at our
+boarding-house. I give the old Master the credit of this compliment. If
+one does not agree with half of what he says, at any rate he always has
+something to say, and entertains and lets out opinions and whims and
+notions of one kind and another that one can quarrel with if he is out of
+humor, or carry away to think about if he happens to be in the receptive
+mood.
+
+But the Lady expressed still more strongly the regret she should feel at
+leaving her young friend, our Scheherezade. I cannot wonder at this.
+The Young Girl has lost what little playfulness she had in the earlier
+months of my acquaintance with her. I often read her stories partly from
+my interest in her, and partly because I find merit enough in them to
+deserve something, better than the rough handling they got from her
+coarse-fibred critic, whoever he was. I see evidence that her thoughts
+are wandering from her task, that she has fits of melancholy, and bursts
+of tremulous excitement, and that she has as much as she can do to keep
+herself at all to her stated, inevitable, and sometimes almost despairing
+literary labor. I have had some acquaintance with vital phenomena of
+this kind, and know something of the nervous nature of young women and
+its "magnetic storms," if I may borrow an expression from the physicists,
+to indicate the perturbations to which they are liable. She is more in
+need of friendship and counsel now than ever before, it seems to me, and
+I cannot bear to think that the Lady, who has become like a mother to
+her, is to leave her to her own guidance.
+
+It is plain enough what is at the bottom of this disturbance. The
+astronomical lessons she has been taking have become interesting enough
+to absorb too much of her thoughts, and she finds them wandering to the
+stars or elsewhere, when they should be working quietly in the editor's
+harness.
+
+The Landlady has her own views on this matter which she communicated to
+me something as follows:
+
+--I don't quite like to tell folks what a lucky place my boarding-house
+is, for fear I should have all sorts of people crowding in to be my
+boarders for the sake of their chances. Folks come here poor and they go
+away rich. Young women come here without a friend in the world, and the
+next thing that happens is a gentleman steps up to 'em and says, "If
+you'll take me for your pardner for life, I'll give you a good home and
+love you ever so much besides"; and off goes my young lady-boarder into a
+fine three-story house, as grand as the governor's wife, with everything
+to make her comfortable, and a husband to care for her into the bargain.
+That's the way it is with the young ladies that comes to board with me,
+ever since the gentleman that wrote the first book that advertised my
+establishment (and never charged me a cent for it neither) merried the
+Schoolma'am. And I think but that's between you and me--that it 's going
+to be the same thing right over again between that young gentleman and
+this young girl here--if she doos n't kill herself with writing for them
+news papers,--it 's too bad they don't pay her more for writing her
+stories, for I read one of 'em that made me cry so the Doctor--my Doctor
+Benjamin--said, "Ma, what makes your eyes look so?" and wanted to rig a
+machine up and look at 'em, but I told him what the matter was, and that
+he needn't fix up his peeking contrivances on my account,--anyhow she's a
+nice young woman as ever lived, and as industrious with that pen of hers
+as if she was at work with a sewing-machine,--and there ain't much
+difference, for that matter, between sewing on shirts and writing on
+stories,--one way you work with your foot, and the other way you work
+with your fingers, but I rather guess there's more headache in the
+stories than there is in the stitches, because you don't have to think
+quite so hard while your foot's going as you do when your fingers is at
+work, scratch, scratch, scratch, scribble, scribble, scribble.
+
+It occurred to me that this last suggestion of the Landlady was worth
+considering by the soft-handed, broadcloth-clad spouters to the laboring
+classes,--so called in distinction from the idle people who only contrive
+the machinery and discover the processes and lay out the work and draw
+the charts and organize the various movements which keep the world going
+and make it tolerable. The organ-blower works harder with his muscles,
+for that matter, than the organ player, and may perhaps be exasperated
+into thinking himself a downtrodden martyr because he does not receive
+the same pay for his services.
+
+I will not pretend that it needed the Landlady's sagacious guess about
+the Young Astronomer and his pupil to open my eyes to certain
+possibilities, if not probabilities, in that direction. Our Scheherezade
+kept on writing her stories according to agreement, so many pages for so
+many dollars, but some of her readers began to complain that they could
+not always follow her quite so well as in her earlier efforts. It seemed
+as if she must have fits of absence. In one instance her heroine began as
+a blonde and finished as a brunette; not in consequence of the use of any
+cosmetic, but through simple inadvertence. At last it happened in one of
+her stories that a prominent character who had been killed in an early
+page, not equivocally, but mortally, definitively killed, done for, and
+disposed of, reappeared as if nothing had happened towards the close of
+her narrative. Her mind was on something else, and she had got two
+stories mixed up and sent her manuscript without having looked it over.
+She told this mishap to the Lady, as something she was dreadfully ashamed
+of and could not possibly account for. It had cost her a sharp note from
+the publisher, and would be as good as a dinner to some half-starved
+Bohemian of the critical press.
+
+The Lady listened to all this very thoughtfully, looking at her with
+great tenderness, and said, "My poor child!" Not another word then, but
+her silence meant a good deal.
+
+When a man holds his tongue it does not signify much. But when a woman
+dispenses with the office of that mighty member, when she sheathes her
+natural weapon at a trying moment, it means that she trusts to still more
+formidable enginery; to tears it may be, a solvent more powerful than
+that with which Hannibal softened the Alpine rocks, or to the heaving
+bosom, the sight of which has subdued so many stout natures, or, it may
+be, to a sympathizing, quieting look which says "Peace, be still!" to the
+winds and waves of the little inland ocean, in a language that means more
+than speech.
+
+While these matters were going on the Master and I had many talks on many
+subjects. He had found me a pretty good listener, for I had learned that
+the best way of getting at what was worth having from him was to wind him
+up with a question and let him run down all of himself. It is easy to
+turn a good talker into an insufferable bore by contradicting him, and
+putting questions for him to stumble over,--that is, if he is not a bore
+already, as "good talkers" are apt to be, except now and then.
+
+We had been discussing some knotty points one morning when he said all at
+once:
+
+--Come into my library with me. I want to read you some new passages
+from an interleaved copy of my book. You haven't read the printed part
+yet. I gave you a copy of it, but nobody reads a book that is given to
+him. Of course not. Nobody but a fool expects him to. He reads a
+little in it here and there, perhaps, and he cuts all the leaves if he
+cares enough about the writer, who will be sure to call on him some day,
+and if he is left alone in his library for five minutes will have hunted
+every corner of it until he has found the book he sent,--if it is to be
+found at all, which does n't always happen, if there's a penal colony
+anywhere in a garret or closet for typographical offenders and vagrants.
+
+--What do you do when you receive a book you don't want, from the
+author?--said I.
+
+--Give him a good-natured adjective or two if I can, and thank him, and
+tell him I am lying under a sense of obligation to him.
+
+--That is as good an excuse for lying as almost any,--I said.
+
+--Yes, but look out for the fellows that send you a copy of their book to
+trap you into writing a bookseller's advertisement for it. I got caught
+so once, and never heard the end of it and never shall hear it.---He took
+down an elegantly bound volume, on opening which appeared a flourishing
+and eminently flattering dedication to himself.---There,--said he, what
+could I do less than acknowledge such a compliment in polite terms, and
+hope and expect the book would prove successful, and so forth and so
+forth? Well, I get a letter every few months from some new locality
+where the man that made that book is covering the fences with his
+placards, asking me whether I wrote that letter which he keeps in
+stereotype and has kept so any time these dozen or fifteen years. Animus
+tuus oculus, as the freshmen used to say. If her Majesty, the Queen of
+England, sends you a copy of her "Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in
+the Highlands," be sure you mark your letter of thanks for it Private!
+
+We had got comfortably seated in his library in the mean time, and the
+Master had taken up his book. I noticed that every other page was left
+blank, and that he had written in a good deal of new matter.
+
+--I tell you what,--he said,--there 's so much intelligence about
+nowadays in books and newspapers and talk that it's mighty hard to write
+without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or
+your volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of
+wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow. Every now and then I find
+something in my book that seems so good to me, I can't help thinking it
+must have leaked in. I suppose other people discover that it came
+through a leak, full as soon as I do. You must write a book or two to
+find out how much and how little you know and have to say. Then you must
+read some notices of it by somebody that loves you and one or two by
+somebody that hates you. You 'll find yourself a very odd piece of
+property after you 've been through these experiences. They 're trying
+to the constitution; I'm always glad to hear that a friend is as well as
+can be expected after he 's had a book.
+
+You must n't think there are no better things in these pages of mine than
+the ones I'm going to read you, but you may come across something here
+that I forgot to say when we were talking over these matters.
+
+He began, reading from the manuscript portion of his book:
+
+--We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought.
+Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to
+say when we get ready. [He looked up from his book just here and said,
+"Don't be afraid, I am not going to quote Pereant."] One of our old
+boarders--the one that called himself "The Professor" I think it
+was--said some pretty audacious things about what he called "pathological
+piety," as I remember, in one of his papers. And here comes along Mr.
+Galton, and shows in detail from religious biographies that "there is a
+frequent correlation between an unusually devout disposition and a weak
+constitution." Neither of them appeared to know that John Bunyan had got
+at the same fact long before them. He tells us, "The more healthy the
+lusty man is, the more prone he is unto evil." If the converse is true,
+no wonder that good people, according to Bunyan, are always in trouble
+and terror, for he says,
+
+ "A Christian man is never long at ease;
+ When one fright is gone, another doth him seize."
+
+If invalidism and the nervous timidity which is apt to go with it are
+elements of spiritual superiority, it follows that pathology and
+toxicology should form a most important part of a theological education,
+so that a divine might know how to keep a parish in a state of chronic
+bad health in order that it might be virtuous.
+
+It is a great mistake to think that a man's religion is going to rid him
+of his natural qualities. "Bishop Hall" (as you may remember to have
+seen quoted elsewhere) "prefers Nature before Grace in the Election of a
+wife, because, saith he, it will be a hard Task, where the Nature is
+peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire conquest while Life
+lasteth."
+
+"Nature" and "Grace" have been contrasted with each other in a way not
+very respectful to the Divine omnipotence. Kings and queens reign "by
+the Grace of God," but a sweet, docile, pious disposition, such as is
+born in some children and grows up with them,--that congenital gift which
+good Bishop Hall would look for in a wife,--is attributed to "Nature."
+In fact "Nature" and "Grace," as handled by the scholastics, are nothing
+more nor less than two hostile Divinities in the Pantheon of
+post-classical polytheism.
+
+What is the secret of the profound interest which "Darwinism" has excited
+in the minds and hearts of more persons than dare to confess their doubts
+and hopes? It is because it restores "Nature" to its place as a true
+divine manifestation. It is that it removes the traditional curse from
+that helpless infant lying in its mother's arms. It is that it lifts
+from the shoulders of man the responsibility for the fact of death. It
+is that, if it is true, woman can no longer be taunted with having
+brought down on herself the pangs which make her sex a martyrdom. If
+development upward is the general law of the race; if we have grown by
+natural evolution out of the cave-man, and even less human forms of life,
+we have everything to hope from the future. That the question can be
+discussed without offence shows that we are entering on a new era, a
+Revival greater than that of Letters, the Revival of Humanity.
+
+The prevalent view of "Nature" has been akin to that which long reigned
+with reference to disease. This used to be considered as a distinct
+entity apart from the processes of life, of which it is one of the
+manifestations. It was a kind of demon to be attacked with things of
+odious taste and smell; to be fumigated out of the system as the evil
+spirit was driven from the bridal-chamber in the story of Tobit. The
+Doctor of earlier days, even as I can remember him, used to exorcise the
+demon of disease with recipes of odor as potent as that of the angel's
+diabolifuge,--the smoke from a fish's heart and liver, duly burned,--"the
+which smell when the evil spirit had smelled he fled into the uttermost
+parts of Egypt." The very moment that disease passes into the category
+of vital processes, and is recognized as an occurrence absolutely
+necessary, inevitable, and as one may say, normal under certain given
+conditions of constitution and circumstance, the medicine-man loses his
+half-miraculous endowments. The mythical serpent is untwined from the
+staff of Esculapius, which thenceforth becomes a useful walking-stick,
+and does not pretend to be anything more.
+
+Sin, like disease, is a vital process. It is a function, and not an
+entity. It must be studied as a section of anthropology. No
+preconceived idea must be allowed to interfere with our investigation of
+the deranged spiritual function, any more than the old ideas of
+demoniacal possession must be allowed to interfere with our study of
+epilepsy. Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct observation
+and analysis, like any other subject involving a series of living
+actions.
+
+In these living actions everything is progressive. There are sudden
+changes of character in what is called "conversion" which, at first,
+hardly seem to come into line with the common laws of evolution. But
+these changes have been long preparing, and it is just as much in the
+order of nature that certain characters should burst all at once from the
+rule of evil propensities, as it is that the evening primrose should
+explode, as it were, into bloom with audible sound, as you may read in
+Keats's Endymion, or observe in your own garden.
+
+There is a continual tendency in men to fence in themselves and a few of
+their neighbors who agree with them in their ideas, as if they were an
+exception to their race. We must not allow any creed or religion
+whatsoever to confiscate to its own private use and benefit the virtues
+which belong to our common humanity. The Good Samaritan helped his
+wounded neighbor simply because he was a suffering fellow-creature. Do
+you think your charitable act is more acceptable than the Good
+Samaritan's, because you do it in the name of Him who made the memory of
+that kind man immortal? Do you mean that you would not give the cup of
+cold water for the sake simply and solely of the poor, suffering
+fellow-mortal, as willingly as you now do, professing to give it for the
+sake of Him who is not thirsty or in need of any help of yours? We must
+ask questions like this, if we are to claim for our common nature what
+belongs to it.
+
+The scientific study of man is the most difficult of all branches of
+knowledge. It requires, in the first place, an entire new terminology to
+get rid of that enormous load of prejudices with which every term applied
+to the malformations, the functional disturbances, and the organic
+diseases of the moral nature is at present burdened. Take that one word
+Sin, for instance: all those who have studied the subject from nature and
+not from books know perfectly well that a certain fraction of what is so
+called is nothing more or less than a symptom of hysteria; that another
+fraction is the index of a limited degree of insanity; that still another
+is the result of a congenital tendency which removes the act we sit in
+judgment upon from the sphere of self-determination, if not entirely, at
+least to such an extent that the subject of the tendency cannot be judged
+by any normal standard.
+
+To study nature without fear is possible, but without reproach,
+impossible. The man who worships in the temple of knowledge must carry
+his arms with him as our Puritan fathers had to do when they gathered in
+their first rude meeting-houses. It is a fearful thing to meddle with
+the ark which holds the mysteries of creation. I remember that when I
+was a child the tradition was whispered round among us little folks that
+if we tried to count the stars we should drop down dead. Nevertheless,
+the stars have been counted and the astronomer has survived. This
+nursery legend is the child's version of those superstitions which would
+have strangled in their cradles the young sciences now adolescent and
+able to take care of themselves, and which, no longer daring to attack
+these, are watching with hostile aspect the rapid growth of the
+comparatively new science of man.
+
+The real difficulty of the student of nature at this time is to reconcile
+absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness with that respect for the past,
+that reverence, for the spirit of reverence wherever we find it, that
+tenderness for the weakest fibres by which the hearts of our
+fellow-creatures hold to their religious convictions, which will make the
+transition from old belief to a larger light and liberty an interstitial
+change and not a violent mutilation.
+
+I remember once going into a little church in a small village some miles
+from a great European capital. The special object of adoration in this
+humblest of places of worship was a bambino, a holy infant, done in wax,
+and covered with cheap ornaments such as a little girl would like to
+beautify her doll with. Many a good Protestant of the old Puritan type
+would have felt a strong impulse to seize this "idolatrous" figure and
+dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church. But one must
+have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this
+poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble,
+unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office
+of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue
+of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years
+in the mind of that poor old woman who is kneeling before it, it is no
+longer a wax doll for her, but has undergone a transubstantiation quite
+as real as that of the Eucharist. The moral is that we must not roughly
+smash other people's idols because we know, or think we know, that they
+are of cheap human manufacture.
+
+--Do you think cheap manufactures encourage idleness?--said I.
+
+The Master stared. Well he might, for I had been getting a little
+drowsy, and wishing to show that I had been awake and attentive, asked a
+question suggested by some words I had caught, but which showed that I
+had not been taking the slightest idea from what he was reading me. He
+stared, shook his head slowly, smiled good-humoredly, took off his great
+round spectacles, and shut up his book.
+
+--Sat prates biberunt,--he said. A sick man that gets talking about
+himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that
+begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop. You'll
+think of some of these things you've been getting half asleep over by and
+by. I don't want you to believe anything I say; I only want you to try
+to see what makes me believe it.
+
+My young friend, the Astronomer, has, I suspect, been making some
+addition to his manuscript. At any rate some of the lines he read us in
+the afternoon of this same day had never enjoyed the benefit of my
+revision, and I think they had but just been written. I noticed that his
+manner was somewhat more excited than usual, and his voice just towards
+the close a little tremulous. Perhaps I may attribute his improvement to
+the effect of my criticisms, but whatever the reason, I think these lines
+are very nearly as correct as they would have been if I had looked them
+over.
+
+ WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.
+
+ VII
+
+ What if a soul redeemed, a spirit that loved
+ While yet on earth and was beloved in turn,
+ And still remembered every look and tone
+ Of that dear earthly sister who was left
+ Among the unwise virgins at the gate,
+ Itself admitted with the bridegroom's train,
+ What if this spirit redeemed, amid the host
+ Of chanting angels, in some transient lull
+ Of the eternal anthem, heard the cry
+ Of its lost darling, whom in evil hour
+ Some wilder pulse of nature led astray
+ And left an outcast in a world of fire,
+ Condemned to be the sport of cruel fiends,
+ Sleepless, unpitying, masters of the skill
+ To wring the maddest ecstasies of pain
+ From worn-out souls that only ask to die,
+ Would it not long to leave the bliss of Heaven,
+ Bearing a little water in its hand
+ To moisten those poor lips that plead in vain
+ With Him we call our Father? Or is all
+ So changed in such as taste celestial joy
+ They hear unmoved the endless wail of woe,
+ The daughter in the same dear tones that hushed
+ Her cradled slumbers; she who once had held
+ A babe upon her bosom from its voice
+ Hoarse with its cry of anguish, yet the same?
+
+ No! not in ages when the Dreadful Bird
+ Stamped his huge footprints, and the Fearful Beast
+ Strode with the flesh about those fossil bones
+ We build to mimic life with pygmy hands,
+ Not in those earliest days when men ran wild
+ And gashed each other with their knives of stone,
+ When their low foreheads bulged in ridgy brows
+ And their flat hands were callous in the palm
+ With walking in the fashion of their sires,
+ Grope as they might to find a cruel god
+ To work their will on such as human wrath
+ Had wrought its worst to torture, and had left
+ With rage unsated, white and stark and cold,
+ Could hate have shaped a demon more malign
+ Than him the dead men mummied in their creed
+ And taught their trembling children to adore!
+ Made in his image! Sweet and gracious souls
+ Dear to my heart by nature's fondest names,
+ Is not your memory still the precious mould
+ That lends its form to Him who hears my prayer?
+ Thus only I behold him, like to them,
+ Long-suffering, gentle, ever slow to wrath,
+ If wrath it be that only wounds to heal,
+ Ready to meet the wanderer ere he reach
+ The door he seeks, forgetful of his sin,
+ Longing to clasp him in a father's arms,
+ And seal his pardon with a pitying tear!
+
+ Four gospels tell their story to mankind,
+ And none so full of soft, caressing words
+ That bring the Maid of Bethlehem and her Babe
+ Before our tear-dimmed eyes, as his who learned
+ In the meek service of his gracious art
+ The tones which like the medicinal balms
+ That calm the sufferer's anguish, soothe our souls.
+ --Oh that the loving woman, she who sat
+ So long a listener at her Master's feet,
+ Had left us Mary's Gospel,--all she heard
+ Too sweet, too subtle for the ear of man!
+ Mark how the tender-hearted mothers read
+ The messages of love between the lines
+ Of the same page that loads the bitter tongue
+ Of him who deals in terror as his trade
+ With threatening words of wrath that scorch like flame!
+ They tell of angels whispering round the bed
+ Of the sweet infant smiling in its dream,
+ Of lambs enfolded in the Shepherd's arms,
+ Of Him who blessed the children; of the land
+ Where crystal rivers feed unfading flowers,
+ Of cities golden-paved with streets of pearl,
+ Of the white robes the winged creatures wear,
+ The crowns and harps from whose melodious strings
+ One long, sweet anthem flows forevermore!
+
+ --We too bad human mothers, even as Thou,
+ Whom we have learned to worship as remote
+ From mortal kindred, wast a cradled babe.
+ The milk of woman filled our branching veins,
+ She lulled us with her tender nursery-song,
+ And folded round us her untiring arms,
+ While the first unremembered twilight year
+ Shaped us to conscious being; still we feel
+ Her pulses in our own,--too faintly feel;
+ Would that the heart of woman warmed our creeds!
+
+ Not from the sad-eyed hermit's lonely cell,
+ Not from the conclave where the holy men
+ Glare on each other, as with angry eyes
+ They battle for God's glory and their own,
+ Till, sick of wordy strife, a show of hands
+ Fixes the faith of ages yet unborn,
+ Ah, not from these the listening soul can hear
+ The Father's voice that speaks itself divine!
+ Love must be still our Master; till we learn
+ What he can teach us of a woman's heart,
+ We know not His, whose love embraces all.
+
+There are certain nervous conditions peculiar to women in which the
+common effects of poetry and of music upon their sensibilities are
+strangely exaggerated. It was not perhaps to be wondered at that Octavia
+fainted when Virgil in reading from his great poem came to the line
+beginning Tu Marcellus eris: It is not hard to believe the story told of
+one of the two Davidson sisters, that the singing of some of Moore's
+plaintive melodies would so impress her as almost to take away the
+faculties of sense and motion. But there must have been some special
+cause for the singular nervous state into which this reading threw the
+young girl, our Scheherezade. She was doubtless tired with overwork and
+troubled with the thought that she was not doing herself justice, and
+that she was doomed to be the helpless prey of some of those corbies who
+not only pick out corbies' eyes, but find no other diet so nutritious and
+agreeable.
+
+Whatever the cause may have been, her heart heaved tumultuously, her
+color came and went, and though she managed to avoid a scene by the
+exercise of all her self-control, I watched her very anxiously, for I was
+afraid she would have had a hysteric turn, or in one of her pallid
+moments that she would have fainted and fallen like one dead before us.
+
+I was very glad, therefore, when evening came, to find that she was going
+out for a lesson on the stars. I knew the open air was what she needed,
+and I thought the walk would do her good, whether she made any new
+astronomical acquisitions or not.
+
+It was now late in the autumn, and the trees were pretty nearly stripped
+of their leaves.--There was no place so favorable as the Common for the
+study of the heavens. The skies were brilliant with stars, and the air
+was just keen enough to remind our young friends that the cold season was
+at hand. They wandered round for a while, and at last found themselves
+under the Great Elm, drawn thither, no doubt, by the magnetism it is so
+well known to exert over the natives of its own soil and those who have
+often been under the shadow of its outstretched arms. The venerable
+survivor of its contemporaries that flourished in the days when
+Blackstone rode beneath it on his bull was now a good deal broken by age,
+yet not without marks of lusty vitality. It had been wrenched and
+twisted and battered by so many scores of winters that some of its limbs
+were crippled and many of its joints were shaky, and but for the support
+of the iron braces that lent their strong sinews to its more infirm
+members it would have gone to pieces in the first strenuous northeaster
+or the first sudden and violent gale from the southwest. But there it
+stood, and there it stands as yet,--though its obituary was long ago
+written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,--leafing
+out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp
+"Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as
+softly as if it were whispering Amen!
+
+Not far from the ancient and monumental tree lay a small sheet of water,
+once agile with life and vocal with evening melodies, but now stirred
+only by the swallow as he dips his wing, or by the morning bath of the
+English sparrows, those high-headed, thick-bodied, full-feeding,
+hot-tempered little John Bulls that keep up such a swashing and swabbing
+and spattering round all the water basins, one might think from the fuss
+they make about it that a bird never took a bath here before, and that
+they were the missionaries of ablution to the unwashed Western world.
+
+There are those who speak lightly of this small aqueous expanse, the eye
+of the sacred enclosure, which has looked unwinking on the happy faces of
+so many natives and the curious features of so many strangers. The music
+of its twilight minstrels has long ceased, but their memory lingers like
+an echo in the name it bears. Cherish it, inhabitants of the two-hilled
+city, once three-hilled; ye who have said to the mountain, "Remove
+hence," and turned the sea into dry land! May no contractor fill his
+pockets by undertaking to fill thee, thou granite girdled lakelet, or
+drain the civic purse by drawing off thy waters! For art thou not the
+Palladium of our Troy? Didst thou not, like the Divine image which was
+the safeguard of Ilium, fall from the skies, and if the Trojan could look
+with pride upon the heaven-descended form of the Goddess of Wisdom,
+cannot he who dwells by thy shining oval look in that mirror and
+contemplate Himself,--the Native of Boston.
+
+There must be some fatality which carries our young men and maidens in
+the direction of the Common when they have anything very particular to
+exchange their views about. At any rate I remember two of our young
+friends brought up here a good many years ago, and I understand that
+there is one path across the enclosure which a young man must not ask a
+young woman to take with him unless he means business, for an action will
+hold--for breach of promise, if she consents to accompany him, and he
+chooses to forget his obligations:
+
+Our two young people stood at the western edge of the little pool,
+studying astronomy in the reflected firmament. The Pleiades were
+trembling in the wave before them, and the three great stars of
+Orion,--for these constellations were both glittering in the eastern sky.
+
+"There is no place too humble for the glories of heaven to shine in," she
+said.
+
+"And their splendor makes even this little pool beautiful and noble," he
+answered. "Where is the light to come from that is to do as much for our
+poor human lives?"
+
+A simple question enough, but the young girl felt her color change as she
+answered, "From friendship, I think."
+
+--Grazing only as-yet,--not striking full, hardly hitting at all,--but
+there are questions and answers that come so very near, the wind of them
+alone almost takes the breath away.
+
+There was an interval of silence. Two young persons can stand looking at
+water for a long time without feeling the necessity of speaking.
+Especially when the water is alive with stars and the young persons are
+thoughtful and impressible. The water seems to do half the thinking
+while one is looking at it; its movements are felt in the brain very much
+like thought. When I was in full training as a flaneur, I could stand on
+the Pont Neuf with the other experts in the great science of passive
+cerebration and look at the river for half an hour with so little mental
+articulation that when I moved on it seemed as if my thinking-marrow had
+been asleep and was just waking up refreshed after its nap.
+
+So the reader can easily account for the interval of silence. It is hard
+to tell how long it would have lasted, but just then a lubberly intrusive
+boy threw a great stone, which convulsed the firmament, the one at their
+feet, I mean. The six Pleiads disappeared as if in search of their lost
+sister; the belt of Orion was broken asunder, and a hundred worlds
+dissolved back into chaos. They turned away and strayed off into one of
+the more open paths, where the view of the sky over them was
+unobstructed. For some reason or other the astronomical lesson did not
+get on very fast this evening.
+
+Presently the young man asked his pupil:
+
+--Do you know what the constellation directly over our heads is?
+
+--Is it not Cassiopea?--she asked a little hesitatingly.
+
+--No, it is Andromeda. You ought not to have forgotten her, for I
+remember showing you a double star, the one in her right foot, through
+the equatorial telescope. You have not forgotten the double star,--the
+two that shone for each other and made a little world by themselves?
+
+--No, indeed,--she answered, and blushed, and felt ashamed because she
+had said indeed, as if it had been an emotional recollection.
+
+The double-star allusion struck another dead silence. She would have
+given a week's pay to any invisible attendant that would have cut her
+stay-lace.
+
+At last: Do you know the story of Andromeda? he said.
+
+--Perhaps I did once, but suppose I don't remember it.
+
+He told her the story of the unfortunate maiden chained to a rock and
+waiting for a sea-beast that was coming to devour her, and how Perseus
+came and set her free, and won her love with her life. And then he began
+something about a young man chained to his rock, which was a star-gazer's
+tower, a prey by turns to ambition, and lonely self-contempt and
+unwholesome scorn of the life he looked down upon after the serenity of
+the firmament, and endless questionings that led him nowhere,--and now he
+had only one more question to ask. He loved her. Would she break his
+chain?--He held both his hands out towards her, the palms together, as if
+they were fettered at the wrists. She took hold of them very gently;
+parted them a little; then wider--wider--and found herself all at once
+folded, unresisting, in her lover's arms.
+
+So there was a new double-star in the living firmament. The
+constellations seemed to kindle with new splendors as the student and the
+story-teller walked homeward in their light; Alioth and Algol looked down
+on them as on the first pair of lovers they shone over, and the autumn
+air seemed full of harmonies as when the morning stars sang together.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into his
+library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved book. We
+three had formed a kind of little club without knowing it from the time
+when the young man began reading those extracts from his poetical
+reveries which I have reproduced in these pages. Perhaps we agreed in too
+many things,--I suppose if we could have had a good hard-headed,
+old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us it might have acted as a
+wholesome corrective. For we had it all our own way; the Lady's kindly
+remonstrance was taken in good part, but did not keep us from talking
+pretty freely, and as for the Young Girl, she listened with the
+tranquillity and fearlessness which a very simple trusting creed
+naturally gives those who hold it. The fewer outworks to the citadel of
+belief, the fewer points there are to be threatened and endangered.
+
+The reader must not suppose that I even attempt to reproduce everything
+exactly as it took place in our conversations, or when we met to listen
+to the Master's prose or to the Young Astronomer's verse. I do not
+pretend to give all the pauses and interruptions by question or
+otherwise. I could not always do it if I tried, but I do not want to,
+for oftentimes it is better to let the speaker or reader go on
+continuously, although there may have been many breaks in the course of
+the conversation or reading. When, for instance, I by and by reproduce
+what the Landlady said to us, I shall give it almost without any hint
+that it was arrested in its flow from time to time by various expressions
+on the part of the hearers.
+
+I can hardly say what the reason of it was, but it is very certain that I
+had a vague sense of some impending event as we took our seats in the
+Master's library. He seemed particularly anxious that we should be
+comfortably seated, and shook up the cushions of the arm-chairs himself,
+and got them into the right places.
+
+Now go to sleep--he said--or listen,--just which you like best. But I am
+going to begin by telling you both a secret.
+
+Liberavi animam meam. That is the meaning of my book and of my literary
+life, if I may give such a name to that party-colored shred of human
+existence. I have unburdened myself in this book, and in some other
+pages, of what I was born to say. Many things that I have said in my
+ripe days have been aching in my soul since I was a mere child. I say
+aching, because they conflicted with many of my inherited beliefs, or
+rather traditions. I did not know then that two strains of blood were
+striving in me for the mastery,--two! twenty, perhaps,--twenty thousand,
+for aught I know,--but represented to me by two,--paternal and maternal.
+Blind forces in themselves; shaping thoughts as they shaped features and
+battled for the moulding of constitution and the mingling of temperament.
+
+Philosophy and poetry came--to me before I knew their names.
+
+ Je fis mes premiers vers, sans savoir les ecrire.
+
+Not verses so much as the stuff that verses are made of. I don't suppose
+that the thoughts which came up of themselves in my mind were so mighty
+different from what come up in the minds of other young folks. And that
+'s the best reason I could give for telling 'em. I don't believe
+anything I've written is as good as it seemed to me when I wrote it,--he
+stopped, for he was afraid he was lying,--not much that I 've written, at
+any rate,--he said--with a smile at the honesty which made him qualify
+his statement. But I do know this: I have struck a good many chords,
+first and last, in the consciousness of other people. I confess to a
+tender feeling for my little brood of thoughts. When they have been
+welcomed and praised it has pleased me, and if at any time they have been
+rudely handled and despitefully entreated it has cost me a little worry.
+I don't despise reputation, and I should like to be remembered as having
+said something worth lasting well enough to last.
+
+But all that is nothing to the main comfort I feel as a writer. I have
+got rid of something my mind could not keep to itself and rise as it was
+meant to into higher regions. I saw the aeronauts the other day emptying
+from the bags some of the sand that served as ballast. It glistened a
+moment in the sunlight as a slender shower, and then was lost and seen no
+more as it scattered itself unnoticed. But the airship rose higher as the
+sand was poured out, and so it seems to me I have felt myself getting
+above the mists and clouds whenever I have lightened myself of some
+portion of the mental ballast I have carried with me. Why should I hope
+or fear when I send out my book? I have had my reward, for I have
+wrought out my thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul. I can
+afford to be forgotten.
+
+Look here!--he said. I keep oblivion always before me.---He pointed to a
+singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a pile of
+manuscripts.---Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what I am writing,
+I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project my thought
+forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean carries it
+backward. When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes of being
+remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows calm. I
+touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow smooth. Our
+world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf to be folded with
+the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and by I shall be just as
+famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded with me in a conglomerate.
+
+He began reading:--"There is no new thing under the sun," said the
+Preacher. He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a
+little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon, and
+take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a message from
+General Grant by the cable, and see a man's leg cut off without its
+hurting him. If it did not take his breath away and lay him out as flat
+as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the splendors of his court, he
+must have rivalled our Indians in the nil admarari line.
+
+For all that, it is a strange thing to see what numbers of new things are
+really old. There are many modern contrivances that are of as early date
+as the first man, if not thousands of centuries older. Everybody knows
+how all the arrangements of our telescopes and microscopes are
+anticipated in the eye, and how our best musical instruments are
+surpassed by the larynx. But there are some very odd things any
+anatomist can tell, showing how our recent contrivances are anticipated
+in the human body. In the alimentary canal are certain pointed eminences
+called villi, and certain ridges called valvuloe conniventes. The makers
+of heating apparatus have exactly reproduced the first in the "pot" of
+their furnaces, and the second in many of the radiators to be seen in our
+public buildings. The object in the body and the heating apparatus is
+the same; to increase the extent of surface.--We mix hair with plaster
+(as the Egyptians mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that it shall
+hold more firmly. But before man had any artificial dwelling the same
+contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance had been
+employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column. India-rubber is
+modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic like that, and
+serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that serves in our
+mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia. The dome, the round
+and the Gothic arch, the groined roof, the flying buttress, are all
+familiar to those who have studied the bony frame of man. All forms of
+the lever and all the principal kinds of hinges are to be met with in our
+own frames. The valvular arrangements of the blood-vessels are
+unapproached by any artificial apparatus, and the arrangements for
+preventing friction are so perfect that two surfaces will play on each
+other for fourscore years or more and never once trouble their owner by
+catching or rubbing so as to be felt or heard.
+
+But stranger than these repetitions are the coincidences one finds in the
+manners and speech of antiquity and our own time. In the days when Flood
+Ireson was drawn in the cart by the Maenads of Marblehead, that fishing
+town had the name of nurturing a young population not over fond of
+strangers. It used to be said that if an unknown landsman showed himself
+in the streets, the boys would follow after him, crying, "Rock him! Rock
+him! He's got a long-tailed coat on!"
+
+Now if one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three
+thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders.
+The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a young
+maiden of the place, gives him some excellent advice. "Hold your
+tongue," she says, "and don't look at anybody or ask any questions, for
+these are seafaring people, and don't like to have strangers round or
+anybody that does not belong here."
+
+Who would have thought that the saucy question, "Does your mother know
+you're out?" was the very same that Horace addressed to the bore who
+attacked him in the Via Sacra?
+
+ Interpellandi locus hic erat; Est tibi mater?
+ Cognati, queis te salvo est opus?
+
+And think of the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent
+words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the
+vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus:
+
+ Chommoda dicebat, siquando commoda vellet
+ Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias.
+ Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum,
+ Cum quantum poterat, dixerat hinsidias...
+
+ Hoc misso in Syriam, requierant omnibus aures...
+ Cum subito affertur nuncius horribilis;
+ Ionios fluctus, postquam illue Arrius isset,
+ Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.
+
+--Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent jest about our crooked
+streets which, if they were a little more familiar with a native author
+of unquestionable veracity, they would strike out from the letter of "Our
+Boston Correspondent," where it is a source of perennial hilarity. It is
+worth while to reprint, for the benefit of whom it may concern, a
+paragraph from the authentic history of the venerable Diedrich
+Knickerbocker:
+
+"The sage council, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter, not
+being able to determine upon any plan for the building of their
+city,--the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their
+peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established paths
+through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built their
+houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque turns and
+labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New York at this very
+day."
+
+--When I was a little boy there came to stay with us for a while a young
+lady with a singularly white complexion. Now I had often seen the masons
+slacking lime, and I thought it was the whitest thing I had ever looked
+upon. So I always called this fair visitor of ours Slacked Lime. I
+think she is still living in a neighboring State, and I am sure she has
+never forgotten the fanciful name I gave her. But within ten or a dozen
+years I have seen this very same comparison going the round of the
+papers, and credited to a Welsh poet, David Ap Gwyllym, or something like
+that, by name.
+
+--I turned a pretty sentence enough in one of my lectures about finding
+poppies springing up amidst the corn; as if it had been foreseen by
+nature that wherever there should be hunger that asked for food, there
+would be pain that needed relief,--and many years afterwards. I had the
+pleasure of finding that Mistress Piozzi had been beforehand with me in
+suggesting the same moral reflection.
+
+--I should like to carry some of my friends to see a giant bee-hive I
+have discovered. Its hum can be heard half a mile, and the great white
+swarm counts its tens of thousands. They pretend to call it a
+planing-mill, but if it is not a bee-hive it is so like one that if a
+hundred people have not said so before me, it is very singular that they
+have not. If I wrote verses I would try to bring it in, and I suppose
+people would start up in a dozen places, and say, "Oh, that bee-hive
+simile is mine,--and besides, did not Mr. Bayard Taylor call the
+snowflakes 'white bees'?"
+
+I think the old Master had chosen these trivialities on purpose to amuse
+the Young Astronomer and myself, if possible, and so make sure of our
+keeping awake while he went on reading, as follows:
+
+--How the sweet souls of all time strike the same note, the same because
+it is in unison with the divine voice that sings to them! I read in the
+Zend Avesta, "No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks so much
+evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good. No earthly man with a
+hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength
+does good."
+
+And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own New
+England and one of our old Puritan preachers. It was in the dreadful
+days of the Salem Witchcraft delusion that one Jonathan Singletary, being
+then in the prison at Ipswich, gave his testimony as to certain fearful
+occurrences,--a great noise, as of many cats climbing, skipping, and
+jumping, of throwing about of furniture, and of men walking in the
+chambers, with crackling and shaking as if the house would fall upon him.
+
+"I was at present," he says, "something affrighted; yet considering what
+I had lately heard made out by Mr. Mitchel at Cambridge, that there is
+more good in God than there is evil in sin, and that although God is the
+greatest good and sin the greatest evil, yet the first Being of evil
+cannot weave the scales or overpower the first Being of good: so
+considering that the authour of good was of greater power than the
+authour of evil, God was pleased of his goodness to keep me from being
+out of measure frighted."
+
+I shall always bless the memory of this poor, timid creature for saving
+that dear remembrance of "Matchless Mitchel." How many, like him, have
+thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were only reaffirming
+the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of humanity, and are
+common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler creeds! But spoken by
+those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded hearers, the words I have
+cited seem to me to have a fragrance like the precious ointment of
+spikenard with which Mary anointed her Master's feet. I can see the
+little bare meeting-house, with the godly deacons, and the grave matrons,
+and the comely maidens, and the sober manhood of the village, with the
+small group of college students sitting by themselves under the shadow of
+the awful Presidential Presence, all listening to that preaching, which
+was, as Cotton Mather says, "as a very lovely song of one that hath a
+pleasant voice"; and as the holy pastor utters those blessed words, which
+are not of any one church or age, but of all time, the humble place of
+worship is filled with their perfume, as the house where Mary knelt was
+filled with the odor of the precious ointment.
+
+--The Master rose, as he finished reading this sentence, and, walking to
+the window, adjusted a curtain which he seemed to find a good deal of
+trouble in getting to hang just as he wanted it.
+
+He came back to his arm-chair, and began reading again
+
+--If men would only open their eyes to the fact which stares them in the
+face from history, and is made clear enough by the slightest glance at
+the condition of mankind, that humanity is of immeasurably greater
+importance than their own or any other particular belief, they would no
+more attempt to make private property of the grace of God than to fence
+in the sunshine for their own special use and enjoyment.
+
+We are all tattoed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the
+record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a
+man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in
+his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he
+will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas,
+mais je les crains,--"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them,
+nevertheless."
+
+--As people grow older they come at length to live so much in memory that
+they often think with a kind of pleasure of losing their dearest
+blessings. Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem
+when remembered. The friend we love best may sometimes weary us by his
+presence or vex us by his infirmities. How sweet to think of him as he
+will be to us after we have outlived him ten or a dozen years! Then we
+can recall him in his best moments, bid him stay with us as long as we
+want his company, and send him away when we wish to be alone again. One
+might alter Shenstone's well-known epitaph to suit such a case:--
+
+ Hen! quanto minus est cum to vivo versari
+
+ Quam erit (vel esset) tui mortui reminisse!
+
+ "Alas! how much less the delight of thy living presence
+ Than will (or would) be that of remembering thee when thou hast
+ left us!"
+
+I want to stop here--I the Poet--and put in a few reflections of my own,
+suggested by what I have been giving the reader from the Master's Book,
+and in a similar vein.
+
+--How few things there are that do not change their whole aspect in the
+course of a single generation! The landscape around us is wholly
+different. Even the outlines of the hills that surround us are changed
+by the creeping of the villages with their spires and school-houses up
+their sides. The sky remains the same, and the ocean. A few old
+churchyards look very much as they used to, except, of course, in Boston,
+where the gravestones have been rooted up and planted in rows with walks
+between them, to the utter disgrace and ruin of our most venerated
+cemeteries. The Registry of Deeds and the Probate Office show us the
+same old folios, where we can read our grandfather's title to his estate
+(if we had a grandfather and he happened to own anything) and see how
+many pots and kettles there were in his kitchen by the inventory of his
+personal property.
+
+Among living people none remain so long unchanged as the actors. I can
+see the same Othello to-day, if I choose, that when I was a boy I saw
+smothering Mrs. Duff-Desdemona with the pillow, under the instigations of
+Mr. Cooper-Iago. A few stone heavier than he was then, no doubt, but the
+same truculent blackamoor that took by the thr-r-r-oat the circumcised
+dog in Aleppo, and told us about it in the old Boston Theatre. In the
+course of a fortnight, if I care to cross the water, I can see
+Mademoiselle Dejazet in the same parts I saw her in under Louis Philippe,
+and be charmed by the same grace and vivacity which delighted my
+grandmother (if she was in Paris, and went to see her in the part of
+Fanchon toute seule at the Theatre des Capucines) in the days when the
+great Napoleon was still only First Consul.
+
+The graveyard and the stage are pretty much the only places where you can
+expect to find your friends--as you left them, five and twenty or fifty
+years ago. I have noticed, I may add, that old theatre-goers bring back
+the past with their stories more vividly than men with any other
+experiences. There were two old New-Yorkers that I used to love to sit
+talking with about the stage. One was a scholar and a writer of note; a
+pleasant old gentleman, with the fresh cheek of an octogenarian Cupid.
+The other not less noted in his way, deep in local lore, large-brained,
+full-blooded, of somewhat perturbing and tumultuous presence. It was
+good to hear them talk of George Frederic Cooke, of Kean, and the lesser
+stars of those earlier constellations. Better still to breakfast with
+old Samuel Rogers, as some of my readers have done more than once, and
+hear him answer to the question who was the best actor he remembered, "I
+think, on the whole, Garrick."
+
+If we did but know how to question these charming old people before it is
+too late! About ten years, more or less, after the generation in advance
+of our own has all died off, it occurs to us all at once, "There! I can
+ask my old friend what he knows of that picture, which must be a Copley;
+of that house and its legends about which there is such a mystery. He
+(or she) must know all about that." Too late! Too late!
+
+Still, now and then one saves a reminiscence that means a good deal by
+means of a casual question. I asked the first of those two old
+New-Yorkers the following question: "Who, on the whole, seemed to you the
+most considerable person you ever met?"
+
+Now it must be remembered that this was a man who had lived in a city
+that calls itself the metropolis, one who had been a member of the State
+and the National Legislature, who had come in contact with men of
+letters and men of business, with politicians and members of all the
+professions, during a long and distinguished public career. I paused for
+his answer with no little curiosity. Would it be one of the great
+Ex-Presidents whose names were known to, all the world? Would it be the
+silver-tongued orator of Kentucky or the "God-like" champion of the
+Constitution, our New-England Jupiter Capitolinus? Who would it be?
+
+"Take it altogether," he answered, very deliberately, "I should say
+Colonel Elisha Williams was the most notable personage that I have met
+with."
+
+--Colonel Elisha Williams! And who might he be, forsooth? A gentleman
+of singular distinction, you may be well assured, even though you are not
+familiar with his name; but as I am not writing a biographical
+dictionary, I shall leave it to my reader to find out who and what he
+was.
+
+--One would like to live long enough to witness certain things which will
+no doubt come to pass by and by. I remember that when one of our good
+kindhearted old millionnaires was growing very infirm, his limbs failing
+him, and his trunk getting packed with the infirmities which mean that
+one is bound on a long journey, he said very simply and sweetly, "I don't
+care about living a great deal longer, but I should like to live long
+enough to find out how much old (a many-millioned fellow-citizen) is
+worth." And without committing myself on the longevity-question, I
+confess I should like to live long enough to see a few things happen that
+are like to come, sooner or later.
+
+I want to hold the skull of Abraham in my hand. They will go through the
+cave of Machpelah at Hebron, I feel sure, in the course of a few
+generations at the furthest, and as Dr. Robinson knows of nothing which
+should lead us to question the correctness of the tradition which regards
+this as the place of sepulture of Abraham and the other patriarchs, there
+is no reason why we may not find his mummied body in perfect
+preservation, if he was embalmed after the Egyptian fashion. I suppose
+the tomb of David will be explored by a commission in due time, and I
+should like to see the phrenological developments of that great king and
+divine singer and warm-blooded man. If, as seems probable, the
+anthropological section of society manages to get round the curse that
+protects the bones of Shakespeare, I should like to see the dome which
+rounded itself over his imperial brain. Not that I am what is called a
+phrenologist, but I am curious as to the physical developments of these
+fellow-mortals of mine, and a little in want of a sensation.
+
+I should like to live long enough to see the course of the Tiber turned,
+and the bottom of the river thoroughly dredged. I wonder if they would
+find the seven-branched golden candlestick brought from Jerusalem by
+Titus, and said to have been dropped from the Milvian bridge. I have
+often thought of going fishing for it some year when I wanted a vacation,
+as some of my friends used to go to Ireland to fish for salmon. There
+was an attempt of that kind, I think, a few years ago.
+
+We all know how it looks well enough, from the figure of it on the Arch
+of Titus, but I should like to "heft" it in my own hand, and carry it
+home and shine it up (excuse my colloquialisms), and sit down and look at
+it, and think and think and think until the Temple of Solomon built up
+its walls of hewn stone and its roofs of cedar around me as noiselessly
+as when it rose, and "there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of
+iron heard in the house while it was in building."
+
+All this, you will remember, Beloved, is a digression on my own account,
+and I return to the old Master whom I left smiling at his own alteration
+of Shenstone's celebrated inscription. He now begin reading again:
+
+--I want it to be understood that I consider that a certain number of
+persons are at liberty to dislike me peremptorily, without showing cause,
+and that they give no offence whatever in so doing.
+
+If I did not cheerfully acquiesce in this sentiment towards myself on the
+part of others, I should not feel at liberty to indulge my own aversions.
+I try to cultivate a Christian feeling to all my fellow-creatures, but
+inasmuch as I must also respect truth and honesty, I confess to myself a
+certain number of inalienable dislikes and prejudices, some of which may
+possibly be shared by others. Some of these are purely instinctive, for
+others I can assign a reason. Our likes and dislikes play so important a
+part in the Order of Things that it is well to see on what they are
+founded.
+
+There are persons I meet occasionally who are too intelligent by half for
+my liking. They know my thoughts beforehand, and tell me what I was
+going to say. Of course they are masters of all my knowledge, and a good
+deal besides; have read all the books I have read, and in later editions;
+have had all the experiences I have been through, and more-too. In my
+private opinion every mother's son of them will lie at any time rather
+than confess ignorance.
+
+--I have a kind of dread, rather than hatred, of persons with a large
+excess of vitality; great feeders, great laughers, great story-tellers,
+who come sweeping over their company with a huge tidal wave of animal
+spirits and boisterous merriment. I have pretty good spirits myself, and
+enjoy a little mild pleasantry, but I am oppressed and extinguished by
+these great lusty, noisy creatures,--and feel as if I were a mute at a
+funeral when they get into full blast.
+
+--I cannot get along much better with those drooping, languid people,
+whose vitality falls short as much as that of the others is in excess. I
+have not life enough for two; I wish I had. It is not very enlivening to
+meet a fellow-creature whose expression and accents say, "You are the
+hair that breaks the camel's back of my endurance, you are the last drop
+that makes my cup of woe run over"; persons whose heads drop on one side
+like those of toothless infants, whose voices recall the tones in which
+our old snuffling choir used to wail out the verses of:
+
+ "Life is the time to serve the Lord."
+
+--There is another style which does not captivate me. I recognize an
+attempt at the grand manner now and then, in persons who are well enough
+in their way, but of no particular importance, socially or otherwise.
+Some family tradition of wealth or distinction is apt to be at the bottom
+of it, and it survives all the advantages that used to set it off. I
+like family pride as well as my neighbors, and respect the high-born
+fellow-citizen whose progenitors have not worked in their shirt-sleeves
+for the last two generations full as much as I ought to. But grand pere
+oblige; a person with a known grandfather is too distinguished to find it
+necessary to put on airs. The few Royal Princes I have happened to know
+were very easy people to get along with, and had not half the social
+knee-action I have often seen in the collapsed dowagers who lifted their
+eyebrows at me in my earlier years.
+
+--My heart does not warm as it should do towards the persons, not
+intimates, who are always too glad to see me when we meet by accident,
+and discover all at once that they have a vast deal to unbosom themselves
+of to me.
+
+--There is one blameless person whom I cannot love and have no excuse for
+hating. It is the innocent fellow-creature, otherwise inoffensive to me,
+whom I find I have involuntarily joined on turning a corner. I suppose
+the Mississippi, which was flowing quietly along, minding its own
+business, hates the Missouri for coming into it all at once with its
+muddy stream. I suppose the Missouri in like manner hates the
+Mississippi for diluting with its limpid, but insipid current the rich
+reminiscences of the varied soils through which its own stream has
+wandered. I will not compare myself, to the clear or the turbid current,
+but I will own that my heart sinks when I find all of a sudden I am in
+for a corner confluence, and I cease loving my neighbor as myself until I
+can get away from him.
+
+--These antipathies are at least weaknesses; they may be sins in the eye
+of the Recording Angel. I often reproach myself with my wrong-doings. I
+should like sometimes to thank Heaven for saving me from some kinds of
+transgression, and even for granting me some qualities that if I dared I
+should be disposed to call virtues. I should do so, I suppose, if I did
+not remember the story of the Pharisee. That ought not to hinder me.
+The parable was told to illustrate a single virtue, humility, and the
+most unwarranted inferences have been drawn from it as to the whole
+character of the two parties. It seems not at all unlikely, but rather
+probable, that the Pharisee was a fairer dealer, a better husband, and a
+more charitable person than the Publican, whose name has come down to us
+"linked with one virtue," but who may have been guilty, for aught that
+appears to the contrary, of "a thousand crimes." Remember how we limit
+the application of other parables. The lord, it will be recollected,
+commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely. His shrewdness
+was held up as an example, but after all he was a miserable swindler, and
+deserved the state-prison as much as many of our financial operators. The
+parable of the Pharisee and the Publican is a perpetual warning against
+spiritual pride. But it must not frighten any one of us out of being
+thankful that he is not, like this or that neighbor, under bondage to
+strong drink or opium, that he is not an Erie-Railroad Manager, and that
+his head rests in virtuous calm on his own pillow. If he prays in the
+morning to be kept out of temptation as well as for his daily bread,
+shall he not return thanks at night that he has not fallen into sin as
+well as that his stomach has been filled? I do not think the poor
+Pharisee has ever had fair play, and I am afraid a good many people sin
+with the comforting, half-latent intention of smiting their breasts
+afterwards and repeating the prayer of the Publican.
+
+ (Sensation.)
+
+This little movement which I have thus indicated seemed to give the
+Master new confidence in his audience. He turned over several pages
+until he came to a part of the interleaved volume where we could all see
+he had written in a passage of new matter in red ink as of special
+interest.
+
+--I told you, he said, in Latin, and I repeat it in English, that I have
+freed my soul in these pages,--I have spoken my mind. I have read you a
+few extracts, most of them of rather slight texture, and some of them,
+you perhaps thought, whimsical. But I meant, if I thought you were in
+the right mood for listening to it, to read you some paragraphs which
+give in small compass the pith, the marrow, of all that my experience has
+taught me. Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
+I took it early, as we all do, and have treated it all along with the
+best palliatives I could get hold of, inasmuch as I could find no radical
+cure for its evils, and have so far managed to keep pretty comfortable
+under it.
+
+It is a great thing for a man to put the whole meaning of his life into a
+few paragraphs, if he does it so that others can make anything out of it.
+If he conveys his wisdom after the fashion of the old alchemists, he may
+as well let it alone. He must talk in very plain words, and that is what
+I have done. You want to know what a certain number of scores of years
+have taught me that I think best worth telling. If I had half a dozen
+square inches of paper, and one penful of ink, and five minutes to use
+them in for the instruction of those who come after me, what should I put
+down in writing? That is the question.
+
+Perhaps I should be wiser if I refused to attempt any such brief
+statement of the most valuable lesson that life has taught me. I am by
+no means sure that I had not better draw my pen through the page that
+holds the quintessence of my vital experiences, and leave those who wish
+to know what it is to distil to themselves from my many printed pages.
+But I have excited your curiosity, and I see that you are impatient to
+hear what the wisdom, or the folly, it may be, of a life shows for, when
+it is crowded into a few lines as the fragrance of a gardenful of roses
+is concentrated in a few drops of perfume.
+
+--By this time I confess I was myself a little excited. What was he
+going to tell us? The Young Astronomer looked upon him with an eye as
+clear and steady and brilliant as the evening star, but I could see that
+he too was a little nervous, wondering what would come next.
+
+The old Master adjusted his large round spectacles, and began:
+
+--It has cost me fifty years to find my place in the Order of Things. I
+had explored all the sciences; I had studied the literature of all ages;
+I had travelled in many lands; I had learned how to follow the working of
+thought in men and of sentiment and instinct in women. I had examined
+for myself all the religions that could make out any claim for
+themselves. I had fasted and prayed with the monks of a lonely convent;
+I had mingled with the crowds that shouted glory at camp-meetings; I had
+listened to the threats of Calvinists and the promises of Universalists;
+I had been a devout attendant on a Jewish Synagogue; I was in
+correspondence with an intelligent Buddhist; and I met frequently with
+the inner circle of Rationalists, who believed in the persistence of
+Force, and the identity of alimentary substances with virtue, and were
+reconstructing the universe on this basis, with absolute exclusion of all
+Supernumeraries. In these pursuits I had passed the larger part of my
+half-century of existence, as yet with little satisfaction. It was on
+the morning of my fiftieth birthday that the solution of the great
+problem I had sought so long came to me as a simple formula, with a few
+grand but obvious inferences. I will repeat the substance of this final
+intuition:
+
+The one central fact an the Order of Things which solves all questions
+is:
+
+At this moment we were interrupted by a knock at the Master's door. It
+was most inopportune, for he was on the point of the great disclosure,
+but common politeness compelled him to answer it, and as the step which
+we had heard was that of one of the softer-footed sex, he chose to rise
+from his chair and admit his visitor.
+
+This visitor was our Landlady. She was dressed with more than usual
+nicety, and her countenance showed clearly that she came charged with an
+important communication.
+
+--I did n't low there was company with you, said the Landlady,--but it's
+jest as well. I've got something to tell my boarders that I don't want
+to tell them, and if I must do it, I may as well tell you all at once as
+one to a time. I 'm agoing to give up keeping boarders at the end of
+this year,--I mean come the end of December.
+
+She took out a white handkerchief, at hand in expectation of what was to
+happen, and pressed it to her eyes. There was an interval of silence.
+The Master closed his book and laid it on the table. The Young
+Astronomer did not look as much surprised as I should have expected. I
+was completely taken aback,--I had not thought of such a sudden breaking
+up of our little circle.
+
+When the Landlady had recovered her composure, she began again:
+
+The Lady that's been so long with me is going to a house of her own,
+--one she has bought back again, for it used to belong to her folks. It's
+a beautiful house, and the sun shines in at the front windows all day
+long. She's going to be wealthy again, but it doos n't make any
+difference in her ways. I've had boarders complain when I was doing as
+well as I knowed how for them, but I never heerd a word from her that
+wasn't as pleasant as if she'd been talking to the Governor's lady. I've
+knowed what it was to have women-boarders that find fault,--there's some
+of 'em would quarrel with me and everybody at my table; they would
+quarrel with the Angel Gabriel if he lived in the house with 'em, and
+scold at him and tell him he was always dropping his feathers round, if
+they could n't find anything else to bring up against him.
+
+Two other boarders of mine has given me notice that they was expecting to
+leave come the first of January. I could fill up their places easy
+enough, for ever since that first book was wrote that called people's
+attention to my boarding-house, I've had more wanting to come than I
+wanted to keep.
+
+But I'm getting along in life, and I ain't quite so rugged as I used to
+be. My daughter is well settled and my son is making his own living.
+I've done a good deal of hard work in my time, and I feel as if I had a
+right to a little rest. There's nobody knows what a woman that has the
+charge of a family goes through, but God Almighty that made her. I've
+done my best for them that I loved, and for them that was under my roof.
+My husband and my children was well cared for when they lived, and he and
+them little ones that I buried has white marble head-stones and
+foot-stones, and an iron fence round the lot, and a place left for me
+betwixt him and the....
+
+Some has always been good to me,--some has made it a little of a strain
+to me to get along. When a woman's back aches with overworking herself
+to keep her house in shape, and a dozen mouths are opening at her three
+times a day, like them little young birds that split their heads open so
+you can a'most see into their empty stomachs, and one wants this and
+another wants that, and provisions is dear and rent is high, and nobody
+to look to,--then a sharp word cuts, I tell you, and a hard look goes
+right to your heart. I've seen a boarder make a face at what I set
+before him, when I had tried to suit him jest as well as I knew how, and
+I haven't cared to eat a thing myself all the rest of that day, and I've
+laid awake without a wink of sleep all night. And then when you come
+down the next morning all the boarders stare at you and wonder what makes
+you so low-spirited, and why you don't look as happy and talk as cheerful
+as one of them rich ladies that has dinner-parties, where they've nothing
+to do but give a few orders, and somebody comes and cooks their dinner,
+and somebody else comes and puts flowers on the table, and a lot of men
+dressed up like ministers come and wait on everybody, as attentive as
+undertakers at a funeral.
+
+And that reminds me to tell you that I'm agoing to live with my daughter.
+Her husband's a very nice man, and when he isn't following a corpse, he's
+as good company as if he was a member of the city council. My son, he's
+agoing into business with the old Doctor he studied with, and he's agoing
+to board with me at my daughter's for a while,--I suppose he'll be
+getting a wife before long. [This with a pointed look at our young
+friend, the Astronomer.]
+
+It is n't but a little while longer that we are going to be together, and
+I want to say to you gentlemen, as I mean to say to the others and as I
+have said to our two ladies, that I feel more obligated to, you for the
+way you 've treated me than I know very well how to put into words.
+Boarders sometimes expect too much of the ladies that provides for them.
+Some days the meals are better than other days; it can't help being so.
+Sometimes the provision-market is n't well supplied, sometimes the fire
+in the cooking-stove does n't burn so well as it does other days;
+sometimes the cook is n't so lucky as she might be. And there is
+boarders who is always laying in wait for the days when the meals is not
+quite so good as they commonly be, to pick a quarrel with the one that is
+trying to serve them so as that they shall be satisfied. But you've all
+been good and kind to me. I suppose I'm not quite so spry and
+quick-sighted as I was a dozen years ago, when my boarder wrote that
+first book so many have asked me about. But--now I'm going to stop
+taking boarders. I don't believe you'll think much about what I did n't
+do,--because I couldn't,--but remember that at any rate I tried honestly
+to serve you. I hope God will bless all that set at my table, old and
+young, rich and poor, merried and single, and single that hopes soon to
+be merried. My husband that's dead and gone always believed that we all
+get to heaven sooner or later,--and sence I've grown older and buried so
+many that I've loved I've come to feel that perhaps I should meet all of
+them that I've known here--or at least as many of 'em as I wanted to--in
+a better world. And though I don't calculate there is any
+boarding-houses in heaven, I hope I shall some time or other meet them
+that has set round my table one year after another, all together, where
+there is no fault-finding with the food and no occasion for it,--and if I
+do meet them and you there--or anywhere,--if there is anything I can do
+for you....
+
+....Poor dear soul! Her ideas had got a little mixed, and her heart was
+overflowing, and the white handkerchief closed the scene with its timely
+and greatly needed service.
+
+--What a pity, I have often thought, that she came in just at that
+precise moment! For the old Master was on the point of telling us, and
+through one of us the reading world,--I mean that fraction of it which
+has reached this point of the record,--at any rate, of telling you,
+Beloved, through my pen, his solution of a great problem we all have to
+deal with. We were some weeks longer together, but he never offered to
+continue his reading. At length I ventured to give him a hint that our
+young friend and myself would both of us be greatly gratified if he would
+begin reading from his unpublished page where he had left off.
+
+--No, sir,--he said,--better not, better not. That which means so much
+to me, the writer, might be a disappointment, or at least a puzzle, to
+you, the listener. Besides, if you'll take my printed book and be at the
+trouble of thinking over what it says, and put that with what you've
+heard me say, and then make those comments and reflections which will be
+suggested to a mind in so many respects like mine as is your own,--excuse
+my good opinion of myself,
+
+(It is a high compliment to me, I replied) you will perhaps find you have
+the elements of the formula and its consequences which I was about to
+read you. It's quite as well to crack your own filberts as to borrow the
+use of other people's teeth. I think we will wait awhile before we pour
+out the Elixir Vitae.
+
+--To tell the honest truth, I suspect the Master has found out that his
+formula does not hold water quite so perfectly as he was thinking, so
+long as he kept it to himself, and never thought of imparting it to
+anybody else. The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it
+seems to shrink towards mediocrity, as. I have noticed that a great
+pumpkin, the wonder of a village, seemed to lose at least a third of its
+dimensions between the field where it grew and the cattle-show
+fair-table, where it took its place with other enormous pumpkins from
+other wondering villages. But however that maybe, I shall always regret
+that I had not the opportunity of judging for myself how completely the
+Master's formula, which, for him, at least, seemed to have solved the
+great problem, would have accomplished that desirable end for me.
+
+The Landlady's announcement of her intention to give up keeping boarders
+was heard with regret by all who met around her table. The Member of the
+Haouse inquired of me whether I could tell him if the Lamb Tahvern was
+kept well abaout these times. He knew that members from his place used
+to stop there, but he hadn't heerd much abaout it of late years. I had
+to inform him that that fold of rural innocence had long ceased offering
+its hospitalities to the legislative, flock. He found refuge at last, I
+have learned, in a great public house in the northern section of the
+city, where, as he said, the folks all went up stairs in a rat-trap, and
+the last I heard of him was looking out of his somewhat elevated
+attic-window in a northwesterly direction in hopes that he might perhaps
+get a sight of the Grand Monadnock, a mountain in New Hampshire which I
+have myself seen from the top of Bunker Hill Monument.
+
+The Member of the Haouse seems to have been more in a hurry to find a new
+resting-place than the other boarders. By the first of January, however,
+our whole company was scattered, never to meet again around the board
+where we had been so long together.
+
+The Lady moved to the house where she had passed many of her prosperous
+years. It had been occupied by a rich family who had taken it nearly as
+it stood, and as the pictures had been dusted regularly, and the books
+had never been handled, she found everything in many respects as she had
+left it, and in some points improved, for the rich people did not know
+what else to do, and so they spent money without stint on their house and
+its adornments, by all of which she could not help profiting. I do not
+choose to give the street and number of the house where she lives, but
+a-great many poor people know very well where it is, and as a matter of
+course the rich ones roll up to her door in their carriages by the dozen
+every fine Monday while anybody is in town.
+
+It is whispered that our two young folks are to be married before another
+season, and that the Lady has asked them to come and stay with her for a
+while. Our Scheherezade is to write no more stories. It is astonishing
+to see what a change for the better in her aspect a few weeks of
+brain-rest and heart's ease have wrought in her. I doubt very much
+whether she ever returns to literary labor. The work itself was almost
+heart-breaking, but the effect upon her of the sneers and cynical
+insolences of the literary rough who came at her in mask and brass
+knuckles was to give her what I fear will be a lifelong disgust against
+any writing for the public, especially in any of the periodicals. I am
+not sorry that she should stop writing, but I am sorry that she should
+have been silenced in such a rude way. I doubt, too, whether the Young
+Astronomer will pass the rest of his life in hunting for comets and
+planets. I think he has found an attraction that will call him down from
+the celestial luminaries to a light not less pure and far less remote.
+And I am inclined to believe that the best answer to many of those
+questions which have haunted him and found expression in his verse will
+be reached by a very different channel from that of lonely contemplation,
+the duties, the cares, the responsible realities of a life drawn out of
+itself by the power of newly awakened instincts and affections. The
+double star was prophetic,--I thought it would be.
+
+The Register of Deeds is understood to have been very handsomely treated
+by the boarder who owes her good fortune to his sagacity and activity.
+He has engaged apartments at a very genteel boarding-house not far from
+the one where we have all been living. The Salesman found it a simple
+matter to transfer himself to an establishment over the way; he had very
+little to move, and required very small accommodations.
+
+The Capitalist, however, seems to have felt it impossible to move without
+ridding himself of a part at--least of his encumbrances. The community
+was startled by the announcement that a citizen who did not wish his name
+to be known had made a free gift of a large sum of money--it was in tens
+of thousands--to an institution of long standing and high character in
+the city of which he was a quiet resident. The source of such a gift
+could not long be kept secret. It, was our economical, not to say
+parsimonious Capitalist who had done this noble act, and the poor man had
+to skulk through back streets and keep out of sight, as if he were a show
+character in a travelling caravan, to avoid the acknowledgments of his
+liberality, which met him on every hand and put him fairly out of
+countenance.
+
+That Boy has gone, in virtue of a special invitation, to make a visit of
+indefinite length at the house of the father of the older boy, whom we
+know by the name of Johnny. Of course he is having a good time, for
+Johnny's father is full of fun, and tells first-rate stories, and if
+neither of the boys gets his brains kicked out by the pony, or blows
+himself up with gunpowder, or breaks through the ice and gets drowned,
+they will have a fine time of it this winter.
+
+The Scarabee could not bear to remove his collections, and the old Master
+was equally unwilling to disturb his books. It was arranged, therefore,
+that they should keep their apartments until the new tenant should come
+into the house, when, if they were satisfied with her management, they
+would continue as her boarders.
+
+The last time I saw the Scarabee he was still at work on the meloe
+question. He expressed himself very pleasantly towards all of us, his
+fellow-boarders, and spoke of the kindness and consideration with which
+the Landlady had treated him when he had been straitened at times for
+want of means. Especially he seemed to be interested in our young couple
+who were soon to be united. His tired old eyes glistened as he asked
+about them,--could it be that their little romance recalled some early
+vision of his own? However that may be, he got up presently and went to
+a little box in which, as he said, he kept some choice specimens. He
+brought to me in his hand something which glittered. It was an exquisite
+diamond beetle.
+
+--If you could get that to her,--he said,--they tell me that ladies
+sometimes wear them in their hair. If they are out of fashion, she can
+keep it till after they're married, and then perhaps after a while there
+may be--you know--you know what I mean--there may be larvae, that 's what
+I 'm thinking there may be, and they 'll like to look at it.
+
+--As he got out the word larvae, a faint sense of the ridiculous seemed
+to take hold of the Scarabee, and for the first and only time during my
+acquaintance with him a slight attempt at a smile showed itself on his
+features. It was barely perceptible and gone almost as soon as seen, yet
+I am pleased to put it on record that on one occasion at least in his
+life the Scarabee smiled.
+
+The old Master keeps adding notes and reflections and new suggestions to
+his interleaved volume, but I doubt if he ever gives them to the public.
+The study he has proposed to himself does not grow easier the longer it
+is pursued. The whole Order of Things can hardly be completely
+unravelled in any single person's lifetime, and I suspect he will have to
+adjourn the final stage of his investigations to that more luminous realm
+where the Landlady hopes to rejoin the company of boarders who are
+nevermore to meet around her cheerful and well-ordered table.
+
+The curtain has now fallen, and I show myself a moment before it to thank
+my audience and say farewell. The second comer is commonly less welcome
+than the first, and the third makes but a rash venture. I hope I have not
+wholly disappointed those who have been so kind to my predecessors.
+
+To you, Beloved, who have never failed to cut the leaves which hold my
+record, who have never nodded over its pages, who have never hesitated in
+your allegiance, who have greeted me with unfailing smiles and part from
+me with unfeigned regrets, to you I look my last adieu as I bow myself
+out of sight, trusting my poor efforts to your always kind remembrance.
+
+ EPILOGUE TO THE BREAKFAST-TABLE SERIES
+
+ AUTOCRAT--PROFESSOR--POET.
+
+ AT A BOOKSTORE.
+
+ Anno Domini 1972.
+
+ A crazy bookcase, placed before
+ A low-price dealer's open door;
+ Therein arrayed in broken rows
+ A ragged crew of rhyme and prose,
+ The homeless vagrants, waifs and strays
+ Whose low estate this line betrays
+ (Set forth the lesser birds to lime)
+ YOUR CHOICE AMONG THESE BOOKS, 1 DIME!
+
+ Ho! dealer; for its motto's sake
+ This scarecrow from the shelf I take;
+ Three starveling volumes bound in one,
+ Its covers warping in the sun.
+ Methinks it hath a musty smell,
+ I like its flavor none too well,
+ But Yorick's brain was far from dull,
+ Though Hamlet pah!'d, and dropped his skull.
+
+ Why, here comes rain! The sky grows dark,
+ --Was that the roll of thunder? Hark!
+ The shop affords a safe retreat,
+ A chair extends its welcome seat,
+ The tradesman has a civil look
+ (I've paid, impromptu, for my book),
+ The clouds portend a sudden shower,
+ I'll read my purchase for an hour.
+
+ ..............
+
+ What have I rescued from the shelf?
+ A Boswell, writing out himself!
+ For though he changes dress and name,
+ The man beneath is still the same,
+ Laughing or sad, by fits and starts,
+ One actor in a dozen parts,
+ And whatsoe'er the mask may be,
+ The voice assures us, This is he.
+
+ I say not this to cry him clown;
+ I find my Shakespeare in his clown,
+ His rogues the self-same parent own;
+ Nay! Satan talks in Milton's tone!
+ Where'er the ocean inlet strays,
+ The salt sea wave its source betrays,
+ Where'er the queen of summer blows,
+ She tells the zephyr, "I'm the rose!"
+
+ And his is not the playwright's page;
+ His table does not ape the stage;
+ What matter if the figures seen
+ Are only shadows on a screen,
+ He finds in them his lurking thought,
+ And on their lips the words he sought,
+ Like one who sits before the keys
+ And plays a tune himself to please.
+
+ And was he noted in his day?
+ Read, flattered, honored? Who shall say?
+ Poor wreck of time the wave has cast
+ To find a peaceful shore at last,
+ Once glorying in thy gilded name
+ And freighted deep with hopes of fame,
+ Thy leaf is moistened with a tear,
+ The first for many a long, long year!
+
+ For be it more or less of art
+ That veils the lowliest human heart
+ Where passion throbs, where friendship glows,
+ Where pity's tender tribute flows,
+ Where love has lit its fragrant fire,
+ And sorrow quenched its vain desire,
+ For me the altar is divine,
+ Its flame, its ashes,--all are mine!
+
+ And thou, my brother, as I look
+ And see thee pictured in thy book,
+ Thy years on every page confessed
+ In shadows lengthening from the west,
+ Thy glance that wanders, as it sought
+ Some freshly opening flower of thought,
+ Thy hopeful nature, light and free,
+ I start to find myself in thee!
+
+ Come, vagrant, outcast, wretch forlorn
+ In leather jerkin stained and torn,
+ Whose talk has filled my idle hour
+ And made me half forget the shower,
+ I'll do at least as much for you,
+ Your coat I'll patch, your gilt renew,
+ Read you,--perhaps,--some other time.
+ Not bad, my bargain! Price one dime!
+ Not bad, my bargain! Price one dime!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OVER THE TEACUPS
+
+by Oliver W. Holmes
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The kind way in which this series of papers has been received has been a
+pleasure greater than I dared to anticipate. I felt that I was a late
+comer in the midst of a crowd of ardent and eager candidates for public
+attention, that I had already had my day, and that if, like the
+unfortunate Frenchman we used read about, I had "come again," I ought not
+to surprised if I received the welcome of "Monsieur Tonson."
+
+It has not proved so. My old readers have come forward in the
+pleasantest possible way and assured me that they were glad to see me
+again. There is no need, therefore, of apologies or explanations. I
+thought I had something left to say and I have found listeners. In
+writing these papers I have had occupation and kept myself in relation
+with my fellow-beings. New sympathies, new sources of encouragement, if
+not of inspiration, have opened themselves before me and cheated the
+least promising season of life of much that seemed to render it dreary
+and depressing. What particularly pleased me has been the freedom of
+criticisms which I have seen from disadvantageous comparisons of my later
+with my earlier writings.
+
+I should like a little rest from literary work before the requiescat
+ensures my repose from earthly labors, but I will not be rash enough to
+promise that I will not even once again greet my old and new readers if
+the impulse becomes irresistible to renew a companionship which has been
+to me such a source of happiness.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, Mass., August, 1891.
+
+O. W. H.
+
+
+
+
+OVER THE TEACUPS.
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+This series of papers was begun in March, 1888. A single number was
+printed, when it was interrupted the course of events, and not resumed
+until nearly years later, in January, 1890. The plan of the series was
+not formed in my mind when I wrote the number. In returning to my task I
+found that my original plan had shaped itself in the underground
+laboratory of my thought so that some changes had to be made in what I
+had written. As I proceeded, the slight story which formed a part of my
+programme eloped itself without any need of much contrivance on my, part.
+Given certain characters in a writer's conception, if they are real to
+him, as they ought to be they will act in such or such a way, according
+to the law of their nature. It was pretty safe to assume that intimate
+relations would spring up between some members of our mixed company; and
+it was not rash conjecture that some of these intimacies might end in
+such attachment as would furnish us hints, at least, of a love-story.
+
+As to the course of the conversations which would take place, very little
+could be guessed beforehand. Various subjects of interest would be
+likely to present themselves, without definite order, oftentimes abruptly
+and, as it would seem, capriciously. Conversation in such a mixed company
+as that of "The Teacups" is likely to be suggestive rather than
+exhaustive. Continuous discourse is better adapted to the lecture-room
+than to the tea-table. There is quite enough of it, I fear too much,--in
+these pages. But the reader must take the reports of our talks as they
+were jotted down. A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of Gobelin
+tapestry; but it has its place and its use.
+
+Some will feel a temptation to compare these conversations with those
+earlier ones, and remark unamiably upon their difference. This is hardly
+fair, and is certainly not wise. They are produced under very different
+conditions, and betray that fact in every line. It is better to take
+them by themselves; and, if my reader finds anything to please or profit
+from, I shall be contented, and he, I feel sure, will not be ungrateful.
+
+The readers who take up this volume may recollect a series of
+conversations held many years ago over the breakfast-table, and reported
+for their more or less profitable entertainment. Those were not very
+early breakfasts at which the talks took place, but at any rate the sun
+was rising, and the guests had not as yet tired themselves with the
+labors of the day. The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about
+it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea
+cannot be expected to reproduce. The toils of the forenoon, the heats of
+midday, in the warm season, the slanting light of the descending sun, or
+the sobered translucency of twilight have subdued the vivacity of the
+early day. Yet under the influence of the benign stimulant many trains
+of thought which will bear recalling, may suggest themselves to some of
+our quiet circle and prove not uninteresting to a certain number of
+readers.
+
+How early many of my old breakfast companions went off to bed! I am
+thinking not merely of those who sat round our table, but of that larger
+company of friends who listened to our conversations as reported. Dear
+girl with the silken ringlets, dear boy with the down-shadowed cheek,
+your grandfather, your grandmother, turned over the freshly printed
+leaves that told the story of those earlier meetings around the plain
+board where so many things were said and sung, not all of which have
+quite faded from memory of this overburdened and forgetful time. Your
+father, your mother, found the scattered leaves gathered in a volume, and
+smiled upon them as not uncompanionable acquaintances. My tea-table
+makes no promises. There is no programme of exercises to studied
+beforehand. What if I should content myself with a single report of what
+was said and done over our teacups? Perhaps my young reader would be
+glad to let me off, for there are talkers enough who have not yet left
+their breakfast-tables; and nobody can blame the young people for
+preferring the thoughts and the language of their own generation, with
+all its future before it, to those of their grandfathers contemporaries.
+
+My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left myself
+entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the teacups. I
+have not told how many cups are commonly on the board, but by using the
+plural I have implied that there is at least one other talker or listener
+beside myself, and for all that appears there may be a dozen. There will
+be no regulation length to my reports,--no attempt to make out a certain
+number of pages. I have no contract to fill so many columns, no pledge
+to contribute so many numbers. I can stop on this first page if I do not
+care to say anything more, and let this article stand by itself if so
+minded. What a sense of freedom it gives not to write by the yard or the
+column!
+
+When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas a
+sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution cover as
+many sheets as possible. We all know the metallic taste of articles
+written under this powerful stimulus. If Bacon's Essays had been
+furnished by a modern hand to the "Quarterly Review" at fifty guineas a
+sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!
+
+The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight
+project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have
+said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or other
+pages. When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer who
+had been long before the public, "Why, I have said all that once or
+oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old
+thought, the same old image, the same old story!" it irritates him, and
+is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary.
+He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they say
+to themselves, "We have had all that before," and turn to another
+writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous.
+This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.
+
+The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all
+he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of
+his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous
+dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever
+admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done,
+Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from
+the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied to
+the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:
+
+ Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+ Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.
+
+His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett
+Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to which
+it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured to repeat
+it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he reproduced it
+with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and artful
+circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had listened to
+those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth ago. The poor
+deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the world remembers
+what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it over again, may
+profit by this recollection. But what if one does say the same
+things,--of course in a little different form each time,--over her? If
+he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.
+Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what all who
+write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of the
+clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year for
+fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred
+audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same
+arguments, illustrations, and catchwords! Think of the editor, as
+Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning, until
+we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do when we read
+the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story, which ends in an
+advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all-curing remedy!
+
+The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my consciousness
+fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private apartments of a
+good many other people's thoughts. The longer we live, the more we find
+we are like other persons. When I meet with any facts in my own mental
+experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them repeated or
+anticipated in the writings or the conversation of others. This feeling
+gives one a freedom in telling his own personal history he could not have
+enjoyed without it. My story belongs to you as much as to me. De te
+fabula narratur. Change the personal pronoun,--that is all. It gives
+many readers a singular pleasure to find a writer telling them something
+they have long known or felt, but which they have never before found any
+one to put in words for them. An author does not always know when he is
+doing the service of the angel who stirred the waters of the pool of
+Bethesda. Many a reader is delighted to find his solitary thought has a
+companion, and is grateful to the benefactor who has strengthened him.
+This is the advantage of the humble reader over the ambitious and
+self-worshipping writer. It is not with him pereant illi, but beati sunt
+illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those who have said our
+good things for us.
+
+What I have been saying of repetitions leads me into a train of
+reflections like which I think many readers will find something in their
+own mental history. The area of consciousness is covered by layers of
+habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave-worn, rounded
+pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each
+other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day, from
+week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and from year to
+year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as we
+unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of
+ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When
+we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to
+sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They
+shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other,
+they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is
+cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the
+others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary as
+the pavement of a city thoroughfare.
+
+It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell which
+I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has seen
+before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any other
+writer.
+
+If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make to
+some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects, my
+answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
+chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with whom I
+like to talk.
+
+All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
+are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous and
+hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
+brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
+interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral
+questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his whims and
+fancies. Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he does not
+choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and when he is
+ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication. I do not find
+fault with all the brain-tappers. Some of them are doing excellent
+service by accumulating facts which could not otherwise be attained. Rut
+one gets tired of the strings of questions sent him, to which he is
+expected to return an answer, plucked, ripe or unripe, from his private
+tree of knowledge. The brain-tappers are like the owner of the goose that
+laid the golden eggs. They would have the embryos and germs of one's
+thoughts out of the mental oviducts, and cannot wait for their
+spontaneous evolution and extrusion.
+
+The story I have promised is, on the whole, the most remarkable of a
+series which I may have told in part at some previous date, but which, if
+I have not told, may be worth recalling at a future time.
+
+Some few of my readers may remember that in a former paper I suggested
+the possibility of the existence of an idiotic area in the human mind,
+corresponding to the blind spot in the human retina. I trust that I
+shall not be thought to have let my wits go wandering in that region of
+my own intellectual domain, when I relate a singular coincidence which
+very lately occurred in my experience, and add a few remarks made by one
+of our company on the delicate and difficult but fascinating subject
+which it forces upon our attention. I will first copy the memorandum
+made at the time:
+
+"Remarkable coincidence. On Monday, April 18th, being at table from 6.30
+P. M. to 7.30, with ________and ________ the two ladies of my
+household, I told them of the case of 'trial by battel' offered by
+Abraham Thornton in 1817. I mentioned his throwing down his glove, which
+was not taken up by the brother of his victim, and so he had to be let
+off, for the old law was still in force. I mentioned that Abraham
+Thornton was said to have come to this country, 'and [I added] he may be
+living near us, for aught that I know." I rose from the table, and found
+an English letter waiting for me, left while I sat at dinner. A copy the
+first portion of this letter:
+
+'20 ALFRED PLACE, West (near Museum) South Kensington, LONDON, S. W.
+April 7, 1887.
+DR. O. W. HOLMES:
+
+DEAR SIR,--In travelling, the other day, I met with a reprint of the very
+interesting case of Thornton for murder, 1817. The prisoner pleaded
+successfully the old Wager of Battel. I thought you would like to read
+the account, and send it with this....
+
+Yours faithfully,
+FRED. RATHBONE.'
+
+Mr. Rathbone is a well-known dealer in old Wedgwood and
+eighteenth-century art. As a friend of my hospitable entertainer, Mr.
+Willett, he had shown me many attentions in England, but I was not
+expecting any communication from him; and when, fresh from my
+conversation, I found this letter just arrived by mail, and left while I
+was at table, and on breaking the seal read what I had a few moments
+before been; telling, I was greatly surprised, and immediately made a
+note of the occurrence, as given above.
+
+I had long been familiar with all the details of this celebrated case,
+but had not referred to it, so far as I can remember, for months or
+years. I know of no train of thought which led me to speak of it on that
+particular day. I had never alluded to it before in that company, nor
+had I ever spoken of it with Mr. Rathbone.
+
+I told this story over our teacups. Among the company at the table is a
+young English girl. She seemed to be amused by the story. "Fancy!" she
+said,--"how very very odd!" "It was a striking and curious coincidence,"
+said the professor who was with us at the table. "As remarkable as two
+teaspoons in one saucer," was the comment of a college youth who happened
+to be one of the company. But the member of our circle whom the reader
+will hereafter know as Number Seven, began stirring his tea in a nervous
+sort of way, and I knew that he was getting ready to say something about
+the case. An ingenious man he is, with a brain like a tinder-box, its
+contents catching at any spark that is flying about. I always like to
+hear what he says when his tinder brain has a spark fall into it. It
+does not follow that because he is often wrong he may not sometimes be
+right, for he is no fool. He treated my narrative very seriously.
+
+The reader need not be startled at the new terms he introduces. Indeed, I
+am not quite sure that some thinking people will not adopt his view of
+the matter, which seems to have a degree of plausibility as he states and
+illustrates it.
+
+"The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from the
+letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of your
+correspondent. The distance at which the action took place [the letter
+was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was sitting]
+shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.
+
+"Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as speech,
+expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime
+conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far off
+from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can be
+stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.
+
+"Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
+containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in my
+dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
+electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained any real
+conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works
+in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural that
+cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
+understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them
+is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
+fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
+of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before long to
+be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric telegraph
+and the slaving `dynamo.'
+
+"What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself on
+a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling about
+in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad cars?
+And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a dress for
+a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says, in that
+pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which Mary, Queen
+of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers still exhale
+the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness for more than
+two hundred years, why should not a written page retain for a week or a
+month the equally mysterious effluence poured over it from the thinking
+marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another excitable nervous centre?"
+
+I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
+speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong. We know too little
+about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it. I am,
+myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
+investigators. When it comes to the various pretended sciences by which
+men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are very apt
+to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans. But a series
+of investigations of the significance of certain popular beliefs and
+superstitions, a careful study of the relations of certain facts to each
+other,--whether that of cause and effect, or merely of coincidence,--is a
+task not unworthy of sober-minded and well-trained students of nature.
+Such a series of investigations has been recently instituted, and was
+reported at a late meeting held in the rooms of the Boston Natural
+History Society. The results were, mostly negative, and in one sense a
+disappointment. A single case, related by Professor Royce, attracted a
+good deal of attention. It was reported in the next morning's
+newspapers, and will be given at full length, doubtless, in the next
+number of the Psychological Journal. The leading facts were, briefly,
+these: A lady in Hamburg, Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last, that
+she had what she supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th, five
+days before. "It seemed," she wrote, "to belong to you; to be a horrid
+pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron
+casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture." It proved that on
+that same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation at
+the hands of a dentist. "No single case," adds Professor Royce, "proves,
+or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic toothaches; but if
+there are any more cases of this sort, we want to hear of them, and that
+all the more because no folk-lore and no supernatural horrors have as yet
+mingled with the natural and well-known impressions that people associate
+with the dentist's chair."
+
+The case I have given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every
+source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated
+with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last
+Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of "The Sporting
+Times" of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from "Kirby's
+Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me at least thirty years ago. I
+had not looked at the account, spoken of it, nor thought of it for a long
+time, when it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it
+seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I
+was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart from
+possible "telepathic" causation, completely water-proof, airtight,
+incombustible, and unassailable.
+
+I referred, when first reporting this curious case of coincidence, with
+suggestive circumstances, to two others, one of which I said was the most
+picturesque and the other the most unlikely, as it would seem, to happen.
+This is the first of those two cases:--
+
+Grenville Tudor Phillips was a younger brother of George Phillips, my
+college classmate, and of Wendell Phillips, the great orator. He lived
+in Europe a large part of his life, but at last returned, and, in the
+year 1863, died at the house of his brother George. I read his death in
+the paper; but, having seen and heard very little of him during his life,
+should not have been much impressed by the fact, but for the following
+occurrence: between the time of Grenville Phillips's death and his
+burial, I was looking in upon my brother, then living in the house in
+which we were both born. Some books which had been my father's were
+stored in shelves in the room I used to occupy when at Cambridge.
+Passing my eye over them, an old dark quarto attracted my attention. It
+must be a Bible, I said to myself, perhaps a rare one,--the "Breeches"
+Bible or some other interesting specimen. I took it from the shelves,
+and, as I did so, an old slip of paper fell out and fluttered to the
+floor. On lifting it I read these words:
+
+The name is Grenville Tudor.
+
+What was the meaning of this slip of paper coming to light at this time,
+after reposing undisturbed so long? There was only one way of explaining
+its presence in my father's old Bible;--a copy of the Scriptures which I
+did not remember ever having handled or looked into before. In
+christening a child the minister is liable to forget the name, just at
+the moment when he ought to remember it. My father preached occasionally
+at the Brattle Street Church. I take this for granted, for I remember
+going with him on one occasion when he did so. Nothing was more likely
+than that he should be asked to officiate at the baptism of the younger
+son of his wife's first cousin, Judge Phillips. This slip was handed him
+to remind him of the name: He brought it home, put it in that old Bible,
+and there it lay quietly for nearly half a century, when, as if it had
+just heard of Mr. Phillips's decease, it flew from its hiding-place and
+startled the eyes of those who had just read his name in the daily column
+of deaths. It would be hard to find anything more than a mere
+coincidence here; but it seems curious enough to be worth telling.
+
+The second of these two last stories must be told in prosaic detail to
+show its whole value as a coincidence.
+
+One evening while I was living in Charles Street, I received a call from
+Dr. S., a well-known and highly respected Boston physician, a particular
+friend of the late Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Southern
+Confederacy. It was with reference to a work which Mr. Stephens was
+about to publish that Dr. S. called upon me. After talking that matter
+over we got conversing on other subjects, among the rest a family
+relationship existing between us,--not a very near one, but one which I
+think I had seen mentioned in genealogical accounts. Mary S. (the last
+name being the same as that of my visitant), it appeared, was the
+great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H. and myself. After cordially
+recognizing our forgotten relationship, now for the first time called to
+mind, we parted, my guest leaving me for his own home. We had been
+sitting in my library on the lower floor. On going up-stairs where Mrs.
+H. was sitting alone, just as I entered the room she pushed a paper
+across the table towards me, saying that perhaps it might interest me.
+It was one of a number of old family papers which she had brought from
+the house of her mother, recently deceased.
+
+I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that it
+was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same Mary
+S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.
+
+If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must be
+considered an instance of it.
+
+All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
+coincidence should occur, but it did.
+
+I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories. But
+after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer appears
+with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he bolts his door
+or not, when everybody can look in at his windows, and all his entrances
+are at the mercy of the critic's skeleton key and the jimmy of any
+ill-disposed assailant!
+
+The company have been silent listeners for the most part; but the reader
+will have a chance to become better acquainted with some cf them by and
+by.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+TO THE READER.
+
+I know that it is a hazardous experiment to address myself again to a
+public which in days long past has given me a generous welcome. But my
+readers have been, and are, a very faithful constituency. I think there
+are many among them who would rather listen to an old voice they are used
+to than to a new one of better quality, even if the "childish treble"
+should betray itself now and then in the tones of the overtired organ.
+But there must be others,--I am afraid many others,--who will exclaim:
+"He has had his day, and why can't he be content? We don't want literary
+revenants, superfluous veterans, writers who have worn out their welcome
+and still insist on being attended to. Give us something fresh,
+something that belongs to our day and generation. Your morning draught
+was well enough, but we don't care for your evening slip-slop. You are
+not in relation with us, with our time, our ideas, our aims, our
+aspirations."
+
+Alas, alas! my friend,--my young friend, for your hair is not yet
+whitened,--I am afraid you are too nearly right. No doubt,--no doubt.
+Teacups are not coffee-cups. They do not hold so much. Their pallid
+infusion is but a feeble stimulant compared with the black decoction
+served at the morning board. And so, perhaps, if wisdom like yours were
+compatible with years like mine, I should drop my pen and make no further
+attempts upon your patience.
+
+But suppose that a writer who has reached and passed the natural limit of
+serviceable years feels that he has some things which he would like to
+say, and which may have an interest for a limited class of readers,--is
+he not right in trying his powers and calmly taking the risk of failure?
+Does it not seem rather lazy and cowardly, because he cannot "beat his
+record," or even come up to the level of what he has done in his prime,
+to shrink from exerting his talent, such as it is, now that he has
+outlived the period of his greatest vigor? A singer who is no longer
+equal to the trials of opera on the stage may yet please at a chamber
+concert or in the drawing-room. There is one gratification an old author
+can afford a certain class of critics: that, namely, of comparing him as
+he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its
+superiors brought within range, so to speak; and if the ablest of them
+will only live long enough, and keep on writing, there is no pop-gun that
+cannot reach him. But I fear that this is an unamiable reflection, and I
+am at this time in a very amiable mood.
+
+I confess that there is something agreeable to me in renewing my
+relations with the reading public. Were it but a single appearance, it
+would give me a pleasant glimpse of the time when I was known as a
+frequent literary visitor. Many of my readers--if I can lure any from
+the pages of younger writers will prove to be the children, or the
+grandchildren, of those whose acquaintance I made something more than a
+whole generation ago. I could depend on a kind welcome from my
+contemporaries,--my coevals. But where are those contemporaries? Ay de
+mi! as Carlyle used to exclaim,--Ah, dear me! as our old women say,--I
+look round for them, and see only their vacant places. The old vine
+cannot unwind its tendrils. The branch falls with the decay of its
+support, and must cling to the new growths around it, if it would not lie
+helpless in the dust. This paper is a new tendril, feeling its way, as
+it best may, to whatever it can wind around. The thought of finding here
+and there an old friend, and making, it may be, once in a while a new
+one, is very grateful to me. The chief drawback to the pleasure is the
+feeling that I am submitting to that inevitable exposure which is the
+penalty of authorship in every form. A writer must make up his mind to
+the possible rough treatment of the critics, who swarm like bacteria
+whenever there is any literary material on which they can feed. I have
+had as little to complain of as most writers, yet I think it is always
+with reluctance that one encounters the promiscuous handling which the
+products of the mind have to put up with, as much as the fruit and
+provisions in the market-stalls. I had rather be criticised, however,
+than criticise; that is, express my opinions in the public prints of
+other writers' work, if they are living, and can suffer, as I should
+often have to make them. There are enough, thank Heaven, without me. We
+are literary cannibals, and our writers live on each other and each
+other's productions to a fearful extent. What the mulberry leaf is to
+the silk-worm, the author's book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the
+critical larva; that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and
+clothing. The process may not be agreeable to the mulberry leaf or to
+the printed page; but without it the leaf would not have become the silk
+that covers the empress's shoulders, and but for the critic the author's
+book might never have reached the scholar's table. Scribblers will feed
+on each other, and if we insist on being scribblers we must consent to be
+fed on. We must try to endure philosophically what we cannot help, and
+ought not, I suppose, to wish to help.
+
+It is the custom at our table to vary the usual talk, by the reading of
+short papers, in prose or verse, by one or more of The Teacups, as we are
+in the habit of calling those who make up our company. Thirty years ago,
+one of our present circle--"Teacup Number Two," The Professor,--read a
+paper on Old Age, at a certain Breakfast-table, where he was in the habit
+of appearing. That paper was published at the time, and has since seen
+the light in other forms. He did not know so much about old age then as
+he does now, and would doubtless write somewhat differently if he took
+the subject up again. But I found that it was the general wish that
+another of our company should let us hear what he had to say about it. I
+received a polite note, requesting me to discourse about old age,
+inasmuch as I was particularly well qualified by my experience to write
+in an authoritative way concerning it. The fact is that I,--for it is
+myself who am speaking,--have recently arrived at the age of threescore
+years and twenty,--fourscore years we may otherwise call it. In the
+arrangement of our table, I am Teacup Number One, and I may as well say
+that I am often spoken of as The Dictator. There is nothing invidious in
+this, as I am the oldest of the company, and no claim is less likely to
+excite jealousy than that of priority of birth.
+
+I received congratulations on reaching my eightieth birthday, not only
+from our circle of Teacups, but from friends, near and distant, in large
+numbers. I tried to acknowledge these kindly missives with the aid of a
+most intelligent secretary; but I fear that there were gifts not thanked
+for, and tokens of good-will not recognized. Let any neglected
+correspondent be assured that it was not intentionally that he or she was
+slighted. I was grateful for every such mark of esteem; even for the
+telegram from an unknown friend in a distant land, for which I cheerfully
+paid the considerable charge which the sender doubtless knew it would
+give me pleasure to disburse for such an expression of friendly feeling.
+
+I will not detain the reader any longer from the essay I have promised.
+
+This is the paper read to The Teacups.
+
+It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar to us
+by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit on life at
+threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some of a stronger
+constitution than the average. Yet we are told that Moses himself lived
+to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that his eye was not dim nor
+his natural strength abated. This is hard to accept literally, but we
+need not doubt that he was very old, and in remarkably good condition for
+a man of his age. Among his followers was a stout old captain, Caleb,
+the son of Jephunneh. This ancient warrior speaks of himself in these
+brave terms: "Lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. As yet, I
+am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me; as my
+strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out
+and to come in." It is not likely that anybody believed his brag about
+his being as good a man for active service at eighty-five as he was at
+forty, when Moses sent him out to spy the land of Canaan. But he was, no
+doubt, lusty and vigorous for his years, and ready to smite the
+Canaanites hip and thigh, and drive them out, and take possession of
+their land, as he did forthwith, when Moses gave him leave.
+
+Grand old men there were, three thousand years ago! But not all
+octogenarians were like Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. Listen to poor old
+Barzillai, and hear him piping: "I am this day fourscore years old; and
+can I discern between good and evil? Can thy servant taste what I eat or
+what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing
+women? Wherefore, then, should thy servant be yet a burden unto my lord
+the king?" And poor King David was worse off than this, as you all
+remember, at the early age of seventy.
+
+Thirty centuries do not seem to have made any very great difference in
+the extreme limits of life. Without pretending to rival the alleged
+cases of life prolonged beyond the middle of its second century, such as
+those of Henry Jenkins and Thomas Parr, we can make a good showing of
+centenarians and nonagenarians. I myself remember Dr. Holyoke, of Salem,
+son of a president of Harvard College, who answered a toast proposed in
+his honor at a dinner given to him on his hundredth birthday.
+
+"Father Cleveland," our venerated city missionary, was born June 21,
+1772, and died June 5, 1872, within a little more than a fortnight of his
+hundredth birthday. Colonel Perkins, of Connecticut, died recently after
+celebrating his centennial anniversary.
+
+Among nonagenarians, three whose names are well known to Bostonians, Lord
+Lyndhurst, Josiah Quincy, and Sidney Bartlett, were remarkable for
+retaining their faculties in their extreme age. That patriarch of our
+American literature, the illustrious historian of his country, is still
+with us, his birth dating in 1800.
+
+Ranke, the great German historian, died at the age of ninety-one, and
+Chevreul, the eminent chemist, at that of a hundred and two.
+
+Some English sporting characters have furnished striking examples of
+robust longevity. In Gilpin's "Forest Scenery" there is the story of one
+of these horseback heroes. Henry Hastings was the name of this old
+gentleman, who lived in the time of Charles the First. It would be hard
+to find a better portrait of a hunting squire than that which the Earl of
+Shaftesbury has the credit of having drawn of this very peculiar
+personage. His description ends by saying, "He lived to be an hundred,
+and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback
+without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past
+fourscore."
+
+Everything depends on habit. Old people can do, of course, more or less
+well, what they have been doing all their lives; but try to teach them
+any new tricks, and the truth of the old adage will very soon show
+itself. Mr. Henry Hastings had done nothing but hunt all his days, and
+his record would seem to have been a good deal like that of Philippus
+Zaehdarm in that untranslatable epitaph which may be found in "Sartor
+Resartus." Judged by its products, it was a very short life of a hundred
+useless twelve months.
+
+It is something to have climbed the white summit, the Mont Blanc of
+fourscore. A small number only of mankind ever see their eightieth
+anniversary. I might go to the statistical tables of the annuity and
+life insurance offices for extended and exact information, but I prefer
+to take the facts which have impressed themselves upon me in my own
+career.
+
+The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I am a member, graduated,
+according to the triennial, fifty-nine in number. It is sixty years,
+then, since that time; and as they were, on an average, about twenty
+years old, those who survive must have reached fourscore years. Of the
+fifty-nine graduates ten only are living, or were at the last accounts;
+one in six, very nearly. In the first ten years after graduation, our
+third decade, when we were between twenty and thirty years old, we lost
+three members,--about one in twenty; between the ages of thirty and
+forty, eight died,--one in seven of those the decade began with; from
+forty to fifty, only two,--or one in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty,
+eight,--or one in six; from sixty to seventy, fifteen,--or two out of
+every five; from seventy to eighty, twelve,--or one in two. The greatly
+increased mortality which began with our seventh decade went on steadily
+increasing. At sixty we come "within range of the rifle-pits," to borrow
+an expression from my friend Weir Mitchell.
+
+Our eminent classmate, the late Professor Benjamin Peirce, showed by
+numerical comparison that the men of superior ability outlasted the
+average of their fellow-graduates. He himself lived a little beyond his
+threescore and ten years. James Freeman Clarke almost reached the age of
+eighty. The eighth decade brought the fatal year for Benjamin Robbins
+Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges of the Supreme Court
+of the United States; for the very able chief justice of Massachusetts,
+George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous wit and electric centre of
+social life, George T. Davis. At the last annual dinner every effort was
+made to bring all the survivors of the class together. Six of the ten
+living members were there, six old men in the place of the thirty or
+forty classmates who surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I
+asked, "Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?"--11 boys whose
+tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was like
+the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty waves
+upon the seashore. Among the six at our late dinner was our first
+scholar, the thorough-bred and accomplished engineer who held the city of
+Lawrence in his brain before it spread itself out along the banks of the
+Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, "My Country, 't
+is of thee," is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them, than
+all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our six
+were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed the list.
+Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs? No,--we
+remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we had lost
+in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could we forget
+James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous action, who
+pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt through all its
+channels as are the light and the strength that radiate through the wires
+which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness to have such
+classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping, complaining
+graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had been
+favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well into
+its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful and
+life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
+equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to
+do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
+every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
+"the black drop." It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
+dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
+in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
+later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about the
+time of the "grand climacteric," the ninth septennial period, the
+sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go on,
+to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every
+faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its
+benign influence.
+
+Do you say that old age is unfeeling? It has not vital energy enough to
+supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions. Old Men's Tears, which
+furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow's Lamentations, do not
+suggest the deepest grief conceivable. A little breath of wind brings
+down the raindrops which have gathered on the leaves of the tremulous
+poplars. A very slight suggestion brings the tears from Marlborough's
+eyes, but they are soon over, and he is smiling again as an allusion
+carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet. Envy not the
+old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it
+sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him
+with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he
+stuns and stupefies. One's fellow-mortals can afford to be as considerate
+and tender with him as Time and Nature.
+
+There was not much boasting among us of our present or our past, as we
+sat together in the little room at the great hotel. A certain amount of
+self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and ten, but at
+three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of those who live to
+that age that she is earnest, and means to dismantle and have done with
+them in a very little while. As for boasting of our past, the laudator
+temporis acti makes but a poor figure in our time. Old people used to
+talk of their youth as if there were giants in those days. We knew some
+tall men when we were young, but we can see a man taller than any one
+among them at the nearest dime museum. We had handsome women among us,
+of high local reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties who
+challenge the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever challenged
+her Athenian admirers. We had fast horses,--did not "Old Blue" trot a
+mile in three minutes? True, but there is a three-year-old colt just put
+on the track who has done it in a little more than two thirds of that
+time. It seems as if the material world had been made over again since
+we were boys. It is but a short time since we were counting up the
+miracles we had lived to witness. The list is familiar enough: the
+railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope, the
+telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric
+illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the sewing
+machine, and the bicycle. And now, we said, we must have come to the end
+of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature. We must rest
+on our achievements. The nineteenth century is not likely to add to
+them; we must wait for the twentieth century. Many of us, perhaps most
+of us, felt in that way. We had seen our planet furnished by the art of
+man with a complete nervous system: a spinal cord beneath the ocean,
+secondary centres,--ganglions,--in all the chief places where men are
+gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout civilization.
+All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving apparatus, we
+see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying force to a vast
+metallic muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the strength of a
+hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants. The lightning
+is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a common carrier. No
+more surprises in this century! A voice whispers, What next?
+
+It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had to
+show. It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not show,
+and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in it. In
+these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch a button and
+your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a pleasure
+to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint and steel, and the
+brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction to tell how we
+used, when those implements were not at hand or not employed, to light
+our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held against the wick, often
+swelling our cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on the verge of
+apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage-coach experiences, of our
+sailing-packet voyages, of the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern
+comforts and conveniences through which we bravely lived and came out the
+estimable personages you find us.
+
+Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun; the
+percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions people had
+just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand display of minus
+quantities in our reminiscences, and the figures look almost as well as
+if they had the plus sign before them.
+
+I am afraid that old people found life rather a dull business in the time
+of King David and his rich old subject and friend, Barzillai, who, poor
+man, could not have read a wicked novel, nor enjoyed a symphony concert,
+if they had had those luxuries in his day. There were no pleasant
+firesides, for there were no chimneys. There were no daily newspapers
+for the old man to read, and he could not read them if there were, with
+his dimmed eyes, nor hear them read, very probably, with his dulled ears.
+There was no tobacco, a soothing drug, which in its various forms is a
+great solace to many old men and to some old women, Carlyle and his
+mother used to smoke their pipes together, you remember.
+
+Old age is infinitely more cheerful, for intelligent people at least,
+than it was two or three thousand years ago. It is our duty, so far as
+we can, to keep it so. There will always be enough about it that is
+solemn, and more than enough, alas! that is saddening. But how much
+there is in our times to lighten its burdens! If they that look out at
+the windows be darkened, the optician is happy to supply them with
+eye-glasses for use before the public, and spectacles for their hours of
+privacy. If the grinders cease because they are few, they can be made
+many again by a third dentition, which brings no toothache in its train.
+By temperance and good Habits of life, proper clothing, well-warmed,
+well-drained, and well-ventilated dwellings, and sufficient, not too much
+exercise, the old man of our time may keep his muscular strength in very
+good condition. I doubt if Mr. Gladstone, who is fast nearing his
+eightieth birthday, would boast, in the style of Caleb, that he was as
+good a man with his axe as he was when he was forty, but I would back
+him,--if the match were possible, for a hundred shekels, against that
+over-confident old Israelite, to cut down and chop up a cedar of Lebanon.
+I know a most excellent clergyman, not far from my own time of life, whom
+I would pit against any old Hebrew rabbi or Greek philosopher of his
+years and weight, if they could return to the flesh, to run a quarter of
+a mile on a good, level track.
+
+We must not make too much of such exceptional cases of prolonged
+activity. I often reproached my dear friend and classmate, Tames Freeman
+Clarke, that his ceaseless labors made it impossible for his coevals to
+enjoy the luxury of that repose which their years demanded. A wise old
+man, the late Dr. James Walker, president of Harvard University, said
+that the great privilege of old age was the getting rid of
+responsibilities. These hard-working veterans will not let one get rid
+of them until he drops in his harness, and so gets rid of them and his
+life together. How often has many a tired old man envied the
+superannuated family cat, stretched upon the rug before the fire, letting
+the genial warmth tranquilly diffuse itself through all her internal
+arrangements! No more watching for mice in dark, damp cellars, no more
+awaiting the savage gray rat at the mouth of his den, no more scurrying
+up trees and lamp-posts to avoid the neighbor's cur who wishes to make
+her acquaintance! It is very grand to "die in harness," but it is very
+pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted
+from the neck and shoulders.
+
+It is natural enough to cling to life. We are used to atmospheric
+existence, and can hardly conceive of ourselves except as breathing
+creatures. We have never tried any other mode of being, or, if we have,
+we have forgotten all about it, whatever Wordsworth's grand ode may tell
+us we remember. Heaven itself must be an experiment to every human soul
+which shall find itself there. It may take time for an earthborn saint
+to become acclimated to the celestial ether,--that is, if time can be
+said to exist for a disembodied spirit. We are all sentenced to capital
+punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our
+earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have
+adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the
+little while we are to be confined in it. The prisoner of Chillon
+
+ "regained [his] freedom with a sigh,"
+
+and a tender-hearted mortal might be pardoned for looking back, like the
+poor lady who was driven from her dwelling-place by fire and brimstone,
+at the home he was leaving for the "undiscovered country."
+
+On the other hand, a good many persons, not suicidal in their tendencies,
+get more of life than they want. One of our wealthy citizens said, on
+hearing that a friend had dropped off from apoplexy, that it made his
+mouth water to hear of such a case. It was an odd expression, but I have
+no doubt that the fine old gentleman to whom it was attributed made use
+of it. He had had enough of his gout and other infirmities. Swift's
+account of the Struldbrugs is not very amusing reading for old people,
+but some may find it a consolation to reflect on the probable miseries
+they escape in not being doomed to an undying earthly existence.
+
+There are strange diversities in the way in which different old persons
+look upon their prospects. A millionaire whom I well remember confessed
+that he should like to live long enough to learn how much a certain
+fellow-citizen, a multimillionaire, was worth. One of the, three
+nonagenarians before referred to expressed himself as having a great
+curiosity about the new sphere of existence to which he was looking
+forward.
+
+The feeling must of necessity come to many aged persons that they have
+outlived their usefulness; that they are no longer wanted, but rather in
+the way, drags on the wheels rather than helping them forward. But let
+them remember the often-quoted line of Milton,
+
+ "They also serve who only stand and wait."
+
+This is peculiarly true of them. They are helping others without always
+being aware of it. They are the shields, the breakwaters, of those who
+come after them. Every decade is a defence of the one next behind it.
+At thirty the youth has sobered into manhood, but the strong men of forty
+rise in almost unbroken rank between him and the approaches of old age as
+they show in the men of fifty. At forty he looks with a sense of
+security at the strong men of fifty, and sees behind them the row of
+sturdy sexagenarians. When fifty is reached, somehow sixty does not look
+so old as it once used to, and seventy is still afar off. After sixty
+the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one
+did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal
+about it. But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to the text with
+the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count himself among
+those who by reason of strength are destined to reach fourscore, of whom
+he can see a number still in reasonably good condition. The octogenarian
+loves to read about people of ninety and over. He peers among the
+asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the University for the names of
+graduates who have been seventy years out of college and remain still
+unstarred. He is curious about the biographies of centenarians. Such
+escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and ancestor of great men,
+the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as they never did before.
+But he cannot deceive himself much longer. See him walking on a level
+surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever; but watch him coming
+down a flight of stairs, and the family record could not tell his years
+more faithfully. He cut you dead, you say? Did it occur to you that he
+could not see you clearly enough to know you from any other son or
+daughter of Adam? He said he was very glad to hear it, did he, when you
+told him that your beloved grandmother had just deceased? Did you happen
+to remember that though he does not allow that he is deaf, he will not
+deny that he does not hear quite so well as he used to? No matter about
+his failings; the longer he holds on to life, the longer he makes life
+seem to all the living who follow him, and thus he is their constant
+benefactor.
+
+Every stage of existence has its special trials and its special
+consolations. Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of these we
+manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and the muscles
+rheumatic, to speak metaphorically,--that is to say, when every act of
+self-determination costs an effort and a pang. We become more and more
+automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long enough we should come to
+be pieces of creaking machinery like Maelzel's chess player,--or what
+that seemed to be.
+
+Emerson was sixty-three years old, the year I have referred to as that of
+the grand climacteric, when he read to his son the poem he called
+"Terminus," beginning:
+
+ "It is time to be old,
+ To take in sail.
+ The God of bounds,
+ Who sets to seas a shore,
+ Came to me in his fatal rounds
+ And said, 'No more!'"
+
+It was early in life to feel that the productive stage was over, but he
+had received warning from within, and did not wish to wait for outside
+advices. There is all the difference in the world in the mental as in
+the bodily constitution of different individuals. Some must "take in
+sail" sooner, some later. We can get a useful lesson from the American
+and the English elms on our Common. The American elms are quite bare,
+and have been so for weeks. They know very well that they are going to
+have storms to wrestle with; they have not forgotten the gales of
+September and the tempests of the late autumn and early winter. It is a
+hard fight they are going to have, and they strip their coats off and
+roll up their shirt-sleeves, and show themselves bare-armed and ready for
+the contest. The English elms are of a more robust build, and stand
+defiant, with all their summer clothing about their sturdy frames. They
+may yet have to learn a lesson of their American cousins, for
+notwithstanding their compact and solid structure they go to pieces in
+the great winds just as ours do. We must drop much of our foliage before
+winter is upon us. We must take in sail and throw over cargo, if that is
+necessary, to keep us afloat. We have to decide between our duties and
+our instinctive demand of rest. I can believe that some have welcomed
+the decay of their active powers because it furnished them with
+peremptory reasons for sparing themselves during the few years that were
+left them.
+
+Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power. The
+sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as we might
+expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature administers.
+But there is another effect of her "black drop" which is not so commonly
+recognized. Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing seems real except
+what is unreal. I am sure that the pictures painted by the
+imagination,--the faded frescos on the walls of memory,--come out in
+clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier.
+Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is
+one which she reserves for our second childhood.
+
+No man can reach an advanced age without thinking of that great change to
+which, in the course of nature, he must be so near. It has been remarked
+that the sterner beliefs of rigid theologians are apt to soften in their
+later years. All reflecting persons, even those whose minds have been
+half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have done all they could to
+disorganize their thinking powers,--all reflecting persons, I say, must
+recognize, in looking back over a long life, how largely their creeds,
+their course of life, their wisdom and unwisdom, their whole characters,
+were shaped by the conditions which surrounded them. Little children
+they came from the hands of the Father of all; little children in their
+helplessness, their ignorance, they are going back to Him. They cannot
+help feeling that they are to be transferred from the rude embrace of the
+boisterous elements to arms that will receive them tenderly. Poor
+planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at the hands of the
+brute forces of nature, from the control of which they are soon to be set
+free. There are some old pessimists, it is true, who believe that they
+and a few others are on a raft, and that the ship which they have
+quitted, holding the rest of mankind, is going down with all on board.
+It is no wonder that there should be such when we remember what have been
+the teachings of the priesthood through long series of ignorant
+centuries. Every age has to shape the Divine image it worships over
+again,--the present age and our own country are busily engaged in the
+task at this time. We unmake Presidents and make new ones. This is an
+apprenticeship for a higher task. Our doctrinal teachers are unmaking
+the Deity of the Westminster Catechism and trying to model a new one,
+with more of modern humanity and less of ancient barbarism in his
+composition. If Jonathan Edwards had lived long enough, I have no doubt
+his creed would have softened into a kindly, humanized belief.
+
+Some twenty or thirty years ago, I said to Longfellow that certain
+statistical tables I had seen went to show that poets were not a
+long-lived race. He doubted whether there was anything to prove they
+were particularly short-lived. Soon after this, he handed me a list he
+had drawn up. I cannot lay my hand upon it at this moment, but I
+remember that Metastasio was the oldest of them all. He died at the age
+of eighty-four. I have had some tables made out, which I have every
+reason to believe are correct so far as they go. From these, it appears
+that twenty English poets lived to the average age of fifty-six years and
+a little over. The eight American poets on the list averaged
+seventy-three and a half, nearly, and they are not all dead yet. The
+list including Greek, Latin, Italian, and German poets, with American and
+English, gave an average of a little over sixty-two years. Our young
+poets need not be alarmed. They can remember that Bryant lived to be
+eighty-three years old, that Longfellow reached seventy-five and Halleck
+seventy-seven, while Whittier is living at the age of nearly eighty-two.
+Tennyson is still writing at eighty, and Browning reached the age of
+seventy-seven.
+
+Shall a man who in his younger days has written poetry, or what passed
+for it, continue to attempt it in his later years? Certainly, if it
+amuses or interests him, no one would object to his writing in verse as
+much as he likes. Whether he should continue to write for the public is
+another question. Poetry is a good deal a matter of heart-beats, and the
+circulation is more languid in the later period of life. The joints are
+less supple; the arteries are more or less "ossified." Something like
+these changes has taken place in the mind. It has lost the flexibility,
+the plastic docility, which it had in youth and early manhood, when the
+gristle had but just become hardened into bone. It is the nature of
+poetry to writhe itself along through the tangled growths of the
+vocabulary, as a snake winds through the grass, in sinuous, complex, and
+unexpected curves, which crack every joint that is not supple as
+india-rubber.
+
+I had a poem that I wanted to print just here. But after what I have
+this moment said, I hesitated, thinking that I might provoke the obvious
+remark that I exemplified the unfitness of which I had been speaking. I
+remembered the advice I had given to a poetical aspirant not long since,
+which I think deserves a paragraph to itself.
+
+My friend, I said, I hope you will not write in verse. When you write in
+prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you
+must.
+
+Should I send this poem to the publishers, or not?
+
+ "Some said, 'John, print it;' others said, 'Not so.'"
+
+I did not ask "some" or "others." Perhaps I should have thought it best
+to keep my poem to myself and the few friends for whom it was written.
+All at once, my daimon--that other Me over whom I button my waistcoat
+when I button it over my own person--put it into my head to look up the
+story of Madame Saqui. She was a famous danseuse, who danced Napoleon in
+and out, and several other dynasties besides. Her last appearance was at
+the age of seventy-six, which is rather late in life for the tight rope,
+one of her specialties. Jules Janin mummified her when she died in 1866,
+at the age of eighty. He spiced her up in his eulogy as if she had been
+the queen of a modern Pharaoh. His foamy and flowery rhetoric put me
+into such a state of good-nature that I said, I will print my poem, and
+let the critical Gil Blas handle it as he did the archbishop's sermon, or
+would have done, if he had been a writer for the "Salamanca Weekly."
+
+It must be premised that a very beautiful loving cup was presented to me
+on my recent birthday, by eleven ladies of my acquaintance. This was the
+most costly and notable of all the many tributes I received, and for
+which in different forms I expressed my gratitude.
+
+ TO THE ELEVEN LADIES
+
+ WHO PRESENTED ME WITH A SILVER LOVING CUP ON THE
+ TWENTY-NINTH OF AUGUST, M DCCC LXXXIX.
+
+ "Who gave this cup?" The secret thou wouldst steal
+ Its brimming flood forbids it to reveal:
+ No mortal's eye shall read it till he first
+ Cool the red throat of thirst.
+
+ If on the golden floor one draught remain,
+ Trust me, thy careful search will be in vain;
+ Not till the bowl is emptied shalt thou know
+ The names enrolled below.
+
+ Deeper than Truth lies buried in her well
+ Those modest names the graven letters spell
+ Hide from the sight; but, wait, and thou shalt see
+ Who the good angels be
+
+ Whose bounty glistens in the beauteous gift
+ That friendly hands to loving lips shall lift:
+ Turn the fair goblet when its floor is dry,
+ Their names shall meet thine eye.
+
+ Count thou their number on the beads of Heaven,
+ Alas! the clustered Pleiads are but seven;
+ Nay, the nine sister Muses are too few,
+ --The Graces must add two.
+
+ "For whom this gift?" For one who all too long
+ Clings to his bough among the groves of song;
+ Autumn's last leaf, that spreads its faded wing
+ To greet a second spring.
+
+ Dear friends, kind friends, whate'er the cup may hold,
+ Bathing its burnished depths, will change to gold
+ Its last bright drop let thirsty Maenads drain,
+ Its fragrance will remain.
+
+ Better love's perfume in the empty bowl
+ Than wine's nepenthe for the aching soul
+ Sweeter than song that ever poet sung,
+ It makes an old heart young!
+
+
+
+III
+
+After the reading of the paper which was reported in the preceding number
+of this record, the company fell into talk upon the subject with which it
+dealt.
+
+The Mistress. "I could have wished you had said more about the religious
+attitude of old age as such. Surely the thoughts of aged persons must be
+very much taken up with the question of what is to become of them. I
+should like to have The Dictator explain himself a little more fully on
+this point."
+
+My dear madam, I said, it is a delicate matter to talk about. You
+remember Mr. Calhoun's response to the advances of an over-zealous
+young clergyman who wished to examine him as to his outfit for the
+long journey. I think the relations between man and his Maker grow
+more intimate, more confidential, if I may say so, with advancing
+years. The old man is less disposed to argue about special matters
+of belief, and more ready to sympathize with spiritually minded
+persons without anxious questioning as to the fold to which they
+belong. That kindly judgment which he exercises with regard to
+others he will, naturally enough, apply to himself. The caressing
+tone in which the Emperor Hadrian addresses his soul is very much
+like that of an old person talking with a grandchild or some other
+pet:
+
+ "Animula, vagula, blandula,
+ Hospes comesque corporis."
+
+ "Dear little, flitting, pleasing sprite,
+ The body's comrade and its guest."
+
+How like the language of Catullus to Lesbia's sparrow!
+
+More and more the old man finds his pleasures in memory, as the present
+becomes unreal and dreamlike, and the vista of his earthly future narrows
+and closes in upon him. At last, if he live long enough, life comes to
+be little more than a gentle and peaceful delirium of pleasing
+recollections. To say, as Dante says, that there is no greater grief
+than to remember past happiness in the hour of misery is not giving the
+whole truth. In the midst of the misery, as many would call it, of
+extreme old age, there is often a divine consolation in recalling the
+happy moments and days and years of times long past. So beautiful are
+the visions of bygone delight that one could hardly wish them to become
+real, lest they should lose their ineffable charm. I can almost conceive
+of a dozing and dreamy centenarian saying to one he loves, "Go, darling,
+go! Spread your wings and leave me. So shall you enter that world of
+memory where all is lovely. I shall not hear the sound of your footsteps
+any more, but you will float before me, an aerial presence. I shall not
+hear any word from your lips, but I shall have a deeper sense of your
+nearness to me than speech can give. I shall feel, in my still solitude,
+as the Ancient Mariner felt when the seraph band gathered before him:
+
+ "'No voice did they impart
+ No voice; but oh! the silence sank
+ Like music on my heart.'"
+
+I said that the lenient way in which the old look at the failings of
+others naturally leads them to judge themselves more charitably. They
+find an apology for their short-comings and wrong-doings in another
+consideration. They know very well that they are not the same persons as
+the middle-aged individuals, the young men, the boys, the children, that
+bore their names, and whose lives were continuous with theirs. Here is
+an old man who can remember the first time he was allowed to go shooting.
+What a remorseless young destroyer he was, to be sure! Wherever he saw a
+feather, wherever a poor little squirrel showed his bushy tail, bang!
+went the old "king's arm," and the feathers or the fur were set flying
+like so much chaff. Now that same old man,--the mortal that was called
+by his name and has passed for the same person for some scores of
+years,--is considered absurdly sentimental by kind-hearted women, because
+he opens the fly-trap and sets all its captives free,--out-of-doors, of
+course, but the dear souls all insisting, meanwhile, that the flies will,
+every one of them, be back again in the house before the day is over. Do
+you suppose that venerable sinner expects to be rigorously called to
+account for the want of feeling he showed in those early years, when the
+instinct of destruction, derived from his forest-roaming ancestors, led
+him to acts which he now looks upon with pain and aversion?
+
+"Senex" has seen three generations grow up, the son repeating the virtues
+and the failings of the father, the grandson showing the same
+characteristics as the father and grandfather. He knows that if such or
+such a young fellow had lived to the next stage of life he would very
+probably have caught up with his mother's virtues, which, like a graft of
+a late fruit on an early apple or pear tree, do not ripen in her children
+until late in the season. He has seen the successive ripening of one
+quality after another on the boughs of his own life, and he finds it hard
+to condemn himself for faults which only needed time to fall off and be
+succeeded by better fruitage. I cannot help thinking that the recording
+angel not only drops a tear upon many a human failing, which blots it out
+forever, but that he hands many an old record-book to the imp that does
+his bidding, and orders him to throw that into the fire instead of the
+sinner for whom the little wretch had kindled it.
+
+"And pitched him in after it, I hope," said Number Seven, who is in some
+points as much of an optimist as any one among us, in spite of the squint
+in his brain,--or in virtue of it, if you choose to have it so.
+
+"I like Wordsworth's 'Matthew,'" said Number Five, "as well as any
+picture of old age I remember."
+
+"Can you repeat it to us?" asked one of The Teacups.
+
+"I can recall two verses of it," said Number Five, and she recited the
+two following ones. Number Five has a very sweet voice. The moment she
+speaks all the faces turn toward her. I don't know what its secret is,
+but it is a voice that makes friends of everybody.
+
+ "'The sighs which Matthew heaved were sighs
+ Of one tired out with fun and madness;
+ The tears which came to Matthew's eyes
+ Were tears of light, the dew of gladness.
+
+ "'Yet, sometimes, when the secret cup
+ Of still and serious thought went round,
+ It seemed as if he drank it up,
+ He felt with spirit so profound:'
+
+"This was the way in which Wordsworth paid his tribute to a
+
+ "'Soul of God's best earthly mould.'"
+
+The sweet voice left a trance-like silence after it, which may have
+lasted twenty heart-beats. Then I said, We all thank you for your
+charming quotation. How much more wholesome a picture of humanity than
+such stuff as the author of the "Night Thoughts" has left us:
+
+ "Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings but Himself
+ That hideous sight, a naked human heart."
+
+Or the author of "Don Juan," telling us to look into
+
+ "Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!"
+
+I hope I am quoting correctly, but I am more of a scholar in Wordsworth
+than in Byron. Was Parson Young's own heart such a hideous spectacle to
+himself?
+
+If it was, he had better have stripped off his surplice. No,--it was
+nothing but the cant of his calling. In Byron it was a mood, and he
+might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in his
+two descriptions of the Venus de' Medici. That picture of old Matthew
+abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind. What nobler
+tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and to make the
+world we live in more beautiful?
+
+We have two or three young people with us who stand a fair chance of
+furnishing us the element without which life and tea-tables alike are
+wanting in interest. We are all, of course, watching them, and curious
+to know whether we are to have a romance or not. Here is one of them;
+others will show themselves presently.
+
+I cannot say just how old the Tutor is, but I do not detect a gray hair
+in his head. My sight is not so good as it was, however, and he may have
+turned the sharp corner of thirty, and even have left it a year or two
+behind him. More probably he is still in the twenties,--say twenty-eight
+or twenty-nine. He seems young, at any rate, excitable, enthusiastic,
+imaginative, but at the same time reserved. I am afraid that he is a
+poet. When I say "I am afraid," you wonder what I mean by the
+expression. I may take another opportunity to explain and justify it; I
+will only say now that I consider the Muse the most dangerous of sirens
+to a young man who has his way to make in the world. Now this young man,
+the Tutor, has, I believe, a future before him. He was born for a
+philosopher,--so I read his horoscope,--but he has a great liking for
+poetry and can write well in verse. We have had a number of poems
+offered for our entertainment, which I have commonly been requested to
+read. There has been some little mystery about their authorship, but it
+is evident that they are not all from the same hand. Poetry is as
+contagious as measles, and if a single case of it break out in any social
+circle, or in a school, there are certain to be a number of similar
+cases, some slight, some serious, and now and then one so malignant that
+the subject of it should be put on a spare diet of stationery, say from
+two to three penfuls of ink and a half sheet of notepaper per diem. If
+any of our poetical contributions are presentable, the reader shall have
+a chance to see them.
+
+It must be understood that our company is not invariably made up of the
+same persons. The Mistress, as we call her, is expected to be always in
+her place. I make it a rule to be present. The Professor is almost as
+sure to be at the table as I am. We should hardly know what to do
+without Number Five. It takes a good deal of tact to handle such a
+little assembly as ours, which is a republic on a small scale, for all
+that they give me the title of Dictator, and Number Five is a great help
+in every social emergency. She sees when a discussion tends to become
+personal, and heads off the threatening antagonists. She knows when a
+subject has been knocking about long enough and dexterously shifts the
+talk to another track. It is true that I am the one most frequently
+appealed to as the highest tribunal in doubtful cases, but I often care
+more for Number Five's opinion than I do for my own. Who is this Number
+Five, so fascinating, so wise, so full of knowledge, and so ready to
+learn? She is suspected of being the anonymous author of a book which
+produced a sensation when published, not very long ago, and which those
+who read are very apt to read a second time, and to leave on their tables
+for frequent reference. But we have never asked her. I do not think she
+wants to be famous. How she comes to be unmarried is a mystery to me; it
+must be that she has found nobody worth caring enough for. I wish she
+would furnish us with the romance which, as I said, our tea-table needs
+to make it interesting. Perhaps the new-comer will make love to her,--I
+should think it possible she might fancy him.
+
+And who is the new-comer? He is a Counsellor and a Politician. Has a
+good war record. Is about forty-five years old, I conjecture. Is
+engaged in a great law case just now. Said to be very eloquent. Has an
+intellectual head, and the bearing of one who has commanded a regiment or
+perhaps a brigade. Altogether an attractive person, scholarly, refined
+has some accomplishments not so common as they might be in the class we
+call gentlemen, with an accent on the word.
+
+There is also a young Doctor, waiting for his bald spot to come, so that
+he may get into practice.
+
+We have two young ladies at the table,--the English girl referred to in a
+former number, and an American girl of about her own age. Both of them
+are students in one of those institutions--I am not sure whether they
+call it an "annex" or not; but at any rate one of those schools where
+they teach the incomprehensible sort of mathematics and other bewildering
+branches of knowledge above the common level of high-school education.
+They seem to be good friends, and form a very pleasing pair when they
+walk in arm in arm; nearly enough alike to seem to belong together,
+different enough to form an agreeable contrast.
+
+Of course we were bound to have a Musician at our table, and we have one
+who sings admirably, and accompanies himself, or one or more of our
+ladies, very frequently.
+
+Such is our company when the table is full. But sometimes only half a
+dozen, or it may be only three or four, are present. At other times we
+have a visitor or two, either in the place of one of our habitual number,
+or in addition to it. We have the elements, we think, of a pleasant
+social gathering,--different sexes, ages, pursuits, and tastes,--all that
+is required for a "symphony concert" of conversation. One of the curious
+questions which might well be asked by those who had been with us on
+different occasions would be, "How many poets are there among you?"
+Nobody can answer this question. It is a point of etiquette with us not
+to press our inquiries about these anonymous poems too sharply,
+especially if any of them betray sentiments which would not bear rough
+handling.
+
+I don't doubt that the different personalities at our table will get
+mixed up in the reader's mind if he is not particularly clear-headed.
+That happens very often, much oftener than all would be willing to
+confess, in reading novels and plays. I am afraid we should get a good
+deal confused even in reading our Shakespeare if we did not look back now
+and then at the dramatis personae. I am sure that I am very apt to
+confound the characters in a moderately interesting novel; indeed, I
+suspect that the writer is often no better off than the reader in the
+dreary middle of the story, when his characters have all made their
+appearance, and before they have reached near enough to the denoument to
+have fixed their individuality by the position they have arrived at in
+the chain of the narrative.
+
+My reader might be a little puzzled when he read that Number Five did or
+said such or such a thing, and ask, "Whom do you mean by that title? I
+am not quite sure that I remember." Just associate her with that line of
+Emerson,
+
+ "Why nature loves the number five,"
+
+and that will remind you that she is the favorite of our table.
+
+You cannot forget who Number Seven is if I inform you that he specially
+prides himself on being a seventh son of a seventh son. The fact of such
+a descent is supposed to carry wonderful endowments with it. Number
+Seven passes for a natural healer. He is looked upon as a kind of
+wizard, and is lucky in living in the nineteenth century instead of the
+sixteenth or earlier. How much confidence he feels in himself as the
+possessor of half-supernatural gifts I cannot say. I think his peculiar
+birthright gives him a certain confidence in his whims and fancies which
+but for that he would hardly feel. After this explanation, when I speak
+of Number Five or Number Seven, you will know to whom I refer.
+
+The company are very frank in their criticisms of each other. "I did not
+like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings," said the Mistress.
+"It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good Christian like you
+to use."
+
+Ah, my dear madam, I answered, I was thinking of the elements and the
+natural forces to which man was born an almost helpless subject in the
+rudimentary stages of his existence, and from which he has only partially
+got free after ages upon ages of warfare with their tyranny. Think what
+hunger forced the caveman to do! Think of the surly indifference of the
+storms that swept the forest and the waters, the earthquake chasms that
+engulfed him, the inundations that drowned him out of his miserable
+hiding-places, the pestilences that lay in wait for him, the unequal
+strife with ferocious animals! I need not sum up all the wretchedness
+that goes to constitute the "martyrdom of man." When our forefathers
+came to this wilderness as it then was, and found everywhere the bones of
+the poor natives who had perished in the great plague (which our Doctor
+there thinks was probably the small-pox), they considered this
+destructive malady as a special mark of providential favor for them. How
+about the miserable Indians? Were they anything but planetary
+foundlings? No! Civilization is a great foundling hospital, and
+fortunate are all those who get safely into the creche before the frost
+or the malaria has killed them, the wild beasts or the venomous reptiles
+worked out their deadly appetites and instincts upon them. The very idea
+of humanity seems to be that it shall take care of itself and develop its
+powers in the "struggle for life." Whether we approve it or not, if we
+can judge by the material record, man was born a foundling, and fought
+his way as he best might to that kind of existence which we call
+civilized,--one which a considerable part of the inhabitants of our
+planet have reached.
+
+If you do not like the expression planetary foundlings, I have no
+objection to your considering the race as put out to nurse. And what a
+nurse Nature is! She gives her charge a hole in the rocks to live in,
+ice for his pillow and snow for his blanket, in one part of the world;
+the jungle for his bedroom in another, with the tiger for his watch-dog,
+and the cobra as his playfellow.
+
+Well, I said, there may be other parts of the universe where there are no
+tigers and no cobras. It is not quite certain that such realms of
+creation are better off, on the whole, than this earthly residence of
+ours, which has fought its way up to the development of such centres of
+civilization as Athens and Rome, to such personalities as Socrates, as
+Washington.
+
+"One of our company has been on an excursion among the celestial bodies
+of our system, I understand," said the Professor.
+
+Number Five colored. "Nothing but a dream," she said. "The truth is, I
+had taken ether in the evening for a touch of neuralgia, and it set my
+imagination at work in a way quite unusual with me. I had been reading a
+number of books about an ideal condition of society,--Sir Thomas Mores
+'Utopia,' Lord Bacon's 'New Atlantis,' and another of more recent date.
+I went to bed with my brain a good deal excited, and fell into a deep
+slumber, in which I passed through some experiences so singular that, on
+awaking, I put them down on paper. I don't know that there is anything
+very original about the experiences I have recorded, but I thought them
+worth preserving. Perhaps you would not agree with me in that belief."
+
+"If Number Five will give us a chance to form our own judgment about her
+dream or vision, I think we shall enjoy it," said the Mistress. "She
+knows what will please The Teacups in the way of reading as well as I do
+how many lumps of sugar the Professor wants in his tea and how many I
+want in mine."
+
+The company was so urgent that Number Five sent up-stairs for her paper.
+
+Number Five reads the story of her dream.
+
+It cost me a great effort to set down the words of the manuscript from
+which I am reading. My dreams for the most part fade away so soon after
+their occurrence that I cannot recall them at all. But in this case my
+ideas held together with remarkable tenacity. By keeping my mind
+steadily upon the work, I gradually unfolded the narrative which follows,
+as the famous Italian antiquary opened one of those fragile carbonized
+manuscripts found in the ruins of Herculaneum or Pompeii.
+
+The first thing I remember about it is that I was floating upward,
+without any sense of effort on my part. The feeling was that of flying,
+which I have often had in dreams, as have many other persons. It was the
+most natural thing in the world,--a semi-materialized volition, if I may
+use such an expression.
+
+At the first moment of my new consciousness,--for I seemed to have just
+emerged from a deep slumber, I was aware that there was a companion at my
+side. Nothing could be more gracious than the way in which this being
+accosted me. I will speak of it as she, because there was a delicacy, a
+sweetness, a divine purity, about its aspect that recalled my ideal of
+the loveliest womanhood.
+
+"I am your companion and your guide," this being made me understand, as
+she looked at me. Some faculty of which I had never before been
+conscious had awakened in me, and I needed no interpreter to explain the
+unspoken language of my celestial attendant.
+
+"You are not yet outside of space and time," she said, "and I am going
+with you through some parts of the phenomenal or apparent universe,--what
+you call the material world. We have plenty of what you call time before
+us, and we will take our voyage leisurely, looking at such objects of
+interest as may attract our attention as we pass. The first thing you
+will naturally wish to look at will be the earth you have just left.
+This is about the right distance," she said, and we paused in our flight.
+
+The great globe we had left was rolling beneath us. No eye of one in the
+flesh could see it as I saw or seemed to see it. No ear of any mortal
+being could bear the sounds that came from it as I heard or seemed to
+hear them. The broad oceans unrolled themselves before me. I could
+recognize the calm Pacific and the stormy Atlantic,--the ships that
+dotted them, the white lines where the waves broke on the shore,--frills
+on the robes of the continents,--so they looked to my woman's perception;
+the--vast South American forests; the glittering icebergs about the
+poles; the snowy mountain ranges, here and there a summit sending up fire
+and smoke; mighty rivers, dividing provinces within sight of each other,
+and making neighbors of realms thousands of miles apart; cities;
+light-houses to insure the safety of sea-going vessels, and war-ships to
+knock them to pieces and sink them. All this, and infinitely more,
+showed itself to me during a single revolution of the sphere: twenty-four
+hours it would have been, if reckoned by earthly measurements of time. I
+have not spoken of the sounds I heard while the earth was revolving under
+us. The howl of storms, the roar and clash of waves, the crack and crash
+of the falling thunderbolt,--these of course made themselves heard as
+they do to mortal ears. But there were other sounds which enchained my
+attention more than these voices of nature. As the skilled leader of an
+orchestra hears every single sound from each member of the mob of
+stringed and wind instruments, and above all the screech of the straining
+soprano, so my sharpened perceptions made what would have been for common
+mortals a confused murmur audible to me as compounded of innumerable
+easily distinguished sounds. Above them all arose one continued,
+unbroken, agonizing cry. It was the voice of suffering womanhood, a
+sound that goes up day and night, one long chorus of tortured victims.
+
+"Let us get out of reach of this," I said; and we left our planet, with
+its blank, desolate moon staring at it, as if it had turned pale at the
+sights and sounds it had to witness.
+
+Presently the gilded dome of the State House, which marked our
+starting-point, came into view for the second time, and I knew that this
+side-show was over. I bade farewell to the Common with its Cogswell
+fountain, and the Garden with its last awe-inspiring monument.
+
+"Oh, if I could sometimes revisit these beloved scenes!" I exclaimed.
+
+"There is nothing to hinder that I know of," said my companion. "Memory
+and imagination as you know them in the flesh are two winged creatures
+with strings tied to their legs, and anchored to a bodily weight of a
+hundred and fifty pounds, more or less. When the string is cut you can
+be where you wish to be,--not merely a part of you, leaving the rest
+behind, but the whole of you. Why shouldn't you want to revisit your old
+home sometimes?"
+
+I was astonished at the human way in which my guide conversed with me.
+It was always on the basis of my earthly habits, experiences, and
+limitations. "Your solar system," she said, "is a very small part of the
+universe, but you naturally feel a curiosity about the bodies which
+constitute it and about their inhabitants. There is your moon: a bare
+and desolate-looking place it is, and well it may be, for it has no
+respirable atmosphere, and no occasion for one. The Lunites do not
+breathe; they live without waste and without supply. You look as if you
+do not understand this. Yet your people have, as you well know, what
+they call incandescent lights everywhere. You would have said there can
+be no lamp without oil or gas, or other combustible substance, to feed
+it; and yet you see a filament which sheds a light like that of noon all
+around it, and does not waste at all. So the Lunites live by influx of
+divine energy, just as the incandescent lamp glows,--glows, and is not
+consumed; receiving its life, if we may call it so, from the central
+power, which wears the unpleasant name of 'dynamo.'"
+
+The Lunites appeared to me as pale phosphorescent figures of ill-defined
+outline, lost in their own halos, as it were. I could not help thinking
+of Shelley's
+
+ "maiden
+ With white fire laden."
+
+But as the Lunites were after all but provincials, as are the tenants of
+all the satellites, I did not care to contemplate them for any great
+length of time.
+
+I do not remember much about the two planets that came next to our own,
+except the beautiful rosy atmosphere of one and the huge bulk of the
+other. Presently, we found ourselves within hailing distance of another
+celestial body, which I recognized at once, by the rings which girdled
+it, as the planet Saturn. A dingy, dull-looking sphere it was in its
+appearance. "We will tie up here for a while," said my attendant. The
+easy, familiar way in which she spoke surprised and pleased me.
+
+Why, said I,--The Dictator,--what is there to prevent beings of another
+order from being as cheerful, as social, as good companions, as the very
+liveliest of God's creatures whom we have known in the flesh? Is it
+impossible for an archangel to smile? Is such a phenomenon as a laugh
+never heard except in our little sinful corner of the universe? Do you
+suppose, that when the disciples heard from the lips of their Master the
+play of words on the name of Peter, there was no smile of appreciation on
+the bearded faces of those holy men? From any other lips we should have
+called this pleasantry a--
+
+Number Five shook her head very slightly, and gave me a look that seemed
+to say, "Don't frighten the other Teacups. We don't call things by the
+names that belong to them when we deal with celestial subjects."
+
+We tied up, as my attendant playfully called our resting, so near the
+planet that I could know--I will not say see and hear, but apprehend--all
+that was going on in that remote sphere; remote, as we who live in what
+we have been used to consider the centre of the rational universe regard
+it. What struck me at once was the deadness of everything I looked upon.
+Dead, uniform color of surface and surrounding atmosphere. Dead
+complexion of all the inhabitants. Dead-looking trees, dead-looking
+grass, no flowers to be seen anywhere.
+
+"What is the meaning of all this?" I said to my guide.
+
+She smiled good-naturedly, and replied, "It is a forlorn home for
+anything above a lichen or a toadstool; but that is no wonder, when you
+know what the air is which they breathe. It is pure nitrogen."
+
+The Professor spoke up. "That can't be, madam," he said. "The
+spectroscope shows the atmosphere of Saturn to be--no matter, I have
+forgotten what; but it was not pure nitrogen, at any rate."
+
+Number Five is never disconcerted. "Will you tell me," she said, "where
+you have found any account of the bands and lines in the spectrum of
+dream-nitrogen? I should be so pleased to become acquainted with them."
+
+The Professor winced a little, and asked Delilah, the handmaiden, to pass
+a plate of muffins to him. The dream had carried him away, and he
+thought for the moment that he was listening to a scientific paper.
+
+Of course, my companion went on to say, the bodily constitution of the
+Saturnians is wholly different from that of air-breathing, that is
+oxygen-breathing, human beings. They are the dullest, slowest, most
+torpid of mortal creatures.
+
+All this is not to be wondered at when you remember the inert
+characteristics of nitrogen. There are in some localities natural
+springs which give out slender streams of oxygen. You will learn by and
+by what use the Saturnians make of this dangerous gas, which, as you
+recollect, constitutes about one fifth of your own atmosphere. Saturn has
+large lead mines, but no other metal is found on this planet. The
+inhabitants have nothing else to make tools of, except stones and shells.
+The mechanical arts have therefore made no great progress among them.
+Chopping down a tree with a leaden axe is necessarily a slow process.
+
+So far as the Saturnians can be said to have any pride in anything, it is
+in the absolute level which characterizes their political and social
+order. They profess to be the only true republicans in the solar system.
+The fundamental articles of their Constitution are these:
+
+All Saturnians are born equal, live equal, and die equal.
+
+All Saturnians are born free,--free, that is, to obey the rules laid down
+for the regulation of their conduct, pursuits, and opinions, free to be
+married to the person selected for them by the physiological section of
+the government, and free to die at such proper period of life as may best
+suit the convenience and general welfare of the community.
+
+The one great industrial product of Saturn is the bread-root. The
+Saturnians find this wholesome and palatable enough; and it is well they
+do, as they have no other vegetable. It is what I should call a most
+uninteresting kind of eatable, but it serves as food and drink, having
+juice enough, so that they get along without water. They have a tough,
+dry grass, which, matted together, furnishes them with clothes
+sufficiently warm for their cold-blooded constitutions, and more than
+sufficiently ugly.
+
+A piece of ground large enough to furnish bread-root for ten persons is
+allotted to each head of a household, allowance being made for the
+possible increase of families. This, however, is not a very important
+consideration, as the Saturnians are not a prolific race. The great
+object of life being the product of the largest possible quantity of
+bread-roots, and women not being so capable in the fields as the stronger
+sex, females are considered an undesirable addition to society. The one
+thing the Saturnians dread and abhor is inequality. The whole object of
+their laws and customs is to maintain the strictest equality in
+everything,--social relations, property, so far as they can be said to
+have anything which can be so called, mode of living, dress, and all
+other matters. It is their boast that nobody ever starved under their
+government. Nobody goes in rags, for the coarse-fibred grass from which
+they fabricate their clothes is very durable. (I confess I wondered how
+a woman could live in Saturn. They have no looking-glasses. There is no
+such article as a ribbon known among them. All their clothes are of one
+pattern. I noticed that there were no pockets in any of their garments,
+and learned that a pocket would be considered prima facie evidence of
+theft, as no honest person would have use for such a secret receptacle.)
+Before the revolution which established the great law of absolute and
+lifelong equality, the inhabitants used to feed at their own private
+tables. Since the regeneration of society all meals are taken in common.
+The last relic of barbarism was the use of plates,--one or even more to
+each individual. This "odious relic of an effete civilization," as they
+called it, has long been superseded by oblong hollow receptacles, one of
+which is allotted to each twelve persons. A great riot took place when
+an attempt was made by some fastidious and exclusive egotists to
+introduce partitions which should partially divide one portion of these
+receptacles into individual compartments. The Saturnians boast that they
+have no paupers, no thieves, none of those fictitious values called
+money,--all which things, they hear, are known in that small Saturn
+nearer the sun than the great planet which is their dwelling-place.
+
+"I suppose that now they have levelled everything they are quiet and
+contented. Have they any of those uneasy people called reformers?"
+
+"Indeed they have," said my attendant. "There are the Orthobrachians,
+who declaim against the shameful abuse of the left arm and hand, and
+insist on restoring their perfect equality with the right. Then there
+are Isopodic societies, which insist on bringing back the original
+equality of the upper and lower limbs. If you can believe it, they
+actually practise going on all fours,--generally in a private way, a few
+of them together, but hoping to bring the world round to them in the near
+future."
+
+Here I had to stop and laugh.
+
+"I should think life might be a little dull in Saturn," I said.
+
+"It is liable to that accusation," she answered. "Do you notice how many
+people you meet with their mouths stretched wide open?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "and I do not know what to make of it. I should think
+every fourth or fifth person had his mouth open in that way."
+
+"They are suffering from the endemic disease of their planet, prolonged
+and inveterate gaping or yawning, which has ended in dislocation of the
+lower jaw. After a time this becomes fixed, and requires a difficult
+surgical operation to restore it to its place."
+
+It struck me that, in spite of their boast that they have no paupers, no
+thieves, no money, they were a melancholy-looking set of beings.
+
+"What are their amusements?" I asked.
+
+"Intoxication and suicide are their chief recreations. They have a way
+of mixing the oxygen which issues in small jets from certain natural
+springs with their atmospheric nitrogen in the proportion of about twenty
+per cent, which makes very nearly the same thing as the air of your
+planet. But to the Saturnians the mixture is highly intoxicating, and is
+therefore a relief to the monotony of their every-day life. This mixture
+is greatly sought after, but hard to obtain, as the sources of oxygen are
+few and scanty. It shortens the lives of those who have recourse to it;
+but if it takes too long, they have other ways of escaping from a life
+which cuts and dries everything for its miserable subjects, defeats all
+the natural instincts, confounds all individual characteristics, and
+makes existence such a colossal bore, as your worldly people say, that
+self-destruction becomes a luxury."
+
+Number Five stopped here.
+
+Your imaginary wholesale Shakerdom is all very fine, said I. Your
+Utopia, your New Atlantis, and the rest are pretty to look at. But your
+philosophers are treating the world of living souls as if they were, each
+of them, playing a game of solitaire,--all the pegs and all the holes
+alike. Life is a very different sort of game. It is a game of chess,
+and not of solitaire, nor even of checkers. The men are not all pawns,
+but you have your knights, bishops, rooks,--yes, your king and queen,--to
+be provided for. Not with these names, of course, but all looking for
+their proper places, and having their own laws and modes of action. You
+can play solitaire with the members of your own family for pegs, if you
+like, and if none of them rebel. You can play checkers with a little
+community of meek, like-minded people. But when it comes to the handling
+of a great state, you will find that nature has emptied a box of chessmen
+before you, and you must play with them so as to give each its proper
+move, or sweep them off the board, and come back to the homely game such
+as I used to see played with beans and kernels of corn on squares marked
+upon the back of the kitchen bellows.
+
+It was curious to see how differently Number Five's narrative was
+received by the different listeners in our circle. Number Five herself
+said she supposed she ought to be ashamed of its absurdities, but she did
+not know that it was much sillier than dreams often are, and she thought
+it might amuse the company. She was herself always interested by these
+ideal pictures of society. But it seemed to her that life must be dull
+in any of them, and with that idea in her head her dreaming fancy had
+drawn these pictures.
+
+The Professor was interested in her conception of the existence of the
+Lunites without waste, and the death in life of the nitrogen-breathing
+Saturnians. Dream-chemistry was a new subject to him. Perhaps Number
+Five would give him some lessons in it.
+
+At this she smiled, and said she was afraid she could not teach him
+anything, but if he would answer a few questions in matter-of-fact
+chemistry which had puzzled her she would be vastly obliged to him.
+
+"You must come to my laboratory," said the Professor.
+
+"I will come to-morrow," said Number Five.
+
+Oh, yes! Much laboratory work they will do! Play of mutual affinities.
+Amalgamates. No freezing mixtures, I'll warrant!
+
+Why shouldn't we get a romance out of all this, hey?
+
+But Number Five looks as innocent as a lamb, and as brave as a lion. She
+does not care a copper for the looks that are going round The Teacups.
+
+Our Doctor was curious about those cases of anchylosis, as he called it,
+of the lower jaw. He thought it a quite possible occurrence. Both the
+young girls thought the dream gave a very hard view of the optimists, who
+look forward to a reorganization of society which shall rid mankind of
+the terrible evils of over-crowding and competition.
+
+Number Seven was quite excited about the matter. He had himself drawn up
+a plan for a new social arrangement. He had shown it to the legal
+gentleman who has lately joined us. This gentleman thought it
+well-intended, but that it would take one constable to every three
+inhabitants to enforce its provisions.
+
+I said the dream could do no harm; it was too outrageously improbable to
+come home to anybody's feelings. Dreams were like broken mosaics,--the
+separated stones might here and there make parts of pictures. If one
+found a caricature of himself made out of the pieces which had
+accidentally come together, he would smile at it, knowing that it was an
+accidental effect with no malice in it. If any of you really believe in
+a working Utopia, why not join the Shakers, and convert the world to this
+mode of life? Celibacy alone would cure a great many of the evils you
+complain of.
+
+I thought this suggestion seemed to act rather unfavorably upon the
+ladies of our circle. The two Annexes looked inquiringly at each other.
+Number Five looked smilingly at them. She evidently thought it was time
+to change the subject of conversation, for she turned to me and said,
+"You promised to read us the poem you read before your old classmates the
+other evening."
+
+I will fulfill my promise, I said. We felt that this might probably be
+our last meeting as a Class. The personal reference is to our greatly
+beloved and honored classmate, James Freeman Clarke.
+
+ AFTER THE CURFEW.
+
+ The Play is over. While the light
+ Yet lingers in the darkening hall,
+
+ I come to say a last Good-night
+ Before the final Exeunt all.
+
+ We gathered once, a joyous throng:
+ The jovial toasts went gayly round;
+ With jest, and laugh, and shout, and song
+ we made the floors and walls resound.
+
+ We come with feeble steps and slow,
+ A little band of four or five,
+ Left from the wrecks of long ago,
+ Still pleased to find ourselves alive.
+
+ Alive! How living, too, are they
+ whose memories it is ours to share!
+ Spread the long table's full array,
+ There sits a ghost in every chair!
+
+ One breathing form no more, alas!
+ Amid our slender group we see;
+ With him we still remained "The Class,"
+ without his presence what are we?
+
+ The hand we ever loved to clasp,
+ That tireless hand which knew no rest,
+ Loosed from affection's clinging grasp,
+ Lies nerveless on the peaceful breast.
+
+ The beaming eye, the cheering voice,
+ That lent to life a generous glow,
+ whose every meaning said "Rejoice,"
+ we see, we hear, no more below.
+
+ The air seems darkened by his loss,
+ Earth's shadowed features look less fair,
+ And heavier weighs the daily cross
+ His willing shoulders helped as bear.
+
+ Why mourn that we, the favored few
+
+ Whom grasping Time so long has spared
+ Life's sweet illusions to pursue,
+ The common lot of age have shared?
+
+ In every pulse of Friendship's heart
+ There breeds unfelt a throb of pain,
+ One hour must rend its links apart,
+ Though years on years have forged the chain.
+
+ So ends "The Boys,"--a lifelong play.
+ We too must hear the Prompter's call
+ To fairer scenes and brighter day
+ Farewell! I let the curtain fall.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+If the reader thinks that all these talking Teacups came together by mere
+accident, as people meet at a boarding-house, I may as well tell him at
+once that he is mistaken. If he thinks I am going to explain how it is
+that he finds them thus brought together, whether they form a secret
+association, whether they are the editors of this or that periodical,
+whether they are connected with some institution, and so on,--I must
+disappoint him. It is enough that he finds them in each other's company,
+a very mixed assembly, of different sexes, ages, and pursuits; and if
+there is a certain mystery surrounds their meetings, he must not be
+surprised. Does he suppose we want to be known and talked about in
+public as "Teacups"? No; so far as we give to the community some records
+of the talks at our table our thoughts become public property, but the
+sacred personality of every Teacup must be properly respected. If any
+wonder at the presence of one of our number, whose eccentricities might
+seem to render him an undesirable associate of the company, he should
+remember that some people may have relatives whom they feel bound to keep
+their eye on; besides the cracked Teacup brings out the ring of the sound
+ones as nothing else does. Remember also that soundest teacup does not
+always hold the best tea, or the cracked teacup the worst.
+
+This is a hint to the reader, who is not expected to be too curious about
+the individual Teacups constituting our unorganized association.
+
+The Dictator Discourses.
+
+I have been reading Balzac's Peau de Chagrin. You have all read the
+story, I hope, for it is the first of his wonderful romances which fixed
+the eyes of the reading world upon him, and is a most fascinating if
+somewhat fantastic tale. A young man becomes the possessor of a certain
+magic skin, the peculiarity of which is that, while it gratifies every
+wish formed by its possessor, it shrinks in all its dimensions each time
+that a wish is gratified. The young man makes every effort to ascertain
+the cause of its shrinking; invokes the aid of the physicist, the
+chemist, the student of natural history, but all in vain. He draws a red
+line around it. That same day he indulges a longing for a certain
+object. The next morning there is a little interval between the red line
+and the skin, close to which it was traced. So always, so inevitably.
+As he lives on, satisfying one desire, one passion, after another, the
+process of shrinking continues. A mortal disease sets in, which keeps
+pace with the shrinking skin, and his life and his talisman come to an
+end together.
+
+One would say that such a piece of integument was hardly a desirable
+possession. And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau de
+chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and
+incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested in its
+progress.
+
+Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of
+eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop
+their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized,
+as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in
+the thaw of January?
+
+How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of
+promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number of
+coming years! What annual the horticulturist can show will bear
+comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has flowered
+in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons? And now the
+last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem, stripped of its
+ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced to the narrowest
+conditions of reproductive existence. Such is the fate of the financial
+peau de chagrin. Pity the poor fractional capitalist, who has just
+managed to live on the eight per cent of his coupon bonds. The shears of
+Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long scissors which
+cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice of dry toast it
+served to flatter with oleomargarine. Do you wonder that my thoughts
+took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these changes and their
+melancholy consequences? If the entire poem, of several hundred lines,
+was "declined with thanks" by an unfeeling editor, that is no reason why
+you should not hear a verse or two of it.
+
+ THE PEAU DE CHAGRIN OF STATE STREET.
+
+ How beauteous is the bond
+ In the manifold array
+ Of its promises to pay,
+ While the eight per cent it gives
+ And the rate at which one lives
+ Correspond!
+
+ But at last the bough is bare
+ Where the coupons one by one
+ Through their ripening days have run,
+ And the bond, a beggar now,
+ Seeks investment anyhow,
+ Anywhere!
+
+The Mistress commonly contents herself with the general supervision of
+the company, only now and then taking an active part in the conversation.
+She started a question the other evening which set some of us thinking.
+
+"Why is it," she said, "that there is so common and so intense a desire
+for poetical reputation? It seems to me that, if I were a man, I had
+rather have done something worth telling of than make verses about what
+other people had done."
+
+"You agree with Alexander the Great," said the Professor. "You would
+prefer the fame of Achilles to that of Homer, who told the story of his
+wrath and its direful consequences. I am afraid that I should hardly
+agree with you. Achilles was little better than a Choctaw brave. I
+won't quote Horace's line which characterizes him so admirably, for I
+will take it for granted that you all know it. He was a gentleman,--so
+is a first-class Indian,--a very noble gentleman in point of courage,
+lofty bearing, courtesy, but an unsoaped, ill-clad, turbulent,
+high-tempered young fellow, looked up to by his crowd very much as the
+champion of the heavy weights is looked up to by his gang of blackguards.
+Alexander himself was not much better,--a foolish, fiery young madcap.
+How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that
+he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure,
+it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got
+drunk,--in very bad company, too,--and then turned fire-bug. He had one
+redeeming point,--he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under
+his pillow. A poet like Homer seems to me worth a dozen such fellows as
+Achilles and Alexander."
+
+"Homer is all very well far those that can read him," said Number Seven,
+"but the fellows that tag verses together nowadays are mostly fools.
+That's my opinion. I wrote some verses once myself, but I had been sick
+and was very weak; hadn't strength enough to write in prose, I suppose."
+
+This aggressive remark caused a little stir at our tea-table. For you
+must know, if I have not told you already, there are suspicions that we
+have more than one "poet" at our table. I have already confessed that I
+do myself indulge in verse now and then, and have given my readers a
+specimen of my work in that line. But there is so much difference of
+character in the verses which are produced at our table, without any
+signature, that I feel quite sure there are at least two or three other
+contributors besides myself. There is a tall, old-fashioned silver urn,
+a sugar-bowl of the period of the Empire, in which the poems sent to be
+read are placed by unseen hands. When the proper moment arrives, I lift
+the cover of the urn and take out any manuscript it may contain. If
+conversation is going on and the company are in a talking mood, I replace
+the manuscript or manuscripts, clap on the cover, and wait until there is
+a moment's quiet before taking it off again. I might guess the writers
+sometimes by the handwriting, but there is more trouble taken to disguise
+the chirography than I choose to take to identify it as that of any
+particular member of our company.
+
+The turn the conversation took, especially the slashing onslaught of
+Number Seven on the writers of verse, set me thinking and talking about
+the matter. Number Five turned on the stream of my discourse by a
+question.
+
+"You receive a good many volumes of verse, do you not?" she said, with a
+look which implied that she knew I did.
+
+I certainly do, I answered. My table aches with them. My shelves groan
+with them. Think of what a fuss Pope made about his trials, when he
+complained that
+
+ "All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out"!
+
+What were the numbers of the
+
+ "Mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease"
+
+to that great multitude of contributors to our magazines, and authors of
+little volumes--sometimes, alas! big ones--of verse, which pour out of
+the press, not weekly, but daily, and at such a rate of increase that it
+seems as if before long every hour would bring a book, or at least an
+article which is to grow into a book by and by?
+
+I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These
+attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one
+like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm
+in,--a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what
+a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for
+immortality! I have often had something to say about them, and I may be
+saying over the same things; but if I do not remember what I have said,
+it is not very likely that my reader will; if he does, he will find, I am
+very sure, that I say it a little differently.
+
+What astonishes me is that this enormous mass of commonplace verse, which
+burdens the postman who brings it, which it is a serious task only to get
+out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is on the whole of
+so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in these
+days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring
+incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which
+verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go
+straight into the waste-basket. To write "poetry" was an art and mystery
+in which only a few noted men and a woman or two were experts.
+
+When "Potter the ventriloquist," the predecessor of the well-remembered
+Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there was something
+unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute marvellous, in his
+performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to their
+owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and
+especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's
+person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must have ghostly
+assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of "professors," that is
+members of the church, whether they had not compromised their characters
+by being seen at such an unhallowed exhibition. Nowadays, a clever boy
+who has made a study of parlor magic can do many of those tricks almost
+as well as the great sorcerer himself. How simple it all seems when we
+have seen the mechanism of the deception!
+
+It is just so with writing in verse. It was not understood that
+everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more
+difficult tricks of juggling. M. Jourdain's discovery that he had been
+speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of the man who
+finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might have been writing
+poetry all his days, if he had only known how perfectly easy and simple
+it is. Not everybody, it is true, has a sufficiently good ear, a
+sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity for handling them, to be what
+is called a poet. I doubt whether more than nine out of ten, in the
+average, have that combination of gifts required for the writing of
+readable verse.
+
+This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The Teacups.
+They looked puzzled for a minute. One whispered to the next Teacup,
+"More than nine out of ten! I should think that was a pretty liberal
+allowance."
+
+Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to
+the mark. I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to
+set up a school for instruction in the art. "Poetry taught in twelve
+lessons." Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write
+"poetry." It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin
+volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody
+cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and
+revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself. Come! who will be
+my pupils in a Course,--Poetry taught in twelve lessons? That made a
+laugh, in which most of The Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.
+Through it all I heard the sweet tones of Number Five's caressing voice;
+not because it was more penetrating or louder than the others, for it was
+low and soft, but it was so different from the others, there was so much
+more life,--the life of sweet womanhood,--dissolved in it.
+
+(Of course he will fall in love with her. "He? Who?" Why, the
+newcomer, the Counsellor. Did I not see his eyes turn toward her as the
+silvery notes rippled from her throat? Did they not follow her in her
+movements, as she turned her tread this or that way?
+
+--What nonsense for me to be arranging matters between two people
+strangers to each other before to-day!)
+
+"A fellow writes in verse when he has nothing to say, and feels too dull
+and silly to say it in prose," said Number Seven.
+
+This made us laugh again, good-naturedly. I was pleased with a kind of
+truth which it seemed to me to wrap up in its rather startling
+affirmation. I gave a piece of advice the other day which I said I
+thought deserved a paragraph to itself. It was from a letter I wrote not
+long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for seeing
+himself in verse but was not hopelessly infatuated with the idea that he
+was born a "poet." "When you write in prose," I said, "you say what you
+mean. When you write in verse you say what you must." I was thinking
+more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a
+very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and
+ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are
+figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under
+what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are
+handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming
+vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you
+have a beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were you writing in
+prose, your imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for
+the harmonies of language, would all have full play. But there is your
+rhyme fastening you by the leg, and you must either reject the line which
+pleases you, or you must whip your hobbling fancy and all your limping
+thoughts into the traces which are hitched to one of three or four or
+half a dozen serviceable words. You cannot make any use of cars, I will
+suppose; you have no occasion to talk about scars; "the red planet Mars"
+has been used already; Dibdin has said enough about the gallant tars;
+what is there left for you but bars? So you give up your trains of
+thought, capitulate to necessity, and manage to lug in some kind of
+allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make use of
+bars. Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking up all
+continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigor, all the virility,
+which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong, graceful,
+spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of intellect to
+the-clink of well or ill matched syllables? I think you will smile if I
+tell you of an idea I have had about teaching the art of writing "poems"
+to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum. The trick of rhyming
+cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing a pleasant amusement
+to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel that I was well
+employed in getting up a Primer for the pupils of the Asylum, and other
+young persons who are incapable of serious thought and connected
+expression. I would start in the simplest way; thus:--
+
+ When darkness veils the evening....
+ I love to close my weary....
+
+The pupil begins by supplying the missing words, which most children who
+are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a certain
+number of trials. When the poet that is to be has got so as to perform
+this task easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each
+line are omitted, is given the child to fill up. By and by the more
+difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feebleminded
+child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with its four pairs of
+rhymes in the first section and its three pairs in the second part.
+
+Number Seven interrupted my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont;
+for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we
+should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly sound Teacup.
+
+"That's the way,--that 's the way!" exclaimed he. "It's just the same
+thing as my plan for teaching drawing."
+
+Some curiosity was shown among The Teacups to know what the queer
+creature had got into his mind, and Number Five asked him, in her
+irresistible tones, if he wouldn't oblige us by telling us all about it.
+
+He looked at her a moment without speaking. I suppose he has often been
+made fun of,--slighted in conversation, taken as a butt for people who
+thought themselves witty, made to feel as we may suppose a cracked piece
+of china-ware feels when it is clinked in the company of sound bits of
+porcelain. I never saw him when he was carelessly dealt with in
+conversation,--for it would sometimes happen, even at our table,--without
+recalling some lines of Emerson which always struck me as of wonderful
+force and almost terrible truthfulness:--
+
+ "Alas! that one is born in blight,
+ Victim of perpetual slight
+ When thou lookest in his face
+ Thy heart saith, 'Brother, go thy ways
+ None shall ask thee what thou doest,
+ Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
+ Or listen when thou repliest,
+ Or remember where thou liest,
+ Or how thy supper is sodden;'
+ And another is born
+ To make the sun forgotten."
+
+Poor fellow! Number Seven has to bear a good deal in the way of neglect
+and ridicule, I do not doubt. Happily, he is protected by an amount of
+belief in himself which shields him from many assailants who would
+torture a more sensitive nature. But the sweet voice of Number Five and
+her sincere way of addressing him seemed to touch his feelings. That was
+the meaning of his momentary silence, in which I saw that his eyes
+glistened and a faint flush rose on his cheeks. In a moment, however, as
+soon as he was on his hobby, he was all right, and explained his new and
+ingenious system as follows:
+
+"A man at a certain distance appears as a dark spot,--nothing more. Good.
+Anybody, man, woman, or child, can make a dot, say a period, such as we
+use in writing. Lesson No. 1. Make a dot; that is, draw your man, a
+mile off, if that is far enough. Now make him come a little nearer, a
+few rods, say. The dot is an oblong figure now. Good. Let your scholar
+draw the oblong figure. It is as easy as it is to make a note of
+admiration. Your man comes nearer, and now some hint of a bulbous
+enlargement at one end, and perhaps of lateral appendages and a
+bifurcation, begins to show itself. The pupil sets down with his pencil
+just what he sees,--no more. So by degrees the man who serves as model
+approaches. A bright pupil will learn to get the outline of a human
+figure in ten lessons, the model coming five hundred feet nearer each
+time. A dull one may require fifty, the model beginning a mile off, or
+more, and coming a hundred feet nearer at each move."
+
+The company were amused by all this, but could not help seeing that there
+was a certain practical possibility about the scheme. Our two Annexes,
+as we call then, appeared to be interested in the project, or fancy, or
+whim, or whatever the older heads might consider it. "I guess I'll try
+it," said the American Annex. "Quite so," answered the English Annex.
+Why the first girl "guessed" about her own intentions it is hard to say.
+What "quite so" referred to it would not be easy to determine. But these
+two expressions would decide the nationality of our two young ladies if
+we met them on the top of the great Pyramid.
+
+I was very glad that Number Seven had interrupted me. In fact, it is a
+good thing once in a while to break in upon the monotony of a steady
+talker at a dinner-table, tea-table, or any other place of social
+converse. The best talker is liable to become the most formidable of
+bores. It is a peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to
+find himself out. Many a terebrant I have known who, in that capacity,
+to borrow a line from Coleridge,
+
+ "Was great, nor knew how great he was."
+
+A line, by the way, which, as I have remarked, has in it a germ like that
+famous "He builded better than he knew" of Emerson.
+
+There was a slight lull in the conversation. The Mistress, who keeps an
+eye on the course of things, and feared that one of those panic silences
+was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and does not
+know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks about the
+"manufacture" of "poetry."
+
+You use the right term, madam, I said. The manufacture of that article
+has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of industry.
+One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary confidant of a wide
+circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any idea of the enormous
+output of verse which is characteristic of our time. There are many
+curious facts connected with this phenomenon. Educated people--yes, and
+many who are not educated--have discovered that rhymes are not the
+private property of a few noted writers who, having squatted on that part
+of the literary domain some twenty or forty or sixty years ago, have, as
+it were, fenced it in with their touchy, barbed-wire reputations, and
+have come to regard it and cause it to be regarded as their private
+property. The discovery having been made that rhyme is not a paddock for
+this or that race-horse, but a common, where every colt, pony, and donkey
+can range at will; a vast irruption into that once-privileged inclosure
+has taken place. The study of the great invasion is interesting.
+
+Poetry is commonly thought to be the language of emotion. On the
+contrary, most of what is so called proves the absence of all passionate
+excitement. It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious, worrying hunt after
+rhymes which can be made serviceable, after images which will be
+effective, after phrases which are sonorous; all this under limitations
+which restrict the natural movements of fancy and imagination. There is
+a secondary excitement in overcoming the difficulties of rhythm and
+rhyme, no doubt, but this is not the emotional heat excited by the
+subject of the "poet's" treatment. True poetry, the best of it, is but
+the ashes of a burnt-out passion. The flame was in the eye and in the
+cheek, the coals may be still burning in the heart, but when we come to
+the words it leaves behind it, a little warmth, a cinder or two just
+glimmering under the dead gray ashes,--that is all we can look for. When
+it comes to the manufactured article, one is surprised to find how well
+the metrical artisans have learned to imitate the real thing. They catch
+all the phrases of the true poet. They imitate his metrical forms as a
+mimic copies the gait of the person he is representing.
+
+Now I am not going to abuse "these same metre ballad-mongers," for the
+obvious reason that, as all The Teacups know, I myself belong to the
+fraternity. I don't think that this reason should hinder my having my
+say about the ballad-mongering business. For the last thirty years I
+have been in the habit of receiving a volume of poems or a poem, printed
+or manuscript--I will not say daily, though I sometimes receive more than
+one in a day, but at very short intervals. I have been consulted by
+hundreds of writers of verse as to the merit of their performances, and
+have often advised the writers to the best of my ability. Of late I have
+found it impossible to attempt to read critically all the literary
+productions, in verse and in prose, which have heaped themselves on every
+exposed surface of my library, like snowdrifts along the railroad
+tracks,--blocking my literary pathway, so that I can hardly find my daily
+papers.
+
+What is the meaning of this rush into rhyming of such a multitude of
+people, of all ages, from the infant phenomenon to the oldest inhabitant?
+
+Many of my young correspondents have told me in so many words, "I want to
+be famous." Now it is true that of all the short cuts to fame, in time
+of peace, there is none shorter than the road paved with rhymes. Byron
+woke up one morning and found himself famous. Still more notably did
+Rouget de l'Isle fill the air of France, nay, the whole atmosphere of
+freedom all the world over, with his name wafted on the wings of the
+Marseillaise, the work of a single night. But if by fame the aspirant
+means having his name brought before and kept before the public, there is
+a much cheaper way of acquiring that kind of notoriety. Have your
+portrait taken as a "Wonderful Cure of a Desperate Disease given up by
+all the Doctors." You will get a fair likeness of yourself and a partial
+biographical notice, and have the satisfaction, if not of promoting the
+welfare of the community, at least that of advancing the financial
+interests of the benefactor whose enterprise has given you your coveted
+notoriety. If a man wants to be famous, he had much better try the
+advertising doctor than the terrible editor, whose waste-basket is a maw
+which is as insatiable as the temporary stomach of Jack the Giant-killer.
+
+"You must not talk so," said Number Five. "I know you don't mean any
+wrong to the true poets, but you might be thought to hold them cheap,
+whereas you value the gift in others,--in yourself too, I rather think.
+There are a great many women,--and some men,--who write in verse from a
+natural instinct which leads them to that form of expression. If you
+could peep into the portfolio of all the cultivated women among your
+acquaintances, you would be surprised, I believe, to see how many of them
+trust their thoughts and feelings to verse which they never think of
+publishing, and much of which never meets any eyes but their own. Don't
+be cruel to the sensitive natures who find a music in the harmonies of
+rhythm and rhyme which soothes their own souls, if it reaches no
+farther."
+
+I was glad that Number Five spoke up as she did. Her generous instinct
+came to the rescue of the poor poets just at the right moment. Not that
+I meant to deal roughly with them, but the "poets" I have been forced
+into relation with have impressed me with certain convictions which are
+not flattering to the fraternity, and if my judgments are not accompanied
+by my own qualifications, distinctions, and exceptions, they may seem
+harsh to many readers.
+
+Let me draw a picture which many a young man and woman, and some no
+longer young, will recognize as the story of their own experiences.
+
+--He is sitting alone with his own thoughts and memories. What is that
+book he is holding? Something precious, evidently, for it is bound in
+"tree calf," and there is gilding enough about it for a birthday present.
+The reader seems to be deeply absorbed in its contents, and at times
+greatly excited by what he reads; for his face is flushed, his eyes
+glitter, and--there rolls a large tear down his cheek. Listen to him; he
+is reading aloud in impassioned tones:
+
+ And have I coined my soul in words for naught?
+ And must I, with the dim, forgotten throng
+ Of silent ghosts that left no earthly trace
+ To show they once had breathed this vital air,
+ Die out, of mortal memories?
+
+His voice is choked by his emotion. "How is it possible," he says to
+himself, "that any one can read my 'Gaspings for Immortality' without
+being impressed by their freshness, their passion, their beauty, their
+originality?" Tears come to his relief freely,--so freely that he has
+to push the precious volume out of the range of their blistering shower.
+Six years ago "Gaspings for Immortality" was published, advertised,
+praised by the professionals whose business it is to boost their
+publishers' authors. A week and more it was seen on the counters of the
+booksellers and at the stalls in the railroad stations. Then it
+disappeared from public view. A few copies still kept their place on the
+shelves of friends,--presentation copies, of course, as there is no
+evidence that any were disposed of by sale; and now, one might as well
+ask for the lost books of Livy as inquire at a bookstore for "Gaspings
+for Immortality."
+
+The authors of these poems are all round us, men and women, and no one
+with a fair amount of human sympathy in his disposition would treat them
+otherwise than tenderly. Perhaps they do not need tender treatment. How
+do you know that posterity may not resuscitate these seemingly dead
+poems, and give their author the immortality for which he longed and
+labored? It is not every poet who is at once appreciated. Some will
+tell you that the best poets never are. Who can say that you, dear
+unappreciated brother or sister, are not one of those whom it is left for
+after times to discover among the wrecks of the past, and hold up to the
+admiration of the world?
+
+I have not thought it necessary to put in all the interpellations, as the
+French call them, which broke the course of this somewhat extended series
+of remarks; but the comments of some of The Teacups helped me to shape
+certain additional observations, and may seem to the reader as of more
+significance than what I had been saying.
+
+Number Seven saw nothing but the folly and weakness of the "rhyming
+cranks," as he called them. He thought the fellow that I had described
+as blubbering over his still-born poems would have been better occupied
+in earning his living in some honest way or other. He knew one chap that
+published a volume of verses, and let his wife bring up the wood for the
+fire by which he was writing. A fellow says, "I am a poet!" and he
+thinks himself different from common folks. He ought to be excused from
+military service. He might be killed, and the world would lose the
+inestimable products of his genius. "I believe some of 'em think," said
+Number Seven, "that they ought not to be called upon to pay their taxes
+and their bills for household expenses, like the rest of us."
+
+"If they would only study and take to heart Horace's 'Ars Poetica,'" said
+the Professor, "it would be a great benefit to them and to the world at
+large. I would not advise you to follow him too literally, of course,
+for, as you will see, the changes that have taken place since his time
+would make some of his precepts useless and some dangerous, but the
+spirit of them is always instructive. This is the way, somewhat
+modernized and accompanied by my running commentary, in which he counsels
+a young poet:
+
+"'Don't try to write poetry, my boy, when you are not in the mood for
+doing it,--when it goes against the grain. You are a fellow of
+sense,--you understand all that.
+
+"'If you have written anything which you think well of, show it to
+Mr.______ , the well-known critic; to "the governor," as you call
+him,--your honored father; and to me, your friend.'
+
+"To the critic is well enough, if you like to be overhauled and put out
+of conceit with yourself,--it may do you good; but I wouldn't go to 'the
+governor' with my verses, if I were you. For either he will think what
+you have written is something wonderful, almost as good as he could have
+written himself,--in fact, he always did believe in hereditary
+genius,--or he will pooh-pooh the whole rhyming nonsense, and tell you
+that you had a great deal better stick to your business, and leave all
+the word-jingling to Mother Goose and her followers.
+
+"'Show me your verses,' says Horace. Very good it was in him, and mighty
+encouraging the first counsel he gives! 'Keep your poem to yourself for
+some eight or ten years; you will have time to look it over, to correct
+it and make it fit to present to the public.'
+
+"'Much obliged for your advice,' says the poor poet, thirsting for a
+draught of fame, and offered a handful of dust. And off he hurries to
+the printer, to be sure that his poem comes out in the next number of the
+magazine he writes for."
+
+"Is not poetry the natural language of lovers?"
+
+It was the Tutor who asked this question, and I thought he looked in the
+direction of Number Five, as if she might answer his question. But Number
+Five stirred her tea devotedly; there was a lump of sugar, I suppose,
+that acted like a piece of marble. So there was a silence while the lump
+was slowly dissolving, and it was anybody's chance who saw fit to take up
+the conversation.
+
+The voice that broke the silence was not the sweet, winsome one we were
+listening for, but it instantly arrested the attention of the company.
+It was the grave, manly voice of one used to speaking, and accustomed to
+be listened to with deference. This was the first time that the company
+as a whole had heard it, for the speaker was the new-comer who has been
+repeatedly alluded to,--the one of whom I spoke as "the Counsellor."
+
+"I think I can tell you something about that," said the Counsellor. "I
+suppose you will wonder how a man of my profession can know or interest
+himself about a question so remote from his arid pursuits. And yet there
+is hardly one man in a thousand who knows from actual experience a
+fraction of what I have learned of the lovers' vocabulary in my
+professional experience. I have, I am sorry to say, had to take an
+important part in a great number of divorce cases. These have brought
+before me scores and hundreds of letters, in which every shade of the
+great passion has been represented. What has most struck me in these
+amatory correspondences has been their remarkable sameness. It seems as
+if writing love-letters reduced all sorts of people to the same level. I
+don't remember whether Lord Bacon has left us anything in that
+line,--unless, indeed, he wrote Romeo and Juliet' and the 'Sonnets;' but
+if he has, I don't believe they differ so very much from those of his
+valet or his groom to their respective lady-loves. It is always, My
+darling! my darling! The words of endearment are the only ones the lover
+wants to employ, and he finds the vocabulary too limited for his vast
+desires. So his letters are apt to be rather tedious except to the
+personage to whom they are addressed. As to poetry, it is very common to
+find it in love-letters, especially in those that have no love in them.
+The letters of bigamists and polygamists are rich in poetical extracts.
+Occasionally, an original spurt in rhyme adds variety to an otherwise
+monotonous performance. I don't think there is much passion in men's
+poetry addressed to women. I agree with The Dictator that poetry is
+little more than the ashes of passion; still it may show that the flame
+has had its sweep where you find it, unless, indeed, it is shoveled in
+from another man's fireplace."
+
+"What do you say to the love poetry of women?" asked the Professor. "Did
+ever passion heat words to incandescence as it did those of Sappho?"
+
+The Counsellor turned,--not to Number Five, as he ought to have done,
+according to my programme, but to the Mistress.
+
+"Madam," he said, "your sex is adorable in many ways, but in the abandon
+of a genuine love-letter it is incomparable. I have seen a string of
+women's love-letters, in which the creature enlaced herself about the
+object of her worship as that South American parasite which clasps the
+tree to which it has attached itself, begins with a slender succulent
+network, feeds on the trunk, spreads its fingers out to hold firmly to
+one branch after another, thickens, hardens, stretches in every
+direction, following the boughs,--and at length gets strong enough to
+hold in its murderous arms, high up in air, the stump and shaft of the
+once sturdy growth that was its support and subsistence."
+
+The Counsellor did not say all this quite so formally as I have set it
+down here, but in a much easier way. In fact, it is impossible to smooth
+out a conversation from memory without stiffening it; you can't have a
+dress shirt look quite right without starching the bosom.
+
+Some of us would have liked to hear more about those letters in the
+divorce cases, but the Counsellor had to leave the table. He promised to
+show us some pictures he has of the South American parasite. I have seen
+them, and I can assure you they are very curious.
+
+The following verses were found in the urn, or sugar-bowl.
+
+ CACOETHES SCRIBENDI.
+
+ If all the trees in all the woods were men,
+ And each and every blade of grass a pen;
+ If every leaf on every shrub and tree
+ Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
+ Were changed to ink, and all earth's living tribes
+ Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
+ And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
+ The human race should write, and write, and write,
+ Till all the pens and paper were used up,
+ And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
+ Still would the scribblers clustered round its brim
+ Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"Dolce, ma non troppo dolce," said the Professor to the Mistress, who was
+sweetening his tea. She always sweetens his and mine for us. He has
+been attending a series of concerts, and borrowed the form of the
+directions to the orchestra. "Sweet, but not too sweet," he said,
+translating the Italian for the benefit of any of the company who might
+not be linguists or musical experts.
+
+"Do you go to those musical hullabaloos?" called out Number Seven. There
+was something very much like rudeness in this question and the tone in
+which it was asked. But we are used to the outbursts, and extravagances,
+and oddities of Number Seven, and do not take offence at his rough
+speeches as we should if any other of the company uttered them.
+
+"If you mean the concerts that have been going on this season, yes, I
+do," said the Professor, in a bland, good-humored way.
+
+"And do you take real pleasure in the din of all those screeching and
+banging and growling instruments?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, modestly, "I enjoy the brouhaha, if you choose to
+consider it such, of all this quarrelsome menagerie of noise-making
+machines, brought into order and harmony by the presiding genius, the
+leader, who has made a happy family of these snarling stringed
+instruments and whining wind instruments, so that although
+
+ "Linguae centum sent, oraque centum,
+
+"notwithstanding there are a hundred vibrating tongues and a hundred
+bellowing mouths, their one grand blended and harmonized uproar sets all
+my fibres tingling with a not unpleasing tremor."
+
+"Do you understand it? Do you take any idea from it? Do you know what
+it all means?" said Number Seven.
+
+The Professor was long-suffering under this series of somewhat peremptory
+questions. He replied very placidly, "I am afraid I have but a
+superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the unfathomable
+mysteries, of music. I can no more conceive of the working conditions of
+the great composer,
+
+ "'Untwisting all the chains that tie
+ The hidden soul of harmony,'
+
+"than a child of three years can follow the reasonings of Newton's
+'Principia.' I do not even pretend that I can appreciate the work of a
+great master as a born and trained musician does. Still, I do love a
+great crash of harmonies, and the oftener I listen to these musical
+tempests the higher my soul seems to ride upon them, as the wild fowl I
+see through my window soar more freely and fearlessly the fiercer the
+storm with which they battle."
+
+"That's all very well," said Number Seven, "but I wish we could get the
+old-time music back again. You ought to have heard,--no, I won't mention
+her, dead, poor girl,--dead and singing with the saints in heaven,--but
+the S_____ girls. If you could have heard them as I did when I was a
+boy, you would have cried, as we all used to. Do you cry at those great
+musical smashes? How can you cry when you don't know what it is all
+about? We used to think the words meant something,--we fancied that
+Burns and Moore said some things very prettily. I suppose you've
+outgrown all that."
+
+No one can handle Number Seven in one of his tantrums half so well as
+Number Five can do it. She can pick out what threads of sense may be
+wound off from the tangle of his ideas when they are crowded and
+confused, as they are apt to be at times. She can soften the occasional
+expression of half-concealed ridicule with which the poor old fellow's
+sallies are liable to be welcomed--or unwelcomed. She knows that the
+edge of a broken teacup may be sharper, very possibly, than that of a
+philosopher's jackknife. A mind a little off its balance, one which has
+a slightly squinting brain as its organ; will often prove fertile in
+suggestions. Vulgar, cynical, contemptuous listeners fly at all its
+weaknesses, and please themselves with making light of its often futile
+ingenuities, when a wiser audience would gladly accept a hint which
+perhaps could be developed in some profitable direction, or so interpret
+an erratic thought that it should prove good sense in disguise. That is
+the way Number Five was in the habit of dealing with the explosions of
+Number Seven. Do you think she did not see the ridiculous element in a
+silly speech, or the absurdity of an outrageously extravagant assertion?
+Then you never heard her laugh when she could give way to her sense of
+the ludicrous without wounding the feelings of any other person. But her
+kind heart never would forget itself, and so Number Seven had a champion
+who was always ready to see that his flashes of intelligence, fitful as
+they were, and liable to be streaked with half-crazy fancies, always
+found one willing recipient of what light there was in them.
+
+Number Five, I have found, is a true lover of music, and has a right to
+claim a real knowledge of its higher and deeper mysteries. But she
+accepted very cordially what our light-headed companion said about the
+songs he used to listen to.
+
+"There is no doubt," she remarked, "that the tears which used to be shed
+over 'Oft in the sully night,' or 'Auld Robin Gray,' or 'A place in thy
+memory, dearest,' were honest tears, coming from the true sources of
+emotion. There was no affectation about them; those songs came home to
+the sensibilities of young people,--of all who had any sensibilities to
+be acted upon. And on the other hand, there is a great amount of
+affectation in the apparent enthusiasm of many persons in admiring and
+applauding music of which they have not the least real appreciation.
+They do not know whether it is good or bad, the work of a first-rate or a
+fifth-rate composer; whether there are coherent elements in it, or
+whether it is nothing more than 'a concourse of sweet sounds' with no
+organic connections. One must be educated, no doubt, to understand the
+more complex and difficult kinds of musical composition. Go to the great
+concerts where you know that the music is good, and that you ought to
+like it whether you do or not. Take a music-bath once or twice a week
+for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the
+water-bath is to the body. I wouldn't trouble myself about the
+affectations of people who go to this or that series of concerts chiefly
+because it is fashionable. Some of these people whom we think so silly
+and hold so cheap will perhaps find, sooner or later, that they have a
+dormant faculty which is at last waking up,--and that they who came
+because others came, and began by staring at the audience, are listening
+with a newly found delight. Every one of us has a harp under bodice or
+waistcoat, and if it can only once get properly strung and tuned it will
+respond to all outside harmonies."
+
+The Professor has some ideas about music, which I believe he has given to
+the world in one form or another; but the world is growing old and
+forgetful, and needs to be reminded now and then of what one has formerly
+told it.
+
+"I have had glimpses," the Professor said, "of the conditions into which
+music is capable of bringing a sensitive nature. Glimpses, I say,
+because I cannot pretend that I am capable of sounding all the depths or
+reaching all the heights to which music may transport our mortal
+consciousness. Let me remind you of a curious fact with reference to the
+seat of the musical sense. Far down below the great masses of thinking
+marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in
+the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white
+filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the
+external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote
+connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres
+of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical faculty
+might be said to have a little brain of its own. It has a special world
+and a private language all to itself. How can one explain its
+significance to those whose musical faculties are in a rudimentary state
+of development, or who have never had them trained? Can you describe in
+intelligible language the smell of a rose as compared with that of a
+violet? No,--music can be translated only by music. Just so far as it
+suggests worded thought, it falls short of its highest office. Pure
+emotional movements of the spiritual nature,--that is what I ask of
+music. Music will be the universal language,--the Volapuk of spiritual
+being."
+
+"Angels sit down with their harps and play at each other, I suppose,"
+said Number Seven. "Must have an atmosphere up there if they have harps,
+or they wouldn't get any music. Wonder if angels breathe like mortals?
+If they do, they must have lungs and air passages, of course. Think of
+an angel with the influenza, and nothing but a cloud for a handkerchief!"
+
+--This is a good instance of the way in which Number Seven's squinting
+brain works. You will now and then meet just such brains in heads you
+know very well. Their owners are much given to asking unanswerable
+questions. A physicist may settle it for us whether there is an
+atmosphere about a planet or not, but it takes a brain with an extra
+fissure in it to ask these unexpected questions,--questions which the
+natural philosopher cannot answer, and which the theologian never thinks
+of asking.
+
+The company at our table do not keep always in the same places. The
+first thing I noticed, the other evening, was that the Tutor was sitting
+between the two Annexes, and the Counsellor was next to Number Five.
+Something ought to come of this arrangement. One of those two young
+ladies must certainly captivate and perhaps capture the Tutor. They are
+just the age to be falling in love and to be fallen in love with. The
+Tutor is good looking, intellectual, suspected of writing poetry, but a
+little shy, it appears to me. I am glad to see him between the two girls.
+If there were only one, she might be shy too, and then there would be
+less chance for a romance such as I am on the lookout for; but these
+young persons lend courage to each other, and between them, if he does
+not wake up like Cymon at the sight of Iphigenia, I shall be
+disappointed. As for the Counsellor and Number Five, they will soon find
+each other out. Yes, it is all pretty clear in my mind,--except that
+there is always an x in a problem where sentiments are involved. No, not
+so clear about the Tutor. Predestined, I venture my guess, to one or the
+other, but to which? I will suspend my opinion for the present.
+
+I have found out that the Counsellor is a childless widower. I am told
+that the Tutor is unmarried, and so far as known not engaged. There is no
+use in denying it,--a company without the possibility of a love-match
+between two of its circle is like a champagne bottle with the cork out
+for some hours as compared to one with its pop yet in reserve. However,
+if there should be any love-making, it need not break up our
+conversations. Most of it will be carried on away from our tea-table.
+
+Some of us have been attending certain lectures on Egypt and its
+antiquities. I have never been on the Nile. If in any future state
+there shall be vacations in which we may have liberty to revisit our old
+home, equipped with a complete brand-new set of mortal senses as our
+travelling outfit, I think one of the first places I should go to, after
+my birthplace, the old gambrel-roofed house,--the place where it stood,
+rather,--would be that mighty, awe-inspiring river. I do not suppose we
+shall ever know half of what we owe to the wise and wonderful people who
+confront us with the overpowering monuments of a past which flows out of
+the unfathomable darkness as the great river streams from sources even as
+yet but imperfectly explored.
+
+I have thought a good deal about Egypt, lately, with reference to our
+historical monuments. How did the great unknown mastery who fixed the
+two leading forms of their monumental records arrive at those admirable
+and eternal types, the pyramid and the obelisk? How did they get their
+model of the pyramid?
+
+Here is an hour-glass, not inappropriately filled with sand from the
+great Egyptian desert. I turn it, and watch the sand as it accumulates
+in the lower half of the glass. How symmetrically, how beautifully, how
+inevitably, the little particles pile up the cone, which is ever building
+and unbuilding itself, always aiming at the stability which is found only
+at a certain fixed angle! The Egyptian children playing in the sand must
+have noticed this as they let the grains fall from their hands, and the
+sloping sides of the miniature pyramid must have been among the familiar
+sights to the little boys and girls for whom the sand furnished their
+earliest playthings. Nature taught her children through the working of
+the laws of gravitation how to build so that her forces should act in
+harmony with art, to preserve the integrity of a structure meant to reach
+a far-off posterity. The pyramid is only the cone in which Nature
+arranges her heaped and sliding fragments; the cone with flattened
+Surfaces, as it is prefigured in certain well-known crystalline forms.
+The obelisk is from another of Nature's patterns; it is only a gigantic
+acicular crystal.
+
+The Egyptians knew what a monument should be, simple, noble, durable. It
+seems to me that we Americans might take a lesson from those early
+architects. Our cemeteries are crowded with monuments which are very far
+from simple, anything but noble, and stand a small chance of being
+permanent. The pyramid is rarely seen, perhaps because it takes up so
+much room; and when built on a small scale seems insignificant as we
+think of it, dwarfed by the vast structures of antiquity. The obelisk is
+very common, and when in just proportions and of respectable dimensions
+is unobjectionable.
+
+But the gigantic obelisks like that on Bunker Hill, and especially the
+Washington monument at the national capital, are open to critical
+animadversion. Let us contrast the last mentioned of these great piles
+with the obelisk as the Egyptian conceived and executed it. The new
+Pharaoh ordered a memorial of some important personage or event. In the
+first place, a mighty stone was dislodged from its connections, and
+lifted, unbroken, from the quarry. This was a feat from which our modern
+stone-workers shrink dismayed. The Egyptians appear to have handled
+these huge monoliths as our artisans handle hearthstones and doorsteps,
+for the land actually bristled with such giant columns. They were shaped
+and finished as nicely as if they were breastpins for the Titans to wear,
+and on their polished surfaces were engraved in imperishable characters
+the records they were erected to preserve.
+
+Europe and America borrow these noble productions of African art and
+power, and find them hard enough to handle after they have succeeded in
+transporting them to Rome, or London, or New York. Their simplicity,
+grandeur, imperishability, speaking symbolism, shame all the pretentious
+and fragile works of human art around them. The obelisk has no joints
+for the destructive agencies of nature to attack; the pyramid has no
+masses hanging in unstable equilibrium, and threatening to fall by their
+own weight in the course of a thousand or two years.
+
+America says the Father of his Country must have a monument worthy of his
+exalted place in history. What shall it be? A temple such as Athens
+might have been proud to rear upon her Acropolis? An obelisk such as
+Thebes might have pointed out with pride to the strangers who found
+admission through her hundred gates? After long meditation and the
+rejection of the hybrid monstrosities with which the nation was menaced,
+an obelisk is at last decided upon. How can it be made grand and
+dignified enough to be equal to the office assigned it? We dare not
+attempt to carve a single stone from the living rock,--all our modern
+appliances fail to make the task as easy to us as it seems to have been
+to the early Egyptians. No artistic skill is required in giving a
+four-square tapering figure to a stone column. If we cannot shape a
+solid obelisk of the proper dimensions, we can build one of separate
+blocks. How can we give it the distinction we demand for it? The nation
+which can brag that it has "the biggest show on earth" cannot boast a
+great deal in the way of architecture, but it can do one thing,--it can
+build an obelisk that shall be taller than any structure now standing
+which the hand of man has raised. Build an obelisk! How different the
+idea of such a structure from that of the unbroken, unjointed prismatic
+shaft, one perfect whole, as complete in itself, as fitly shaped and
+consolidated to defy the elements, as the towering palm or the tapering
+pine! Well, we had the satisfaction for a time of claiming the tallest
+structure in the world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has
+sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and
+speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the
+American love of the superlative. We have the higher civilization among
+us, and we must try to keep down the forth-putting instincts of the
+lower. We do not want to see our national monument placarded as "the
+greatest show on earth,"--perhaps it is well that it is taken down from
+that bad eminence.
+
+I do not think that this speech of mine was very well received. It
+appeared to jar somewhat on the nerves of the American Annex. There was
+a smile on the lips of the other Annex,--the English girl,--which she
+tried to keep quiet, but it was too plain that she enjoyed my diatribe.
+
+It must be remembered that I and the other Teacups, in common with the
+rest of our fellow-citizens, have had our sensibilities greatly worked
+upon, our patriotism chilled, our local pride outraged, by the
+monstrosities which have been allowed to deform our beautiful public
+grounds. We have to be very careful in conducting a visitor, say from
+his marble-fronted hotel to the City Hall.--Keep pretty straight along
+after entering the Garden,--you will not care to inspect the little
+figure of the military gentleman to your right.--Yes, the Cochituate
+water is drinkable, but I think I would not turn aside to visit that
+small fabric which makes believe it is a temple, and is a weak-eyed
+fountain feebly weeping over its own insignificance. About that other
+stone misfortune, cruelly reminding us of the "Boston Massacre," we will
+not discourse; it is not imposing, and is rarely spoken of.
+
+What a mortification to the inhabitants of a city with some hereditary
+and contemporary claims to cultivation; which has noble edifices, grand
+libraries, educational institutions of the highest grade, an art-gallery
+filled with the finest models and rich in paintings and statuary,--a
+stately city that stretches both arms across the Charles to clasp the
+hands of Harvard, her twin-sister, each lending lustre to the other like
+double stars,--what a pity that she should be so disfigured by crude
+attempts to adorn her and commemorate her past that her most loving
+children blush for her artificial deformities amidst the wealth of her
+natural beauties! One hardly knows which to groan over most sadly,--the
+tearing down of old monuments, the shelling of the Parthenon, the
+overthrow of the pillared temples of Rome, and in a humbler way the
+destruction of the old Hancock house, or the erection of monuments which
+are to be a perpetual eyesore to ourselves and our descendants.
+
+We got talking on the subject of realism, of which so much has been said
+of late.
+
+It seems to me, I said, that the great additions which have been made by
+realism to the territory of literature consist largely in swampy,
+malarious, ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously been left to
+reptiles and vermin. It is perfectly easy to be original by violating
+the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. The general consent of
+civilized people was supposed to have banished certain subjects from the
+conversation of well-bred people and the pages of respectable literature.
+There is no subject, or hardly any, which may not be treated of at the
+proper time, in the proper place, by the fitting person, for the right
+kind of listener or reader. But when the poet or the story-teller
+invades the province of the man of science, he is on dangerous ground. I
+need say nothing of the blunders he is pretty sure to make. The
+imaginative writer is after effects. The scientific man is after truth.
+Science is decent, modest; does not try to startle, but to instruct. The
+same scenes and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the
+story teller's highly colored paragraphs can be read without giving
+offence in the chaste language of the physiologist or the physician.
+
+There is a very celebrated novel, "Madame Bovary," the work of M.
+Flaubert, which is noted for having been the subject of prosecution as an
+immoral work. That it has a serious lesson there is no doubt, if one
+will drink down to the bottom of the cup. But the honey of sensuous
+description is spread so deeply over the surface of the goblet that a
+large proportion of its readers never think of its holding anything else.
+All the phases of unhallowed passion are described in full detail. That
+is what the book is bought and read for, by the great majority of its
+purchasers, as all but simpletons very well know. That is what makes it
+sell and brought it into the courts of justice. This book is famous for
+its realism; in fact, it is recognized as one of the earliest and most
+brilliant examples of that modern style of novel which, beginning where
+Balzac left off, attempted to do for literature what the photograph has
+done for art. For those who take the trouble to drink out of the cup
+below the rim of honey, there is a scene where realism is carried to its
+extreme,--surpassed in horror by no writer, unless it be the one whose
+name must be looked for at the bottom of the alphabet, as if its natural
+place were as low down in the dregs of realism as it could find itself.
+This is the death-bed scene, where Madame Bovary expires in convulsions.
+The author must have visited the hospitals for the purpose of watching
+the terrible agonies he was to depict, tramping from one bed to another
+until he reached the one where the cries and contortions were the most
+frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No hospital physician would
+have pictured the straggle in such colors. In the same way, that other
+realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient suffering from delirium tremens,
+the disease known to common speech as "the horrors." In describing this
+case he does all that language can do to make it more horrible than the
+reality. He gives us, not realism, but super-realism, if such a term
+does not contradict itself.
+
+In this matter of the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which our
+natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach us to
+avoid, art has been far in advance of literature. It is three hundred
+years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as Spagnoletto, was born
+in the province Valencia, in Spain. We had the misfortune of seeing a
+painting of his in a collection belonging to one of the French princes,
+and exhibited at the Art Museum. It was that of a man performing upon
+himself the operation known to the Japanese as hararkiri. Many persons
+who looked upon this revolting picture will never get rid of its
+remembrance, and will regret the day when their eyes fell upon it. I
+should share the offence of the painter if I ventured to describe it.
+Ribera was fond of depicting just such odious and frightful subjects.
+"Saint Lawrence writhing on his gridiron, Saint Sebastian full of arrows,
+were equally a source of delight to him. Even in subjects which had no
+such elements of horror he finds the materials for the delectation of his
+ferocious pencil; he makes up for the defect by rendering with a brutal
+realism deformity and ugliness."
+
+The first great mistake made by the ultra-realists; like Flaubert and
+Zola, is, as I have said, their ignoring the line of distinction between
+imaginative art and science. We can find realism enough in books of
+anatomy, surgery, and medicine. In studying the human figure, we want to
+see it clothed with its natural integuments. It is well for the artist
+to study the ecorche in the dissecting-room, but we do not want the
+Apollo or the Venus to leave their skins behind them when they go into
+the gallery for exhibition. Lancisi's figures show us how the great
+statues look when divested of their natural covering. It is instructive,
+but useful chiefly as a means to aid in the true artistic reproduction of
+nature. When the, hospitals are invaded by the novelist, he should learn
+something from the physician as well as from the patients. Science
+delineates in monochrome. She never uses high tints and strontian lights
+to astonish lookers-on. Such scenes as Flaubert and Zola describe would
+be reproduced in their essential characters, but not dressed up in
+picturesque phrases. That is the first stumbling-block in the way of the
+reader of such realistic stories as those to which I have referred.
+There are subjects which must be investigated by scientific men which
+most educated persons would be glad to know nothing about. When a
+realistic writer like Zola surprises his reader into a kind of knowledge
+he never thought of wishing for, he sometimes harms him more than he has
+any idea of doing. He wants to produce a sensation, and he leaves a
+permanent disgust not to be got rid of. Who does not remember odious
+images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they
+have stained? A man's vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words,
+and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their
+hold. One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain
+poems of Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness.
+Expressions and thoughts of a certain character stain the fibre of the
+thinking organ, and in some degree affect the hue of every idea that
+passes through the discolored tissues.
+
+This is the gravest accusation to bring against realism, old or recent,
+whether in the brutal paintings of Spagnoletto or in the unclean
+revelations of Zola. Leave the description of the drains and cesspools
+to the hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to the
+physician, the details of the laundry to the washerwoman. If we are to
+have realism in its tedious descriptions of unimportant particulars, let
+it be of particulars which do not excite disgust. Such is the description
+of the vegetables in Zola's "Ventre de Paris," where, if one wishes to
+see the apotheosis of turnips, beets, and cabbages, he can find them
+glorified as supremely as if they had been symbols of so many deities;
+their forms, their colors, their expression, worked upon until they seem
+as if they were made to be looked at and worshipped rather than to be
+boiled and eaten.
+
+I am pleased to find a French critic of M. Flaubert expressing ideas with
+which many of my own entirely coincide. "The great mistake of the
+realists," he says, "is that they profess to tell the truth because they
+tell everything. This puerile hunting after details, this cold and
+cynical inventory of all the wretched conditions in the midst of which
+poor humanity vegetates, not only do not help us to understand it better,
+but, on the contrary, the effect on the spectators is a kind of dazzled
+confusion mingled with fatigue and disgust. The material truthfulness to
+which the school of M. Flaubert more especially pretends misses its aim
+in going beyond it. Truth is lost in its own excess."
+
+I return to my thoughts on the relations of imaginative art in all its
+forms with science. The subject which in the hands of the scientific
+student is handled decorously,--reverently, we might almost say,--becomes
+repulsive, shameful, and debasing in the unscrupulous manipulations of
+the low-bred man of letters.
+
+I confess that I am a little jealous of certain tendencies in our own
+American literature, which led one of the severest and most outspoken of
+our satirical fellow-countrymen, no longer living to be called to account
+for it, to say; in a moment of bitterness, that the mission of America
+was to vulgarize mankind. I myself have sometimes wondered at the
+pleasure some Old World critics have professed to find in the most
+lawless freaks of New World literature. I have questioned whether their
+delight was not like that of the Spartans in the drunken antics of their
+Helots. But I suppose I belong to another age, and must not attempt to
+judge the present by my old-fashioned standards.
+
+The company listened very civilly to these remarks, whether they agreed
+with them or not. I am not sure that I want all the young people to
+think just as I do in matters of critical judgment. New wine does not go
+well into old bottles, but if an old cask has held good wine, it may
+improve a crude juice to stand awhile upon the lees of that which once
+filled it.
+
+I thought the company had had about enough of this disquisition. They
+listened very decorously, and the Professor, who agrees very well with
+me, as I happen to know, in my views on this business of realism, thanked
+me for giving them the benefit of my opinion.
+
+The silence that followed was broken by Number Seven's suddenly
+exclaiming,--
+
+"I should like to boss creation for a week!"
+
+This expression was an outbreak suggested by some train of thought which
+Number Seven had been following while I was discoursing. I do not think
+one of the company looked as if he or she were shocked by it as an
+irreligious or even profane speech. It is a better way always, in
+dealing with one of those squinting brains, to let it follow out its own
+thought. It will keep to it for a while; then it will quit the rail, so
+to speak, and run to any side-track which may present itself.
+
+"What is the first thing you would do?" asked Number Five in a pleasant,
+easy way.
+
+"The first thing? Pick out a few thousand of the best specimens of the
+best races, and drown the rest like so many blind puppies."
+
+"Why," said she, "that was tried once, and does not seem to have worked
+very well."
+
+"Very likely. You mean Noah's flood, I suppose. More people nowadays,
+and a better lot to pick from than Noah had."
+
+"Do tell us whom you would take with you," said Number Five.
+
+"You, if you would go," he answered, and I thought I saw a slight flush
+on his cheek. "But I didn't say that I should go aboard the new ark
+myself. I am not sure that I should. No, I am pretty sure that I
+shouldn't. I don't believe, on the whole, it would pay me to save
+myself. I ain't of much account. But I could pick out some that were."
+
+And just now he was saying that he should like to boss the universe! All
+this has nothing very wonderful about it. Every one of us is subject to
+alternations of overvaluation and undervaluation of ourselves. Do you
+not remember soliloquies something like this? "Was there ever such a
+senseless, stupid creature as I am? How have I managed to keep so long
+out of the idiot asylum? Undertook to write a poem, and stuck fast at
+the first verse. Had a call from a friend who had just been round the
+world. Did n't ask him one word about what he had seen or heard, but
+gave him full details of my private history, I having never been off my
+own hearth-rug for more than an hour or two at a time, while he was
+circumnavigating and circumrailroading the globe. Yes, if anybody can
+claim the title, I am certainly the prize idiot." I am afraid that we
+all say such things as this to ourselves at times. Do we not use more
+emphatic words than these in our self-depreciation? I cannot say how it
+is with others, but my vocabulary of self-reproach and humiliation is so
+rich in energetic expressions that I should be sorry to have an
+interviewer present at an outburst of one of its raging geysers, its
+savage soliloquies. A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb
+uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and
+down. Number Seven is very much like other people in this respect,--very
+much like you and me.
+
+This train of reflections must not carry me away from Number Seven.
+
+"If I can't get a chance to boss this planet for a week or so," he began
+again, "I think I could write its history,--yes, the history of the
+world, in less compass than any one who has tried it so far."
+
+"You know Sir Walter Raleigh's 'History of the World,' of course?" said
+the Professor.
+
+"More or less,--more or less," said Number Seven prudently. "But I don't
+care who has written it before me. I will agree to write the story of
+two worlds, this and the next, in such a compact way that you can commit
+them both to memory in less time than you can learn the answer to the
+first question in the Catechism."
+
+What he had got into his head we could not guess, but there was no little
+curiosity to discover the particular bee which was buzzing in his bonnet.
+He evidently enjoyed our curiosity, and meant to keep us waiting awhile
+before revealing the great secret.
+
+"How many words do you think I shall want?"
+
+It is a formula, I suppose, I said, and I will grant you a hundred words.
+
+"Twenty," said the Professor. "That was more than the wise men of Greece
+wanted for their grand utterances."
+
+The two Annexes whispered together, and the American Annex gave their
+joint result. One thousand was the number they had fixed on. They were
+used to hearing lectures, and could hardly conceive that any subject
+could be treated without taking up a good part of an hour.
+
+"Less than ten," said Number Five. "If there are to be more than ten, I
+don't believe that Number Seven would think the surprise would be up to
+our expectations."
+
+"Guess as much as you like," said Number Seven.
+
+"The answer will keep. I don't mean to say what it is until we are ready
+to leave the table." He took a blank card from his pocket-book, wrote
+something on it, or appeared, at any rate, to write, and handed it, face
+down, to the Mistress. What was on the card will be found near the end
+of this paper. I wonder if anybody will be curious enough to look
+further along to find out what it was before she reads the next
+paragraph?
+
+In the mean time there is a train of thought suggested by Number Seven
+and his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study
+the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less.
+There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see
+things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or
+with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the
+two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You
+wonder at the eccentricities of this or that connection of your own.
+Watch yourself, and you will find impulses which, but for the restraints
+you put upon them, would make you do the same foolish things which you
+laugh at in that cousin of yours. I once lived in the same house with
+the near relative of a very distinguished person, whose name is still
+honored and revered among us. His brain was an active one, like that of
+his famous relative, but it was full of random ideas, unconnected trains
+of thought, whims, crotchets, erratic suggestions. Knowing him, I could
+interpret the mental characteristics of the whole family connection in
+the light of its exaggerated peculiarities as exhibited in my odd
+fellow-boarder. Squinting brains are a great deal more common than we
+should at first sight believe. Here is a great book, a solid octavo of
+five hundred pages, full of the vagaries of this class of organizations.
+I hope to refer to this work hereafter, but just now I will only say
+that, after reading till one is tired the strange fancies of the squarers
+of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the
+moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they
+have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as
+baseless, as the least rational of those which are here recorded.
+
+Some day I want to talk about my library. It is such a curious
+collection of old and new books, such a mosaic of learning and fancies
+and follies, that a glance over it would interest the company. Perhaps I
+may hereafter give you a talk abut books, but while I am saying a few
+passing words upon the subject the greatest bibliographical event that
+ever happened in the book-market of the New World is taking place under
+our eyes. Here is Mr. Bernard Quaritch just come from his well-known
+habitat, No. 15 Piccadilly, with such a collection of rare, beautiful,
+and somewhat expensive volumes as the Western Continent never saw before
+on the shelves of a bibliopole.
+
+We bookworms are all of us now and then betrayed into an extravagance.
+The keen tradesmen who tempt us are like the fishermen who dangle a
+minnow, a frog, or a worm before the perch or pickerel who may be on the
+lookout for his breakfast. But Mr. Quaritch comes among us like that
+formidable angler of whom it is said,
+
+ His hook he baited with a dragon's tail,
+ And sat upon a rock and bobbed for whale.
+
+The two catalogues which herald his coming are themselves interesting
+literary documents. One can go out with a few shillings in his pocket,
+and venture among the books of the first of these catalogues without
+being ashamed to show himself with no larger furnishing of the means for
+indulging his tastes,--he will find books enough at comparatively modest
+prices. But if one feels very rich, so rich that it requires a good deal
+to frighten him, let him take the other catalogue and see how many books
+he proposes to add to his library at the prices affixed. Here is a Latin
+Psalter with the Canticles, from the press of Fust and Schoeffer, the
+second book issued from their press, the second book printed with a date,
+that date being 1459. There are only eight copies of this work known to
+exist; you can have one of them, if so disposed, and if you have change
+enough in your pocket. Twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars
+will make you the happy owner of this precious volume. If this is more
+than you want to pay, you can have the Gold Gospels of Henry VIII., on
+purple vellum, for about half the money. There are pages on pages of
+titles of works any one of which would be a snug little property if
+turned into money at its catalogue price.
+
+Why will not our multimillionaires look over this catalogue of Mr.
+Quaritch, and detain some of its treasures on this side of the Atlantic
+for some of our public libraries? We decant the choicest wines of Europe
+into our cellars; we ought to be always decanting the precious treasures
+of her libraries and galleries into our own, as we have opportunity and
+means. As to the means, there are so many rich people who hardly know
+what to do with their money that it is well to suggest to them any new
+useful end to which their superfluity may contribute. I am not in
+alliance with Mr. Quaritch; in fact, I am afraid of him, for if I stayed
+a single hour in his library, where I never was but once, and then for
+fifteen minutes only, I should leave it so much poorer than I entered it
+that I should be reminded of the picture in the titlepage of Fuller's
+'Historie of the Holy Warre,' "We went out full. We returned empty."
+
+--After the teacups were all emptied, the card containing Number Seven's
+abridged history of two worlds, this and the next, was handed round.
+
+This was all it held:
+
+After all had looked at it, it was passed back to me. "Let The Dictator
+interpret it," they all said.
+
+This is what I announced as my interpretation:
+
+Two worlds, the higher and the lower, separated by the thinnest of
+partitions. The lower world is that of questions; the upper world is
+that of answers. Endless doubt and unrest here below; wondering,
+admiring, adoring certainty above.--Am I not right?
+
+"You are right," answered Number Seven solemnly. "That is my
+revelation."
+
+The following poem was found in the sugar-bowl.
+
+I read it to the company. There was much whispering and there were many
+conjectures as to its authorship, but every Teacup looked innocent, and
+we separated each with his or her private conviction. I had mine, but I
+will not mention it.
+
+ THE ROSE AND THE FERN.
+
+ Lady, life's sweetest lesson wouldst thou learn,
+ Come thou with me to Love's enchanted bower:
+ High overhead the trellised roses burn;
+ Beneath thy feet behold the feathery fern,
+ A leaf without a flower.
+
+ What though the rose leaves fall? They still are sweet,
+ And have been lovely in their beauteous prime,
+ While the bare frond seems ever to repeat,
+ "For us no bud, no blossom, wakes to greet
+ The joyous flowering time!"
+
+ Heed thou the lesson. Life has leaves to tread
+ And flowers to cherish; summer round thee glows;
+ Wait not till autumn's fading robes are shed,
+ But while its petals still are burning red
+ Gather life's full-blown rose!
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Of course the reading of the poem at the end of the last paper has left a
+deep impression. I strongly suspect that something very much like
+love-making is going on at our table. A peep under the lid of the
+sugar-bowl has shown me that there is another poem ready for the company.
+That receptacle is looked upon with an almost tremulous excitement by
+more than one of The Teacups. The two Annexes turn towards the mystic
+urn as if the lots which were to determine their destiny were shut up in
+it. Number Five, quieter, and not betraying more curiosity than belongs
+to the sex at all ages, glances at the sugarbowl now and then; looking so
+like a clairvoyant, that sometimes I cannot help thinking she must be
+one. There is a sly look about that young Doctor's eyes, which might
+imply that he knows something about what the silver vessel holds, or is
+going to hold. The Tutor naturally falls under suspicion, as he is known
+to have written and published poems. I suppose the Professor and myself
+have hardly been suspected of writing love-poems; but there is no
+telling,--there is no telling. Why may not some one of the lady Teacups
+have played the part of a masculine lover? George Sand, George Eliot,
+Charles Egbert Craddock, made pretty good men in print. The authoress of
+"Jane Eyre" was taken for a man by many persons. Can Number Five be
+masquerading in verse? Or is one of the two Annexes the make believe
+lover? Or did these girls lay their heads together, and send the poem we
+had at our last sitting to puzzle the company? It is certain that the
+Mistress did not write the poem. It is evident that Number Seven, who is
+so severe in his talk about rhymesters, would not, if he could, make such
+a fool of himself as to set up for a "poet." Why should not the
+Counsellor fall in love and write verses? A good many lawyers have been
+"poets."
+
+Perhaps the next poem, which may be looked for in its proper place, may
+help us to form a judgment. We may have several verse-writers among us,
+and if so there will be a good opportunity for the exercise of judgment
+in distributing their productions among the legitimate claimants. In the
+mean time, we must not let the love-making and the song-writing interfere
+with the more serious matters which these papers are expected to contain.
+
+Number Seven's compendious and comprehensive symbolism proved suggestive,
+as his whimsical notions often do. It always pleases me to take some
+hint from anything he says when I can, and carry it out in a direction
+not unlike that of his own remark. I reminded the company of his
+enigmatical symbol.
+
+You can divide mankind in the same way, I said. Two words, each of two
+letters, will serve to distinguish two classes of human beings who
+constitute the principal divisions of mankind. Can any of you tell what
+those two words are?
+
+"Give me five letters," cried Number Seven, "and I can solve your
+problem! F-o-o-l-s,--those five letters will give you the first and
+largest half. For the other fraction"--
+
+Oh, but, said I, I restrict you absolutely to two letters. If you are
+going to take five, you may as well take twenty or a hundred.
+
+After a few attempts, the company gave it up. The nearest approach to
+the correct answer was Number Five's guess of Oh and Ah: Oh signifying
+eternal striving after an ideal, which belongs to one kind of nature; and
+Ah the satisfaction of the other kind of nature, which rests at ease in
+what it has attained.
+
+Good! I said to Number Five, but not the answer I am after. The great
+division between human beings is into the Ifs and the Ases.
+
+"Is the last word to be spelt with one or two s's?" asked the young
+Doctor.
+
+The company laughed feebly at this question. I answered it soberly. With
+one s. There are more foolish people among the Ifs than there are among
+the Ases.
+
+The company looked puzzled, and asked for an explanation.
+
+This is the meaning of those two words as I interpret them: If it
+were,--if it might be,--if it could be,--if it had been. One portion of
+mankind go through life always regretting, always whining, always
+imagining. These are the people whose backbones remain cartilaginous all
+their lives long, as do those of certain other vertebrate animals,--the
+sturgeons, for instance. A good many poets must be classed with this
+group of vertebrates.
+
+As it is,--this is the way in which the other class of people look at the
+conditions in which they find themselves. They may be optimists or
+pessimists, they are very largely optimists,--but, taking things just as
+they find them, they adjust the facts to their wishes if they can; and if
+they cannot, then they adjust themselves to the facts. I venture to say
+that if one should count the Ifs and the Ases in the conversation of his
+acquaintances, he would find the more able and important persons among
+them--statesmen, generals, men of business--among the Ases, and the
+majority of the conspicuous failures among the Ifs. I don't know but
+this would be as good a test as that of Gideon,--lapping the water or
+taking it up in the hand. I have a poetical friend whose conversation is
+starred as thick with ifs as a boiled ham is with cloves. But another
+friend of mine, a business man, whom I trust in making my investments,
+would not let me meddle with a certain stock which I fancied, because, as
+he said, "there are too many ifs in it. As it looks now, I would n't
+touch it."
+
+I noticed, the other evening, that some private conversation was going on
+between the Counsellor and the two Annexes. There was a mischievous look
+about the little group, and I thought they were hatching some plot among
+them. I did not hear what the English Annex said, but the American
+girl's voice was sharper, and I overheard what sounded to me like, "It is
+time to stir up that young Doctor." The Counsellor looked very knowing,
+and said that he would find a chance before long. I was rather amused to
+see how readily he entered into the project of the young people. The
+fact is, the Counsellor is young for his time of life; for he already
+betrays some signs of the change referred to in that once familiar street
+song, which my friend, the great American surgeon, inquired for at the
+music-shops under the title, as he got it from the Italian minstrel,
+
+ "Silva tredi mondi goo."
+
+I saw, soon after this, that the Counsellor was watching his chance to
+"stir up the young Doctor."
+
+It does not follow, because our young Doctor's bald spot is slower in
+coming than he could have wished, that he has not had time to form many
+sound conclusions in the calling to which he has devoted himself
+Vesalius, the father of modern descriptive anatomy, published his great
+work on that subject before he was thirty. Bichat, the great anatomist
+and physiologist, who died near the beginning of this century, published
+his treatise, which made a revolution in anatomy and pathology, at about
+the same age; dying soon after he had reached the age of thirty. So,
+possibly the Counsellor may find that he has "stirred up" a young man
+who, can take care of his own head, in case of aggressive movements in
+its direction.
+
+"Well, Doctor," the Counsellor began, "how are stocks in the measles
+market about these times? Any corner in bronchitis? Any syndicate in
+the vaccination business?" All this playfully.
+
+"I can't say how it is with other people's patients; most of my families
+are doing very well without my help, at this time."
+
+"Do tell me, Doctor, how many families you own. I have heard it said
+that some of our fellow-citizens have two distinct families, but you
+speak as if you had a dozen."
+
+"I have, but not so large a number as I should like. I could take care
+of fifteen or twenty more without: having to work too hard."
+
+"Why, Doctor, you are as bad as a Mormon. What do you mean by calling
+certain families yours?"
+
+"Don't you speak about my client? Don't your clients call you their
+lawyer? Does n't your baker, does n't your butcher, speak of the
+families he supplies as his families?"
+
+To be sure, yes, of course they do; but I had a notion that a man had as
+many doctors as he had organs to be doctored."
+
+"Well, there is some truth in that; but did you think the old-fashioned
+family doctor was extinct, a fossil like the megatherium?"
+
+"Why, yes, after the recent experience of a friend of mine, I did begin
+to think that there would soon be no such personage left as that same
+old-fashioned family doctor. Shall I tell you what that experience was?"
+
+The young Doctor said he should be mightily pleased to hear it. He was
+going to be one of those old-fogy practitioners himself.
+
+"I don't know," the Counsellor said, "whether my friend got all the
+professional terms of his story correctly, nor whether I have got them
+from him without making any mistakes; but if I do make blunders in some
+of the queer names, you can correct me. This is my friend's story:
+
+"My family doctor," he said, "was a very sensible man, educated at a
+school where they professed to teach all the specialties, but not
+confining himself to any one branch of medical practice. Surgical
+practice he did not profess to meddle with, and there were some classes
+of patients whom he was willing to leave to the female physician. But
+throughout the range of diseases not requiring exceptionally skilled
+manual interference, his education had authorized him to consider
+himself, and he did consider himself, qualified to undertake the
+treatment of all ordinary cases--It so happened that my young wife was
+one of those uneasy persons who are never long contented with their
+habitual comforts and blessings, but always trying to find something a
+little better, something newer, at any rate. I was getting to be near
+fifty years old, and it happened to me, as it not rarely does to people
+at about that time of life, that my hair began to fall out. I spoke of
+it to my doctor, who smiled, said it was a part of the process of
+reversed evolution, but might be retarded a little, and gave me a
+prescription. I did not find any great effect from it, and my wife would
+have me go to a noted dermatologist. The distinguished specialist
+examined my denuded scalp with great care. He looked at it through a
+strong magnifier. He examined the bulb of a fallen hair in a powerful
+microscope. He deliberated for a while, and then said, "This is a case
+of alopecia. It may perhaps be partially remedied. I will give you a
+prescription." Which he did, and told me to call again in a fortnight.
+At the end of three months I had called six times, and each time got a
+new recipe, and detected no difference in the course of my "alopecia."
+After I had got through my treatment, I showed my recipes to my family
+physician; and we found that three of them were the same he had used,
+familiar, old-fashioned remedies, and the others were taken from a list
+of new and little-tried prescriptions mentioned in one of the last
+medical journals, which was lying on the old doctor's table. I might as
+well have got no better under his charge, and should have got off much
+cheaper.
+
+"The next trouble I had was a little redness of the eyes, for which my
+doctor gave me a wash; but my wife would have it that I must see an
+oculist. So I made four visits to an oculist, and at the last visit the
+redness was nearly gone,--as it ought to have been by that time. The
+specialist called my complaint conjunctivitis, but that did not make it
+feel any better nor get well any quicker. If I had had a cataract or any
+grave disease of the eye, requiring a nice operation on that delicate
+organ, of course I should have properly sought the aid of an expert,
+whose eye, hand, and judgment were trained to that special business; but
+in this case I don't doubt that my family doctor would have done just as
+well as the expert. However, I had to obey orders, and my wife would have
+it that I should entrust my precious person only to the most skilful
+specialist in each department of medical practice.
+
+"In the course of the year I experienced a variety of slight
+indispositions. For these I was auriscoped by an aurist, laryngoscoped
+by a laryngologist, ausculted by a stethoscopist, and so on, until a
+complete inventory of my organs was made out, and I found that if I
+believed all these searching inquirers professed to have detected in my
+unfortunate person, I could repeat with too literal truth the words of
+the General Confession, "And there is no health in us." I never heard so
+many hard names in all my life. I proved to be the subject of a long
+catalogue of diseases, and what maladies I was not manifestly guilty of I
+was at least suspected of harboring. I was handed along all the way from
+alopecia, which used to be called baldness, to zoster, which used to be
+known as shingles. I was the patient of more than a dozen specialists.
+Very pleasant persons, many of them, but what a fuss they made about my
+trifling incommodities! 'Please look at that photograph. See if there is
+a minute elevation under one eye.'
+
+"'On which side?' I asked him, for I could not be sure there was anything
+different on one side from what I saw on the other.
+
+"'Under the left eye. I called it a pimple; the specialist called it
+acne. Now look at this photograph. It was taken after my acne had been
+three months under treatment. It shows a little more distinctly than in
+the first photograph, does n't it?'
+
+"'I think it does,' I answered. 'It does n't seem to me that you gained
+a great deal by leaving your customary adviser for the specialist.'
+
+"'Well,' my friend continued, 'following my wife's urgent counsel, I kept
+on, as I told you, for a whole year with my specialists, going from head
+to foot, and tapering off with a chiropodist. I got a deal of amusement
+out of their contrivances and experiments. Some of them lighted up my
+internal surfaces with electrical or other illuminating apparatus.
+Thermometers, dynamometers, exploring-tubes, little mirrors that went
+half-way down to my stomach, tuning-forks, ophthalmoscopes,
+percussion-hammers, single and double stethoscopes, speculums,
+sphygmometers,--such a battery of detective instruments I had never
+imagined. All useful, I don't doubt; but at the end of the year I began
+to question whether I should n't have done about as well to stick to my
+long tried practitioner. When the bills for "professional services" came
+in, and the new carpet had to be given up, and the old bonnet trimmed
+over again, and the sealskin sack remained a vision, we both agreed, my
+wife and I, that we would try to get along without consulting
+specialists, except in such cases as our family physician considered to
+be beyond his skill.'"
+
+The Counsellor's story of his friend's experiences seemed to please the
+young Doctor very much. It "stirred him up," but in an agreeable way;
+for, as he said, he meant to devote himself to family practice, and not
+to adopt any limited class of cases as a specialty. I liked his views so
+well that I should have been ready to adopt them as my own, if they had
+been challenged.
+
+ The young Doctor discourses.
+
+"I am very glad," he said, "that we have a number of practitioners among
+us who confine themselves to the care of single organs and their
+functions. I want to be able to consult an oculist who has done nothing
+but attend to eyes long enough to know all that is known about their
+diseases and their treatment,--skilful enough to be trusted with the
+manipulation of that delicate and most precious organ. I want an aurist
+who knows all about the ear and what can be done for its disorders. The
+maladies of the larynx are very ticklish things to handle, and nobody
+should be trusted to go behind the epiglottis who has not the tactus
+eruditus. And so of certain other particular classes of complaints. A
+great city must have a limited number of experts, each a final authority,
+to be appealed to in cases where the family physician finds himself in
+doubt. There are operations which no surgeon should be willing to
+undertake unless he has paid a particular, if not an exclusive, attention
+to the cases demanding such operations. All this I willingly grant.
+
+"But it must not be supposed that we can return to the methods of the old
+Egyptians--who, if my memory serves me correctly, had a special physician
+for every part of the body--without falling into certain errors and
+incurring certain liabilities.
+
+"The specialist is much like other people engaged in lucrative business.
+He is apt to magnify his calling, to make much of any symptom which will
+bring a patient within range of his battery of remedies. I found a case
+in one of our medical journals, a couple of years ago, which illustrates
+what I mean. Dr. ___________ of Philadelphia, had a female patient with
+a crooked nose,--deviated septum, if our young scholars like that better.
+She was suffering from what the doctor called reflex headache. She had
+been to an oculist, who found that the trouble was in her eyes. She went
+from him to a gynecologist, who considered her headache as owing to
+causes for which his specialty had the remedies. How many more
+specialists would have appropriated her, if she had gone the rounds of
+them all, I dare not guess; but you remember the old story of the siege,
+in which each artisan proposed means of defence which he himself was
+ready to furnish. Then a shoemaker said, 'Hang your walls with new
+boots.'
+
+"Human nature is the same with medical specialists as it was with ancient
+cordwainers, and it is too possible that a hungry practitioner may be
+warped by his interest in fastening on a patient who, as he persuades
+himself, comes under his medical jurisdiction. The specialist has but one
+fang with which to seize and bold his prey, but that fang is a fearfully
+long and sharp canine. Being confined to a narrow field of observation
+and practice, he is apt to give much of his time to curious study, which
+may be magnifique, but is not exactly la guerre against the patient's
+malady. He divides and subdivides, and gets many varieties of diseases,
+in most respects similar. These he equips with new names, and thus we
+have those terrific nomenclatures which are enough to frighten the
+medical student, to say nothing of the sufferers staggering under this
+long catalogue of local infirmities. The 'old-fogy' doctor, who knows
+the family tendencies of his patient, who 'understands his constitution,'
+will often treat him better than the famous specialist, who sees him for
+the first time, and has to guess at many things 'the old doctor' knows
+from his previous experience with the same patient and the family to
+which he belongs.
+
+"It is a great luxury to practise as a specialist in almost any class of
+diseases. The special practitioner has his own hours, hardly needs a
+night-bell, can have his residence out of the town in which he exercises
+his calling, in short, lives like a gentleman; while the hard-worked
+general practitioner submits to a servitude more exacting than that of
+the man who is employed in his stable or in his kitchen. That is the kind
+of life I have made up my mind to."
+
+The teaspoons tinkled all round the table. This was the usual sign of
+approbation, instead of the clapping of hands.
+
+The young Doctor paused, and looked round among The Teacups. "I beg your
+pardon," he said, "for taking up so much of your time with medicine. It
+is a subject that a good many persons, especially ladies, take an
+interest in and have a curiosity about, but I have no right to turn this
+tea-table into a lecture platform."
+
+"We should like to hear you talk longer about it," said the English
+Annex. "One of us has thought of devoting herself to the practice of
+medicine. Would you lecture to us; if you were a professor in one of the
+great medical schools?"
+
+"Lecture to students of your sex? Why not, I should like to know? I
+don't think it is the calling for which the average woman is especially
+adapted, but my teacher got a part of his medical education from a lady,
+Madame Lachapelle; and I don't see why, if one can learn from a woman, he
+may not teach a woman, if he knows enough."
+
+"We all like a little medical talk now and then," said Number Five, "and
+we are much obliged to you for your discourse. You are specialist enough
+to take care of a sprained ankle, I suppose, are you not?"
+
+"I hope I should be equal to that emergency," answered the young Doctor;
+"but I trust you are not suffering from any such accident?"
+
+"No," said Number Five, "but there is no telling what may happen. I
+might slip, and get a sprain or break a sinew, or something, and I should
+like to know that there is a practitioner at hand to take care of my
+injury. I think I would risk myself in your bands, although you are not
+a specialist. Would you venture to take charge of the case?"
+
+"Ah, my dear lady," he answered gallantly, "the risk would be in the
+other direction. I am afraid it would be safer for your doctor if he
+were an older man than I am."
+
+This is the first clearly, indisputably sentimental outbreak which has
+happened in conversation at our table. I tremble to think what will come
+of it; for we have several inflammable elements in our circle, and a
+spark like this is liable to light on any one or two of them.
+
+I was not sorry that this medical episode came in to vary the usual
+course of talk at our table. I like to have one--of an intelligent
+company, who knows anything thoroughly, hold the floor for a time, and
+discourse upon the subject which chiefly engages his daily thoughts and
+furnishes his habitual occupation. It is a privilege to meet such a
+person now and then, and let him have his full swing. But because there
+are "professionals" to whom we are willing to listen as oracles, I do not
+want to see everybody who is not a "professional" silenced or snubbed, if
+he ventures into any field of knowledge which he has not made especially
+his own. I like to read Montaigne's remarks about doctors, though he
+never took a medical degree. I can even enjoy the truth in the sharp
+satire of Voltaire on the medical profession. I frequently prefer the
+remarks I hear from the pew after the sermon to those I have just been
+hearing from the pulpit. There are a great many things which I never
+expect to comprehend, but which I desire very much to apprehend. Suppose
+that our circle of Teacups were made up of specialists,--experts in
+various departments. I should be very willing that each one should have
+his innings at the proper time, when the company were ready for him. But
+the time is coming when everybody will know something about every thing.
+How can one have the illustrated magazines, the "Popular Science
+Monthly," the Psychological journals, the theological periodicals, books
+on all subjects, forced on his attention, in their own persons, so to
+speak, or in the reviews which analyze and pass judgment upon them,
+without getting some ideas which belong to many provinces of human
+intelligence? The air we breathe is made up of four elements, at least:
+oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid gas, and knowledge. There is something
+quite delightful to witness in the absorption and devotion of a genuine
+specialist. There is a certain sublimity in that picture of the dying
+scholar in Browning's "A Grammarian's Funeral:"--
+
+ "So with the throttling hands of death at strife,
+ Ground he at grammar;
+ Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife;
+ While he could stammer
+ He settled Hoti's business--let it be--
+ Properly based Oun
+ Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
+ Dead from the waist down."
+
+A genuine enthusiasm, which will never be satisfied until it has pumped
+the well dry at the bottom of which truth is lying, always excites our
+interest, if not our admiration.
+
+One of the pleasantest of our American writers, whom we all remember as
+Ik Marvel, and greet in his more recent appearance as Donald Grant
+Mitchell, speaks of the awkwardness which he feels in offering to the
+public a "panoramic view of British writers in these days of
+specialists,--when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis of the
+works of a single author, and to the proper study of a single period."
+
+He need not have feared that his connected sketches of "English Lands,
+Letters and Kings" would be any less welcome because they do not pretend
+to fill up all the details or cover all the incidents they hint in vivid
+outline. How many of us ever read or ever will read Drayton's
+"Poly-Olbion?" Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are filled with
+admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions, and historical
+events, but how many of us in these days have time to read and inwardly
+digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses? I fear that the specialist is
+apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer too cheap. So far as I have
+observed in medical specialties, what he knows in addition to the
+knowledge of the well-taught general practitioner is very largely curious
+rather than important. Having exhausted all that is practical, the
+specialist is naturally tempted to amuse himself with the natural history
+of the organ or function he deals with; to feel as a writing-master does
+when he sets a copy,--not content to shape the letters properly, but he
+must add flourishes and fancy figures, to let off his spare energy.
+
+I am beginning to be frightened. When I began these papers, my idea was
+a very simple and innocent one. Here was a mixed company, of various
+conditions, as I have already told my readers, who came together
+regularly, and before they were aware of it formed something like a club
+or association. As I was the patriarch among them, they gave me the name
+some of you may need to be reminded of; for as these reports are
+published at intervals, you may not remember the fact that I am what The
+Teacups have seen fit to call The Dictator.
+
+Now, what did I expect when I began these papers, and what is it that has
+begun to frighten me?
+
+I expected to report grave conversations and light colloquial passages of
+arms among the members of the circle. I expected to hear, perhaps to
+read, a paper now and then. I expected to have, from time to time, a
+poem from some one of The Teacups, for I felt sure there must be among
+them one or more poets,--Teacups of the finer and rarer translucent kind
+of porcelain, to speak metaphorically.
+
+Out of these conversations and written contributions I thought I might
+make up a readable series of papers; a not wholly unwelcome string of
+recollections, anticipations, suggestions, too often perhaps repetitions,
+that would be to the twilight what my earlier series had been to the
+morning.
+
+I hoped also that I should come into personal relations with my old
+constituency, if I may call my nearer friends, and those more distant
+ones who belong to my reading parish, by that name. It is time that I
+should. I received this blessed morning--I am telling the literal
+truth--a highly flattering obituary of myself in the shape of an extract
+from "Le National" of the 10th of February last. This is a bi-weekly
+newspaper, published in French, in the city of Plattsburg, Clinton
+County, New York. I am occasionally reminded by my unknown friends that
+I must hurry up their autograph, or make haste to copy that poem they
+wish to have in the author's own handwriting, or it will be too late; but
+I have never before been huddled out of the world in this way. I take
+this rather premature obituary as a hint that, unless I come to some
+arrangement with my well-meaning but insatiable correspondents, it would
+be as well to leave it in type, for I cannot bear much longer the load
+they lay upon me. I will explain myself on this point after I have told
+my readers what has frightened me.
+
+I am beginning to think this room where we take our tea is more like a
+tinder-box than a quiet and safe place for "a party in a parlor." It is
+true that there are at least two or three incombustibles at our table,
+but it looks to me as if the company might pair off before the season is
+over, like the crew of Her Majesty's ship the Mantelpiece,--three or four
+weddings clear our whole table of all but one or two of the impregnables.
+The poem we found in the sugar-bowl last week first opened my eyes to the
+probable state of things. Now, the idea of having to tell a
+love-story,--perhaps two or three love-stories,--when I set out with the
+intention of repeating instructive, useful, or entertaining discussions,
+naturally alarms me. It is quite true that many things which look to me
+suspicious may be simply playful. Young people (and we have several such
+among The Teacups) are fond of make-believe courting when they cannot
+have the real thing,--"flirting," as it used to be practised in the days
+of Arcadian innocence, not the more modern and more questionable
+recreation which has reached us from the home of the cicisbeo. Whatever
+comes of it, I shall tell what I see, and take the consequences.
+
+But I am at this moment going to talk in my own proper person to my own
+particular public, which, as I find by my correspondence, is a very
+considerable one, and with which I consider myself in exceptionally
+pleasant relations.
+
+I have read recently that Mr. Gladstone receives six hundred letters a
+day. Perhaps he does not receive six hundred letters every day, but if
+he gets anything like half that number daily, what can he do with them?
+There was a time when he was said to answer all his correspondents. It
+is understood, I think, that he has given up doing so in these later
+days.
+
+I do not pretend that I receive six hundred or even sixty letters a day,
+but I do receive a good many, and have told the public of the fact from
+time to time, under the pressure of their constantly increasing
+exertions. As it is extremely onerous, and is soon going to be
+impossible, for me to keep up the wide range of correspondence which has
+become a large part of my occupation, and tends to absorb all the vital
+force which is left me, I wish to enter into a final explanation with the
+well-meaning but merciless taskmasters who have now for many years been
+levying their daily tax upon me. I have preserved thousands of their
+letters, and destroyed a very large number, after answering most of them.
+A few interesting chapters might be made out of the letters I have
+kept,--not only such as are signed by the names of well-known personages,
+but many from unknown friends, of whom I had never heard before and have
+never heard since. A great deal of the best writing the languages of the
+world have ever known has been committed to leaves that withered out of
+sight before a second sunlight had fallen upon them. I have had many
+letters I should have liked to give the public, had their nature admitted
+of their being offered to the world. What straggles of young ambition,
+finding no place for its energies, or feeling its incapacity to reach the
+ideal towards which it was striving! What longings of disappointed,
+defeated fellow-mortals, trying to find a new home for themselves in the
+heart of one whom they have amiably idealized! And oh, what hopeless
+efforts of mediocrities and inferiorities, believing in themselves as
+superiorities, and stumbling on through limping disappointments to
+prostrate failure! Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most
+part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.
+The unreadable author particularly requests us to make a critical
+examination of his book, and report to him whatever may be our
+verdict,--as if he wanted anything but our praise, and that very often to
+be used in his publisher's advertisements.
+
+But what does not one have to submit to who has become the martyr--the
+Saint Sebastian--of a literary correspondence! I will not dwell on the
+possible impression produced on a sensitive nature by reading one's own
+premature obituary, as I have told you has been my recent experience. I
+will not stop to think whether the urgent request for an autograph by
+return post, in view of the possible contingencies which might render it
+the last one was ever to write, is pleasing or not. At threescore and
+twenty one must expect such hints of what is like to happen before long.
+I suppose, if some near friend were to watch one who was looking over
+such a pressing letter, he might possibly see a slight shadow flit over
+the reader's features, and some such dialogue might follow as that
+between Othello and Iago, after "this honest creature" has been giving
+breath to his suspicions about Desdemona:
+
+ "I see this hath a little dash'd your spirits.
+ Not a jot, not a jot.
+ .............
+ "My lord, I see you're moved."
+
+And a little later the reader might, like Othello, complain,
+
+ "I have a pain upon my forehead here."
+
+Nothing more likely. But, for myself, I have grown callous to all such
+allusions. The repetition of the Scriptural phrase for the natural term
+of life is so frequent that it wears out one's sensibilities.
+
+But how many charming and refreshing letters I have received! How often
+I have felt their encouragement in moments of doubt and depression, such
+as the happiest temperaments must sometimes experience!
+
+If the time comes when to answer all my kind unknown friends, even by
+dictation, is impossible, or more than I feel equal to, I wish to refer
+any of those who may feel disappointed at not receiving an answer to the
+following general acknowledgments:
+
+I. I am always grateful for any attention which shows me that I am
+kindly remembered.--II. Your pleasant message has been read to me, and
+has been thankfully listened to.--III. Your book (your essay) (your
+poem) has reached me safely, and has received all the respectful
+attention to which it seemed entitled. It would take more than all the
+time I have at my disposal to read all the printed matter and all the
+manuscripts which are sent to me, and you would not ask me to attempt the
+impossible. You will not, therefore, expect me to express a critical
+opinion of your work.--IV. I am deeply sensible to your expressions of
+personal attachment to me as the author of certain writings which have
+brought me very near to you, in virtue of some affinity in our ways of
+thought and moods of feeling. Although I cannot keep up correspondences
+with many of my readers who seem to be thoroughly congenial with myself,
+let them be assured that their letters have been read or heard with
+peculiar gratification, and are preserved as precious treasures.
+
+I trust that after this notice no correspondent will be surprised to find
+his or her letter thus answered by anticipation; and that if one of the
+above formulae is the only answer he receives, the unknown friend will
+remember that he or she is one of a great many whose incessant demands
+have entirely outrun my power of answering them as fully as the
+applicants might wish and perhaps expect.
+
+I could make a very interesting volume of the letters I have received
+from correspondents unknown to the world of authorship, but writing from
+an instinctive impulse, which many of them say they have long felt and
+resisted. One must not allow himself to be flattered into an
+overestimate of his powers because he gets many letters expressing a
+peculiar attraction towards his books, and a preference of them to those
+with which he would not have dared to compare his own. Still, if the
+homo unius libri--the man of one book--choose to select one of our own
+writing as his favorite volume, it means something,--not much, perhaps;
+but if one has unlocked the door to the secret entrance of one heart, it
+is not unlikely that his key may fit the locks of others. What if nature
+has lent him a master key? He has found the wards and slid back the bolt
+of one lock; perhaps he may have learned the secret of others. One
+success is an encouragement to try again. Let the writer of a truly
+loving letter, such as greets one from time to time, remember that,
+though he never hears a word from it, it may prove one of the best
+rewards of an anxious and laborious past, and the stimulus of a still
+aspiring future.
+
+Among the letters I have recently received, none is more interesting than
+the following. The story of Helen Keller, who wrote it, is told in the
+well-known illustrated magazine called "The Wide Awake," in the number
+for July, 1888. For the account of this little girl, now between nine
+and ten years old, and other letters of her writing, I must refer to the
+article I have mentioned. It is enough to say that she is deaf and dumb
+and totally blind. She was seven years old when her teacher, Miss
+Sullivan, under the direction of Mr. Anagnos, at the Blind Asylum at
+South Boston, began her education. A child fuller of life and happiness
+it would be hard to find. It seems as if her soul was flooded with light
+and filled with music that had found entrance to it through avenues
+closed to other mortals. It is hard to understand how she has learned to
+deal with abstract ideas, and so far to supplement the blanks left by the
+senses of sight and hearing that one would hardly think of her as wanting
+in any human faculty. Remember Milton's pathetic picture of himself,
+suffering from only one of poor little Helen's deprivations:
+
+ "Not to me returns
+ Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
+ Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
+ Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
+ But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
+ Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
+ Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
+ Presented with a universal blank
+ Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
+ And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out."
+
+Surely for this loving and lovely child does
+
+ "the celestial Light
+ Shine inward."
+
+Anthropologist, metaphysician, most of all theologian, here is a lesson
+which can teach you much that you will not find in your primers and
+catechisms. Why should I call her "poor little Helen"? Where can you
+find a happier child?
+
+SOUTH BOSTON, MASS., March 1, 1890.
+
+DEAR KIND POET,--I have thought of you many times since that bright
+Sunday when I bade you goodbye, and I am going to write you a letter
+because I love you. I am sorry that you have no little children to play
+with sometimes, but I think you are very happy with your books, and your
+many, many friends. On Washington's Birthday a great many people came
+here to see the little blind children, and I read for them from your
+poems, and showed them some beautiful shells which came from a little
+island near Palos. I am reading a very sad story called "Little Jakey."
+Jakey was the sweetest little fellow you can imagine, but he was poor and
+blind. I used to think, when I was small and before I could read, that
+everybody was always happy, and at first it made me very sad to know
+about pain and great sorrow; but now I know that we could never learn to
+be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world. I am studying
+about insects in Zoology, and I have learned many things about
+butterflies. They do not make honey for us, like the bees, but many of
+them are as beautiful as the flowers they light upon, and they always
+delight the hearts of little children. They live a gay life, flitting
+from flower to flower, sipping the drops of honey-dew, without a thought
+for the morrow. They are just like little boys and girls when they
+forget books and studies, and run away to the woods and the fields to
+gather wild-flowers, or wade in the ponds for fragrant lilies, happy in
+the bright sunshine. If my little sister comes to Boston next June, will
+you let me bring her to see you? She is a lovely baby and I am sure you
+will love [her]. Now I must tell my gentle poet good-bye, for I have a
+letter to write home before I go to bed. From your loving little friend,
+HELEN A. KELLER.
+
+The reading of this letter made many eyes glisten, and a dead silence
+hushed the whole circle. All at once Delilah, our pretty table-maid,
+forgot her place,--what business had she to be listening to our
+conversation and reading?--and began sobbing, just as if she had been a
+lady. She could n't help it, she explained afterwards,--she had a little
+blind sister at the asylum, who had told her about Helen's reading to the
+children.
+
+It was very awkward, this breaking-down of our pretty Delilah, for one
+girl crying will sometimes set off a whole row of others,--it is as
+hazardous as lighting one cracker in a bunch. The two Annexes hurried
+out their pocket-handkerchiefs, and I almost expected a semi-hysteric
+cataclysm. At this critical moment Number Five called Delilah to her,
+looked into her face with those calm eyes of hers, and spoke a few soft
+words. Was Number Five forgetful, too? Did she not remember the
+difference of their position? I suppose so. But she quieted the poor
+handmaiden as simply and easily as a nursing mother quiets her unweaned
+baby. Why are we not all in love with Number Five? Perhaps we are. At
+any rate, I suspect the Professor. When we all get quiet, I will touch
+him up about that visit she promised to make to his laboratory.
+
+I got a chance at last to speak privately with him.
+
+"Did Number Five go to meet you in your laboratory, as she talked of
+doing?"
+
+"Oh, yes, of course she did,--why, she said she would!"
+
+"Oh, to be sure. Do tell me what she wanted in your laboratory."
+
+"She wanted me to burn a diamond for her."
+
+"Burn a diamond! What was that for? Because Cleopatra swallowed a
+pearl?"
+
+"No, nothing of that kind. It was a small stone, and had a flaw in it.
+Number Five said she did n't want a diamond with a flaw in it, and that
+she did want to see how a diamond would burn."
+
+"Was that all that happened?"
+
+"That was all. She brought the two Annexes with her, and I gave my three
+visitors a lecture on carbon, which they seemed to enjoy very much."
+
+I looked steadily in the Professor's face during the reading of the
+following poem. I saw no questionable look upon it,--but he has a
+remarkable command of his features. Number Five read it with a certain
+archness of expression, as if she saw all its meaning, which I think some
+of the company did not quite take in. They said they must read it slowly
+and carefully. Somehow, "I like you" and "I love you" got a little
+mixed, as they heard it. It was not Number Five's fault, for she read it
+beautifully, as we all agreed, and as I knew she would when I handed it
+to her.
+
+ I LIKE YOU AND I LOVE YOU.
+
+ I LIKE YOU met I LOVE YOU, face to face;
+ The path was narrow, and they could not pass.
+ I LIKE YOU smiled; I LOVE YOU cried, Alas!
+ And so they halted for a little space.
+
+ "Turn thou and go before," I LOVE YOU said,
+ "Down the green pathway, bright with many a flower
+ Deep in the valley, lo! my bridal bower
+ Awaits thee." But I LIKE YOU shook his head.
+
+ Then while they lingered on the span-wide shelf
+ That shaped a pathway round the rocky ledge,
+ I LIKE YOU bared his icy dagger's edge,
+ And first he slew I LOVE YOU,--then himself.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There is no use in burdening my table with those letters of inquiry as to
+where our meetings are held, and what are the names of the persons
+designated by numbers, or spoken of under the titles of the Professor,
+the Tutor, and so forth. It is enough that you are aware who I am, and
+that I am known at the tea-table as The Dictator. Theatrical "asides" are
+apt to be whispered in a pretty loud voice, and the persons who ought not
+to have any idea of what is said are expected to be reasonably hard of
+bearing. If I named all The Teacups, some of them might be offended. If
+any of my readers happen to be able to identify any one Teacup by some
+accidental circumstance,--say, for instance, Number Five, by the incident
+of her burning the diamond,--I hope they will keep quiet about it.
+Number Five does n't want to be pointed out in the street as the
+extravagant person who makes use of such expensive fuel, for the story
+would soon grow to a statement that she always uses diamonds, instead of
+cheaper forms of carbon, to heat her coffee with. So with other members
+of the circle. The "Cracked Teacup," Number Seven, would not, perhaps,
+be pleased to recognize himself under that title. I repeat it,
+therefore, Do not try to identify the individual Teacups. You will not
+get them right; or, if you do, you may too probably make trouble. How is
+it possible that I can keep up my freedom of intercourse with you all if
+you insist on bellowing my "asides" through a speaking-trumpet? Besides,
+you cannot have failed to see that there are strong symptoms of the
+springing up of delicate relations between some of our number. I told
+you how it would be. It did not require a prophet to foresee that the
+saucy intruder who, as Mr. Willis wrote, and the dear dead girls used to
+sing, in our young days,
+
+ "Taketh every form of air,
+ And every shape of earth,
+ And comes unbidden everywhere,
+ Like thought's mysterious birth,"
+
+would pop his little curly head up between one or more pairs of Teacups.
+If you will stop these questions, then, I will go on with my reports of
+what was said and done at our meetings over the teacups.
+
+Of all things beautiful in this fair world, there is nothing so
+enchanting to look upon, to dream about, as the first opening of the
+flower of young love. How closely the calyx has hidden the glowing
+leaves in its quiet green mantle! Side by side, two buds have been
+tossing jauntily in the breeze, often brought very near to each other,
+sometimes touching for a moment, with a secret thrill in their
+close-folded heart-leaves, it may be, but still the cool green sepals
+shutting tight over the burning secret within. All at once a morning ray
+touches one of the two buds, and the point of a blushing petal betrays
+the imprisoned and swelling blossom.
+
+--Oh, no, I did not promise a love-story. There may be a little
+sentiment now and then, but these papers are devoted chiefly to the
+opinions, prejudices, fancies, whims, of myself, The Dictator, and others
+of The Teacups who have talked or written for the general benefit of the
+company.
+
+Here are some of the remarks I made the other evening on the subject of
+Intellectual Over-Feeding and its consequence, Mental Dyspepsia. There is
+something positively appalling in the amount of printed matter yearly,
+monthly, weekly, daily, secreted by that great gland of the civilized
+organism, the press. I need not dilate upon this point, for it is
+brought home to every one of you who ever looks into a bookstore or a
+public library. So large is the variety of literary products continually
+coming forward, forced upon the attention of the reader by stimulating
+and suggestive titles, commended to his notice by famous names, recasting
+old subjects and developing and illustrating new ones, that the mind is
+liable to be urged into a kind of unnatural hunger, leading to a
+repletion which is often followed by disgust and disturbed nervous
+conditions as its natural consequence.
+
+It has long been a favorite rule with me, a rule which I have never lost
+sight of, however imperfectly I have carried it out: Try to know enough
+of a wide range of subjects to profit by the conversation of intelligent
+persons of different callings and various intellectual gifts and
+acquisitions. The cynic will paraphrase this into a shorter formula: Get
+a smattering in every sort of knowledge. I must therefore add a second
+piece of advice: Learn to hold as of small account the comments of the
+cynic. He is often amusing, sometimes really witty, occasionally,
+without meaning it, instructive; but his talk is to profitable
+conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is
+to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied out
+of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with
+all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will "cavil on the ninth
+part of a hair," if it will give him a chance to show off his idle
+erudition.
+
+I saw attributed to me, the other day, the saying, "Know something about
+everything, and everything about something." I am afraid it does not
+belong to me, but I will treat it as I used to treat a stray boat which
+came through my meadow, floating down the Housatonic,--get hold of it and
+draw it ashore, and hold on to it until the owner turns up. If this
+precept is used discreetly, it is very serviceable; but it is as well to
+recognize the fact that you cannot know something about everything in
+days like these of intellectual activity, of literary and scientific
+production. We all feel this. It makes us nervous to see the shelves of
+new books, many of which we feel as if we ought to read, and some among
+them to study. We must adopt some principle of selection among the books
+outside of any particular branch which we may have selected for study. I
+have often been asked what books I would recommend for a course of
+reading. I have always answered that I had a great deal rather take
+advice than give it. Fortunately, a number of scholars have furnished
+lists of books to which the inquirer may be directed. But the worst of
+it is that each student is in need of a little library specially adapted
+to his wants. Here is a young man writing to me from a Western college,
+and wants me to send him a list of the books which I think would be most
+useful to him. He does not send me his intellectual measurements, and he
+might as well have sent to a Boston tailor for a coat, without any hint
+of his dimensions in length, breadth, and thickness.
+
+But instead of laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of the
+books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much humbler
+task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young or old,
+suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness,
+book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or
+indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or
+Latin names if I thought it worth while.
+
+I have a picture hanging in my library, a lithograph, of which many of my
+readers may have seen copies. It represents a gray-haired old book-lover
+at the top of a long flight of steps. He finds himself in clover, so to
+speak, among rare old editions, books he has longed to look upon and
+never seen before, rarities, precious old volumes, incunabula,
+cradle-books, printed while the art was in its infancy,--its glorious
+infancy, for it was born a giant. The old bookworm is so intoxicated
+with the sight and handling of the priceless treasures that he cannot
+bear to put one of the volumes back after he has taken it from the shelf.
+So there he stands,--one book open in his hands, a volume under each arm,
+and one or more between his legs,--loaded with as many as he can possibly
+hold at the same time.
+
+Now, that is just the way in which the extreme form of book-hunger shows
+itself in the reader whose appetite has become over-developed. He wants
+to read so many books that he over-crams himself with the crude materials
+of knowledge, which become knowledge only when the mental digestion has
+time to assimilate them. I never can go into that famous "Corner
+Bookstore" and look over the new books in the row before me, as I enter
+the door, without seeing half a dozen which I want to read, or at least
+to know something about. I cannot empty my purse of its contents, and
+crowd my bookshelves with all those volumes. The titles of many of them
+interest me. I look into one or two, perhaps. I have sometimes picked
+up a line or a sentence, in these momentary glances between the uncut
+leaves of a new book, which I have never forgotten. As a trivial but
+bona fide example, one day I opened a book on duelling. I remember only
+these words: "Conservons-la, cette noble institution." I had never
+before seen duelling called a noble institution, and I wish I had taken
+the name of the book. Book-tasting is not necessarily profitless, but it
+is very stimulating, and makes one hungry for more than he needs for the
+nourishment of his thinking-marrow. To feed this insatiable hunger, the
+abstracts, the reviews, do their best. But these, again, have grown so
+numerous and so crowded with matter that it is hard to find time to
+master their contents. We are accustomed, therefore, to look for
+analyses of these periodicals, and at last we have placed before us a
+formidable-looking monthly, "The Review of Reviews." After the analyses
+comes the newspaper notice; and there is still room for the epigram,
+which sometimes makes short work with all that has gone before on the
+same subject.
+
+It is just as well to recognize the fact that if one should read day and
+night, confining himself to his own language, he could not pretend to
+keep up with the press. He might as well try to race with a locomotive.
+The first discipline, therefore, is that of despair. If you could stick
+to your reading day and night for fifty years, what a learned idiot you
+would become long before the half-century was over! Well, then, there is
+no use in gorging one's self with knowledge, and no need of self-reproach
+because one is content to remain more or less ignorant of many things
+which interest his fellow-creatures. We gain a good deal of knowledge
+through the atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental hearsay,
+provided we have the mordant in our own consciousness which makes the
+wise remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident, take hold
+upon it. After the stage of despair comes the period of consolation. We
+soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of our neighbors as
+we supposed. The fractional value of the wisest shows a small numerator
+divided by an infinite denominator of knowledge.
+
+I made some explanations to The Teacups, the other evening, which they
+received very intelligently and graciously, as I have no doubt the
+readers of these reports of mine will receive them. If the reader will
+turn back to the end of the fourth number of these papers, he will find
+certain lines entitled, "Cacoethes Scribendi." They were said to have
+been taken from the usual receptacle of the verses which are contributed
+by The Teacups, and, though the fact was not mentioned, were of my own
+composition. I found them in manuscript in my drawer, and as my subject
+had naturally suggested the train of thought they carried out into
+extravagance, I printed them. At the same time they sounded very
+natural, as we say, and I felt as if I had published them somewhere or
+other before; but I could find no evidence of it, and so I ventured to
+have them put in type.
+
+And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph. I have
+often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than common, that
+it was not new, and perhaps was not my own. I have very rarely, however,
+found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as would be enough to
+justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,--conscious plagiarism is
+not my particular failing. I therefore say my say, set down my thought,
+print my line, and do not heed the suspicion that I may not be as
+original as I supposed, in the passage I have been writing. My
+experience may be worth something to a modest young writer, and so I have
+interrupted what I was about to say by intercalating this paragraph.
+
+In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault. I had
+printed those same lines, years ago, in "The Contributors' Club," to
+which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse. Nobody but the editor
+has noticed the fact, so far as I know. This is consoling, or
+mortifying, I hardly know which. I suppose one has a right to plagiarize
+from himself, but he does not want to present his work as fresh from the
+workshop when it has been long standing in his neighbor's shop-window.
+
+But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry Howard
+Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in which he
+quotes a passage from an old book, "A Heroine, Adventures of Cherubina,"
+which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had ever seen it. I
+have not the slightest recollection of the book or the passage. I think
+its liveliness and "local color" will make it please the reader, as it
+pleases me, more than my own more prosaic extravagances:
+
+ LINES TO A PRETTY LITTLE MAID OF MAMMA'S.
+
+ "If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran
+ One tide of ink to Ispahan,
+ If all the geese in Lincoln fens
+ Produced spontaneous well-made pens,
+ If Holland old and Holland new
+ One wondrous sheet of paper grew,
+ And could I sing but half the grace
+ Of half a freckle in thy face,
+ Each syllable I wrote would reach
+ From Inverness to Bognor's beach,
+ Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine,
+ Each verse an equinoctial line!"
+
+"The immediate dismissal of the 'little maid' was the consequence."
+
+I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the last
+sentence was read.
+
+Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless. I have laid
+myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence, which has
+been passed over without invidious comment by the readers of my papers.
+How could I, for instance, have written in my original "copy" for the
+printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a giant's tail instead
+of a dragon's? It is the automatic fellow,--Me--Number-Two of our dual
+personality,--who does these things, who forgets the message
+Me--Number--One sends down to him from the cerebral convolutions, and
+substitutes a wrong word for the right one. I suppose Me--Number--Two
+will "sass back," and swear that "giant's" was the message which came
+down from headquarters. He is always doing the wrong thing and excusing
+himself. Who blows out the gas instead of shutting it off? Who puts the
+key in the desk and fastens it tight with the spring lock? Do you mean
+to say that the upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the
+convolutions of the brain, does not know better? Of course he does, and
+Me-Number-Two is a careless servant, who remembers some old direction,
+and follows that instead of the one just given.
+
+Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in so
+doing. He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just what he
+is told to do. Number Five is disposed to agree with him. We will talk
+over the question.
+
+But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a dragon?
+Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological catalogue.
+The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage; that is, the
+vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a young quadruped.
+During the late session of the Medical Congress at Washington, my friend
+Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London physician, of the highest character
+and standing, showed me the photograph of a small boy, some three or four
+years old, who had a very respectable little tail, which would have
+passed muster on a pig, and would have made a frog or a toad ashamed of
+himself. I have never heard what became of the little boy, nor have I
+looked in the books or journals to find out if there are similar cases on
+record, but I have no doubt that there are others. And if boys may have
+this additional ornament to their vertebral columns, why not men? And if
+men, why not giants? So I may not have made a very bad blunder, after
+all, and my reader has learned something about the homo caudatus as
+spoken of by Linnxus, and as shown me in photograph by Dr. Priestley.
+This child is a candidate for the vacant place of Missing Link.
+
+In accounting for the blunders, and even gross blunders, which, sooner or
+later, one who writes much is pretty sure to commit, I must not forget
+the part played by the blind spot or idiotic area in the brain, which I
+have already described.
+
+The most knowing persons we meet with are sometimes at fault. Nova
+onania possumus omnes is not a new nor profound axiom, but it is well to
+remember it as a counterpoise to that other truly American saying of the
+late Mr. Samuel Patch, "Some things can be done as well as others." Yes,
+some things, but not all things. We all know men and women who hate to
+admit their ignorance of anything. Like Talkative in "Pilgrim's
+Progress," they are ready to converse of "things heavenly or things
+earthly; things moral or things evangelical; things sacred or things
+profane; things past or things to come; things foreign or things at home;
+things more essential or things circumstantial."
+
+Talkative is apt to be a shallow fellow, and to say foolish things about
+matters he only half understands, and yet he has his place in society.
+The specialists would grow to be intolerable, were they not counterpoised
+to some degree by the people of general intelligence. The man who knows
+too much about one particular subject is liable to become a terrible
+social infliction. Some of the worst bores (to use plain language) we
+ever meet with are recognized as experts of high grade in their
+respective departments. Beware of making so much as a pinhole in the dam
+that holds back their knowledge. They ride their hobbies without bit or
+bridle. A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be
+dreaded than a mounted specialist.
+
+One of the best offices which women perform for men is that of tasting
+books for them. They may or may not be profound students,--some of them
+are; but we do not expect to meet women like Mrs. Somerville, or Caroline
+Herschel, or Maria Mitchell at every dinner-table or afternoon tea. But
+give your elect lady a pile of books to look over for you, and she will
+tell you what they have for her and for you in less time than you would
+have wasted in stupefying yourself over a single volume.
+
+One of the encouraging signs of the times is the condensed and
+abbreviated form in which knowledge is presented to the general reader.
+The short biographies of historic personages, of which within the past
+few years many have been published, have been a great relief to the large
+class of readers who want to know something, but not too much, about
+them.
+
+What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling
+that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only
+long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred? Many readers remember
+what old Rogers, the poet, said:
+
+"When I hear a new book talked about or have it pressed upon me, I read
+an old one."
+
+Happy the man who finds his rest in the pages of some favorite classic!
+I know no reader more to be envied than that friend of mine who for many
+years has given his days and nights to the loving study of Horace. After
+a certain period in life, it is always with an effort that we admit a new
+author into the inner circle of our intimates. The Parisian omnibuses,
+as I remember them half a century ago,--they may still keep to the same
+habit, for aught that I know,--used to put up the sign "Complet" as soon
+as they were full. Our public conveyances are never full until the
+natural atmospheric pressure of sixteen pounds to the square inch is
+doubled, in the close packing of the human sardines that fill the
+all-accommodating vehicles. A new-comer, however well mannered and well
+dressed, is not very welcome under these circumstances. In the same way,
+our tables are full of books half-read and books we feel that we must
+read. And here come in two thick volumes, with uncut leaves, in small
+type, with many pages, and many lines to a page,--a book that must be
+read and ought to be read at once. What a relief to hand it over to the
+lovely keeper of your literary conscience, who will tell you all that you
+will most care to know about it, and leave you free to plunge into your
+beloved volume, in which you are ever finding new beauties, and from
+which you rise refreshed, as if you had just come from the cool waters of
+Hippocrene! The stream of modern literature represented by the books and
+periodicals on the crowded counters is a turbulent and clamorous torrent,
+dashing along among the rocks of criticism, over the pebbles of the
+world's daily events; trying to make itself seen and heard amidst the
+hoarse cries of the politicians and the rumbling wheels of traffic. The
+classic is a still lakelet, a mountain tarn, fed by springs that never
+fail, its surface never ruffled by storms,--always the same, always
+smiling a welcome to its visitor. Such is Horace to my friend. To his
+eye "Lydia, dic per omnes" is as familiar as "Pater noster qui es in
+caelis" to that of a pious Catholic. "Integer vitae," which he has put
+into manly English, his Horace opens to as Watt's hymn-book opens to
+"From all that dwell below the skies." The more he reads, the more he
+studies his author, the richer are the treasures he finds. And what
+Horace is to him, Homer, or Virgil, or Dante is to many a quiet reader,
+sick to death of the unending train of bookmakers.
+
+I have some curious books in my library, a few of which I should like to
+say something about to The Teacups, when they have no more immediately
+pressing subjects before them. A library of a few thousand volumes ought
+always to have some books in it which the owner almost never opens, yet
+with whose backs he is so well acquainted that he feels as if he knew
+something of their contents. They are like those persons whom we meet in
+our daily walks, with whose faces and figures, whose summer and winter
+garments, whose walking-sticks and umbrellas even, we feel acquainted,
+and yet whose names, whose business, whose residences, we know nothing
+about. Some of these books are so formidable in their dimensions, so
+rusty and crabbed in their aspect, that it takes a considerable amount of
+courage to attack them.
+
+I will ask Delilah to bring down from my library a very thick, stout
+volume, bound in parchment, and standing on the lower shelf, next the
+fireplace. The pretty handmaid knows my books almost as if she were my
+librarian, and I don't doubt she would have found it if I had given only
+the name on the back.
+
+Delilah returned presently, with the heavy quarto in her arms. It was a
+pleasing sight,--the old book in the embrace of the fresh young damsel.
+I felt, on looking at them, as I did when I followed the slip of a girl
+who conducted us in the Temple, that ancient building in the heart of
+London. The long-enduring monuments of the dead do so mock the fleeting
+presence of the living!
+
+Is n't this book enough to scare any of you? I said, as Delilah dumped
+it down upon the table. The teacups jumped from their saucers as it
+thumped on the board. Danielis Georgii Morhofii Polyhistor, Literarius,
+Philosophicus et Poeticus. Lubecae MDCCXXXIII. Perhaps I should not
+have ventured to ask you to look at this old volume, if it had not been
+for the fact that Dr. Johnson mentions Morohof as the author to whom he
+was specially indebted.--more, I think, than to any other. It is a grand
+old encyclopaedic summary of all the author knew about pretty nearly
+everything, full of curious interest, but so strangely mediaeval, so
+utterly antiquated in most departments of knowledge, that it is hard to
+believe the volume came from the press at a time when persons whom I well
+remember were living. Is it possible that the books which have been for
+me what Morhof was for Dr. Johnson can look like that to the student of
+the year 1990?
+
+Morhof was a believer in magic and the transmutation of metals. There was
+always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I have
+felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder of
+projection had been cast into the crucible, and the fire of the last
+transmutation furnace went out. Perhaps I am wrong in implying that
+alchemy is an extinct folly. It existed in New England's early days, as
+we learn from the Winthrop papers, and I see no reason why gold-making
+should not have its votaries as well as other popular delusions.
+
+Among the essays of Morhof is one on the "Paradoxes of the Senses." That
+title brought to mind the recollection of another work I have been
+meaning to say something about, at some time when you were in the
+listening mood. The book I refer to is "A Budget of Paradoxes," by
+Augustus De Morgan. De Morgan is well remembered as a very distinguished
+mathematician, whose works have kept his name in high honor to the
+present time. The book I am speaking of was published by his widow, and
+is largely made up of letters received by him and his comments upon them.
+Few persons ever read it through. Few intelligent readers ever took it
+up and laid it down without taking a long draught of its singular and
+interesting contents. The letters are mostly from that class of persons
+whom we call "cranks," in our familiar language.
+
+At this point Number Seven interrupted me by calling out, "Give us some
+of those cranks' letters. A crank is a man who does his own thinking. I
+had a relation who was called a crank. I believe I have been spoken of
+as one myself. That is what you have to expect if you invent anything
+that puts an old machine out of fashion, or solve a problem that has
+puzzled all the world up to your time. There never was a religion
+founded but its Messiah was called a crank. There never was an idea
+started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its
+originator was spoken of as a crank. Do you want to know why that name
+is given to the men who do most for the world's progress? I will tell
+you. It is because cranks make all the wheels in all the machinery of
+the world go round. What would a steam-engine be without a crank? I
+suppose the first fool that looked on the first crank that was ever made
+asked what that crooked, queer-looking thing was good for. When the
+wheels got moving he found out. Tell us something about that book which
+has so much to say concerning cranks."
+
+Hereupon I requested Delilah to carry back Morhof, and replace him in the
+wide gap he had left in the bookshelf. She was then to find and bring
+down the volume I had been speaking of.
+
+Delilah took the wisdom of the seventeenth century in her arms, and
+departed on her errand. The book she brought down was given me some
+years ago by a gentleman who had sagaciously foreseen that it was just
+one of those works which I might hesitate about buying, but should be
+well pleased to own. He guessed well; the book has been a great source
+of instruction and entertainment to me. I wonder that so much time and
+cost should have been expended upon a work which might have borne a title
+like the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus; and yet it is such a wonderful
+museum of the productions of the squinting brains belonging to the class
+of persons commonly known as cranks that we could hardly spare one of its
+five hundred octavo pages.
+
+Those of us who are in the habit of receiving letters from all sorts of
+would-be-literary people--letters of inquiry, many of them with reference
+to matters we are supposed to understand--can readily see how it was that
+Mr. De Morgan, never too busy to be good-natured with the people who
+pestered--or amused-him with their queer fancies, received such a number
+of letters from persons who thought they had made great discoveries, from
+those who felt that they and their inventions and contrivances had been
+overlooked, and who sought in his large charity of disposition and great
+receptiveness a balm for their wounded feelings and a ray of hope for
+their darkened prospects.
+
+The book before us is made up from papers published in "The Athenaeum,"
+with additions by the author. Soon after opening it we come to names
+with which we are familiar, the first of these, that of Cornelius
+Agrippa, being connected with the occult and mystic doctrines dealt with
+by many of De Morgan's correspondents. But the name most likely to
+arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and
+martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great
+horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De
+Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno
+was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes,
+an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be
+easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about
+1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the
+maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties
+of the same."
+
+Number Seven could not contain himself when the reading had reached this
+point. He rose from his chair, and tinkled his spoon against the side of
+his teacup. It may have been a fancy, but I thought it returned a sound
+which Mr. Richard Briggs would have recognized as implying an organic
+defect. But Number Seven did not seem to notice it, or, if he did, to
+mind it.
+
+"Why did n't we all have a chance to help erect that statue?" he cried.
+"A murdered heretic at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a hero
+of knowledge in the nineteenth,--I drink to the memory of the roasted
+crank, Giordano Bruno!"
+
+Number Seven lifted his teacup to his lips, and most of us followed his
+example.
+
+After this outburst of emotion and eloquence had subsided, and the
+teaspoons lay quietly in their saucers, I went on with my extract from
+the book I had in hand.
+
+I think, I said, that the passage which follows will be new and
+instructive to most of the company. De Morgan's interpretation of the
+cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious a
+piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with anywhere
+in any book, new or old. I am the more willing to mention it as it
+suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon.
+Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers
+who did not think their time thrown away in laboring at this seemingly
+puerile task.
+
+"There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the
+numerals in words would do well to take up; it is the formation of
+sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only
+once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and
+I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves some years ago with
+attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined words he gave me
+Phiz, styx, wrong, buck, flame, quiz.
+
+"I gave him the following, which he agreed was 'admirable sense,'--I
+certainly think the words would never have come together except in this
+way: I quartz pyx who fling muck beds. I long thought that no human
+being could say this under any circumstances. At last I happened to be
+reading a religious writer,--as he thought himself,--who threw aspersions
+on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday came into my head; this
+fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered
+that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the
+heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the
+ferocious sectarian who turns his religious vessels into mud-holders, for
+the benefit of those who will not see what he sees."
+
+"There are several other sentences given, in which all the letters
+(except v and j as consonants) are employed, of which the following is
+the best: Get nymph; quiz sad brow; fix luck,--which in more sober
+English would be, Marry; be cheerful; watch your business. There is more
+edification, more religion, in this than in all the 666 interpretations
+put together."
+
+There is something very pleasant in the thought of these two sages
+playing at jackstraws with the letters of the alphabet. The task which
+De Morgan and Dr. Whewell, "the omniscient," set themselves would not be
+unworthy of our own ingenious scholars, and it might be worth while for
+some one of our popular periodicals to offer a prize for the best
+sentence using up the whole alphabet, under the same conditions as those
+submitted to by our two philosophers.
+
+This whole book of De Morgan's seems to me full of instruction. There is
+too much of it, no doubt; yet one can put up with the redundancy for the
+sake of the multiplicity of shades of credulity and self-deception it
+displays in broad daylight. I suspect many of us are conscious of a
+second personality in our complex nature, which has many traits
+resembling those found in the writers of the letters addressed to Mr. De
+Horgan.
+
+I have not ventured very often nor very deeply into the field of
+metaphysics, but if I were disposed to make any claim in that direction,
+it would be the recognition of the squinting brain, the introduction of
+the term "cerebricity" corresponding to electricity, the idiotic area in
+the brain or thinking-marrow, and my studies of the second member in the
+partnership of I-My-Self & Co. I add the Co. with especial reference to
+a very interesting article in a late Scribner, by my friend Mr. William
+James. In this article the reader will find a full exposition of the
+doctrine of plural personality illustrated by striking cases. I have
+long ago noticed and referred to the fact of the stratification of the
+currents of thought in three layers, one over the other. I have
+recognized that where there are two individuals talking together there
+are really six personalities engaged in the conversation. But the
+distinct, separable, independent individualities, taking up conscious
+life one after the other, are brought out by Mr. James and the
+authorities to which he refers as I have not elsewhere seen them
+developed.
+
+Whether we shall ever find the exact position of the idiotic centre or
+area in the brain (if such a spot exists) is uncertain. We know exactly
+where the blind spot of the eye is situated, and can demonstrate it
+anatomically and physiologically. But we have only analogy to lead us to
+infer the possible or even probable existence of an insensible spot in
+the thinking-centre. If there is a focal point where consciousness is at
+its highest development, it would not be strange if near by there should
+prove to be an anaesthetic district or limited space where no report from
+the senses was intelligently interpreted. But all this is mere
+hypothesis.
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that I am nominally the head personage of the
+circle of Teacups, I do not pretend or wish to deny that we all look to
+Number Five as our chief adviser in all the literary questions that come
+before us. She reads more and better than any of us. She is always
+ready to welcome the first sign of genius, or of talent which approaches
+genius. She makes short work with all the pretenders whose only excuse
+for appealing to the public is that they "want to be famous." She is one
+of the very few persons to whom I am willing to read any one of my own
+productions while it is yet in manuscript, unpublished. I know she is
+disposed to make more of it than it deserves; but, on the other hand,
+there are degrees in her scale of judgment, and I can distinguish very
+easily what delights her from what pleases only, or is, except for her
+kindly feeling to the writer, indifferent, or open to severe comment.
+What is curious is that she seems to have no literary aspirations, no
+desire to be known as a writer. Yet Number Five has more esprit, more
+sparkle, more sense in her talk, than many a famous authoress from whom
+we should expect brilliant conversation.
+
+There are mysteries about Number Five. I am not going to describe her
+personally. Whether she belongs naturally among the bright young people,
+or in the company of the maturer persons, who have had a good deal of
+experience of the world, and have reached the wisdom of the riper decades
+without losing the graces of the earlier ones, it would be hard to say.
+The men and women, young and old, who throng about her forget their own
+ages. "There is no such thing as time in her presence," said the
+Professor, the other day, in speaking of her. Whether the Professor is in
+love with her or not is more than I can say, but I am sure that he goes
+to her for literary sympathy and counsel, just as I do. The reader may
+remember what Number Five said about the possibility of her getting a
+sprained ankle, and her asking the young Doctor whether he felt equal to
+taking charge of her if she did. I would not for the world insinuate
+that he wishes she would slip and twist her foot a little,--just a
+little, you know, but so that it would have to be laid on a pillow in a
+chair, and inspected, and bandaged, and delicately manipulated. There
+was a banana-skin which she might naturally have trodden on, in her way
+to the tea-table. Nobody can suppose that it was there except by the
+most innocent of accidents. There are people who will suspect everybody.
+The idea of the Doctor's putting that banana-skin there! People love to
+talk in that silly way about doctors.
+
+Number Five had promised to read us a narrative which she thought would
+interest some of the company. Who wrote it she did not tell us, but I
+inferred from various circumstances that she had known the writer. She
+read the story most effectively in her rich, musical voice. I noticed
+that when it came to the sounds of the striking clock, the ringing of the
+notes was so like that which reaches us from some far-off cathedral tower
+that we wanted to bow our heads, as if we had just heard a summons to the
+Angelus. This was the short story that Number Five read to The
+Teacups:--
+
+I have somewhere read this anecdote. Louis the Fourteenth was looking
+out, one day, from, a window of his palace of Saint-Germain. It was a
+beautiful landscape which spread out before him, and the monarch,
+exulting in health, strength, and the splendors of his exalted position,
+felt his bosom swell with emotions of pride and happiness: Presently he
+noticed the towers of a church in the distance, above the treetops.
+"What building is that?" he asked. "May it please your Majesty, that is
+the Church of St. Denis, where your royal ancestors have been buried for
+many generations." The answer did not "please his Royal Majesty."
+There, then, was the place where he too was to lie and moulder in the
+dust. He turned, sick at heart, from the window, and was uneasy until he
+had built him another palace, from which he could never be appalled by
+that fatal prospect.
+
+Something like the experience of Louis the Fourteenth was that of the
+owner of
+
+ THE TERRIBLE CLOCK.
+
+I give the story as transcribed from the original manuscript:--
+
+The clock was bequeathed to me by an old friend who had recently died.
+His mind had been a good deal disordered in the later period of his life.
+This clock, I am told; seemed to have a strange fascination for him. His
+eyes were fastened on it during the last hours of his life. He died just
+at midnight. The clock struck twelve, the nurse told me, as he drew his
+last breath, and then, without any known cause, stopped, with both hands
+upon the hour.
+
+It is a complex and costly piece of mechanism. The escapement is in
+front, so that every tooth is seen as it frees itself. It shows the
+phases of the moon, the month of the year, the day of the month, and the
+day of the week, as well as the hour and minute of the day.
+
+I had not owned it a week before I began to perceive the same kind of
+fascination as that which its former owner had experienced. This
+gradually grew upon me, and presently led to trains of thought which
+became at first unwelcome, then worrying, and at last unendurable. I
+began by taking offence at the moon. I did not like to see that
+"something large and smooth and round," so like the skull which little
+Peterkin picked up on the field of Blenheim. "How many times," I kept
+saying to myself, "is that wicked old moon coming up to stare at me?" I
+could not stand it. I stopped a part of the machinery, and the moon went
+into permanent eclipse. By and by the sounds of the infernal machine
+began to trouble and pursue me. They talked to me; more and more their
+language became that of articulately speaking men. They twitted me with
+the rapid flight of time. They hurried me, as if I had not a moment to
+lose. Quick! Quick! Quick! as each tooth released itself from the
+escapement. And as I looked and listened there could not be any mistake
+about it. I heard Quick! Quick! Quick! as plainly, at least, as I ever
+heard a word from the phonograph. I stood watching the dial one day,--it
+was near one o'clock,--and a strange attraction held me fastened to the
+spot. Presently something appeared to trip or stumble inside of the
+infernal mechanism. I waited for the sound I knew was to follow. How
+nervous I got! It seemed to me that it would never strike. At last the
+minute-hand reached the highest point of the dial. Then there was a
+little stir among the works, as there is in a congregation as it rises to
+receive the benediction. It was no form of blessing which rung out those
+deep, almost sepulchral tones. But the word they uttered could not be
+mistaken. I can hear its prolonged, solemn vibrations as if I were
+standing before the clock at this moment.
+
+Gone! Yes, I said to myself, gone,--its record made up to be opened in
+eternity.
+
+I stood still, staring vaguely at the dial as in a trance. And as the
+next hour creeps stealthily up, it starts all at once, and cries aloud,
+Gone!--Gone! The sun sinks lower, the hour-hand creeps downward with it,
+until I hear the thrice-repeated monosyllable, Gone!--Gone!--Gone! Soon
+through the darkening hours, until at the dead of night the long roll is
+called, and with the last Gone! the latest of the long procession that
+filled the day follows its ghostly companions into the stillness and
+darkness of the past.
+
+I silenced the striking part of the works. Still, the escapement kept
+repeating, Quick! Quick! Quick! Still the long minute-hand, like the
+dart in the grasp of Death, as we see it in Roubiliac's monument to Mrs.
+Nightingale, among the tombs of Westminster Abbey, stretched itself out,
+ready to transfix each hour as it passed, and make it my last. I sat by
+the clock to watch the leap from one day of the week to the next. Then
+would come, in natural order, the long stride from one month to the
+following one.
+
+I could endure it no longer. "Take that clock away!" I said. They took
+it away. They took me away, too,--they thought I needed country air.
+The sounds and motions still pursued me in imagination. I was very
+nervous when I came here. The walks are pleasant, but the walls seem to
+me unnecessarily high. The boarders are numerous; a little
+miscellaneous, I think. But we have the Queen, and the President of the
+United States, and several other distinguished persons, if we may trust
+what they tell about themselves.
+
+After we had listened to Number Five's story, I was requested to read a
+couple of verses written by me when the guest of my friends, whose name
+is hinted by the title prefixed to my lines.
+
+ LA MAISON D'OR.
+
+ BAR HARBOR.
+
+ From this fair home behold on either side
+ The restful mountains or the restless sea:
+ So the warm sheltering walls of life divide
+ Time and its tides from still eternity.
+
+ Look on the waves: their stormy voices teach
+ That not on earth may toil and struggle cease.
+ Look on the mountains: better far than speech
+ Their silent promise of eternal peace.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had intended to devote this particular report to an account of my
+replies to certain questions which have been addressed to me,--questions
+which I have a right to suppose interest the public, and which,
+therefore, I was justified in bringing before The Teacups, and presenting
+to the readers of these articles.
+
+Some may care for one of these questions, and some for another. A good
+many young people think nothing about life as it presents itself in the
+far horizon, bounded by the snowy ridges of threescore and the dim peaks
+beyond that remote barrier. Again, there are numbers of persons who know
+nothing at all about the Jews; while, on the other hand, there are those
+who can, or think they can, detect the Israelitish blood in many of their
+acquaintances who believe themselves of the purest Japhetic origin, and
+are full of prejudices about the Semitic race.
+
+I do not mean to be cheated out of my intentions. I propose to answer my
+questioners on the two points just referred to, but I find myself so much
+interested in the personal affairs of The Teacups that I must deal with
+them before attacking those less exciting subjects. There is no use, let
+me say here, in addressing to me letters marked "personal," "private,"
+"confidential," and so forth, asking me how I came to know what happened
+in certain conversations of which I shall give a partial account. If
+there is a very sensitive phonograph lying about here and there in
+unsuspected corners, that might account for some part of my revelations.
+If Delilah, whose hearing is of almost supernatural delicacy, reports to
+me what she overhears, it might explain a part of the mystery. I do not
+want to accuse Delilah, but a young person who assures me she can hear my
+watch ticking in my pocket, when I am in the next room, might undoubtedly
+tell many secrets, if so disposed. Number Five is pretty nearly
+omniscient, and she and I are on the best terms with each other. These
+are all the hints I shall give you at present.
+
+The Teacups of whom the least has been heard at our table are the Tutor
+and the Musician. The Tutor is a modest young man, kept down a little, I
+think, by the presence of older persons, like the Professor and myself.
+I have met him several times, of late, walking with different lady
+Teacups: once with the American Annex; twice with the English Annex; once
+with the two Annexes together; once with Number Five.
+
+I have mentioned the fact that the Tutor is a poet as among his claims to
+our attention. I must add that I do not think any the worse of him for
+expressing his emotions and experiences in verse. For though rhyming is
+often a bad sign in a young man, especially if he is already out of his
+teens, there are those to whom it is as natural, one might almost say as
+necessary, as it is to a young bird to fly. One does not care to see
+barnyard fowls tumbling about in trying to use their wings. They have a
+pair of good, stout drumsticks, and had better keep to them, for the most
+part. But that feeling does not apply to young eagles, or even to young
+swallows and sparrows. The Tutor is by no means one of those ignorant,
+silly, conceited phrase-tinklers, who live on the music of their own
+jingling syllables and the flattery of their foolish friends. I think
+Number Five must appreciate him. He is sincere, warmhearted,--his poetry
+shows that,--not in haste to be famous, and he looks to me as if he only
+wanted love to steady him. With one of those two young girls he ought
+certainly to be captivated, if he is not already. Twice walking with the
+English Annex, I met him, and they were so deeply absorbed in
+conversation they hardly noticed me. He has been talking over the matter
+with Number Five, who is just the kind of person for a confidante.
+
+"I know I feel very lonely," he was saying, "and I only wish I felt sure
+that I could make another person happy. My life would be transfigured if
+I could find such a one, whom I could love well enough to give my life to
+her,--for her, if that were needful, and who felt an affinity for me, if
+any one could."
+
+"And why not your English maiden?" said Number Five.
+
+"What makes you think I care more for her than for her American friend?"
+said the Tutor.
+
+"Why, have n't I met you walking with her, and did n't you both seem
+greatly interested in the subject you were discussing? I thought, of
+course, it was something more or less sentimental that you were talking
+about."
+
+"I was explaining that 'enclitic de' in Browning's Grammarian's Funeral.
+I don't think there was anything very sentimental about that. She is an
+inquisitive creature, that English girl. She is very fond of asking me
+questions,--in fact, both of them are. There is one curious difference
+between them: the English girl settles down into her answers and is
+quiet; the American girl is never satisfied with yesterday's conclusions;
+she is always reopening old questions in the light of some new fact or
+some novel idea. I suppose that people bred from childhood to lean their
+backs against the wall of the Creed and the church catechism find it hard
+to sit up straight on the republican stool, which obliges them to stiffen
+their own backs. Which of these two girls would be the safest choice for
+a young man? I should really like to hear what answer you would make if I
+consulted you seriously, with a view to my own choice,--on the
+supposition that there was a fair chance that either of them might be
+won."
+
+"The one you are in love with," answered Number Five.
+
+"But what if it were a case of 'How happy could I be with either'? Which
+offers the best chance of happiness,--a marriage between two persons of
+the same country, or a marriage where one of the parties is of foreign
+birth? Everything else being equal, which is best for an American to
+marry, an American or an English girl? We need not confine the question
+to those two young persons, but put it more generally."
+
+"There are reasons on both sides," answered Number Five. "I have often
+talked this matter over with The Dictator. This is the way he speaks
+about it. English blood is apt to tell well on the stock upon which it
+is engrafted. Over and over again he has noticed finely grown specimens
+of human beings, and on inquiry has found that one or both of the parents
+or grandparents were of British origin. The chances are that the
+descendants of the imported stock will be of a richer organization, more
+florid, more muscular, with mellower voices, than the native whose blood
+has been unmingled with that of new emigrants since the earlier colonial
+times.--So talks The Dictator.--I myself think the American will find his
+English wife concentrates herself more readily and more exclusively on
+her husband,--for the obvious reason that she is obliged to live mainly
+in him. I remember hearing an old friend of my early days say, 'A woman
+does not bear transplanting.' It does not do to trust these old sayings,
+and yet they almost always have some foundation in the experience of
+mankind, which has repeated them from generation to generation. Happy is
+the married woman of foreign birth who can say to her husband, as
+Andromache said to Hector, after enumerating all the dear relatives she
+had lost,
+
+ "'Yet while my hector still survives,
+ I see My father, mother, brethren, all in thee!'
+
+"How many a sorrowing wife, exiled from her native country, dreams of the
+mother she shall see no more! How many a widow, in a strange land,
+wishes that her poor, worn-out body could be laid among her kinsfolk, in
+the little churchyard where she used to gather daisies in her childhood!
+It takes a great deal of love to keep down the 'climbing sorrow' that
+swells up in a woman's throat when such memories seize upon her, in her
+moments of desolation. But if a foreign-born woman does willingly give
+up all for a man, and never looks backward, like Lot's wife, she is a
+prize that it is worth running a risk to gain,--that is, if she has the
+making of a good woman in her; and a few years will go far towards
+naturalizing her."
+
+The Tutor listened to Number Five with much apparent interest. "And
+now," he said, "what do you think of her companion?"
+
+"A charming girl for a man of a quiet, easy temperament. The great
+trouble is with her voice. It is pitched a full note too high. It is
+aggressive, disturbing, and would wear out a nervous man without his ever
+knowing what was the matter with him. A good many crazy Northern people
+would recover their reason if they could live for a year or two among the
+blacks of the Southern States. But the penetrating, perturbing quality
+of the voices of many of our Northern women has a great deal to answer
+for in the way of determining love and friendship. You remember that
+dear friend of ours who left us not long since? If there were more
+voices like hers, the world would be a different place to live in. I do
+not believe any man or woman ever came within the range of those sweet,
+tranquil tones without being hushed, captivated, entranced I might almost
+say, by their calming, soothing influence. Can you not imagine the tones
+in which those words, 'Peace, be still,' were spoken? Such was the
+effect of the voice to which but a few weeks ago we were listening. It
+is hard to believe that it has died out of human consciousness. Can such
+a voice be spared from that world of happiness to which we fondly look
+forward, where we love to dream, if we do not believe with assured
+conviction, that whatever is loveliest in this our mortal condition shall
+be with us again as an undying possession? Your English friend has a
+very agreeable voice, round, mellow, cheery, and her articulation is
+charming. Other things being equal, I think you, who are, perhaps,
+oversensitive, would live from two to three years longer with her than
+with the other. I suppose a man who lived within hearing of a murmuring
+brook would find his life shortened if a sawmill were set up within
+earshot of his dwelling."
+
+"And so you advise me to make love to the English girl, do you?" asked
+the Tutor.
+
+Number Five laughed. It was not a loud laugh, she never laughed noisily;
+it was not a very hearty laugh; the idea did not seem to amuse her much.
+
+"No," she said, "I won't take the responsibility. Perhaps this is a case
+in which the true reading of Gay's line would be--
+
+ "How happy could I be with neither.
+
+"There are several young women in the world besides our two Annexes."
+
+I question whether the Tutor had asked those questions very seriously,
+and I doubt if Number Five thought he was very much in earnest.
+
+One of The Teacups reminded me that I had promised to say something of my
+answers to certain questions. So I began at once:
+
+I have given the name of brain-tappers to the literary operatives who
+address persons whose names are well known to the public, asking their
+opinions or their experiences on subjects which are at the time of
+general interest. They expect a literary man or a scientific expert to
+furnish them materials for symposia and similar articles, to be used by
+them for their own special purposes. Sometimes they expect to pay for
+the information furnished them; at other times, the honor of being
+included in a list of noted personages who have received similar requests
+is thought sufficient compensation. The object with which the
+brain-tapper puts his questions may be a purely benevolent and entirely
+disinterested one. Such was the object of some of those questions which
+I have received and answered. There are other cases, in which the
+brain-tapper is acting much as those persons do who stop a physician in
+the street to talk with him about their livers or stomachs, or other
+internal arrangements, instead of going to his office and consulting him,
+expecting to pay for his advice. Others are more like those busy women
+who, having the generous intention of making a handsome present to their
+pastor, at as little expense as may be, send to all their neighbors and
+acquaintances for scraps of various materials, out of which the imposing
+"bedspread" or counterpane is to be elaborated.
+
+That is all very well so long as old pieces of stuff are all they call
+for, but it is a different matter to ask for clippings out of new and
+uncut rolls of cloth. So it is one thing to ask an author for liberty to
+use extracts from his published writings, and it is a very different
+thing to expect him to write expressly for the editor's or compiler's
+piece of literary patchwork.
+
+I have received many questions within the last year or two, some of which
+I am willing to answer, but prefer to answer at my own time, in my own
+way, through my customary channel of communication with the public. I
+hope I shall not be misunderstood as implying any reproach against the
+inquirers who, in order to get at facts which ought to be known, apply to
+all whom they can reach for information. Their inquisitiveness is not
+always agreeable or welcome, but we ought to be glad that there are
+mousing fact-hunters to worry us with queries to which, for the sake of
+the public, we are bound to give our attention. Let me begin with my
+brain-tappers.
+
+And first, as the papers have given publicity to the fact that I, The
+Dictator of this tea-table, have reached the age of threescore years and
+twenty, I am requested to give information as to how I managed to do it,
+and to explain just how they can go and do likewise. I think I can lay
+down a few rules that will help them to the desired result. There is no
+certainty in these biological problems, but there are reasonable
+probabilities upon which it is safe to act.
+
+The first thing to be done is, some years before birth, to advertise for
+a couple of parents both belonging to long-lived families. Especially let
+the mother come of a race in which octogenarians and nonagenarians are
+very common phenomena. There are practical difficulties in following out
+this suggestion, but possibly the forethought of your progenitors, or
+that concurrence of circumstances which we call accident, may have
+arranged this for you.
+
+Do not think that a robust organization is any warrant of long life, nor
+that a frail and slight bodily constitution necessarily means scanty
+length of days. Many a strong-limbed young man and many a blooming young
+woman have I seen failing and dropping away in or before middle life, and
+many a delicate and slightly constituted person outliving the athletes
+and the beauties of their generation. Whether the excessive development
+of the muscular system is compatible with the best condition of general
+health is, I think, more than doubtful. The muscles are great sponges
+that suck up and make use of large quantities of blood, and the other
+organs must be liable to suffer for want of their share.
+
+One of the Seven Wise Men of Greece boiled his wisdom down into two
+words,--NOTHING TOO MUCH. It is a rule which will apply to food,
+exercise, labor, sleep, and, in short, to every part of life. This is
+not so very difficult a matter if one begins in good season and forms
+regular habits. But what if I should lay down the rule, Be cheerful;
+take all the troubles and trials of life with perfect equanimity and a
+smiling countenance? Admirable directions! Your friend, the
+curly-haired blonde, with florid complexion, round cheeks, the best
+possible digestion and respiration, the stomach of an ostrich and the
+lungs of a pearl-diver, finds it perfectly easy to carry them into
+practice. You, of leaden complexion, with black and lank hair, lean,
+hollow-eyed, dyspeptic, nervous, find it not so easy to be always
+hilarious and happy. The truth is that the persons of that buoyant
+disposition which comes always heralded by a smile, as a yacht driven by
+a favoring breeze carries a wreath of sparkling foam before her, are born
+with their happiness ready made. They cannot help being cheerful any
+more than their saturnine fellow-mortal can help seeing everything
+through the cloud he carries with him. I give you the precept, then, Be
+cheerful, for just what it is worth, as I would recommend to you to be
+six feet, or at least five feet ten, in stature. You cannot settle that
+matter for yourself, but you can stand up straight, and give your five
+feet five its--full value. You can help along a little by wearing
+high-heeled shoes. So you can do something to encourage yourself in
+serenity of aspect and demeanor, keeping your infirmities and troubles in
+the background instead of making them the staple of your conversation.
+This piece of advice, if followed, may be worth from three to five years
+of the fourscore which you hope to attain.
+
+If, on the other hand, instead of going about cheerily in society, making
+the best of everything and as far as possible forgetting your troubles,
+you can make up your mind to economize all your stores of vital energy,
+to hoard your life as a miser hoards his money, you will stand a fair
+chance of living until you are tired of life,--fortunate if everybody is
+not tired of you.
+
+One of my prescriptions for longevity may startle you somewhat. It is
+this: Become the subject of a mortal disease. Let half a dozen doctors
+thump you, and knead you, and test you in every possible way, and render
+their verdict that you have an internal complaint; they don't know
+exactly what it is, but it will certainly kill you by and by. Then bid
+farewell to the world and shut yourself up for an invalid. If you are
+threescore years old when you begin this mode of life, you may very
+probably last twenty years, and there you are,--an octogenarian. In the
+mean time, your friends outside have been dropping off, one after
+another, until you find yourself almost alone, nursing your mortal
+complaint as if it were your baby, hugging it and kept alive by it,--if
+to exist is to live. Who has not seen cases like this,--a man or a woman
+shutting himself or herself up, visited by a doctor or a succession of
+doctors (I remember that once, in my earlier experience, I was the
+twenty-seventh physician who had been consulted), always taking medicine,
+until everybody was reminded of that impatient speech of a relative of
+one of these invalid vampires who live on the blood of tired-out
+attendants, "I do wish she would get well--or something"? Persons who
+are shut up in that way, confined to their chambers, sometimes to their
+beds, have a very small amount of vital expenditure, and wear out very
+little of their living substance. They are like lamps with half their
+wicks picked down, and will continue to burn when other lamps have used
+up all their oil. An insurance office might make money by taking no
+risks except on lives of persons suffering from mortal disease. It is on
+this principle of economizing the powers of life that a very eminent
+American physician,--Dr. Weir Mitchell, a man of genius,--has founded his
+treatment of certain cases of nervous exhaustion.
+
+What have I got to say about temperance, the use of animal food, and so
+forth? These are questions asked me. Nature has proved a wise teacher,
+as I think, in my own case. The older I grow, the less use I make of
+alcoholic stimulants. In fact, I hardly meddle with them at all, except
+a glass or two of champagne occasionally. I find that by far the best
+borne of all drinks containing alcohol. I do not suppose my experience
+can be the foundation of a universal rule. Dr. Holyoke, who lived to be
+a hundred, used habitually, in moderate quantities, a mixture of cider,
+water, and rum. I think, as one grows older, less food, especially less
+animal food, is required. But old people have a right to be epicures, if
+they can afford it. The pleasures of the palate are among the last
+gratifications of the senses allowed them. We begin life as little
+cannibals,--feeding on the flesh and blood of our mothers. We range
+through all the vegetable and animal products, of nature, and I suppose,
+if the second childhood could return to the food of the first, it might
+prove a wholesome diet.
+
+What do I say to smoking? I cannot grudge an old man his pipe, but I
+think tobacco often does a good deal of harm to the health,--to the eyes
+especially, to the nervous system generally, producing headache,
+palpitation, and trembling. I myself gave it up many years ago.
+Philosophically speaking, I think self-narcotization and
+self-alcoholization are rather ignoble substitutes for undisturbed
+self-consciousness and unfettered self-control.
+
+Here is another of those brain-tapping letters, of similar character,
+which I have no objection to answering at my own time and in the place
+which best suits me. As the questions must be supposed to be asked with
+a purely scientific and philanthropic purpose, it can make little
+difference when and where they are answered. For myself, I prefer our
+own tea-table to the symposia to which I am often invited. I do not
+quarrel with those who invite their friends to a banquet to which many
+strangers are expected to contribute. It is a very easy and pleasant way
+of giving an entertainment at little cost and with no responsibility.
+Somebody has been writing to me about "Oatmeal and Literature," and
+somebody else wants to know whether I have found character influenced by
+diet; also whether, in my opinion, oatmeal is preferable to pie as an
+American national food.
+
+In answer to these questions, I should say that I have my beliefs and
+prejudices; but if I were pressed hard for my proofs of their
+correctness, I should make but a poor show in the witness-box. Most
+assuredly I do believe that body and mind are much influenced by the kind
+of food habitually depended upon. I am persuaded that a too exclusively
+porcine diet gives a bristly character to the beard and hair, which is
+borrowed from the animal whose tissues these stiff-bearded compatriots of
+ours have too largely assimilated. I can never stray among the village
+people of our windy capes without now and then coming upon a human being
+who looks as if he had been split, salted, and dried, like the salt-fish
+which has built up his arid organism. If the body is modified by the
+food which nourishes it, the mind and character very certainly will be
+modified by it also. We know enough of their close connection with each
+other to be sure of that, without any statistical observations to prove
+it.
+
+Do you really want to know "whether oatmeal is preferable to pie as an
+American national food"? I suppose the best answer I can give to your
+question is to tell you what is my own practice. Oatmeal in the morning,
+as an architect lays a bed of concrete to form a base for his
+superstructure. Pie when I can get it; that is, of the genuine sort, for
+I am not patriotic enough to think very highly of the article named after
+the Father of his Country, who was first in war, first in peace,--not
+first in pies, according to my standard.
+
+There is a very odd prejudice against pie as an article of diet. It is
+common to hear every form of bodily degeneracy and infirmity attributed
+to this particular favorite food. I see no reason or sense in it. Mr.
+Emerson believed in pie, and was almost indignant when a fellow-traveller
+refused the slice he offered him. "Why, Mr.________," said be, "what is
+pie made for!" If every Green Mountain boy has not eaten a thousand
+times his weight in apple, pumpkin, squash, and mince pie, call me a
+dumpling. And Colonel Ethan Allen was one of them,--Ethan Allen, who, as
+they used to say, could wrench off the head of a wrought nail with his
+teeth.
+
+If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your
+health the better. You know enough not to eat or drink what you have
+found does not agree with you. You ought to know enough not to expose
+yourself needlessly to draughts. If you take a "constitutional," walk
+with the wind when you can, and take a closed car against it if you can
+get one. Walking against the wind is one of the most dangerous kinds of
+exposure, if you are sensitive to cold. But except a few simple rules
+such as I have just given, let your health take care of itself so long as
+it behaves decently. If you want to be sure not to reach threescore and
+twenty, get a little box of homoeopathic pellets and a little book of
+homeopathic prescriptions. I had a poor friend who fell into that way,
+and became at last a regular Hahnemaniac. He left a box of his little
+jokers, which at last came into my hands. The poor fellow had cultivated
+symptoms as other people cultivate roses or chrysanthemums. What a
+luxury of choice his imagination presented to him! When one watches for
+symptoms, every organ in the body is ready to put in its claim. By and
+by a real illness attacked him, and the box of little pellets was shut
+up, to minister to his fancied evils no longer.
+
+Let me tell you one thing. I think if patients and physicians were in
+the habit of recognizing the fact I am going to mention, both would be
+gainers. The law I refer to must be familiar to all observing
+physicians, and to all intelligent persons who have observed their own
+bodily and mental conditions. This is the curve of health. It is a
+mistake to suppose that the normal state of health is represented by a
+straight horizontal line. Independently of the well-known causes which
+raise or depress the standard of vitality, there seems to be,--I think I
+may venture to say there is,--a rhythmic undulation in the flow of the
+vital force. The "dynamo" which furnishes the working powers of
+consciousness and action has its annual, its monthly, its diurnal waves,
+even its momentary ripples, in the current it furnishes. There are
+greater and lesser curves in the movement of every day's life,--a series
+of ascending and descending movements, a periodicity depending on the
+very nature of the force at work in the living organism. Thus we have
+our good seasons and our bad seasons, our good days and our bad days,
+life climbing and descending in long or short undulations, which I have
+called the curve of health.
+
+From this fact spring a great proportion of the errors of medical
+practice. On it are based the delusions of the various shadowy systems
+which impose themselves on the ignorant and half-learned public as
+branches or "schools" of science. A remedy taken at the time of the
+ascent in the curve of health is found successful. The same remedy taken
+while the curve is in its downward movement proves a failure.
+
+So long as this biological law exists, so long the charlatan will keep
+his hold on the ignorant public. So long as it exists, the wisest
+practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the effect of what
+he calls and loves to think are his remedies. Long-continued and
+sagacious observation will to some extent undeceive him; but were it not
+for the happy illusion that his useless or even deleterious drugs were
+doing good service, many a practitioner would give up his calling for one
+in which he could be more certain that he was really being useful to the
+subjects of his professional dealings. For myself, I should prefer a
+physician of a sanguine temperament, who had a firm belief in himself and
+his methods. I do not wonder at all that the public support a whole
+community of pretenders who show the portraits of the patients they have
+"cured." The best physicians will tell you that, though many patients
+get well under their treatment, they rarely cure anybody. If you are
+told also that the best physician has many more patients die on his hands
+than the worst of his fellow-practitioners, you may add these two
+statements to your bundle of paradoxes, and if they puzzle you I will
+explain them at some future time.
+
+[I take this opportunity of correcting a statement now going the rounds
+of the medical and probably other periodicals. In "The Journal of the
+American Medical Association," dated April 26,1890, published at Chicago,
+I am reported, in quotation marks, as saying, "Give me opium, wine, and
+milk, and I will cure all diseases to which flesh is heir."
+
+In the first place, I never said I will cure, or can cure, or would or
+could cure, or had cured any disease. My venerated instructor, Dr. James
+Jackson, taught me never to use that expression. Curo means, I take care
+of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean nothing more, it is
+properly employed. So, in the amphitheatre of the Ecole de Medecine, I
+used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, "Je le pansay, Dieu le guarist."
+(I dressed his wound, and God cured him.) Next, I am not in the habit of
+talking about "the diseases to which flesh is heir." The expression has
+become rather too familiar for repetition, and belongs to the rhetoric of
+other latitudes. And, lastly, I have said some plain things, perhaps
+some sharp ones, about the abuse of drugs and the limited number of
+vitally important remedies, but I am not so ignorantly presumptuous as to
+make the foolish statement falsely attributed to me.]
+
+I paused a minute or two, and as no one spoke out; I put a question to
+the Counsellor.
+
+Are you quite sure that you wish to live to be threescore and twenty
+years old?
+
+"Most certainly I do. Don't they say that Theophrastus lived to his
+hundred and seventh year, and did n't he complain of the shortness of
+life? At eighty a man has had just about time to get warmly settled in
+his nest. Do you suppose he doesn't enjoy the quiet of that
+resting-place? No more haggard responsibility to keep him awake
+nights,--unless he prefers to retain his hold on offices and duties from
+which he can be excused if he chooses. No more goading ambitions,--he
+knows he has done his best. No more jealousies, if he were weak enough
+to feel such ignoble stirrings in his more active season. An
+octogenarian with a good record, and free from annoying or distressing
+infirmities, ought to be the happiest of men. Everybody treats him with
+deference. Everybody wants to help him. He is the ward of the
+generations that have grown up since he was in the vigor of maturity.
+Yes, let me live to be fourscore years, and then I will tell you whether
+I should like a few more years or not."
+
+You carry the feelings of middle age, I said, in imagination, over into
+the period of senility, and then reason and dream about it as if its
+whole mode of being were like that of the earlier period of life. But how
+many things there are in old age which you must live into if you would
+expect to have any "realizing sense" of their significance! In the first
+place, you have no coevals, or next to none. At fifty, your vessel is
+stanch, and you are on deck with the rest, in all weathers. At sixty,
+the vessel still floats, and you are in the cabin. At seventy, you, with
+a few fellow-passengers, are on a raft. At eighty, you are on a spars to
+which, possibly, one, or two, or three friends of about your own age are
+still clinging. After that, you must expect soon to find yourself alone,
+if you are still floating, with only a life-preserver to keep your old
+white-bearded chin above the water.
+
+Kindness? Yes, pitying kindness, which is a bitter sweet in which the
+amiable ingredient can hardly be said to predominate. How pleasant do
+you think it is to have an arm offered to you when you are walking on a
+level surface, where there is no chance to trip? How agreeable do you
+suppose it is to have your well-meaning friends shout and screech at you,
+as if you were deaf as an adder, instead of only being, as you insist,
+somewhat hard of hearing? I was a little over twenty years old when I
+wrote the lines which some of you may have met with, for they have been
+often reprinted:
+
+ The mossy marbles rest
+ On the lips that he has prest
+ In their bloom,
+ And the names he loved to hear
+ Have been carved for many a year
+ On the tomb.
+
+The world was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now.
+
+"I thought you were one of those who looked upon old age cheerfully, and
+welcomed it as a season of peace and contented enjoyment."
+
+I am one of those who so regard it. Those are not bitter or scalding
+tears that fall from my eyes upon "the mossy marbles." The young who
+left my side early in my life's journey are still with me in the
+unchanged freshness and beauty of youth. Those who have long kept
+company with me live on after their seeming departure, were it only by
+the mere force of habit; their images are all around me, as if every
+surface had been a sensitive film that photographed them; their voices
+echo about me, as if they had been recorded on those unforgetting
+cylinders which bring back to us the tones and accents that have
+imprinted them, as the hardened sands show us the tracks of extinct
+animals. The melancholy of old age has a divine tenderness in it, which
+only the sad experiences of life can lend a human soul. But there is a
+lower level,--that of tranquil contentment and easy acquiescence in the
+conditions in which we find ourselves; a lower level, in which old age
+trudges patiently when it is not using its wings. I say its wings, for
+no period of life is so imaginative as that which looks to younger people
+the most prosaic. The atmosphere of memory is one in which imagination
+flies more easily and feels itself more at home than in the thinner ether
+of youthful anticipation. I have told you some of the drawbacks of age;
+I would not have you forget its privileges. When it comes down from its
+aerial excursions, it has much left to enjoy on the humble plane of
+being. And so you think you would like to become an octogenarian? "I
+should," said the Counsellor, now a man in the high noon of bodily and
+mental vigor. "Four more--yes, five more--decades would not be too much,
+I think. And how much I should live to see in that time! I am glad you
+have laid down some rules by which a man may reasonably expect to leap
+the eight barred gate. I won't promise to obey them all, though."
+
+Among the questions addressed to me, as to a large number of other
+persons, are the following. I take them from "The American Hebrew" of
+April 4, 1890. I cannot pretend to answer them all, but I can say
+something about one or two of them.
+
+"I. Can you, of your own personal experience, find any justification
+whatever for the entertainment of prejudice towards individuals solely
+because they are Jews?
+
+"II. Is this prejudice not due largely to the religious instruction that
+is given by the church acid Sunday-school? For instance, the teachings
+that the Jews crucified Jesus; that they rejected him, and can only
+secure salvation by belief in him, and similar matters that are
+calculated to excite in the impressionable mind of the child an aversion,
+if not a loathing, for members of 'the despised race.'
+
+"III. Have you observed in the social or business life of the Jew, so
+far as your personal experience has gone, any different standard of
+conduct than prevails among Christians of the same social status?
+
+"IV. Can you suggest what should be done to dispel the existing
+prejudice?"
+
+As to the first question, I have had very slight acquaintance with the
+children of Israel. I shared more or less the prevailing prejudices
+against the persecuted race. I used to read in my hymn-book,--I hope I
+quote correctly,--
+
+ "See what a living stone
+ The builders did refuse!
+ Yet God has built his church thereon,
+ In spite of envious Jews."
+
+I grew up inheriting the traditional idea that they were a race lying
+under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the gospel. Like other
+children of New England birth, I walked in the narrow path of Puritan
+exclusiveness. The great historical church of Christendom was presented
+to me as Bunyan depicted it: one of the two giants sitting at the door of
+their caves, with the bones, of pilgrims scattered about them, and
+grinning at the travellers whom they could no longer devour. In the
+nurseries of old-fashioned Orthodoxy there was one religion in the
+world,--one religion, and a multitude of detestable, literally damnable
+impositions, believed in by uncounted millions, who were doomed to
+perdition for so believing. The Jews were the believers in one of these
+false religions. It had been true once, but was now a pernicious and
+abominable lie. The principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend
+money, and to fulfil the predictions of the old prophets of their race.
+
+No doubt the individual sons of Abraham whom we found in our ill-favored
+and ill-flavored streets were apt to be unpleasing specimens of the race.
+It was against the most adverse influences of legislation, of religious
+feeling, of social repugnance, that the great names of Jewish origin made
+themselves illustrious; that the philosophers, the musicians, the
+financiers, the statesmen, of the last centuries forced the world to
+recognize and accept them. Benjamin, the son of Isaac, a son of Israel,
+as his family name makes obvious, has shown how largely Jewish blood has
+been represented in the great men and women of modern days.
+
+There are two virtues which Christians have found it very hard to
+exemplify in practice. These are modesty and civility. The Founder of
+the Christian religion appeared among a people accustomed to look for a
+Messiah, a special ambassador from heaven, with an authoritative message.
+They were intimately acquainted with every expression having reference to
+this divine messenger. They had a religion of their own, about which
+Christianity agrees with Judaism in asserting that it was of divine
+origin. It is a serious fact, to which we do not give all the attention
+it deserves, that this divinely instructed people were not satisfied with
+the evidence that the young Rabbi who came to overthrow their ancient
+church and found a new one was a supernatural being. "We think he was a
+great Doctor," said a Jewish companion with whom I was conversing. He
+meant a great Teacher, I presume, though healing the sick was one of his
+special offices. Instead of remembering that they were entitled to form
+their own judgment of the new Teacher, as they had judged of Hillel and
+other great instructors, Christians, as they called themselves, have
+insulted, calumniated, oppressed, abased, outraged, "the chosen race"
+during the long succession of centuries since the Jewish contemporaries
+of the Founder of Christianity made up their minds that he did not meet
+the conditions required by the subject of the predictions of their
+Scriptures. The course of the argument against them is very briefly and
+effectively stated by Mr. Emerson:
+
+"This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he
+was a man."
+
+It seems as if there should be certain laws of etiquette regulating the
+relation of different religions to each other. It is not civil for a
+follower of Mahomet to call his neighbor of another creed a "Christian
+dog." Still more, there should be something like politeness in the
+bearing of Christian sects toward each other, and of believers in the new
+dispensation toward those who still adhere to the old. We are in the
+habit of allowing a certain arrogant assumption to our Roman Catholic
+brethren. We have got used to their pretensions. They may call us
+"heretics," if they like. They may speak of us as "infidels," if they
+choose, especially if they say it in Latin. So long as there is no
+inquisition, so long as there is no auto da fe, we do not mind the hard
+words much; and we have as good phrases to give them back: the Man of Sin
+and the Scarlet Woman will serve for examples. But it is better to be
+civil to each other all round. I doubt if a convert to the religion of
+Mahomet was ever made by calling a man a Christian dog. I doubt if a
+Hebrew ever became a good Christian if the baptismal rite was performed
+by spitting on his Jewish gabardine. I have often thought of the advance
+in comity and true charity shown in the title of my late honored friend
+James Freeman Clarke's book, "The Ten Great Religions." If the creeds of
+mankind try to understand each other before attempting mutual
+extermination, they will be sure to find a meaning in beliefs which are
+different from their own. The old Calvinistic spirit was almost savagely
+exclusive. While the author of the "Ten Great Religions" was growing up
+in Boston under the benignant, large-minded teachings of the Rev. James
+Freeman, the famous Dr. John M. Mason, at New York, was fiercely
+attacking the noble humanity of "The Universal Prayer." "In preaching,"
+says his biographer, "he once quoted Pope's lines as to God's being
+adored alike 'by saint, by savage, and by sage,' and pronounced it (in
+his deepest guttural) 'the most damnable lie.'"
+
+What could the Hebrew expect when a Christian preacher could use such
+language about a petition breathing the very soul of humanity? Happily,
+the true human spirit is encroaching on that arrogant and narrow-minded
+form of selfishness which called itself Christianity.
+
+The golden rule should govern us in dealing with those whom we call
+unbelievers, with heathen, and with all who do not accept our religious
+views. The Jews are with us as a perpetual lesson to teach us modesty
+and civility. The religion we profess is not self-evident. It did not
+convince the people to whom it was sent. We have no claim to take it for
+granted that we are all right, and they are all wrong. And, therefore,
+in the midst of all the triumphs of Christianity, it is well that the
+stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring
+cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in the
+Father's earthly house as well as in the heavenly one; that civilized
+humanity, longer in time and broader in space than any historical form of
+belief, is mightier than any one institution or organization it includes.
+
+Many years ago I argued with myself the proposition which my Hebrew
+correspondent has suggested. Recognizing the fact that I was born to a
+birthright of national and social prejudices against "the chosen
+people,"--chosen as the object of contumely and abuse by the rest of the
+world,--I pictured my own inherited feelings of aversion in all their
+intensity, and the strain of thought under the influence of which those
+prejudices gave way to a more human, a more truly Christian feeling of
+brotherhood. I must ask your indulgence while I quote a few verses from
+a poem of my own, printed long ago under the title "At the Pantomime."
+
+I was crowded between two children of Israel, and gave free inward
+expression to my feelings. All at once I happened to look more closely
+at one of my neighbors, and saw that the youth was the very ideal of the
+Son of Mary.
+
+ A fresh young cheek whose olive hue
+ The mantling blood shows faintly through;
+ Locks dark as midnight, that divide
+ And shade the neck on either side;
+ Soft, gentle, loving eyes that gleam
+ Clear as a starlit mountain stream;
+ So looked that other child of Shem,
+ The Maiden's Boy of Bethlehem!
+
+ --And thou couldst scorn the peerless blood
+ That flows unmingled from the Flood,
+ Thy scutcheon spotted with the stains
+ Of Norman thieves and pirate Danes!
+ The New World's foundling, in thy pride
+ Scowl on the Hebrew at thy side,
+ And lo! the very semblance there
+ The Lord of Glory deigned to wear!
+
+ I see that radiant image rise,
+ The flowing hair, the pitying eyes,
+ The faintly crimsoned cheek that shows
+ The blush of Sharon's opening rose,
+ Thy hands would clasp his hallowed feet
+ Whose brethren soil thy Christian seat,
+ Thy lips would press his garment's hem
+ That curl in wrathful scorn for them!
+
+ A sudden mist, a watery screen,
+ Dropped like a veil before the scene;
+ The shadow floated from my soul,
+ And to my lips a whisper stole:
+ --Thy prophets caught the Spirit's flame,
+ From thee the Son of Mary came,
+ With thee the Father deigned to dwell,
+ Peace be upon thee, Israel!
+
+It is not to be expected that intimate relations will be established
+between Jewish and Christian communities until both become so far
+rationalized and humanized that their differences are comparatively
+unimportant. But already there is an evident approximation in the
+extreme left of what is called liberal Christianity and the
+representatives of modern Judaism. The life of a man like the late Sir
+Moses Montefiore reads a lesson from the Old Testament which might well
+have been inspired by the noblest teachings of the Christian Gospels.
+
+ Delilah, and how she got her name.
+
+Est-elle bien gentille, cette petite? I said one day to Number Five, as
+our pretty Delilah put her arm between us with a bunch of those tender
+early radishes that so recall the rosy-fingered morning of Homer. The
+little hand which held the radishes would not have shamed Aurora. That
+hand has never known drudgery, I feel sure.
+
+When I spoke those French words our little Delilah gave a slight,
+seemingly involuntary start, and her cheeks grew of as bright a red as
+her radishes. Ah, said I to myself; does that young girl understand
+French? It may be worth while to be careful what one says before her.
+
+There is a mystery about this girl. She seems to know her place
+perfectly,--except, perhaps, when she burst out crying, the other day,
+which was against all the rules of table-maiden's etiquette,--and yet she
+looks as if she had been born to be waited on, and not to perform that
+humble service for others. We know that once in a while girls with
+education and well connected take it into their heads to go into service
+for a few weeks or months. Sometimes it is from economic motives,--to
+procure means for their education, or to help members of their families
+who need assistance. At any rate, they undertake the lighter menial
+duties of some household where they are not known, and, having
+stooped--if stooping it is to be considered--to lowly offices, no born
+and bred servants are more faithful to all their obligations. You must
+not suppose she was christened Delilah. Any of our ministers would
+hesitate to give such a heathen name to a Christian child.
+
+The way she came to get it was this: The Professor was going to give a
+lecture before an occasional audience, one evening. When he took his
+seat with the other Teacups, the American Annex whispered to the other
+Annex, "His hair wants cutting,--it looks like fury." "Quite so," said
+the English Annex. "I wish you would tell him so,--I do, awfully."
+"I'll fix it," said the American girl. So, after the teacups were
+emptied and the company had left the table, she went up to the Professor.
+"You read this lecture, don't you, Professor?" she said. "I do," he
+answered. "I should think that lock of hair which falls down over your
+forehead would trouble you," she said. "It does sometimes," replied the
+Professor. "Let our little maid trim it for you. You're equal to that,
+aren't you?" turning to the handmaiden. "I always used to cut my father's
+hair," she answered. She brought a pair of glittering shears, and before
+she would let the Professor go she had trimmed his hair and beard as they
+had not been dealt with for many a day. Everybody said the Professor
+looked ten years younger. After that our little handmaiden was always
+called Delilah, among the talking Teacups.
+
+The Mistress keeps a watchful eye on this young girl. I should not be
+surprised to find that she was carrying out some ideal, some fancy or
+whim,--possibly nothing more, but springing from some generous, youthful
+impulse. Perhaps she is working for that little sister at the Blind
+Asylum. Where did she learn French? She did certainly blush, and
+betrayed every sign of understanding the words spoken about her in that
+language. Sometimes she sings while at her work, and we have all been
+struck with the pure, musical character of her voice. It is just such a
+voice as ought to come from that round white throat. We made a discovery
+about it the other evening.
+
+The Mistress keeps a piano in her room, and we have sometimes had music
+in the evening. One of The Teacups, to whom I have slightly referred, is
+an accomplished pianist, and the two Annexes sing very sweetly
+together,--the American girl having a clear soprano voice, the English
+girl a mellow contralto. They had sung several tunes, when the Mistress
+rang for Avis,--for that is our Delilah's real name. She whispered to
+the young girl, who blushed and trembled. "Don't be frightened," said the
+Mistress encouragingly. "I have heard you singing 'Too Young for Love,'
+and I will get our pianist to play it. The young ladies both know it,
+and you must join in."
+
+The two voices, with the accompaniment, had hardly finished the first
+line when a pure, ringing, almost childlike voice joined the vocal duet.
+The sound of her own voice seemed to make her forget her fears, and she
+warbled as naturally and freely as any young bird of a May morning.
+Number Five came in while she was singing, and when she got through
+caught her in her arms and kissed her, as if she were her sister, and not
+Delilah, our table-maid. Number Five is apt to forget herself and those
+social differences to which some of us attach so much importance. This
+is the song in which the little maid took part:
+
+ TOO YOUNG FOR LOVE.
+
+ Too young for love?
+ Ah, say not so!
+ Tell reddening rose-buds not to blow!
+ Wait not for spring to pass away,
+ --Love's summer months begin with May!
+ Too young for love?
+ Ah, say not so!
+ Too young? Too young?
+ Ah, no! no! no!
+
+ Too young for love?
+ Ah, say not so,
+ While daisies bloom and tulips glow!
+ June soon will come with lengthened day
+ To practise all love learned in May.
+ Too young for love?
+ Ah, say not so!
+ Too young? Too young?
+ Ah, no! no! no!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+I often wish that our Number Seven could have known and corresponded with
+the author of "The Budget of Paradoxes." I think Mr. De Morgan would
+have found some of his vagaries and fancies not undeserving of a place in
+his wonderful collection of eccentricities, absurdities,
+ingenuities,--mental freaks of all sorts. But I think he would have now
+and then recognized a sound idea, a just comparison, a suggestive hint, a
+practical notion, which redeemed a page of extravagances and crotchety
+whims. I confess that I am often pleased with fancies of his, and should
+be willing to adopt them as my own. I think he has, in the midst of his
+erratic and tangled conceptions, some perfectly clear and consistent
+trains of thought.
+
+So when Number Seven spoke of sending us a paper, I welcomed the
+suggestion. I asked him whether he had any objection to my looking it
+over before he read it. My proposal rather pleased him, I thought, for,
+as was observed on a former occasion, he has in connection with a belief
+in himself another side,--a curious self-distrust. I have no question
+that he has an obscure sense of some mental deficiency. Thus you may
+expect from him first a dogma, and presently a doubt. If you fight his
+dogma, he will do battle for it stoutly; if you let him alone, he will
+very probably explain its extravagances, if it has any, and tame it into
+reasonable limits. Sometimes he is in one mood, sometimes in another.
+
+The first portion of what we listened to shows him at his best; in the
+latter part I am afraid you will think he gets a little wild.
+
+I proceed to lay before you the paper which Number Seven read to The
+Teacups. There was something very pleasing in the deference which was
+shown him. We all feel that there is a crack in the teacup, and are
+disposed to handle it carefully. I have left out a few things which he
+said, feeling that they might give offence to some of the company. There
+were sentences so involved and obscure that I was sure they would not be
+understood, if indeed he understood them himself. But there are other
+passages so entirely sane, and as it seems to me so just, that if any
+reader attributes them to me I shall not think myself wronged by the
+supposition. You must remember that Number Seven has had a fair
+education, that he has been a wide reader in many directions, and that he
+belongs to a family of remarkable intellectual gifts. So it was not
+surprising that he said some things which pleased the company, as in fact
+they did. The reader will not be startled to see a certain abruptness in
+the transition from one subject to another,--it is a characteristic of
+the squinting brain wherever you find it. Another curious mark rarely
+wanting in the subjects of mental strabismus is an irregular and often
+sprawling and deformed handwriting. Many and many a time I have said,
+after glancing at the back of a letter, "This comes from an insane
+asylum, or from an eccentric who might well be a candidate for such an
+institution." Number Seven's manuscript, which showed marks of my
+corrections here and there, furnished good examples of the chirography of
+persons with ill-mated cerebral hemispheres. But the earlier portions of
+the manuscript are of perfectly normal appearance.
+
+Conticuere omnes, as Virgil says. We were all silent as Number Seven
+began the reading of his paper.
+
+ Number Seven reads.
+
+I am the seventh son of a seventh son, as I suppose you all know. It is
+commonly believed that some extraordinary gifts belong to the fortunate
+individuals born under these exceptional conditions. However this may be,
+a peculiar virtue was supposed to dwell in me from my earliest years. My
+touch was believed to have the influence formerly attributed to that of
+the kings and queens of England. You may remember that the great Dr.
+Samuel Johnson, when a child, was carried to be touched by her Majesty
+Queen Anne for the "king's evil," as scrofula used to be called. Our
+honored friend The Dictator will tell you that the brother of one of his
+Andover schoolmates was taken to one of these gifted persons, who touched
+him, and hung a small bright silver coin, either a "fourpence ha'penny"
+or a "ninepence," about his neck, which, strange to say, after being worn
+a certain time, became tarnished, and finally black,--a proof of the
+poisonous matters which had become eliminated from the system and
+gathered upon the coin. I remember that at one time I used to carry
+fourpence ha'pennies with holes bored through them, which I furnished to
+children or to their mothers, under pledges of secrecy,--receiving a
+piece of silver of larger dimensions in exchange. I never felt quite
+sure about any extraordinary endowment being a part of my inheritance in
+virtue of my special conditions of birth. A phrenologist, who examined
+my head when I was a boy, said the two sides were unlike. My hatter's
+measurement told me the same thing; but in looking over more than a
+bushel of the small cardboard hat-patterns which give the exact shape of
+the head, I have found this is not uncommon. The phrenologist made all
+sorts of predictions of what I should be and do, which proved about as
+near the truth as those recorded in Miss Edith Thomas's charming little
+poem, "Augury," which some of us were reading the other day.
+
+I have never been through college, but I had a relative who was famous as
+a teacher of rhetoric in one of our universities, and especially for
+taking the nonsense out of sophomorical young fellows who could not say
+anything without rigging it up in showy and sounding phrases. I think I
+learned from him to express myself in good old-fashioned English, and
+without making as much fuss about it as our Fourth of July orators and
+political haranguers were in the habit of making.
+
+I read a good many stories during my boyhood, one of which left a lasting
+impression upon me, and which I have always commended to young people.
+It is too late, generally, to try to teach old people, yet one may profit
+by it at any period of life before the sight has become too dim to be of
+any use. The story I refer to is in "Evenings at Home," and is called
+"Eyes and No Eyes." I ought to have it by me, but it is constantly
+happening that the best old things get overlaid by the newest trash; and
+though I have never seen anything of the kind half so good, my table and
+shelves are cracking with the weight of involuntary accessions to my
+library.
+
+This is the story as I remember it: Two children walk out, and are
+questioned when they come home. One has found nothing to observe,
+nothing to admire, nothing to describe, nothing to ask questions about.
+The other has found everywhere objects of curiosity and interest. I
+advise you, if you are a child anywhere under forty-five, and do not yet
+wear glasses, to send at once for "Evenings at Home" and read that story.
+For myself, I am always grateful to the writer of it for calling my
+attention to common things. How many people have been waked to a quicker
+consciousness of life by Wordsworth's simple lines about the daffodils,
+and what he says of the thoughts suggested to him by "the meanest flower
+that blows"!
+
+I was driving with a friend, the other day, through a somewhat dreary
+stretch of country, where there seemed to be very little to attract
+notice or deserve remark. Still, the old spirit infused by "Eyes and No
+Eyes" was upon me, and I looked for something to fasten my thought upon,
+and treat as an artist treats a study for a picture. The first object to
+which my eyes were drawn was an old-fashioned well-sweep. It did not take
+much imaginative sensibility to be stirred by the sight of this most
+useful, most ancient, most picturesque, of domestic conveniences. I know
+something of the shadoof of Egypt,--the same arrangement by which the
+sacred waters of the Nile have been lifted, from the days of the Pharaohs
+to those of the Khedives. That long forefinger pointing to heaven was a
+symbol which spoke to the Puritan exile as it spoke of old to the
+enslaved Israelite. Was there ever any such water as that which we used
+to draw from the deep, cold well, in "the old oaken bucket"? What
+memories gather about the well in all ages! What love-matches have been
+made at its margin, from the times of Jacob and, Rachel downward! What
+fairy legends hover over it, what fearful mysteries has it hidden! The
+beautiful well-sweep! It is too rarely that we see it, and as it dies
+out and gives place to the odiously convenient pump, with the last patent
+on its cast-iron uninterestingness, does it not seem as if the farmyard
+aspect had lost half its attraction? So long as the dairy farm exists,
+doubtless there must be every facility for getting water in abundance;
+but the loss of the well-sweep cannot be made up to us even if our milk
+were diluted to twice its present attenuation.
+
+The well-sweep had served its turn, and my companion and I relapsed into
+silence. After a while we passed another farmyard, with nothing which
+seemed deserving of remark except the wreck of an old wagon.
+
+"Look," I said, "if you want to see one of the greatest of all the
+triumphs of human ingenuity, one of the most beautiful, as it is one of
+the most useful, of all the mechanisms which the intelligence of
+successive ages has called into being."
+
+"I see nothing," my companion answered, "but an old broken-down wagon.
+Why they leave such a piece of lumbering trash about their place, where
+people can see it as they pass, is more than I can account for."
+
+"And yet," said I, "there is one of the most extraordinary products of
+human genius and skill,--an object which combines the useful and the
+beautiful to an extent which hardly any simple form of mechanism can
+pretend to rival. Do you notice how, while everything else has gone to
+smash, that wheel remains sound and fit for service? Look at it merely
+for its beauty.
+
+"See the perfect circles, the outer and the inner. A circle is in itself
+a consummate wonder of geometrical symmetry. It is the line in which the
+omnipotent energy delights to move. There is no fault in it to be
+amended. The first drawn circle and the last both embody the same
+complete fulfillment of a perfect design. Then look at the rays which
+pass from the inner to the outer circle. How beautifully they bring the
+greater and lesser circles into connection with each other! The flowers
+know that secret,--the marguerite in the meadow displays it as clearly as
+the great sun in heaven. How beautiful is this flower of wood and iron,
+which we were ready to pass by without wasting a look upon it! But its
+beauty is only the beginning of its wonderful claim upon us for our
+admiration. Look at that field of flowering grass, the triticum
+vulgare,--see how its waves follow the breeze in satiny alternations of
+light and shadow. You admire it for its lovely aspect; but when you
+remember that this flowering grass is wheat, the finest food of the
+highest human races, it gains a dignity, a glory, that its beauty alone
+could not give it.
+
+"Now look at that exquisite structure lying neglected and disgraced, but
+essentially unchanged in its perfection, before you. That slight and
+delicate-looking fabric has stood such a trial as hardly any slender
+contrivance, excepting always the valves of the heart, was ever subjected
+to. It has rattled for years over the cobble-stones of a rough city
+pavement. It has climbed over all the accidental obstructions it met in
+the highway, and dropped into all the holes and deep ruts that made the
+heavy farmer sitting over it use his Sunday vocabulary in a week-day form
+of speech. At one time or another, almost every part of that old wagon
+has given way. It has had two new pairs of shafts. Twice the axle has
+broken off close to the hub, or nave. The seat broke when Zekle and
+Huldy were having what they called 'a ride' together. The front was
+kicked in by a vicious mare. The springs gave way and the floor bumped
+on the axle. Every portion of the wagon became a prey of its special
+accident, except that most fragile looking of all its parts, the wheel.
+Who can help admiring the exact distribution of the power of resistance
+at the least possible expenditure of material which is manifested in this
+wondrous triumph of human genius and skill? The spokes are planted in
+the solid hub as strongly as the jaw-teeth of a lion in their deep-sunken
+sockets. Each spoke has its own territory in the circumference, for
+which it is responsible. According to the load the vehicle is expected
+to carry, they are few or many, stout or slender, but they share their
+joint labor with absolute justice,--not one does more, not one does less,
+than its just proportion. The outer end of the spokes is received into
+the deep mortise of the wooden fellies, and the structure appears to be
+complete. But how long would it take to turn that circle into a polygon,
+unless some mighty counteracting force should prevent it? See the iron
+tire brought hot from the furnace and laid around the smoking
+circumference. Once in place, the workman cools the hot iron; and as it
+shrinks with a force that seems like a hand-grasp of the Omnipotent, it
+clasps the fitted fragments of the structure, and compresses them into a
+single inseparable whole.
+
+"Was it not worth our while to stop a moment before passing that old
+broken wagon, and see whether we could not find as much in it as Swift
+found in his 'Meditations on a Broomstick'? I have been laughed at for
+making so much of such a common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's
+court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who
+dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari
+is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor,
+who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a
+cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything worth reverencing
+or honoring."
+
+After calling my companion's attention to the wheel, and discoursing upon
+it until I thought he was getting sleepy, we jogged along until we came
+to a running stream. It was crossed by a stone bridge of a single arch.
+There are very few stone arches over the streams in New England country
+towns, and I always delighted in this one. It was built in the last
+century, amidst the doubting predictions of staring rustics, and stands
+to-day as strong as ever, and seemingly good for centuries to come.
+
+"See there!" said I,--"there is another of my 'Eyes and No Eyes' subjects
+to meditate upon. Next to the wheel, the arch is the noblest of those
+elementary mechanical composites, corresponding to the proximate
+principles of chemistry. The beauty of the arch consists first in its
+curve, commonly a part of the circle, of the perfection of which I have
+spoken. But the mind derives another distinct pleasure from the
+admirable manner in which the several parts, each different from all the
+others, contribute to a single harmonious effect. It is a typical
+example of the piu nel uno. An arch cut out or a single stone would not
+be so beautiful as one of which each individual stone was shaped for its
+exact position. Its completion by the locking of the keystone is a
+delight to witness and to contemplate. And how the arch endures, when
+its lateral thrust is met by solid masses of resistance! In one of the
+great temples of Baalbec a keystone has slipped, but how rare is that
+occurrence! One will hardly find another such example among all the
+ruins of antiquity. Yes, I never get tired of arches. They are noble
+when shaped of solid marble blocks, each carefully beveled for its
+position. They are beautiful when constructed with the large thin tiles
+the Romans were so fond of using. I noticed some arches built in this
+way in the wall of one of the grand houses just going up on the bank of
+the river. They were over the capstones of the windows,--to take off the
+pressure from them, no doubt, for now and then a capstone will crack
+under the weight of the superincumbent mass. How close they fit, and how
+striking the effect of their long radiations!"
+
+The company listened very well up to this point. When he began the
+strain of thoughts which follows, a curious look went round The Teacups.
+
+What a strange underground life is that which is led by the organisms we
+call trees! These great fluttering masses of leaves, stems, boughs,
+trunks, are not the real trees. They live underground, and what we see
+are nothing more nor less than their tails.
+
+The Mistress dropped her teaspoon. Number Five looked at the Doctor,
+whose face was very still and sober. The two Annexes giggled, or came
+very near it.
+
+Yes, a tree is an underground creature, with its tail in the air. All its
+intelligence is in its roots. All the senses it has are in its roots.
+Think what sagacity it shows in its search after food and drink! Somehow
+or other, the rootlets, which are its tentacles, find out that there is a
+brook at a moderate distance from the trunk of the tree, and they make
+for it with all their might. They find every crack in the rocks where
+there are a few grains of the nourishing substance they care for, and
+insinuate themselves into its deepest recesses. When spring and summer
+come, they let their tails grow, and delight in whisking them about in
+the wind, or letting them be whisked about by it; for these tails are
+poor passive things, with very little will of their own, and bend in
+whatever direction the wind chooses to make them. The leaves make a deal
+of noise whispering. I have sometimes thought I could understand them,
+as they talk with each other, and that they seemed to think they made the
+wind as they wagged forward and back. Remember what I say. The next
+time you see a tree waving in the wind, recollect that it is the tail of
+a great underground, many-armed, polypus-like creature, which is as proud
+of its caudal appendage, especially in summer-time, as a peacock of his
+gorgeous expanse of plumage.
+
+Do you think there is anything so very odd about this idea? Once get it
+well into your heads, and you will find it renders the landscape
+wonderfully interesting. There are as many kinds of tree-tails as there
+are of tails to dogs and other quadrupeds. Study them as Daddy Gilpin
+studied them in his "Forest Scenery," but don't forget that they are only
+the appendage of the underground vegetable polypus, the true organism to
+which they belong.
+
+He paused at this point, and we all drew long breaths, wondering what was
+coming next. There was no denying it, the "cracked Teacup" was clinking
+a little false,--so it seemed to the company. Yet, after all, the fancy
+was not delirious,--the mind could follow it well enough; let him go on.
+
+What do you say to this? You have heard all sorts of things said in
+prose and verse about Niagara. Ask our young Doctor there what it
+reminds him of. Is n't it a giant putting his tongue out? How can you
+fail to see the resemblance? The continent is a great giant, and the
+northern half holds the head and shoulders. You can count the pulse of
+the giant wherever the tide runs up a creek; but if you want to look at
+the giant's tongue, you must go to Niagara. If there were such a thing
+as a cosmic physician, I believe he could tell the state of the country's
+health, and the prospects of the mortality for the coming season, by
+careful inspection of the great tongue, which Niagara is putting out for
+him, and has been showing to mankind ever since the first flint-shapers
+chipped their arrow-heads. You don't think the idea adds to the
+sublimity and associations of the cataract? I am sorry for that, but I
+can't help the suggestion. It is just as manifestly a tongue put out for
+inspection as if it had Nature's own label to that effect hung over it.
+I don't know whether you can see these things as clearly as I do. There
+are some people that never see anything, if it is as plain as a hole in a
+grindstone, until it is pointed out to them; and some that can't see it
+then, and won't believe there is any hole till they've poked their finger
+through it. I've got a great many things to thank God for, but perhaps
+most of all that I can find something to admire, to wonder at, to set my
+fancy going, and to wind up my enthusiasm pretty much everywhere.
+
+Look here! There are crowds of people whirled through our streets on
+these new-fashioned cars, with their witch-broomsticks overhead,--if they
+don't come from Salem, they ought to,--and not more than one in a dozen
+of these fish-eyed bipeds thinks or cares a nickel's worth about the
+miracle which is wrought for their convenience. They know that without
+hands or feet, without horses, without steam, so far as they can see,
+they are transported from place to place, and that there is nothing to
+account for it except the witch-broomstick and the iron or copper cobweb
+which they see stretched above them. What do they know or care about
+this last revelation of the omnipresent spirit of the material universe?
+We ought to go down on our knees when one of these mighty caravans, car
+after car, spins by us, under the mystic impulse which seems to know not
+whether its train is loaded or empty. We are used to force in the
+muscles of horses, in the expansive potency of steam, but here we have
+force stripped stark naked,--nothing but a filament to cover its
+nudity,--and yet showing its might in efforts that would task the
+working-beam of a ponderous steam-engine. I am thankful that in an age
+of cynicism I have not lost my reverence. Perhaps you would wonder to
+see how some very common sights impress me. I always take off my hat if
+I stop to speak to a stone-cutter at his work. "Why?" do you ask me?
+Because I know that his is the only labor that is likely to endure. A
+score of centuries has not effaced the marks of the Greek's or the
+Roman's chisel on his block of marble. And now, before this new
+manifestation of that form of cosmic vitality which we call electricity,
+I feel like taking the posture of the peasants listening to the Angelus.
+How near the mystic effluence of mechanical energy brings us to the
+divine source of all power and motion! In the old mythology, the right
+hand of Jove held and sent forth the lightning. So, in the record of the
+Hebrew prophets, did the right hand of Jehovah cast forth and direct it.
+Was Nahum thinking of our far-off time when he wrote, "The chariots shall
+rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad
+ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings"?
+
+Number Seven had finished reading his paper. Two bright spots in his
+cheeks showed that he had felt a good deal in writing it, and the flush
+returned as he listened to his own thoughts. Poor old fellow! The
+"cracked Teacup" of our younger wits,--not yet come to their full human
+sensibilities,--the "crank" of vulgar tongues, the eccentric, the seventh
+son of a seventh son, too often made the butt of thoughtless pleasantry,
+was, after all, a fellow-creature, with flesh and blood like the rest of
+us. The wild freaks of his fancy did not hurt us, nor did they prevent
+him from seeing many things justly, and perhaps sometimes more vividly
+and acutely than if he were as sound as the dullest of us.
+
+The teaspoons tinkled loudly all round the table, as he finished reading.
+The Mistress caught her breath. I was afraid she was going to sob, but
+she took it out in vigorous stirring of her tea. Will you believe that I
+saw Number Five, with a sweet, approving smile on her face all the time,
+brush her cheek with her hand-kerchief? There must have been a tear
+stealing from beneath its eyelid. I hope Number Seven saw it. He is one
+of the two men at our table who most need the tender looks and tones of a
+woman. The Professor and I are hors de combat; the Counsellor is busy
+with his cases and his ambitions; the Doctor is probably in love with a
+microscope, and flirting with pathological specimens; but Number Seven
+and the Tutor are, I fear, both suffering from that worst of all famines,
+heart-hunger.
+
+Do you remember that Number Seven said he never wrote a line of "poetry"
+in his life, except once when he was suffering from temporary weakness of
+body and mind? That is because he is a poet. If he had not been one, he
+would very certainly have taken to tinkling rhymes. What should you
+think of the probable musical genius of a young man who was particularly
+fond of jingling a set of sleigh-bells? Should you expect him to turn
+out a Mozart or a Beethoven? Now, I think I recognize the poetical
+instinct in Number Seven, however imperfect may be its expression, and
+however he may be run away with at times by fantastic notions that come
+into his head. If fate had allotted him a helpful companion in the shape
+of a loving and intelligent wife, he might have been half cured of his
+eccentricities, and we should not have had to say, in speaking of him,
+"Poor fellow!" But since this cannot be, I am pleased that he should
+have been so kindly treated on the occasion of the reading of his paper.
+If he saw Number Five's tear, he will certainly fall in love with her.
+No matter if he does Number Five is a kind of Circe who does not turn the
+victims of her enchantment into swine, but into lambs. I want to see
+Number Seven one of her little flock. I say "little." I suspect it is
+larger than most of us know. Anyhow, she can spare him sympathy and
+kindness and encouragement enough to keep him contented with himself and
+with her, and never miss the pulses of her loving life she lends him. It
+seems to be the errand of some women to give many people as much
+happiness as they have any right to in this world. If they concentrated
+their affection on one, they would give him more than any mortal could
+claim as his share. I saw Number Five watering her flowers, the other
+day. The watering-pot had one of those perforated heads, through which
+the water runs in many small streams. Every plant got its share: the
+proudest lily bent beneath the gentle shower; the lowliest daisy held its
+little face up for baptism. All were refreshed, none was flooded.
+Presently she took the perforated head, or "rose," from the neck of the
+watering-pot, and the full stream poured out in a round, solid column.
+It was almost too much for the poor geranium on which it fell, and it
+looked at one minute as if the roots would be laid bare, and perhaps the
+whole plant be washed out of the soil in which it was planted. What if
+Number Five should take off the "rose" that sprinkles her affections on
+so many, and pour them all on one? Can that ever be? If it can, life is
+worth living for him on whom her love may be lavished.
+
+One of my neighbors, a thorough American, is much concerned about the
+growth of what he calls the "hard-handed aristocracy." He tells the
+following story:--
+
+"I was putting up a fence about my yard, and employed a man of whom I
+knew something,--that he was industrious, temperate, and that he had a
+wife and children to support,--a worthy man, a native New Englander. I
+engaged him, I say, to dig some post-holes. My employee bought a new
+spade and scoop on purpose, and came to my place at the appointed time,
+and began digging. While he was at work, two men came over from a
+drinking-saloon, to which my residence is nearer than I could desire.
+One of them I had known as Mike Fagan, the other as Hans Schleimer. They
+looked at Hiram, my New Hampshire man, in a contemptuous and threatening
+way for a minute or so, when Fagan addressed him:
+
+"'And how much does the man pay yez by the hour?'
+
+"'The gentleman does n't pay me by the hour,' said Hiram.
+
+"'How mosh does he bay you by der veeks?' said Hans.
+
+"'I don' know as that's any of your business,' answered Hiram.
+
+"'Faith, we'll make it our business,' said Mike Fagan. 'We're Knoights
+of Labor, we'd have yez to know, and ye can't make yer bargains jist as
+ye loikes. We manes to know how mony hours ye worrks, and how much ye
+gets for it.'
+
+"'Knights of Labor!' said I. 'Why, that is a kind of title of nobility,
+is n't it? I thought the laws of our country did n't allow titles of
+that kind. But if you have a right to be called knights, I suppose I
+ought to address you as such. Sir Michael, I congratulate you on the
+dignity you have attained. I hope Lady Fagan is getting on well with my
+shirts. Sir Hans, I pay my respects to your title. I trust that Lady
+Schleixner has got through that little difficulty between her ladyship
+and yourself in which the police court thought it necessary to
+intervene.'
+
+"The two men looked at me. I weigh about a hundred and eighty pounds,
+and am well put together. Hiram was noted in his village as a
+'rahstler.' But my face is rather pallid and peaked, and Hiram had
+something of the greenhorn look. The two men, who had been drinking,
+hardly knew what ground to take. They rather liked the sound of Sir
+Michael and, Sir Hans. They did not know very well what to make of their
+wives as 'ladies.' They looked doubtful whether to take what had been
+said as a casus belli or not, but they wanted a pretext of some kind or
+other. Presently one of them saw a label on the scoop, or longhandled,
+spoon-like shovel, with which Hiram had been working.
+
+"'Arrah, be jabers!' exclaimed Mike Fagan, 'but has n't he been a-tradin'
+wid Brown, the hardware fellah, that we boycotted! Grab it, Hans, and
+we'll carry it off and show it to the brotherhood.'
+
+"The men made a move toward the implement.
+
+"'You let that are scoop-shovel alone,' said Hiram.
+
+"I stepped to his side. The Knights were combative, as their noble
+predecessors with the same title always were, and it was necessary to
+come to a voie de fait. My straight blow from the shoulder did for Sir
+Michael. Hiram treated Sir Hans to what is technically known as a
+cross-buttock.
+
+"'Naow, Dutchman,' said Hiram, 'if you don't want to be planted in that
+are post-hole, y'd better take y'rself out o' this here piece of private
+property. "Dangerous passin," as the sign-posts say, abaout these
+times.'
+
+"Sir Michael went down half stunned by my expressive gesture; Sir Hans
+did not know whether his hip was out of joint or he had got a bad sprain;
+but they were both out of condition for further hostilities. Perhaps it
+was hardly fair to take advantage of their misfortunes to inflict a
+discourse upon them, but they had brought it on themselves, and we each
+of us gave them a piece of our mind.
+
+"'I tell you what it is,' said Hiram, 'I'm a free and independent
+American citizen, and I an't a-gon' to hev no man tyrannize over me, if
+he doos call himself by one o' them noblemen's titles. Ef I can't work
+jes' as I choose, fur folks that wants me to work fur 'em and that I want
+to work fur, I might jes' as well go to Sibery and done with it. My
+gran'f'ther fit in Bunker Hill battle. I guess if our folks in them days
+did n't care no great abaout Lord Percy and Sir William Haowe, we an't
+a-gon' to be scart by Sir Michael Fagan and Sir Hans What 's-his-name,
+nor no other fellahs that undertakes to be noblemen, and tells us common
+folks what we shall dew an' what we sha'n't. No, sir!'
+
+"I took the opportunity to explain to Sir Michael and Sir Hans what it
+was our fathers fought for, and what is the meaning of liberty. If these
+noblemen did not like the country, they could go elsewhere. If they did
+n't like the laws, they had the ballot-box, and could choose new
+legislators. But as long as the laws existed they must obey them. I
+could not admit that, because they called themselves by the titles the
+Old World nobility thought so much of, they had a right to interfere in
+the agreements I entered into with my neighbor. I told Sir Michael that
+if he would go home and help Lady Fagan to saw and split the wood for her
+fire, he would be better employed than in meddling with my domestic
+arrangements. I advised Sir Hans to ask Lady Schleimer for her bottle of
+spirits to use as an embrocation for his lame hip. And so my two
+visitors with the aristocratic titles staggered off, and left us plain,
+untitled citizens, Hiram and myself, to set our posts, and consider the
+question whether we lived in a free country or under the authority of a
+self-constituted order of quasi-nobility."
+
+It is a very curious fact that, with all our boasted "free and equal"
+superiority over the communities of the Old World, our people have the
+most enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction. Sir Michael
+and Sir Hans belong to one of the most extended of the aristocratic
+orders. But we have also "Knights and Ladies of Honor," and, what is
+still grander, "Royal Conclave of Knights and Ladies," "Royal Arcanum,"
+and "Royal Society of Good Fellows," "Supreme Council," "Imperial
+Court," "Grand Protector," and "Grand Dictator," and so on. Nothing
+less than "Grand" and "Supreme" is good enough for the dignitaries of our
+associations of citizens. Where does all this ambition for names without
+realities come from? Because a Knight of the Garter wears a golden star,
+why does the worthy cordwainer, who mends the shoes of his
+fellow-citizens, want to wear a tin star, and take a name that had a
+meaning as used by the representatives of ancient families, or the men
+who had made themselves illustrious by their achievements?
+
+It appears to be a peculiarly American weakness. The French republicans
+of the earlier period thought the term citizen was good enough for
+anybody. At a later period, "Roi Citoyen"--the citizen king was a common
+title given to Louis Philippe. But nothing is too grand for the
+American, in the way of titles. The proudest of them all signify
+absolutely nothing. They do not stand for ability, for public service,
+for social importance, for large possessions; but, on the contrary, are
+oftenest found in connection with personalities to which they are
+supremely inapplicable. We can hardly afford to quarrel with a national
+habit which, if lightly handled, may involve us in serious domestic
+difficulties. The "Right Worshipful" functionary whose equipage stops at
+my back gate, and whose services are indispensable to the health and
+comfort of my household, is a dignitary whom I must not offend. I must
+speak with proper deference to the lady who is scrubbing my floors, when
+I remember that her husband, who saws my wood, carries a string of
+high-sounding titles which would satisfy a Spanish nobleman.
+
+After all, every people must have its own forms of ostentation, pretence,
+and vulgarity. The ancient Romans had theirs, the English and the French
+have theirs as well,--why should not we Americans have ours? Educated
+and refined persons must recognize frequent internal conflicts between
+the "Homo sum" of Terence and the "Odi profanum vulgus" of Horace. The
+nobler sentiment should be that of every true American, and it is in that
+direction that our best civilization is constantly tending.
+
+We were waited on by a new girl, the other evening. Our pretty maiden
+had left us for a visit to some relative,--so the Mistress said. I do
+sincerely hope she will soon come back, for we all like to see her
+flitting round the table.
+
+I don't know what to make of it. I had it all laid out in my mind. With
+such a company there must be a love-story. Perhaps there will be, but
+there may be new combinations of the elements which are to make it up,
+and here is a bud among the full-blown flowers to which I must devote a
+little space.
+
+ Delilah.
+
+I must call her by the name we gave her after she had trimmed the Samson
+locks of our Professor. Delilah is a puzzle to most of us. A pretty
+creature, dangerously pretty to be in a station not guarded by all the
+protective arrangements which surround the maidens of a higher social
+order. It takes a strong cage to keep in a tiger or a grizzly bear, but
+what iron bars, what barbed wires, can keep out the smooth and subtle
+enemy that finds out the cage where beauty is imprisoned? Our young
+Doctor is evidently attracted by the charming maiden who serves him and
+us so modestly and so gracefully. Fortunately, the Mistress never loses
+sight of her. If she were her own daughter, she could not be more
+watchful of all her movements. And yet I do not believe that Delilah
+needs all this overlooking. If I am not mistaken, she knows how to take
+care of herself, and could be trusted anywhere, in any company, without a
+duenna. She has a history,--I feel sure of it. She has been trained and
+taught as young persons of higher position in life are brought up, and
+does not belong in the humble station in which we find her. But inasmuch
+as the Mistress says nothing about her antecedents, we do not like to be
+too inquisitive. The two Annexes are, it is plain, very curious about
+her. I cannot wonder. They are both good-looking girls, but Delilah is
+prettier than either of them. My sight is not so good as it was, but I
+can see the way in which the eyes of the young people follow each other
+about plainly enough to set me thinking as to what is going on in the
+thinking marrow behind them. The young Doctor's follow Delilah as she
+glides round the table,--they look into hers whenever they get a chance;
+but the girl's never betray any consciousness of it, so far as I can see.
+There is no mistaking the interest with which the two, Annexes watch all
+this. Why shouldn't they, I should like to know? The Doctor is a bright
+young fellow, and wants nothing but a bald spot and a wife to find
+himself in a comfortable family practice. One of the Annexes, as I have
+said, has had thoughts of becoming a doctress. I don't think the Doctor
+would want his wife to practise medicine, for reasons which I will not
+stop to mention. Such a partnership sometimes works wonderfully well, as
+in one well-known instance where husband and wife are both eminent in the
+profession; but our young Doctor has said to me that he had rather see
+his wife,--if he ever should have one,--at the piano than at the
+dissecting-table. Of course the Annexes know nothing about this, and
+they may think, as he professed himself willing to lecture on medicine to
+women, he might like to take one of his pupils as a helpmeet.
+
+If it were not for our Delilah's humble position, I don't see why she
+would not be a good match for any young man. But then it is so hard to
+take a young woman from so very lowly a condition as that of a "waitress"
+that it would require a deal of courage to venture on such a step. If we
+could only find out that she is a princess in disguise, so to
+speak,--that is, a young person of presentable connections as well as
+pleasing looks and manners; that she has had an education of some kind,
+as we suspected when she blushed on hearing herself spoken of as a
+"gentille petite," why, then everything would be all right, the young
+Doctor would have plain sailing,--that is, if he is in love with her, and
+if she fancies him,--and I should find my love-story,--the one I
+expected, but not between the parties I had thought would be mating with
+each other.
+
+Dear little Delilah! Lily of the valley, growing in the shade
+now,--perhaps better there until her petals drop; and yet if she is all I
+often fancy she is, how her youthful presence would illuminate and
+sweeten a household! There is not one of us who does not feel interested
+in her,--not one of us who would not be delighted at some Cinderella
+transformation which would show her in the setting Nature meant for her
+favorite.
+
+The fancy of Number Seven about the witches' broomsticks suggested to one
+of us the following poem:
+
+ THE BROOMSTICK TRAIN;
+ OR, THE RETURN OF THE WITCHES.
+
+ Lookout! Look out, boys! Clear the track!
+ The witches are here! They've all come back!
+ They hanged them high,--No use! No use!
+ What cares a witch for a hangman's noose?
+ They buried them deep, but they would n't lie, still,
+ For cats and witches are hard to kill;
+ They swore they shouldn't and wouldn't die,
+ Books said they did, but they lie! they lie!
+
+ --A couple of hundred years, or so,
+ They had knocked about in the world below,
+ When an Essex Deacon dropped in to call,
+ And a homesick feeling seized them all;
+ For he came from a place they knew full well,
+ And many a tale he had to tell.
+ They long to visit the haunts of men,
+ To see the old dwellings they knew again,
+ And ride on their broomsticks all around
+ Their wide domain of unhallowed ground.
+
+ In Essex county there's many a roof
+ Well known to him of the cloven hoof;
+ The small square windows are full in view
+ Which the midnight hags went sailing through,
+ On their well-trained broomsticks mounted high,
+ Seen like shadows against the sky;
+ Crossing the track of owls and bats,
+ Hugging before them their coal-black cats.
+
+ Well did they know, those gray old wives,
+ The sights we see in our daily drives
+ Shimmer of lake and shine of sea,
+ Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree,
+ (It wasn't then as we see it now,
+ With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;)
+ Dusky nooks in the Essex woods,
+ Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes,
+ Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake
+ Glide through his forests of fern and brake;
+ Ipswich River; its old stone bridge;
+ Far off Andover's Indian Ridge,
+ And many a scene where history tells
+ Some shadow of bygone terror dwells,
+ Of "Norman's Woe" with its tale of dread,
+ Of the Screeching Woman of Marblehead,
+ (The fearful story that turns men pale
+ Don't bid me tell it,--my speech would fail.)
+
+ Who would not, will not, if he can,
+ Bathe in the breezes of fair Cape Ann,
+ Rest in the bowers her bays enfold,
+ Loved by the sachems and squaws of old?
+ Home where the white magnolias bloom,
+ Sweet with the bayberry's chaste perfume,
+ Hugged by the woods and kissed by the seal
+ Where is the Eden like to thee?
+
+ For that "couple of hundred years, or so,"
+ There had been no peace in the world below;
+ The witches still grumbling, "It is n't fair;
+ Come, give us a taste of the upper air!
+ We've had enough of your sulphur springs,
+ And the evil odor that round them clings;
+ We long for a drink that is cool and nice,
+ Great buckets of water with Wenham ice;
+ We've served you well up-stairs, you know;
+ You're a good old-fellow--come, let us go!"
+
+ I don't feel sure of his being good,
+ But he happened to be in a pleasant mood,
+ As fiends with their skins full sometimes are,
+ (He'd been drinking with "roughs" at a Boston bar.)
+ So what does he do but up and shout
+ To a graybeard turnkey, "Let 'em out!"
+
+ To mind his orders was all he knew;
+ The gates swung open, and out they flew.
+ "Where are our broomsticks?" the beldams cried.
+ "Here are your broomsticks," an imp replied.
+ "They've been in--the place you know--so long
+ They smell of brimstone uncommon strong;
+ But they've gained by being left alone,
+ Just look, and you'll see how tall they've grown."
+ --And where is my cat? "a vixen squalled.
+ Yes, where are our cats?" the witches bawled,
+ And began to call them all by name:
+ As fast as they called the cats, they came
+ There was bob-tailed Tommy and long-tailed Tim,
+ And wall-eyed Jacky and green-eyed Jim,
+ And splay-foot Benny and slim-legged Beau,
+ And Skinny and Squally, and Jerry and Joe,
+
+ And many another that came at call,
+ It would take too long to count them all.
+ All black,--one could hardly tell which was which,
+ But every cat knew his own old witch;
+ And she knew hers as hers knew her,
+ Ah, did n't they curl their tails and purr!
+
+ No sooner the withered hags were free
+ Than out they swarmed for a midnight spree;
+ I could n't tell all they did in rhymes,
+ But the Essex people had dreadful times.
+ The Swampscott fishermen still relate
+ How a strange sea-monster stole thair bait;
+ How their nets were tangled in loops and knots,
+ And they found dead crabs in their lobster-pots.
+ Poor Danvers grieved for her blasted crops,
+ And Wilmington mourned over mildewed hops.
+ A blight played havoc with Beverly beans,
+ It was all the work of those hateful queans!
+ A dreadful panic began at "Pride's,"
+ Where the witches stopped in their midnight rides,
+ And there rose strange rumors and vague alarms
+ 'Mid the peaceful dwellers at Beverly Farms.
+
+ Now when the Boss of the Beldams found
+ That without his leave they were ramping round,
+ He called,--they could hear him twenty miles,
+ From Chelsea beach to the Misery Isles;
+ The deafest old granny knew his tone
+ Without the trick of the telephone.
+ "Come here, you witches! Come here!" says he,
+ --"At your games of old, without asking me
+ I'll give you a little job to do
+ That will keep you stirring, you godless crew!"
+
+ They came, of course, at their master's call,
+ The witches, the broomsticks, the cats, and all;
+ He led the hags to a railway train
+ The horses were trying to drag in vain.
+ "Now, then," says he, "you've had your fun,
+ And here are the cars you've got to run.
+
+ "The driver may just unhitch his team,
+ We don't want horses, we don't want steam;
+ You may keep your old black cats to hug,
+ But the loaded train you've got to lug."
+
+ Since then on many a car you'll see
+ A broomstick plain as plain can be;
+ On every stick there's a witch astride,
+ The string you see to her leg is tied.
+ She will do a mischief if she can,
+ But the string is held by a careful man,
+ And whenever the evil-minded witch
+ Would cut come caper, he gives a twitch.
+ As for the hag, you can't see her,
+ But hark! you can hear her black cat's purr,
+ And now and then, as a car goes by,
+ You may catch a gleam from her wicked eye.
+
+ Often you've looked on a rushing train,
+ But just what moved it was not so plain.
+ It couldn't be those wires above,
+ For they could neither pull nor shove;
+ Where was the motor that made it go
+ You couldn't guess, but now you know.
+
+ Remember my rhymes when you ride again
+ On the rattling rail by the broomstick train!
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+In my last report of our talks over the teacups I had something to say of
+the fondness of our people for titles. Where did the anti-republican,
+anti-democratic passion for swelling names come from, and how long has it
+been naturalized among us?
+
+A striking instance of it occurred at about the end of the last century.
+It was at that time there appeared among us one of the most original and
+singular personages to whom America has given birth. Many of our
+company,--many of my readers,--all well acquainted with his name, and not
+wholly ignorant of his history. They will not object to my giving some
+particulars relating to him, which, if not new to them, will be new to
+others into whose hands these pages may fall.
+
+Timothy Dexter, the first claimant of a title of nobility among the
+people of the United States of America, was born in the town of Malden,
+near Boston. He served an apprenticeship as a leather-dresser, saved
+some money, got some more with his wife, began trading and speculating,
+and became at last rich, for those days. His most famous business
+enterprise was that of sending an invoice of warming-pans to the West
+Indies. A few tons of ice would have seemed to promise a better return;
+but in point of fact, he tells us, the warming-pans were found useful in
+the manufacture of sugar, and brought him in a handsome profit. His
+ambition rose with his fortune. He purchased a large and stately house
+in Newburyport, and proceeded to embellish and furnish it according to
+the dictates of his taste and fancy. In the grounds about his house, he
+caused to be erected between forty and fifty wooden statues of great men
+and allegorical figures, together with four lions and one lamb. Among
+these images were two statues of Dexter himself, one of which held a
+label with a characteristic inscription. His house was ornamented with
+minarets, adorned with golden balls, and surmounted by a large gilt
+eagle. He equipped it with costly furniture, with paintings, and a
+library. He went so far as to procure the services of a poet laureate,
+whose business it seems to have been to sing his praises. Surrounded with
+splendors like these, the plain title of "Mr." Dexter would have been
+infinitely too mean and common. He therefore boldly took the step of
+self-ennobling, and gave himself forth--as he said, obeying "the voice of
+the people at large"--as "Lord Timothy Dexter," by which appellation he
+has ever since been known to the American public.
+
+If to be the pioneer in the introduction of Old World titles into
+republican America can confer a claim to be remembered by posterity, Lord
+Timothy Dexter has a right to historic immortality. If the true American
+spirit shows itself most clearly in boundless self-assertion, Timothy
+Dexter is the great original American egotist. If to throw off the
+shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry rules and examples of
+grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special province and the chartered
+privilege of the American writer, Timothy Dexter is the founder of a new
+school, which tramples under foot the conventionalities that hampered and
+subjugated the faculties of the poets, the dramatists, the historians,
+essayists, story-tellers, orators, of the worn-out races which have
+preceded the great American people.
+
+The material traces of the first American nobleman's existence have
+nearly disappeared. The house is still standing, but the statues, the
+minarets, the arches, and the memory of the great Lord Timothy Dexter
+live chiefly in tradition, and in the work which he bequeathed to
+posterity, and of which I shall say a few words. It is unquestionably a
+thoroughly original production, and I fear that some readers may think I
+am trifling with them when I am quoting it literally. I am going to make
+a strong claim for Lord Timothy as against other candidates for a certain
+elevated position.
+
+Thomas Jefferson is commonly recognized as the first to proclaim before
+the world the political independence of America. It is not so generally
+agreed upon as to who was the first to announce the literary emancipation
+of our country.
+
+One of Mr. Emerson's biographers has claimed that his Phi Beta Kappa
+Oration was our Declaration of Literary Independence. But Mr. Emerson
+did not cut himself loose from all the traditions of Old World
+scholarship. He spelled his words correctly, he constructed his
+sentences grammatically. He adhered to the slavish rules of propriety,
+and observed the reticences which a traditional delicacy has considered
+inviolable in decent society, European and Oriental alike. When he wrote
+poetry, he commonly selected subjects which seemed adapted to poetical
+treatment,--apparently thinking that all things were not equally
+calculated to inspire the true poet's genius. Once, indeed, he ventured
+to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," but he chiefly
+restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would
+approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment. He was not
+always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his
+verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have
+been accepted as regulating both. In short, with all his originality, he
+worked in Old World harness, and cannot be considered as the creator of a
+truly American, self-governed, self-centred, absolutely independent style
+of thinking and writing, knowing no law but its own sovereign will and
+pleasure.
+
+A stronger claim might be urged for Mr. Whitman. He takes into his
+hospitable vocabulary words which no English dictionary recognizes as
+belonging to the language,--words which will be looked for in vain
+outside of his own pages. He accepts as poetical subjects all things
+alike, common and unclean, without discrimination, miscellaneous as the
+contents of the great sheet which Peter saw let down from heaven. He
+carries the principle of republicanism through the whole world of created
+objects. He will "thread a thread through [his] poems," he tells us,
+"that no one thing in the universe is inferior to another thing." No man
+has ever asserted the surpassing dignity and importance of the American
+citizen so boldly and freely as Mr. Whitman. He calls himself "teacher
+of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism." He begins one of his
+chants, "I celebrate myself," but he takes us all in as partners in his
+self-glorification. He believes in America as the new Eden.
+
+"A world primal again,--vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new
+race dominating previous ones and grander far, New politics--new
+literature and religions--new inventions and arts."
+
+Of the new literature be himself has furnished specimens which certainly
+have all the originality he can claim for them. So far as egotism is
+concerned, he was clearly anticipated by the titled personage to whom I
+have referred, who says of himself, "I am the first in the East, the
+first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western world."
+But while Mr. Whitman divests himself of a part of his baptismal name,
+the distinguished New Englander thus announces his proud position: "Ime
+the first Lord in the younited States of A mercary Now of Newburyport.
+it is the voice of the peopel and I cant Help it." This extract is from
+his famous little book called "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones." As an
+inventor of a new American style he goes far beyond Mr. Whitman, who, to
+be sure, cares little for the dictionary, and makes his own rules of
+rhythm, so far as there is any rhythm in his sentences. But Lord Timothy
+spells to suit himself, and in place of employing punctuation as it is
+commonly used, prints a separate page of periods, colons, semicolons,
+commas, notes of interrogation and of admiration, with which the reader
+is requested to "peper and soolt" the book as he pleases.
+
+I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of
+declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter, who not
+only taught his countrymen that they need not go to the Heralds' College
+to authenticate their titles of nobility, but also that they were at
+perfect liberty to spell just as they liked, and to write without
+troubling themselves about stops of any kind. In writing what I suppose
+he intended for poetry, he did not even take the pains to break up his
+lines into lengths to make them look like verse, as may be seen by the
+following specimen:
+
+ WONDER OF WONDERS!
+
+How great the soul is! Do not you all wonder and admire to see and
+behold and hear? Can you all believe half the truth, and admire to hear
+the wonders how great the soul is--only behold--past finding out! Only
+see how large the soul is! that if a man is drowned in the sea what a
+great bubble comes up out of the top of the water... The bubble is the
+soul.
+
+I confess that I am not in sympathy with some of the movements that
+accompany the manifestations of American social and literary
+independence. I do not like the assumption of titles of Lords and
+Knights by plain citizens of a country which prides itself on recognizing
+simple manhood and womanhood as sufficiently entitled to respect without
+these unnecessary additions. I do not like any better the familiar, and
+as it seems to me rude, way of speaking of our fellow-citizens who are
+entitled to the common courtesies of civilized society. I never thought
+it dignified or even proper for a President of the United States to call
+himself, or to be called by others, "Frank" Pierce. In the first place I
+had to look in a biographical dictionary to find out whether his
+baptismal name was Franklin, or Francis, or simply Frank, for I think
+children are sometimes christened with this abbreviated name. But it is
+too much in the style of Cowper's unpleasant acquaintance:
+
+ "The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
+ And proves by thumping on your back
+ How he esteems your merit."
+
+I should not like to hear our past chief magistrates spoken of as Jack
+Adams or Jim Madison, and it would have been only as a political partisan
+that I should have reconciled myself to "Tom" Jefferson. So, in spite of
+"Ben" Jonson, "Tom" Moore, and "Jack" Sheppard, I prefer to speak of a
+fellow-citizen already venerable by his years, entitled to respect by
+useful services to his country, and recognized by many as the prophet of
+a new poetical dispensation, with the customary title of adults rather
+than by the free and easy school-boy abbreviation with which he
+introduced himself many years ago to the public. As for his rhapsodies,
+Number Seven, our "cracked Teacup," says they sound to him like "fugues
+played on a big organ which has been struck by lightning." So far as
+concerns literary independence, if we understand by that term the getting
+rid of our subjection to British criticism, such as it was in the days
+when the question was asked, "Who reads an American book?" we may
+consider it pretty well established. If it means dispensing with
+punctuation, coining words at will, self-revelation unrestrained by a
+sense of what is decorous, declamations in which everything is glorified
+without being idealized, "poetry" in which the reader must make the
+rhythms which the poet has not made for him, then I think we had better
+continue literary colonists. I shrink from a lawless independence to
+which all the virile energy and trampling audacity of Mr. Whitman fail to
+reconcile me. But there is room for everybody and everything in our huge
+hemisphere. Young America is like a three-year-old colt with his saddle
+and bridle just taken off. The first thing he wants to do is to roll.
+He is a droll object, sprawling in the grass with his four hoofs in the
+air; but he likes it, and it won't harm us. So let him roll,--let him
+roll.
+
+Of all The Teacups around our table, Number Five is the one who is the
+object of the greatest interest. Everybody wants to be her friend, and
+she has room enough in her hospitable nature to find a place for every
+one who is worthy of the privilege. The difficulty is that it is so hard
+to be her friend without becoming her lover. I have said before that she
+turns the subjects of her Circe-like enchantment, not into swine, but
+into lambs. The Professor and I move round among her lambs, the docile
+and amiable flock that come and go at her bidding, that follow her
+footsteps, and are content to live in the sunshine of her smile and
+within reach of the music of her voice. I like to get her away from
+their amiable bleatings; I love to talk with her about life, of which she
+has seen a great deal, for she knows what it is to be an idol in society
+and the centre of her social circle. It might be a question whether
+women or men most admire and love her. With her own sex she is always
+helpful, sympathizing, tender, charitable, sharing their griefs as well
+as taking part in their pleasures. With men it has seemed to make little
+difference whether they were young or old: all have found her the same
+sweet, generous, unaffected companion; fresh enough in feeling for the
+youngest, deep enough in the wisdom of the heart for the oldest. She
+does not pretend to be youthful, nor does she trouble herself that she
+has seen the roses of more Junes than many of--the younger women who
+gather round her. She has not had to say,
+
+ Comme je regrette
+ Mon bras si dodu,
+
+for her arm has never lost its roundness, and her face is one of those
+that cannot be cheated of their charm even if they live long enough to
+look upon the grown up grandchildren of their coevals.
+
+It is a wonder how Number Five can find the time to be so much to so many
+friends of both sexes, in spite of the fact that she is one of the most
+insatiable of readers. She not only reads, but she remembers; she not
+only remembers, but she records, for her own use and pleasure, and for
+the delight and profit of those who are privileged to look over her
+note-books. Number Five, as I think I have said before, has not the
+ambition to figure as an authoress. That she could write most agreeably
+is certain. I have seen letters of hers to friends which prove that
+clearly enough. Whether she would find prose or verse the most natural
+mode of expression I cannot say, but I know she is passionately fond of
+poetry, and I should not be surprised if, laid away among the pressed
+pansies and roses of past summers, there were poems, songs, perhaps, of
+her own, which she sings to herself with her fingers touching the piano;
+for to that she tells her secrets in tones sweet as the ring-dove's call
+to her mate.
+
+I am afraid it may be suggested that I am drawing Number Five's portrait
+too nearly after some model who is unconsciously sitting for it; but have
+n't I told you that you must not look for flesh and blood personalities
+behind or beneath my Teacups? I am not going to make these so lifelike
+that you will be saying, This is Mr. or Miss, or Mrs. So-and-So. My
+readers must remember that there are very many pretty, sweet, amiable
+girls and women sitting at their pianos, and finding chords to the music
+of their heart-strings. If I have pictured Number Five as one of her
+lambs might do it, I have succeeded in what I wanted to accomplish. Why
+don't I describe her person? If I do, some gossip or other will be sure
+to say, "Oh, he means her, of course," and find a name to match the
+pronoun.
+
+It is strange to see how we are all coming to depend upon the friendly
+aid of Number Five in our various perplexities. The Counsellor asked her
+opinion in one of those cases where a divorce was too probable, but a
+reconciliation was possible. It takes a woman to sound a woman's heart,
+and she found there was still love enough under the ruffled waters to
+warrant the hope of peace and tranquillity. The young Doctor went to her
+for counsel in the case of a hysteric girl possessed with the idea that
+she was a born poetess, and covering whole pages of foolscap with
+senseless outbursts, which she wrote in paroxysms of wild excitement, and
+read with a rapture of self-admiration which there was nothing in her
+verses to justify or account for. How sweetly Number Five dealt with
+that poor deluded sister in her talk with the Doctor! "Yes," she said to
+him, "nothing can be fuller of vanity, self-worship, and self-deception.
+But we must be very gentle with her. I knew a young girl tormented with
+aspirations, and possessed by a belief that she was meant for a higher
+place than that which fate had assigned her, who needed wholesome advice,
+just as this poor young thing does. She did not ask for it, and it was
+not offered. Alas, alas! 'no man cared for her soul,'--no man nor woman
+either. She was in her early teens, and the thought of her earthly
+future, as it stretched out before her, was more than she could bear, and
+she sought the presence of her Maker to ask the meaning of her abortive
+existence.--We will talk it over. I will help you take care of this
+child."
+
+The Doctor was thankful to have her assistance in a case with which he
+would have found it difficult to deal if he had been left to, his unaided
+judgment, and between them the young girl was safely piloted through the
+perilous straits in which she came near shipwreck.
+
+I know that it is commonly said of her that every male friend of hers
+must become her lover unless he is already lassoed by another. Il fait
+passer par l'a. The young Doctor is, I think, safe, for I am convinced
+that he is bewitched with Delilah. Since she has left us, he has seemed
+rather dejected; I feel sure that he misses her. We all do, but he more
+seriously than the rest of us. I have said that I cannot tell whether
+the Counsellor is to be counted as one of Number Five's lambs or not, but
+he evidently admires her, and if he is not fascinated, looks as if he
+were very near that condition.
+
+It was a more delicate matter about which the Tutor talked with her.
+Something which she had pleasantly said to him about the two Annexes led
+him to ask her, more or less seriously, it may be remembered, about the
+fitness of either of them to be the wife of a young man in his position.
+She talked so sensibly, as it seemed to him, about it that he continued
+the conversation, and, shy as he was, became quite easy and confidential
+in her company. The Tutor is not only a poet, but is a great reader of
+the poetry of many languages. It so happened that Number Five was
+puzzled, one day, in reading a sonnet of Petrarch, and had recourse to
+the Tutor to explain the difficult passage. She found him so thoroughly
+instructed, so clear, so much interested, so ready to impart knowledge,
+and so happy in his way of doing it, that she asked him if he would not
+allow her the privilege of reading an Italian author under his guidance,
+now and then.
+
+The Tutor found Number Five an apt scholar, and something more than that;
+for while, as a linguist, he was, of course, her master, her intelligent
+comments brought out the beauties of an author in a way to make the text
+seem like a different version. They did not always confine themselves to
+the book they were reading. Number Five showed some curiosity about the
+Tutor's relations with the two Annexes. She suggested whether it would
+not be well to ask one or both of them in to take part in their readings.
+The Tutor blushed and hesitated. "Perhaps you would like to ask one of
+them," said Number Five. "Which one shall it be?" "It makes no
+difference to me which," he answered, "but I do not see that we need
+either." Number Five did not press the matter further. So the young
+Tutor and Number Five read together pretty regularly, and came to depend
+upon their meeting over a book as one of their stated seasons of
+enjoyment. He is so many years younger than she is that I do not suppose
+he will have to pass par la, as most of her male friends have done. I
+tell her sometimes that she reminds me of my Alma Mater, always young,
+always fresh in her attractions, with her scholars all round her, many of
+them graduates, or to graduate sooner or later.
+
+What do I mean by graduates? Why, that they have made love to her, and
+would be entitled to her diploma, if she gave a parchment to each one of
+them who had had the courage to face the inevitable. About the
+Counsellor I am, as I have said, in doubt. Who wrote that "I Like You
+and I Love You," which we found in the sugar-bowl the other day? Was it
+a graduate who had felt the "icy dagger," or only a candidate for
+graduation who was afraid of it? So completely does she subjugate those
+who come under her influence that I believe she looks upon it as a matter
+of course that the fateful question will certainly come, often after a
+brief acquaintance. She confessed as much to me, who am in her
+confidence, and not a candidate for graduation from her academy. Her
+graduates--her lambs I called them--are commonly faithful to her, and
+though now and then one may have gone off and sulked in solitude, most of
+them feel kindly to her, and to those who have shared the common fate of
+her suitors. I do really believe that some of them would be glad to see
+her captured by any one, if such there can be, who is worthy of her. She
+is the best of friends, they say, but can she love anybody, as so many
+other women do, or seem to? Why shouldn't our Musician, who is evidently
+fond of her company, and sings and plays duets with her, steal her heart
+as Piozzi stole that of the pretty and bright Mrs. Thrale, as so many
+music-teachers have run away with their pupils' hearts? At present she
+seems to be getting along very placidly and contentedly with her young
+friend the Tutor. There is something quite charming in their relations
+with each other. He knows many things she does not, for he is reckoned
+one of the most learned in his literary specialty of all the young men of
+his time; and it can be a question of only a few years when some
+first-class professorship will be offered him. She, on the other hand,
+has so much more experience, so much more practical wisdom, than he has
+that he consults her on many every-day questions, as he did, or made
+believe do, about that of making love to one of the two Annexes. I had
+thought, when we first sat round the tea-table, that she was good for the
+bit of romance I wanted; but since she has undertaken to be a kind of
+half-maternal friend to the young Tutor, I am afraid I shall have to give
+her up as the heroine of a romantic episode. It would be a pity if there
+were nothing to commend these papers to those who take up this periodical
+but essays, more or less significant, on subjects more or less
+interesting to the jaded and impatient readers of the numberless stories
+and entertaining articles which crowd the magazines of this prolific
+period. A whole year of a tea-table as large as ours without a single
+love passage in it would be discreditable to the company. We must find
+one, or make one, before the tea-things are taken away and the table is
+no longer spread.
+
+ The Dictator turns preacher.
+
+We have so many light and playful talks over the teacups that some
+readers may be surprised to find us taking up the most serious and solemn
+subject which can occupy a human intelligence. The sudden appearance
+among our New England Protestants of the doctrine of purgatory as a
+possibility, or even probability, has startled the descendants of the
+Puritans. It has naturally led to a reconsideration of the doctrine of
+eternal punishment. It is on that subject that Number Five and I have
+talked together. I love to listen to her, for she talks from the
+promptings of a true woman's heart. I love to talk to her, for I learn
+my own thoughts better in that way than in any other "L'appetit vient en
+mangeant," the French saying has it. "L'esprit vient en causant;" that
+is, if one can find the right persons to talk with.
+
+The subject which has specially interested Number Five and myself, of
+late, was suggested to me in the following way.
+
+Some two years ago I received a letter from a clergyman who bears by
+inheritance one of the most distinguished names which has done honor to
+the American "Orthodox" pulpit. This letter requested of me "a
+contribution to a proposed work which was to present in their own
+language the views of 'many men of many minds' on the subject of future
+punishment. It was in my mind to let the public hear not only from
+professional theologians, but from other professions, as from jurists on
+the alleged but disputed value of the hangman's whip overhanging the
+witness-box, and from physicians on the working of beliefs about the
+future life in the minds of the dangerously sick. And I could not help
+thinking what a good thing it would be to draw out the present writer
+upon his favorite borderland between the spiritual and the material."
+The communication came to me, as the writer reminds me in a recent
+letter, at a "painfully inopportune time," and though it was courteously
+answered, was not made the subject of a special reply.
+
+This request confers upon me a certain right to express my opinion on
+this weighty subject without fear and without reproach even from those
+who might be ready to take offence at one of the laity for meddling with
+pulpit questions. It shows also that this is not a dead issue in our
+community, as some of the younger generation seem to think. There are
+some, there may be many, who would like to hear what impressions one has
+received on the subject referred to, after a long life in which he has
+heard and read a great deal about the matter. There is a certain gravity
+in the position of one who is, in the order of nature very near the
+undiscovered country. A man who has passed his eighth decade feels as if
+he were already in the antechamber of the apartments which he may be
+called to occupy in the house of many mansions. His convictions
+regarding the future of our race are likely to be serious, and his
+expressions not lightly uttered. The question my correspondent suggests
+is a tremendous one. No other interest compares for one moment with that
+belonging to it. It is not only ourselves that it concerns, but all whom
+we love or ever have loved, all our human brotherhood, as well as our
+whole idea of the Being who made us and the relation in which He stands
+to his creatures. In attempting to answer my correspondent's question, I
+shall no doubt repeat many things I have said before in different forms,
+on different occasions. This is no more than every clergyman does
+habitually, and it would be hard if I could not have the same license
+which the professional preacher enjoys so fully.
+
+Number Five and I have occasionally talked on religious questions, and
+discovered many points of agreement in our views. Both of us grew up
+under the old "Orthodox" or Calvinistic system of belief. Both of us
+accepted it in our early years as a part of our education. Our experience
+is a common one. William Cullen Bryant says of himself, "The Calvinistic
+system of divinity I adopted of course, as I heard nothing else taught
+from the pulpit, and supposed it to be the accepted belief of the
+religious world." But it was not the "five points" which remained in the
+young poet's memory and shaped his higher life. It was the influence of
+his mother that left its permanent impression after the questions and
+answers of the Assembly's Catechism had faded out, or remained in memory
+only as fossil survivors of an extinct or fast-disappearing theological
+formation. The important point for him, as for so many other children of
+Puritan descent, was not his father's creed, but his mother's character,
+precepts, and example. "She was a person," he says, "of excellent
+practical sense, of a quick and sensitive moral judgment, and had no
+patience with any form of deceit or duplicity. Her prompt condemnation of
+injustice, even in those instances in which it is tolerated by the world,
+made a strong impression upon me in early life; and if, in the discussion
+of public questions, I have in my riper age endeavored to keep in view
+the great rule of right without much regard to persons, it has been owing
+in a great degree to the force of her example, which taught me never to
+countenance a wrong because others did."
+
+I have quoted this passage because it was an experience not wholly unlike
+my own, and in certain respects like that of Number Five. To grow up in
+a narrow creed and to grow out of it is a tremendous trial of one's
+nature. There is always a bond of fellowship between those who have been
+through such an ordeal.
+
+The experiences we have had in common naturally lead us to talk over the
+theological questions which at this time are constantly presenting
+themselves to the public, not only in the books and papers expressly
+devoted to that class of subjects, but in many of the newspapers and
+popular periodicals, from the weeklies to the quarterlies. The pulpit
+used to lay down the law to the pews; at the present time, it is of more
+consequence what the pews think than what the minister does, for the
+obvious reason that the pews can change their minister, and often do,
+whereas the minister cannot change the pews, or can do so only to a very
+limited extent. The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern
+of that of the hearers, for the most part. Thirty years ago, when I was
+writing on theological subjects, I came in for a very pretty share of
+abuse, such as it was the fashion of that day, at least in certain
+quarters, to bestow upon those who were outside of the high-walled
+enclosures in which many persons; not naturally unamiable or exclusive,
+found themselves imprisoned. Since that time what changes have taken
+place! Who will believe that a well-behaved and reputable citizen could
+have been denounced as a "moral parricide," because he attacked some of
+the doctrines in which he was supposed to have been brought up? A single
+thought should have prevented the masked theologian who abused his
+incognito from using such libellous language.
+
+Much, and in many families most, of the religious teaching of children is
+committed to the mother. The experience of William Cullen Bryant, which
+I have related in his own words, is that of many New England children.
+Now, the sternest dogmas that ever came from a soul cramped or palsied by
+an obsolete creed become wonderfully softened in passing between the lips
+of a mother. The cruel doctrine at which all but case-hardened
+"professionals" shudder cones out, as she teaches and illustrates it, as
+unlike its original as the milk which a peasant mother gives her babe is
+unlike the coarse food which furnishes her nourishment. The virus of a
+cursing creed is rendered comparatively harmless by the time it reaches
+the young sinner in the nursery. Its effects fall as far short of what
+might have been expected from its virulence as the pearly vaccine vesicle
+falls short of the terrors of the confluent small-pox. Controversialists
+should therefore be careful (for their own sakes, for they hurt nobody so
+much as themselves) how they use such terms as "parricide" as
+characterizing those who do not agree in all points with the fathers whom
+or whose memory they honor and venerate. They might with as much
+propriety call them matricides, if they did not agree with the milder
+teachings of their mothers. I can imagine Jonathan Edwards in the
+nursery with his three-year-old child upon his knee. The child looks up
+to his face and says to him,--"Papa, nurse tells me that you say God
+hates me worse than He hates one of those horrid ugly snakes that crawl
+all round. Does God hate me so?"
+
+"Alas! my child, it is but too true. So long as you are out of Christ
+you are as a viper, and worse than a viper, in his sight."
+
+By and by, Mrs. Edwards, one of the loveliest of women and sweetest of
+mothers, comes into the nursery. The child is crying.
+
+"What is the matter, my darling?"
+
+"Papa has been telling me that God hates me worse than a snake."
+
+Poor, gentle, poetical, sensitive, spiritual, almost celestial Mrs.
+Jonathan Edwards! On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived,
+written down, given to the press, by the child's father; on the other
+side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother pleading in
+her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered husband. Do you
+suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender soul of her darling?
+Would it have been moral parricide for a son of the great divine to have
+repudiated the doctrine which degraded his blameless infancy to the
+condition and below the condition of the reptile? Was it parricide in
+the second or third degree when his descendant struck out that venomous
+sentence from the page in which it stood as a monument to what depth
+Christian heathenism could sink under the teaching of the great master of
+logic and spiritual inhumanity? It is too late to be angry about the
+abuse a well--meaning writer received thirty years ago. The whole
+atmosphere has changed since then. It is mere childishness to expect men
+to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their
+own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father
+was of his son's age.
+
+So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman
+Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants. They
+have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they
+both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession,
+the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,--these all inspire a confidence which
+without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive
+natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres
+of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and
+smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends,
+and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no
+wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence.
+To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae,
+of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place. If Cowper had
+been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled by a
+Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing, looking
+upon himself as a castaway. I have seen a good many Roman Catholics on
+their dying beds, and it always appeared to me that they accepted the
+inevitable with a composure which showed that their belief, whether or
+not the best to live by, was a better one to die by than most of the
+harder creeds which have replaced it.
+
+In the more intelligent circles of American society one may question
+anything and everything, if he will only do it civilly. We may talk
+about eschatology, the science of last things,--or, if you will, the
+natural history of the undiscovered country, without offence before
+anybody except young children and very old women of both sexes. In our
+New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary
+question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as
+completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the
+sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have
+its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it,--as the novels of Zola
+and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who
+have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.
+
+The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in
+their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined to
+an eternity of suffering. That this eternity is to be one of bodily
+pain--of "torment "--is the literal teaching of Scripture, which has been
+literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets, and the artists of
+many long ages which followed the acceptance of the recorded legends of
+the church as infallible. The doctrine has always been recognized, as it
+is now, as a very terrible one. It has found a support in the story of
+the fall of man, and the view taken of the relation of man to his Maker
+since that event. The hatred of God to mankind in virtue of their "first
+disobedience" and inherited depravity is at the bottom of it. The extent
+to which that idea was carried is well shown in the expressions I have
+borrowed from Jonathan Edwards. According to his teaching,--and he was a
+reasoner who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the
+premises of the faith he accepted,--man inherits the curse of God as his
+principal birthright.
+
+What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of
+inflicting endless misery on the human race? A man to be punished for
+what he could not help! He was expected to be called to account for
+Adam's sin. It is singular to notice that the reasoning of the wolf with
+the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the Creator with his
+creatures. "You stirred the brook up and made my drinking-place muddy."
+"But, please your wolfship, I couldn't do that, for I stirred the water
+far down the stream,--below your drinking-place." "Well, anyhow, your
+father troubled it a year or two ago, and that is the same thing." So
+the wolf falls upon the lamb and makes a meal of him. That is wolf
+logic,--and theological reasoning.
+
+How shall we characterize the doctrine of endless torture as the destiny
+of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this planet? I
+prefer to let another writer speak of it. Mr. John Morley uses the
+following words: "The horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful idea
+that has ever corroded human character,--the idea of eternal punishment."
+Sismondi, the great historian, heard a sermon on eternal punishment, and
+vowed never again to enter another church holding the same creed.
+Romanism he considered a religion of mercy and peace by the side of what
+the English call the Reformation.--I mention these protests because I
+happen to find them among my notes, but it would be easy to accumulate
+examples of the same kind. When Cowper, at about the end of the last
+century, said satirically of the minister he was attacking,
+
+ "He never mentioned hell to ears polite,"
+
+he was giving unconscious evidence that the sense of the barbarism of the
+idea was finding its way into the pulpit. When Burns, in the midst of
+the sulphurous orthodoxy of Scotland, dared to say,
+
+ "The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip
+ To haud the wretch in order,"
+
+he was only appealing to the common sense and common humanity of his
+fellow-countrymen.
+
+All the reasoning in the world, all the proof-texts in old manuscripts,
+cannot reconcile this supposition of a world of sleepless and endless
+torment with the declaration that "God is love."
+
+Where did this "frightful idea" come from? We are surprised, as we grow
+older, to find that the legendary hell of the church is nothing more nor
+less than the Tartarus of the old heathen world. It has every mark of
+coming from the cruel heart of a barbarous despot. Some malignant and
+vindictive Sheik, some brutal Mezentius, must have sat for many pictures
+of the Divinity. It was not enough to kill his captive enemy, after
+torturing him as much as ingenuity could contrive to do it. He escaped
+at last by death, but his conqueror could not give him up so easily, and
+so his vengeance followed him into the unseen and unknown world. How the
+doctrine got in among, the legends of the church we are no more bound to
+show than we are to account for the intercalation of the "three
+witnesses" text, or the false insertion, or false omission, whichever it
+may be, of the last twelve verses of the Gospel of St Mark. We do not
+hang our grandmothers now, as our ancestors did theirs, on the strength
+of the positive command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
+
+The simple truth is that civilization has outgrown witchcraft, and is
+outgrowing the Christian Tartarus. The pulpit no longer troubles itself
+about witches and their evil doings. All the legends in the world could
+not arrest the decay of that superstition and all the edicts that grew
+out of it. All the stories that can be found in old manuscripts will
+never prevent the going out of the fires of the legendary Inferno. It is
+not much talked about nowadays to ears polite or impolite. Humanity is
+shocked and repelled by it. The heart of woman is in unconquerable
+rebellion against it. The more humane sects tear it from their "Bodies
+of Divinity" as if it were the flaming shirt of Nessus. A few doctrines
+with which it was bound up have dropped or are dropping away from it: the
+primal curse; consequential damages to give infinite extension to every
+transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of relative
+obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to the
+proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the responsible
+being, and not the parent who gave it birth and determined its conditions
+of existence.
+
+After a doctrine like "the hangman's whip" has served its purpose,--if it
+ever had any useful purpose,--after a doctrine like that of witchcraft
+has hanged old women enough, civilization contrives to get rid of it.
+When we say that civilization crowds out the old superstitious legends,
+we recognize two chief causes. The first is the naked individual
+protest; the voice of the inspiration which giveth man understanding.
+This shows itself conspicuously in the modern poets. Burns in Scotland,
+Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, in America, preached a new gospel to the
+successors of men like Thomas Boston and Jonathan Edwards. In due
+season, the growth of knowledge, chiefly under the form of that part of
+knowledge called science, so changes the views of the universe that many
+of its long-unchallenged legends become no more than nursery tales. The
+text-books of astronomy and geology work their way in between the
+questions and answers of the time-honored catechisms. The doctrine of
+evolution, so far as it is accepted, changes the whole relations of man
+to the creative power. It substitutes infinite hope in the place of
+infinite despair for the vast majority of mankind. Instead of a
+shipwreck, from which a few cabin passengers and others are to be saved
+in the long-boat, it gives mankind a vessel built to endure the tempests,
+and at last to reach a port where at the worst the passengers can find
+rest, and where they may hope for a home better than any which they ever
+had in their old country. It is all very well to say that men and women
+had their choice whether they would reach the safe harbor or not.
+
+ "Go to it grandam, child;
+ Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
+ Give it a plum, a cherry and a fig."
+
+We know what the child will take. So which course we shall take depends
+very much on the way the choice is presented to us, and on what the
+chooser is by nature. What he is by nature is not determined by himself,
+but by his parentage. "They know not what they do." In one sense this
+is true of every human being. The agent does not know, never can know,
+what makes him that which he is. What we most want to ask of our Maker
+is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into
+conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong. We
+want an advocate of helpless humanity whose task it shall be, in the
+words of Milton,
+
+ "To justify the ways of God to man."
+
+We have heard Milton's argument, but for the realization of his vision of
+the time
+
+ "When Hell itself shall pass away,
+ And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day,"
+
+our suffering race must wait in patience.
+
+The greater part of the discourse the reader has had before him was
+delivered over the teacups one Sunday afternoon. The Mistress looked
+rather grave, as if doubtful whether she ought not to signify her
+disapprobation of what seemed to her dangerous doctrine.
+
+However, as she knew that I was a good church-goer and was on the best
+terms with her minister, she said nothing to show that she had taken the
+alarm. Number Five listened approvingly. We had talked the question
+over well, and were perfectly agreed on the main point. How could it be
+otherwise? Do you suppose that any intellectual, spiritual woman, with a
+heart under her bodice, can for a moment seriously believe that the
+greater number of the high-minded men, the noble and lovely women, the
+ingenuous and affectionate children, whom she knows and honors or loves,
+are to be handed over to the experts in a great torture-chamber, in
+company with the vilest creatures that have once worn human shape?
+
+"If there is such a world as used to be talked about from the pulpit, you
+may depend upon it," she said to me once, "there will soon be organized a
+Humane Society in heaven, and a mission established among 'the spirits in
+prison.'"
+
+Number Five is a regular church-goer, as I am. I do not believe either
+of us would darken the doors of a church if we were likely to hear any of
+the "old-fashioned" sermons, such as I used to listen to in former years
+from a noted clergyman, whose specialty was the doctrine of eternal
+punishment. But you may go to the churches of almost any of our
+Protestant denominations, and hear sermons by which you can profit,
+because the ministers are generally good men, whose moral and spiritual
+natures are above the average, and who know that the harsh preaching of
+two or three generations ago would offend and alienate a large part of
+their audience. So neither Number Five nor I are hypocrites in attending
+church or "going to meeting." I am afraid it does not make a great deal
+of difference to either of us what may be the established creed of the
+worshipping assembly. That is a matter of great interest, perhaps of
+great importance, to them, but of much less, comparatively, to us.
+Companionship in worship, and sitting quiet for an hour while a trained
+speaker, presumably somewhat better than we are, stirs up our spiritual
+nature,--these are reasons enough to Number Five, as to me, for regular
+attendance on divine worship.
+
+Number Seven is of a different way of thinking and feeling. He insists
+upon it that the churches keep in their confessions of faith statements
+which they do not believe, and that it is notorious that they are afraid
+to meddle with them. The Anglo-American church has dropped the
+Athanasian Creed from its service; the English mother church is afraid
+to. There are plenty of Universalists, Number Seven says, in the
+Episcopalian and other Protestant churches, but they do not avow their
+belief in any frank and candid fashion. The churches know very well, he
+maintains, that the fear of everlasting punishment more than any or all
+other motives is the source of their power and the support of their
+organizations. Not only are the fears of mankind the whip to scourge and
+the bridle to restrain them, but they are the basis of an almost
+incalculable material interest. "Talk about giving up the doctrine of
+endless punishment by fire!" exclaimed Number Seven; "there is more
+capital embarked in the subterranean fire-chambers than in all the
+iron-furnaces on the face of the earth. To think what an army of
+clerical beggars would be turned loose on the world, if once those raging
+flames were allowed to go out or to calm down! Who can wonder that the
+old conservatives draw back startled and almost frightened at the thought
+that there may be a possible escape for some victims whom the Devil was
+thought to have secured? How many more generations will pass before
+Milton's alarming prophecy will find itself realized in the belief of
+civilized mankind?"
+
+Remember that Number Seven is called a "crank" by many persons, and take
+his remarks for just what they are worth, and no more.
+
+Out of the preceding conversation must have originated the following
+poem, which was found in the common receptacle of these versified
+contributions:
+
+ TARTARUS.
+
+ While in my simple gospel creed
+ That "God is Love" so plain I read,
+ Shall dreams of heathen birth affright
+ My pathway through the coming night?
+ Ah, Lord of life, though spectres pale
+ Fill with their threats the shadowy vale,
+ With Thee my faltering steps to aid,
+ How can I dare to be afraid?
+
+ Shall mouldering page or fading scroll
+ Outface the charter of the soul?
+ Shall priesthood's palsied arm protect
+ The wrong our human hearts reject,
+ And smite the lips whose shuddering cry
+ Proclaims a cruel creed a lie?
+ The wizard's rope we disallow
+ Was justice once,--is murder now!
+
+ Is there a world of blank despair,
+ And dwells the Omnipresent there?
+ Does He behold with smile serene
+ The shows of that unending scene,
+ Where sleepless, hopeless anguish lies,
+ And, ever dying, never dies?
+
+ Say, does He hear the sufferer's groan,
+ And is that child of wrath his own?
+ O mortal, wavering in thy trust,
+ Lift thy pale forehead from the dust
+ The mists that cloud thy darkened eyes
+ Fade ere they reach the o'erarching skies!
+ When the blind heralds of despair
+ Would bid thee doubt a Father's care,
+ Look up from earth, and read above
+ On heaven's blue tablet, GOD IS LOVE!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+ The tea is sweetened.
+
+We have been going on very pleasantly of late, each of us pretty well
+occupied with his or her special business. The Counsellor has been
+pleading in a great case, and several of The Teacups were in the
+court-room. I thought, but I will not be certain, that some of his
+arguments were addressed to Number Five rather than to the jury,--the
+more eloquent passages especially.
+
+Our young Doctor seems to me to be gradually getting known in the
+neighborhood and beyond it. A member of one of the more influential
+families, whose regular physician has gone to Europe, has sent for him to
+come and see her, and as the patient is a nervous lady, who has nothing
+in particular the matter with her, he is probably in for a good many
+visits and a long bill by and by. He has even had a call at a distance
+of some miles from home,--at least he has had to hire a conveyance
+frequently of late, for he has not yet set up his own horse and chaise.
+We do not like to ask him about who his patient may be, but he or she is
+probably a person of some consequence, as he is absent several hours on
+these out-of-town visits. He may get a good practice before his bald
+spot makes its appearance, for I have looked for it many times without as
+yet seeing a sign of it. I am sure he must feel encouraged, for he has
+been very bright and cheerful of late; and if he sometimes looks at our
+new handmaid as if he wished she were Delilah, I do not think he is
+breaking his heart about her absence. Perhaps he finds consolation in
+the company of the two Annexes, or one of them,--but which, I cannot make
+out. He is in consultations occasionally with Number Five, too, but
+whether professionally or not I have no means of knowing. I cannot for
+the life of me see what Number Five wants of a doctor for herself, so
+perhaps it is another difficult case in which her womanly sagacity is
+called upon to help him.
+
+In the mean time she and the Tutor continue their readings. In fact, it
+seems as if these readings were growing more frequent, and lasted longer
+than they did at first. There is a little arbor in the grounds connected
+with our place of meeting, and sometimes they have gone there for their
+readings. Some of The Teacups have listened outside once in a while, for
+the Tutor reads well, and his clear voice must be heard in the more
+emphatic passages, whether one is expressly listening or not. But
+besides the reading there is now and then some talking, and persons
+talking in an arbor do not always remember that latticework, no matter
+how closely the vines cover it, is not impenetrable to the sound of the
+human voice. There was a listener one day,--it was not one of The
+Teacups, I am happy to say,--who heard and reported some fragments of a
+conversation which reached his ear. Nothing but the profound intimacy
+which exists between myself and the individual reader whose eyes are on
+this page would induce me to reveal what I was told of this conversation.
+The first words seem to have been in reply to some question.
+
+"Why, my dear friend, how can you think of such a thing? Do you know--I
+am--old enough to be your--[I think she must have been on the point of
+saying mother, but that was more than any woman could be expected to
+say]--old enough to be your aunt?"
+
+"To be sure you are," answered the Tutor, "and what of it? I have two
+aunts, both younger than I am. Your years may be more than mine, but
+your life is fuller of youthful vitality than mine is. I never feel so
+young as when I have been with you. I don't believe in settling
+affinities by the almanac. You know what I have told you more than once;
+you have n't 'bared the ice-cold dagger's edge' upon me yet; may I not
+cherish the"....
+
+What a pity that the listener did not hear the rest of the sentence and
+the reply to it, if there was one! The readings went on the same as
+before, but I thought that Number Five was rather more silent and more
+pensive than she had been.
+
+I was much pleased when the American Annex came to me one day and told me
+that she and the English Annex were meditating an expedition, in which
+they wanted the other Teacups to join. About a dozen miles from us is an
+educational institution of the higher grade, where a large number of
+young ladies are trained in literature, art, and science, very much as
+their brothers are trained in the colleges. Our two young ladies have
+already been through courses of this kind in different schools, and are
+now busy with those more advanced studies which are ventured upon by only
+a limited number of "graduates." They have heard a good deal about this
+institution, but have never visited it.
+
+Every year, as the successive classes finish their course, there is a
+grand reunion of the former students, with an "exhibition," as it is
+called, in which the graduates of the year have an opportunity of showing
+their proficiency in the various branches taught. On that occasion
+prizes are awarded for excellence in different departments. It would be
+hard to find a more interesting ceremony. These girls, now recognized as
+young ladies, are going forth as missionaries of civilization among our
+busy people. They are many of them to be teachers, and those who have
+seen what opportunities they have to learn will understand their fitness
+for that exalted office. Many are to be the wives and mothers of the
+generation next coming upon the stage. Young and beautiful, "youth is
+always beautiful," said old Samuel Rogers,--their countenances radiant
+with developed intelligence, their complexions, their figures, their
+movements, all showing that they have had plenty of outdoor as well as
+indoor exercise, and have lived well in all respects, one would like to
+read on the wall of the hall where they are assembled,--
+
+ Siste, viator!
+ Si uxorem requiris, circumspice!
+
+This proposed expedition was a great event in our comparatively quiet
+circle. The Mistress, who was interested in the school, undertook to be
+the matron of the party. The young Doctor, who knew the roads better
+than any of us, was to be our pilot. He arranged it so that he should
+have the two Annexes under his more immediate charge. We were all on the
+lookout to see which of the two was to be the favored one, for it was
+pretty well settled among The Teacups that a wife he must have, whether
+the bald spot came or not; he was getting into business, and he could not
+achieve a complete success as a bachelor.
+
+Number Five and the Tutor seemed to come together as a matter of course.
+I confess that I could not help regretting that our pretty Delilah was
+not to be one of the party. She always looked so young, so fresh,--she
+would have enjoyed the excursion so much, that if she had been still with
+us I would have told the Mistress that she must put on her best dress;
+and if she had n't one nice enough, I would give her one myself. I
+thought, too, that our young Doctor would have liked to have her with us;
+but he appeared to be getting along very well with the Annexes, one of
+whom it seems likely that he will annex to himself and his fortunes, if
+she fancies him, which is not improbable.
+
+The organizing of this expedition was naturally a cause of great
+excitement among The Teacups. The party had to be arranged in such a way
+as to suit all concerned, which was a delicate matter. It was finally
+managed in this way: The Mistress was to go with a bodyguard, consisting
+of myself, the Professor, and Number Seven, who was good company, with
+all his oddities. The young Doctor was to take the two Annexes in a
+wagon, and the Tutor was to drive Number Five in a good old-fashioned
+chaise drawn by a well-conducted family horse. As for the Musician, he
+had gone over early, by special invitation, to take a part in certain
+musical exercises which were to have a place in the exhibition. This
+arrangement appeared to be in every respect satisfactory. The Doctor was
+in high spirits, apparently delighted, and devoting himself with great
+gallantry to his two fair companions. The only question which intruded
+itself was, whether he might not have preferred the company of one to
+that of two. But both looked very attractive in their best dresses: the
+English Annex, the rosier and heartier of the two; the American girl,
+more delicate in features, more mobile and excitable, but suggesting the
+thought that she would tire out before the other. Which of these did he
+most favor? It was hard to say. He seemed to look most at the English
+girl, and yet he talked more with the American girl. In short, he
+behaved particularly well, and neither of the young ladies could complain
+that she was not attended to. As to the Tutor and Number Five, their
+going together caused no special comment. Their intimacy was accepted as
+an established fact, and nothing but the difference in their ages
+prevented the conclusion that it was love, and not mere friendship, which
+brought them together. There was, no doubt, a strong feeling among many
+people that Number Five's affections were a kind of Gibraltar or
+Ehrenbreitstein, say rather a high table-land in the region of perpetual,
+unmelting snow. It was hard for these people to believe that any man of
+mortal mould could find a foothold in that impregnable fortress,--could
+climb to that height and find the flower of love among its glaciers. The
+Tutor and Number Five were both quiet, thoughtful: he, evidently
+captivated; she, what was the meaning of her manner to him? Say that she
+seemed fond of him, as she might be were he her nephew,--one for whom she
+had a special liking. If she had a warmer feeling than this, she could
+hardly know how to manage it; for she was so used to having love made to
+her without returning it that she would naturally be awkward in dealing
+with the new experience.
+
+The Doctor drove a lively five-year-old horse, and took the lead. The
+Tutor followed with a quiet, steady-going nag; if he had driven the
+five-year-old, I would not have answered for the necks of the pair in the
+chaise, for he was too much taken up with the subject they were talking
+of, to be very careful about his driving. The Mistress and her escort
+brought up the rear,--I holding the reins, the Professor at my side, and
+Number Seven sitting with the Mistress.
+
+We arrived at the institution a little later than we had expected to, and
+the students were flocking into the hall, where the Commencement
+exercises were to take place, and the medal-scholars were to receive the
+tokens of their excellence in the various departments. From our seats we
+could see the greater part of the assembly,--not quite all, however of
+the pupils. A pleasing sight it was to look upon, this array of young
+ladies dressed in white, with their class badges, and with the ribbon of
+the shade of blue affected by the scholars of the institution. If
+Solomon in all his glory was not to be compared to a lily, a whole bed of
+lilies could not be compared to this garden-bed of youthful womanhood.
+
+The performances were very much the same as most of us have seen at the
+academies and collegiate schools. Some of the graduating class read
+their "compositions," one of which was a poem,--an echo of the prevailing
+American echoes, of course, but prettily worded and intelligently read.
+Then there was a song sung by a choir of the pupils, led by their
+instructor, who was assisted by the Musician whom we count among The
+Teacups.--There was something in one of the voices that reminded me of
+one I had heard before. Where could it have been? I am sure I cannot
+remember. There are some good voices in our village choir, but none so
+pure and bird-like as this. A sudden thought came into my head, but I
+kept it to myself. I heard a tremulous catching of the breath, something
+like a sob, close by me. It was the Mistress,--she was crying. What was
+she crying for? It was impressive, certainly, to listen to these young
+voices, many of them blending for the last time,--for the scholars were
+soon to be scattered all over the country, and some of them beyond its
+boundaries,--but why the Mistress was so carried away, I did not know.
+She must be more impressible than most of us; yet I thought Number Five
+also looked as if she were having a struggle with herself to keep down
+some rebellious signs of emotion.
+
+The exercises went on very pleasingly until they came to the awarding of
+the gold medal of the year and the valedictory, which was to be delivered
+by the young lady to whom it was to be presented. The name was called;
+it was one not unfamiliar to our ears, and the bearer of it--the Delilah
+of our tea-table, Avis as she was known in the school and elsewhere--rose
+in her place and came forward, so that for the first time on that day, we
+looked upon her. It was a sensation for The Teacups. Our modest, quiet
+waiting-girl was the best scholar of her year. We had talked French
+before her, and we learned that she was the best French scholar the
+teacher had ever had in the school. We had never thought of her except as
+a pleasing and well-trained handmaiden, and here she was an accomplished
+young lady.
+
+Avis went through her part very naturally and gracefully, and when it was
+finished, and she stood before us with the medal glittering on her
+breast, we did not know whether to smile or to cry,--some of us did one,
+and some the other.--We all had an opportunity to see her and
+congratulate her before we left the institution. The mystery of her six
+weeks' serving at our table was easily solved. She had been studying too
+hard and too long, and required some change of scene and occupation. She
+had a fancy for trying to see if she could support herself as so many
+young women are obliged to, and found a place with us, the Mistress only
+knowing her secret.
+
+"She is to be our young Doctor's wife!" the Mistress whispered to me, and
+did some more crying, not for grief, certainly.
+
+Whether our young Doctor's long visits to a neighboring town had anything
+to do with the fact that Avis was at that institution, whether she was
+the patient he visited or not, may be left in doubt. At all events, he
+had always driven off in the direction which would carry him to the place
+where she was at school.
+
+I have attended a large number of celebrations, commencements, banquets,
+soirees, and so forth, and done my best to help on a good many of them.
+In fact, I have become rather too well known in connection with
+"occasions," and it has cost me no little trouble. I believe there is no
+kind of occurrence for which I have not been requested to contribute
+something in prose or verse. It is sometimes very hard to say no to the
+requests. If one is in the right mood when he or she writes an
+occasional poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier. "Why,
+that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bullieve," the unlettered
+applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes to
+write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a
+single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to
+say that Ropers,--the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers,
+author of the Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,--was
+accustomed to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just given
+birth to a couplet. It is not quite so bad as that with most of us who
+are called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some grand
+meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance has had
+more good honest work put into it than the minister's sermon of that week
+had cost him. If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and easily at her
+launching, it does not mean that no great pains have been taken to secure
+the result. Because a poem is an "occasional" one, it does not follow
+that it has not taken as much time and skill as if it had been written
+without immediate, accidental, temporary motive. Pindar's great odes
+were occasional poems, just as much as our Commencement and Phi Beta
+Kappa poems are, and yet they have come down among the most precious
+bequests of antiquity to modern times.
+
+The mystery of the young Doctor's long visits to the neighboring town was
+satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his relations with
+our charming "Delilah,"--for Delilah we could hardly help calling her.
+Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the teacups, now the princess, or,
+what was better, the pride of the school to which she had belonged, fit
+for any position to which she might be called, was to be the wife of our
+young Doctor. It would not have been the right thing to proclaim the
+fact while she was a pupil, but now that she had finished her course of
+instruction there was no need of making a secret of the engagement.
+
+So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I hoped
+and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter where it
+might have been looked for.
+
+What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events? They
+were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like the rest
+of us, and women, like some of the rest of us. They behaved perfectly.
+They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring the young lady to
+the tea-table where she had played her part so becomingly. It is safe to
+say that each of the Annexes world have liked to be asked the lover's
+last question by the very nice young man who had been a pleasant
+companion at the table and elsewhere to each of them. That same question
+is the highest compliment a man can pay a woman, and a woman does not
+mind having a dozen or more such compliments to string on the rosary of
+her remembrances. Whether either of them was glad, on the whole, that he
+had not offered himself to the other in preference to herself would be a
+mean, shabby question, and I think altogether too well of you who are
+reading this paper to suppose that you would entertain the idea of asking
+it.
+
+It was a very pleasant occasion when the Doctor brought Avis over to sit
+with us at the table where she used to stand and wait upon us. We
+wondered how we could for a moment have questioned that she was one to be
+waited upon, and not made for the humble office which nevertheless she
+performed so cheerfully and so well.
+
+ Commencements and other Celebrations, American and English.
+
+The social habits of our people have undergone an immense change within
+the past half century, largely in consequence of the vast development of
+the means of intercourse between different neighborhoods.
+
+Commencements, college gatherings of all kinds, church assemblages,
+school anniversaries, town centennials,--all possible occasions for
+getting crowds together are made the most of. "'T is sixty years
+since,"--and a good many years over,--the time to which my memory
+extends. The great days of the year were, Election,--General Election on
+Wednesday, and Artillery Election on the Monday following, at which time
+lilacs were in bloom and 'lection buns were in order; Fourth of July,
+when strawberries were just going out; and Commencement, a grand time of
+feasting, fiddling, dancing, jollity, not to mention drunkenness and
+fighting, on the classic green of Cambridge. This was the season of
+melons and peaches. That is the way our boyhood chronicles events. It
+was odd that the literary festival should be turned into a Donnybrook
+fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the
+crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of
+the great occasion. They had been so for generations, and it was only
+gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies
+and solemnities of the present sober anniversary.
+
+Nowadays our celebrations smack of the Sunday-school more than of the
+dancing-hall. The aroma of the punch-bowl has given way to the milder
+flavor of lemonade and the cooling virtues of ice-cream. A strawberry
+festival is about as far as the dissipation of our social gatherings
+ventures. There was much that was objectionable in those swearing,
+drinking, fighting times, but they had a certain excitement for us boys
+of the years when the century was in its teens, which comes back to us
+not without its fascinations. The days of total abstinence are a great
+improvement over those of unlicensed license, but there was a picturesque
+element about the rowdyism of our old Commencement days, which had a
+charm for the eye of boyhood. My dear old friend,--book-friend, I
+mean,--whom I always called Daddy Gilpin (as I find Fitzgerald called
+Wordsworth, Daddy Wordsworth),--my old friend Gilpin, I say, considered
+the donkey more picturesque in a landscape than the horse. So a village
+fete as depicted by Teniers is more picturesque than a teetotal picnic or
+a Sabbath-school strawberry festival. Let us be thankful that the
+vicious picturesque is only a remembrance, and the virtuous commonplace a
+reality of to-day.
+
+What put all this into my head is something which the English Annex has
+been showing me. Most of my readers are somewhat acquainted with our own
+church and village celebrations. They know how they are organized; the
+women always being the chief motors, and the machinery very much the same
+in one case as in another. Perhaps they would like to hear how such
+things are managed in England; and that is just what they may learn from
+the pamphlet which was shown me by the English Annex, and of which I will
+give them a brief account.
+
+Some of us remember the Rev. Mr. Haweis, his lectures and his violin,
+which interested and amused us here in Boston a few years ago. Now Mr.
+Haweis, assisted by his intelligent and spirited wife, has charge of the
+parish of St. James, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone, London. On entering
+upon the twenty-fifth year of his incumbency in Marylebone, and the
+twenty-eighth of his ministry in the diocese of London, it was thought a
+good idea to have an "Evening Conversazione and Fete." We can imagine
+just how such a meeting would be organized in one of our towns.
+Ministers, deacons, perhaps a member of Congress, possibly a Senator, and
+even, conceivably, his Excellency the Governor, and a long list of ladies
+lend their names to give lustre to the occasion. It is all very
+pleasant, unpretending, unceremonious, cheerful, well ordered,
+commendable, but not imposing.
+
+Now look at our Marylebone parish celebration, and hold your breath while
+the procession of great names passes before you. You learn at the outset
+that it is held UNDER ROYAL PATRONAGE, and read the names of two royal
+highnesses, one highness, a prince, and a princess. Then comes a list
+before which if you do not turn pale, you must certainly be in the habit
+of rouging: three earls, seven lords, three bishops, two generals (one of
+them Lord Wolseley), one admiral, four baronets, nine knights, a crowd of
+right honorable and honorable ladies (many of them peeresses), and a mob
+of other personages, among whom I find Mr. Howells, Bret Harte, and
+myself.
+
+Perhaps we are disposed to smile at seeing so much made of titles; but
+after what we have learned of Lord Timothy Dexter and the high-sounding
+names appropriated by many of our own compatriots, who have no more claim
+to them than we plain Misters and Misseses, we may feel to them something
+as our late friend Mr. Appleton felt to the real green turtle soup set
+before him, when he said that it was almost as good as mock.
+
+The entertainment on this occasion was of the most varied character. The
+programme makes the following announcement:
+
+ Friday, 4 July, 18-.
+
+ At 8 P. M. the Doors will Open.
+ Mr. Haweis will receive his Friends.
+ The Royal Handbell Ringers will Ring.
+ The Fish-pond will be Fished.
+ The Stalls will be Visited.
+ The Phonograph will Utter.
+
+Refreshments will be called for, and they will come,--Tea, Coffee, and
+Cooling Drinks. Spirits will not be called for, from the Vasty Deep or
+anywhere else,--nor would they come if they were.
+
+At 9.30 Mrs. Haweis will join the assembly.
+
+I am particularly delighted with this last feature in the preliminary
+announcement. It is a proof of the high regard in which the estimable
+and gifted lady who shares her husband's labors is held by the people of
+their congregation, and the friends who share in their feelings. It is
+such a master stroke of policy, too, to keep back the principal
+attraction until the guests must have grown eager for her appearance: I
+can well imagine how great a saving it must have been to the good lady's
+nerves, which were probably pretty well tried already by the fatigues and
+responsibilities of the busy evening. I have a right to say this, for I
+myself had the honor of attending a meeting at Mr. Haweis's house, where
+I was a principal guest, as I suppose, from the fact of the great number
+of persons who were presented to me. The minister must be very popular,
+for the meeting was a regular jam,--not quite so tremendous as that
+greater one, where but for the aid of Mr. Smalley, who kept open a
+breathing-space round us, my companion and myself thought we should have
+been asphyxiated.
+
+The company was interested, as some of my readers maybe, to know what
+were the attractions offered to the visitors besides that of meeting the
+courteous entertainers and their distinguished guests. I cannot give
+these at length, for each part of the show is introduced in the programme
+with apt quotations and pleasantries, which enlivened the catalogue.
+There were eleven stalls, "conducted on the cooperative principle of
+division of profits and interest; they retain the profits, and you take a
+good deal of interest, we hope, in their success."
+
+Stall No. 1. Edisoniana, or the Phonograph. Alluded to by the Roman
+Poet as Vox, et praeterea nihil.
+
+Stall No. 2. Money-changing.
+
+Stall No. 3. Programmes and General Enquiries.
+
+Stall No. 4. Roses.
+
+A rose by any other name, etc. Get one. You can't expect to smell one
+without buying it, but you may buy one without smelling it.
+
+Stall No. 5. Lasenby Liberty Stall. (I cannot explain this. Probably
+articles from Liberty's famous establishment.)
+
+Stall No. 6. Historical Costumes and Ceramics.
+
+Stall No. 7. The Fish-pond.
+
+Stall No. 8. Varieties.
+
+Stall No. 9. Bookstall. (Books) "highly recommended for insomnia;
+friends we never speak to, and always cut if we want to know them well."
+
+Stall No. 10. Icelandic.
+
+Stall No. 11. Call Office. "Mrs. Magnusson, who is devoted to the North
+Pole and all its works, will thaw your sympathies, enlighten your minds,"
+etc., etc.
+
+All you buy may be left at the stalls, ticketed. A duplicate ticket will
+be handed to you on leaving. Present your duplicate at the Call Office.
+
+At 9.45, First Concert.
+
+At 10.45, An Address of Welcome by Rev. H. R. Haweis.
+
+At 11 P. M., Bird-warbling Interlude by Miss Mabel Stephenson, U. S. A.
+
+At 11.20, Second Concert.
+
+ NOTICE!
+
+Three Great Pictures.
+
+LORD TENNYSON. G. F. Watts, R. A. JOHN STUART MILL G. F. Watts, R. A.
+JOSEPH GARIBALDI Sig. Rondi.
+
+ NOTICE!
+
+A Famous Violin.
+
+A world-famed Stradivarius Violin, for which Mr. Hill, of Bond Street,
+gave L 1000, etc., etc.
+
+ REFRESHMENTS.
+
+Tickets for Tea, Coffee, Sandwiches, Iced Drinks, or Ices, Sixpence each,
+etc., etc.
+
+I hope my American reader is pleased and interested by this glimpse of
+the way in which they do these things in London.
+
+There is something very pleasant about all this, but what specially
+strikes me is a curious flavor of city provincialism. There are little
+centres in the heart of great cities, just as there are small fresh-water
+ponds in great islands with the salt sea roaring all round them, and bays
+and creeks penetrating them as briny as the ocean itself. Irving has
+given a charming picture of such a quasi-provincial centre in one of his
+papers in the Sketch-Book,--the one with the title "Little Britain."
+London is a nation of itself, and contains provinces, districts, foreign
+communities, villages, parishes,--innumerable lesser centres, with their
+own distinguishing characteristics, habits, pursuit, languages, social
+laws, as much isolated from each other as if "mountains interposed" made
+the separation between them. One of these lesser centres is that over
+which my friend Mr. Haweis presides as spiritual director. Chelsea has
+been made famous as the home of many authors and artists,--above all, as
+the residence of Carlyle during the greater part of his life. Its
+population, like that of most respectable suburbs, must belong mainly to
+the kind of citizens which resembles in many ways the better class,--as
+we sometimes dare to call it,--of one of our thriving New England towns.
+How many John Gilpins there must be in this population,--citizens of
+"famous London town," but living with the simplicity of the inhabitants
+of our inland villages! In the mighty metropolis where the wealth of the
+world displays itself they practise their snug economies, enjoy their
+simple pleasures, and look upon ice-cream as a luxury, just as if they
+were living on the banks of the Connecticut or the Housatonic, in regions
+where the summer locusts of the great cities have not yet settled on the
+verdure of the native inhabitants. It is delightful to realize the fact
+that while the West End of London is flaunting its splendors and the East
+End in struggling with its miseries, these great middle-class communities
+are living as comfortable, unpretending lives as if they were in one of
+our thriving townships in the huckleberry-districts. Human beings are
+wonderfully alike when they are placed in similar conditions.
+
+We were sitting together in a very quiet way over our teacups. The young
+Doctor, who was in the best of spirits, had been laughing and chatting
+with the two Annexes. The Tutor, who always sits next to Number Five of
+late, had been conversing with her in rather low tones. The rest of us
+had been soberly sipping our tea, and when the Doctor and the Annexes
+stopped talking there was one of those dead silences which are sometimes
+so hard to break in upon, and so awkward while they last. All at once
+Number Seven exploded in a loud laugh, which startled everybody at the
+table.
+
+What is it that sets you laughing so? said I.
+
+"I was thinking," Number Seven replied, "of what you said the other day
+of poetry being only the ashes of emotion. I believe that some people
+are disposed to dispute the proposition. I have been putting your
+doctrine to the test. In doing it I made some rhymes,--the first and
+only ones I ever made. I will suppose a case of very exciting emotion,
+and see whether it would probably take the form of poetry or prose. You
+are suddenly informed that your house is on fire, and have to scramble
+out of it, without stopping to tie your neck-cloth neatly or to put a
+flower in your buttonhole. Do you think a poet turning out in his
+night-dress, and looking on while the flames were swallowing his home and
+all its contents, would express himself in this style?
+
+ "My house is on fire!
+ Bring me my lyre!
+ Like the flames that rise heavenward my song shall aspire!
+
+"He would n't do any such thing, and you know he wouldn't. He would yell
+Fire! Fire! with all his might. Not much rhyming for him just yet!
+Wait until the fire is put out, and he has had time to look at the
+charred timbers and the ashes of his home, and in the course of a week he
+may possibly spin a few rhymes about it. Or suppose he was making an
+offer of his hand and heart, do you think he would declaim a versified
+proposal to his Amanda, or perhaps write an impromptu on the back of his
+hat while he knelt before her?
+
+ "My beloved, to you
+ I will always be true.
+ Oh, pray make me happy, my love, do! do! do!
+
+"What would Amanda think of a suitor who courted her with a rhyming
+dictionary in his pocket to help him make love?"
+
+You are right, said I,--there's nothing in the world like rhymes to cool
+off a man's passion. You look at a blacksmith working on a bit of iron
+or steel. Bright enough it looked while it was on the hearth, in the
+midst of the sea-coal, the great bellows blowing away, and the rod or the
+horse-shoe as red or as white as the burning coals. How it fizzes as it
+goes into the trough of water, and how suddenly all the glow is gone! It
+looks black and cold enough now. Just so with your passionate
+incandescence. It is all well while it burns and scintillates in your
+emotional centres, without articulate and connected expression; but the
+minute you plunge it into the rhyme-trough it cools down, and becomes as
+dead and dull as the cold horse-shoe. It is true that if you lay it cold
+on the anvil and hammer away on it for a while it warms up somewhat.
+Just so with the rhyming fellow,--he pounds away on his verses and they
+warm up a little. But don't let him think that this afterglow of
+composition is the same thing as the original passion. That found
+expression in a few oh, oh's, eheu's, helas, helas's, and when the
+passion had burned itself out you got the rhymed verses, which, as I have
+said, are its ashes.
+
+I thanked Number Seven for his poetical illustration of my thesis. There
+is great good to be got out of a squinting brain, if one only knows how
+to profit by it. We see only one side of the moon, you know, but a
+fellow with a squinting brain seems now and then to get a peep at the
+other side. I speak metaphorically. He takes new and startling views of
+things we have always looked at in one particular aspect. There is a
+rule invariably to be observed with one of this class of intelligences:
+Never contradict a man with a squinting brain. I say a man, because I do
+not think that squinting brains are nearly so common in women as they are
+in men. The "eccentrics" are, I think, for the most part of the male
+sex.
+
+That leads me to say that persons with a strong instinctive tendency to
+contradiction are apt to become unprofitable companions. Our thoughts
+are plants that never flourish in inhospitable soils or chilling
+atmospheres. They are all started under glass, so to speak; that is,
+sheltered and fostered in our own warm and sunny consciousness. They
+must expect some rough treatment when we lift the sash from the frame and
+let the outside elements in upon them. They can bear the rain and the
+breezes, and be all the better for them; but perpetual contradiction is a
+pelting hailstorm, which spoils their growth and tends to kill them out
+altogether.
+
+Now stop and consider a moment. Are not almost all brains a little
+wanting in bilateral symmetry? Do you not find in persons whom you love,
+whom you esteem, and even admire, some marks of obliquity in mental
+vision? Are there not some subjects in looking at which it seems to you
+impossible that they should ever see straight? Are there not moods in
+which it seems to you that they are disposed to see all things out of
+plumb and in false relations with each other? If you answer these
+questions in the affirmative, then you will be glad of a hint as to the
+method of dealing with your friends who have a touch of cerebral
+strabismus, or are liable to occasional paroxysms of perversity. Let
+them have their head. Get them talking on subjects that interest them.
+As a rule, nothing is more likely to serve this purpose than letting them
+talk about themselves; if authors, about their writings; if artists,
+about their pictures or statues; and generally on whatever they have most
+pride in and think most of their own relations with.
+
+Perhaps you will not at first sight agree with me in thinking that slight
+mental obliquity is as common as I suppose. An analogy may have some
+influence on your belief in this matter. Will you take the trouble to
+ask your tailor how many persons have their two shoulders of the same
+height? I think he will tell you that the majority of his customers show
+a distinct difference of height on the two sides. Will you ask a
+portrait-painter how many of those who sit to hint have both sides of
+their faces exactly alike? I believe he will tell you that one side is
+always a little better than the other. What will your hatter say about
+the two sides of the head? Do you see equally well with both eyes, and
+hear equally well with both ears? Few persons past middle age will
+pretend that they do. Why should the two halves of a brain not show a
+natural difference, leading to confusion of thought, and very possibly to
+that instinct of contradiction of which I was speaking? A great deal of
+time is lost in profitless conversation, and a good deal of ill temper
+frequently caused, by not considering these organic and practically
+insuperable conditions. In dealing with them, acquiescence is the best
+of palliations and silence the sovereign specific.
+
+I have been the reporter, as you have seen, of my own conversation and
+that of the other Teacups. I have told some of the circumstances of
+their personal history, and interested, as I hope, here and there a
+reader in the fate of different members of our company. Here are our
+pretty Delilah and our Doctor provided for. We may take it for granted
+that it will not be very long that the young couple will have to wait;
+for, as I have told you all, the Doctor is certainly getting into
+business, and bids fair to have a thriving practice before he saddles his
+nose with an eyeglass and begins to think of a pair of spectacles. So
+that part of our little domestic drama is over, and we can only wish the
+pair that is to be all manner of blessings consistent with a reasonable
+amount of health in the community on whose ailings must depend their
+prosperity.
+
+All our thoughts are now concentrated on the relation existing between
+Number Five and the Tutor. That there is some profound instinctive
+impulse which is drawing them closer together no one who watches them can
+for a moment doubt. There are two principles of attraction which bring
+different natures together: that in which the two natures closely
+resemble each other, and that in which one is complementary of the other.
+In the first case, they coalesce, as do two drops of water or of mercury,
+and become intimately blended as soon as they touch; in the other, they
+rush together as an acid and an alkali unite, predestined from eternity
+to find all they most needed in each other. What is the condition of
+things in the growing intimacy of Number Five and the Tutor? He is many
+years her junior, as we know. Both of them look that fact squarely in the
+face. The presumption is against the union of two persons under these
+circumstances. Presumptions are strong obstacles against any result we
+wish to attain, but half our work in life is to overcome them. A great
+many results look in the distance like six-foot walls, and when we get
+nearer prove to be only five-foot hurdles, to be leaped over or knocked
+down. Twenty years from now she may be a vigorous and active old woman,
+and he a middle-aged, half-worn-out invalid, like so many overworked
+scholars. Everything depends on the number of drops of the elixir vitae
+which Nature mingled in the nourishment she administered to the embryo
+before it tasted its mother's milk. Think of Cleopatra, the bewitching
+old mischief-maker; think of Ninon de L'Enclos, whose own son fell
+desperately in love with her, not knowing the relation in which she stood
+to him; think of Dr. Johnson's friend, Mrs. Thrale, afterward Mrs.
+Piozzi, who at the age of eighty was full enough of life to be making
+love ardently and persistently to Conway, the handsome young actor. I
+can readily believe that Number Five will outlive the Tutor, even if he
+is fortunate enough rather in winning his way into the fortress through
+gates that open to him of their own accord. If he fails in his siege, I
+do really believe he will die early; not of a broken heart, exactly, but
+of a heart starved, with the food it was craving close to it, but
+unattainable. I have, therefore, a deep interest in knowing how Number
+Five and the Tutor are getting along together. Is there any danger of
+one or the other growing tired of the intimacy, and becoming willing to
+get rid of it, like a garment which has shrunk and grown too tight? Is
+it likely that some other attraction may come into disturb the existing
+relation? The problem is to my mind not only interesting, but
+exceptionally curious. You remember the story of Cymon and Iphigenia as
+Dryden tells it. The poor youth has the capacity of loving, but it lies
+hidden in his undeveloped nature. All at once he comes upon the sleeping
+beauty, and is awakened by her charms to a hitherto unfelt consciousness.
+With the advent of the new passion all his dormant faculties start into
+life, and the seeming simpleton becomes the bright and intelligent lover.
+The case of Number Five is as different from that of Cymon as it could
+well be. All her faculties are wide awake, but one emotional side of her
+nature has never been called into active exercise. Why has she never
+been in love with any one of her suitors? Because she liked too many of
+them. Do you happen to remember a poem printed among these papers,
+entitled "I Like You and I Love You"
+
+No one of the poems which have been placed in the urn,--that is, in the
+silver sugar-bowl,--has had any name attached to it; but you could guess
+pretty nearly who was the author of some of them, certainly of the one
+just, referred to. Number Five was attracted to the Tutor from the first
+time he spoke to her. She dreamed about him that night, and nothing
+idealizes and renders fascinating one in whom we have already an interest
+like dreaming of him or of her. Many a calm suitor has been made
+passionate by a dream; many a passionate lover has been made wild and
+half beside himself by a dream; and now and then an infatuated but
+hapless lover, waking from a dream of bliss to a cold reality of
+wretchedness, has helped himself to eternity before he was summoned to
+the table.
+
+Since Number Five had dreamed about the Tutor, he had been more in her
+waking thoughts than she was willing to acknowledge. These thoughts were
+vague, it is true,--emotions, perhaps, rather than worded trains of
+ideas; but she was conscious of a pleasing excitement as his name or his
+image floated across her consciousness; she sometimes sighed as she
+looked over the last passage they had read from the same book, and
+sometimes when they were together they were silent too long,--too long!
+What were they thinking of?
+
+And so it was all as plain sailing for Number Five and the young Tutor as
+it had been for Delilah and the young Doctor, was it? Do you think so?
+Then you do not understand Number Five. Many a woman has as many
+atmospheric rings about her as the planet Saturn. Three are easily to be
+recognized. First, there is the wide ring of attraction which draws into
+itself all that once cross its outer border. These revolve about her
+without ever coming any nearer. Next is the inner ring of attraction.
+Those who come within its irresistible influence are drawn so close that
+it seems as if they must become one with her sooner or later. But within
+this ring is another,--an atmospheric girdle, one of repulsion, which
+love, no matter how enterprising, no matter how prevailing or how
+insinuating, has never passed, and, if we judge of what is to be by what
+has been, never will. Perhaps Nature loved Number Five so well that she
+grudged her to any mortal man, and gave her this inner girdle of
+repulsion to guard her from all who would know her too nearly and love
+her too well. Sometimes two vessels at sea keep each other company for a
+long distance, it may be daring a whole voyage. Very pleasant it is to
+each to have a companion to exchange signals with from time to time; to
+came near enough, when the winds are light, to hold converse in ordinary
+tones from deck to deck; to know that, in case of need, there's help at
+hand. It is good for them to be near each other, but not good to be too
+near. Woe is to them if they touch! The wreck of one or both is likely
+to be the consequence. And so two well-equipped and heavily freighted
+natures may be the best of companions to each other, and yet must never
+attempt to come into closer union. Is this the condition of affairs
+between Number Five and the Tutor? I hope not, for I want them to be
+joined together in that dearest of intimacies, which, if founded in true
+affinity, is the nearest approach to happiness to be looked for in our
+mortal, experience. We mast wait. The Teacups will meet once more
+before the circle is broken, and we may, perhaps, find the solution of
+the question we have raised.
+
+In the mean time, our young Doctor is playing truant oftener than ever.
+He has brought Avis,--if we must call her so, and not Delilah,--several
+times to take tea with us. It means something, in these days, to
+graduate from one of our first-class academies or collegiate schools. I
+shall never forget my first visit to one of these institutions. How much
+its pupils know, I said, which I was never taught, and have never
+learned! I was fairly frightened to see what a teaching apparatus was
+provided for them. I should think the first thing to be done with most
+of the husbands, they are likely to get would be to put them through a
+course of instruction. The young wives must find their lords wofully
+ignorant, in a large proportion of cases. When the wife has educated the
+husband to such a point that she can invite him to work out a problem in
+the higher mathematics or to perform a difficult chemical analysis with
+her as his collaborator, as less instructed dames ask their husbands to
+play a game of checkers or backgammon, they can have delightful and
+instructive evenings together. I hope our young Doctor will take kindly
+to his wife's (that is to be) teachings.
+
+When the following verses were taken out of the urn, the Mistress asked
+me to hand the manuscript to the young Doctor to read. I noticed that he
+did not keep his eyes very closely fixed on the paper. It seemed as if
+he could have recited the lines without referring to the manuscript at
+all.
+
+ AT THE TURN OF THE ROAD.
+
+ The glory has passed from the goldenrod's plume,
+ The purple-hued asters still linger in bloom;
+ The birch is bright yellow, the sumachs are red,
+ The maples like torches aflame overhead.
+
+ But what if the joy of the summer is past,
+ And winter's wild herald is blowing his blast?
+ For me dull November is sweeter than May,
+ For my love is its sunshine,--she meets me to-day!
+
+ Will she come? Will the ring-dove return to her nest?
+ Will the needle swing back from the east or the west?
+ At the stroke of the hour she will be at her gate;
+ A friend may prove laggard,--love never comes late.
+
+ Do I see her afar in the distance? Not yet.
+ Too early! Too early! She could not forget!
+ When I cross the old bridge where the brook overflowed,
+ She will flash full in sight at the turn of the road.
+
+ I pass the low wall where the ivy entwines;
+ I tread the brown pathway that leads through the pines;
+ I haste by the boulder that lies in the field,
+ Where her promise at parting was lovingly sealed.
+
+ Will she come by the hillside or round through the wood?
+ Will she wear her brown dress or her mantle and hood?
+ The minute draws near,--but her watch may go wrong;
+ My heart will be asking, What keeps her so long?
+
+ Why doubt for a moment? More shame if I do!
+ Why question? Why tremble? Are angels more true?
+ She would come to the lover who calls her his own
+ Though she trod in the track of a whirling cyclone!
+
+ --I crossed the old bridge ere the minute had passed.
+ I looked: lo! my Love stood before me at last.
+ Her eyes, how they sparkled, her cheeks, how they glowed,
+ As we met, face to face, at the turn of the road!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+There was a great tinkling of teaspoons the other evening, when I took my
+seat at the table, where all The Teacups were gathered before my
+entrance. The whole company arose, and the Mistress, speaking for them,
+expressed the usual sentiment appropriate to such occasions. "Many happy
+returns" is the customary formula. No matter if the object of this kind
+wish is a centenarian, it is quite safe to assume that he is ready and
+very willing to accept as many more years as the disposing powers may see
+fit to allow him.
+
+The meaning of it all was that this was my birthday. My friends, near
+and distant, had seen fit to remember it, and to let me know in various
+pleasant ways that they had not forgotten it. The tables were adorned
+with flowers. Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects were displayed on a
+side table. A great green wreath, which must have cost the parent oak a
+large fraction of its foliage, was an object of special admiration.
+Baskets of flowers which had half unpeopled greenhouses, large bouquets
+of roses, fragrant bunches of pinks, and many beautiful blossoms I am not
+botanist enough to name had been coming in upon me all day long. Many of
+these offerings were brought by the givers in person; many came with
+notes as fragrant with good wishes as the flowers they accompanied with
+their natural perfumes.
+
+How old was I, The Dictator, once known by another equally audacious
+title,--I, the recipient of all these favors and honors? I had cleared
+the eight-barred gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer, far fewer,
+go over, a year before. I was a trespasser on the domain belonging to
+another generation. The children of my coevals were fast getting gray
+and bald, and their children beginning to look upon the world as
+belonging to them, and not to their sires and grandsires. After that
+leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a kind of impropriety to keep
+on as if one were still of a reasonable age. Sometimes it seems to me
+almost of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering about in the
+preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper guards so jealously. But, on the
+other hand, I remember that men of science have maintained that the
+natural life of man is nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. I
+always think of a familiar experience which I bring from the French
+cafes, well known to me in my early manhood. One of the illustrated
+papers of my Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.
+
+A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table. He has just
+had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit verre. Most
+of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but there may be here
+and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic fluids, living among the
+bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not aware that the words, as
+commonly used, signify a small glass--a very small glass--of spirit,
+commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-cafe, or coffee-chaser. This drinking
+of brandy, "neat," I may remark by the way, is not quite so bad as it
+looks. Whiskey or rum taken unmixed from a tumbler is a knock-down blow
+to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or
+Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.
+
+Well,--to go back behind our brackets,--the guest is calling to the
+waiter, "Garcon! et le bain de pieds!" Waiter! and the foot-bath!--The
+little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom
+is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy rung over into
+this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer.
+
+Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit. At seventy
+years it used to be said that the little glass was full. We should be
+more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and Tennyson and
+our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking, writing, speaking, in
+the green preserve belonging to their children and grandchildren, and
+Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in the distance. But,
+returning resolutely to the petit verre, I am willing to concede that all
+after fourscore is the bain de pieds,--the slopping over, so to speak, of
+the full measure of life. I remember that one who was very near and dear
+to me, and who lived to a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the
+century did not look very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very
+sweet, natural way for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a
+burden to her children, themselves getting well into years. It is not
+hard to understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the
+case of that beloved nonagenarian. I have known few persons, young or
+old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose
+memory comes up before me as I write.
+
+Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracefully, as pleasingly, as we
+come into blossom! I always think of the morning-glory as the loveliest
+example of a graceful yielding to the inevitable. It is beautiful before
+its twisted corolla opens; it is comely as it folds its petals inward,
+when its brief hours of perfection are over. Women find it easier than
+men to grow old in a becoming way. A very old lady who has kept
+something, it may be a great deal, of her youthful feelings, who is
+daintily cared for, who is grateful for the attentions bestowed upon her,
+and enters into the spirit of the young lives that surround her, is as
+precious to those who love her as a gem in an antique setting, the
+fashion of which has long gone by, but which leaves the jewel the color
+and brightness which are its inalienable qualities. With old men it is
+too often different. They do not belong so much indoors as women do.
+They have no pretty little manual occupations. The old lady knits or
+stitches so long as her eyes and fingers will let her. The old man
+smokes his pipe, but does not know what to do with his fingers, unless he
+plays upon some instrument, or has a mechanical turn which finds business
+for them.
+
+But the old writer, I said to The Teacups, as I say to you, my readers,
+labors under one special difficulty, which I am thinking of and
+exemplifying at this moment. He is constantly tending to reflect upon
+and discourse about his own particular stage of life. He feels that he
+must apologize for his intrusion upon the time and thoughts of a
+generation which he naturally supposes must be tired of him, if they ever
+had any considerable regard for him. Now, if the world of readers hates
+anything it sees in print, it is apology. If what one has to say is
+worth saying, he need not beg pardon fur saying it. If it is not worth
+saying I will not finish the sentence. But it is so hard to resist the
+temptation, notwithstanding that the terrible line beginning "Superfluous
+lags the veteran" is always repeating itself in his dull ear!
+
+What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his
+constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he has
+reached the age of threescore and twenty? His coevals have dropped away
+by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units scattered about here and
+there, like the few beads above the water after a ship has gone to
+pieces. Does he write and publish for those of his own time of life? He
+need not print a large edition. Does he hope to secure a hearing from
+those who have come into the reading world since his coevals? They have
+found fresher fields and greener pastures. Their interests are in the
+out-door, active world. Some of them are circumnavigating the planet
+while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug. Some are
+gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons. Some are
+settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he
+is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the
+obituaries in his morning or evening paper.
+
+Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than in
+her dealings with the old. She has no idea of mortifying them by sudden
+and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of consciousness.
+The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of its perfection long
+before its deficiency calls the owner's special attention to it. Very
+probably, the first hint we have of the change is that a friend makes the
+pleasing remark that we are "playing the trombone," as he calls it; that
+is, moving a book we are holding backward and forward, to get the right
+focal distance. Or it may be we find fault with the lamp or the
+gas-burner for not giving so much light as it used to. At last,
+somewhere between forty and fifty, we begin to dangle a jaunty pair of
+eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity. In due time a pair of
+sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon
+it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness
+comes which no glasses can penetrate. Nature is pitiless in carrying out
+the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the
+condemned on his way to the final scene. The man who is to be hanged
+always has a good breakfast provided for him.
+
+Do not think that the old look upon themselves as the helpless, hopeless,
+forlorn creatures which they seem to young people. Do these young folks
+suppose that all vanity dies out of the natures of old men and old women?
+A dentist of olden time told me that a good-looking young man once said
+to him, "Keep that incisor presentable, if you can, till I am fifty, and
+then I sha'n't care how I look." I venture to say that that gentleman
+was as particular about his personal appearance and as proud of his good
+looks at fifty, and many years after fifty, as he was in the twenties,
+when he made that speech to the dentist.
+
+My dear friends around the teacups, and at that wider board where I am
+now entertaining, or trying to entertain, my company, is it not as plain
+to you as it is to me that I had better leave such tasks as that which I
+am just finishing to those who live in a more interesting period of life
+than one which, in the order of nature, is next door to decrepitude?
+Ought I not to regret having undertaken to report the doings and sayings
+of the members of the circle which you have known as The Teacups?
+
+Dear, faithful reader, whose patient eyes have followed my reports
+through these long months, you and I are about parting company. Perhaps
+you are one of those who have known me under another name, in those
+far-off days separated from these by the red sea of the great national
+conflict. When you first heard the tinkle of the teaspoons, as the table
+was being made ready for its guests, you trembled for me, in the kindness
+of your hearts. I do not wonder that you did,--I trembled for myself.
+But I remembered the story of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was seen all of
+a tremor just as he was going into action. "How is this?" said a brother
+officer to him. "Surely you are not afraid?" "No," he answered, "but my
+flesh trembles at the thought of the dangers into which my intrepid
+spirit will carry me." I knew the risk of undertaking to carry through a
+series of connected papers. And yet I thought it was better to run that
+risk, more manly, more sensible, than to give way to the fears which made
+my flesh tremble as did Sir Cloudesley Shovel's. For myself the labor
+has been a distraction, and one which came at a time when it was needed.
+Sometimes, as in one of those poems recently published,--the reader will
+easily guess which,--the youthful spirit has come over me with such a
+rush that it made me feel just as I did when I wrote the history of the
+"One-hoss Shay" thirty years ago. To repeat one of my comparisons, it
+was as if an early fruit had ripened on a graft upon an old, steady-going
+tree, to the astonishment of all its later-maturing products. I should
+hardly dare to say so much as this if I had not heard a similar opinion
+expressed by others.
+
+Once committed to my undertaking, there was no turning back. It is true
+that I had said I might stop at any moment, but after one or two numbers
+it seemed as if there were an informal pledge to carry the series on, as
+in former cases, until I had completed my dozen instalments.
+
+Writers and speakers have their idiosyncrasies, their habits, their
+tricks, if you had rather call them so, as to their ways of writing and
+speaking. There is a very old and familiar story, accompanied by a
+feeble jest, which most of my readers may probably enough have met with
+in Joe Miller or elsewhere. It is that of a lawyer who could never make
+an argument without having a piece of thread to work upon with his
+fingers while he was pleading. Some one stole it from him one day, and
+he could not get on at all with his speech,--he had lost the thread of
+his discourse, as the story had it. Now this is what I myself once saw.
+It was at a meeting where certain grave matters were debated in an
+assembly of professional men. A speaker, whom I never heard before or
+since, got up and made a long and forcible argument. I do not think he
+was a lawyer, but he spoke as if he had been trained to talk to juries.
+He held a long string in one hand, which he drew through the other band
+incessantly, as he spoke, just as a shoe maker performs the motion of
+waxing his thread. He appeared to be dependent on this motion. The
+physiological significance of the fact I suppose to be that the flow of
+what we call the nervous current from the thinking centre to the organs
+of speech was rendered freer and easier by the establishment of a
+simultaneous collateral nervous current to the set of muscles concerned
+in the action I have described.
+
+I do not use a string to help me write or speak, but I must have its
+equivalent. I must have my paper and pen or pencil before me to set my
+thoughts flowing in such form that they can be written continuously.
+There have been lawyers who could think out their whole argument in
+connected order without a single note. There are authors,--and I think
+there are many,--who can compose and finish off a poem or a story without
+writing a word of it until, when the proper time comes, they copy what
+they carry in their heads. I have been told that Sir Edwin Arnold
+thought out his beautiful "Light of Asia" in this way.
+
+I find the great charm of writing consists in its surprises. When one is
+in the receptive attitude of mind, the thoughts which are sprung upon
+him, the images which flash through his--consciousness, are a delight and
+an excitement. I am impatient of every hindrance in setting down my
+thoughts,--of a pen that will not write, of ink that will not flow, of
+paper that will not receive the ink. And here let me pay the tribute
+which I owe to one of the humblest but most serviceable of my assistants,
+especially in poetical composition. Nothing seems more prosaic than the
+stylographic pen. It deprives the handwriting of its beauty, and to some
+extent of its individual character. The brutal communism of the letters
+it forms covers the page it fills with the most uniformly uninteresting
+characters. But, abuse it as much as you choose, there is nothing like
+it for the poet, for the imaginative writer. Many a fine flow of thought
+has been checked, perhaps arrested, by the ill behavior of a goose-quill.
+Many an idea has escaped while the author was dipping his pen in the
+inkstand. But with the stylographic pen, in the hands of one who knows
+how to care for it and how to use it, unbroken rhythms and harmonious
+cadences are the natural products of the unimpeded flow of the fluid
+which is the vehicle of the author's thoughts and fancies. So much for my
+debt of gratitude to the humble stylographic pen. It does not furnish
+the proper medium for the correspondence of intimates, who wish to see as
+much of their friends' personality as their handwriting can hold,--still
+less for the impassioned interchange of sentiments between lovers; but in
+writing for the press its use is open to no objection. Its movement over
+the paper is like the flight of a swallow, while the quill pen and the
+steel pen and the gold pen are all taking short, laborious journeys, and
+stopping to drink every few minutes.
+
+A chief pleasure which the author of novels and stories experiences is
+that of becoming acquainted with the characters be draws. It is
+perfectly true that his characters must, in the nature of things, have
+more or less of himself in their composition. If I should seek an
+exemplification of this in the person of any of my Teacups, I should find
+it most readily in the one whom I have called Number Seven, the one with
+the squinting brain. I think that not only I, the writer, but many of my
+readers, recognize in our own mental constitution an occasional obliquity
+of perception, not always detected at the time, but plain enough when
+looked back upon. What extravagant fancies you and I have seriously
+entertained at one time or another! What superstitious notions have got
+into our heads and taken possession of its empty chambers,--or, in the
+language of science, seized on the groups of nerve-cells in some of the
+idle cerebral convolutions!
+
+The writer, I say, becomes acquainted with his characters as he goes on.
+They are at first mere embryos, outlines of distinct personalities. By
+and by, if they have any organic cohesion, they begin to assert
+themselves. They can say and do such and such things; such and such
+other things they cannot and must not say or do. The story-writer's and
+play-writer's danger is that they will get their characters mixed, and
+make A say what B ought to have said. The stronger his imaginative
+faculty, the less liable will the writer be to this fault; but not even
+Shakespeare's power of throwing himself into his characters prevents many
+of his different personages from talking philosophy in the same strain
+and in a style common to them all.
+
+You will often observe that authors fall in love with the imaginary
+persons they describe, and that they bestow affectionate epithets upon
+them which it may happen the reader does not consider in any way called
+for. This is a pleasure to which they have a right. Every author of a
+story is surrounded by a little family of ideal children, as dear to him,
+it may be, as are flesh-and-blood children to their parents. You may
+forget all about the circle of Teacups to which I have introduced
+you,--on the supposition that you have followed me with some degree of
+interest; but do you suppose that Number Five does not continue as a
+presence with me, and that my pretty Delilah has left me forever because
+she is going to be married?
+
+No, my dear friend, our circle will break apart, and its different
+members will soon be to you as if they had never been. But do you think
+that I can forget them? Do you suppose that I shall cease to follow the
+love (or the loves; which do you think is the true word, the singular or
+the plural?) of Number Five and the young Tutor who is so constantly
+found in her company? Do you suppose that I do not continue my relations
+with the "Cracked Teacup,"--the poor old fellow with whom I have so much
+in common, whose counterpart, perhaps, you may find in your own complex
+personality?
+
+I take from the top shelf of the hospital department of my library--the
+section devoted to literary cripples, imbeciles, failures, foolish
+rhymesters, and silly eccentrics--one of the least conspicuous and most
+hopelessly feeble of the weak-minded population of that intellectual
+almshouse. I open it and look through its pages. It is a story. I have
+looked into it once before,--on its first reception as a gift from the
+author. I try to recall some of the names I see there: they mean nothing
+to me, but I venture to say the author cherishes them all, and cries over
+them as he did when he was writing their history. I put the book back
+among its dusty companions, and, sitting down in my reflective
+rocking-chair, think how others must forget, and how I shall remember,
+the company that gathered about this table.
+
+Shall I ever meet any one of them again, in these pages or in any other?
+Will the cracked Teacup hold together, or will he go to pieces, and find
+himself in that retreat where the owner of the terrible clock which drove
+him crazy is walking under the shelter of the high walls? Has the young
+Doctor's crown yet received the seal which is Nature's warrant of wisdom
+and proof of professional competency? And Number Five and her young
+friend the Tutor,--have they kept on in their dangerous intimacy? Did
+they get through the tutto tremante passage, reading from the same old
+large edition of Dante which the Tutor recommended as the best, and in
+reading from which their heads were necessarily brought perilously near
+to each other?
+
+It would be very pleasant if I could, consistently with the present state
+of affairs, bring these two young people together. I say two young
+people, for the one who counts most years seems to me to be really the
+younger of the pair. That Number Five foresaw from the first that any
+tenderer feeling than that of friendship would intrude itself between
+them I do not believe. As for the Tutor, he soon found where he was
+drifting. It was his first experience in matters concerning the heart,
+and absorbed his whole nature as a thing of course. Did he tell her he
+loved her? Perhaps he did, fifty times; perhaps he never had the courage
+to say so outright. But sometimes they looked each other straight in the
+eyes, and strange messages seemed to pass from one consciousness to the
+other. Will the Tutor ask Number Five to be his wife; and if he does,
+will she yield to the dictates of nature, and lower the flag of that
+fortress so long thought impregnable? Will he go on writing such poems
+to her as "The Rose and the Fern" or "I Like You and I Love You," and be
+content with the pursuit of that which he never can attain? That is all
+very well, on the "Grecian Urn" of Keats,--beautiful, but not love such
+as mortals demand. Still, that may be all, for aught that we have yet
+seen.
+
+ "Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
+ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
+ Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
+ Though winning near the goal,--yet do not grieve;
+ She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
+ Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
+
+ .........................
+
+ "More happy love! more happy, happy love!
+ Forever warm, and still to be enjoyed,
+ Forever panting and forever young!"
+
+And so, good-bye, young people, whom we part with here. Shadows you have
+been and are to my readers; very real you have been and are to me,--as
+real as the memories of many friends whom I shall see no more.
+
+As I am not in the habit of indulging in late suppers, the reader need
+not think that I shall spread another board and invite him to listen to
+the conversations which take place around it. If, from time to time, he
+finds a slight refection awaiting him on the sideboard, I hope he may
+welcome it as pleasantly as he has accepted what I have offered him from
+the board now just being cleared.
+
+ ..........................
+
+It is a good rule for the actor who manages the popular street drama of
+Punch not to let the audience or spectators see his legs. It is very
+hard for the writer of papers like these, which are now coming to their
+conclusion, to keep his personality from showing itself too conspicuously
+through the thin disguises of his various characters. As the show is now
+over, as the curtain has fallen, I appear before it in my proper person,
+to address a few words to the friends who have assisted, as the French
+say, by their presence, and as we use the word, by the kind way in which
+they have received my attempts at their entertainment.
+
+This series of papers is the fourth of its kind which I have offered to
+my readers. I may be allowed to look back upon the succession of serial
+articles which was commenced more than thirty years ago, in 1857. "The
+Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" was the first of the series. It was
+begun without the least idea what was to be its course and its outcome.
+Its characters shaped themselves gradually as the manuscript grew under
+my hand. I jotted down on the sheet of blotting paper before me the
+thoughts and fancies which came into my head. A very odd-looking object
+was this page of memoranda. Many of the hints were worked up into formal
+shape, many were rejected. Sometimes I recorded a story, a jest, or a pun
+for consideration, and made use of it or let it alone as my second
+thought decided. I remember a curious coincidence, which, if I have ever
+told in print,--I am not sure whether I have or not,--I will tell over
+again. I mention it, not for the pun, which I rejected as not very
+edifying and perhaps not new, though I did not recollect having seen it.
+
+Mulier, Latin for woman; why apply that name to one of the gentle but
+occasionally obstinate sex? The answer was that a woman is (sometimes)
+more mulish than a mule. Please observe that I did not like the poor pun
+very well, and thought it rather rude and inelegant. So I left it on the
+blotter, where it was standing when one of the next numbers of "Punch"
+came out and contained that very same pun, which must have been hit upon
+by some English contributor at just about the same time I fell upon it on
+this side of the Atlantic. This fact may be added to the chapter of
+coincidences which belongs to the first number of this series of papers.
+
+The "Autocrat" had the attraction of novelty, which of course was wanting
+in the succeeding papers of similar character. The criticisms upon the
+successive numbers as they came out were various, but generally
+encouraging. Some were more than encouraging; very high-colored in their
+phrases of commendation. When the papers were brought together in a
+volume their success was beyond my expectations. Up to the present time
+the "Autocrat" has maintained its position. An immortality of a whole
+generation is more than most writers are entitled to expect. I venture
+to think, from the letters I receive from the children and grandchildren
+of my first set of readers, that for some little time longer, at least,
+it will continue to be read, and even to be a favorite with some of its
+readers. Non omnis moriar is a pleasant thought to one who has loved his
+poor little planet, and will, I trust, retain kindly recollections of it
+through whatever wilderness of worlds he may be called to wander in his
+future pilgrimages. I say "poor little planet." Ever since I had a ten
+cent look at the transit of Venus, a few years ago, through the telescope
+in the Mall, the earth has been wholly different to me from what it used
+to be. I knew from books what a speck it is in the universe, but nothing
+ever brought the fact home like the sight of the sister planet sailing
+across the sun's disk, about large enough for a buckshot, not large
+enough for a full-sized bullet. Yes, I love the little globule where I
+have spent more than fourscore years, and I like to think that some of my
+thoughts and some of my emotions may live themselves over again when I am
+sleeping. I cannot thank all the kind readers of the "Autocrat" who are
+constantly sending me their acknowledgments. If they see this printed
+page, let them be assured that a writer is always rendered happier by
+being told that he has made a fellow-being wiser or better, or even
+contributed to his harmless entertainment. This a correspondent may take
+for granted, even if his letter of grateful recognition receives no
+reply. It becomes more and more difficult for me to keep up with my
+correspondents, and I must soon give it up as impossible.
+
+"The Professor at the Breakfast Table" followed immediately on the heels
+of the "Autocrat." The Professor was the alter ego of the first
+personage. In the earlier series he had played a secondary part, and in
+this second series no great effort was made to create a character wholly
+unlike the first. The Professor was more outspoken, however, on
+religious subjects, and brought down a good deal of hard language on
+himself and the author to whom he owed his existence. I suppose he may
+have used some irritating expressions, unconsciously, but not
+unconscientiously, I am sure. There is nothing harder to forgive than
+the sting of an epigram. Some of the old doctors, I fear, never pardoned
+me for saying that if a ship, loaded with an assorted cargo of the drugs
+which used to be considered the natural food of sick people, went to the
+bottom of the sea, it would be "all the better for mankind and all the
+worse for the fishes." If I had not put that snapper on the end of my
+whip-lash, I might have got off without the ill temper which my
+antithesis provoked. Thirty years set that all right, and the same
+thirty years have so changed the theological atmosphere that such abusive
+words as "heretic" and "infidel," applied to persons who differ from the
+old standards of faith, are chiefly interesting as a test of breeding,
+being seldom used by any people above the social half-caste line. I am
+speaking of Protestants; how it may be among Roman Catholics I do not
+know, but I suspect that with them also it is a good deal a matter of
+breeding. There were not wanting some who liked the Professor better
+than the Autocrat. I confess that I prefer my champagne in its first
+burst of gaseous enthusiasm; but if my guest likes it better after it has
+stood awhile, I am pleased to accommodate him. The first of my series
+came from my mind almost with an explosion, like the champagne cork; it
+startled me a little to see what I had written, and to hear what people
+said about it. After that first explosion the flow was more sober, and I
+looked upon the product of my wine-press more coolly. Continuations
+almost always sag a little. I will not say that of my own second effort,
+but if others said it, I should not be disposed to wonder at or to
+dispute them.
+
+"The Poet at the Breakfast Table" came some years later. This series of
+papers was not so much a continuation as a resurrection. It was a doubly
+hazardous attempt, made without any extravagant expectations, and was
+received as well as I had any right to anticipate. It differed from the
+other two series in containing a poem of considerable length, published
+in successive portions. This poem holds a good deal of self-communing,
+and gave me the opportunity of expressing some thoughts and feelings not
+to be found elsewhere in my writings. I had occasion to read the whole
+volume, not long since, in preparation for a new edition, and was rather
+more pleased with it than I had expected to be. An old author is
+constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions
+of his earlier years. It is a long time since I have read the
+"Autocrat," but I take it up now and then and read in it for a few
+minutes, not always without some degree of edification.
+
+These three series of papers, "Autocrat," "Professor," "Poet," are all
+studies of life from somewhat different points of view. They are largely
+made up of sober reflections, and appeared to me to require some lively
+human interest to save them from wearisome didactic dulness. What could
+be more natural than that love should find its way among the young people
+who helped to make up the circle gathered around the table? Nothing is
+older than the story of young love. Nothing is newer than that same old
+story. A bit of gilding here and there has a wonderful effect in
+enlivening a landscape or an apartment. Napoleon consoled the Parisians
+in their year of defeat by gilding the dome of the Invalides. Boston has
+glorified her State House and herself at the expense of a few sheets of
+gold leaf laid on the dome, which shines like a sun in the eyes of her
+citizens, and like a star in those of the approaching traveller. I think
+the gilding of a love-story helped all three of these earlier papers. The
+same need I felt in the series of papers just closed. The slight
+incident of Delilah's appearance and disappearance served my purpose to
+some extent. But what should I do with Number Five? The reader must
+follow out her career for himself. For myself, I think that she and the
+Tutor have both utterly forgotten the difference of their years in the
+fascination of intimate intercourse. I do not believe that a nature so
+large, so rich in affection, as Number Five's is going to fall defeated
+of its best inheritance of life, like a vine which finds no support for
+its tendrils to twine around, and so creeps along the ground from which
+nature meant that love should lift it. I feel as if I ought to follow
+these two personages of my sermonizing story until they come together or
+separate, to fade, to wither,--perhaps to die, at last, of something like
+what the doctors call heart-failure, but which might more truly be called
+heart-starvation. When I say die, I do not mean necessarily the death
+that goes into the obituary column. It may come to that, in one or both;
+but I think that, if they are never united, Number Five will outlive the
+Tutor, who will fall into melancholy ways, and pine and waste, while she
+lives along, feeling all the time that she has cheated herself of
+happiness. I hope that is not going to be their fortune, or misfortune.
+Vieille fille fait jeune mariee. What a youthful bride Number Five would
+be, if she could only make up her mind to matrimony! In the mean time
+she must be left with her lambs all around her. May heaven temper the
+winds to them, for they have been shorn very close, every one of them, of
+their golden fleece of aspirations and anticipations.
+
+I must avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words to my distant
+friends who take interest enough in my writings, early or recent, to wish
+to enter into communication with me by letter, or to keep up a
+communication already begun. I have given notice in print that the
+letters, books, and manuscripts which I receive by mail are so numerous
+that if I undertook to read and answer them all I should have little time
+for anything else. I have for some years depended on the assistance of a
+secretary, but our joint efforts have proved unable, of late, to keep
+down the accumulations which come in with every mail. So many of the
+letters I receive are of a pleasant character that it is hard to let them
+go unacknowledged. The extreme friendliness which pervades many of them
+gives them a value which I rate very highly. When large numbers of
+strangers insist on claiming one as a friend, on the strength of what he
+has written, it tends to make him think of himself somewhat indulgently.
+It is the most natural thing in the world to want to give expression to
+the feeling the loving messages from far-off unknown friends must excite.
+Many a day has had its best working hours broken into, spoiled for all
+literary work, by the labor of answering correspondents whose good
+opinion it is gratifying to have called forth, but who were unconsciously
+laying a new burden on shoulders already aching. I know too well that
+what I say will not reach the eyes of many who might possibly take a hint
+from it. Still I must keep repeating it before breaking off suddenly and
+leaving whole piles of letters unanswered. I have been very heavily
+handicapped for many years. It is partly my own fault. From what my
+correspondents tell me, I must infer that I have established a dangerous
+reputation for willingness to answer all sorts of letters. They come
+with such insinuating humility,--they cannot bear to intrude upon my
+time, they know that I have a great many calls upon it,--and
+incontinently proceed to lay their additional weight on the load which is
+breaking my back.
+
+The hypocrisy of kind-hearted people is one of the most painful
+exhibitions of human weakness. It has occurred to me that it might be
+profitable to reproduce some of my unwritten answers to correspondents.
+If those which were actually written and sent were to be printed in
+parallel columns with those mentally formed but not written out responses
+and comments, the reader would get some idea of the internal conflicts an
+honest and not unamiable person has to go through, when he finds himself
+driven to the wall by a correspondence which is draining his vocabulary
+to find expressions that sound as agreeably, and signify as little, as
+the phrases used by a diplomatist in closing an official communication.
+
+No. 1. Want my autograph, do you? And don't know how to spell my name.
+An a for an e in my middle name. Leave out the l in my last name. Do
+you know how people hate to have their names misspelled? What do you
+suppose are the sentiments entertained by the Thompsons with a p towards
+those who address them in writing as Thomson?
+
+No. 2. Think the lines you mention are by far the best I ever wrote,
+hey? Well, I didn't write those lines. What is more, I think they are
+as detestable a string of rhymes as I could wish my worst enemy had
+written. A very pleasant frame of mind I am in for writing a letter,
+after reading yours!
+
+No. 3. I am glad to hear that my namesake, whom I never saw and never
+expect to see, has cut another tooth; but why write four pages on the
+strength of that domestic occurrence?
+
+No. 4. You wish to correct an error in my Broomstick poem, do you? You
+give me to understand that Wilmington is not in Essex County, but in
+Middlesex. Very well; but are they separated by running water? Because
+if they are not, what could hinder a witch from crossing the line that
+separates Wilmington from Andover, I should like to know? I never meant
+to imply that the witches made no excursions beyond the district which
+was more especially their seat of operations.
+
+As I come towards the end of this task which I had set myself, I wish, of
+course, that I could have performed it more to my own satisfaction and
+that of my readers. This is a feeling which almost every one must have
+at the conclusion of any work he has undertaken. A common and very simple
+reason for this disappointment is that most of us overrate our capacity.
+We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to, in virtue of our
+endowments. The figurative descriptions of the last Grand Assize must no
+more be taken literally than the golden crowns, which we do not expect or
+want to wear on our heads, or the golden harps, which we do not want or
+expect to hold in our hands. Is it not too true that many religious
+sectaries think of the last tribunal complacently, as the scene in which
+they are to have the satisfaction of saying to the believers of a creed
+different from their own, "I told you so"? Are not others oppressed with
+the thought of the great returns which will be expected of them as the
+product of their great gifts, the very limited amount of which they do
+not suspect, and will be very glad to learn, even at the expense of their
+self-love, when they are called to their account? If the ways of the
+Supreme Being are ever really to be "justified to men," to use Milton's
+expression, every human being may expect an exhaustive explanation of
+himself. No man is capable of being his own counsel, and I cannot help
+hoping that the ablest of the, archangels will be retained for the
+defence of the worst of sinners. He himself is unconscious of the
+agencies which made him what he is. Self-determining he may be, if you
+will, but who determines the self which is the proximate source of the
+determination? Why was the A self like his good uncle in bodily aspect
+and mental and moral qualities, and the B self like the bad uncle in look
+and character? Has not a man a right to ask this question in the here or
+in the hereafter,--in this world or in any world in which he may find
+himself? If the All-wise wishes to satisfy his reasonable and reasoning
+creatures, it will not be by a display of elemental convulsions, but by
+the still small voice, which treats with him as a dependent entitled to
+know the meaning of his existence, and if there was anything wrong in his
+adjustment to the moral and spiritual conditions of the world around him
+to have full allowance made for it. No melodramatic display of warring
+elements, such as the white-robed Second Adventist imagines, can meet the
+need of the human heart. The thunders and lightnings of Sinai terrified
+and impressed the more timid souls of the idolatrous and rebellious
+caravan which the great leader was conducting, but a far nobler
+manifestation of divinity was that when "the Lord spake unto Moses face
+to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend."
+
+I find the burden and restrictions of rhyme more and more troublesome as
+I grow older. There are times when it seems natural enough to employ
+that form of expression, but it is only occasionally; and the use of it
+as the vehicle of the commonplace is so prevalent that one is not much
+tempted to select it as the medium for his thoughts and emotions. The
+art of rhyming has almost become a part of a high-school education, and
+its practice is far from being an evidence of intellectual distinction.
+Mediocrity is as much forbidden to the poet in our days as it was in
+those of Horace, and the immense majority of the verses written are
+stamped with hopeless mediocrity.
+
+When one of the ancient poets found he was trying to grind out verses
+which came unwillingly, he said he was writing--
+
+ INVITA MINERVA.
+
+ Vex not the Muse with idle prayers,
+ --She will not hear thy call;
+ She steals upon thee unawares,
+ Or seeks thee not at all.
+
+ Soft as the moonbeams when they sought
+ Endymion's fragrant bower,
+ She parts the whispering leaves of thought
+ To show her full-blown flower.
+
+ For thee her wooing hour has passed,
+ The singing birds have flown,
+ And winter comes with icy blast
+ To chill thy buds unblown.
+
+ Yet, though the woods no longer thrill
+ As once their arches rung,
+ Sweet echoes hover round thee still
+ Of songs thy summer sung.
+
+ Live in thy past; await no more
+ The rush of heaven-sent wings;
+ Earth still has music left in store
+ While Memory sighs and sings.
+
+I hope my special Minerva may not always be unwilling, but she must not
+be called upon as she has been in times past. Now that the teacups have
+left the table, an occasional evening call is all that my readers must
+look for. Thanking them for their kind companionship, and hoping that I
+may yet meet them in the now and then in the future, I bid them goodbye
+for the immediate present, then in the future, I bid them goodbye for the
+immediate present.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ELSIE VENNER
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+This tale was published in successive parts in the "Atlantic Monthly,"
+under the name of "The Professor's Story," the first number having
+appeared in the third week of December, 1859. The critic who is curious
+in coincidences must refer to the Magazine for the date of publication of
+the chapter he is examining.
+
+In calling this narrative a "romance," the Author wishes to make sure of
+being indulged in the common privileges of the poetic license. Through
+all the disguise of fiction a grave scientific doctrine may be detected
+lying beneath some of the delineations of character. He has used this
+doctrine as a part of the machinery of his story without pledging his
+absolute belief in it to the extent to which it is asserted or implied.
+It was adopted as a convenient medium of truth rather than as an accepted
+scientific conclusion. The reader must judge for himself what is the
+value of various stories cited from old authors. He must decide how much
+of what has been told he can accept either as having actually happened,
+or as possible and more or less probable. The Author must be permitted,
+however, to say here, in his personal character, and as responsible to
+the students of the human mind and body, that since this story has been
+in progress he has received the most startling confirmation of the
+possibility of the existence of a character like that which he had drawn
+as a purely imaginary conception in Elsie Venner.
+
+BOSTON, January, 1861.
+
+
+
+
+A SECOND PREFACE.
+
+This is the story which a dear old lady, my very good friend, spoke of as
+"a medicated novel," and quite properly refused to read. I was always
+pleased with her discriminating criticism. It is a medicated novel, and
+if she wished to read for mere amusement and helpful recreation there was
+no need of troubling herself with a story written with a different end in
+view.
+
+This story has called forth so many curious inquiries that it seems worth
+while to answer the more important questions which have occurred to its
+readers.
+
+In the first place, it is not based on any well-ascertained physiological
+fact. There are old fables about patients who have barked like dogs or
+crowed like cocks, after being bitten or wounded by those animals. There
+is nothing impossible in the idea that Romulus and Remus may have imbibed
+wolfish traits of character from the wet nurse the legend assigned them,
+but the legend is not sound history, and the supposition is nothing more
+than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence
+bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to form the
+starting-point of an imaginative composition.
+
+The real aim, of the story was to test the doctrine of "original sin" and
+human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that
+technical denomination. Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a
+crotalus before she was born, morally responsible for the "volitional"
+aberrations, which translated into acts become what is known as sin, and,
+it may be, what is punished as crime? If, on presentation of the
+evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the human conscience a proper
+object of divine pity and not of divine wrath, as a subject of moral
+poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her position at the bar of
+judgment, human or divine, and that of the unfortunate victim who
+received a moral poison from a remote ancestor before he drew his first
+breath?
+
+It might be supposed that the character of Elsie Veneer was suggested by
+some of the fabulous personages of classical or mediaeval story. I
+remember that a French critic spoke of her as cette pauvre Melusine. I
+ought to have been ashamed, perhaps, but I had, not the slightest idea
+who Melusina was until I hunted up the story, and found that she was a
+fairy, who for some offence was changed every Saturday to a serpent from
+her waist downward. I was of course familiar with Keats's Lamia, another
+imaginary being, the subject of magical transformation into a serpent.
+My story was well advanced before Hawthorne's wonderful "Marble Faun,"
+which might be thought to have furnished me with the hint of a mixed
+nature,--human, with an alien element,--was published or known to me. So
+that my poor heroine found her origin, not in fable or romance, but in a
+physiological conception fertilized by a theological dogma.
+
+I had the dissatisfaction of enjoying from a quiet corner a well-meant
+effort to dramatize "Elsie Veneer." Unfortunately, a physiological
+romance, as I knew beforehand, is hardly adapted for the melodramatic
+efforts of stage representation. I can therefore say, with perfect
+truth, that I was not disappointed. It is to the mind, and not to the
+senses, that such a story must appeal, and all attempts to render the
+character and events objective on the stage, or to make them real by
+artistic illustrations, are almost of necessity failures. The story has
+won the attention and enjoyed the favor of a limited class of readers,
+and if it still continues to interest others of the same tastes and
+habits of thought I can ask nothing more of it.
+
+January 23, 1883.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+I have nothing of importance to add to the two preceding Prefaces. The
+continued call for this story, which was not written for popularity, but
+with a very serious purpose, has somewhat surprised and, I need not add,
+gratified me. I can only restate the motive idea of the tale in a little
+different language. Believing, as I do, that our prevailing theologies
+are founded upon an utterly false view of the relation of man to his
+Creator, I attempted to illustrate the doctrine of inherited moral
+responsibility for other people's misbehavior. I tried to make out a
+case for my poor Elsie, whom the most hardened theologian would find it
+hard to blame for her inherited ophidian tastes and tendencies. How,
+then, is he to blame mankind for inheriting "sinfulness" from their first
+parents? May not the serpent have bitten Eve before the birth of Cain,
+her first-born? That would have made an excuse for Cain's children, as
+Elsie's ante-natal misfortune made an excuse for her. But what
+difference does it make in the child's responsibility whether his
+inherited tendencies come from a snake-bite or some other source which he
+knew nothing about and could not have prevented from acting? All this is
+plain enough, and the only use of the story is to bring the dogma of
+inherited guilt and its consequences into a clearer point of view.
+
+But, after all, the tale must have proved readable as a story to account
+for the large number of editions which it has reached.
+
+Some readers have been curious about the locality the writer was thought
+to have in view. No particular place was intended. Some of the
+characters may have been thought to have been drawn from life; but the
+personages mentioned are mostly composites, like Mr. Galton's compound
+photographic likenesses, and are not calculated to provoke scandal or
+suits for libel.
+
+O. W. H.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 3, 1891.
+
+
+
+
+ELSIE VENNER.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND.
+
+There is nothing in New England corresponding at all to the feudal
+aristocracies of the Old World. Whether it be owing to the stock from
+which we were derived, or to the practical working of our institutions,
+or to the abrogation of the technical "law of honor," which draws a sharp
+line between the personally responsible class of "gentlemen" and the
+unnamed multitude of those who are not expected to risk their lives for
+an abstraction,--whatever be the cause, we have no such aristocracy here
+as that which grew up out of the military systems of the Middle Ages.
+
+What we mean by "aristocracy" is merely the richer part of the community,
+that live in the tallest houses, drive real carriages, (not "kerridges,")
+kidglove their hands, and French-bonnet their ladies' heads, give parties
+where the persons who call them by the above title are not invited, and
+have a provokingly easy way of dressing, walking, talking, and nodding to
+people, as if they felt entirely at home, and would not be embarrassed in
+the least, if they met the Governor, or even the President of the United
+States, face to face. Some of these great folks are really well-bred,
+some of them are only purse-proud and assuming,--but they form a class,
+and are named as above in the common speech.
+
+It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when
+subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and
+here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these
+into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for
+four ancient maidens,--with whom it is best the family should die out,
+unless it can begin again as its great-grandfather did. Now a million is
+a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious form the
+summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft or commerce; and as this kind of
+meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is pretty certain that sons
+and grandsons will not get another golden cheese out of it, whether they
+milk the same cows or turn in new ones. In other words, the
+millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of
+persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human
+element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration without
+falling into serious error. Of course, this trivial and, fugitive fact
+of personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some special
+means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the third
+generation. This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need
+not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in
+childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands
+of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels when
+the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison
+over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers,
+wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in long boots with
+silken tassels.
+
+There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call
+it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to
+be a caste,--not in any odious sense;--but, by the repetition of the same
+influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct
+organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity,
+and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the
+good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all
+we can and tell all we see.
+
+If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our
+colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two
+different aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme
+cases to illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure
+is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,--inelegant, partly from careless
+attitudes, partly from ill-dressing,--the face is uncouth in feature, or
+at least common,--the mouth coarse and unformed,--the eye unsympathetic,
+even if bright,--the movements of the face are clumsy, like those of the
+limbs,--the voice is unmusical,--and the enunciation as if the words were
+coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other aspect
+is commonly slender, his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,--his
+features are regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is bright and
+quick,--his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers
+dance over their music, and his whole air, though it may be timid, and
+even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what
+to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the
+first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a
+pointer or a setter to his field-work.
+
+The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to
+bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of
+life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than
+their share of development,--the organs of thought and expression less
+than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed.
+A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration.
+You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of will
+and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very few
+of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, in a large proportion
+of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons.
+
+That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin
+caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled
+aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge.
+There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and
+all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary.
+Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break
+out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up
+after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their
+place, it maybe,--but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood
+of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old
+historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female
+descendant.
+
+There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern
+States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general
+distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very
+probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come
+direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and he may, perhaps,
+even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the
+English alphabet, but of no other.
+
+It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude
+of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual
+classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training
+are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as
+well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or
+less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that
+sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and
+sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual
+aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual
+acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain
+of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large
+uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary
+class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism;
+thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the
+hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor
+for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of
+animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an
+unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always
+overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality.
+A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add
+muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his
+thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes,
+your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too
+hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main
+fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best
+fruits come from well-known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple,
+like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from
+a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the
+land.
+
+Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste of
+New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE STUDENT AND HIS CERTIFICATE.
+
+Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the school
+connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after the Lecture
+one day and wished to speak with the Professor. He was a student of
+mark,--first favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby colts. There
+are in every class half a dozen bright faces to which the teacher
+naturally, directs his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose
+attention he seems to hold that of the mass of listeners. Among these
+some one is pretty sure to take the lead, by virtue of a personal
+magnetism, or some peculiarity of expression, which places the face in
+quick sympathetic relations with the lecturer. This was a young man with
+such a face; and I found,--for you have guessed that I was the
+"Professor" above-mentioned,--that, when there was anything difficult to
+be explained, or when I was bringing out some favorite illustration of a
+nice point, (as, for instance; when I compared the cell-growth, by which
+Nature builds up a plant or an animal, to the glassblower's similar mode
+of beginning,--always with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he is
+going to make,) I naturally looked in his face and gauged my success by
+its expression.
+
+It was a handsome face,--a little too pale, perhaps, and would have borne
+something more of fulness without becoming heavy. I put the organization
+to which it belongs in Section B of Class 1 of my Anglo-American
+Anthropology (unpublished). The jaw in this section is but slightly
+narrowed,--just enough to make the width of the forehead tell more
+decidedly. The moustache often grows vigorously, but the whiskers are
+thin. The skin is like that of Jacob, rather than like Esau's. One
+string of the animal nature has been taken away, but this gives only a
+greater predominance to the intellectual chords. To see just how the
+vital energy has been toned down, you must contrast one of this section
+with a specimen of Section A of the same class,--say, for instance, one
+of the old-fashioned, full-whiskered, red-faced, roaring, big Commodores
+of the last generation, whom you remember, at least by their portraits,
+in ruffled shirts, looking as hearty as butchers and as plucky as
+bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up from their foreheads,
+which were not commonly very high or broad. The special form of physical
+life I have been describing gives you a right to expect more delicate
+perceptions and a more reflective, nature than you commonly find in
+shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.
+
+The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking all the time as if he
+wanted to say something in private, and waiting for two or three others,
+who were still hanging about, to be gone.
+
+Something is wrong!--I said to myself, when I noticed his
+expression.--Well, Mr. Langdon,--I said to him, when we were alone,--can
+I do anything for you to-day?
+
+You can, Sir,--he said.--I am going to leave the class, for the present,
+and keep school.
+
+Why, that 's a pity, and you so near graduating! You'd better stay and
+finish this course and take your degree in the spring, rather than break
+up your whole plan of study.
+
+I can't help myself, Sir,--the young man answered.--There 's trouble at
+home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done. So I must look out
+for myself for a while. It's what I've done before, and am ready to do
+again. I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a
+common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that. Are you
+willing to give it to me?
+
+Willing? Yes, to be sure,--but I don't want you to go. Stay; we'll make
+it easy for you. There's a fund will do something for you, perhaps.
+Then you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,--and claim them in
+money, if you want that more than medals.
+
+I have thought it all over,--he answered,--and have pretty much made up
+my mind to go.
+
+A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild
+utterance, but means at least as much as he says. There are some people
+whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual under-statement. I often
+tell Mrs. Professor that one of her "I think it's sos" is worth the
+Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they "know it's so."
+When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more
+liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statement
+by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a
+kind of eloquence in that person's utterance not laid down in Blair or
+Campbell.
+
+This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with
+family-recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid
+which many students would have thankfully welcomed. I knew him too well
+to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined to
+go. Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in
+themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an
+early period. When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully,
+the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to
+find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away
+timid adventurers. I have seen young men more than once, who came to a
+great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for their
+education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to travel, and
+establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of any person
+which they had not earned. But these are exceptional cases. There are
+horse-tamers, born so,--as we all know; there are woman-tamers, who
+bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and
+there are world-tamers, who can make any community, even a Yankee one,
+get down and let them jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled
+Cruiser.
+
+Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively; but
+he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would not let
+him be dependent. The New England Brahmin caste often gets blended with
+connections of political influence or commercial distinction. It is a
+charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune carries him in this way
+into some of the "old families" who have fine old houses, and city-lots
+that have risen in the market, and names written in all the stock-books
+of all the dividend-paying companies. His narrow study expands into a
+stately library, his books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds,
+and his favorites are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian
+sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.
+
+The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman, had
+made an advantageous alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea Wentworth had
+read one of his sermons which had been printed "by request," and became
+deeply interested in the young author, whom she had never seen. Out of
+this circumstance grew a correspondence, an interview, a declaration, a
+matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children. Wentworth
+Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of these, and lived in the old
+family-mansion. Unfortunately, that principle of the diminution of
+estates by division, to which I have referred, rendered it somewhat
+difficult to maintain the establishment upon the fractional income which
+the proprietor received from his share of the property. Wentworth
+Langdon, Esq., represented a certain intermediate condition of life not
+at all infrequent in our old families. He was the connecting link
+between the generation which lived in ease, and even a kind of state,
+upon its own resources, and the new brood, which must live mainly by its
+wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside into that
+lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of Kidderminster
+carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils constituting the family
+furniture and wardrobe. This slack-water period of a race, which comes
+before the rapid ebb of its prosperity, is familiar to all who live in
+cities. There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than these children
+of rich families, just above the necessity of active employment, yet not
+in a condition to place their own children advantageously, if they happen
+to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried. Some mend
+their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous
+progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so
+that you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few
+generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, and tombstones
+with armorial bearings.
+
+In a large city, this class of citizens is familiar to us in the streets.
+They are very courteous in their salutations; they have time enough to
+bow and take their hats off,--which, of course, no businessman can afford
+to do. Their beavers are smoothly brushed, and their boots well
+polished; all their appointments are tidy; they look the respectable
+walking gentleman to perfection. They are prone to habits,--they
+frequent reading-rooms,--insurance-offices,--they walk the same streets
+at the same hours,--so that one becomes familiar with their faces and
+persons, as a part of the street-furniture.
+
+There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have
+noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water
+gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for
+years, but never have learned his name. About this person we shall have
+accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;--thus, his face, figure,
+gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may be
+familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of our
+consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never found
+the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has idealized
+itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk
+the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff
+and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person
+dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and then it happens,
+perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its
+shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all its
+real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some accident
+reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried so long in
+our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as a
+fellow-citizen. Now the slack--water gentry are among the persons most
+likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and
+reality,--for the reason, that, playing no important part in the
+community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
+individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the
+public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we
+cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from
+them.
+
+To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been "dead-headed"
+into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in his
+pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for
+reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived. I
+will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are
+three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each
+of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar
+interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental
+character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are
+Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have
+in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
+gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in
+perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
+gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them
+is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place
+has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and
+down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and
+private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of
+the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have
+grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
+forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
+hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out their ships all
+over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre
+or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once
+lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of
+the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions--like the
+Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you
+mount the broad staircase)--show that there was not only wealth, but
+style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is
+not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in
+a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
+expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of
+their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have
+even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the
+most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they had been
+English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or some other
+Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.
+
+As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
+prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for
+a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of
+ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
+mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
+material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
+charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only
+when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built and
+organized in the present century.
+
+--It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
+Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be an
+only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his
+meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel in
+an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
+Elizabeth Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon,
+and others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they
+stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean
+pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight
+stove has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose!
+So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period,
+to do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in
+his studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him
+the present means of support as a student.
+
+You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a
+certificate of his fitness to teach, and why I did not choose to urge him
+to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without
+ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he
+must,--that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise. He was
+not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary to allow
+half-time to students engaged in school-keeping,--that is, to count a
+year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his professional
+studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is expected to be
+under an instructor before applying for his degree,--he would not
+necessarily lose more than a few months of time. He had a small library
+of professional books, which he could take with him.
+
+So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying with
+him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young gentleman of
+excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good education, and
+that his services would be of great value in any school, academy, or
+other institution, where young persons of-either sex were to be
+instructed.
+
+I confess, that expression, "either sex," ran a little thick, as I may
+say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair
+character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion, I
+considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be let
+loose in a roomful of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in love
+just then--and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as they most
+assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him, why, there
+was no telling what gratitude and natural sensibility might bring about.
+
+Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never
+knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they act
+as curses are said to,--come home to roost. Give them often enough,
+until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some day or other, you
+will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in any climate, or
+somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of the youngest children.
+
+I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all
+right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach
+myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others
+into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could
+not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated.
+Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a young
+girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous
+experiment. Or, on the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature
+should ever be concentrated on them, they would be absorbed into the very
+depths of his nature, and then his blood would turn to flame and burn his
+life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes that cover a
+burning coal.
+
+I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate. An academy for young
+gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys' school, that
+would be a very good place for him;--some of them are pretty rough, but
+there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth strain of blood; he can give
+any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out
+of time in ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow as that out a
+girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the dove-cotes!
+I was a fool,--that's all.
+
+I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words until
+it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny. I could hardly
+sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which might
+take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or prospects.
+What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial misalliances
+where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet flings his
+magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some fresh-faced,
+half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him than her
+father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To think of
+the eagle's wings, being clipped so that he shall never lift himself over
+the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always must,--because, as
+one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves, a woman, and a woman a
+man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary. You think yourself
+a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least
+five-thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you
+would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and
+nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection. And you, my
+dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but
+if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of
+whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you
+would
+
+ "First endure, then pity, then embrace,"
+
+I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
+doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.
+
+I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked
+out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor
+patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better
+kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The
+great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the
+poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody
+is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich,
+though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common
+practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not
+get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he
+died.
+
+Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep them
+clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting
+indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and had
+once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon
+be an opening into the Doctor's Paradise,--the streets with only one side
+to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,--set up a nice
+little coach, and be driven round like a first-class London doctor,
+instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting
+anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape Ann fishing-smack. By
+the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his
+way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the
+background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as to
+become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not
+have him marry until he knew his level,--that is, again, looking at the
+matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments
+at all into consideration. But remember, that a young man, using large
+endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with the
+highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging labor.
+And to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is something
+in itself,--that is, if you like money, and influence, and a seat on the
+platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of
+places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal better than
+any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute
+in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand
+aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special
+vocation.
+
+That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I
+have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit
+to teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he will run like a moth
+into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up
+in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him.
+Oh, yes! country doctor,--half a dollar a visit,--drive, drive, drive
+all day,--get up at night and harness your own horse,--drive again ten
+miles in a snow-storm, shake powders out of two phials, (pulv.
+glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac. as partes equates,)--drive back again,
+if you don't happen to get stuck in a drift, no home, no peace, no
+continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social
+intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel
+like the mummy of an Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture,
+and was dug up a hundred years afterwards! Why did n't I warn him about
+love and all that nonsense? Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do
+with it, yet awhile? Why did n't I hold up to him those awful examples I
+could have cited, where poor young fellows who could just keep themselves
+afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for
+a life-preserver? All this of two words in a certificate!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MR. BERNARD TRIES HIS HAND.
+
+Whether the Student advertised for a school, or whether he fell in with
+the advertisement of a school-committee, is not certain. At any rate, it
+was not long before he found himself the head of a large district, or, as
+it was called by the inhabitants, "deestric" school, in the flourishing
+inland village of Pequawkett, or, as it is commonly spelt, Pigwacket
+Centre. The natives of this place would be surprised, if they should
+hear that any of the readers of a work published in Boston were
+unacquainted with so remarkable a locality. As, however, some copies of
+it may be read at a distance from this distinguished metropolis, it may
+be well to give a few particulars respecting the place, taken from the
+Universal Gazetteer.
+
+"PIGWACKET, sometimes spelt Pequawkett. A post-village and township in
+_________ Co., State of _________,situated in a fine agricultural region,
+2 thriving villages, Pigwacket Centre and Smithville, 3 churches, several
+school houses, and many handsome private residences. Mink River runs
+through the town, navigable for small boats after heavy rains. Muddy
+Pond at N. E. section, well stocked with horn pouts, eels, and shiners.
+Products, beef, pork, butter, cheese. Manufactures, shoe-pegs,
+clothes-pins, and tin-ware. Pop. 1373."
+
+The reader may think there is nothing very remarkable implied in this
+description. If, however he had read the town-history, by the Rev. Jabez
+Grubb, he would have learned, that, like the celebrated Little
+Pedlington, it was distinguished by many very remarkable advantages.
+Thus:
+
+"The situation of Pigwacket is eminently beautiful, looking down the
+lovely valley of Mink River, a tributary of the Musquash. The air is
+salubrious, and many of the inhabitants have attained great age, several
+having passed the allotted period of 'three-score years and ten' before
+succumbing to any of the various 'ills that flesh is heir to.' Widow
+Comfort Leevins died in 1836 AEt. LXXXVII. years. Venus, an African,
+died in 1841, supposed to be C. years old. The people are distinguished
+for intelligence, as has been frequently remarked by eminent
+lyceum-lecturers, who have invariably spoken in the highest terms of a
+Pigwacket audience. There is a public library, containing nearly a
+hundred volumes, free to all subscribers. The preached word is well
+attended, there is a flourishing temperance society, and the schools are
+excellent. It is a residence admirably adapted to refined families who
+relish the beauties of Nature and the charms of society. The Honorable
+John Smith, formerly a member of the State Senate, was a native of this
+town."
+
+That is the way they all talk. After all, it is probably pretty much
+like other inland New England towns in point of "salubrity,"--that is,
+gives people their choice of dysentery or fever every autumn, with a
+season-ticket for consumption, good all the year round. And so of the
+other pretences. "Pigwacket audience," forsooth! Was there ever an
+audience anywhere, though there wasn't a pair of eyes in it brighter than
+pickled oysters, that did n't think it was "distinguished for
+intelligence"?--"The preached word"! That means the Rev. Jabez Grubb's
+sermons. "Temperance society"! "Excellent schools"! Ah, that is just
+what we were talking about.
+
+The truth was, that District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, had had a good deal
+of trouble of late with its schoolmasters. The committee had done their
+best, but there were a number of well-grown and pretty rough young
+fellows who had got the upper-hand of the masters, and meant to keep it.
+Two dynasties had fallen before the uprising of this fierce democracy.
+This was a thing that used to be not very uncommon; but in so
+"intelligent" a community as that of Pigwacket Centre, in an era of
+public libraries and lyceum-lectures, it was portentous and alarming.
+
+The rebellion began under the ferule of Master Weeks, a slender youth
+from a country college, underfed, thin-blooded, sloping-shouldered,
+knock-kneed, straight-haired, weak-bearded, pale-eyed, wide-pupilled,
+half-colored; a common type enough in in-door races, not rich enough to
+pick and choose in their alliances. Nature kills off a good many of this
+sort in the first teething-time, a few in later childhood, a good many
+again in early adolescence; but every now and then one runs the gauntlet
+of her various diseases, or rather forms of one disease, and grows up, as
+Master Weeks had done.
+
+It was a very foolish thing for him to try to inflict personal punishment
+on such a lusty young fellow as Abner Briggs, Junior, one of the "hardest
+customers" in the way of a rough-and-tumble fight that there were
+anywhere round. No doubt he had been insolent, but it would have been
+better to overlook it. It pains me to report the events which took place
+when the master made his rash attempt to maintain his authority. Abner
+Briggs, Junior, was a great, hulking fellow, who had been bred to
+butchering, but urged by his parents to attend school, in order to learn
+the elegant accomplishments of reading and writing, in which he was sadly
+deficient. He was in the habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in
+school-hours, of throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural
+and easy process, of occasional insolence and general negligence. One of
+the soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master's
+head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it adhered
+in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo. The master looked round
+and saw the young butcher's arm in an attitude which pointed to it
+unequivocally as the source from which the projectile had taken its
+flight.
+
+Master Weeks turned pale. He must "lick" Abner Briggs, Junior, or
+abdicate. So he determined to lick Abner Briggs, Junior.
+
+"Come here, Sir!" he said; "you have insulted me and outraged the decency
+of the schoolroom often enough! Hold out your hand!"
+
+The young fellow grinned and held it out. The master struck at it with
+his black ruler, with a will in the blow and a snapping of the eyes, as
+much as to say that he meant to make him smart this time. The young
+fellow pulled his hand back as the ruler came down, and the master hit
+himself a vicious blow with it on the right knee. There are things no
+man can stand. The master caught the refractory youth by the collar and
+began shaking him, or rather shaking himself against him.
+
+"Le' go o' that are coat, naow," said the fellow, "or I 'll make ye! 'T
+'ll take tew on yet' handle me, I tell ye, 'n' then ye caant dew
+it!"--and the young pupil returned the master's attention by catching
+hold of his collar.
+
+When it comes to that, the best man, not exactly in the moral sense, but
+rather in the material, and more especially the muscular point of view,
+is very apt to have the best of it, irrespectively of the merits of the
+case. So it happened now. The unfortunate schoolmaster found himself
+taking the measure of the sanded floor, amidst the general uproar of the
+school. From that moment his ferule was broken, and the school-committee
+very soon had a vacancy to fill.
+
+Master Pigeon, the successor of Master Weeks, was of better stature, but
+loosely put together, and slender-limbed. A dreadfully nervous kind of
+man he was, walked on tiptoe, started at sudden noises, was distressed
+when he heard a whisper, had a quick, suspicious look, and was always
+saying, "Hush?" and putting his hands to his ears. The boys were not
+long in finding out this nervous weakness, of course. In less than a week
+a regular system of torments was inaugurated, full of the most diabolical
+malice and ingenuity. The exercises of the conspirators varied from day
+to day, but consisted mainly of foot-scraping, solos on the slate-pencil,
+(making it screech on the slate,) falling of heavy books, attacks of
+coughing, banging of desk-lids, boot-creaking, with sounds as of drawing
+a cork from time to time, followed by suppressed chuckles.
+
+Master Pigeon grew worse and worse under these inflictions. The rascally
+boys always had an excuse for any one trick they were caught at. "Could
+n' help coughin', Sir." "Slipped out o' m' han', Sir." "Did n' go to,
+Sir." "Did n' dew't o' purpose, Sir." And so on,--always the best of
+reasons for the most outrageous of behavior. The master weighed himself
+at the grocer's on a platform balance, some ten days after he began
+keeping the school. At the end of a week he weighed himself again. He
+had lost two pounds. At the end of another week he had lost five. He
+made a little calculation, based on these data, from which he learned
+that in a certain number of months, going on at this rate, he should come
+to weigh precisely nothing at all; and as this was a sum in subtraction
+he did not care to work out in practice, Master Pigeon took to himself
+wings and left the school-committee in possession of a letter of
+resignation and a vacant place to fill once more.
+
+This was the school to which Mr. Bernard Langdon found himself appointed
+as master. He accepted the place conditionally, with the understanding
+that he should leave it at the end of a month, if he were tired of it.
+
+The advent of Master Langdon to Pigwacket Centre created a much more
+lively sensation than had attended that of either of his predecessors.
+Looks go a good way all the world over, and though there were several
+good-looking people in the place, and Major Bush was what the natives of
+the town called a "hahnsome mahn," that is, big, fat, and red, yet the
+sight of a really elegant young fellow, with the natural air which grows
+up with carefully-bred young persons, was a novelty. The Brahmin blood
+which came from his grandfather as well as from his mother, a direct
+descendant of the old Flynt family, well known by the famous tutor, Henry
+Flynt, (see Cat. Harv. Anno 1693,) had been enlivened and enriched by
+that of the Wentworths, which had had a good deal of ripe old Madeira and
+other generous elements mingled with it, so that it ran to gout sometimes
+in the old folks and to high spirit, warm complexion, and curly hair in
+some of the younger ones. The soft curling hair Mr. Bernard had
+inherited,--something, perhaps, of the high spirit; but that we shall
+have a chance of finding out by and by. But the long sermons and the
+frugal board of his Brahmin ancestry, with his own habits of study, had
+told upon his color, which was subdued to something more of delicacy than
+one would care to see in a young fellow with rough work before him.
+This, however, made him look more interesting, or, as the young ladies at
+Major Bush's said, "interestin'."
+
+When Mr. Bernard showed himself at meeting, on the first Sunday after his
+arrival, it may be supposed that a good many eyes were turned upon the
+young schoolmaster. There was something heroic in his coming forward so
+readily to take a place which called for a strong hand, and a prompt,
+steady will to guide it. In fact, his position was that of a military
+chieftain on the eve of a battle. Everybody knew everything in Pigwacket
+Centre; and it was an understood thing that the young rebels meant to put
+down the new master, if they could. It was natural that the two
+prettiest girls in the village, called in the local dialect, as nearly as
+our limited alphabet will represent it, Alminy Cutterr, and Arvilly
+Braowne, should feel and express an interest in the good-looking
+stranger, and that, when their flattering comments were repeated in the
+hearing of their indigenous admirers, among whom were some of the older
+"boys" of the school, it should not add to the amiable dispositions of
+the turbulent youth.
+
+Monday came, and the new schoolmaster was in his chair at the upper end
+of the schoolhouse, on the raised platform. The rustics looked at his
+handsome face, thoughtful, peaceful, pleasant, cheerful, but sharply cut
+round the lips and proudly lighted about the eyes. The ringleader of the
+mischief-makers, the young butcher who has before figured in this
+narrative, looked at him stealthily, whenever he got a chance to study
+him unobserved; for the truth was, he felt uncomfortable, whenever he
+found the large, dark eyes fixed on his own little, sharp, deep-set, gray
+ones. But he managed to study him pretty well,--first his face, then his
+neck and shoulders, the set of his arms, the narrowing at the loins, the
+make of his legs, and the way he moved. In short, he examined him as he
+would have examined a steer, to see what he could do and how he would cut
+up. If he could only have gone to him and felt of his muscles, he would
+have been entirely satisfied. He was not a very wise youth, but he did
+know well enough, that, though big arms and legs are very good things,
+there is something besides size that goes to make a man; and he had heard
+stories of a fighting-man, called "The Spider," from his attenuated
+proportions, who was yet a terrible hitter in the ring, and had whipped
+many a big-limbed fellow, in and out of the roped arena.
+
+Nothing could be smoother than the way in which everything went on for
+the first day or two. The new master was so kind and courteous, he
+seemed to take everything in such a natural, easy way, that there was no
+chance to pick a quarrel with him. He in the mean time thought it best
+to watch the boys and young men for a day or two with as little show of
+authority as possible. It was easy enough to see that he would have
+occasion for it before long.
+
+The schoolhouse was a grim, old, red, one-story building, perched on a
+bare rock at the top of a hill,--partly because this was a conspicuous
+site for the temple of learning, and partly because land is cheap where
+there is no chance even for rye or buckwheat, and the very sheep find
+nothing to nibble. About the little porch were carved initials and
+dates, at various heights, from the stature of nine to that of eighteen.
+Inside were old unpainted desks,--unpainted, but browned with the umber
+of human contact,--and hacked by innumerable jack-knives. It was long
+since the walls had been whitewashed, as might be conjectured by the
+various traces left upon them, wherever idle hands or sleepy heads could
+reach them. A curious appearance was noticeable on various higher parts
+of the wall: namely, a wart-like eruption, as one would be tempted to
+call it, being in reality a crop of the soft missiles before mentioned,
+which, adhering in considerable numbers, and hardening after the usual
+fashion of papier-mache, formed at last permanent ornaments of the
+edifice.
+
+The young master's quick eye soon noticed that a particular part of the
+wall was most favored with these ornamental appendages. Their position
+pointed sufficiently clearly to the part of the room they came from. In
+fact, there was a nest of young mutineers just there, which must be
+broken up by a coup d'etat. This was easily effected by redistributing
+the seats and arranging the scholars according to classes, so that a
+mischievous fellow, charged full of the rebellious imponderable, should
+find himself between two non-conductors, in the shape of small boys of
+studious habits. It was managed quietly enough, in such a plausible sort
+of way that its motive was not thought of. But its effects were soon
+felt; and then began a system of correspondence by signs, and the
+throwing of little scrawls done up in pellets, and announced by
+preliminary a'h'ms! to call the attention of the distant youth addressed.
+Some of these were incendiary documents, devoting the schoolmaster to the
+lower divinities, as "a stuck-up dandy," as "a purse-proud aristocrat,"
+as "a sight too big for his, etc.," and holding him up in a variety of
+equally forcible phrases to the indignation of the youthful community of
+School District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre.
+
+Presently the draughtsman of the school set a caricature in circulation,
+labelled, to prevent mistakes, with the schoolmaster's name. An immense
+bell-crowned hat, and a long, pointed, swallow-tailed coat showed that
+the artist had in his mind the conventional dandy, as shown in prints of
+thirty or forty years ago, rather than any actual human aspect of the
+time. But it was passed round among the boys and made its laugh, helping
+of course to undermine the master's authority, as "Punch" or the
+"Charivari" takes the dignity out of an obnoxious minister. One morning,
+on going to the schoolroom, Master Langdon found an enlarged copy of this
+sketch, with its label, pinned on the door. He took it down, smiled a
+little, put it into his pocket, and entered the schoolroom. An insidious
+silence prevailed, which looked as if some plot were brewing. The boys
+were ripe for mischief, but afraid. They had really no fault to find
+with the master, except that he was dressed like a gentleman, which a
+certain class of fellows always consider a personal insult to themselves.
+But the older ones were evidently plotting, and more than once the
+warning a'h'm! was heard, and a dirty little scrap of paper rolled into a
+wad shot from one seat to another. One of these happened to strike the
+stove-funnel, and lodged on the master's desk. He was cool enough not to
+seem to notice it. He secured it, however, and found an opportunity to
+look at it, without being observed by the boys. It required no immediate
+notice.
+
+He who should have enjoyed the privilege of looking upon Mr. Bernard
+Langdon the next morning, when his toilet was about half finished, would
+have had a very pleasant gratuitous exhibition. First he buckled the
+strap of his trousers pretty tightly. Then he took up a pair of heavy
+dumb-bells, and swung them for a few minutes; then two great "Indian
+clubs," with which he enacted all sorts of impossible-looking feats. His
+limbs were not very large, nor his shoulders remarkably broad; but if you
+knew as much of the muscles as all persons who look at statues and
+pictures with a critical eye ought to have learned,--if you knew the
+trapezius, lying diamond-shaped over the back and shoulders like a monk's
+cowl,--or the deltoid, which caps the shoulder like an epaulette,--or the
+triceps, which furnishes the calf of the upper arm,--or the hard-knotted
+biceps,--any of the great sculptural landmarks, in fact,--you would have
+said there was a pretty show of them, beneath the white satiny skin of
+Mr. Bernard Langdon. And if you had seen him, when he had laid down the
+Indian clubs, catch hold of a leather strap that hung from the beam of
+the old-fashioned ceiling,--and lift and lower himself over and over
+again by his left hand alone, you might have thought it a very simple and
+easy thing to do, until you tried to do it yourself. Mr. Bernard looked
+at himself with the eye of an expert. "Pretty well!" he said;--"not so
+much fallen off as I expected." Then he set up his bolster in a very
+knowing sort of way, and delivered two or three blows straight as rulers
+and swift as winks. "That will do," he said. Then, as if determined to
+make a certainty of his condition, he took a dynamometer from one of the
+drawers in his old veneered bureau. First he squeezed it with his two
+hands. Then he placed it on the floor and lifted, steadily, strongly.
+The springs creaked and cracked; the index swept with a great stride far
+up into the high figures of the scale; it was a good lift. He was
+satisfied. He sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at his
+cleanly-shaped arms. "If I strike one of those boobies, I am afraid I
+shall spoil him," he said. Yet this young man, when weighed with his
+class at the college, could barely turn one hundred and forty-two pounds
+in the scale,--not a heavy weight, surely; but some of the middle
+weights, as the present English champion, for instance, seem to be of a
+far finer quality of muscle than the bulkier fellows.
+
+The master took his breakfast with a good appetite that morning, but was
+perhaps rather more quiet than usual. After breakfast he went up-stairs
+and put, on a light loose frock, instead of that which he commonly wore,
+which was a close-fitting and rather stylish one. On his way to school
+he met Alminy Cutterr, who happened to be walking in the other direction.
+"Good-morning, Miss Cutter," he said; for she and another young lady had
+been introduced to him, on a former occasion, in the usual phrase of
+polite society in presenting ladies to gentlemen,--"Mr. Langdon, let me
+make y' acquainted with Miss Cutterr;--let me make y' acquainted with
+Miss Braowne." So he said, "Good-morning"; to which she replied,
+"Good-mornin', Mr. Langdon. Haow's your haalth?" The answer to this
+question ought naturally to have been the end of the talk; but Alminy
+Cutterr lingered and looked as if she had something more on her mind.
+
+A young fellow does not require a great experience to read a simple
+country-girl's face as if it were a sign-board. Alminy was a good soul,
+with red cheeks and bright eyes, kind-hearted as she could be, and it was
+out of the question for her to hide her thoughts or feelings like a fine
+lady. Her bright eyes were moist and her red cheeks paler than their
+wont, as she said, with her lips quivering, "Oh, Mr. Langdon, them boys
+'ll be the death of ye, if ye don't take caar!"
+
+"Why, what's the matter, my dear?" said Mr. Bernard.--Don't think there
+was anything very odd in that "my dear," at the second interview with a
+village belle;--some of these woman-tamers call a girl "My dear," after
+five minutes' acquaintance, and it sounds all right as they say it. But
+you had better not try it at a venture.
+
+It sounded all right to Alminy, as Mr. Bernard said it.--"I 'll tell ye
+what's the mahtterr," she said, in a frightened voice. "Ahbner 's go'n'
+to car' his dog, 'n' he'll set him on ye'z sure 'z y' 'r' alive. 'T's
+the same cretur that haaf eat up Eben Squires's little Jo, a year come
+nex' Faast day."
+
+Now this last statement was undoubtedly overcolored; as little Jo Squires
+was running about the village,--with an ugly scar on his arm, it is true,
+where the beast had caught him with his teeth, on the occasion of the
+child's taking liberties with him, as he had been accustomed to do with a
+good-tempered Newfoundland dog, who seemed to like being pulled and
+hauled round by children. After this the creature was commonly muzzled,
+and, as he was fed on raw meat chiefly, was always ready for a fight,
+which he was occasionally indulged in, when anything stout enough to
+match him could be found in any of the neighboring villages.
+
+Tiger, or, more briefly, Tige, the property of Abner Briggs, Junior,
+belonged to a species not distinctly named in scientific books, but well
+known to our country-folks under the name "Yallah dog." They do not use
+this expression as they would say black dog or white dog, but with almost
+as definite a meaning as when they speak of a terrier or a spaniel. A
+"yallah dog" is a large canine brute, of a dingy old-flannel color, of no
+particular breed except his own, who hangs round a tavern or a butcher's
+shop, or trots alongside of a team, looking as if he were disgusted with
+the world, and the world with him. Our inland population, while they
+tolerate him, speak of him with contempt. Old ______, of Meredith
+Bridge, used to twit the sun for not shining on cloudy days, swearing,
+that, if he hung up his "yallah dog," he would make a better show of
+daylight. A country fellow, abusing a horse of his neighbor's, vowed,
+that, "if he had such a hoss, he'd swap him for a `yallah dog,'--and then
+shoot the dog."
+
+Tige was an ill-conditioned brute by nature, and art had not improved him
+by cropping his ears and tail and investing him with a spiked collar. He
+bore on his person, also, various not ornamental scars, marks of old
+battles; for Tige had fight in him, as was said before, and as might be
+guessed by a certain bluntness about the muzzle, with a projection of the
+lower jaw, which looked as if there might be a bull-dog stripe among the
+numerous bar-sinisters of his lineage.
+
+It was hardly fair, however, to leave Alminy Cutterr waiting while this
+piece of natural history was telling.--As she spoke of little Jo, who had
+been "haaf eat up" by Tige, she could not contain her sympathies, and
+began to cry.
+
+"Why, my dear little soul," said Mr. Bernard, "what are you worried
+about? I used to play with a bear when I was a boy; and the bear used to
+hug me, and I used to kiss him,--so!"
+
+It was too bad of Mr. Bernard, only the second time he had seen Alminy;
+but her kind feelings had touched him, and that seemed the most natural
+way of expressing his gratitude. Ahniny looked round to see if anybody
+was near; she saw nobody, so of course it would do no good to "holler."
+She saw nobody; but a stout young fellow, leading a yellow dog, muzzled,
+saw her through a crack in a picket fence, not a great way off the road.
+Many a year he had been "hangin' 'raoun'" Alminy, and never did he see
+any encouraging look, or hear any "Behave, naow!" or "Come, naow, a'n't
+ye 'shamed?" or other forbidding phrase of acquiescence, such as village
+belles under stand as well as ever did the nymph who fled to the willows
+in the eclogue we all remember.
+
+No wonder he was furious, when he saw the school master, who had never
+seen the girl until within a week, touching with his lips those rosy
+cheeks which he had never dared to approach. But that was all; it was a
+sudden impulse; and the master turned away from the young girl, laughing,
+and telling her not to fret herself about him,--he would take care of
+himself.
+
+So Master Langdon walked on toward his school-house, not displeased,
+perhaps, with his little adventure, nor immensely elated by it; for he
+was one of the natural class of the sex-subduers, and had had many a
+smile without asking, which had been denied to the feeble youth who try
+to win favor by pleading their passion in rhyme, and even to the more
+formidable approaches of young officers in volunteer companies,
+considered by many to be quite irresistible to the fair who have once
+beheld them from their windows in the epaulettes and plumes and sashes of
+the "Pigwacket Invincibles," or the "Hackmatack Rangers."
+
+Master Langdon took his seat and began the exercises of his school. The
+smaller boys recited their lessons well enough, but some of the larger
+ones were negligent and surly. He noticed one or two of them looking
+toward the door, as if expecting somebody or something in that direction.
+At half past nine o'clock, Abner Briggs, Junior, who had not yet shown
+himself, made his appearance. He was followed by his "yallah dog,"
+without his muzzle, who squatted down very grimly near the door, and gave
+a wolfish look round the room, as if he were considering which was the
+plumpest boy to begin with. The young butcher, meanwhile, went to his
+seat, looking somewhat flushed, except round the lips, which were hardly
+as red as common, and set pretty sharply.
+
+"Put out that dog, Abner Briggs!"--The master spoke as the captain speaks
+to the helmsman, when there are rocks foaming at the lips, right under
+his lee.
+
+Abner Briggs answered as the helmsman answers, when he knows he has a
+mutinous crew round him that mean to run the ship on the reef, and is one
+of the mutineers himself. "Put him aout y'rself, 'f ye a'n't afeard on
+him!"
+
+The master stepped into the aisle: The great cur showed his teeth,--and
+the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out of his eyes,
+and flashed from his sharp tusks, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep
+red gullet.
+
+The movements of animals are so much quicker than those of human beings
+commonly are, that they avoid blows as easily as one of us steps out of
+the way of an ox-cart. It must be a very stupid dog that lets himself be
+run over by a fast driver in his gig; he can jump out of the wheel's way
+after the tire has already touched him. So, while one is lifting a stick
+to strike or drawing back his foot to kick, the beast makes his spring,
+and the blow or the kick comes too late.
+
+It was not so this time. The master was a fencer, and something of a
+boxer; he had played at singlestick, and was used to watching an
+adversary's eye and coming down on him without any of those premonitory
+symptoms by which unpractised persons show long beforehand what mischief
+they meditate.
+
+"Out with you!" he said, fiercely,--and explained what he meant by a
+sudden flash of his foot that clashed the yellow dog's white teeth
+together like the springing of a bear-trap. The cur knew he had found
+his master at the first word and glance, as low animals on four legs, or
+a smaller number, always do; and the blow took him so by surprise, that
+it curled him up in an instant, and he went bundling out of the open
+schoolhouse-door with a most pitiable yelp, and his stump of a tail shut
+down as close as his owner ever shut the short, stubbed blade of his
+jack-knife.
+
+It was time for the other cur to find who his master.
+
+"Follow your dog, Abner Briggs!" said Master Langdon.
+
+The stout butcher-youth looked round, but the rebels were all cowed and
+sat still.
+
+"I'll go when I'm ready," he said,--"'n' I guess I won't go afore I'm
+ready."
+
+"You're ready now," said Master Langdon, turning up his cuffs so that the
+little boys noticed the yellow gleam of a pair of gold sleeve-buttons,
+once worn by Colonel Percy Wentworth, famous in the Old French War.
+
+Abner Briggs, Junior, did not apparently think he was ready, at any rate;
+for he rose up in his place, and stood with clenched fists, defiant, as
+the master strode towards him. The master knew the fellow was really
+frightened, for all his looks, and that he must have no time to rally.
+So he caught him suddenly by the collar, and, with one great pull, had
+him out over his desk and on the open floor. He gave him a sharp fling
+backwards and stood looking at him.
+
+The rough-and-tumble fighters all clinch, as everybody knows; and Abner
+Briggs, Junior, was one of that kind. He remembered how he had floored
+Master Weeks, and he had just "spunk" enough left in him to try to repeat
+his former successful experiment an the new master. He sprang at him,
+open-handed, to clutch him. So the master had to strike,--once, but very
+hard, and just in the place to tell. No doubt, the authority that doth
+hedge a schoolmaster added to the effect of the blow; but the blow was
+itself a neat one, and did not require to be repeated.
+
+"Now go home," said the master, "and don't let me see you or your dog
+here again." And he turned his cuffs down over the gold sleeve-buttons.
+
+This finished the great Pigwacket Centre School rebellion. What could be
+done with a master who was so pleasant as long as the boys behaved
+decently, and such a terrible fellow when he got "riled," as they called
+it? In a week's time everything was reduced to order, and the
+school-committee were delighted. The master, however, had received a
+proposition so much more agreeable and advantageous, that he informed the
+committee he should leave at the end of his month, having in his eye a
+sensible and energetic young college-graduate who would be willing and
+fully competent to take his place.
+
+So, at the expiration of the appointed time, Bernard Langdon, late master
+of the School District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, took his departure from
+that place for another locality, whither we shall follow him, carrying
+with him the regrets of the committee, of most of the scholars, and of
+several young ladies; also two locks of hair, sent unbeknown to payrents,
+one dark and one warmish auburn, inscribed with the respective initials
+of Alminy Cutterr and Arvilly Braowne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MOTH FLIES INTO THE CANDLE.
+
+The invitation which Mr. Bernard Langdon had accepted came from the Board
+of Trustees of the "Apollinean Female Institute," a school for the
+education of young ladies, situated in the flourishing town of Rockland.
+This was an establishment on a considerable scale, in which a hundred
+scholars or thereabouts were taught the ordinary English branches,
+several of the modern languages, something of Latin, if desired, with a
+little natural philosophy, metaphysics, and rhetoric, to finish off with
+in the last year, and music at any time when they would pay for it. At
+the close of their career in the Institute, they were submitted to a
+grand public examination, and received diplomas tied in blue ribbons,
+which proclaimed them with a great flourish of capitals to be graduates
+of the Apollinean Female Institute.
+
+Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions. It was ennobled by
+lying at the foot of a mountain,--called by the working-folks of the
+place "the Maounting,"--which sufficiently showed that it was the
+principal high land of the district in which it was situated. It lay to
+the south of this, and basked in the sunshine as Italy stretches herself
+before the Alps. To pass from the town of Tamarack on the north of the
+mountain to Rockland on the south was like crossing from Coire to
+Chiavenna.
+
+There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and romance and mystery to a
+place like the impending presence of a high mountain. Our beautiful
+Northampton with its fair meadows and noble stream is lovely enough, but
+owes its surpassing attraction to those twin summits which brood over it
+like living presences, looking down into its streets as if they were its
+tutelary divinities, dressing and undressing their green shrines, robing
+themselves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing clouds, and doing penance
+in the snowy shroud of winter, as if they had living hearts under their
+rocky ribs and changed their mood like the children of the soil at their
+feet, who grow up under their almost parental smiles and frowns. Happy
+is the child whose first dreams of heaven are blended with the evening
+glories of Mount Holyoke, when the sun is firing its treetops, and
+gilding the white walls that mark its one human dwelling! If the other
+and the wilder of the two summits has a scowl of terror in its
+overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage
+solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet,
+companionable village.--And how the mountains love their children! The
+sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any
+port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces
+only in the midst of their own families.
+
+The Mountain which kept watch to the north of Rockland lay waste and
+almost inviolate through much of its domain. The catamount still glared
+from the branches of its old hemlocks on the lesser beasts that strayed
+beneath him. It was not long since a wolf had wandered down, famished in
+the winter's dearth, and left a few bones and some tufts of wool of what
+had been a lamb in the morning. Nay, there were broad-footed tracks in
+the snow only two years previously, which could not be mistaken;--the
+black bear alone could have set that plantigrade seal, and little
+children must come home early from school and play, for he is an
+indiscriminate feeder when he is hungry, and a little child would not
+come amiss when other game was wanting.
+
+But these occasional visitors may have been mere wanderers, which,
+straying along in the woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the
+streets of still villages by night, had worked their way along down from
+the ragged mountain-spurs of higher latitudes. The one feature of The
+Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its woods was the existence of
+the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted by
+those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer venom under our cold
+northern sky than the cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and
+poisons.
+
+From the earliest settlement of the place, this fact had been, next to
+the Indians, the reigning nightmare of the inhabitants. It was easy
+enough, after a time, to drive away the savages; for "a screeching Indian
+Divell," as our fathers called him, could not crawl into the crack of a
+rock to escape from his pursuers. But the venomous population of
+Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their fortress that might have
+defied the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol. In its deep
+embrasures and its impregnable easemates they reared their families, they
+met in love or wrath, they twined together in family knots, they hissed
+defiance in hostile clans, they fed, slept, hibernated, and in due time
+died in peace. Many a foray had the towns-people made, and many a
+stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,--nay, there were families where the
+children's first toy was made from the warning appendage that once
+vibrated to the wrath of one of these "cruel serpents." Sometimes one of
+them, coaxed out by a warm sun, would writhe himself down the hillside
+into the roads, up the walks that led to houses,--worse than this, into
+the long grass, where the barefooted mowers would soon pass with their
+swinging scythes,--more rarely into houses, and on one memorable
+occasion, early in the last century, into the meeting-house, where he
+took a position on the pulpit-stairs,--as is narrated in the "Account of
+Some Remarkable Providences," etc., where it is suggested that a strong
+tendency of the Rev. Didymus Bean, the Minister at that time, towards the
+Arminian Heresy may have had something to do with it, and that the
+Serpent supposed to have been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs was a false
+show of the Daemon's Contrivance, he having come in to listen to a
+Discourse which was a sweet Savour in his Nostrils, and, of course, not
+being capable of being killed Himself. Others said, however, that,
+though there was good Reason to think it was a Damon, yet he did come
+with Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful Servant,--etc.
+
+One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of a rattlesnake in this town
+early in the present century. After this there was a great snake-hunt,
+in which very many of these venomous beasts were killed,--one in
+particular, said to have been as big round as a stout man's arm, and to
+have had no less than forty joints to his rattle,--indicating, according
+to some, that he had lived forty years, but, if we might put any faith in
+the Indian tradition, that he had killed forty human beings,--an idle
+fancy, clearly. This hunt, however, had no permanent effect in keeping
+down the serpent population. Viviparous, creatures are a kind of
+specie-paying lot, but oviparous ones only give their notes, as it were,
+for a future brood,--an egg being, so to speak, a promise to pay a young
+one by and by, if nothing happen. Now the domestic habits of the
+rattlesnake are not studied very closely, for obvious reasons; but it is,
+no doubt, to all intents and purposes oviparous. Consequently it has
+large families, and is not easy to kill out.
+
+In the year 184-, a melancholy proof was afforded to the inhabitants of
+Rockland, that the brood which infested The Mountain was not extirpated.
+A very interesting young married woman, detained at home at the time by
+the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of her own house by a
+rattlesnake which had found its way down from The Mountain. Owing to the
+almost instant employment of powerful remedies, the bite did not prove
+immediately fatal; but she died within a few months of the time when she
+was bitten.
+
+All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of shadow over The Mountain. Yet,
+as many years passed without any accident, people grew comparatively
+careless, and it might rather be said to add a fearful kind of interest
+to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles, which had been the
+terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were
+there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white
+men's service, if they meddled with them.
+
+The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our pleasant
+country-towns can boast of. A brook came tumbling down the mountain-side
+and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the village. In the
+parts of its course where it ran through the woods, the water looked
+almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,--to say like smoky quartz
+would perhaps give a better idea,--but in the open plain it sparkled over
+the pebbles white as a queen's diamonds. There were huckleberry-pastures
+on the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty of the sweet-scented
+bayberry mingled with the other bushes. In other fields grew great store
+of high-bush blackberries. Along the roadside were bayberry-bushes, hung
+all over with bright red coral pendants in autumn and far into the
+winter. Then there were swamps set thick with dingy alders, where the
+three-leaved arum and the skunk's-cabbage grew broad and succulent,
+shelving down into black boggy pools here and there at the edge of which
+the green frog, stupidest of his tribe, sat waiting to be victimized by
+boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and agile leopard-frog had
+taken the six-foot spring that plumped him into the middle of the pool.
+And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread its flat disk of
+embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened polished and
+brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets, cheated by the
+cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves like
+white-cheeked invalids. Over these rose the old forest-trees,--the
+maple, scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet
+life-blood,--the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like
+the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten
+armies, always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora and
+her swain,--the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old
+marbles,--the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at its
+foot,--and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed,
+dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of whose aerial solitudes the crow
+brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed till
+his incisors grew to look like ram's-horns.
+
+Rockland would have been but half a town without its pond; Guinnepeg Pond
+was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean Institute were
+very anxious that it should be called Crystalline Lake. It was here that
+the young folks used to sail in summer and skate in winter; here, too,
+those queer, old, rum-scented good-for-nothing, lazy, story-telling,
+half-vagabonds, who sawed a little wood or dug a few potatoes now and
+then under the pretence of working for their living, used to go and fish
+through the ice for pickerel every winter. And here those three young
+people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat
+in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of these smiling ponds which
+has not devoured more youths and maidens than any of those monsters the
+ancients used to tell such lies about. But it was a pretty pond, and
+never looked more innocent--so the native "bard" of Rockland said in his
+elegy--than on the morning when they found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria
+floating among the lily-pads.
+
+The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called,
+was, in the language of its Prospectus, a "first-class Educational
+Establishment." It employed a considerable corps of instructors to rough
+out and finish the hundred young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its
+roof. First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and the Matron of the
+school. Silas Peckham was a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of the
+coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish. Everybody knows the type of
+Yankee produced by this climate and diet: thin, as if he had been split
+and dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food he
+is made of; and about as sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal with
+as the other is to the taste. Silas Peckham kept a young ladies' school
+exactly as he would have kept a hundred head of cattle,--for the simple,
+unadorned purpose of making just as much money in just as few years as
+could be safely done. Mr. Peckham gave very little personal attention to
+the department of instruction, but was always busy with contracts for
+flour and potatoes, beef and pork, and other nutritive staples, the
+amount of which required for such an establishment was enough to frighten
+a quartermaster. Mrs. Peckham was from the West, raised on Indian corn
+and pork, which give a fuller outline and a more humid temperament, but
+may perhaps be thought to render people a little coarse-fibred. Her
+specialty was to look after the feathering, cackling, roosting, rising,
+and general behavior of these hundred chicks. An honest, ignorant woman,
+she could not have passed an examination in the youngest class. So this
+distinguished institution was under the charge of a commissary and a
+housekeeper, and its real business was making money by taking young girls
+in as boarders.
+
+Connected with this, however, was the incidental fact, which the public
+took for the principal one, namely, the business of instruction. Mr.
+Peckham knew well enough that it was just as well to have good
+instructors as bad ones, so far as cost was concerned, and a great deal
+better for the reputation of his feeding-establishment. He tried to get
+the best he could without paying too much, and, having got them, to screw
+all the work out of them that could possibly be extracted.
+
+There was a master for the English branches, with a young lady assistant.
+There was another young lady who taught French, of the ahvaung and
+baundahng style, which does not exactly smack of the asphalt of the
+Boulevards. There was also a German teacher of music, who sometimes
+helped in French of the ahfaung and bauntaung style,--so that, between
+the two, the young ladies could hardly have been mistaken for Parisians,
+by a Committee of the French Academy. The German teacher also taught a
+Latin class after his fashion,--benna, a ben, gahboot, ahead, and so
+forth.
+
+The master for the English branches had lately left the school for
+private reasons, which need not be here mentioned,--but he had gone, at
+any rate, and it was his place which had been offered to Mr. Bernard
+Langdon. The offer came just in season,--as, for various causes, he was
+willing to leave the place where he had begun his new experience.
+
+It was on a fine morning that Mr. Bernard, ushered in by Mr. Peckham,
+made his appearance in the great schoolroom of the Apollinean Institute.
+A general rustle ran all round the seats when the handsome young man was
+introduced. The principal carried him to the desk of the young lady
+English assistant, Miss Darley by name, and introduced him to her.
+
+There was not a great deal of study done that day. The young lady
+assistant had to point out to the new master the whole routine in which
+the classes were engaged when their late teacher left, and which had gone
+on as well as it could since. Then Master Langdon had a great many
+questions to ask, some relating to his new duties, and some, perhaps,
+implying a degree of curiosity not very unnatural under the
+circumstances. The truth is, the general effect of the schoolroom, with
+its scores of young girls, all their eyes naturally centring on him with
+fixed or furtive glances, was enough to bewilder and confuse a young man
+like Master Langdon, though he was not destitute of self-possession, as
+we have already seen.
+
+You cannot get together a hundred girls, taking them as they come, from
+the comfortable and affluent classes, probably anywhere, certainly not in
+New England, without seeing a good deal of beauty. In fact, we very
+commonly mean by beauty the way young girls look when there is nothing to
+hinder their looking as Nature meant them to. And the great schoolroom
+of the Apollinean Institute did really make so pretty a show on the
+morning when Master Langdon entered it, that he might be pardoned for
+asking Miss Darley more questions about his scholars than about their
+lessons.
+
+There were girls of all ages: little creatures, some pallid and
+delicate-looking, the offspring of invalid parents,--much given to books,
+not much to mischief, commonly spoken of as particularly good children,
+and contrasted with another sort, girls of more vigorous organization,
+who were disposed to laughing and play, and required a strong hand to
+manage them; then young growing misses of every shade of Saxon
+complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue: blondes, some of
+them so translucent-looking that it seemed as if you could see the souls
+in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if souls were objects of sight;
+brunettes, some with rose-red colors, and some with that swarthy hue
+which often carries with it a heavily-shaded lip, and which, with pure
+outlines and outspoken reliefs, gives us some of our handsomest
+women,--the women whom ornaments of plain gold adorn more than any other
+parures; and again, but only here and there, one with dark hair and gray
+or blue eyes, a Celtic type, perhaps, but found in our native stock
+occasionally; rarest of all, a light-haired girl with dark eyes, hazel,
+brown, or of the color of that mountain-brook spoken of in this chapter,
+where it ran through shadowy woodlands. With these were to be seen at
+intervals some of maturer years, full-blown flowers among the opening
+buds, with that conscious look upon their faces which so many women wear
+during the period when they never meet a single man without having his
+monosyllable ready for him,--tied as they are, poor things! on the rock
+of expectation, each of them an Andromeda waiting for her Perseus.
+
+"Who is that girl in ringlets,--the fourth in the third row on the
+right?" said Master Langdon.
+
+"Charlotte Ann Wood," said Miss Darley; "writes very pretty poems."
+
+"Oh!--And the pink one, three seats from her? Looks bright; anything in
+her?"
+
+"Emma Dean,--day-scholar,--Squire Dean's daughter,--nice girl,--second
+medal last year."
+
+The master asked these two questions in a careless kind of way, and did
+not seem to pay any too much attention to the answers.
+
+"And who and what is that," he said,--"sitting a little apart
+there,--that strange, wild-looking girl?"
+
+This time he put the real question he wanted answered;--the other two
+were asked at random, as masks for the third.
+
+The lady-teacher's face changed;--one would have said she was frightened
+or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the
+master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up;--she was
+winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a
+kind of reverie.
+
+Miss Darley drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide
+her lips. "Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she
+whispered softly; "that is Elsie Venner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.
+
+It was a comfort to get to a place with something like society, with
+residences which had pretensions to elegance, with people of some
+breeding, with a newspaper, and "stores" to advertise in it, and with two
+or three churches to keep each other alive by wholesome agitation.
+Rockland was such a place.
+
+Some of the natural features of the town have been described already. The
+Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed it from
+wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary
+country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which
+belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it
+dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded
+than the passing stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate by
+cutting off the northern winds and holding the sun's heat like a
+garden-wall. Peachtrees, which, on the northern side of the mountain,
+hardly ever came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.
+
+But there was still another relation between the mountain and the town at
+its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and which
+was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants. Those
+high-impending forests,--"hangers," as White of Selborne would have
+called them,--sloping far upward and backward into the distance, had
+always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if
+some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare,
+precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide
+like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest chance-support, and, so
+sliding, crush the village out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled
+over on the valley of Goldau.
+
+Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence
+in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this
+awful green wall, piled up into the air over their heads. They would lie
+awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffed snapping of roots, as if
+a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like
+the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging
+with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and
+crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet, by one of
+those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature,
+there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years
+after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening
+mountainside, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls.
+The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction. If the
+mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought
+to be there. It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is
+said to exert.
+
+This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source
+of danger which was an element in the every-day life of the Rockland
+people. The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against
+them, that a Rocklander could n't hear a beanpod rattle without saying,
+"The Lord have mercy on us!" It is very true, that many a nervous old
+lady has had a terrible start, caused by some mischievous young rogue's
+giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy vegetable products in her
+immediate vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the
+excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where
+there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes, mean
+ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent without his
+venom,--poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a
+poison-bag. Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a
+certain gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger. It was
+noted that the old people retained their hearing longer than in other
+places. Some said it was the softened climate, but others believed it
+was owing to the habit of keeping their ears open whenever they were
+walking through the grass or in the woods. At any rate, a slight sense
+of danger is often an agreeable stimulus. People sip their creme de
+noyau with a peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there is a bare
+possibility that it may contain prussic acid enough to knock them over;
+in which case they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had emptied
+itself into the earth through their brain and marrow.
+
+But Rockland had other features which helped to give it a special
+character. First of all, there was one grand street which was its chief
+glory. Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its elms made a
+long, pointed-arched gallery of it through most of its extent. No
+natural Gothic arch compares, for a moment, with that formed by two
+American elms, where their lofty jets of foliage shoot across each
+other's ascending curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of green.
+When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely
+avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,
+
+ "Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear
+ As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!"
+
+he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with
+all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.
+
+Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its
+elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable
+creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and
+patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and
+makes arrangements for coming up by and by. So, in spring, one finds a
+crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small
+compared to those succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them,
+slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod's
+innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has
+established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and
+parsnip consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your
+great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean girth,
+three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it
+covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor
+insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.
+
+Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its
+Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or
+"mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street, also,
+the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly
+congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a
+house in Elm Street. A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square,
+with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with
+turned posts round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its
+door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of a clean shirt-front.
+It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master
+wears his white wrist bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs. It may not
+have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at
+any rate. Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for
+want of any linen to show. The mansion-house which has had to "button
+itself up tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin," will be
+advertising for boarders presently. The old English pattern of the New
+England mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas
+Abney's place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family,
+and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into consciousness in
+our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between the
+moments of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over us
+when we can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears to the hot,
+aching eyes beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy calm
+with them which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed and sung under
+the shelter of the old English mansion-house. Next to the
+mansion-houses, came the two-story trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses,
+which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the
+street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the
+mansion-houses. Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac
+and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower
+story almost to the exclusion of light and airy so that, what with small
+windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking
+growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were the
+most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere among the
+abodes of the living. Their garnishing was apt to assist this
+impression. Large-patterned carpets, which always look discontented in
+little rooms, haircloth furniture, black and shiny as beetles' wing
+cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called
+astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,--these things were
+inevitable. In set piles round the lamp was ranged the current
+literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound
+numbers of one of the Unknown Public's Magazines with worn-out steel
+engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished
+British author whom it is unnecessary to mention, a volume of sermons, or
+a novel or two, or both, according to the tastes of the family, and the
+Good Book, which is always Itself in the cheapest and commonest company.
+The father of the family with his hand in the breast of his coat, the
+mother of the same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a print of the Last
+Supper, by no means Morghen's, or the Father of his Country, or the old
+General, or the Defender of the Constitution, or an unknown clergyman
+with an open book before him,--these were the usual ornaments of the
+walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the others according to politics
+and other tendencies.
+
+This intermediate class of houses, wherever one finds them in New England
+towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They have
+neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the
+farm-house. They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature. The
+mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open to
+the sunshine. The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it has a good
+warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with the rest
+of the family, without fear and without reproach. These lesser
+country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent
+subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion. The
+chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the
+warmest welcome. If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and
+cheerful, the first precept would be,--The dearest fuel, plenty of it,
+and let half the heat go up the chimney. If you can't afford this, don't
+try to live in a "genteel" fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest
+farm-house.
+
+There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland.
+The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too
+often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less
+pleasing kind of rustic architecture. A little back from the road,
+seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two
+stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet
+of the ground. This, like the "mansion-house," is copied from an old
+English pattern. Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for
+instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their roofs
+acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they sprung.
+The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air
+and rain to a quiet dove or slate color. An old broken millstone at the
+door,--a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens, which the
+shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping
+eye,--a single large elm a little at one side,--a barn twice as big as
+the house,--a cattle-yard, with
+
+ "The white horns tossing above the wall,"--
+
+some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round them,--a
+row of beehives,--a garden-patch, with roots, and currant-bushes, and
+many-hued hollyhocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed, seedling onions,
+and marigolds and flower-de-luces, and lady's-delights, and peonies,
+crowding in together, with southernwood in the borders, and woodbine and
+hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,--these were the
+features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house,
+when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over
+poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their
+vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images
+that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as
+they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush of the
+red wave out of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from the green
+waves of the ocean.
+
+Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking
+like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the
+air,--as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of
+their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with
+their sharp-pointed weathercocks.
+
+The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England
+meeting-house. It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square
+tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs, out
+of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at its
+summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery
+running round three sides of the building. On the fourth side the
+pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it. Here preached
+the Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., successor, after a number of
+generations, to the office and the parsonage of the Reverend Didymus
+Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of his alleged heresies.
+He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and occasionally delivered a
+discourse which was considered by the hard-headed theologians of his
+parish to have settled the whole matter fully and finally, so that now
+there was a good logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which might
+begin at once upon the platform of his demonstrations. Yet the Reverend
+Dr. Honeywood was fonder of preaching plain, practical sermons about the
+duties of life, and showing his Christianity in abundant good works among
+his people. It was noticed by some few of his flock, not without
+comment, that the great majority of his texts came from the Gospels, and
+this more and more as he became interested in various benevolent
+enterprises which brought him into relations with-ministers and
+kindhearted laymen of other denominations. He was in fact a man of a
+very warm, open, and exceedingly human disposition, and, although bred by
+a clerical father, whose motto was "Sit anima mea cum Puritanis," he
+exercised his human faculties in the harness of his ancient faith with
+such freedom that the straps of it got so loose they did not interfere
+greatly with the circulation of the warm blood through his system. Once
+in a while he seemed to think it necessary to come out with a grand
+doctrinal sermon, and them he would lapse away for a while into preaching
+on men's duties to each other and to society, and hit hard, perhaps, at
+some of the actual vices of the time and place, and insist with such
+tenderness and eloquence on the great depth and breadth of true Christian
+love and charity, that his oldest deacon shook his head, and wished he
+had shown as much interest when he was preaching, three Sabbaths back, on
+Predestination, or in his discourse against the Sabellians. But he was
+sound in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside at the council
+held in the town of Tamarack, on the other side of the mountain, which
+expelled its clergyman for maintaining heretical doctrines? As presiding
+officer, he did not vote, of course, but there was no doubt that he was
+all right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him, and that couldn't
+very well let him go wrong.
+
+The meeting-house on the other and opposite summit was of a more modern
+style, considered by many a great improvement on the old New England
+model, so that it is not uncommon for a country parish to pull down its
+old meeting-house, which has been preached in for a hundred years or so,
+and put up one of these more elegant edifices. The new building was in
+what may be called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles and
+crockets and other ornaments were, like the body of the building, all of
+pine wood,--an admirable material, as it is very soft and easily worked,
+and can be painted of any color desired. Inside, the walls were stuccoed
+in imitation of stone,--first a dark brown square, then two light brown
+squares, then another dark brown square, and so on, to represent the
+accidental differences of shade always noticeable in the real stones of
+which walls are built. To be sure, the architect could not help getting
+his party-colored squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as those
+of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid doing things in a systematic and
+serial way; indeed, people who wish to plant trees in natural chimps know
+very well that they cannot keep from making regular lines and symmetrical
+figures, unless by some trick or other, as that one of throwing a peck of
+potatoes up into the air and sticking in a tree wherever a potato happens
+to fall. The pews of this meeting-house were the usual oblong ones,
+where people sit close together, with a ledge before them to support
+their hymn-books, liable only to occasional contact with the back of the
+next pew's heads or bonnets, and a place running under the seat of that
+pew where hats could be deposited,--always at the risk of the owner, in
+case of injury by boots or crickets.
+
+In this meeting-house preached the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, a divine
+of the "Liberal" school, as it is commonly called, bred at that famous
+college which used to be thought, twenty or thirty years ago, to have the
+monopoly of training young men in the milder forms of heresy. His
+ministrations were attended with decency, but not followed with
+enthusiasm. "The beauty of virtue" got to be an old story at last. "The
+moral dignity of human nature" ceased to excite a thrill of satisfaction,
+after some hundred repetitions. It grew to be a dull business, this
+preaching against stealing and intemperance, while he knew very well that
+the thieves were prowling round orchards and empty houses, instead of
+being there to hear the sermon, and that the drunkards, being rarely
+church-goers, get little good by the statistics and eloquent appeals of
+the preacher. Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr. Fairweather
+let off a polemic discourse against his neighbor opposite, which waked
+his people up a little; but it was a languid congregation, at best,--very
+apt to stay away from meeting in the afternoon, and not at all given to
+extra evening services. The minister, unlike his rival of the other side
+of the way, was a down-hearted and timid kind of man. He went on
+preaching as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings at
+times. There was a little Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill
+where his own was placed, which he always had to pass on Sundays. He
+could never look on the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and
+aisles or knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in
+among them and go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional
+contact which makes a worshipping throng as different from the same
+numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered
+cinders.
+
+"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and working-women!"
+he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that atmosphere,
+stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies, and cloudy with
+the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of droning over
+these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The intellectual
+isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all terrible things to
+natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a minority. No
+person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye,
+his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous,
+though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy
+one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His dark, melancholic
+aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more
+striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a belief which made him
+a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-humored
+and companionable gentleman, whose laugh on week-days did one as much
+good to listen to as the best sermon he ever delivered on a Sunday.
+
+A mile or two from the centre of Rockland was a pretty little Episcopal
+church, with a roof like a wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained
+window, and a trained rector, who read the service with such ventral
+depth of utterance and rrreduplication of the rrresonant letter, that his
+own mother would not have known him for her son, if the good woman had
+not ironed his surplice and put it on with her own hands.
+
+There were two public-houses in the place: one dignified with the name of
+the Mountain House, somewhat frequented by city people in the summer
+months, large-fronted, three-storied, balconied, boasting a distinct
+ladies'-drawing-room, and spreading a table d'hote of some pretensions;
+the other, "Pollard's Tahvern," in the common speech,--a two-story
+building, with a bar-room, once famous, where there was a great smell of
+hay and boots and pipes and all other bucolic-flavored elements,--where
+games of checkers were played on the back of the bellows with red and
+white kernels of corn, or with beans and coffee, where a man slept in a
+box-settle at night, to wake up early passengers,--where teamsters came
+in, with wooden-handled whips and coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic
+flavor of the atmosphere, and middle-aged male gossips, sometimes
+including the squire of the neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange
+a question or two about the news, and then fall into that solemn state of
+suspended animation which the temperance bar-rooms of modern days produce
+in human beings, as the Grotta del Cane does in dogs in the well-known
+experiments related by travellers. This bar-room used to be famous for
+drinking and storytelling, and sometimes fighting, in old times. That was
+when there were rows of decanters on the shelf behind the bar, and a
+hissing vessel of hot water ready, to make punch, and three or four
+loggerheads (long irons clubbed at the end) were always lying in the fire
+in the cold season, waiting to be plunged into sputtering and foaming
+mugs of flip,--a goodly compound; speaking according to the flesh, made
+with beer and sugar, and a certain suspicion of strong waters, over which
+a little nutmeg being grated, and in it the hot iron being then allowed
+to sizzle, there results a peculiar singed aroma, which the wise regard
+as a warning to remove themselves at once out of the reach of temptation.
+
+But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer presented its old attractions,
+and the loggerheads had long disappeared from the fire. In place of the
+decanters, were boxes containing "lozengers," as they were commonly
+called, sticks of candy in jars, cigars in tumblers, a few lemons, grown
+hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long exposure, but still feebly
+suggestive of possible lemonade,--the whole ornamented by festoons of
+yellow and blue cut flypaper. On the front shelf of the bar stood a
+large German-silver pitcher of water, and scattered about were
+ill-conditioned lamps, with wicks that always wanted picking, which
+burned red and smoked a good deal, and were apt to go out without any
+obvious cause, leaving strong reminiscences of the whale-fishery in the
+circumambient air.
+
+The common schoolhouses of Rockland were dwarfed by the grandeur of the
+Apollinean Institute. The master passed one of them, in a walk he was
+taking, soon after his arrival at Rockland. He looked in at the rows of
+desks, and recalled his late experiences. He could not help laughing, as
+he thought how neatly he had knocked the young butcher off his pins.
+
+"A little science is a dangerous thing, 'as well as a little 'learning,'"
+he said to himself; "only it's dangerous to the fellow you' try it on."
+And he cut him a good stick, and began climbing the side of The Mountain
+to get a look at that famous Rattlesnake Ledge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE SUNBEAM AND THE SHADOW.
+
+The virtue of the world is not mainly in its leaders. In the midst of
+the multitude which follows there is often something better than in the
+one that goes before. Old generals wanted to take Toulon, but one of
+their young colonels showed them how. The junior counsel has been known
+not unfrequently to make a better argument than his senior fellow,--if,
+indeed, he did not make both their arguments. Good ministers will tell
+you they have parishioners who beat them in the practice of the virtues.
+A great establishment, got up on commercial principles, like the
+Apollinean Institute, might yet be well carried on, if it happened to get
+good teachers. And when Master Langdon came to see its management, he
+recognized that there must be fidelity and intelligence somewhere among
+the instructors. It was only necessary to look for a moment at the fair,
+open forehead, the still, tranquil eye of gentle, habitual authority, the
+sweet gravity that lay upon the lips, to hear the clear answers to the
+pupils' questions, to notice how every request had the force without the
+form of a command, and the young man could not doubt that the good genius
+of the school stood before him in the person of Helen barley.
+
+It was the old story. A poor country-clergyman dies, and leaves a widow
+and a daughter. In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter
+bread of a governess in some rich family. In New England she must keep a
+school. So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds
+herself the prima donna in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas
+Peckham's educational establishment.
+
+What a miserable thing it is to be poor. She was dependent, frail,
+sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping,
+thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared
+for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have
+his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money's
+worth as he could get. She was consequently, in plain English,
+overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,--sadder a
+great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in
+capacities of suffering than a man. She has so many varieties of
+headache,--sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera
+into her temples,--sometimes letting her work with half her brain while
+the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces,--sometimes tightening
+round the brows as if her cap-band were a ring of iron,--and then her
+neuralgias, and her backaches, and her fits of depression, in which she
+thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which
+men speak slightingly of as hysterical,--convulsions, that is all, only
+not commonly fatal ones,--so many trials which belong to her fine and
+mobile structure,--that she is always entitled to pity, when she is
+placed in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies.
+
+The poor young lady's work had, of course, been doubled since the
+departure of Master Langdon's predecessor. Nobody knows what the
+weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin to
+be overtasked, but those who have tried it. The relays of fresh pupils,
+each new set with its exhausting powers in full action, coming one after
+another, take out all the reserved forces and faculties of resistance
+from the subject of their draining process.
+
+The day's work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she sat
+down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or
+compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the
+pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill
+stair of labor she was daily climbing.
+
+How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher's tasks! She was
+conscientious in her duties, and would insist on reading every
+sentence,--there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar or
+bad spelling. There might have been twenty or thirty of these themes in
+the bundle before her. Of course she knew pretty well the leading
+sentiments they could contain: that beauty was subject to the accidents
+of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence uncertain; that virtue
+was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like the dewdrop from the flower,
+ere the sun had reached its meridian; that life was o'ershadowed with
+trials; that the lessons of virtue instilled by our beloved teachers were
+to be our guides through all our future career. The imagery employed
+consisted principally of roses, lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with
+the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to meteor. Who does not know
+the small, slanted, Italian hand of these girls'-compositions, their
+stringing together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases; their
+occasional gushes of sentiment, their profound estimates of the world,
+sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of a bantam
+pullet's last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell on its head
+would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who knew the great ocean with all
+its typhoons and tornadoes? Yet every now and then one is liable to be
+surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained,
+except by the mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a
+young girl and exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other
+instances exalts the sensibility,--a little something of that which made
+Joan of Arc, and the Burney girl who prophesied "Evelina," and the
+Davidson sisters. In the midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss
+Darley read over so carefully were two or three that had something of
+individual flavor about them, and here and there there was an image or an
+epithet which showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a fallen
+scarlet feather marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.
+
+The young lady-teacher read them with a certain indifference of manner,
+as one reads proofs--noting defects of detail, but not commonly arrested
+by the matters treated of. Even Miss Charlotte Ann Wood's poem,
+beginning--
+
+ "How sweet at evening's balmy hour,"
+
+did not excite her. She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and
+Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the pile of
+papers she had finished. She was looking over some of the last of them
+in a rather listless way,--for the poor thing was getting sleepy in spite
+of herself,--when she came to one which seemed to rouse her attention,
+and lifted her drooping lids. She looked at it a moment before she would
+touch it. Then she took hold of it by one corner and slid it off from
+the rest. One would have said she was afraid of it, or had some
+undefined antipathy which made it hateful to her. Such odd fancies are
+common enough in young persons in her nervous state. Many of these young
+people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble the tips of
+their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive objects.
+
+This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long, slender
+hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something strangely
+suggestive about the look of it, but exactly of what, Miss barley either
+could not or did not try to think. The subject of the paper was The
+Mountain,--the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. It
+showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the
+region. One would have said that the writer must have threaded its
+wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as well as by day.
+As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a kind of tremulous
+agitation came over her. There were hints in this strange paper she did
+not know what to make of. There was something in its descriptions and
+imagery that recalled,--Miss Darley could not say what,--but it made her
+frightfully nervous. Still she could not help reading, till she came to
+one passage which so agitated her, that the tired and over-wearied girl's
+self-control left her entirely. She sobbed once or twice, then laughed
+convulsively; and flung herself on the bed, where she worked out a set
+hysteric spasm as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands and
+see that she did not hurt herself.
+
+By and by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a
+volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and
+wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.
+
+Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
+which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state
+that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and it
+was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which made
+a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance. The theme
+was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner, and
+was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited the
+master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before mentioned. The
+next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally enough,
+but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon in his
+own.
+
+The girls had not yet entered the school room.
+
+"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.
+
+"I was not well yesterday," she, answered. "I had a worry and a kind of
+fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls
+and bodies. Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm in arm,
+between two guardian angels. Sometimes I faint almost with the thought
+of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants.--Tell me,
+are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural
+law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?"
+
+Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his
+profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which
+individuals, families, and races are born. He replied, therefore, with a
+smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of
+facts.
+
+"Why, of course. Each of us is only the footing-up of a double column of
+figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,--and some of
+them are plus, and some minus. If the columns don't add up right, it is
+commonly because we can't make out all the figures. I don't mean to say
+that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and keep
+the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer to a
+long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people born
+with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of Nature, as you
+call them. If they happen to cut these at right angles, of course they
+are beyond the reach of common influences. Slight obliquities are what
+we have most to do with in education. Penitentiaries and insane asylums
+take care of most of the right-angle cases.--I am afraid I have put it
+too much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know. Pray, what
+set you to asking me this? Any strange cases among the scholars?"
+
+The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous glance that came with the
+question. She, too, was of gentle blood,--not meaning by that that she
+was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated stock, never
+rich, but long trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies,
+amenities, reticences, graces, which no one thinks of until he misses
+them, are the traditional right of those who spring from such families.
+And when two persons of this exceptional breeding meet in the midst of
+the common multitude, they seek each other's company at once by the
+natural law of elective affinity. It is wonderful how men and women know
+their peers. If two stranger queens, sole survivors of two shipwrecked
+vessels, were cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once
+address the other as "Our Royal Sister."
+
+Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of Bernard Langdon glittering with
+the light which flashed from them with his question. Not as those
+foolish, innocent country-girls of the small village did she look into
+them, to be fascinated and bewildered, but to sound them with a calm,
+steadfast purpose. "A gentleman," she said to herself, as she read his
+expression and his features with a woman's rapid, but exhausting glance.
+"A lady," he said to himself, as he met her questioning look,--so brief,
+so quiet, yet so assured, as of one whom necessity had taught to read
+faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents, as
+wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few
+seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any
+vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression, she
+would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face so
+softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly, he
+would not have said to himself, "She is a LADY," for that word meant a
+good deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths and the scholarly
+Langdons.
+
+"There are strange people everywhere, Mr. Langdon," she said, "and I
+don't think our schoolroom is an exception. I am glad you believe in the
+force of transmitted tendencies. It would break my heart, if I did not
+think that there are faults beyond the reach of everything but God's
+special grace. I should die, if I thought that my negligence or
+incapacity was alone responsible for the errors and sins of those I have
+charge of. Yet there are mysteries I do not know how to account for."
+She looked all round the schoolroom, and then said, in a whisper, "Mr.
+Langdon, we had a girl that stole, in the school, not long ago. Worse
+than that, we had a girl who tried to set us on fire. Children of good
+people, both of them. And we have a girl now that frightens me so"--
+
+The door opened, and three misses came in to take their seats: three
+types, as it happened, of certain classes, into which it would not have
+been difficult to distribute the greater number of the girls in the
+school.--Hannah Martin. Fourteen years and three months old.
+Short-necked, thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead,
+large, dull eyes. Looks good-natured, with little other expression.
+Three buns in her bag, and a large apple. Has a habit of attacking her
+provisions in school-hours.--Rosa Milburn. Sixteen. Brunette, with a
+rare-ripe flush in her cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes
+wandering, apt to be downcast. Moody at times. Said to be passionate,
+if irritated. Finished in high relief. Carries shoulders well back and
+walks well, as if proud of her woman's life, with a slight rocking
+movement, being one of the wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless,--a
+hard girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket, which she means to
+read in school-time.--Charlotte Ann Wood. Fifteen. The poetess before
+mentioned. Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes. Delicate
+child, half unfolded. Gentle, but languid and despondent. Does not go
+much with the other girls, but reads a good deal, especially poetry,
+underscoring favorite passages. Writes a great many verses, very fast,
+not very correctly; full of the usual human sentiments, expressed in the
+accustomed phrases. Under-vitalized. Sensibilities not covered with
+their normal integuments. A negative condition, often confounded with
+genius, and sometimes running into it. Young people who fall out of line
+through weakness of the active faculties are often confounded with those
+who step out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.
+
+The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups, until
+the schoolroom was nearly full. Then there was a little pause, and a
+light step was heard in the passage. The lady-teacher's eyes turned to
+the door, and the master's followed them in the same direction.
+
+A girl of about seventeen entered. She was tall and slender, but
+rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes
+sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the queen of
+graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the very
+highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was a
+splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth which
+was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered
+dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little
+fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a
+short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing
+listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling
+it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and braiding it in with her
+long, delicate fingers. Presently she looked up. Black, piercing eyes,
+not large,--a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley
+bust,--black hair, twisted in heavy braids,--a face that one could not
+help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look away from for
+something in its expression, and could not for those diamond eyes. They
+were fixed on the lady-teacher now. The latter turned her own away, and
+let them wander over the other scholars. But they could not help coming
+back again for a single glance at the wild beauty. The diamond eyes were
+on her still. She turned the leaves of several of her books, as if in
+search of some passage, and, when she thought she had waited long enough
+to be safe, once more stole a quick look at the dark girl. The diamond
+eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief to her forehead, which
+had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost shivered, for she felt
+cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse, which she could not
+resist, she left her place and went to the young girl's desk.
+
+"What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?" It was a strange question to
+put, for the girl had not signified that she wished the teacher to come
+to her.
+
+"Nothing," she said. "I thought I could make you come." The girl spoke
+in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her
+articulation of one or two consonants was not absolutely perfect.
+
+"Where did you get that flower, Elsie?" said Miss Darley. It was a rare
+alpine flower, which was found only in one spot among the rocks of The
+Mountain.
+
+"Where it grew," said Elsie Veneer. "Take it." The teacher could not
+refuse her. The girl's finger tips touched hers as she took it. How
+cold they were for a girl of such an organization!
+
+The teacher went back to her seat. She made an excuse for quitting the
+schoolroom soon afterwards. The first thing she did was to fling the
+flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over it. The second was to
+wash the tips of her fingers, as if she had been another Lady Macbeth. A
+poor, over-tasked, nervous creature,--we must not think too much of her
+fancies.
+
+After school was done, she finished the talk with the master which had
+been so suddenly interrupted. There were things spoken of which may
+prove interesting by and by, but there are other matters we must first
+attend to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE EVENT OF THE SEASON.
+
+"Mr. and Mrs. Colonel Sprowle's compliments to Mr. Langdon and requests
+the pleasure of his company at a social entertainment on Wednesday
+evening next.
+ "Elm St. Monday."
+
+On paper of a pinkish color and musky smell, with a large "S" at the top,
+and an embossed border. Envelop adherent, not sealed. Addressed
+
+ LANGDON ESQ.
+ Present.
+
+Brought by H. Frederic Sprowle, youngest son of the Colonel,--the H. of
+course standing for the paternal Hezekiah, put in to please the father,
+and reduced to its initial to please the mother, she having a marked
+preference for Frederic. Boy directed to wait for an answer.
+
+"Mr. Langdon has the pleasure of accepting Mr. and Mrs. Colonel Sprowle's
+polite invitation for Wednesday evening."
+
+On plain paper, sealed with an initial.
+
+In walking along the main street, Mr. Bernard had noticed a large house
+of some pretensions to architectural display, namely, unnecessarily
+projecting eaves, giving it a mushroomy aspect, wooden mouldings at
+various available points, and a grandiose arched portico. It looked a
+little swaggering by the side of one or two of the mansion-houses that
+were not far from it, was painted too bright for Mr. Bernard's taste, had
+rather too fanciful a fence before it, and had some fruit-trees planted
+in the front-yard, which to this fastidious young gentleman implied a
+defective sense of the fitness of things, not promising in people who
+lived in so large a house, with a mushroom roof and a triumphal arch for
+its entrance.
+
+This place was known as "Colonel Sprowle's villa," (genteel friends,)--as
+"the elegant residence of our distinguished fellow-citizen, Colonel
+Sprowle," (Rockland Weekly Universe,)--as "the neew haouse," (old
+settlers,)--as "Spraowle's Folly," (disaffected and possibly envious
+neighbors,)--and in common discourse, as "the Colonel's."
+
+Hezekiah Sprowle, Esquire, Colonel Sprowle of the Commonwealth's Militia,
+was a retired "merchant." An India merchant he might, perhaps, have been
+properly called; for he used to deal in West India goods, such as coffee,
+sugar, and molasses, not to speak of rum,--also in tea, salt fish,
+butter and cheese, oil and candles, dried fruit, agricultural "p'doose"
+generally, industrial products, such as boots and shoes, and various
+kinds of iron and wooden ware, and at one end of the establishment in
+calicoes and other stuffs,--to say nothing of miscellaneous objects of
+the most varied nature, from sticks of candy, which tempted in the
+smaller youth with coppers in their fists, up to ornamental articles of
+apparel, pocket-books, breast-pins, gilt-edged Bibles, stationery, in
+short, everything which was like to prove seductive to the rural
+population. The Colonel had made money in trade, and also by matrimony.
+He had married Sarah, daughter and heiress of the late Tekel Jordan,
+Esq., an old miser, who gave the town-clock, which carries his name to
+posterity in large gilt letters as a generous benefactor of his native
+place. In due time the Colonel reaped the reward of well-placed
+affections. When his wife's inheritance fell in, he thought he had money
+enough to give up trade, and therefore sold out his "store," called in
+some dialects of the English language shop, and his business.
+
+Life became pretty hard work to him, of course, as soon as he had nothing
+particular to do. Country people with money enough not to have to work
+are in much more danger than city people in the same condition. They get
+a specific look and character, which are the same in all the villages
+where one studies them. They very commonly fall into a routine, the
+basis of which is going to some lounging-place or other, a bar-room, a
+reading-room, or something of the kind. They grow slovenly in dress, and
+wear the same hat forever. They have a feeble curiosity for news
+perhaps, which they take daily as a man takes his bitters, and then fall
+silent and think they are thinking. But the mind goes out under this
+regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if
+the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water,
+which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments,
+and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed
+future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and
+though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather late at
+night with a curious tendency to say the same thing twice and even three
+times over, it had always been in very cold weather,--and everybody knows
+that no one is safe to drink a couple of glasses of wine in a warm room
+and go suddenly out into the cold air.
+
+Miss Matilda Sprowle, sole daughter of the house, had reached the age at
+which young ladies are supposed in technical language to have come out,
+and thereafter are considered to be in company.
+
+"There's one piece o' goods," said the Colonel to his wife, "that we
+ha'n't disposed of, nor got a customer for yet. That 's Matildy. I
+don't mean to set HER up at vaandoo. I guess she can have her pick of a
+dozen."
+
+"She 's never seen anybody yet," said Mrs. Sprowle, who had had a certain
+project for some time, but had kept quiet about it. "Let's have a party,
+and give her a chance to show herself and see some of the young folks."
+
+The Colonel was not very clear-headed, and he thought, naturally enough,
+that the party was his own suggestion, because his remark led to the
+first starting of the idea. He entered into the plan, therefore, with a
+feeling of pride as well as pleasure, and the great project was resolved
+upon in a family council without a dissentient voice. This was the
+party, then, to which Mr. Bernard was going. The town had been full of it
+for a week. "Everybody was asked." So everybody said that was invited.
+But how in respect of those who were not asked? If it had been one of
+the old mansion-houses that was giving a party, the boundary between the
+favored and the slighted families would have been known pretty well
+beforehand, and there would have been no great amount of grumbling. But
+the Colonel, for all his title, had a forest of poor relations and a
+brushwood swamp of shabby friends, for he had scrambled up to fortune,
+and now the time was come when he must define his new social position.
+
+This is always an awkward business in town or country. An exclusive
+alliance between two powers is often the same thing as a declaration of
+war against a third. Rockland was soon split into a triumphant minority,
+invited to Mrs. Sprowle's party, and a great majority, uninvited, of
+which the fraction just on the border line between recognized "gentility"
+and the level of the ungloved masses was in an active state of excitement
+and indignation.
+
+"Who is she, I should like to know?" said Mrs. Saymore, the tailor's
+wife. "There was plenty of folks in Rockland as good as ever Sally
+Jordan was, if she had managed to pick up a merchant. Other folks could
+have married merchants, if their families was n't as wealthy as them old
+skinflints that willed her their money," etc., etc. Mrs. Saymore
+expressed the feeling of many beside herself. She had, however, a
+special right to be proud of the name she bore. Her husband was own
+cousin to the Saymores of Freestone Avenue (who write the name Seymour,
+and claim to be of the Duke of Somerset's family, showing a clear descent
+from the Protector to Edward Seymour, (1630,)--then a jump that would
+break a herald's neck to one Seth Saymore,(1783,)--from whom to the head
+of the present family the line is clear again). Mrs. Saymore, the
+tailor's wife, was not invited, because her husband mended clothes. If
+he had confined himself strictly to making them, it would have put a
+different face upon the matter.
+
+The landlord of the Mountain House and his lady were invited to Mrs.
+Sprowle's party. Not so the landlord of Pollard's Tahvern and his lady.
+Whereupon the latter vowed that they would have a party at their house
+too, and made arrangements for a dance of twenty or thirty couples, to be
+followed by an entertainment. Tickets to this "Social Ball" were soon
+circulated, and, being accessible to all at a moderate price, admission
+to the "Elegant Supper" included, this second festival promised to be as
+merry, if not as select, as the great party.
+
+Wednesday came. Such doings had never been heard of in Rockland as went
+on that day at the "villa." The carpet had been taken up in the long
+room, so that the young folks might have a dance. Miss Matilda's piano
+had been moved in, and two fiddlers and a clarionet-player engaged to
+make music. All kinds of lamps had been put in requisition, and even
+colored wax-candles figured on the mantel-pieces. The costumes of the
+family had been tried on the day before: the Colonel's black suit fitted
+exceedingly well; his lady's velvet dress displayed her contours to
+advantage; Miss Matilda's flowered silk was considered superb; the eldest
+son of the family, Mr. T. Jordan Sprowle, called affectionately and
+elegantly "Geordie," voted himself "stunnin'"; and even the small youth
+who had borne Mr. Bernard's invitation was effective in a new jacket and
+trousers, buttony in front, and baggy in the reverse aspect, as is wont
+to be the case with the home-made garments of inland youngsters.
+
+Great preparations had been made for the refection which was to be part
+of the entertainment. There was much clinking of borrowed spoons, which
+were to be carefully counted, and much clicking of borrowed china, which
+was to be tenderly handled, for nobody in the country keeps those vast
+closets full of such things which one may see in rich city-houses. Not a
+great deal could be done in the way of flowers, for there were no
+greenhouses, and few plants were out as yet; but there were paper
+ornaments for the candlesticks, and colored mats for the lamps, and all
+the tassels of the curtains and bells were taken out of those brown linen
+bags, in which, for reasons hitherto undiscovered, they are habitually
+concealed in some households. In the remoter apartments every imaginable
+operation was going on at once,--roasting, boiling, baking, beating,
+rolling, pounding in mortars, frying, freezing; for there was to be
+ice-cream to-night of domestic manufacture;--and in the midst of all
+these labors, Mrs. Sprowle and Miss Matilda were moving about, directing
+and helping as they best might, all day long. When the evening came, it
+might be feared they would not be in just the state of mind and body to
+entertain company.
+
+--One would like to give a party now and then, if one could be a
+billionnaire.--"Antoine, I am going to have twenty people to dine
+to-day." "Biens, Madame." Not a word or thought more about it, but get
+home in season to dress, and come down to your own table, one of your own
+guests.--"Giuseppe, we are to have a party a week from to-night,--five
+hundred invitations--there is the list." The day comes. "Madam, do you
+remember you have your party tonight?" "Why, so I have! Everything
+right? supper and all?" "All as it should be, Madam."
+
+"Send up Victorine." "Victorine, full toilet for this evening,--pink,
+diamonds, and emeralds. Coiffeur at seven. Allez."--Billionism, or
+even millionism, must be a blessed kind of state, with health and clear
+conscience and youth and good looks,--but most blessed is this, that it
+takes off all the mean cares which give people the three wrinkles between
+the eyebrows, and leaves them free to have a good time and make others
+have a good time, all the way along from the charity that tips up
+unexpected loads of wood before widows' houses, and leaves foundling
+turkeys upon poor men's door-steps, and sets lean clergymen crying at the
+sight of anonymous fifty-dollar bills, to the taste which orders a
+perfect banquet in such sweet accord with every sense that everybody's
+nature flowers out full--blown in its golden--glowing, fragrant
+atmosphere.
+
+--A great party given by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind of
+solemnity, so to speak. It involves so much labor and anxiety,--its
+spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of
+every-day family-life,--it is such a formidable matter to break in the
+raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table,--there is
+such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary
+operations,--so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which
+divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local
+universe,--that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests'
+company on "this solemn occasion," they would pretty nearly express the
+true state of things.
+
+The Colonel himself had been pressed into the service. He had pounded
+something in the great mortar. He had agitated a quantity of sweetened
+and thickened milk in what was called a cream-freezer. At eleven
+o'clock, A. M., he retired for a space. On returning, his color was
+noted to be somewhat heightened, and he showed a disposition to be
+jocular with the female help,--which tendency, displaying itself in
+livelier demonstrations than were approved at head-quarters, led to his
+being detailed to out-of-door duties, such as raking gravel, arranging
+places for horses to be hitched to, and assisting in the construction of
+an arch of wintergreen at the porch of the mansion.
+
+A whiff from Mr. Geordie's cigar refreshed the toiling females from time
+to time; for the windows had to be opened occasionally, while all these
+operations were going on, and the youth amused himself with inspecting
+the interior, encouraging the operatives now and then in the phrases
+commonly employed by genteel young men,--for he had perused an odd volume
+of "Verdant Green," and was acquainted with a Sophomore from one of the
+fresh-water colleges. "Go it on the feed!" exclaimed this spirited young
+man. "Nothin' like a good spread. Grub enough and good liquor, that's
+the ticket. Guv'nor'll do the heavy polite, and let me alone for
+polishin' off the young charmers." And Mr. Geordie looked expressively at
+a handmaid who was rolling gingerbread, as if he were rehearsing for "Don
+Giovanni."
+
+Evening came at last, and the ladies were forced to leave the scene of
+their labors to array themselves for the coming festivities. The tables
+had been set in a back room, the meats were ready, the pickles were
+displayed, the cake was baked, the blanc-mange had stiffened, and the
+ice-cream had frozen.
+
+At half past seven o'clock, the Colonel, in costume, came into the front
+parlor, and proceeded to light the lamps. Some were good-humored enough
+and took the hint of a lighted match at once. Others were as vicious as
+they could be,--would not light on any terms, any more than if they were
+filled with water, or lighted and smoked one side of the chimney, or
+spattered a few sparks and sulked themselves out, or kept up a faint show
+of burning, so that their ground glasses looked as feebly phosphorescent
+as so many invalid fireflies. With much coaxing and screwing and
+pricking, a tolerable illumination was at last achieved. At eight there
+was a grand rustling of silks, and Mrs. and Miss Sprowle descended from
+their respective bowers or boudoirs. Of course they were pretty well
+tired by this time, and very glad to sit down,--having the prospect
+before them of being obliged to stand for hours. The Colonel walked
+about the parlor, inspecting his regiment of lamps. By and by Mr.
+Geordie entered.
+
+"Mph! mph!" he sniffed, as he came in. "You smell of lamp-smoke here."
+
+That always galls people,--to have a new-comer accuse them of smoke or
+close air, which they have got used to and do not perceive. The Colonel
+raged at the thought of his lamps' smoking, and tongued a few anathemas
+inside of his shut teeth, but turned down two or three wicks that burned
+higher than the rest.
+
+Master H. Frederic next made his appearance, with questionable marks upon
+his fingers and countenance. Had been tampering with something brown and
+sticky. His elder brother grew playful, and caught him by the baggy
+reverse of his more essential garment.
+
+"Hush!" said Mrs. Sprowle,--"there 's the bell!"
+
+Everybody took position at once, and began to look very smiling and
+altogether at ease.--False alarm. Only a parcel of spoons,--"loaned,"
+as the inland folks say when they mean lent, by a neighbor.
+
+"Better late than never!" said the Colonel, "let me heft them spoons."
+
+Mrs. Sprowle came down into her chair again as if all her bones had been
+bewitched out of her.
+
+"I'm pretty nigh beat out a'ready," said she, "before any of the folks
+has come."
+
+They sat silent awhile, waiting for the first arrival. How nervous they
+got! and how their senses were sharpened!
+
+"Hark!" said Miss Matilda,--"what 's that rumblin'?"
+
+It was a cart going over a bridge more than a mile off, which at any
+other time they would not have heard. After this there was a lull, and
+poor Mrs. Sprowle's head nodded once or twice. Presently a crackling and
+grinding of gravel;--how much that means, when we are waiting for those
+whom we long or dread to see! Then a change in the tone of the
+gravel-crackling.
+
+"Yes, they have turned in at our gate. They're comin'! Mother! mother!"
+
+Everybody in position, smiling and at ease. Bell rings. Enter the first
+set of visitors. The Event of the Season has begun.
+
+"Law! it's nothin' but the Cranes' folks! I do believe Mahala 's come in
+that old green de-laine she wore at the Surprise Party!"
+
+Miss Matilda had peeped through a crack of the door and made this
+observation and the remark founded thereon. Continuing her attitude of
+attention, she overheard Mrs. Crane and her two daughters conversing in
+the attiring-room, up one flight.
+
+"How fine everything is in the great house!" said Mrs. Crane,--"jest
+look at the picters!"
+
+"Matildy Sprowle's drawin's," said Ada Azuba, the eldest daughter.
+
+"I should think so," said Mahala Crane, her younger sister,--a wide-awake
+girl, who had n't been to school for nothing, and performed a little on
+the lead pencil herself. "I should like to know whether that's a
+hay-cock or a mountain!"
+
+Miss Matilda winced; for this must refer to her favorite monochrome,
+executed by laying on heavy shadows and stumping them down into mellow
+harmony,--the style of drawing which is taught in six lessons, and the
+kind of specimen which is executed in something less than one hour.
+Parents and other very near relatives are sometimes gratified with these
+productions, and cause them to be framed and hung up, as in the present
+instance.
+
+"I guess we won't go down jest yet," said Mrs. Crane, "as folks don't
+seem to have come."
+
+So she began a systematic inspection of the dressing-room and its
+conveniences.
+
+"Mahogany four-poster;--come from the Jordans', I cal'la,te. Marseilles
+quilt. Ruffles all round the piller. Chintz curtings,--jest put
+up,--o' purpose for the party, I'll lay ye a dollar.--What a nice
+washbowl!" (Taps it with a white knuckle belonging to a red finger.)
+"Stone chaney.--Here's a bran'-new brush and comb,--and here's a
+scent-bottle. Come here, girls, and fix yourselves in the glass, and
+scent your pocket-handkerchers."
+
+And Mrs. Crane bedewed her own kerchief with some of the eau de Cologne
+of native manufacture,--said on its label to be much superior to the
+German article.
+
+It was a relief to Mrs. and the Miss Cranes when the bell rang and the
+next guests were admitted. Deacon and Mrs. Soper,--Deacon Soper of the
+Rev. Mr. Fairweather's church, and his lady. Mrs. Deacon Soper was
+directed, of course, to the ladies' dressing-room, and her husband to the
+other apartment, where gentlemen were to leave their outside coats and
+hats. Then came Mr. and Mrs. Briggs, and then the three Miss Spinneys,
+then Silas Peckham, Head of the Apollinean Institute, and Mrs. Peckham,
+and more after them, until at last the ladies' dressing-room got so full
+that one might have thought it was a trap none of them could get out of.
+In truth, they all felt a little awkwardly. Nobody wanted to be first to
+venture down-stairs. At last Mr. Silas Peckham thought it was time to
+make a move for the parlor, and for this purpose presented himself at the
+door of the ladies' dressing-room.
+
+"Lorindy, my dear!" he exclaimed to Mrs. Peckham,--"I think there can be
+no impropriety in our joining the family down-stairs."
+
+Mrs. Peckham laid her large, flaccid arm in the sharp angle made by the
+black sleeve which held the bony limb her husband offered, and the two
+took the stair and struck out for the parlor. The ice was broken, and
+the dressing-room began to empty itself into the spacious, lighted
+apartments below.
+
+Mr. Silas Peckham slid into the room with Mrs. Peckham alongside, like a
+shad convoying a jelly-fish.
+
+"Good-evenin', Mrs. Sprowle! I hope I see you well this evenin'. How 's
+your haalth, Colonel Sprowle?"
+
+"Very well, much obleeged to you. Hope you and your good lady are well.
+Much pleased to see you. Hope you'll enjoy yourselves. We've laid out
+to have everything in good shape,--spared no trouble nor ex"--
+
+"pence,"--said Silas Peckham.
+
+Mrs. Colonel Sprowle, who, you remember, was a Jordan, had nipped the
+Colonel's statement in the middle of the word Mr. Peckham finished, with
+a look that jerked him like one of those sharp twitches women keep giving
+a horse when they get a chance to drive one.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Crane, Miss Ada Azuba, and Miss Mahala Crane made their
+entrance. There had been a discussion about the necessity and propriety
+of inviting this family, the head of which kept a small shop for hats and
+boots and shoes. The Colonel's casting vote had carried it in the
+affirmative.--How terribly the poor old green de-laine did cut up in the
+blaze of so many lamps and candles.
+
+--Deluded little wretch, male or female, in town or country, going to
+your first great party, how little you know the nature of the ceremony in
+which you are to bear the part of victim! What! are not these garlands
+and gauzy mists and many-colored streamers which adorn you, is not this
+music which welcomes you, this radiance that glows about you, meant
+solely for your enjoyment, young miss of seventeen or eighteen summers,
+now for the first time swimming unto the frothy, chatoyant, sparkling,
+undulating sea of laces and silks and satins, and white-armed,
+flower-crowned maidens struggling in their waves beneath the lustres that
+make the false summer of the drawing-room?
+
+Stop at the threshold! This is a hall of judgment you are entering; the
+court is in session; and if you move five steps forward, you will be at
+its bar.
+
+There was a tribunal once in France, as you may remember, called the
+Chambre Ardente, the Burning Chamber. It was hung all round with lamps,
+and hence its name. The burning chamber for the trial of young maidens
+is the blazing ball-room. What have they full-dressed you, or rather
+half-dressed you for, do you think? To make you look pretty, of course!
+Why have they hung a chandelier above you, flickering all over with
+flames, so that it searches you like the noonday sun, and your deepest
+dimple cannot hold a shadow? To give brilliancy to the gay scene, no
+doubt!--No, my clear! Society is inspecting you, and it finds
+undisguised surfaces and strong lights a convenience in the process. The
+dance answers the purpose of the revolving pedestal upon which the "White
+Captive" turns, to show us the soft, kneaded marble, which looks as if it
+had never been hard, in all its manifold aspects of living loveliness.
+No mercy for you, my love! Justice, strict justice, you shall certainly
+have,--neither more nor less. For, look you, there are dozens, scores,
+hundreds, with whom you must be weighed in the balance; and you have got
+to learn that the "struggle for life" Mr. Charles Darwin talks about
+reaches to vertebrates clad in crinoline, as well as to mollusks in
+shells, or articulates in jointed scales, or anything that fights for
+breathing-room and food and love in any coat of fur or feather! Happy
+they who can flash defiance from bright eyes and snowy shoulders back
+into the pendants of the insolent lustres!
+
+--Miss Mahala Crane did not have these reflections; and no young girl
+ever did, or ever will, thank Heaven! Her keen eyes sparkled under her
+plainly parted hair and the green de-laine moulded itself in those
+unmistakable lines of natural symmetry in which Nature indulges a small
+shopkeeper's daughter occasionally as well as a wholesale dealer's young
+ladies. She would have liked a new dress as much as any other girl, but
+she meant to go and have a good time at any rate.
+
+The guests were now arriving in the drawing-room pretty fast, and the
+Colonel's hand began to burn a good deal with the sharp squeezes which
+many of the visitors gave it. Conversation, which had begun like a
+summer-shower, in scattering drops, was fast becoming continuous, and
+occasionally rising into gusty swells, with now and then a broad-chested
+laugh from some Captain or Major or other military personage,--for it may
+be noted that all large and loud men in the unpaved districts bear
+military titles.
+
+Deacon Soper came up presently, and entered into conversation with
+Colonel Sprowle.
+
+"I hope to see our pastor present this evenin'," said the Deacon.
+
+"I don't feel quite sure," the Colonel answered. "His dyspepsy has been
+bad on him lately. He wrote to say, that, Providence permittin', it
+would be agreeable to him to take a part in the exercises of the evenin';
+but I mistrusted he did n't mean to come. To tell the truth, Deacon
+Soper, I rather guess he don't like the idee of dancin', and some of the
+other little arrangements."
+
+"Well," said the Deacon, "I know there's some condemns dancin'. I've
+heerd a good deal of talk about it among the folks round. Some have it
+that it never brings a blessin' on a house to have dancin' in it. Judge
+Tileston died, you remember, within a month after he had his great ball,
+twelve year ago, and some thought it was in the natur' of a judgment. I
+don't believe in any of them notions. If a man happened to be struck
+dead the night after he'd been givin' a ball," (the Colonel loosened his
+black stock a little, and winked and swallowed two or three times,) "I
+should n't call it a judgment,--I should call it a coincidence. But I 'm
+a little afraid our pastor won't come. Somethin' or other's the matter
+with Mr. Fairweather. I should sooner expect to see the old Doctor come
+over out of the Orthodox parsonage-house."
+
+"I've asked him," said the Colonel.
+
+"Well?" said Deacon Soper.
+
+"He said he should like to come, but he did n't know what his people
+would say. For his part, he loved to see young folks havin' their sports
+together, and very often felt as if he should like to be one of 'em
+himself. 'But,' says I, 'Doctor, I don't say there won't be a little
+dancin'.' 'Don't!' says he, 'for I want Letty to go,' (she's his
+granddaughter that's been stayin' with him,) 'and Letty 's mighty fond of
+dancin'. You know,' says the Doctor, 'it is n't my business to settle
+whether other people's children should dance or not.' And the Doctor
+looked as if he should like to rigadoon and sashy across as well as the
+young one he was talkin' about. He 's got blood in him, the old Doctor
+has. I wish our little man and him would swop pulpits."
+
+Deacon Soper started and looked up into the Colonel's face, as if to see
+whether he was in earnest.
+
+Mr. Silas Peckham and his lady joined the group.
+
+"Is this to be a Temperance Celebration, Mrs. Sprowle?" asked Mr. Silas
+Peckham.
+
+Mrs. Sprowle replied, "that there would be lemonade and srub for those
+that preferred such drinks, but that the Colonel had given folks to
+understand that he did n't mean to set in judgment on the marriage in
+Canaan, and that those that didn't like srub and such things would find
+somethin' that would suit them better."
+
+Deacon Soper's countenance assumed a certain air of restrained
+cheerfulness. The conversation rose into one of its gusty paroxysms just
+then. Master H. Frederic got behind a door and began performing the
+experiment of stopping and unstopping his ears in rapid alternation,
+greatly rejoicing in the singular effect of mixed conversation chopped
+very small, like the contents of a mince-pie, or meat-pie, as it is more
+forcibly called in the deep-rutted villages lying along the unsalted
+streams. All at once it grew silent just round the door, where it had
+been loudest,--and the silence spread itself like a stain, till it hushed
+everything but a few corner-duets. A dark, sad-looking, middle-aged
+gentleman entered the parlor, with a young lady on his arm,--his
+daughter, as it seemed, for she was not wholly unlike him in feature, and
+of the same dark complexion.
+
+"Dudley Venner," exclaimed a dozen people, in startled, but
+half-suppressed tones.
+
+"What can have brought Dudley out to-night?" said Jefferson Buck, a young
+fellow, who had been interrupted in one of the corner-duets which he was
+executing in concert with Miss Susy Pettingill.
+
+"How do I know, Jeff?" was Miss Susy's answer. Then, after a
+pause,--"Elsie made him come, I guess. Go ask Dr. Kittredge; he knows
+all about 'em both, they say."
+
+Dr. Kittredge, the leading physician of Rockland, was a shrewd old man,
+who looked pretty keenly into his patients through his spectacles, and
+pretty widely at men, women, and things in general over them.
+Sixty-three years old,--just the year of the grand climacteric. A bald
+crown, as every doctor should have. A consulting practitioner's mouth;
+that is, movable round the corners while the case is under examination,
+but both corners well drawn down and kept so when the final opinion is
+made up. In fact, the Doctor was often sent for to act as "caounsel,"
+all over the county, and beyond it. He kept three or four horses,
+sometimes riding in the saddle, commonly driving in a sulky, pretty fast,
+and looking straight before him, so that people got out of the way of
+bowing to him as he passed on the road. There was some talk about his
+not being so long-sighted as other folks, but his old patients laughed
+and looked knowing when this was spoken of.
+
+The Doctor knew a good many things besides how to drop tinctures and
+shake out powders. Thus, he knew a horse, and, what is harder to
+understand, a horse-dealer, and was a match for him. He knew what a
+nervous woman is, and how to manage her. He could tell at a glance when
+she is in that condition of unstable equilibrium in which a rough word is
+like a blow to her, and the touch of unmagnetized fingers reverses all
+her nervous currents. It is not everybody that enters into the soul of
+Mozart's or Beethoven's harmonies; and there are vital symphonies in B
+flat, and other low, sad keys, which a doctor may know as little of as a
+hurdy-gurdy player of the essence of those divine musical mysteries. The
+Doctor knew the difference between what men say and what they mean as
+well as most people. When he was listening to common talk, he was in the
+habit of looking over his spectacles; if he lifted his head so as to look
+through them at the person talking, he was busier with that person's
+thoughts than with his words.
+
+Jefferson Buck was not bold enough to confront the Doctor with Miss
+Susy's question, for he did not look as if he were in the mood to answer
+queries put by curious young people. His eyes were fixed steadily on the
+dark girl, every movement of whom he seemed to follow.
+
+She was, indeed, an apparition of wild beauty, so unlike the girls about
+her that it seemed nothing more than natural, that, when she moved, the
+groups should part to let her pass through them, and that she should
+carry the centre of all looks and thoughts with her. She was dressed to
+please her own fancy, evidently, with small regard to the modes declared
+correct by the Rockland milliners and mantua-makers. Her heavy black
+hair lay in a braided coil, with a long gold pin shat through it like a
+javelin. Round her neck was a golden torque, a round, cord-like chain,
+such as the Gaols used to wear; the "Dying Gladiator" has it. Her dress
+was a grayish watered silk; her collar was pinned with a flashing diamond
+brooch, the stones looking as fresh as morning dew-drops, but the silver
+setting of the past generation; her arms were bare, round, but slender
+rather than large, in keeping with her lithe round figure. On her wrists
+she wore bracelets: one was a circlet of enamelled scales; the other
+looked as if it might have been Cleopatra's asp, with its body turned to
+gold and its, eyes to emeralds.
+
+Her father--for Dudley Venner was her father--looked like a man of
+culture and breeding, but melancholy and with a distracted air, as one
+whose life had met some fatal cross or blight. He saluted hardly anybody
+except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at
+him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to
+think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark
+girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of a shy and
+sad-hearted recluse.
+
+It was hard to say what could have brought Elsie Venner to the party.
+Hardly anybody seemed to know her, and she seemed not at all disposed to
+make acquaintances. Here and there was one of the older girls from the
+Institute, but she appeared to have nothing in common with them. Even in
+the schoolroom, it may be remembered, she sat apart by her own choice,
+and now in the midst of the crowd she made a circle of isolation round
+herself. Drawing her arm out of her father's, she stood against the
+wall, and looked, with a strange, cold glitter in her eyes, at the crowd
+which moved and babbled before her.
+
+The old Doctor came up to her by and by.
+
+"Well, Elsie, I am quite surprised to find you here. Do tell me how you
+happened to do such a good-natured thing as to let us see you at such a
+great party."
+
+"It's been dull at the mansion-house," she said, "and I wanted to get out
+of it. It's too lonely there,--there's nobody to hate since Dick's
+gone."
+
+The Doctor laughed good-naturedly, as if this were an amusing bit of
+pleasantry,--but he lifted his head and dropped his eyes a little, so as
+to see her through his spectacles. She narrowed her lids slightly, as
+one often sees a sleepy cat narrow hers,--somewhat as you may remember
+our famous Margaret used to, if you remember her at all,--so that her
+eyes looked very small, but bright as the diamonds on her breast. The
+old Doctor felt very oddly as she looked at him; be did not like the
+feeling, so he dropped his head and lifted his eyes and looked at her
+over his spectacles again.
+
+"And how have you all been at the mansion house?" said the Doctor.
+
+"Oh, well enough. But Dick's gone, and there's nobody left but Dudley
+and I and the people. I'm tired of it. What kills anybody quickest,
+Doctor?" Then, in a whisper, "I ran away again the other day, you know."
+
+"Where did you go?" The Doctor spoke in a low, serious tone.
+
+"Oh, to the old place. Here, I brought this for you."
+
+The Doctor started as she handed him a flower of the Atragene Americana,
+for he knew that there was only one spot where it grew, and that not one
+where any rash foot, least of all a thin-shod woman's foot, should
+venture.
+
+"How long were you gone?" said the Doctor.
+
+"Only one night. You should have heard the horns blowing and the guns
+firing. Dudley was frightened out of his wits. Old Sophy told him she'd
+had a dream, and that I should be found in Dead-Man's Hollow, with a
+great rock lying on me. They hunted all over it, but they did n't find
+me,--I was farther up."
+
+Doctor Kittredge looked cloudy and worried while she was speaking, but
+forced a pleasant professional smile, as he said cheerily, and as if
+wishing to change the subject,
+
+"Have a good dance this evening, Elsie. The fiddlers are tuning up.
+Where 's the young master? has he come yet? or is he going to be late,
+with the other great folks?"
+
+The girl turned away without answering, and looked toward the door.
+
+The "great folks," meaning the mansion-house gentry, were just beginning
+to come; Dudley Venner and his daughter had been the first of them.
+Judge Thornton, white-headed, fresh-faced, as good at sixty as he was at
+forty, with a youngish second wife, and one noble daughter, Arabella,
+who, they said, knew as much law as her father, a stately, Portia like
+girl, fit for a premier's wife, not like to find her match even in the
+great cities she sometimes visited; the Trecothicks, the family of a
+merchant, (in the larger sense,) who, having made himself rich enough by
+the time he had reached middle life, threw down his ledger as Sylla did
+his dagger, and retired to make a little paradise around him in one of
+the stateliest residences of the town, a family inheritance; the
+Vaughans, an old Rockland race, descended from its first settlers,
+Toryish in tendency in Revolutionary times, and barely escaping
+confiscation or worse; the Dunhams, a new family, dating its gentility
+only as far back as the Honorable Washington Dunham, M. C., but turning
+out a clever boy or two that went to college; and some showy girls with
+white necks and fat arms who had picked up professional husbands: these
+were the principal mansion-house people. All of them had made it a point
+to come; and as each of them entered, it seemed to Colonel and Mrs.
+Sprowle that the lamps burned up with a more cheerful light, and that the
+fiddles which sounded from the uncarpeted room were all half a tone
+higher and half a beat quicker.
+
+Mr. Bernard came in later than any of them; he had been busy with his new
+duties. He looked well and that is saying a good deal; for nothing but a
+gentleman is endurable in full dress. Hair that masses well, a head set
+on with an air, a neckerchief tied cleverly by an easy, practised hand,
+close-fitting gloves, feet well shaped and well covered,--these
+advantages can make us forgive the odious sable broadcloth suit, which
+appears to have been adopted by society on the same principle that
+condemned all the Venetian gondolas to perpetual and uniform blackness.
+Mr. Bernard, introduced by Mr. Geordie, made his bow to the Colonel and
+his lady and to Miss Matilda, from whom he got a particularly gracious
+curtsy, and then began looking about him for acquaintances. He found two
+or three faces he knew,--many more strangers. There was Silas
+Peckham,--there was no mistaking him; there was the inelastic amplitude
+of Mrs. Peckham; few of the Apollinean girls, of course, they not being
+recognized members of society,--but there is one with the flame in her
+cheeks and the fire in her eyes, the girl of vigorous tints and emphatic
+outlines, whom we saw entering the schoolroom the other day. Old Judge
+Thornton has his eyes on her, and the Colonel steals a look every now and
+then at the red brooch which lifts itself so superbly into the light, as
+if he thought it a wonderfully becoming ornament. Mr. Bernard himself
+was not displeased with the general effect of the rich-blooded
+schoolgirl, as she stood under the bright lamps, fanning herself in the
+warm, languid air, fixed in a kind of passionate surprise at the new life
+which seemed to be flowering out in her consciousness. Perhaps he looked
+at her somewhat steadily, as some others had done; at any rate, she
+seemed to feel that she was looked at, as people often do, and, turning
+her eyes suddenly on him, caught his own on her face, gave him a
+half-bashful smile, and threw in a blush involuntarily which made it more
+charming.
+
+"What can I do better," he said to himself, "than have a dance with Rosa
+Milburn?" So he carried his handsome pupil into the next room and took
+his place with her in a cotillon. Whether the breath of the Goddess of
+Love could intoxicate like the cup of Circe,--whether a woman is ever
+phosphorescent with the luminous vapor of life that she exhales,--these
+and other questions which relate to occult influences exercised by
+certain women we will not now discuss. It is enough that Mr. Bernard was
+sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly new to him, nor
+unprecedented in the history of human experience, but always a revelation
+when it comes over us for the first or the hundredth time, so pale is the
+most recent memory by the side of the passing moment with the flush of
+any new-born passion on its cheek. Remember that Nature makes every man
+love all women, and trusts the trivial matter of special choice to the
+commonest accident.
+
+If Mr. Bernard had had nothing to distract his attention, he might have
+thought too much about his handsome partner, and then gone home and
+dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up thinking of
+her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her studies, and so
+on, through the whole syllogism which ends in Nature's supreme quod erat
+demonstrandum. What was there to distract him or disturb him? He did
+not know,--but there was something. This sumptuous creature, this Eve
+just within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in the ways of the
+world, but on tiptoe to reach the fruit of the tree of knowledge,--alive
+to the moist vitality of that warm atmosphere palpitating with voices and
+music, as the flower of some dioecious plant which has grown in a lone
+corner and suddenly unfolding its corolla on some hot-breathing June
+evening, feels that the air is perfumed with strange odors and loaded
+with golden dust wafted from those other blossoms with which its double
+life is shared,--this almost over-womanized woman might well have
+bewitched him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-charm. It was,
+perhaps, only the same consciousness that some one was looking at him
+which he himself had just given occasion to in his partner. Presently, in
+one of the turns of the dance, he felt his eyes drawn to a figure he had
+not distinctly recognized, though he had dimly felt its presence, and saw
+that Elsie Venner was looking at him as if she saw nothing else but him.
+He was not a nervous person, like the poor lady-teacher, yet the glitter
+of the diamond eyes affected him strangely. It seemed to disenchant the
+air, so full a moment before of strange attractions. He became silent,
+and dreamy, as it were. The round-limbed beauty at his side crushed her
+gauzy draperies against him, as they trod the figure of the dance
+together, but it was no more to him than if an old nurse had laid her
+hand on his sleeve. The young girl chafed at his seeming neglect, and
+her imperious blood mounted into her cheeks; but he appeared unconscious
+of it.
+
+"There is one of our young ladies I must speak to," he said,--and was
+just leaving his partner's side.
+
+"Four hands all round?" shouted the first violin,--and Mr. Bernard found
+himself seized and whirled in a circle out of which he could not escape,
+and then forced to "cross over," and then to "dozy do," as the maestro
+had it,--and when, on getting back to his place, he looked for Elsie
+Venner, she was gone.
+
+The dancing went on briskly. Some of the old folks looked on, others
+conversed in groups and pairs, and so the evening wore along, until a
+little after ten o'clock. About this time there was noticed an increased
+bustle in the passages, with a considerable opening and shutting of
+doors. Presently it began to be whispered about that they were going to
+have supper. Many, who had never been to any large party before, held
+their breath for a moment at this announcement. It was rather with a
+tremulous interest than with open hilarity that the rumor was generally
+received.
+
+One point the Colonel had entirely forgotten to settle. It was a point
+involving not merely propriety, but perhaps principle also, or at least
+the good report of the house,--and he had never thought to arrange it.
+He took Judge Thornton aside and whispered the important question to
+him,--in his distress of mind, mistaking pockets and taking out his
+bandanna instead of his white handkerchief to wipe his forehead.
+
+"Judge," he said, "do you think, that, before we commence refreshing
+ourselves at the tables, it would be the proper thing to--crave a--to
+request Deacon Soper or some other elderly person--to ask a blessing?"
+
+The Judge looked as grave as if he were about giving the opinion of the
+Court in the great India-rubber case.
+
+"On the whole," he answered, after a pause, "I should think it might,
+perhaps, be dispensed with on this occasion. Young folks are noisy, and
+it is awkward to have talking and laughing going on while blessing is
+being asked. Unless a clergyman is present and makes a point of it, I
+think it will hardly be expected."
+
+The Colonel was infinitely relieved. "Judge, will you take Mrs. Sprowle
+in to supper?" And the Colonel returned the compliment by offering his
+arm to Mrs. Judge Thornton.
+
+The door of the supper-room was now open, and the company, following the
+lead of the host and hostess, began to stream into it, until it was
+pretty well filled.
+
+There was an awful kind of pause. Many were beginning to drop their
+heads and shut their eyes, in anticipation of the usual petition before a
+meal; some expected the music to strike up,--others, that an oration
+would now be delivered by the Colonel.
+
+"Make yourselves at home, ladies and gentlemen," said the Colonel; "good
+things were made to eat, and you're welcome to all you see before you."
+
+So saying he attacked a huge turkey which stood at the head of the table;
+and his example being followed first by the bold, then by the doubtful,
+and lastly by the timid, the clatter soon made the circuit of the tables.
+Some were shocked, however, as the Colonel had feared they would be, at
+the want of the customary invocation. Widow Leech, a kind of relation,
+who had to be invited, and who came with her old, back-country-looking
+string of gold beads round her neck, seemed to feel very serious about
+it.
+
+"If she'd ha' known that folks would begrutch cravin' a blessin' over
+sech a heap o' provisions, she'd rather ha' staid t' home. It was a bad
+sign, when folks was n't grateful for the baounties of Providence."
+
+The elder Miss Spinney, to whom she made this remark, assented to it, at
+the same time ogling a piece of frosted cake, which she presently
+appropriated with great refinement of manner,--taking it between her
+thumb and forefinger, keeping the others well spread and the little
+finger in extreme divergence, with a graceful undulation of the neck, and
+a queer little sound in her throat, as of an M that wanted to get out and
+perished in the attempt.
+
+The tables now presented an animated spectacle. Young fellows of the
+more dashing sort, with high stand-up collars and voluminous bows to
+their neckerchiefs, distinguished themselves by cutting up fowls and
+offering portions thereof to the buxom girls these knowing ones had
+commonly selected.
+
+"A bit of the wing, Roxy, or of the--under limb?"
+
+The first laugh broke out at this, but it was premature, a sporadic
+laugh, as Dr. Kittredge would have said, which did not become epidemic.
+People were very solemn as yet, many of them being new to such splendid
+scenes, and crushed, as it were, in the presence of so much crockery and
+so many silver spoons, and such a variety of unusual viands and
+beverages. When the laugh rose around Roxy and her saucy beau, several
+looked in that direction with an anxious expression, as if something had
+happened, a lady fainted, for instance, or a couple of lively fellows
+come to high words.
+
+"Young folks will be young folks," said Deacon Soper. "No harm done.
+Least said soonest mended."
+
+"Have some of these shell-oysters?" said the Colonel to Mrs. Trecothick.
+
+A delicate emphasis on the word shell implied that the Colonel knew what
+was what. To the New England inland native, beyond the reach of the east
+winds, the oyster unconditioned, the oyster absolute, without a
+qualifying adjective, is the pickled oyster. Mrs. Trecothick, who knew
+very well that an oyster long out of his shell (as is apt to be the case
+with the rural bivalve) gets homesick and loses his sprightliness,
+replied, with the pleasantest smile in the world, that the chicken she
+had been helped to was too delicate to be given up even for the greater
+rarity. But the word "shell-oysters" had been overheard; and there was a
+perceptible crowding movement towards their newly discovered habitat, a
+large soup-tureen.
+
+Silas Peckham had meantime fallen upon another locality of these recent
+mollusks. He said nothing, but helped himself freely, and made a sign to
+Mrs. Peckham.
+
+"Lorindy," he whispered, "shell-oysters"
+
+And ladled them out to her largely, without betraying any emotion, just
+as if they had been the natural inland or pickled article.
+
+After the more solid portion of the banquet had been duly honored, the
+cakes and sweet preparations of various kinds began to get their share of
+attention. There were great cakes and little cakes, cakes with raisins
+in them, cakes with currants, and cakes without either; there were brown
+cakes and yellow cakes, frosted cakes, glazed cakes, hearts and rounds,
+and jumbles, which playful youth slip over the forefinger before spoiling
+their annular outline. There were mounds of blo'monje, of the arrowroot
+variety,--that being undistinguishable from such as is made with Russia
+isinglass. There were jellies, which had been shaking, all the time the
+young folks were dancing in the next room, as if they were balancing to
+partners. There were built-up fabrics, called Charlottes, caky
+externally, pulpy within; there were also marangs, and likewise
+custards,--some of the indolent-fluid sort, others firm, in which every
+stroke of the teaspoon left a smooth, conchoidal surface like the
+fracture of chalcedony, with here and there a little eye like what one
+sees in cheeses. Nor was that most wonderful object of domestic art
+called trifle wanting, with its charming confusion of cream and cake and
+almonds and jam and jelly and wine and cinnamon and froth; nor yet the
+marvellous floating-island,--name suggestive of all that is romantic in
+the imaginations of youthful palates.
+
+"It must have cost you a sight of work, to say nothin' of money, to get
+all this beautiful confectionery made for the party," said Mrs. Crane to
+Mrs. Sprowle.
+
+"Well, it cost some consid'able labor, no doubt," said Mrs. Sprowle.
+"Matilda and our girls and I made 'most all the cake with our own hands,
+and we all feel some tired; but if folks get what suits 'em, we don't
+begrudge the time nor the work. But I do feel thirsty," said the poor
+lady, "and I think a glass of srub would do my throat good; it's dreadful
+dry. Mr. Peckham, would you be so polite as to pass me a glass of srub?"
+
+Silas Peckham bowed with great alacrity, and took from the table a small
+glass cup, containing a fluid reddish in hue and subacid in taste. This
+was srub, a beverage in local repute, of questionable nature, but
+suspected of owing its tint and sharpness to some kind of syrup derived
+from the maroon-colored fruit of the sumac. There were similar small
+cups on the table filled with lemonade, and here and there a decanter of
+Madeira wine, of the Marsala kind, which some prefer to, and many more
+cannot distinguish from, that which comes from the Atlantic island.
+
+"Take a glass of wine, Judge," said, the Colonel; "here is an article
+that I rather think 'll suit you."
+
+The Judge knew something of wines, and could tell all the famous old
+Madeiras from each other, "Eclipse," "Juno," the almost fabulously scarce
+and precious "White-top," and the rest. He struck the nativity of the
+Mediterranean Madeira before it had fairly moistened his lip.
+
+"A sound wine, Colonel, and I should think of a genuine vintage. Your
+very good health."
+
+"Deacon Soper," said the Colonel, "here is some Madary Judge Thornton
+recommends. Let me fill you a glass of it."
+
+The Deacon's eyes glistened. He was one of those consistent Christians
+who stick firmly by the first miracle and Paul's advice to Timothy.
+
+"A little good wine won't hurt anybody," said the Deacon. "Plenty,
+--plenty,--plenty. There!" He had not withdrawn his glass, while the
+Colonel was pouring, for fear it should spill, and now it was running
+over.
+
+--It is very odd how all a man's philosophy and theology are at the mercy
+of a few drops of a fluid which the chemists say consists of nothing but
+C4, O2, H6. The Deacon's theology fell off several points towards
+latitudinarianism in the course of the next ten minutes. He had a deep
+inward sense that everything was as it should be, human nature included.
+The little accidents of humanity, known collectively to moralists as sin,
+looked very venial to his growing sense of universal brotherhood and
+benevolence.
+
+"It will all come right," the Deacon said to himself,--"I feel a joyful
+conviction that everything is for the best. I am favored with a blessed
+peace of mind, and a very precious season of good feelin' toward my
+fellow-creturs."
+
+A lusty young fellow happened to make a quick step backward just at that
+instant, and put his heel, with his weight on top of it, upon the
+Deacon's toes.
+
+"Aigh! What the d' d' didos are y' abaout with them great huffs o'
+yourn?" said the Deacon, with an expression upon his features not exactly
+that of peace and good-will to men. The lusty young fellow apologized;
+but the Deacon's face did not come right, and his theology backed round
+several points in the direction of total depravity.
+
+Some of the dashing young men in stand-up collars and extensive neckties,
+encouraged by Mr. Geordie, made quite free with the "Ma,dary," and even
+induced some of the more stylish girls--not of the mansion-house set, but
+of the tip-top two-story families--to taste a little. Most of these
+young ladies made faces at it, and declared it was "perfectly horrid,"
+with that aspect of veracity peculiar to their age and sex.
+
+About this time a movement was made on the part of some of the
+mansion-house people to leave the supper-table. Miss Jane Trecothick had
+quietly hinted to her mother that she had had enough of it. Miss
+Arabella Thornton had whispered to her father that he had better adjourn
+this court to the next room. There were signs of migration,--a
+loosening of people in their places,--a looking about for arms to hitch
+on to.
+
+"Stop!" said the Colonel. "There's something coming yet.--Ice-cream!"
+
+The great folks saw that the play was not over yet, and that it was only
+polite to stay and see it out. The word "ice-cream" was no sooner
+whispered than it passed from one to another all down the tables. The
+effect was what might have been anticipated. Many of the guests had
+never seen this celebrated product of human skill, and to all the
+two-story population of Rockland it was the last expression of the art of
+pleasing and astonishing the human palate. Its appearance had been
+deferred for several reasons: first, because everybody would have
+attacked it, if it had come in with the other luxuries; secondly, because
+undue apprehensions were entertained (owing to want of experience) of its
+tendency to deliquesce and resolve itself with alarming rapidity into
+puddles of creamy fluid; and, thirdly, because the surprise would make a
+grand climax to finish off the banquet.
+
+There is something so audacious in the conception of ice-cream, that it
+is not strange that a population undebauched by the luxury of great
+cities looks upon it with a kind of awe and speaks of it with a certain
+emotion. This defiance of the seasons, forcing Nature to do her work of
+congelation in the face of her sultriest noon, might well inspire a timid
+mind with fear lest human art were revolting against the Higher Powers,
+and raise the same scruples which resisted the use of ether and
+chloroform in certain contingencies. Whatever may be the cause, it is
+well known that the announcement at any private rural entertainment that
+there is to be ice-cream produces an immediate and profound impression.
+It may be remarked, as aiding this impression, that exaggerated ideas are
+entertained as to the dangerous effects this congealed food may produce
+on persons not in the most robust health.
+
+There was silence as the pyramids of ice were placed on the table,
+everybody looking on in admiration. The Colonel took a knife and
+assailed the one at the head of the table. When he tried to cut off a
+slice, it didn't seem to understand it, however, and only tipped, as if
+it wanted to upset. The Colonel attacked it on the other side, and it
+tipped just as badly the other way. It was awkward for the Colonel.
+"Permit me," said the Judge,--and he took the knife and struck a sharp
+slanting stroke which sliced off a piece just of the right size, and
+offered it to Mrs. Sprowle. This act of dexterity was much admired by
+the company.
+
+The tables were all alive again.
+
+"Lorindy, here's a plate of ice-cream," said Silas Peckham.
+
+"Come, Mahaly," said a fresh-looking young-fellow with a saucerful in
+each hand, "here's your ice-cream;--let's go in the corner and have a
+celebration, us two." And the old green de-lame, with the young curves
+under it to make it sit well, moved off as pleased apparently as if it
+had been silk velvet with thousand-dollar laces over it.
+
+"Oh, now, Miss Green! do you think it's safe to put that cold stuff into
+your stomick?" said the Widow Leech to a young married lady, who, finding
+the air rather warm, thought a little ice would cool her down very
+nicely. "It's jest like eatin' snowballs. You don't look very rugged;
+and I should be dreadful afeard, if I was you."
+
+"Carrie," said old Dr. Kittredge, who had overheard this,--"how well
+you're looking this evening! But you must be tired and heated;--sit down
+here, and let me give you a good slice of ice-cream. How you young folks
+do grow up, to be sure! I don't feel quite certain whether it's you or
+your older sister, but I know it 's somebody I call Carrie, and that I
+'ve known ever since."
+
+A sound something between a howl and an oath startled the company and
+broke off the Doctor's sentence. Everybody's eyes turned in the
+direction from which it came. A group instantly gathered round the
+person who had uttered it, who was no other than Deacon Soper.
+
+"He's chokin'! he's chokin'!" was the first exclamation,--"slap him on
+the back!"
+
+Several heavy fists beat such a tattoo on his spine that the Deacon felt
+as if at least one of his vertebrae would come up.
+
+"He's black in the face," said Widow Leech, "he 's swallered somethin'
+the wrong way. Where's the Doctor?--let the Doctor get to him, can't
+ye?"
+
+"If you will move, my good lady, perhaps I can," said Doctor Kittredge,
+in a calm tone of voice. "He's not choking, my friends," the Doctor
+added immediately, when he got sight of him.
+
+"It 's apoplexy,--I told you so,--don't you see how red he is in the
+face?" said old Mrs. Peake, a famous woman for "nussin" sick folks,
+--determined to be a little ahead of the Doctor.
+
+"It's not apoplexy," said Dr. Kittredge.
+
+"What is it, Doctor? what is it? Will he die? Is he dead?--Here's his
+poor wife, the Widow Soper that is to be, if she a'n't a'ready"
+
+"Do be quiet, my good woman," said Dr. Kittredge.--"Nothing serious, I
+think, Mrs. Soper. Deacon!"
+
+The sudden attack of Deacon Soper had begun with the extraordinary sound
+mentioned above. His features had immediately assumed an expression of
+intense pain, his eyes staring wildly, and, clapping his hands to his
+face, he had rocked his head backward and forward in speechless agony.
+
+At the Doctor's sharp appeal the Deacon lifted his head.
+
+"It's all right," said the Doctor, as soon as he saw his face. "The
+Deacon had a smart attack of neuralgic pain. That 's all. Very severe,
+but not at all dangerous."
+
+The Doctor kept his countenance, but his diaphragm was shaking the change
+in iris waistcoat-pockets with subterranean laughter. He had looked
+through his spectacles and seen at once what had happened. The Deacon,
+not being in the habit of taking his nourishment in the congealed state,
+had treated the ice-cream as a pudding of a rare species, and, to make
+sure of doing himself justice in its distribution, had taken a large
+mouthful of it without the least precaution. The consequence was a
+sensation as if a dentist were killing the nerves of twenty-five teeth at
+once with hot irons, or cold ones, which would hurt rather worse.
+
+The Deacon swallowed something with a spasmodic effort, and recovered
+pretty soon and received the congratulations of his friends. There were
+different versions of the expressions he had used at the onset of his
+complaint,--some of the reported exclamations involving a breach of
+propriety, to say the least,--but it was agreed that a man in an attack
+of neuralgy wasn't to be judged of by the rules that applied to other
+folks.
+
+The company soon after this retired from the supper-room. The
+mansion-house gentry took their leave, and the two-story people soon
+followed. Mr. Bernard had stayed an hour or two, and left soon after he
+found that Elsie Venner and her father had disappeared. As he passed by
+the dormitory of the Institute, he saw a light glimmering from one of its
+upper rooms, where the lady-teacher was still waking. His heart ached,
+when he remembered, that, through all these hours of gayety, or what was
+meant for it, the patient girl had been at work in her little chamber;
+and he looked up at the silent stars, as if to see that they were
+watching over her. The planet Mars was burning like a red coal; the
+northern constellation was slanting downward about its central point of
+flame; and while he looked, a falling star slid from the zenith and was
+lost.
+
+He reached his chamber and was soon dreaming over the Event of the
+Season.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE MORNING AFTER.
+
+Colonel Sprowle's family arose late the next morning. The fatigues and
+excitements of the evening and the preparation for it were followed by a
+natural collapse, of which somnolence was a leading symptom. The sun
+shone into the window at a pretty well opened angle when the Colonel
+first found himself sufficiently awake to address his yet slumbering
+spouse.
+
+"Sally!" said the Colonel, in a voice that was a little husky,--for he
+had finished off the evening with an extra glass or two of "Madary," and
+had a somewhat rusty and headachy sense of renewed existence, on greeting
+the rather advanced dawn,--"Sally!"
+
+"Take care o' them custard-cups! There they go!"
+
+Poor Mrs. Sprowle was fighting the party over in her dream; and as the
+visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into
+another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart Leyden
+jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its sudden and lively poonk!
+
+"Sally!" said the Colonel,--"wake up, wake up. What 'r' y' dreamin'
+abaout?"
+
+Mrs. Sprowle raised herself, by a sort of spasm, sur son seant, as they
+say in France,--up on end, as we have it in New England. She looked
+first to the left, then to the right, then straight before her,
+apparently without seeing anything, and at last slowly settled down, with
+her two eyes, blank of any particular meaning, directed upon the Colonel.
+
+"What time is 't?" she said.
+
+"Ten o'clock. What y' been dreamin' abaout? Y' giv a jump like a
+hopper-grass. Wake up, wake UP! Th' party 's over, and y' been asleep
+all the mornin'. The party's over, I tell ye! Wake up!"
+
+"Over!" said Mrs. Sprowle, who began to define her position at
+last,--"over! I should think 't was time 't was over! It's lasted a
+hundud year. I've been workin' for that party longer 'n Methuselah's
+lifetime, sence I been asleep. The pies would n' bake, and the blo'monje
+would n' set, and the ice-cream would n' freeze, and all the folks kep'
+comin' 'n' comin' 'n' comin',--everybody I ever knew in all my
+life,--some of 'em 's been dead this twenty year 'n' more,--'n' nothin'
+for 'em to eat nor drink. The fire would n' burn to cook anything, all
+we could do. We blowed with the belluses, 'n' we stuffed in paper 'n'
+pitch-pine kindlin's, but nothin' could make that fire burn; 'n' all the
+time the folks kep' comin', as if they'd never stop,--'n' nothin' for 'em
+but empty dishes, 'n' all the borrowed chaney slippin' round on the
+waiters 'n' chippin' 'n' crackin',--I would n' go through what I been
+through t'-night for all th' money in th' Bank,--I do believe it's harder
+t' have a party than t'"--
+
+Mrs. Sprowle stated the case strongly.
+
+The Colonel said he did n't know how that might be. She was a better
+judge than he was. It was bother enough, anyhow, and he was glad that it
+was over. After this, the worthy pair commenced preparations for
+rejoining the waking world, and in due time proceeded downstairs.
+
+Everybody was late that morning, and nothing had got put to rights. The
+house looked as if a small army had been quartered in it over night. The
+tables were of course in huge disorder, after the protracted assault they
+had undergone. There had been a great battle evidently, and it had gone
+against the provisions. Some points had been stormed, and all their
+defences annihilated, but here and there were centres of resistance which
+had held out against all attacks,--large rounds of beef, and solid
+loaves of cake, against which the inexperienced had wasted their energies
+in the enthusiasm of youth or uninformed maturity, while the
+longer-headed guests were making discoveries of "shell-oysters" and
+"patridges" and similar delicacies.
+
+The breakfast was naturally of a somewhat fragmentary character. A
+chicken that had lost his legs in the service of the preceding campaign
+was once more put on duty. A great ham stuck with cloves, as Saint
+Sebastian was with arrows, was again offered for martyrdom. It would have
+been a pleasant sight for a medical man of a speculative turn to have
+seen the prospect before the Colonel's family of the next week's
+breakfasts, dinners, and suppers. The trail that one of these great
+rural parties leaves after it is one of its most formidable
+considerations. Every door-handle in the house is suggestive of
+sweetmeats for the next week, at least. The most unnatural articles of
+diet displace the frugal but nutritious food of unconvulsed periods of
+existence. If there is a walking infant about the house, it will
+certainly have a more or less fatal fit from overmuch of some
+indigestible delicacy. Before the week is out, everybody will be tired
+to death of sugary forms of nourishment and long to see the last of the
+remnants of the festival.
+
+The family had not yet arrived at this condition. On the contrary, the
+first inspection of the tables suggested the prospect of days of
+unstinted luxury; and the younger portion of the household, especially,
+were in a state of great excitement as the account of stock was taken
+with reference to future internal investments. Some curious facts came
+to light during these researches.
+
+"Where's all the oranges gone to?" said Mrs. Sprowle. "I expected
+there'd be ever so many of 'em left. I did n't see many of the folks
+eatin' oranges. Where's the skins of 'em? There ought to be six dozen
+orange-skins round on the plates, and there a'n't one dozen. And all the
+small cakes, too, and all the sugar things that was stuck on the big
+cakes. Has anybody counted the spoons? Some of 'em got swallered,
+perhaps. I hope they was plated ones, if they did!"
+
+The failure of the morning's orange-crop and the deficit in other
+expected residual delicacies were not very difficult to account for. In
+many of the two-story Rockland families, and in those favored households
+of the neighboring villages whose members had been invited to the great
+party, there was a very general excitement among the younger people on
+the morning after the great event. "Did y' bring home somethin' from the
+party? What is it? What is it? Is it frut-cake? Is it nuts and
+oranges and apples? Give me some! Give me some!" Such a concert of
+treble voices uttering accents like these had not been heard since the
+great Temperance Festival with the celebrated "colation" in the open air
+under the trees of the Parnassian Grove,--as the place was christened by
+the young ladies of the Institute. The cry of the children was not in
+vain. From the pockets of demure fathers, from the bags of sharp-eyed
+spinsters, from the folded handkerchiefs of light-fingered sisters, from
+the tall hats of sly-winking brothers, there was a resurrection of the
+missing oranges and cakes and sugar-things in many a rejoicing
+family-circle, enough to astonish the most hardened "caterer" that ever
+contracted to feed a thousand people under canvas.
+
+The tender recollections of those dear little ones whom extreme youth or
+other pressing considerations detain from scenes of festivity--a trait of
+affection by no means uncommon among our thoughtful people--dignifies
+those social meetings where it is manifested, and sheds a ray of sunshine
+on our common nature. It is "an oasis in the desert,"--to use the
+striking expression of the last year's "Valedictorian" of the Apollinean
+Institute. In the midst of so much that is purely selfish, it is
+delightful to meet such disinterested care for others. When a large
+family of children are expecting a parent's return from an entertainment,
+it will often require great exertions on his part to freight himself so
+as to meet their reasonable expectations. A few rules are worth
+remembering by all who attend anniversary dinners in Faneuil Hall or
+elsewhere. Thus: Lobsters' claws are always acceptable to children of
+all ages. Oranges and apples are to be taken one at a time, until the
+coat-pockets begin to become inconveniently heavy. Cakes are injured by
+sitting upon them; it is, therefore, well to carry a stout tin box of a
+size to hold as many pieces as there are children in the domestic circle.
+A very pleasant amusement, at the close of one of these banquets, is
+grabbing for the flowers with which the table is embellished. These will
+please the ladies at home very greatly, and, if the children are at the
+same time abundantly supplied with fruits, nuts, cakes, and any little
+ornamental articles of confectionery which are of a nature to be
+unostentatiously removed, the kind-hearted parent will make a whole
+household happy, without any additional expense beyond the outlay for his
+ticket.
+
+There were fragmentary delicacies enough left, of one kind and another,
+at any rate, to make all the Colonel's family uncomfortable for the next
+week. It bid fair to take as long to get rid of the remains of the great
+party as it had taken to make ready for it.
+
+In the mean time Mr. Bernard had been dreaming, as young men dream, of
+gliding shapes with bright eyes and burning cheeks, strangely blended
+with red planets and hissing meteors, and, shining over all, the white,
+un-wandering star of the North, girt with its tethered constellations.
+
+After breakfast he walked into the parlor, where he found Miss Darley.
+She was alone, and, holding a school-book in her hand, was at work with
+one of the morning's lessons. She hardly noticed him as he entered,
+being very busy with her book,--and he paused a moment before speaking,
+and looked at her with a kind of reverence. It would not have been
+strictly true to call her beautiful. For years,--since her earliest
+womanhood,--those slender hands had taken the bread which repaid the toil
+of heart and brain from the coarse palms which offered it in the world's
+rude market. It was not for herself alone that she had bartered away the
+life of her youth, that she had breathed the hot air of schoolrooms, that
+she had forced her intelligence to posture before her will, as the
+exigencies of her place required,--waking to mental labor,--sleeping to
+dream of problems,--rolling up the stone of education for an endless
+twelvemonth's term, to find it at the bottom of the hill again when
+another year called her to its renewed duties, schooling her temper in
+unending inward and outward conflicts, until neither dulness nor
+obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could reach her serene
+self-possession. Not for herself alone. Poorly as her prodigal labors
+were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they cost, her value was
+too well established to leave her without what, under other
+circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient compensation. But
+there were others who looked to her in their need, and so the modest
+fountain which might have been filled to its brim was continually drained
+through silent-flowing, hidden sluices.
+
+Out of such a life, inherited from a race which had lived in conditions
+not unlike her own, beauty, in the common sense of the term, could hardly
+find leisure to develop and shape itself. For it must be remembered,
+that symmetry and elegance of features and figure, like perfectly formed
+crystals in the mineral world, are reached only by insuring a certain
+necessary repose to individuals and to generations. Human beauty is an
+agricultural product in the country, growing up in men and women as in
+corn and cattle, where the soil is good. It is a luxury almost
+monopolized by the rich in cities, bred under glass like their forced
+pine-apples and peaches. Both in city and country, the evolution of the
+physical harmonies which make music to our eyes requires a combination of
+favorable circumstances, of which alternations of unburdened tranquillity
+with intervals of varied excitement of mind and body are among the most
+important. Where sufficient excitement is wanting, as often happens in
+the country, the features, however rich in red and white, get heavy, and
+the movements sluggish; where excitement is furnished in excess, as is
+frequently the case in cities, the contours and colors are impoverished,
+and the nerves begin to make their existence known to the consciousness,
+as the face very soon informs us.
+
+Helen Darley could not, in the nature of things, have possessed the kind
+of beauty which pleases the common taste. Her eye was calm, sad-looking,
+her features very still, except when her pleasant smile changed them for
+a moment, all her outlines were delicate, her voice was very gentle, but
+somewhat subdued by years of thoughtful labor, and on her smooth forehead
+one little hinted line whispered already that Care was beginning to mark
+the trace which Time sooner or later would make a furrow. She could not
+be a beauty; if she had been, it would have been much harder for many
+persons to be interested in her. For, although in the abstract we all
+love beauty, and although, if we were sent naked souls into some
+ultramundane warehouse of soulless bodies and told to select one to our
+liking, we should each choose a handsome one, and never think of the
+consequences,--it is quite certain that beauty carries an atmosphere of
+repulsion as well as of attraction with it, alike in both sexes. We may
+be well assured that there are many persons who no more think of
+specializing their love of the other sex upon one endowed with signal
+beauty, than they think of wanting great diamonds or thousand-dollar
+horses. No man or woman can appropriate beauty without paying for
+it,--in endowments, in fortune, in position, in self-surrender, or other
+valuable stock; and there are a great many who are too poor, too
+ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay any of these prices for
+it. So the unbeautiful get many more lovers than the beauties; only, as
+there are more of them, their lovers are spread thinner and do not make
+so much show.
+
+The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender
+admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social
+combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale
+lambent nimbus round her head.
+
+"I did not see you at the great party last evening," he said, presently.
+
+She looked up and answered, "No. I have not much taste for such large
+companies. Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me after it
+has been paid for. There is always something to do, some lesson or
+exercise,--and it so happened, I was very busy last night with the new
+problems in geometry. I hope you had a good time."
+
+"Very. Two or three of our girls were there. Rosa Milburn. What a
+beauty she is! I wonder what she feeds on! Wine and musk and chloroform
+and coals of fire, I believe; I didn't think there was such color and
+flavor in a woman outside the tropics."
+
+Miss Darley smiled rather faintly; the imagery was not just to her taste:
+femineity often finds it very hard to accept the fact of muliebrity.
+
+"Was"--?
+
+She stopped short; but her question had asked itself.
+
+"Elsie there? She was, for an hour or so. She looked frightfully
+handsome. I meant to have spoken to her, but she slipped away before I
+knew it."
+
+"I thought she meant to go to the party," said Miss Darley. "Did she
+look at you?"
+
+"She did. Why?"
+
+"And you did not speak to her?"
+
+"No. I should have spoken to her, but she was gone when I looked for
+her. A strange creature! Is n't there an odd sort of fascination about
+her? You have not explained all the mystery about the girl. What does
+she come to this school for? She seems to do pretty much as she likes
+about studying."
+
+Miss Darley answered in very low tones. "It was a fancy of hers to come,
+and they let her have her way. I don't know what there is about her,
+except that she seems to take my life out of me when she looks at me. I
+don't like to ask other people about our girls. She says very little to
+anybody, and studies, or makes believe to study, almost what she likes.
+I don't know what she is," (Miss Darley laid her hand, trembling, on the
+young master's sleeve,) "but I can tell when she is in the room without
+seeing or hearing her. Oh, Mr. Langdon, I am weak and nervous, and no
+doubt foolish,--but--if there were women now, as in the days of our
+Saviour, possessed of devils, I should think there was something not
+human looking out of Elsie Venner's eyes!"
+
+The poor girl's breast rose and fell tumultuously as she spoke, and her
+voice labored, as if some obstruction were rising in her throat.
+
+A scene might possibly have come of it, but the door opened. Mr. Silas
+Peckham. Miss Darley got away as soon as she well could.
+
+"Why did not Miss Darley go to the party last evening?" said Mr. Bernard.
+
+"Well, the fact is," answered Mr. Silas Peckham, "Miss Darley, she's
+pooty much took up with the school. She's an industris young.
+woman,--yis, she is industris,--but perhaps she a'n't quite so spry a
+worker as some. Maybe, considerin' she's paid for her time, she is n't
+fur out o' the way in occoopyin' herself evenin's,--that--is, if so be
+she a'n't smart enough to finish up all her work in the daytime.
+Edoocation is the great business of the Institoot. Amoosements are
+objec's of a secondary natur', accordin' to my v'oo." [The unspellable
+pronunciation of this word is the touchstone of New England Brahminism.]
+
+Mr. Bernard drew a deep breath, his thin nostrils dilating, as if the air
+did not rush in fast enough to cool his blood, while Silas Peckham was
+speaking. The Head of the Apollinean Institute delivered himself of
+these judicious sentiments in that peculiar acid, penetrating tone,
+thickened with a nasal twang, which not rarely becomes hereditary after
+three or four generations raised upon east winds, salt fish, and large,
+white-bellied, pickled cucumbers. He spoke deliberately, as if weighing
+his words well, so that, during his few remarks, Mr. Bernard had time for
+a mental accompaniment with variations, accented by certain bodily
+changes, which escaped Mr. Peckham's observation. First there was a
+feeling of disgust and shame at hearing Helen Darley spoken of like a
+dumb working animal. That sent the blood up into his cheeks. Then the
+slur upon her probable want of force--her incapacity, who made the
+character of the school and left this man to pocket its profits--sent a
+thrill of the old Wentworth fire through him, so that his muscles
+hardened, his hands closed, and he took the measure of Mr. Silas Peckham,
+to see if his head would strike the wall in case he went over backwards
+all of a sudden. This would not do, of course, and so the thrill passed
+off and the muscles softened again. Then came that state of tenderness
+in the heart, overlying wrath in the stomach, in which the eyes grow
+moist like a woman's, and there is also a great boiling-up of
+objectionable terms out of the deep-water vocabulary, so that Prudence
+and Propriety and all the other pious P's have to jump upon the lid of
+speech to keep them from boiling over into fierce articulation. All this
+was internal, chiefly, and of course not recognized by Mr. Silas Peckham.
+The idea, that any full-grown, sensible man should have any other notion
+than that of getting the most work for the least money out of his
+assistants, had never suggested itself to him.
+
+Mr. Bernard had gone through this paroxysm, and cooled down, in the
+period while Mr. Peckham was uttering these words in his thin, shallow
+whine, twanging up into the frontal sinuses. What was the use of losing
+his temper and throwing away his place, and so, among the consequences
+which would necessarily follow, leaving the poor lady-teacher without a
+friend to stand by her ready to lay his hand on the grand-inquisitor
+before the windlass of his rack had taken one turn too many?
+
+"No doubt, Mr. Peckham," he said, in a grave, calm voice, "there is a
+great deal of work to be done in the school; but perhaps we can
+distribute the duties a little more evenly after a time. I shall look
+over the girls' themes myself, after this week. Perhaps there will be
+some other parts of her labor that I can take on myself. We can arrange
+a new programme of studies and recitations."
+
+"We can do that," said Mr. Silas Peckham. "But I don't propose mater'lly
+alterin' Miss Darley's dooties. I don't think she works to hurt herself.
+Some of the Trustees have proposed interdoosin' new branches of study,
+and I expect you will be pooty much occoopied with the dooties that
+belong to your place. On the Sahbath you will be able to attend divine
+service three times, which is expected of our teachers. I shall continoo
+myself to give Sahbath Scriptur' readin's to the young ladies. That is a
+solemn dooty I can't make up my mind to commit to other people. My
+teachers enjoy the Lord's day as a day of rest. In it they do no manner
+of work, except in cases of necessity or mercy, such as fillin' out
+diplomas, or when we git crowded jest at the end of a term, or when there
+is an extry number of p'oopils, or other Providential call to dispense
+with the ordinance."
+
+Mr. Bernard had a fine glow in his cheeks by this time,--doubtless
+kindled by the thought of the kind consideration Mr. Peckham showed for
+his subordinates in allowing them the between meeting-time on Sundays
+except for some special reason. But the morning was wearing away; so he
+went to the schoolroom, taking leave very properly of his respected
+principal, who soon took his hat and departed.
+
+Mr. Peckham visited certain "stores" or shops, where he made inquiries
+after various articles in the provision-line, and effected a purchase or
+two. Two or three barrels of potatoes, which had sprouted in a promising
+way, he secured at a bargain. A side of feminine beef was also obtained
+at a low figure. He was entirely satisfied with a couple of barrels of
+flour, which, being invoiced "slightly damaged," were to be had at a
+reasonable price.
+
+After this, Silas Peckham felt in good spirits. He had done a pretty
+stroke of business. It came into his head whether he might not follow it
+up with a still more brilliant speculation. So he turned his steps in
+the direction of Colonel Sprowle's.
+
+It was now eleven o'clock, and the battle-field of last evening was as we
+left it. Mr. Peckham's visit was unexpected, perhaps not very well
+timed, but the Colonel received him civilly.
+
+"Beautifully lighted,--these rooms last night!" said Mr. Peckham.
+"Winter-strained?"
+
+The Colonel nodded.
+
+"How much do you pay for your winter-strained?"
+
+The Colonel told him the price.
+
+"Very hahnsome supper,--very hahnsome. Nothin' ever seen like it in
+Rockland. Must have been a great heap of things leftover."
+
+The compliment was not ungrateful, and the Colonel acknowledged it by
+smiling and saying, "I should think the' was a trifle? Come and look."
+
+When Silas Peckham saw how many delicacies had survived the evening's
+conflict, his commercial spirit rose at once to the point of a proposal.
+
+"Colonel Sprowle," said he, "there's 'meat and cakes and pies and pickles
+enough on that table to spread a hahnsome colation. If you'd like to
+trade reasonable, I think perhaps I should be willin' to take 'em off
+your hands. There's been a talk about our havin' a celebration in the
+Parnassian Grove, and I think I could work in what your folks don't want
+and make myself whole by chargin' a small sum for tickets. Broken meats,
+of course, a'n't of the same valoo as fresh provisions; so I think you
+might be willin' to trade reasonable."
+
+Mr. Peckham paused and rested on his proposal. It would not, perhaps,
+have been very extraordinary, if Colonel Sprowle had entertained the
+proposition. There is no telling beforehand how such things will strike
+people. It didn't happen to strike the Colonel favorably. He had a
+little red-blooded manhood in him.
+
+"Sell you them things to make a colation out of?" the Colonel replied.
+"Walk up to that table, Mr. Peckham, and help yourself! Fill your
+pockets; Mr. Peckham! Fetch a basket, and our hired folks shall fill it
+full for ye! Send a cart, if y' like, 'n' carry off them leavin's to
+make a celebration for your pupils with! Only let me tell ye this:--as
+sure 's my name's Hezekiah Spraowle, you 'll be known through the taown
+'n' through the caounty, from that day forrard, as the Principal of the
+Broken-Victuals Institoot!"
+
+Even provincial human-nature sometimes has a touch of sublimity about it.
+Mr. Silas Peckham had gone a little deeper than he meant, and come upon
+the "hard pan," as the well-diggers call it, of the Colonel's character,
+before he thought of it. A militia-colonel standing on his sentiments is
+not to be despised. That was shown pretty well in New England two or
+three generations ago. There were a good many plain officers that talked
+about their "rigiment" and their "caounty" who knew very well how to say
+"Make ready!" "Take aim!" "Fire!"--in the face of a line of grenadiers
+with bullets in their guns and bayonets on them. And though a rustic
+uniform is not always unexceptionable in its cut and trimmings, yet there
+was many an ill-made coat in those old times that was good enough to be
+shown to the enemy's front rank too often to be left on the field with a
+round hole in its left lapel that matched another going right through the
+brave heart of the plain country captain or major or colonel who was
+buried in it under the crimson turf.
+
+Mr. Silas Peckham said little or nothing. His sensibilities were not
+acute, but he perceived that he had made a miscalculation. He hoped that
+there was no offence,--thought it might have been mutooally agreeable,
+conclooded he would give up the idee of a colation, and backed himself
+out as if unwilling to expose the less guarded aspect of his person to
+the risk of accelerating impulses.
+
+The Colonel shut the door,--cast his eye on the toe of his right boot, as
+if it had had a strong temptation,--looked at his watch, then round the
+room, and, going to a cupboard, swallowed a glass of deep-red brandy and
+water to compose his feelings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE DOCTOR ORDERS THE BEST SULKY. (With a Digression on "Hired Help.")
+
+"ABEL! Slip Cassia into the new sulky, and fetch her round."
+
+Abel was Dr. Kittredge's hired man. He was born in New Hampshire, a
+queer sort of State, with fat streaks of soil and population where they
+breed giants in mind and body, and lean streaks which export imperfectly
+nourished young men with promising but neglected appetites, who may be
+found in great numbers in all the large towns, or could be until of late
+years, when they have been half driven out of their favorite
+basement-stories by foreigners, and half coaxed away from them by
+California. New Hampshire is in more than one sense the Switzerland of
+New England. The "Granite State" being naturally enough deficient in
+pudding-stone, its children are apt to wander southward in search of that
+deposit,--in the unpetrified condition.
+
+Abel Stebbins was a good specimen of that extraordinary hybrid or mule
+between democracy and chrysocracy, a native-born New-England serving-man.
+The Old World has nothing at all like him. He is at once an emperor and
+a subordinate. In one hand he holds one five-millionth part (be the same
+more or less) of the power that sways the destinies of the Great
+Republic. His other hand is in your boot, which he is about to polish.
+It is impossible to turn a fellow citizen whose vote may make his
+master--say, rather, employer--Governor or President, or who may be one
+or both himself, into a flunky. That article must be imported ready-made
+from other centres of civilization. When a New Englander has lost his
+self-respect as a citizen and as a man, he is demoralized, and cannot be
+trusted with the money to pay for a dinner.
+
+It may be supposed, therefore, that this fractional emperor, this
+continent-shaper, finds his position awkward when he goes into service,
+and that his employer is apt to find it still more embarrassing. It is
+always under protest that the hired man does his duty. Every act of
+service is subject to the drawback, "I am as good as you are." This is
+so common, at least, as almost to be the rule, and partly accounts for
+the rapid disappearance of the indigenous "domestic" from the basements
+above mentioned. Paleontologists will by and by be examining the floors
+of our kitchens for tracks of the extinct native species of serving-man.
+The female of the same race is fast dying out; indeed, the time is not
+far distant when all the varieties of young woman will have vanished from
+New England, as the dodo has perished in the Mauritius. The young lady
+is all that we shall have left, and the mop and duster of the last Ahnira
+or Loizy will be stared at by generations of Bridgets and Noras as that
+famous head and foot of the lost bird are stared at in the Ashmolean
+Museum.
+
+Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man, took the true American view of his
+difficult position. He sold his time to the Doctor, and, having sold it,
+he took care to fulfil his half of the bargain. The Doctor, on his part,
+treated him, not like a gentleman, because one does not order a gentleman
+to bring up his horse or run his errands, but he treated him like a man.
+Every order was given in courteous terms. His reasonable privileges were
+respected as much as if they had been guaranteed under hand and seal.
+The Doctor lent him books from his own library, and gave him all friendly
+counsel, as if he were a son or a younger brother.
+
+Abel had Revolutionary blood in his veins, and though he saw fit to "hire
+out," he could never stand the word "servant," or consider himself the
+inferior one of the two high contracting parties. When he came to live
+with the Doctor, he made up his mind he would dismiss the old gentleman,
+if he did not behave according to his notions of propriety. But he soon
+found that the Doctor was one of the right sort, and so determined to
+keep him. The Doctor soon found, on his side, that he had a trustworthy,
+intelligent fellow, who would be invaluable to him, if he only let him
+have his own way of doing what was to be done.
+
+The Doctor's hired man had not the manners of a French valet. He was
+grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely smiled,
+but was always at work in the daytime, and always reading in the evening.
+He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man could properly do,
+would go to the door or "tend table," bought the provisions for the
+family,--in short, did almost everything for them but get their clothing.
+There was no office in a perfectly appointed household, from that of
+steward down to that of stable-boy, which he did not cheerfully assume.
+His round of work not consuming all his energies, he must needs cultivate
+the Doctor's garden, which he kept in one perpetual bloom, from the
+blowing of the first crocus to the fading of the last dahlia.
+
+This garden was Abel's poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos.
+Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy
+in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and
+sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the
+sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding
+floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man.
+It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect. He worshipped God according
+to the strict way of his fathers; but a florist's Puritanism is always
+colored by the petals of his flowers,--and Nature never shows him a
+black corolla.
+
+He may or may not figure again in this narrative; but as there must be
+some who confound the New England hired man, native-born, with the
+servant of foreign birth, and as there is the difference of two
+continents and two civilizations between them, it did not seem fair to
+let Abel bring round the Doctor's mare and sulky without touching his
+features in half-shadow into our background.
+
+The Doctor's mare, Cassia, was so called by her master from her cinnamon
+color, cassia being one of the professional names for that spice or drug.
+She was of the shade we call sorrel, or, as an Englishman would perhaps
+say, chestnut,--a genuine "Morgan" mare, with a low forehand, as is
+common in this breed, but with strong quarters and flat hocks, well
+ribbed up, with a good eye and a pair of lively ears,--a first-rate
+doctor's beast, would stand until her harness dropped off her back at the
+door of a tedious case, and trot over hill and dale thirty miles in three
+hours, if there was a child in the next county with a bean in its
+windpipe and the Doctor gave her a hint of the fact. Cassia was not
+large, but she had a good deal of action, and was the Doctor's
+show-horse. There were two other animals in his stable: Quassia or
+Quashy, the black horse, and Caustic, the old bay, with whom he jogged
+round the village.
+
+"A long ride to-day?" said Abel, as he brought up the equipage.
+
+"Just out of the village,--that 's all.--There 's a kink in her
+mane,--pull it out, will you?"
+
+"Goin' to visit some of the great folks," Abel said to himself. "Wonder
+who it is."--Then to the Doctor,--"Anybody get sick at Sprowles's? They
+say Deacon Soper had a fit, after eatin' some o' their frozen victuals."
+
+The Doctor smiled. He guessed the Deacon would do well enough. He was
+only going to ride over to the Dudley mansion-house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE DOCTOR CALLS ON ELSIE VENNER.
+
+If that primitive physician, Chiron, M. D., appears as a Centaur, as we
+look at him through the lapse of thirty centuries, the modern
+country-doctor, if he could be seen about thirty miles off, could not be
+distinguished from a wheel-animalcule. He inhabits a wheel-carriage. He
+thinks of stationary dwellings as Long Tom Coffin did of land in general;
+a house may be well enough for incidental purposes, but for a "stiddy"
+residence give him a "kerridge." If he is classified in the Linnaean
+scale, he must be set down thus: Genus Homo; Species Rotifer infusorius,
+the wheel-animal of infusions.
+
+The Dudley mansion was not a mile from the Doctor's; but it never
+occurred to him to think of walking to see any of his patients' families,
+if he had any professional object in his visit. Whenever the narrow
+sulky turned in at a gate, the rustic who was digging potatoes, or hoeing
+corn, or swishing through the grass with his scythe, in wave-like
+crescents, or stepping short behind a loaded wheelbarrow, or trudging
+lazily by the side of the swinging, loose-throated, short-legged oxen,
+rocking along the road as if they had just been landed after a
+three-months' voyage, the toiling native, whatever he was doing, stopped
+and looked up at the house the Doctor was visiting.
+
+"Somebody sick over there t' Haynes's. Guess th' old man's ailin' ag'in.
+Winder's half-way open in the chamber,--should n' wonder 'f he was dead
+and laid aout. Docterin' a'n't no use, when y' see th' winders open like
+that. Wahl, money a'n't much to speak of to th' old man naow! He don'
+want but tew cents,--'n' old Widah Peake, she knows what he wants them
+for!"
+
+Or again,--
+
+"Measles raound pooty thick. Briggs's folks buried two children with 'em
+lass' week. Th' of Doctor, he'd h' ker'd 'em threugh. Struck in 'n'
+p'dooced mo't'f'cation,--so they say."
+
+This is only meant as a sample of the kind of way they used to think or
+talk, when the narrow sulky turned in at the gate of some house where
+there was a visit to be made.
+
+Oh, that narrow sulky! What hopes, what fears, what comfort, what
+anguish, what despair, in the roll of its coming or its parting wheels!
+In the spring, when the old people get the coughs which give them a few
+shakes and their lives drop in pieces like the ashes of a burned thread
+which have kept the threadlike shape until they were stirred,--in the hot
+summer noons, when the strong man comes in from the fields, like the son
+of the Shunamite, crying, "My head, my head,"--in the dying autumn days,
+when youth and maiden lie fever-stricken in many a household,
+still-faced, dull-eyed, dark-flushed, dry-lipped, low-muttering in their
+daylight dreams, their fingers moving singly like those of slumbering
+harpers,--in the dead winter, when the white plague of the North has
+caged its wasted victims, shuddering as they think of the frozen soil
+which must be quarried like rock to receive them, if their perpetual
+convalescence should happen to be interfered with by any untoward
+accident,--at every season, the narrow sulky rolled round freighted with
+unmeasured burdens of joy and woe.
+
+The Doctor drove along the southern foot of The Mountain. The "Dudley
+Mansion" was near the eastern edge of this declivity, where it rose
+steepest, with baldest cliffs and densest patches of overhanging wood.
+It seemed almost too steep to climb, but a practised eye could see from a
+distance the zigzag lines of the sheep-paths which scaled it like
+miniature Alpine roads. A few hundred feet up The Mountain's side was a
+dark deep dell, unwooded, save for a few spindling, crazy-looking
+hackmatacks or native larches, with pallid green tufts sticking out
+fantastically all over them. It shelved so deeply, that, while the
+hemlock-tassels were swinging on the trees around its border, all would
+be still at its springy bottom, save that perhaps a single fern would
+wave slowly backward and forward like a sabre with a twist as of a
+feathered oar,--and this when not a breath could be felt, and every other
+stem and blade were motionless. There was an old story of one having
+perished here in the winter of '86, and his body having been found in the
+spring,--whence its common name of "Dead-Man's Hollow." Higher up there
+were huge cliffs with chasms, and, it was thought, concealed caves, where
+in old times they said that Tories lay hid,--some hinted not without
+occasional aid and comfort from the Dudleys then living in the
+mansion-house. Still higher and farther west lay the accursed
+ledge,--shunned by all, unless it were now and then a daring youth, or a
+wandering naturalist who ventured to its edge in the hope of securing
+some infantile Crotalus durissus, who had not yet cut his poison teeth.
+
+Long, long ago, in old Colonial times, the Honorable Thomas Dudley,
+Esquire, a man of note and name and great resources, allied by descent to
+the family of "Tom Dudley," as the early Governor is sometimes
+irreverently called by our most venerable, but still youthful
+antiquary,--and to the other public Dudleys, of course,--of all of whom
+he made small account, as being himself an English gentleman, with little
+taste for the splendors of provincial office, early in the last century,
+Thomas Dudley had built this mansion. For several generations it had
+been dwelt in by descendants of the same name, but soon after the
+Revolution it passed by marriage into the hands of the Venners, by whom
+it had ever since been held and tenanted.
+
+As the doctor turned an angle in the road, all at once the stately old
+house rose before him. It was a skilfully managed effect, as it well
+might be, for it was no vulgar English architect who had planned the
+mansion and arranged its position and approach. The old house rose
+before the Doctor, crowning a terraced garden, flanked at the left by an
+avenue of tall elms. The flower-beds were edged with box, which diffused
+around it that dreamy balsamic odor, full of ante-natal reminiscences of
+a lost Paradise, dimly fragrant as might be the bdellium of ancient
+Havilah, the land compassed by the river Pison that went out of Eden.
+The garden was somewhat neglected, but not in disgrace,--and in the time
+of tulips and hyacinths, of roses, of "snowballs," of honeysuckles, of
+lilacs, of syringas, it was rich with blossoms.
+
+From the front-windows of the mansion the eye reached a far blue
+mountain-summit,--no rounded heap, such as often shuts in a
+village-landscape, but a sharp peak, clean-angled as Ascutney from the
+Dartmouth green. A wide gap through miles of woods had opened this
+distant view, and showed more, perhaps, than all the labors of the
+architect and the landscape-gardener the large style of the early
+Dudleys.
+
+The great stone-chimney of the mansion-house was the centre from which
+all the artificial features of the scene appeared to flow. The roofs,
+the gables, the dormer-windows, the porches, the clustered offices in the
+rear, all seemed to crowd about the great chimney. To this central
+pillar the paths all converged. The single poplar behind the
+house,--Nature is jealous of proud chimneys, and always loves to put a
+poplar near one, so that it may fling a leaf or two down its black throat
+every autumn,--the one tall poplar behind the house seemed to nod and
+whisper to the grave square column, the elms to sway their branches
+towards it. And when the blue smoke rose from its summit, it seemed to
+be wafted away to join the azure haze which hung around the peak in the
+far distance, so that both should bathe in a common atmosphere.
+
+Behind the house were clumps of lilacs with a century's growth upon them,
+and looking more like trees than like shrubs. Shaded by a group of these
+was the ancient well, of huge circuit, and with a low arch opening out of
+its wall about ten feet below the surface,--whether the door of a crypt
+for the concealment of treasure, or of a subterranean passage, or merely
+of a vault for keeping provisions cool in hot weather, opinions differed.
+
+On looking at the house, it was plain that it was built with Old-World
+notions of strength and durability, and, so far as might be, with
+Old-World materials. The hinges of the doors stretched out like arms,
+instead of like hands, as we make them. The bolts were massive enough
+for a donjon-keep. The small window-panes were actually inclosed in the
+wood of the sashes instead of being stuck to them with putty, as in our
+modern windows. The broad staircase was of easy ascent, and was guarded
+by quaintly turned and twisted balusters. The ceilings of the two rooms
+of state were moulded with medallion-portraits and rustic figures, such
+as may have been seen by many readers in the famous old Philipse
+house,--Washington's head-quarters,--in the town of Yorkers. The
+fire-places, worthy of the wide-throated central chimney, were bordered
+by pictured tiles, some of them with Scripture stories, some with
+Watteau-like figures,--tall damsels in slim waists and with spread enough
+of skirt for a modern ballroom, with bowing, reclining, or musical swains
+of what everybody calls the "conventional" sort,--that is, the swain
+adapted to genteel society rather than to a literal sheep-compelling
+existence.
+
+The house was furnished, soon after it was completed, with many heavy
+articles made in London from a rare wood just then come into fashion, not
+so rare now, and commonly known as mahogany. Time had turned it very
+dark, and the stately bedsteads and tall cabinets and claw-footed chairs
+and tables were in keeping with the sober dignity of the ancient mansion.
+The old "hangings" were yet preserved in the chambers, faded, but still
+showing their rich patterns,--properly entitled to their name, for they
+were literally hung upon flat wooden frames like trellis-work, which
+again were secured to the naked partitions.
+
+There were portraits of different date on the walls of the various
+apartments, old painted coats-of-arms, bevel-edged mirrors, and in one
+sleeping-room a glass case of wax-work flowers and spangly symbols, with
+a legend signifying that E. M. (supposed to be Elizabeth Mascarene)
+wished not to be "forgot"
+
+ "When I am dead and lay'd in dust
+ And all my bones are"--
+
+Poor E. M.! Poor everybody that sighs for earthly remembrance in a
+planet with a core of fire and a crust of fossils!
+
+Such was the Dudley mansion-house,--for it kept its ancient name in spite
+of the change in the line of descent. Its spacious apartments looked
+dreary and desolate; for here Dudley Venner and his daughter dwelt by
+themselves, with such servants only as their quiet mode of life required.
+He almost lived in his library, the western room on the ground-floor.
+Its window looked upon a small plat of green, in the midst of which was a
+single grave marked by a plain marble slab. Except this room, and the
+chamber where he slept, and the servants' wing, the rest of the house was
+all Elsie's. She was always a restless, wandering child from her early
+years, and would have her little bed moved from one chamber to
+another,--flitting round as the fancy took her. Sometimes she would drag
+a mat and a pillow into one of the great empty rooms, and, wrapping
+herself in a shawl, coil up and go to sleep in a corner. Nothing
+frightened her; the "haunted" chamber, with the torn hangings that
+flapped like wings when there was air stirring, was one of her favorite
+retreats. She had been a very hard creature to manage. Her father could
+influence, but not govern her. Old Sophy, born of a slave mother in the
+house, could do more with her than anybody, knowing her by long
+instinctive study. The other servants were afraid of her. Her father had
+sent for governesses, but none of them ever stayed long. She made them
+nervous; one of them had a strange fit of sickness; not one of them ever
+came back to the house to see her. A young Spanish woman who taught her
+dancing succeeded best with her, for she had a passion for that exercise,
+and had mastered some of the most difficult dances. Long before this
+period, she had manifested some most extraordinary singularities of taste
+or instinct. The extreme sensitiveness of her father on this point
+prevented any allusion to them; but there were stories floating round,
+some of them even getting into the papers,--without her name, of
+course,--which were of a kind to excite intense curiosity, if not more
+anxious feelings. This thing was certain, that at the age of twelve she
+was missed one night, and was found sleeping in the open air under a
+tree, like a wild creature. Very often she would wander off by day,
+always without a companion, bringing home with her a nest, a flower, or
+even a more questionable trophy of her ramble, such as showed that there
+was no place where she was afraid to venture. Once in a while she had
+stayed out over night, in which case the alarm was spread, and men went
+in search of her, but never successfully,--so--that some said she hid
+herself in trees, and others that she had found one of the old Tory
+caves.
+
+Some, of course, said she was a crazy girl, and ought to be sent to an
+Asylum. But old Dr. Kittredge had shaken his head, and told them to bear
+with her, and let her have her way as much as they could, but watch her,
+as far as possible, without making her suspicious of them. He visited her
+now and then, under the pretext of seeing her father on business, or of
+only making a friendly call.
+
+The Doctor fastened his horse outside the gate, and walked up the
+garden-alley. He stopped suddenly with a start. A strange sound had
+jarred upon his ear. It was a sharp prolonged rattle, continuous, but
+rising and falling as if in rhythmical cadence. He moved softly towards
+the open window from which the sound seemed to proceed.
+
+Elsie was alone in the room, dancing one of those wild Moorish fandangos,
+such as a matador hot from the Plaza de Toros of Seville or Madrid might
+love to lie and gaze at. She was a figure to look upon in silence. The
+dancing frenzy must have seized upon her while she was dressing; for she
+was in her bodice, bare-armed, her hair floating unbound far below the
+waist of her barred or banded skirt. She had caught up her castanets, and
+rattled them as she danced with a kind of passionate fierceness, her
+lithe body undulating with flexuous grace, her diamond eyes glittering,
+her round arms wreathing and unwinding, alive and vibrant to the tips of
+the slender fingers. Some passion seemed to exhaust itself in this
+dancing paroxysm; for all at once she reeled from the middle of the
+floor, and flung herself, as it were in a careless coil, upon a great
+tiger's-skin which was spread out in one corner of the apartment.
+
+The old Doctor stood motionless, looking at her as she lay panting on the
+tawny, black-lined robe of the dead monster which stretched out beneath
+her, its rude flattened outline recalling the Terror of the Jungle as he
+crouched for his fatal spring. In a few moments her head drooped upon
+her arm, and her glittering eyes closed,--she was sleeping. He stood
+looking at her still, steadily, thoughtfully, tenderly. Presently he
+lifted his hand to his forehead, as if recalling some fading remembrance
+of other years.
+
+"Poor Catalina!"
+
+This was all he said. He shook his head,--implying that his visit would
+be in vain to-day,--returned to his sulky, and rode away, as if in a
+dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+COUSIN RICHARD'S VISIT.
+
+The Doctor was roused from his revery by the clatter of approaching
+hoofs. He looked forward and saw a young fellow galloping rapidly
+towards him.
+
+A common New-England rider with his toes turned out, his elbows jerking
+and the daylight showing under him at every step, bestriding a cantering
+beast of the plebeian breed, thick at every point where he should be
+thin, and thin at every point where he should be thick, is not one of
+those noble objects that bewitch the world. The best horsemen outside of
+the cities are the unshod countryboys, who ride "bareback," with only a
+halter round the horse's neck, digging their brown heels into his ribs,
+and slanting over backwards, but sticking on like leeches, and taking the
+hardest trot as if they loved it.--This was a different sight on which
+the Doctor was looking. The streaming mane and tail of the unshorn,
+savage-looking, black horse, the dashing grace with which the young
+fellow in the shadowy sombrero, and armed with the huge spurs, sat in his
+high-peaked saddle, could belong only to the mustang of the Pampas and
+his master. This bold rider was a young man whose sudden apparition in
+the quiet inland town had reminded some of the good people of a bright,
+curly-haired boy they had known some eight or ten years before as little
+Dick Venner.
+
+This boy had passed several of his early years at the Dudley mansion, the
+playmate of Elsie, being her cousin, two or three years older than
+herself, the son of Captain Richard Venner, a South American trader, who,
+as he changed his residence often, was glad to leave the boy in his
+brother's charge. The Captain's wife, this boy's mother, was a lady of
+Buenos Ayres, of Spanish descent, and had died while the child was in his
+cradle. These two motherless children were as strange a pair as one roof
+could well cover. Both handsome, wild, impetuous, unmanageable, they
+played and fought together like two young leopards, beautiful, but
+dangerous, their lawless instincts showing through all their graceful
+movements.
+
+The boy was little else than a young Gaucho when he first came to
+Rockland; for he had learned to ride almost as soon as to walk, and could
+jump on his pony and trip up a runaway pig with the bolas or noose him
+with his miniature lasso at an age when some city-children would hardly
+be trusted out of sight of a nursery-maid. It makes men imperious to sit
+a horse; no man governs his fellows so well as from this living throne.
+And so, from Marcus Aurelius in Roman bronze, down to the "man on
+horseback" in General Cushing's prophetic speech, the saddle has always
+been the true seat of empire. The absolute tyranny of the human will
+over a noble and powerful beast develops the instinct of personal
+prevalence and dominion; so that horse-subduer and hero were almost
+synonymous in simpler times, and are closely related still. An ancestry
+of wild riders naturally enough bequeaths also those other tendencies
+which we see in the Tartars, the Cossacks, and our own Indian Centaurs,
+and as well, perhaps, in the old-fashioned fox-hunting squire as in any
+of these. Sharp alternations of violent action and self-indulgent
+repose; a hard run, and a long revel after it; this is what over-much
+horse tends to animalize a man into. Such antecedents may have helped to
+make little Dick Venner a self-willed, capricious boy, and a rough
+playmate for Elsie.
+
+Elsie was the wilder of the two. Old Sophy, who used to watch them with
+those quick, animal-looking eyes of hers,--she was said to be the
+granddaughter of a cannibal chief, and inherited the keen senses
+belonging to all creatures which are hunted as game, Old Sophy, who
+watched them in their play and their quarrels, always seemed to be more
+afraid for the boy than the girl. "Masse Dick! Masse Dick! don' you be
+too rough wi' dat gal! She scratch you las' week, 'n' some day she bite
+you; 'n' if she bite you, Masse Dick!" Old Sophy nodded her head
+ominously, as if she could say a great deal more; while, in grateful
+acknowledgment of her caution, Master Dick put his two little fingers in
+the angles of his mouth, and his forefingers on his lower eyelids,
+drawing upon these features until his expression reminded her of
+something she vaguely recollected in her infancy,--the face of a
+favorite deity executed in wood by an African artist for her grandfather,
+brought over by her mother, and burned when she became a Christian.
+
+These two wild children had much in common. They loved to ramble
+together, to build huts, to climb trees for nests, to ride the colts, to
+dance, to race, and to play at boys' rude games as if both were boys.
+But wherever two natures have a great deal in common, the conditions of a
+first-rate quarrel are furnished ready-made. Relations are very apt to
+hate each other just because they are too much alike. It is so frightful
+to be in an atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the
+hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity of body, all the defects of speech,
+all the failings of temper, intensified by concentration, so that every
+fault of our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like our images
+in a saloon lined with mirrors! Nature knows what she is about. The
+centrifugal principle which grows out of the antipathy of like to like is
+only the repetition in character of the arrangement we see expressed
+materially in certain seed-capsules, which burst and throw the seed to
+all points of the compass. A house is a large pod with a human germ or
+two in each of its cells or chambers; it opens by dehiscence of the
+front-door by and by, and projects one of its germs to Kansas, another to
+San Francisco, another to Chicago, and so on; and this that Smith may not
+be Smithed to death and Brown may not be Browned into a mad-house, but
+mix in with the world again and struggle back to average humanity.
+
+Elsie's father, whose fault was to indulge her in everything, found that
+it would never do to let these children grow up together. They would
+either love each other as they got older, and pair like wild creatures,
+or take some fierce antipathy, which might end nobody could tell where.
+It was not safe to try. The boy must be sent away. A sharper quarrel
+than common decided this point. Master Dick forgot Old Sophy's caution,
+and vexed the girl into a paroxysm of wrath, in which she sprang at him
+and bit his arm. Perhaps they made too much of it; for they sent for the
+old Doctor, who came at once when he heard what had happened. He had a
+good deal to say about the danger there was from the teeth of animals or
+human beings when enraged; and as he emphasized his remarks by the
+application of a pencil of lunar caustic to each of the marks left by the
+sharp white teeth, they were like to be remembered by at least one of his
+hearers.
+
+So Master Dick went off on his travels, which led him into strange places
+and stranger company. Elsie was half pleased and half sorry to have him
+go; the children had a kind of mingled liking and hate for each other,
+just such as is very common among relations. Whether the girl had most
+satisfaction in the plays they shared, or in teasing him, or taking her
+small revenge upon him for teasing her, it would have been hard to say.
+At any rate, she was lonely without him. She had more fondness for the
+old black woman than anybody; but Sophy could not follow her far beyond
+her own old rocking-chair. As for her father, she had made him afraid of
+her, not for his sake, but for her own. Sometimes she would seem to be
+fond of him, and the parent's heart would yearn within him as she twined
+her supple arms about him; and then some look she gave him, some
+half-articulated expression, would turn his cheek pale and almost make
+him shiver, and he would say kindly, "Now go, Elsie, dear," and smile
+upon her as she went, and close and lock the door softly after her. Then
+his forehead would knot and furrow itself, and the drops of anguish stand
+thick upon it. He would go to the western window of his study and look
+at the solitary mound with the marble slab for its head-stone. After his
+grief had had its way, he would kneel down and pray for his child as one
+who has no hope save in that special grace which can bring the most
+rebellious spirit into sweet subjection. All this might seem like
+weakness in a parent having the charge of one sole daughter of his house
+and heart; but he had tried authority and tenderness by turns so long
+without any good effect, that he had become sore perplexed, and,
+surrounding her with cautious watchfulness as he best might, left her in
+the main to her own guidance and the merciful influences which Heaven
+might send down to direct her footsteps.
+
+Meantime the boy grew up to youth and early manhood through a strange
+succession of adventures. He had been at school at Buenos Ayres,--had
+quarrelled with his mother's relatives,--had run off to the Pampas, and
+lived with the Gauchos;--had made friends with the Indians, and ridden
+with them, it was rumored, in some of their savage forays,--had returned
+and made up his quarrel,--had got money by inheritance or otherwise,--had
+troubled the peace of certain magistrates,--had found it convenient to
+leave the City of Wholesome Breezes for a time, and had galloped off on a
+fast horse of his, (so it was said,) with some officers riding after him,
+who took good care (but this was only the popular story) not to catch
+him. A few days after this he was taking his ice on the Alameda of
+Mendoza, and a week or two later sailed from Valparaiso for New York,
+carrying with him the horse with which he had scampered over the Plains,
+a trunk or two with his newly purchased outfit of, clothing and other
+conveniences, and a belt heavy with gold and with a few Brazilian
+diamonds sewed in it, enough in value to serve him for a long journey.
+
+Dick Venner had seen life enough to wear out the earlier sensibilities of
+adolescence. He was tired of worshipping or tyrannizing over the bistred
+or umbered beauties of mingled blood among whom he had been living. Even
+that piquant exhibition which the Rio de Mendoza presents to the amateur
+of breathing sculpture failed to interest him. He was thinking of a
+far-off village on the other side of the equator, and of the wild girl
+with whom he used to play and quarrel, a creature of a different race
+from these degenerate mongrels.
+
+"A game little devil she was, sure enough!"--And as Dick spoke, he bared
+his wrist to look for the marks she had left on it: two small white
+scars, where the two small sharp upper teeth had struck when she flashed
+at him with her eyes sparkling as bright as those glittering stones sewed
+up in the belt he wore. "That's a filly worth noosing!" said Dick to
+himself, as he looked in admiration at the sign of her spirit and
+passion. "I wonder if she will bite at eighteen as she did at eight!
+She shall have a chance to try, at any rate!"
+
+Such was the self-sacrificing disposition with which Richard Venner,
+Esq., a passenger by the Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his native
+shore, and turned his face in the direction of Rockland, The Mountain,
+and the mansion-house. He had heard something, from time to time, of his
+New-England relatives, and knew that they were living together as he left
+them. And so he heralded himself to "My dear Uncle" by a letter signed
+"Your loving nephew, Richard Venner," in which letter he told a very
+frank story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed much gratitude
+for the excellent counsel and example which had helped to form his
+character and preserve him in the midst of temptation, inquired
+affectionately after his uncle's health, was much interested to know
+whether his lively cousin who used to be his playmate had grown up as
+handsome as she promised to be, and announced his intention of paying his
+respects to them both at Rockland. Not long after this came the trunks
+marked R. V. which he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent: he
+was not going to wait for a reply or an invitation.
+
+What a sound that is,--the banging down of the preliminary trunk, without
+its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal
+appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them! If it announce
+the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to look at it, to
+sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone exile walking out
+on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying alongside, with the
+colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he
+sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of
+the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises
+made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted
+house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a
+sense of knocking-kneed collapse with it as the thumping down in the
+front entry of the heavy portmanteau, rammed with the changes of
+uncounted coming weeks?
+
+Whether the R. V. portmanteaus brought one or the other of these emotions
+to the tenants of the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy to settle.
+Elsie professed to be pleased with the thought of having an adventurous
+young stranger, with stories to tell, an inmate of their quiet, not to
+say dull, family. Under almost any other circumstances, her father would
+have been unwilling to take a young fellow of whom he knew so little
+under his roof; but this was his nephew, and anything that seemed like to
+amuse or please Elsie was agreeable to him. He had grown almost
+desperate, and felt as if any change in the current of her life and
+feelings might save her from some strange paroxysm of dangerous mental
+exaltation or sullen perversion of disposition, from which some fearful
+calamity might come to herself or others.
+
+Dick had been several weeks at the Dudley mansion. A few days before, he
+had made a sudden dash for the nearest large city,--and when the Doctor
+met him, he was just returning from his visit.
+
+It had been a curious meeting between the two young persons, who had
+parted so young and after such strange relations with each other. When
+Dick first presented himself at the mansion, not one in the house would
+have known him for the boy who had left them all so suddenly years ago.
+He was so dark, partly from his descent, partly from long habits of
+exposure, that Elsie looked almost fair beside him. He had something of
+the family beauty which belonged to his cousin, but his eye had a fierce
+passion in it, very unlike the cold glitter of Elsie's. Like many people
+of strong and imperious temper, he was soft-voiced and very gentle in his
+address, when he had no special reason for being otherwise. He soon
+found reasons enough to be as amiable as he could force himself to be
+with his uncle and his cousin. Elsie was to his fancy. She had a
+strange attraction for him, quite unlike anything he had ever known in
+other women. There was something, too, in early associations: when those
+who parted as children meet as man and woman, there is always a renewal
+of that early experience which followed the taste of the forbidden
+fruit,--a natural blush of consciousness, not without its charm.
+
+Nothing could be more becoming than the behavior of "Richard Venner,
+Esquire, the guest of Dudley Venner, Esquire, at his noble mansion," as
+he was announced in the Court column of the "Rockland Weekly Universe."
+He was pleased to find himself treated with kindness and attention as a
+relative. He made himself very agreeable by abundant details concerning
+the religious, political, social, commercial, and educational progress of
+the South American cities and states. He was himself much interested in
+everything that was going on about the Dudley mansion, walked all over
+it, noticed its valuable wood-lots with special approbation, was
+delighted with the grand old house and its furniture, and would not be
+easy until he had seen all the family silver and heard its history. In
+return, he had much to tell of his father, now dead,--the only one of the
+Venners, beside themselves, in whose fate his uncle was interested. With
+Elsie, he was subdued and almost tender in his manner; with the few
+visitors whom they saw, shy and silent,--perhaps a little watchful, if
+any young man happened to be among them.
+
+Young fellows placed on their good behavior are apt to get restless and
+nervous, all ready to fly off into some mischief or other. Dick Venner
+had his half-tamed horse with him to work off his suppressed life with.
+When the savage passion of his young blood came over him, he would fetch
+out the mustang, screaming and kicking as these amiable beasts are wont
+to do, strap the Spanish saddle tight to his back, vault into it, and,
+after getting away from the village, strike the long spurs into his sides
+and whirl away in a wild gallop, until the black horse was flecked with
+white foam, and the cruel steel points were red with his blood. When
+horse and rider were alike fired, he would fling the bridle on his neck
+and saunter homeward, always contriving to get to the stable in a quiet
+way, and coming into the house as calm as a bishop after a sober trot on
+his steady-going cob.
+
+After a few weeks of this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce
+excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great
+success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her
+treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar,
+very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this,
+perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy
+conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at
+times was quite irresistible, so that he would feel himself drawn to her
+by a power which seemed to take away his will for the moment. It may
+have been nothing but the common charm of bright eyes; but he had never
+before experienced the same kind of attraction.
+
+Perhaps she was not so very different from what she had been as a child,
+after all. At any rate, so it seemed to Dick Venner, who, as was said
+before, had tried making love to her. They were sitting alone in the
+study one day; Elsie had round her neck that somewhat peculiar ornament,
+the golden torque, which she had worn to the great party. Youth is
+adventurous and very curious about necklaces, brooches, chains, and other
+such adornments, so long as they are worn by young persons of the female
+sex. Dick was seized with a great passion for examining this curious
+chain, and, after some preliminary questions, was rash enough to lean
+towards her and put out his hand toward the neck that lay in the golden
+coil.
+
+She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down
+so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself. He started
+involuntarily; for she looked so like the little girl who had struck him
+with those sharp flashing teeth, that the whole scene came back, and he
+felt the stroke again as if it had just been given, and the two white
+scars began to sting as they did after the old Doctor had burned them
+with that stick of gray caustic, which looked so like a slate pencil, and
+felt so much like the end of a red-hot poker.
+
+It took something more than a gallop to set him right after this. The
+next day he mentioned having received a letter from a mercantile agent
+with whom he had dealings. What his business was is, perhaps, none of
+our business. At any rate, it required him to go at once to the city
+where his correspondent resided.
+
+Independently of this "business" which called him, there may have been
+other motives, such as have been hinted at. People who have been living
+for a long time in dreary country-places, without any emotion beyond such
+as are occasioned by a trivial pleasure or annoyance, often get crazy at
+last for a vital paroxysm of some kind or other. In this state they rush
+to the great cities for a plunge into their turbid life-baths, with a
+frantic thirst for every exciting pleasure, which makes them the willing
+and easy victims of all those who sell the Devil's wares on commission.
+The less intelligent and instructed class of unfortunates, who venture
+with their ignorance and their instincts into what is sometimes called
+the "life" of great cities, are put through a rapid course of instruction
+which entitles them very commonly to a diploma from the police court. But
+they only illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind at large
+which has been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other
+eminently worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital
+hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the
+brute, but perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the
+yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped too long in one moral
+posture.
+
+Richard Veneer was a young man of remarkable experience for his years.
+He ran less risk, therefore, in exposing himself to the temptations and
+dangers of a great city than many older men, who, seeking the livelier
+scenes of excitement to be found in large towns as a relaxation after the
+monotonous routine of family life, are too often taken advantage of and
+made the victims of their sentiments or their generous confidence in
+their fellow-creatures. Such was not his destiny. There was something
+about him which looked as if he would not take bullying kindly. He had
+also the advantage of being acquainted with most of those ingenious
+devices by which the proverbial inconstancy of fortune is steadied to
+something more nearly approaching fixed laws, and the dangerous risks
+which have so often led young men to ruin and suicide are practically
+reduced to somewhat less than nothing. So that Mr. Richard Veneer worked
+off his nervous energies without any troublesome adventure, and was ready
+to return to Rockland in less than a week, without having lightened the
+money-belt he wore round his body, or tarnished the long glittering knife
+he carried in his boot.
+
+Dick had sent his trunk to the nearest town through which the railroad
+leading to the city passed. He rode off on his black horse and left him
+at the place where he took the cars. On arriving at the city station, he
+took a coach and drove to one of the great hotels. Thither drove also a
+sagacious-looking, middle-aged man, who entered his name as "W. Thompson"
+in the book at the office immediately after that of "R. Venner." Mr.
+"Thompson" kept a carelessly observant eye upon Mr. Venner during his
+stay at the hotel, and followed him to the cars when he left, looking
+over his shoulder when he bought his ticket at the station, and seeing
+him fairly off without obtruding himself in any offensive way upon his
+attention. Mr. Thompson, known in other quarters as Detective Policeman
+Terry, got very little by his trouble. Richard Venner did not turn out
+to be the wife-poisoner, the defaulting cashier, the river-pirate, or the
+great counterfeiter. He paid his hotel-bill as a gentleman should always
+do, if he has the money and can spare it. The detective had probably
+overrated his own sagacity when he ventured to suspect Mr. Venner. He
+reported to his chief that there was a knowing-looking fellow he had been
+round after, but he rather guessed he was nothing more than "one o' them
+Southern sportsmen."
+
+The poor fellows at the stable where Dick had left his horse had had
+trouble enough with him. One of the ostlers was limping about with a
+lame leg, and another had lost a mouthful of his coat, which came very
+near carrying a piece of his shoulder with it. When Mr. Venner came back
+for his beast, he was as wild as if he had just been lassoed, screaming,
+kicking, rolling over to get rid of his saddle, and when his rider was at
+last mounted, jumping about in a way to dislodge any common horseman. To
+all this Dick replied by sticking his long spurs deeper and deeper into
+his flanks, until the creature found he was mastered, and dashed off as
+if all the thistles of the Pampas were pricking him.
+
+"One more gallop, Juan?" This was in the last mile of the road before he
+came to the town which brought him in sight of the mansion-house. It was
+in this last gallop that the fiery mustang and his rider flashed by the
+old Doctor. Cassia pointed her sharp ears and shied to let them pass.
+The Doctor turned and looked through the little round glass in the back
+of his sulky.
+
+"Dick Turpin, there, will find more than his match!" said the Doctor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE APOLLINEAN INSTITUTE. (With Extracts from the "Report of the
+committee.")
+
+The readers of this narrative will hardly expect any elaborate details of
+the educational management of the Apollinean Institute. They cannot be
+supposed to take the same interest in its affairs as was shown by the
+Annual Committees who reported upon its condition and prospects. As
+these Committees were, however, an important part of the mechanism of the
+establishment, some general account of their organization and a few
+extracts from the Report of the one last appointed may not be out of
+place.
+
+Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance for packing his
+Committees, whether they happened always to be made up of optimists by
+nature, whether they were cajoled into good-humor by polite attentions,
+or whether they were always really delighted with the wonderful
+acquirements of the pupils and the admirable order of the school, it is
+certain that their Annual Reports were couched in language which might
+warm the heart of the most cold-blooded and calculating father that ever
+had a family of daughters to educate. In fact, these Annual Reports were
+considered by Mr. Peckham as his most effective advertisements.
+
+The first thing, therefore, was to see that the Committee was made up of
+persons known to the public.
+
+Some worn-out politician, in that leisurely and amiable transition-state
+which comes between official extinction and the paralysis which will
+finish him as soon as his brain gets a little softer, made an admirable
+Chairman for Mr. Peckham, when he had the luck to pick up such an
+article. Old reputations, like old fashions, are more prized in the
+grassy than in the stony districts. An effete celebrity, who would never
+be heard of again in the great places until the funeral sermon waked up
+his memory for one parting spasm, finds himself in full flavor of renown
+a little farther back from the changing winds of the sea-coast. If such
+a public character was not to be had, so that there was no chance of
+heading the Report with the name of the Honorable Mr. Somebody, the next
+best thing was to get the Reverend Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous
+position. Then would follow two or three local worthies with Esquire
+after their names. If any stray literary personage from one of the great
+cities happened to be within reach, he was pounced upon by Mr. Silas
+Peckham. It was a hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a
+hundred miles or two to the outside suburbs after peace and unwatered
+milk, to be pumped for a speech in this unexpected way. It was harder
+still, if he had been induced to venture a few tremulous remarks, to be
+obliged to write them out for the "Rockland Weekly Universe," with the
+chance of seeing them used as an advertising certificate as long as he
+lived, if he lived as long as the late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving
+his certificate in favor of Whitwell's celebrated Cephalic Snuff.
+
+The Report of the last Committee had been signed by the Honorable,
+___________late __________ of ____________, as Chairman. (It is with
+reluctance that the name and titles are left in blank; but our public
+characters are so familiarly known to the whole community that this
+reserve becomes necessary.) The other members of the Committee were the
+Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring town, who was to make the prayer
+before the Exercises of the Exhibition, and two or three notabilities of
+Rockland, with geoponic eyes, and glabrous, bumpless foreheads. A few
+extracts from the Report are subjoined:
+
+"The Committee have great pleasure in recording their unanimous opinion,
+that the Institution was never in so flourishing a condition....
+
+"The health of the pupils is excellent; the admirable quality of food
+supplied shows itself in their appearance; their blooming aspect excited
+the admiration of the Committee, and bears testimony to the assiduity of
+the excellent Matron.
+
+"......moral and religious condition most encouraging, which they cannot
+but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the faithful
+Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty which he
+cannot commit to other people.
+
+"......great progress in their studies, under the intelligent
+superintendence of the accomplished Principal, assisted by Mr. Badger,
+[Mr. Langdon's predecessor,] Miss Darley, the lady who superintends the
+English branches, Miss Crabs, her assistant and teacher of Modern
+Languages, and Mr. Schneider, teacher of French, German, Latin, and
+Music....
+
+"Education is the great business of the Institute. Amusements are
+objects of a secondary nature; but these are by no means neglected....
+
+"......English compositions of great originality and beauty, creditable
+alike to the head and heart of their accomplished authors.... several
+poems of a very high order of merit, which would do honor to the
+literature of any age or country.... life-like drawings, showing great
+proficiency.... Many converse fluently in various modern languages....
+perform the most difficult airs with the skill of professional
+musicians....
+
+"......advantages unsurpassed, if equalled by those of any Institution in
+the country, and reflecting the highest honor on the distinguished Head
+of the Establishment, SILAS PECKHAM, Esquire, and his admirable Lady, the
+MATRON, with their worthy assistants...."
+
+The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard more good than a week's
+vacation would have done: It gave him such a laugh as he had not had for
+a month. The way in which Silas Peckham had made his Committee say what
+he wanted them to--for he recognized a number of expressions in the
+Report as coming directly from the lips of his principal, and could not
+help thinking how cleverly he had forced his phrases, as jugglers do the
+particular card they wish their dupe to take--struck him as particularly
+neat and pleasing.
+
+He had passed through the sympathetic and emotional stages in his new
+experience, and had arrived at the philosophical and practical state,
+which takes things coolly, and goes to work to set them right. He had
+breadth enough of view to see that there was nothing so very exceptional
+in this educational trader's dealings with his subordinates, but he had
+also manly feeling enough to attack the particular individual instance of
+wrong before him. There are plenty of dealer's in morals, as in ordinary
+traffic, who confine themselves to wholesale business. They leave the
+small necessity of their next-door neighbor to the retailers, who are
+poorer in statistics and general facts, but richer in the every-day
+charities. Mr. Bernard felt, at first, as one does who sees a gray rat
+steal out of a drain and begin gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded
+with fruit or blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he is let alone.
+The first impulse is to murder him with the nearest ragged stone. Then
+one remembers that he is a rodent, acting after the law of his kind, and
+cools down and is contented to drive him off and guard the tree against
+his teeth for the future. As soon as this is done, one can watch his
+attempts at mischief with a certain amusement.
+
+This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through. First, the
+indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into
+relations with a mean one. Then the impulse of extermination,--a divine
+instinct, intended to keep down vermin of all classes to their working
+averages in the economy of Nature. Then a return of cheerful
+tolerance,--a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and
+sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run,
+terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful
+consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come
+between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.
+
+Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-natured
+and hopeful as ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional
+training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous
+disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable. He saw well enough
+that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he
+could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight of
+cares. The worst of it was, that she was one of those women who
+naturally overwork themselves, like those horses who will go at the top
+of their pace until they drop. Such women are dreadfully unmanageable.
+It is as hard reasoning with them as it would have been reasoning with
+Io, when she was flying over land and sea, driven by the sting of the
+never-sleeping gadfly.
+
+This was a delicate, interesting game that he played. Under one innocent
+pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had made
+her own. He would collect the themes and have them all read and marked,
+answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other teachers
+come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon himself
+not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his office, but
+stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly have belonged
+to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking better and
+feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month before.
+
+When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or exhausted by
+overworking, there follow effects which have often been misinterpreted by
+moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes
+neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony.
+Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive
+and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has
+been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to
+others only an angel would make good, reproaches herself with
+incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a
+model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his
+diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the
+perfection of an archangel.
+
+Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more
+unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the
+Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to
+endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples
+it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where
+miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the
+vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by
+spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions a
+dozen times a day. They are full of interest, but they should be
+transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man
+who makes a study of insanity.
+
+This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility
+were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much
+of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could
+have a chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many of
+the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being
+relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual
+teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line
+which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but
+exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a
+morbid state of the body that it is no wonder they are often confounded.
+And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of
+spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night
+with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens,
+and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they
+overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,--as the
+draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and makes the fire
+burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.
+
+It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, that
+we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs of the
+Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things, not so
+very unlike each other as to require a minute description for each
+particular one among them. They have all very much the same general
+features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have
+something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where
+paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at
+colleges and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite
+should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people,
+especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the
+living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if
+possible, by those who love them like their own flesh and blood.
+Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are
+almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of
+their exacting necessities and demands.
+
+Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred
+interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The
+clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them, if
+his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of
+disgust when money is counted out to him for administering the
+consolations of religion, for saving some precious life, for sowing the
+seeds of Christian civilization in young ingenuous souls.
+
+And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
+mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
+commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to all
+who see the task they are performing in our new social order. These girls
+are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with other
+manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a surplus of
+males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a
+possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be
+a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted
+that she may not be called upon to fill it.
+
+But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education
+of our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through
+its women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large
+establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the
+higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps,
+reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own
+happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the
+practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But
+this is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so
+early, that, if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere
+practical duties, our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as
+it often does in large places where money is made too rapidly. This is
+the meaning, therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to
+most of these large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps
+unwisely or uncharitably.
+
+We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at
+the Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same
+class. People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we contrast
+extremes in pairs. They approach much nearer, if we take them in groups
+of twenty. Take two separate hundreds as they come, without choosing,
+and you get the gamut of human character in both so completely that you
+can strike many chords in each which shall be in perfect unison with
+corresponding ones in the other. If we go a step farther, and compare
+the population of two villages of the same race and region, there is such
+a regularly graduated distribution and parallelism of character, that it
+seems as if Nature must turn out human beings in sets like chessmen.
+
+It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found
+himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all the
+fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends, when they
+learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The school never
+went on more smoothly than during the first period of his administration,
+after he had arranged its duties, and taken his share, and even more than
+his share, upon himself. But human nature does not wait for the diploma
+of the Apollinean Institute to claim the exercise of it, instincts and
+faculties. These young girls saw but little of the youth of the
+neighborhood. The mansion-house young men were off at college or in the
+cities, or making love to each other's sisters, or at any rate
+unavailable for some reason or other. There were a few "clerks,"--that
+is, young men who attended shops, commonly called "stores,"--who were
+fond of walking by the Institute, when they were off duty, for the sake
+of exchanging a word or a glance with any one of the young ladies they
+might happen to know, if any such were stirring abroad: crude young men,
+mostly, with a great many "Sirs" and "Ma'ams" in their speech, and with
+that style of address sometimes acquired in the retail business, as if
+the salesman were recommending himself to a customer, "First-rate family
+article, Ma'am; warranted to wear a lifetime; just one yard and three
+quarters in this pattern, Ma'am; sha'n't I have the pleasure?" and so
+forth. If there had been ever so many of them, and if they had been ever
+so fascinating, the quarantine of the Institute was too rigorous to allow
+any romantic infection to be introduced from without.
+
+Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed,
+well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but
+the manners of a friend and equal, moving about among these young girls
+day after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs,
+his voice growing familiar to them, never in any harsh tones, often
+soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic, with its male depth and
+breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as if it were a river in
+which a hundred of these little piping streamlets-might lose themselves;
+anybody might see what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their
+parents that they enjoyed themselves much, this term, at the Institute,
+and thought they were making rapid progress in their studies. There was
+a great enthusiasm for the young master's reading-classes in English
+poetry. Some of the poor little things began to adorn themselves with an
+extra ribbon, or a bit of such jewelry as they had before kept for great
+occasions. Dear souls! they only half knew what they were doing it for.
+Does the bird know why its feathers grow more brilliant and its voice
+becomes musical in the pairing season?
+
+And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town, where a mere accident had
+placed Mr. Bernard Langdon, there was a concentration of explosive
+materials which might at any time change its Arcadian and academic repose
+into a scene of dangerous commotion. What said Helen Darley, when she
+saw with her woman's glance that more than one girl, when she should be
+looking at her book, was looking over it toward the master's desk? Was
+her own heart warmed by any livelier feeling than gratitude, as its life
+began to flow with fuller pulses, and the morning sky again looked bright
+and the flowers recovered their lost fragrance? Was there any strange,
+mysterious affinity between the master and the dark girl who sat by
+herself? Could she call him at will by looking at him? Could it be
+that--? It made her shiver to think of it.--And who was that strange
+horseman who passed Mr. Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so
+like Mephistopheles galloping hard to be in season at the witches'
+Sabbath-gathering? That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry
+her, they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a
+fancy to the dark girl! And who is she, and what?--by what demon is she
+haunted, by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by
+what destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror in
+it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters
+always, but warms for none?
+
+Some of these questions are ours. Some were Helen Darley's. Some of
+them mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night
+after meeting the strange horseman. In the morning he happened to be a
+little late in entering the schoolroom. There was something between the
+leaves of the Virgil which lay upon his desk. He opened it and saw a
+freshly gathered mountain-flower. He looked at Elsie, instinctively,
+involuntarily. She had another such flower on her breast.
+
+A young girl's graceful compliment,--that is all,--no doubt,--no doubt.
+It was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid between the
+leaves of the Fourth Book of the "AEneid," and at this line,
+
+ "Incipit effari, mediaque in voce resistit."
+
+A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's
+mind, and he determined to try the Sortes Virgilianae. He shut the
+volume, and opened it again at a venture.--The story of Laocoon!
+
+He read with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from "Horresco
+referees" to "Bis medium amplexi," and flung the book from him, as if its
+leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that princes die of.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+CURIOSITY.
+
+People will talk. 'Ciascun lo dice' is a tune that is played oftener
+than the national air of this country or any other.
+
+"That 's what they say. Means to marry her, if she is his cousin. Got
+money himself,--that 's the story,--but wants to come and live in the old
+place, and get the Dudley property by and by." "Mother's folks was
+wealthy."--"Twenty-three to twenty-five year old."--"He a'n't more 'n
+twenty, or twenty-one at the outside."--"Looks as if he knew too much to
+be only twenty year old."--"Guess he's been through the mill,--don't look
+so green, anyhow, hey? Did y' ever mind that cut over his left eyebrow?"
+
+So they gossiped in Rockland. The young fellows could make nothing of
+Dick Venner. He was shy and proud with the few who made advances to him.
+The young ladies called him handsome and romantic, but he looked at them
+like a many-tailed pacha who was in the habit of, ordering his wives by
+the dozen.
+
+"What do you think of the young man over there at the Veneers'?" said
+Miss Arabella Thornton to her father.
+
+"Handsome," said the Judge, "but dangerous-looking. His face is
+indictable at common law. Do you know, my dear, I think there is a blank
+at the Sheriff's office, with a place for his name in it?"
+
+The Judge paused and looked grave, as if he had just listened to the
+verdict of the jury and was going to pronounce sentence.
+
+"Have you heard anything against him?" said the Judge's daughter.
+
+"Nothing. But I don't like these mixed bloods and half-told stories.
+Besides, I have seen a good many desperate fellows at the bar, and I have
+a fancy they all have a look belonging to them. The worst one I ever
+sentenced looked a good deal like this fellow. A wicked mouth. All our
+other features are made for us; but a man makes his own mouth."
+
+"Who was the person you sentenced?"
+
+"He was a young fellow that undertook to garrote a man who had won his
+money at cards. The same slender shape, the same cunning, fierce look,
+smoothed over with a plausible air. Depend upon it, there is an
+expression in all the sort of people who live by their wits when they
+can, and by worse weapons when their wits fail them, that we old
+law-doctors know just as well as the medical counsellors know the marks
+of disease in a man's face. Dr. Kittredge looks at a man and says he is
+going to die; I look at another man and say he is going to be hanged, if
+nothing happens. I don't say so of this one, but I don't like his looks.
+I wonder Dudley Veneer takes to him so kindly."
+
+"It's all for Elsie's sake," said Miss Thornton. "I feel quite sure of
+that. He never does anything that is not meant for her in some way. I
+suppose it amuses her to have her cousin about the house. She rides a
+good deal since he has been here. Have you seen them galloping about
+together? He looks like my idea of a Spanish bandit on that wild horse
+of his."
+
+"Possibly he has been one,--or is one," said the Judge,--smiling as men
+smile whose lips have often been freighted with the life and death of
+their fellow-creatures. "I met them riding the other day. Perhaps Dudley
+is right, if it pleases her to have a companion. What will happen,
+though, if he makes love to her? Will Elsie be easily taken with such a
+fellow? You young folks are supposed to know more about these matters
+than we middle-aged people."
+
+"Nobody can tell. Elsie is not like anybody else. The girls who have
+seen most of her think she hates men, all but 'Dudley,' as she calls her
+father. Some of them doubt whether she loves him. They doubt whether
+she can love anything human, except perhaps the old black woman who has
+taken care of her since she was a baby. The village people have the
+strangest stories about her; you know what they call her?"
+
+She whispered three words in her father's ear. The Judge changed color
+as she spoke, sighed deeply, and was silent as if lost in thought for a
+moment.
+
+"I remember her mother," he said, "so well! A sweeter creature never
+lived. Elsie has something of her in her look, but those are not her
+mother's eyes. They were dark, but soft, as in all I ever saw of her
+race. Her father's are dark too, but mild, and even tender, I should
+say. I don't know what there is about Elsie's,--but do you know, my
+dear, I find myself curiously influenced by them? I have had to face a
+good many sharp eyes and hard ones,--murderers' eyes and pirates',--men
+who had to be watched in the bar, where they stood on trial, for fear
+they should spring on the prosecuting officers like tigers,--but I never
+saw such eyes as Elsie's; and yet they have a kind of drawing virtue or
+power about them,--I don't know what else to call it: have you never
+observed this?"
+
+His daughter smiled in her turn.
+
+"Never observed it? Why, of course, nobody could be with Elsie Venner
+and not observe it. There are a good many other strange things about
+her: did you ever notice how she dresses?"
+
+"Why, handsomely enough, I should think," the Judge answered. "I suppose
+she dresses as she likes, and sends to the city for what she wants. What
+do you mean in particular? We men notice effects in dress, but not much
+in detail."
+
+"You never noticed the colors and patterns of her dresses? You never
+remarked anything curious about her ornaments? Well! I don't believe
+you men know, half the time, whether a lady wears a nine-penny collar or
+a thread-lace cape worth a thousand dollars. I don't believe you know a
+silk dress from a bombazine one. I don't believe you can tell whether a
+woman is in black or in colors, unless you happen to know she is a widow.
+Elsie Venner has a strange taste in dress, let me tell you. She sends
+for the oddest patterns of stuffs, and picks out the most curious things
+at the jeweller's, whenever she goes to town with her father. They say
+the old Doctor tells him to let her have her way about such matters.
+Afraid of her mind, if she is contradicted, I suppose. You've heard
+about her going to school at that place,--the 'Institoot,' as those
+people call it? They say she's bright enough in her way,--has studied at
+home, you know, with her father a good deal, knows some modern languages
+and Latin, I believe: at any rate, she would have it so,--she must go to
+the 'Institoot.' They have a very good female teacher there, I hear; and
+the new master, that young Mr. Langdon, looks and talks like a
+well-educated young man. I wonder what they 'll make of Elsie, between
+them!"
+
+So they talked at the Judge's, in the calm, judicial-looking
+mansion-house, in the grave, still library, with the troops of wan-hued
+law-books staring blindly out of their titles at them as they talked,
+like the ghosts of dead attorneys fixed motionless and speechless, each
+with a thin, golden film over his unwinking eyes.
+
+In the mean time, everything went on quietly enough after Cousin
+Richard's return. A man of sense,--that is, a man who knows perfectly
+well that a cool head is worth a dozen warm hearts in carrying the
+fortress of a woman's affections, (not yours, "Astarte," nor yours,
+"Viola,")--who knows that men are rejected by women every day because
+they, the men, love them, and are accepted every day because they do not,
+and therefore can study the arts of pleasing,--a man of sense, when he
+finds he has established his second parallel too soon, retires quietly to
+his first, and begins working on his covered ways again. The whole art
+of love may be read in any Encyclopaedia under the title Fortification,
+where the terms just used are explained. After the little adventure of
+the necklace, Dick retreated at once to his first parallel. Elsie loved
+riding,--and would go off with him on a gallop now and then. He was a
+master of all those strange Indian horseback-feats which shame the tricks
+of the circus-riders, and used to astonish and almost amuse her sometimes
+by disappearing from his saddle, like a phantom horseman lying flat
+against the side of the bounding creature that bore him, as if he were a
+hunting leopard with his claws in the horse's flank and flattening
+himself out against his heaving ribs. Elsie knew a little Spanish too,
+which she had learned from the young person who had taught her dancing,
+and Dick enlarged her vocabulary with a few soft phrases, and would sing
+her a song sometimes, touching the air upon an ancient-looking guitar
+they had found with the ghostly things in the garret,--a quaint old
+instrument, marked E. M. on the back, and supposed to have belonged to a
+certain Elizabeth Mascarene, before mentioned in connection with a work
+of art,--a fair, dowerless lady, who smiled and sung and faded away,
+unwedded, a hundred years ago, as dowerless ladies, not a few, are
+smiling and singing and fading now,--God grant each of them His
+love,--and one human heart as its interpreter!
+
+As for school, Elsie went or stayed away as she liked. Sometimes, when
+they thought she was at her desk in the great schoolroom, she would be on
+The Mountain,--alone always. Dick wanted to go with her, but she would
+never let him. Once, when she had followed the zigzag path a little way
+up, she looked back and caught a glimpse of him following her. She
+turned and passed him without a word, but giving him a look which seemed
+to make the scars on his wrist tingle, went to her room, where she locked
+herself up, and did not come out again till evening, Old Sophy having
+brought her food, and set it down, not speaking, but looking into her
+eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel out his master's will
+in his face. The evening was clear and the moon shining. As Dick sat at
+his chamber-window, looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed
+figure flit between the trees and steal along the narrow path which led
+upward. Elsie's pillow was unpressed that night, but she had not been
+missed by the household,--for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel.
+The next morning she avoided him and went off early to school. It was
+the same morning that the young master found the flower between the
+leaves of his Virgil.
+
+The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her cousin
+for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought him. She
+had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in certain poetical
+readings which the master conducted with the elder scholars. This gave
+Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways when her eye was on her
+book, to notice the inflections of her voice, to watch for any expression
+of her sentiments; for, to tell the truth, he had a kind of fear that the
+girl had taken a fancy to him, and, though she interested him, he did not
+wish to study her heart from the inside.
+
+The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon him.
+She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly smiled
+at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of
+expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had
+felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A person
+accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind,
+and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of
+disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face produced
+upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice;
+in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows
+that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears.
+The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in its
+stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the blind who
+show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her
+to be lovely, and left out nothing but love. And yet the master could
+not help feeling that some instinct was working in this girl which was in
+some way leading her to seek his presence. She did not lift her
+glittering eyes upon him as at first. It seemed strange that she did
+not, for they were surely her natural weapons of conquest. Her color did
+not come and go like that of young girls under excitement. She had a
+clear brunette complexion, a little sun-touched, it may be,--for the
+master noticed once, when her necklace was slightly displaced, that a
+faint ring or band of a little lighter shade than the rest of the surface
+encircled her neck. What was the slight peculiarity of her enunciation,
+when she read? Not a lisp, certainly, but the least possible
+imperfection in articulating some of the lingual sounds,--just enough to
+be noticed at first, and quite forgotten after being a few times heard.
+
+Not a word about the flower on either side. It was not uncommon for the
+schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild flower on the teacher's desk.
+Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it was a little delicate
+flower, which looked as if it were made to press, and it was probably
+shut in by accident at the particular place where he found it. He took
+it into his head to examine it in a botanical point of view. He found it
+was not common,--that it grew only in certain localities,--and that one
+of these was among the rocks of the eastern spur of The Mountain.
+
+It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb the sides of
+the Alps to find the flower called the Edelweiss for the maidens whom
+they wish to please. It is a pretty fancy, that of scaling some
+dangerous height before the dawn, so as to gather the flower in its
+freshness, that the favored maiden may wear it to church on Sunday
+morning, a proof at once of her lover's devotion and his courage. Mr.
+Bernard determined to explore the region where this flower was said to
+grow, that he might see where the wild girl sought the blossoms of which
+Nature was so jealous.
+
+It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his
+land-voyage of discovery. He had more curiosity, it may be, than he
+would have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering habits, and
+the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances
+were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon traces
+of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have known.
+
+The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind in an
+excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open. The trees are always
+talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every tree talks
+to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the middle of a
+pasture,) but grating their boughs against each other, as old horn-handed
+farmers press their dry, rustling palms together, dropping a nut or a
+leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a woodpecker, or rustling as a
+squirrel flashes along a branch. It was now the season of singing-birds,
+and the woods were haunted with mysterious, tender music. The voices of
+the birds which love the deeper shades of the forest are sadder than
+those of the open fields: these are the nuns who have taken the veil, the
+hermits that have hidden themselves away from the world and tell their
+griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the wilderness,--for the one
+deep inner silence that Nature breaks with her fitful superficial sounds
+becomes multiplied as the image of a star in ruffled waters. Strange!
+The woods at first convey the impression of profound repose, and yet, if
+you watch their ways with open ear, you find the life which is in them is
+restless and nervous as that of a woman: the little twigs are crossing
+and twining and separating like slender fingers that cannot be still; the
+stray leaf is to be flattened into its place like a truant curl; the
+limbs sway and twist, impatient of their constrained attitude; and the
+rounded masses of foliage swell upward and subside from time to time with
+long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-drops which
+had lain hidden among the deeper shadows. I pray you, notice, in the
+sweet summer days which will soon see you among the mountains, this
+inward tranquillity that belongs to the heart of the woodland, with this
+nervousness, for I do not know what else to call it, of outer movement.
+One would say, that Nature, like untrained persons, could not sit still
+without nestling about or doing something with her limbs or features, and
+that high breeding was only to be looked for in trim gardens, where the
+soul of the trees is ill at ease perhaps, but their manners are
+unexceptionable, and a rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is
+an indecorum. The real forest is hardly still except in the Indian
+summer; then there is death in the house, and they are waiting for the
+sharp shrunken months to come with white raiment for the summer's burial.
+
+There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most
+solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions. Up to a certain
+period of growth they are eminently beautiful, their boughs disposed in
+the most graceful pagoda-like series of close terraces, thick and dark
+with green crystalline leaflets. In spring the tender shoots come out of
+a paler green, finger-like, as if they were pointing to the violets at
+their feet. But when the trees have grown old, and their rough boles
+measure a yard and more through their diameter, they are no longer
+beautiful, but they have a sad solemnity all their own, too full of
+meaning to require the heart's comment to be framed in words. Below, all
+their earthward-looking branches are sapless and shattered, splintered by
+the weight of many winters' snows; above, they are still green and full
+of life, but their summits overtop all the deciduous trees around them,
+and in their companionship with heaven they are alone. On these the
+lightning loves to fall. One such Mr. Bernard saw,--or rather, what had
+been one such; for the bolt had torn the tree like an explosion from
+within, and the ground was strewed all around the broken stump with
+flakes of rough bark and strips and chips of shivered wood, into which
+the old tree had been rent by the bursting rocket from the thunder-cloud.
+
+--The master had struck up The Mountain obliquely from the western side
+of the Dudley mansion-house. In this way he ascended until he reached a
+point many hundred feet above the level of the plain, and commanding all
+the country beneath and around. Almost at his feet he saw the
+mansion-house, the chimney standing out of the middle of the roof, or
+rather, like a black square hole in it,--the trees almost directly over
+their stems, the fences as lines, the whole nearly as an architect would
+draw a ground-plan of the house and the inclosures round it. It
+frightened him to see how the huge masses of rock and old forest-growths
+hung over the home below. As he descended a little and drew near the
+ledge of evil name, he was struck with the appearance of a long narrow
+fissure that ran parallel with it and above it for many rods, not
+seemingly of very old standing,--for there were many fibres of roots
+which had evidently been snapped asunder when the rent took place, and
+some of which were still succulent in both separated portions.
+
+Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he set forth, not to come back
+before he had examined the dreaded ledge. He had half persuaded himself
+that it was scientific curiosity. He wished to examine the rocks, to see
+what flowers grew there, and perhaps to pick up an adventure in the
+zoological line; for he had on a pair of high, stout boots, and he
+carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one extremity, so as to
+be very convenient to hold down a crotalus with, if he should happen to
+encounter one. He knew the aspect of the ledge from a distance; for its
+bald and leprous-looking declivities stood out in their nakedness from
+the wooded sides of The Mountain, when this was viewed from certain
+points of the village. But the nearer aspect of the blasted region had
+something frightful in it. The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had
+been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves. In some places they
+overhung their base so as to look like leaning towers which might topple
+over at any minute. In other parts they were scooped into niches or
+caverns. Here and there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them
+of such width that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of
+meeting the regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.
+
+Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but cracks
+or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could find hold.
+High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw some tufts of
+flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had found between the
+leaves of his Virgil. Not there, surely! No woman would have clung
+against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle blossom. And yet the
+master looked round everywhere, and even up the side of that rock, to see
+if there were no signs of a woman's footstep. He peered about curiously,
+as if his eye might fall on some of those fragments of dress which women
+leave after them, whenever they run against each other or against
+anything else,--in crowded ballrooms, in the brushwood after picnics, on
+the fences after rambles, scattered round over every place which has
+witnessed an act of violence, where rude hands have been laid upon them.
+Nothing--Stop, though, one moment. That stone is smooth and polished,
+as if it had been somewhat worn by the pressure of human feet. There is
+one twig broken among the stems of that clump of shrubs. He put his foot
+upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub. In this way he
+turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on a natural platform,
+which lay in front of one of the wider fissures,--whether the mouth of a
+cavern or not he could not yet tell. A flat stone made an easy seat,
+upon which he sat down, as he was very glad to do, and looked
+mechanically about him. A small fragment splintered from the rock was at
+his feet. He took it and threw it down the declivity a little below
+where he sat. He looked about for a stem or a straw of some kind to bite
+upon,--a country-instinct,--relic, no doubt, of the old
+vegetable-feeding habits of Eden. Is that a stem or a straw? He picked
+it up. It was a hair-pin.
+
+To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort of thrill shoot through him at
+the sight of this harmless little implement would be a statement not at
+variance with the fact of the case. That smooth stone had been often
+trodden, and by what foot he could not doubt. He rose up from his seat to
+look round for other signs of a woman's visits. What if there is a
+cavern here, where she has a retreat, fitted up, perhaps, as anchorites
+fitted their cells,--nay, it may be, carpeted and mirrored, and with one
+of those tiger-skins for a couch, such as they, say the girl loves to lie
+on? Let us look, at any rate.
+
+Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and looked into
+it. His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp,
+cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady
+motion towards the light, and himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb,
+staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear
+that cannot move, as in the terror of dreams. The two sparks of light
+came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted
+themselves up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled
+in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing which breathes, be
+it man or brute, can hear unmoved,--the long, loud, stinging whirr, as
+the huge, thick bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and adjusted
+his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were drawn as with magnets
+toward the circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture to the
+swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man with her
+anaesthetics: the cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's first
+shake deadens the man's fear and feeling; and the crotalus paralyzes
+before he strikes. He waited as in a trance,--waited as one that longs
+to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two
+pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked
+straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were losing
+their light and terror, that they were growing tame and dull; the charm
+was dissolving, the numbness was passing away, he could move once more.
+He heard a light breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the
+face of Elsie Venner, looking motionless into the reptile's eyes, which
+had shrunk and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+FAMILY SECRETS.
+
+It was commonly understood in the town of Rockland that Dudley Venner had
+had a great deal of trouble with that daughter of his, so handsome, yet
+so peculiar, about whom there were so many strange stories. There was no
+end to the tales which were told of her extraordinary doings. Yet her
+name was never coupled with that of any youth or man, until this cousin
+had provoked remark by his visit; and even then it was oftener in the
+shape of wondering conjectures whether he would dare to make love to her,
+than in any pretended knowledge of their relations to each other, that
+the public tongue exercised its village-prerogative of tattle.
+
+The more common version of the trouble at the mansion-house was this:
+Elsie was not exactly in her right mind. Her temper was singular, her
+tastes were anomalous, her habits were lawless, her antipathies were many
+and intense, and she was liable to explosions of ungovernable anger.
+Some said that was not the worst of it. At nearly fifteen years old,
+when she was growing fast, and in an irritable state of mind and body,
+she had had a governess placed over her for whom she had conceived an
+aversion. It was whispered among a few who knew more of the family
+secrets than others, that, worried and exasperated by the presence and
+jealous oversight of this person, Elsie had attempted to get finally rid
+of her by unlawful means, such as young girls have been known to employ
+in their straits, and to which the sex at all ages has a certain
+instinctive tendency, in preference to more palpable instruments for the
+righting of its wrongs. At any rate, this governess had been taken
+suddenly ill, and the Doctor had been sent for at midnight. Old Sophy
+had taken her master into a room apart, and said a few words to him which
+turned him as white as a sheet. As soon as he recovered himself, he sent
+Sophy out, called in the old Doctor, and gave him some few hints, on
+which he acted at once, and had the satisfaction of seeing his patient
+out of danger before he left in the morning. It is proper to say, that,
+during the following days, the most thorough search was made in every
+nook and cranny of those parts of the house which Elsie chiefly haunted,
+but nothing was found which might be accused of having been the
+intentional cause of the probably accidental sudden illness of the
+governess. From this time forward her father was never easy. Should he
+keep her apart, or shut her up, for fear of risk to others, and so lose
+every chance of restoring her mind to its healthy tone by kindly
+influences and intercourse with wholesome natures? There was no proof,
+only presumption, as to the agency of Elsie in the matter referred to.
+But the doubt was worse, perhaps, than certainty would have been,--for
+then he would have known what to do.
+
+He took the old Doctor as his adviser. The shrewd old man listened to
+the father's story, his explanations of possibilities, of probabilities,
+of dangers, of hopes. When he had got through, the Doctor looked him in
+the face steadily, as if he were saying, Is that all?
+
+The father's eyes fell. This was not all. There was something at the
+bottom of his soul which he could not bear to speak of,--nay, which, as
+often as it reared itself through the dark waves of unworded
+consciousness into the breathing air of thought, he trod down as the
+ruined angels tread down a lost soul, trying to come up out of the
+seething sea of torture. Only this one daughter! No! God never would
+have ordained such a thing. There was nothing ever heard of like it; it
+could not be; she was ill,--she would outgrow all these singularities; he
+had had an aunt who was peculiar; he had heard that hysteric girls showed
+the strangest forms of moral obliquity for a time, but came right at
+last. She would change all at once, when her health got more firmly
+settled in the course of her growth. Are there not rough buds that open
+into sweet flowers? Are there not fruits, which, while unripe, are not
+to be tasted or endured, which mature into the richest taste and
+fragrance? In God's good time she would come to her true nature; her
+eyes would lose that frightful, cold glitter; her lips would not feel so
+cold when she pressed them against his cheek; and that faint birth-mark,
+her mother swooned when she first saw, would fade wholly out,--it was
+less marked, surely, now than it used to be!
+
+So Dudley Venner felt, and would have thought, if he had let his thoughts
+breathe the air of his soul. But the Doctor read through words and
+thoughts and all into the father's consciousness. There are states of
+mind which may be shared by two persons in presence of each other, which
+remain not only unworded, but unthoughted, if such a word may be coined
+for our special need. Such a mutually interpenetrative consciousness
+there was between the father and the old physician. By a common impulse,
+both of them rose in a mechanical way and went to the western window,
+where each started, as he saw the other's look directed towards the white
+stone which stood in the midst of the small plot of green turf.
+
+The Doctor had, for a moment, forgotten himself but he looked up at the
+clouds, which were angry, and said, as if speaking of the weather, "It is
+dark now, but we hope it will clear up by and by. There are a great many
+more clouds than rains, and more rains than strokes of lightning, and
+more strokes of lightning than there are people killed. We must let this
+girl of ours have her way, as far as it is safe. Send away this woman
+she hates, quietly. Get her a foreigner for a governess, if you
+can,--one that can dance and sing and will teach her. In the house old
+Sophy will watch her best. Out of it you must trust her, I am
+afraid,--for she will not be followed round, and she is in less danger
+than you think. If she wanders at night, find her, if you can; the woods
+are not absolutely safe. If she will be friendly with any young people,
+have them to see her,--young men especially. She will not love any one
+easily, perhaps not at all; yet love would be more like to bring her
+right than anything else. If any young person seems in danger of falling
+in love with her, send him to me for counsel."
+
+Dry, hard advice, but given from a kind hewn, with a moist eye, and in
+tones which tried to be cheerful and were full of sympathy. This advice
+was the key to the more than indulgent treatment which, as we have seen,
+the girl had received from her father and all about her. The old Doctor
+often came in, in the kindest, most natural sort of way, got into
+pleasant relations with Elsie by always treating her in the same easy
+manner as at the great party, encouraging all her harmless fancies, and
+rarely reminding her that he was a professional adviser, except when she
+came out of her own accord, as in the talk they had at the party, telling
+him of some wild trick she had been playing.
+
+"Let her go to the girls' school, by all means," said the Doctor, when
+she had begun to talk about it. "Possibly she may take to some of the
+girls or of the teachers. Anything to interest her. Friendship, love,
+religion, whatever will set her nature at work. We must have headway on,
+or there will be no piloting her. Action first of all, and then we will
+see what to do with it."
+
+So, when Cousin Richard came along, the Doctor, though he did not like
+his looks any too well, told her father to encourage his staying for a
+time. If she liked him, it was good; if she only tolerated him, it was
+better than nothing.
+
+"You know something about that nephew of yours, during these last years,
+I suppose?" the Doctor said. "Looks as if he had seen life. Has a scar
+that was made by a sword-cut, and a white spot on the side of his neck
+that looks like a bullet-mark. I think he has been what folks call a
+'hard customer.'"
+
+Dudley Venner owned that he had heard little or nothing of him of late
+years. He had invited himself, and of course it would not be decent not
+to receive him as a relative. He thought Elsie rather liked having him
+about the house for a while. She was very capricious,--acted as if she
+fancied him one day and disliked him the next. He did not know,--but
+sometimes thought that this nephew of his might take a serious liking to
+Elsie. What should he do about it, if it turned out so?
+
+The Doctor lifted his eyebrows a little. He thought there was no fear.
+Elsie was naturally what they call a man-hater, and there was very little
+danger of any sudden passion springing up between two such young persons.
+Let him stay awhile; it gives her something to think about. So he stayed
+awhile, as we have seen.
+
+The more Mr. Richard became acquainted with the family,--that is, with
+the two persons of whom it consisted,--the more favorably the idea of a
+permanent residence in the mansion-house seemed to impress him. The
+estate was large,--hundreds of acres, with woodlands and meadows of great
+value. The father and daughter had been living quietly, and there could
+not be a doubt that the property which came through the Dudleys must have
+largely increased of late years. It was evident enough that they had an
+abundant income, from the way in which Elsie's caprices were indulged.
+She had horses and carriages to suit herself; she sent to the great city
+for everything she wanted in the way of dress. Even her diamonds--and
+the young man knew something about these gems--must be of considerable
+value; and yet she wore them carelessly, as it pleased her fancy. She
+had precious old laces, too, almost worth their weight in diamonds; laces
+which had been snatched from altars in ancient Spanish cathedrals during
+the wars, and which it would not be safe to leave a duchess alone with
+for ten minutes. The old house was fat with the deposits of rich
+generations which had gone before. The famous "golden" fire-set was a
+purchase of one of the family who had been in France during the
+Revolution, and must have come from a princely palace, if not from one of
+the royal residences. As for silver, the iron closet which had been made
+in the dining-room wall was running over with it: tea-kettles,
+coffee-pots, heavy-lidded tankards, chafing-dishes, punch-bowls, all that
+all the Dudleys had ever used, from the caudle-cup which used to be
+handed round the young mother's chamber, and the porringer from which
+children scooped their bread-and-milk with spoons as solid as ingots, to
+that ominous vessel, on the upper shelf, far back in the dark, with a
+spout like a slender italic S, out of which the sick and dying, all along
+the last century, and since, had taken the last drops that passed their
+lips. Without being much of a scholar, Dick could see well enough, too,
+that the books in the library had been ordered from the great London
+houses, whose imprint they bore, by persons who knew what was best and
+meant to have it. A man does not require much learning to feel pretty
+sure, when he takes one of those solid, smooth, velvet-leaved quartos,
+say a Baskerville Addison, for instance, bound in red morocco, with a
+margin of gold as rich as the embroidery of a prince's collar, as Vandyck
+drew it,--he need not know much to feel pretty sure that a score or two
+of shelves full of such books mean that it took a long purse, as well as
+a literary taste, to bring them together.
+
+To all these attractions the mind of this thoughtful young gentleman may
+be said to have been fully open. He did not disguise from himself,
+however, that there were a number of drawbacks in the way of his becoming
+established as the heir of the Dudley mansion-house and fortune. In the
+first place, Cousin Elsie was, unquestionably, very piquant, very
+handsome, game as a hawk, and hard to please, which made her worth trying
+for. But then there was something about Cousin Elsie,--(the small, white
+scars began stinging, as he said this to himself, and he pushed his
+sleeve up to look at them)--there was something about Cousin Elsie he
+couldn't make out. What was the matter with her eyes, that they sucked
+your life out of you in that strange way? What did she always wear a
+necklace for? Had she some such love-token on her neck as the old Don's
+revolver had left on his? How safe would anybody feel to live with her?
+Besides, her father would last forever, if he was left to himself. And
+he may take it into his head to marry again. That would be pleasant!
+
+So talked Cousin Richard to himself, in the calm of the night and in the
+tranquillity of his own soul. There was much to be said on both sides.
+It was a balance to be struck after the two columns were added up. He
+struck the balance, and came to the conclusion that he would fall in love
+with Elsie Venner.
+
+The intelligent reader will not confound this matured and serious
+intention of falling in love with the young lady with that mere impulse
+of the moment before mentioned as an instance of making love. On the
+contrary, the moment Mr. Richard had made up his mind that he should fall
+in love with Elsie, he began to be more reserved with her, and to try to
+make friends in other quarters. Sensible men, you know, care very little
+what a girl's present fancy is. The question is: Who manages her, and
+how can you get at that person or those persons? Her foolish little
+sentiments are all very well in their way; but business is business, and
+we can't stop for such trifles. The old political wire-pullers never go
+near the man they want to gain, if they can help it; they find out who
+his intimates and managers are, and work through them. Always handle any
+positively electrical body, whether it is charged with passion or power,
+with some non-conductor between you and it, not with your naked hands.
+--The above were some of the young gentleman's working axioms; and he
+proceeded to act in accordance with them.
+
+He began by paying his court more assiduously to his uncle. It was not
+very hard to ingratiate himself in that quarter; for his manners were
+insinuating, and his precocious experience of life made him entertaining.
+The old neglected billiard--room was soon put in order, and Dick, who was
+a magnificent player, had a series of games with his uncle, in which,
+singularly enough, he was beaten, though his antagonist had been out of
+play for years. He evinced a profound interest in the family history,
+insisted on having the details of its early alliances, and professed a
+great pride in it, which he had inherited from his father, who, though he
+had allied himself with the daughter of an alien race, had yet chosen one
+with the real azure blood in her veins, as proud as if she had Castile
+and Aragon for her dower and the Cid for her grand-papa. He also asked a
+great deal of advice, such as inexperienced young persons are in need of,
+and listened to it with due reverence.
+
+It is not very strange that uncle Dudley took a kinder view of his nephew
+than the Judge, who thought he could read a questionable history in his
+face,--or the old Doctor, who knew men's temperaments and organizations
+pretty well, and had his prejudices about races, and could tell an old
+sword-cut and a ballet-mark in two seconds from a scar got by falling
+against the fender, or a mark left by king's evil. He could not be
+expected to share our own prejudices; for he had heard nothing of the
+wild youth's adventures, or his scamper over the Pampas at short notice.
+So, then, "Richard Venner, Esquire, guest of Dudley Venner, Esquire, at
+his elegant mansion," prolonged his visit until his presence became
+something like a matter of habit, and the neighbors began to think that
+the fine old house would be illuminated before long for a grand marriage.
+
+He had done pretty well with the father: the next thing was to gain over
+the nurse. Old Sophy was as cunning as a red fox or a gray woodchuck.
+She had nothing in the world to do but to watch Elsie; she had nothing to
+care for but this girl and her father. She had never liked Dick too
+well; for he used to make faces at her and tease her when he was a boy,
+and now he was a man there was something about him--she could not tell
+what--that made her suspicious of him. It was no small matter to get her
+over to his side.
+
+The jet-black Africans know that gold never looks so well as on the foil
+of their dark skins. Dick found in his trunk a string of gold beads,
+such as are manufactured in some of our cities, which he had brought from
+the gold region of Chili,--so he said,--for the express purpose of giving
+them to old Sophy. These Africans, too, have a perfect passion for
+gay-colored clothing; being condemned by Nature, as it were, to a
+perpetual mourning-suit, they love to enliven it with all sorts of
+variegated stuffs of sprightly patterns, aflame with red and yellow. The
+considerate young man had remembered this, too, and brought home for
+Sophy some handkerchiefs of rainbow hues, which had been strangely
+overlooked till now, at the bottom of one of his trunks. Old Sophy took
+his gifts, but kept her black eyes open and watched every movement of the
+young people all the more closely. It was through her that the father had
+always known most of the actions and tendencies of his daughter.
+
+In the mean time the strange adventure on The Mountain had brought the
+young master into new relations with Elsie. She had led him out of,
+danger; perhaps saved him from death by the strange power she exerted.
+He was grateful, and yet shuddered at the recollection of the whole
+scene. In his dreams he was pursued by the glare of cold glittering
+eyes, whether they were in the head of a woman or of a reptile he could
+not always tell, the images had so run together. But he could not help
+seeing that the eyes of the young girl had been often, very often, turned
+upon him when he had been looking away, and fell as his own glance met
+them. Helen Darley told him very plainly that this girl was thinking
+about him more than about her book. Dick Venner found she was getting
+more constant in her attendance at school. He learned, on inquiry, that
+there was a new master, a handsome young man. The handsome young man
+would not have liked the look that, came over Dick's face when he heard
+this fact mentioned.
+
+In short, everything was getting tangled up together, and there would be
+no chance of disentangling the threads in this chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+PHYSIOLOGICAL.
+
+If Master Bernard felt a natural gratitude to his young pupil for saving
+him from an imminent peril, he was in a state of infinite perplexity to
+know why he should have needed such aid. He, an active, muscular,
+courageous, adventurous young fellow, with--a stick in his hand, ready to
+hold down the Old Serpent himself, if he had come in his way, to stand
+still, staring into those two eyes, until they came up close to him, and
+the strange, terrible sound seemed to freeze him stiff where he
+stood,--what was the meaning of it? Again, what was the influence this
+girl had seemingly exerted, under which the venomous creature had
+collapsed in such a sudden way? Whether he had been awake or dreaming he
+did not feel quite sure. He knew he had gone up The Mountain, at any
+rate; he knew he had come down The Mountain with the girl walking just
+before him;--there was no forgetting her figure, as she walked on in
+silence, her braided locks falling a little, for want of the lost
+hairpin, perhaps, and looking like a wreathing coil of--Shame on such
+fancies!--to wrong that supreme crowning gift of abounding Nature, a rush
+of shining black hair, which, shaken loose, would cloud her all round,
+like Godiva, from brow to instep! He was sure he had sat down before the
+fissure or cave. He was sure that he was led softly away from the place,
+and that it was Elsie who had led him. There was the hair-pin to show
+that so far it was not a dream. But between these recollections came a
+strange confusion; and the more the master thought, the more he was
+perplexed to know whether she had waked him, sleeping, as he sat on the
+stone, from some frightful dream, such as may come in a very brief
+slumber, or whether she had bewitched him into a trance with those
+strange eyes of hers, or whether it was all true, and he must solve its
+problem as he best might.
+
+There was another recollection connected with this mountain adventure.
+As they approached the mansion-house, they met a young man, whom Mr.
+Bernard remembered having seen once at least before, and whom he had
+heard of as a cousin of the young girl. As Cousin Richard Venner, the
+person in question, passed them, he took the measure, so to speak, of Mr.
+Bernard, with a look so piercing, so exhausting, so practised, so
+profoundly suspicious, that the young master felt in an instant that he
+had an enemy in this handsome youth,--an enemy, too, who was like to be
+subtle and dangerous.
+
+Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, that, come what might, enemy or no
+enemy, live or die, he would solve the mystery of Elsie Venner, sooner or
+later. He was not a man to be frightened out of his resolution by a
+scowl, or a stiletto, or any unknown means of mischief, of which a whole
+armory was hinted at in that passing look Dick Venner had given him.
+Indeed, like most adventurous young persons, he found a kind of charm in
+feeling that there might be some dangers in the way of his
+investigations. Some rumors which had reached him about the supposed
+suitor of Elsie Venner, who was thought to be a desperate kind of fellow,
+and whom some believed to be an unscrupulous adventurer, added a curious,
+romantic kind of interest to the course of physiological and
+psychological inquiries he was about instituting.
+
+The afternoon on The Mountain was still upper-most in his mind. Of
+course he knew the common stories--about fascination. He had once been
+himself an eyewitness of the charming of a small bird by one of our
+common harmless serpents. Whether a human being could be reached by this
+subtile agency, he had been skeptical, notwithstanding the mysterious
+relation generally felt to exist between man and this creature, "cursed
+above all cattle and above every beast of the field,"--a relation which
+some interpret as the fruit of the curse, and others hold to be so
+instinctive that this animal has been for that reason adopted as the
+natural symbol of evil. There was another solution, however, supplied
+him by his professional reading. The curious work of Mr. Braid of
+Manchester had made him familiar with the phenomena of a state allied to
+that produced by animal magnetism, and called by that writer by the name
+of hypnotism. He found, by referring to his note-book, the statement
+was, that, by fixing the eyes on a bright object so placed as to produce
+a strain upon the eyes and eyelids, and to maintain a steady fixed stare,
+there comes on in a few seconds a very singular condition, characterized
+by muscular rigidity and inability to move, with a strange exaltation of
+most of the senses, and generally a closure of the eyelids,--this
+condition being followed by torpor.
+
+Now this statement of Mr. Braid's, well known to the scientific world,
+and the truth of which had been confirmed by Mr. Bernard in certain
+experiments he had instituted, as it has been by many other
+experimenters, went far to explain the strange impressions, of which,
+waking or dreaming, he had certainly been the subject. His nervous
+system had been in a high state of exaltation at the time. He remembered
+how the little noises that made rings of sound in the silence of the
+woods, like pebbles dropped in still waters, had reached his inner
+consciousness. He remembered that singular sensation in the roots of the
+hair, when he came on the traces of the girl's presence, reminding him of
+a line in a certain poem which he had read lately with a new and peculiar
+interest. He even recalled a curious evidence of exalted sensibility and
+irritability, in the twitching of the minute muscles of the internal ear
+at every unexpected sound, producing an odd little snap in the middle of
+the head, which proved to him that he was getting very nervous.
+
+The next thing was to find out whether it were possible that the venomous
+creature's eyes should have served the purpose of Mr. Braid's "bright
+object" held very close to the person experimented on, or whether they
+had any special power which could be made the subject of exact
+observation.
+
+For this purpose Mr. Bernard considered it necessary to get a live
+crotalus or two into his possession, if this were possible. On inquiry,
+he found that there was a certain family living far up the mountainside,
+not a mile from the ledge, the members of which were said to have taken
+these creatures occasionally, and not to be in any danger, or at least in
+any fear, of being injured by them. He applied to these people, and
+offered a reward sufficient to set them at work to capture some of these
+animals, if such a thing were possible.
+
+A few days after this, a dark, gypsy-looking woman presented herself at
+his door. She held up her apron as if it contained something precious in
+the bag she made with it.
+
+"Y' wanted some rattlers," said the woman. "Here they be."
+
+She opened her apron and showed a coil of rattlesnakes lying very
+peaceably in its fold. They lifted their heads up, as if they wanted to
+see what was going on, but showed no sign of anger.
+
+"Are you crazy?" said Mr. Bernard. "You're dead in an hour, if one of
+those creatures strikes you!"
+
+He drew back a little, as he spoke; it might be simple disgust; it might
+be fear; it might be what we call antipathy, which is different from
+either, and which will sometimes show itself in paleness, and even
+faintness, produced by objects perfectly harmless and not in themselves
+offensive to any sense.
+
+"Lord bless you," said the woman, "rattlers never touches our folks. I'd
+jest 'z lieves handle them creaturs as so many striped snakes."
+
+So saying, she put their heads down with her hand, and packed them
+together in her apron as if they had been bits of cart-rope.
+
+Mr. Bernard had never heard of the power, or, at least, the belief in the
+possession of a power by certain persons, which enables them to handle
+these frightful reptiles with perfect impunity. The fact, however, is
+well known to others, and more especially to a very distinguished
+Professor in one of the leading institutions of the great city of the
+land, whose experiences in the neighborhood of Graylock, as he will
+doubtless inform the curious, were very much like those of the young
+master.
+
+Mr. Bernard had a wired cage ready for his formidable captives, and
+studied their habits and expression with a strange sort of interest. What
+did the Creator mean to signify, when he made such shapes of horror, and,
+as if he had doubly cursed this envenomed wretch, had set a mark upon him
+and sent him forth the Cain of the brotherhood of serpents? It was a
+very curious fact that the first train of thoughts Mr. Bernard's small
+menagerie suggested to him was the grave, though somewhat worn, subject
+of the origin of evil. There is now to be seen in a tall glass jar, in
+the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Cantabridge in the territory of the
+Massachusetts, a huge crotalus, of a species which grows to more
+frightful dimensions than our own, under the hotter skies of South
+America. Look at it, ye who would know what is the tolerance, the
+freedom from prejudice, which can suffer such an incarnation of all that
+is devilish to lie unharmed in the cradle of Nature! Learn, too, that
+there are many things in this world which we are warned to shun, and are
+even suffered to slay, if need be, but which we must not hate, unless we
+would hate what God loves and cares for.
+
+Whatever fascination the creature might exercise in his native haunts,
+Mr. Bernard found himself not in the least nervous or affected in any way
+while looking at his caged reptiles. When their cage was shaken, they
+would lift their heads and spring their rattles; but the sound was by no
+means so formidable to listen to as when it reverberated among the chasms
+of the echoing rocks. The expression of the creatures was watchful,
+still, grave, passionless, fate-like, suggesting a cold malignity which
+seemed to be waiting for its opportunity. Their awful, deep-cut mouths
+were sternly closed over the long hollow fangs which rested their roots
+against the swollen poison-gland, where the venom had been hoarding up
+ever since the last stroke had emptied it. They never winked, for
+ophidians have no movable eyelids, but kept up that awful fixed stare
+which made the two unwinking gladiators the survivors of twenty pairs
+matched by one of the Roman Emperors, as Pliny tells us, in his "Natural
+History." Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold still light.
+They were of a pale-golden or straw color, horrible to look into, with
+their stony calmness, their pitiless indifference, hardly enlivened by
+the almost imperceptible vertical slit of the pupil, through which Death
+seemed to be looking out like the archer behind the long narrow loop-hole
+in a blank turret-wall. On the whole, the caged reptiles, horrid as they
+were, hardly matched his recollections of what he had seen or dreamed he
+save at the cavern. These looked dangerous enough, but yet quiet. A
+treacherous stillness, however,--as the unfortunate New York physician
+found, when he put his foot out to wake up the torpid creature, and
+instantly the fang flashed through his boot, carrying the poison into his
+blood, and death with it.
+
+Mr. Bernard kept these strange creatures, and watched all their habits
+with a natural curiosity. In any collection of animals the venomous
+beasts are looked at with the greatest interest, just as the greatest
+villains are most run after by the unknown public. Nobody troubles
+himself for a common striped snake or a petty thief, but a cobra or a
+wife-killer is a centre of attraction to all eyes. These captives did
+very little to earn their living, but, on the other hand, their living
+was not expensive, their diet being nothing but air, au naturel. Months
+and months these creatures will live and seem to thrive well enough, as
+any showman who has then in his menagerie will testify, though they never
+touch anything to eat or drink.
+
+In the mean time Mr. Bernard had become very curious about a class of
+subjects not treated of in any detail in those text-books accessible in
+most country-towns, to the exclusion of the more special treatises, and
+especially of the rare and ancient works found on the shelves of the
+larger city-libraries. He was on a visit to old Dr. Kittredge one day,
+having been asked by him to call in for a few moments as soon as
+convenient. The Doctor smiled good-humoredly when he asked him if he had
+an extensive collection of medical works.
+
+"Why, no," said the old Doctor, "I haven't got a great many printed
+books; and what I have I don't read quite as often as I might, I'm
+afraid. I read and studied in the time of it, when I was in the midst of
+the young men who were all at work with their books; but it's a mighty
+hard matter, when you go off alone into the country, to keep up with all
+that's going on in the Societies and the Colleges. I'll tell you, though,
+Mr. Langdon, when a man that's once started right lives among sick folks
+for five-and-thirty years, as I've done, if he has n't got a library of
+five-and-thirty volumes bound up in his head at the end of that time,
+he'd better stop driving round and sell his horse and sulky. I know the
+bigger part of the families within a dozen miles' ride. I know the
+families that have a way of living through everything, and I know the
+other set that have the trick of dying without any kind of reason for it.
+I know the years when the fevers and dysenteries are in earnest, and when
+they're only making believe. I know the folks that think they're dying
+as soon as they're sick, and the folks that never find out they 're sick
+till they're dead. I don't want to undervalue your science, Mr. Langdon.
+There are things I never learned, because they came in after my day, and
+I am very glad to send my patients to those that do know them, when I am
+at fault; but I know these people about here, fathers and mothers, and
+children and grandchildren, so as all the science in the world can't know
+them, without it takes time about it, and sees them grow up and grow old,
+and how the wear and tear of life comes to them. You can't tell a horse
+by driving him once, Mr. Langdon, nor a patient by talking half an hour
+with him."
+
+"Do you know much about the Veneer family?" said Mr. Bernard, in a
+natural way enough, the Doctor's talk having suggested the question.
+
+The Doctor lifted his head with his accustomed movement, so as to command
+the young man through his spectacles.
+
+"I know all the families of this place and its neighborhood," he
+answered.
+
+"We have the young lady studying with us at the Institute," said Mr.
+Bernard.
+
+"I know it," the Doctor answered. "Is she a good scholar?"
+
+All this time the Doctor's eyes were fixed steadily on Mr. Bernard,
+looking through the glasses.
+
+"She is a good scholar enough, but I don't know what to make of her.
+Sometimes I think she is a little out of her head. Her father, I
+believe, is sensible enough;--what sort of a woman was her mother,
+Doctor?--I suppose, of course, you remember all about her?"
+
+"Yes, I knew her mother. She was a very lovely young woman."--The Doctor
+put his hand to his forehead and drew a long breath.--"What is there you
+notice out of the way about Elsie Venner?"
+
+"A good many things," the master answered. "She shuns all the other
+girls. She is getting a strange influence over my fellow-teacher, a
+young lady,--you know Miss Helen Darley, perhaps? I am afraid this girl
+will kill her. I never saw or heard of anything like it, in prose at
+least;--do you remember much of Coleridge's Poems, Doctor?"
+
+The good old Doctor had to plead a negative.
+
+"Well, no matter. Elsie would have been burned for a witch in old times.
+I have seen the girl look at Miss Darley when she had not the least idea
+of it, and all at once I would see her grow pale and moist, and sigh, and
+move round uneasily, and turn towards Elsie, and perhaps get up and go to
+her, or else have slight spasmodic movements that looked like
+hysterics;--do you believe in the evil eye, Doctor?"
+
+"Mr. Langdon," the Doctor said, solemnly, "there are strange things about
+Elsie Veneer,--very strange things. This was what I wanted to speak to
+you about. Let me advise you all to be very patient with the girl, but
+also very careful. Her love is not to be desired, and "--he spoke in a
+lower tone--"her hate is to be dreaded. Do you think she has any special
+fancy for anybody else in the school besides Miss Darley?"
+
+Mr. Bernard could not stand the old Doctor's spectacled eyes without
+betraying a little of the feeling natural to a young man to whom a home
+question involving a possible sentiment is put suddenly.
+
+"I have suspected," he said,--"I have had a kind of feeling--that
+she--Well, come, Doctor,--I don't know that there 's any use in
+disguising the matter,--I have thought Elsie Veneer had rather a fancy
+for somebody else,--I mean myself."
+
+There was something so becoming in the blush with which the young man
+made this confession, and so manly, too, in the tone with which he spoke,
+so remote from any shallow vanity, such as young men who are incapable of
+love are apt to feel, when some loose tendril of a woman's fancy which a
+chance wind has blown against them twines about them for the want of
+anything better, that the old Doctor looked at him admiringly, and could
+not help thinking that it was no wonder any young girl should be pleased
+with him.
+
+"You are a man of nerve, Mr. Langdon?" said the Doctor.
+
+"I thought so till very lately," he replied. "I am not easily
+frightened, but I don't know but I might be bewitched or magnetized, or
+whatever it is when one is tied up and cannot move. I think I can find
+nerve enough, however, if there is any special use you want to put it
+to."
+
+"Let me ask you one more question, Mr. Langdon. Do you find yourself
+disposed to take a special interest in Elsie,--to fall in love with her,
+in a word? Pardon me, for I do not ask from curiosity, but a much more
+serious motive."
+
+"Elsie interests me," said the young man, "interests me strangely. She
+has a wild flavor in her character which is wholly different from that of
+any human creature I ever saw. She has marks of genius, poetic or
+dramatic,--I hardly know which. She read a passage from Keats's 'Lamia'
+the other day, in the schoolroom, in such a way that I declare to you I
+thought some of the girls would faint or go into fits. Miss Darley got
+up and left the room, trembling all over. Then, I pity her, she is so
+lonely. The girls are afraid of her, and she seems to have either a
+dislike or a fear of them. They have all sorts of painful stories about
+her. They give her a name which no human creature ought to bear. They
+say she hides a mark on her neck by always wearing a necklace. She is
+very graceful, you know, and they will have it that she can twist herself
+into all sorts of shapes, or tie herself in a knot, if she wants to.
+There is not one of them that will look her in the eyes. I pity the poor
+girl; but, Doctor, I do not love her. I would risk my life for her, if
+it would do her any good, but it would be in cold blood. If her hand
+touches mine, it is not a thrill of passion I feel running through me,
+but a very different emotion. Oh, Doctor! there must be something in
+that creature's blood which has killed the humanity in her. God only
+knows the cause that has blighted such a soul in so beautiful a body! No,
+Doctor, I do not love the girl."
+
+"Mr. Langdon," said the Doctor, "you are young, and I am old. Let me
+talk to you with an old man's privilege, as an adviser. You have come to
+this country-town without suspicion, and you are moving in the midst of
+perils. There are things which I must not tell you now; but I may warn
+you. Keep your eyes open and your heart shut. If, through pitying that
+girl, you ever come to love her, you are lost. If you deal carelessly
+with her, beware! This is not all. There are other eyes on you beside
+Elsie Venner's. Do you go armed?"
+
+"I do!" said Mr. Bernard,--and he "put his hands up" in the shape of
+fists, in such a way as to show that he was master of the natural weapons
+at any rate.
+
+The Doctor could not help smiling. But his face fell in an instant.
+
+"You may want something more than those tools to work with. Come with me
+into my sanctum."
+
+The Doctor led Mr. Bernard into a small room opening out of the study.
+It was a place such as anybody but a medical man would shiver to enter.
+There was the usual tall box with its bleached, rattling tenant; there
+were jars in rows where "interesting cases" outlived the grief of widows
+and heirs in alcoholic immortality,--for your "preparation-jar" is the
+true "monumentum aere perennius;" there were various semi-possibilities
+of minute dimensions and unpromising developments; there were shining
+instruments of evil aspect, and grim plates on the walls, and on one
+shelf by itself, accursed and apart, coiled in a long cylinder of spirit,
+a huge crotalus, rough-scaled, flatheaded, variegated with dull bands,
+one of which partially encircled the neck like a collar,--an awful wretch
+to look upon, with murder written all over him in horrid hieroglyphics.
+Mr. Bernard's look was riveted on this creature,--not fascinated
+certainly, for its eyes looked like white beads, being clouded by the
+action of the spirits in which it had been long kept,--but fixed by some
+indefinite sense of the renewal of a previous impression;--everybody
+knows the feeling, with its suggestion of some past state of existence.
+There was a scrap of paper on the jar, with something written on it. He
+was reaching up to read it when the Doctor touched him lightly.
+
+"Look here, Mr. Langdon!" he said, with a certain vivacity of manner, as
+if wishing to call away his attention,--"this is my armory."
+
+The Doctor threw open the door of a small cabinet, where were disposed in
+artistic patterns various weapons of offence and defence,--for he was a
+virtuoso in his way, and by the side of the implements of the art of
+healing had pleased himself with displaying a collection of those other
+instruments, the use of which renders the first necessary.
+
+"See which of these weapons you would like best to carry about you," said
+the Doctor.
+
+Mr. Bernard laughed, and looked at the Doctor as if he half doubted
+whether he was in earnest.
+
+"This looks dangerous enough," he said,--"for the man who carries it, at
+least."
+
+He took down one of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a
+traveller may, occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the country.
+The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out several inches,
+so as to look like a skewer.
+
+"This must be a jealous bull-fighter's weapon," he said, and put it back
+in its place.
+
+Then he took down an ancient-looking broad-bladed dagger, with a complex
+aspect about it, as if it had some kind of mechanism connected with it.
+
+"Take care!" said the Doctor; "there is a trick to that dagger."
+
+He took it and touched a spring. The dagger split suddenly into three
+blades, as when one separates the forefinger and the ring-finger from the
+middle one. The outside blades were sharp on their outer edge. The stab
+was to be made with the dagger shut, then the spring touched and the
+split blades withdrawn.
+
+Mr. Bernard replaced it, saying, that it would have served for sidearm to
+old Suwarrow, who told his men to work their bayonets back and forward
+when they pinned a Turk, but to wriggle them about in the wound when they
+stabbed a Frenchman.
+
+"Here," said the Doctor, "this is the thing you want."
+
+He took down a much more modern and familiar implement,--a small,
+beautifully finished revolver.
+
+"I want you to carry this," he said; "and more than that, I want you to
+practise with it often, as for amusement, but so that it maybe seen and
+understood that you are apt to have a pistol about you. Pistol-shooting
+is pleasant sport enough, and there is no reason why you should not
+practise it like other young fellows. And now," the Doctor said, "I have
+one other, weapon to give you."
+
+He took a small piece of parchment and shook a white powder into it from
+one of his medicine-jars. The jar was marked with the name of a mineral
+salt, of a nature to have been serviceable in case of sudden illness in
+the time of the Borgias. The Doctor folded the parchment carefully, and
+marked the Latin name of the powder upon it.
+
+"Here," he said, handing it to Mr. Bernard, "you see what it is, and you
+know what service it can render. Keep these two protectors about your
+person day and night; they will not harm you, and you may want one or the
+other or both before you think of it."
+
+Mr. Bernard thought it was very odd, and not very old-gentlemanlike, to
+be fitting him out for treason, stratagem, and spoils, in this way.
+There was no harm, however, in carrying a doctor's powder in his pocket,
+or in amusing himself with shooting at a mark, as he had often done
+before. If the old gentleman had these fancies, it was as well to humor
+him.
+
+So he thanked old Doctor Kittredge, and shook his hand warmly as he left
+him.
+
+"The fellow's hand did not tremble, nor his color change," the Doctor
+said, as he watched him walking away. "He is one of the right sort."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+EPISTOLARY.
+
+Mr. Langdon to the Professor.
+
+MY DEAR PROFESSOR, You were kind enough to promise me that you would
+assist me in any professional or scientific investigations in which I
+might become engaged. I have of late become deeply interested in a class
+of subjects which present peculiar difficulty, and I must exercise the
+privilege of questioning you on some points upon which I desire
+information I cannot otherwise obtain. I would not trouble you, if I
+could find any person or books competent to enlighten me on some of these
+singular matters which have so excited me. The leading doctor here is a
+shrewd, sensible man, but not versed in the curiosities of medical
+literature.
+
+I proceed, with your leave, to ask a considerable number of
+questions,--hoping to get answers to some of them, at least.
+
+Is there any evidence that human beings can be infected or wrought upon
+by poisons, or otherwise, so that they shall manifest any of the
+peculiarities belonging to beings of a lower nature? Can such
+peculiarities--be transmitted by inheritance? Is there anything to
+countenance the stories, long and widely current, about the "evil eye"?
+or is it a mere fancy that such a power belongs to any human being? Have
+you any personal experience as to the power of fascination said to be
+exercised by certain animals? What can you make of those circumstantial
+statements we have seen in the papers, of children forming mysterious
+friendships with ophidians of different species, sharing their food with
+them, and seeming to be under some subtile influence exercised by those
+creatures? Have you read, critically, Coleridge's poem of "Christabel,"
+and Keats's "Lamia"?--If so, can you understand them, or find any
+physiological foundation for the story of either?
+
+There is another set of questions of a different nature I should like to
+ask, but it is hardly fair to put so many on a single sheet. There is
+one, however, you must answer. Do you think there may be
+predispositions, inherited or ingrafted, but at any rate constitutional,
+which shall take out certain apparently voluntary determinations from the
+control of the will, and leave them as free from moral responsibility as
+the instincts of the lower animals? Do you not think there may be a
+crime which is not a sin?
+
+Pardon me, my dear Sir, for troubling you with such a list of notes of
+interrogation. There are some very strange things going on here in this
+place, country-town as it is. Country-life is apt to be dull; but when
+it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because it gives its whole
+mind to what it is about. These rural sinners make terrible work with
+the middle of the Decalogue, when they get started. However, I hope I
+shall live through my year's school-keeping without catastrophes, though
+there are queer doings about me which puzzle me and might scare some
+people. If anything should happen, you will be one of the first to hear
+of it, no doubt. But I trust not to help out the editors of the
+"Rockland Weekly Universe" with an obituary of the late lamented, who
+signed himself in life--
+
+Your friend and pupil,
+BERNARD C. LANGDON.
+
+
+The Professor to Mr. Langdon.
+
+MY DEAR MR. LANGDON, I do not wonder that you find no answer from your
+country friends to the curious questions you put. They belong to that
+middle region between science and poetry which sensible men, as they are
+called, are very shy of meddling with. Some people think that truth and
+gold are always to be washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion,
+that, unless there are so many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense
+respectively, it does not pay to wash for either, so long as one can find
+anything else to do. I don't doubt there is some truth in the phenomena
+of animal magnetism, for instance; but when you ask me to cradle for it,
+I tell you that the hysteric girls cheat so, and the professionals are
+such a set of pickpockets, that I can do something better than hunt for
+the grains of truth among their tricks and lies. Do you remember what I
+used to say in my lectures?--or were you asleep just then, or cutting
+your initials on the rail? (You see I can ask questions, my young
+friend.) Leverage is everything,--was what I used to say;--don't begin to
+pry till you have got the long arm on your side.
+
+To please you, and satisfy your doubts as far as possible, I have looked
+into the old books,--into Schenckius and Turner and Kenelm. Digby and the
+rest, where I have found plenty of curious stories which you must take
+for what they are worth.
+
+Your first question I can answer in the affirmative upon pretty good
+authority. Mizaldus tells, in his "Memorabilia," the well-known story of
+the girl fed on poisons, who was sent by the king of the Indies to
+Alexander the Great. "When Aristotle saw her eyes sparkling and snapping
+like those of serpents, he said, 'Look out for yourself, Alexander! this
+is a dangerous companion for you!'"--and sure enough, the young lady
+proved to be a very unsafe person to her friends. Cardanus gets a story
+from Avicenna, of a certain man bit by a serpent, who recovered of his
+bite, the snake dying therefrom. This man afterwards had a daughter whom
+venomous serpents could not harm, though she had a fatal power over them.
+
+I suppose you may remember the statements of old authors about
+Zycanthropy, the disease in which men took on the nature and aspect of
+wolves. Actius and Paulus, both men of authority, describe it. Altomaris
+gives a horrid case; and Fincelius mentions one occurring as late as
+1541, the subject of which was captured, still insisting that he was a
+wolf, only that the hair of his hide was turned in! Versipelles, it may
+be remembered, was the Latin name for these "were-wolves."
+
+As for the cases where rabid persons have barked and bit like dogs, there
+are plenty of such on record.
+
+More singular, or at least more rare, is the account given by Andreas
+Baccius, of a man who was struck in the hand by a cock, with his beak,
+and who died on the third day thereafter, looking for all the world like
+a fighting-cock, to the great horror of the spectators.
+
+As to impressions transmitted at a very early period of existence, every
+one knows the story of King James's fear of a naked sword, and the way it
+is accounted for. Sir Kenelm Digby says,--"I remember when he dubbed me
+Knight, in the ceremony of putting the point of a naked sword upon my
+shoulder, he could not endure to look upon it, but turned his face
+another way, insomuch, that, in lieu of touching my shoulder, he had
+almost thrust the point into my eyes, had not the Duke of Buckingham
+guided his hand aright." It is he, too, who tells the story of the
+mulberry mark upon the neck of a certain lady of high condition, which
+"every year, to mulberry season, did swell, grow big, and itch." And
+Gaffarel mentions the case of a girl born with the figure of a fish on
+one of her limbs, of which the wonder was, that, when the girl did eat
+fish, this mark put her to sensible pain. But there is no end to cases
+of this kind, and I could give some of recent date, if necessary, lending
+a certain plausibility at least to the doctrine of transmitted
+impressions.
+
+I never saw a distinct case of evil eye, though I have seen eyes so bad
+that they might produce strange effects on very sensitive natures. But
+the belief in it under various names, fascination, jettcztura, etc., is
+so permanent and universal, from Egypt to Italy, and from the days of
+Solomon to those of Ferdinand of Naples, that there must be some
+peculiarity, to say the least, on which the opinion is based. There is
+very strong evidence that some such power is exercised by certain of the
+lower animals. Thus, it is stated on good authority that "almost every
+animal becomes panic-struck at the sight of the rattlesnake, and seems at
+once deprived of the power of motion, or the exercise of its usual
+instinct of self-preservation." Other serpents seem to share this power
+of fascination, as the Cobra and the Buccephalus Capensis.
+
+Some think that it is nothing but fright; others attribute it to the
+
+ "strange powers that lie
+ Within the magic circle of the eye,"--
+
+as Churchill said, speaking of Garrick.
+
+You ask me about those mysterious and frightful intimacies between
+children and serpents, of which so many instances have been recorded. I
+am sure I cannot tell what to make of them. I have seen several such
+accounts in recent papers, but here is one published in the seventeenth
+century, which is as striking as any of the more modern ones:
+
+"Mr. Herbert Tones of Monmouth, when he was a little Boy, was used to eat
+his Milk in a Garden in the Morning, and was no sooner there, but a large
+Snake always came, and eat out of the Dish with him, and did so for a
+considerable time, till one Morning, he striking the Snake on the Head,
+it hissed at him. Upon which he told his Mother that the Baby (for so he
+call'd it) cry'd Hiss at him. His Mother had it kill'd, which occasioned
+him a great Fit of Sickness, and 'twas thought would have dy'd, but did
+recover."
+
+There was likewise one "William Writtle, condemned at Maidston Assizes
+for a double murder, told a Minister that was with him after he was
+condemned, that his mother told him, that when he was a Child, there
+crept always to him a Snake, wherever she laid him. Sometimes she would
+convey him up Stairs, and leave him never so little, she should be sure
+to find a Snake in the Cradle with him, but never perceived it did him
+any harm."
+
+One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious
+relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the
+influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed to
+produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by Dr.
+Hering at Surinam. There is something frightful in the disposition of
+certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at the eyes of cattle
+without any apparent provocation or other motive. It is natural enough
+that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a
+serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being
+like cow-pox by vaccination.
+
+You know all about the Psylli, or ancient serpent tamers, I suppose.
+Savary gives an account of the modern serpent-tamers in his "Letters on
+Egypt." These modern jugglers are in the habit of making the venomous
+Naja counterfeit death, lying out straight and stiff, changing it into a
+rod, as the ancient magicians did with their serpents, (probably the same
+animal,) in the time of Moses.
+
+I am afraid I cannot throw much light on "Christabel" or "Lamia" by any
+criticism I can offer. Geraldine, in the former, seems to be simply a
+malignant witch-woman with the evil eye, but with no absolute ophidian
+relationship. Lamia is a serpent transformed by magic into a woman. The
+idea of both is mythological, and not in any sense physiological. Some
+women unquestionably suggest the image of serpents; men rarely or never.
+I have been struck, like many others, with the ophidian head and eye of
+the famous Rachel.
+
+Your question about inherited predispositions, as limiting the sphere of
+the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a very wide
+range of speculation. I can give you only a brief abstract of my own
+opinions on this delicate and difficult subject. Crime and sin, being
+the preserves of two great organized interests, have been guarded against
+all reforming poachers with as great jealousy as the Royal Forests. It
+is so easy to hang a troublesome fellow! It is so much simpler to
+consign a soul to perdition, or say masses, for money, to save it, than
+to take the blame on ourselves for letting it grow up in neglect and run
+to ruin for want of humanizing influences! They hung poor, crazy
+Bellingham for shooting Mr. Perceval. The ordinary of Newgate preached
+to women who were to swing at Tyburn for a petty theft as if they were
+worse than other people,--just as though he would not have been a
+pickpocket or shoplifter, himself, if he had been born in a den of
+thieves and bred up to steal or starve! The English law never began to
+get hold of the idea that a crime was not necessarily a sin, till
+Hadfield, who thought he was the Saviour of mankind, was tried for
+shooting at George the Third;--lucky for him that he did not hit his
+Majesty!
+
+It is very singular that we recognize all the bodily defects that unfit a
+man for military service, and all the intellectual ones that limit his
+range of thought, but always talk at him as if all his moral powers were
+perfect. I suppose we must punish evil-doers as we extirpate vermin; but
+I don't know that we have any more right to judge them than we have to
+judge rats and mice, which are just as good as cats and weasels, though
+we think it necessary to treat them as criminals.
+
+The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly studied,
+unless it be by the phrenologists. You know from my lectures that I
+consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a branch of
+positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense debt. It has
+melted the world's conscience in its crucible, and cast it in a new
+mould, with features less like those of Moloch and more like those of
+humanity. If it has failed to demonstrate its system of special
+correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed relations between
+organization and mind and character. It has brought out that great
+doctrine of moral insanity, which has done more to make men charitable
+and soften legal and theological barbarism than any one doctrine that I
+can think of since the message of peace and good-will to men.
+
+Automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems to
+be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such
+(metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries: until somebody
+shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action in
+the bodily system, I would not give much for men's judgments of each
+others' characters. Shut up the robber and the defaulter, we must. But
+what if your oldest boy had been stolen from his cradle and bred in a
+North-Street cellar? What if you are drinking a little too much wine and
+smoking a little too much tobacco, and your son takes after you, and so
+your poor grandson's brain being a little injured in physical texture, he
+loses the fine moral sense on which you pride yourself, and doesn't see
+the difference between signing another man's name to a draft and his own?
+
+I suppose the study of automatic action in the moral world (you see what
+I mean through the apparent contradiction of terms) may be a dangerous
+one in the view of many people. It is liable to abuse, no doubt. People
+are always glad to, get hold of anything which limits their
+responsibility. But remember that our moral estimates come down to us
+from ancestors who hanged children for stealing forty shillings' worth,
+and sent their souls to perdition for the sin of being born,--who
+punished the unfortunate families of suicides, and in their eagerness for
+justice executed one innocent person every three years, on the average,
+as Sir James Mackintosh tells us.
+
+I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself to
+you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will find it a
+good one. Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane. They are
+in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to sound minds,
+is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless administered with the
+greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid collision with them, so far
+as you honorably can; keep your temper, if you can,--for one angry man is
+as good as another; restrain them from violence, promptly, completely,
+and with the least possible injury, just as in the case of maniacs,--and
+when you have got rid of them, or got them tied hand and foot so that
+they can do no mischief, sit down and contemplate them charitably,
+remembering that nine tenths of their' perversity comes from outside
+influences, drunken ancestors, abuse in childhood, bad company, from
+which you have happily been preserved, and for some of which you, as a
+member of society, may be fractionally responsible. I think also that
+there are special influences which work in the brood lake ferments, and I
+have a suspicion that some of those curious old stories I cited may have
+more recent parallels. Have you ever met with any cases which admitted
+of a solution like that which I have mentioned?
+
+Yours very truly,
+_____________ _____________
+
+ Bernard Langdon to Philip Staples.
+MY DEAR PHILIP,--
+
+I have been for some months established in this place, turning the main
+crank of the machinery for the manufactory of accomplishments
+superintended by, or rather worked to the profit of, a certain Mr. Silas
+Peckham. He is a poor wretch, with a little thin fishy blood in his
+body, lean and flat, long-armed and large-handed, thick-jointed and
+thin-muscled,--you know those unwholesome, weak-eyed, half-fed creatures,
+that look not fit to be round among live folks, and yet not quite dead
+enough to bury. If you ever hear of my being in court to answer to a
+charge of assault and battery, you may guess that I have been giving him
+a thrashing to settle off old scores; for he is a tyrant, and has come
+pretty near killing his principal lady-assistant with overworking her and
+keeping her out of all decent privileges.
+
+Helen Darley is this lady's name,--twenty two or three years old, I
+should think,--a very sweet, pale woman,--daughter of the usual
+country-clergyman,--thrown on her own resources from an early age, and
+the rest: a common story, but an uncommon person,--very. All conscience
+and sensibility, I should say,--a cruel worker,--no kind of regard for
+herself, seems as fragile and supple as a young willow-shoot, but try her
+and you find she has the spring in her of a steel cross-bow. I am glad I
+happened to come to this place, if it were only for her sake. I have
+saved that girl's life; I am as sure of it as if I had pulled her out of
+the fire or water.
+
+Of course I'm in love with her, you say,--we always love those whom we
+have benefited; "saved her life,--her love was the reward of his
+devotion," etc., etc., as in a regular set novel. In love, Philip? Well,
+about that,--I love Helen Darley--very much: there is hardly anybody I
+love so well. What a noble creature she is! One of those that just go
+right on, do their own work and everybody else's, killing themselves inch
+by inch without ever thinking about it,--singing and dancing at their
+toil when they begin, worn and saddened after a while, but pressing
+steadily on, tottering by and by, and catching at the rail by the
+way-side to help them lift one foot before the other, and at last
+falling, face down, arms stretched forward.
+
+Philip, my boy, do you know I am the sort of man that locks his door
+sometimes and cries his heart out of his eyes,--that can sob like a woman
+and not be ashamed of it? I come of fighting-blood on one side, you
+know; I think I could be savage on occasion. But I am tender,--more and
+more tender as I come into my fulness of manhood. I don't like to strike
+a man, (laugh, if you like,--I know I hit hard when I do strike,)--but
+what I can't stand is the sight of these poor, patient, toiling women,
+who never find out in this life how good they are, and never know what it
+is to be told they are angels while they still wear the pleasing
+incumbrances of humanity. I don't know what to make of these cases. To
+think that a woman is never to be a woman again, whatever she may come to
+as an unsexed angel,--and that she should die unloved! Why does not
+somebody come and carry off this noble woman, waiting here all ready to
+make a man happy? Philip, do you know the pathos there is in the eyes of
+unsought women, oppressed with the burden of an inner life unshared? I
+can see into them now as I could not in those 'earlier days. I sometimes
+think their pupils dilate on purpose to let my consciousness glide
+through them; indeed, I dread them, I come so close to the nerve of the
+soul itself in these momentary intimacies. You used to tell me I was a
+Turk,--that my heart was full of pigeon-holes, with accommodations inside
+for a whole flock of doves. I don't know but I am still as Youngish as
+ever in my ways,--Brigham-Youngish, I mean; at any rate, T. always want
+to give a little love to all the poor things that cannot have a whole man
+to themselves. If they would only be contented with a little!
+
+Here now are two girls in this school where I am teaching. One of them,
+Rosa M., is not more than sixteen years old, I think they say; but Nature
+has forced her into a tropical luxuriance of beauty, as if it were July
+with her, instead of May. I suppose it is all natural enough that this
+girl should like a young man's attention, even if he were a grave
+schoolmaster; but the eloquence of this young thing's look is
+unmistakable,--and yet she does not know the language it is
+talking,--they none of them do; and there is where a good many poor
+creatures of our good-for-nothing sex are mistaken. There is no danger
+of my being rash, but I think this girl will cost somebody his life yet.
+She is one of those women men make a quarrel about and fight to the death
+for,--the old feral instinct, you know.
+
+Pray, don't think I am lost in conceit, but there is another girl here
+who I begin to think looks with a certain kindness on me. Her name is
+Elsie V., and she is the only daughter and heiress of an old family in
+this place. She is a portentous and almost fearful creature. If I
+should tell you all I know and half of what I fancy about her, you would
+tell me to get my life insured at once. Yet she is the most painfully
+interesting being,--so handsome! so lonely!--for she has no friends
+among the girls, and sits apart from them,--with black hair like the
+flow of a mountain-brook after a thaw, with a low-browed, scowling beauty
+of face, and such eyes as were never seen before, I really believe, in
+any human creature.
+
+Philip, I don't know what to say about this Elsie. There is something
+about her I have not fathomed. I have conjectures which I could not
+utter to any living soul. I dare not even hint the possibilities which
+have suggested themselves to me. This I will say, that I do take the
+most intense interest in this young person, an interest much more like
+pity than love in its common sense. If what I guess at is true, of all
+the tragedies of existence I ever knew this is the saddest, and yet so
+full of meaning! Do not ask me any questions,--I have said more than I
+meant to already; but I am involved in strange doubts and
+perplexities,--in dangers too, very possibly,--and it is a relief just to
+speak ever so guardedly of them to an early and faithful friend.
+
+Yours ever, BERNARD.
+
+P. S. I remember you had a copy of Fortunius Licetus' "De Monstris"
+among your old books. Can't you lend it to me for a while? I am
+curious, and it will amuse me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+OLD SOPHY CALLS ON THE REVEREND DOCTOR.
+
+The two meeting-houses which faced each other like a pair of
+fighting-cocks had not flapped their wings or crowed at each other for a
+considerable time. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather had been dyspeptic and
+low-spirited of late, and was too languid for controversy. The Reverend
+Doctor Honeywood had been very busy with his benevolent associations, and
+had discoursed chiefly on practical matters, to the neglect of special
+doctrinal subjects. His senior deacon ventured to say to him that some
+of his people required to be reminded of the great fundamental doctrine
+of the worthlessness of all human efforts and motives. Some of them were
+altogether too much pleased with the success of the Temperance Society
+and the Association for the Relief of the Poor. There was a pestilent
+heresy about, concerning the satisfaction to be derived from a good
+conscience, as if, anybody ever did anything which was not to be hated,
+loathed, despised, and condemned.
+
+The old minister listened gravely, with an inward smile, and told his
+deacon that he would attend to his suggestion. After the deacon had
+gone, he tumbled over his manuscripts, until at length he came upon his
+first-rate old sermon on "Human Nature." He had read a great deal of
+hard theology, and had at last reached that curious state which is so
+common in good ministers,--that, namely, in which they contrive to switch
+off their logical faculties on the narrow sidetrack of their technical
+dogmas, while the great freight-train of their substantial human
+qualities keeps in the main highway of common-sense, in which kindly
+souls are always found by all who approach them by their human side.
+
+The Doctor read his sermon with a pleasant, paternal interest: it was
+well argued from his premises. Here and there he dashed his pen through
+a harsh expression. Now and then he added an explanation or qualified
+abroad statement. But his mind was on the logical side-track, and he
+followed the chain of reasoning without fairly perceiving where it would
+lead him, if he carried it into real life.
+
+He was just touching up the final proposition, when his granddaughter,
+Letty, once before referred to, came into the room with her smiling face
+and lively movement. Miss Letty or Letitia Forrester was a city-bred
+girl of some fifteen or sixteen years old, who was passing the summer
+with her grandfather for the sake of country air and quiet. It was a
+sensible arrangement; for, having the promise of figuring as a belle by
+and by, and being a little given to dancing, and having a voice which
+drew a pretty dense circle around the piano when she sat down to play and
+sing, it was hard to keep her from being carried into society before her
+time, by the mere force of mutual attraction. Fortunately, she had some
+quiet as well as some social tastes, and was willing enough to pass two
+or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much better
+bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places where
+so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of
+self-consciousness.
+
+Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a young
+girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic pattern
+which is the classical type of certain excellent young females, often the
+subjects of biographical memoirs. But the old minister was proud of his
+granddaughter for all that. She was so full of life, so graceful, so
+generous, so vivacious, so ready always to do all she could for him and
+for everybody, so perfectly frank in her avowed delight in the pleasures
+which this miserable world offered her in the shape of natural beauty, of
+poetry, of music, of companionship, of books, of cheerful cooperation in
+the tasks of those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not find it
+in his heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those particular
+graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes noticed in
+feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases which
+impaired their vivacity and removed them from the range of temptation.
+
+When Letty, therefore, came bounding into the old minister's study, he
+glanced up from his manuscript, and, as his eye fell upon her, it flashed
+across him that there was nothing so very monstrous and unnatural about
+the specimen of congenital perversion he was looking at, with his
+features opening into their pleasantest sunshine. Technically, according
+to the fifth proposition of the sermon on Human Nature, very bad, no
+doubt. Practically, according to the fact before him, a very pretty
+piece of the Creator's handiwork, body and soul. Was it not a
+conceivable thing that the divine grace might show itself in different
+forms in a fresh young girl like Letitia, and in that poor thing he had
+visited yesterday, half-grown, half-colored, in bed for the last year
+with hip-disease?
+
+Was it to be supposed that this healthy young girl, with life throbbing
+all over her, could, without a miracle, be good according to the invalid
+pattern and formula?
+
+And yet there were mysteries in human nature which pointed to some
+tremendous perversion of its tendencies,--to some profound, radical vice
+of moral constitution, native or transmitted, as you will have it, but
+positive, at any rate, as the leprosy, breaking out in the blood of
+races, guard them ever so carefully. Did he not know the case of a young
+lady in Rockland, daughter of one of the first families in the place, a
+very beautiful and noble creature to look at, for whose bringing up
+nothing had been spared,--a girl who had had governesses to teach her at
+the house, who had been indulged almost too kindly,--a girl whose father
+had given himself, up to her, he being himself a pure and high-souled
+man?--and yet this girl was accused in whispers of having been on the
+very verge of committing a fatal crime; she was an object of fear to all
+who knew the dark hints which had been let fall about her, and there were
+some that believed--Why, what was this but an instance of the total
+obliquity and degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it
+be owing, but to an innate organic tendency?
+
+"Busy, grandpapa?" said Letty, and without waiting for an answer kissed
+his cheek with a pair of lips made on purpose for that little
+function,--fine, but richly turned out, the corners tucked in with a
+finish of pretty dimples, the rose-bud lips of girlhood's June.
+
+The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter. Nature swelled up from
+his heart in a wave that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle to his
+eye. But it is very hard to be interrupted just as we are winding up a
+string of propositions with the grand conclusion which is the statement
+in brief of all that has gone before: our own starting-point, into which
+we have been trying to back our reader or listener as one backs a, horse
+into the shafts.
+
+"Video meliora, proboque,--I see the better, and approve it; deteriora
+sequor, I follow after the worse; 't is that natural dislike to what is
+good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted selfishness, totally insensible
+to the claims of"--
+
+Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss Letty.
+
+"Do come, if you can, grandpapa," said the young girl; "here is a poor
+old black woman wants to see you so much!"
+
+The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the
+dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so
+much of the world's life and happiness. "With the heart man believeth
+unto righteousness;" a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good
+or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special
+beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with
+Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all, the patterns of
+all earth's thousand tribes!
+
+The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden on
+it. He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young girl's
+face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that she was a
+little angel,--which was in violent contradiction to the leading doctrine
+of his sermon on Human Nature. And so he followed her out of the study
+into the wide entry of the old-fashioned country-house.
+
+An old black woman sat on the plain oaken settle which humble visitors
+waiting to see the minister were wont to occupy. She was old, but how
+old it would be very hard to guess. She might be seventy. She might be
+ninety. One could not swear she was not a hundred. Black women remain
+at a stationary age (to the eyes of white people, at least) for thirty
+years. They do not appear to change during this period any more than so
+many Trenton trilobites. Bent up, wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long
+upper-lip, projecting jaws, retreating chin, still meek features, long
+arms, large flat hands with uncolored palms and slightly webbed fingers,
+it was impossible not to see in this old creature a hint of the
+gradations by which life climbs up through the lower natures to the
+highest human developments. We cannot tell such old women's ages because
+we do not understand the physiognomy of a race so unlike our own. No
+doubt they see a great deal in each other's faces that we
+cannot,--changes of color and expression as real as our own, blushes and
+sudden betrayals of feeling,--just as these two canaries know what their
+single notes and short sentences and full song with this or that
+variation mean, though it is a mystery to us unplumed mortals.
+
+This particular old black woman was a striking specimen of her class. Old
+as she looked, her eye was bright and knowing. She wore a red-and-yellow
+turban, which set off her complexion well, and hoops of gold in her ears,
+and beads of gold about her neck, and an old funeral ring upon her
+finger. She had that touching stillness about her which belongs to
+animals that wait to be spoken to and then look up with a kind of sad
+humility.
+
+"Why, Sophy!" said the good minister, "is this you?"
+
+She looked up with the still expression on her face. "It's ol' Sophy,"
+she said.
+
+"Why," said the Doctor, "I did not believe you could walk so far as this
+to save the Union. Bring Sophy a glass of wine, Letty. Wine's good for
+old folks like Sophy and me, after walking a good way, or preaching a
+good while."
+
+The young girl stepped into the back-parlor, where she found the great
+pewter flagon in which the wine that was left after each
+communion-service was brought to the minister's house. With much toil
+she managed to tip it so as to get a couple of glasses filled. The
+minister tasted his, and made old Sophy finish hers.
+
+"I wan' to see you 'n' talk wi' you all alone," she said presently.
+
+The minister got up and led the way towards his study. "To be sure," he
+said; he had only waited for her to rest a moment before he asked her
+into the library. The young girl took her gently by the arm, and helped
+her feeble steps along the passage. When they reached the study, she
+smoothed the cushion of a rocking-chair, and made the old woman sit down
+in it. Then she tripped lightly away, and left her alone with the
+minister.
+
+Old Sophy was a member of the Reverend Doctor Honeywood's church. She had
+been put through the necessary confessions in a tolerably satisfactory
+manner. To be sure, as her grandfather had been a cannibal chief,
+according to the common story, and, at any rate, a terrible wild savage,
+and as her mother retained to the last some of the prejudices of her
+early education, there was a heathen flavor in her Christianity which had
+often scandalized the elder of the minister's two deacons. But, the good
+minister had smoothed matters over: had explained that allowances were to
+be made for those who had been long sitting without the gate of
+Zion,--that, no doubt, a part of the curse which descended to the
+children of Ham consisted in "having the understanding darkened," as well
+as the skin,--and so had brought his suspicious senior deacon to tolerate
+old Sophy as one of the communion of fellow-sinners.
+
+--Poor things! How little we know the simple notions with which these
+rudiments of souls are nourished by the Divine Goodness! Did not Mrs.
+Professor come home this very blessed morning with a story of one of her
+old black women?
+
+"And how do you feel to-day, Mrs. Robinson?"
+
+"Oh, my dear, I have this singing in my head all the time." (What
+doctors call tinnitus aurium.)
+
+"She 's got a cold in the head," said old Mrs. Rider.
+
+"Oh, no, my dear! Whatever I'm thinking about, it's all this singing,
+this music. When I'm thinking of the dear Redeemer, it all turns into
+this singing and music. When the clark came to see me, I asked him if he
+couldn't cure me, and he said, No,--it was the Holy Spirit in me, singing
+to me; and all the time I hear this beautiful music, and it's the Holy
+Spirit a-singing to me."
+
+The good man waited for Sophy to speak; but she did not open her lips as
+yet.
+
+"I hope you are not troubled in mind or body," he said to her at length,
+finding she did not speak.
+
+The poor old woman took out a white handkerchief, and lifted it--to her
+black face. She could not say a word for her tears and sobs.
+
+The minister would have consoled her; he was used to tears, and could in
+most cases withstand their contagion manfully; but something choked his
+voice suddenly, and when he called upon it, he got no answer, but a
+tremulous movement of the muscles, which was worse than silence.
+
+At last she spoke.
+
+"Oh, no, no, no! It's my poor girl, my darling, my beauty, my baby, that
+'s grown up to be a woman; she will come to a bad end; she will do
+something that will make them kill her or shut her up all her life. Or,
+Doctor, Doctor, save her, pray for her! It a'n't her fault. It a'n't
+her fault. If they knew all that I know, they would n' blame that poor
+child. I must tell you, Doctor: if I should die, perhaps nobody else
+would tell you. Massa Veneer can't talk about it. Doctor Kittredge
+won't talk about it. Nobody but old Sophy to tell you, Doctor; and old
+Sophy can't die without telling you."
+
+The kind minister soothed the poor old soul with those gentle, quieting
+tones which had carried peace and comfort to so many chambers of sickness
+and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened by the trials laid upon them.
+
+Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and proceeded to tell her story.
+She told it in the low half-whisper which is the natural voice of lips
+oppressed wish grief and fears; with quick glances around the apartment
+from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the dim portraits on the walls
+and the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her words.
+
+It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report
+minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers of
+stories made out of authors' brains. Yet its main character can be
+imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to give
+all its details.
+
+She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,--she being
+then a middle-aged woman. The heir and hope of a family which had been
+narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been surrounded with
+every care and trained by the best education he could have in New
+England. He had left college, and was studying the profession which
+gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he fell in love with a young girl
+left in the world almost alone, as he was. The old woman told the story
+of his young love and his joyous bridal with a tenderness which had
+something more, even, than her family sympathies to account for it. Had
+she not hanging over her bed a paper-cutting of a profile,--jet black,
+but not blacker than the face it represented--of one who would have been
+her own husband in the small years of this century, if the vessel in
+which he went to sea, like Jamie in the ballad, had not sailed away and
+never come back to land? Had she not her bits of furniture stowed away
+which had been got ready for her own wedding,--two rocking-chairs, one
+worn with long use, one kept for him so long that it had grown a
+superstition with her never to sit in it,--and might he not come back
+yet, after all? Had she not her chest of linen ready for her humble
+house-keeping with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of neatly
+folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against her
+black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in "the
+presence"?
+
+All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet
+dwelling upon every incident with a loving pleasure. How happy this
+young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they had
+formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young and fresh
+and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early summer when they
+walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in the
+garden,--she told of this as loath to leave it and come to the woe that
+lay beneath.
+
+She told the whole story;-shall I repeat it? Not now. If, in the course
+of relating the incidents I have undertaken to report, it tells itself,
+perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of producing a painful
+impression on some of those susceptible readers whom it would be
+ill-advised to disturb or excite, when they rather require to be amused
+and soothed. In our pictures of life, we must show the flowering-out of
+terrible growths which have their roots deep, deep underground. Just how
+far we shall lay bare the unseemly roots themselves is a matter of
+discretion and taste, and which none of us are infallible.
+
+The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her
+peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and
+hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development.
+She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when she first tried to
+crawl across the carpet, and her father's look as she worked her way
+towards him. With the memory of Juliet's nurse she told the story of her
+teething, and how, the woman to whose breast she had clung dying suddenly
+about that time, they had to struggle hard with the child before she
+would learn the accomplishment of feeding with a spoon. And so of her
+fierce plays and fiercer disputes with that boy who had been her
+companion, and the whole scene of the quarrel when she struck him with
+those sharp white teeth, frightening her, old Sophy, almost to death;
+for, as she said, the boy would have died, if it hadn't been for the old
+Doctor's galloping over as fast as he could gallop and burning the places
+right out of his arm. Then came the story of that other incident,
+sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such an ecstasy of
+fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the household. And so
+the old woman came down to this present time. That boy she never loved
+nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man, and he was under
+their roof. He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and Elsie hated him, and
+sometimes she would look at him over her shoulder just as she used to
+look at that woman she hated; and she, old Sophy, couldn't sleep for
+thinking she should hear a scream from the white chamber some night and
+find him in spasms such as that woman came so near dying with. And then
+there was something about Elsie she did not know what to make of: she
+would sit and hang her head sometimes, and look as if she were dreaming;
+and she brought home books they said a young gentleman up at the great
+school lent her; and once she heard her whisper in her sleep, and she
+talked as young girls do to themselves when they're thinking about
+somebody they have a liking for and think nobody knows it.
+
+She finished her long story at last. The minister had listened to it in
+perfect silence. He sat still even when she had done speaking,--still,
+and lost in thought. It was a very awkward matter for him to have a hand
+in. Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Veneers had a pew in the
+Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house. It would seem that he, Mr.
+Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most interested. Had
+he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people? Was there enough
+capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature to furnish sympathy
+and unshrinking service for his friends in an emergency? or was he too
+busy with his own attacks of spiritual neuralgia, and too much occupied
+with taking account of stock of his own thin-blooded offences, to forget
+himself and his personal interests on the small scale and the large, and
+run a risk of his life, if need were, at any rate give himself up without
+reserve to the dangerous task of guiding and counselling these distressed
+and imperilled fellow-creatures?
+
+The good minister thought the best thing to do would be to call and talk
+over some of these matters with Brother Fairweather,--for so he would
+call him at times, especially if his senior deacon were not within
+earshot. Having settled this point, he comforted Sophy with a few words
+of counsel and a promise of coming to see her very soon. He then called
+his man to put the old white horse into the chaise and drive Sophy back
+to the mansion-house.
+
+When the Doctor sat down to his sermon again, it looked very differently
+from the way it had looked at the moment he left it. When he came to
+think of it, he did not feel quite so sure practically about that matter
+of the utter natural selfishness of everybody. There was Letty, now,
+seemed to take a very unselfish interest in that old black woman, and
+indeed in poor people generally; perhaps it would not be too much to say
+that she was always thinking of other people. He thought he had seen
+other young persons naturally unselfish, thoughtful for others; it seemed
+to be a family trait in some he had known.
+
+But most of all he was exercised about this poor girl whose story Sophy
+had been telling. If what the old woman believed was true,--and it had
+too much semblance of probability,--what became of his theory of
+ingrained moral obliquity applied to such a case? If by the visitation
+of God a person receives any injury which impairs the intellect or the
+moral perceptions, is it not monstrous to judge such a person by our
+common working standards of right and wrong? Certainly, everybody will
+answer, in cases where there is a palpable organic change brought about,
+as when a blow on the head produces insanity. Fools! How long will it
+be before we shall learn that for every wound which betrays itself to the
+sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations that cripple,
+each of them, some one or more of our highest faculties? If what Sophy
+told and believed was the real truth, what prayers could be agonizing
+enough, what tenderness could be deep enough, for this poor, lost,
+blighted, hapless, blameless child of misfortune, struck by such a doom
+as perhaps no living creature in all the sisterhood of humanity shared
+with her?
+
+The minister thought these matters over until his mind was bewildered
+with doubts and tossed to and fro on that stormy deep of thought heaving
+forever beneath the conflict of windy dogmas. He laid by his old sermon.
+He put back a pile of old commentators with their eyes and mouths and
+hearts full of the dust of the schools. Then he opened the book of
+Genesis at the eighteenth chapter and read that remarkable argument of
+Abraham's with his Maker in which he boldly appeals to first principles.
+He took as his text, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" and
+began to write his sermon, afterwards so famous, "On the Obligations of
+an Infinite Creator to a Finite Creature."
+
+It astonished the good people, who had been accustomed so long to repeat
+mechanically their Oriental hyperboles of self-abasement, to hear their
+worthy minister maintaining that the dignified attitude of the old
+Patriarch, insisting on what was reasonable and fair with reference to
+his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful to his Maker, and a
+great deal manlier and more to his credit, than if he had yielded the
+whole matter, and pretended that men had not rights as well as duties.
+The same logic which had carried him to certain conclusions with
+reference to human nature, this same irresistible logic carried him
+straight on from his text until he arrived at those other results, which
+not only astonished his people, as was said, but surprised himself. He
+went so far in defence of the rights of man, that he put his foot into
+several heresies, for which men had been burned so often, it was time, if
+ever it could be, to acknowledge the demonstration of the argumentum ad
+ignem. He did not believe in the responsibility of idiots. He did not
+believe a new-born infant was morally answerable for other people's acts.
+He thought a man with a crooked spine would never be called to account
+for not walking erect. He thought if the crook was in his brain, instead
+of his back, he could not fairly be blamed for any consequence of this
+natural defect, whatever lawyers or divines might call it. He argued,
+that, if a person inherited a perfect mind, body, and disposition, and
+had perfect teaching from infancy, that person could do nothing more than
+keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing that the Creator allows a
+person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted organic tendency, and
+then puts this person into the hands of teachers incompetent or
+positively bad, is not what is called sin or transgression of the law
+necessarily involved in the premises? Is not a Creator bound to guard
+his children against the ruin which inherited ignorance might entail on
+them? Would it be fair for a parent to put into a child's hands the
+title-deeds to all its future possessions, and a bunch of matches? And
+are not men children, nay, babes, in the eye of Omniscience?--The
+minister grew bold in his questions. Had not he as good right to ask
+questions as Abraham?
+
+This was the dangerous vein of speculation in which the Reverend Doctor
+Honeywood found himself involved, as a consequence of the suggestions
+forced upon him by old Sophy's communication. The truth was, the good
+man had got so humanized by mixing up with other people in various
+benevolent schemes, that, the very moment he could escape from his old
+scholastic abstractions, he took the side of humanity instinctively, just
+as the Father of the Faithful did,--all honor be to the noble old
+Patriarch for insisting on the worth of an honest man, and making the
+best terms he could for a very ill-conditioned metropolis, which might
+possibly, however, have contained ten righteous people, for whose sake it
+should be spared!
+
+The consequence of all this was, that he was in a singular and seemingly
+self-contradictory state of mind when he took his hat and cane and went
+forth to call on his heretical brother. The old minister took it for
+granted that the Reverend Mr. Fairweather knew the private history of his
+parishioner's family. He did not reflect that there are griefs men never
+put into words,--that there are fears which must not be spoken,--intimate
+matters of consciousness which must be carried, as bullets which have
+been driven deep into the living tissues are sometimes carried, for a
+whole lifetime,--encysted griefs, if we may borrow the chirurgeon's term,
+never to be reached, never to be seen, never to be thrown out, but to go
+into the dust with the frame that bore them about with it, during long
+years of anguish, known only to the sufferer and his Maker. Dudley
+Venner had talked with his minister about this child of his. But he had
+talked cautiously, feeling his way for sympathy, looking out for those
+indications of tact and judgment which would warrant him in some partial
+communication, at least, of the origin of his doubts and fears, and never
+finding them.
+
+There was something about the Reverend Mr. Fairweather which repressed
+all attempts at confidential intercourse. What this something was,
+Dudley Venner could hardly say; but he felt it distinctly, and it sealed
+his lips. He never got beyond certain generalities connected with
+education and religious instruction. The minister could not help
+discovering, however, that there were difficulties connected with this
+girl's management, and he heard enough outside of the family to convince
+him that she had manifested tendencies, from an early age, at variance
+with the theoretical opinions he was in the habit of preaching, and in a
+dim way of holding for truth, as to the natural dispositions of the human
+being.
+
+About this terrible fact of congenital obliquity his new beliefs began to
+cluster as a centre, and to take form as a crystal around its nucleus.
+Still, he might perhaps have struggled against them, had it not been for
+the little Roman Catholic chapel he passed every Sunday, on his way to
+the meeting-house. Such a crowd of worshippers, swarming into the pews
+like bees, filling all the aisles, running over at the door like berries
+heaped too full in the measure,--some kneeling on the steps, some
+standing on the sidewalk, hats off, heads down, lips moving, some looking
+on devoutly from the other side of the street! Oh, could he have
+followed his own Bridget, maid of all work, into the heart of that
+steaming throng, and bowed his head while the priests intoned their Latin
+prayers! could he have snuffed up the cloud of frankincense, and felt
+that he was in the great ark which holds the better half of the Christian
+world, while all around it are wretched creatures, some struggling
+against the waves in leaky boats, and some on ill-connected rafts, and
+some with their heads just above water, thinking to ride out the flood
+which is to sweep the earth clean of sinners, upon their own private,
+individual life-preservers!
+
+Such was the present state of mind of the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather,
+when his clerical brother called upon him to talk over the questions to
+which old Sophy had called his attention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE REVEREND DOCTOR CALLS ON BROTHER FAIRWEATHER.
+
+For the last few months, while all these various matters were going on in
+Rockland, the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had been busy with the records
+of ancient councils and the writings of the early fathers. The more he
+read, the more discontented he became with the platform upon which he and
+his people were standing. They and he were clearly in a minority, and
+his deep inward longing to be with the majority was growing into an
+engrossing passion. He yearned especially towards the good old
+unquestioning, authoritative Mother Church, with her articles of faith
+which took away the necessity for private judgment, with her traditional
+forms and ceremonies, and her whole apparatus of stimulants and anodynes.
+
+About this time he procured a breviary and kept it in his desk under the
+loose papers. He sent to a Catholic bookstore and obtained a small
+crucifix suspended from a string of beads. He ordered his new coat to be
+cut very narrow in the collar and to be made single-breasted. He began
+an informal series of religious conversations with Miss O'Brien, the
+young person of Irish extraction already referred to as Bridget, maid of
+all work. These not proving very satisfactory, he managed to fall in
+with Father McShane, the Catholic priest of the Rockland church.
+
+Father McShane encouraged his nibble very scientifically. It would be
+such a fine thing to bring over one of those Protestant heretics, and a
+"liberal" one too!--not that there was any real difference between them,
+but it sounded better, to say that one of these rationalizing
+free-and-equal religionists had been made a convert than any of those
+half-way Protestants who were the slaves of catechisms instead of
+councils, and of commentators instead of popes. The subtle priest played
+his disciple with his finest tackle. It was hardly necessary: when
+anything or anybody wishes to be caught, a bare hook and a coarse line
+are all that is needed.
+
+If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty,
+if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And
+the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a
+heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice
+which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life we
+shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination.
+In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before
+deciding how to cast our vote. In religious matters there are great
+multitudes watching us perpetually, each propagandist ready with his
+bundle of finalities, which having accepted we may be at peace. The more
+absolute the submission demanded, the stronger the temptation becomes to
+those who have been long tossed among doubts and conflicts.
+
+So it is that in all the quiet bays which indent the shores of the great
+ocean of thought, at every sinking wharf, we see moored the hulks and the
+razees of enslaved or half-enslaved intelligences. They rock peacefully
+as children in their cradles on the subdued swell which comes feebly in
+over the bar at the harbor's mouth, slowly crusting with barnacles,
+pulling at their iron cables as if they really wanted to be free; but
+better contented to remain bound as they are. For these no more the
+round unwalled horizon of the open sea, the joyous breeze aloft, the
+furrow, the foam, the sparkle, that track the rushing keel! They have
+escaped the dangers of the wave, and lie still henceforth, evermore.
+Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss, and palsy the chief beatitude!
+
+America owes its political freedom to religious Protestantism. But
+political freedom is reacting on religious prescription with still
+mightier force. We wonder, therefore, when we find a soul which was born
+to a full sense of individual liberty, an unchallenged right of
+self-determination on every new alleged truth offered to its
+intelligence, voluntarily surrendering any portion of its liberty to a
+spiritual dictatorship which always proves to rest, in the last analysis,
+on a majority vote, nothing more nor less, commonly an old one, passed in
+those barbarous times when men cursed and murdered each other for
+differences of opinion, and of course were not in a condition to settle
+the beliefs of a comparatively civilized community.
+
+In our disgust, we are liable to be intolerant. We forget that weakness
+is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our
+most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity, Who of us does
+not look with great tenderness on the young chieftain in the "Fair Maid
+of Perth," when he confesses his want of courage? All of us love
+companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us
+are more or less imaginative in our theology.
+
+Some of us may find the aid of material symbols a comfort, if not a
+necessity. The boldest thinker may have his moments of languor and
+discouragement, when he feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths
+with the old beldame crossing herself at the cathedral-door,--nay, that,
+if he could drop all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with
+the brown-eyed solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all
+their simple consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass,
+and life turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of
+herbs,--no individual mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the
+great calm cattle-sense of all time and all places that know the milky
+smell of herds,--if he could be like these, he would be content to be
+driven home by the cow-boy, and share the grassy banquet of the king of
+ancient Babylon. Let us be very generous, then, in our judgment of those
+who leave the front ranks of thought for the company of the meek
+non-combatants who follow with the baggage and provisions. Age, illness,
+too much wear and tear, a half-formed paralysis, may bring any of us to
+this pass. But while we can think and maintain the rights of our own
+individuality against every human combination, let us not forget to
+caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice which is
+criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to indulge. God
+help him, over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad
+supplication, Requiescat in pace!
+
+A knock at the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's study door called his eyes from
+the book on which they were intent. He looked up, as if expecting a
+welcome guest.
+
+The Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., entered the study of the
+Reverend Chauncy Fairweather. He was not the expected guest. Mr.
+Fairweather slipped the book he was reading into a half-open drawer, and
+pushed in the drawer. He slid something which rattled under a paper
+lying on the table. He rose with a slight change of color, and welcomed,
+a little awkwardly, his unusual visitor.
+
+"Good-evening, Brother Fairweather!" said the Reverend Doctor, in a very
+cordial, good-humored way. "I hope I am not spoiling one of those
+eloquent sermons I never have a chance to hear."
+
+"Not at all, not at all," the younger clergyman answered, in a languid
+tone, with a kind of habitual half-querulousness which belonged to
+it,--the vocal expression which we meet with now and then, and which says
+as plainly as so many words could say it, "I am a suffering individual.
+I am persistently undervalued, wronged, and imposed upon by mankind and
+the powers of the universe generally. But I endure all. I endure you.
+Speak. I listen. It is a burden to me, but I even approve. I sacrifice
+myself. Behold this movement of my lips! It is a smile."
+
+The Reverend Doctor knew this forlorn way of Mr. Fairweather's, and was
+not troubled by it. He proceeded to relate the circumstances of his
+visit from the old black woman, and the fear she was in about the young
+girl, who being a parishioner of Mr. Fairweather's, he had thought it
+best to come over and speak to him about old Sophy's fears and fancies.
+
+In telling the old woman's story, he alluded only vaguely to those
+peculiar circumstances to which she had attributed so much importance,
+taking it for granted that the other minister must be familiar with the
+whole series of incidents she had related. The old minister was
+mistaken, as we have before seen. Mr. Fairweather had been settled in
+the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard a strange hint now
+and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than idle
+and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip. All that he fully
+understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and
+that the extraordinary care which had been bestowed on her had been so
+far thrown away that she was a dangerous, self-willed girl, whom all
+feared and almost all shunned, as if she carried with her some malignant
+influence.
+
+He replied, therefore, after hearing the story, that Elsie had always
+given trouble. There seemed to be a kind of natural obliquity about her.
+Perfectly unaccountable. A very dark case. Never amenable to good
+influences. Had sent her good books from the Sunday-school library.
+Remembered that she tore out the frontispiece of one of them, and kept
+it, and flung the book out of the window. It was a picture of Eve's
+temptation; and he recollected her saying that Eve was a good woman,--and
+she'd have done just so, if she'd been there. A very sad child, very sad;
+bad from infancy. He had talked himself bold, and said all at once,
+"Doctor, do you know I am almost ready to accept your doctrine of the
+congenital sinfulness of human nature? I am afraid that is the only thing
+which goes to the bottom of the difficulty."
+
+The old minister's face did not open so approvingly as Mr. Fairweather
+had expected.
+
+"Why, yes,--well,--many find comfort in it,--I believe;--there is much to
+be said,--there are many bad people,--and bad children,--I can't be so
+sure about bad babies,--though they cry very malignantly at
+times,--especially if they have the stomach-ache. But I really don't know
+how to condemn this poor Elsie; she may have impulses that act in her
+like instincts in the lower animals, and so not come under the bearing of
+our ordinary rules of judgment."
+
+"But this depraved tendency, Doctor,--this unaccountable perverseness.
+My dear Sir, I am afraid your school is in the right about human nature.
+Oh, those words of the Psalmist, 'shapen in iniquity,' and the rest!
+What are we to do with them,--we who teach that the soul of a child is an
+unstained white tablet?"
+
+"King David was very subject to fits of humility, and much given to
+self-reproaches," said the Doctor, in a rather dry way. "We owe you and
+your friends a good deal for calling attention to the natural graces,
+which, after all, may, perhaps, be considered as another form of
+manifestation of the divine influence. Some of our writers have pressed
+rather too hard on the tendencies of the human soul toward evil as such.
+It maybe questioned whether these views have not interfered with the
+sound training of certain young persons, sons of clergymen and others. I
+am nearer of your mind about the possibility of educating children so
+that they shall become good Christians without any violent transition.
+That is what I should hope for from bringing them up 'in the nurture and
+admonition of the Lord.'"
+
+The younger minister looked puzzled, but presently answered, "Possibly we
+may have called attention to some neglected truths; but, after all, I
+fear we must go to the old school, if we want to get at the root of the
+matter. I know there is an outward amiability about many young persons,
+some young girls especially, that seems like genuine goodness; but I have
+been disposed of late to lean toward your view, that these human
+affections, as we see them in our children,--ours, I say, though I have
+not the fearful responsibility of training any of my own,--are only a
+kind of disguised and sinful selfishness."
+
+The old minister groaned in spirit. His heart had been softened by the
+sweet influences of children and grandchildren. He thought of a
+half-sized grave in the burial-ground, and the fine, brave, noble-hearted
+boy he laid in it thirty years before,--the sweet, cheerful child who had
+made his home all sunshine until the day when he was brought into it, his
+long curls dripping, his fresh lips purpled in death,--foolish dear
+little blessed creature to throw himself into the deep water to save the
+drowning boy, who clung about him and carried him under! Disguised
+selfishness! And his granddaughter too, whose disguised selfishness was
+the light of his household!
+
+"Don't call it my view!" he said. "Abstractly, perhaps, all natures may
+be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the divine
+grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in many
+natures. Besides, this perversion itself may often be disease, bad
+habits transmitted, like drunkenness, or some hereditary misfortune, as
+with this Elsie we were talking about."
+
+The younger minister was completely mystified. At every step he made
+towards the Doctor's recognized theological position, the Doctor took
+just one step towards his. They would cross each other soon at this
+rate, and might as well exchange pulpits,--as Colonel Sprowle once wished
+they would, it may be remembered.
+
+The Doctor, though a much clearer-headed man, was almost equally puzzled.
+He turned the conversation again upon Elsie, and endeavored to make her
+minister feel the importance of bringing every friendly influence to bear
+upon her at this critical period of her life. His sympathies did not
+seem so lively as the Doctor could have wished. Perhaps he had vastly
+more important objects of solicitude in his own spiritual interests.
+
+A knock at the door interrupted them. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather rose
+and went towards it. As he passed the table, his coat caught something,
+which came rattling to the floor. It was a crucifix with a string of
+beads attached. As he opened the door, the Milesian features of Father
+McShane presented themselves, and from their centre proceeded the
+clerical benediction in Irish-sounding Latin, Pax vobiscum!
+
+The Reverend Doctor Honeywood rose and left the priest and his disciple
+together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+THE SPIDER ON HIS THREAD.
+
+There was nobody, then, to counsel poor Elsie, except her father, who had
+learned to let her have her own way so as not to disturb such relations
+as they had together, and the old black woman, who had a real, though
+limited influence over the girl. Perhaps she did not need counsel. To
+look upon her, one might well suppose that she was competent to defend
+herself against any enemy she was like to have. That glittering, piercing
+eye was not to be softened by a few smooth words spoken in low tones,
+charged with the common sentiments which win their way to maidens'
+hearts. That round, lithe, sinuous figure was as full of dangerous life
+as ever lay under the slender flanks and clean-shaped limbs of a panther.
+
+There were particular times when Elsie was in such a mood that it must
+have been a bold person who would have intruded upon her with reproof or
+counsel. "This is one of her days," old Sophy would say quietly to her
+father, and he would, as far as possible, leave her to herself. These
+days were more frequent, as old Sophy's keen, concentrated watchfulness
+had taught her, at certain periods of the year. It was in the heats of
+summer that they were most common and most strongly characterized. In
+winter, on the other hand, she was less excitable, and even at times
+heavy and as if chilled and dulled in her sensibilities. It was a
+strange, paroxysmal kind of life that belonged to her. It seemed to come
+and go with the sunlight. All winter long she would be comparatively
+quiet, easy to manage, listless, slow in her motions; her eye would lose
+something of its strange lustre; and the old nurse would feel so little
+anxiety, that her whole expression and aspect would show the change, and
+people would say to her, "Why, Sophy, how young you're looking!"
+
+As the spring came on, Elsie would leave the fireside, have her
+tiger-skin spread in the empty southern chamber next the wall, and lie
+there basking for whole hours in the sunshine. As the season warmed, the
+light would kindle afresh in her eyes, and the old woman's sleep would
+grow restless again,--for she knew, that, so long as the glitter was
+fierce in the girl's eyes, there was no trusting her impulses or
+movements.
+
+At last, when the veins of the summer were hot and swollen, and the
+juices of all the poison-plants and the blood of all the creatures that
+feed upon them had grown thick and strong,--about the time when the
+second mowing was in hand, and the brown, wet-faced men were following up
+the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass, (falling as the
+waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers dropping as the
+grass-flowers drop,--with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds,--frsh,--for
+that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all pure vowel-sounds for the
+winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to the unyielding earth,)--about
+this time of over-ripe midsummer, the life of Elsie seemed fullest of its
+malign and restless instincts. This was the period of the year when the
+Rockland people were most cautious of wandering in the leafier coverts
+which skirted the base of The Mountain, and the farmers liked to wear
+thick, long boots, whenever they went into the bushes. But Elsie was
+never so much given to roaming over The Mountain as at this season; and
+as she had grown more absolute and uncontrollable, she was as like to
+take the night as the day for her rambles.
+
+At this season, too, all her peculiar tastes in dress and ornament came
+out in a more striking way than at other times. She was never so superb
+as then, and never so threatening in her scowling beauty. The barred
+skirts she always fancied showed sharply beneath her diaphanous muslins;
+the diamonds often glittered on her breast as if for her own pleasure
+rather than to dazzle others; the asp-like bracelet hardly left her arm.
+She was never seen without some necklace,--either the golden cord she
+wore at the great party, or a chain of mosaics, or simply a ring of
+golden scales. Some said that Elsie always slept in a necklace, and that
+when she died she was to be buried in one. It was a fancy of hers,--but
+many thought there was a reason for it.
+
+Nobody watched Elsie with a more searching eye than her cousin, Dick
+Venner. He had kept more out of her way of late, it is true, but there
+was not a movement she made which he did not carefully observe just so
+far as he could without exciting her suspicion. It was plain enough to
+him that the road to fortune was before him, and that the first thing was
+to marry Elsie. What course he should take with her, or with others
+interested, after marrying her, need not be decided in a hurry.
+
+He had now done all he could expect to do at present in the way of
+conciliating the other members of the household. The girl's father
+tolerated him, if he did not even like him. Whether he suspected his
+project or not Dick did not feel sure; but it was something to have got a
+foothold in the house, and to have overcome any prepossession against him
+which his uncle might have entertained. To be a good listener and a bad
+billiard-player was not a very great sacrifice to effect this object.
+Then old Sophy could hardly help feeling well-disposed towards him, after
+the gifts he had bestowed on her and the court he had paid her. These
+were the only persons on the place of much importance to gain over. The
+people employed about the house and farm-lands had little to do with
+Elsie, except to obey her without questioning her commands.
+
+Mr. Richard began to think of reopening his second parallel. But he had
+lost something of the coolness with which he had begun his system of
+operations. The more he had reflected upon the matter, the more he had
+convinced himself that this was his one great chance in life. If he
+suffered this girl to escape him, such an opportunity could hardly, in
+the nature of things, present itself a second time. Only one life
+between Elsie and her fortune,--and lives are so uncertain! The girl
+might not suit him as a wife. Possibly. Time enough to find out after
+he had got her. In short, he must have the property, and Elsie Venner,
+as she was to go with it,--and then, if he found it convenient and
+agreeable to, lead a virtuous life, he would settle down and raise
+children and vegetables; but if he found it inconvenient and
+disagreeable, so much the worse for those who made it so. Like many
+other persons, he was not principled against virtue, provided virtue were
+a better investment than its opposite; but he knew that there might be
+contingencies in which the property would be better without its
+incumbrances, and he contemplated this conceivable problem in the light
+of all its possible solutions.
+
+One thing Mr. Richard could not conceal from himself: Elsie had some new
+cause of indifference, at least, if not of aversion to him. With the
+acuteness which persons who make a sole business of their own interest
+gain by practice, so that fortune-hunters are often shrewd where real
+lovers are terribly simple, he fixed at once on the young man up at the
+school where the girl had been going of late, as probably at the bottom
+of it.
+
+"Cousin Elsie in love!" so he communed with himself upon his lonely
+pillow. "In love with a Yankee schoolmaster! What else can it be? Let
+him look out for himself! He'll stand but a bad chance between us. What
+makes you think she's in love with him? Met her walking with him. Don't
+like her looks and ways;--she's thinking about something, anyhow. Where
+does she get those books she is reading so often? Not out of our
+library, that 's certain. If I could have ten minutes' peep into her
+chamber now, I would find out where she got them, and what mischief she
+was up to."
+
+At that instant, as if some tributary demon had heard his wish, a shape
+which could be none but Elsie's flitted through a gleam of moonlight into
+the shadow of the trees. She was setting out on one of her midnight
+rambles.
+
+Dick felt his heart stir in its place, and presently his cheeks flushed
+with the old longing for an adventure. It was not much to invade a young
+girl's deserted chamber, but it would amuse a wakeful hour, and tell him
+some little matters he wanted to know. The chamber he slept in was over
+the room which Elsie chiefly occupied at this season. There was no great
+risk of his being seen or heard, if he ventured down-stairs to her
+apartment.
+
+Mr. Richard Venner, in the pursuit of his interesting project, arose and
+lighted a lamp. He wrapped himself in a dressing-gown and thrust his
+feet into a pair of cloth slippers. He stole carefully down the stair,
+and arrived safely at the door of Elsie's room.
+
+The young lady had taken the natural precaution to leave it fastened,
+carrying the key with her, no doubt,--unless; indeed, she had got out by
+the window, which was not far from the ground. Dick could get in at this
+window easily enough, but he did not like the idea of leaving his
+footprints in the flower-bed just under it. He returned to his own
+chamber, and held a council of war with himself.
+
+He put his head out of his own window and looked at that beneath. It was
+open. He then went to one of his trunks, which he unlocked, and began
+carefully removing its contents. What these were we need not stop to
+mention,--only remarking that there were dresses of various patterns,
+which might afford an agreeable series of changes, and in certain
+contingencies prove eminently useful. After removing a few of these, he
+thrust his hand to the very bottom of the remaining pile and drew out a
+coiled strip of leather many yards in length, ending in a noose,--a
+tough, well-seasoned lasso, looking as if it had seen service and was
+none the worse for it. He uncoiled a few yards of this and fastened it
+to the knob of a door. Then he threw the loose end out of the window so
+that it should hang by the open casement of Elsie's room. By this he let
+himself down opposite her window, and with a slight effort swung himself
+inside the room. He lighted a match, found a candle, and, having lighted
+that, looked curiously about him, as Clodius might have done when he
+smuggled himself in among the Vestals.
+
+Elsie's room was almost as peculiar as her dress and ornaments. It was a
+kind of museum of objects, such as the woods are full of to those who
+have eyes to see them, but many of them such as only few could hope to
+reach, even if they knew where to look for them. Crows' nests, which are
+never found but in the tall trees, commonly enough in the forks of
+ancient hemlocks, eggs of rare birds, which must have taken a quick eye
+and a hard climb to find and get hold of, mosses and ferns of unusual
+aspect, and quaint monstrosities of vegetable growth, such as Nature
+delights in, showed that Elsie had her tastes and fancies like any
+naturalist or poet.
+
+Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and
+fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it. The foliage of trees
+does not always require clipping to make it look like an image of life.
+From those windows at Canoe Meadow, among the mountains, we could see all
+summer long a lion rampant, a Shanghai chicken, and General Jackson on
+horseback, done by Nature in green leaves, each with a single tree. But
+to Nature's tricks with boughs and roots and smaller vegetable growths
+there is no end. Her fancy is infinite, and her humor not always
+refined. There is a perpetual reminiscence of animal life in her rude
+caricatures, which sometimes actually reach the point of imitating the
+complete human figure, as in that extraordinary specimen which nobody
+will believe to be genuine, except the men of science, and of which the
+discreet reader may have a glimpse by application in the proper quarter.
+
+Elsie had gathered so many of these sculpture-like monstrosities, that
+one might have thought she had robbed old Sophy's grandfather of his
+fetishes. They helped to give her room a kind of enchanted look, as if a
+witch had her home in it. Over the fireplace was a long, staff-like
+branch, strangled in the spiral coils of one of those vines which strain
+the smaller trees in their clinging embraces, sinking into the bark until
+the parasite becomes almost identified with its support. With these
+sylvan curiosities were blended objects of art, some of them not less
+singular, but others showing a love for the beautiful in form and color,
+such as a girl of fine organization and nice culture might naturally be
+expected to feel and to indulge, in adorning her apartment.
+
+All these objects, pictures, bronzes, vases, and the rest, did not detain
+Mr. Richard Veneer very long, whatever may have been his sensibilities to
+art. He was more curious about books and papers. A copy of Keats lay on
+the table. He opened it and read the name of Bernard C. Langdon on the
+blank leaf. An envelope was on the table with Elsie's name written in a
+similar hand; but the envelope was empty, and he could not find the note
+it contained. Her desk was locked, and it would not be safe to tamper
+with it. He had seen enough; the girl received books and notes from this
+fellow up at the school, this usher, this Yankee quill-driver;--he was
+aspiring to become the lord of the Dudley domain, then, was he?
+
+Elsie had been reasonably careful. She had locked up her papers,
+whatever they might be. There was little else that promised to reward
+his curiosity, but he cast his eye on everything. There was a
+clasp-Bible among her books. Dick wondered if she ever unclasped it.
+There was a book of hymns; it had her name in it, and looked as if it
+might have been often read;--what the diablo had Elsie to do with hymns?
+
+Mr. Richard Venner was in an observing and analytical state of mind, it
+will be noticed, or he might perhaps have been touched with the innocent
+betrayals of the poor girl's chamber. Had she, after all, some human
+tenderness in her heart? That was not the way he put the question,--but
+whether she would take seriously to this schoolmaster, and if she did,
+what would be the neatest and surest and quickest way of putting a stop
+to all that nonsense. All this, however, he could think over more safely
+in his own quarters. So he stole softly to the window, and, catching the
+end of the leathern thong, regained his own chamber and drew in the
+lasso.
+
+It needs only a little jealousy to set a man on who is doubtful in love
+or wooing, or to make him take hold of his courting in earnest. As soon
+as Dick had satisfied himself that the young schoolmaster was his rival
+in Elsie's good graces, his whole thoughts concentrated themselves more
+than ever on accomplishing his great design of securing her for himself.
+There was no time to be lost. He must come into closer relations with
+her, so as to withdraw her thoughts from this fellow, and to find out
+more exactly what was the state of her affections, if she had any. So he
+began to court her company again, to propose riding with her, to sing to
+her, to join her whenever she was strolling about the grounds, to make
+himself agreeable, according to the ordinary understanding of that
+phrase, in every way which seemed to promise a chance for succeeding in
+that amiable effort.
+
+The girl treated him more capriciously than ever. She would be sullen
+and silent, or she would draw back fiercely at some harmless word or
+gesture, or she would look at him with her eyes narrowed in such a
+strange way and with such a wicked light in them that Dick swore to
+himself they were too much for him, and would leave her for the moment.
+Yet she tolerated him, almost as a matter of necessity, and sometimes
+seemed to take a kind of pleasure in trying her power upon him. This he
+soon found out, and humored her in the fancy that she could exercise a
+kind of fascination over him, though there were times in which he
+actually felt an influence he could not understand, an effect of some
+peculiar expression about her, perhaps, but still centring in those
+diamond eyes of hers which it made one feel so curiously to look into.
+
+Whether Elsie saw into his object or not was more than he could tell. His
+idea was, after having conciliated the good-will of all about her as far
+as possible, to make himself first a habit and then a necessity with the
+girl,--not to spring any trap of a declaration upon her until tolerance
+had grown into such a degree of inclination as her nature was like to
+admit. He had succeeded in the first part of his plan. He was at
+liberty to prolong his visit at his own pleasure. This was not strange;
+these three persons, Dudley Venner, his daughter, and his nephew,
+represented all that remained of an old and honorable family. Had Elsie
+been like other girls, her father might have been less willing to
+entertain a young fellow like Dick as an inmate; but he had long outgrown
+all the slighter apprehensions which he might have had in common with all
+parents, and followed rather than led the imperious instincts of his
+daughter. It was not a question of sentiment, but of life and death, or
+more than that,--some dark ending, perhaps, which would close the
+history of his race with disaster and evil report upon the lips of all
+coming generations.
+
+As to the thought of his nephew's making love to his daughter, it had
+almost passed from his mind. He had been so long in the habit of looking
+at Elsie as outside of all common influences and exceptional in the law
+of her nature, that it was difficult for him to think of her as a girl to
+be fallen in love with. Many persons are surprised, when others court
+their female relatives; they know them as good young or old women
+enough,--aunts, sisters, nieces, daughters, whatever they may be,--but
+never think of anybody's falling in love with them, any more than of
+their being struck by lightning. But in this case there were special
+reasons, in addition to the common family delusion,--reasons which seemed
+to make it impossible that she should attract a suitor. Who would dare
+to marry Elsie? No, let her have the pleasure, if it was one, at any
+rate the wholesome excitement, of companionship; it might save her from
+lapsing into melancholy or a worse form of madness. Dudley Venner had a
+kind of superstition, too, that, if Elsie could only outlive three
+septenaries, twenty-one years, so that, according to the prevalent idea,
+her whole frame would have been thrice made over, counting from her
+birth, she would revert to the natural standard of health of mind and
+feelings from which she had been so long perverted. The thought of any
+other motive than love being sufficient to induce Richard to become her
+suitor had not occurred to him. He had married early, at that happy
+period when interested motives are least apt to influence the choice; and
+his single idea of marriage was, that it was the union of persons
+naturally drawn towards each other by some mutual attraction. Very
+simple, perhaps; but he had lived lonely for many years since his wife's
+death, and judged the hearts of others, most of all of his brother's son,
+by his own. He had often thought whether, in case of Elsie's dying or
+being necessarily doomed to seclusion, he might not adopt this nephew and
+make him his heir; but it had not occurred to him that Richard might wish
+to become his son-in-law for the sake of his property.
+
+It is very easy to criticise other people's modes of dealing with their
+children. Outside observers see results; parents see processes. They
+notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood of this
+or that ancestor; they can detect the irrepressible movement of
+hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the common
+observer. To be a parent is almost to be a fatalist. This boy sits with
+legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw; his
+grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement of the
+eyebrows which we remember in one of them, and the gusty temper of three
+different generations, can tell pretty nearly the range of possibilities
+and the limitations of a child, actual or potential, of a given
+stock,--errors excepted always, because children of the same stock are
+not bred just alike, because the traits of some less known ancestor are
+liable to break out at any time, and because each human being has, after
+all, a small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a
+flavor, so that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a
+court of justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a
+criminal of him. It is well that young persons cannot read these fatal
+oracles of Nature. Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after all. We
+make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our eyes. That
+is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained, and the
+physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the principle of
+selection which would disinherit all the weaker children. The
+magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made
+up,--the people without biographies, whose lives have made a clear
+solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of being precipitated in
+the opaque sediment of history--
+
+But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.
+
+There were not wanting people who accused Dudley VENNER of weakness and
+bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of opinion that
+the great mistake was in not "breaking her will" when she was a little
+child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said, but that she
+had been spoiled by indulgence. If they had had the charge of her,
+they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand of her father now;
+but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There are people who think
+that everything may be done, if the doer, be he educator or physician, be
+only called "in season." No doubt,--but in season would often be a
+hundred or two years before the child was born; and people never send so
+early as that.
+
+The father of Elsie Veneer knew his duties and his difficulties too well
+to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So soon as
+he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life up to
+following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a stern and
+terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not without force of
+intellect and will, and the manly ambition for himself and his
+family-name which belonged to his endowments and his position. Passive
+endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a nature.
+
+What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
+his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
+not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His
+minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort
+of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and
+grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the
+egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of avarice and
+self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician and the old
+black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike
+dumb the lips of Consolation?
+
+In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
+which young men and young women go about looking into each other's faces,
+with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and making them
+beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his other self
+early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his freshness
+in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most, who
+infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves into a
+life already upon half allowance of the necessary luxuries of existence.
+The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful in outward
+circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend Doctor. It
+was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each other,
+string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now and then
+when some chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained or
+over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they
+become at last as two instruments with a single voice. Something more
+than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him
+when he found himself once more alone,--alone, save for the little
+diamond-eyed child lying in the old black woman's arms, with the coral
+necklace round--her throat and the rattle in her hand.
+
+He would not die by his own act. It was not the way in his family. There
+may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was enough; he did
+not come of suicidal stock. He must live for this child's sake, at any
+rate; and yet,--oh, yet, who could tell with what thoughts he looked upon
+her? Sometimes her little features would look placid, and something like
+a smile would steal over them; then all his tender feelings would rush
+up, into his eyes, and he would put his arms out to take her from the old
+woman,--but all at once her eyes would narrow and she would throw her
+head back, and a shudder would seize him as he stooped over his
+child,--he could not look upon her,--he could not touch his lips to her
+cheek; nay, there would sometimes come into his soul such frightful
+suggestions that he would hurry from the room lest the hinted thought
+should become a momentary madness and he should lift his hand against the
+hapless infant which owed him life.
+
+In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his
+restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward
+action. He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any of
+the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having no
+particular care for his life. Sometimes he would go into the accursed
+district where the venomous reptiles were always to be dreaded, and court
+their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near with a kind of blind
+fury which was strange in a person of his gentle nature.
+
+One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon his
+home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and fissures
+that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off some time or
+other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below? He thought
+of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference, in fact with
+a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift and thorough
+solution of this great problem of life he was working out in
+ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a
+catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to
+other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet he
+loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence. Danger is often the
+best counterirritant in cases of mental suffering; he found a solace in
+careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the trials of each
+day better by dwelling in imagination on the possibility that it might be
+the last for him and the home that was his.
+
+Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually fell
+into more easy and less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from his
+more perilous rambles. He thought less of the danger from the great
+overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for centuries; it was
+not very likely they would crash or slide in his time. He became
+accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old Sophy dressed her
+with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with
+silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a
+hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to
+become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled
+feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him, and often a
+terror.
+
+At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty, and
+in some degree reaped his reward. Elsie grew up with a kind of filial
+feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of. She never would obey
+him; that was not to be looked for. Commands, threats, punishments, were
+out of the question with her; the mere physical effects of crossing her
+will betrayed themselves in such changes of expression and manner that it
+would have been senseless to attempt to govern her in any such way.
+Leaving her mainly to herself, she could be to some extent indirectly
+influenced,--not otherwise. She called her father "Dudley," as if he had
+been her brother. She ordered everybody and would be ordered by none.
+
+Who could know all these things, except the few people of the household?
+What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons laid the blame
+on her father of those peculiarities which were freely talked about,--of
+those darker tendencies which were hinted of in whispers? To all this
+talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely indifferent, not only
+with the indifference which all gentlemen feel to the gossip of their
+inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which did not wonder or blame.
+He knew that his position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible
+one, and schooled himself to bear his destiny as well as he might, and
+report himself only at Headquarters.
+
+He had grown gentle under this discipline. His hair was just beginning
+to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual
+sadness and anxiety. He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn to,
+who did not know either too much or too little. He had no heart to rest
+upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and the
+sorrows that were aching in his own breast. Yet he had not allowed
+himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to his
+trials and fears. He had resisted the seductions which always beset
+solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies. He
+disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of wine. He
+sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing, wide-open
+eyes through all the weary hours of the night.
+
+It was understood between Dudley Veneer and old Doctor Kittredge that
+Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of
+certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection of
+her reason. Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in the
+mind of either. But Dudley Veneer had studied Elsie's case in the light
+of all the books he could find which might do anything towards explaining
+it. As in all cases where men meddle with medical science for a special
+purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his imagination found
+what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it to the facts before
+him. So it was he came to cherish those two fancies before alluded to
+that the ominous birthmark she had carried from infancy might fade and
+become obliterated, and that the age of complete maturity might be
+signalized by an entire change in her physical and mental state. He held
+these vague hopes as all of us nurse our only half-believed illusions.
+Not for the world would he have questioned his sagacious old medical
+friend as to the probability or possibility of their being true. We are
+very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one
+word the hopes we live on.
+
+In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed
+himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and varied
+reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised at the
+extent of Dudley Veneer's information. Doctor Kittredge found that he
+was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological
+discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural
+chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints about
+the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance with the
+classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and calm them
+down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and periodicals,
+and gradually gained an interest in the events of the passing time. Yet
+he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his
+neighbors, nor even churlish towards them, but on the other hand not
+cultivating any intimate relations with them.
+
+He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth,
+indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
+extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
+second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost something
+of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to
+struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which
+he had confronted with such an effort had become an endurable habit.
+
+At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
+acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until their
+intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were
+at twenty, Dudley Veneer was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul
+than in the first freshness of his youth, when he counted but half his
+present years. He had entered that period which marks the decline of men
+who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty a
+man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life
+will carry him rapidly downward. At this time his inward: nature was
+richer and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could
+only be summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his
+sympathies could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as
+now; for his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all
+these years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life
+were softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling,
+as the wreck left by a mountainslide is covered over by the gentle
+intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the
+stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the
+peaceful slopes around it.
+
+Perhaps Dudley Veneer had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if he
+had been more in society and less in his study. The indulgence with
+which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent. A man more in the
+habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a person with
+Dick's questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy. But he was
+singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an additional
+motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the routine of
+Elsie's life.
+
+If Dudley Veneer did not know just what he wanted at this period of his
+life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who thought
+they did know. He had been a widower long enough, "--nigh twenty year,
+wa'n't it? He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,--there wa'n't anything
+to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other folks. What was the
+reason he did n't go abaout to taown-meetin's 'n' Sahbath-meetin's, 'n'
+lyceums, 'n' school 'xaminations, 'n' s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals,--and
+other entertainments where the still-faced two-story folks were in the
+habit of looking round to see if any of the mansion-house gentry were
+present?--Fac' was, he was livin' too lonesome daown there at the
+mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't he make up to the Jedge's daughter? She
+was genteel enough for him, and--let's see, haow old was she?
+Seven-'n'itwenty,--no, six-'n'-twenty,--born the same year we buried our
+little Anny Marl".
+
+There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
+interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But "Portia,"
+as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not happen to awaken
+the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met her once in a
+while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen of the grand
+style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a woman not quite
+so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in her
+speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or three more
+joints in her frame, and two or three soft inflections in her voice,
+which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so
+bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes
+all that he could not tell, in less time than it would have takes him to
+discuss the champion paper of the last Quarterly with the admirable
+"Portia." Heu, quanto minus! How much more was that lost image to him
+than all it left on earth!
+
+The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that
+just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular day
+it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about so much
+love will be made every year in a given population; but who will rain his
+young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to the
+astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as it does and why
+love is made just as it is are equally puzzling questions.
+
+The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his daughter
+than the female children born to him by the common law of life. It is
+not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves: before her
+image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has passed through
+fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over by ten thousand
+pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which bandy
+it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back and
+forward in a saloon lined with mirrors. With this altered image of the
+woman before him, his preexisting ideal becomes blended. The object of
+his love is in part the offspring of her legal parents, but more of her
+lover's brain. The difference between the real and the ideal objects of
+love must not exceed a fixed maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite
+them stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes
+certain limits. A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof,
+with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do
+well to remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a
+dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious
+falls.
+
+Whether Dudley Veneer would ever find a breathing image near enough to
+his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
+very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
+steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
+silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public
+worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old griefs,
+herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into sweet
+acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such woman as this, if Heaven
+should send him such, might call him back to the world of happiness, from
+which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again be the young lover
+who walked through the garden-alleys all red with roses in the old dead
+and buried June of long ago. He could never forget the bride of his
+youth, whose image, growing phantomlike with the lapse of years, hovered
+over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams. But if
+it might be in God's good providence that this desolate life should come
+under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of
+renewed existence was in store for him! His life had not all been buried
+under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It
+seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be
+so. His first passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or
+stain upon it. With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of
+any word or look he would have wished to forget. All those little
+differences, such as young married people with any individual flavor in
+their characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added
+to the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some
+perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the whole
+harmonious movement. It was a deep wound that Fate had inflicted on him;
+nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was clean, and its edge
+was smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in healthy natures, whatever
+a false sentiment may say, by the wise and beneficent law of our being.
+The recollection of a deep and true affection is rather a divine
+nourishment for a life to grow strong upon than a poison to destroy it.
+
+Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early
+bereavement. It was partly the result of the long struggle between
+natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary tendencies
+these had to overcome, on the other,--between hope and fear, so long in
+conflict that despair itself would have been like an anodyne, and he
+would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the heavy sleep of a
+bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some new affection might
+perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart; but what power could
+calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose with every morning's
+sun and watched with every evening star,--what power save alone that of
+him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and leaving after him only the
+ashes printed with his footsteps?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+THE WIDOW ROWENS GIVES A TEA-PARTY.
+
+There was a good deal of interest felt, as has been said, in the lonely
+condition of Dudley Venner in that fine mansion-house of his, and with
+that strange daughter, who would never be married, as many people
+thought, in spite of all the stories. The feelings expressed by the good
+folks who dated from the time when they "buried aour little Anny Mari',"
+and others of that homespun stripe, were founded in reason, after all.
+And so it was natural enough that they should be shared by various
+ladies, who, having conjugated the verb to live as far as the
+preterpluperfect tense, were ready to change one of its vowels and begin
+with it in the present indicative. Unfortunately, there was very little
+chance of showing sympathy in its active form for a gentleman who kept
+himself so much out of the way as the master of the Dudley Mansion.
+
+Various attempts had been made, from time to time, of late years, to get
+him out of his study, which had, for the most part, proved failures. It
+was a surprise, therefore, when he was seen at the Great Party at the
+Colonel's. But it was an encouragement to try him again, and the
+consequence had been that he had received a number of notes inviting him
+to various smaller entertainments, which, as neither he nor Elsie had any
+fancy for them, he had politely declined.
+
+Such was the state of things when he received an invitation to take tea
+sociably, with a few friends, at Hyacinth Cottage, the residence of the
+Widow Rowens, relict of the late Beeri Rowens, Esquire, better known as
+Major Rowens. Major Rowens was at the time of his decease a promising
+officer in the militia, in the direct line of promotion, as his waistband
+was getting tighter every year; and, as all the world knows, the
+militia-officer who splits off most buttons and fills the largest
+sword-belt stands the best chance of rising, or, perhaps we might say,
+spreading, to be General.
+
+Major Rowens united in his person certain other traits which help a man
+to eminence in the branch of public service referred to. He ran to high
+colors, to wide whiskers, to open pores; he had the saddle-leather skin
+common in Englishmen, rarer in Americans,--never found in the Brahmin
+caste, oftener in the military and the commodores: observing people know
+what is meant; blow the seed-arrows from the white-kid-looking button
+which holds them on a dandelion-stalk, and the pricked-pincushion surface
+shows you what to look for. He had the loud gruff voice which implies
+the right to command. He had the thick hand, stubbed fingers, with
+bristled pads between their joints, square, broad thumb-nails, and sturdy
+limbs, which mark a constitution made to use in rough out-door work. He
+had the never-failing predilection for showy switch-tailed horses that
+step high, and sidle about, and act as if they were going to do something
+fearful the next minute, in the face of awed and admiring multitudes
+gathered at mighty musters or imposing cattle-shows. He had no
+objection, either, to holding the reins in a wagon behind another kind of
+horse,--a slouching, listless beast, with a strong slant to his shoulder;
+and a notable depth to his quarter and an emphatic angle at the hock, who
+commonly walked or lounged along in a lazy trot of five or six miles an
+hour; but, if a lively colt happened to come rattling up alongside, or a
+brandy-faced old horse-jockey took the road to show off a fast nag, and
+threw his dust into the Major's face, would pick his legs up all at once,
+and straighten his body out, and swing off into a three-minute gait, in a
+way that "Old Blue" himself need not have been ashamed of.
+
+For some reason which must be left to the next generation of professors
+to find out, the men who are knowing in horse-flesh have an eye also for,
+let a long dash separate the brute creation from the angelic being now to
+be named,--for lovely woman. Of this fact there can be no possible
+doubt; and therefore you shall notice, that, if a fast horse trots before
+two, one of the twain is apt to be a pretty bit of muliebrity, with
+shapes to her, and eyes flying about in all directions.
+
+Major Rowens, at that time Lieutenant of the Rockland Fusileers, had
+driven and "traded" horses not a few before he turned his acquired skill
+as a judge of physical advantages in another direction. He knew a neat,
+snug hoof, a delicate pastern, a broad haunch, a deep chest, a close
+ribbed-up barrel, as well as any other man in the town. He was not to be
+taken in by your thick-jointed, heavy-headed cattle, without any go to
+them, that suit a country-parson, nor yet by the "gaanted-up,"
+long-legged animals, with all their constitutions bred out of them, such
+as rich greenhorns buy and cover up with their plated trappings.
+
+Whether his equine experience was of any use to him in the selection of
+the mate with whom he was to go in double harness so long as they both
+should live, we need not stop to question. At any rate, nobody could
+find fault with the points of Miss Marilla Van Deusen, to whom he offered
+the privilege of becoming Mrs. Rowens. The Van must have been crossed
+out of her blood, for she was an out-and-out brunette, with hair and eyes
+black enough for a Mohawk's daughter. A fine style of woman, with very
+striking tints and outlines,--an excellent match for the Lieutenant,
+except for one thing. She was marked by Nature for a widow. She was
+evidently got up for mourning, and never looked so well as in deep black,
+with jet ornaments.
+
+The man who should dare to marry her would doom himself; for how could
+she become the widow she was bound to be, unless he could retire and give
+her a chance? The Lieutenant lived, however, as we have seen, to become
+Captain and then Major, with prospects of further advancement. But Mrs.
+Rowens often said she should never look well in colors. At last her
+destiny fulfilled itself, and the justice of Nature was vindicated.
+Major Rowens got overheated galloping about the field on the day of the
+Great Muster, and had a rush of blood to the head, according to the
+common report,--at any rate, something which stopped him short in his
+career of expansion and promotion, and established Mrs. Rowens in her
+normal condition of widowhood.
+
+The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow. A very
+shallow crape bonnet, frilled and froth-like, allowed the parted raven
+hair to show its glossy smoothness. A jet pin heaved upon her bosom with
+every sigh of memory, or emotion of unknown origin. Jet bracelets shone
+with every movement of her slender hands, cased in close-fitting black
+gloves. Her sable dress was ridged with manifold flounces, from beneath
+which a small foot showed itself from time to time, clad in the same hue
+of mourning. Everything about her was dark, except the whites of her
+eyes and the enamel of her teeth. The effect was complete. Gray's Elegy
+was not a more perfect composition.
+
+Much as the Widow was pleased with the costume belonging to her
+condition, she did not disguise from herself that under certain
+circumstances she might be willing to change her name again. Thus, for
+instance, if a gentleman not too far gone in maturity, of dignified
+exterior, with an ample fortune, and of unexceptionable character, should
+happen to set his heart upon her, and the only way to make him happy was
+to give up her weeds and go into those unbecoming colors again for his
+sake,--why, she felt that it was in her nature to make the sacrifice. By
+a singular coincidence it happened that a gentleman was now living in
+Rockland who united in himself all these advantages. Who he was, the
+sagacious reader may very probably have divined. Just to see how it
+looked, one day, having bolted her door, and drawn the curtains close,
+and glanced under the sofa, and listened at the keyhole to be sure there
+was nobody in the entry,--just to see how it looked, she had taken out an
+envelope and written on the back of it Mrs. Manilla Veneer. It made her
+head swim and her knees tremble. What if she should faint, or die, or
+have a stroke of palsy, and they should break into the room and find that
+name written! How she caught it up and tore it into little shreds, and
+then could not be easy until she had burned the small heap of pieces--
+
+But these are things which every honorable reader will consider imparted
+in strict confidence.
+
+The Widow Rowens, though not of the mansion house set, was among the most
+genteel of the two-story circle, and was in the habit of visiting some of
+the great people. In one of these visits she met a dashing young fellow
+with an olive complexion at the house of a professional gentleman who had
+married one of the white necks and pairs of fat arms from a distinguished
+family before referred to. The professional gentleman himself was out,
+but the lady introduced the olive-complexioned young man as Mr. Richard
+Venner.
+
+The Widow was particularly pleased with this accidental meeting. Had
+heard Mr. Venner's name frequently mentioned. Hoped his uncle was well,
+and his charming cousin,--was she as original as ever? Had often admired
+that charming creature he rode: we had had some fine horses. Had never
+got over her taste for riding, but could find nobody that liked a good
+long gallop since--well--she could n't help wishing she was alongside of
+him, the other day, when she saw him dashing by, just at twilight.
+
+The Widow paused; lifted a flimsy handkerchief with a very deep black
+border so as to play the jet bracelet; pushed the tip of her slender foot
+beyond the lowest of her black flounces; looked up; looked down; looked
+at Mr. Richard, the very picture of artless simplicity,--as represented
+in well-played genteel comedy.
+
+"A good bit of stuff," Dick said to himself, "and something of it left
+yet; caramba!" The Major had not studied points for nothing, and the
+Widow was one of the right sort. The young man had been a little
+restless of late, and was willing to vary his routine by picking up an
+acquaintance here and there. So he took the Widow's hint. He should
+like to have a scamper of half a dozen miles with her some fine morning.
+
+The Widow was infinitely obliged; was not sure that she could find any
+horse in the village to suit her; but it was so kind in him! Would he not
+call at Hyacinth Cottage, and let her thank him again there?
+
+Thus began an acquaintance which the Widow made the most of, and on the
+strength of which she determined to give a tea-party and invite a number
+of persons of whom we know something already. She took a half-sheet of
+note-paper and made out her list as carefully as a country "merchant's
+clerk" adds up two and threepence (New-England nomenclature) and twelve
+and a half cents, figure by figure, and fraction by fraction, before he
+can be sure they will make half a dollar, without cheating somebody.
+After much consideration the list reduced itself to the following names:
+Mr. Richard Venner and Mrs. Blanche Creamer, the lady at whose house she
+had met him,--mansion-house breed,--but will come,--soft on Dick; Dudley
+Venner,--take care of him herself; Elsie,--Dick will see to her,--won't
+it fidget the Creamer woman to see him round her? the old Doctor,--he 's
+always handy; and there's that young master there, up at the
+school,--know him well enough to ask him,--oh, yes, he'll come. One,
+two, three, four, five, six,--seven; not room enough, without the leaf in
+the table; one place empty, if the leaf's in. Let's see,--Helen Darley,
+--she 'll do well enough to fill it up,--why, yes, just the thing,
+--light brown hair, blue eyes,--won't my pattern show off well against
+her? Put her down,--she 's worth her tea and toast ten times over,
+--nobody knows what a "thunder-and-lightning woman," as poor Major used
+to have it, is, till she gets alongside of one of those old-maidish
+girls, with hair the color of brown sugar, and eyes like the blue of a
+teacup.
+
+The Widow smiled with a feeling of triumph at having overcome her
+difficulties and arranged her party,--arose and stood before her glass,
+three-quarters front, one-quarter profile, so as to show the whites of
+the eyes and the down of the upper lip. "Splendid!" said the Widow--and
+to tell the truth, she was not far out of the way, and with Helen Darley
+as a foil anybody would know she must be foudroyant and pyramidal,--if
+these French adjectives may be naturalized for this one particular
+exigency.
+
+So the Widow sent out her notes. The black grief which had filled her
+heart and had overflowed in surges of crape around her person had left a
+deposit half an inch wide at the margin of her note-paper. Her seal was a
+small youth with an inverted torch, the same on which Mrs. Blanche
+Creamer made her spiteful remark, that she expected to see that boy of
+the Widow's standing on his head yet; meaning, as Dick supposed, that she
+would get the torch right-side up as soon as she had a chance. That was
+after Dick had made the Widow's acquaintance, and Mrs. Creamer had got it
+into her foolish head that she would marry that young fellow, if she
+could catch him. How could he ever come to fancy such a quadroon-looking
+thing as that, she should like to know?
+
+It is easy enough to ask seven people to a party; but whether they will
+come or not is an open question, as it was in the case of the spirits of
+the vasty deep. If the note issues from a three-story mansion-house, and
+goes to two-story acquaintances, they will all be in an excellent state
+of health, and have much pleasure in accepting this very polite
+invitation. If the note is from the lady of a two-story family to
+three-story ones, the former highly respectable person will very probably
+find that an endemic complaint is prevalent, not represented in the
+weekly bills of mortality, which occasions numerous regrets in the bosoms
+of eminently desirable parties that they cannot have the pleasure of
+and-so-forthing.
+
+In this case there was room for doubt,--mainly as to whether Elsie would
+take a fancy to come or not. If she should come, her father would
+certainly be with her. Dick had promised, and thought he could bring
+Elsie. Of course the young schoolmaster will come, and that poor
+tired-out looking Helen, if only to get out of sight of those horrid
+Peckham wretches. They don't get such invitations every day. The others
+she felt sure of,--all but the old Doctor,--he might have some horrid
+patient or other to visit; tell him Elsie Venner's going to be there,--he
+always likes to have an eye on her, they say,--oh, he'd come fast enough,
+without any more coaxing.
+
+She wanted the Doctor, particularly. It was odd, but she was afraid of
+Elsie. She felt as if she should be safe enough, if the old Doctor were
+there to see to the girl; and then she should have leisure to devote
+herself more freely to the young lady's father, for whom all her
+sympathies were in a state of lively excitement.
+
+It was a long time since the Widow had seen so many persons round her
+table as she had now invited. Better have the plates set and see how
+they will fill it up with the leaf in.--A little too scattering with only
+eight plates set: if she could find two more people, now, that would
+bring the chairs a little closer,--snug, you know,--which makes the
+company sociable. The Widow thought over her acquaintances. Why how
+stupid! there was her good minister, the same who had married her, and
+might--might--bury her for aught she anew, and his granddaughter staying
+with him,--nice little girl, pretty, and not old enough to be
+dangerous;--for the Widow had no notion of making a tea-party and asking
+people to it that would be like to stand between her and any little
+project she might happen to have on anybody's heart,--not she! It was
+all right now; Blanche was married and so forth; Letty was a child; Elsie
+was his daughter; Helen Darley was a nice, worthy drudge,--poor
+thing!--faded, faded,--colors wouldn't wash, just what she wanted to show
+off against. Now, if the Dudley mansion-house people would only
+come,--that was the great point.
+
+"Here's a note for us, Elsie," said her father, as they sat round the
+breakfast-table. "Mrs. Rowens wants us all to come to tea."
+
+It was one of "Elsie's days," as old Sophy called them. The light in her
+eyes was still, but very bright. She looked up so full of perverse and
+wilful impulses, that Dick knew he could make her go with him and her
+father. He had his own motives for bringing her to this
+determination,--and his own way of setting about it.
+
+"I don't want to go," he said. "What do you say, uncle?"
+
+"To tell the truth, Richard, I don't mach fancy the Major's widow. I
+don't like to see her weeds flowering out quite so strong. I suppose you
+don't care about going, Elsie?"
+
+Elsie looked up in her father's face with an expression which he knew but
+too well. She was just in the state which the plain sort of people call
+"contrary," when they have to deal with it in animals. She would insist
+on going to that tea-party; he knew it just as well before she spoke as
+after she had spoken. If Dick had said he wanted to go and her father
+had seconded his wishes, she would have insisted on staying at home. It
+was no great matter, her father said to himself, after all; very likely
+it would amuse her; the Widow was a lively woman enough,--perhaps a
+little comme il ne faut pas socially, compared with the Thorntons and
+some other families; but what did he care for these petty village
+distinctions?
+
+Elsie spoke.
+
+"I mean to go. You must go with me, Dudley. You may do as you like,
+Dick."
+
+That settled the Dudley-mansion business, of course. They all three
+accepted, as fortunately did all the others who had been invited.
+
+Hyacinth Cottage was a pretty place enough, a little too much choked
+round with bushes, and too much overrun with climbing-roses, which, in
+the season of slugs and rose-bugs, were apt to show so brown about the
+leaves and so coleopterous about the flowers, that it might be questioned
+whether their buds and blossoms made up for these unpleasant animal
+combinations,--especially as the smell of whale-oil soap was very
+commonly in the ascendant over that of the roses. It had its patch of
+grass called "the lawn," and its glazed closet known as "the
+conservatory," according to that system of harmless fictions
+characteristic of the rural imagination and shown in the names applied to
+many familiar objects. The interior of the cottage was more tasteful and
+ambitious than that of the ordinary two-story dwellings. In place of the
+prevailing hair-cloth covered furniture, the visitor had the satisfaction
+of seating himself upon a chair covered with some of the Widow's
+embroidery, or a sofa luxurious with soft caressing plush. The sporting
+tastes of the late Major showed in various prints on the wall: Herring's
+"Plenipotentiary," the "red bullock" of the '34 Derby; "Cadland" and "The
+Colonel;" "Crucifix;" "West-Australian," fastest of modern racers; and
+among native celebrities, ugly, game old "Boston," with his straight neck
+and ragged hips; and gray "Lady Suffolk," queen, in her day, not of the
+turf but of the track, "extending" herself till she measured a rod, more
+or less, skimming along within a yard of the ground, her legs opening and
+shutting under her with a snap, like the four blades of a compound
+jack-knife.
+
+These pictures were much more refreshing than those dreary fancy
+death-bed scenes, common in two-story country-houses, in which Washington
+and other distinguished personages are represented as obligingly devoting
+their last moments to taking a prominent part in a tableau, in which
+weeping relatives, attached servants, professional assistants, and
+celebrated personages who might by a stretch of imagination be supposed
+present, are grouped in the most approved style of arrangement about the
+chief actor's pillow.
+
+A single glazed bookcase held the family library, which was hidden from
+vulgar eyes by green silk curtains behind the glass. It would have been
+instructive to get a look at it, as it always is to peep into one's
+neighbor's book-shelves. From other sources and opportunities a partial
+idea of it has been obtained. The Widow had inherited some books from
+her mother, who was something of a reader: Young's "Night-Thoughts;" "The
+Preceptor;" "The Task, a Poem," by William Cowper; Hervey's
+"Meditations;" "Alonzo and Melissa;" "Buccaneers of America;" "The
+Triumphs of Temper;" "La Belle Assemblee;" Thomson's "Seasons;" and a few
+others. The Major had brought in "Tom Jones" and "Peregrine Pickle;"
+various works by Mr. Pierce Egan; "Boxiana," "The Racing Calendar;" and a
+"Book of Lively Songs and Jests." The Widow had added the Poems of Lord
+Byron and T. Moore; "Eugene Aram;" "The Tower of London," by Harrison
+Ainsworth; some of Scott's Novels; "The Pickwick Papers;" a volume of
+Plays, by W. Shakespeare; "Proverbial Philosophy;" "Pilgrim's Progress;"
+"The Whole Duty of Man" (a present when she was married); with two
+celebrated religious works, one by William Law and the other by Philip
+Doddridge, which were sent her after her husband's death, and which she
+had tried to read, but found that they did not agree with her. Of course
+the bookcase held a few school manuals and compendiums, and one of Mr.
+Webster's Dictionaries. But the gilt-edged Bible always lay on the
+centre-table, next to the magazine with the fashion-plates and the
+scrap-book with pictures from old annuals and illustrated papers.
+
+The reader need not apprehend the recital, at full length, of such
+formidable preparations for the Widow's tea-party as were required in the
+case of Colonel Sprowle's Social Entertainment. A tea-party, even in the
+country, is a comparatively simple and economical piece of business. As
+soon as the Widow found that all her company were coming, she set to
+work, with the aid of her "smart" maid-servant and a daughter of her own,
+who was beginning to stretch and spread at a fearful rate, but whom she
+treated as a small child, to make the necessary preparations. The silver
+had to be rubbed; also the grand plated urn,--her mother's before
+hers,--style of the Empire,--looking as if it might have been made to
+hold the Major's ashes. Then came the making and baking of cake and
+gingerbread, the smell whereof reached even as far as the sidewalk in
+front of the cottage, so that small boys returning from school snuffed it
+in the breeze, and discoursed with each other on its suggestions; so that
+the Widow Leech, who happened to pass, remembered she had n't called on
+Marilly Raowens for a consid'ble spell, and turned in at the gate and
+rang three times with long intervals,--but all in vain, the inside Widow
+having "spotted" the outside one through the blinds, and whispered to her
+aides-de-camp to let the old thing ring away till she pulled the bell out
+by the roots, but not to stir to open the door.
+
+Widow Rowens was what they called a real smart, capable woman, not very
+great on books, perhaps, but knew what was what and who was who as well
+as another,--knew how to make the little cottage look pretty, how to set
+out a tea-table, and, what a good many women never can find out, knew her
+own style and "got herself up tip-top," as our young friend Master
+Geordie, Colonel Sprowle's heir-apparent, remarked to his friend from one
+of the fresh-water colleges. Flowers were abundant now, and she had
+dressed her rooms tastefully with them. The centre-table had two or
+three gilt-edged books lying carelessly about on it, and some prints and
+a stereoscope with stereographs to match, chiefly groups of picnics,
+weddings, etc., in which the same somewhat fatigued looking ladies of
+fashion and brides received the attentions of the same unpleasant-looking
+young men, easily identified under their different disguises, consisting
+of fashionable raiment such as gentlemen are supposed to wear habitually.
+With these, however, were some pretty English scenes,--pretty except for
+the old fellow with the hanging under-lip who infests every one of that
+interesting series; and a statue or two, especially that famous one
+commonly called the Lahcoon, so as to rhyme with moon and spoon, and
+representing an old man with his two sons in the embraces of two
+monstrous serpents.
+
+There is no denying that it was a very dashing achievement of the Widow's
+to bring together so considerable a number of desirable guests. She felt
+proud of her feat; but as to the triumph of getting Dudley Venner to come
+out for a visit to Hyacinth Cottage, she was surprised and almost
+frightened at her own success. So much might depend on the impressions
+of that evening!
+
+The next thing was to be sure that everybody should be in the right place
+at the tea-table, and this the Widow thought she could manage by a few
+words to the older guests and a little shuffling about and shifting when
+they got to the table. To settle everything the Widow made out a
+diagram, which the reader should have a chance of inspecting in an
+authentic copy, if these pages were allowed under any circumstances to be
+the vehicle of illustrations. If, however, he or she really wishes to
+see the way the pieces stood as they were placed at the beginning of the
+game, (the Widow's gambit,) he or she had better at once take a sheet of
+paper, draw an oval, and arrange the characters according to the
+following schedule.
+
+At the head of the table, the Hostess, Widow Marilla Rowens. Opposite
+her, at the other end, Rev. Dr. Honeywood. At the right of the Hostess,
+Dudley Veneer, next him Helen Darley, next her Dr. Kittredge, next him
+Mrs. Blanche Creamer, then the Reverend Doctor. At the left of the
+Hostess, Bernard Langdon, next him Letty Forrester, next Letty Mr.
+Richard Veneer, next him Elsie, and so to the Reverend Doctor again.
+
+The company came together a little before the early hour at which it was
+customary to take tea in Rockland. The Widow knew everybody, of course:
+who was there in Rockland she did not know? But some of them had to be
+introduced: Mr. Richard Veneer to Mr. Bernard, Mr. Bernard to Miss Letty,
+Dudley Veneer to Miss Helen Darley, and so on. The two young men looked
+each other straight in the eyes, both full of youthful life, but one of
+frank and fearless aspect, the other with a dangerous feline beauty alien
+to the New England half of his blood.
+
+The guests talked, turned over the prints, looked at the flowers, opened
+the "Proverbial Philosophy" with gilt edges, and the volume of Plays by
+W. Shakespeare, examined the horse-pictures on the walls, and so passed
+away the time until tea was announced, when they paired off for the room
+where it was in readiness. The Widow had managed it well; everything was
+just as she wanted it. Dudley Veneer was between herself and the poor
+tired-looking schoolmistress with her faded colors. Blanche Creamer, a
+lax, tumble-to-pieces, Greuze-ish looking blonde, whom the Widow hated
+because the men took to her, was purgatoried between the two old Doctors,
+and could see all the looks that passed between Dick Venner and his
+cousin. The young schoolmaster could talk to Miss Letty: it was his
+business to know how to talk to schoolgirls. Dick would amuse himself
+with his cousin Elsie. The old Doctors only wanted to be well fed and
+they would do well enough.
+
+It would be very pleasant to describe the tea-table; but in reality, it
+did not pretend to offer a plethoric banquet to the guests. The Widow
+had not visited the mansion-houses for nothing, and she had learned there
+that an overloaded tea-table may do well enough for farm-hands when they
+come in at evening from their work and sit down unwashed in their
+shirtsleeves, but that for decently bred people such an insult to the
+memory of a dinner not yet half-assimilated is wholly inadmissible.
+Everything was delicate, and almost everything of fair complexion: white
+bread and biscuits, frosted and sponge cake, cream, honey, straw-colored
+butter; only a shadow here and there, where the fire had crisped and
+browned the surfaces of a stack of dry toast, or where a preserve had
+brought away some of the red sunshine of the last year's summer. The
+Widow shall have the credit of her well-ordered tea-table, also of her
+bountiful cream-pitchers; for it is well known that city-people find
+cream a very scarce luxury in a good many country-houses of more
+pretensions than Hyacinth Cottage. There are no better maims for ladies
+who give tea-parties than these:
+
+Cream is thicker than water. Large heart never loved little cream pot.
+
+There is a common feeling in genteel families that the third meal of the
+day is not so essential a part of the daily bread as to require any
+especial acknowledgment to the Providence which bestows it. Very devout
+people, who would never sit down to a breakfast or a dinner without the
+grace before meat which honors the Giver of it, feel as if they thanked
+Heaven enough for their tea and toast by partaking of them cheerfully
+without audible petition or ascription. But the Widow was not exactly
+mansion-house-bred, and so thought it necessary to give the Reverend
+Doctor a peculiar look which he understood at once as inviting his
+professional services. He, therefore, uttered a few simple words of
+gratitude, very quietly,--much to the satisfaction of some of the guests,
+who had expected one of those elaborate effusions, with rolling up of the
+eyes and rhetorical accents, so frequent with eloquent divines when they
+address their Maker in genteel company.
+
+Everybody began talking with the person sitting next at hand. Mr.
+Bernard naturally enough turned his attention first to the Widow; but
+somehow or other the right side of the Widow seemed to be more wide awake
+than the left side, next him, and he resigned her to the courtesies of
+Mr. Dudley Venner, directing himself, not very unwillingly, to the young
+girl next him on the other side. Miss Letty Forrester, the granddaughter
+of the Reverend Doctor, was city-bred, as anybody might see, and
+city-dressed, as any woman would know at sight; a man might only feel the
+general effect of clear, well-matched colors, of harmonious proportions,
+of the cut which makes everything cling like a bather's sleeve where a
+natural outline is to be kept, and ruffle itself up like the hackle of a
+pitted fighting-cock where art has a right to luxuriate in silken
+exuberance. How this citybred and city-dressed girl came to be in
+Rockland Mr. Bernard did not know, but he knew at any rate that she was
+his next neighbor and entitled to his courtesies. She was handsome, too,
+when he came to look, very handsome when he came to look again,--endowed
+with that city beauty which is like the beauty of wall-fruit, something
+finer in certain respects than can be reared off the pavement.
+
+The miserable routinists who keep repeating invidiously Cowper's
+
+ "God made the country and man made the town,"
+
+as if the town were a place to kill out the race in, do not know what
+they are talking about. Where could they raise such Saint-Michael pears,
+such Saint-Germains, such Brown-Beurres, as we had until within a few
+years growing within the walls of our old city-gardens? Is the dark and
+damp cavern where a ragged beggar hides himself better than a
+town-mansion which fronts the sunshine and backs on its own cool shadow,
+with gas and water and all appliances to suit all needs? God made the
+cavern and man made the house! What then?
+
+There is no doubt that the pavement keeps a deal of mischief from coming
+up out of the earth, and, with a dash off of it in summer, just to cool
+the soles of the feet when it gets too hot, is the best place for many
+constitutions, as some few practical people have already discovered. And
+just so these beauties that grow and ripen against the city-walls, these
+young fellows with cheeks like peaches and young girls with cheeks like
+nectarines, show that the most perfect forms of artificial life can do as
+much for the human product as garden-culture for strawberries and
+blackberries.
+
+If Mr. Bernard had philosophized or prosed in this way, with so pretty,
+nay, so lovely a neighbor as Miss Letty Forrester waiting for him to
+speak to her, he would have to be dropped from this narrative as a person
+unworthy of his good-fortune, and not deserving the kind reader's further
+notice. On the contrary, he no sooner set his eyes fairly on her than he
+said to himself that she was charming, and that he wished she were one of
+his scholars at the Institute. So he began talking with her in an easy
+way; for he knew something of young girls by this time, and, of course,
+could adapt himself to a young lady who looked as if she might be not
+more than fifteen or sixteen years old, and therefore could hardly be a
+match in intellectual resources for the seventeen and eighteen year-old
+first-class scholars of the Apollinean Institute. But city-wall-fruit
+ripens early, and he soon found that this girl's training had so
+sharpened her wits and stored her memory, that he need not be at the
+trouble to stoop painfully in order to come down to her level.
+
+The beauty of good-breeding is that it adjusts itself to all relations
+without effort, true to itself always however the manners of those around
+it may change. Self-respect and respect for others,--the sensitive
+consciousness poises itself in these as the compass in the ship's
+binnacle balances itself and maintains its true level within the two
+concentric rings which suspend it on their pivots. This thorough-bred
+school-girl quite enchanted Mr. Bernard. He could not understand where
+she got her style, her way of dress, her enunciation, her easy manners.
+The minister was a most worthy gentleman, but this was not the Rockland
+native-born manner; some new element had come in between the good, plain,
+worthy man and this young girl, fit to be a Crown Prince's partner where
+there were a thousand to choose from.
+
+He looked across to Helen Darley, for he knew she would understand the
+glance of admiration with which he called her attention to the young
+beauty at his side; and Helen knew what a young girl could be, as
+compared with what too many a one is, as well as anybody.
+
+This poor, dear Helen of ours! How admirable the contrast between her
+and the Widow on the other side of Dudley Venner! But, what was very
+odd, that gentleman apparently thought the contrast was to the advantage
+of this poor, dear Helen. At any rate, instead of devoting himself
+solely to the Widow, he happened to be just at that moment talking in a
+very interested and, apparently, not uninteresting way to his right-hand
+neighbor, who, on her part, never looked more charmingly,--as Mr. Bernard
+could not help saying to himself,--but, to be sure, he had just been
+looking at the young girl next him, so that his eyes were brimful of
+beauty, and may have spilled some of it on the first comer: for you know
+M. Becquerel has been showing us lately how everything is phosphorescent;
+that it soaks itself with light in an instant's exposure, so that it is
+wet with liquid sunbeams, or, if you will, tremulous with luminous
+vibrations, when first plunged into the negative bath of darkness, and
+betrays itself by the light which escapes from its surface.
+
+Whatever were the reason, this poor, dear Helen never looked so sweetly.
+Her plainly parted brown hair, her meek, blue eyes, her cheek just a
+little tinged with color, the almost sad simplicity of her dress, and
+that look he knew so well,--so full of cheerful patience, so sincere,
+that he had trusted her from the first moment as the believers of the
+larger half of Christendom trust the Blessed Virgin,--Mr. Bernard took
+this all in at a glance, and felt as pleased as if it had been his own
+sister Dorothea Elizabeth that he was looking at. As for Dudley Veneer,
+Mr. Bernard could not help being struck by the animated expression of his
+countenance. It certainly showed great kindness, on his part, to pay so
+much attention to this quiet girl, when he had the thunder-and-lightning
+Widow on the other side of him.
+
+Mrs. Marilla Rowens did not know what to make of it. She had made her
+tea-party expressly for Mr. Dudley Veneer. She had placed him just as
+she wanted, between herself and a meek, delicate woman who dressed in
+gray, wore a plain breastpin with hair in it, who taught a pack of girls
+up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a
+teacher,--the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was
+this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that
+very undistinguished young person as if he rather preferred her
+conversation of the two!
+
+The truth was that Dudley Veneer and Helen Darley met as two travellers
+might meet in the desert, wearied, both of them, with their long journey,
+one having food, but no water, the other water, but no food. Each saw
+that the other had been in long conflict with some trial; for their
+voices were low and tender, as patiently borne sorrow and humbly uttered
+prayers make every human voice. Through these tones, more than by what
+they said, they came into natural sympathetic relations with each other.
+Nothing could be more unstudied. As for Dudley Venner, no beauty in all
+the world could have so soothed and magnetized him as the very repose and
+subdued gentleness which the Widow had thought would make the best
+possible background for her own more salient and effective attractions.
+No doubt, Helen, on her side, was almost too readily pleased with the
+confidence this new acquaintance she was making seemed to show her from
+the very first. She knew so few men of any condition! Mr. Silas
+Peckham: he was her employer, and she ought to think of him as well as
+she could; but every time she thought of him it was with a shiver of
+disgust. Mr. Bernard Langdon: a noble young man, a true friend, like a
+brother to her,--God bless him, and send him some young heart as fresh as
+his own! But this gentleman produced a new impression upon her, quite
+different from any to which she was accustomed. His rich, low tones had
+the strangest significance to her; she felt sure he must have lived
+through long experiences, sorrowful like her own. Elsie's father! She
+looked into his dark eyes, as she listened to him, to see if they had any
+glimmer of that peculiar light, diamond-bright, but cold and still, which
+she knew so well in Elsie's. Anything but that! Never was there more
+tenderness, it seemed to her, than in the whole look and expression of
+Elsie's father. She must have been a great trial to him; yet his face
+was that of one who had been saddened, not soured, by his discipline.
+Knowing what Elsie must be to him, how hard she must make any parent's
+life, Helen could not but be struck with the interest Mr. Dudley Venner
+showed in her as his daughter's instructress. He was too kind to her;
+again and again she meekly turned from him, so as to leave him free to
+talk to the showy lady at his other side, who was looking all the while
+
+ "like the night
+ Of cloudless realms and starry skies;"
+
+but still Mr. Dudley Venner, after a few courteous words, came back to
+the blue eyes and brown hair; still he kept his look fixed upon her, and
+his tones grew sweeter and lower as he became more interested in talk,
+until this poor, dear Helen, what with surprise, and the bashfulness
+natural to one who had seen little of the gay world, and the stirring of
+deep, confused sympathies with this suffering father, whose heart seemed
+so full of kindness, felt her cheeks glowing with unwonted flame, and
+betrayed the pleasing trouble of her situation by looking so sweetly as
+to arrest Mr. Bernard's eye for a moment, when he looked away from the
+young beauty sitting next him.
+
+Elsie meantime had been silent, with that singular, still, watchful look
+which those who knew her well had learned to fear. Her head just a
+little inclined on one side, perfectly motionless for whole minutes, her
+eyes seeming to, grow small and bright, as always when she was under her
+evil influence, she was looking obliquely at the young girl on the other
+side of her cousin Dick and next to Bernard Langdon. As for Dick
+himself, she seemed to be paying very little attention to him. Sometimes
+her eyes would wander off to Mr. Bernard, and their expression, as old
+Dr. Kittredge, who watched her for a while pretty keenly, noticed, would
+change perceptibly. One would have said that she looked with a kind of
+dull hatred at the girl, but with a half-relenting reproachful anger at
+Mr. Bernard.
+
+Miss Letty Forrester, at whom Elsie had been looking from time to time in
+this fixed way, was conscious meanwhile of some unusual influence. First
+it was a feeling of constraint,--then, as it were, a diminished power
+over the muscles, as if an invisible elastic cobweb were spinning round
+her,--then a tendency to turn away from Mr. Bernard, who was making
+himself very agreeable, and look straight into those eyes which would not
+leave her, and which seemed to be drawing her towards them, while at the
+same time they chilled the blood in all her veins.
+
+Mr. Bernard saw this influence coming over her. All at once he noticed
+that she sighed, and that some little points of moisture began to glisten
+on her forehead. But she did not grow pale perceptibly; she had no
+involuntary or hysteric movements; she still listened to him and smiled
+naturally enough. Perhaps she was only nervous at being stared at. At
+any rate, she was coming under some unpleasant influence or other, and
+Mr. Bernard had seen enough of the strange impression Elsie sometimes
+produced to wish this young girl to be relieved from it, whatever it was.
+He turned toward Elsie and looked at her in such a way as to draw her
+eyes upon him. Then he looked steadily and calmly into them. It was a
+great effort, for some perfectly inexplicable reason. At one instant he
+thought he could not sit where he was; he must go and speak to Elsie.
+Then he wanted to take his eyes away from hers; there was something
+intolerable in the light that came from them. But he was determined to
+look her down, and he believed he could do it, for he had seen her
+countenance change more than once when he had caught her gaze steadily
+fixed on him. All this took not minutes, but seconds. Presently she
+changed color slightly,--lifted her head, which was inclined a little to
+one side,--shut and opened her eyes two or three times, as if they had
+been pained or wearied,--and turned away baffled, and shamed, as it would
+seem, and shorn for the time of her singular and formidable or at least
+evil-natured power of swaying the impulses of those around her.
+
+It takes too long to describe these scenes where a good deal of life is
+concentrated into a few silent seconds. Mr. Richard Veneer had sat
+quietly through it all, although this short pantomime had taken place
+literally before his face. He saw what was going on well enough, and
+understood it all perfectly well. Of course the schoolmaster had been
+trying to make Elsie jealous, and had succeeded. The little schoolgirl
+was a decoy-duck,--that was all. Estates like the Dudley property were
+not to be had every day, and no doubt the Yankee usher was willing to
+take some pains to make sure of Elsie. Does n't Elsie look savage? Dick
+involuntarily moved his chair a little away from her, and thought he felt
+a pricking in the small white scars on his wrist. A dare-devil fellow,
+but somehow or other this girl had taken strange hold of his imagination,
+and he often swore to himself, that, when he married her, he would carry
+a loaded revolver with him to his bridal chamber.
+
+Mrs. Blanche Creamer raged inwardly at first to find herself between the
+two old gentlemen of the party. It very soon gave her great comfort,
+however, to see that Marilla, Rowens had just missed it in her
+calculations, and she chuckled immensely to find Dudley Veneer devoting
+himself chiefly to Helen Darley. If the Rowens woman should hook Dudley,
+she felt as if she should gnaw all her nails off for spite. To think of
+seeing her barouching about Rockland behind a pair of long-tailed bays
+and a coachman with a band on his hat, while she, Blanche Creamer, was
+driving herself about in a one-horse "carriage"! Recovering her spirits
+by degrees, she began playing her surfaces off at the two old Doctors,
+just by way of practice. First she heaved up a glaring white shoulder,
+the right one, so that the Reverend Doctor should be stunned by it, if
+such a thing might be. The Reverend Doctor was human, as the Apostle was
+not ashamed to confess himself. Half-devoutly and half-mischievously he
+repeated inwardly, "Resist the Devil and he will flee from you." As the
+Reverend Doctor did not show any lively susceptibility, she thought she
+would try the left shoulder on old Dr. Kittredge. That worthy and
+experienced student of science was not at all displeased with the
+manoeuvre, and lifted his head so as to command the exhibition through
+his glasses. "Blanche is good for half a dozen years or so, if she is
+careful," the Doctor said to himself, "and then she must take to her
+prayer-book." After this spasmodic failure of Mrs. Blanche Creamer's to
+stir up the old Doctors, she returned again to the pleasing task of
+watching the Widow in her evident discomfiture. But dark as the Widow
+looked in her half-concealed pet, she was but as a pale shadow, compared
+to Elsie in her silent concentration of shame and anger.
+
+"Well, there is one good thing," said Mrs. Blanche Creamer; "Dick doesn't
+get much out of that cousin of his this evening! Does n't he look
+handsome, though?"
+
+So Mrs. Blanche, being now a good deal taken up with her observations of
+those friends of hers and ours, began to be rather careless of her two
+old Doctors, who naturally enough fell into conversation with each other
+across the white surfaces of that lady, perhaps not very politely, but,
+under the, circumstances, almost as a matter of necessity.
+
+When a minister and a doctor get talking together, they always have a
+great deal to say; and so it happened that the company left the table
+just as the two Doctors were beginning to get at each other's ideas about
+various interesting matters. If we follow them into the other parlor, we
+can, perhaps, pick up something of their conversation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+WHY DOCTORS DIFFER.
+
+The company rearranged itself with some changes after leaving the
+tea-table. Dudley Veneer was very polite to the Widow; but that lady
+having been called off for a few moments for some domestic arrangement,
+he slid back to the side of Helen Darley, his daughter's faithful
+teacher. Elsie had got away by herself, and was taken up in studying the
+stereoscopic Laocoon. Dick, being thus set free, had been seized upon by
+Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had diffused herself over three-quarters of a
+sofa and beckoned him to the remaining fourth. Mr. Bernard and Miss
+Letty were having a snug fete-'a-fete in the recess of a bay-window. The
+two Doctors had taken two arm-chairs and sat squared off against each
+other. Their conversation is perhaps as well worth reporting as that of
+the rest of the company, and, as it was carried on in a louder tone, was
+of course more easy to gather and put on record.
+
+It was a curious sight enough to see those two representatives of two
+great professions brought face to face to talk over the subjects they had
+been looking at all their lives from such different points of view. Both
+were old; old enough to have been moulded by their habits of thought and
+life; old enough to have all their beliefs "fretted in," as vintners
+say,--thoroughly worked up with their characters. Each of them looked his
+calling. The Reverend Doctor had lived a good deal among books in his
+study; the Doctor, as we will call the medical gentleman, had been riding
+about the country for between thirty and forty years. His face looked
+tough and weather-worn; while the Reverend Doctor's, hearty as it
+appeared, was of finer texture. The Doctor's was the graver of the two;
+there was something of grimness about it, partly owing to the
+northeasters he had faced for so many years, partly to long companionship
+with that stern personage who never deals in sentiment or pleasantry.
+His speech was apt to be brief and peremptory; it was a way he had got by
+ordering patients; but he could discourse somewhat, on occasion, as the
+reader may find out. The Reverend Doctor had an open, smiling
+expression, a cheery voice, a hearty laugh, and a cordial way with him
+which some thought too lively for his cloth, but which children, who are
+good judges of such matters, delighted in, so that he was the favorite of
+all the little rogues about town. But he had the clerical art of
+sobering down in a moment, when asked to say grace while somebody was in
+the middle of some particularly funny story; and though his voice was so
+cheery in common talk, in the pulpit, like almost all preachers, he had a
+wholly different and peculiar way of speaking, supposed to be more
+acceptable to the Creator than the natural manner. In point of fact,
+most of our anti-papal and anti-prelatical clergymen do really intone
+their prayers, without suspecting in the least that they have fallen into
+such a Romish practice.
+
+This is the way the conversation between the Doctor of Divinity and the
+Doctor of Medicine was going on at the point where these notes take it
+up.
+
+"Obi tres medici, duo athei, you know, Doctor. Your profession has
+always had the credit of being lax in doctrine,--though pretty stringent
+in practice, ha! ha!"
+
+"Some priest said that," the Doctor answered, dryly. "They always talked
+Latin when they had a bigger lie than common to get rid of."
+
+"Good!" said the Reverend Doctor; "I'm afraid they would lie a little
+sometimes. But isn't there some truth in it, Doctor? Don't you think
+your profession is apt to see 'Nature' in the place of the God of
+Nature,--to lose sight of the great First Cause in their daily study of
+secondary causes?"
+
+"I've thought about that," the Doctor answered, "and I've talked about it
+and read about it, and I've come to the conclusion that nobody believes
+in God and trusts in God quite so much as the doctors; only it is n't
+just the sort of Deity that some of your profession have wanted them to
+take up with. There was a student of mine wrote a dissertation on the
+Natural Theology of Health and Disease, and took that old lying proverb
+for his motto. He knew a good deal more about books than ever I did, and
+had studied in other countries. I'll tell you what he said about it. He
+said the old Heathen Doctor, Galen, praised God for his handiwork in the
+human body, just as if he had been a Christian, or the Psalmist himself.
+He said they had this sentence set up in large letters in the great
+lecture-room in Paris where he attended: I dressed his wound and God
+healed him. That was an old surgeon's saying. And he gave a long list
+of doctors who were not only Christians, but famous ones. I grant you,
+though, ministers and doctors are very apt to see differently in
+spiritual matters."
+
+"That's it," said the Reverend Doctor; "you are apt to see 'Nature' where
+we see God, and appeal to 'Science' where we are contented with
+Revelation."
+
+"We don't separate God and Nature, perhaps, as you do," the Doctor
+answered. "When we say that God is omnipresent and omnipotent and
+omniscient, we are a little more apt to mean it than your folks are. We
+think, when a wound heals, that God's presence and power and knowledge
+are there, healing it, just as that old surgeon did. We think a good
+many theologians, working among their books, don't see the facts of the
+world they live in. When we tell 'em of these facts, they are apt to
+call us materialists and atheists and infidels, and all that. We can't
+help seeing the facts, and we don't think it's wicked to mention 'em."
+
+"Do tell me," the Reverend Doctor said, "some of these facts we are in
+the habit of overlooking, and which your profession thinks it can see and
+understand."
+
+"That's very easy," the Doctor replied. "For instance: you don't
+understand or don't allow for idiosyncrasies as we learn to. We know
+that food and physic act differently with different people; but you think
+the same kind of truth is going to suit, or ought to suit, all minds. We
+don't fight with a patient because he can't take magnesia or opium; but
+you are all the time quarrelling over your beliefs, as if belief did not
+depend very much on race and constitution, to say nothing of early
+training."
+
+"Do you mean to say that every man is not absolutely free to choose his
+beliefs?"
+
+"The men you write about in your studies are, but not the men we see in
+the real world. There is some apparently congenital defect in the
+Indians, for instance, that keeps them from choosing civilization and
+Christianity. So with the Gypsies, very likely. Everybody knows that
+Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a matter of race.
+Constitution has more to do with belief than people think for. I went to
+a Universalist church, when I was in the city one day, to hear a famous
+man whom all the world knows, and I never saw such pews-full of broad
+shoulders and florid faces, and substantial, wholesome-looking persons,
+male and female, in all my life. Why, it was astonishing. Either their
+creed made them healthy, or they chose it because they were healthy.
+Your folks have never got the hang of human nature."
+
+"I am afraid this would be considered a degrading and dangerous view of
+human beliefs and responsibility for them," the Reverend Doctor replied.
+"Prove to a man that his will is governed by something outside of
+himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and religious nature.
+There is nothing bad men want to believe so much as that they are
+governed by necessity. Now that which is at once degrading and dangerous
+cannot be true."
+
+"No doubt," the Doctor replied, "all large views of mankind limit our
+estimate of the absolute freedom of the will. But I don't think it
+degrades or endangers us, for this reason, that, while it makes us
+charitable to the rest of mankind, our own sense of freedom, whatever it
+is, is never affected by argument. Conscience won't be reasoned with.
+We feel that we can practically do this of that, and if we choose the
+wrong, we know we are responsible; but observation teaches us that this
+or that other race or individual has not the same practical freedom of
+choice. I don't see how we can avoid this conclusion in the instance of
+the American Indians. The science of Ethnology has upset a good many
+theoretical notions about human nature."
+
+"Science!" said the Reverend Doctor, "science! that was a word the
+Apostle Paul did not seem to think much of, if we may judge by the
+Epistle to Timothy: 'Oppositions of science falsely so called.' I own
+that I am jealous of that word and the pretensions that go with it.
+Science has seemed to me to be very often only the handmaid of
+skepticism."
+
+"Doctor!" the physician said, emphatically, "science is knowledge.
+Nothing that is not known properly belongs to science. Whenever
+knowledge obliges us to doubt, we are always safe in doubting.
+Astronomers foretell eclipses, say how long comets are to stay with us,
+point out where a new planet is to be found. We see they know what they
+assert, and the poor old Roman Catholic Church has at last to knock
+under. So Geology proves a certain succession of events, and the best
+Christian in the world must make the earth's history square with it.
+Besides, I don't think you remember what great revelations of himself the
+Creator has made in the minds of the men who have built up science. You
+seem to me to hold his human masterpieces very cheap. Don't you think
+the 'inspiration of the Almighty' gave Newton and Cuvier
+'understanding'?"
+
+The Reverend Doctor was not arguing for victory. In fact, what he wanted
+was to call out the opinions of the old physician by a show of
+opposition, being already predisposed to agree with many of them. He was
+rather trying the common arguments, as one tries tricks of fence merely
+to learn the way of parrying. But just here he saw a tempting opening,
+and could not resist giving a home-thrust.
+
+"Yes; but you surely would not consider it inspiration of the same kind
+as that of the writers of the Old Testament?"
+
+That cornered the Doctor, and he paused a moment before he replied. Then
+he raised his head, so as to command the Reverend Doctor's face through
+his spectacles, and said,
+
+"I did not say that. You are clear, I suppose, that the Omniscient spoke
+through Solomon, but that Shakespeare wrote without his help?"
+
+The Reverend Doctor looked very grave. It was a bold, blunt way of
+putting the question. He turned it aside with the remark, that
+Shakespeare seemed to him at times to come as near inspiration as any
+human being not included among the sacred writers.
+
+"Doctor," the physician began, as from a sudden suggestion, "you won't
+quarrel with me, if I tell you some of my real thoughts, will you?"
+
+"Say on, my dear Sir, say on," the minister answered, with his most
+genial smile; "your real thoughts are just what I want to get at. A
+man's real thoughts are a great rarity. If I don't agree with you, I
+shall like to hear you."
+
+The Doctor began; and in order to give his thoughts more connectedly, we
+will omit the conversational breaks, the questions and comments of the
+clergyman, and all accidental interruptions.
+
+"When the old ecclesiastics said that where there were three doctors
+there were two atheists, they lied, of course. They called everybody who
+differed from them atheists, until they found out that not believing in
+God was n't nearly so ugly a crime as not believing in some particular
+dogma; then they called them heretics, until so many good people had been
+burned under that name that it began to smell too strong of roasting
+flesh,--and after that infidels, which properly means people without
+faith, of whom there are not a great many in any place or time. But
+then, of course, there was some reason why doctors shouldn't think about
+religion exactly as ministers did, or they never would have made that
+proverb. It 's very likely that something of the same kind is true now;
+whether it is so or not, I am going to tell you the reasons why it would
+not be strange, if doctors should take rather different views from
+clergymen about some matters of belief. I don't, of course, mean all
+doctors nor all clergymen. Some doctors go as far as any old New England
+divine, and some clergymen agree very well with the doctors that think
+least according to rule.
+
+"To begin with their ideas of the Creator himself. They always see him
+trying to help his creatures out of their troubles. A man no sooner gets
+a cut, than the Great Physician, whose agency we often call Nature, goes
+to work, first to stop the blood, and then to heal the wound, and then to
+make the scar as small as possible. If a man's pain exceeds a certain
+amount, he faints, and so gets relief. If it lasts too long, habit comes
+in to make it tolerable. If it is altogether too bad, he dies. That is
+the best thing to be done under the circumstances. So you see, the
+doctor is constantly in presence of a benevolent agency working against a
+settled order of things, of which pain and disease are the accidents, so
+to speak. Well, no doubt they find it harder than clergymen to believe
+that there can be any world or state from which this benevolent agency is
+wholly excluded. This may be very wrong; but it is not unnatural.
+
+"They can hardly conceive of a permanent state of being in which cuts
+would never try to heal, nor habit render suffering endurable. This is
+one effect of their training.
+
+"Then, again, their attention is very much called to human limitations.
+Ministers work out the machinery of responsibility in an abstract kind of
+way; they have a sort of algebra of human nature, in which friction and
+strength (or weakness) of material are left out. You see, a doctor is in
+the way of studying children from the moment of birth upwards. For the
+first year or so he sees that they are just as much pupils of their Maker
+as the young of any other animals. Well, their Maker trains them to pure
+selfishness. Why? In order that they may be sure to take care of
+themselves. So you see, when a child comes to be, we will say a year and
+a day old, and makes his first choice between right and wrong, he is at a
+disadvantage; for he, has that vis a tergo, as we doctors call it, that
+force from behind, of a whole year's life of selfishness, for which he is
+no more to blame than a calf is to blame for having lived in the same
+way, purely to gratify his natural appetites. Then we see that baby grow
+up to a child, and, if he is fat and stout and red and lively, we expect
+to find him troublesome and noisy, and, perhaps, sometimes disobedient
+more or less; that's the way each new generation breaks its egg-shell;
+but if he is very weak and thin, and is one of the kind that may be
+expected to die early, he will very likely sit in the house all day and
+read good books about other little sharp-faced children just like
+himself, who died early, having always been perfectly indifferent to all
+the out-door amusements of the wicked little red-cheeked children.
+
+"Some of the little folks we watch grow up to be young women, and
+occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then
+that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,--to lie and cheat,
+perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a
+minister a good example of total depravity. We don't see her in that
+light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we
+can, and so expect to make her will come all right again. By and by we
+are called in to see an old baby, threescore years and ten or more old.
+We find this old baby has never got rid of that first year's teaching
+which led him to fill his stomach with all he could pump into it, and
+his hands with everything he could grab. People call him a miser. We
+are sorry for him; but we can't help remembering his first year's
+training, and the natural effect of money on the great majority of those
+that have it. So while the ministers say he 'shall hardly enter into the
+kingdom of heaven,' we like to remind them that 'with God all things are
+possible.'
+
+"Once more, we see all kinds of monomania and insanity. We learn from
+them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed to be
+sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a large class of persons
+condemned as sinners by theologians, but considered by us as invalids.
+We have constant reasons for noticing the transmission of qualities from
+parents to offspring, and we find it hard to hold a child accountable in
+any moral point of view for inherited bad temper or tendency to
+drunkenness,--as hard as we should to blame him for inheriting gout or
+asthma. I suppose we are more lenient with human nature than theologians
+generally are. We know that the spirits of men and their views of the
+present and the future go up and down with the barometer, and that a
+permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the
+whole theology of Christendom.
+
+"Ministers talk about the human will as if it stood on a high look-out,
+with plenty of light, and elbowroom reaching to the horizon. Doctors are
+constantly noticing how it is tied up and darkened by inferior
+organization, by disease, and all sorts of crowding interferences, until
+they get to look upon Hottentots and Indians--and a good many of their
+own race as a kind of self-conscious blood-clocks with very limited power
+of self-determination. That's the tendency, I say, of a doctor's
+experience. But the people to whom they address their statements of the
+results of their observation belong to the thinking class of the highest
+races, and they are conscious of a great deal of liberty of will. So in
+the face of the fact that civilization with all it offers has proved a
+dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,--on the whole, I
+say, a dead failure,--they talk as if they knew from their own will all
+about that of a Digger Indian! We are more apt to go by observation of
+the facts in the case. We are constantly seeing weakness where you see
+depravity. I don't say we're right; I only tell what you must often find
+to be the fact, right or wrong, in talking with doctors. You see, too,
+our notions of bodily and moral disease, or sin, are apt to go together.
+We used to be as hard on sickness as you were on sin. We know better
+now. We don't look at sickness as we used to, and try to poison it with
+everything that is offensive, burnt toads and earth-worms and
+viper-broth, and worse things than these. We know that disease has
+something back of it which the body isn't to blame for, at least in most
+cases, and which very often it is trying to get rid of. Just so with
+sin. I will agree to take a hundred new-born babes of a certain stock
+and return seventy-five of them in a dozen years true and honest, if not
+'pious' children. And I will take another hundred, of a different stock,
+and put them in the hands of certain Ann-Street or Five-Points teachers,
+and seventy-five of them will be thieves and liars at the end of the same
+dozen years. I have heard of an old character, Colonel Jaques, I believe
+it was, a famous cattle-breeder, who used to say he could breed to pretty
+much any pattern he wanted to. Well, we doctors see so much of families,
+how the tricks of the blood keep breaking out, just as much in character
+as they do in looks, that we can't help feeling as if a great many people
+hadn't a fair chance to be what is called 'good,' and that there isn't a
+text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one,
+'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'
+
+"As for our getting any quarter at the hands of theologians, we don't
+expect it, and have no right to. You don't give each other any quarter.
+I have had two religious books sent me by friends within a week or two.
+One is Mr. Brownson's; he is as fair and square as Euclid; a real honest,
+strong thinker, and one that knows what he is talking about,--for he has
+tried all sorts of religions, pretty much. He tells us that the Roman
+Catholic Church is the one 'through which alone we can hope for heaven.'
+The other is by a worthy Episcopal rector, who appears to write as if he
+were in earnest, and he calls the Papacy the 'Devil's Masterpiece,' and
+talks about the 'Satanic scheme' of that very Church 'through which
+alone,' as Mr. Brownson tells us, 'we can hope for heaven'
+
+"What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,--'atheists,'
+heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders
+picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes
+where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just
+like other folks. They 'll 'crock' your fingers, but they can't burn us.
+
+"Doctors are the best-natured people in the world, except when they get
+fighting with each other. And they have some advantages over you. You
+inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no
+children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them.
+It did n't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people
+to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what
+it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will
+take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so
+many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.
+
+"Besides, though our libraries are, perhaps, not commonly quite so big as
+yours, God opens one book to physicians that a good many of you don't
+know much about,--the Book of Life. That is none of your dusty folios
+with black letters between pasteboard and leather, but it is printed in
+bright red type, and the binding of it is warm and tender to every touch.
+They reverence that book as one of the Almighty's infallible revelations.
+They will insist on reading you lessons out of it, whether you call them
+names or not. These will always be lessons of charity. No doubt,
+nothing can be more provoking to listen to. But do beg your folks to
+remember that the Smithfield fires are all out, and that the cinders are
+very dirty and not in the least dangerous. They'd a great deal better be
+civil, and not be throwing old proverbs in the doctors' faces, when they
+say that the man of the old monkish notions is one thing and the man they
+watch from his cradle to his coffin is something very different."
+
+It has cost a good deal of trouble to work the Doctor's talk up into this
+formal shape. Some of his sentences have been rounded off for him, and
+the whole brought into a more rhetorical form than it could have
+pretended to, if taken as it fell from his lips. But the exact course of
+his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible his expressions
+have been retained. Though given in the form of a discourse, it must be
+remembered that this was a conversation, much more fragmentary and
+colloquial than it seems as just read.
+
+The Reverend Doctor was very far from taking offence at the old
+physician's freedom of speech. He knew him to be honest, kind,
+charitable, self-denying, wherever any sorrow was to be alleviated,
+always reverential, with a cheerful trust in the great Father of all
+mankind. To be sure, his senior deacon, old Deacon Shearer,--who seemed
+to have got his Scripture-teachings out of the "Vinegar Bible," (the one
+where Vineyard is misprinted Vinegar; which a good many people seem to
+have adopted as the true reading,)--his senior deacon had called Dr.
+Kittredge an "infidel." But the Reverend Doctor could not help feeling,
+that, unless the text, "By their fruits ye shall know them," were an
+interpolation, the Doctor was the better Christian of the two. Whatever
+his senior deacon might think about it, he said to himself that he
+shouldn't be surprised if he met the Doctor in heaven yet, inquiring
+anxiously after old Deacon Shearer.
+
+He was on the point of expressing himself very frankly to the Doctor,
+with that benevolent smile on his face which had sometimes come near
+giving offence to the readers of the "Vinegar" edition, but he saw that
+the physician's attention had been arrested by Elsie. He looked in the
+same direction himself, and could not help being struck by her attitude
+and expression. There was something singularly graceful in the curves of
+her neck and the rest of her figure, but she was so perfectly still that
+it seemed as if she were hardly breathing. Her eyes were fixed on the
+young girl with whom Mr. Bernard was talking. He had often noticed their
+brilliancy, but now it seemed to him that they appeared dull, and the
+look on her features was as of some passion which had missed its stroke.
+Mr. Bernard's companion seemed unconscious that she was the object of
+this attention, and was listening to the young master as if he had
+succeeded in making himself very agreeable.
+
+Of course Dick Veneer had not mistaken the game that was going on. The
+schoolmaster meant to make Elsie jealous,--and he had done it. That 's
+it: get her savage first, and then come wheedling round her,--a sure
+trick, if he isn't headed off somehow. But Dick saw well enough that he
+had better let Elsie alone just now, and thought the best way of killing
+the evening would be to amuse himself in a little lively talk with Mrs.
+Blanche Creamer, and incidentally to show Elsie that he could make
+himself acceptable to other women, if not to herself.
+
+The Doctor presently went up to Elsie, determined to engage her in
+conversation and get her out of her thoughts, which he saw, by her look,
+were dangerous. Her father had been on the point of leaving Helen Darley
+to go to her, but felt easy enough when he saw the old Doctor at her
+side, and so went on talking. The Reverend Doctor, being now left alone,
+engaged the Widow Rowens, who put the best face on her vexation she
+could, but was devoting herself to all the underground deities for having
+been such a fool as to ask that pale-faced thing from the Institute to
+fill up her party.
+
+There is no space left to report the rest of the conversation. If there
+was anything of any significance in it, it will turn up by and by, no
+doubt. At ten o'clock the Reverend Doctor called Miss Letty, who had no
+idea it was so late; Mr. Bernard gave his arm to Helen; Mr. Richard saw
+to Mrs. Blanche Creamer; the Doctor gave Elsie a cautioning look, and
+went off alone, thoughtful; Dudley Venner and his daughter got into their
+carriage and were whirled away. The Widow's gambit was played, and she
+had not won the game.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+THE WILD HUNTSMAN.
+
+The young master had not forgotten the old Doctor's cautions. Without
+attributing any great importance to the warning he had given him, Mr.
+Bernard had so far complied with his advice that he was becoming a pretty
+good shot with the pistol. It was an amusement as good as many others to
+practise, and he had taken a fancy to it after the first few days.
+
+The popping of a pistol at odd hours in the backyard of the Institute was
+a phenomenon more than sufficiently remarkable to be talked about in
+Rockland. The viscous intelligence of a country-village is not easily
+stirred by the winds which ripple the fluent thought of great cities, but
+it holds every straw and entangles every insect that lights upon it. It
+soon became rumored in the town that the young master was a wonderful
+shot with the pistol. Some said he could hit a fo'pence-ha'penny at
+three rod; some, that he had shot a swallow, flying, with a single ball;
+some, that he snuffed a candle five times out of six at ten paces, and
+that he could hit any button in a man's coat he wanted to. In other
+words, as in all such cases, all the common feats were ascribed to him,
+as the current jokes of the day are laid at the door of any noted wit,
+however innocent he may be of them.
+
+In the natural course of things, Mr. Richard Venner, who had by this time
+made some acquaintances, as we have seen, among that class of the
+population least likely to allow a live cinder of gossip to go out for
+want of air, had heard incidentally that the master up there at the
+Institute was all the time practising with a pistol, that they say he can
+snuff a candle at ten rods, (that was Mrs. Blanche Creamer's version,)
+and that he could hit anybody he wanted to right in the eye, as far as he
+could see the white of it.
+
+Dick did not like the sound of all this any too well. Without believing
+more than half of it, there was enough to make the Yankee schoolmaster
+too unsafe to be trifled with. However, shooting at a mark was pleasant
+work enough; he had no particular objection to it himself. Only he did
+not care so much for those little popgun affairs that a man carries in
+his pocket, and with which you could n't shoot a fellow,--a robber,
+say,--without getting the muzzle under his nose. Pistols for boys;
+long-range rifles for men. There was such a gun lying in a closet with
+the fowling-pieces. He would go out into the fields and see what he
+could do as a marksman.
+
+The nature of the mark which Dick chose for experimenting upon was
+singular. He had found some panes of glass which had been removed from
+an old sash, and he placed these successively before his target,
+arranging them at different angles. He found that a bullet would go
+through the glass without glancing or having its force materially abated.
+It was an interesting fact in physics, and might prove of some practical
+significance hereafter. Nobody knows what may turn up to render these
+out-of-the-way facts useful. All this was done in a quiet way in one of
+the bare spots high up the side of The Mountain. He was very thoughtful
+in taking the precaution to get so far away; rifle-bullets are apt to
+glance and come whizzing about people's ears, if they are fired in the
+neighborhood of houses. Dick satisfied himself that he could be
+tolerably sure of hitting a pane of glass at a distance of thirty rods,
+more or less, and that, if there happened to be anything behind it, the
+glass would not materially alter the force or direction of the bullet.
+
+About this time it occurred to him also that there was an old
+accomplishment of his which he would be in danger of losing for want of
+practice, if he did not take some opportunity to try his hand and regain
+its cunning, if it had begun to be diminished by disuse. For his first
+trial, he chose an evening when the moon was shining, and after the hour
+when the Rockland people were like to be stirring abroad. He was so far
+established now that he could do much as he pleased without exciting
+remark.
+
+The prairie horse he rode, the mustang of the Pampas, wild as he was, had
+been trained to take part in at least one exercise. This was the
+accomplishment in which Mr. Richard now proposed to try himself. For
+this purpose he sought the implement of which, as it may be remembered,
+he had once made an incidental use,--the lasso, or long strip of hide
+with a slip-noose at the end of it. He had been accustomed to playing
+with such a thong from his boyhood, and had become expert in its use in
+capturing wild cattle in the course of his adventures. Unfortunately,
+there were no wild bulls likely to be met with in the neighborhood, to
+become the subjects of his skill. A stray cow in the road, an ox or a
+horse in a pasture, must serve his turn,--dull beasts, but moving marks
+to aim at, at any rate.
+
+Never, since he had galloped in the chase over the Pampas, had Dick
+Venner felt such a sense of life and power as when he struck the long
+spurs into his wild horse's flanks, and dashed along the road with the
+lasso lying like a coiled snake at the saddle-bow. In skilful hands, the
+silent, bloodless noose, flying like an arrow, but not like that leaving
+a wound behind it,--sudden as a pistol-shot, but without the telltale
+explosion,--is one of the most fearful and mysterious weapons that arm
+the hand of man. The old Romans knew how formidable, even in contest
+with a gladiator equipped with sword, helmet, and shield, was the almost
+naked retiarius, with his net in one hand and his three-pronged javelin
+in the other. Once get a net over a man's head, or a cord round his
+neck, or, what is more frequently done nowadays, bonnet him by knocking
+his hat down over his eyes, and he is at the mercy of his opponent. Our
+soldiers who served against the Mexicans found this out too well. Many a
+poor fellow has been lassoed by the fierce riders from the plains, and
+fallen an easy victim to the captor who had snared him in the fatal
+noose.
+
+But, imposing as the sight of the wild huntsmen of the Pampas might have
+been, Dick could not help laughing at the mock sublimity of his
+situation, as he tried his first experiment on an unhappy milky mother
+who had strayed from her herd and was wandering disconsolately along the
+road, laying the dust, as slue went, with thready streams from her
+swollen, swinging udders. "Here goes the Don at the windmill!" said
+Dick, and tilted full speed at her, whirling the lasso round his head as
+he rode. The creature swerved to one side of the way, as the wild horse
+and his rider came rushing down upon her, and presently turned and ran,
+as only cows and it would n't be safe to say it--can run. Just before he
+passed,--at twenty or thirty feet from her,--the lasso shot from his
+hand, uncoiling as it flew, and in an instant its loop was round her
+horns. "Well cast!" said Dick, as he galloped up to her side and
+dexterously disengaged the lasso. "Now for a horse on the run!"
+
+He had the good luck to find one, presently, grazing in a pasture at the
+road-side. Taking down the rails of the fence at one point, he drove the
+horse into the road and gave chase. It was a lively young animal enough,
+and was easily roused to a pretty fast pace. As his gallop grew more and
+more rapid, Dick gave the reins to the mustang, until the two horses
+stretched themselves out in their longest strides. If the first feat
+looked like play, the one he was now to attempt had a good deal the
+appearance of real work. He touched the mustang with the spur, and in a
+few fierce leaps found himself nearly abreast of the frightened animal he
+was chasing. Once more he whirled the lasso round and round over his
+head, and then shot it forth, as the rattlesnake shoots his head from the
+loops against which it rests. The noose was round the horse's neck, and
+in another instant was tightened so as almost to stop his breath. The
+prairie horse knew the trick of the cord, and leaned away from the
+captive, so as to keep the thong tensely stretched between his neck and
+the peak of the saddle to which it was fastened. Struggling was of no
+use with a halter round his windpipe, and he very soon began to tremble
+and stagger,--blind, no doubt, and with a roaring in his ears as of a
+thousand battle-trumpets,--at any rate, subdued and helpless. That was
+enough. Dick loosened his lasso, wound it up again, laid it like a pet
+snake in a coil at his saddle-bow, turned his horse, and rode slowly
+along towards the mansion-house.
+
+The place had never looked more stately and beautiful to him than as he
+now saw it in the moonlight. The undulations of the land,--the grand
+mountain screen which sheltered the mansion from the northern blasts,
+rising with all its hanging forests and parapets of naked rock high
+towards the heavens,--the ancient mansion, with its square chimneys, and
+bodyguard of old trees, and cincture of low walls with marble-pillared
+gateways,--the fields, with their various coverings,--the beds of
+flowers,--the plots of turf, one with a gray column in its centre bearing
+a sundial on which the rays of the moon were idly shining, another with a
+white stone and a narrow ridge of turf,--over all these objects,
+harmonized with all their infinite details into one fair whole by the
+moonlight, the prospective heir, as he deemed himself, looked with
+admiring eyes.
+
+But while he looked, the thought rose up in his mind like waters from a
+poisoned fountain, that there was a deep plot laid to cheat him of the
+inheritance which by a double claim he meant to call his own. Every day
+this ice-cold beauty, this dangerous, handsome cousin of his, went up to
+that place,--that usher's girl-trap. Everyday,--regularly now,--it used
+to be different. Did she go only to get out of his, her cousin's, reach?
+Was she not rather becoming more and more involved in the toils of this
+plotting Yankee?
+
+If Mr. Bernard had shown himself at that moment a few rods in advance,
+the chances are that in less than one minute he would have found himself
+with a noose round his neck, at the heels of a mounted horseman.
+Providence spared him for the present. Mr. Richard rode his horse
+quietly round to the stable, put him up, and proceeded towards the house.
+He got to his bed without disturbing the family, but could not sleep.
+The idea had fully taken possession of his mind that a deep intrigue was
+going on which would end by bringing Elsie and the schoolmaster into
+relations fatal to all his own hopes. With that ingenuity which always
+accompanies jealousy, he tortured every circumstance of the last few
+weeks so as to make it square with this belief. From this vein of
+thought he naturally passed to a consideration of every possible method
+by which the issue he feared might be avoided.
+
+Mr. Richard talked very plain language with himself in all these inward
+colloquies. Supposing it came to the worst, what could be done then?
+First, an accident might happen to the schoolmaster which should put a
+complete and final check upon his projects and contrivances. The
+particular accident which might interrupt his career must, evidently, be
+determined by circumstances; but it must be of a nature to explain itself
+without the necessity of any particular person's becoming involved in the
+matter. It would be unpleasant to go into particulars; but everybody
+knows well enough that men sometimes get in the way of a stray bullet,
+and that young persons occasionally do violence to themselves in various
+modes,--by firearms, suspension, and other means,--in consequence of
+disappointment in love, perhaps, oftener than from other motives. There
+was still another kind of accident which might serve his purpose. If
+anything should happen to Elsie, it would be the most natural thing in
+the world that his uncle should adopt him, his nephew and only near
+relation, as his heir. Unless, indeed, uncle Dudley should take it into
+his head to marry again. In that case, where would he, Dick, be? This
+was the most detestable complication which he could conceive of. And yet
+he had noticed--he could not help noticing--that his uncle had been very
+attentive to, and, as it seemed, very much pleased with, that young woman
+from the school. What did that mean? Was it possible that he was going
+to take a fancy to her?
+
+It made him wild to think of all the several contingencies which might
+defraud him of that good-fortune which seemed but just now within his
+grasp. He glared in the darkness at imaginary faces: sometimes at that
+of the handsome, treacherous schoolmaster; sometimes at that of the
+meek-looking, but no doubt, scheming, lady-teacher; sometimes at that of
+the dark girl whom he was ready to make his wife; sometimes at that of
+his much respected uncle, who, of course, could not be allowed to peril
+the fortunes of his relatives by forming a new connection. It was a
+frightful perplexity in which he found himself, because there was no one
+single life an accident to which would be sufficient to insure the
+fitting and natural course of descent to the great Dudley property. If
+it had been a simple question of helping forward a casualty to any one
+person, there was nothing in Dick's habits of thought and living to make
+that a serious difficulty. He had been so much with lawless people, that
+a life between his wish and his object seemed only as an obstacle to be
+removed, provided the object were worth the risk and trouble. But if
+there were two or three lives in the way, manifestly that altered the
+case.
+
+His Southern blood was getting impatient. There was enough of the
+New-Englander about him to make him calculate his chances before he
+struck; but his plans were liable to be defeated at any moment by a
+passionate impulse such as the dark-hued races of Southern Europe and
+their descendants are liable to. He lay in his bed, sometimes arranging
+plans to meet the various difficulties already mentioned, sometimes
+getting into a paroxysm of blind rage in the perplexity of considering
+what object he should select as the one most clearly in his way. On the
+whole, there could be no doubt where the most threatening of all his
+embarrassments lay. It was in the probable growing relation between
+Elsie and the schoolmaster. If it should prove, as it seemed likely,
+that there was springing up a serious attachment tending to a union
+between them, he knew what he should do, if he was not quite so sure how
+he should do it.
+
+There was one thing at least which might favor his projects, and which,
+at any rate, would serve to amuse him. He could, by a little quiet
+observation, find out what were the schoolmaster's habits of life:
+whether he had any routine which could be calculated upon; and under what
+circumstances a strictly private interview of a few minutes with him
+might be reckoned on, in case it should be desirable. He could also very
+probably learn some facts about Elsie. whether the young man was in the
+habit of attending her on her way home from school; whether she stayed
+about the schoolroom after the other girls had gone; and any incidental
+matters of interest which might present themselves.
+
+He was getting more and more restless for want of some excitement. A mad
+gallop, a visit to Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had taken such a fancy to
+him, or a chat with the Widow Rowens, who was very lively in her talk,
+for all her sombre colors, and reminded him a good deal of same of his
+earlier friends, the senoritas,--all these were distractions, to be sure,
+but not enough to keep his fiery spirit from fretting itself in longings
+for more dangerous excitements. The thought of getting a knowledge of
+all Mr. Bernard's ways, so that he would be in his power at any moment,
+was a happy one.
+
+For some days after this he followed Elsie at a long distance behind, to
+watch her until she got to the schoolhouse. One day he saw Mr. Bernard
+join her: a mere accident, very probably, for it was only once this
+happened. She came on her homeward way alone,--quite apart from the
+groups of girls who strolled out of the schoolhouse yard in company.
+Sometimes she was behind them all,--which was suggestive. Could she have
+stayed to meet the schoolmaster?
+
+If he could have smuggled himself into the school, he would have liked to
+watch her there, and see if there was not some understanding between her
+and the master which betrayed itself by look or word. But this was beyond
+the limits of his audacity, and he had to content himself with such
+cautious observations as could be made at a distance. With the aid of a
+pocket-glass he could make out persons without the risk of being observed
+himself.
+
+Mr. Silos Peckham's corps of instructors was not expected to be off duty
+or to stand at ease for any considerable length of time. Sometimes Mr.
+Bernard, who had more freedom than the rest, would go out for a ramble in
+the daytime, but more frequently it would be in the evening, after the
+hour of "retiring," as bedtime was elegantly termed by the young ladies
+of the Apollinean Institute. He would then not unfrequently walk out
+alone in the common roads, or climb up the sides of The Mountain, which
+seemed to be one of his favorite resorts. Here, of course, it was
+impossible to follow him with the eye at a distance. Dick had a hideous,
+gnawing suspicion that somewhere in these deep shades the schoolmaster
+might meet Elsie, whose evening wanderings he knew so well. But of this
+he was not able to assure himself. Secrecy was necessary to his present
+plans, and he could not compromise himself by over-eager curiosity. One
+thing he learned with certainty. The master returned, after his walk one
+evening, and entered the building where his room was situated. Presently
+a light betrayed the window of his apartment. From a wooded bank, some
+thirty or forty rods from this building, Dick Venner could see the
+interior of the chamber, and watch the master as he sat at his desk, the
+light falling strongly upon his face, intent upon the book or manuscript
+before him. Dick contemplated him very long in this attitude. The sense
+of watching his every motion, himself meanwhile utterly unseen, was
+delicious. How little the master was thinking what eyes were on him!
+
+Well,--there were two things quite certain. One was, that, if he chose,
+he could meet the schoolmaster alone, either in the road or in a more
+solitary place, if he preferred to watch his chance for an evening or
+two. The other was, that he commanded his position, as he sat at his
+desk in the evening, in such a way that there would be very little
+difficulty,--so far as that went; of course, however, silence is always
+preferable to noise, and there is a great difference in the marks left by
+different casualties. Very likely nothing would come of all this
+espionage; but, at any rate, the first thing to be done with a man you
+want to have in your power is to learn his habits.
+
+Since the tea-party at the Widow Rowens's, Elsie had been more fitful and
+moody than ever. Dick understood all this well enough, you know. It was
+the working of her jealousy against that young schoolgirl to whom the
+master had devoted himself for the sake of piquing the heiress of the
+Dudley mansion. Was it possible, in any way, to exasperate her irritable
+nature against him, and in this way to render her more accessible to his
+own advances? It was difficult to influence her at all. She endured his
+company without seeming to enjoy it. She watched him with that strange
+look of hers, sometimes as if she were on her guard against him,
+sometimes as if she would like to strike at him as in that fit of
+childish passion. She ordered him about with a haughty indifference
+which reminded him of his own way with the dark-eyed women whom he had
+known so well of old. All this added a secret pleasure to the other
+motives he had for worrying her with jealous suspicions. He knew she
+brooded silently on any grief that poisoned her comfort,--that she fed on
+it, as it were, until it ran with every drop of blood in her veins,--and
+that, except in some paroxysm of rage, of which he himself was not likely
+the second time to be the object, or in some deadly vengeance wrought
+secretly, against which he would keep a sharp lookout, so far as he was
+concerned, she had no outlet for her dangerous, smouldering passions.
+
+Beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy
+inner life either in words or song! So long as a woman can talk, there
+is nothing she cannot bear. If she cannot have a companion to listen to
+her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or instrumental,--then, if
+she is of the real woman sort, and has a few heartfuls of wild blood in
+her, and you have done her a wrong,--double-bolt the door which she may
+enter on noiseless slipper at midnight,--look twice before you taste of
+any cup whose draught the shadow of her hand may have darkened!
+
+But let her talk, and, above all, cry, or, if she is one of the
+coarser-grained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives in
+the language, and let her blister her lips with them until she is tired,
+she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of coffee
+from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment.
+
+So, if she can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her
+wickedness will run off through her throat or the tips of her fingers.
+How many tragedies find their peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades and
+strenuous bravuras! How many murders are executed in double-quick time
+upon the keys which stab the air with their dagger-strokes of sound!
+What would our civilization be without the piano? Are not Erard and
+Broadwood and Chickering the true humanizers of our time? Therefore do I
+love to hear the all-pervading tum tum jarring the walls of little
+parlors in houses with double door-plates on their portals, looking out
+on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist
+is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore
+complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of
+the small unlovely farmhouse, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine
+flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue
+the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys,
+which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords would not have
+been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides through the meadows
+by her father's door,--or living, with that other current which runs
+beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement, choking with wretched
+weeds that were once in spotless flower?
+
+Poor Elsie! She never sang nor played. She never shaped her inner life
+in words: such utterance was as much denied to her nature as common
+articulate speech to the deaf mute. Her only language must be in action.
+Watch her well by day and by night, old Sophy! watch her well! or the
+long line of her honored name may close in shame, and the stately mansion
+of the Dudleys remain a hissing and a reproach till its roof is buried in
+its cellar!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+ON HIS TRACKS.
+
+"Able!" said the old Doctor, one morning, "after you've harnessed
+Caustic, come into the study a few minutes, will you?"
+
+Abel nodded. He was a man of few words, and he knew that the "will you"
+did not require an answer, being the true New-England way of rounding the
+corners of an employer's order,--a tribute to the personal independence
+of an American citizen.
+
+The hired man came into the study in the course of a few minutes. His
+face was perfectly still, and he waited to be spoken to; but the Doctor's
+eye detected a certain meaning in his expression, which looked as if he
+had something to communicate.
+
+"Well?" said the Doctor.
+
+"He's up to mischief o' some kind, I guess," said Abel. "I jest happened
+daown by the mansion-haouse last night, 'n' he come aout o' the gate on
+that queer-lookin' creator' o' his. I watched him, 'n' he rid, very
+slow, all raoun' by the Institoot, 'n' acted as ef he was spyin' abaout.
+He looks to me like a man that's calc'latin' to do some kind of ill-turn
+to somebody. I should n't like to have him raoun' me, 'f there wa'n't a
+pitchfork or an eel-spear or some sech weep'n within reach. He may be
+all right; but I don't like his looks, 'n' I don't see what he's lurkin'
+raoun' the Institoot for, after folks is abed."
+
+"Have you watched him pretty close for the last few days?" said the
+Doctor.
+
+"W'll, yes,--I've had my eye on him consid'ble o' the time. I haf to be
+pooty shy abaout it, or he'll find aout th't I'm on his tracks. I don'
+want him to get a spite ag'inst me, 'f I c'n help it; he looks to me like
+one o' them kind that kerries what they call slung-shot, 'n' hits ye on
+the side o' th' head with 'em so suddin y' never know what hurts ye."
+
+"Why," said the Doctor, sharply,--"have you ever seen him with any such
+weapon about him?"
+
+"W'll, no,--I caan't say that I hev," Abel answered. "On'y he looks kin'
+o' dangerous. Maybe he's all jest 'z he ought to be,--I caan't say that
+he a'n't,--but he's aout late nights, 'n' lurkin' raonn' jest 'z ef he
+was spyin' somebody, 'n' somehaow I caan't help mistrustin' them
+Portagee-lookin' fellahs. I caan't keep the run o' this chap all the
+time; but I've a notion that old black woman daown 't the mansion-haouse
+knows 'z much abaout him 'z anybody."
+
+The Doctor paused a moment, after hearing this report from his private
+detective, and then got into his chaise, and turned Caustic's head in the
+direction of the Dudley mansion. He had been suspicious of Dick from the
+first. He did not like his mixed blood, nor his looks, nor his ways. He
+had formed a conjecture about his projects early. He had made a shrewd
+guess as to the probable jealousy Dick would feel of the schoolmaster,
+had found out something of his movements, and had cautioned Mr.
+Bernard,--as we have seen. He felt an interest in the young man,--a
+student of his own profession, an intelligent and ingenuously
+unsuspecting young fellow, who had been thrown by accident into the
+companionship or the neighborhood of two persons, one of whom he knew to
+be dangerous, and the other he believed instinctively might be capable of
+crime.
+
+The Doctor rode down to the Dudley mansion solely for the sake of seeing
+old Sophy. He was lucky enough to find her alone in her kitchen. He
+began taking with her as a physician; he wanted to know how her
+rheumatism had been. The shrewd old woman saw through all that with her
+little beady black eyes. It was something quite different he had come
+for, and old Sophy answered very briefly for her aches and ails.
+
+"Old folks' bones a'n't like young folks'," she said. "It's the Lord's
+doin's, 'n' 't a'n't much matter. I sha'n' be long roan' this kitchen.
+It's the young Missis, Doctor,--it 's our Elsie,--it 's the baby, as we
+use' t' call her,--don' you remember, Doctor? Seventeen year ago, 'n'
+her poor mother cryin' for her,--'Where is she? where is she? Let me see
+her! '--'n' how I run up-stairs,--I could run then,--'n' got the coral
+necklace 'n' put it round her little neck, 'n' then showed her to her
+mother,--'n' how her mother looked at her, 'n' looked, 'n' then put out
+her poor thin fingers 'n' lifted the necklace,--'n' fell right back on
+her piller, as white as though she was laid out to bury?"
+
+The Doctor answered her by silence and a look of grave assent. He had
+never chosen to let old Sophy dwell upon these matters, for obvious
+reasons. The girl must not grow up haunted by perpetual fears and
+prophecies, if it were possible to prevent it.
+
+"Well, how has Elsie seemed of late?" he said, after this brief pause.
+
+The old woman shook her head. Then she looked up at the Doctor so
+steadily and searchingly that the diamond eyes of Elsie herself could
+hardly have pierced more deeply.
+
+The Doctor raised his head, by his habitual movement, and met the old
+woman's look with his own calm and scrutinizing gaze, sharpened by the
+glasses through which he now saw her.
+
+Sophy spoke presently in an awed tone, as if telling a vision.
+
+"We shall be havin' trouble before long. The' 's somethin' comin' from
+the Lord. I've had dreams, Doctor. It's many a year I've been
+a-dreamin', but now they're comin' over 'n' over the same thing. Three
+times I've dreamed one thing, Doctor,--one thing!"
+
+"And what was that?" the Doctor said, with that shade of curiosity in his
+tone which a metaphysician would probably say is an index of a certain
+tendency to belief in the superstition to which the question refers.
+
+"I ca'n' jestly tell y' what it was, Doctor," the old woman answered, as
+if bewildered and trying to clear up her recollections; "but it was
+somethin' fearful, with a great noise 'n' a great cryin' o' people,--like
+the Las' Day, Doctor! The Lord have mercy on my poor chil', 'n' take
+care of her, if anything happens! But I's feared she'll never live to
+see the Las' Day, 'f 't don' come pooty quick."
+
+Poor Sophy, only the third generation from cannibalism, was, not
+unnaturally, somewhat confused in her theological notions. Some of the
+Second-Advent preachers had been about, and circulated their predictions
+among the kitchen--population of Rockland. This was the way in which it
+happened that she mingled her fears in such a strange manner with their
+doctrines.
+
+The Doctor answered solemnly, that of the day and hour we knew not, but
+it became us to be always ready.--"Is there anything going on in the
+household different from common?"
+
+Old Sophy's wrinkled face looked as full of life and intelligence, when
+she turned it full upon the Doctor, as if she had slipped off her
+infirmities and years like an outer garment. All those fine instincts of
+observation which came straight to her from her savage grandfather looked
+out of her little eyes. She had a kind of faith that the Doctor was a
+mighty conjurer, who, if he would, could bewitch any of them. She had
+relieved her feelings by her long talk with the minister, but the Doctor
+was the immediate adviser of the family, and had watched them through all
+their troubles. Perhaps he could tell them what to do. She had but one
+real object of affection in the world,--this child that she had tended
+from infancy to womanhood. Troubles were gathering thick round her; how
+soon they would break upon her, and blight or destroy her, no one could
+tell; but there was nothing in all the catalogue of terrors which might
+not come upon the household at any moment. Her own wits had sharpened
+themselves in keeping watch by day and night, and her face had forgotten
+its age in the excitement which gave life to its features.
+
+"Doctor," old Sophy said, "there's strange things goin' on here by night
+and by day. I don' like that man,--that Dick,--I never liked him. He
+giv' me some o' these things I' got on; I take 'em 'cos I know it make
+him mad, if I no take 'em; I wear 'em, so that he need n' feel as if I
+did n' like him; but, Doctor, I hate him,--jes' as much as a member of
+the church has the Lord's leave to hate anybody."
+
+Her eyes sparkled with the old savage light, as if her ill-will to Mr.
+Richard Veneer might perhaps go a little farther than the Christian limit
+she had assigned. But remember that her grandfather was in the habit of
+inviting his friends to dine with him upon the last enemy he had bagged,
+and that her grandmother's teeth were filed down to points, so that they
+were as sharp as a shark's.
+
+"What is that you have seen about Mr. Richard Veneer that gives you such
+a spite against him, Sophy?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"What I' seen 'bout Dick Veneer?" she replied, fiercely. "I'll tell y'
+what I' seen. Dick wan's to marry our Elsie,--that 's what he wan's; 'n'
+he don' love her, Doctor,--he hates her, Doctor, as bad as I hate him!
+He wan's to marry our Elsie, In' live here in the big house, 'n' have
+nothin' to do but jes' lay still 'n' watch Massa Venner 'n' see how
+long 't Ill take him to die, 'n' 'f he don' die fas' 'puff, help him some
+way t' die fasser!--Come close up t' me, Doctor! I wan' t' tell you
+somethin' I tol' th' minister t' other day. Th' minister, he come down
+'n' prayed 'n' talked good,--he's a good man, that Doctor Honeywood, 'n'
+I tol' him all 'bout our Elsie, but he did n' tell nobody what to do to
+stop all what I' been dreamin' about happenin'. Come close up to me,
+Doctor!"
+
+The Doctor drew his chair close up to that of the old woman.
+
+"Doctor, nobody mus'n' never marry our Elsie 's longs she lives! Nobody
+mus' n' never live with Elsie but ol Sophy; 'n' ol Sophy won't never die
+'s long 's Elsie 's alive to be took care of. But I's feared, Doctor,
+I's greatly feared Elsie wan' to marry somebody. The' 's a young
+gen'l'm'n up at that school where she go,--so some of 'em tells me, 'n'
+she loves t' see him 'n' talk wi' him, 'n' she talks about him when she
+'s asleep sometimes. She mus 'n' never marry nobody, Doctor! If she do,
+he die, certain!"
+
+"If she has a fancy for the young man up at the school there," the Doctor
+said, "I shouldn't think there would be much danger from Dick."
+
+"Doctor, nobody know nothin' 'bout Elsie but of Sophy. She no like any
+other creator' th't ever drawed the bref o' life. If she ca'n' marry one
+man 'cos she love him, she marry another man 'cos she hate him."
+
+"Marry a man because she hates him, Sophy? No woman ever did such a
+thing as that, or ever will do it."
+
+"Who tol' you Elsie was a woman, Doctor?" said old Sophy, with a flash
+of strange intelligence in her eyes.
+
+The Doctor's face showed that he was startled. The old woman could not
+know much about Elsie that he did not know; but what strange superstition
+had got into her head, he was puzzled to guess. He had better follow
+Sophy's lead and find out what she meant.
+
+"I should call Elsie a woman, and a very handsome one," he said. "You
+don't mean that she has any mark about her, except--you know--under the
+necklace?"
+
+The old woman resented the thought of any deformity about her darling.
+
+"I did n' say she had nothin'--but jes' that--you know. My beauty have
+anything ugly? She's the beautifullest-shaped lady that ever had a
+shinin' silk gown drawed over her shoulders. On'y she a'n't like no
+other woman in none of her ways. She don't cry 'n' laugh like other
+women. An' she ha'n' got the same kind o' feelin's as other women.--Do
+you know that young gen'l'm'n up at the school, Doctor?"
+
+"Yes, Sophy, I've met him sometimes. He's a very nice sort of young man,
+handsome, too, and I don't much wonder Elsie takes to him. Tell me,
+Sophy, what do you think would happen, if he should chance to fall in
+love with Elsie, and she with him, and he should marry her?"
+
+"Put your ear close to my lips, Doctor, dear!" She whispered a little to
+the Doctor, then added aloud, "He die,--that's all."
+
+"But surely, Sophy, you a'n't afraid to have Dick marry her, if she would
+have him for any reason, are you? He can take care of himself, if
+anybody can."
+
+"Doctor!" Sophy answered, "nobody can take care of hisself that live wi'
+Elsie! Nobody never in all this worl' mus' live wi' Elsie but of Sophy,
+I tell you. You don' think I care for Dick? What do I care, if Dick
+Venner die? He wan's to marry our Elsie so 's to live in the big house
+'n' get all the money 'n' all the silver things 'n' all the chists full
+o' linen 'n' beautiful clothes. That's what Dick wan's. An' he hates
+Elsie 'cos she don' like him. But if he marry Elsie, she 'll make him
+die some wrong way or other, 'n' they'll take her 'n' hang her, or he'll
+get mad with her 'n' choke her.--Oh, I know his chokin' tricks!--he don'
+leave his keys roun' for nothin'"
+
+"What's that you say, Sophy? Tell me what you mean by all that."
+
+So poor Sophy had to explain certain facts not in all respects to her
+credit. She had taken the opportunity of his absence to look about his
+chamber, and, having found a key in one of his drawers, had applied it to
+a trunk, and, finding that it opened the trunk, had made a kind of
+inspection for contraband articles, and, seeing the end of a leather
+thong, had followed it up until she saw that it finished with a noose,
+which, from certain appearances, she inferred to have seen service of at
+least doubtful nature. An unauthorized search; but old Sophy considered
+that a game of life and death was going on in the household, and that she
+was bound to look out for her darling.
+
+The Doctor paused a moment to think over this odd piece of information.
+Without sharing Sophy's belief as to the kind of use this
+mischievous-looking piece of property had been put to, it was certainly
+very odd that Dick should have such a thing at the bottom of his trunk.
+The Doctor remembered reading or hearing something about the lasso and
+the lariat and the bolas, and had an indistinct idea that they had been
+sometimes used as weapons of warfare or private revenge; but they were
+essentially a huntsman's implements, after all, and it was not very
+strange that this young man had brought one of them with him. Not
+strange, perhaps, but worth noting.
+
+"Do you really think Dick means mischief to anybody, that he has such
+dangerous-looking things?" the Doctor said, presently.
+
+"I tell you, Doctor. Dick means to have Elsie. If he ca'n' get her, he
+never let nobody else have her! Oh, Dick 's a dark man, Doctor! I know
+him! I 'member him when he was little boy,--he always cunin'. I think he
+mean mischief to somebody. He come home late nights,--come in
+softly,--oh, I hear him! I lay awake, 'n' got sharp ears,--I hear the
+cats walkin' over the roofs,--'n' I hear Dick Veneer, when he comes up in
+his stockin'-feet as still as a cat. I think he mean' mischief to
+somebody. I no like his looks these las' days.--Is that a very pooty
+gen'l'm'n up at the schoolhouse, Doctor?"
+
+"I told you he was good-looking. What if he is?"
+
+"I should like to see him, Doctor,--I should like to see the pooty
+gen'l'm'n that my poor Elsie loves. She mus 'n' never marry nobody,
+--but, oh, Doctor, I should like to see him, 'n' jes' think a little how
+it would ha' been, if the Lord had n' been so hard on Elsie."
+
+She wept and wrung her hands. The kind Doctor was touched, and left her
+a moment to her thoughts.
+
+"And how does Mr. Dudley Veneer take all this?" he said, by way of
+changing the subject a little.
+
+"Oh, Massa Veneer, he good man, but he don' know nothin' 'bout Elsie, as
+of Sophy do. I keep close by her; I help her when she go to bed, 'n' set
+by her sometime when she--'sleep; I come to her in th' mornin' 'n' help
+her put on her things."--Then, in a whisper;--"Doctor, Elsie lets of
+Sophy take off that necklace for her. What you think she do, 'f anybody
+else tech it?"
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure, Sophy,--strike the person, perhaps."
+
+"Oh, yes, strike 'em! but not with her han's, Doctor!"--The old woman's
+significant pantomime must be guessed at.
+
+"But you haven't told me, Sophy, what Mr. Dudley Veneer thinks of his
+nephew, nor whether he has any notion that Dick wants to marry Elsie."
+
+"I tell you. Massa Venner, he good man, but he no see nothin' 'bout what
+goes on here in the house. He sort o' broken-hearted, you know,--sort o'
+giv up,--don' know what to do wi' Elsie, 'xcep' say 'Yes, yes.' Dick
+always look smilin' 'n' behave well before him. One time I thought Massa
+Veneer b'lieve Dick was goin' to take to Elsie; but now he don' seem to
+take much notice,--he kin' o' stupid-' like 'bout sech things. It's
+trouble, Doctor; 'cos Massa Veneer bright man naterally,--'n' he's got a
+great heap o' books. I don' think Massa Veneer never been jes' heself
+sence Elsie 's born. He done all he know how,--but, Doctor, that wa'n' a
+great deal. You men-folks don' know nothin' 'bout these young gals; 'n'
+'f you knowed all the young gals that ever lived, y' would n' know
+nothin' 'bout our Elsie."
+
+"No,--but, Sophy, what I want to know is, whether you think Mr. Veneer
+has any kind of suspicion about his nephew,--whether he has any notion
+that he's a dangerous sort of fellow,--or whether he feels safe to have
+him about, or has even taken a sort of fancy to him."
+
+"Lar' bless you, Doctor, Massa Veneer no more idee 'f any mischief 'bout
+Dick than he has 'bout you or me. Y' see, he very fond o' the
+Cap'n,--that Dick's father,--'n' he live so long alone here, 'long wi'
+us, that he kin' o' like to see mos' anybody 't 's got any o' th' of
+family-blood in 'em. He ha'n't got no more suspicions 'n a baby,--y'
+never see sech a man 'n y'r life. I kin' o' think he don' care for
+nothin' in this world 'xcep' jes' t' do what Elsie wan's him to. The fus'
+year after young Madam die he do nothin' but jes' set at the window 'n'
+look out at her grave, 'n' then come up 'n' look at the baby's neck 'n'
+say, 'It's fadin', Sophy, a'n't it? 'n' then go down in the study 'n'
+walk 'n' walk, 'n' them kneel down 'n' pray. Doctor, there was two places
+in the old carpet that was all threadbare, where his knees had worn 'em.
+An' sometimes, you remember 'bout all that,--he'd go off up into The
+Mountain, 'n' be gone all day, 'n' kill all the Ugly Things he could find
+up there.--Oh, Doctor, I don' like to think o' them days!--An' by 'n'
+by he grew kin' o' still, 'n' begun to read a little, 'n' 't las' he got
+'s quiet's a lamb, 'n' that's the way he is now. I think he's got
+religion, Doctor; but he a'n't so bright about what's goin' on, 'n' I
+don' believe he never suspec' nothin' till somethin' happens; for the' 's
+somethin' goin' to happen, Doctor, if the Las' Day does n' come to stop
+it; 'n' you mus' tell us what to do, 'n' save my poor Elsie, my baby that
+the Lord has n' took care of like all his other childer."
+
+The Doctor assured the old woman that he was thinking a great deal about
+them all, and that there were other eyes on Dick besides her own. Let
+her watch him closely about the house, and he would keep a look-out
+elsewhere. If there was anything new, she must let him know at once.
+Send up one of the menservants, and he would come down at a moment's
+warning.
+
+There was really nothing definite against this young man; but the Doctor
+was sure that he was meditating some evil design or other. He rode
+straight up to the Institute. There he saw Mr. Bernard, and had a brief
+conversation with him, principally on matters relating to his personal
+interests.
+
+That evening, for some unknown reason, Mr. Bernard changed the place of
+his desk and drew down the shades of his windows. Late that night Mr.
+Richard Venner drew the charge of a rifle, and put the gun back among the
+fowling-pieces, swearing that a leather halter was worth a dozen of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+THE PERILOUS HOUR.
+
+Up to this time Dick Venner had not decided on the particular mode and
+the precise period of relieving himself from the unwarrantable
+interference which threatened to defeat his plans. The luxury of feeling
+that he had his man in his power was its own reward. One who watches in
+the dark, outside, while his enemy, in utter unconsciousness, is
+illuminating his apartment and himself so that every movement of his head
+and every button on his coat can be seen and counted, experiences a
+peculiar kind of pleasure, if he holds a loaded rifle in his hand, which
+he naturally hates to bring to its climax by testing his skill as a
+marksman upon the object of his attention.
+
+Besides, Dick had two sides in his nature, almost as distinct as we
+sometimes observe in those persons who are the subjects of the condition
+known as double consciousness. On his New England side he was cunning
+and calculating, always cautious, measuring his distance before he risked
+his stroke, as nicely as if he were throwing his lasso. But he was
+liable to intercurrent fits of jealousy and rage, such as the light-hued
+races are hardly capable of conceiving, blinding paroxysms of passion,
+which for the time overmastered him, and which, if they found no ready
+outlet, transformed themselves into the more dangerous forces that worked
+through the instrumentality of his cool craftiness.
+
+He had failed as yet in getting any positive evidence that there was any
+relation between Elsie and the schoolmaster other than such as might
+exist unsuspected and unblamed between a teacher and his pupil. A book,
+or a note, even, did not prove the existence of any sentiment. At one
+time he would be devoured by suspicions, at another he would try to laugh
+himself out of them. And in the mean while he followed Elsie's tastes as
+closely as he could, determined to make some impression upon her,--to
+become a habit, a convenience, a necessity,--whatever might aid him in
+the attainment of the one end which was now the aim of his life.
+
+It was to humor one of her tastes already known to the reader, that he
+said to her one morning,--"Come, Elsie, take your castanets, and let us
+have a dance."
+
+He had struck the right vein in the girl's fancy, for she was in the mood
+for this exercise, and very willingly led the way into one of the more
+empty apartments. What there was in this particular kind of dance which
+excited her it might not be easy to guess; but those who looked in with
+the old Doctor, on a former occasion, and saw her, will remember that she
+was strangely carried away by it, and became almost fearful in the
+vehemence of her passion. The sound of the castanets seemed to make her
+alive all over. Dick knew well enough what the exhibition would be, and
+was almost afraid of her at these moments; for it was like the dancing
+mania of Eastern devotees, more than the ordinary light amusement of
+joyous youth,--a convulsion of the body and the mind, rather than a
+series of voluntary modulated motions.
+
+Elsie rattled out the triple measure of a saraband. Her eyes began to
+glitter more brilliantly, and her shape to undulate in freer curves.
+Presently she noticed that Dick's look was fixed upon her necklace. His
+face betrayed his curiosity; he was intent on solving the question, why
+she always wore something about her neck. The chain of mosaics she had
+on at that moment displaced itself at every step, and he was peering with
+malignant, searching eagerness to see if an unsunned ring of fairer hue
+than the rest of the surface, or any less easily explained peculiarity,
+were hidden by her ornaments.
+
+She stopped suddenly, caught the chain of mosaics and settled it hastily
+in its place, flung down her castanets, drew herself back, and stood
+looking at him, with her head a little on one side, and her eyes
+narrowing in the way he had known so long and well.
+
+"What is the matter, Cousin Elsie? What do you stop for?" he said.
+
+Elsie did not answer, but kept her eyes on him, full of malicious light.
+The jealousy which lay covered up under his surface-thoughts took this
+opportunity to break out.
+
+"You would n't act so, if you were dancing with Mr. Langdon,--would you,
+Elsie?" he asked.
+
+It was with some effort that he looked steadily at her to see the effect
+of his question.
+
+Elsie colored,--not much, but still perceptibly. Dick could not remember
+that he had ever seen her show this mark of emotion before, in all his
+experience of her fitful changes of mood. It had a singular depth of
+significance, therefore, for him; he knew how hardly her color came.
+Blushing means nothing, in some persons; in others, it betrays a profound
+inward agitation,--a perturbation of the feelings far more trying than
+the passions which with many easily moved persons break forth in tears.
+All who have observed much are aware that some men, who have seen a good
+deal of life in its less chastened aspects and are anything but modest,
+will blush often and easily, while there are delicate and sensitive women
+who can faint, or go into fits, if necessary, but are very rarely seen to
+betray their feelings in their cheeks, even when their expression shows
+that their inmost soul is blushing scarlet. Presently she answered,
+abruptly and scornfully, "Mr. Langdon is a gentleman, and would not vex
+me as you do."
+
+"A gentleman!" Dick answered, with the most insulting accent,--"a
+gentleman! Come, Elsie, you 've got the Dudley blood in your veins, and
+it does n't do for you to call this poor, sneaking schoolmaster a
+gentleman!"
+
+He stopped short. Elsie's bosom was heaving, the faint flush on her
+cheek was becoming a vivid glow. Whether it were shame or wrath, he saw
+that he had reached some deep-lying centre of emotion. There was no
+longer any doubt in his mind. With another girl these signs of confusion
+might mean little or nothing; with her they were decisive and final.
+Elsie Venner loved Bernard Langdon.
+
+The sudden conviction, absolute, overwhelming, which rushed upon him, had
+well-nigh led to an explosion of wrath, and perhaps some terrible scene
+which might have fulfilled some of old Sophy's predictions. This,
+however, would never do. Dick's face whitened with his thoughts, but he
+kept still until he could speak calmly.
+
+"I've nothing against the young fellow," he said; "only I don't think
+there's anything quite good enough to keep the company of people that
+have the Dudley blood in them. You a'n't as proud as I am. I can't
+quite make up my mind to call a schoolmaster a gentleman, though this one
+may be well enough. I 've nothing against him, at any rate."
+
+Elsie made no answer, but glided out of the room and slid away to her own
+apartment. She bolted the door and drew her curtains close. Then she
+threw herself on the floor, and fell into a dull, slow ache of passion,
+without tears, without words, almost without thoughts. So she remained,
+perhaps, for a half-hour, at the end of which time it seemed that her
+passion had become a sullen purpose. She arose, and, looking cautiously
+round, went to the hearth, which was ornamented with curious old Dutch
+tiles, with pictures of Scripture subjects. One of these represented the
+lifting of the brazen serpent. She took a hair-pin from one of her
+braids, and, insinuating its points under the edge of the tile, raised it
+from its place. A small leaden box lay under the tile, which she opened,
+and, taking from it a little white powder, which she folded in a scrap of
+paper, replaced the box and the tile over it.
+
+Whether Dick had by any means got a knowledge of this proceeding, or
+whether he only suspected some unmentionable design on her part, there is
+no sufficient means of determining. At any rate, when they met, an hour
+or two after these occurrences, he could not help noticing how easily she
+seemed to have got over her excitement. She was very pleasant with
+him,--too pleasant, Dick thought. It was not Elsie's way to come out of
+a fit of anger so easily as that. She had contrived some way of letting
+off her spite; that was certain. Dick was pretty cunning, as old Sophy
+had said, and, whether or not he had any means of knowing Elsie's private
+intentions, watched her closely, and was on his guard against accidents.
+
+For the first time, he took certain precautions with reference to his
+diet, such as were quite alien to his common habits. On coming to the
+dinner-table, that day, he complained of headache, took but little food,
+and refused the cup of coffee which Elsie offered him, saying that it did
+not agree with him when he had these attacks.
+
+Here was a new complication. Obviously enough, he could not live in this
+way, suspecting everything but plain bread and water, and hardly feeling
+safe in meddling with them. Not only had this school-keeping wretch come
+between him and the scheme by which he was to secure his future fortune,
+but his image had so infected his cousin's mind that she was ready to try
+on him some of those tricks which, as he had heard hinted in the village,
+she had once before put in practice upon a person who had become odious
+to her.
+
+Something must be done, and at once, to meet the double necessities of
+this case. Every day, while the young girl was in these relations with
+the young man, was only making matters worse. They could exchange words
+and looks, they could arrange private interviews, they would be stooping
+together over the same book, her hair touching his cheek, her breath
+mingling with his, all the magnetic attractions drawing them together
+with strange, invisible effluences. As her passion for the schoolmaster
+increased, her dislike to him, her cousin, would grow with it, and all
+his dangers would be multiplied. It was a fearful point he had, reached.
+He was tempted at one moment to give up all his plans and to disappear
+suddenly from the place, leaving with the schoolmaster, who had come
+between him and his object, an anonymous token of his personal sentiments
+which would be remembered a good while in the history of the town of
+Rockland. This was but a momentary thought; the great Dudley property
+could not be given up in that way.
+
+Something must happen at once to break up all this order of things. He
+could think of but one Providential event adequate to the emergency,--an
+event foreshadowed by various recent circumstances, but hitherto floating
+in his mind only as a possibility. Its occurrence would at once change
+the course of Elsie's feelings, providing her with something to think of
+besides mischief, and remove the accursed obstacle which was thwarting
+all his own projects. Every possible motive, then,--his interest, his
+jealousy, his longing for revenge, and now his fears for his own
+safety,--urged him to regard the happening of a certain casualty as a
+matter of simple necessity. This was the self-destruction of Mr. Bernard
+Langdon.
+
+Such an event, though it might be surprising to many people, would not be
+incredible, nor without many parallel cases. He was poor, a miserable
+fag, under the control of that mean wretch up there at the school, who
+looked as if he had sour buttermilk in his veins instead of blood. He
+was in love with a girl above his station, rich, and of old family, but
+strange in all her ways, and it was conceivable that he should become
+suddenly jealous of her. Or she might have frightened him with some
+display of her peculiarities which had filled him with a sudden
+repugnance in the place of love. Any of these things were credible, and
+would make a probable story enough,--so thought Dick over to himself
+with the New-England half of his mind.
+
+Unfortunately, men will not always take themselves out of the way when,
+so far as their neighbors are concerned, it would be altogether the most
+appropriate and graceful and acceptable service they could render. There
+was at this particular moment no special reason for believing that the
+schoolmaster meditated any violence to his own person. On the contrary,
+there was good evidence that he was taking some care of himself. He was
+looking well and in good spirits, and in the habit of amusing himself and
+exercising, as if to keep up his standard of health, especially of taking
+certain evening-walks, before referred to, at an hour when most of the
+Rockland people had "retired," or, in vulgar language, "gone to bed."
+
+Dick Veneer settled it, however, in his own mind, that Mr. Bernard
+Langdon must lay violent hands upon himself. He even went so far as to
+determine the precise hour, and the method in which the "rash act," as it
+would undoubtedly be called in the next issue of "The Rockland Weekly
+Universe," should be committed. Time,--this evening. Method, asphyxia,
+by suspension. It was, unquestionably, taking a great liberty with a man
+to decide that he should become felo de se without his own consent.
+Such, however, was the decision of Mr. Richard Veneer with regard to Mr.
+Bernard Langdon.
+
+If everything went right, then, there would be a coroner's inquest
+to-morrow upon what remained of that gentleman, found suspended to the
+branch of a tree somewhere within a mile of the Apollinean Institute.
+The "Weekly Universe" would have a startling paragraph announcing a "SAD
+EVENT!!!" which had "thrown the town into an intense state of excitement.
+Mr. Barnard Langden, a well-known teacher at the Appolinian Institute,
+was found, etc., etc. The vital spark was extinct. The motive to the
+rash act can only be conjectured, but is supposed to be disappointed
+affection. The name of an accomplished young lady of the highest
+respectability and great beauty is mentioned in connection with this
+melancholy occurrence."
+
+Dick Venner was at the tea-table that evening, as usual.--No, he would
+take green tea, if she pleased,--the same that her father drank. It
+would suit his headache better.--Nothing,--he was much obliged to her.
+He would help himself,--which he did in a little different way from
+common, naturally enough, on account of his headache. He noticed that
+Elsie seemed a little nervous while she was rinsing some of the teacups
+before their removal.
+
+"There's something going on in that witch's head," he said to himself.
+"I know her,--she 'd be savage now, if she had n't got some trick in
+hand. Let 's see how she looks to-morrow!"
+
+Dick announced that he should go to bed early that evening, on account of
+this confounded headache which had been troubling him so much. In fact,
+he went up early, and locked his door after him, with as much noise as he
+could make. He then changed some part of his dress, so that it should be
+dark throughout, slipped off his boots, drew the lasso out from the
+bottom of the contents of his trunk, and, carrying that and his boots in
+his hand, opened his door softly, locked it after him, and stole down the
+back-stairs, so as to get out of the house unnoticed. He went straight
+to the stable and saddled the mustang. He took a rope from the stable
+with him, mounted his horse, and set forth in the direction of the
+Institute.
+
+Mr. Bernard, as we have seen, had not been very profoundly impressed by
+the old Doctor's cautions,--enough, however, to follow out some of his
+hints which were not troublesome to attend to. He laughed at the idea of
+carrying a loaded pistol about with him; but still it seemed only fair,
+as the old Doctor thought so much of the matter, to humor him about it.
+As for not going about when and where he liked, for fear he might have
+some lurking enemy, that was a thing not to be listened to nor thought
+of. There was nothing to be ashamed of or troubled about in any of his
+relations with the school-girls. Elsie, no doubt, showed a kind of
+attraction towards him, as did perhaps some others; but he had been
+perfectly discreet, and no father or brother or lover had any just cause
+of quarrel with him. To be sure, that dark young man at the Dudley
+mansion-house looked as if he were his enemy, when he had met him; but
+certainly there was nothing in their relations to each other, or in his
+own to Elsie, that would be like to stir such malice in his mind as would
+lead him to play any of his wild Southern tricks at his, Mr. Bernard's,
+expense. Yet he had a vague feeling that this young man was dangerous,
+and he had been given to understand that one of the risks he ran was from
+that quarter.
+
+On this particular evening, he had a strange, unusual sense of some
+impending peril. His recent interview with the Doctor, certain remarks
+which had been dropped in his hearing, but above all an unaccountable
+impression upon his spirits, all combined to fill his mind with a
+foreboding conviction that he was very near some overshadowing danger.
+It was as the chill of the ice-mountain toward which the ship is steering
+under full sail. He felt a strong impulse to see Helen Darley and talk
+with her. She was in the common parlor, and, fortunately, alone.
+
+"Helen," he said,--for they were almost like brother and sister now,--"I
+have been thinking what you would do, if I should have to leave the
+school at short notice, or be taken away suddenly by any accident."
+
+"Do?" she said, her cheek growing paler than its natural delicate
+hue,--"why, I do not know how I could possibly consent to live here, if
+you left us. Since you came, my life has been almost easy; before, it
+was getting intolerable. You must not talk about going, my dear friend;
+you have spoiled me for my place. Who is there here that I can have any
+true society with, but you? You would not leave us for another school,
+would you?"
+
+"No, no, my dear Helen," Mr. Bernard said, "if it depends on myself, I
+shall stay out my full time, and enjoy your company and friendship. But
+everything is uncertain in this world. I have been thinking that I might
+be wanted elsewhere, and called when I did not think of it;--it was a
+fancy, perhaps,--but I can't keep it out of my mind this evening. If any
+of my fancies should come true, Helen, there are two or three messages I
+want to leave with you. I have marked a book or two with a cross in
+pencil on the fly-leaf;--these are for you. There is a little hymn-book I
+should like to have you give to Elsie from me;--it may be a kind of
+comfort to the poor girl."
+
+Helen's eyes glistened as she interrupted him,--
+
+"What do you mean? You must not talk so, Mr. Langdon. Why, you never
+looked better in your life. Tell me now, you are not in earnest, are
+you, but only trying a little sentiment on me?"
+
+Mr. Bernard smiled, but rather sadly.
+
+"About half in earnest," he said. "I have had some fancies in my
+head,--superstitions, I suppose,--at any rate, it does no harm to tell
+you what I should like to have done, if anything should happen,--very
+likely nothing ever will. Send the rest of the books home, if you
+please, and write a letter to my mother. And, Helen, you will find one
+small volume in my desk enveloped and directed, you will see to
+whom;--give this with your own hands; it is a keepsake."
+
+The tears gathered in her eyes; she could not speak at first. Presently,
+"Why, Bernard, my dear friend, my brother, it cannot be that you are in
+danger? Tell me what it is, and, if I can share it with you, or counsel
+you in any way, it will only be paying back the great debt I owe you.
+No, no,--it can't be true,--you are tired and worried, and your spirits
+have got depressed. I know what that is;--I was sure, one winter, that
+I should die before spring; but I lived to see the dandelions and
+buttercups go to seed. Come, tell me it was nothing but your
+imagination."
+
+She felt a tear upon her cheek, but would not turn her face away from
+him; it was the tear of a sister.
+
+"I am really in earnest, Helen," he said. "I don't know that there is
+the least reason in the world for these fancies. If they all go off and
+nothing comes of them, you may laugh at me, if you like. But if there
+should be any occasion, remember my requests. You don't believe in
+presentiments, do you?"
+
+"Oh, don't ask-me, I beg you," Helen answered. "I have had a good many
+frights for every one real misfortune I have suffered. Sometimes I have
+thought I was warned beforehand of coming trouble, just as many people
+are of changes in the weather, by some unaccountable feeling,--but not
+often, and I don't like to talk about such things. I wouldn't think
+about these fancies of yours. I don't believe you have exercised
+enough;--don't you think it's confinement in the school has made you
+nervous?"
+
+"Perhaps it has; but it happens that I have thought more of exercise
+lately, and have taken regular evening walks, besides playing my old
+gymnastic tricks every day."
+
+They talked on many subjects, but through all he said Helen perceived a
+pervading tone of sadness, and an expression as of a dreamy foreboding of
+unknown evil. They parted at the usual hour, and went to their several
+rooms. The sadness of Mr. Bernard had sunk into the heart of Helen, and
+she mingled many tears with her prayers that evening, earnestly
+entreating that he might be comforted in his days of trial and protected
+in his hour of danger.
+
+Mr. Bernard stayed in his room a short time before setting out for his
+evening walk. His eye fell upon the Bible his mother had given him when
+he left home, and he opened it in the New Testament at a venture. It
+happened that the first words he read were these,--"Lest, coming
+suddenly, he find you sleeping." In the state of mind in which he was at
+the moment, the text startled him. It was like a supernatural warning.
+He was not going to expose himself to any particular danger this evening;
+a walk in a quiet village was as free from risk as Helen Darley or his
+own mother could ask; yet he had an unaccountable feeling of
+apprehension, without any definite object. At this moment he remembered
+the old Doctor's counsel, which he had sometimes neglected, and, blushing
+at the feeling which led him to do it, he took the pistol his suspicious
+old friend had forced upon him, which he had put away loaded, and,
+thrusting it into his pocket, set out upon his walk.
+
+The moon was shining at intervals, for the night was partially clouded.
+There seemed to be nobody stirring, though his attention was unusually
+awake, and he could hear the whirr of the bats overhead, and the
+pulsating croak of the frogs in the distant pools and marshes. Presently
+he detected the sound of hoofs at some distance, and, looking forward,
+saw a horseman coming in his direction. The moon was under a cloud at
+the moment, and he could only observe that the horse and his rider looked
+like a single dark object, and that they were moving along at an easy
+pace. Mr. Bernard was really ashamed of himself, when he found his hand
+on the butt of his pistol. When the horseman was within a hundred and
+fifty yards of him, the moon shone out suddenly and revealed each of them
+to the other. The rider paused for a moment, as if carefully surveying
+the pedestrian, then suddenly put his horse to the full gallop, and
+dashed towards him, rising at the same instant in his stirrups and
+swinging something round his head, what, Mr. Bernard could not make out.
+It was a strange manoeuvre,--so strange and threatening in aspect that
+the young man forgot his nervousness in an instant, cocked his pistol,
+and waited to see what mischief all this meant. He did not wait long. As
+the rider came rushing towards him, he made a rapid motion and something
+leaped five-and-twenty feet through the air, in Mr. Bernard's direction.
+In an instant he felt a ring, as of a rope or thong, settle upon his
+shoulders. There was no time to think, he would be lost in another
+second. He raised his pistol and fired,--not at the rider, but at the
+horse. His aim was true; the mustang gave one bound and fell lifeless,
+shot through the head. The lasso was fastened to his saddle, and his
+last bound threw Mr. Bernard violently to the earth, where he lay
+motionless, as if stunned.
+
+In the mean time, Dick Venner, who had been dashed down with his horse,
+was trying to extricate himself,--one of his legs being held fast under
+the animal, the long spur on his boot having caught in the saddle-cloth.
+He found, however, that he could do nothing with his right arm, his
+shoulder having been in some way injured in his fall. But his Southern
+blood was up, and, as he saw Mr. Bernard move as if he were coming to his
+senses, he struggled violently to free himself.
+
+"I 'll have the dog, yet," he said,--"only let me get at him with the
+knife!"
+
+He had just succeeded in extricating his imprisoned leg, and was ready to
+spring to his feet, when he was caught firmly by the throat, and looking
+up, saw a clumsy barbed weapon, commonly known as a hay fork, within an
+inch of his breast.
+
+"Hold on there! What 'n thunder 'r' y' abaout, y' darned Portagee?" said
+a voice, with a decided nasal tone in it, but sharp and resolute.
+
+Dick looked from the weapon to the person who held it, and saw a sturdy,
+plain man standing over him, with his teeth clinched, and his aspect that
+of one all ready for mischief.
+
+"Lay still, naow!" said Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man; "'f y' don't,
+I'll stick ye, 'z sure 'z y' 'r' alive! I been arfter ye f'r a week, 'n'
+I got y' naow! I knowed I'd ketch ye at some darned trick or 'nother
+'fore I'd done 'ith ye!"
+
+Dick lay perfectly still, feeling that he was crippled and helpless,
+thinking all the time with the Yankee half of his mind what to do about
+it. He saw Mr. Bernard lift his head and look around him. He would get
+his senses again in a few minutes, very probably, and then he, Mr.
+Richard Venner, would be done for.
+
+"Let me up! let me up!" he cried, in a low, hurried voice,--"I 'll give
+you a hundred dollars in gold to let me go. The man a'n't hurt,--don't
+you see him stirring? He'll come to himself in two minutes. Let me up!
+I'll give you a hundred and fifty dollars in gold, now, here on the
+spot,--and the watch out of my pocket; take it yourself, with your own
+hands!"
+
+"I'll see y' darned fust! Ketch me lett'n' go!" was Abel's emphatic
+answer. "Yeou lay still, 'n' wait t'll that man comes tew."
+
+He kept the hay-fork ready for action at the slightest sign of
+resistance.
+
+Mr. Bernard, in the mean time, had been getting, first his senses, and
+then some few of his scattered wits, a little together.
+
+"What is it?"--he said. "Who'shurt? What's happened?"
+
+"Come along here 'z quick 'z y' ken," Abel answered, "'n' haalp me fix
+this fellah. Y' been hurt, y'rself, 'n' the' 's murder come pooty nigh
+happenin'."
+
+Mr. Bernard heard the answer, but presently stared about and asked again,
+"Who's hurt? What's happened?"
+
+"Y' 'r' hurt, y'rself, I tell ye," said Abel; "'n' the' 's been a murder,
+pooty nigh."
+
+Mr. Bernard felt something about his neck, and, putting his hands up,
+found the loop of the lasso, which he loosened, but did not think to slip
+over his head, in the confusion of his perceptions and thoughts. It was a
+wonder that it had not choked him, but he had fallen forward so as to
+slacken it.
+
+By this time he was getting some notion of what he was about, and
+presently began looking round for his pistol, which had fallen. He found
+it lying near him, cocked it mechanically, and walked, somewhat
+unsteadily, towards the two men, who were keeping their position as still
+as if they were performing in a tableau.
+
+"Quick, naow!" said Abel, who had heard the click of cocking the pistol,
+and saw that he held it in his hand, as he came towards him. "Gi' me that
+pistil, and yeou fetch that 'ere rope layin' there. I 'll have this here
+fella,h fixed 'n less 'n two minutes."
+
+Mr. Bernard did as Abel said,--stupidly and mechanically, for he was but
+half right as yet. Abel pointed the pistol at Dick's head.
+
+"Naow hold up y'r hands, yeou fellah," he said, "'n' keep 'em up, while
+this man puts the rope mound y'r wrists."
+
+Dick felt himself helpless, and, rather than have his disabled arm
+roughly dealt with, held up his hands. Mr. Bernard did as Abel said; he
+was in a purely passive state, and obeyed orders like a child. Abel then
+secured the rope in a most thorough and satisfactory complication of
+twists and knots.
+
+"Naow get up, will ye?" he said; and the unfortunate Dick rose to his
+feet.
+
+"Who's hurt? What's happened?" asked poor Mr. Bernard again, his memory
+having been completely jarred out of him for the time.
+
+"Come, look here naow, yeou, don' Stan' askin' questions over 'n'
+over;--'t beats all! ha'n't I tol' y' a dozen times?"
+
+As Abel spoke, he turned and looked at Mr. Bernard.
+
+"Hullo! What 'n thunder's that 'ere raoun' y'r neck? Ketched ye 'ith a
+slippernoose, hey? Wal, if that a'n't the craowner! Hol' on a minute,
+Cap'n, 'n' I'll show ye what that 'ere halter's good for."
+
+Abel slipped the noose over Mr. Bernard's head, and put it round the neck
+of the miserable Dick Veneer, who made no sign of resistance,--whether
+on account of the pain he was in, or from mere helplessness, or because
+he was waiting for some unguarded moment to escape,--since resistance
+seemed of no use.
+
+"I 'm go'n' to kerry y' home," said Abel; "'T' th' ol Doctor, he's got a
+gre't cur'osity t' see ye. Jes' step along naow,--off that way, will
+ye?--'n' I Ill hol' on t' th' bridle, f' fear y' sh'd run away."
+
+He took hold of the leather thong, but found that it was fastened at the
+other end to the saddle. This was too much for Abel.
+
+"Wal, naow, yeou be a pooty chap to hev raound! A fellah's neck in a
+slippernoose at one eend of a halter, 'n' a hors on th' full spring at t'
+other eend!"
+
+He looked at him from' head to foot as a naturalist inspects a new
+specimen. His clothes had suffered in his fall, especially on the leg
+which had been caught under the horse.
+
+"Hullo! look o' there, naow! What's that 'ere stickin' aout o' y'r
+boot?"
+
+It was nothing but the handle of an ugly knife, which Abel instantly
+relieved him of.
+
+The party now took up the line of march for old Doctor Kittredge's house,
+Abel carrying the pistol and knife, and Mr. Bernard walking in silence,
+still half-stunned, holding the hay-fork, which Abel had thrust into his
+hand. It was all a dream to him as yet. He remembered the horseman
+riding at him, and his firing the pistol; but whether he was alive, and
+these walls around him belonged to the village of Rockland, or whether he
+had passed the dark river, and was in a suburb of the New Jerusalem, he
+could not as yet have told.
+
+They were in the street where the Doctor's house was situated.
+
+"I guess I'll fire off one o' these here berrils," said Abel.
+
+He fired.
+
+Presently there was a noise of opening windows, and the nocturnal
+head-dresses of Rockland flowered out of them like so many developments
+of the Nightblooming Cereus. White cotton caps and red bandanna
+handkerchiefs were the prevailing forms of efflorescence. The main point
+was that the village was waked up. The old Doctor always waked easily,
+from long habit, and was the first among those who looked out to see what
+had happened.
+
+"Why, Abel!" he called out, "what have you got there? and what 's all
+this noise about?"
+
+"We've ketched the Portagee!" Abel answered, as laconically as the hero
+of Lake Erie, in his famous dispatch. "Go in there, you fellah!"
+
+The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had
+bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous
+in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if it
+had been a child in a fit that he was sent for.
+
+"Richard Veneer!" the Doctor exclaimed. "What is the meaning of all
+this? Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?"
+
+Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.
+
+"My mind is confused," he said. "I've had a fall.--Oh, yes!--wait a
+minute and it will all come back to me."
+
+"Sit down, sit down," the Doctor said. "Abel will tell me about it.
+Slight concussion of the brain. Can't remember very well for an hour or
+two,--will come right by to-morrow."
+
+"Been stunded," Abel said. "He can't tell nothin'."
+
+Abel then proceeded to give a Napoleonic bulletin of the recent combat of
+cavalry and infantry and its results,--none slain, one captured.
+
+The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles.
+
+"What 's the matter with your shoulder, Venner?"
+
+Dick answered sullenly, that he didn't know, fell on it when his horse
+came down. The Doctor examined it as carefully as he could through his
+clothes.
+
+"Out of joint. Untie his hands, Abel"
+
+By this time a small alarm had spread among the neighbors, and there was
+a circle around Dick, who glared about on the assembled honest people
+like a hawk with a broken wing.
+
+When the Doctor said, "Untie his hands," the circle widened perceptibly.
+
+"Isn't it a leetle rash to give him the use of his hands? I see there's
+females and children standin' near."
+
+This was the remark of our old friend, Deacon Soper, who retired from the
+front row, as he spoke, behind a respectable-looking, but somewhat
+hastily dressed person of the defenceless sex, the female help of a
+neighboring household, accompanied by a boy, whose unsmoothed shock of
+hair looked like a last year's crow's-nest.
+
+But Abel untied his hands, in spite of the Deacon's considerate
+remonstrance.
+
+"Now," said the Doctor, "the first thing is to put the joint back."
+
+"Stop," said Deacon Soper,--"stop a minute. Don't you think it will be
+safer--for the women-folks--jest to wait till mornin', afore you put that
+j'int into the socket?"
+
+Colonel Sprowle, who had been called by a special messenger, spoke up at
+this moment.
+
+"Let the women-folks and the deacons go home, if they're scared, and put
+the fellah's j'int in as quick as you like. I 'll resk him, j'int in or
+out."
+
+"I want one of you to go straight down to Dudley Venner's with a
+message," the Doctor said. "I will have the young man's shoulder in
+quick enough."
+
+"Don't send that message!" said Dick, in a hoarse voice;--"do what you
+like with my arm, but don't send that message! Let me go,--I can walk,
+and I'll be off from this place. There's nobody hurt but myself. Damn
+the shoulder!--let me go! You shall never hear of me again!"
+
+Mr. Bernard came forward.
+
+"My friends," he said, "I am not injured,--seriously, at least. Nobody
+need complain against this man, if I don't. The Doctor will treat him
+like a human being, at any rate; and then, if he will go, let him. There
+are too many witnesses against him here for him to want to stay."
+
+The Doctor, in the mean time, without saying a word to all this, had got
+a towel round the shoulder and chest and another round the arm, and had
+the bone replaced in a very few minutes.
+
+"Abel, put Cassia into the new chaise," he said, quietly. "My friends
+and neighbors, leave this young man to me."
+
+"Colonel Sprowle, you're a justice of the peace," said Deacon Soper, "and
+you know what the law says in cases like this. It a'n't so clear that it
+won't have to come afore the Grand Jury, whether we will or no."
+
+"I guess we'll set that j'int to-morrow mornin'," said Colonel
+Sprowle,--which made a laugh at the Deacon's expense, and virtually
+settled the question.
+
+"Now trust this young man in my care," said the old Doctor, "and go home
+and finish your naps. I knew him when he was a boy and I'll answer for
+it, he won't trouble you any more. The Dudley blood makes folks proud, I
+can tell you, whatever else they are."
+
+The good people so respected and believed in the Doctor that they left
+the prisoner with him.
+
+Presently, Cassia, the fast Morgan mare, came up to the front-door, with
+the wheels of the new, light chaise flashing behind her in the moonlight.
+The Doctor drove Dick forty miles at a stretch that night, out of the
+limits of the State.
+
+"Do you want money?" he said, before he left him.
+
+Dick told him the secret of his golden belt.
+
+"Where shall I send your trunk after you from your uncle's?"
+
+Dick gave him a direction to a seaport town to which he himself was
+going, to take passage for a port in South America.
+
+"Good-bye, Richard," said the Doctor. "Try to learn something from
+to-night's lesson."
+
+The Southern impulses in Dick's wild blood overcame him, and he kissed
+the old Doctor on both cheeks, crying as only the children of the sun can
+cry, after the first hours in the dewy morning of life. So Dick Venner
+disappears from this story. An hour after dawn, Cassia pointed her fine
+ears homeward, and struck into her square, honest trot, as if she had not
+been doing anything more than her duty during her four hours' stretch of
+the last night.
+
+Abel was not in the habit of questioning the Doctor's decisions.
+
+"It's all right," he said to Mr. Bernard. "The fellah 's Squire Venner's
+relation, anyhaow. Don't you want to wait here, jest a little while,
+till I come back? The's a consid'able nice saddle 'n' bridle on a dead
+boss that's layin' daown there in the road 'n' I guess the' a'n't no use
+in lettin' on 'em spite,--so I'll jest step aout 'n' fetch 'em along. I
+kind o' calc'late 't won't pay to take the cretur's shoes 'n' hide off
+to-night,--'n' the' won't be much iron on that hose's huffs an haour
+after daylight, I'll bate ye a quarter."
+
+"I'll walk along with you," said Mr. Bernard; "I feel as if I could get
+along well enough now."
+
+So they set off together. There was a little crowd round the dead
+mustang already, principally consisting of neighbors who had adjourned
+from the Doctor's house to see the scene of the late adventure. In
+addition to these, however, the assembly was honored by the presence of
+Mr. Principal Silas Peckham, who had been called from his slumbers by a
+message that Master Langdon was shot through the head by a
+highway-robber, but had learned a true version of the story by this time.
+His voice was at that moment heard above the rest,--sharp, but thin, like
+bad cider-vinegar.
+
+"I take charge of that property, I say. Master Langdon 's actin' under
+my orders, and I claim that hoss and all that's on him. Hiram! jest slip
+off that saddle and bridle, and carry 'em up to the Institoot, and bring
+down a pair of pinchers and a file,--and--stop--fetch a pair of shears,
+too; there's hosshair enough in that mane and tail to stuff a bolster
+with."
+
+"You let that hoss alone!" spoke up Colonel Sprowle. "When a fellah goes
+out huntin' and shoots a squirrel, do you think he's go'n' to let another
+fellah pick him up and kerry him off? Not if he's got a double-berril
+gun, and t'other berril ha'n't been fired off yet! I should like to see
+the mahn that'll take off that seddle 'n' bridle, excep' the one th't hez
+a fair right to the whole concern!"
+
+Hiram was from one of the lean streaks in New Hampshire, and, not being
+overfed in Mr. Silas Peckham's kitchen, was somewhat wanting in stamina,
+as well as in stomach, for so doubtful an enterprise, as undertaking to
+carry out his employer's orders in the face of the Colonel's defiance.
+
+Just then Mr. Bernard and Abel came up together. "Here they be," said
+the Colonel. "Stan' beck, gentlemen!"
+
+Mr. Bernard, who was pale and still a little confused, but gradually
+becoming more like himself, stood and looked in silence for a moment.
+
+All his thoughts seemed to be clearing themselves in this interval. He
+took in the whole series of incidents: his own frightful risk; the
+strange, instinctive, nay, Providential impulse, which had led him so
+suddenly to do the one only thing which could possibly have saved him;
+the sudden appearance of the Doctor's man, but for which he might yet
+have been lost; and the discomfiture and capture of his dangerous enemy.
+
+It was all past now, and a feeling of pity rose in Mr. Bernard's heart.
+
+"He loved that horse, no doubt," he said,--"and no wonder. A beautiful,
+wild--looking creature! Take off those things that are on him, Abel, and
+have them carried to Mr. Dudley Veneer's. If he does not want them, you
+may keep them yourself, for all that I have to say. One thing more. I
+hope nobody will lift his hand against this noble creature to mutilate
+him in any way. After you have taken off the saddle and bridle, Abel,
+bury him just as he is. Under that old beech-tree will be a good place.
+You'll see to it,--won't you, Abel?"
+
+Abel nodded assent, and Mr. Bernard returned to the Institute, threw
+himself in his clothes on the bed, and slept like one who is heavy with
+wine.
+
+Following Mr. Bernard's wishes, Abel at once took off the high-peaked
+saddle and the richly ornamented bridle from the mustang. Then, with the
+aid of two or three others, he removed him to the place indicated.
+Spades and shovels were soon procured, and before the moon had set, the
+wild horse of the Pampas was at rest under the turf at the wayside, in
+the far village among the hills of New England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+THE NEWS REACHES THE DUDLEY MANSION.
+
+Early the next morning Abel Stebbins made his appearance at Dudley
+Veneer's, and requested to see the maan o' the haouse abaout somethin' o'
+consequence. Mr. Veneer sent word that the messenger should wait below,
+and presently appeared in the study, where Abel was making himself at
+home, as is the wont of the republican citizen, when he hides the purple
+of empire beneath the apron of domestic service.
+
+"Good mornin', Squire!" said Abel, as Mr. Venner entered. "My name's
+Stebbins, 'n' I'm stoppin' f'r a spell 'ith of Doctor Kittredge."
+
+"Well, Stebbins," said Mr. Dudley Veneer, "have you brought any special
+message from the Doctor?"
+
+"Y' ha'n't heerd nothin' abaout it, Squire, d' ye mean t' say?" said
+Abel,--beginning to suspect that he was the first to bring the news of
+last evening's events.
+
+"About what?" asked Mr. Veneer, with some interest.
+
+"Dew tell, naow! Waal, that beats all! Why, that 'ere Portagee relation
+o' yourn 'z been tryin' t' ketch a fellah 'n a slippernoose, 'n' got
+ketched himself,--that's all. Y' ha'n't heerd noth'n' abaout it?"
+
+"Sit down," said Mr. Dudley Veneer, calmly, "and tell me all you have to
+say."
+
+So Abel sat down and gave him an account of the events of the last
+evening. It was a strange and terrible surprise to Dudley Veneer to find
+that his nephew, who had been an inmate of his house and the companion of
+his daughter, was to all intents and purposes guilty of the gravest of
+crimes. But the first shock was no sooner over than he began to think
+what effect the news would have on Elsie. He imagined that there was a
+kind of friendly feeling between them, and he feared some crisis would be
+provoked in his daughter's mental condition by the discovery. He would
+wait, however, until she came from her chamber, before disturbing her
+with the evil tidings.
+
+Abel did not forget his message with reference to the equipments of the
+dead mustang.
+
+"The' was some things on the hoss, Squire, that the man he ketched said
+he did n' care no gre't abaout; but perhaps you'd like to have 'em
+fetched to the mansion-haouse. Ef y' did n' care abaout 'em, though, I
+should n' min' keepin' on 'em; they might come handy some time or
+'nother; they say, holt on t' anything for ten year 'n' there 'll be some
+kin' o' use for 't."
+
+"Keep everything," said Dudley Veneer. "I don't want to see anything
+belonging to that young man."
+
+So Abel nodded to Mr. Veneer, and left the study to find some of the men
+about the stable to tell and talk over with them the events of the last
+evening. He presently came upon Elbridge, chief of the equine
+department, and driver of the family-coach.
+
+"Good mornin', Abe," said Elbridge. "What's fetched y' daown here so
+all-fired airly?"
+
+"You're a darned pooty lot daown here, you be!"
+
+Abel answered. "Better keep your Portagees t' home nex' time, ketchin'
+folks 'ith slippernooses raoun' their necks, 'n' kerryin' knives 'n their
+boots!"
+
+"What 'r' you jawin' abaout?" Elbridge said, looking up to see if he was
+in earnest, and what he meant.
+
+"Jawin' abaout? You'll find aout'z soon 'z y' go into that 'ere stable
+o' yourn! Y' won't curry that 'ere long-tailed black hoss no more; 'n'
+y' won't set y'r eyes on the fellah that rid him, ag'in, in a hurry!"
+
+Elbridge walked straight to the stable, without saying a word, found the
+door unlocked, and went in.
+
+"Th' critter's gone, sure enough!" he said. "Glad on 't! The darndest,
+kickin'est, bitin'est beast th't ever I see, 'r ever wan' t' see ag'in!
+Good reddance! Don' wan' no snappin'-turkles in my stable! Whar's the
+man gone th't brought the critter?"
+
+"Whar he's gone? Guess y' better go 'n ask my ol man; he kerried him off
+lass' night; 'n' when he comes back, mebbe he 'll tell ye whar he's gone
+tew!"
+
+By this time Elbridge had found out that Abel was in earnest, and had
+something to tell. He looked at the litter in the mustang's stall, then
+at the crib.
+
+"Ha'n't eat b't haalf his feed. Ha'n't been daown on his straw. Must ha'
+been took aout somewhere abaout ten 'r 'levee o'clock. I know that 'ere
+critter's ways. The fellah's had him aout nights afore; b't I never
+thought nothin' o' no mischief. He 's a kin' o' haalf Injin. What is 't
+the chap's been a-doin' on? Tell 's all abaout it."
+
+Abel sat down on a meal-chest, picked up a straw and put it into his
+mouth. Elbridge sat down at the other end, pulled out his jack-knife,
+opened the penknife-blade, and began sticking it into the lid of the
+meal-chest. The Doctor's man had a story to tell, and he meant to get
+all the enjoyment out of it. So he told it with every luxury of
+circumstance. Mr. Veneer's man heard it all with open mouth. No
+listener in the gardens of Stamboul could have found more rapture in a
+tale heard amidst the perfume of roses and the voices of birds and
+tinkling of fountains than Elbridge in following Abel's narrative, as
+they sat there in the aromatic ammoniacal atmosphere of the stable, the
+grinding of the horses' jaws keeping evenly on through it all, with now
+and then the interruption of a stamping hoof, and at intervals a ringing
+crow from the barn-yard.
+
+Elbridge stopped a minute to think, after Abel had finished.
+
+"Who's took care o' them things that was on the hoss?" he said, gravely.
+
+"Waal, Langden, he seemed to kin 'o' think I'd ought to have 'em,--'n'
+the Squire; he did n' seem to have no 'bjection; 'n' so,--waal, I
+calc'late I sh'll jes' holt on to 'em myself; they a'n't good f 'r much,
+but they're cur'ous t' keep t' look at."
+
+Mr. Veneer's man did not appear much gratified by this arrangement,
+especially as he had a shrewd suspicion that some of the ornaments of the
+bridle were of precious metal, having made occasional examinations of
+them with the edge of a file. But he did not see exactly what to do
+about it, except to get them from Abel in the way of bargain.
+
+"Waal, no,--they a'n't good for much 'xcep' to look at. 'F y' ever rid
+on that seddle once, y' would n' try it ag'in, very spry,--not 'f y' c'd
+haalp y'rsaalf.
+
+"I tried it,--darned 'f I sot daown f'r th' nex' week,--eat all my
+victuals stan'in'. I sh'd like t' hev them things wal enough to heng up
+'n the stable; 'f y' want t' trade some day, fetch 'em along daown."
+
+Abel rather expected that Elbridge would have laid claim to the saddle
+and bridle on the strength of some promise or other presumptive title,
+and thought himself lucky to get off with only offering to think abaout
+tradin'.
+
+When Elbridge returned to the house, he found the family in a state of
+great excitement. Mr. Venner had told Old Sophy, and she had informed
+the other servants. Everybody knew what had happened, excepting Elsie.
+Her father had charged them all to say nothing about it to her; he would
+tell her, when she came down.
+
+He heard her step at last,--alight, gliding step,--so light that her
+coming was often unheard, except by those who perceived the faint rustle
+that went with it. She was paler than common this morning, as she came
+into her father's study.
+
+After a few words of salutation, he said quietly, "Elsie, my dear, your
+cousin Richard has left us."
+
+She grew still paler, as she asked,
+
+"Is he dead?"
+
+Dudley Venner started to see the expression with which Elsie put this
+question.
+
+"He is living,--but dead to us from this day forward," said her father.
+
+He proceeded to tell her, in a general way, the story he had just heard
+from Abel. There could be no doubting it;--he remembered him as the
+Doctor's man; and as Abel had seen all with his own eyes, as Dick's
+chamber, when unlocked with a spare key, was found empty, and his bed had
+not been slept in, he accepted the whole account as true.
+
+When he told of Dick's attempt on the young schoolmaster, ("You know Mr.
+Langdon very well, Elsie,--a perfectly inoffensive young man, as I
+understand,") Elsie turned her face away and slid along by the wall to
+the window which looked out oh the little grass-plot with the white stone
+standing in it. Her father could not see her face, but he knew by her
+movements that her dangerous mood was on her. When she heard the sequel
+of the story, the discomfiture and capture of Dick, she turned round for
+an instant, with a look of contempt and of something like triumph upon
+her face. Her father saw that her cousin had become odious to her: He
+knew well, by every change of her countenance, by her movements, by every
+varying curve of her graceful figure, the transitions front passion to
+repose, from fierce excitement to the dull languor which often succeeded
+her threatening paroxysms.
+
+She remained looking out at the window. A group of white fan-tailed
+pigeons had lighted on the green plot before it and clustered about one
+of their companions who lay on his back, fluttering in a strange way,
+with outspread wings and twitching feet. Elsie uttered a faint cry;
+these were her special favorites and often fed from her hand. She threw
+open the long window, sprang out, caught up the white fantail, and held
+it to her bosom. The bird stretched himself out, and then lay still,
+with open eyes, lifeless. She looked at him a moment, and, sliding in
+through the open window and through the study, sought her own apartment,
+where she locked herself in, and began to sob and moan like those that
+weep. But the gracious solace of tears seemed to be denied her, and her
+grief, like her anger, was a dull ache, longing, like that, to finish
+itself with a fierce paroxysm, but wanting its natural outlet.
+
+This seemingly trifling incident of the death of her favorite appeared to
+change all the current of her thought. Whether it were the sight of the
+dying bird, or the thought that her own agency might have beep concerned
+in it, or some deeper grief, which took this occasion to declare
+itself,--some dark remorse or hopeless longing,--whatever it might be,
+there was an unwonted tumult in her soul. To whom should she go in her
+vague misery? Only to Him who knows all His creatures' sorrows, and
+listens to the faintest human cry. She knelt, as she had been taught to
+kneel from her childhood, and tried to pray. But her thoughts refused to
+flow in the language of supplication. She could not plead for herself as
+other women plead in their hours of anguish. She rose like one who
+should stoop to drink, and find dust in the place of water. Partly from
+restlessness, partly from an attraction she hardly avowed to herself, she
+followed her usual habit and strolled listlessly along to the school.
+
+Of course everybody at the Institute was full of the terrible adventure
+of the preceding evening. Mr. Bernard felt poorly enough; but he had
+made it a point to show himself the next morning, as if nothing had
+happened. Helen Darley knew nothing of it all until she hard risen, when
+the gossipy matron of the establishment made her acquainted with all its
+details, embellished with such additional ornamental appendages as it had
+caught up in transmission from lip to lip. She did not love to betray
+her sensibilities, but she was pale and tremulous and very nearly tearful
+when Mr. Bernard entered the sitting-room, showing on his features traces
+of the violent shock he had received and the heavy slumber from which he
+had risen with throbbing brows. What the poor girl's impulse was, on
+seeing him, we need not inquire too curiously. If he had been her own
+brother, she would have kissed him and cried on his neck; but something
+held her back. There is no galvanism in kiss-your-brother; it is copper
+against copper: but alien bloods develop strange currents, when they flow
+close to each other, with only the films that cover lip and cheek between
+them. Mr. Bernard, as some of us may remember, violated the proprieties
+and laid himself open to reproach by his enterprise with a bouncing
+village-girl, to whose rosy cheek an honest smack was not probably an
+absolute novelty. He made it all up by his discretion and good behavior
+now. He saw by Helen's moist eye and trembling lip that her woman's
+heart was off its guard, and he knew, by the infallible instinct of sex,
+that he should be forgiven, if he thanked her for her sisterly sympathies
+in the most natural way,--expressive, and at the same time economical of
+breath and utterance. He would not give a false look to their friendship
+by any such demonstration. Helen was a little older than himself, but
+the aureole of young womanhood had not yet begun to fade from around her.
+She was surrounded by that enchanted atmosphere into which the girl walks
+with dreamy eyes, and out of which the woman passes with a story written
+on her forehead. Some people think very little of these refinements;
+they have not studied magnetism and the law of the square of the
+distance.
+
+So Mr. Bernard thanked Helen for her interest without the aid of the
+twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet,--the love labial,--the limping
+consonant which it takes two to speak plain. Indeed, he scarcely let her
+say a word, at first; for he saw that it was hard for her to conceal her
+emotion. No wonder; he had come within a hair's-breadth of losing his
+life, and he had been a very kind friend and a very dear companion to
+her.
+
+There were some curious spiritual experiences connected with his last
+evening's adventure which were working very strongly in his mind. It was
+borne in upon him irresistibly that he had been dead since he had seen
+Helen,--as dead as the son of the Widow of Nain before the bier was
+touched and he sat up and began to speak. There was an interval between
+two conscious moments which appeared to him like a temporary
+annihilation, and the thoughts it suggested were worrying him with
+strange perplexities.
+
+He remembered seeing the dark figure on horseback rise in the saddle and
+something leap from its hand. He remembered the thrill he felt as the
+coil settled on his shoulders, and the sudden impulse which led him to
+fire as he did. With the report of the pistol all became blank, until he
+found himself in a strange, bewildered state, groping about for the
+weapon, which he had a vague consciousness of having dropped. But,
+according to Abel's account, there must have been an interval of some
+minutes between these recollections, and he could not help asking, Where
+was the mind, the soul, the thinking principle, all this time?
+
+A man is stunned by a blow with a stick on the head. He becomes
+unconscious. Another man gets a harder blow on the head from a bigger
+stick, and it kills him. Does he become unconscious, too? If so, when
+does he come to his consciousness? The man who has had a slight or
+moderate blow comes to himself when the immediate shock passes off and
+the organs begin to work again, or when a bit of the skull is pried up,
+if that happens to be broken. Suppose the blow is hard enough to spoil
+the brain and stop the play of the organs, what happens them?
+
+A British captain was struck by a cannon-ball on the head, just as he was
+giving an order, at the Battle of the Nile. Fifteen months afterwards he
+was trephined at Greenwich Hospital, having been insensible all that
+time. Immediately after the operation his consciousness returned, and he
+at once began carrying out the order he was giving when the shot struck
+him. Suppose he had never been trephined, when would his consciousness
+have returned? When his breath ceased and his heart stopped beating?
+
+When Mr. Bernard said to Helen, "I have been dead since I saw you," it
+startled her not a little; for his expression was that of perfect good
+faith, and she feared that his mind was disordered. When he explained,
+not as has been done just now, at length, but in a hurried, imperfect
+way, the meaning of his strange assertion, and the fearful Sadduceeisms
+which it had suggested to his mind, she looked troubled at first, and
+then thoughtful. She did not feel able to answer all the difficulties he
+raised, but she met them with that faith which is the strength as well as
+the weakness of women,--which makes them weak in the hands of man, but
+strong in the presence of the Unseen.
+
+"It is a strange experience," she said; "but I once had something like
+it. I fainted, and lost some five or ten minutes out of my life, as much
+as if I had been dead. But when I came to myself, I was the same person
+every way, in my recollections and character. So I suppose that loss of
+consciousness is not death. And if I was born out of unconsciousness
+into infancy with many family-traits of mind and body, I can believe,
+from my own reason, even without help from Revelation, that I shall be
+born again out of the unconsciousness of death with my individual traits
+of mind and body. If death is, as it should seem to be, a loss of
+consciousness, that does not shake my faith; for I have been put into a
+body once already to fit me for living here, and I hope to be in some way
+fitted after this life to enjoy a better one. But it is all trust in God
+and in his Word. These are enough for me; I hope they are for you."
+
+Helen was a minister's daughter, and familiar from her childhood with
+this class of questions, especially with all the doubts and perplexities
+which are sure to assail every thinking child bred in any inorganic or
+not thoroughly vitalized faith,--as is too often the case with the
+children of professional theologians. The kind of discipline they are
+subjected to is like that of the Flat-Head Indian pappooses. At five or
+ten or fifteen years old they put their hands up to their foreheads and
+ask, What are they strapping down my brains in this way for? So they
+tear off the sacred bandages of the great Flat-Head tribe, and there
+follows a mighty rush of blood to the long-compressed region. This
+accounts, in the most lucid manner, for those sudden freaks with which
+certain children of this class astonish their worthy parents at the
+period of life when they are growing fast, and, the frontal pressure
+beginning to be felt as something intolerable, they tear off the holy
+compresses.
+
+The hour for school came, and they went to the great hall for study. It
+would not have occurred to Mr. Silas Peckham to ask his assistant whether
+he felt well enough to attend to his duties; and Mr. Bernard chose to be
+at his post. A little headache and confusion were all that remained of
+his symptoms.
+
+Later, in the course of the forenoon, Elsie Venner came and took her
+place. The girls all stared at her--naturally enough; for it was hardly
+to have been expected that she would show herself, after such an event in
+the household to which she belonged. Her expression was somewhat
+peculiar, and, of course, was attributed to the shock her feelings had
+undergone on hearing of the crime attempted by her cousin and daily
+companion. When she was looking on her book, or on any indifferent
+object, her countenance betrayed some inward disturbance, which knitted
+her dark brows, and seemed to throw a deeper shadow over her features.
+But, from time to time, she would lift her eyes toward Mr. Bernard, and
+let them rest upon him, without a thought, seemingly, that she herself
+was the subject of observation or remark. Then they seemed to lose their
+cold glitter, and soften into a strange, dreamy tenderness. The deep
+instincts of womanhood were striving to grope their way to the surface of
+her being through all the alien influences which overlaid them. She
+could be secret and cunning in working out any of her dangerous impulses,
+but she did not know how to mask the unwonted feeling which fixed her
+eyes and her thoughts upon the only person who had ever reached the
+spring of her hidden sympathies.
+
+The girls all looked at Elsie, whenever they could steal a glance
+unperceived, and many of them were struck with this singular expression
+her features wore. They had long whispered it around among each other
+that she had a liking for the master; but there were too many of them of
+whom something like this could be said, to make it very remarkable. Now,
+however, when so many little hearts were fluttering at the thought of the
+peril through which the handsome young master had so recently passed,
+they were more alive than ever to the supposed relation between him and
+the dark school-girl. Some had supposed there was a mutual attachment
+between them; there was a story that they were secretly betrothed, in
+accordance with the rumor which had been current in the village. At any
+rate, some conflict was going on in that still, remote, clouded soul, and
+all the girls who looked upon her face were impressed and awed as they
+had never been before by the shadows that passed over it.
+
+One of these girls was more strongly arrested by Elsie's look than the
+others. This was a delicate, pallid creature, with a high forehead, and
+wide-open pupils, which looked as if they could take in all the shapes
+that flit in what, to common eyes, is darkness,--a girl said to be
+clairvoyant under certain influences. In the recess, as it was called,
+or interval of suspended studies in the middle of the forenoon, this girl
+carried her autograph-book,--for she had one of those indispensable
+appendages of the boarding-school miss of every degree,--and asked Elsie
+to write her name in it. She had an irresistible feeling, that, sooner
+or later, and perhaps very soon, there would attach an unusual interest
+to this autograph. Elsie took the pen and wrote, in her sharp Italian
+hand,
+
+Elsie Venner, Infelix.
+
+It was a remembrance, doubtless, of the forlorn queen of the "AEneid";
+but its coming to her thought in this way confirmed the sensitive
+school-girl in her fears for Elsie, and she let fall a tear upon the page
+before she closed it.
+
+Of course, the keen and practised observation of Helen Darley could not
+fail to notice the change of Elsie's manner and expression. She had long
+seen that she was attracted to the young master, and had thought, as the
+old Doctor did, that any impression which acted upon her affections might
+be the means of awakening a new life in her singularly isolated nature.
+Now, however, the concentration of the poor girl's thoughts upon the one
+object which had had power to reach her deeper sensibilities was so
+painfully revealed in her features, that Helen began to fear once more,
+lest Mr. Bernard, in escaping the treacherous violence of an assassin,
+had been left to the equally dangerous consequences of a violent,
+engrossing passion in the breast of a young creature whose love it would
+be ruin to admit and might be deadly to reject. She knew her own heart
+too well to fear that any jealousy might mingle with her new
+apprehensions. It was understood between Bernard and Helen that they
+were too good friends to tamper with the silences and edging proximities
+of lovemaking. She knew, too, the simply human, not masculine, interest
+which Mr. Bernard took in Elsie; he had been frank with Helen, and more
+than satisfied her that with all the pity and sympathy which overflowed
+his soul, when he thought of the stricken girl, there mingled not one
+drop of such love as a youth may feel for a maiden.
+
+It may help the reader to gain some understanding of the anomalous nature
+of Elsie Veneer, if we look with Helen into Mr. Bernard's opinions and
+feelings with reference to her, as they had shaped themselves in his
+consciousness at the period of which we are speaking.
+
+At first he had been impressed by her wild beauty, and the contrast of
+all her looks and ways with those of the girls around her. Presently a
+sense of some ill-defined personal element, which half-attracted and
+half-repelled those who looked upon her, and especially those on whom she
+looked, began to make itself obvious to him, as he soon found it was
+painfully sensible to his more susceptible companion, the lady-teacher.
+It was not merely in the cold light of her diamond eyes, but in all her
+movements, in her graceful postures as she sat, in her costume, and, he
+sometimes thought, even in her speech, that this obscure and exceptional
+character betrayed itself. When Helen had said, that, if they were living
+in times when human beings were subject to possession, she should have
+thought there was something not human about Elsie, it struck an
+unsuspected vein of thought in his own mind, which he hated to put in
+words, but which was continually trying to articulate itself among the
+dumb thoughts which lie under the perpetual stream of mental whispers.
+
+Mr. Bernard's professional training had made him slow to accept
+marvellous stories and many forms of superstition. Yet, as a man of
+science, he well knew that just on the verge of the demonstrable facts of
+physics and physiology there is a nebulous border-land which what is
+called "common sense" perhaps does wisely not to enter, but which
+uncommon sense, or the fine apprehension of privileged intelligences, may
+cautiously explore, and in so doing find itself behind the scenes which
+make up for the gazing world the show which is called Nature.
+
+It was with something of this finer perception, perhaps with some degree
+of imaginative exaltation, that he set himself to solving the problem of
+Elsie's influence to attract and repel those around her. His letter
+already submitted to the reader hints in what direction his thoughts were
+disposed to turn. Here was a magnificent organization, superb in
+vigorous womanhood, with a beauty such as never comes but after
+generations of culture; yet through all this rich nature there ran some
+alien current of influence, sinuous and dark, as when a clouded streak
+seams the white marble of a perfect statue.
+
+It would be needless to repeat the particular suggestions which had come
+into his mind, as they must probably have come into that of the reader
+who has noted the singularities of Elsie's tastes and personal traits.
+The images which certain poets had dreamed of seemed to have become a
+reality before his own eyes. Then came that unexplained adventure of The
+Mountain,--almost like a dream in recollection, yet assuredly real in
+some of its main incidents,--with all that it revealed or hinted. This
+girl did not fear to visit the dreaded region, where danger lurked in
+every nook and beneath every tuft of leaves. Did the tenants of the
+fatal ledge recognize some mysterious affinity which made them tributary
+to the cold glitter of her diamond eyes? Was she from her birth one of
+those frightful children, such as he had read about, and the Professor
+had told him of, who form unnatural friendships with cold, writhing
+ophidians? There was no need of so unwelcome a thought as this; she had
+drawn him away from the dark opening in the rock at the moment when he
+seemed to be threatened by one of its malignant denizens; that was all he
+could be sure of; the counter-fascination might have been a dream, a
+fancy, a coincidence. All wonderful things soon grow doubtful in our own
+minds, as do even common events, if great interests prove suddenly to
+attach to their truth or falsehood.
+
+--I, who am telling of these occurrences, saw a friend in the great city,
+on the morning of a most memorable disaster, hours after the time when
+the train which carried its victims to their doom had left. I talked with
+him, and was for some minutes, at least, in his company. When I reached
+home, I found that the story had gone before that he was among the lost,
+and I alone could contradict it to his weeping friends and relatives. I
+did contradict it; but, alas! I began soon to doubt myself, penetrated
+by the contagion of their solicitude; my recollection began to question
+itself; the order of events became dislocated; and when I heard that he
+had reached home in safety, the relief was almost as great to me as to
+those who had expected to see their own brother's face no more.
+
+Mr. Bernard was disposed, then, not to accept the thought of any odious
+personal relationship of the kind which had suggested itself to him when
+he wrote the letter referred to. That the girl had something of the
+feral nature, her wild, lawless rambles in forbidden and blasted regions
+of The Mountain at all hours, her familiarity with the lonely haunts
+where any other human foot was so rarely seen, proved clearly enough.
+But the more he thought of all her strange instincts and modes of being,
+the more he became convinced that whatever alien impulse swayed her will
+and modulated or diverted or displaced her affections came from some
+impression that reached far back into the past, before the days when the
+faithful Old Sophy had rocked her in the cradle. He believed that she
+had brought her ruling tendency, whatever it was, into the world with
+her.
+
+When the school was over and the girls had all gone, Helen lingered in
+the schoolroom to speak with Mr. Bernard.
+
+"Did you remark Elsie's ways this forenoon?" she said.
+
+"No, not particularly; I have not noticed anything as sharply as I
+commonly do; my head has been a little queer, and I have been thinking
+over what we were talking about, and how near I came to solving the great
+problem which every day makes clear to such multitudes of people. What
+about Elsie?"
+
+"Bernard, her liking for you is growing into a passion. I have studied
+girls for a long while, and I know the difference between their passing
+fancies and their real emotions. I told you, you remember, that Rosa
+would have to leave us; we barely missed a scene, I think, if not a whole
+tragedy, by her going at the right moment. But Elsie is infinitely more
+dangerous to herself and others. Women's love is fierce enough, if it
+once gets the mastery of them, always; but this poor girl does not know
+what to do with a passion."
+
+Mr. Bernard had never told Helen the story of the flower in his Virgil,
+or that other adventure--which he would have felt awkwardly to refer to;
+but it had been perfectly understood between them that Elsie showed in
+her own singular way a well-marked partiality for the young master.
+
+"Why don't they take her away from the school, if she is in such a
+strange, excitable state?" said Mr. Bernard.
+
+"I believe they are afraid of her," Helen answered. "It is just one of
+those cases that are ten thousand thousand times worse than insanity. I
+don't think from what I hear, that her father has ever given up hoping
+that she will outgrow her peculiarities. Oh, these peculiar children for
+whom parents go on hoping every morning and despairing every night! If I
+could tell you half that mothers have told me, you would feel that the
+worst of all diseases of the moral sense and the will are those which all
+the Bedlams turn away from their doors as not being cases of insanity!"
+
+"Do you think her father has treated her judiciously?" said Mr. Bernard.
+
+"I think," said Helen, with a little hesitation, which Mr. Bernard did
+not happen to notice,--"I think he has been very kind and indulgent, and
+I do not know that he could have treated her otherwise with a better
+chance of success."
+
+"He must of course be fond of her," Mr. Bernard said; "there is nothing
+else in the world for him to love."
+
+Helen dropped a book she held in her hand, and, stooping to pick it up,
+the blood rushed into her cheeks.
+
+"It is getting late," she said; "you must not stay any longer in this
+close schoolroom. Pray, go and get a little fresh air before
+dinner-time."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+A SOUL IN DISTRESS.
+
+The events told in the last two chapters had taken place toward the close
+of the week. On Saturday evening the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather
+received a note which was left at his door by an unknown person who
+departed without saying a word. Its words were these: "One who is in
+distress of mind requests the prayers of this congregation that God would
+be pleased to look in mercy upon the soul that he has afflicted."
+
+There was nothing to show from whom the note came, or the sex or age or
+special source of spiritual discomfort or anxiety of the writer. The
+handwriting was delicate and might well be a woman's. The clergyman was
+not aware of any particular affliction among his parishioners which was
+likely to be made the subject of a request of this kind. Surely neither
+of the Venners would advertise the attempted crime of their relative in
+this way. But who else was there? The more he thought about it, the
+more it puzzled him, and as he did not like to pray in the dark, without
+knowing for whom he was praying, he could think of nothing better than to
+step into old Doctor Kittredge's and see what he had to say about it.
+
+The old Doctor was sitting alone in his study when the Reverend Mr.
+Fairweather was ushered in. He received his visitor very pleasantly,
+expecting, as a matter of course, that he would begin with some new
+grievance, dyspeptic, neuralgic, bronchitic, or other. The minister,
+however, began with questioning the old Doctor about the sequel of the
+other night's adventure; for he was already getting a little Jesuitical,
+and kept back the object of his visit until it should come up as if
+accidentally in the course of conversation.
+
+"It was a pretty bold thing to go off alone with that reprobate, as you
+did," said the minister.
+
+"I don't know what there was bold about it," the Doctor answered. "All he
+wanted was to get away. He was not quite a reprobate, you see; he didn't
+like the thought of disgracing his family or facing his uncle. I think
+he was ashamed to see his cousin, too, after what he had done."
+
+"Did he talk with you on the way?"
+
+"Not much. For half an hour or so he did n't speak a word. Then he
+asked where I was driving him. I told him, and he seemed to be surprised
+into a sort of grateful feeling. Bad enough, no doubt, but might be
+worse. Has some humanity left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge
+him,--I can't."
+
+"You are too charitable, Doctor," the minister said. "I condemn him just
+as if he had carried out his project, which, they say, was to make it
+appear as if the schoolmaster had committed suicide. That's what people
+think the rope found by him was for. He has saved his neck,--but his
+soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question."
+
+"I can't judge men's souls," the Doctor said. "I can judge their acts,
+and hold them responsible for those,--but I don't know much about their
+souls. If you or I had found our soul in a half-breed body; and been
+turned loose to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just
+such tricks as this fellow has been trying. What if you or I had
+inherited all the tendencies that were born with his cousin Elsie?"
+
+"Oh, that reminds me,"--the minister said, in a sudden way,--"I have
+received a note, which I am requested to read from the pulpit tomorrow.
+I wish you would just have the kindness to look at it and see where you
+think it came from."
+
+The Doctor examined it carefully. It was a woman's or girl's note, he
+thought. Might come from one of the school-girls who was anxious about
+her spiritual condition. Handwriting was disguised; looked a little like
+Elsie Veneer's, but not characteristic enough to make it certain. It
+would be a new thing, if she had asked public prayers for herself, and a
+very favorable indication of a change in her singular moral nature. It
+was just possible Elsie might have sent that note. Nobody could foretell
+her actions. It would be well to see the girl and find out whether any
+unusual impression had been produced on her mind by the recent occurrence
+or by any other cause.
+
+The Reverend Mr. Fairweather folded the note and put it into his pocket.
+
+"I have been a good deal exercised in mind lately, myself," he said.
+
+The old Doctor looked at him through his spectacles, and said, in his
+usual professional tone,
+
+"Put out your tongue."
+
+The minister obeyed him in that feeble way common with persons of weak
+character,--for people differ as much in their mode of performing this
+trifling act as Gideon's soldiers in their way of drinking at the brook.
+The Doctor took his hand and placed a finger mechanically on his wrist.
+
+"It is more spiritual, I think, than bodily," said the Reverend Mr.
+Fairweather.
+
+"Is your appetite as good as usual?" the Doctor asked.
+
+"Pretty good," the minister answered; "but my sleep, my sleep, Doctor,--I
+am greatly troubled at night with lying awake and thinking of my future,
+I am not at ease in mind."
+
+He looked round at all the doors, to be sure they were shut, and moved
+his chair up close to the Doctor's.
+
+"You do not know the mental trials I have been going through for the last
+few months."
+
+"I think I do," the old Doctor said. "You want to get out of the new
+church into the old one, don't you?"
+
+The minister blushed deeply; he thought he had been going on in a very
+quiet way, and that nobody suspected his secret. As the old Doctor was
+his counsellor in sickness, and almost everybody's confidant in trouble,
+he had intended to impart cautiously to him some hints of the change of
+sentiments through which he had been passing. He was too late with his
+information, it appeared, and there was nothing to be done but to throw
+himself on the Doctor's good sense and kindness, which everybody knew,
+and get what hints he could from him as to the practical course he should
+pursue. He began, after an awkward pause,
+
+"You would not have me stay in a communion which I feel to be alien to
+the true church, would you?"
+
+"Have you stay, my friend?" said the Doctor, with a pleasant, friendly
+look,--"have you stay? Not a month, nor a week, nor a day, if I could
+help it. You have got into the wrong pulpit, and I have known it from
+the first. The sooner you go where you belong, the better. And I'm very
+glad you don't mean to stop half-way. Don't you know you've always come
+to me when you've been dyspeptic or sick anyhow, and wanted to put
+yourself wholly into my hands, so that I might order you like a child
+just what to do and what to take? That 's exactly what you want in
+religion. I don't blame you for it. You never liked to take the
+responsibility of your own body; I don't see why you should want to have
+the charge of your own soul. But I'm glad you're going to the Old Mother
+of all. You wouldn't have been contented short of that."
+
+The Reverend Mr. Fairweather breathed with more freedom. The Doctor saw
+into his soul through those awful spectacles of his,--into it and beyond
+it, as one sees through a thin fog. But it was with a real human
+kindness, after all. He felt like a child before a strong man; but the
+strong man looked on him with a father's indulgence. Many and many a
+time, when he had come desponding and bemoaning himself on account of
+some contemptible bodily infirmity, the old Doctor had looked at him
+through his spectacles, listened patiently while he told his ailments,
+and then, in his large parental way, given him a few words of wholesome
+advice, and cheered him up so that he went off with a light heart,
+thinking that the heaven he was so much afraid of was not so very near,
+after all. It was the same thing now. He felt, as feeble natures always
+do in the presence of strong ones, overmastered, circumscribed, shut in,
+humbled; but yet it seemed as if the old Doctor did not despise him any
+more for what he considered weakness of mind than he used to despise him
+when he complained of his nerves or his digestion.
+
+Men who see into their neighbors are very apt to be contemptuous; but men
+who see through them find something lying behind every human soul which
+it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of
+the order of God's manifold universe.
+
+Little as the Doctor had said out of which comfort could be extracted,
+his genial manner had something grateful in it. A film of gratitude came
+over the poor man's cloudy, uncertain eye, and a look of tremulous relief
+and satisfaction played about his weak mouth. He was gravitating to the
+majority, where he hoped to find "rest"; but he was dreadfully sensitive
+to the opinions of the minority he was on the point of leaving.
+
+The old Doctor saw plainly enough what was going on in his mind.
+
+"I sha'n't quarrel with you," he said,--"you know that very well; but you
+mustn't quarrel with me, if I talk honestly with you; it isn't everybody
+that will take the trouble. You flatter yourself that you will make a
+good many enemies by leaving your old communion. Not so many as you
+think. This is the way the common sort of people will talk:--'You have
+got your ticket to the feast of life, as much as any other man that ever
+lived. Protestantism says,--"Help yourself; here's a clean plate, and a
+knife and fork of your own, and plenty of fresh dishes to choose from."
+The Old Mother says,--"Give me your ticket, my dear, and I'll feed you
+with my gold spoon off these beautiful old wooden trenchers. Such nice
+bits as those good old gentlemen have left for you!" There is no
+quarrelling with a man who prefers broken victuals. That's what the
+rougher sort will say; and then, where one scolds, ten will laugh. But,
+mind you, I don't either scold or laugh. I don't feel sure that you
+could very well have helped doing what you will soon do. You know you
+were never easy without some medicine to take when you felt ill in body.
+I'm afraid I've given you trashy stuff sometimes, just to keep you quiet.
+Now, let me tell you, there is just the same difference in spiritual
+patients that there is in bodily ones. One set believes in wholesome
+ways of living, and another must have a great list of specifics for all
+the soul's complaints. You belong with the last, and got accidentally
+shuffled in with the others."
+
+The minister smiled faintly, but did not reply. Of course, he considered
+that way of talking as the result of the Doctor's professional training.
+It would not have been worth while to take offence at his plain speech,
+if he had been so disposed; for he might wish to consult him the next day
+as to "what he should take" for his dyspepsia or his neuralgia.
+
+He left the Doctor with a hollow feeling at the bottom of his soul, as if
+a good piece of his manhood had been scooped out of him. His hollow
+aching did not explain itself in words, but it grumbled and worried down
+among the unshaped thoughts which lie beneath them. He knew that he had
+been trying to reason himself out of his birthright of reason. He knew
+that the inspiration which gave him understanding was losing its throne
+in his intelligence, and the almighty Majority-Vote was proclaiming
+itself in its stead. He knew that the great primal truths, which each
+successive revelation only confirmed, were fast becoming hidden beneath
+the mechanical forms of thought, which, as with all new converts,
+engrossed so large a share of his attention. The "peace," the "rest,"
+which he had purchased were dearly bought to one who had been trained to
+the arms of thought, and whose noble privilege it might have been to live
+in perpetual warfare for the advancing truth which the next generation
+will claim as the legacy of the present.
+
+The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was getting careless about his sermons. He
+must wait the fitting moment to declare himself; and in the mean time he
+was preaching to heretics. It did not matter much what he preached,
+under such circumstances. He pulled out two old yellow sermons from a
+heap of such, and began looking over that for the forenoon. Naturally
+enough, he fell asleep over it, and, sleeping, he began to dream.
+
+He dreamed that he was under the high arches of an old cathedral, amidst
+a throng of worshippers. The light streamed in through vast windows,
+dark with the purple robes of royal saints, or blazing with yellow
+glories around the heads of earthly martyrs and heavenly messengers. The
+billows of the great organ roared among the clustered columns, as the sea
+breaks amidst the basaltic pillars which crowd the stormy cavern of the
+Hebrides. The voice of the alternate choirs of singing boys swung back
+and forward, as the silver censer swung in the hands of the white-robed
+children. The sweet cloud of incense rose in soft, fleecy mists, full of
+penetrating suggestions of the East and its perfumed altars. The knees
+of twenty generations had worn the pavement; their feet had hollowed the
+steps; their shoulders had smoothed the columns. Dead bishops and abbots
+lay under the marble of the floor in their crumbled vestments; dead
+warriors, in rusted armor, were stretched beneath their sculptured
+effigies. And all at once all the buried multitudes who had ever
+worshipped there came thronging in through the aisles. They choked every
+space, they swarmed into all the chapels, they hung in clusters over the
+parapets of the galleries, they clung to the images in every niche, and
+still the vast throng kept flowing and flowing in, until the living were
+lost in the rush of the returning dead who had reclaimed their own.
+Then, as his dream became more fantastic, the huge cathedral itself
+seemed to change into the wreck of some mighty antediluvian vertebrate;
+its flying-buttresses arched round like ribs, its piers shaped themselves
+into limbs, and the sound of the organ-blast changed to the wind
+whistling through its thousand-jointed skeleton.
+
+And presently the sound lulled, and softened and softened, until it was
+as the murmur of a distant swarm of bees. A procession of monks wound
+along through an old street, chanting, as they walked. In his dream he
+glided in among them and bore his part in the burden of their song. He
+entered with the long train under a low arch, and presently he was
+kneeling in a narrow cell before an image of the Blessed Maiden holding
+the Divine Child in her arms, and his lips seemed to whisper,
+
+ Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!
+
+He turned to the crucifix, and, prostrating himself before the spare,
+agonizing shape of the Holy Sufferer, fell into a long passion of tears
+and broken prayers. He rose and flung himself, worn-out, upon his hard
+pallet, and, seeming to slumber, dreamed again within his dream. Once
+more in the vast cathedral, with throngs of the living choking its
+aisles, amidst jubilant peals from the cavernous depths of the great
+organ, and choral melodies ringing from the fluty throats of the singing
+boys. A day of great rejoicings,--for a prelate was to be consecrated,
+and the bones of the mighty skeleton-minster were shaking with anthems,
+as if there were life of its own within its buttressed ribs. He looked
+down at his feet; the folds of the sacred robe were flowing about them:
+he put his hand to his head; it was crowned with the holy mitre. A long
+sigh, as of perfect content in the consummation of all his earthly hopes,
+breathed through the dreamer's lips, and shaped itself, as it escaped,
+into the blissful murmur,
+
+ Ego sum Episcopus!
+
+One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an opening
+in a stained window. It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the old
+builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the rain through their
+open mouths. It looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair, with its
+hideous grin growing broader and broader, until it laughed out aloud,
+such a hard, stony, mocking laugh, that he awoke out of his second dream
+through his first into his common consciousness, and shivered, as he
+turned to the two yellow sermons which he was to pick over and weed of
+the little thought they might contain, for the next day's service.
+
+The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather was too much taken up with his own
+bodily and spiritual condition to be deeply mindful of others. He
+carried the note requesting the prayers of the congregation in his pocket
+all day; and the soul in distress, which a single tender petition might
+have soothed, and perhaps have saved from despair or fatal error, found
+no voice in the temple to plead for it before the Throne of Mercy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+THE SECRET IS WHISPERED.
+
+The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather's congregation was not large, but
+select. The lines of social cleavage run through religious creeds as if
+they were of a piece with position and fortune. It is expected of
+persons of a certain breeding, in some parts of New England, that they
+shall be either Episcopalians or Unitarians. The mansion-house gentry of
+Rockland were pretty fairly divided between the little chapel, with the
+stained window and the trained rector, and the meeting-house where the
+Reverend Mr. Fairweather officiated.
+
+It was in the latter that Dudley Venner worshipped, when he attended
+service anywhere,--which depended very much on the caprice of Elsie. He
+saw plainly enough that a generous and liberally cultivated nature might
+find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two persuasions, but
+he objected to some points of the formal creed of the older church, and
+especially to the mechanism which renders it hard to get free from its
+outworn and offensive formulae,--remembering how Archbishop Tillotson
+wished in vain that it could be "well rid of" the Athanasian Creed.
+This, and the fact that the meeting-house was nearer than the chapel,
+determined him, when the new rector, who was not quite up to his mark in
+education, was appointed, to take a pew in the "liberal" worshippers'
+edifice.
+
+Elsie was very uncertain in her feeling about going to church. In
+summer, she loved rather to stroll over The Mountain, on Sundays. There
+was even a story, that she had one of the caves before mentioned fitted
+up as an oratory, and that she had her own wild way of worshipping the
+God whom she sought in the dark chasms of the dreaded cliffs. Mere
+fables, doubtless; but they showed the common belief, that Elsie, with
+all her strange and dangerous elements of character, had yet strong
+religious feeling mingled with them. The hymn-book which Dick had found,
+in his midnight invasion of her chamber, opened to favorite hymns,
+especially some of the Methodist and Quietist character. Many had
+noticed, that certain tunes, as sung by the choir, seemed to impress her
+deeply; and some said, that at such times her whole expression would
+change, and her stormy look would soften so as to remind them of her
+poor, sweet mother.
+
+On the Sunday morning after the talk recorded in the last chapter, Elsie
+made herself ready to go to meeting. She was dressed much as usual,
+excepting that she wore a thick veil, turned aside, but ready to conceal
+her features. It was natural enough that she should not wish to be
+looked in the face by curious persons who would be staring to see what
+effect the occurrence of the past week had had on her spirits. Her
+father attended her willingly; and they took their seats in the pew,
+somewhat to the surprise of many, who had hardly expected to see them,
+after so humiliating a family development as the attempted crime of their
+kinsman had just been furnishing for the astonishment of the public.
+
+The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was now in his coldest mood. He had passed
+through the period of feverish excitement which marks a change of
+religious opinion. At first, when he had began to doubt his own
+theological positions, he had defended them against himself with more
+ingenuity and interest, perhaps, than he could have done against another;
+because men rarely take the trouble to understand anybody's difficulties
+in a question but their own. After this, as he began to draw off from
+different points of his old belief, the cautious disentangling of himself
+from one mesh after another gave sharpness to his intellect, and the
+tremulous eagerness with which he seized upon the doctrine which, piece
+by piece, under various pretexts and with various disguises, he was
+appropriating, gave interest and something like passion to his words.
+But when he had gradually accustomed his people to his new phraseology,
+and was really adjusting his sermons and his service to disguise his
+thoughts, he lost at once all his intellectual acuteness and all his
+spiritual fervor.
+
+Elsie sat quietly through the first part of the service, which was
+conducted in the cold, mechanical way to be expected. Her face was
+hidden by her veil; but her father knew her state of feeling, as well by
+her movements and attitudes as by the expression of her features. The
+hymn had been sung, the short prayer offered, the Bible read, and the
+long prayer was about to begin. This was the time at which the "notes"
+of any who were in affliction from loss of friends, the sick who were
+doubtful of recovery, those who had cause to be grateful for preservation
+of life or other signal blessing, were wont to be read.
+
+Just then it was that Dudley Veneer noticed that his daughter was
+trembling,--a thing so rare, so unaccountable, indeed, under the
+circumstances, that he watched her closely, and began to fear that some
+nervous paroxysm, or other malady, might have just begun to show itself
+in this way upon her.
+
+The minister had in his pocket two notes. One, in the handwriting of
+Deacon Soper, was from a member of this congregation, returning thanks
+for his preservation through a season of great peril, supposed to be the
+exposure which he had shared with others, when standing in the circle
+around Dick Veneer. The other was the anonymous one, in a female hand,
+which he had received the evening before. He forgot them both. His
+thoughts were altogether too much taken up with more important matters.
+He prayed through all the frozen petitions of his expurgated form of
+supplication, and not a single heart was soothed or lifted, or reminded
+that its sorrows were struggling their way up to heaven, borne on the
+breath from a human soul that was warm with love.
+
+The people sat down as if relieved when the dreary prayer was finished.
+Elsie alone remained standing until her father touched her. Then she sat
+down, lifted her veil, and looked at him with a blank, sad look, as if
+she had suffered some pain or wrong, but could not give any name or
+expression to her vague trouble. She did not tremble any longer, but
+remained ominously still, as if she had been frozen where she sat.
+
+--Can a man love his own soul too well? Who, on the whole, constitute
+the nobler class of human beings? those who have lived mainly to make
+sure of their own personal welfare in another and future condition of
+existence, or they who have worked with all their might for their race,
+for their country, for the advancement of the kingdom of God, and left
+all personal arrangements concerning themselves to the sole charge of Him
+who made them and is responsible to himself for their safe-keeping? Is
+an anchorite who has worn the stone floor of his cell into basins with
+his knees bent in prayer, more acceptable than the soldier who gives his
+life for the maintenance of any sacred right or truth, without thinking
+what will specially become of him in a world where there are two or three
+million colonists a month, from this one planet, to be cared for? These
+are grave questions, which must suggest themselves to those who know that
+there are many profoundly selfish persons who are sincerely devout and
+perpetually occupied with their own future, while there are others who
+are perfectly ready to sacrifice themselves for any worthy object in this
+world, but are really too little occupied with their exclusive
+personality to think so much as many do about what is to become of them
+in another.
+
+The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather did not, most certainly, belong to this
+latter class. There are several kinds of believers, whose history we
+find among the early converts to Christianity.
+
+There was the magistrate, whose social position was such that he
+preferred a private interview in the evening with the Teacher to
+following him--with the street-crowd. He had seen extraordinary facts
+which had satisfied him that the young Galilean had a divine commission.
+But still he cross-questioned the Teacher himself. He was not ready to
+accept statements without explanation. That was the right kind of man.
+See how he stood up for the legal rights of his Master, when the people
+were for laying hands on him!
+
+And again, there was the government official, intrusted with public
+money, which, in those days, implied that he was supposed to be honest.
+A single look of that heavenly countenance, and two words of gentle
+command, were enough for him. Neither of these men, the early disciple,
+nor the evangelist, seems to have been thinking primarily about his own
+personal safety.
+
+But now look at the poor, miserable turnkey, whose occupation shows what
+he was like to be, and who had just been thrusting two respectable
+strangers, taken from the hands of a mob, covered with stripes and
+stripped of clothing, into the inner prison, and making their feet fast
+in the stocks. His thought, in the moment of terror, is for himself:
+first, suicide; then, what he shall do,--not to save his household,--not
+to fulfil his duty to his office,--not to repair the outrage he has been
+committing,--but to secure his own personal safety. Truly, character
+shows itself as much in a man's way of becoming a Christian as in any
+other!
+
+--Elsie sat, statue-like, through the sermon. It would not be fair to
+the reader to give an abstract of that. When a man who has been bred to
+free thought and free speech suddenly finds himself stepping about, like
+a dancer amidst his eggs, among the old addled majority-votes which he
+must not tread upon, he is a spectacle for men and angels. Submission to
+intellectual precedent and authority does very well for those who have
+been bred to it; we know that the underground courses of their minds are
+laid in the Roman cement of tradition, and that stately and splendid
+structures may be reared on such a foundation. But to see one laying a
+platform over heretical quicksands, thirty or forty or fifty years deep,
+and then beginning to build upon it, is a sorry sight. A new convert
+from the reformed to the ancient faith may be very strong in the arms,
+but he will always have weak legs and shaky knees. He may use his hands
+well, and hit hard with his fists, but he will never stand on his legs in
+the way the man does who inherits his belief.
+
+The services were over at last, and Dudley Venner and his daughter walked
+home together in silence. He always respected her moods, and saw clearly
+enough that some inward trouble was weighing upon her. There was nothing
+to be said in such cases, for Elsie could never talk of her griefs. An
+hour, or a day, or a week of brooding, with perhaps a sudden flash of
+violence: this was the way in which the impressions which make other
+women weep, and tell their griefs by word or letter, showed their effects
+in her mind and acts.
+
+She wandered off up into the remoter parts of The Mountain, that day,
+after their return. No one saw just where she went,--indeed, no one knew
+its forest-recesses and rocky fastnesses as she did. She was gone until
+late at night; and when Old Sophy, who had watched for her, bound up her
+long hair for her sleep, it was damp with the cold dews.
+
+The old black woman looked at her without speaking, but questioning her
+with every feature as to the sorrow that was weighing on her.
+
+Suddenly she turned to Old Sophy.
+
+"You want to know what there is troubling me;" she said. "Nobody loves
+me. I cannot love anybody. What is love, Sophy?"
+
+"It's what poor Ol' Sophy's got for her Elsie," the old woman answered.
+"Tell me, darlin',--don' you love somebody?--don' you love? you
+know,--oh, tell me, darlin', don' you love to see the gen'l'man that
+keeps up at the school where you go? They say he's the pootiest
+gen'l'man that was ever in the town here. Don' be 'fraid of poor Ol'
+Sophy, darlin',--she loved a man once,--see here! Oh, I've showed you
+this often enough!"
+
+She took from her pocket a half of one of the old Spanish silver coins,
+such as were current in the earlier part of this century. The other half
+of it had been lying in the deep sea-sand for more than fifty years.
+
+Elsie looked her in the face, but did not answer in words. What strange
+intelligence was that which passed between them through the diamond eyes
+and the little beady black ones?--what subtile intercommunication,
+penetrating so much deeper than articulate speech? This was the nearest
+approach to sympathetic relations that Elsie ever had: a kind of dumb
+intercourse of feeling, such as one sees in the eyes of brute mothers
+looking on their young. But, subtile as it was, it was narrow and
+individual; whereas an emotion which can shape itself in language opens
+the gate for itself into the great community of human affections; for
+every word we speak is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in
+the die of some human experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts,
+and always transferred warm from one to another. By words we share the
+common consciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in these
+symbols. By music we reach those special states of consciousness which,
+being without form, cannot be shaped with the mosaics of the vocabulary.
+The language of the eyes runs deeper into the personal nature, but it is
+purely individual, and perishes in the expression.
+
+If we consider them all as growing out of the consciousness as their
+root, language is the leaf, music is the flower; but when the eyes meet
+and search each other, it is the uncovering of the blanched stem through
+which the whole life runs, but which has never taken color or form from
+the sunlight.
+
+For three days Elsie did not return to the school. Much of the time she
+was among the woods and rocks. The season was now beginning to wane, and
+the forest to put on its autumnal glory. The dreamy haze was beginning
+to soften the landscape, and the mast delicious days of the year were
+lending their attraction to the scenery of The Mountain. It was not very
+singular that Elsie should be lingering in her old haunts, from which the
+change of season must soon drive her. But Old Sophy saw clearly enough
+that some internal conflict was going on, and knew very well that it must
+have its own way and work itself out as it best could. As much as looks
+could tell Elsie had told her. She had said in words, to be sure, that
+she could not love. Something warped and thwarted the emotion which
+would have been love in another, no doubt; but that such an emotion was
+striving with her against all malign influences which interfered with it
+the old woman had a perfect certainty in her own mind.
+
+Everybody who has observed the working of emotions in persons of various
+temperaments knows well enough that they have periods of incubation,
+which differ with the individual, and with the particular cause and
+degree of excitement, yet evidently go through a strictly self-limited
+series of evolutions, at the end of which, their result--an act of
+violence, a paroxysm of tears, a gradual subsidence into repose, or
+whatever it may be--declares itself, like the last stage of an attack of
+fever and ague. No one can observe children without noticing that there
+is a personal equation, to use the astronomer's language, in their
+tempers, so that one sulks an hour over an offence which makes another a
+fury for five minutes, and leaves him or her an angel when it is over.
+
+At the end of three days, Elsie braided her long, glossy, black hair, and
+shot a golden arrow through it. She dressed herself with more than usual
+care, and came down in the morning superb in her stormy beauty. The
+brooding paroxysm was over, or at least her passion had changed its
+phase. Her father saw it with great relief; he had always many fears for
+her in her hours and days of gloom, but, for reasons before assigned, had
+felt that she must be trusted to herself, without appealing to actual
+restraint, or any other supervision than such as Old Sophy could exercise
+without offence.
+
+She went off at the accustomed hour to the school. All the girls had
+their eyes on her. None so keen as these young misses to know an inward
+movement by an outward sign of adornment: if they have not as many
+signals as the ships that sail the great seas, there is not an end of
+ribbon or a turn of a ringlet which is not a hieroglyphic with a hidden
+meaning to these little cruisers over the ocean of sentiment.
+
+The girls all looked at Elsie with a new thought; for she was more
+sumptuously arrayed than perhaps ever before at the school; and they said
+to themselves that she had come meaning to draw the young master's eyes
+upon her. That was it; what else could it be? The beautiful cold girl
+with the diamond eyes meant to dazzle the handsome young gentleman. He
+would be afraid to love her; it couldn't be true, that which some people
+had said in the village; she was n't the kind of young lady to make Mr.
+Langdon happy. Those dark people are never safe: so one of the young
+blondes said to herself. Elsie was not literary enough for such a
+scholar: so thought Miss Charlotte Ann Wood, the young poetess. She
+couldn't have a good temper, with those scowling eyebrows: this was the
+opinion of several broad-faced, smiling girls, who thought, each in her
+own snug little mental sanctum, that, if, etc., etc., she could make him
+so happy!
+
+Elsie had none of the still, wicked light in her eyes, that morning. She
+looked gentle, but dreamy; played with her books; did not trouble herself
+with any of the exercises,--which in itself was not very remarkable, as
+she was always allowed, under some pretext or other, to have her own way.
+
+The school-hours were over at length. The girls went out, but she
+lingered to the last. She then came up to Mr. Bernard, with a book in
+her hand, as if to ask a question.
+
+"Will you walk towards my home with me today?" she said, in a very low
+voice, little more than a whisper.
+
+Mr. Bernard was startled by the request, put in such a way. He had a
+presentiment of some painful scene or other. But there was nothing to be
+done but to assure her that it would give him great pleasure.
+
+So they walked along together on their way toward the Dudley mansion.
+
+"I have no friend," Elsie said, all at once. "Nothing loves me but one
+old woman. I cannot love anybody. They tell me there is something in my
+eyes that draws people to me and makes them faint: Look into them, will
+you?"
+
+She turned her face toward him. It was very pale, and the diamond eyes
+were glittering with a film, such as beneath other lids would have
+rounded into a tear.
+
+"Beautiful eyes, Elsie," he said,--"sometimes very piercing,--but soft
+now, and looking as if there were something beneath them that friendship
+might draw out. I am your friend, Elsie. Tell me what I can do to
+render your life happier."
+
+"Love me!" said Elsie Venner.
+
+What shall a man do, when a woman makes such a demand, involving such an
+avowal? It was the tenderest, cruellest, humblest moment of Mr.
+Bernard's life. He turned pale, he trembled almost, as if he had been a
+woman listening to her lover's declaration.
+
+"Elsie," he said, presently, "I so long to be of some use to you, to have
+your confidence and sympathy, that I must not let you say or do anything
+to put us in false relations. I do love you, Elsie, as a suffering
+sister with sorrows of her own,--as one whom I would save at the risk of
+my happiness and life,--as one who needs a true friend more than--any of
+all the young girls I have known. More than this you would not ask me to
+say. You have been through excitement and trouble lately, and it has
+made you feel such a need more than ever. Give me your hand, dear Elsie,
+and trust me that I will be as true a friend to you as if we were
+children of the same mother."
+
+Elsie gave him her hand mechanically. It seemed to him that a cold aura
+shot from it along his arm and chilled the blood running through his
+heart. He pressed it gently, looked at her with a face full of grave
+kindness and sad interest, then softly relinquished it.
+
+It was all over with poor Elsie. They walked almost in silence the rest
+of the way. Mr. Bernard left her at the gate of the mansion-house, and
+returned with sad forebodings. Elsie went at once to her own room, and
+did not come from it at the usual hours. At last Old Sophy began to be
+alarmed about her, went to her apartment, and, finding the door unlocked,
+entered cautiously. She found Elsie lying on her bed, her brows strongly
+contracted, her eyes dull, her whole look that of great suffering. Her
+first thought was that she had been doing herself a harm by some deadly
+means or other. But Elsie, saw her fear, and reassured her.
+
+"No," she said, "there is nothing wrong, such as you are thinking of; I
+am not dying. You may send for the Doctor; perhaps he can take the pain
+from my head. That is all I want him to do. There is no use in the
+pain, that I know of; if he can stop it, let him."
+
+So they sent for the old Doctor. It was not long before the solid trot
+of Caustic, the old bay horse, and the crashing of the gravel under the
+wheels, gave notice that the physician was driving up the avenue.
+
+The old Doctor was a model for visiting practitioners. He always came
+into the sick-room with a quiet, cheerful look, as if he had a
+consciousness that he was bringing some sure relief with him. The way a
+patient snatches his first look at his doctor's face, to see whether he
+is doomed, whether he is reprieved, whether he is unconditionally
+pardoned, has really something terrible about it. It is only to be met
+by an imperturbable mask of serenity, proof against anything and
+everything in a patient's aspect. The physician whose face reflects his
+patient's condition like a mirror may do well enough to examine people
+for a life-insurance office, but does not belong to the sickroom. The
+old Doctor did not keep people waiting in dread suspense, while he stayed
+talking about the case,--the patient all the time thinking that he and
+the friends are discussing some alarming symptom or formidable operation
+which he himself is by-and-by--to hear of.
+
+He was in Elsie's room almost before she knew he was in the house. He
+came to her bedside in such a natural, quiet way, that it seemed as if he
+were only a friend who had dropped in for a moment to say a pleasant
+word. Yet he was very uneasy about Elsie until he had seen her; he never
+knew what might happen to her or those about her, and came prepared for
+the worst.
+
+"Sick, my child?" he said, in a very soft, low voice.
+
+Elsie nodded, without speaking.
+
+The Doctor took her hand,--whether with professional views, or only in a
+friendly way, it would have been hard to tell. So he sat a few minutes,
+looking at her all the time with a kind of fatherly interest, but with it
+all noting how she lay, how she breathed, her color, her expression, all
+that teaches the practised eye so much without a single question being
+asked. He saw she was in suffering, and said presently,
+
+"You have pain somewhere; where is it?"
+
+She put her hand to her head.
+
+As she was not disposed to talk, he watched her for a while, questioned
+Old Sophy shrewdly a few minutes, and so made up his mind as to the
+probable cause of disturbance and the proper remedies to be used.
+
+Some very silly people thought the old Doctor did not believe in
+medicine, because he gave less than certain poor half-taught creatures in
+the smaller neighboring towns, who took advantage of people's sickness to
+disgust and disturb them with all manner of ill-smelling and ill-behaving
+drugs. In truth, he hated to give anything noxious or loathsome to those
+who were uncomfortable enough already, unless he was very sure it would
+do good,--in which case, he never played with drugs, but gave good,
+honest, efficient doses. Sometimes he lost a family of the more boorish
+sort, because they did not think they got their money's worth out of him,
+unless they had something more than a taste of everything he carried in
+his saddlebags.
+
+He ordered some remedies which he thought would relieve Elsie, and left
+her, saying he would call the next day, hoping to find her better. But
+the next day came, and the next, and still Elsie was on her bed,
+feverish, restless, wakeful, silent. At night she tossed about and
+wandered, and it became at length apparent that there was a settled
+attack, something like what they called, formerly, a "nervous fever."
+
+On the fourth day she was more restless than common. One of the women of
+the house came in to help to take care of her; but she showed an aversion
+to her presence.
+
+"Send me Helen Darley," she said, at last.
+
+The old Doctor told them, that, if possible, they must indulge this fancy
+of hers. The caprices of sick people were never to be despised, least of
+all of such persons as Elsie, when rendered irritable and exacting by
+pain and weakness.
+
+So a message was sent to Mr. Silas Peckham at the Apollinean Institute,
+to know if he could not spare Miss Helen Darley for a few days, if
+required, to give her attention to a young lady who attended his school
+and who was now lying ill,--no other person than the daughter of Dudley
+Venner.
+
+A mean man never agrees to anything without deliberately turning it over,
+so that he may see its dirty side, and, if he can, sweating the coin he
+pays for it. If an archangel should offer to save his soul for sixpence,
+he would try to find a sixpence with a hole in it. A gentleman says yes
+to a great many things without stopping to think: a shabby fellow is
+known by his caution in answering questions, for fear of, compromising
+his pocket or himself.
+
+Mr. Silas Peckham looked very grave at the request. The dooties of Miss
+Darley at the Institoot were important, very important. He paid her
+large sums of money for her time,--more than she could expect to get in
+any other institootion for the edoocation of female youth. A deduction
+from her selary would be necessary, in case she should retire from the
+sphere of her dooties for a season. He should be put to extry expense,
+and have to perform additional labors himself. He would consider of the
+matter. If any arrangement could be made, he would send word to Squire
+Venner's folks.
+
+"Miss Darley," said Silas Peckham, "the' 's a message from Squire
+Venner's that his daughter wants you down at the mansion-house to see
+her. She's got a fever, so they inform me. If it's any kind of ketchin'
+fever, of course you won't think of goin' near the mansion-house. If
+Doctor Kittredge says it's safe, perfec'ly safe, I can't object to your
+goin', on sech conditions as seem to be fair to all' concerned. You will
+give up your pay for the whole time you are absent,--portions of days to
+be caounted as whole days. You will be charged with board the same as if
+you eat your victuals with the household. The victuals are of no use
+after they're cooked but to be eat, and your bein' away is no savin' to
+our folks. I shall charge you a reasonable compensation for the demage
+to the school by the absence of a teacher. If Miss Crabs undertakes any
+dooties belongin' to your department of instruction, she will look to you
+for sech pecooniary considerations as you may agree upon between you. On
+these conditions I am willin' to give my consent to your temporary
+absence from the post of dooty. I will step down to Doctor Kittredge's
+myself, and make inquiries as to the natur' of the complaint."
+
+Mr. Peckham took up a rusty and very narrow-brimmed hat, which he cocked
+upon one side of his head, with an air peculiar to the rural gentry. It
+was the hour when the Doctor expected to be in his office, unless he had
+some special call which kept him from home.
+
+He found the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather just taking leave of the
+Doctor. His hand was on the pit of his stomach, and his countenance was
+expressive of inward uneasiness.
+
+"Shake it before using," said the Doctor; "and the sooner you make up
+your mind to speak right out, the better it will be for your digestion."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Peckham! Walk in, Mr. Peckham! Nobody sick up at the school, I
+hope?"
+
+"The haalth of the school is fust-rate," replied Mr. Peckham. "The
+sitooation is uncommonly favorable to saloobrity." (These last words
+were from the Annual Report of the past year.) "Providence has spared our
+female youth in a remarkable measure. I've come with reference to
+another consideration. Dr. Kittredge, is there any ketchin' complaint
+goin' about in the village?"
+
+"Well, yes," said the Doctor, "I should say there was something of that
+sort. Measles. Mumps. And Sin,--that's always catching."
+
+The old Doctor's eye twinkled; once in a while he had his little touch of
+humor.
+
+Silas Peckham slanted his eye up suspiciously at the Doctor, as if he was
+getting some kind of advantage over him. That is the way people of his
+constitution are apt to take a bit of pleasantry.
+
+"I don't mean sech things, Doctor; I mean fevers. Is there any ketchin'
+fevers--bilious, or nervous, or typus, or whatever you call 'em--now
+goin' round this village? That's what I want to ascertain, if there's no
+impropriety."
+
+The old Doctor looked at Silas through his spectacles.
+
+"Hard and sour as a green cider-apple," he thought to himself. "No,"; he
+said,--"I don't know any such cases."
+
+"What's the matter with Elsie Venner?" asked Silas, sharply, as if he
+expected to have him this time.
+
+"A mild feverish attack, I should call it in anybody else; but she has a
+peculiar constitution, and I never feel so safe about her as I should
+about most people."
+
+"Anything ketchin' about it?" Silas asked, cunningly.
+
+"No, indeed!" said the Doctor,--"catching? no,--what put that into your
+head, Mr. Peckham?"
+
+"Well, Doctor," the conscientious Principal answered, "I naterally feel a
+graat responsibility, a very graaat responsibility, for the noomerous and
+lovely young ladies committed to my charge. It has been a question,
+whether one of my assistants should go, accordin' to request, to stop
+with Miss Venner for a season. Nothin' restrains my givin' my full and
+free consent to her goin' but the fear lest contagious maladies should be
+introdooced among those lovely female youth. I shall abide by your
+opinion,--I understan' you to say distinc'ly, her complaint is not
+ketchin'?--and urge upon Miss Darley to fulfil her dooties to a
+sufferin' fellow-creature at any cost to myself and my establishment. We
+shall miss her very much; but it is a good cause, and she shall go,--and
+I shall trust that Providence will enable us to spare her without
+permanent demage to the interests of the Institootion."
+
+Saying this, the excellent Principal departed, with his rusty
+narrow-brimmed hat leaning over, as if it had a six-knot breeze abeam,
+and its gunwale (so to speak) was dipping into his coat-collar. He
+announced the result of his inquiries to Helen, who had received a brief
+note in the mean time from a poor relation of Elsie's mother, then at the
+mansion-house, informing her of the critical situation of Elsie and of
+her urgent desire that Helen should be with her. She could not hesitate.
+She blushed as she thought of the comments that might be made; but what
+were such considerations in a matter of life and death? She could not
+stop to make terms with Silas Peckham. She must go. He might fleece
+her, if he would; she would not complain,--not even to Bernard, who, she
+knew, would bring the Principal to terms, if she gave the least hint of
+his intended extortions.
+
+So Helen made up her bundle of clothes to be sent after her, took a book
+or two with her to help her pass the time, and departed for the Dudley
+mansion. It was with a great inward effort that she undertook the
+sisterly task which was thus forced upon her. She had a kind of terror
+of Elsie; and the thought of having charge of her, of being alone with
+her, of coming under the full influence of those diamond eyes,--if,
+indeed, their light were not dimmed by suffering and weariness,--was one
+she shrank from. But what could she do? It might be a turning-point in
+the life of the poor girl; and she must overcome all her fears, all her
+repugnance, and go to her rescue.
+
+"Is Helen come?" said Elsie, when she heard, with her fine sense
+quickened by the irritability of sickness, a light footfall on the stair,
+with a cadence unlike that of any inmate of the house.
+
+"It's a strange woman's step," said Old Sophy, who, with her exclusive
+love for Elsie, was naturally disposed to jealousy of a new-comer. "Let
+Ol' Sophy set at 'th' foot o' th' bed, if th' young missis sets by th'
+piller,--won' y', darlin'? The' 's nobody that's white can love y' as
+th' of black woman does;--don' sen' her away, now, there 's a dear soul!"
+
+Elsie motioned her to sit in the place she had pointed to, and Helen at
+that moment entered the room. Dudley Venner followed her.
+
+"She is your patient," he said, "except while the Doctor is here. She has
+been longing to have you with her, and we shall expect you to make her
+well in a few days."
+
+So Helen Darley found herself established in the most unexpected manner
+as an inmate of the Dudley mansion. She sat with Elsie most of the time,
+by day and by night, soothing her, and trying to enter into her
+confidence and affections, if it should prove that this strange creature
+was really capable of truly sympathetic emotions.
+
+What was this unexplained something which came between her soul and that
+of every other human being with whom she was in relations? Helen
+perceived, or rather felt, that she had, folded up in the depths of her
+being, a true womanly nature. Through the cloud that darkened her
+aspect, now and then a ray would steal forth, which, like the smile of
+stern and solemn people, was all the more impressive from its contrast
+with the expression she wore habitually. It might well be that pain and
+fatigue had changed her aspect; but, at any rate, Helen looked into her
+eyes without that nervous agitation which their cold glitter had produced
+on her when they were full of their natural light. She felt sure that
+her mother must have been a lovely, gentle woman. There were gleams of a
+beautiful nature shining through some ill-defined medium which disturbed
+and made them flicker and waver, as distant images do when seen through
+the rippling upward currents of heated air. She loved, in her own way,
+the old black woman, and seemed to keep up a kind of silent communication
+with her, as if they did not require the use of speech. She appeared to
+be tranquillized by the presence of Helen, and loved to have her seated
+at the bedside. Yet something, whatever it was, prevented her from
+opening her heart to her kind companion; and even now there were times
+when she would lie looking at her, with such a still, watchful, almost
+dangerous expression, that Helen would sigh, and change her place, as
+persons do whose breath some cunning orator had been sucking out of them
+with his spongy eloquence, so that, when he stops, they must get some air
+and stir about, or they feel as if they should be half smothered and
+palsied.
+
+It was too much to keep guessing what was the meaning of all this. Helen
+determined to ask Old Sophy some questions which might probably throw
+light upon her doubts. She took the opportunity one evening when Elsie
+was lying asleep and they were both sitting at some distance from her
+bed.
+
+"Tell me, Sophy," she said, "was Elsie always as shy as she seems to be
+now, in talking with those to whom she is friendly?"
+
+"Alway jes' so, Miss Darlin', ever sense she was little chil'. When she
+was five, six year old, she lisp some,--call me Thophy; that make her
+kin' o' 'shamed, perhaps: after she grow up, she never lisp, but she kin'
+o' got the way o' not talkin' much. Fac' is, she don' like talkin' as
+common gals do, 'xcep' jes' once in a while wi' some partic'lar
+folks,--'n' then not much."
+
+"How old is Elsie?"
+
+"Eighteen year this las' September."
+
+"How long ago did her mother die?" Helen asked, with a little trembling
+in her voice.
+
+"Eighteen year ago this October," said Old Sophy.
+
+Helen was silent for a moment. Then she whispered, almost
+inaudibly,--for her voice appeared to fail her,
+
+"What did her mother die of, Sophy?"
+
+The old woman's small eyes dilated until a ring of white showed round
+their beady centres. She caught Helen by the hand and clung to it, as if
+in fear. She looked round at Elsie, who lay sleeping, as of she might be
+listening. Then she drew Helen towards her and led her softly out of the
+room.
+
+"'Sh!--'sh!" she said, as soon as they were outside the door. "Don'
+never speak in this house 'bout what Elsie's mother died of!" she said.
+"Nobody never says nothin' 'bout it. Oh, God has made Ugly Things wi'
+death in their mouths, Miss Darlin', an' He knows what they're for; but
+my poor Elsie!--to have her blood changed in her before--It was in July
+Mistress got her death, but she liv' till three week after my poor Elsie
+was born."
+
+She could speak no more. She had said enough. Helen remembered the
+stories she had heard on coming to the village, and among them one
+referred to in an early chapter of this narrative. All the unaccountable
+looks and tastes and ways of Elsie came back to her in the light of an
+ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien element in her nature.
+She knew the secret of the fascination which looked out of her cold,
+glittering eyes. She knew the significance of the strange repulsion
+which she felt in her own intimate consciousness underlying the
+inexplicable attraction which drew her towards the young girl in spite of
+this repugnance. She began to look with new feelings on the
+contradictions in her moral nature,--the longing for sympathy, as shown
+by her wishing for Helen's company, and the impossibility of passing
+beyond the cold circle of isolation within which she had her being. The
+fearful truth of that instinctive feeling of hers, that there was
+something not human looking out of Elsie's eyes, came upon her with a
+sudden flash of penetrating conviction. There were two warring
+principles in that superb organization and proud soul. One made her a
+woman, with all a woman's powers and longings. The other chilled all the
+currents of outlet for her emotions. It made her tearless and mute, when
+another woman would have wept and pleaded. And it infused into her soul
+something--it was cruel now to call it malice--which was still and
+watchful and dangerous, which waited its opportunity, and then shot like
+an arrow from its bow out of the coil of brooding premeditation. Even
+those who had never seen the white scars on Dick Venner's wrist, or heard
+the half-told story of her supposed attempt to do a graver mischief, knew
+well enough by looking at her that she was one of the creatures not to be
+tampered with,--silent in anger and swift in vengeance.
+
+Helen could not return to the bedside at once after this communication.
+It was with altered eyes that she must look on the poor girl, the victim
+of such an unheard-of fatality. All was explained to her now. But it
+opened such depths of solemn thought in her awakened consciousness, that
+it seemed as if the whole mystery of human life were coming up again
+before her for trial and judgment. "Oh," she thought, "if, while the will
+lies sealed in its fountain, it may be poisoned at its very source, so
+that it shall flow dark and deadly through its whole course, who are we
+that we should judge our fellow-creatures by ourselves?" Then came the
+terrible question, how far the elements themselves are capable of
+perverting the moral nature: if valor, and justice, and truth, the
+strength of man and the virtue of woman, may not be poisoned out of a
+race by the food of the Australian in his forest, by the foul air and
+darkness of the Christians cooped up in the "tenement-houses" close by
+those who live in the palaces of the great cities?
+
+She walked out into the garden, lost in thought upon these dark and deep
+matters. Presently she heard a step behind her, and Elsie's father came
+up and joined her. Since his introduction to Helen at the distinguished
+tea-party given by the Widow Rowens, and before her coming to sit with
+Elsie, Mr. Dudley Venner had in the most accidental way in the world met
+her on several occasions: once after church, when she happened to be
+caught in a slight shower and he insisted on holding his umbrella over
+her on her way home;--once at a small party at one of the mansion-houses,
+where the quick-eyed lady of the house had a wonderful knack of bringing
+people together who liked to see each other;--perhaps at other times and
+places; but of this there is no certain evidence.
+
+They naturally spoke of Elsie, her illness, and the aspect it had taken.
+But Helen noticed in all that Dudley Venner said about his daughter a
+morbid sensitiveness, as it seemed to her, an aversion to saying much
+about her physical condition or her peculiarities,--a wish to feel and
+speak as a parent should, and yet a shrinking, as if there were something
+about Elsie which he could not bear to dwell upon. She thought she saw
+through all this, and she could interpret it all charitably. There were
+circumstances about his daughter which recalled the great sorrow of his
+life; it was not strange that this perpetual reminder should in some
+degree have modified his feelings as a father. But what a life he must
+have been leading for so many years, with this perpetual source of
+distress which he could not name! Helen knew well enough, now, the
+meaning of the sadness which had left such traces in his features and
+tones, and it made her feel very kindly and compassionate towards him.
+
+So they walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines
+of box breathing its fragrance of eternity;--for this is one of the odors
+which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if
+we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there
+was box growing on it. So they walked, finding their way softly to each
+other's sorrows and sympathies, each matching some counterpart to the
+other's experience of life, and startled to see how the different, yet
+parallel, lessons they had been taught by suffering had led them step by
+step to the same serene acquiescence in the orderings of that Supreme
+Wisdom which they both devoutly recognized.
+
+Old Sophy was at the window and saw them walking up and down the
+garden-alleys. She watched them as her grandfather the savage watched
+the figures that moved among the trees when a hostile tribe was lurking
+about his mountain.
+
+"There'll be a weddin' in the ol house," she said, "before there's roses
+on them bushes ag'in. But it won' be my poor Elsie's weddin', 'n' ol'
+Sophy won' be there."
+
+When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not
+that Elsie's life might be spared. She dared not ask that as a favor of
+Heaven. What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to those
+about her but an ever-present terror? Might she but be so influenced by
+divine grace, that what in her was most truly human, most purely
+woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable instinct which
+had pervaded her being like a subtile poison that was all she could ask,
+and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and tenderer love than her own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+THE WHITE ASH.
+
+When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still
+deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might
+well awaken. She understood, as never before, the singular fascination
+and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in Elsie's presence.
+It had not been without a great effort that she had forced herself to
+become the almost constant attendant of the sick girl; and now she was
+learning, but not for the first time, the blessed truth which so many
+good women have found out for themselves, that the hardest duty bravely
+performed soon becomes a habit, and tends in due time to transform itself
+into a pleasure.
+
+The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself. The
+fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young girl's
+powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no disposition to
+take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on air. It was
+remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her
+features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was burning
+away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs of
+danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might turn
+the balance which held life and death poised against each other. He
+surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every opportunity
+of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death to the scale of
+life, as she will often do if not rudely disturbed or interfered with.
+
+Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming to
+her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village. Some
+of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent her,
+and her table was covered with fruits which tempted her in vain. Several
+of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own handiwork,
+and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint offering.
+Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing to have
+his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some boughs full
+of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging to the stricken
+trees. With these he brought also some of the already fallen leaflets of
+the white ash, remarkable for their rich olive-purple color, forming a
+beautiful contrast with some of the lighter-hued leaves. It so happened
+that this particular tree, the white ash, did not grow upon The Mountain,
+and the leaflets were more welcome for their comparative rarity. So the
+girls made their basket, and the floor of it they covered with the rich
+olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as they could lay their hands
+upon served to fill it, and with many kindly messages they sent it to
+Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.
+
+Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and
+Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
+Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever. The
+school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes
+for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased
+Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the
+flowers, and taking them from the basket, that she might see the leaves.
+All at once she appeared to be agitated; she looked at the basket, then
+around, as if there were some fearful presence about her which she was
+searching for with her eager glances. She took out the flowers, one by
+one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring, her hands
+trembling,--till, as she came near the bottom of the basket, she flung
+out all the rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple
+leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into
+herself in a curdling terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back
+senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled
+listeners at her bedside.
+
+"Take it away!--take it away!--quick!" said Old Sophy, as she hastened
+to her mistress's pillow. "It 's the leaves of the tree that was always
+death to her,--take it away! She can't live wi' it in the room!"
+
+The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to rouse
+her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered up the
+flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment, She came to
+herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In her delirium
+she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such exactness of
+circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had some such
+retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up in her own
+fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human eyes, and
+of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.
+
+All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before. But
+this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind
+it. From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression
+and her manner. The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the
+old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a
+mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming
+forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes,
+and the stormy scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.
+
+With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her,
+Elsie had never felt that he loved her. The reader knows well enough
+what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of
+natural affection in his breast. There was nothing in the world he would
+not do for Elsie. He had sacrificed his whole life to her. His very
+seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew
+that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation. Just so far
+as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her
+thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative. No
+person, as was said long ago, could judge him, because his task was not
+merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers. A nature
+like Elsie's had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed
+in its laws where it could not be led.
+
+Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter's
+illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and
+please her. Always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor
+between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest,
+mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the
+other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.
+
+It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated by a
+seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were
+sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other. She had fallen
+into a light slumber. As they were looking at her, the same thought came
+into both their minds at the same moment. Old Sophy spoke for both, as
+she said, in a low voice,
+
+"It 's her mother's look,--it 's her mother's own face right over
+again,--she never look' so before, the Lord's hand is on her! His will
+be done!"
+
+When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father's face, she
+saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she remembered at
+rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to her by some
+unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.
+
+"Elsie, dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was
+sometimes like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen
+her, so as to remember her!"
+
+The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the
+mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishing
+eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought that she might soon
+rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden
+overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her
+heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the
+malign influence--evil spirit it might almost be called--which had
+pervaded her being, had at last been driven forth or exorcised, and that
+these tears were at once the sign and the pledge of her redeemed nature.
+But now she was to be soothed, and not excited. After her tears she
+slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.
+
+Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and told him all the circumstances
+connected with the extraordinary attack from which Elsie had suffered.
+It was the purple leaves, she said. She remembered that Dick once
+brought home a branch of a tree with some of the same leaves on it, and
+Elsie screamed and almost fainted then. She, Sophy, had asked her, after
+she had got quiet, what it was in the leaves that made her feel so bad.
+Elsie could n't tell her,--did n't like to speak about it,--shuddered
+whenever Sophy mentioned it.
+
+This did not sound so strangely to the old Doctor as it does to some who
+listen to his narrative. He had known some curious examples of
+antipathies, and remembered reading of others still more singular. He had
+known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and recollected the
+story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a chest when one of these
+sensitive individuals came into the room, so as not to disturb him; but
+he presently began to sweat and turn pale, and cried out that there must
+be a cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were poisoned by
+strawberries, by honey, by different meats, many who could not endure
+cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of roses. If he had known all
+the stories in the old books, he would have found that some have swooned
+and become as dead men at the smell of a rose,--that a stout soldier has
+been known to turn and run at the sight or smell of rue,--that cassia and
+even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings in certain.
+individuals,--in short, that almost everything has seemed to be a poison
+to somebody.
+
+"Bring me that basket, Sophy," said the old Doctor, "if you can find it."
+
+Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's apartment.
+
+"These purple leaves are from the white ash," he said. "You don't know
+the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?"
+
+"I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,"
+Sophy answered. "Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true, is
+it?"
+
+The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer. He went directly to Elsie's
+room. Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special
+change in his patient. He spoke with her as usual, made some slight
+alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful
+look. He met her father on the stairs.
+
+"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Veneer.
+
+"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am
+afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember,
+as never before?"
+
+"Yes," her father answered,--"oh, yes! What is the meaning of this
+change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her
+whole being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can it be that the curse
+is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her
+mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"
+
+"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell you
+all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's life."
+
+They walked out together, and the Doctor began: "She has lived a double
+being, as it were,--the consequence of the blight which fell upon her in
+the dim period before consciousness. You can see what she might have
+been but for this. You know that for these eighteen years her whole
+existence has taken its character from that influence which we need not
+name. But you will remember that few of the lower forms of life last as
+human beings do; and thus it might have been hoped and trusted with some
+show of reason, as I have always suspected you hoped and trusted, perhaps
+more confidently than myself, that the lower nature which had become
+engrafted on the higher would die out and leave the real woman's life she
+inherited to outlive this accidental principle which had so poisoned her
+childhood and youth. I believe it is so dying out; but I am
+afraid,--yes, I must say it, I fear it has involved the centres of life
+in its own decay. There is hardly any pulse at Elsie's wrist; no
+stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if life were slowly
+retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as those who lie
+down in the cold and never wake."
+
+Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep
+sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long
+schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation
+itself the measure of his past trials. Dear as his daughter might become
+to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to
+that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being. If
+he could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had become a soft, calm
+light,--that her soul was at peace with all about her and with Him;
+above,--this crumb from the children's table was enough for him, as it
+was for the Syro-Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might go
+out from her daughter.
+
+There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a
+clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school, Mr.
+Langdon. He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her
+bedside. It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with him.
+Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him only to show
+how superior she had grown to the weakness which had betrayed her into
+that extraordinary request, so contrary to the instincts and usages of
+her sex? Or was it that the singular change which had come over her had
+involved her passionate fancy for him and swept it away with her other
+habits of thought and feeling? Or could it be that she felt that all
+earthly interests were becoming of little account to her, and wished to
+place herself right with one to whom she had displayed a wayward movement
+of her unbalanced imagination? She welcomed Mr. Bernard as quietly as
+she had received Helen Darley. He colored at the recollection of that
+last scene, when he came into her presence; but she smiled with perfect
+tranquillity. She did not speak to him of any apprehension; but he saw
+that she looked upon herself as doomed. So friendly, yet so calm did she
+seem through all their interview, that Mr. Bernard could only look back
+upon her manifestation of feeling towards him on their walk from the
+school as a vagary of a mind laboring under some unnatural excitement,
+and wholly at variance with the true character of Elsie Venner as he saw
+her before him in her subdued, yet singular beauty. He looked with almost
+scientific closeness of observation into the diamond eyes; but that
+peculiar light which he knew so well was not there. She was the same in
+one sense as on that first day when he had seen her coiling and uncoiling
+her golden chain; yet how different in every aspect which revealed her
+state of mind and emotion! Something of tenderness there was, perhaps,
+in her tone towards him; she would not have sent for him, had she not
+felt more than an ordinary interest in him. But through the whole of his
+visit she never lost her gracious self-possession. The Dudley race might
+well be proud of the last of its daughters, as she lay dying, but
+unconquered by the feeling of the present or the fear of the future.
+
+As for Mr. Bernard, he found it very hard to look upon her, and listen to
+her unmoved. There was nothing that reminded him of the stormy--browed,
+almost savage girl he remembered in her fierce loveliness,--nothing of
+all her singularities of air and of costume. Nothing? Yes, one thing.
+Weak and suffering as she was, she had never parted with one particular
+ornament, such as a sick person would naturally, as it might be supposed,
+get rid of at once. The golden cord which she wore round her neck at the
+great party was still there. A bracelet was lying by her pillow; she had
+unclasped it from her wrist.
+
+Before Mr. Bernard left her, she said,
+
+"I shall never see you again. Some time or other, perhaps, you will
+mention my name to one whom you love. Give her this from your scholar
+and friend Elsie."
+
+He took the bracelet, raised her hand to his lips, then turned his face
+away; in that moment he was the weaker of the two.
+
+"Good-bye," she said; "thank you for coming."
+
+His voice died away in his throat, as he tried to answer her. She
+followed him with her eyes as he passed from her sight through the door,
+and when it closed after him sobbed tremulously once or twice, but
+stilled herself, and met Helen, as she entered, with a composed
+countenance.
+
+"I have had a very pleasant visit from Mr. Langdon," Elsie said. "Sit by
+me, Helen, awhile without speaking; I should like to sleep, if I
+can,--and to dream."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+THE GOLDEN CORD IS LOOSED.
+
+The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, hearing that his parishioner's
+daughter, Elsie, was very ill, could do nothing less than come to the
+mansion-house and tender such consolations as he was master of. It was
+rather remarkable that the old Doctor did not exactly approve of his
+visit. He thought that company of every sort might be injurious in her
+weak state. He was of opinion that Mr. Fairweather, though greatly
+interested in religious matters, was not the most sympathetic person that
+could be found; in fact, the old Doctor thought he was too much taken up
+with his own interests for eternity to give himself quite 'so heartily to
+the need of other people as some persons got up on a rather more generous
+scale (our good neighbor Dr. Honeywood, for instance) could do. However,
+all these things had better be arranged to suit her wants; if she would
+like to talk with a clergyman, she had a great deal better see one as
+often as she liked, and run the risk of the excitement, than have a
+hidden wish for such a visit and perhaps find herself too weak to see him
+by-and-by.
+
+The old Doctor knew by sad experience that dreadful mistake against which
+all medical practitioners should be warned. His experience may well be a
+guide for others. Do not overlook the desire for spiritual advice and
+consolation which patients sometimes feel, and, with the frightful
+mauvaise honte peculiar to Protestantism, alone among all human beliefs,
+are ashamed to tell. As a part of medical treatment, it is the
+physician's business to detect the hidden longing for the food of the
+soul, as much as for any form of bodily nourishment. Especially in the
+higher walks of society, where this unutterably miserable false shame of
+Protestantism acts in proportion to the general acuteness of the
+cultivated sensibilities, let no unwillingness to suggest the sick
+person's real need suffer him to languish between his want and his morbid
+sensitiveness. What an infinite advantage the Mussulmans and the
+Catholics have over many of our more exclusively spiritual sects in the
+way they keep their religion always by them and never blush for it! And
+besides this spiritual longing, we should never forget that
+
+ "On some fond breast the parting soul relies,"
+
+and the minister of religion, in addition to the sympathetic nature which
+we have a right to demand in him, has trained himself to the art of
+entering into the feelings of others.
+
+The reader must pardon this digression, which introduces the visit of the
+Reverend Chauncy Fairweather to Elsie Veneer. It was mentioned to her
+that he would like to call and see how she was, and she consented,--not
+with much apparent interest, for she had reasons of her own for not
+feeling any very deep conviction of his sympathy for persons in sorrow.
+But he came, and worked the conversation round to religion, and confused
+her with his hybrid notions, half made up of what he had been believing
+and teaching all his life, and half of the new doctrines which he had
+veneered upon the surface of his old belief. He got so far as to make a
+prayer with her,--a cool, well-guarded prayer, which compromised his
+faith as little as possible, and which, if devotion were a game played
+against Providence, might have been considered a cautious and sagacious
+move.
+
+When he had gone, Elsie called Old Sophy to her.
+
+"Sophy," she said, "don't let them send that cold hearted man to me any
+more. If your old minister comes--to see you, I should like to hear him
+talk. He looks as if he cared for everybody, and would care for me.
+And, Sophy, if I should die one of these days, I should like to have that
+old minister come and say whatever is to be said over me. It would
+comfort Dudley more, I know, than to have that hard man here, when you're
+in trouble, for some of you will be sorry when I'm gone,--won't you,
+Sophy?"
+
+The poor old black woman could not stand this question. The cold
+minister had frozen Elsie until she felt as if nobody cared for her or
+would regret her,--and her question had betrayed this momentary feeling.
+
+"Don' talk so! don' talk so, darlin'!" she cried, passionately. "When you
+go, Ol' Sophy'll go; 'n' where you go, Ol' Sophy'll go: 'n' we'll both go
+t' th' place where th' Lord takes care of all his children, whether their
+faces are white or black. Oh, darlin', darlin'! if th' Lord should let
+me die firs', you shall fin' all ready for you when you come after me.
+On'y don' go 'n' leave poor Ol' Sophy all 'lone in th' world!"
+
+Helen came in at this moment and quieted the old woman with a look. Such
+scenes were just what were most dangerous, in the state in which Elsie
+was lying: but that is one of the ways in which an affectionate friend
+sometimes unconsciously wears out the life which a hired nurse, thinking
+of nothing but her regular duties and her wages, would have spared from
+all emotional fatigue.
+
+The change which had come over Elsie's disposition was itself the cause
+of new excitements. How was it possible that her father could keep away
+from her, now that she was coming back to the nature and the very look of
+her mother, the bride of his youth? How was it possible to refuse her,
+when she said to Old Sophy, that she should like to have her minister
+come in and sit by her, even though his presence might perhaps prove a
+new source of excitement?
+
+But the Reverend Doctor did come and sit by her, and spoke such soothing
+words to her, words of such peace and consolation, that from that hour
+she was tranquil as never before. All true hearts are alike in the hour
+of need; the Catholic has a reserved fund of faith for his
+fellow-creature's trying moment, and the Calvinist reveals those springs
+of human brotherhood and charity in his soul which are only covered over
+by the iron tables inscribed with the harder dogmas of his creed. It was
+enough that the Reverend Doctor knew all Elsie's history. He could not
+judge her by any formula, like those which have been moulded by past ages
+out of their ignorance. He did not talk with her as if she were an
+outside sinner worse than himself. He found a bruised and languishing
+soul, and bound up its wounds. A blessed office,--one which is confined
+to no sect or creed, but which good men in all times, under various names
+and with varying ministries, to suit the need of each age, of each race,
+of each individual soul, have come forward to discharge for their
+suffering fellow-creatures.
+
+After this there was little change in Elsie, except that her heart beat
+more feebly every day,--so that the old Doctor himself, with all his
+experience, could see nothing to account for the gradual failing of the
+powers of life, and yet could find no remedy which seemed to arrest its
+progress in the smallest degree.
+
+"Be very careful," he said, "that she is not allowed to make any muscular
+exertion. Any such effort, when a person is so enfeebled, may stop the
+heart in a moment; and if it stops, it will never move again."
+
+Helen enforced this rule with the greatest care. Elsie was hardly
+allowed to move her hand or to speak above a whisper. It seemed to be
+mainly the question now, whether this trembling flame of life would be
+blown out by some light breath of air, or whether it could be so nursed
+and sheltered by the hollow of these watchful hands that it would have a
+chance to kindle to its natural brightness.
+
+--Her father came in to sit with her in the evening. He had never talked
+so freely with her as during the hour he had passed at her bedside,
+telling her little circumstances of her mother's life, living over with
+her all that was pleasant in the past, and trying to encourage her with
+some cheerful gleams of hope for the future. A faint smile played over
+her face, but she did not answer his encouraging suggestions. The hour
+came for him to leave her with those who watched by her.
+
+"Good-night, my dear child," he said, and stooping down, kissed her
+cheek.
+
+Elsie rose by a sudden effort, threw her arms round his neck, kissed him,
+and said, "Good-night, my dear father!"
+
+The suddenness of her movement had taken him by surprise, or he would
+have checked so dangerous an effort. It was too late now. Her arms slid
+away from him like lifeless weights,--her head fell back upon her
+pillow,--along sigh breathed through her lips.
+
+"She is faint," said Helen, doubtfully; "bring me the hartshorn, Sophy."
+
+The old woman had started from her place, and was now leaning over her,
+looking in her face, and listening for the sound of her breathing.
+
+"She 's dead! Elsie 's dead! My darlin 's dead!" she cried aloud,
+filling the room with her utterance of anguish.
+
+Dudley Venner drew her away and silenced her with a voice of authority,
+while Helen and an assistant plied their restoratives. It was all in
+vain.
+
+The solemn tidings passed from the chamber of death through the family.
+The daughter, the hope of that old and honored house, was dead in the
+freshness of her youth, and the home of its solitary representative was
+hereafter doubly desolate.
+
+A messenger rode hastily out of the avenue. A little after this the
+people of the village and the outlying farm-houses were startled by the
+sound of a bell.
+
+One,--two,--three,--four,
+
+They stopped in every house, as far as the wavering vibrations reached,
+and listened--
+
+five,--six,--seven,--
+
+It was not the little child which had been lying so long at the point of
+death; that could not be more than three or four years old--
+
+eight,--nine,--ten,--and so on to fifteen, sixteen,--seventeen,
+--eighteen--
+
+The pulsations seemed to keep on,--but it was the brain, and not the
+bell, that was throbbing now.
+
+"Elsie 's dead!" was the exclamation at a hundred firesides.
+
+"Eighteen year old," said old Widow Peake, rising from her chair.
+"Eighteen year ago I laid two gold eagles on her mother's eyes,--he
+wouldn't have anything but gold touch her eyelids,--and now Elsie's to be
+straightened,--the Lord have mercy on her poor sinful soul!"
+
+Dudley Venner prayed that night that he might be forgiven, if he had
+failed in any act of duty or kindness to this unfortunate child of his,
+now freed from all the woes born with her and so long poisoning her soul.
+He thanked God for the brief interval of peace which had been granted
+her, for the sweet communion they had enjoyed in these last days, and for
+the hope of meeting her with that other lost friend in a better world.
+
+Helen mingled a few broken thanks and petitions with her tears: thanks
+that she had been permitted to share the last days and hours of this poor
+sister in sorrow; petitions that the grief of bereavement might be
+lightened to the lonely parent and the faithful old servant.
+
+Old Sophy said almost nothing, but sat day and night by her dead darling.
+But sometimes her anguish would find an outlet in strange sounds,
+something between a cry and a musical note,--such as noise had ever heard
+her utter before. These were old remembrances surging up from her
+childish days, coming through her mother from the cannibal chief, her
+grandfather,--death-wails, such as they sing in the mountains of Western
+Africa, when they see the fires on distant hill-sides and know that their
+own wives and children are undergoing the fate of captives.
+
+The time came when Elsie was to be laid by her mother in the small square
+marked by the white stone.
+
+It was not unwillingly that the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had
+relinquished the duty of conducting the service to the Reverend Doctor
+Honeywood, in accordance with Elsie's request. He could not, by any
+reasoning, reconcile his present way of thinking with a hope for the
+future of his unfortunate parishioner. Any good old Roman Catholic
+priest, born and bred to his faith and his business, would have found a
+loophole into some kind of heaven for her, by virtue of his doctrine of
+"invincible ignorance," or other special proviso; but a recent convert
+cannot enter into the working conditions of his new creed. Beliefs must
+be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the
+soul's wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.
+
+The Reverend Doctor had no such scruples. Like thousands of those who
+are classed nominally with the despairing believers, he had never prayed
+over a departed brother or sister without feeling and expressing a
+guarded hope that there was mercy in store for the poor sinner, whom
+parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters could not bear to give up
+to utter ruin without a word,--and would not, as he knew full well, in
+virtue of that human love and sympathy which nothing can ever extinguish.
+And in this poor Elsie's history he could read nothing which the tears of
+the recording angel might not wash away. As the good physician of the
+place knew the diseases that assailed the bodies of men and women, so he
+had learned the mysteries of the sickness of the soul.
+
+So many wished to look upon Elsie's face once more, that her father would
+not deny them; nay, he was pleased that those who remembered her living
+should see her in the still beauty of death. Helen and those with her
+arrayed her for this farewell-view. All was ready for the sad or curious
+eyes which were to look upon her. There 'was no painful change to be
+concealed by any artifice. Even her round neck was left uncovered, that
+she might be more like one who slept. Only the golden cord was left in
+its place: some searching eye might detect a trace of that birthmark
+which it was whispered she had always worn a necklace to conceal.
+
+At the last moment, when all the preparations were completed, Old Sophy
+stooped over her, and, with trembling hand, loosed the golden cord. She
+looked intently; for some little space: there was no shade nor blemish
+where the ring of gold had encircled her throat. She took it gently away
+and laid it in the casket which held her ornaments.
+
+"The Lord be praised!" the old woman cried, aloud. "He has taken away
+the mark that was on her; she's fit to meet his holy angels now!"
+
+So Elsie lay for hours in the great room, in a kind of state, with
+flowers all about her,--her black hair braided as in life,--her brows
+smooth, as if they had never known the scowl of passion,--and on her lips
+the faint smile with which she had uttered her last "Good--night." The
+young girls from the school looked at her, one after another, and passed
+on, sobbing, carrying in their hearts the picture that would be with them
+all their days. The great people of the place were all there with their
+silent sympathy. The lesser kind of gentry, and many of the plainer folk
+of the village, half-pleased to find themselves passing beneath the
+stately portico of the ancient mansion-house, crowded in, until the ample
+rooms were overflowing. All the friends whose acquaintance we have made
+were there, and many from remoter villages and towns.
+
+There was a deep silence at last. The hour had come for the parting
+words to be spoken over the dead. The good old minister's voice rose out
+of the stillness, subdued and tremulous at first, but growing firmer and
+clearer as he went on, until it reached the ears of the visitors who were
+in the far, desolate chambers, looking at the pictured hangings and the
+old dusty portraits. He did not tell her story in his prayer. He only
+spoke of our dear departed sister as one of many whom Providence in its
+wisdom has seen fit to bring under bondage from their cradles. It was
+not for us to judge them by any standard of our own. He who made the
+heart alone knew the infirmities it inherited or acquired. For all that
+our dear sister had presented that was interesting and attractive in her
+character we were to be grateful; for whatever was dark or inexplicable
+we must trust that the deep shadow which rested on the twilight dawn of
+her being might render a reason before the bar of Omniscience; for the
+grace which had lightened her last days we should pour out our hearts in
+thankful acknowledgment. From the life and the death of this our dear
+sister we should learn a lesson of patience with our fellow-creatures in
+their inborn peculiarities, of charity in judging what seem to us wilful
+faults of character, of hope and trust, that, by sickness or affliction,
+or such inevitable discipline as life must always bring with it, if by no
+gentler means, the soul which had been left by Nature to wander into the
+path of error and of suffering might be reclaimed and restored to its
+true aim, and so led on by divine grace to its eternal welfare. He
+closed his prayer by commending each member of the afflicted family to
+the divine blessing.
+
+Then all at once rose the clear sound of the girls' voices, in the sweet,
+sad melody of a funeral hymn,--one of those which Elsie had marked, as if
+prophetically, among her own favorites.
+
+And so they laid her in the earth, and showered down flowers upon her,
+and filled her grave, and covered it with green sods. By the side of it
+was another oblong ridge, with a white stone standing at its head. Mr.
+Bernard looked upon it, as he came close to the place where Elsie was
+laid, and read the inscription,
+
+ CATALINA
+
+ WIFE TO DUDLEY VENNER
+
+ DIED
+ OCTOBER 13TH 1840
+
+ AGED XX YEARS
+
+A gentle rain fell on the turf after it was laid. This was the beginning
+of a long and dreary autumnal storm, a deferred "equinoctial," as many
+considered it. The mountain streams were all swollen and turbulent, and
+the steep declivities were furrowed in every direction by new channels.
+It made the house seem doubly desolate to hear the wind howling and the
+rain beating upon the roofs. The poor relation who was staying at the
+house would insist on Helen's remaining a few days: Old Sophy was in such
+a condition, that it kept her in continual anxiety, and there were many
+cares which Helen could take off from her.
+
+The old black woman's life was buried in her darling's grave. She did
+nothing but moan and lament for her. At night she was restless, and
+would get up and wander to Elsie's apartment and look for her and call
+her by name. At other times she would lie awake and listen to the wind
+and the rain,--sometimes with such a wild look upon her face, and with
+such sudden starts and exclamations, that it seemed as if she heard
+spirit-voices and were answering the whispers of unseen visitants. With
+all this were mingled hints of her old superstition,--forebodings of
+something fearful about to happen,--perhaps the great final catastrophe
+of all things, according to the prediction current in the kitchens of
+Rockland.
+
+"Hark!" Old Sophy would say,--"don' you hear th' crackin' 'n' th'
+snappin' up in Th' Mountain, 'n' th' rollin' o' th' big stones? The' 's
+somethin' stirrin' among th' rocks; I hear th' soun' of it in th' night,
+when th' wind has stopped blowin'. Oh, stay by me a little while, Miss
+Darlin'! stay by me! for it's th' Las' Day, maybe, that's close on us,
+'n' I feel as if I could n' meet th' Lord all alone!"
+
+It was curious,--but Helen did certainly recognize sounds, during the
+lull of the storm, which were not of falling rain or running
+streams,--short snapping sounds, as of tense cords breaking,--long uneven
+sounds, as of masses rolling down steep declivities. But the morning
+came as usual; and as the others said nothing of these singular noises,
+Helen did not think it necessary to speak of them. All day long she and
+the humble relative of Elsie's mother, who had appeared as poor relations
+are wont to in the great prises of life, were busy in arranging the
+disordered house, and looking over the various objects which Elsie's
+singular tastes had brought together, to dispose of them as her father
+might direct. They all met together at the usual hour for tea. One of
+the servants came in, looking very blank, and said to the poor relation,
+
+"The well is gone dry; we have nothing but rainwater."
+
+Dudley Venner's countenance changed; he sprang to, his feet and went
+to--assure himself of the fact, and, if he could, of the reason of it.
+For a well to dry up during such a rain-storm was extraordinary,--it was
+ominous.
+
+He came back, looking very anxious.
+
+"Did any of you notice any remarkable sounds last night," he said,--"or
+this morning? Hark! do you hear anything now?"
+
+They listened in perfect silence for a few moments. Then there came a
+short cracking sound, and two or three snaps, as of parting cords.
+
+Dudley Venner called all his household together.
+
+"We are in danger here, as I think, to-night," he said,--"not very great
+danger, perhaps, but it is a risk I do not wish you to run. These heavy
+rains have loosed some of the rocks above, and they may come down and
+endanger the house. Harness the horses, Elbridge, and take all the
+family away. Miss Darley will go to the Institute; the others will pass
+the night at the Mountain House. I shall stay here, myself: it is not at
+all likely that anything will come of these warnings; but if there
+should, I choose to be there and take my chance."
+
+It needs little, generally, to frighten servants, and they were all ready
+enough to go. The poor relation was one of the timid sort, and was
+terribly uneasy to be got out of the house. This left no alternative, of
+course, for Helen, but to go also. They all urged upon Dudley Veneer to
+go with them: if there was danger, why should he remain to risk it, when
+he sent away the others?
+
+Old Sophy said nothing until the time came for her to go with the second
+of Elbridge's carriage-loads.
+
+"Come, Sophy," said Dudley Veneer, "get your things and go. They will
+take good care of you at the Mountain House; and when we have made sure
+that there is no real danger, you shall come back at once."
+
+"No, Masse!" Sophy answered. "I've seen Elsie into th' ground, 'n' I
+a'n't goin' away to come back 'n' fin' Masse Veneer buried under th'
+rocks. My darlin' 's gone; 'n' now, if Masse goes, 'n' th' of place
+goes, it's time for Ol' Sophy to go, too. No, Masse Veneer, we'll both
+stay in th' of mansion 'n' wait for th' Lord!"
+
+Nothing could change the old woman's determination; and her master, who
+only feared, but did not really expect the long-deferred catastrophe, was
+obliged to consent to her staying. The sudden drying of the well at such
+a time was the most alarming sign; for he remembered that the same thing
+had been observed just before great mountain-slides. This long rain,
+too, was just the kind of cause which was likely to loosen the strata of
+rock piled up in the ledges; if the dreaded event should ever come to
+pass, it would be at such a time.
+
+He paced his chamber uneasily until long past midnight. If the morning
+came without accident, he meant to have a careful examination made of all
+the rents and fissures above, of their direction and extent, and
+especially whether, in case of a mountain-slide, the huge masses would be
+like to reach so far to the east and so low down the declivity as the
+mansion.
+
+At two o'clock in the morning he was dozing in his chair. Old Sophy had
+lain down on her bed, and was muttering in troubled dreams.
+
+All at once a loud crash seemed to rend the very heavens above them: a
+crack as of the thunder that follows close upon the bolt,--a rending and
+crashing as of a forest snapped through all its stems, torn, twisted,
+splintered, dragged with all its ragged boughs into one chaotic ruin.
+The ground trembled under them as in an earthquake; the old mansion
+shuddered so that all its windows chattered in their casements; the great
+chimney shook off its heavy cap-stones, which came down on the roof with
+resounding concussions; and the echoes of The Mountain roared and
+bellowed in long reduplication, as if its whole foundations were rent,
+and this were the terrible voice of its dissolution.
+
+Dudley Venner rose from his chair, folded his arms, and awaited his fate.
+There was no knowing where to look for safety; and he remembered too well
+the story of the family that was lost by rushing out of the house, and so
+hurrying into the very jaws of death.
+
+He had stood thus but for a moment, when he heard the voice of Old Sophy
+in a wild cry of terror:
+
+"It's th' Las' Day! It's th' Las' Day! The Lord is comin' to take us
+all!"
+
+"Sophy!" he called; but she did not hear him or heed him, and rushed out
+of the house.
+
+The worst danger was over. If they were to be destroyed, it would
+necessarily be in a few seconds from the first thrill of the terrible
+convulsion. He waited in awful suspense, but calm. Not more than one or
+two minutes could have passed before the frightful tumult and all its
+sounding echoes had ceased. He called Old Sophy; but she did not answer.
+He went to the western window and looked forth into the darkness. He
+could not distinguish the outlines of the landscape, but the white stone
+was clearly visible, and by its side the new-made mound. Nay, what was
+that which obscured its outline, in shape like a human figure? He flung
+open the window and sprang through. It was all that there was left of
+poor Old Sophy, stretched out lifeless, upon her darling's grave.
+
+He had scarcely composed her limbs and drawn the sheet over her, when the
+neighbors began to arrive from all directions. Each was expecting to
+hear of houses overwhelmed and families destroyed; but each came with the
+story that his own household was safe. It was not until the morning
+dawned that the true nature and extent of the sudden movement was
+ascertained. A great seam had opened above the long cliff, and the
+terrible Rattlesnake Ledge, with all its envenomed reptiles, its dark
+fissures and black caverns, was buried forever beneath a mighty incumbent
+mass of ruin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+MR. SILAS PECKHAM RENDERS HIS ACCOUNT.
+
+The morning rose clear and bright. The long storm was over, and the calm
+autumnal sunshine was now to return, with all its infinite repose and
+sweetness. With the earliest dawn exploring parties were out in every
+direction along the southern slope of The Mountain, tracing the ravages
+of the great slide and the track it had followed. It proved to be not so
+much a slide as the breaking off and falling of a vast line of cliff,
+including the dreaded Ledge. It had folded over like the leaves of a
+half-opened book when they close, crushing the trees below, piling its
+ruins in a glacis at the foot of what had been the overhanging wall of
+the cliff, and filling up that deep cavity above the mansion-house which
+bore the ill-omened name of Dead Man's Hollow. This it was which had
+saved the Dudley mansion. The falling masses, or huge fragments breaking
+off from them, would have swept the house and all around it to
+destruction but for this deep shelving dell, into which the stream of
+ruin was happily directed. It was, indeed, one of Nature's conservative
+revolutions; for the fallen masses made a kind oz shelf, which interposed
+a level break between the inclined planes above and below it, so that the
+nightmare-fancies of the dwellers in the Dudley mansion, and in many
+other residences under the shadow of The Mountain, need not keep them
+lying awake hereafter to listen for the snapping of roots and the
+splitting of the rocks above them.
+
+Twenty-four hours after the falling of the cliff, it seemed as if it had
+happened ages ago. The new fact had fitted itself in with all the old
+predictions, forebodings, fears, and acquired the solidarity belonging to
+all events which have slipped out of the fingers of Time and dissolved in
+the antecedent eternity.
+
+Old Sophy was lying dead in the Dudley mansion. If there were tears shed
+for her, they could not be bitter ones; for she had lived out her full
+measure of days, and gone--who could help fondly believing it?--to rejoin
+her beloved mistress. They made a place for her at the foot of the two
+mounds. It was thus she would have chosen to sleep, and not to have
+wronged her humble devotion in life by asking to lie at the side of those
+whom she had served so long and faithfully. There were very few present
+at the simple ceremony. Helen Darley was one of these few. The old black
+woman had been her companion in all the kind offices of which she had
+been the ministering angel to Elsie.
+
+After it was all over, Helen was leaving with the rest, when Dudley
+Veneer begged her to stay a little, and he would send her back: it was a
+long walk; besides, he wished to say some things to her, which he had not
+had the opportunity of speaking. Of course Helen could not refuse him;
+there must be many thoughts coming into his mind which he would wish to
+share with her who had known his daughter so long and been with filer in
+her last days.
+
+She returned into the great parlor with the wrought cornices and the
+medallion-portraits on the ceiling.
+
+"I am now alone in the world," Dudley Veneer said.
+
+Helen must have known that before he spoke. But the tone in which he
+said it had so much meaning, that she could not find a word to answer him
+with. They sat in silence, which the old tall clock counted out in long
+seconds; but it was silence which meant more than any words they had ever
+spoken.
+
+"Alone in the world. Helen, the freshness of my life is gone, and there
+is little left of the few graces which in my younger days might have
+fitted me to win the love of women. Listen to me,--kindly, if you can;
+forgive me, at least. Half my life has been passed in constant fear and
+anguish, without any near friend to share my trials. My task is done
+now; my fears have ceased to prey upon me; the sharpness of early sorrows
+has yielded something of its edge to time. You have bound me to you by
+gratitude in the tender care you have taken of my poor child. More than
+this. I must tell you all now, out of the depth of this trouble through
+which I am passing. I have loved you from the moment we first met; and
+if my life has anything left worth accepting, it is yours. Will you take
+the offered gift?"
+
+Helen looked in his face, surprised, bewildered.
+
+"This is not for me,--not for me," she said. "I am but a poor faded
+flower, not worth the gathering, of such a one as you. No, no,--I have
+been bred to humble toil all my days, and I could not be to you what you
+ought to ask. I am accustomed to a kind of loneliness and
+self-dependence. I have seen nothing, almost, of the world, such as you
+were born to move in. Leave me to my obscure place and duties; I shall
+at least have peace;--and you--you will surely find in due time some one
+better fitted by Nature and training to make you happy."
+
+"No, Miss Darley!" Dudley Venner said, almost sternly. "You must not
+speak to a man, who has lived through my experiences, of looking about
+for a new choice after his heart has once chosen. Say that you can never
+love me; say that I have lived too long to share your young life; say
+that sorrow has left nothing in me for Love to find his pleasure in; but
+do not mock me with the hope of a new affection for some unknown object.
+The first look of yours brought me to your side. The first tone of your
+voice sunk into my heart. From this moment my life must wither out or
+bloom anew. My home is desolate. Come under my roof and make it bright
+once more,--share my life with me,--or I shall give the halls of the old
+mansion to the bats and the owls, and wander forth alone without a hope
+or a friend!"
+
+To find herself with a man's future at the disposal of a single word of
+hers!--a man like this, too, with a fascination for her against which
+she had tried to shut her heart, feeling that he lived in another sphere
+than hers, working as she was for her bread a poor operative in the
+factory of a hard master and jealous overseer, the salaried drudge of Mr.
+Silas Peckham! Why, she had thought he was grateful to her as a friend
+of his daughter; she had even pleased herself with the feeling that he
+liked her, in her humble place, as a woman of some cultivation and many
+sympathetic points of relation with himself; but that he loved her,--that
+this deep, fine nature, in a man so far removed from her in outward
+circumstance, should have found its counterpart in one whom life had
+treated so coldly as herself,--that Dudley Venner should stake his
+happiness on a breath of hers,--poor Helen Darley's,--it was all a
+surprise, a confusion, a kind of fear not wholly fearful. Ah, me! women
+know what it is, that mist over the eyes, that trembling in the limbs,
+that faltering of the voice, that sweet, shame-faced, unspoken confession
+of weakness which does not wish to be strong, that sudden overflow in the
+soul where thoughts loose their hold on each other and swim single and
+helpless in the flood of emotion,--women know what it is!
+
+No doubt she was a little frightened and a good deal bewildered, and that
+her sympathies were warmly excited for a friend to whom she had been
+brought so near, and whose loneliness she saw and pitied. She lost that
+calm self-possession she had hoped to maintain.
+
+"If I thought that I could make you happy,--if I should speak from my
+heart, and not my reason,--I am but a weak woman,--yet if I can be to
+you--What can I say?"
+
+What more could this poor, dear Helen say?
+
+"Elbridge, harness the horses and take Miss Darley back to the school."
+
+What conversation had taken place since Helen's rhetorical failure is not
+recorded in the minutes from which this narrative is constructed. But
+when the man who had been summoned had gone to get the carriage ready,
+Helen resumed something she had been speaking of.
+
+"Not for the world. Everything must go on just as it has gone on, for
+the present. There are proprieties to be consulted. I cannot be hard
+with you, that out of your very affliction has sprung this--this
+well--you must name it for me,--but the world will never listen to
+explanations. I am to be Helen Darley, lady assistant in Mr. Silas
+Peckham's school, as long as I see fit to hold my office. And I mean to
+attend to my scholars just as before; so that I shall have very little
+time for visiting or seeing company. I believe, though, you are one of
+the Trustees and a Member of the Examining Committee; so that, if you
+should happen to visit the school, I shall try to be civil to you."
+
+Every lady sees, of course, that Helen was quite right; but perhaps here
+and there one will think that Dudley Venner was all wrong,--that he was
+too hasty,--that he should have been too full of his recent grief for
+such a confession as he has just made, and the passion from which it
+sprung. Perhaps they do not understand the sudden recoil of a strong
+nature long compressed. Perhaps they have not studied the mystery of
+allotropism in the emotions of the human heart. Go to the nearest
+chemist and ask him to show you some of the dark-red phosphorus which
+will not burn without fierce heating, but at 500 deg. Fahrenheit, changes
+back again to the inflammable substance we know so well. Grief seems
+more like ashes than like fire; but as grief has been love once, so it
+may become love again. This is emotional allotropism.
+
+Helen rode back to the Institute and inquired for Mr. Peckham. She had
+not seen him during the brief interval between her departure from the
+mansion-house and her return to Old Sophy's funeral. There were various
+questions about the school she wished to ask.
+
+"Oh, how's your haalth, Miss Darley?" Silas began. "We've missed you
+consid'able. Glad to see you back at the post of dooty. Hope the Squire
+treated you hahnsomely,--liberal pecooniary compensation,--hey? A'n't
+much of a loser, I guess, by acceptin' his propositions?"
+
+Helen blushed at this last question, as if Silas had meant something by
+it beyond asking what money she had received; but his own double-meaning
+expression and her blush were too nice points for him to have taken
+cognizance of. He was engaged in a mental calculation as to the amount
+of the deduction he should make under the head of "demage to the
+institootion,"--this depending somewhat on that of the "pecooniary
+compensation" she might have received for her services as the friend of
+Elsie Venner.
+
+So Helen slid back at once into her routine, the same faithful, patient
+creature she had always been. But what was this new light which seemed
+to have kindled in her eyes? What was this look of peace, which nothing
+could disturb, which smiled serenely through all the little meannesses
+with which the daily life of the educational factory surrounded her,
+which not only made her seem resigned, but overflowed all her features
+with a thoughtful, subdued happiness? Mr. Bernard did not know,--perhaps
+he did not guess. The inmates of the Dudley mansion were not scandalized
+by any mysterious visits of a veiled or unveiled lady. The vibrating
+tongues of the "female youth" of the Institute were not set in motion by
+the standing of an equipage at the gate, waiting for their lady-teacher.
+The servants at the mansion did not convey numerous letters with
+superscriptions in a bold, manly hand, sealed with the arms of a
+well-known house, and directed to Miss Helen Darley; nor, on the other
+hand, did Hiram, the man from the lean streak in New Hampshire, carry
+sweet-smelling, rose-hued, many-layered, criss-crossed,
+fine-stitch-lettered packages of note-paper directed to Dudley Venner,
+Esq., and all too scanty to hold that incredible expansion of the famous
+three words which a woman was born to say,--that perpetual miracle which
+astonishes all the go-betweens who wear their shoes out in carrying a
+woman's infinite variations on the theme--
+
+ "I love you."
+
+But the reader must remember that there are walks in country-towns where
+people are liable to meet by accident, and that the hollow of an old tree
+has served the purpose of a post-office sometimes; so that he has her
+choice (to divide the pronouns impartially) of various hypotheses to
+account for the new glory of happiness which seemed to have irradiated
+our poor Helen's features, as if her dreary life were awakening in the
+dawn of a blessed future.
+
+With all the alleviations which have been hinted at, Mr. Dudley Venner
+thought that the days and the weeks had never moved so slowly as through
+the last period of the autumn that was passing. Elsie had been a
+perpetual source of anxiety to him, but still she had been a companion.
+He could not mourn for her; for he felt that she was safer with her
+mother, in that world where there are no more sorrows and dangers, than
+she could have been with him. But as he sat at his window and looked at
+the three mounds, the loneliness of the great house made it seem more
+like the sepulchre than these narrow dwellings where his beloved and her
+daughter lay close to each other, side by side,--Catalina, the bride of
+his youth, and Elsie, the child whom he had nurtured, with poor Old
+Sophy, who had followed them like a black shadow, at their feet, under
+the same soft turf, sprinkled with the brown autumnal leaves. It was not
+good for him to be thus alone. How should he ever live through the long
+months of November and December?
+
+The months of November and December did, in some way or other, get rid of
+themselves at last, bringing with them the usual events of village-life
+and a few unusual ones. Some of the geologists had been up to look at
+the great slide, of which they gave those prolix accounts which everybody
+remembers who read the scientific journals of the time. The engineers
+reported that there was little probability of any further convulsion
+along the line of rocks which overhung the more thickly settled part of
+the town. The naturalists drew up a paper on the "Probable Extinction
+of the Crotalus Durissus in the Township of Rockland." The engagement
+of the Widow Rowens to a Little Millionville merchant was
+announced,--"Sudding 'n' onexpected," Widow Leech said,--"waalthy, or she
+wouldn't ha' looked at him,--fifty year old, if he is a day, 'n' hu'n't
+got a white hair in his head." The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had
+publicly announced that he was going to join the Roman Catholic
+communion,--not so much to the surprise or consternation of the
+religious world as he had supposed. Several old ladies forthwith
+proclaimed their intention of following him; but, as one or two of them
+were deaf, and another had been threatened with an attack of that mild,
+but obstinate complaint, dementia senilis, many thought it was not so
+much the force of his arguments as a kind of tendency to jump as the
+bellwether jumps, well known in flocks not included in the Christian
+fold. His bereaved congregation immediately began pulling candidates on
+and off, like new boots, on trial. Some pinched in tender places; some
+were too loose; some were too square-toed; some were too coarse, and did
+n't please; some were too thin, and would n't last;--in short, they could
+n't possibly find a fit. At last, people began to drop in to hear old
+Doctor Honeywood. They were quite surprised to find what a human old
+gentleman he was, and went back and told the others, that, instead of
+being a case of confluent sectarianism, as they supposed, the good old
+minister had been so well vaccinated with charitable virus that he was
+now a true, open-souled Christian of the mildest type. The end of all
+which was, that the liberal people went over to the old minister almost
+in a body, just at the time that Deacon Shearer and the "Vinegar-Bible"
+party split off, and that not long afterwards they sold their own
+meeting-house to the malecontents, so that Deacon Soper used often to
+remind Colonel Sprowle of his wish that "our little man and him [the
+Reverend Doctor] would swop pulpits," and tell him it had "pooty nigh
+come trew."--But this is anticipating the course of events, which were
+much longer in coming about; for we have but just got through that
+terrible long month, as Mr. Dudley Venner found it, of December.
+
+On the first of January, Mr. Silas Peckham was in the habit of settling
+his quarterly accounts, and making such new arrangements as his
+convenience or interest dictated. New Year was a holiday at the
+Institute. No doubt this accounted for Helen's being dressed so
+charmingly,--always, to be sure in, her own simple way, but yet with such
+a true lady's air, that she looked fit to be the mistress of any mansion
+in the land.
+
+She was in the parlor alone, a little before noon, when Mr. Peckham came
+in.
+
+"I'm ready to settle my accaount with you now, Miss Darley," said Silas.
+
+"As you please, Mr. Peckham," Helen answered, very graciously.
+
+"Before payin' you your selary," the Principal continued, "I wish to come
+to an understandin' as to the futur'. I consider that I've been payin'
+high, very high, for the work you do. Women's wages can't be expected to
+do more than feed and clothe 'em, as a gineral thing, with a little
+savin', in case of sickness, and to bury 'em, if they break daown, as all
+of 'em are liable to do at any time. If I a'n't misinformed, you not
+only support yourself out of my establishment, but likewise relatives of
+yours, who I don't know that I'm called upon to feed and clothe. There
+is a young woman, not burdened with destitute relatives, has signified
+that she would be glad to take your dooties for less pecooniary
+compensation, by a consid'able amaount, than you now receive. I shall be
+willin', however, to retain your services at sech redooced rate as we
+shall fix upon,--provided sech redooced rate be as low or lower than the
+same services can be obtained elsewhere."
+
+"As you please, Mr. Peckham," Helen answered, with a smile so sweet that
+the Principal (who of course had trumped up this opposition-teacher for
+the occasion) said to himself she would stand being cut down a quarter,
+perhaps a half, of her salary.
+
+"Here is your accaount, Miss Darley, and the balance doo you," said Silas
+Peckham, handing her a paper and a small roll of infectious-flavored
+bills wrapping six poisonous coppers of the old coinage.
+
+She took the paper and began looking at it. She could not quite make up
+her mind to touch the feverish bills with the cankering coppers in them,
+and left them airing themselves on the table.
+
+The document she held ran as follows:
+
+Silas Peckham, Esq., Principal of the Apollinean Institute, In Account
+with Helen Darley, Assist. Teacher.
+
+ Dr. Cr.
+
+To salary for quarter By Deduction for absence
+ending Jan 1st @ $75 per 1 week 3 days ...........$10.00
+quarter ................ $75.00
+ "Board, lodging, etc for
+ 10 days @ 75 cts per day.. 7.50
+
+ "Damage to Institution by
+ absence of teacher from
+ duties, say ............. 25.00
+
+ "Stationary furnished ..... .43
+
+ "Postage-stamp ............ .01
+
+ "Balance due Helen Darley. 32.06
+ ------ --------
+ $75.00 $75.00
+
+ROCKLAND, Jan. 1st, 1859.
+
+
+Now Helen had her own private reasons for wishing to receive the small
+sum which was due her at this time without any unfair deduction,--reasons
+which we need not inquire into too particularly, as we may be very sure
+that they were right and womanly. So, when she looked over this account
+of Mr. Silas Peckham's, and saw that he had contrived to pare down her
+salary to something less than half its stipulated amount, the look which
+her countenance wore was as near to that of righteous indignation as her
+gentle features and soft blue eyes would admit of its being.
+
+"Why, Mr. Peckham," she said, "do you mean this? If I am of so much
+value to you that you must take off twenty-five dollars for ten days'
+absence, how is it that my salary is to be cut down to less than
+seventy-five dollars a quarter, if I remain here?"
+
+"I gave you fair notice," said Silas. "I have a minute of it I took down
+immed'ately after the intervoo."
+
+He lugged out his large pocket-book with the strap going all round it,
+and took from it a slip of paper which confirmed his statement.
+
+"Besides," he added, slyly, "I presoom you have received a liberal
+pecooniary compensation from Squire Venner for nussin' his daughter."
+
+Helen was looking over the bill while he was speaking.
+
+"Board and lodging for ten days, Mr. Peckham,--whose board and lodging,
+pray?"
+
+The door opened before Silas Peckham could answer, and Mr. Bernard walked
+into the parlor. Helen was holding the bill in her hand, looking as any
+woman ought to look who has been at once wronged and insulted.
+
+"The last turn of the thumbscrew!" said Mr. Bernard to himself.
+
+"What is it, Helen? You look troubled."
+
+She handed him the account.
+
+He looked at the footing of it. Then he looked at the items. Then he
+looked at Silas Peckham.
+
+At this moment Silas was sublime. He was so transcendently unconscious
+of the emotions going on in Mr. Bernard's mind at the moment, that he had
+only a single thought.
+
+"The accaount's correc'ly cast, I presoom;--if the' 's any mistake of
+figgers or addin' 'em up, it'll be made all right. Everything's
+accordin' to agreement. The minute written immed'ately after the
+intervoo is here in my possession."
+
+Mr. Bernard looked at Helen. Just what would have happened to Silas
+Peckham, as he stood then and there, but for the interposition of a
+merciful Providence, nobody knows or ever will know; for at that moment
+steps were heard upon the stairs, and Hiram threw open the parlor-door
+for Mr. Dudley Venner to enter.
+
+He saluted them all gracefully with the good-wishes of the season, and
+each of them returned his compliment,--Helen blushing fearfully, of
+course, but not particularly noticed in her embarrassment by more than
+one.
+
+Silas Peckham reckoned with perfect confidence on his Trustees, who had
+always said what he told them to, and done what he wanted. It was a good
+chance now to show off his power, and, by letting his instructors know
+the unstable tenure of their offices, make it easier to settle his
+accounts and arrange his salaries. There was nothing very strange in Mr.
+Venner's calling; he was one of the Trustees, and this was New Year's
+Day. But he had called just at the lucky moment for Mr. Peckham's
+object.
+
+"I have thought some of makin' changes in the department of instruction,"
+he began. "Several accomplished teachers have applied to me, who would
+be glad of sitooations. I understand that there never have been so many
+fust-rate teachers, male and female, out of employment as doorin' the
+present season. If I can make sahtisfahctory arrangements with my
+present corpse of teachers, I shall be glad to do so; otherwise I shell,
+with the permission of the Trustees, make sech noo arrangements as
+circumstahnces compel."
+
+"You may make arrangements for a new assistant in my department, Mr.
+Peckham," said Mr. Bernard, "at once,--this day,--this hour. I am not
+safe to be trusted with your person five minutes out of this lady's
+presence,--of whom I beg pardon for this strong language. Mr. Venner, I
+must beg you, as one of the Trustees of this Institution, to look at the
+manner in which its Principal has attempted to swindle this faithful
+teacher whose toils and sacrifices and self-devotion to the school have
+made it all that it is, in spite of this miserable trader's incompetence.
+Will you look at the paper I hold?"
+
+Dudley Venner took the account and read it through, without changing a
+feature. Then he turned to Silas Peckham.
+
+"You may make arrangements for a new assistant in the branches this lady
+has taught. Miss Helen Darley is to be my wife. I had hoped to have
+announced this news in a less abrupt and ungraceful manner. But I came
+to tell you with my own lips what you would have learned before evening
+from my friends in the village."
+
+Mr. Bernard went to Helen, who stood silent, with downcast eyes, and took
+her hand warmly, hoping she might find all the happiness she deserved.
+Then he turned to Dudley Venner, and said, "She is a queen, but has never
+found it out. The world has nothing nobler than this dear woman, whom
+you have discovered in the disguise of a teacher. God bless her and
+you!"
+
+Dudley Venner returned his friendly grasp, without answering a word in
+articulate speech.
+
+Silas remained dumb and aghast for a brief space. Coming to himself a
+little, he thought there might have been some mistake about the
+items,--would like to have Miss barley's bill returned,--would make it
+all right,--had no idee that Squire Venner had a special int'rest in Miss
+barley,--was sorry he had given offence,--if he might take that bill and
+look it over--
+
+"No. Mr. Peckham," said Mr. Dudley Venner, "there will be a full meeting
+of the Board next week, and the bill, and such evidence with reference to
+the management of the Institution and the treatment of its instructors as
+Mr. Langdon sees fit to bring forward will be laid before them."
+
+Miss Helen Darley became that very day the guest of Miss Arabella
+Thornton, the Judge's daughter. Mr. Bernard made his appearance a week
+or two later at the Lectures, where the Professor first introduced him to
+the reader.
+
+He stayed after the class had left the room.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Langdon! how do you do? Very glad to see you back again. How
+have you been since our correspondence on Fascination and other curious
+scientific questions?"
+
+It was the Professor who spoke,--whom the reader will recognize as
+myself, the teller of this story.
+
+"I have been well," Mr. Bernard answered, with a serious look which
+invited a further question.
+
+"I hope you have had none of those painful or dangerous experiences you
+seemed to be thinking of when you wrote; at any rate, you have escaped
+having your obituary written."
+
+"I have seen some things worth remembering. Shall I call on you this
+evening and tell you about them?"
+
+"I shall be most happy to see you."
+
+This was the way in which I, the Professor, became acquainted with some
+of the leading events of this story. They interested me sufficiently to
+lead me to avail myself of all those other extraordinary methods of
+obtaining information well known to writers of narrative.
+
+Mr. Langdon seemed to me to have gained in seriousness and strength of
+character by his late experiences. He threw his whole energies into his
+studies with an effect which distanced all his previous efforts.
+Remembering my former hint, he employed his spare hours in writing for
+the annual prizes, both of which he took by a unanimous vote of the
+judges. Those who heard him read his Thesis at the Medical Commencement
+will not soon forget the impression made by his fine personal appearance
+and manners, nor the universal interest excited in the audience, as he
+read, with his beautiful enunciation, that striking paper entitled
+"Unresolved Nebulae in Vital Science." It was a general remark of the
+Faculty,--and old Doctor Kittredge, who had come down on purpose to hear
+Mr. Langdon, heartily agreed to it,--that there had never been a diploma
+filled up, since the institution which conferred upon him the degree of
+Doctor Medicdnce was founded, which carried with it more of promise to
+the profession than that which bore the name of
+
+ BERNARDUS CARYL LANGDON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+Mr. Bernard Langdon had no sooner taken his degree, than, in accordance
+with the advice of one of his teachers whom he frequently consulted, he
+took an office in the heart of the city where he had studied. He had
+thought of beginning in a suburb or some remoter district of the city
+proper.
+
+"No," said his teacher,--to wit, myself,--"don't do any such thing. You
+are made for the best kind of practice; don't hamper yourself with an
+outside constituency, such as belongs to a practitioner of the second
+class. When a fellow like you chooses his beat, he must look ahead a
+little. Take care of all the poor that apply to you, but leave the
+half-pay classes to a different style of doctor,--the people who spend
+one half their time in taking care of their patients, and the other half
+in squeezing out their money. Go for the swell-fronts and south-exposure
+houses; the folks inside are just as good as other people, and the
+pleasantest, on the whole, to take care of. They must have somebody, and
+they like a gentleman best. Don't throw yourself away. You have a good
+presence and pleasing manners. You wear white linen by inherited
+instinct. You can pronounce the word view. You have all the elements of
+success; go and take it. Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue
+yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy,
+while you are about it. The highest social class furnishes incomparably
+the best patients, taking them by and large. Besides, when they won't
+get well and bore you to death, you can send 'em off to travel. Mind me
+now, and take the tops of your sparrowgrass. Somebody must have
+'em,--why shouldn't you? If you don't take your chance, you'll get the
+butt-ends as a matter of course."
+
+Mr. Bernard talked like a young man full of noble sentiments. He wanted
+to be useful to his fellow-beings. Their social differences were nothing
+to him. He would never court the rich,--he would go where he was called.
+He would rather save the life of a poor mother of a family than that of
+half a dozen old gouty millionnaires whose heirs had been yawning and
+stretching these ten years to get rid of them.
+
+"Generous emotions!" I exclaimed. "Cherish 'em; cling to 'em till you
+are fifty, till you are seventy, till you are ninety! But do as I tell
+you,--strike for the best circle of practice, and you 'll be sure to get
+it!"
+
+Mr. Langdon did as I told him,--took a genteel office, furnished it
+neatly, dressed with a certain elegance, soon made a pleasant circle of
+acquaintances, and began to work his way into the right kind of business.
+I missed him, however, for some days, not long after he had opened his
+office. On his return, he told me he had been up at Rockland, by special
+invitation, to attend the wedding of Mr. Dudley Venner and Miss Helen
+Darley. He gave me a full account of the ceremony, which I regret that I
+cannot relate in full. "Helen looked like an angel,"--that, I am sure,
+was one of his expressions. As for her dress, I should like to give the
+details, but am afraid of committing blunders, as men always do, when
+they undertake to describe such matters. White dress, anyhow,--that I am
+sure of,--with orange-flowers, and the most wonderful lace veil that was
+ever seen or heard of. The Reverend Doctor Honeywood performed the
+ceremony, of course. The good people seemed to have forgotten they ever
+had had any other minister, except Deacon Shearer and his set of
+malcontents, who were doing a dull business in the meeting-house lately
+occupied by the Reverend Mr. Fairweather.
+
+"Who was at the wedding?"
+
+"Everybody, pretty much. They wanted to keep it quiet, but it was of no
+use. Married at church. Front pews, old Dr. Kittredge and all the
+mansionhouse people and distinguished strangers,--Colonel Sprowle and
+family, including Matilda's young gentleman, a graduate of one of the
+fresh-water colleges,--Mrs. Pickins (late Widow Rowens) and
+husband,--Deacon Soper and numerous parishioners. A little nearer the
+door, Abel, the Doctor's man, and Elbridge, who drove them to church in
+the family-coach. Father Fairweather, as they all call him now, came in
+late with Father McShane."
+
+"And Silas Peckham?"
+
+"Oh, Silas had left The School and Rockland. Cut up altogether too badly
+in the examination instituted by the Trustees. Had removed over to
+Tamarack, and thought of renting a large house and 'farming' the
+town-poor."
+
+Some time after this, as I was walking with a young friend along by the
+swell-fronts and south-exposures, whom should I see but Mr. Bernard
+Langdon, looking remarkably happy, and keeping step by the side of a very
+handsome and singularly well-dressed young lady? He bowed and lifted his
+hat as we passed.
+
+"Who is that pretty girl my young doctor has got there?" I said to my
+companion.
+
+"Who is that?" he answered. "You don't know? Why, that is neither more
+nor less than Miss Letitia Forrester, daughter of--of--why, the great
+banking firm, you know, Bilyuns Brothers & Forrester. Got acquainted
+with her in the country, they say. There 's a story that they're
+engaged, or like to be, if the firm consents."
+
+"Oh" I said.
+
+I did not like the look of it in the least. Too young,--too young. Has
+not taken any position yet. No right to ask for the hand of Bilyuns
+Brothers & Co.'s daughter. Besides, it will spoil him for practice, if
+he marries a rich girl before he has formed habits of work.
+
+I looked in at his office the other day. A box of white kids was lying
+open on the table. A three-cornered note, directed in a very delicate
+lady's-hand, was distinguishable among a heap of papers. I was just
+going to call him to account for his proceedings, when he pushed the
+three-cornered note aside and took up a letter with a great
+corporation-seal upon it. He had received the offer of a professor's
+chair in an ancient and distinguished institution.
+
+"Pretty well for three-and-twenty, my boy," I said. "I suppose you'll
+think you must be married one of these days, if you accept this office."
+
+Mr. Langdon blushed.--There had been stories about him, he knew. His name
+had been mentioned in connection with that of a very charming young lady.
+The current reports were not true. He had met this young lady, and been
+much pleased with her, in the country, at the house of her grandfather,
+the Reverend Doctor Honeywood,--you remember Miss Letitia Forrester, whom
+I have mentioned repeatedly? On coming to town, he found his
+country-acquaintance in a social position which seemed to discourage his
+continued intimacy. He had discovered, however; that he was a not
+unwelcome visitor, and had kept up friendly relations with her. But
+there was no truth in the current reports,--none at all.'
+
+Some months had passed, after this visit, when I happened one evening to
+stroll into a box in one of the principal theatres of the city. A small
+party sat on the seats before me: a middle-aged gentleman and his lady,
+in front, and directly behind them my young doctor and the same very
+handsome young lady I had seen him walking with on the sidewalk before
+the swell-fronts and south-exposures. As Professor Langdon seemed to be
+very much taken up with his companion, and both of them looked as if they
+were enjoying themselves, I determined not to make my presence known to
+my young friend, and to withdraw quietly after feasting my eyes with the
+sight of them for a few minutes.
+
+"It looks as if something might come of it," I said to myself. At that
+moment the young lady lifted her arm accidentally in such a way that the
+light fell upon the clasp of a chain which encircled her wrist. My eyes
+filled with tears as I read upon the clasp, in sharp-cut Italic letters,
+E. Y. They were tears at once of sad remembrance and of joyous
+anticipation; for the ornament on which I looked was the double pledge of
+a dead sorrow and a living affection. It was the golden bracelet,--the
+parting-gift of Elsie Venner. the golden bracelet,--the parting-gift of
+Elsie Venner.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+TO MY READERS.
+
+"A new Preface" is, I find, promised with my story. If there are any
+among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the Moral
+appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and learn what I
+have to say here.
+
+This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
+remember, entitled "Elsie Venner." Like that,--it is intended for two
+classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers of the
+"Morals" in Aesop and of this Preface.
+
+The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which some
+thought cruel, even on paper. It imagined an alien element introduced
+into the blood of a human being before that being saw the light. It
+showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with the ophidian
+characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
+period. Whether anything like this ever happened, or was possible,
+mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest the limitations
+of human responsibility in a simple and effective way.
+
+The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
+experience. The successive development of inherited bodily aspects and
+habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see families
+grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less obviously
+to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There is something
+frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but
+particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to
+generation. Jonathan Edwards the younger tells the story of a brutal
+wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father, when the old man cried
+out, "Don't drag me any further, for I did n't drag my father beyond this
+tree." [The original version of this often-repeated story may be found
+in Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7th, Chapter 7th.] I have attempted to show
+the successive evolution of some inherited qualities in the character of
+Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to disturb the narrative, but
+plainly enough to be kept in sight by the small class of preface-readers.
+
+If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
+higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
+learned ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against the
+scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human action
+from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of the
+cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing about it,
+the large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being
+preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the
+simple facts of the narrative.
+
+Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
+limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
+self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
+intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in our
+new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown of
+scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of nature into
+the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as much as in the
+bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all that we are evil
+in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return at once to our old
+demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House in his
+time-honored prerogatives.
+
+As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may be needed
+here to make some of my characters and statements appear probable. The
+long-pending question involving a property which had become in the mean
+time of immense value finds its parallel in the great De Haro land-case,
+decided in the Supreme Court while this story was in progress (May 14th,
+1867). The experiment of breaking the child's will by imprisonment and
+fasting is borrowed from a famous incident, happening long before the
+case lately before one of the courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where
+a little girl was beaten to death because she would not say her prayers.
+The mental state involving utter confusion of different generations in a
+person yet capable of forming a correct judgment on other matters, is
+almost a direct transcript from nature. I should not have ventured to
+repeat the questions of the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle
+Hazard about her family conditions, and their comments, had not a lady of
+fortune and position mentioned to me a similar circumstance in the school
+history of one of her own children. Perhaps I should have hesitated in
+reproducing Myrtle Hazard's "Vision," but for a singular experience of
+his own related to me by the late Mr. Forceythe Willson.
+
+Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent correspondent
+of mine. I have also received a good many communications, signed with
+various names, which must have been from near female relatives of that
+young gentleman. I once sent a kind of encyclical letter to the whole
+family connection; but as the delusion under which they labor is still
+common, and often leads to the wasting of time, the contempt of honest
+study or humble labor, and the misapplication of intelligence not so far
+below mediocrity as to be incapable of affording a respectable return
+when employed in the proper direction, I thought this picture from life
+might also be of service. When I say that no genuine young poet will
+apply it to himself, I think I have so far removed the sting that few or
+none will complain of being wounded.
+
+It is lamentable to be forced to add that the Reverend Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker is only a softened copy of too many originals to whom, as a
+regular attendant upon divine worship from my childhood to the present
+time, I have respectfully listened, while they dealt with me and mine and
+the bulk of their fellow-creatures after the manner of their sect. If,
+in the interval between his first showing himself in my story and its
+publication in a separate volume, anything had occurred to make me
+question the justice or expediency of drawing and exhibiting such a
+portrait, I should have reconsidered it, with the view of retouching its
+sharper features. But its essential truthfulness has been illustrated
+every month or two, since my story has been in the course of publication,
+by a fresh example from real life, stamped in darker colors than any with
+which I should have thought of staining my pages.
+
+There are a great many good clergymen to one bad one, but a writer finds
+it hard to keep to the true proportion of good and bad persons in telling
+a story. The three or four good ministers I have introduced in this
+narrative must stand for many whom I have known and loved, and some of
+whom I count to-day among my most valued friends. I hope the best and
+wisest of them will like this story and approve it. If they cannot all
+do this, I know they will recognize it as having been written with a
+right and honest purpose.
+BOSTON, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+It is a quarter of a century since the foregoing Preface was written, and
+that is long enough to allow a story to be forgotten by the public, and
+very possibly by the writer of it also. I will not pretend that I have
+forgotten all about "The Guardian Angel," but it is long since I have
+read it, and many of its characters and incidents are far from being
+distinct in my memory. There are, however, a few points which hold their
+place among my recollections. The revolt of Myrtle Hazard from the
+tyranny of that dogmatic dynasty now breaking up in all directions has
+found new illustrations since this tale was written. I need only refer
+to two instances of many. The first is from real life. Mr. Robert C.
+Adams's work, "Travels in Faith from Tradition to Reason," is the outcome
+of the teachings of one of the most intransigeant of our New England
+Calvinists, the late Reverend Nehemiah Adams. For an example in
+fiction,--fiction which bears all the marks of being copied from real
+life,--I will refer to "The Story of an African Farm." The boy's honest,
+but terrible outburst, "I hate God," was, I doubt not, more acceptable in
+the view of his Maker than the lying praise of many a hypocrite who,
+having enthroned a demon as Lord of the Universe, thinks to conciliate
+his favor by using the phrases which the slaves of Eastern despots are in
+the habit of addressing to their masters. I have had many private
+letters showing the same revolt of reasoning natures against doctrines
+which shock the more highly civilized part of mankind in this nineteenth
+century and are leading to those dissensions which have long shown as
+cracks, and are fast becoming lines of cleavage in some of the largest
+communions of Protestantism.
+
+The principle of heredity has been largely studied since this story was
+written. This tale, like "Elsie Venner," depends for its deeper
+significance on the ante-natal history of its subject. But the story was
+meant to be readable for those who did not care for its underlying
+philosophy. If it fails to interest the reader who ventures upon it, it
+may find a place on an unfrequented bookshelf in common with other
+"medicated novels."
+
+Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of
+rhymesters to which he belongs. I ought not to forget that I too
+introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses; many
+of which had better not have been written, and would not be reprinted
+now, but for the fact that they have established a right to a place among
+my poems in virtue of long occupancy. Besides, although the writing of
+verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I cannot forget that Joseph
+Story and George Bancroft each published his little book, of rhymes, and
+that John Quincy Adams has left many poems on record, the writing of
+which did not interfere with the vast and important labors of his
+illustrious career.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891.
+O. W. H.
+
+ THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AN ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the "State Banner and Delphian
+Oracle," published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the principal centres
+in a thriving river-town of New England, contained an advertisement which
+involved the story of a young life, and stained the emotions of a small
+community. Such faces of dismay, such shaking of heads, such gatherings
+at corners, such halts of complaining, rheumatic wagons, and dried-up,
+chirruping chaises, for colloquy of their still-faced tenants, had not
+been known since the rainy November Friday, when old Malachi Withers was
+found hanging in his garret up there at the lonely house behind the
+poplars.
+
+The number of the "Banner and Oracle" which contained this advertisement
+was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to which it belonged.
+Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of the date referred to will
+show the reader what kind of entertainment the paper was accustomed to
+furnish its patrons, and also serve some incidental purposes of the
+writer in bringing into notice a few personages who are to figure in this
+narrative.
+
+The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular
+subscribers,--"B. Gridley, Esq." The sarcastic annotations at various
+points, enclosed in brackets and italicised that they may be
+distinguished from any other comments, were taken from the pencilled
+remarks of that gentleman, intended for the improvement of a member of
+the family in which he resided, and are by no means to be attributed to
+the harmless pen which reproduces them.
+
+Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons acquainted
+with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a schoolmaster, a
+college tutor, and afterwards for many years professor,--a man of
+learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be
+found, except in old, unmarried students,--the double flowers of college
+culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the life of
+the race all funded in the individual. Being a man of letters, Byles
+Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of the
+good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known
+much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the
+importance they attached to their little local concerns. He was, of
+course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural observers
+and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
+not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
+together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
+characters of a real-life stock company.
+
+The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
+worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire, whose
+handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored lithograph,
+representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed willow--hung
+in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental parlor. Her
+household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of age, of whom
+more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon her doorstep
+when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken in for the
+night, kept for a week, and always thereafter cherished by the good soul
+as her own; also of Miss Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the
+"Academy" in another part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding
+with her.
+
+What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
+guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly to
+hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of the
+old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not believe a
+word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as to growl to
+himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the way about it.
+
+The leading article of the "Banner and Oracle" for June 18th must have
+been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked, several of the
+"metropolitan" journals of the date of June 15th and thereabout had
+evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some of his ideas before
+he gave them to the public. The Foreign News by the Europa at Halifax,
+15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions the type of the office
+could supply. More battles! The Allies victorious! The King and
+General Cialdini beat the Austrians at Palestro! 400 Austrians drowned
+in a canal! Anti-French feeling in Germany! Allgermine Zeiturg talks of
+conquest of Allsatia and Loraine and the occupation of Paris! [Vicious
+digs with a pencil through the above proper names.] Race for the Derby
+won by Sir Joseph Hawley's Musjid! [That's what England cares for!
+Hooray for the Darby! Italy be deedeed!] Visit of Prince Alfred to the
+Holy Land. Letter from our, own Correspondent. [Oh! Oh! A West
+Minkville?] Cotton advanced. Breadstuffs declining.--Deacon Rumrill's
+barn burned down on Saturday night. A pig missing; supposed to have
+"fallen a prey to the devouring element." [Got roasted.] A yellow
+mineral had been discovered on the Doolittle farm, which, by the report
+of those who had seen it, bore a strong resemblance to California gold
+ore. Much excitement in the neighborhood in consequence [Idiots! Iron
+pyrites!] A hen at Four Corners had just laid an egg measuring 7 by 8
+inches. Fetch on your biddies! [Editorial wit!] A man had shot an eagle
+measuring six feet and a half from tip to tip of his wings.--Crops
+suffering for want of rain [Always just so. "Dry times, Father Noah!"]
+The editors had received a liberal portion of cake from the happy couple
+whose matrimonial union was recorded in the column dedicated to Hymen.
+Also a superior article of [article of! bah!] steel pen from the
+enterprising merchant [shopkeeper] whose advertisement was to be found on
+the third page of this paper.--An interesting Surprise Party [cheap
+theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on Thursday evening last at the house
+of the Rev. Mr. Stoker. The parishioners had donated [donated! GIVE is
+a good word enough for the Lord's Prayer. DONATE our daily bread!] a bag
+of meal, a bushel of beans, a keg of pickles, and a quintal of salt-fish.
+The worthy pastor was much affected, etc., etc. [Of course. Call'em.
+SENSATION parties and done with it!] The Rev. Dr. Pemberton and the
+venerable Dr. Hurlbut honored the occasion with their presence.--We learn
+that the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, rector of St. Bartholomew's Chapel, has
+returned from his journey, and will officiate to-morrow.
+
+Then came strings of advertisements, with a luxuriant vegetation of
+capitals and notes of admiration. More of those PRIME GOODS! Full
+Assortments of every Article in our line! [Except the one thing you
+want!] Auction Sale. Old furniture, feather-beds, bed-spreads [spreads!
+ugh!], setts [setts!] crockery-ware, odd vols., ullage bbls. of this and
+that, with other household goods, etc., etc., etc.,--the etceteras
+meaning all sorts of insane movables, such as come out of their
+bedlam-holes when an antiquated domestic establishment disintegrates
+itself at a country "vandoo."--Several announcements of "Feed," whatever
+that may be,--not restaurant dinners, anyhow,--also of "Shorts,"--terms
+mysterious to city ears as jute and cudbear and gunnybags to such as
+drive oxen in the remote interior districts.--Then the marriage column
+above alluded to, by the fortunate recipients of the cake. Right
+opposite, as if for matrimonial ground-bait, a Notice that Whereas my
+wife, Lucretia Babb, has left my bed and board, I will not be
+responsible, etc., etc., from this date.--Jacob Penhallow (of the late
+firm Wibird and Penhallow) had taken Mr. William Murray Bradshaw into
+partnership, and the business of the office would be carried on as usual
+under the title Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law. Then came the
+standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut,
+the medical patriarch of the town and his son. Following this, hideous
+quack advertisements, some of them with the certificates of Honorables,
+Esquires, and Clergymen.--Then a cow, strayed or stolen from the
+subscriber.--Then the advertisement referred to in our first paragraph:
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD has been missing from her home in this place since Thursday
+morning, June 16th. She is fifteen years old, tall and womanly for her
+age, has dark hair and eyes, fresh complexion, regular features, pleasant
+smile and voice, but shy with strangers. Her common dress was a black and
+white gingham check, straw hat, trimmed with green ribbon. It is feared
+she may have come to harm in some way, or be wandering at large in a
+state of temporary mental alienation. Any information relating to the
+missing child will be gratefully received and properly rewarded by her
+afflicted aunt,
+
+MISS SILENCE WITHERS, Residing at the Withers Homestead, otherwise known
+as "The Poplars," in this village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GREAT EXCITEMENT
+
+The publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village
+fever of the last two days to its height. Myrtle Hazard's disappearance
+had been pretty well talked round through the immediate neighborhood, but
+now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry had not found her, and
+the alarm was so great that the young girl's friends were willing to
+advertise her in a public journal, it was clear that the gravest
+apprehensions were felt and justified. The paper carried the tidings to
+many who had not heard it. Some of the farmers who had been busy all the
+week with their fields came into the village in their wagons on Saturday,
+and there first learned the news, and saw the paper, and the placards
+which were posted up, and listened, open-mouthed, to the whole story.
+
+Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and some
+stir in the neighboring settlements. Of course there was a great variety
+of comment, its character depending very much on the sense, knowledge,
+and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young people who talked
+over the painful and mysterious occurrence.
+
+The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest. Nurse
+Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl when she
+was a little bright-eyed child, handed over "the baby" she was holding to
+another attendant, and got on her things to go straight up to The
+Poplars. She had been holding "the baby" these forty years and more, but
+somehow it never got to be more than a month or six weeks old. She
+reached The Poplars after much toil and travail. Mistress Fagan, Irish,
+house-servant, opened the door, at which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as
+she was in the habit of doing at the doors of those who sent for her.
+
+"Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?" asked Nurse Byloe.
+
+"Niver a blissed word," said she. "Miss Withers is upstairs with Miss
+Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'. Miss Badlam's in the parlor. The
+men has been draggin' the pond. They have n't found not one thing, but
+only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the gray cat,--it's
+them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied round her neck and
+then drownded her." [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had a snarl of similar
+string in his pocket.]
+
+Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor. A woman was sitting
+there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself with the
+blackest of black fans.
+
+"Nuss Byloe, is that you? Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you, though
+we 're all in trouble. Set right down, Nuss, do. Oh, it's dreadful
+times!"
+
+A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was here
+called on for its function.
+
+Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of those
+soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so fearfully
+like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they flatten
+under the subsiding person.
+
+The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin of
+Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at
+intervals for some years. She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more
+or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course
+she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with women.
+She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her locks
+somewhat of late years. Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a
+quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave the
+impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very
+possibly, crafty person.
+
+"I could n't help comin'," said Nurse Byloe, "we do so love our
+babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?"
+
+The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive
+pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech.
+
+"I never tended children as you have, Nuss," she said. "But I 've known
+Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she should
+have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above all things and
+desperately wicked,'"--and she wept.
+
+"Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?" said Nurse Byloe. "Y' don't think
+anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?"
+
+"Child!" said Cynthia Badlam,--"child enough to wear this very gown I
+have got on and not find it too big for her neither." [It would have
+pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]
+
+The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange of
+intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty.
+Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the
+conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead
+to it as to the music of the spheres.
+
+Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together, through
+whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb growths of thought
+ripened in both their souls into articulate speech, consentingly, as the
+movement comes after the long stillness of a Quaker meeting.
+
+Their lips opened at the same moment. "You don't mean"--began Nurse
+Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.
+
+"They need n't drag the pond," she said. "They need n't go beating the
+woods as if they were hunting a patridge,--though for that matter Myrtle
+Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a pullet.
+Nothing ever took hold of that girl,--not catechising, nor advising, nor
+punishing. It's that dreadful will of hers never was broke. I've always
+been afraid that she would turn out a child of wrath. Did y' ever watch
+her at meetin' playing with posies and looking round all the time of the
+long prayer? That's what I've seen her do many and many a time. I'm
+afraid--Oh dear! Miss Byloe, I'm afraid to say--what I'm afraid of. Men
+are so wicked, and young girls are full of deceit and so ready to listen
+to all sorts of artful creturs that take advantage of their ignorance and
+tender years." She wept once more, this time with sobs that seemed
+irrepressible.
+
+"Dear suz!" said the nurse, "I won't believe no sech thing as wickedness
+about Myrtle Hazard. You mean she's gone an' run off with some
+good-for-nothin' man or other? If that ain't what y' mean, what do y'
+mean? It can't be so, Miss Badlam: she's one o' my babies. At any rate,
+I handled her when she fust come to this village,--and none o' my babies
+never did sech a thing. Fifteen year old, and be bringin' a whole family
+into disgrace! If she was thirty year old, or five-an'-thirty or more,
+and never'd had a chance to be married, and if one o' them artful creturs
+you was talkin' of got hold of her, then, to be sure,--why, dear
+me!--law! I never thought, Miss Badlam!--but then of course you could
+have had your pickin' and choosin' in the time of it; and I don't mean to
+say it's too late now if you felt called that way, for you're better
+lookin' now than some that's younger, and there's no accountin' for
+tastes."
+
+A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia
+Badlam dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her
+slightly indiscreet personality much better by her explanations. She
+stopped short, and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden lady
+sitting before her with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes, and one
+hand clenching the arm of the reeking-chair, as if some spasm had clamped
+it there. The nurse looked at her with a certain growing interest she
+had never felt before. It was the first time for some years that she had
+had such a chance, partly because Miss Cynthia had often been away for
+long periods,--partly because she herself had been busy professionally.
+There was no occasion for her services, of course, in the family at The
+Poplars; and she was always following round from place to place after
+that everlasting migratory six-weeks or less old baby.
+
+There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle of
+fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe fixed on
+Cynthia Badlam. The silver threads in the side fold of hair, the
+delicate lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing down at the
+angle of the mouth,--almost imperceptible, but the nurse dwelt upon
+it,--a certain moulding of the features as of an artist's clay model
+worked by delicate touches with the fingers, showing that time or pain or
+grief had had a hand in shaping them, the contours, the adjustment of
+every fold of the dress, the attitude, the very way of breathing, were
+all passed through the searching inspection of the ancient expert,
+trained to know all the changes wrought by time and circumstance. It
+took not so long as it takes to describe it, but it was an analysis of
+imponderables, equal to any of Bunsen's with the spectroscope.
+
+Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive, questioning
+way, in her turn, upon the nurse.
+
+"It's dreadful close here,--I'm 'most smothered," Nurse Byloe said; and,
+putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the necklace of
+gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,--a bead having been added
+from time to time as she thickened. It lay in a deep groove of her large
+neck, and had not troubled her in breathing before, since the day when
+her husband was run over by an ox-team.
+
+At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba
+Stoker, daughter of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence, and
+consult with her as to what further search they should institute. The
+two, Myrtle's aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could well be.
+Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a shadowy,
+pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the habitual look of
+the people in the funeral carriage which follows next to the hearse, and
+the tone in speaking that may be noticed in a household where one of its
+members is lying white and still in a cool, darkened chamber overhead.
+Bathsheba Stoker was not called handsome; but she had her mother's
+youthful smile, which was so fresh and full of sweetness that she seemed
+like a beauty while she was speaking or listening; and she could never be
+plain so long as any expression gave life to her features. In perfect
+repose, her face, a little prematurely touched by sad experiences,--for
+she was but seventeen years old,--had the character and decision stamped
+in its outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to warn, to
+comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting the
+courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a responsibility.
+She had been trying her powers of consolation on Miss Silence. It was a
+sudden freak of Myrtle's. She had gone off on some foolish but innocent
+excursion. Besides, she was a girl that would take care of herself; for
+she was afraid of nothing, and nimbler than any boy of her age, and
+almost as strong as any. As for thinking any bad thoughts about her,
+that was a shame; she cared for none of the young fellows that were round
+her. Cyprian Eveleth was the one she thought most of; but Cyprian was as
+true as his sister Olive, and who else was there?
+
+To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning, For two
+whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid every
+minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting advice of
+all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course through the two
+nights, and now utterly broken down and collapsed.
+
+Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and hastened
+back to her mother's bedside, which she hardly left, except for the
+briefest of visits.
+
+"It's a great trial, Miss Withers, that's laid on you," said Nurse Byloe.
+
+"If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord," Miss
+Silence answered,--"if I only knew that but if she is living in sin, or
+dead in wrong--doing, what is to become of me?--Oh, what is to become of
+me when 'He maketh inquisition far blood'?"
+
+"Cousin Silence," said Miss Cynthia, "it is n't your fault, if that young
+girl has taken to evil ways. If going to meeting three times every
+Sabbath day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of good
+books, and the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline, could
+have corrected her sinful nature, she would never have run away from a
+home where she enjoyed all these privileges. It's that Indian blood,
+Cousin Silence. It's a great mercy you and I have n't got any of it in
+our veins! What can you expect of children that come from heathens and
+savages? You can't lay it to yourself, Cousin Silence, if Myrtle Hazard
+goes wrong"--
+
+"The Lord will lay it to me,--the Lord will lay it to me," she moaned.
+"Did n't he say to Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?'"
+
+Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face. She had had about enough
+of this talk between the two women. "I hope the Lard 'll take care of
+Myrtle Hazard fust, if she's in trouble, 'n' wants help," she said; "'n'
+then look out for them that comes next. Y' 're too suspicious, Miss
+Badlam; y' 're too easy to believe stories. Myrtle Hazard was as pretty
+a child and as good a child as ever I see, if you did n't rile her; 'n'
+d' d y' ever see one o' them hearty lively children, that had n't a
+sperrit of its own? For my part, I'd rather handle one of 'em than a
+dozen o' them little waxy, weak-eyed, slim-necked creturs that always do
+what they tell 'em to, and die afore they're a dozen year old; and never
+was the time when I've seen Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but
+what it's always been, 'Good mornin', Miss Byloe,' and 'How do you do,
+Miss Byloe? I'm so glad to see you.' The handsomest young woman, too,
+as all the old folks will agree in tellin' you, s'ence the time o' Judith
+Pride that was,--the Pride of the County they used to call her, for her
+beauty. Her great-grandma, y' know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David
+Withers. What I want to know is, whether anything has been heerd, and
+jest what's been done about findin' the poor thing. How d' ye know she
+has n't fell into the river? Have they fired cannon? They say that
+busts the gall of drownded folks, and makes the corpse rise. Have they
+looked in the woods everywhere? Don't believe no wrong of nobody, not
+till y' must,--least of all of them that come o' the same folks, partly,
+and has lived with yo all their days. I tell y', Myrtle Hazard's jest as
+innocent of all what y' 've been thinkin' about,--bless the poor child;
+she's got a soul that's as clean and sweet-well, as a pond-lily when it
+fust opens of a mornin', without a speck on it no more than on the fust
+pond-lily God Almighty ever made!"
+
+That gave a turn to the two women's thoughts, and their handkerchiefs
+went up to their faces. Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on Cynthia
+Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline and every
+light and shadow in her figure. She did not announce any opinion as to
+the age or good looks or general aspect or special points of Miss
+Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write humph! but which real
+folks make with closed lips, thus: m'!--a sort of half-suppressed
+labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there is a good deal which
+might be said, and all the vocal organs want to have a chance at it, if
+there is to be any talking.
+
+Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person that
+came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.
+
+The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers called
+him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
+people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
+village had not been so much older. A man over ninety is a great comfort
+to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme
+outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy
+must get by him before he can come near their camp. Dr. Hurlbut, at
+ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced; but
+the college catalogue showed that he must be seventy-five years old, if,
+as we may suppose, he was twenty at the time of his graduation.
+
+He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of his
+flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his serene
+and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured dignity
+of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an imposing
+personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion demanded it.
+His creed was of the sternest: he was looked up to as a bulwark against
+all the laxities which threatened New England theology. But it was a
+creed rather of the study and of the pulpit than of every-day application
+among his neighbors. He dealt too much in the lofty abstractions which
+had always such fascinations for the higher class of New England divines,
+to busy himself as much as he might have done with the spiritual
+condition of individuals. He had also a good deal in him of what he used
+to call the Old Man, which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in
+putting off,--meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as
+much as the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and
+tending to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.
+
+In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
+monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all that
+made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house bell. But
+Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of novelty than its
+forefathers. It wants change, and it loves young blood. Polyandry is
+getting to be the normal condition of the Church; and about the time a
+man is becoming a little overripe for the livelier human sentiments, he
+may be pretty sure the women are looking round to find him a colleague.
+In this way it was that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the
+colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.
+
+If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces--the charity,
+the sweetness of disposition, the humility--of Father Pemberton, he would
+have found a small remnant of the "Old Man," as the good clergyman would
+have called it, which was never in harmony with the Rev. Mr. Stoker. The
+younger divine felt his importance, and made his venerable colleague feel
+that he felt it. Father Pemberton had a fair chance at rainy Sundays and
+hot summer-afternoon services; but the junior pushed him aside without
+ceremony whenever he thought there was like to be a good show in the
+pews. As for those courtesies which the old need, to soften the sense of
+declining faculties and failing attractions, the younger pastor bestowed
+them in public, but was negligent of them, to say the least, when not on
+exhibition.
+
+Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man, but he would not hate
+him, and he never complained to him or of him. It would have been of no
+use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the Rev. Mr. Stoker;
+and when the women run after a minister or a doctor, what do the men
+signify?
+
+Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess. He
+was not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his hair
+smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent, plausible, had a
+gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of listening to their
+spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife. This is what Byles Gridley
+said; but he was apt to be caustic at times.
+
+Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely. Like Jonathan Edwards,
+like David Osgood, he felt his call to be to study-work, and was
+impatient of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to which,
+especially from the younger females of his flock, his colleague had won
+the hearts of so many of his parishioners. His presence had a wonderful
+effect in restoring the despondent Miss Silence to her equanimity; for
+not all the hard divinity he had preached for half a century had spoiled
+his kindly nature; and not the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to
+welcome death as a refuge from the rage and bitterness of theologians,
+was more in contrast with the disputants with whom he mingled, than the
+old minister, in the hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his
+study, forging thunderbolts to smite down sinners.
+
+It was well that there were no tithing-men about on that next day,
+Sunday; for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a dozen
+miles of the village. They were out on Bear Hill the whole day, beating
+up the bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of their ragged
+nests, and in one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed, growling, bobtailed
+catamount, who sat spitting and looking all ready to spring at them, on
+the tall tree where he clung with his claws unsheathed, until a young
+fellow came up with a gun and shot him dead. They went through and
+through the swamp at Musquash Hollow; but found nothing better than a
+wicked old snapping-turtle, evil to behold, with his snaky head and
+alligator tail, but worse to meddle with, if his horny jaws were near
+enough to spring their man-trap on the curious experimenter. At Wood-End
+there were some Indians, ill-conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making
+baskets, the miracle of which was that they were so clean. They had seen
+a young lady answering the description, about a week ago. She had bought
+a basket. Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell.--Eyes like
+hers (pointing to a squaw with a man's hat on).
+
+At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods,--some who ought
+to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as one might
+well suppose it would. Hunting on a Sabbath day! They did n't mean to
+shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked. A good many said it
+was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away from meeting and have a
+sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work of necessity and mercy, one
+or both.
+
+While they were scattering themselves about in this way, some in earnest,
+some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a little while
+that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like forty atmospheres on
+every true-born Puritan, two young men had been since Friday in search of
+the lost girl, each following a clue of his own, and determined to find
+her if she was among the living.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister Olive
+was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clue to the
+mystery of Myrtle's disappearance.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the great
+seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.
+
+In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of the
+good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes, and wrote
+those touching stanzas, "The Lost Myrtle," which were printed in the next
+"Banner and Oracle," and much admired by many who read them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ANTECEDENTS.
+
+The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town. It was built on
+the east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave the name
+to Oxbow Village. It stood on an elevation, its west gable close to the
+river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the foot of the slope
+behind it, woods at the east, open to the south, with a great row of
+Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the house. The Hon. Selah
+Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the first colonists, built it for
+his own residence, in the early part of the last century. Deeply
+impressed with his importance in the order of things, he had chosen to
+place it a little removed from the cluster of smaller dwellings about the
+Oxbow; and with some vague fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook
+the Rhine and the Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place
+his substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house. Long afterwards a
+bay-window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the
+second story on the west side, so that it looked directly down on the
+river running beneath it. The chamber, thus half suspended in the air,
+had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard; and as the
+boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses, through the
+window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket she fancied in
+those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it a name which became
+current among the young people, and indeed furnished to Gifted Hopkins
+the subject of one of his earliest poems, to wit, "The Fire-hang-bird's
+Nest."
+
+If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers
+Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late years,
+we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital antecedents. It is
+by no means certain that our individual personality is the single
+inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. Nay, there is recorded an
+experience of one of the living persons mentioned in this narrative,--to
+be given in full in its proper place, which, so far as it is received in
+evidence, tends to show that some, at least, who have long been dead, may
+enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in
+these bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering
+exclusively our own. There are many circumstances, familiar to common
+observers, which favor this belief to a certain extent. Thus, at one
+moment we detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
+characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or
+others. There are times when our friends do not act like themselves, but
+apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own proper
+nature. We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us.
+Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in. No less than eight
+distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a single female
+mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable authority. In this
+light we may perhaps see the meaning of a sentence, from a work which
+will be repeatedly referred to in this narrative, viz.: "This body in
+which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a
+private carriage, but an omnibus."
+
+The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their faith
+before they were known as Puritans. The record was obscure in some
+points; but the portrait, marked "Ann Holyoake, burned by ye bloudy
+Papists, ano 15.." (figures illegible), was still hanging against the
+panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The Poplars. The
+following words were yet legible on the canvas: "Thou hast made a
+covenant O Lord with mee and my Children forever."
+
+The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a prayer
+she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled. There had
+always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of her descendants
+could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this solemn "covenant."
+
+There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
+spirit exercised a kind of supervision over her descendants; that she
+either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them, from
+time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast his lot
+with the emigrants,--of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the third
+generation, when the Indians were about to attack the settlement where
+she lived,--and of another, just before he was killed at Quebec.
+
+There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann Holyoake,
+as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of Myrtle's mother.
+Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition more readily on this
+account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the guardian spirit which
+had watched over her ancestors was often near her, and would be with her
+in her time of need.
+
+The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of that
+delusion. A careless expression in one of her letters, that "ye Parson
+was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em," had got
+abroad, and given great offence to godly people. There was no doubt that
+some odd "manifestations," as they would be called nowadays, had taken
+place in the household when she was a girl, and that she presented many
+of the conditions belonging to what are at the present day called
+mediums.
+
+Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
+loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings, and
+to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic
+sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court. He loved to wear a
+crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in which the
+village folk used to say he looked as "hahnsome as a piny,"--meaning a
+favorite flower of his, which is better spelt peony, and to which it was
+not unnatural that his admirers should compare him.
+
+If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough have
+sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who would have
+dropped into their places like posts into their holes, asking no
+questions of life, contented, like so many other honest folks, with the
+part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their wardrobe of flesh
+and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing to do but to walk
+across the stage wearing it. But Major Gideon Withers, for some reason
+or other, married a slender, sensitive, nervous, romantic woman, which
+accounted for the fact that his son David, "King David," as he was called
+in his time, had a very different set of tastes from his father, showing
+a turn for literature and sentiment in his youth, reading Young's "Night
+Thoughts," and Thomson's "Seasons," and sometimes in those early days
+writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded just as fine
+to him as Effie and Minnie sound to young people now, as Musidora, as
+Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and Zillah, have all sounded
+to young people in their time,--ashes of roses as they are to us now, and
+as our endearing Scotch diminutives will be to others by and by.
+
+King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was rich,
+and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew too old to
+write love-poems, married the famous beauty before mentioned, Miss Judith
+Pride, and the race came up again in vigor. Their son, Jeremy, took for
+his first wife a delicate, melancholic girl, who matured into a sad-eyed
+woman, and bore him two children, Malachi and Silence.
+
+When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then put on
+a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to Miss
+Virginia Wild, there residing. This lady was said to have a few drops of
+genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain that her cheek
+had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear shows on its warmest
+cheek when it blushes.--Love shuts itself up in sympathy like a
+knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily. All the rest followed in
+due order according to Nature's kindly programme.
+
+Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in
+love with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried her
+to India, where their first and only child was born, and received the
+name of Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics. So her earliest
+impressions,--it would not be exact to call them recollections,--besides
+the smiles of her father and mother, were of dusky faces, of loose white
+raiment, of waving fans, of breezes perfumed with the sweet exhalations
+of sandal-wood, of gorgeous flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas,
+of gliding palanquins, and all the languid luxury of the South. The
+pestilence which has its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far
+from its birth place in these later years, took her father and mother
+away, suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity. A
+relation of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to
+America on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her care, while
+still a mere infant, to her relatives at the old homestead. During the
+long voyage, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her
+consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to have become a part of her
+being. The waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother; and,
+looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with tender
+care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the rhythm of their
+movement became a part of her, almost as much as her own pulse and
+breath.
+
+The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
+predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in
+embryo, waiting to come to maturity. It was as when several grafts,
+bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same
+stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her
+father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned, and
+more or less obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time, before
+the absolute and total result of their several forces had found its
+equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an
+individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting,
+some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held
+mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her hands; but sweet and
+gracious influences were also born with her; and the battle of life was
+to be fought between them, God helping her in her need, and her own free
+choice siding with one or the other. The formal statement of this
+succession of ripening characteristics need not be repeated, but the fact
+must be borne in mind.
+
+This was the child who was delivered into the hands of Miss Silence
+Withers, her mother's half--sister, keeping house with her brother
+Malachi, a bachelor, already called Old Malachi, though hardly entitled
+by his years to such a venerable prefix. Both these persons had
+inherited the predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother. Malachi, the
+chief heir of the family property, was rich, but felt very poor. He
+owned this fine old estate of some hundreds of acres. He had moneys in
+the bank, shares in various companies, wood-lots in the town; and a large
+tract of Western land, the subject of a lawsuit which seemed as if it
+would never be settled, and kept him always uneasy.
+
+Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old house, but nobody knew
+this for a certainty. In spite of his abundant means, he talked much of
+poverty, and kept the household on the narrowest footing of economy. One
+Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and then, did all
+their work; and the only company they saw was Miss Cynthia Badlam, who,
+as a relative, claimed a home with them whenever she was so disposed.
+
+The "little Indian," as Malachi called her, was an awkward accession to
+the family. Silence Withers knew no more about children and their ways
+and wants than if she had been a female ostrich. Thus it was that she
+found it necessary to send for a woman well known in the place as the
+first friend whose acquaintance many of the little people of the town had
+made in this vale of tears.
+
+Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art of handling the
+young of her species with the soft firmness which one may notice in cats
+with their kittens,--more grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing her cubs.
+Myrtle did not know she was held; she only felt she was lifted, and borne
+up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly cloud, and smiled
+accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at home in her arms.
+
+"As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life. But where did them
+black eyes come from? Born in Injy,--that 's it, ain't it? No, it's her
+poor mother's eyes to be sure. Does n't it seem as if there was a kind
+of Injin look to 'em? She'll be a lively one to manage, if I know
+anything about childun. See her clinchin' them little fists!"
+
+This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought her rather severe
+countenance close to the child for inspection of its features. The
+ungracious aspect of the woman and the defiant attitude of the child
+prefigured in one brief instant the history of many long coming years.
+
+It was not a great while before the two parties in that wearing conflict
+of alien lives, which is often called education, began to measure their
+strength against each other. The child was bright, observing, of
+restless activity, inquisitively curious, very hard to frighten, and with
+a will which seemed made for mastery, not submission.
+
+The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was committed was
+disposed to discharge her duty to the girl faithfully and
+conscientiously; but there were two points in her character and belief
+which had a most important bearing on the manner in which she carried out
+her laudable intentions. First, she was one of that class of human
+beings whose one single engrossing thought is their own welfare,--in the
+next world, it is true, but still their own personal welfare. The Roman
+Church recognizes this class, and provides every form of specific to meet
+their spiritual condition. But in so far as Protestantism has thrown out
+works as a means of insuring future safety, these unfortunates are as
+badly off as nervous patients who have no drops, pills, potions, no
+doctors' rules, to follow. Only tell a poor creature what to do, and he
+or she will do it, and be made easy, were it a pilgrimage of a thousand
+miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of boiled ones; but if once
+assured that doing does no good, the drooping Little-faiths are left at
+leisure to worry about their souls, as the other class of weaklings worry
+about their bodies. The effect on character does not seem to be very
+different in the two classes. Metaphysicians may discuss the nature of
+selfishness at their leisure; if to have all her thoughts centring on the
+one point of her own well-being by and by was selfishness, then Silence
+Withers was supremely selfish; and if we are offended with that form of
+egotism, it is no more than ten of the twelve Apostles were, as the
+reader may see by turning to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the twentieth
+chapter and the twenty-fourth verse.
+
+The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
+theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not work
+kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary, developed a
+mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which threatened to end in
+utter lawlessness. Miss Silence started from the approved doctrine, that
+all children are radically and utterly wrong in all their motives,
+feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as they remain subject to their
+natural instincts. It was by the eradication, and not the education, of
+these instincts, that the character of the human being she was moulding
+was to be determined. The first great preliminary process, so soon as the
+child manifested any evidence of intelligent and persistent
+self-determination, was to break her will.
+
+There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the teaching
+of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder nature than his
+own to carry out many of his dogmas to their practical application. He
+wrought in the pure mathematics, so to speak, of theology, and left the
+working rules to the good sense and good feeling of his people.
+
+Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to apply the great
+doctrine, and it came at last in a very trivial way.
+
+"Myrtle does n't want brown bread. Myrtle won't have brown bread. Myrtle
+will have white bread."
+
+"Myrtle is a wicked child. She will have what Aunt Silence says she
+shall have. She won't have anything but brown bread."
+
+Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood mounted to her
+face, the child untied her little "tire," got down from the table, took
+up her one forlorn, featureless doll, and went to bed without her supper.
+The next morning the worthy woman thought that hunger and reflection
+would have subdued the rebellious spirit. So there stood yesterday's
+untouched supper waiting for her breakfast. She would not taste it, and
+it became necessary to enforce that extreme penalty of the law which had
+been threatened, but never yet put in execution. Miss Silence, in
+obedience to what she felt to be a painful duty, without any passion, but
+filled with high, inexorable purpose, carried the child up to the garret,
+and, fastening her so that she could not wander about and hurt herself,
+left her to her repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment when a plaintive
+entreaty for liberty and food should announce that the evil nature had
+yielded and the obdurate will was broken.
+
+The garret was an awful place. All the skeleton-like ribs of the roof
+showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to be trusted
+consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and plaster. A great,
+mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,--it was the chimney, but it
+looked like a horrible cell to put criminals into. The whole place was
+festooned with cobwebs,--not light films, such as the housewife's broom
+sweeps away before they have become a permanent residence, but vast gray
+draperies, loaded with dust, sprinkled with yellow powder from the beams
+where the worms were gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy
+spiders who had, lived there since they were eggs and would leave it for
+unborn spiders who would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long
+after the human tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home. Here
+this little criminal was imprisoned, six, twelve,--tell it not to
+mothers,--eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw her
+hands, a prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
+guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting, but
+sullen and unsubdued. The Irishwoman, poor stupid Kitty Fagan, who had
+no theory of human nature, saw her over the lean shoulders of the
+spinster, and, forgetting all differences of condition and questions of
+authority, rushed to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and, with a
+tempest of passionate tears and kisses, bore her off to her own humble
+realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed from the best stores of
+the house, until there was as much danger from repletion as there had
+been from famine. How the experiment might have ended but for this
+empirical and most unphilosophical interference, there is no saying; but
+it settled the point that the rebellious nature was not to be subjugated
+in a brief conflict.
+
+The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as she
+grew older. At the age of four years she was detected in making a
+cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being reprimanded
+for so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by Father Pemberton,
+who thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows upon the child, and, to
+his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden uprising of weak, foolish,
+grandfatherly feelings, that a mist came over his eyes, and he left out
+his "ninthly" altogether, thereby spoiling the logical sequence of
+propositions which had kept his large forehead knotty for a week.
+
+At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of
+Major Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his
+exalted military office. It was then for the first time that her aunt
+Silence remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and the
+portrait. She had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad colors,
+as was fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but happening one day to
+see a small negro girl peacocking round in a flaming scarlet petticoat,
+she struck for bright colors in her own apparel, and carried her point at
+last. It was as if a ground-sparrow had changed her gray feathers for
+the burning plumage of some tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough
+that Cyprian Eveleth should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her
+little chamber the fire-hang-bird's nest,--using the country boy's
+synonyme for the Baltimore oriole.
+
+At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give new
+meaning to the life of a child.
+
+Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one time,
+but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under their
+influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an extravagance.
+He was growing more and more solitary in his habits, more and more
+negligent of his appearance. He was up late at night, wandering about
+the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his light being seen
+flitting from window to window, the story got about that the old house
+was haunted.
+
+One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the house.
+Her uncle had been gone since the day before. The two women were both
+away at the village. At such times the child took a strange delight in
+exploring all the hiding-places of the old mansion. She had the
+mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the dead and the living all to
+herself. What a fearful kind of pleasure in its silence and loneliness!
+The old clock that Marmaduke Storr made in London more than a hundred
+years ago was clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century. The
+featured moon on its dial had lifted one eye, as if to watch the child,
+as it had watched so many generations of children, while the swinging
+pendulum ticked them along into youth, maturity, gray hairs,
+deathbeds,--ticking through the prayer at the funeral, ticking without
+grief through all the still or noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without
+joy when the smiles and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.
+She looked at herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.
+She pulled aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads
+of the house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it,
+and the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
+like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the
+chisel.
+
+She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
+punishment. A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
+higher than a man's head. Something was hanging from it,--an old
+garment, was it? She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand. She did
+what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
+downstairs with all her might. She rushed out of the door and called to
+the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place. What could be
+done was done, but it was too late.
+
+Uncle Malachi had made away with himself. That was plain on the face of
+thing. In due time the coroner's verdict settled it. It was not so
+strange as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and all the
+country round about. Everybody knew he had money enough, and yet he had
+hanged himself for fear of starving to death.
+
+For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years before,
+leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the exception of a
+certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle Hazard when she
+should arrive at the age of twenty years.
+
+The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event. Its
+depressing influence followed the child to school, where she learned the
+common branches of knowledge. It followed her to the Sabbath-day
+catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the federal headship
+of Adam, and her consequent personal responsibilities, and other
+technicalities which are hardly milk for babes, perhaps as well as other
+children, but without any very profound remorse for what she could not
+help, so far as she understood the matter, any more than her sex or
+stature, and with no very clear comprehension of the phrases which the
+New England followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the
+elementary instruction of young people.
+
+At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract the
+eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom made advances towards
+her acquaintance. But the dreary discipline of the household had sunk
+into her soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for herself,
+which it was hard for friendship to penetrate. Bathsheba Stoker was
+chained to the bedside of an invalid mother. Olive Eveleth, a kind,
+true-hearted girl, belonged to another religious communion; and this
+tended to render their meetings less frequent, though Olive was still her
+nearest friend. Cyprian was himself a little shy, and rather held to
+Myrtle through his sister than by any true intimacy directly with
+herself. Of the other young men of the village Gifted Hopkins was
+perhaps the most fervent of her admirers, as he had repeatedly shown by
+effusions in verse, of which, under the thinnest of disguises, she was
+the object.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young man of
+striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability, had kept his eye on
+her of late; but it was generally supposed that he would find a wife in
+the city, where he was in the habit of going to visit a fashionable
+relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place. She, at any rate,
+understood very well that he meant, to use his own phrase, "to go in for
+a corner lot,"--understanding thereby a young lady with possessions and
+without encumbrances. If the old man had only given his money to Myrtle,
+William Murray Bradshaw would have made sure of her; but she was not
+likely ever to get much of it. Miss Silence Withers, it was understood,
+would probably leave her money as the Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual
+director, should indicate, and it seemed likely that most of it would go
+to a rising educational institution where certain given doctrines were to
+be taught through all time, whether disproved or not, and whether those
+who taught them believed them or not, provided only they would say they
+believed them.
+
+Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she made this
+disposition of her property, or pledged the word of the Church that she
+should have plenary absolution. But she felt that she would be making
+friends in Influential Quarters by thus laying up her treasure, and that
+she would be safe if she had the good-will of the ministers of her sect.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and, though not
+like to inherit much of the family property, was fast growing into a
+large dower of hereditary beauty. Always handsome, her features shaped
+themselves in a finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her figure
+promised a perfect womanly development, and her movements had the grace
+which high-breeding gives the daughter of a queen, and which Nature now
+and then teaches the humblest of village maidens. She could not long
+escape the notice of the lovers and flatterers of beauty, and the time of
+danger was drawing near.
+
+At this period of her life she made two discoveries which changed the
+whole course of her thoughts, and opened for her a new world of ideas and
+possibilities.
+
+Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the garret had been a
+fearful place to think of, and still more to visit. The stories that the
+house was haunted gained in frequency of repetition and detail of
+circumstance. But Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and explored its
+recesses at such times as she could creep among them undisturbed. Hid
+away close under the eaves she found an old trunk covered with dust and
+cobwebs. The mice had gnawed through its leather hinges, and, as it had
+been hastily stuffed full, the cover had risen, and two or three volumes
+had fallen to the floor. This trunk held the papers and books which her
+great-grandmother, the famous beauty, had left behind her, records of the
+romantic days when she was the belle of the county,--storybooks, memoirs,
+novels, and poems, and not a few love-letters,--a strange collection,
+which, as so often happens with such deposits in old families, nobody had
+cared to meddle with, and nobody had been willing to destroy, until at
+last they had passed out of mind, and waited for a new generation to
+bring them into light again.
+
+The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin. Under one of the
+boards which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden an
+old leather mitten. Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of silver
+dollars, and a thumb of gold half-eagles.
+
+Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded
+maiden. The books were hers to read as much as any other's; the gold and
+silver were only a part of that small provision which would be hers by
+and by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself. The tree of
+the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into her lap, and,
+without any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and did eat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.
+
+The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside presentment as
+one will find among five hundred college alumni as they file in
+procession. His strong, squared features, his formidable scowl, his
+solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his positive and as it were
+categorical stride, his slow, precise way of putting a statement, the
+strange union of trampling radicalism in some directions and
+high-stepping conservatism in others, which made it impossible to
+calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his testy ways and his generous
+impulses, his hard judgments and kindly actions, were characteristics
+that gave him a very decided individuality.
+
+He had all the aspects of a man of books. His study, which was the best
+room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was filled with a miscellaneous-looking
+collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had got together
+from the shelves of all the libraries that had been broken up during his
+long life as a scholar. Classics, theology, especially of the
+controversial sort, statistics, politics, law, medicine, science, occult
+and overt, general literature,--almost every branch of knowledge was
+represented. His learning was very various, and of course mixed up,
+useful and useless, new and ancient, dogmatic and rational,--like his
+library, in short; for a library gathered like his is a looking-glass in
+which the owner's mind is reflected.
+
+The common people about the village did not know what to make of such a
+phenomenon. He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
+ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry cases
+into court for quarrelsome neighbors. What was he good for? Not a great
+deal, some of the wiseacres thought,--had "all sorts of sense but common
+sense,"--"smart mahn, but not prahctical." There were others who read
+him more shrewdly. He knowed more, they said, than all the ministers put
+together, and if he'd stan' for Ripresentative they 'd like to vote for
+him,--they hed n't hed a smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire
+Wibird was thar.
+
+They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with that of
+all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real scholar in
+his special line of study,--as all D. D.'s are supposed to be, or they
+would not have been honored with that distinguished title. But Mr. Byles
+Gridley not only had more learning than the deep-sea line of the bucolic
+intelligence could fathom; he had more wisdom also than they gave him
+credit for, even those among them who thought most of his abilities.
+
+In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against those
+of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a reputation as
+"Master" Gridley, that he kept that title even after he had become a
+college tutor and professor. As a tutor he had to deal with many of
+these same boys, and others like them, in the still more vivacious period
+of their early college life. He got rid of his police duties when he
+became a professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as he
+used once to watch them, and learned to read character with a skill which
+might have fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents. But he
+loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the
+market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a vocabulary. So it
+was that he had passed his life in the patient mechanical labor of
+instruction, leaving too many of his instincts and faculties in abeyance.
+
+The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to worldly
+wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed, than it
+does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood
+grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more
+practical than a gerund or a cosine. Master Gridley not only knew a good
+deal of human nature, but he knew how to keep his knowledge to himself
+upon occasion. He understood singularly well the ways and tendencies of
+young people. He was shrewd in the detection of trickery, and very
+confident in those who had once passed the ordeal of his well-schooled
+observing powers. He had no particular tendency to meddle with the
+personal relations of those about him; but if they were forced upon him
+in any way, he was like to see into them at least as quickly as any of
+his neighbors who thought themselves most endowed with practical skill.
+
+In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said a
+little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out to
+pasture. He felt that he had separated himself from human interests, and
+was henceforth to live in his books with the dead, until he should be
+numbered with them himself. He had chosen this quiet village as a place
+where he might pass his days undisturbed, and find a peaceful
+resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel was dry, and the sun
+lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would spread their many-colored
+counterpane over the bed where he would be taking his rest. It sometimes
+came over him painfully that he was never more to be of any importance to
+his fellow-creatures. There was nobody living to whom he was connected
+by any very near ties. He felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose
+house he lived; he sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he
+was not unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great
+consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small
+interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
+sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril
+dilating with ominous intensity of meaning. But he said sadly to
+himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to show
+for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back to his
+Lord.
+
+He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many would
+hold of small significance. Though he had mourned for no lost love, at
+least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the pang of
+parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and
+griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his private urn
+filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes. He was the father of a dead
+book.
+
+Why "Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.," had not met with
+an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating public,
+it would take us too long to inquire in detail. Indeed; he himself was
+never able to account satisfactorily for the state of things which his
+bookseller's account made evident to him. He had read and re-read his
+work; and the more familiar he became with it, the less was he able to
+understand the singular want of popular appreciation of what he could not
+help recognizing as its excellences. He had a special copy of his work,
+printed on large paper and sumptuously bound. He loved to read in this,
+as people read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and
+it might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the
+ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been heard.
+"That's a thought, now, for you!--See Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay's
+Essay printed six years after thus book." "A felicitous image! and so
+everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle had hit upon it."
+"If this is not genuine pathos, where will you find it, I should like to
+know? And nobody to open the book where it stands written but one poor
+old man--in this generation, at least--in this generation!" It may be
+doubted whether he would ever have loved his book with such jealous
+fondness if it had gone through a dozen editions, and everybody was
+quoting it to his face. But now it lived only for him; and to him it was
+wife and child, parent, friend, all in one, as Hector was all in all to
+his spouse. He never tired of it, and in his more sanguine moods he
+looked forward to the time when the world would acknowledge its merits,
+and his genius would find full recognition. Perhaps he was right: more
+than one book which seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has
+had a resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in
+the tombstone memory of antiquaries. Comfort for some of us, dear
+fellow-writer.
+
+It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some means
+of support upon which he could depend. He was economical, if not over
+frugal in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took newspapers
+and reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact being, though
+it was not generally known, that a distant relative had not long before
+died, leaving him a very comfortable property.
+
+His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the late
+legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed into the
+hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw. He had entire
+confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the young man who
+had been recently associated in the business.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his last two names, was
+the son of a lawyer of some note for his acuteness, who marked out his
+calling for him in having him named after the great Lord Mansfield.
+Murray Bradshaw was about twenty-five years old, by common consent
+good-looking, with a finely formed head, a searching eye, and a sharp-cut
+mouth, which smiled at his bidding without the slightest reference to the
+real condition of his feeling at the moment. This was a great
+convenience; for it gave him an appearance of good-nature at the small
+expense of a slight muscular movement which was as easy as winking, and
+deceived everybody but those who had studied him long and carefully
+enough to find that this play of his features was what a watch maker
+would call a detached movement.
+
+He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by hard study as by
+skilful veneering, and had taken great pains to stand well with the
+Faculty, at least one of whom, Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched him with
+no little interest as a man with a promising future, provided he were not
+so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in his excess of
+contrivance. His classmates could not help liking him; as to loving him,
+none of them would have thought of that. He was so shrewd, so keen, so
+full of practical sense, and so good-humored as long as things went on to
+his liking, that few could resist his fascination. He had a way of
+talking with people about what they were interested in, as if it were the
+one matter in the world nearest to his heart. But he was commonly trying
+to find out something, or to produce some impression, as a juggler is
+working at his miracle while he keeps people's attention by his voluble
+discourse and make-believe movements. In his lightest talk he was almost
+always edging towards a practical object, and it was an interesting and
+instructive amusement to watch for the moment at which he would ship the
+belt of his colloquial machinery on to the tight pulley. It was done so
+easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign of it. Master Gridley
+could usually detect the shifting action, but the young man's features
+and voice never betrayed him.
+
+He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as he
+well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and in
+such a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he wished to
+please. He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of life: he was
+not handicapped with any burdensome ideals. He took everything at its
+marked value. He accepted the standard of the street as a final fact for
+to-day, like the broker's list of prices.
+
+His whole plan of life was laid out. He knew that law was the best
+introduction to political life, and he meant to use it for this end. He
+chose to begin his career in the country, so as to feel his way more
+surely and gradually to its ultimate aim; but he had no intention of
+burning his shining talents in a grazing district, however tall its grass
+might grow. His business was not with these stiff-jointed, slow-witted
+graziers, but with the supple, dangerous, far-seeing men who sit scheming
+by the gas-light in the great cities, after all the lamps and candles are
+out from the Merrimac to the Housatonic. Every strong and every weak
+point of those who might probably be his rivals were laid down on his
+charts, as winds and currents and rocks are marked on those of a
+navigator. All the young girls in the country, and not a few in the
+city, with which, as mentioned, he had frequent relations, were on his
+list of possible availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation,
+provided always that their position and prospects were such as would make
+them proper matches for so considerable a person as the future Hon.
+William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old pupil since they had
+resided in the same village. The old professor could not help admiring
+him, notwithstanding certain suspicious elements in his character; for
+after muddy village talk, a clear stream of intelligent conversation was
+a great luxury to the hard-headed scholar. The more he saw of him, the
+more he learned to watch his movements, and to be on his guard in talking
+with him. The old man could be crafty, with all his simplicity, and he
+had found out that under his good-natured manner there often lurked some
+design more or less worth noting, and which might involve other interests
+deserving protection.
+
+For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had of late experienced a
+certain degree of relenting with regard to himself, probably brought
+about by the expressions of gratitude from worthy Mrs. Hopkins for acts
+of kindness to which he himself attached no great value. He had been
+kind to her son Gifted; he had been fatherly with Susan Posey, her
+relative and boarder; and he had shown himself singularly and
+unexpectedly amiable with the little twins who had been adopted by the
+good woman into her household. In fact, ever since these little
+creatures had begun to toddle about and explode their first consonants,
+he had looked through his great round spectacles upon them with a decided
+interest; and from that time it seemed as if some of the human and social
+sentiments which had never leafed or flowered in him, for want of their
+natural sunshine, had begun growing up from roots which had never lost
+their life. His liking for the twins may have been an illustration of
+that singular law which old Dr. Hurlbut used to lay down, namely, that at
+a certain period of life, say from fifty to sixty and upward, the
+grand-paternal instinct awakens in bachelors, the rhythms of Nature
+reaching them in spite of her defeated intentions; so that when men marry
+late they love their autumn child with a twofold affection,--father's and
+grandfather's both in one.
+
+However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles Gridley was
+beginning to take a part in his neighbors' welfare and misfortunes, such
+as could hardly have been expected of a man so long lost in his books and
+his scholastic duties. And among others, Myrtle Hazard had come in for a
+share of his interest. He had met her now and then in her walks to and
+from school and meeting, and had been taken with her beauty and her
+apparent unconsciousness of it, which he attributed to the forlorn kind
+of household in which she had grown up. He had got so far as to talk
+with her now and then, and found himself puzzled, as well he might be, in
+talking with a girl who had been growing into her early maturity in
+antagonism with every influence that surrounded her.
+
+"Love will reach her by and by," he said, "in spite of the dragons up at
+the den yonder.
+
+ "'Centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat
+ Argus, et hos unus saepe fefellit amor.'"
+
+But there was something about Myrtle,--he hardly knew whether to call it
+dignity, or pride, or reserve, or the mere habit of holding back brought
+about by the system of repression under which she had been
+educated,--which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance. Yet he
+was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment that he might
+be able to help her some day, and that very probably she would want his
+help; for she was alone in the world, except for the dragons, and sure to
+be assailed by foes from without and from within.
+
+He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his conversations with
+Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself never introduced it, of course the
+young man must have forced it, as conjurers force a card, and with some
+special object. This set him thinking hard; and, as a result of it, he
+determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her name up to set him
+talking.
+
+So he talked, not suspecting how carefully the old man listened.
+
+"It was a demonish hard case," he said, "that old Malachi had left his
+money as he did. Myrtle Hazard was going to be the handsomest girl
+about, when she came to her beauty, and she was coming to it mighty fast.
+If they could only break that will, but it was no use trying. The
+doctors said he was of sound mind for at least two years after making it.
+If Silence Withers got the land claim, there'd be a pile, sure enough.
+Myrtle Hazard ought to have it. If the girl had only inherited that
+property--whew? She'd have been a match for any fellow. That old
+Silence Withers would do just as her minister told her,--even chance
+whether she gives it to the Parson-factory, or marries Bellamy Stoker,
+and gives it to him after his wife's dead. He'd take it if he had to take
+her with it. Earn his money, hey, Master Gridley?"
+
+"Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker?" said Mr. Gridley, smiling.
+
+"Think well of him? Too fond of using the Devil's pitchfork for my
+fancy! Forks over pretty much all the world but himself and his lot
+into--the bad place, you know; and toasts his own cheese with it with
+very much the same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in that
+business. Besides, he has a weakness for pretty saints--and sinners.
+That's an odd name he has. More belle amie than Joseph about him, I
+rather guess!"
+
+The old professor smiled again. "So you don't think he believes all the
+mediaeval doctrines he is in the habit of preaching, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen described
+somewhere. 'There are those who hold the opinion that truth is only safe
+when diluted,--about one fifth to four fifths lies,--as the oxygen of the
+air is with its nitrogen. Else it would burn us all up.'"
+
+Byles Gridley colored and started a little. This was one of his own
+sayings in "Thoughts on the Universe." But the young man quoted it
+without seeming to suspect its authorship.
+
+"Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"I don't remember. Some paper, I rather think. It's one of those good
+things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em. Sounds like
+Coleridge."
+
+"That's what I call a compliment worth having," said Byles Gridley to
+himself, when he got home. "Let me look at that passage."
+
+He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and got so much interested,
+reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell, and
+Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down to tea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TWINS.
+
+Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that tea
+was waiting. He rather liked Susan Posey. She was a pretty creature,
+slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the second or
+third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the kind of girl
+that very young men are apt to remember as their first love. She had a
+taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but, what was better, she
+was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and mother and grandmother to
+the two little forlorn twins who had been stranded on the Widow Hopkins's
+doorstep.
+
+These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three years
+old. A few words will make us acquainted with them. Nothing had ever
+been known of their origin. The sharp eyes of all the spinsters had been
+through every household in the village and neighborhood, and not a
+suspicion fixed itself on any one. It was a dark night when they were
+left; and it was probable that they had been brought from another town,
+as the sound of wheels had been heard close to the door where they were
+found, had stopped for a moment, then been heard again, and lost in the
+distance.
+
+How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
+briefly mentioned. At first nobody thought they would live a day, such
+little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem. But the young doctor
+came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in cotton-wool,
+and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-teaspoonfuls of milk
+given them, and after being kept alive in this way, like the young of
+opossums and kangaroos, they came to a conclusion about which they did
+not seem to have made up their thinking-pulps for some weeks, namely, to
+go on trying to cross the sea of life by tugging at the four-and-twenty
+oars which must be pulled day and night until the unknown shore is
+reached, and the oars lie at rest under the folded hands.
+
+As it was not very likely that the parents who left their offspring round
+on doorsteps were of saintly life, they were not presented for baptism
+like the children of church-members. Still, they must have names to be
+known by, and Mrs. Hopkins was much exercised in the matter. Like many
+New England parents, she had a decided taste for names that were
+significant and sonorous. That which she had chosen for her oldest
+child, the young poet, was either a remarkable prophecy, or it had
+brought with it the endowments it promised. She had lost, or, in her own
+more pictorial language, she had buried, a daughter to whom she had given
+the names, at once of cheerful omen and melodious effect, Wealthy
+Amadora.
+
+As for them poor little creturs, she said, she believed they was rained
+down out o' the skies, jest as they say toads and tadpoles come. She
+meant to be a mother to 'em for all that, and give 'em jest as good names
+as if they was the governor's children, or the minister's. If Mr.
+Gridley would be so good as to find her some kind of a real handsome
+Chris'n name for 'em, she'd provide 'em with the other one. Hopkinses
+they shall be bred and taught, and Hopkinses they shall be called. Ef
+their father and mother was ashamed to own 'em, she was n't. Couldn't
+Mr. Gridley pick out some pooty sounding names from some of them great
+books of his. It's jest as well to have 'em pooty as long as they don't
+cost any more than if they was Tom and Sally.
+
+A grim smile passed over the rugged features of Byles Gridley. "Nothing
+is easier than that, Mrs. Hopkins," he said. "I will give you two very
+pretty names that I think will please you and other folks. They're new
+names, too. If they shouldn't like to keep them, they can change them
+before they're christened, if they ever are. Isosceles will be just the
+name for the boy, and I'm sure you won't find a prettier name for the
+girl in a hurry than Helminthia."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two
+names, which were forthwith adopted. As they were rather long for common
+use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms of Sossy and
+Minthy, under which designation the babes began very soon to thrive
+mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of little sinners at
+a great rate, and growing as if they were put out at compound interest.
+
+This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
+Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by Miss
+Susan Posey.
+
+"I am coming, my dear," he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
+Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from the
+delicious page he was reading. It was not the living child that was
+kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a trivial
+use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.
+
+Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his eye
+was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of papers.
+Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him. Could that be a
+copy of "Thoughts on the Universe"? He watched his opportunity, and got
+a hurried sight of the volume. His own treatise, sure enough! Leaves
+Uncut. Opened of itself to the one hundred and twentieth page. The
+axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he did not remember from
+what,--"sounded like Coleridge"--was staring him in the face from that
+very page. When he remembered how he had pleased himself with that
+compliment the other day, he blushed like a school-girl; and then,
+thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his forgotten book, pick out a
+phrase or two from it, and play on his weakness with it, to win his good
+opinion,--for what purpose he did not know, but doubtless to use him in
+some way,--he grinned with a contempt about equally divided between
+himself and the young schemer.
+
+"Ah ha!" he muttered scornfully. "Sounds like Coleridge, hey? Niccolo
+Macchiavelli Bradshaw!"
+
+From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
+even more suspicion than before. Yet he would not forego his company and
+conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and this
+trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way of
+flattering his brother plenipotentiary. Who could say? Some time or
+other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty with just
+such a trick. Shallower men than he had gone out as ministers of the
+great Republic. At any rate, the fellow was worth watching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE USE OF SPECTACLES.
+
+The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he lived
+for knowing everything that was going on. He rather enjoyed it; and
+sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted landlady and
+her boarders with the unaccountable results of his sagacity. One thing
+was quite beyond her comprehension. She was perfectly sure that Mr.
+Gridley could see out of the back of his head, just as other people see
+with their natural organs. Time and again he had told her what she was
+doing when his back was turned to her, just as if he had been sitting
+squarely in front of her. Some laughed at this foolish notion; but
+others, who knew more of the nebulous sciences, told her it was like's
+not jes' so. Folks had read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their
+stomachs, 'n' why should n't they see out o' the backs o' their heads?
+
+Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs.
+Hopkins; and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of so
+simple a matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of knowing all
+there is in it,--not quite yet, however, of knowing all that came of it.
+It was not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs. Felix Lorraine and
+other dangerous historical personages have so long made use of. It was
+nothing but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair of formidable spectacles
+with large round glasses. He had often noticed the reflection of objects
+behind him when they caught their images at certain angles, and had got
+the habit of very often looking at the reflecting surface of one or the
+other of the glasses, when he seemed to be looking through them. It put
+a singular power into his possession, which might possibly hereafter lead
+to something more significant than the mystification of the Widow
+Hopkins.
+
+A short time before Myrtle Hazard's disappearance, Mr. Byles Gridley had
+occasion to call again at the office of Penhallow and Bradshaw on some
+small matter of business of his own. There were papers to look over, and
+he put on his great round-glassed spectacles. He and Mr. Penhallow sat
+down at the table, and Mr. Bradshaw was at a desk behind them. After
+sitting for a while, Mr. Penhallow seemed to remember something he had
+meant to attend to, for he said all at once: "Excuse me, Mr. Gridley.
+Mr. Bradshaw, if you are not busy, I wish you would look over this bundle
+of papers. They look like old receipted bills and memoranda of no
+particular use; but they came from the garret of the Withers place, and
+might possibly have something that would be of value. Look them over,
+will you, and see whether there is anything there worth saving."
+
+The young man took the papers, and Mr. Penhallow sat down again at the
+table with Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+This last-named gentleman felt just then a strong impulse to observe the
+operations of Murray Bradshaw. He could not have given any very good
+reason for it, any more than any of us can for half of what we do.
+
+"I should like to examine that conveyance we were speaking of once more,"
+said he. "Please to look at this one in the mean time, will you, Mr.
+Penhallow?"
+
+Master Gridley held the document up before him. He did not seem to find
+it quite legible, and adjusted his spectacles carefully, until they were
+just as he wanted them. When he had got them to suit himself, sitting
+there with his back to Murray Bradshaw, he could see him and all his
+movements, the desk at which he was standing, and the books in the
+shelves before him,--all this time appearing as if he were intent upon
+his own reading.
+
+The young man began in a rather indifferent way to look over the papers.
+He loosened the band round them, and took them up one by one, gave a
+careless glance at them, and laid them together to tie up again when he
+had gone through them. Master Gridley saw all this process, thinking
+what a fool he was all the time to be watching such a simple proceeding.
+Presently he noticed a more sudden movement: the young man had found
+something which arrested his attention, and turned his head to see if he
+was observed. The senior partner and his client were both apparently
+deep in their own affairs. In his hand Mr. Bradshaw held a paper folded
+like the others, the back of which he read, holding it in such a way that
+Master Gridley saw very distinctly three large spots of ink upon it, and
+noticed their position. Murray Bradshaw took another hurried glance at
+the two gentlemen, and then quickly opened the paper. He ran it over
+with a flash of his eye, folded it again, and laid it by itself. With
+another quick turn of his head, as if to see whether he were observed or
+like to be, he reached his hand out and took a volume down from the
+shelves. In this volume he shut the document, whatever it was, which he
+had just taken out of the bundle, and placed the book in a very silent
+and as it were stealthy way back in its place. He then gave a look at
+each of the other papers, and said to his partner: "Old bills, old
+leases, and insurance policies that have run out. Malachi seems to have
+kept every scrap of paper that had a signature to it."
+
+"That 's the way with the old misers, always," said Mr. Penhallow.
+
+Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,--or
+pretending to read it. He took off his spectacles.
+
+"We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow." Then
+turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,
+
+ "'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
+ Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
+ Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat'
+
+"You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly as
+if he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man
+steadily, but with out betraying any suspicion. His old habits as a
+teacher made that easy.
+
+Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on his
+cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
+excitement.
+
+"Something is going on inside there," the old man said to himself. He
+waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw got up
+and left the office. As soon as he and the senior partner were alone,
+Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in his library.
+There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis,--the
+fine Elzevir edition of 1664. It was bound in parchment, and thus
+readily distinguishable at a glance from all the books round it. Now Mr.
+Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar, and knew and cared very little
+about the civil law. He had fallen in with this book at an auction, and
+bought it to place in his shelves with the other "properties" of the
+office, because it would look respectable. Anything shut up in one of
+those two octavos might stay there a lifetime without Mr. Penhallow's
+disturbing it; that Master Gridley knew, and of course the young man knew
+it too.
+
+We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in the
+lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the knight's
+zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to ourselves we
+are not after the thing coveted. Put a lump of sugar in a canary-bird's
+cage, and the small creature will illustrate the instinct for the benefit
+of inquirers or sceptics. Byles Gridley went to the other side of the
+room and took a volume of Reports from the shelves. He put it back and
+took a copy of "Fearne on Contingent Remainders," and looked at that for
+a moment in an idling way, as if from a sense of having nothing to do.
+Then he drew the back of his forefinger along the books on the shelf, as
+if nothing interested him in them, and strolled to the shelf in front of
+the desk at which Murray Bradshaw had stood. He took down the second
+volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over mechanically,
+as if in search of some title, and replaced it.
+
+He looked round for a moment. Mr. Penhallow was writing hard at his
+table, not thinking of him, it was plain enough. He laid his hand on the
+FIRST volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis. There was a document shut up
+in it. His hand was on the book, whether taking it out or putting it
+back was not evident, when the door opened and Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw entered.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Gridley," he said, "you are not studying the civil law, are
+you?" He strode towards him as he spoke, his face white, his eyes fixed
+fiercely on him.
+
+"It always interests me, Mr. Bradshaw," he answered, "and this is a fine
+edition of it. One may find a great many valuable things in the Corpus
+Juris Civilis."
+
+He looked impenetrable, and whether or not he had seen more than Mr.
+Bradshaw wished him to see, that gentleman could not tell. But there
+stood the two books in their place, and when, after Master Gridley had
+gone, he looked in the first volume, there was the document he had shut
+up in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MYRTLE'S LETTER--THE YOUNG MEN'S PURSUIT.
+
+"You know all about it, Olive?" Cyprian Eveleth said to his sister, after
+a brief word of greeting.
+
+"Know of what, Cyprian?"
+
+"Why, sister, don't you know that Myrtle Hazard is missing,--gone!--gone
+nobody knows where, and that we are looking in all directions to find
+her?"
+
+Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment. At the end of that
+moment the story seemed almost old to her. It was a natural ending of
+the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her earliest years.
+When she got large and strong enough, she broke out of jail,--that was
+all. The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or later, whether it is a
+wooden or an iron one. Olive felt as if she had dimly foreseen just such
+a finishing to the tragedy of the poor girl's home bringing-up. Why
+could not she have done something to prevent it? Well,--what shall we do
+now, and as it is?--that is the question.
+
+"Has she left no letter,--no explanation of her leaving in this way?"
+
+"Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows."
+
+"Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter. I
+think we shall."
+
+Olive's sagacity and knowledge of her friend's character had not misled
+her. She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she opened and
+read as here follows:
+
+MY DEAREST OLIVE:--Think no evil of me for what I have done. The
+fire-hang-bird's nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor bird
+is flown.
+
+I can live as I have lived no longer. This place is chilling all the
+life out of me, and I must find another home. It is far, far away, and
+you will not hear from me again until I am there. Then I will write to
+you.
+
+You know where I was born,--under a hot sun and in the midst of strange,
+lovely scenes that I seem still to remember. I must visit them again: my
+heart always yearns for them. And I must cross the sea to get
+there,--the beautiful great sea that I have always longed for and that my
+river has been whispering about to me ever so many years. My life is
+pinched and starved here. I feel as old as aunt Silence, and I am only
+fifteen,--a child she has called me within a few days. If this is to be
+a child, what is it to be a woman?
+
+I love you dearly,--and your brother is almost to me as if he were mine.
+I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,--yes, and the old man that has
+spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to give you
+pain,--to leave you all,--but my way of life is killing me, and I am too
+young to die. I cannot take the comfort with you, my dear friends, that
+I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of ice in my heart, and all
+the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.
+
+I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive. Do you remember
+how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to flee into
+Egypt? I have had a dream like that, Olive. There is an old belief in
+our family that the spirit of one who died many generations ago watches
+over some of her descendants. They say it led our first ancestor to come
+over here when it was a wilderness. I believe it has appeared to others
+of the family in times of trouble. I have had a strange dream at any
+rate, and the one I saw, or thought I saw, told me to leave this place.
+Perhaps I should have stayed if it had not been for that, but it seemed
+like an angel's warning.
+
+Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken. On Monday,
+you may show this letter to my friends, not before. I do not think they
+will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our house. Aunt
+Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the other woman hates me,
+I always thought. Kitty Fagan will cry hard. Tell her perhaps I shall
+come back by and by. There is a little box in my room, with some
+keepsakes marked,--one is for poor Kitty. You can give them to the right
+ones. Yours is with them.
+
+Good-by, dearest. Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday. And if
+you never see me again, remember how much I loved you. Never think
+hardly of me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not know how
+much misery can be crowded into fifteen years of a young girl's life.
+God be with you!
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to Cyprian.
+"Her secret is as safe with you as with me," she said. "But this is
+madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing herself a wrong.
+
+"What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and
+sail for India. It is strange that they have not tracked her. There is
+no time to be lost. She shall not go out into the world in this way,
+child that she is. No; she shall come back, and make her home with us,
+if she cannot be happy with these people. Ours is a happy and a cheerful
+home, and she shall be to me as a younger sister, and your sister too,
+Cyprian. But you must see her; you must leave this very hour; and you
+may find her. Go to your cousin Edward, in Boston, at once; tell him
+your errand, and get him to help you find our poor dear sister. Then
+give her the note I will write, and say I know your heart, Cyprian, and I
+can trust that to tell you what to say."
+
+In a very short time Cyprian Eveleth was on his way to Boston. But
+another, keener even in pursuit than he, was there before him.
+
+Ever since the day when Master Gridley had made that over-curious
+observation of the young lawyer's proceedings at the office, Murray
+Bradshaw had shown a far livelier interest than before in the conditions
+and feelings of Myrtle Hazard. He had called frequently at The Poplars
+to talk over business matters, which seemed of late to require a deal of
+talking. He had been very deferential to Miss Silence, and had wound
+himself into the confidence of Miss Badlam. He found it harder to
+establish any very near relations with Myrtle, who had never seemed to
+care much for any young man but Cyprian Eveleth, and to care for him
+quite as much as Olive's brother as for any personal reason. But he
+carefully studied Myrtle's tastes and ways of thinking and of life, so
+that, by and by, when she should look upon herself as a young woman, and
+not as a girl, he would have a great advantage in making her more
+intimate acquaintance.
+
+Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India. She
+talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes
+which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions. She made
+herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
+swung it between two elms. Here she would lie in the hot summer days,
+and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India had sent
+her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw her into
+day-dreams, which were almost like trances.
+
+These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
+presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned for
+himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue and cry,
+and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away if he could
+help it.
+
+The first fact was this. He found among the copies of the city newspaper
+they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a square had been cut
+out. He procured another copy of this paper of the same date, and found
+that the piece cut out was an advertisement to the effect that the A 1
+Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to sail from Boston for Calcutta, on
+the 20th of June.
+
+The second fact was the following. On the window-sill of her little
+hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some
+threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood.
+They were Myrtle's of course. A simpleton might have constructed a
+tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had cast herself from
+the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had been thrust out after
+a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful
+witness,--and so on. Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder.
+He said nothing about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger,
+and, as soon as he got home, examined them with a magnifier. They had
+been cut off smoothly, as with a pair of scissors. This was part of a
+mass of hair, then, which had been shorn and thrown from the window.
+Nobody would do that but she herself. What would she do it for? To
+disguise her sex, of course. The other inferences were plain enough.
+
+The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and concluded
+that he would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river, and scour the
+woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport town from which
+she would without doubt sail if she had formed the project he thought on
+the whole most probable.
+
+Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to catch
+the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of the
+missing girl nearer home. In the cars he made the most suggestive
+inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly conductor's memory.
+Had any young fellow been on the train within a day or two, who had
+attracted his notice? Smooth, handsome face, black eyes, short black
+hair, new clothes, not fitting very well, looked away when he paid his
+fare, had a soft voice like a woman's,--had he seen anybody answering to
+some such description as this? The gentlemanly conductor had not
+noticed,--was always taking up and setting down way-passengers,--might
+have had such a young man aboard,--there was two or three students one
+day in the car singing college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked
+if they had their tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and, so
+saying, he poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was
+reclining with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
+provoke in lovely woman,--"Fare!"
+
+It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel, where
+they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby, with
+nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and anything but
+clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable and mean, and to
+undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in the office, who, while
+he shoves the book round to you for your name, is making a hasty
+calculation as to how high up he can venture to doom you. But Murray
+Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more than made up for by the
+air and tone which imply the habit of being attended to. The clerk saw
+that in a glance, and, as he looked at the name and address in the book,
+spoke sharply in the explosive dialect of his tribe,--
+
+"Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!"
+
+When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he appeared in
+his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable countenance and
+gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two stories higher, where he
+found himself in a room not much better than a garret, feeling lonely
+enough, for he did not know he had an acquaintance in the same house.
+The two young men were in and out so irregularly that it was not very
+strange that they did not happen to meet each other.
+
+The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in the
+city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward. He was not
+only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and its ways,
+and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives, his own were of
+such intensity that he thought of nothing else by day, and dreamed of
+nothing else by night. He went to work, therefore, in the most
+systematic manner. He first visited the ship Swordfish, lying at her
+wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself that as yet nobody at all
+corresponding to the description of Myrtle Hazard had been seen by any
+person on board. He visited all the wharves, inquiring on every vessel
+where it seemed possible she might have been looking about. Hotels,
+thoroughfares, every place where he might hear of her or meet her, were
+all searched. He took some of the police into his confidence, and had
+half a dozen pairs of eyes besides his own opened pretty widely, to
+discover the lost girl.
+
+On Sunday, the 19th, he got the first hint which encouraged him to think
+he was on the trail of his fugitive. He had gone down again to the wharf
+where the Swordfish, advertised to sail the next day, was lying. The
+captain was not on board, but one of the mates was there, and he
+addressed his questions to him, not with any great hope of hearing
+anything important, but determined to lose no chance, however small. He
+was startled with a piece of information which gave him such an exquisite
+pang of delight that he could hardly keep the usual quiet of his
+demeanor. A youth corresponding to his description of Myrtle Hazard in
+her probable disguise had been that morning on board the Swordfish,
+making many inquires as to the hour at which she was to sail, and who
+were to be the passengers, and remained some time on board, going all
+over the vessel, examining her cabin accommodations, and saying he should
+return to-morrow before she sailed,--doubtless intending to take passage
+in her, as there was plenty of room on board. There could be little
+question, from the description, who this young person was. It was a
+rather delicate--looking, dark--haired youth, smooth-faced, somewhat shy
+and bashful in his ways, and evidently excited and nervous. He had
+apparently been to look about him, and would come back at the last
+moment, just as the vessel was ready to sail, and in an hour or two be
+beyond the reach of inquiry.
+
+Murray Bradshaw returned to his hotel, and, going to his chamber,
+summoned all his faculties in state council to determine what course he
+should follow, now that he had the object of his search certainly within
+reaching distance. There was no danger now of her eluding him; but the
+grave question arose, what was he to do when he stood face to face with
+her. She must not go,--that was fixed. If she once got off in that
+ship, she might be safe enough; but what would become of certain projects
+in which he was interested,--that was the question. But again, she was
+no child, to be turned away from her adventure by cajolery, or by any
+such threats as common truants would find sufficient to scare them back
+to their duty. He could tell the facts of her disguise and the manner of
+her leaving home to the captain of the vessel, and induce him to send her
+ashore as a stray girl, to be returned to her relatives. But this would
+only make her furious with him; and he must not alienate her from
+himself, at any rate. He might plead with her in the name of duty, for
+the sake of her friends, for the good name of the family. She had
+thought all these things over before she ran away. What if he should
+address her as a lover, throw himself at her feet, implore her to pity
+him and give up her rash scheme, and, if things came to the very worst,
+offer to follow her wherever she went, if she would accept him in the
+only relation that would render it possible. Fifteen years old,--he
+nearly ten years older,--but such things had happened before, and this
+was no time to stand on trifles.
+
+He worked out the hypothesis of the matrimonial offer as he would have
+reasoned out the probabilities in a law case he was undertaking.
+
+1. He would rather risk that than lose all hold upon her. The girl was
+handsome enough for his ambitious future, wherever it might carry him.
+She came of an honorable family, and had the great advantage of being
+free from a tribe of disagreeable relatives, which is such a drawback on
+many otherwise eligible parties. To these considerations were to be
+joined other circumstances which we need not here mention, of a nature to
+add greatly to their force, and which would go far of themselves to
+determine his action.
+
+2. How was it likely she would look on such an extraordinary
+proposition? At first, no doubt, as Lady Anne looked upon the advances
+of Richard. She would be startled, perhaps shocked. What then? She
+could not help feeling flattered at such an offer from him,--him, William
+Murray Bradshaw, the rising young man of his county, at her feet, his
+eyes melting with the love he would throw into them, his tones subdued to
+their most sympathetic quality, and all those phrases on his lips which
+every day beguile women older and more discreet than this romantic,
+long-imprisoned girl, whose rash and adventurous enterprise was an
+assertion of her womanhood and her right to dispose of herself as she
+chose. He had not lived to be twenty-five years old without knowing his
+power with women. He believed in himself so thoroughly, that his very
+confidence was a strong promise of success.
+
+3. In case all his entreaties, arguments, and offers made no impression,
+should he make use of that supreme resource, not to be employed save in
+extreme need, but which was of a nature, in his opinion, to shake a
+resolution stronger than this young girl was like to oppose to it? That
+would be like Christian's coming to his weapon called All-prayer, he said
+to himself, with a smile that his early readings of Bunyan should have
+furnished him an image for so different an occasion. The question was
+one he could not settle till the time came,--he must leave it to the
+instinct of the moment.
+
+The next morning found him early waking after a night of feverish dreams.
+He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked down to the
+wharf where the Swordfish was moored. The ship had left the wharf, and
+was lying out in the stream: A small boat had just reached her, and a
+slender youth, as he appeared at that distance, climbed, not
+over-adroitly, up the vessel's side.
+
+Murray Bradshaw called to a boatman near by and ordered the man to row
+him over as fast as he could to the vessel lying in the stream. He had no
+sooner reached the deck of the Swordfish than he asked for the young
+person who had just been put on board.
+
+"He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain," was the
+reply.
+
+His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the
+steps leading to the cabin. The young person was talking earnestly with
+the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had
+the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr. Cyprian Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn which
+is to see it unfold. The delicate petals are twisted into a spiral,
+which at the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the hidden springs
+of its life, will uncoil itself and let the day into the chamber of its
+virgin heart. But the spiral must unwind by its own law, and the hand
+that shall try to hasten the process will only spoil the blossom which
+would have expanded in symmetrical beauty under the rosy fingers of
+morning.
+
+We may take a hint from Nature's handling of the flower in dealing with
+young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls, which, from
+their organization and conditions, require more careful treatment than
+those of their tougher-fibred brothers. Many parents reproach themselves
+for not having enforced their own convictions on their children in the
+face of every inborn antagonism they encountered. Let them not be too
+severe in their self-condemnation. A want of judgment in this matter has
+sent many a young person to Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly
+enough if it had only been trusted to the sweet influences of morning
+sunshine. In such cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not
+always an unalloyed evil. It may take the place of something worse, the
+wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the perpetual
+interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and hostile to its
+own. Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left to Nature in this
+extremity. But before she comes to that, she has many expedients. The
+mind does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to
+the starvation point. Its experience is like that of those who have been
+long drifting about on rafts or in long-boats. There is nothing out of
+which it will not contrive to get some sustenance. A person of note,
+long held captive for a political offence, is said to have owed the
+preservation of his reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get
+exercise and excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor
+of his dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic
+explorations until he had found it.
+
+Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would have
+been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if Providence, which
+in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected agencies, had not made a
+special provision for her mental welfare. She was in that arid household
+as the prophet in the land where there was no dew nor rain for these long
+years. But as he had the brook Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the
+morning and the bread and flesh in the evening which the ravens brought
+him, so she had the river and her secret store of books.
+
+The river was light and life and music and companionship to her. She
+learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it had
+sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars. But there was more
+than that in it,--it was infinitely sympathetic. A river is strangely
+like a human soul. It has its dark and bright days, its troubles from
+within, and its disturbances from without. It often runs over ragged
+rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with ripples as it slides over
+sands that are level as a floor. It betrays its various moods by aspects
+which are the commonplaces of poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles
+and frowns. Its face is full of winking eyes, when the scattering
+rain-drops first fall upon it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as
+with knitted brows, when the winds are let loose. It talks, too, in its
+own simple dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way to
+the ocean, as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of
+delay. Prisoners who know what a flower or an insect has been to them in
+their solitary cell, invalids who have employed their vacant minds in
+studying the patterns of paper-hangings on the walls of their
+sick-chambers, can tell what the river was to the lonely, imaginative
+creature who used to sit looking into its depths, hour after hour, from
+the airy height of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+Of late a thought had mingled with her fancies which had given to the
+river the aspect of something more than a friend and a companion. It
+appeared all at once as a Deliverer. Did not its waters lead, after long
+wanderings, to the great highway of the world, and open to her the gates
+of those cities from which she could take her departure unchallenged
+towards the lands of the morning or of the sunset? Often, after a
+freshet, she had seen a child's miniature boat floating down on its side
+past her window, and traced it in imagination back to some crystal brook
+flowing by the door of a cottage far up a blue mountain in the distance.
+So she now began to follow down the stream the airy shallop that held her
+bright fancies. These dreams of hers were colored by the rainbows of an
+enchanted fountain,--the books of adventure, the romances, the stories
+which fortune had placed in her hands,--the same over which the heart of
+the Pride of the County had throbbed in the last century, and on the
+pages of some of which the traces of her tears might still be seen.
+
+The literature which was furnished for Myrtle's improvement was chiefly
+of a religious character, and, however interesting and valuable to those
+to whom it was adapted, had not been chosen with any wise regard to its
+fitness for her special conditions. Of what use was it to offer books
+like the "Saint's Rest" to a child whose idea of happiness was in
+perpetual activity? She read "Pilgrim's Progress," it is true, with
+great delight. She liked the idea of travelling with a pack on one's
+back, the odd shows at the House of the interpreter, the fighting, the
+adventures, the pleasing young ladies at the palace the name of which was
+Beautiful, and their very interesting museum of curiosities. As for the
+allegorical meaning, it went through her consciousness like a peck of
+wheat through a bushel measure with the bottom out, without touching.
+
+But the very first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury threw
+the "Pilgrim's Progress" quite into the shade. It was the story of a
+youth who ran away and lived on an island,--one Crusoe,--a homely
+narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable adventures.
+There too was the history, coming much nearer home, of Deborah Sampson,
+the young woman who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, with a
+portrait of her in man's attire, looking intrepid rather than lovely. A
+virtuous young female she was, and married well, as she deserved to, and
+raised a family with as good a name as wife and mother as the best of
+them. But perhaps not one of these books and stories took such hold of
+her imagination as the tale of Rasselas, which most young persons find
+less entertaining than the "Vicar of Wakefield," with which it is
+nowadays so commonly bound up. It was the prince's discontent in the
+Happy Valley, the iron gate opening to the sound of music, and closing
+forever on those it admitted, the rocky boundaries of the imprisoning
+valley, the visions of the world beyond, the projects of escape, and the
+long toil which ended in their accomplishment, which haunted her sleeping
+and waking. She too was a prisoner, but it was not in the Happy Valley.
+Of the romances and the love-letters we must take it for granted that she
+selected wisely, and read discreetly; at least we know nothing to the
+contrary.
+
+There were mysterious reminiscences and hints of her past coming over her
+constantly. It was in the course of the long, weary spring before her
+disappearance, that a dangerous chord was struck which added to her
+growing restlessness. In an old closet were some seashells and
+coral-fans, and dried star-fishes and sea, horses, and a natural mummy of
+a rough-skinned dogfish. She had not thought of them for years, but now
+she felt impelled to look after them. The dim sea odors which still
+clung to them penetrated to the very inmost haunts of memory, and called
+up that longing for the ocean breeze which those who have once breathed
+and salted their blood with it never get over, and which makes the
+sweetest inland airs seem to them at last tame and tasteless. She held a
+tigershell to her ear, and listened to that low, sleepy murmur, whether
+in the sense or in the soul we hardly know, like that which had so often
+been her lullaby,--a memory of the sea, as Landor and Wordsworth have
+sung.
+
+"You are getting to look like your father," Aunt Silence said one day; "I
+never saw it before. I always thought you took after old Major Gideon
+Withers. Well, I hope you won't come to an early grave like poor
+Charles,--or at any rate, that you may be prepared."
+
+It did not seem very likely that the girl was going out of the world at
+present, but she looked Miss Silence in the face very seriously, and
+said, "Why not an early grave, Aunt, if this world is such a bad place as
+you say it is?"
+
+"I'm afraid you are not fit for a better."
+
+She wondered if Silence Withers and Cynthia Badlam were just ripe for
+heaven.
+
+For some months Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as was said, had been an
+habitual visitor at The Poplars, had lived there as a permanent resident.
+Between her and Silence Withers, Myrtle Hazard found no rest for her
+soul. Each of them was for untwisting the morning-glory without waiting
+for the sunshine to do it. Each had her own wrenches and pincers to use
+for that purpose. All this promised little for the nurture and
+admonition of the young girl, who, if her will could not be broken by
+imprisonment and starvation at three years old, was not likely to be
+over-tractable to any but gentle and reasonable treatment at fifteen.
+
+Aunt Silence's engine was responsibility,--her own responsibility, and
+the dreadful consequences which would follow to her, Silence, if Myrtle
+should in any way go wrong. Ever since her failure in that moral coup
+d'etat by which the sinful dynasty of the natural self-determining power
+was to be dethroned, her attempts in the way of education had been a
+series of feeble efforts followed by plaintive wails over their utter
+want of success. The face she turned upon the young girl in her solemn
+expostulations looked as if it were inscribed with the epitaphs of hope
+and virtue. Her utterances were pitched in such a forlorn tone, that the
+little bird in his cage, who always began twittering at the sound of
+Myrtle's voice, would stop in his song, and cock his head with a look of
+inquiry full of pathos, as if he wanted to know what was the matter, and
+whether he could do anything to help.
+
+The specialty of Cynthia Badlam was to point out all the dangerous and
+unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and this
+young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up examples of
+those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil end, to present
+the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the lively girl's
+apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion that a bright
+example of excellence stood before her in the irreproachable relative who
+addressed her. Especially with regard to the allurements which the world
+offers to the young and inexperienced female, Miss Cynthia Badlam was
+severe and eloquent. Sometimes poor Myrtle would stare, not seeing the
+meaning of her wise caution, sometimes look at Miss Cynthia with a
+feeling that there was something about her that was false and forced,
+that she had nothing in common with young people, that she had no pity
+for them, only hatred of their sins, whatever these might be,--a hatred
+which seemed to extend to those sources of frequent temptation, youth and
+beauty, as if they were in themselves objectionable.
+
+Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of music.
+They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which Myrtle, who was
+a natural singer, was expected to bear her part. This would have been
+pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected had been cheerful or
+soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of a sort to inspire a love
+for what was lovely in this life, and to give some faint foretaste of the
+harmonies of a better world to come. But there is a fondness for minor
+keys and wailing cadences common to the monotonous chants of cannibals
+and savages generally, to such war-songs as the wild, implacable
+"Marseillaise," and to the favorite tunes of low--spirited Christian
+pessimists. That mournful "China," which one of our most agreeable
+story-tellers has justly singled out as the cry of despair itself, was
+often sung at The Poplars, sending such a sense of utter misery through
+the house, that poor Kitty Fagan would cross herself, and wring her
+hands, and think of funerals, and wonder who was going to die,--for she
+fancied she heard the Banshee's warning in those most dismal ululations.
+
+On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
+Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and came
+dome with her hands full of leaves and blossoms. Silence Withers looked
+at them as if they were a kind of melancholy manifestation of frivolity
+on the part of the wicked old earth. Not that she did not inhale their
+faint fragrance with a certain pleasure, and feel their beauty as none
+whose souls are not wholly shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the
+world was, in her estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a
+momentary forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.
+
+Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
+everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost
+odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly. "There's a worm in
+that leaf, Myrtle. He has rolled it all round him, and hidden himself
+from sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is so young and
+fresh. There is a worm in every young soul, Myrtle."
+
+"But there is not a worm in every leaf, Miss Cynthia. Look," she said,"
+all these are open, and you can see all over and under them, and there is
+nothing there. Are there never any worms in the leaves after they get
+old and yellow, Miss Cynthia?"
+
+That was a pretty fair hit for a simple creature of fifteen, but perhaps
+she was not so absolutely simple as one might have thought.
+
+It was on the evening of this same day that they were sitting together.
+The sweet season was opening, and it seemed as if the whispering of the
+leaves, the voices of the birds, the softness of the air, the young life
+stirring in everything, called on all creatures to join the universal
+chorus of praise that was going up around them.
+
+"What shall we sing this evening?" said Miss Silence.
+
+"Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence," said Miss
+Cynthia. "It is Saturday evening. Holy time has begun. Let us prepare
+our minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath."
+
+She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this
+nineteenth century.
+
+"Book Second. Hymn 44. Long metre. I guess 'Putney' will be as good a
+tune as any to sing it to."
+
+The trio began,--
+
+ "With holy fear, and humble song,"
+
+and got through the first verse together pretty well. Then came the
+second verse:
+
+ "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+ The land of horror and despair,
+ Justice has built a dismal hell,
+ And laid her stores of vengeance there."
+
+Myrtle's voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she hardly
+kept up her part with proper spirit.
+
+"Sing out, Myrtle," said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third verse:
+
+ "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+ Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+ And darts t' inflict immortal pains,
+ Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+This last verse was a duet, and not a trio. Myrtle closed her lips while
+it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a look of
+anger and disgust. The hunted soul was at bay.
+
+"I won't sing such words," she said, "and I won't stay here to hear them
+sung. The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and I am not
+going to sing them. You can't scare me into being good with your cruel
+hymn-book!"
+
+She could not swear: she was not a boy. She would not cry: she felt
+proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged. All these images, borrowed from the
+holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her--and had simply irritated
+her. The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but not
+penetrating, only enrages. It was a moment of fearful danger to her
+character, to her life itself.
+
+Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to her
+hanging chamber. She threw open the window and looked down into the
+stream. For one moment her head swam with the sudden, overwhelming,
+almost maddening thought that came over her,--the impulse to fling
+herself headlong into those running waters and dare the worst these
+dreadful women had threatened her with. Something she often thought
+afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back during that brief
+moment, and the paroxysm--just such a paroxysm as throws many a young
+girl into the Thames or the Seine--passed away. She remained looking, in
+a misty dream, into the water far below. Its murmur recalled the whisper
+of the ocean waves. And through the depths it seemed as if she saw into
+that strange, half--remembered world of palm-trees and white robes and
+dusky faces, and amidst them, looking upon her with ineffable love and
+tenderness, until all else faded from her sight, the face of a fair
+woman,--was it hers, so long, long dead, or that dear young mother's who
+was to her less a recollection than a dream?
+
+Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she unclasped
+her hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a voice
+whispering to her from that unknown world where she felt there was a
+spirit watching over her? At any rate, her face was never more serene
+than when she went to meeting with the two maiden ladies on the following
+day, Sunday, and heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a sermon from Luke vii.
+48, which made both the women shed tears, but especially so excited Miss
+Cynthia that she was in a kind of half-hysteric condition all the rest of
+the day.
+
+After that Myrtle was quieter and more docile than ever before. Could it
+be, Miss Silence thought, that the Rev. Mr. Stoker's sermon had touched
+her hard heart? However that was, she did not once wear the stormy look
+with which she had often met the complaining remonstrances Miss Silence
+constantly directed against all the spontaneous movements of the youthful
+and naturally vivacious subject of her discipline.
+
+June is an uncertain month, as everybody knows, and there were frosts in
+many parts of New England in the June of 1859. But there were also
+beautiful days and nights, and the sun was warm enough to be fast
+ripening the strawberries,--also certain plans which had been in flower
+some little time. Some preparations had been going on in a quiet way, so
+that at the right moment a decisive movement could be made. Myrtle knew
+how to use her needle, and always had a dexterous way of shaping any
+article of dress or ornament,--a natural gift not very rare, but
+sometimes very needful, as it was now.
+
+On the morning of the 15th of June she was wandering by the shores of the
+river, some distance above The Poplars, when a boat came drifting along
+by her, evidently broken loose from its fastenings farther up the stream.
+It was common for such waifs to show themselves after heavy rains had
+swollen the river. They might have run the gauntlet of nobody could tell
+how many farms, and perhaps passed by half a dozen towns and villages in
+the night, so that, if of common, cheap make, they were retained without
+scruple, by any who might find them, until the owner called for them, if
+he cared to take the trouble.
+
+Myrtle took a knife from her pocket, cut down a long, slender sapling,
+and coaxed the boat to the side of the bank. A pair of old oars lay in
+the bottom of the boat; she took one of these and paddled it into a
+little cove, where it could lie hid among the thick alders. Then she went
+home and busied herself about various little matters more interesting to
+her than to us.
+
+She was never more amiable and gracious than on this day. But she looked
+often at the clock, as they remembered afterwards, and studied over a
+copy of the Farmer's Almanac which was lying in the kitchen, with a
+somewhat singular interest. The days were nearly at their longest, the
+weather was mild, the night promised to be clear and bright.
+
+The household was, to all appearance, asleep at the usual early hour.
+When all seemed quiet, Myrtle lighted her lamp, stood before her mirror,
+and untied the string that bound her long and beautiful dark hair, which
+fell in its abundance over her shoulders and below her girdle.
+
+She lifted its heavy masses with one hand, and severed it with a strong
+pair of scissors, with remorseless exaction of every wandering curl,
+until she stood so changed by the loss of that outward glory of her
+womanhood, that she felt as if she had lost herself and found a brother
+she had never seen before.
+
+"Good-by, Myrtle!" she said, and, opening her window very gently, she
+flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them for a
+few moments as they floated down the stream. Then she dressed herself in
+the character of her imaginary brother, took up the carpet-bag in which
+she had placed what she chose to carry with her, stole softly
+down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the lower floor, shutting
+it very carefully so as to be sure that nobody should be disturbed.
+
+She glided along, looking all about her, fearing she might be seen by
+some curious wanderer, and reached the cove where the boat she had
+concealed was lying. She got into it, and, taking the rude oars, pulled
+herself into the middle of the swollen stream. Her heart beat so that it
+seemed to her as if she could hear it between the strokes of the oar.
+The lights were not all out in the village, and she trembled lest she
+should see the figure of some watcher looking from the windows in sight
+of which she would have to pass, and that a glimpse of this boat stealing
+along at so late an hour might give the clue to the secret of her
+disappearance, with which the whole region was to be busied in the course
+of the next day.
+
+Presently she came abreast of The Poplars. The house lay so still, so
+peaceful,--it would wake to such dismay! The boat slid along beneath her
+own overhanging chamber.
+
+"No song to-morrow from the Fire-hang-bird's Nest!" she said. So she
+floated by the slumbering village, the flow of the river carrying her
+steadily on, and the careful strokes of the oars adding swiftness to her
+flight.
+
+At last she came to the "Broad Meadows," and knew that she was alone, and
+felt confident that she had got away unseen. There was nothing,
+absolutely nothing, to point out which way she had gone. Her boat came
+from nobody knew where, her disguise had been got together at different
+times in such a manner as to lead to no suspicion, and not a human being
+ever had the slightest hint that she had planned and meant to carry out
+the enterprise which she had now so fortunately begun.
+
+Not till the last straggling house had been long past, not till the
+meadows were stretched out behind her as well as before her, spreading
+far off into the distance on each side, did she give way to the sense of
+wild exultation which was coming fast over her. But then, at last, she
+drew a long, long breath, and, standing up in the boat, looked all around
+her. The stars were shining over her head and deep down beneath her.
+The cool wind came fresh upon her cheek over the long grassy reaches. No
+living thing moved in all the wide level circle which lay about her. She
+had passed the Red Sea, and was alone in the Desert.
+
+She threw down her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her
+strong, sweet voice burst into song,--the song of the Jewish maiden when
+she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand solo, which
+we all remember in its ancient words, and in their modern paraphrase,
+
+ "Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
+ Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!"
+
+The poor child's repertory was limited to songs of the religious sort
+mainly, but there was a choice among these. Her aunt's favorites, beside
+"China," already mentioned, were "Bangor," which the worthy old New
+England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city
+called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn." But Myrtle was in no
+mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in "Balerma," and "Arlington,"
+and "Silver Street," and at last in that most riotous of devotional
+hymns, which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a
+cellar under his chapel,--"Jordan." So she let her wild spirits run
+loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole over her, and she sang herself
+into a more tranquil mood with the gentle music of "Dundee." And again
+she pulled quietly and steadily at her oars, until she reached the wooded
+region through which the river winds after leaving the "Broad Meadows."
+
+The tumult in her blood was calmed, yet every sense and faculty was awake
+to the manifold delicious, mysterious impressions of that wonderful June
+night, The stars were shining between the tall trees, as if all the
+jewels of heaven had been set in one belt of midnight sky. The voices of
+the wind, as they sighed through the pines, seemed like the breath of a
+sleeping child, and then, as they lisped from the soft, tender leaves of
+beeches and maples, like the half-articulate whisper of the mother
+hushing all the intrusive sounds that might awaken it. Then came the
+pulsating monotone of the frogs from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an
+owl from an old tree that overhung it, the splash of a mink or musquash,
+and nearer by, the light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered off in his
+quiet way to his hole in the nearest bank. The laurels were just coming
+into bloom,--the yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer sisters,
+pushing their golden cups through the water, not content, like those, to
+float on the surface of the stream that fed them, emblems of showy
+wealth, and, like that, drawing all manner of insects to feed upon them.
+The miniature forests of ferns came down to the edge of the stream, their
+tall, bending plumes swaying in the night breeze. Sweet odors from
+oozing pines, from dewy flowers, from spicy leaves, stole out of the
+tangled thickets, and made the whole scene more dream-like with their
+faint, mingled suggestions.
+
+By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place of
+the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender tamaracks,
+sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and were out of
+their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way from their
+spindling branches. The winds came cool and damp out of the
+hiding-places among their dark recesses. The country people about here
+called this region the "Witches' Hollow," and had many stories about the
+strange things that happened there. The Indians used to hold their
+"powwows," or magical incantations, upon a broad mound which rose out of
+the common level, and where some old hemlocks and beeches formed a dark
+grove, which served them as a temple for their demon-worship. There were
+many legends of more recent date connected with this spot, some of them
+hard to account for, and no superstitious or highly imaginative person
+would have cared to pass through it alone in the dead of the night, as
+this young girl was doing.
+
+She knew nothing of all these fables and fancies. Her own singular
+experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by
+anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious by
+those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to them.
+We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to explain
+them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact that so they
+were told us. The reader will find Myrtle's "Vision," as written out at
+a later period from her recollections, at the end of this chapter.
+
+The night was passing, and she meant to be as far away as possible from
+the village she had left, before morning. But the boat, like all craft
+on country rivers, was leaky, and she had to work until tired, bailing it
+out, before she was ready for another long effort. The old tin measure,
+which was all she had to bail with, leaked as badly as the boat, and her
+task was a tedious one. At last she got it in good trim, and sat down to
+her oars with the determination to pull steadily as long as her strength
+would hold out.
+
+Hour after hour she kept at her work, sweeping round the long bends where
+the river was hollowing out one bank and building new shore on the
+opposite one, so as gradually to shift its channel; by clipper-shaped
+islands, sharp at the bows looking up stream, sharp too at the stern,
+looking down,--their shape solving the navigator's problem of least
+resistance, as a certain young artist had pointed out; by slumbering
+villages; by outlying farm-houses; between cornfields where the young
+plants were springing up in little thready fountains; in the midst of
+stumps where the forest had just been felled; through patches, where the
+fire of the last great autumnal drought had turned all the green beauty
+of the woods into brown desolation; and again amidst broad expanses of
+open meadow stretching as far as the eye could reach in the uncertain
+light. A faint yellow tinge was beginning to stain the eastern horizon.
+Her boat was floating quietly along, for she had at last taken in her
+oars, and she was now almost tired out with toil and excitement. She
+rested her head upon her hands, and felt her eyelids closing in spite of
+herself. And now there stole upon her ear a low, gentle, distant murmur,
+so soft that it seemed almost to mingle with the sound of her own
+breathing, but so steady, so uniform, that it soothed her to sleep, as if
+it were the old cradle-song the ocean used to sing to her, or the lullaby
+of her fair young mother.
+
+So she glided along, slowly, slowly, down the course of the winding
+river, and the flushing dawn kindled around her as she slumbered, and the
+low, gentle murmur grew louder and louder, but still she slept, dreaming
+of the murmuring ocean.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.
+
+"A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of June
+15, 1859. Written out at the request of a friend from my recollections.
+
+"The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told since,
+Witches' Hollow. I had never been there before, and did not know that it
+was called so, or anything about it.
+
+"The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of hill
+or mound that rose out of the low meadows. I saw a burning cross lying
+on the slope of that mound. It burned with a pale greenish light, and
+did not waste, though I watched it for a long time, as the boat I was in
+moved slowly with the current and I had stopped rowing.
+
+"I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking at
+this cross. I think my eyes were open when I saw these other
+appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.
+
+"I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
+moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
+outside of myself.
+
+"The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement, as
+if without any effort. They made many gestures, and seemed to speak, but
+I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its meaning in some
+other way.
+
+"I knew the faces of some of these figures. They were the same I have
+seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house where I
+was brought up, called The Poplars. I saw my father and my mother as
+they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her father
+and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who lived a great while
+ago. All of these have been long dead, and the longer they had been dead
+the less like substance they looked and the more like shadows, so that
+the oldest was like one's breath of a frosty morning, but shaped like the
+living figure.
+
+"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be moving
+as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath! I thought they wanted
+to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which I seemed to see
+as it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like a sponge that
+has water pressed out of it.
+
+"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
+others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in my
+own life.
+
+"My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than any
+of the rest. Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have become a
+part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over the life they
+had led, on the sea and in strange countries.
+
+"Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a very
+strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard sometimes,
+though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I used to read
+in the graveyard. It seemed to me that there was something about his
+life that I did not want to make a part of mine, but that there was some
+right he had in me through my being of his blood, and so his health and
+his strength went all through me, and I was always to have what was left
+of his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a portion of mine.
+
+"So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
+famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to be
+called the Pride of the County.
+
+"And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait
+marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors, and
+was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the witchcraft
+trials.
+
+"There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-dress of
+feathers. She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw something of my own
+features in her face.
+
+"It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our
+blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me, and
+was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence with me
+since, as if she lived again in me; but not always,--only at times,--and
+then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the world. I had a
+feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.
+
+"It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do
+really live over some part of their past lives in my life. I do not
+understand it all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I have
+not thought of. I write it down as nearly as I can give it from memory,
+by request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have all the
+real names withheld.
+
+"MYRTLE HAZARD."
+
+
+NOTE BY THE FRIEND.
+
+"This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the
+category of the supernatural. Probably it was one of those intuitions,
+with objective projection, which sometimes come to imaginative young
+persons, especially girls, in certain exalted nervous conditions. The
+study of the portraits, with the knowledge of some parts of the history
+of the persons they represented, and the consciousness of instincts
+inherited in all probability from these same ancestors, formed the basis
+of Myrtle's 'Vision.' The lives of our progenitors are, as we know,
+reproduced in different proportions in ourselves. Whether they as
+individuals have any consciousness of it, is another matter. It is
+possible that they do get a second as it were fractional life in us. It
+might seem that many of those whose blood flows in our veins struggle for
+the mastery, and by and by one or more get the predominance, so that we
+grow to be like father, or mother, or remoter ancestor, or two or more
+are blended in us, not to the exclusion, however, it must be understood,
+of a special personality of our own, about which these others are
+grouped. Independently of any possible scientific value, this 'Vision'
+serves to illustrate the above-mentioned fact of common experience, which
+is not sufficiently weighed by most moralists.
+
+"How much it may be granted to certain young persons to see, not in
+virtue of their intellectual gifts, but through those direct channels
+which worldly wisdom may possibly close to the luminous influx, each
+reader must determine for himself by his own standards of faith and
+evidence.
+
+"One statement of the narrative admits of a simple natural explanation,
+which does not allow the lovers of the marvellous to class it with the
+quasi-miraculous appearance seen by Colonel Gardiner, and given in full
+by Dr. Doddridge in his Life of that remarkable Christian soldier.
+Decaying wood is often phosphorescent, as many readers must have seen for
+themselves. The country people are familiar with the sight of it in wild
+timber-land, and have given it the name of 'Fox-fire.' Two trunks of
+trees in this state, lying across each other, will account for the fact
+observed, and vindicate the truth of the young girl's story without
+requiring us to suppose any exceptional occurrence outside of natural
+laws."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER.
+
+It was already morning when a young man living in the town of Alderbank,
+after lying awake for an hour thinking the unutterable thoughts that
+nineteen years of life bring to the sleeping and waking dreams of young
+people, rose from his bed, and, half dressing himself, sat down at his
+desk, from which he took a letter, which he opened and read. It was
+written in a delicate, though hardly formed female hand, and crossed like
+a checker-board, as is usual with these redundant manuscripts. The
+letter was as follows:
+
+OXBOW VILLAGE, June 13, 1859.
+
+MY DEAREST CLEMENT,--You was so good to write me such a sweet little bit
+of a letter,--only, dear, you never seem to be in quite so good spirits
+as you used to be. I wish your Susie was with you to cheer you up; but
+no, she must be patient, and you must be patient too, for you are so
+ambitious! I have heard you say so many times that nobody could be a
+great artist without passing years and years at work, and growing pale
+and lean with thinking so hard. You won't grow pale and lean, I hope;
+for I do so love to see that pretty color in your cheeks you have always
+had ever since I have known you; and besides, I do not believe you will
+have to work so very hard to do something great,--you have so much
+genius, and people of genius do such beautiful things with so little
+trouble. You remember those beautiful lines out of our newspaper I sent
+you? Well, Mr. Hopkins told me he wrote those lines in one evening
+without stopping! I wish you could see Mr. Hopkins,--he is a very
+talented person. I cut out this little piece about him from the paper on
+purpose to show you,--for genius loves genius,--and you would like to
+hear him read his own poetry,--he reads it beautifully. Please send this
+piece from the paper back, as I want to put it in my scrapbook, under his
+autograph:--
+
+"Our young townsman, Mr. Gifted Hopkins, has proved himself worthy of the
+name he bears. His poetical effusions are equally creditable to his head
+and his heart, displaying the highest order of genius and powers of
+imagination and fancy hardly second to any writer of the age. He is
+destined to make a great sensation in the world of letters."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins is the same good soul she always was. She is very proud of
+her son, as is natural, and keeps a copy of everything he writes. I
+believe she cries over them every time she reads them. You don't know
+how I take to little Sossy and Minthy, those two twins I have written to
+you about before. Poor little creatures,--what a cruel thing it was in
+their father and mother not to take care of them! What do you think? Old
+bachelor Gridley lets them come up into his room, and builds forts and
+castles for them with his big books! "The world's coming to an end,"
+Mrs. Hopkins said the first time he did so. He looks so savage with that
+scowl of his, and talks so gruff when he is scolding at things in
+general, that nobody would have believed he would have let such little
+things come anywhere near him. But he seems to be growing kind to all of
+us and everybody. I saw him talking to the Fire-hang-bird the other day.
+You know who the Fire-hang-bird is, don't you? Myrtle Hazard her name
+is. I wish you could see her. I don't know as I do, though. You would
+want to make a statue of her, or a painting, I know. She is so handsome
+that all the young men stand round to see her come out of meeting. Some
+say that Lawyer Bradshaw is after her; but my! he is ten years older than
+she is. She is nothing but a girl, though she looks as if she was
+eighteen. She lives up at a place called The Poplars, with an old woman
+that is her aunt or something, and nobody seems to be much acquainted
+with her except Olive Eveleth, who is the minister's daughter at Saint
+Bartholomew's Church. She never has beauxs round her, as some young
+girls do--they say that she is not happy with her aunt and another woman
+that stays with her, and that is the reason she keeps so much to herself.
+The minister came to see me the other day,--Mr. Stoker his name is. I
+was all alone, and it frightened me, for he looks, oh, so solemn on
+Sundays! But he called me "My dear," and did n't say anything horrid,
+you know, about my being such a dreadful, dreadful sinner, as I have
+heard of his saying to some people,--but he looked very kindly at me, and
+took my hand, and laid his hand on my shoulder like a brother, and hoped
+I would come and see him in his study. I suppose I must go, but I don't
+want to. I don't seem to like him exactly.
+
+I hope you love me as well as ever you did. I can't help feeling
+sometimes as if you was growing away from me,--you know what I
+mean,--getting to be too great a person for such a small person as I am.
+
+I know I can't always understand you when you talk about art, and that
+you know a great deal too much for such a simple girl as I am. Oh, if I
+thought I could never make you happy!... There, now! I am almost
+ashamed to send this paper so spotted. Gifted Hopkins wrote some
+beautiful verses one day on "A Maiden Weeping." He compared the tears
+falling from her eyes to the drops of dew which one often sees upon the
+flowers in the morning. Is n't it a pretty thought?
+
+I wish I loved art as well as I do poetry; but I am afraid I have not so
+much taste as some girls have. You remember how I liked that picture in
+the illustrated magazine, and you said it was horrid. I have been afraid
+since to like almost anything, for fear you should tell me some time or
+other it was horrid. Don't you think I shall ever learn to know what is
+nice from what is n't?
+
+Oh, dear Clement, I wish you would do one thing to please me. Don't say
+no, for you can do everything you try to,--I am sure you can. I want you
+to write me some poetry,--just three or four little verses TO SUZIE. Oh,
+I should feel so proud to have some lines written all on purpose for me.
+Mr. Hopkins wrote some the other day, and printed them in the paper, "To
+M---e." I believe he meant them for Myrtle,--the first and last letter
+of her name, you see, "M" and "e."
+
+Your letter was a dear one, only so short! I wish you would tell me all
+about what you are doing at Alderbank. Have you made that model of
+Innocence that is to have my forehead, and hair parted like mine! Make it
+pretty, do, that is a darling.
+
+Now don't make a face at my letter. It is n't a very good one, I know;
+but your poor little Susie does the best she can, and she loves you so
+much!
+
+Now do be nice and write me one little bit of a mite of a poem,--it will
+make me just as happy!
+
+I am very well, and as happy as I can be when you are away.
+
+Your affectionate SUSIE.
+
+(Directed to Mr. Clement Lindsay, Alderbank.)
+
+The envelope of this letter was unbroken, as was before said, when the
+young man took it from his desk. He did not tear it with the hot
+impatience of some lovers, but cut it open neatly, slowly, one would say
+sadly. He read it with an air of singular effort, and yet with a certain
+tenderness. When he had finished it, the drops were thick on his
+forehead; he groaned and put his hands to his face, which was burning
+red.
+
+This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to! He
+was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of fastidious
+taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue eyes, his
+commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every change of
+thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not improbably claim
+that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter had spoken,--the
+strange, divine, dread gift of genius.
+
+This poor, simple, innocent, trusting creature, so utterly incapable of
+coming into any true relation with his aspiring mind, his large and
+strong emotions,--this mere child, all simplicity and goodness, but
+trivial and shallow as the little babbling brooklet that ran by his
+window to the river, to lose its insignificant being in the swift torrent
+he heard rushing over the rocks,--this pretty idol for a weak and kindly
+and easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as the queen of his
+affections, to be adopted as the companion of his labors! The boy, led
+by the commonest instinct, the mere attraction of biped to its female,
+which accident had favored, had thrown away the dearest possession of
+manhood,--liberty,--and this bauble was to be his lifelong reward! And
+yet not a bauble either, for a pleasing person and a gentle and sweet
+nature, which had once made her seem to him the very paragon of
+loveliness, were still hers. Alas! her simple words were true,--he had
+grown away from her. Her only fault was that she had not grown with him,
+and surely he could not reproach her with that.
+
+"No," he said to himself, "I will never leave her so long as her heart
+clings to me. I have been rash, but she shall not pay the forfeit. And
+if I may think of myself, my life need not be wretched because she cannot
+share all my being with me. The common human qualities are more than all
+exceptional gifts. She has a woman's heart; and what talent of mine is
+to be named by the love a true woman can offer in exchange for these
+divided and cold affections? If it had pleased God to mate me with one
+more equal in other ways, who could share my thoughts, who could kindle
+my inspiration, who had wings to rise into the air with me as well as
+feet to creep by my side upon the earth,--what cannot such a woman do for
+a man!
+
+"What! cast away the flower I took in the bud because it does not show as
+I hoped it would when it opened? I will stand by my word; I will be all
+as a man that I promised as a boy. Thank God, she is true and pure and
+sweet. My nest will be a peaceful one; but I must take wing
+alone,--alone."
+
+He drew one long sigh, and the cloud passed from his countenance. He
+must answer that letter now, at once. There were reasons, he thought,
+which made it important. And so, with the cheerfulness which it was kind
+and becoming to show, so far as possible, and yet with a little
+excitement on one particular point, which was the cause of his writing so
+promptly, he began his answer.
+
+ALDERBANK, Thursday morning, June 16, 1859.
+
+MY DEAR SUSIE,--I have just been reading your pleasant letter; and if I
+do not send you the poem you ask for so eloquently, I will give you a
+little bit of advice, which will do just as well,--won't it, my dear? I
+was interested in your account of various things going on at Oxbow
+Village. I am very glad you find young Mr. Hopkins so agreeable a
+friend. His poetry is better than some which I see printed in the
+village papers, and seems generally unexceptionable in its subjects and
+tone. I do not believe he is a dangerous companion, though the habit of
+writing verse does not always improve the character. I think I have seen
+it make more than one of my acquaintances idle, conceited, sentimental,
+and frivolous,--perhaps it found them so already. Don't make too much of
+his talent, and particularly don't let him think that because he can
+write verses he has nothing else to do in this world. That is for his
+benefit, dear, and you must skilfully apply it.
+
+Now about yourself. My dear Susie, there was something in your letter
+that did not please me. You speak of a visit from the Rev. Mr. Stoker,
+and of his kind, brotherly treatment, his cordiality of behavior, and his
+asking you to visit him in his study. I am very glad to hear you say
+that you "don't seem to like him." He is very familiar, it seems to me,
+for so new an acquaintance. What business had he to be laying his hand
+on your shoulder? I should like to see him try these free-and-easy ways
+in my presence! He would not have taken that liberty, my dear! No, he
+was alone with you, and thought it safe to be disrespectfully familiar.
+I want you to maintain your dignity always with such persons, and I beg
+you not to go to the study of this clergyman, unless some older friend
+goes with you on every occasion, and sits through the visit. I must
+speak plainly to you, my dear, as I have a right to. If the minister has
+anything of importance to say, let it come through the lips of some
+mature person. It may lose something of the fervor with which it would
+have been delivered at first hand, but the great rules of Christian life
+are not so dependent on the particular individual who speaks them, that
+you must go to this or that young man to find out what they are. If to
+any man, I should prefer the old gentleman whom you have mentioned in
+your letters, Father Pemberton. You understand me, my dear girl, and the
+subject is not grateful. You know how truly I am interested in all that
+relates to you,--that I regard you with an affection which--
+
+ HELP! HELP! HELP!
+
+A cry as of a young person's voice was heard faintly, coming from the
+direction of the river. Something in the tone of it struck to his heart,
+and he sprang as if he had been stabbed. He flung open his chamber
+window and leaped from it to the ground. He ran straight to the bank of
+the river by the side of which the village of Alderbank was built, a
+little farther down the stream than the house in which he was living.
+
+Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which
+break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and swift,
+and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they are sought
+and admired by tourists. The stream was now swollen, and rushed in a
+deep and rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky straits,
+plunging at last in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous roar, into the
+depths below the cliff from which it tumbled.
+
+A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock
+which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years, hoarded
+a little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled to support
+a decent vegetable existence. The high waters had nearly submerged it,
+but a few slender twigs were seen above their surface.
+
+A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the
+fall, which was but a few rods farther down. In the skiff was a youth of
+fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the boat
+dragging at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away and go
+over the fall. It was not likely that the boy would come to shore alive
+if it did. There were stories, it is true, that the Indians used to
+shoot the fall in their canoes with safety; but everybody knew that at
+least three persons had been lost by going over it since the town was
+settled; and more than one dead body had been found floating far down the
+river, with bruises and fractured bones, as if it had taken the same
+fatal plunge.
+
+There was no time to lose. Clement ran a little way up the river-bank,
+flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he could leap
+into the water. The current swept him toward the fall, but he worked
+nearer and nearer the middle of the stream. He was making for the rock,
+thinking he could plant his feet upon it and at the worst hold the boat
+until he could summon other help by shouting. He had barely got his feet
+upon the rock, when the twigs by which the boy was holding gave way. He
+seized the boat, but it dragged him from his uncertain footing, and with
+a desperate effort he clambered over its side and found himself its
+second doomed passenger.
+
+There was but an instant for thought.
+
+"Sit still," he said, "and, just as we go over, put your arms round me
+under mine, and don't let go for your life!"
+
+He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes brought
+the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it was deepest,
+and would plunge them into the deepest pool.
+
+"Hold your breath! God save us! Now!"
+
+They rose, as if with one will, and stood for an instant, the arms of the
+younger closely embracing the other as he had directed.
+
+A sliding away from beneath them of the floor on which they stood, as the
+drop fails under the feet of a felon. A great rush of air, and a mighty,
+awful, stunning roar,--an involuntary gasp, a choking flood of water that
+came bellowing after them, and hammered them down into the black depths
+so far that the young man, though used to diving and swimming long
+distances underwater, had well-nigh yielded to the fearful need of air,
+and sucked in his death in so doing.
+
+The boat came up to the surface, broken in twain, splintered, a load of
+firewood for those who raked the river lower down. It had turned
+crosswise, and struck the rocks. A cap rose to the surface, such a one
+as boys wear,--the same that boy had on. And then--after how many
+seconds by the watch cannot be known, but after a time long enough, as
+the young man remembered it, to live his whole life over in
+memory--Clement Lindsay felt the blessed air against his face, and,
+taking a great breath, came to his full consciousness. The arms of the
+boy were still locked around him as in the embrace of death. A few
+strokes brought him to the shore, dragging his senseless burden with him.
+
+He unclasped the arms that held him so closely encircled, and laid the
+slender form of the youth he had almost died to save gently upon the
+grass. It was as if dead. He loosed the ribbon that was round the neck,
+he tore open the checked shirt--
+
+The story of Myrtle Hazard's sex was told; but she was deaf to his cry of
+surprise, and no blush came to her cold cheek. Not too late, perhaps, to
+save her,--not too late to try to save her, at least!
+
+He placed his lips to hers, and filled her breast with the air from his
+own panting chest. Again and again he renewed these efforts, hoping,
+doubting, despairing,--once more hoping, and at last, when he had almost
+ceased to hope, she gasped, she breathed, she moaned, and rolled her eyes
+wildly round her, she was born again into this mortal life.
+
+He caught her up in his arms, bore her to the house, laid her on a sofa,
+and, having spent his strength in this last effort, reeled and fell, and
+lay as one over whom have just been whispered the words,
+
+"He is gone."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER--WHAT CAME OF IT.
+
+The first thing Clement Lindsay did, when he was fairly himself again,
+was to finish his letter to Susan Posey. He took it up where it left
+off, "with an affection which----" and drew a long dash, as above. It was
+with great effort he wrote the lines which follow, for he had got an ugly
+blow on the forehead, and his eyes were "in mourning," as the gentlemen
+of the ring say, with unbecoming levity.
+
+"An adventure! Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the cry
+of a young person, as it sounded, for help. I ran to the river and
+jumped in, and had the pleasure of saving a life. I got some bruises
+which have laid me up for a day or two; but I am getting over them very
+well now, and you need not worry about me at all. I will write again
+soon; so pray do not fret yourself, for I have had no hurt that will
+trouble me for any time."
+
+Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her heart
+would break. Oh dear! Oh dear! what should she do! He was almost
+killed, she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones. Oh dear! Oh
+dear! She would go and see him, there!--she must and would. He would
+die, she knew he would,--and so on.
+
+It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human element in
+Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme trouble, should
+think of him as a counsellor. But the wonderful relenting kind of look
+on his grave features as he watched the little twins tumbling about his
+great books, and certain marks of real sympathy he had sometimes shown
+for her in her lesser woes, encouraged her, and she went straight to his
+study, letter in hand. She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful
+sanctuary.
+
+"Come in, Susan Posey," was its answer, in a pleasant tone. The old
+master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand on
+the panel.
+
+What a sight! 'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a Sebastopol
+which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and the terrible
+Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile manifestations of the
+most singular character. He was actually discharging a large sugar-plum
+at the postern gate, which having been left unclosed, the missile would
+certainly have reached one of the garrison, when he paused as the door
+opened, and the great round spectacles and four wide, staring infants'
+eyes were levelled at Miss Susan Posey.
+
+She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at this
+manifestation. The old man had emptied his shelves of half their folios
+to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had seated the two
+delighted and uproarious babes. There was his Cave's "Historia
+Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," and a whole
+array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book
+of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates
+of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one
+side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,--an odd collection, as
+folios from lower shelves are apt to be.
+
+The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that it
+fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
+garrison had been on short rations for some time.
+
+He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble. "What now, Susan
+Posey, my dear?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble! What shall I do? What shall I
+do?"
+
+She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way that
+Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
+adventure.
+
+"So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some hard
+knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey? Well, well, Clement Lindsay is a
+brave fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child. Let me
+take the letter again a moment, Susan Posey. What is the date of it?
+June 16th. Yes,--yes,--yes!"
+
+He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted to;
+for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to those round
+spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not unbecoming blush,
+opened the fold of the letter before she handed it back.
+
+"No, no, Susan Posey. He will come all right. His writing is steady,
+and if he had broken any bones he would have mentioned it. It's a thing
+his wife will be proud of, if he is ever married, Susan Posey,"
+(blushes,) "and his children too," (more blushes running up to her back
+hair,) "and there 's nothing to be worried about. But I'll tell you
+what, my dear, I've got a little business that calls me down the river
+tomorrow, and I shouldn't mind stopping an hour at Alderbank and seeing
+how our young friend Clement Lindsay is; and then, if he was going to
+have a long time of it, why we could manage it somehow that any friend
+who had any special interest in him could visit him, just to while away
+the tiresomeness of being sick. That's it, exactly. I'll stop at
+Alderbank, Susan Posey. Just clear up these two children for me, will
+you, my dear? Isosceles, come now,--that 's a good child. Helminthia,
+carry these sugar-plums down--stairs for me, and take good care of them,
+mind!"
+
+It was a case of gross bribery and corruption, for the fortress was
+immediately, evacuated on the receipt of a large paper of red and white
+comfits, and the garrison marched down--stairs much like conquerors,
+under the lead of the young lady, who was greatly eased in mind by the
+kind words and the promise of Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+But he, in the mean time, was busy with thoughts she did not suspect. "A
+young person," he said to himself,--"why a young person? Why not say a
+boy, if it was a boy? What if this should be our handsome truant?--'June
+16th, Thursday morning!'--About time to get to Alderbank by the river, I
+should think. None of the boats missing? What then? She may have made a
+raft, or picked up some stray skiff. Who knows? And then got
+shipwrecked, very likely. There are rapids and falls farther along the
+river. It will do no harm to go down there and look about, at any rate."
+
+On Saturday morning, therefore, Mr. Byles Gridley set forth to procure a
+conveyance to make a visit, as he said, dawn the river, and perhaps be
+gone a day or two. He went to a stable in the village, and asked if they
+could let him have a horse.
+
+The man looked at him with that air of native superiority which the
+companionship of the generous steed confers on all his associates, down
+to the lightest weight among the jockeys.
+
+"Wal, I hain't got nothin' in the shape of a h'oss, Mr. Gridley. I've got
+a mare I s'pose I could let y' have."
+
+"Oh, very well," said the old master, with a twinkle in his eye as sly as
+the other's wink,--he had parried a few jokes in his time,--"they charge
+half-price for mares always, I believe."
+
+That was a new view of the subject. It rather took the wind out of the
+stable-keeper, and set a most ammoniacal fellow, who stood playing with a
+currycomb, grinning at his expense. But he rallied presently.
+
+"Wal, I b'lieve they do for some mares, when they let 'em to some folks;
+but this here ain't one o' them mares, and you ain't one o' them folks.
+All my cattle's out but this critter, 'n' I don't jestly want to have
+nobody drive her that ain't pretty car'ful,--she's faast, I tell
+ye,--don't want no whip.--How fur d' d y' want t' go?"
+
+Mr. Gridley was quite serious now, and let the man know that he wanted
+the mare and a light covered wagon, at once, to be gone for one or two
+days, and would waive the question of sex in the matter of payment.
+
+Alderbank was about twenty miles down the river by the road. On arriving
+there, he inquired for the house where a Mr. Lindsay lived. There was
+only one Lindsay family in town,--he must mean Dr. William Lindsay. His
+house was up there a little way above the village, lying a few rods back
+from the river.
+
+He found the house without difficulty, and knocked at the door. A
+motherly-looking woman opened it immediately, and held her hand up as if
+to ask him to speak and move softly.
+
+"Does Mr. Clement Lindsay live here?"
+
+"He is staying here for the present. He is a nephew of ours. He is in
+his bed from an injury."
+
+"Nothing very serious, I hope?"
+
+"A bruise on his head,--not very bad, but the doctor was afraid of
+erysipelas. Seems to be doing well enough now."
+
+"Is there a young person here, a stranger?"
+
+"There is such a young person here. Do you come with any authority to
+make inquiries?"
+
+"I do. A young friend of mine is missing, and I thought it possible I
+might learn something here about it. Can I see this young person?"
+
+The matron came nearer to Byles Gridley, and said: "This person is a
+young woman disguised as a boy. She was rescued by my nephew at the risk
+of his life, and she has been delirious ever since she has recovered her
+consciousness. She was almost too far gone to be resuscitated, but
+Clement put his mouth to hers and kept her breathing until her own breath
+returned and she gradually came to."
+
+"Is she violent in her delirium?"
+
+"Not now. No; she is quiet enough, but wandering,--wants to know where
+she is, and whose the strange faces are,--mine and my husband's,--that 's
+Dr. Lindsay,--and one of my daughters, who has watched with her."
+
+"If that is so, I think I had better see her. If she is the person I
+suspect her to be, she will know me; and a familiar face may bring back
+her recollections and put a stop to her wanderings. If she does not know
+me, I will not stay talking with her. I think she will, if she is the
+one I am seeking after. There is no harm in trying."
+
+Mrs. Lindsay took a good long look at the old man. There was no
+mistaking his grave, honest, sturdy, wrinkled, scholarly face. His voice
+was assured and sincere in its tones. His decent black coat was just
+what a scholar's should be,--old, not untidy, a little shiny at the
+elbows with much leaning on his study-table, but neatly bound at the
+cuffs, where worthy Mrs. Hopkins had detected signs of fatigue and come
+to the rescue. His very hat looked honest as it lay on the table. It
+had moulded itself to a broad, noble head, that held nothing but what was
+true and fair, with a few harmless crotchets just to fill in with, and it
+seemed to know it.
+
+The good woman gave him her confidence at once. "Is the person you are
+seeking a niece or other relative of yours?"
+
+(Why did not she ask if the girl was his daughter? What is that look of
+paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers and
+old nurses know so well in men and in women?)
+
+"No, she is not a relative. But I am acting for those who are."
+
+"Wait a moment and I will go and see that the room is all right."
+
+She returned presently. "Follow me softly, if you please. She is
+asleep,--so beautiful,--so innocent!"
+
+Byles Gridley, Master of Arts, retired professor, more than sixty years
+old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed with wrecks
+of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his one literary
+venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care for him but
+accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the bed and looked
+upon the pallid, still features of Myrtle Hazard. He strove hard against
+a strange feeling that was taking hold of him, that was making his face
+act rebelliously, and troubling his eyes with sudden films. He made a
+brief stand against this invasion. "A weakness,--a weakness!" he said to
+himself. "What does all this mean? Never such a thing for these twenty
+years! Poor child! poor child!--Excuse me, madam," he said, after a
+little interval, but for what offence he did not mention. A great deal
+might be forgiven, even to a man as old as Byles Gridley, looking upon
+such a face,--so lovely, yet so marked with the traces of recent
+suffering, and even now showing by its changes that she was struggling in
+some fearful dream. Her forehead contracted, she started with a slight
+convulsive movement, and then her lips parted, and the cry escaped from
+them,--how heart-breaking when there is none to answer it,--"Mother!"
+
+Gone back again through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood to
+that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she uttered was
+answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of clinging lips, the
+embrace of caressing arms!
+
+"It is better to wake her," Mrs. Lindsay said; "she is having a troubled
+dream. Wake up, my child, here is a friend waiting to see you."
+
+She laid her hand very gently on Myrtle's forehead. Myrtle opened her
+eyes, but they were vacant as yet.
+
+"Are we dead?" she said. "Where am I? This is n't heaven--there are no
+angels--Oh, no, no, no! don't send me to the other place--fifteen
+years,--only fifteen years old--no father, no mother--nobody loved me.
+Was it wicked in me to live?" Her whole theological training was
+condensed in that last brief question.
+
+The, old man took her hand and looked her in the face, with a wonderful
+tenderness in his squared features. "Wicked to live, my dear? No
+indeed! Here! look at me, my child; don't you know your old friend Byles
+Gridley?"
+
+She was awake now. The sight of a familiar countenance brought back a
+natural train of thought. But her recollection passed over everything
+that had happened since Thursday morning.
+
+"Where is the boat I was in?" she said. "I have just been in the water,
+and I was dreaming that I was drowned. Oh! Mr. Gridley, is that you?
+Did you pull me out of the water?"
+
+"No, my dear, but you are out of it, and safe and sound: that is the main
+point. How do you feel now you are awake?"
+
+She yawned, and stretched her arms and looked round, but did not answer
+at first. This was all natural, and a sign that she was coming right.
+She looked down at her dress. It was not inappropriate to her sex, being
+a loose gown that belonged to one of the girls in the house.
+
+"I feel pretty well," she answered, "but a little confused. My boat will
+be gone, if you don't run and stop it now. How did you get me into dry
+clothes so quick?"
+
+Master Byles Gridley found himself suddenly possessed by a large and
+luminous idea of the state of things, and made up his mind in a moment as
+to what he must do. There was no time to be lost. Every day, every
+hour, of Myrtle's absence was not only a source of anxiety and a cause of
+useless searching but it gave room for inventive fancies to imagine evil.
+It was better to run some risk of injury to health, than to have her
+absence prolonged another day.
+
+"Has this adventure been told about in the village, Mrs. Lindsay?"
+
+"No, we thought it best to wait until she could tell her own story,
+expecting her return to consciousness every hour, and thinking there
+might be some reason for her disguise which it would be kinder to keep
+quiet about."
+
+"You know nothing about her, then?"
+
+"Not a word. It was a great question whether to tell the story and make
+inquiries; but she was safe, and could hardly bear disturbance, and, my
+dear sir, it seemed too probable that there was some sad story behind
+this escape in disguise, and that the poor child might need shelter and
+retirement. We meant to do as well as we could for her."
+
+"All right, Mrs. Lindsay. You do not know who she is, then?"
+
+"No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know. Then I shall
+not have to answer any questions about it."
+
+"Very good, madam,--just as it should be. And your family, are they as
+discreet as yourself?"
+
+"Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one of
+us. That was agreed upon among us."
+
+"Now then, madam. My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley. Your
+husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he comes
+back. This child is of good family and of good name. I know her well,
+and mean, with your kind help, to save her from the consequences which
+her foolish adventure might have brought upon her. Before the bells ring
+for meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be in her bed at her home,
+at Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story to ourselves as far as may
+be. It will all blow over, if we do. The gossips will only know that
+she was upset in the river and cared for by some good people,--good
+people and sensible people too, Mrs. Lindsay. And now I want to see the
+young man that rescued my friend here,--Clement Lindsay, I have heard his
+name before."
+
+Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well
+enough that he was a young man of the right kind. He knew them at sight,
+fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in their blood to
+begin with,--shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and fine-fibred, with
+well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-floor of the faculties,
+and well-vaulted arches for the upper range of apprehensions and
+combinations. "Plenty of basements," he used to say, "without attics and
+skylights. Plenty of skylights without rooms enough and space enough
+below." But here was "a three-story brain," he said to himself as he
+looked at it, and this was the youth who was to find his complement in
+our pretty little Susan Posey! His judgment may seem to have been hasty,
+but he took the measure of young men of twenty at sight from long and
+sagacious observation, as Nurse Byloe knew the "heft" of a baby the
+moment she fixed her old eyes on it.
+
+Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never seen
+him, for Susan's letters had had a good deal to say about him of late.
+It was agreed between them that the story should be kept as quiet as
+possible, and that the young girl should not know the name of her
+deliverer,--it might save awkward complications. It was not likely that
+she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had ended so
+disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.
+
+The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the
+whole nature of Myrtle for the time. Her mind was unsettled: she could
+hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall. She was
+perfectly docile and plastic,--was ready to go anywhere Mr. Gridley
+wanted her to go, without any sign of reluctance. And so it was agreed
+that he should carry her back in his covered wagon that very night. All
+possible arrangements were made to render her journey comfortable. The
+fast mare had to trot very gently, and the old master would stop and
+adjust the pillows from time to time, and administer the restoratives
+which the physician had got ready, all as naturally and easily as if he
+had been bred a nurse, vastly to his own surprise, and with not a little
+gain to his self-appreciation. He was a serviceable kind of body on
+occasion, after all, was he not, hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to
+himself.
+
+At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the
+stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the slumbering
+household to receive back the wanderer.
+
+It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous
+guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of
+petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented herself at the
+door.
+
+But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking bundle of
+clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or break in silence.
+When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave face of the old
+master, she thought it was all over with the poor girl she loved, and
+that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing back only what had once
+been Myrtle Hazard. She screamed aloud,--so wildly that Myrtle lifted
+her head from the pillow against which she had rested it, and started
+forward.
+
+The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it was
+the girl she loved, and not her ghost. Then it all came over her,--she
+had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by night, and been
+rescued by the brave old man who had brought her back. What crying and
+kisses and prayers and blessings were poured forth, in a confusion of
+which her bodily costume was a fitting type, those who know the
+vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race may imagine better
+than we could describe it.
+
+The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative. There
+were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she was
+to have could be settled. What they were, it is needless to suggest; but
+while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her "responsibility"
+was removed, then with a fair share of pity and kindness, and other
+lukewarm emotions,--while Miss Badlam waited for an explanation before
+giving way to her feelings,--Mr. Gridley put the essential facts before
+them in a few words. She had gone down the river some miles in her boat,
+which was upset by a rush of the current, and she had come very near
+being drowned. She was got out, however, by a person living near by, and
+cared for by some kind women in a house near the river, where he had been
+fortunate enough to discover her.--Who cut her hair off? Perhaps those
+good people,--she had been out of her head. She was alive and unharmed,
+at any rate, wanting only a few days' rest. They might be very thankful
+to get her back, and leave her to tell the rest of her story when she had
+got her strength and memory, for she was not quite herself yet, and might
+not be for some days.
+
+And so there she was at last laid in her own bed, listening again to the
+ripple of the waters beneath her, Miss Silence sitting on one side
+looking as sympathetic as her insufficient nature allowed her to look;
+the Irishwoman uncertain between delight at Myrtle's return and sorrow
+for her condition; and Miss Cynthia Badlam occupying herself about
+house-matters, not unwilling to avoid the necessity of displaying her
+conflicting emotions.
+
+Before he left the house, Mr. Gridley repeated the statement is the most
+precise manner,--some miles down the river--upset and nearly
+drowned--rescued almost dead--brought to and cared for by kind women in
+the house where he, Byles Gridley, found her. These were the facts, and
+nothing more than this was to be told at present. They had better be
+made known at once, and the shortest and best way would be to have it
+announced by the minister at meeting that forenoon. With their
+permission, he would himself write the note for Mr. Stoker to read, and
+tell the other ministers that they might announce it to their people.
+
+The bells rang for meeting, but the little household at The Poplars did
+not add to the congregation that day. In the mean time Kitty Fagan had
+gone down with Mr. Byles Gridley's note, to carry it to the Rev. Mr.
+Stoker. But, on her way, she stopped at the house of one Mrs. Finnegan,
+a particular friend of hers; and the great event of the morning
+furnishing matter for large discourse, and various social allurements
+adding to the fascination of having a story to tell, Kitty Fagan forgot
+her note until meeting had begun and the minister had read the text of
+his sermon. "Bless my soul! and sure I 've forgot ahl about the letter!"
+she cried all at once, and away she tramped for the meeting-house. The
+sexton took the note, which was folded, and said he would hand it up to
+the pulpit after the sermon,--it would not do to interrupt the preacher.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, as was said, a somewhat remarkable gift in
+prayer,--an endowment by no means confined to profoundly spiritual
+persons,--in fact, not rarely owing much of its force to a strong animal
+nature underlying the higher attributes. The sweet singer of Israel
+would never have written such petitions and such hymns if his manhood had
+been less complete; the flavor of remembered frailties could not help
+giving a character to his most devout exercises, or they would not have
+come quite home to our common humanity. But there is no gift more
+dangerous to the humility and sincerity of a minister. While his spirit
+ought to be on its knees before the throne of grace, it is too apt to be
+on tiptoe, following with admiring look the flight of its own rhetoric.
+The essentially intellectual character of an extemporaneous composition
+spoken to the Creator with the consciousness that many of his creatures
+are listening to criticise or to admire, is the great argument for set
+forms of prayer.
+
+The congregation on this particular Sunday was made up chiefly of women
+and old men. The young men were hunting after Myrtle Hazard. Mr. Byles
+Gridley was in his place, wondering why the minister did not read his
+notice before the prayer. This prayer, was never reported, as is the
+questionable custom with regard to some of these performances, but it was
+wrought up with a good deal of rasping force and broad pathos. When he
+came to pray for "our youthful sister, missing from her pious home,
+perhaps nevermore to return to her afflicted relatives," and the women
+and old men began crying, Byles Gridley was on the very point of getting
+up and cutting short the whole matter by stating the simple fact that she
+had got back, all right, and suggesting that he had better pray for some
+of the older and tougher sinners before him. But on the whole it would
+be more decorous to wait, and perhaps he was willing to hear what the
+object of his favorite antipathy had to say about it. So he waited
+through the prayer. He waited through the hymn, "Life is the time"--He
+waited to hear the sermon.
+
+The minister gave out his text from the Book of Esther, second chapter,
+seventh verse: "For she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was
+fair and beautiful." It was to be expected that the reverend gentleman,
+who loved to produce a sensation, would avail himself of the excitable
+state of his audience to sweep the key-board of their emotions, while, as
+we may, say, all the stops were drawn out. His sermon was from notes;
+for, though absolutely extemporaneous composition may be acceptable to
+one's Maker, it is not considered quite the thing in speaking to one's
+fellow-mortals. He discoursed for a time on the loss of parents, and on
+the dangers to which the unfortunate orphan is exposed. Then he spoke of
+the peculiar risks of the tender female child, left without its natural
+guardians. Warming with his subject, he dilated with wonderful unction
+on the temptations springing from personal attractions. He pictured the
+"fair and beautiful" women of Holy Writ, lingering over their names with
+lover-like devotion. He brought Esther before his audience, bathed and
+perfumed for the royal presence of Ahasuerus. He showed them the sweet
+young Ruth, lying down in her innocence at the feet of the lord of the
+manor. He dwelt with special luxury on the charms which seduced the
+royal psalmist,--the soldier's wife for whom he broke the commands of the
+decalogue, and the maiden for whose attentions, in his cooler years, he
+violated the dictates of prudence and propriety. All this time Byles
+Gridley had his stern eyes on him. And while he kindled into passionate
+eloquence on these inspiring themes, poor Bathsheba, whom her mother had
+sent to church that she might get a little respite from her home duties,
+felt her blood growing cold in her veins, as the pallid image of the
+invalid wife, lying on her bed of suffering, rose in the midst of the
+glowing pictures which borrowed such warmth from her husband's
+imagination.
+
+The sermon, with its hinted application to the event of the past week,
+was over at last. The shoulders of the nervous women were twitching with
+sobs. The old men were crying in their vacant way. But all the while the
+face of Byles Gridley, firm as a rock in the midst of this lachrymal
+inundation, was kept steadily on the preacher, who had often felt the
+look that came through the two round glasses searching into the very
+marrow of his bones.
+
+As the sermon was finished, the sexton marched up through the broad aisle
+and handed the note over the door of the pulpit to the clergyman, who was
+wiping his face after the exertion of delivering his discourse. Mr.
+Stoker looked at it, started, changed color,--his vision of "The Dangers
+of Beauty, a Sermon printed by Request," had vanished,--and passed the
+note to Father Pemberton, who sat by him in the pulpit. With much pains
+he deciphered its contents, for his eyes were dim with years, and, having
+read it, bowed his head upon his hands in silent thanksgiving. Then he
+rose in the beauty of his tranquil and noble old age, so touched with the
+message he had to proclaim to his people, that the three deep furrows on
+his forehead, which some said he owed to the three dogmas of original
+sin, predestination, and endless torment, seemed smoothed for the moment,
+and his face was as that of an angel while he spoke.
+
+"Sisters and Brethren,--Rejoice with us, for we have found our lamb which
+had strayed from the fold. This our daughter was dead and is alive
+again; she was lost and is found. Myrtle Hazard, rescued from great
+peril of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now in her
+home. Thou, O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow her, didst
+not let the deep swallow her up, nor the pit shut its mouth upon her.
+Let us return our thanks to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God
+of Jacob, who is our God and Father, and who hath wrought this great
+deliverance."
+
+After his prayer, which it tried him sorely to utter in unbroken tones,
+he gave out the hymn,
+
+ "Lord, thou hast heard thy servant cry,
+ And rescued from the grave;"
+
+but it was hardly begun when the leading female voice trembled and
+stopped,--and another,--and then a third,--and Father Pemberton, seeing
+that they were all overcome, arose and stretched out his arms, and
+breathed over them his holy benediction.
+
+The village was soon alive with the news. The sexton forgot the
+solemnity of the Sabbath, and the bell acted as if it was crazy, tumbling
+heels over head at such a rate, and with such a clamor, that a good many
+thought there was a fire, and, rushing out from every quarter, instantly
+caught the great news with which the air was ablaze.
+
+A few of the young men who had come back went even further in their
+demonstrations. They got a small cannon in readiness, and without
+waiting for the going down of the sun, began firing rapidly, upon which
+the Rev. Mr. Stoker sallied forth to put a stop to this violation of the
+Sabbath. But in the mean time it was heard on all the hills, far and
+near. Some said they were firing in the hope of raising the corpse; but
+many who heard the bells ringing their crazy peals guessed what had
+happened. Before night the parties were all in, one detachment bearing
+the body of the bob-tailed catamount swung over a pole, like the mighty
+cluster of grapes from Eshcol, and another conveying with wise precaution
+that monstrous snapping-turtle which those of our friends who wish to see
+will find among the specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in the great
+collection at Cantabridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+VEXED WITH A DEVIL.
+
+It was necessary at once to summon a physician to advise as to the
+treatment of Myrtle, who had received a shock, bodily and mental, not
+lightly to be got rid of, and very probably to be followed by serious and
+varied disturbances. Her very tranquillity was suspicious, for there
+must be something of exhaustion in it, and the reaction must come sooner
+or later.
+
+Old Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut, at the age of ninety-two, very deaf, very nearly
+blind, very feeble, liable to odd lapses of memory, was yet a wise
+counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases, and on rare occasions was
+still called upon to exercise his ancient skill. Here was a case in
+which a few words from him might soothe the patient and give confidence
+to all who were interested in her. Miss Silence Withers went herself to
+see him.
+
+"Miss Withers, father, wants to talk with you about her niece, Miss
+Hazard," said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.
+
+"Miss Withers, Miss Withers?--Oh, Silence Withers,--lives up at The
+Poplars. How's the Deacon, Miss Withers?" [Ob. 1810.]
+
+"My grandfather is not living, Dr. Hurlbut," she screamed into his ear.
+
+"Dead, is he? Well, it isn't long since he was with us; and they come
+and go,--they come and go. I remember his father, Major Gideon Withers.
+He had a great red feather on training-days,--that was what made me
+remember him. Who did you say was sick and wanted to see me, Fordyce?"
+
+"Myrtle Hazard, father,--she has had a narrow escape from drowning, and
+it has left her in a rather nervous state. They would like to have you
+go up to The Poplars and take a look at her. You remember Myrtle Hazard?
+She is the great-granddaughter of your old friend the Deacon."
+
+He had to wait a minute before his thoughts would come to order; with a
+little time, the proper answer would be evolved by the slow automatic
+movement of the rusted mental machinery.
+
+After the silent moment: "Myrtle Hazard, Myrtle Hazard,--yes, yes, to be
+sure! The old Withers stock,--good constitutions,--a little apt to be
+nervous, one or two of 'em. I've given 'em a good deal of valerian and
+assafoetida,--not quite so much since the new blood came in. There is
+n't the change in folks people think,--same thing over and over again.
+I've seen six fingers on a child that had a six-fingered great-uncle, and
+I've seen that child's grandchild born with six fingers. Does this girl
+like to have her own way pretty well, like the rest of the family?"
+
+"A little too well, I suspect, father. You will remember all about her
+when you come to see her and talk with her. She would like to talk with
+you, and her aunt wants to see you too; they think there's nobody like
+the 'old Doctor'."
+
+He was not too old to be pleased with this preference, and said he was
+willing to go when they were ready. With no small labor of preparation
+he was at last got to the house, and crept with his son's aid up to the
+little room over the water, where his patient was still lying.
+
+There was a little too much color in Myrtle's cheeks and a glistening
+lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement. It gave a strange
+brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an unpractised
+observer. The old man looked at her long and curiously, his imperfect
+sight excusing the closeness of his scrutiny.
+
+He laid his trembling hand upon her forehead, and then felt her pulse
+with his shriveled fingers. He asked her various questions about
+herself, which she answered with a tone not quite so calm as natural, but
+willingly and intelligently. They thought she seemed to the old Doctor
+to be doing very well, for he spoke cheerfully to her, and treated her in
+such a way that neither she nor any of those around her could be alarmed.
+The younger physician was disposed to think she was only suffering from
+temporary excitement, and that it would soon pass off.
+
+They left the room to talk it over.
+
+"It does not amount to much, I suppose, father," said Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut. "You made the pulse about ninety,--a little hard,--did n't you;
+as I did? Rest, and low diet for a day or two, and all will be right,
+won't it?"
+
+Was it the feeling of sympathy, or was it the pride of superior sagacity,
+that changed the look of the old man's wrinkled features? "Not so
+fast,--not so fast, Fordyce," he said. "I've seen that look on another
+face of the same blood,--it 's a great many years ago, and she was dead
+before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look, and it meant
+trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I see some danger of
+a brain fever. And if she doesn't have that, then look out for some
+hysteric fits that will make mischief. Take that handkerchief off of her
+head, and cut her hair close, and keep her temples cool, and put some
+drawing plasters to the soles of her feet, and give her some of my
+pilulae compositae, and follow them with some doses of sal polychrest.
+I've been through it all before--in that same house. Live folks are only
+dead folks warmed over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face, Handsome
+Judith, to begin with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's mother,--there
+'s where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the black-eyed woman
+with the Indian blood in her,--look out for that,--look out for that.
+And--and--my son, do you remember Major Gideon Withers?" [Ob. 1780.]
+
+"Why no, father, I can't say that I remember the Major; but I know the
+picture very well. Does she remind you of him?"
+
+He paused again, until the thoughts came slowly straggling, up to the
+point where the question left him. He shook his head solemnly, and
+turned his dim eyes on his son's face.
+
+Four generations--four generations; man and wife,--yes, five generations,
+for old Selah Withers took me in his arms when I was a child, and called
+me 'little gal,' for I was in girl's clothes,--five generations before
+this Hazard child I 've looked on with these old eyes. And it seems to
+me that I can see something of almost every one of 'em in this child's
+face, it's the forehead of this one, and it's the eyes of that one, and
+it's that other's mouth, and the look that I remember in another, and
+when she speaks, why, I've heard that same voice before--yes, yes as long
+ago as when I was first married; for I remember Rachel used to think I
+praised Handsome Judith's voice more than it deserved,--and her face too,
+for that matter. You remember Rachel, my first wife,--don't you,
+Fordyce?"
+
+"No, father, I don't remember her, but I know her portrait." (As he was
+the son of the old Doctor's second wife, he could hardly be expected to
+remember her predecessor.)
+
+The old Doctor's sagacity was not in fault about the somewhat threatening
+aspect of Myrtle's condition. His directions were followed implicitly;
+for with the exception of the fact of sluggishness rather than loss of
+memory, and of that confusion of dates which in slighter degrees is often
+felt as early as middle-life, and increases in most persons from year to
+year, his mind was still penetrating, and his advice almost as
+trustworthy, as in his best days.
+
+It was very fortunate that the old Doctor ordered Myrtle's hair to be
+cut, and Miss Silence took the scissors and trimmed it at once. So,
+whenever she got well and was seen about, there would be no mystery about
+the loss of her locks,--the Doctor had been afraid of brain fever, and
+ordered them to cut her hair.
+
+Many things are uncertain in this world, and among them the effect of a
+large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians. Whether it
+was by the use of the means ordered by the old Doctor, or by the efforts
+of nature, or by both together, at any rate the first danger was averted,
+and the immediate risk from brain fever soon passed over. But the
+impression upon her mind and body had been too profound to be dissipated
+by a few days' rest. The hysteric stage which the wise old man had
+apprehended began to manifest itself by its usual signs, if anything can
+be called usual in a condition the natural order of which is disorder and
+anomaly.
+
+And now the reader, if such there be, who believes in the absolute
+independence and self-determination of the will, and the consequent total
+responsibility of every human being for every irregular nervous action
+and ill-governed muscular contraction, may as well lay down this
+narrative, or he may lose all faith in poor Myrtle Hazard, and all
+patience with the writer who tells her story.
+
+The mental excitement so long sustained, followed by a violent shock to
+the system, coming just at the period of rapid development, gave rise to
+that morbid condition, accompanied with a series of mental and moral
+perversions, which in ignorant ages and communities is attributed to the
+influence of evil spirits, but for the better-instructed is the malady
+which they call hysteria. Few households have ripened a growth of
+womanhood without witnessing some of its manifestations, and its
+phenomena are largely traded in by scientific pretenders and religious
+fanatics. Into this cloud, with all its risks and all its humiliations,
+Myrtle Hazard is about to enter. Will she pass through it unharmed, or
+wander from her path, and fall over one of those fearful precipices which
+lie before her?
+
+After the ancient physician had settled the general plan of treatment,
+its details and practical application were left to the care of his son.
+Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut was a widower, not yet forty years old, a man of a
+fine masculine aspect and a vigorous nature. He was a favorite with his
+female patients,--perhaps many of them would have said because he was
+good-looking and pleasant in his manners, but some thought in virtue of a
+special magnetic power to which certain temperaments were impressible,
+though there was no explaining it. But he himself never claimed any such
+personal gift, and never attempted any of the exploits which some thought
+were in his power if he chose to exercise his faculty in that direction.
+This girl was, as it were, a child to him, for he had seen her grow up
+from infancy, and had often held her on his knee in her early years. The
+first thing he did was to get her a nurse, for he saw that neither of the
+two women about her exercised a quieting influence upon her nerves. So
+he got her old friend, Nurse Byloe, to come and take care of her.
+
+The old nurse looked calm enough at one or two of his first visits, but
+the next morning her face showed that something had been going wrong.
+"Well, what has been the trouble, Nurse?" the Doctor said, as soon as he
+could get her out of the room.
+
+"She's been attackted, Doctor, sence you been here, dreadful. It's them
+high stirricks, Doctor, 'n' I never see 'em higher, nor more of 'em.
+Laughin' as ef she would bust. Cryin' as ef she'd lost all her friends,
+'n' was a follerin' their corpse to their graves. And spassums,--sech
+spassums! And ketchin' at her throat, 'n' sayin' there was a great ball
+a risin' into it from her stommick. One time she had a kind o' lockjaw
+like. And one time she stretched herself out 'n' laid jest as stiff as
+ef she was dead. And she says now that her head feels as ef a nail had
+been driv' into it,--into the left temple, she says, and that's what
+makes her look so distressed now."
+
+The Doctor came once more to her bedside. He saw that her forehead was
+contracted, and that she was evidently suffering from severe pain
+somewhere.
+
+"Where is your uneasiness, Myrtle?" he asked.
+
+She moved her hand very slowly, and pressed it on her left temple. He
+laid his hand upon the same spot, kept it there a moment, and then
+removed it. She took it gently with her own, and placed it on her temple
+again. As he sat watching her, he saw that her features were growing
+easier, and in a short time her deep, even breathing showed that she was
+asleep.
+
+"It beats all," the old nurse said. "Why, she's been a complainin' ever
+sence daylight, and she hain't slep' not a wink afore, sence twelve
+o'clock las' night! It's j es' like them magnetizers,--I never heerd you
+was one o' them kind, Dr. Hurlbut."
+
+"I can't say how it is, Nurse,--I have heard people say my hand was
+magnetic, but I never thought of its quieting her so quickly. No sleep
+since twelve o'clock last night, you say?"
+
+"Not a wink, 'n' actin' as ef she was possessed a good deal o' the time.
+You read your Bible, Doctor, don't you? You're pious? Do you remember
+about that woman in Scriptur' out of whom the Lord cast seven devils?
+Well, I should ha' thought there was seventy devils in that gal last
+night, from the way she carr'd on. And now she lays there jest as
+peaceful as a new-born babe,--that is, accordin' to the sayin' about 'em;
+for as to peaceful new-born babes, I never see one that come t' anything,
+that did n't screech as ef the haouse was afire 'n' it wanted to call all
+the fire-ingines within ten mild."
+
+The Doctor smiled, but he became thoughtful in a moment. Did he possess
+a hitherto unexercised personal power, which put the key of this young
+girl's nervous system into his hands? The remarkable tranquillizing
+effect of the contact of his hand with her forehead looked like an
+immediate physical action.
+
+It might have been a mere coincidence, however. He would not form an
+opinion until his next visit.
+
+At that next visit it did seem as if some of Nurse Byloe's seventy devils
+had possession of the girl. All the strange spasmodic movements, the
+chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing and crying, were in
+full blast. All the remedies which had been ordered seemed to have been
+of no avail. The Doctor could hardly refuse trying his quasi magnetic
+influence, and placed the tips of his fingers on her forehead. The
+result was the same that had followed the similar proceeding the day
+before,--the storm was soon calmed, and after a little time she fell into
+a quiet sleep, as in the first instance.
+
+Here was an awkward affair for the physician, to be sure! He held this
+power in his hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed to
+possess. How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and what
+would be the consequence of the mysterious relation which must
+necessarily spring up between a man like him, in the plenitude of vital
+force, of strongly attractive personality, and a young girl organized for
+victory over the calmest blood and the steadiest resistance?
+
+Every day after this made matters worse. There was something almost
+partaking of the miraculous in the influence he was acquiring over her.
+His "Peace, be still!" was obeyed by the stormy elements of this young
+soul, as if it had been a supernatural command. How could he resist the
+dictate of humanity which called him to make his visits more frequent,
+that her intervals of rest might be more numerous? How could he refuse to
+sit at her bedside for a while in the evening, that she might be quieted,
+instead of beginning the night sleepless and agitated?
+
+The Doctor was a man of refined feeling as well as of principle, and he
+had besides a sacred memory in the deepest heart of his affections. It
+was the common belief in the village that he would never marry again, but
+that his first and only love was buried in the grave of the wife of his
+youth. It did not easily occur to him to suspect himself of any weakness
+with regard to this patient of his, little more than a child in years.
+It did not at once suggest itself to him that she, in her strange,
+excited condition, might fasten her wandering thoughts upon him, too far
+removed by his age, as it seemed, to strike the fancy of a young girl
+under almost any conceivable conditions.
+
+Thus it was that many of those beautiful summer evenings found him
+sitting by his patient, the river rippling and singing beneath them, the
+moon shining over them, sweet odors from the thickets on the banks of the
+stream stealing in on the soft air that came through the open window, and
+every time they were thus together, the subtile influence which bound
+them to each other bringing them more and more into inexplicable
+harmonies and almost spiritual identity.
+
+But all this did not hinder the development of new and strange conditions
+in Myrtle Hazard. Her will was losing its power. "I cannot help
+it"--the hysteric motto--was her constant reply. It is not pleasant to
+confess the truth, but she was rapidly undergoing a singular change of
+her moral nature. She had been a truthful child. If she had kept her
+secret about what she had found in the garret, she thought she was
+exercising her rights, and she had never been obliged to tell any lies
+about it.
+
+But now she seemed to have lost the healthy instincts for veracity and
+honesty. She feigned all sorts of odd symptoms, and showed a wonderful
+degree of cunning in giving an appearance of truth to them. It became
+next to impossible to tell what was real and what was simulated. At one
+time she could not be touched ever so lightly without shrinking and
+crying out. At another time she would squint, and again she would be
+half paralyzed for a time. She would pretend to fast for days, living on
+food she had concealed and took secretly in the night.
+
+The nurse was getting worn out. Kitty Fagan would have had the priest
+come to the house and sprinkle it with holy water. The two women were
+beginning to get nervous themselves. The Rev. Mr. Stoker said in
+confidence to Miss Silence, that there was reason to fear she might have
+been given over for a time to the buffetings of Satan, and that perhaps
+his (Mr. Stoker's) personal attentions might be useful in that case. And
+so it appeared that the "young doctor" was the only being left with whom
+she had any complete relations and absolute sympathy. She had become so
+passive in his hands that it seemed as if her only healthy life was, as
+it were, transmitted through him, and that she depended on the transfer
+of his nervous power, as the plant upon the light for its essential
+living processes.
+
+The two young men who had met in so unexpected a manner on board the ship
+Swordfish had been reasonably discreet in relating their adventures.
+Myrtle Hazard may or may not have had the plan they attributed to her;
+however that was, they had looked rather foolish when they met, and had
+not thought it worth while to be very communicative about the matter when
+they returned. It had at least given them a chance to become a little
+better acquainted with each other, and it was an opportunity which the
+elder and more artful of the two meant to turn to advantage.
+
+Of all Myrtle's few friends only one was in the habit of seeing her often
+during this period, namely, Olive Eveleth, a girl so quiet and sensible
+that she, if anybody, could be trusted with her. But Myrtle's whole
+character seemed to have changed, and Olive soon found that she was in
+some mystic way absorbed into another nature. Except when the
+physician's will was exerted upon her, she was drifting without any
+self-directing power, and then any one of those manifold impulses which
+would in some former ages have been counted as separate manifestations on
+the part of distinct demoniacal beings might take possession of her.
+Olive did little, therefore, but visit Myrtle from time to time to learn
+if any change had occurred in her condition. All this she reported to
+Cyprian, and all this was got out of him by Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+That gentleman was far from being pleased with the look of things as they
+were represented. What if the Doctor, who was after all in the prime of
+life and younger-looking than some who were born half a dozen years after
+him, should get a hold on this young woman,--girl now, if you will, but
+in a very few years certain to come within possible, nay, not very
+improbable, matrimonial range of him? That would be pleasant, wouldn't
+it? It had happened sometimes, as he knew, that these magnetizing tricks
+had led to infatuation on the part of the subjects of the wonderful
+influence. So he concluded to be ill and consult the younger Dr.
+Hurlbut, and incidentally find out how the land lay.
+
+The next question was, what to be ill with. Some not ungentlemanly
+malady, not hereditary, not incurable, not requiring any obvious change
+in habits of life. Dyspepsia would answer the purpose well enough: so
+Mr. Murray Bradshaw picked up a medical book and read ten minutes or more
+for that complaint. At the end of this time he was an accomplished
+dyspeptic; for lawyers half learn a thing quicker than the members of any
+other profession.
+
+He presented himself with a somewhat forlorn countenance to Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, as suffering from some of the less formidable symptoms of that
+affection. He got into a very interesting conversation with him,
+especially about some nervous feelings which had accompanied his attack
+of indigestion. Thence to nervous complaints in general. Thence to the
+case of the young lady at The Poplars whom he was attending. The Doctor
+talked with a certain reserve, as became his professional relations with
+his patient; but it was plain enough that, if this kind of intercourse
+went on much longer, it would be liable to end in some emotional
+explosion or other, and there was no saying how it would at last turn
+out.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was afraid to meddle directly. He knew something more
+about the history of Myrtle's adventure than any of his neighbors, and,
+among other things, that it had given Mr. Byles Gridley a peculiar
+interest in her, of which he could take advantage. He therefore artfully
+hinted his fears to the old man, and left his hint to work itself out.
+
+However suspicious Master Gridley was of him and his motives, he thought
+it worth while to call up at The Poplars and inquire for himself of the
+nurse what was this new relation growing up between the physician and his
+young patient.
+
+She imparted her opinion to him in a private conversation with great
+freedom. "Sech doin's! sech doin's! The gal's jest as much bewitched as
+ever any gal was sence them that was possessed in Scriptur'. And every
+day it 's wus and wus. Ef that Doctor don't stop comin', she won't
+breathe without his helpin' her to before long. And, Mr. Gridley, I
+don't like to say so,--but I can't help thinkin' he's gettin' a little
+bewitched too. I don't believe he means to take no kind of advantage of
+her; but, Mr. Gridley, you've seen them millers fly round and round a
+candle, and you know how it ginerally comes out. Men is men and gals is
+gals. I would n't trust no man, not ef he was much under a hundred year
+old,--and as for a gal--!"
+
+"Mulieri ne mortuae quidem credendum est," said Mr. Gridley. "You
+wouldn't trust a woman even if she was dead, hey, Nurse?"
+
+"Not till she was buried, 'n' the grass growin' a foot high over her,"
+said Nurse Byloe, "unless I'd know'd her sence she was a baby. I've
+know'd this one sence she was two or three year old; but this gal ain't
+Myrtle Hazard no longer,--she's bewitched into somethin' different. I'll
+tell ye what, Mr. Gridley; you get old Dr. Hurlbut to come and see her
+once a day for a week, and get the young doctor to stay away. I'll resk
+it. She 'll have some dreadful tantrums at fust, but she'll come to it
+in two or three, days."
+
+Master Byles Gridley groaned in spirit. He had come to this village to
+end his days in peace, and here he was just going to make a martyr of
+himself for the sake of a young person to whom he was under no
+obligation, except that he had saved her from the consequences of her own
+foolish act, at the expense of a great overturn of all his domestic
+habits. There was no help for it. The nurse was right, and he must
+perform the disagreeable duty of letting the Doctor know that he was
+getting into a track which might very probably lead to mischief, and that
+he must back out as fast as he could.
+
+At 2 P. M. Gifted Hopkins presented the following note at the Doctor's
+door:
+
+"Mr. Byles Gridley would be much obliged to Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut if he
+would call at his study this evening."
+
+"Odd, is n't it, father, the old man's asking me to come and see him?
+Those old stub-twist constitutions never want patching."
+
+"Old man! old man! Who's that you call old,--not Byles Gridley, hey?
+Old! old! Sixty year, more or less! How old was Floyer when he died,
+Fordyce? Ninety-odd, was n't it? Had the asthma though, or he'd have
+lived to be as old as Dr. Holyoke,--a hundred year and over. That's old.
+But men live to be a good deal more than that sometimes. What does Byles
+Gridley want of you, did you say?"
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell, father; I'll go and find out." So he went over
+to Mrs. Hopkins's in the evening, and was shown up into the study.
+
+Master Gridley treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors
+sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies. He presently began asking
+certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful period of
+life he was fast approaching. Then he discoursed of medicine, ancient
+and modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a little, and evincing a
+good deal of acquaintance with old doctrines and authors.
+
+He had a few curious old medical books in his library, which he said he
+should like to show Dr. Hurlbut.
+
+"There, now! What do you say to this copy of Joannes de Ketam, Venice,
+1522? Look at these woodcuts,--the first anatomical pictures ever
+printed, Doctor, unless these others of Jacobus Berengarius are older!
+See this scene of the plague-patient, the doctor smelling at his
+pouncet-box, the old nurse standing square at the bedside, the young
+nurse with the bowl, holding back and turning her head away, and the old
+burial-hag behind her, shoving her forward, a very curious book, Doctor,
+and has the first phrenological picture in it ever made. Take a look,
+too, at my Vesalius,--not the Leyden edition, Doctor, but the one with
+the grand old original figures,--so good that they laid them to Titian.
+And look here, Doctor, I could n't help getting this great folio Albinus,
+1747,--and the nineteenth century can't touch it, Doctor,--can't touch it
+for completeness and magnificence, so all the learned professors tell me!
+Brave old fellows, Doctor, and put their lives into their books as you
+gentlemen don't pretend to do nowadays. And good old fellows,
+Doctor,--high-minded, scrupulous, conscientious, punctilious,--remembered
+their duties to man and to woman, and felt all the responsibilities of
+their confidential relation to families. Did you ever read the oldest of
+medical documents,--the Oath of Hippocrates?"
+
+The Doctor thought he had read it, but did not remember much about it.
+
+"It 's worth reading, Doctor,--it's worth remembering; and, old as it is,
+it is just as good to-day as it was when it was laid down as a rule of
+conduct four hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered.
+Let me read it to you, Dr. Hurlbut."
+
+There was something in Master Gridley's look that made the Doctor feel a
+little nervous; he did not know just what was coming.
+
+Master Gridley took out his great Hippocrates, the edition of Foesius,
+and opened to the place. He turned so as to face the Doctor, and read
+the famous Oath aloud, Englishing it as he went along. When he came to
+these words which follow, he pronounced them very slowly and with special
+emphasis.
+
+"My life shall be pure and holy."
+
+"Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the good of the patient:
+
+"I will abstain from inflicting any voluntary injury, and from leading
+away any, whether man or woman, bond or free."
+
+The Doctor changed color as he listened, and the moisture broke out on
+his forehead.
+
+Master Gridley saw it, and followed up his advantage. "Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, are you not in danger of violating the sanctities of your
+honorable calling, and leading astray a young person committed to your
+sacred keeping?"
+
+While saying these words, Master Gridley looked full upon him, with a
+face so charged with grave meaning, so impressed with the gravity of his
+warning accents, that the Doctor felt as if he were before some dread
+tribunal, and remained silent. He was a member of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's
+church, and the words he had just listened to were those of a sinful old
+heathen who had never heard a sermon in his life; but they stung him, for
+all that, as the parable of the prophet stung the royal transgressor.
+
+He spoke at length, for the plain honest words had touched the right
+spring of consciousness at the right moment; not too early, for he now
+saw whither he was tending,--not too late, for he was not yet in the
+inner spirals of the passion which whirls men and women to their doom in
+ever-narrowing coils, that will not unwind at the command of God or man.
+
+He spoke as one who is humbled by self-accusation, yet in a manly way, as
+became his honorable and truthful character.
+
+"Master Gridley," he said, "I stand convicted before you. I know too
+well what you are thinking of. It is true, I cannot continue my
+attendance on Myrtle--on Miss Hazard, for you mean her--without peril to
+both of us. She is not herself. God forbid that I should cease to be
+myself! I have been thinking of a summer tour, and I will at once set
+out upon it, and leave this patient in my father's hands. I think he
+will find strength to visit her under the circumstances."
+
+The Doctor went off the next morning without saying a word to Myrtle
+Hazard, and his father made the customary visit in his place.
+
+That night the spirit tare her, as may well be supposed, and so the
+second night. But there was no help for it: her doctor was gone, and the
+old physician, with great effort, came instead, sat by her, spoke kindly
+to her, left wise directions to her attendants, and above all assured
+them that, if they would have a little patience, they would see all this
+storm blow over.
+
+On the third night after his visit, the spirit rent her sore, and came
+out of her, or, in the phrase of to-day, she had a fierce paroxysm, after
+which the violence of the conflict ceased, and she might be called
+convalescent so far as that was concerned.
+
+But all this series of nervous disturbances left her in a very
+impressible and excitable condition. This was just the state to invite
+the spiritual manipulations of one of those theological practitioners who
+consider that the treatment of all morbid states of mind short of raving
+madness belongs to them and not to the doctors. This same condition was
+equally favorable for the operations of any professional experimenter who
+would use the flame of religious excitement to light the torch of an
+earthly passion. So many fingers that begin on the black keys stray to
+the white ones before the tune is played out!
+
+If Myrtle Hazard was in charge of any angelic guardian, the time was at
+hand when she would need all celestial influences; for the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker was about to take a deep interest in her spiritual
+welfare.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SKIRMISHING.
+
+"So the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has called upon you, Susan Posey, has
+he? And wants you to come and talk religion with him in his study, Susan
+Posey, does he? Religion is a good thing, my dear, the best thing in the
+world, and never better than when we are young, and no young people need
+it more than young girls. There are temptations to all, and to them as
+often as to any, Susan Posey. And temptations come to them in places
+where they don't look for them, and from persons they never thought of as
+tempters. So I am very glad to have your thoughts called to the subject
+of religion. 'Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.'
+
+"But Susan Posey, my dear, I think you hard better not break in upon the
+pious meditations of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker in his private study.
+A monk's cell and a minister's library are hardly the places for young
+ladies. They distract the attention of these good men from their
+devotions and their sermons. If you think you must go, you had better
+take Mrs. Hopkins with you. She likes religious conversation, and it
+will do her good too, and save a great deal of time for the minister,
+conversing with two at once. She is of discreet age, and will tell you
+when it is time to come away,--you might stay too long, you know. I've
+known young persons stay a good deal too long at these interviews,--a
+great deal too long, Susan Posey!"
+
+Such was the fatherly counsel of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+Susan was not very quick of apprehension, but she could not help seeing
+the justice of Master Gridley's remark, that for a young person to go and
+break in on the hours that a minister requires for his studies, without
+being accompanied by a mature friend who would remind her when it was
+time to go, would be taking an unfair advantage of his kindness in asking
+her to call upon him. She promised, therefore, that she would never go
+without having Mrs. Hopkins as her companion, and with this assurance her
+old friend rested satisfied.
+
+It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice
+than those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey. Of
+that it will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions and
+character of the minister and his household.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages already
+alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive to many
+women. He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy intimacy
+with them which implies some knowledge of the female nature, and, above
+all, confidence in one's powers. There was little doubt, the gossips
+maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish would have been
+willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him that other end of his
+yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting, unequal to the burden.
+
+That lady must have been some years older than her husband,--how many we
+need not inquire too curiously,--but in vitality she had long passed the
+prime in which he was still flourishing. She had borne him five
+children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three of them.
+Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of village life wearied
+her; the parishioners expected too much of her as the minister's wife;
+she had wanted more fresh air and more cheerful companionship; and her
+thoughts had fed too much on death and sin,--good bitter tonics to
+increase the appetite for virtue, but not good as food and drink for the
+spirit.
+
+But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these obvious
+depressing influences. She felt that she was no longer to her husband
+what she had been to him, and felt it with something of
+self-reproach,--which was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true and
+tender wife. Deeper than all the rest was still another feeling, which
+had hardly risen into the region of inwardly articulated thought, but lay
+unshaped beneath all the syllabled trains of sleeping or waking
+consciousness.
+
+The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual
+matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who came
+with such intent. Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon Rumrill, in
+great iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and tremulous voice,
+who had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast with two horns, or
+the woman that fled into the wilderness, or other points not settled to
+his mind in Scott's Commentary. The minister was always very busy at
+such times, and made short work of his deacon's doubts. Or it might be
+that an ancient woman, a mother or a grandmother in Israel, came with her
+questions and her perplexities to her pastor; and it was pretty certain
+that just at that moment he was very deep in his next sermon, or had a
+pressing visit to make.
+
+But it would also happen occasionally that one of the tenderer ewe-lambs
+of the flock needed comfort from the presence of the shepherd. Poor Mrs.
+Stoker noticed, or thought she noticed, that the good man had more
+leisure for the youthful and blooming sister than for the more discreet
+and venerable matron or spinster. The sitting was apt to be longer; and
+the worthy pastor would often linger awhile about the door, to speed the
+parting guest, perhaps, but a little too much after the fashion of young
+people who are not displeased with each other, and who often find it as
+hard to cross a threshold single as a witch finds it to get over a
+running stream. More than once, the pallid, faded wife had made an
+errand to the study, and, after a keen look at the bright young cheeks,
+flushed with the excitement of intimate spiritual communion, had gone
+back to her chamber with her hand pressed against her heart, and the
+bitterness of death in her soul.
+
+The end of all these bodily and mental trials was, that the minister's
+wife had fallen into a state of habitual invalidism, such as only women,
+who feel all the nerves which in men are as insensible as
+telegraph-wires, can experience.
+
+The doctor did not know what to make of her case,--whether she would live
+or die,--whether she would languish for years, or, all at once, roused by
+some strong impression, or in obedience to some unexplained movement of
+the vital forces, take up her bed and walk. For her bed had become her
+home, where she lived as if it belonged to her organism. There she lay,
+a not unpleasing invalid to contemplate, always looking resigned,
+patient, serene, except when the one deeper grief was stirred, always
+arrayed with simple neatness, and surrounded with little tokens that
+showed the constant presence with her of tasteful and thoughtful
+affection. She did not know, nobody could know, how steadily, how
+silently all this artificial life was draining the veins and blanching
+the cheek of her daughter Bathsheba, one of the everyday, air-breathing
+angels without nimbus or aureole who belong to every story which lets us
+into a few households, as much as the stars and the flowers belong to
+everybody's verses.
+
+Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was not
+in the shape of outward commendation. Some of the more censorious
+members of her father's congregation were severe in their remarks upon
+her absorption in the supreme object of her care. It seems that this had
+prevented her from attending to other duties which they considered more
+imperative. They did n't see why she shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school as
+well as the rest, and as to her not comin' to meetin' three times on
+Sabbath day like other folks, they couldn't account for it, except
+because she calculated that she could get along without the means of
+grace, bein' a minister's daughter. Some went so far as to doubt if she
+had ever experienced religion, for all she was a professor. There was a
+good many indulged a false hope. To this, others objected her life of
+utter self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother
+as some evidence of Christian character. But old Deacon Rumrill put down
+that heresy by showing conclusively from Scott's Commentary on Romans xi.
+1-6, that this was altogether against her chance of being called, and
+that the better her disposition to perform good works, the more unlikely
+she was to be the subject of saving grace. Some of these severe critics
+were good people enough themselves, but they loved active work and
+stirring companionship, and would have found their real cross if they had
+been called to sit at an invalid's bedside.
+
+As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so much
+time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly have
+prompted. He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great
+reluctance we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited not
+only her mother's youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness which, born
+with some of God's creatures, is, if not "grace," at least a
+manifestation of native depravity which might well be mistaken for it.
+
+The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single
+point. There was one subject on which no word ever passed between them.
+The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a mantle to
+cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the husband and
+father, and no word ever passed between them implying a suspicion of the
+loyalty of his affections. Bathsheba came at last so to fill with her
+tenderness the space left empty in the neglected heart, that her mother
+only spoke her habitual feeling when she said, "I should think you were
+in love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter."
+
+This was a dangerous state of things for the minister. Strange
+suggestions and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams and
+reveries. The thought once admitted that another's life is becoming
+superfluous and a burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on the soul. Woe
+to the man or woman whose days are passed in watching the hour-glass
+through which the sands run too slowly for longings that are like a
+skulking procession of bloodless murders! Without affirming such horrors
+of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be libellous to say that his fancy
+was tampering with future possibilities, as it constantly happens with
+those who are getting themselves into training for some act of folly, or
+some crime, it may be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an
+idea in the consciousness, and by and by ripen into fact.
+
+It must not be taken for granted that he was actually on the road to some
+fearful deed, or that he was an utterly lost soul. He was ready to yield
+to temptation if it came in his way; he would even court it, but he did
+not shape out any plan very definitely in his mind, as a more desperate
+sinner would have done. He liked the pleasurable excitement of emotional
+relations with his pretty lambs, and enjoyed it under the name of
+religious communion. There is a border land where one can stand on the
+territory of legitimate instincts and affections, and yet be so near, the
+pleasant garden of the Adversary, that his dangerous fruits and flowers
+are within easy reach. Once tasted, the next step is like to be the
+scaling of the wall. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was very fond of this border
+land. His imagination was wandering over it too often when his pen was
+travelling almost of itself along the weary parallels of the page before
+him. All at once a blinding flash would come over him the lines of his
+sermon would run together, the fresh manuscript would shrivel like a dead
+leaf, and the rows of hard-hearted theology on the shelves before him,
+and the broken-backed Concordance, and the Holy Book itself, would fade
+away as he gave himself up to the enchantment of his delirious dream.
+
+The reader will probably consider it a discreet arrangement that pretty
+Susan Posey should seek her pastor in grave company. Mrs. Hopkins
+willingly consented to the arrangement which had been proposed, and
+agreed to go with the young lady on her visit to the Rev. Mr. Stoker's
+study. They were both arrayed in their field-day splendors on this
+occasion. Susan was lovely in her light curls and blue ribbons, and the
+becoming dress which could not help betraying the modestly emphasized
+crescendos and gently graded diminuendos of her figure. She was as round
+as if she had been turned in a lathe, and as delicately finished as if
+she had been modelled for a Flora. She had naturally an airy toss of the
+head and a springy movement of the joints, such as some girls study in
+the glass (and make dreadful work of it), so that she danced all over
+without knowing it, like a little lively bobolink on a bulrush. In
+short, she looked fit to spoil a homily for Saint Anthony himself.
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was not less perfect in her somewhat different style. She
+might be called impressive and imposing in her grand-costume, which she
+wore for this visit. It was a black silk dress, with a crape shawl, a
+firmly defensive bonnet, and an alpaca umbrella with a stern-looking and
+decided knob presiding as its handle. The dried-leaf rustle of her silk
+dress was suggestive of the ripe autumn of life, bringing with it those
+golden fruits of wisdom and experience which the grave teachers of
+mankind so justly prefer to the idle blossoms of adolescence.
+
+It is needless to say that the visit was conducted with the most perfect
+propriety in all respects. Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take upon
+herself a large share of the conversation. The minister, on the other
+hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss Susan, but,
+with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good woman drew his fire
+so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly any of his insinuating
+looks, reached the tender object at which they were aimed. It is
+probable that his features or tones betrayed some impatience at having
+thus been foiled of his purpose, for Mrs. Hopkins thought he looked all
+the time as if he wanted to get rid of her. The three parted, therefore,
+not in the best humor all round. Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd see the
+minister in Jericho before she'd fix herself up as if she was goin' to a
+weddin' to go and see him again. Why, he did n't make any more of her
+than if she'd been a tabby-cat. She believed some of these ministers
+thought women's souls dried up like peas in a pod by the time they was
+forty year old; anyhow, they did n't seem to care any great about 'em,
+except while they was green and tender. It was all Miss Se-usan, Miss
+Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear! but as for her, she might jest as well
+have gone with her apron on, for any notice he took of her. She did n't
+care, she was n't goin' to be left out when there was talkin' goin' on,
+anyhow.
+
+Susan Posey, on her part, said she did n't like him a bit. He looked so
+sweet at her, and held his head on one side,--law! just as if he had been
+a young beau! And,--don't tell,--but he whispered that he wished the
+next time I came I wouldn't bring that Hopkins woman!
+
+It would not be fair to repeat what the minister said to himself; but we
+may own as much as this, that, if worthy Mrs. Hopkins had heard it, she
+would have treated him to a string of adjectives which would have greatly
+enlarged his conceptions of the female vocabulary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+BATTLE.
+
+In tracing the history of a human soul through its commonplace nervous
+perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations, there is
+danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject of such
+weakness. It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a young girl;
+but you who remember when_______ _________, only fifteen years old,
+untouched by passion, unsullied in name, was found in the shallow brook
+where she had sternly and surely sought her death,--(too true! too
+true!--ejus animae Jesu miserere!--but a generation has passed since
+then,)--will not smile so scornfully.
+
+Myrtle Hazard no longer required the physician's visits, but her mind was
+very far from being poised in the just balance of its faculties. She was
+of a good natural constitution and a fine temperament; but she had been
+overwrought by all that she had passed through, and, though happening to
+have been born in another land, she was of American descent. Now, it has
+long been noticed that there is something in the influences, climatic or
+other, here prevailing, which predisposes to morbid religious excitement.
+The graver reader will not object to seeing the exact statement of a
+competent witness belonging to a by-gone century, confirmed as it is by
+all that we see about us.
+
+"There is no Experienced Minister of the Gospel who hath not in the Cases
+of Tempted Souls often had this Experience, that the ill Cases of their
+distempered Bodies are the frequent Occasion and Original of their
+Temptations." "The Vitiated Humours in many Persons, yield the Steams
+whereinto Satan does insinuate himself, till he has gained a sort of
+Possession in them, or at least an Opportunity to shoot into the Mind as
+many Fiery Darts as may cause a sad Life unto them; yea, 't is well if
+Self-Murder be not the sad end into which these hurried. People are
+thus precipitated. New England, a country where Splenetic Maladies are
+prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded
+Numberless Instances, of even pious People, who have contracted these
+Melancholy Indispositions which have unhinged them from all Service or
+Comfort; yea, not a few Persons have been hurried thereby to lay Violent
+Hands upon themselves at the last. These are among the unsearchable
+Judgments of God!"
+
+Such are the words of the Rev. Cotton Mather.
+
+The minister had hardly recovered from his vexatious defeat in the
+skirmish where the Widow Hopkins was his principal opponent, when he
+received a note from Miss Silence Withers, which promised another and
+more important field of conflict. It contained a request that he would
+visit Myrtle Hazard, who seemed to be in a very excitable and impressible
+condition, and who might perhaps be easily brought under those influences
+which she had resisted from her early years, through inborn perversity of
+character.
+
+When the Rev. Mr. Stoker received this note, he turned very pale,--which
+was a bad sign. Then he drew a long breath or two, and presently a flush
+tingled up to his cheek, where it remained a fixed burning glow. This
+may have been from the deep interest he felt in Myrtle's spiritual
+welfare; but he had often been sent for by aged sinners in more immediate
+peril, apparently, without any such disturbance of the circulation.
+
+To know whether a minister, young or still in flower; is in safe or
+dangerous paths, there are two psychometers, a comparison between which
+will give as infallible a return as the dry and wet bulbs of the
+ingenious "Hygrodeik." The first is the black broadcloth forming the
+knees of his pantaloons; the second, the patch of carpet before his
+mirror. If the first is unworn and the second is frayed and threadbare,
+pray for him. If the first is worn and shiny, while the second keeps its
+pattern and texture, get him to pray for you.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker should have gone down on his knees then and there,
+and sought fervently for the grace which he was like to need in the
+dangerous path just opening before him. He did not do this; but he stood
+up before his looking-glass and parted his hair as carefully as if he had
+been separating the saints of his congregation from the sinners, to send
+the list to the statistical columns of a religious newspaper. He
+selected a professional neckcloth, as spotlessly pure as if it had been
+washed in innocency, and adjusted it in a tie which was like the white
+rose of Sharon. Myrtle Hazard was, he thought, on the whole, the
+handsomest girl he had ever seen; Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup
+from the meadow is to a tiger-lily. He, knew the nature of the nervous
+disturbances through which she had been passing, and that she must be in
+a singularly impressible condition. He felt sure that he could establish
+intimate spiritual relations with her by drawing out her repressed
+sympathies, by feeding the fires of her religious imagination, by
+exercising all those lesser arts of fascination which are so familiar to
+the Don Giovannis, and not always unknown to the San Giovannis.
+
+As for the hard doctrines which he used to produce sensations with in the
+pulpit, it would have been a great pity to worry so lovely a girl, in
+such a nervous state, with them. He remembered a savory text about being
+made all things to all men, which would bear application particularly
+well to the case of this young woman. He knew how to weaken his
+divinity, on occasion, as well as an old housewife to weaken her tea,
+lest it should keep people awake.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker was a man of emotions. He loved to feel his heart
+beat; he loved all the forms of non-alcoholic drunkenness, which are so
+much better than the vinous, because they taste themselves so keenly,
+whereas the other (according to the statement of experts who are familiar
+with its curious phenomena) has a certain sense of unreality connected
+with it. He delighted in the reflex stimulus of the excitement he
+produced in others by working on their feelings. A powerful preacher is
+open to the same sense of enjoyment--an awful, tremulous, goose-flesh
+sort of state, but still enjoyment--that a great tragedian feels when he
+curdles the blood of his audience.
+
+Mr. Stoker was noted for the vividness of his descriptions of the future
+which was in store for the great bulk of his fellow-townsmen and
+fellow-worlds-men. He had three sermons on this subject, known to all
+the country round as the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon, and the
+convulsion-fit sermon, from the various effects said to have been
+produced by them when delivered before large audiences. It might be
+supposed that his reputation as a terrorist would have interfered with
+his attempts to ingratiate himself with his young favorites. But the
+tragedian who is fearful as Richard or as Iago finds that no hindrance to
+his success in the part of Romeo. Indeed, women rather take to terrible
+people; prize-fighters, pirates, highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks,
+and Bluebeards generally have a fascination for the sex; your virgin has
+a natural instinct to saddle your lion. The fact, therefore, that the
+young girl had sat under his tremendous pulpitings, through the sweating
+sermon, the fainting sermon, and the convulsion-fit sermon, did not
+secure her against the influence of his milder approaches.
+
+Myrtle was naturally surprised at receiving a visit from him; but she was
+in just that unbalanced state in which almost any impression is welcome.
+He showed so much interest, first in her health, then in her thoughts and
+feelings, always following her lead in the conversation, that before he
+left her she felt as if she had made a great discovery; namely, that this
+man, so formidable behind the guns of his wooden bastion, was a most
+tenderhearted and sympathizing person when he came out of it unarmed.
+How delightful he was as he sat talking in the twilight in low and tender
+tones, with respectful pauses of listening, in which he looked as if he
+too had just made a discovery,--of an angel, to wit, to whom he could not
+help unbosoming his tenderest emotions, as to a being from another
+sphere!
+
+It was a new experience to Myrtle. She was all ready for the spiritual
+manipulations of an expert. The excitability which had been showing
+itself in spasms and strange paroxysms had been transferred to those
+nervous centres, whatever they may be, cerebral or ganglionic, which are
+concerned in the emotional movements of the religious nature. It was
+taking her at an unfair disadvantage, no doubt. In the old communion,
+some priest might have wrought upon her while in this condition, and we
+might have had at this very moment among us another Saint Theresa or
+Jacqueline Pascal. She found but a dangerous substitute in the spiritual
+companionship of a saint like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+People think the confessional is unknown in our Protestant churches. It
+is a great mistake. The principal change is, that there is no screen
+between the penitent and the father confessor. The minister knew his
+rights, and very soon asserted them. He gave aunt Silence to understand
+that he could talk more at ease if he and his young disciple were left
+alone together. Cynthia Badlam did not like this arrangement. She was
+afraid to speak about it; but she glared at them aslant, with the look of
+a biting horse when his eyes follow one sideways until they are all white
+but one little vicious spark of pupil.
+
+It was not very long before the Rev. Mr. Stoker had established pretty
+intimate relations with the household at The Poplars. He had reason to
+think, he assured Miss Silence, that Myrtle was in a state of mind which
+promised a complete transformation of her character. He used the phrases
+of his sect, of course, in talking with the elderly lady; but the
+language which he employed with the young girl was free from those
+mechanical expressions which would have been like to offend or disgust
+her.
+
+As to his rougher formulae, he knew better than to apply them to a
+creature of her fine texture. If he had been disposed to do so, her
+simple questions and answers to his inquiries would have made it
+difficult. But it was in her bright and beautiful eyes, in her handsome
+features, and her winning voice, that he found his chief obstacle. How
+could he look upon her face in its loveliness, and talk to her as if she
+must be under the wrath and curse of God for the mere fact of her
+existence? It seemed more natural and it certainly was more
+entertaining, to question her in such a way as to find out what kind of
+theology had grown up in her mind as the result of her training in the
+complex scheme of his doctrinal school. And as he knew that the merest
+child, so soon as it begins to think at all, works out for itself
+something like a theory of human nature, he pretty soon began sounding
+Myrtle's thoughts on this matter.
+
+What was her own idea; he would be pleased to know, about her natural
+condition as one born of a sinful race, and her inherited liabilities on
+that account?
+
+Myrtle smiled like a little heathen, as she was, according to the
+standard of her earlier teachings. That kind of talk used to worry her
+when she was a child, sometimes. Yes, she remembered its coming back to
+her in a dream she had, when--when--(She did not finish her sentence.)
+Did he think she hated every kind of goodness and loved every kind of
+evil? Did he think she was hateful to the Being who made her?
+
+The minister looked straight into the bright, brave, tender eyes, and
+answered, "Nothing in heaven or on earth could help loving you, Myrtle!"
+
+Pretty well for a beginning!
+
+Myrtle saw nothing but pious fervor in this florid sentiment. But as she
+was honest and clear-sighted, she could not accept a statement which
+seemed so plainly in contradiction with his common teachings, without
+bringing his flattering assertion to the test of another question.
+
+Did he suppose, she asked, that any persons could be Christians, who
+could not tell the day or the year of their change from children of
+darkness to children of light.
+
+The shrewd clergyman, whose creed could be lax enough on occasion, had
+provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these awkward
+questions in casuistical divinity. He had hunted up recipes for
+spiritual neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis, just as
+doctors do for their bodily counterparts.
+
+To be sure they could. Why, what did the great Richard Baxter say in his
+book on Infant Baptism? That at a meeting of many eminent Christians,
+some of them very famous ministers, when it was desired that every one
+should give an account of the time and manner of his conversion, there
+was but one of them all could do it. And as for himself, Mr. Baxter
+said, he could not remember the day or the year when he began to be
+sincere, as he called it. Why, did n't President Wheelock say to a young
+man who consulted him, that some persons might be true Christians without
+suspecting it?
+
+All this was so very different from the uncompromising way in which
+religious doctrines used to be presented to the young girl from the
+pulpit, that it naturally opened her heart and warmed her affections.
+Remember, if she needs excuse, that the defeated instincts of a strong
+nature were rushing in upon her, clamorous for their rights, and that she
+was not yet mature enough to understand and manage them. The paths of
+love and religion are at the fork of a road which every maiden travels.
+If some young hand does not open the turnpike gate of the first, she is
+pretty sure to try the other, which has no toll-bar. It is also very
+commonly noticed that these two paths, after diverging awhile, run into
+each other. True love leads many wandering souls into the better way.
+Nor is it rare to see those who started in company for the gates of pearl
+seated together on the banks that border the avenue to that other portal,
+gathering the roses for which it is so famous.
+
+It was with the most curious interest that the minister listened to the
+various heresies into which her reflections had led her. Somehow or
+other they did not sound so dangerous coming from her lips as when they
+were uttered by the coarser people of the less rigorous denominations, or
+preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen. He found it impossible
+to think of her in connection with those denunciations of sinners for
+which his discourses had been noted. Some of the sharp old church-members
+began to complain that his exhortations were losing their pungency. The
+truth was, he was preaching for Myrtle Hazard. He was getting bewitched
+and driven beside himself by the intoxication of his relations with her.
+
+All this time she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was
+exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination. She
+loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he furnished her.
+She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he selected for her. She
+loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies, hardly knowing sometimes
+whether she were in the body, or out of the body, while he lifted her
+upon the wings of his passion-kindled rhetoric. The time came when she
+had learned to listen for his step, when her eyes glistened at meeting
+him, when the words he uttered were treasured as from something more than
+a common mortal, and the book he had touched was like a saintly relic.
+It never suggested itself to her for an instant that this was anything
+more than such a friendship as Mercy might have cultivated with
+Great-Heart. She gave her confidence simply because she was very young
+and innocent. The green tendrils of the growing vine must wind round
+something.
+
+The seasons had been changing their scenery while the events we have told
+were occurring, and the loveliest days of autumn were now shining. To
+those who know the "Indian summer" of our Northern States, it is needless
+to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the soul. The
+stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the planet
+were sleeping, like a top, before it begins to rock with the storms of
+autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its light;
+love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back
+into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the
+ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his winter
+fireside.
+
+The minister had got into the way of taking frequent walks with Myrtle,
+whose health had seemed to require the open air, and who was fast
+regaining her natural look. Under the canopy of the scarlet, orange, and
+crimson leaved maples, of the purple and violet clad oaks, of the birches
+in their robes of sunshine, and the beeches in their clinging drapery of
+sober brown, they walked together while he discoursed of the joys of
+heaven, the sweet communion of kindred souls, the ineffable bliss of a
+world where love would be immortal and beauty should never know decay.
+And while she listened, the strange light of the leaves irradiated the
+youthful figure of Myrtle, as when the stained window let in its colors
+on Madeline, the rose-bloom and the amethyst and the glory.
+
+"Yes! we shall be angels together," exclaimed the Rev. Mr. Stoker. "Our
+souls were made for immortal union. I know it; I feel it in every throb
+of my heart. Even in this world you are as an angel to me, lifting me
+into the heaven where I shall meet you again, or it will not be heaven.
+Oh, if on earth our communion could have been such as it must be
+hereafter! O Myrtle, Myrtle!"
+
+He stretched out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the
+rapture of his devotion. Was it the light reflected from the glossy
+leaves of the poison sumach which overhung the path that made his cheek
+look so pale? Was he going to kneel to her?
+
+Myrtle turned her dark eyes on him with a simple wonder that saw an
+excess of saintly ardor in these demonstrations, and drew back from it.
+
+"I think of heaven always as the place where I shall meet my mother," she
+said calmly.
+
+These words recalled the man to himself for a moment and he was silent.
+Presently he seated himself on a stone. His lips were tremulous as he
+said, in a low tone, "Sit down by me, Myrtle."
+
+"No," she answered, with something which chilled him in her voice, "we
+will not stay here any longer; it is time to go home."
+
+"Full time!" muttered Cynthia Badlam, whose watchful eyes had been upon
+them, peering through a screen of yellow leaves, that turned her face
+pace as if with deadly passion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+FLANK MOVEMENT.
+
+Miss Cynthia Badlam was in the habit of occasionally visiting the Widow
+Hopkins. Some said but then people will talk, especially in the country,
+where they have not much else to do, except in haying-time. She had
+always known the widow, long before Mr. Gridley came there to board, or
+any other special event happened in her family. No matter what people
+said.
+
+Miss Badlam called to see Mrs. Hopkins, then, and the two had a long talk
+together, of which only a portion is on record. Here are such fragments
+as have been preserved.
+
+"What would I do about it? Why, I'd put a stop to such carry'n's on,
+mighty quick, if I had to tie the girl to the bedpost, and have a bulldog
+that world take the seat out of any pair of black pantaloons that come
+within forty rod of her,--that's what I'd do about it! He undertook to
+be mighty sweet with our Susan one while, but ever sence he's been
+talkin' religion with Myrtle Hazard he's let us alone. Do as I did when
+he asked our Susan to come to his study,--stick close to your girl and
+you 'll put a stop to all this business. He won't make love to two at
+once, unless they 're both pretty young, I 'll warrant. Follow her
+round, Miss Cynthy, and keep your eyes on her."
+
+"I have watched her like a cat, Mrs. Hopkins, but I can't follow her
+everywhere,--she won't stand what Susan Posey 'll stand. There's no use
+our talking to her,--we 've done with that at our house. You never know
+what that Indian blood of hers will make her do. She's too high-strung
+for us to bit and bridle. I don't want to see her name in the paper
+again, alongside of that" (She did not finish the sentence.) "I'd rather
+have her fished dead out of the river, or find her where she found her
+uncle Malachi!"
+
+"You don't think, Miss Cynthy, that the man means to inveigle the girl
+with the notion of marryin' her by and by, after poor Mrs. Stoker's dead
+and gone?"
+
+"The Lord in heaven forbid!" exclaimed Miss Cynthia, throwing up her
+hands. "A child of fifteen years old, if she is a woman to look at!"
+
+"It's too bad,--it's too bad to think of, Miss Cynthy; and there's that
+poor woman dyin' by inches, and Miss Bathsheby settin' with her day and
+night, she has n't got a bit of her father in her, it's all her
+mother,--and that man, instead of bein' with her to comfort her as any
+man ought to be with his wife, in sickness and in health, that's what he
+promised. I 'm sure when my poor husband was sick.... To think of that
+man goin' about to talk religion to all the prettiest girls he can find
+in the parish, and his wife at home like to leave him so soon,--it's a
+shame,--so it is, come now! Miss Cynthy, there's one of the best men and
+one of the learnedest men that ever lived that's a real friend of Myrtle
+Hazard, and a better friend to her than she knows of,--for ever sence he
+brought her home, he feels jest like a father to her,--and that man is
+Mr. Gridley, that lives in this house. It's him I 'll speak to about the
+minister's carry'in's on. He knows about his talking sweet to our Susan,
+and he'll put things to rights! He's a master hand when he does once
+take hold of anything, I tell you that! Jest get him to shet up them
+books of his, and take hold of anybody's troubles, and you'll see how he
+'ll straighten 'em out."
+
+There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small
+twins, "Sossy" and "Minthy," in the home dialect, came hand in hand into
+the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing to
+interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in listening to
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last poems to her, with
+great delight to both of them.
+
+The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their uncertain
+steps. "My babies, I call 'em, Miss Cynthy. Ain't they nice children?
+Come to go to bed, little dears? Only a few minutes, Miss Cynthy."
+
+She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept, and,
+leaving the door open, began undressing them. Cynthia turned her
+rocking-chair round so as to face the open door. She looked on while the
+little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few words they
+lisped as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their beds, and heard
+their pretty good-night.
+
+A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been denied
+cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in her own
+heart where a mother's affection should have nestled. Cynthia sat
+perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs. Hopkins at her
+quasi parental task. A tear stole down her rigid face as she saw the
+rounded limbs of the children bared in their white beauty, and their
+little heads laid on the pillow. They were sleeping quietly when Mrs.
+Hopkins left the room for a moment on some errand of her own. Cynthia
+rose softly from her chair, stole swiftly to the bedside, and printed a
+long, burning kiss on each of their foreheads.
+
+When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her
+place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as one
+in sudden pangs of grief.
+
+"It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy," she said,--"a great trouble to have
+such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for. If she was like our
+Susan Posey, now!--but we must do the best we can; and if Mr. Gridley
+once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he 'll make it all come
+right. I wouldn't take on about it if I was you. You let me speak to our
+Mr. Gridley. We all have our troubles. It is n't everybody that can
+ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my poor husband used to say; and
+life 's a road that 's got a good many thank-you-ma'ams to go bumpin'
+over, says he."
+
+Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late Mr.
+Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own suggestion in
+reference to consulting Master Gridley. The good woman took the first
+opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little diffusely, as is
+often the way of widows who keep boarders.
+
+"There's something going on I don't like, Mr. Gridley. They tell me that
+Minister Stoker is following round after Myrtle Hazard, talking religion
+at her jest about the same way he'd have liked to with our Susan, I
+calculate. If he wants to talk religion to me or Silence Withers,--well,
+no, I don't feel sure about Silence,--she ain't as young as she used to
+be, but then ag'in she ain't so fur gone as some, and she's got
+money,--but if he wants to talk religion with me, he may come and
+welcome. But as for Myrtle Hazard, she's been sick, and it's left her a
+little flighty by what they say, and to have a minister round her all the
+time ravin' about the next world as if he had a latch-key to the front
+door of it, is no way to make her come to herself again. I 've seen more
+than one young girl sent off to the asylum by that sort of work, when, if
+I'd only had 'em, I'd have made 'em sweep the stairs, and mix the
+puddin's, and tend the babies, and milk the cow, and keep 'em too busy
+all day to be thinkin' about themselves, and have 'em dress up nice
+evenin's and see some young folks and have a good time, and go to meetin'
+Sundays, and then have done with the minister, unless it was old Father
+Pemberton. He knows forty times as much about heaven as that Stoker man
+does, or ever 's like to,--why don't they run after him, I should like to
+know? Ministers are men, come now; and I don't want to say anything
+against women, Mr. Gridley, but women are women, that's the fact of it,
+and half of 'em are hystericky when they're young; and I've heard old Dr.
+Hurlbut say many a time that he had to lay in an extra stock of valerian
+and assafaetida whenever there was a young minister round,--for there's
+plenty of religious ravin', says he, that's nothin' but hysterics."
+
+[Mr. Fronde thinks that was the trouble with Bloody Queen Mary, but the
+old physician did not get the idea from him.]
+
+"Well, and what do you propose to do about the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker
+and his young proselyte, Miss Myrtle Hazard?" said Mr. Gridley, when Mrs.
+Hopkins at last gave him a chance to speak.
+
+"Mr. Gridley,"--Mrs. Hopkins looked full upon him as she spoke,--"people
+used to say that you was a good man and a great man and one of the
+learnedest men alive, but that you didn't know much nor care for much
+except books. I know you used to live pretty much to yourself when you
+first came to board in this house. But you've been very good to my son;
+...and if Gifted lives till you ...till you are in ...your grave, ...he
+will write a poem--I know he will--that will tell your goodness to babes
+unborn."
+
+[Here Master Gridley groaned, and repeated to himself silently,
+
+ "Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum,
+ Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit."
+
+All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman's talk.]
+
+"And if ever Gifted makes a book,--don't say anything about it, Mr.
+Gridley, for goodness' sake, for he wouldn't have anybody know it, only I
+can't help thinking that some time or other he will print a book,--and if
+he does, I know whose name he'll put at the head of it,--'Dedicated to B.
+G., with the gratitude and respect--' There, now, I had n't any business
+to say a word about it, and it's only jest in case he does, you know.
+I'm sure you deserve it all. You've helped him with the best of advice.
+And you've been kind to me when I was in trouble. And you've been like a
+grandfather" [Master Gridley winced,--why could n't the woman have said
+father?--that grand struck his ear like a spade going into the gravel]
+"to those babes, poor little souls! left on my door-step like a couple of
+breakfast rolls,--only you know it's the baker left then. I believe in
+you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker and in Father Pemberton,--but,
+poor man, he's old, and you won't be old these twenty years yet."
+
+[Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n't so, but felt
+comforted and refreshed.]
+
+"You've got to help Myrtle Hazard again. You brought her home when she
+come so nigh drowning. You got the old doctor to go and see her when she
+come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and nonsense, whatever
+they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh bein' crazy, too. I know,
+for Nurse Byloe told me all about it. And now Myrtle's gettin' run away
+with by that pesky Minister Stoker. Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday
+crying and sobbing as if her heart would break about it. For my part, I
+did n't think Cynthy cared so much for the girl as all that, but I saw
+her takin' on dreadfully with my own eyes. That man's like a hen-hawk
+among the chickens, first he picks up one, and then he picks up another.
+I should like to know if nobody but young folks has souls to be saved,
+and specially young women!"
+
+"Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,"
+said Master Gridley.
+
+Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to
+her, of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of which
+the keen spinster had been a witness, having followed them for the
+express purpose of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister was up
+to.
+
+It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet kindness
+of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best of her
+adventure. He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to consider
+himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the thought that
+he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been in the way of
+considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important than
+his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers that
+surrounded her. He loved his classics and his old books; he took an
+interest, too, in the newspapers and periodicals that brought the
+fermenting thought and the electric life of the great world into his
+lonely study; but these things just about him were getting strong hold on
+him, and most of all the fortunes of this beautiful young woman. How
+strange! For a whole generation he had lived in no nearer relation to
+his fellow-creatures than that of a half-fossilized teacher; and all at
+once he found himself face to face with the very most intense form of
+life, the counsellor of threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled
+loveliness. What business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of
+which he had said in "Thoughts on the Universe,"--"Every man leads or is
+led by something that goes on four legs."
+
+Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes all
+human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of
+dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he
+were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an
+extra gallon of air at every breath, Then--you who have written a book
+that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand the
+movement--he took down "Thoughts on the Universe" for a refreshing
+draught from his own wellspring. He opened as chance ordered it, and his
+eyes fell on the following passage:
+
+"The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch, the
+Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.' A homely
+utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and hierarchies.
+These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that some things can NOT
+be done as well as others."
+
+"There, now!" he said, talking to himself in his usual way, "is n't that
+good? It always seems to me that I find something to the point when I
+open that book. 'Some things can be done as well as others,' can they?
+Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle Hazard? I
+think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be trusted. She
+does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable bodies?"
+
+Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the Library,
+when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her. Miss Cynthia,
+who received him, led him to this apartment and left him alone with
+Myrtle. She welcomed him very cordially, but colored as she did so,--his
+visit was a surprise. She was at work on a piece of embroidery. Her
+first instinctive movement was to thrust it out of sight with the thought
+of concealment; but she checked this, and before the blush of detection
+had reached her cheek, the blush of ingenuous shame for her weakness had
+caught and passed it, and was in full possession. She sat with her
+worsted pattern held bravely in sight, and her cheek as bright as its
+liveliest crimson.
+
+"Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you," he said, "or I should not have
+ventured to disturb you in this way. A work of art, is it, Miss Myrtle
+Hazard?"
+
+"Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,--for my pastor."
+
+"Oh! oh! That is well. A good old man. I have a great regard for the
+Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. I wish all ministers were as good and simple
+and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. And I wish all the
+young people thought as much about their elders as you do, Miss Myrtle
+Hazard. We that are old love little acts of kindness. You gave me more
+pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked that handsome cushion
+for me. The old minister will be greatly pleased,--poor old man!"
+
+"But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father
+Pemberton. They are for--Mr. Stoker."
+
+"The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker! He is not an old man, the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker. He may perhaps be a widower before a great while.--Does
+he know that you are working those slippers for him?"
+
+"Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley. I meant them for a surprise to him. He has
+been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I thought
+anybody did. He is so different from what I thought; he makes religion
+so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would agree with him, if
+they could only hear him talk."
+
+"Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n't he?"
+
+"Too much, almost, I am afraid. He says he has been too hard in his
+sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his hearers
+enough."
+
+"Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women rather
+more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?"
+
+There was something in the tone of this question that helped its slightly
+sarcastic expression. Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's sincerity was
+roused.
+
+"How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley? I am sure I wish you or anybody
+could have heard him talk as I have. There is no age in souls, he says;
+and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or young."
+
+"No age in souls,--no age in souls. Souls of forty as young as souls of
+fifteen; that 's it." Master Gridley did not say this loud. But he did
+speak as follows: "I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages. You have had
+comfort in his companionship, and there are others who might be very glad
+to profit by it. I know a very excellent person who has had trials, and
+is greatly interested in religious conversation. Do you think he would
+be willing to let this friend of mine share in the privileges of
+spiritual intercourse which you enjoy?"
+
+There was but one answer possible. Of course he would.
+
+"I hope it is so, my dear young lady. But listen to me one moment. I
+love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your
+own--grandfather." (There was moral heroism in that word.) "I love you
+as if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer
+me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in mind,
+body, or estate. You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt me; but
+until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near you, you will
+find me there. Now, my dear child, you ought to know that the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker has the reputation of being too fond of prosecuting
+religious inquiries with young and handsome women."
+
+Myrtle's eyes fell,--a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.
+
+"He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,--a very
+pretty girl, as you know."
+
+Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.
+
+"I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about
+with him. He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death, and
+cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if nature did not tell
+her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first good-looking
+young woman he can get to listen to him."
+
+Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.
+
+"Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man
+alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?"
+
+"Of course I would," said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts, her
+shame, her pride, were all excited. "Who is your friend, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"An excellent woman,--Mrs. Hopkins. You know her, Gifted Hopkins's
+mother, with whom I am residing. Shall the minister be given to
+understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?"
+
+Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations. "As you
+say," she answered. "Is there nobody that I can trust, or is everybody
+hunting me like a bird?" She hid her face in her hands.
+
+"You can trust me, my dear," said Byles Gridley. "Take your needle, my
+child, and work at your pattern,--it will come out a rose by and by.
+Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken patiently, and the
+pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. You can trust me.
+Good-by, my dear."
+
+"Let her finish the slippers," the old man said to himself as he trudged
+home, "and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton. He shall have his
+feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.
+
+Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had ceased
+to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of
+the old mansion. Then she went to her little chamber and sat down in a
+sort of revery. She could not doubt his sincerity, and there was
+something in her own consciousness which responded to the suspicions he
+had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker.
+
+It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other words
+which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest lessons
+and our sharpest rebukes. The hint another gives us finds whole trains
+of thought which have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in
+inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a burning
+syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for a spark to
+become letters of fire.
+
+The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
+"developing" room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of the
+truth just mentioned. There is nothing to be seen on the glass just
+taken from the camera. But there is a potential, though invisible,
+picture hid in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he pours a
+wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought which is at once a
+surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of your own features where a
+moment before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.
+
+In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called up
+a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the
+consciousness of Myrtle Hazard. It was not merely their significance, it
+was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting time. If they had
+been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the first stitch
+on the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as the
+artist's developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed in
+the camera. But she had been of late in training for her lesson in ways
+that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has
+shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps
+hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the
+Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow
+handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was
+the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so
+much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.
+
+These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had given
+her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just now more
+than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it happened
+that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and emotional
+elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved to play upon,
+the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the mellow sunshine,
+the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky, had been quietly
+doing their work. The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the
+discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving themselves
+into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health. It
+needed but the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole
+programme of her daily mode of being. The word had been spoken. She saw
+its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast
+out an unworthy intimate! How hard for any!--but for a girl so young,
+and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard!
+
+She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed
+on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a
+very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by
+the first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously turned
+in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half
+repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later date,
+each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to
+flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly
+creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress,
+her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a
+bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample
+folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other
+portrait, which was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa
+to trustful souls of the Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures
+while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung
+up in her chamber.
+
+The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
+constellations which she bad seen shining brightly almost overhead in the
+early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in the
+very attitude in which she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had burned
+out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She started to
+find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long remaining in
+one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a great fear seized her,
+and she sprang for a match. It broke with the quick movement she made to
+kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend were after her. It
+flashed and went out. Oh the terror, the terror! The darkness seemed
+alive with fearful presences. The lurid glare of her own eyeballs
+flashed backwards into her brain. She tried one more match; it kindled
+as it should, and she lighted another lamp. Her first impulse was to
+assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar objects around
+her. She held the lamp up to the picture of Judith Pride. The beauty
+looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her
+eyes; but there she was, as always. She turned the light upon the pale
+face of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed
+to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
+childhood. Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering,
+caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and
+the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
+
+In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting there,
+still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors. Two
+women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of
+life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been what is called, in
+our poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of her ripened
+beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid
+animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the
+lusty lovers of complete muliebrity. The other,--how delicate, how
+translucent, how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the lineaments
+of her whom the young girl looked upon as her hereditary protector.
+
+The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and scorn,
+pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair. And while
+Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed creature
+seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old fable, like the
+black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size, and at last of
+colossal proportions. And, fearful to relate, the batrachian features
+humanized themselves as the monster grew, and, shaping themselves more
+and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle saw in them a hideous
+likeness of--No! no! it was too horrible, was that the face which had
+been so close to hers but yesterday? were those the lips, the breath from
+which had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while they read
+together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as much like a
+love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of disgust--the
+natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and
+she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other
+figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin
+hand seemed to take hers. The warm life went out of her, and she was to
+herself as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with passive acquiescence
+wherever it was led. Presently she found herself in a half-lighted
+apartment, where there were books on the shelves around, and a desk with
+loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with a worn bit of
+carpet before it. And while she looked, a great serpent writhed in
+through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the room, laying one
+huge ring all round it, and then, going round again, laid another ring
+over the first, and so on until he was wound all round the room like the
+spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in the centre; and then the
+serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air, and bring his head close down
+to Myrtle's face; and the features were not those of a serpent, but of a
+man, and it hissed out the words she had read that very day in a little
+note which said, "Come to my study to-morrow, and we will read hymns
+together."
+
+Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and the
+two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in their own.
+Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to their influence,
+and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each would have led
+her her own way,--whither she knew not. It was the strife of her
+"Vision," only in another form,--the contest of two lives her blood
+inherited for the mastery of her soul. The might of beauty conquered.
+Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely phantom, which
+seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished fire of life, and so like
+herself as she would grow to be when noon should have ripened her into
+maturity.
+
+Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
+corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes, which
+seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness. Then came a
+confused sense of eager search for something that she knew was hidden,
+whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a floor, or in
+some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten drawer,
+or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there was
+something which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be her
+talisman. She was in the midst of this eager search when she awoke.
+
+The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her fears
+she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what meaning
+there was in this frightfully real dream. Her courage came back as her
+senses assured her that all around her was natural, as when she left it.
+She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint her nightmare had
+given her.
+
+In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
+upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and large
+drawers below. "That desk is yours, Myrtle," her uncle Malachi had once
+said to her; "and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay you
+to study." Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about the mystery of
+the old desk. All the little drawers, of which there were a considerable
+number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had
+carefully examined. She determined to make one more trial. It was the
+dead of the night, and this was a fearful old place to be wandering
+about; but she was possessed with an urgent feeling which would not let
+her wait until daylight.
+
+She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided along the narrow
+entries as she had seemed to move in her dream. She opened the folding
+doors of the great upright desk. She had always before examined it by
+daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the little drawers out,
+she had never thoroughly explored the recesses which received them. But
+in her new-born passion of search, she held her light so as to illuminate
+all these deeper spaces. At once she thought she saw the marks of
+pressure with a finger. She pressed her own finger on this place, and,
+as it yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster sprang
+forward, revealing its well-kept secret that it was the mask of a tall,
+deep, very narrow drawer. There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle
+turned it over, a golden bracelet fell into her hand. She recognized it
+at once as that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman
+whose portrait hung in her chamber. She clasped it upon her wrist, and
+from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely
+phantom who had been with her in her dream.
+
+"The old man walked last night, God save us!" said Kitty Fagan to Biddy
+Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious discovery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+VICTORY.
+
+It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an
+unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination
+tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who
+goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her
+fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles
+Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the
+grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the "properties" with
+which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.
+
+The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so
+easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the
+hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist. She
+felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a saint. A
+young girl's caprice? Possibly. A return of the natural instincts of
+girlhood with returning health? Perhaps so. An impression produced by
+her dream? An effect of an influx from another sphere of being? The
+working of Master Byles Gridley's emphatic warning? The magic of her new
+talisman?
+
+We may safely leave these questions for the present. As we have to tell,
+not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should have done
+it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it would be to
+lay bare all the springs of her action. Until this period, she had
+hardly thought of herself as a born beauty. The flatteries she had
+received from time to time were like the chips and splinters under the
+green wood, when the chill women pretended to make a fire in the best
+parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly
+warming, much less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.
+
+Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to look
+upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet. Its suggestions
+betrayed themselves in one of her first movements. Nothing could be
+soberer than the cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe
+household had established as the rule of her costume. But the girl was
+no sooner out of bed than a passion came over her to see herself in that
+less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century
+had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She
+rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and
+neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back
+to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many
+things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty,"
+but she could mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of
+feature and form which had made the original of the picture before her
+famous. The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded
+neck, the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely
+shaped arms and hands, and something very like the same features startled
+her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the
+fleeting one of the mirror.
+
+The world was hers then,--for she had not read romances and love-letters
+without finding that beauty governs it in all times and places. Who was
+this middle-aged minister that had been hanging round her and talking to
+her about heaven, when there was not a single joy of earth that she had
+as yet tasted? A man that had been saying all his fine things to Miss
+Susan Posey, too, had he, before he had bestowed his attentions on her?
+And to a dozen other girls, too, nobody knows who!
+
+The revulsion was a very sadden one. Such changes of feeling are apt to
+be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with, and
+Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much deliberation
+where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve. Master Gridley guessed
+sagaciously what would be the effect of his revelation, when he told her
+of the particular attentions the minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey
+and various other young women.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and
+made himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed. He had
+drawn down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued light
+which is merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments, and wheeled
+up his sofa so that two could sit at the table and read from the same
+book.
+
+At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish
+impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed it.
+At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his heart
+throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.
+
+Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of sealed
+despatches. Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's substitute, and
+she delivered into the hand of the astonished clergyman the following
+missive:
+
+TO THE REV. MR. STOKER.
+
+Reverend Sir,--I shall not come to your study this day. I do not feel
+that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and I am
+told by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear you talk
+on this subject. I hear that Mrs. Hopkins is interested in religious
+subjects, and would have been glad to see you in my company. As I cannot
+go with her, perhaps Miss Susan Posey will take my place. I thank you
+for all the good things you have said to me, and that you have given me
+so much of your company. I hope we shall sing hymns together in heaven
+some time, if we are good enough, but I want to wait for that awhile, for
+I do not feel quite ready. I am not going to see you any more alone,
+reverend sir. I think this is best, and I have good advice. I want to
+see more of young people of my own age, and I have a friend, Mr. Gridley,
+who I think is older than you are, that takes an interest in me; and as
+you have many others that you must be interested in, he can take the
+place of a father better than you can do. I return to you the hymn-book,
+I read one of those you marked, and do not care to read any more.
+
+Respectfully yours,
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this awkwardly
+written, but tolerably intelligible letter. What could he do about it?
+It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot Byles Gridley, and
+strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which homicides he felt at the moment
+that he could have committed. And here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and
+the next day was Sunday, and his morning's discourse was unwritten. His
+savage mediaeval theology came to his relief, and he clutched out of a
+heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn "convulsion-fit" sermon. He
+preached it the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard
+did not hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive
+Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+SAINT AND SINNER
+
+It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
+improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
+beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician
+advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by
+going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship.
+She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as Myrtle
+wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never before, the
+three girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became more and more
+intimate, and grew more and more into each other's affections.
+
+These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be
+found in all our towns and villages. Olive had been carefully trained,
+and at the proper age confirmed. Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in
+due time startled and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve,
+with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that
+required more watching. She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the
+other girls, for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts
+more interesting, as being a more genuine representative of that
+inexperienced and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of our
+race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative idea of
+woman, and who might have been alive and happy now (though at a great
+age) but for a single fatal error.
+
+The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father,
+was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man,
+with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a
+safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his
+sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon
+the soil. Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as
+into her bodily and intellectual developments, which one might suppose
+was the natural order of things in a well-regulated Christian--household,
+where the children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the
+Lord.
+
+Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with vague
+apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious phrases and
+graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age of fourteen
+years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very commonly
+considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the formation of
+religious character. It began with a shivering sense of enormous guilt,
+inherited and practised from her earliest infancy. Just as every breath
+she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the air with carbonic acid,
+so her every thought and feeling had been tainting the universe with sin.
+This spiritual chill or rigor had in due order been followed by the
+fever-flush of hope, and that in its turn had ushered in the last stage,
+the free opening of all the spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation of
+self-surrender.
+
+Good Christians are made by many very different processes. Bathsheba had
+taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was genuine, in
+spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not understand that the
+spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same as that which
+poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the feet of her Lord, and led her
+forth at early dawn with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.
+
+Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-worn
+formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity, hateful to
+the Father in Heaven who made her. She had grown up in antagonism with
+all that surrounded her. She had been talked to about her corrupt nature
+and her sinful heart, until the words had become an offence and an
+insult. Bathsheba knew her father's fondness for young company too well
+to suppose that his intercourse with Myrtle had gone beyond the
+sentimental and poetical stage, and was not displeased when she found
+that there was some breach between them. Myrtle herself did not profess
+to have passed through the technical stages of the customary spiritual
+paroxysm. Still, the gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her
+and judged her kindly. She was modest enough to think that perhaps the
+natural state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after
+the spiritual change of which she had been the subject. A manifest
+heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.
+
+The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine of
+Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before grace in
+the election of a wife; because, saith he, "it will be a hard Task, where
+the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire Conquest
+whilst Life lasteth." An opinion apparently entertained by many modern
+ecclesiastics, and one which may be considered very encouraging to those
+young ladies of the politer circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops
+and other fashionable clergymen. Not of course that "grace" is so rare a
+gift among the young ladies of the upper social sphere; but they are in
+the habit of using the word with a somewhat different meaning from that
+which the good Bishop attached to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+VILLAGE POET.
+
+It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without often
+meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on her cheek
+was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to overlook as a
+hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and so it was that
+she found herself all at once the centre of attraction to three young men
+with whom we have made some acquaintance, namely, Cyprian Eveleth, Gifted
+Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.
+
+When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave Cyprian
+a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way. Indeed, they
+all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of relation; only, as
+he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him the inside track, as
+the sporting men say, with reference to any rivals for the good-will of
+either of these. Of course neither Bathsheba nor Myrtle thought of him
+in any other light than as Olive's brother, and would have been surprised
+with the manifestation on his part of any other feeling, if it existed.
+So he became very nearly as intimate with them as Olive was, and hardly
+thought of his intimacy as anything more than friendship, until one day
+Myrtle sang some hymns so sweetly that Cyprian dreamed about her that
+night; and what young person does not know that the woman or the man once
+idealized and glorified in the exalted state of the imagination belonging
+to sleep becomes dangerous to the sensibilities in the waking hours that
+follow? Yet something drew Cyprian to the gentler and more subdued
+nature of Bathsheba, so that he often thought, like a gayer personage
+than himself, whose divided affections are famous in song, that he could
+have been blessed to share her faithful heart, if Myrtle had not
+bewitched him with her unconscious and innocent sorceries. As for poor,
+modest Bathsheba, she thought nothing of herself, but was almost as much
+fascinated by Myrtle as if she had been one of the sex she was born to
+make in love with her.
+
+The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
+Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins. This young gentleman had the enormous
+advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical endowment.
+No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist the youth or man
+who addresses her in verse. The thought that she is the object of a
+poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition more completely than
+all that wealth or office or social eminence can offer. Do the young
+millionnaires and the members of the General Court get letters from
+unknown ladies, every day, asking for their autographs and photographs?
+Well, then!
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very depth
+of his soul. Could he not confer that immortality so dear to the human
+heart? Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and Oracle" gave him
+already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame," to quote its own
+words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius, of which these spring
+blossoms were the promise. It was a most formidable battery, then, which
+Cyprian's first rival opened upon the fortress of Myrtle's affections.
+
+His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-playful
+bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he would bag a girl
+within twelve months of date who should unite three desirable qualities,
+specified in the bet, in a higher degree than any one of the five who
+were on the matrimonial programme which she had laid out for him,--and
+Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to win the bet. When a young
+fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up his mind to bring down his
+bird, it is no joke, but a very serious and a tolerably certain piece of
+business. Not being made a fool of by any boyish nonsense,--passion and
+all that,--he has a great advantage. Many a woman rejects a man because
+he is in love with her, and accepts another because he is not. The first
+is thinking too much of himself and his emotions,--the other makes a
+study of her and her friends, and learns what ropes to pull. But then it
+must be remembered that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say
+nothing of the brother of a bosom friend.
+
+The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such interesting
+objects of study, that a narrative like this can well afford to linger
+awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all the forms of genius.
+And by contrasting the powers and limitations of two such young persons
+as Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we may better appreciate the
+nature of that divine inspiration which gives to poetry the superiority
+it claims over every other form of human expression.
+
+Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms of
+music, from his earliest childhood. He began beating with his heels the
+accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender age,--a
+habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself, as, though
+it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that which is
+beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and emphasize by
+vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the tune of Auld
+Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a large number of
+boots join in the performance. He showed a remarkable talent for playing
+on one of the less complex musical instruments, too limited in compass to
+satisfy exacting ears, but affording excellent discipline to those who
+wish to write in the simpler metrical forms,--the same which summons the
+hero from his repose and stirs his blood in battle.
+
+By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
+resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same, yet
+had a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well in
+couples; as eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and smart;
+and so of numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps, which number
+he considerably increased as he grew older, until he may have had fifty
+or more such pairs at his command.
+
+The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each other,
+and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or eleven
+syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten, constituted a
+rare combination of talents in the opinion of those upon whose judgment
+he relied. He was naturally led to try his powers in the expression of
+some just thought or natural sentiment in the shape of verse, that
+wonderful medium of imparting thought and feeling to his fellow-creatures
+which a bountiful Providence had made his rare and inestimable endowment.
+
+It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was of
+the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we do not
+wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a sensation so
+entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was such as no other
+young person had ever known, at least in anything like the same degree.
+This extraordinary emotion was brought on by the sight of Myrtle Hazard,
+with whom he had never before had any near relations, as they had been at
+different schools, and Myrtle was too reserved to be very generally known
+among the young people of his age.
+
+Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, "Lines to M----e,"
+which were published in the village paper, and were claimed by all
+possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes, one Minnie,
+one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell the name borrowed
+from her who was troubled about many things.
+
+The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to the
+hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth that,
+whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time to obtain
+a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was the
+glorious career of a poet. It was a most pleasing circumstance, that his
+mother, while she fully recognized the propriety of his being diligent in
+the prosaic line of business to which circumstances had called him, was
+yet as much convinced as he himself that he was destined to achieve
+literary fame. She had read Watts and Select Hymns all through, she
+said, and she did n't see but what Gifted could make the verses come out
+jest as slick, and the sound of the rhymes jest as pooty, as Izik Watts
+or the Selectmen, whoever they was,--she was sure they couldn't be the
+selectmen of this town, wherever they belonged. It is pleasant to say
+that the young man, though favored by nature with this rarest of talents,
+did not forget the humbler duties that Heaven, which dresses few
+singing-birds in the golden plumes of fortune, had laid upon him. After
+having received a moderate amount of instruction at one of the less
+ambitious educational institutions of the town, supplemented, it is true,
+by the judicious and gratuitous hints of Master Gridley, the young poet,
+in obedience to a feeling which did him the highest credit, relinquished,
+at least for the time, the Groves of Academus, and offered his youth at
+the shrine of Plutus, that is, left off studying and took to business.
+He became what they call a "clerk" in what they call a "store" up in the
+huckleberry districts, and kept such accounts as were required by the
+business of the establishment. His principal occupation was, however, to
+attend to the details of commerce as it was transacted over the counter.
+This industry enabled him, to his great praise be it spoken, to assist
+his excellent parent, to clothe himself in a becoming manner, so that he
+made a really handsome figure on Sundays and was always of presentable
+aspect, likewise to purchase a book now and then, and to subscribe for
+that leading periodical which furnishes the best models to the youth of
+the country in the various modes of composition.
+
+Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
+disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations. The truth
+was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal for modern
+English poetry. Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap from the Greek
+Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation of spirits; but he
+did not think very much of "your Keatses, and your Tennysons, and the
+whole Hasheesh crazy lot," as he called the dreamily sensuous idealists
+who belong to the same century that brought in ether and chloroform. He
+rather shook his head at Gifted Hopkins for indulging so largely in
+metrical composition.
+
+"Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend," he said to him, one
+day. "Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if you
+undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects into a
+mighty small sum. There's some danger that it will take all the sense
+out of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate. You young
+scribblers think any kind of nonsense will do for the public, if it only
+has a string of rhymes tacked to it. Cut off the bobs of your kite,
+Gifted Hopkins, and see if it does n't pitch, and stagger, and come down
+head-foremost. Don't write any stuff with rhyming tails to it that won't
+make a decent show for itself after you've chopped all the rhyming tails
+off. That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins. Is there any book you would like
+to have out of my library? Have you ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?"
+
+He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of Cyprian
+Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.
+
+Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that some
+had called Spenser the poet's poet. "What a pity," he said to himself,
+"that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that William Murray
+Bradshaw! What's the reason, I wonder, that all the little earthen pots
+blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at such a great rate,
+while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do all their simmering
+inside?"
+
+That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth and
+all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone. The smiles of woman,
+in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre. Fame
+beckoned him upward from her templed steep. The rhymes which rose before
+him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on which he would
+climb to a heaven of-glory.
+
+Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
+anticipations of success. "All up with the boy, if he's going to take to
+rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar and weighing
+out pounds of tea. Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end in. Poets, to be
+sure! Sausage-makers! Empty skins of old phrases,--stuff 'em with odds
+and ends of old thoughts that never were good for anything,--cut 'em up
+in lengths and sell'em to fools!
+
+"And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if you
+can't do that, pay folks to take'em. Bah! what a fine style of genius
+common-sense is! There's a passage in the book that would fit half these
+addle-headed rhymesters. What is that saying of mine about I squinting
+brains?"
+
+He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and read:--
+
+ "Of Squinting Brains.
+
+"Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen who
+squint with their brains. It is an infirmity in one of the eyes, making
+the two unequal in power, that makes men squint. Just so it is an
+inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men idiots and
+others rascals. I knows a fellow whose right half is a genius, but his
+other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a friend perfectly honest
+on one side, but who was sent to jail because the other had an inveterate
+tendency in the direction of picking pockets and appropriating aes
+alienum."
+
+All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.
+
+The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins had
+never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice might,
+to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative nature.
+Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover of lonely
+walks,--one who listened for the whispers of Nature and watched her
+shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over everything. But
+Cyprian had never shown the talent or the inclination for writing in
+verse.
+
+He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being somewhat
+older, and having had the advantage of academic and college culture,
+often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his powers, such as
+genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler intelligences.
+Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the name of Gifted
+Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate neighborhood, and
+his autograph had been requested by more than one young lady living in
+another county, he never thought of envying the young poet's spreading
+popularity.
+
+That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor may be
+inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed himself in
+his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one which was held at
+the "store" where he officiated as "clerk."
+
+"I become more and more assured, Cyprian," he said, leaning over the
+counter, "that I was born to be a poet. I feel it in my marrow. I must
+succeed. I must win the laurel of fame. I must taste the sweets of"--
+
+"Molasses," said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that moment,
+bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, "ma wants three gills of
+molasses."
+
+Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure. He served
+the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness, made an entry
+on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.
+
+"Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian. The very last piece I wrote was copied
+in two papers. It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and--don't think I am
+too vain--one young lady has told me that it reminded her of Pollok. You
+never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?"
+
+"I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises, and a
+letter now and then. Do you find it an easy and pleasant exercise to
+make rhymes?"
+
+Pleasant! Poetry is to me a delight and a passion. I never know what I
+am going to write when I sit down. And presently the rhymes begin
+pounding in my brain,--it seems as if there were a hundred couples of
+them, paired like so many dancers,--and then these rhymes seem to take
+possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in all sorts of
+beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the verses run measuring
+themselves out like"--
+
+"Ribbins,--any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins? Five eighths of a yard,
+if you please, Mr. Hopkins. How's your folks?" Then, in a lower tone,
+"Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were sweet pooty."
+
+Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid of
+certain brass nails on the counter. He gave good measure, not prodigal,
+for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very moderate strain on
+the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with a contempt of
+infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its genial mood.
+
+The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those bewitching
+glances which the young poet--let us rather say the poet, without making
+odious distinctions--is in the confirmed habit of receiving from dear
+woman.
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: "I do not know where this talent, as my
+friends call it, of mine, comes from. My father used to carry a chain
+for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the house he
+used to measure land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet.
+My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young
+men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I
+got it, it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose,
+almost. Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in
+verse, Cyprian?"
+
+"I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often," Cyprian
+answered; "but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
+words that seem fitting to clothe them. I have imagined a great many
+poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any kind.
+Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'? If you have ever
+heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and unversed poetry."
+
+"I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme
+or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were
+painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can
+you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is
+neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of
+course you can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in
+verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it."
+
+Cyprian left the conversation at this point. It was getting more
+suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter
+over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and bargained
+with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against
+his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that
+of the young poet reciting his own verses.
+
+"A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry," Cyprian said,
+as he left the "store." "All in one note, pretty much. Not a great many
+tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two more like them.
+But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt it is as exciting to
+Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius to express itself in a
+poem."
+
+Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting. He loved too well the sweet
+intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of
+Milton. These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted
+Hopkins.
+
+Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
+friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
+modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences of
+rhyme. He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
+childhood, its simplicity, its reverence. It seemed as if nothing of all
+that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there was
+no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else he
+could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to speak.
+He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the root as
+well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection or
+admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet lavished
+the wealth of his verse. Thus Nature took him into her confidence. She
+loves the men of science well, and tells them all her family
+secrets,--who is the father of this or that member of the group, who is
+brother, sister, cousin, and so on, through all the circle of
+relationship. But there are others to whom she tells her dreams; not
+what species or genus her lily belongs to, but what vague thought it has
+when it dresses in white, or what memory of its birthplace that is which
+we call its fragrance. Cyprian was one of these. Yet he was not a
+complete nature. He required another and a wholly different one to be
+the complement of his own. Olive came as near it as a sister could,
+but--we must borrow an old image--moonlight is no more than a cold and
+vacant glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming
+orb of day. If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered,
+well-balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative
+gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the intense
+reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn her
+existence,--how she could direct and chasten and elevate the character of
+all his thoughts and actions!
+
+"Bathsheba," said Olive, "it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more and
+more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard. He has never got over the fancy he
+took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and called her the
+fire-hang-bird. Wouldn't they suit each other by and by, after Myrtle
+has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and noble woman, as I feel
+sure she will in due time?"
+
+"Myrtle is very lovely," Bathsheba answered, "but is n't she a little
+too--flighty--for one like your brother? Cyprian isn't more like other
+young men than Myrtle is like other young girls. I have thought
+sometimes--I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and common ones do
+not get along best together. Does n't Cyprian want some more every-day
+kind of girl to keep him straight? Myrtle is beautiful,
+beautiful,--fascinates everybody. Has Mr. Bradshaw been following after
+her lately? He is taken with her too. Didn't you ever think she would
+have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last? He looks to me like a man
+that would hold on desperately as a lover."
+
+If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl, hardly
+sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or nineteen, it
+would have been plain sailing enough for Murray Bradshaw. But he knew
+what a distance their ages seemed just now to put between them,--a
+distance which would grow practically less and less with every year, and
+he did not wish to risk anything so long as there was no danger of
+interference. He rather encouraged Gifted Hopkins to write poetry to
+Myrtle. "Go in, Gifted," he said, "there's no telling what may come of
+it," and Gifted did go in at a great rate.
+
+Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a
+good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of
+Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron
+or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle
+was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as
+she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+
+He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth. A good young man,--limited, but
+exemplary. Would succeed well as rector of a small parish. That
+required little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of virtue.
+As for himself, he confessed to ambition,--yes, a great deal of ambition.
+A failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings. He felt the
+instinct to handle the larger interests of society. The village would
+perhaps lose sight of him for a time; but he meant to emerge sooner or
+later in the higher spheres of government or diplomacy. Myrtle must keep
+his secret. Nobody else knew it. He could not help making a confidant
+of her,--a thing he had never done before with any other person as to his
+plans in life. Perhaps she might watch his career with more interest
+from her acquaintance with him. He loved to think that there was one
+woman at least who would be pleased to hear of his success if he
+succeeded, as with life and health he would,--who would share his
+disappointment if fate should not favor him.--So he wound and wreathed
+himself into her thoughts.
+
+It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she was
+the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to sympathize with
+the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she had the honor of
+witnessing. And it is not very far from being the solitary confidant,
+and the single source of inspiration, to the growth of a livelier
+interest, where a young man and a young woman are in question.
+
+Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before. The three
+young men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in her
+frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of meeting her in
+his sister's company, and the convenient visits which, in connection with
+the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make, without question, at The
+Poplars.
+
+It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a
+certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle. Very pleasant and sisterly
+always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean more
+than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which might be
+fanned into the flame of love. Cyprian felt this so certainly that he
+was on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba, who looked to him as
+if she would sympathize as heartily with him as his own sister, and whose
+sympathy would have a certain flavor in it,--something which one cannot
+find in the heart of the dearest sister that ever lived. But Bathsheba
+was herself sensitive, and changed color when Cyprian ventured a hint or
+two in the direction of his thought, so that he never got so fax as to
+unburden his heart to her about Myrtle, whom she admired so sincerely
+that she could not have helped feeling a great interest in his passion
+towards her.
+
+As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher and
+fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and more
+freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song. Every week she would
+receive a delicately tinted note with lines to "Myrtle awaking," or to
+"Myrtle retiring," (one string of verses a little too Musidora-ish, and
+which soon found itself in the condition of a cinder, perhaps reduced to
+that state by spontaneous combustion,) or to "The Flower of the Tropics,"
+or to the "Nymph of the River-side," or other poetical alias, such as
+bards affect in their sieges of the female heart.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament. As he read and re-read his
+verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart of the
+angelic being to whom they were addressed. That she was slow in
+confessing the impression they made upon her, was a favorable sign; so
+many girls called his poems "sweet pooty," that those charming words,
+though soothing, no longer stirred him deeply. Myrtle's silence showed
+that the impression his verses had made was deep. Time would develop her
+sentiments; they were both young; his position was humble as yet; but
+when he had become famous through the land-oh blissful thought!--the bard
+of Oxbow Village would bear a name that any woman would be proud to
+assume, and the M. H. which her delicate hands had wrought on the
+kerchiefs she wore would yet perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but
+Myrtle Hopkins.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.
+
+There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard might have made a
+safe thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that she
+had only been secured against interference. But the constant habit of
+reading his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk to so
+excitable a nature as that of the young poet. Poets were always capable
+of divided affections, and Cowley's "Chronicle" is a confession that
+would fit the whole tribe of them. It is true that Gifted had no right
+to regard Susan's heart as open to the wiles of any new-comer. He knew
+that she considered herself, and was considered by another, as pledged
+and plighted. Yet she was such a devoted listener, her sympathies were
+so easily roused, her blue eyes glistened so tenderly at the least
+poetical hint, such as "Never, oh never," "My aching heart," "Go, let me
+weep,"--any of those touching phrases out of the long catalogue which
+readily suggests itself, that her influence was getting to be such that
+Myrtle (if really anxious to secure him) might look upon it with
+apprehension, and the owner of Susan's heart (if of a jealous
+disposition) might have thought it worth while to make a visit to Oxbow
+Village to see after his property.
+
+It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as this
+to the young lady's lover.
+
+The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature. Susan was
+loyal as ever to her absent friend. Gifted Hopkins had never yet
+presumed upon the familiar relations existing between them to attempt to
+shake her allegiance. It is quite as likely, after all, that the young
+gentleman about to make his appearance in Oxbow Village visited the place
+of his own accord, without a hint from anybody. But the fact concerns us
+more than the reason of it, just now.
+
+"Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley? Who do you think is coming?"
+said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as the first
+season may see in a city belle, but not the second.
+
+"Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow at
+that business. Perhaps the Governor. No, I don't think it can be the
+Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his Excellency.
+It must be the President, Susan Posey,--President James Buchanan. Have
+n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,--what do I care for governors and
+presidents? I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand
+presidents,--and he 's coming,--my Clement is coming," said Susan, who
+had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as her next
+friend and faithful counsellor.
+
+Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note informing
+her that her friend was soon to be with her. Everybody told everything
+to Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the parsonage to tell her
+that there was a young gentleman coming to Oxbow Village; upon which
+Olive asked who it was, exactly as if she did not know; whereupon Susan
+dropped her eyes and said, "Clement,--I mean Mr. Lindsay."
+
+That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five
+minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,--it was
+too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world shouldn't know
+anything of what was going on in it. Bathsheba had been in all the
+morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the air every day; so
+Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive had gone, and walked
+straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard that a certain young
+gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow Village.
+
+It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to Myrtle
+in the name of Clement Lindsay. Since the adventure which had brought
+these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a disaster,
+had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and but for Master
+Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish scandal, Myrtle had
+never referred to it in any way. Nobody really knew what her plans had
+been except Olive and Cyprian, who had observed a very kind silence about
+the whole matter. The common version of the story was harmless, and near
+enough to the truth,--down the river,--boat upset,--pulled out,--taken
+care of by some women in a house farther down,--sick, brain
+fever,--pretty near it, anyhow,--old Dr. Hurlbut called in,--had her hair
+cut,--hystericky, etc., etc.
+
+Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and it
+was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the subject in
+her presence. It followed from all this that the name of Clement Lindsay
+had no peculiar meaning for her. Nor was she like to recognize him as
+the youth in whose company she had gone through her mortal peril, for all
+her recollections were confused and dreamlike from the moment when she
+awoke and found herself in the foaming rapids just above the fall, until
+that when her senses returned, and she saw Master Byles Gridley standing
+over her with that look of tenderness in his square features which had
+lingered in her recollection, and made her feel towards him as if she
+were his daughter.
+
+Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and had
+been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity to have
+any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle Hazard as a
+consciousness on both sides of what had happened would naturally suggest.
+
+"Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?" Myrtle asked.
+
+Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,--the young
+man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to her ever
+since they were children almost?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I remember now. Oh dear! I have forgotten so many things, I
+should think I had been dead and was coming back to life again. Do you
+know anything about him, Bathsheba? Did n't somebody say he was very
+handsome? I wonder if he is really in love with Susan Posey. Such a
+simple thing? I want to see him. I have seen so few young men."
+
+As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her left
+arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement. The glimmering
+gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow gleam which has
+been the reddening of so many hands and the blackening of so, many souls
+since that innocent sin-breeder was first picked up in the land of
+Havilah. There came a sudden light into her eye, such as Bathsheba had
+never seen there before. It looked to her as if Myrtle were saying
+unconsciously to herself that she had the power of beauty, and would like
+to try its influence on the handsome young man whom she was soon to meet,
+even at the risk of unseating poor little Susan in his affections. This
+pained the gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having tasted the
+world's pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the lowly duties
+which lay nearest to her. For Bathsheba's phrasing of life was in the
+monosyllables of a rigid faith. Her conceptions of the human soul were
+all simplicity and purity, but elementary. She could not conceive the
+vast license the creative energy allows itself in mingling the instincts
+which, after long conflict, may come into harmonious adjustment. The
+flash which Myrtle's eye had caught from the gleam of the golden bracelet
+filled Bathsheba with a sudden fear that she was like to be led away by
+the vanities of that world lying in wickedness of which the minister's
+daughter had heard so much and seen so little.
+
+Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself. She only
+felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often
+gives us,--such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent
+feel,--that impalpable something which in the slightest possible
+inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a
+sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true
+that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle
+Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives. Bathsheba's virgin
+perceptions had caught a faint early ray of its glimmering twilight.
+
+She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has made
+seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and that she
+did not know about Susan's sentiments. Only, as they had kept so long to
+each other, she supposed there must be love between them.
+
+Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
+perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look
+upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds of
+Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty fancies.
+She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes
+fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but on that
+other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the splendors of
+her full-blown womanhood.
+
+The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as the
+glance at him already given might have foreshadowed. But his features
+had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and the sober
+tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had given him a
+maturity beyond his years. The story was not an uncommon one. At
+sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream. At eighteen he had awoke, and
+found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that its
+life was dependent on his own. Whether it would have perished if its
+filaments had been gently disentangled from the object to which they had
+attached themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps
+question. To justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an
+experiment, we must remember that to young people in their teens a first
+passion is a portentous and unprecedented phenomenon. The young man may
+have been mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and
+may have done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it
+was the mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's
+feelings by his own. He measured the depth of his own rather by what he
+felt they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.
+
+Clement was called a "genius" by those who knew him, and was consequently
+in danger of being spoiled early. The risk is great enough anywhere, but
+greatest in a new country, where there is an almost universal want of
+fixed standards of excellence.
+
+He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
+planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work of
+eye and hand. It would not have been strange if he thought he could do
+everything, having gifts which were capable of various application,--and
+being an American citizen. But though he was a good draughtsman, and had
+made some reliefs and modelled some figures, he called himself only an
+architect. He had given himself up to his art, not merely from a love
+of it and talent for it, but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he
+thought his country wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of
+religious, social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry,
+and the mine. Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a
+brilliant failure.
+
+"Grand notions,--grand notions," the master with whom he studied said.
+"Large ground plan of life,--splendid elevation. A little wild in some
+of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's the kind of boy
+that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man. Wait and see,--wait and
+see. He works days, and we can let him dream nights. There's a good
+deal of him, anyhow." His fellow-students were puzzled. Those who
+thought of their calling as a trade, and looked forward to the time when
+they should be embodying the ideals of municipal authorities in brick and
+stone, or making contracts with wealthy citizens, doubted whether Clement
+would have a sharp eye enough for business. "Too many whims, you know.
+All sorts of queer ideas in his head,--as if a boy like him were going to
+make things all over again!".
+
+No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans and
+expectations. But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the source of
+all great thoughts and deeds,--a beautiful delirium which age commonly
+tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world furnishes gratis
+proves a pretty certain cure.
+
+Creation is always preceded by chaos. The youthful architect's mind was
+confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in upon it,
+and which he had not yet had time or developed mature strength sufficient
+to reduce to order. The young American of any freshness of intellect is
+stimulated to dangerous excess by the conditions of life into which he is
+born. There is a double proportion of oxygen in the New World air. The
+chemists have not found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs
+have long since made the discovery.
+
+Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his possibilities of
+happiness in one direction, and he felt that there was a certain grandeur
+in the recompense of working out his defeated instincts through the
+ambitious medium of his noble art. Had not Pharaohs chosen it to
+proclaim their longings for immortality, Caesars their passion for pomp
+and luxury, and priests to symbolize their conceptions of the heavenly
+mansions? His dreams were on a grand scale; such, after all, are the
+best possessions of youth. Had he but been free, or mated with a nature
+akin to his own, he would have felt himself as truly the heir of creation
+as any young man that lived. But his lot was cast, and his youth had all
+the serious aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood. In the region of
+his art alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which
+his home life could never give him.
+
+Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank,
+but was called unexpectedly back to the city. Happily Susan was not
+exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
+between them to dare to question his actions. Perhaps she found a
+partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried
+his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing
+them to her. "Would that you were with us at this delightful
+season," she wrote in the autumn; "but no, your Susan must not
+repine. Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,
+
+ "Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
+ For absence makes thee doubly dear;
+ Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
+ 'T is night without the orb of day!'"
+
+The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and promising
+friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself. The letter, it is
+unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can tell her love, or
+other matter of interest, over and over again in as many forms as another
+poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing the musical changes of
+"In Memoriam."
+
+The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long. They
+convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come
+to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to
+keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any rate. But at
+last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was coming; yes, it
+was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real happy to see him?
+
+To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for human
+nature's daily food. Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could have told
+herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have confessed to
+certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of late, cast a
+shadow on her seemingly bright future. With all the pleasure that the
+thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a little tremor, a certain
+degree of awe, in contemplating his visit. If she could have clothed her
+self-humiliation in the gold and purple of the "Portuguese Sonnets," it
+would have been another matter; but the trouble with the most common
+sources of disquiet is that they have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology
+to air themselves in; the inward burning goes on without the relief and
+gratifying display of the crater.
+
+"A friend of mine is coming to the village," she said to Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins. "I want you to see him. He is a genius,--as some other young
+men are." (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet blushed
+with ingenuous delight.) "I have known him for ever so many years. He
+and I are very good friends." The poet knew that this meant an exclusive
+relation between them; and though the fact was no surprise to him, his
+countenance fell a little. The truth was, that his admiration was
+divided between Myrtle, who seemed to him divine and adorable, but
+distant, and Susan, who listened to his frequent poems, whom he was in
+the habit of seeing in artless domestic costumes, and whose attractions
+had been gaining upon him of late in the enforced absence of his
+divinity.
+
+He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his
+desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the
+language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he
+began thus--
+
+ "ANOTHER'S!
+
+ "Another's! Oh the pang, the smart!
+ Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge,
+ --The barbed fang has rent a heart
+ Which--which
+
+"judge--judge,--no, not judge. Budge, drudge, fudge--What a disgusting
+language English is! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as grudge!
+And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in full flow, stopped
+short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
+
+Judge,--budge,--drudge,--nudge, oh!--smudge,--misery!--fudge. In
+vain,--futile,--no use,--all up for to-night!"
+
+While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native
+tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,--went to
+bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the village,
+where he was to make his brief residence at the house of Deacon Rumrill,
+who, having been a loser by the devouring element, was glad to receive a
+stray boarder when any such were looking about for quarters.
+
+For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out a
+volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the night.
+It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs. Hopkins's
+household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience, he held it in
+check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages of the book with
+which he had prudently provided himself.
+
+"Hope you slept well last night," said the old Deacon, when Mr. Clement
+came down to breakfast the next morning.
+
+"Very well, thank you,--that is, after I got to bed. But I sat up pretty
+late reading my favorite Scott. I am apt to forget how the hours pass
+when I have one of his books in my hand."
+
+The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of
+interest.
+
+"You couldn't find better reading, young man. Scott is my favorite
+author. A great man. I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame hanging up
+in the other room. I have read him all through three times."
+
+The young man's countenance brightened. He had not expected to find so
+much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.
+
+"What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon? I suppose you have
+your particular likings, as the rest of us have."
+
+The Deacon was flattered by the question. "Well," he answered, "I can
+hardly tell you. I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote.
+Sometimes I think it is one thing, and sometimes another. Great on
+Paul's Epistles,--don't you think so?"
+
+The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about "Paul's
+Letters to his Kinsfolk,"--a book of Sir Walter's less famous than many
+of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the Deacon's
+statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and smiling at
+his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.
+
+"I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and as
+he ought to be," said Mr. Clement: "Such character, such nature and so
+much grace."
+
+"That's it,--that's it, young man," the Deacon broke in,--"Natur' and
+Grace,--Natur' and Grace. Nobody ever knew better what those two words
+meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see--you've chosen such good
+wholesome reading. You can't set up too late, young man, to read Scott.
+If I had twenty children, they should all begin reading Scott as soon as
+they were old enough to spell sin,--and that's the first word my little
+ones learned, next to 'pa' and I 'ma.' Nothing like beginning the lessons
+of life in good season."
+
+"What a grim old satirist!" Clement said to himself. "I wonder if the
+old man reads other novelists.--Do tell me, Deacon, if you have read
+Thackeray's last story? "
+
+"Thackeray's story? Published by the American Tract Society?"
+
+"Not exactly," Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find
+such an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking
+church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a
+muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and
+smile. First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the
+immovable solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a
+little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable
+Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a
+literary taste which would make him a more agreeable companion than the
+common ecclesiastics of his grade in country villages.
+
+After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs.
+Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his visit
+would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for though she
+knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that moment in Oxbow
+Village.
+
+As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey, almost
+running against her just as he turned a corner. She looked wonderfully
+lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the frosts had
+begun to bite. A young gentleman was walking at her side, and reading to
+her from a paper he held in his hand. Both looked deeply interested,--so
+much so that Clement felt half ashamed of himself for intruding upon them
+so abruptly.
+
+But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them. The
+first thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous
+exclamations, "Why, Clement!" "Why, Susan!" What might have come next
+in the programme, but for the presence of a third party, is matter of
+conjecture; but what did come next was a mighty awkward look on the part
+of Susan Posey, and the following short speech: "Mr. Lindsay, let me
+introduce Mr. Hopkins, my friend, the poet I 've written to you about.
+He was just reading two of his poems to me. Some other time, Gifted--Mr.
+Hopkins."
+
+"Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,--pray go on," said Clement. "I 'm very fond of
+poetry."
+
+The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over
+again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the "Banner
+and Oracle,"--the first verse being, as the readers of that paper will
+remember,
+
+ "She moves in splendor, like the ray
+ That flashes from unclouded skies,
+ And all the charms of night and day
+ Are mingled in her hair and eyes."
+
+Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone with
+his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably. He signified his
+approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the
+rhymes absolutely without blemish. The stanzas reminded him forcibly of
+one of the greatest poets of the century.
+
+Gifted flushed hot with pleasure. He had tasted the blood of his own
+rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the bag
+of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to drag his
+piece away from him.
+
+"Perhaps you will like these lines still better," he said; "the style is
+more modern:--
+
+ "'O daughter of the spiced South,
+ Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
+ That staineth with its hue divine
+ The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'"
+
+And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of two
+rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
+
+Clement was cornered. It was necessary to say something for the poet's
+sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense responsible
+for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had spoken so often and
+so enthusiastically.
+
+"Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should think,
+until of late years. You modelled this piece on the style of a famous
+living English poet, did you not?"
+
+"Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,--I never imitate. Originality is, if I
+may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte. Why, the
+critics allow as much as that. See here, Mr. Lindsay."
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom a
+cutting from a newspaper,--which dropped helplessly open of itself, as if
+tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or creases, by
+reason of having been often folded and unfolded read aloud as follows:
+
+"The bard of Oxbow Pillage--our valued correspondent who writes over the
+signature of G. H.--is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his
+originality than for any other of his numerous gifts."
+
+Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated
+with a sense of triumph. Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
+satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without knowing
+it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a little bit--the
+merest infinitesimal atom--nearer to Gifted Hopkins, who was on one side
+of her, while Clement walked on the other. Women love the conquering
+party,--it is the way of their sex. And poets, as we have seen, are
+well-nigh irresistible when they exert their dangerous power of
+fascination upon the female heart. But Clement was above jealousy; and,
+if he perceived anything of this movement, took no notice of it.
+
+He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day. She was tender in her
+expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little something in her
+looks and language from time to time that Clement did not know exactly
+what to make of. She colored once or twice when the young poet's name
+was mentioned. She was not so full of her little plans for the future as
+she had sometimes been, "everything was so uncertain," she said. Clement
+asked himself whether she felt quite as sure that her attachment would
+last as she once did. But there were no reproaches, not even any
+explanations, which are about as bad between lovers. There was nothing
+but an undefined feeling on his side that she did not cling quite so
+closely to him, perhaps, as he had once thought, and that, if he had
+happened to have been drowned that day when he went down with the
+beautiful young woman, it was just conceivable that Susan, who would have
+cried dreadfully, no doubt, would in time have listened to consolation
+from some other young man,--possibly from the young poet whose verses he
+had been admiring. Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there
+is nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to
+say. Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well knew,
+after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the rose which
+had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned by Cowper.
+
+As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this visit
+of Clement's than he had ever before known. He wandered about with a
+dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a
+falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed
+his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant suggestions of
+good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was to be her guest at
+tea. And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut called in the native
+dialect cymbal (Qu. Symbol? B. G.) which graced the board with its
+plastic forms, suggestive of the most pleasing objects,--the spiral
+ringlets pendent from the brow of beauty; the magic circlet, which is the
+pledge of plighted affection,--the indissoluble knot, which typifies the
+union of hearts, which organs were also largely represented; this
+exceptional delicacy would at any other time have claimed his special
+notice. But his mother remarked that he paid little attention to these,
+and his, "No, I thank you," when it came to the preserved "damsels," as
+some call them, carried a pang with it to the maternal bosom. The most
+touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional or the result
+of accident was not evident was a broken heart, which he left upon his
+plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the language of
+flowers. His thoughts were gloomy during that day, running a good deal
+on the more picturesque and impressive methods of bidding a voluntary
+farewell to a world which had allured him with visions of beauty only to
+snatch them from his impassioned gaze. His mother saw something of this,
+and got from him a few disjointed words, which led her to lock up the
+clothes-line and hide her late husband's razors,--an affectionate, yet
+perhaps unnecessary precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from
+this point of view by those who have the natural outlet of verse to
+relieve them is rarely followed by a casualty. It may rather be
+considered as implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those
+who meditate an--imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and
+are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this is
+apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to write or a
+proof to be corrected.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+THE SECOND MEETING.
+
+Miss Eveleth requests the pleasure of Mr. Lindsay's company to meet a few
+friends on the evening of the Feast of St. Ambrose, December 7th,
+Wednesday.
+
+THE PARSONAGE, December 6th.
+
+It was the luckiest thing in the world. They always made a little
+festival of that evening at the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth's, in honor of his
+canonized namesake, and because they liked to have a good time. It came
+this year just at the right moment, for here was a distinguished stranger
+visiting in the place. Oxbow Village seemed to be running over with its
+one extra young man,--as may be seen sometimes in larger villages, and
+even in cities of moderate dimensions.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had called on Clement the day after his
+arrival. He had already met the Deacon in the street, and asked some
+questions about his transient boarder.
+
+A very interesting young man, the Deacon said, much given to the reading
+of pious books. Up late at night after he came, reading Scott's
+Commentary. Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other young folks
+were of their novels and romances and other immoral publications. He,
+the Deacon, thought of having a few religious friends to meet the young
+gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and should like to have him, Mr.
+Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the exercises.--Mr. Bradshaw was
+unfortunately engaged. He thought the young gentleman could hardly find
+time for such a meeting during his brief visit.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect constitution,
+and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in training to furnish one
+of those biographies beginning with the statement that, from his infancy,
+the subject of it showed no inclination for boyish amusements, and so on,
+until he dies out, for the simple reason that there was not enough of him
+to live. Very interesting, no doubt, Master Byles Gridley would have
+said, but had no more to do with good, hearty, sound life than the
+history of those very little people to be seen in museums preserved in
+jars of alcohol, like brandy peaches.
+
+When Mr. Clement Lindsay presented himself, Mr. Bradshaw was a good deal
+surprised to see a young fellow of such a mould. He pleased himself with
+the idea that he knew a man of mark at sight, and he set down Clement in
+that category at his first glance. The young man met his penetrating and
+questioning look with a frank, ingenuous, open aspect, before which he
+felt himself disarmed, as it were, and thrown upon other means of
+analysis. He would try him a little in talk.
+
+"I hope you like these people you are with. What sort of a man do you
+find my old friend the Deacon?"
+
+Clement laughed. "A very queer old character. Loves his joke as well,
+and is as sly in making it, as if he had studied Joe Miller instead of
+the Catechism."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked at the young man to know what he meant. Mr. Lindsay
+talked in a very easy way for a serious young person. He was puzzled.
+He did not see to the bottom of this description of the Deacon. With a
+lawyer's instinct, he kept his doubts to himself and tried his witness
+with a new question.
+
+"Did you talk about books at all with the old man?"
+
+"To be sure I did. Would you believe it,--that aged saint is a great
+novel-reader. So he tells me. What is more, he brings up his children
+to that sort of reading, from the time when they first begin to spell.
+If anybody else had told me such a story about an old country deacon, I
+wouldn't have believed it; but he said so himself, to me, at breakfast
+this morning."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw felt as if either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in the
+first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he himself could
+be out of his wits. He must try one more question. He had become so
+mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his interrogation in
+legal form.
+
+"Will you state, if you please--I beg your pardon--may I ask who is your
+own favorite author?"
+
+"I think just now I like to read Scott better than almost anybody."
+
+"Do you mean the Rev. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary?"
+
+Clement stared at Mr. Bradshaw, and wondered whether he was trying to
+make a fool of him. The young lawyer hardly looked as if he could be a
+fool himself.
+
+"I mean Sir Walter Scott," he said, dryly.
+
+"Oh!" said Mr. Bradshaw. He saw that there had been a slight
+misunderstanding between the young man and his worthy host, but it was
+none of his business, and there were other subjects of interest to talk
+about.
+
+"You know one of our charming young ladies very well, I believe, Mr.
+Lindsay. I think you are an old acquaintance of Miss Posey, whom we all
+consider so pretty."
+
+Poor Clement! The question pierced to the very marrow of his soul, but
+it was put with the utmost suavity and courtesy, and honeyed with a
+compliment to the young lady, too, so that there was no avoiding a direct
+and pleasant answer to it.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I have known the young lady you speak of for a long
+time, and very well,--in fact, as you must have heard, we are something
+more than friends. My visit here is principally on her account."
+
+"You must give the rest of us a chance to see something of you during
+your visit, Mr. Lindsay. I hope you are invited to Miss Eveleth's
+to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yes, I got a note this morning. Tell me, Mr. Bradshaw, who is there
+that I shall meet if I go? I have no doubt there are girls here in the
+village I should like to see, and perhaps some young fellows that I
+should like to talk with. You know all that's prettiest and pleasantest,
+of course."
+
+"Oh, we're a little place, Mr. Lindsay. A few nice people, the rest
+comme Va, you know. High-bush blackberries and low-bush
+black-berries,--you understand,--just so everywhere,--high-bush here and
+there, low-bush plenty. You must see the two parsons' daughters,--Saint
+Ambrose's and Saint Joseph's,--and another girl I want particularly to
+introduce you to. You shall form your own opinion of her. I call her
+handsome and stylish, but you have got spoiled, you know. Our young
+poet, too, one we raised in this place, Mr. Lindsay, and a superior
+article of poet, as we think,--that is, some of us, for the rest of us
+are jealous of him, because the girls are all dying for him and want his
+autograph. And Cyp,--yes, you must talk to Cyp,--he has ideas. But
+don't forget to get hold of old Byles Master Gridley I mean--before you
+go. Big head. Brains enough for a cabinet minister, and fit out a
+college faculty with what was left over. Be sure you see old Byles. Set
+him talking about his book, 'Thoughts on the Universe.' Did n't sell
+much, but has got knowing things in it. I'll show you a copy, and then
+you can tell him you know it, and he will take to you. Come in and get
+your dinner with me to-morrow. We will dine late, as the city folks do,
+and after that we will go over to the Rector's. I should like to show
+you some of our village people."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw liked the thought of showing the young man to some of his
+friends there. As Clement was already "done for," or "bowled out," as
+the young lawyer would have expressed the fact of his being pledged in
+the matrimonial direction, there was nothing to be apprehended on the
+score of rivalry. And although Clement was particularly good-looking,
+and would have been called a distinguishable youth anywhere, Mr. Bradshaw
+considered himself far more than his match, in all probability, in social
+accomplishments. He expected, therefore, a certain amount of reflex
+credit for bringing such a fine young fellow in his company, and a second
+instalment of reputation from outshining him in conversation. This was
+rather nice calculating, but Murray Bradshaw always calculated. With most
+men life is like backgammon, half skill, and half luck, but with him it
+was like chess. He never pushed a pawn without reckoning the cost, and
+when his mind was least busy it was sure to be half a dozen moves ahead
+of the game as it was standing.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw gave Clement a pretty dinner enough for such a place as
+Oxbow Village. He offered him some good wine, and would have made him
+talk so as to show his lining, to use one of his own expressions, but
+Clement had apparently been through that trifling experience, and could
+not be coaxed into saying more than he meant to say. Murray Bradshaw was
+very curious to find out how it was that he had become the victim of such
+a rudimentary miss as Susan Posey. Could she be an heiress in disguise?
+Why no, of course not; had not he made all proper inquiries about that
+when Susan came to town? A small inheritance from an aunt or uncle, or
+some such relative, enough to make her a desirable party in the eyes of
+certain villagers perhaps, but nothing to allure a man like this, whose
+face and figure as marketable possessions were worth say a hundred
+thousand in the girl's own right, as Mr. Bradshaw put it roughly, with
+another hundred thousand if his talent is what some say, and if his
+connection is a desirable one, a fancy price,--anything he would fetch.
+Of course not. Must have got caught when he was a child. Why the diavolo
+didn't he break it off, then?
+
+There was no fault to find with the modest entertainment at the
+Parsonage. A splendid banquet in a great house is an admirable thing,
+provided always its getting up did not cost the entertainer an inward
+conflict, nor its recollection a twinge of economical regret, nor its
+bills a cramp of anxiety. A simple evening party in the smallest village
+is just as admirable in its degree, when the parlor is cheerfully
+lighted, and the board prettily spread, and the guests are made to feel
+comfortable without being reminded that anybody is making a painful
+effort.
+
+We know several of the young people who were there, and need not trouble
+ourselves for the others. Myrtle Hazard had promised to come. She had
+her own way of late as never before; in fact, the women were afraid of
+her. Miss Silence felt that she could not be responsible for her any
+longer. She had hopes for a time that Myrtle would go through the
+customary spiritual paroxysm under the influence of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's
+assiduous exhortations; but since she had broken off with him, Miss
+Silence had looked upon her as little better than a backslider. And now
+that the girl was beginning to show the tendencies which seemed to come
+straight down to her from the belle of the last century, (whose rich
+physical developments seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as in
+themselves a kind of offence against propriety,) the forlorn woman folded
+her thin hands and looked on hopelessly, hardly venturing a remonstrance
+for fear of some new explosion. As for Cynthia, she was comparatively
+easy since she had, through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the minister's
+questionable arrangement of religious intimacy. She had, in fact, in a
+quiet way, given Mr. Bradshaw to understand that he would probably meet
+Myrtle at the Parsonage if he dropped in at their small gathering.
+Clement walked over to Mrs. Hopkins's after his dinner with the young
+lawyer, and asked if Susan was ready to go with him. At the sound of his
+voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his forehead, and called himself, in subdued
+tones, a miserable being. His imagination wavered uncertain for a while
+between pictures of various modes of ridding himself of existence, and
+fearful deeds involving the life of others. He had no fell purpose of
+actually doing either, but there was a gloomy pleasure in contemplating
+them as possibilities, and in mentally sketching the "Lines written in
+Despair" which would be found in what was but an hour before the pocket
+of the youthful bard, G. H., victim of a hopeless passion. All this
+emotion was in the nature of a surprise to the young man. He had fully
+believed himself desperately in love with Myrtle Hazard; and it was not
+until Clement came into the family circle with the right of eminent
+domain over the realm of Susan's affections, that this unfortunate
+discovered that Susan's pretty ways and morning dress and love of poetry
+and liking for his company had been too much for him, and that he was
+henceforth to be wretched during the remainder of his natural life,
+except so far as he could unburden himself in song.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon
+Myrtle to the little party at the Eveleths. Myrtle was not insensible to
+the attractions of the young lawyer, though she had never thought of
+herself except as a child in her relations with any of these older
+persons. But she was not the same girl that she had been but a few
+months before. She had achieved her independence by her audacious and
+most dangerous enterprise. She had gone through strange nervous trials
+and spiritual experiences which had matured her more rapidly than years
+of common life would have done. She had got back her health, bringing
+with it a riper wealth of womanhood. She had found her destiny in the
+consciousness that she inherited the beauty belonging to her blood, and
+which, after sleeping for a generation or two as if to rest from the
+glare of the pageant that follows beauty through its long career of
+triumph, had come to the light again in her life, and was to repeat the
+legends of the olden time in her own history.
+
+Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes of
+the town would have thought essential to render a young girl like her
+presentable. There were a few heirlooms of old date, however, which she
+had kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked over until she
+found some lace and other convertible material, with which she enlivened
+her costume a little for the evening. As she clasped the antique
+bracelet around her wrist, she felt as if it were an amulet that gave her
+the power of charming which had been so long obsolete in her lineage. At
+the bottom of her heart she cherished a secret longing to try her
+fascinations on the young lawyer. Who could blame her? It was not an
+inwardly expressed intention,--it was the simple instinctive movement to
+subjugate the strongest of the other sex who had come in her way, which,
+as already said, is as natural to a woman as it is to a man to be
+captivated by the loveliest of those to whom he dares to aspire.
+
+Before William Murray Bradshaw and Myrtle Hazard had reached the
+Parsonage, the girl's cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were flashing
+with a new excitement. The young man had not made love to her directly,
+but he had interested her in herself by a delicate and tender flattery of
+manner, and so set her fancies working that she was taken with him as
+never before, and wishing that the Parsonage had been a mile farther from
+The Poplars. It was impossible for a young girl like Myrtle to conceal
+the pleasure she received from listening to her seductive admirer, who
+was trying all his trained skill upon his artless companion. Murray
+Bradshaw felt sure that the game was in his hands if he played it with
+only common prudence. There was no need of hurrying this child,--it might
+startle her to make downright love abruptly; and now that he had an ally
+in her own household, and was to have access to her with a freedom he had
+never before enjoyed, there was a refined pleasure in playing his
+fish,--this gamest of golden-scaled creatures,--which had risen to his
+fly, and which he wished to hook, but not to land, until he was sure it
+would be worth his while.
+
+They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming, that
+Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that it would
+take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities involved.
+
+"How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!" said Cyprian
+Eveleth, pensively.
+
+"What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!" said Bathsheba cheerfully.
+
+Cyprian sighed. "She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her. Is
+n't she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,--a poem
+herself,--a glorious lyric,--all light and music! See what a smile the
+creature has! And her voice! When did you ever hear such tones? And
+when was it ever so full of life before."
+
+Bathsheba sighed. "I do not know any poets but Gifted Hopkins. Does not
+Myrtle look more in her place by the side of Murray Bradshaw than she
+would with Gifted hitched on her arm?"
+
+Just then the poet made his appearance. He looked depressed, as if it
+had cost him an effort to come. He was, however, charged with a message
+which he must deliver to the hostess of the evening.
+
+"They 're coming presently," he said. "That young man and Susan. Wants
+you to introduce him, Mr. Bradshaw."
+
+The bell rang presently, and Murray Bradshaw slipped out into the entry
+to meet the two lovers.
+
+"How are you, my fortunate friend?" he said, as he met them at the door.
+"Of course you're well and happy as mortal man can be in this vale of
+tears. Charming, ravishing, quite delicious, that way of dressing your
+hair, Miss Posey! Nice girls here this evening, Mr. Lindsay. Looked
+lovely when I came out of the parlor. Can't say how they will show after
+this young lady puts in an appearance." In reply to which florid
+speeches Susan blushed, not knowing what else to do, and Clement smiled
+as naturally as if he had been sitting for his photograph.
+
+He felt, in a vague way, that he and Susan were being patronized, which
+is not a pleasant feeling to persons with a certain pride of character.
+There was no expression of contempt about Mr. Bradshaw's manner or
+language at which he could take offence. Only he had the air of a man
+who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm consciousness that he
+himself is out of reach of comparison in the possessions or qualities
+which he is admiring in the other. Clement was right in his obscure
+perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while he was making his phrases.
+That gentleman was, in another moment, to have the tingling delight of
+showing the grand creature he had just begun to tame. He was going to
+extinguish the pallid light of Susan's prettiness in the brightness of
+Myrtle's beauty. He would bring this young man, neutralized and rendered
+entirely harmless by his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to
+face with a masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not in words,
+but as plainly as speech could have told him, "Behold my captive!"
+
+It was a proud moment for Murray Bradshaw. He had seen, or thought that
+he had seen, the assured evidence of a speedy triumph over all the
+obstacles of Myrtle's youth and his own present seeming slight excess of
+maturity. Unless he were very greatly mistaken, he could now walk the
+course; the plate was his, no matter what might be the entries. And this
+youth, this handsome, spirited-looking, noble-aired young fellow, whose
+artist-eye could not miss a line of Myrtle's proud and almost defiant
+beauty, was to be the witness of his power, and to look in admiration
+upon his prize! He introduced him to the others, reserving her for the
+last. She was at that moment talking with the worthy Rector, and turned
+when Mr. Bradshaw spoke to her.
+
+"Miss Hazard, will you allow me to present to you my friend, Mr. Clement
+Lindsay?"
+
+They looked full upon each other, and spoke the common words of
+salutation. It was a strange meeting; but we who profess to tell the
+truth must tell strange things, or we shall be liars.
+
+In poor little Susan's letter there was some allusion to a bust of
+Innocence which the young artist had begun, but of which he had said
+nothing in his answer to her. He had roughed out a block of marble for
+that impersonation; sculpture was a delight to him, though secondary to
+his main pursuit. After his memorable adventure, the image of the girl
+he had rescued so haunted him that the pale ideal which was to work
+itself out in the bust faded away in its perpetual presence, and--alas,
+poor Susan! in obedience to the impulse that he could not control, he
+left Innocence sleeping in the marble, and began modelling a figure of
+proud and noble and imperious beauty, to which he gave the name of
+Liberty.
+
+The original which had inspired his conception was before him. These
+were the lips to which his own had clung when he brought her back from
+the land of shadows. The hyacinthine curl of her lengthening locks had
+added something to her beauty; but it was the same face which had haunted
+him. This was the form he had borne seemingly lifeless in his arms, and
+the bosom which heaved so visibly before him was that which his eyes they
+were the calm eyes of a sculptor, but of a sculptor hardly twenty years
+old.
+
+Yes,--her bosom was heaving. She had an unexplained feeling of
+suffocation, and drew great breaths,--she could not have said why,--but
+she could not help it; and presently she became giddy, and had a great
+noise in her ears, and rolled her eyes about, and was on the point of
+going into an hysteric spasm. They called Dr. Hurlbut, who was making
+himself agreeable to Olive just then, to come and see what was the matter
+with Myrtle.
+
+"A little nervous turn,--that is all," he said.
+
+"Open the window. Loose the ribbon round her neck. Rub her hands.
+Sprinkle some water on her forehead.
+
+"A few drops of cologne. Room too warm for her,--that 's all, I think."
+
+Myrtle came to herself after a time without anything like a regular
+paroxysm. But she was excitable, and whatever the cause of the
+disturbance may have been, it seemed prudent that she should go home
+early; and the excellent Rector insisted on caring for her, much to the
+discontent of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+"Demonish odd," said this gentleman, "was n't it, Mr. Lindsay, that Miss
+Hazard should go off in that way. Did you ever see her before?"
+
+"I--I--have seen that young lady before," Clement answered.
+
+"Where did you meet her?" Mr. Bradshaw asked, with eager interest.
+
+"I met her in the Valley of the Shadow of Death," Clement answered, very
+solemnly.--"I leave this place to-morrow morning. Have you any commands
+for the city?"
+
+"Knows how to shut a fellow up pretty well for a young one, doesn't he?"
+Mr. Bradshaw thought to himself.
+
+"Thank you, no," he answered, recovering himself. "Rather a melancholy
+place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley you spoke of.
+I should like to know about it."
+
+Mr. Clement had the power of looking steadily into another person's eyes
+in a way that was by no means encouraging to curiosity or favorable to
+the process of cross-examination. Mr. Bradshaw was not disposed to press
+his question in the face of the calm, repressive look the young man gave
+him.
+
+"If he was n't bagged, I shouldn't like the shape of things any too
+well," he said to himself.
+
+The conversation between Mr. Clement Lindsay and Miss Susan Posey, as
+they walked home together, was not very brilliant. "I am going to-morrow
+morning," he said, "and I must bid you good-by tonight." Perhaps it is as
+well to leave two lovers to themselves, under these circumstances.
+
+Before he went he spoke to his worthy host, whose moderate demands he had
+to satisfy, and with whom he wished to exchange a few words.
+
+"And by the way, Deacon, I have no use for this book, and as it is in a
+good type, perhaps you would like it. Your favorite, Scott, and one of
+his greatest works. I have another edition of it at home, and don't care
+for this volume."
+
+"Thank you, thank you, Mr. Lindsay, much obleeged. I shall read that
+copy for your sake, the best of books next to the Bible itself."
+
+After Mr. Lindsay had gone, the Deacon looked at the back of the book.
+"Scott's Works, Vol. IX." He opened it at hazard, and happened to fall
+on a well-known page, from which he began reading aloud, slowly,
+
+ "When Izrul, of the Lord beloved,
+ Out of the land of bondage came."
+
+The whole hymn pleased the grave Deacon. He had never seen this work of
+the author of the Commentary. No matter; anything that such a good man
+wrote must be good reading, and he would save it up for Sunday. The
+consequence of this was, that, when the Rev. Mr. Stoker stopped in on his
+way to meeting on the "Sabbath," he turned white with horror at the
+spectacle of the senior Deacon of his church sitting, open-mouthed and
+wide-eyed, absorbed in the pages of "Ivanhoe," which he found enormously
+interesting; but, so far as he had yet read, not occupied with religious
+matters so much as he had expected.
+
+Myrtle had no explanation to give of her nervous attack. Mr. Bradshaw
+called the day after the party, but did not see her. He met her walking,
+and thought she seemed a little more distant than common. That would
+never do. He called again at The Poplars a few days afterwards, and was
+met in the entry by Miss Cynthia, with whom he had a long conversation on
+matters involving Myrtle's interests and their own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+MADNESS?
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay returned to the city and his usual labors in a state
+of strange mental agitation. He had received an impression for which he
+was unprepared. He had seen for the second time a young girl whom, for
+the peace of his own mind, and for the happiness of others, he should
+never again have looked upon until Time had taught their young hearts the
+lesson which all hearts must learn, sooner or later.
+
+What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with one of those
+disappointments, or been betrayed into one of those positions, which do
+violence to all the tenderest feelings, blighting the happiness of youth,
+and the prospects of after years?
+
+If the person is a young man, he has various resources. He can take to
+the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotine himself at brief intervals into
+a kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he begins to "color" at
+last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his mind gets the tobacco
+flavor. Or he can have recourse to the more suggestive stimulants, which
+will dress his future up for him in shining possibilities that glitter
+like Masonic regalia, until the morning light and the waking headache
+reveal his illusion. Some kind of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if
+he holds his grief fast tied to his heartstrings. But as grief must be
+fed with thought, or starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the
+mind so busy in other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of
+that ravening passion. To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to
+end in putting all the mental machinery into disorder.
+
+Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already fought,
+and that he had conquered. He believed that he had subdued himself
+completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow of
+disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had
+assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own larger
+being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of apprehending.
+
+He had deceived himself. The battle was not fought and won. There had
+been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the
+enemy--intrenched in the very citadel of life--had rallied, and would
+make another desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.
+
+The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
+proof that he felt his danger. He believed that, if he came into the
+presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
+master of his feelings. Some explanation must take place between them,
+and how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and in what do
+all emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl as this tend to
+find their last expression?
+
+Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work. He would give
+himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been. His
+plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were never so
+continuous as now. But the passion still wrought within him, and, if he
+drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep until he could
+endure it no longer, and must give it some manifestation. He had covered
+up the bust of Liberty so closely, that not an outline betrayed itself
+through the heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His thoughts
+recurred to his unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he
+could find a silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was
+torture to keep imprisoned in his soul. The cold stone would tell them,
+but without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of
+himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered from
+a presence which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all that made
+him seem honorable and worthy to himself.
+
+He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped, and struck the first
+flake from the glittering marble. The toil, once begun, fascinated him
+strangely, and after the day's work was done, and at every interval he
+could snatch from his duties, he wrought at his secret task.
+
+"Clement is graver than ever," the young men said at the office. "What's
+the matter, do you suppose? Turned off by the girl they say he means to
+marry by and by? How pale he looks too! Must have something worrying
+him: he used to look as fresh as a clove pink."
+
+The master with whom he studied saw that he was losing color, and looking
+very much worn; and determined to find out, if he could, whether he was
+not overworking himself. He soon discovered that his light was seen
+burning late into the night, that he was neglecting his natural rest, and
+always busy with some unknown task, not called for in his routine of duty
+or legitimate study.
+
+"Something is wearing on you, Clement," he said. "You are killing
+yourself with undertaking too much. Will you let me know what keeps you
+so busy when you ought to be asleep, or taking your ease and comfort in
+some way or other?"
+
+Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its model. He had now
+almost finished it, laboring at it with such sleepless devotion, and he
+was willing to let his master have a sight of his first effort of the
+kind,--for he was not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though he had
+modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to time.
+
+"Come with me," he said.
+
+The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest chamber. A
+closely shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in the light of the solitary
+window.
+
+"That is my ideal personage," Clement said. "Wait one moment, and you
+shall see how far I have caught the character of our uncrowned queen."
+
+The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional young woman
+with classical wreath or feather headdress, whom we have placed upon our
+smallest coin, so that our children may all grow up loving Liberty.
+
+As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work, the master stared
+at it in amazement. He looked at it long and earnestly, and at length
+turned his eyes, a little moistened by some feeling which thus betrayed
+itself, upon his scholar.
+
+"This is no ideal, Clement. It is the portrait of a very young but very
+beautiful woman. No common feeling could have guided your hand in
+shaping such a portrait from memory. This must be that friend of yours
+of whom I have often heard as an amiable young person. Pardon me, for
+you know that nobody cares more for you than I do,--I hope that you are
+happy in all your relations with this young friend of yours. How could
+one be otherwise?"
+
+It was hard to bear, very hard. He forced a smile. "You are partly
+right," he said. "There is a resemblance, I trust, to a living person,
+for I had one in my mind."
+
+"Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting a bust of
+Innocence? I do not see any block in your room but this. Is that done?"
+
+"Done with!" Clement answered; and, as he said it, the thought stung
+through him that this was the very stone which was to have worn the
+pleasant blandness of pretty Susan's guileless countenance. How the new
+features had effaced the recollection of the others!
+
+In a few days more Clement had finished his bust. His hours were again
+vacant to his thick-coming fancies. While he had been busy with his
+marble, his hands had required his attention, and he must think closely
+of every detail upon which he was at work. But at length his task was
+done, and he could contemplate what he had made of it. It was a triumph
+for one so little exercised in sculpture. The master had told him so, and
+his own eye could not deceive him. He might never succeed in any
+repetition of his effort, but this once he most certainly had succeeded.
+He could not disguise from himself the source of this extraordinary good
+fortune in so doubtful and difficult an attempt. Nor could he resist the
+desire of contemplating the portrait bust, which--it was foolish to talk
+about ideals--was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.
+
+It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor; his own work
+was an over-match for its artist. Clement had made a mistake in
+supposing that by giving his dream a material form he should drive it
+from the possession of his mind. The image in which he had fixed his
+recollection of its original served only to keep her living presence
+before him. He thought of her as she clasped her arms around him, and
+they were swallowed up in the rushing waters, coming so near to passing
+into the unknown world together. He thought of her as he stretched her
+lifeless form upon the bank, and looked for one brief moment on her
+unsunned loveliness,--"a sight to dream of, not to tell." He thought of
+her as his last fleeting glimpse had shown her, beautiful, not with the
+blossomy prettiness that passes away with the spring sunshine, but with a
+rich vitality of which noble outlines and winning expression were only
+the natural accidents. And that singular impression which the sight of
+him had produced upon her,--how strange! How could she but have listened
+to him,--to him, who was, as it were, a second creator to her, for he had
+bought her back from the gates of the unseen realm,--if he had recalled
+to her the dread moments they had passed in each other's arms, with
+death, not love, in all their thoughts. And if then he had told her how
+her image had remained with him, how it had colored all his visions, and
+mingled with all his conceptions, would not those dark eyes have melted
+as they were turned upon him? Nay, how could he keep the thought away,
+that she would not have been insensible to his passion, if he could have
+suffered its flame to kindle in his heart? Did it not seem as if Death
+had spared them for Love, and that Love should lead them together through
+life's long journey to the gates of Death?
+
+Never! never! never! Their fates were fixed. For him, poor insect as he
+was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his wingless
+mate! For her--he thought he saw her doom.
+
+Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist,
+who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all
+around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not
+perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for
+him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically
+what we know as soon as we see it; but he felt in his inner consciousness
+all that we must tell for him. Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing,
+capable of winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of
+understanding her,--oh, if he could but touch him with the angel's spear,
+and bid him take his true shape before her whom he was gradually
+enveloping in the silken meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place
+for her in the world,--oh yes, doubtless. He would be proud of her in
+company, would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights.
+But from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
+established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly pattern.
+He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her in their place
+his table of market-values. He would teach her to submit her
+sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of
+the moment, no matter which world or half-world it came from. "As the
+husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to what he worked in.
+
+All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife of
+Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did, from the
+few times he had seen him. He would be rich by and by, very probably.
+He looked like one of those young men who are sharp, and hard enough to
+come to fortune. Then she would have to take her place in the great
+social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the
+animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the
+sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable
+life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an
+existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the
+piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How
+many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to
+welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony of
+dressing, dawdling, and driving!
+
+This could not go on so forever. Clement had placed a red curtain so as
+to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which his
+fancy turned to the semblance of life. He would sit and look at the
+features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed as if
+the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as if they
+were ready to speak to him. His companions began to whisper strange
+things of him in the studio,--that his eye was getting an unnatural
+light,--that he talked as if to imaginary listeners,--in short, that
+there was a look as if something were going wrong with his brain, which
+it might be feared would spoil his fine intelligence. It was the
+undecided battle, and the enemy, as in his noblest moments he had
+considered the growing passion, was getting the better of him.
+
+He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled and
+whispered away his peace, when the post-man brought him a letter. It was
+from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise. We know how she
+used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent feelings, and the
+trifling matters that were going on in her little village world. But now
+she wrote in sadness. Something, she did not too clearly explain what,
+had grieved her, and she gave free expression to her feelings. "I have
+no one that loves me but you," she said; "and if you leave me I must
+droop and die. Are you true to me, dearest Clement,--true as when we
+promised each other that we would love while life lasted? Or have you
+forgotten one who will never cease to remember that she was once your own
+Susan?"
+
+Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long hour looking at
+the exquisitely wrought features of her who had come between him and
+honor and his plighted word.
+
+At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from its pedestal,
+laid it upon the cloth with which it had been covered. He wrapped it
+closely, fold upon fold, as the mother whom man condemns and God pities
+wraps the child she loves before she lifts her hand against its life.
+Then he took a heavy hammer and shattered his lovely idol into shapeless
+fragments. The strife was over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw was in pretty intimate relations with Miss
+Cynthia Badlam. It was well understood between them that it might be of
+very great advantage to both of them if he should in due time become the
+accepted lover of Myrtle Hazard. So long as he could be reasonably
+secure against interference, he did not wish to hurry her in making her
+decision. Two things he did wish to be sure of, if possible, before
+asking her the great question;--first, that she would answer it in the
+affirmative; and secondly, that certain contingencies, the turning of
+which was not as yet absolutely capable of being predicted, should happen
+as he expected. Cynthia had the power of furthering his wishes in many
+direct and indirect ways, and he felt sure of her cooperation. She had
+some reason to fear his enmity if she displeased him, and he had taken
+good care to make her understand that her interests would be greatly
+promoted by the success of the plan which he had formed, and which was
+confided to her alone.
+
+He kept the most careful eye on every possible source of disturbance to
+this quietly maturing plan. He had no objection to have Gifted Hopkins
+about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him. The youthful bard
+entertained her very innocently with his bursts of poetry, but she was in
+no danger from a young person so intimately associated with the
+yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-paper parcel. There was
+Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any very particular solicitude.
+Myrtle had evidently found out that she was handsome and stylish and all
+that, and it was not very likely she would take up with such a bashful,
+humble, country youth as this. He could expect nothing beyond a possible
+rectorate in the remote distance, with one of those little pony chapels
+to preach in, which, if it were set up on a stout pole, would pass for a
+good-sized martin-house. Cyprian might do to practise on, but there was
+no danger of her looking at him in a serious way. As for that youth,
+Clement Lindsay, if he had not taken himself off as he did, Murray
+Bradshaw confessed to himself that he should have felt uneasy. He was
+too good-looking, and too clever a young fellow to have knocking about
+among fragile susceptibilities. But on reflection he saw there could be
+no danger.
+
+"All up with him,--poor diavolo! Can't understand it--such a little
+sixpenny miss--pretty enough boiled parsnip blonde, if one likes that
+sort of thing--pleases some of the old boys, apparently. Look out, Mr.
+L. remember Susanna and the Elders. Good!
+
+"Safe enough if something new doesn't turn up. Youngish. Sixteen's a
+little early. Seventeen will do. Marry a girl while she's in the
+gristle, and you can shape her bones for her. Splendid creature without
+her trimmings. Wants training. Must learn to dance, and sing something
+besides psalm-tunes."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw began humming the hymn, "When I can read my title clear,"
+adding some variations of his own. "That 's the solo for my prima
+donna!"
+
+In the mean time Myrtle seemed to be showing some new developments. One
+would have said that the instincts of the coquette, or at least of the
+city belle, were coming uppermost in her nature. Her little nervous
+attack passed away, and she gained strength and beauty every day. She
+was becoming conscious of her gifts of fascination, and seemed to please
+herself with the homage of her rustic admirers. Why was it that no one
+of them had the look and bearing of that young man she had seen but a
+moment the other evening? To think that he should have taken up with
+such a weakling as Susan Posey! She sighed, and not so much thought as
+felt how kind it would have been in Heaven to have made her such a man.
+But the image of the delicate blonde stood between her and all serious
+thought of Clement Lindsay. She saw the wedding in the distance, and
+very foolishly thought to herself that she could not and would not go to
+it.
+
+But Clement Lindsay was gone, and she must content herself with such
+worshippers as the village afforded. Murray Bradshaw was surprised and
+confounded at the easy way in which she received his compliments, and
+played with his advances, after the fashion of the trained ball-room
+belles, who know how to be almost caressing in manner, and yet are really
+as far off from the deluded victim of their suavities as the topmost
+statue of the Milan cathedral from the peasant that kneels on its floor.
+He admired her all the more for this, and yet he saw that she would be a
+harder prize to win than he had once thought. If he made up his mind
+that he would have her, he must go armed with all implements, from the
+red hackle to the harpoon.
+
+The change which surprised Murray Bradshaw could not fail to be noticed
+by all those about her. Miss Silence had long ago come to pantomime,
+rolling up of eyes, clasping of hands, making of sad mouths, and the
+rest,--but left her to her own way, as already the property of that great
+firm of World & Co. which drives such sharp bargains for young souls with
+the better angels. Cynthia studied her for her own purposes, but had
+never gained her confidence. The Irish servant saw that some change had
+come over her, and thought of the great ladies she had sometimes looked
+upon in the old country. They all had a kind of superstitious feeling
+about Myrtle's bracelet, of which she had told them the story, but which
+Kitty half believed was put in the drawer by the fairies, who brought her
+ribbons and partridge feathers, and other slight adornments with which
+she contrived to set off her simple costume, so as to produce those
+effects which an eye for color and cunning fingers can bring out of
+almost nothing.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the two
+great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely
+handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for
+she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton was going to be
+the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of going down on his
+knees to her, and telling her that his heart was hers and hers alone.
+But he suddenly remembered that he had on his best trousers, and the idea
+of carrying the marks of his devotion in the shape of two dusty
+impressions on his most valued article of apparel turned the scale
+against the demonstration. It happened the next morning, that Susan
+Posey wore the most becoming ribbon she had displayed for a long time,
+and Gifted was so taken with her pretty looks that he might very probably
+have made the same speech to her that he had been on the point of making
+to Myrtle the day before, but that he remembered her plighted affections,
+and thought what he should have to say for himself when Clement Lindsay,
+in a frenzy of rage and jealousy, stood before him, probably armed with
+as many deadly instruments as a lawyer mentions by name in an indictment
+for murder.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations Myrtle
+was making of her tastes and inclinations. He had always felt dazzled,
+as well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in her
+expression and manner which made him feel still more strongly that they
+were intended for different spheres of life. He could not but own that
+she was born for a brilliant destiny,--that no ball-room would throw a
+light from its chandeliers too strong for her,--that no circle would be
+too brilliant for her to illuminate by her presence. Love does not
+thrive without hope, and Cyprian was beginning to see that it was idle in
+him to think of folding these wide wings of Myrtle's so that they would
+be shut up in any cage he could ever offer her. He began to doubt
+whether, after all, he might not find a meeker and humbler nature better
+adapted to his own. And so it happened that one evening after the three
+girls, Olive, Myrtle, and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage,
+and Cyprian, availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them,
+he found he had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl
+whose voice had grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in the
+sick-chamber, that it seemed to him more like music than speech. It
+would not be fair to say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian was
+devoting himself to Bathsheba. Her ambition was already reaching beyond
+her little village circle, and she had an inward sense that Cyprian found
+a form of sympathy in the minister's simple-minded daughter which he
+could not ask from a young woman of her own aspirations.
+
+Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one morning
+surprised by an early call from Myrtle. He had a volume of Walton's
+Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the original, when she
+entered.
+
+"Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?" he
+exclaimed. "I might call you Keren-Happuch, which is Hebrew for Child of
+Beauty, and not be very far out of the way, Job's youngest daughter, my
+dear. And what brings my young friend out in such good season this
+morning? Nothing going wrong up at our ancient mansion, The Poplars, I
+trust?"
+
+"I want to talk with you, dear Master Gridley," she answered. She looked
+as if she did not know just how to begin.
+
+"Anything that interests you, Myrtle, interests me. I think you have
+some project in that young head of yours, my child. Let us have it, in
+all its dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness. I think I can guess,
+Myrtle, that we have a little plan of some kind or other. We don't visit
+Papa Job quite so early as this without some special cause,--do we, Miss
+Keren-Happuch?"
+
+"I want to go to the city--to school," Myrtle said, with the directness
+which belonged to her nature.
+
+"That is precisely what I want you to do myself, Miss Myrtle Hazard. I
+don't like to lose you from the village, but I think we must spare you
+for a while."
+
+"You're the best and dearest man that ever lived. What could have made
+you think of such a thing for me, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Because you are ignorant, my child,--partly I want to see you fitted to
+take a look at the world without feeling like a little country miss. Has
+your aunt Silence promised to bear your expenses while you are in the
+city? It will cost a good deal of money."
+
+"I have not said a word to her about it. I am sure I don't know what she
+would say. But I have some money, Mr. Gridley."
+
+She showed him a purse with gold, telling him how she came by it. "There
+is some silver besides. Will it be enough?"
+
+"No, no, my child, we must not meddle with that. Your aunt will let me
+put it in the bank for you, I think, where it will be safe. But that
+shall not make any difference. I have got a little money lying idle,
+which you may just as well have the use of as not. You can pay it back
+perhaps some time or other; if you did not, it would not make much
+difference. I am pretty much alone in the world, and except a book now
+and then--Aut liberos aut libros, as our valiant heretic has it,--you
+ought to know a little Latin, Myrtle, but never mind--I have not much
+occasion for money. You shall go to the best school that any of our
+cities can offer, Myrtle, and you shall stay there until we agree that
+you are fitted to come back to us an ornament to Oxbow Village, and to
+larger places than this if you are called there. We have had some talk
+about it, your aunt Silence and I, and it is all settled. Your aunt does
+not feel very rich just now, or perhaps she would do more for you. She
+has many pious and poor friends, and it keeps her funds low. Never mind,
+my child, we will have it all arranged for you, and you shall begin the
+year 1860 in Madam Delacoste's institution for young ladies. Too many
+rich girls and fashionable ones there, I fear, but you must see some of
+all kinds, and there are very good instructors in the school,--I know
+one,--he was a college boy with me,--and you will find pleasant and good
+companions there, so he tells me; only don't be in a hurry to choose your
+friends, for the least desirable young persons are very apt to cluster
+about a new-comer."
+
+Myrtle was bewildered with the suddenness of the prospect thus held out
+to her. It is a wonder that she did not bestow an embrace upon the
+worthy old master. Perhaps she had too much tact. It is a pretty way
+enough of telling one that he belongs to a past generation, but it does
+tell him that not over-pleasing fact. Like the title of Emeritus
+Professor, it is a tribute to be accepted, hardly to be longed for.
+
+When the curtain rises again, it will show Miss Hazard in a new
+character, and surrounded by a new world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY SCHOOL.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw was obliged to leave town for a week or two on business
+connected with the great land-claim. On his return, feeling in pretty
+good spirits, as the prospects looked favorable, he went to make a call
+at The Poplars. He asked first for Miss Hazard.
+
+"Bliss your soul, Mr. Bridshaw," answered Mistress Kitty Fagan, "she's
+been gahn nigh a wake. It's to the city, to the big school, they've sint
+her."
+
+This announcement seemed to make a deep impression on Murray Bradshaw,
+for his feelings found utterance in one of the most energetic forms of
+language to which ears polite or impolite are accustomed. He next asked
+for Miss Silence, who soon presented herself. Mr. Bradshaw asked, in a
+rather excited way, "Is it possible, Miss Withers, that your niece has
+quitted you to go to a city school?"
+
+Miss Silence answered, with her chief--mourner expression, and her
+death-chamber tone: "Yes, she has left us for a season. I trust it may
+not be her destruction. I had hoped in former years that she would
+become a missionary, but I have given up all expectation of that now.
+Two whole years, from the age of four to that of six, I had prevailed
+upon her to give up sugar,--the money so saved to go to a graduate of our
+institution--who was afterwards----he labored among the
+cannibal-islanders. I thought she seemed to take pleasure in this small
+act of self-denial, but I have since suspected that Kitty gave her secret
+lumps. It was by Mr. Gridley's advice that she went, and by his
+pecuniary assistance. What could I do? She was bent on going, and I was
+afraid she would have fits, or do something dreadful, if I did not let
+her have her way. I am afraid she will come back to us spoiled. She has
+seemed so fond of dress lately, and once she spoke of learning--yes, Mr.
+Bradshaw, of learning to--dance! I wept when I heard of it. Yes, I
+wept."
+
+That was such a tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak of
+in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the world to
+many women is that of themselves in tears,--that it brought a return of
+the same overflow, which served as a substitute for conversation until
+Miss Badlam entered the apartment.
+
+Miss Cynthia followed the same general course of remark. They could not
+help Myrtle's going if they tried. She had always maintained that, if
+they had only once broke her will when she was little, they would have
+kept the upper hand of her; but her will never was broke. They came
+pretty near it once, but the child would n't give in.
+
+Miss Cynthia went to the door with Mr. Bradshaw, and the conversation
+immediately became short and informal.
+
+"Demonish pretty business! All up for a year or more,--hey?"
+
+Don't blame me,--I couldn't stop her."
+
+"Give me her address,--I 'll write to her. Any young men teach in the
+school?"
+
+"Can't tell you. She'll write to Olive and Bathsheba, and I'll find out
+all about it."
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Clymer Ketchum,
+of 24 Carat Place, containing many interesting remarks and inquiries,
+some of the latter relating to Madam Delacoste's institution for the
+education of young ladies.
+
+While this was going on at Oxbow Village, Myrtle was establishing herself
+at the rather fashionable school to which Mr. Gridley had recommended
+her. Mrs. or Madam Delacoste's boarding-school had a name which on the
+whole it deserved pretty well. She had some very good instructors for
+girls who wished to get up useful knowledge in case they might marry
+professors or ministers. They had a chance to learn music, dancing,
+drawing, and the way of behaving in company. There was a chance, too, to
+pick up available acquaintances, for many rich people sent their
+daughters to the school, and it was something to have been bred in their
+company.
+
+There was the usual division of the scholars into a first and second set,
+according to the social position, mainly depending upon the fortune, of
+the families to which they belonged. The wholesale dealer's daughter
+very naturally considered herself as belonging to a different order from
+the retail dealer's daughter. The keeper of a great hotel and the editor
+of a widely circulated newspaper were considered as ranking with the
+wholesale dealers, and their daughters belonged also to the untitled
+nobility which has the dollar for its armorial bearing. The second set
+had most of the good scholars, and some of the prettiest girls; but
+nobody knew anything about their families, who lived off the great
+streets and avenues, or vegetated in country towns.
+
+Myrtle Hazard's advent made something like a sensation. They did not
+know exactly what to make of her. Hazard? Hazard? No great firm of
+that name. No leading hotel kept by any Hazard, was there? No newspaper
+of note edited by anybody called Hazard, was there? Came from where?
+Oxbow Village. Oh, rural district. Yes.--Still they could not help
+owning that she was handsome, a concession which of course had to be made
+with reservations.
+
+"Don't you think she's vuiry good-lookin'?" said a Boston girl to a New
+York girl. "I think she's real pooty."
+
+"I dew, indeed. I didn't think she was haaf so handsome the feeest time
+I saw her," answered the New York girl.
+
+"What a pity she had n't been bawn in Bawston!"
+
+"Yes, and moved very young to Ne Yock!"
+
+"And married a sarsaparilla man, and lived in Fiff Avenoo, and moved in
+the fust society."
+
+"Better dew that than be strong-mainded, and dew your own cook'n, and
+live in your own kitch'n."
+
+"Don't forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!"
+
+"Indeed I shaan't. What's the name of the alley, and which bell?" The
+New York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.
+
+"Had n't you better let me write it for you, dear?" said the Boston girl.
+"It is as well to have it legible, you know."
+
+"Take it," said the New York girl. "There 's tew York shill'ns in it
+when I hand it to you."
+
+"Your whole quarter's allowance, I bullieve,--ain't it?" said the Boston
+girl.
+
+"Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will be
+strictly attended to in this institution. The most correct standards of
+pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example. It will be the
+special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils out of all
+provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-bred English
+scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity."--Extract from
+the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-school.
+
+Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls. Striking, they all agreed,
+but then the criticisms began. Many of the girls chattered a little
+broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had been half
+educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which are to social
+operators what his cutting instruments are to the surgeon. Her face she
+allowed was handsome; but her style, according to this oracle, was a
+little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly comme il faut. More
+specifically, she was guilty of contours fortement prononces,--corsage de
+paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage, etc., etc. This girl prided herself
+on her figure.
+
+Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had christened
+her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of Myrtle's face,
+but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy girl's.
+
+The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and Trojans
+over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live freshman.
+She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as they could find
+out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of a queen, and she
+looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or two would make her a
+belle of the first water. She had that air of indifference to their
+little looks and whispered comments which is surest to disarm all the
+critics of a small tattling community. On the other hand, she came to
+this school to learn, and not to play; and the modest and more plainly
+dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep
+victualling establishments for some hundreds of people, considered her as
+rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters of the
+rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling over each
+other in the golden dust of the great city markets.
+
+She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets. She came
+with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply
+them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over the heads of
+the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists. She learned,
+therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced instructors. Her
+somewhat rude sketching soon began to show something of the artist's
+touch. Her voice, which had only been taught to warble the simplest
+melodies, after a little training began to show its force and sweetness
+and flexibility in the airs that enchant drawing-room audiences. She
+caught with great readiness the manner of the easiest girls,
+unconsciously, for she inherited old social instincts which became nature
+with the briefest exercise. Not much license of dress was allowed in the
+educational establishment of Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an
+opportunity to show her taste within the conventional limits prescribed.
+And Myrtle soon began to challenge remark by a certain air she contrived
+to give her dresses, and the skill with which she blended their colors.
+
+"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
+representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
+Planet Hotel, "she's got style, lots of it. I call her perfectly
+splendid, when she's got up in her swell clothes. That oriole's wing she
+wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she'll be a stunning
+Pocahontas for the next tableau."
+
+Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only merchantable
+article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from, thought she could be
+made presentable in the first circles if taken in hand in good season.
+So it came about that, before many weeks had passed over her as a scholar
+in the great educational establishment, she might be considered as on the
+whole the most popular girl in the whole bevy of them. The studious ones
+admired her for her facility of learning, and her extraordinary appetite
+for every form of instruction, and the showy girls, who were only
+enduring school as the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of
+society, recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be
+like to make a sensation sooner or later.
+
+There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
+themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted
+her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
+
+"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe. "We
+keep nine, and a pony for Edgar."
+
+Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep
+any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an
+acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker)
+that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--they were letting in
+persons one knew nothing about.
+
+Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used
+in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just bought a
+complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of
+china at her own home,--old china, which had been a hundred years in the
+family, some of it.
+
+"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clare Browne. "What queer-looking
+stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and
+bright! Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you
+got any handsome pictures in your house?"
+
+"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said, "some
+of them older than the china."
+
+"How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?"
+
+"One was a great beauty in her time."
+
+"How jolly!"
+
+"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,--burned
+to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."
+
+"How very very wicked! It was n't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling
+me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?--But you 've got some new
+pictures and things, have n't you? Who furnished your parlors?"
+
+"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense. I don't believe it. What color are your
+carriage-horses?"
+
+"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but
+a cow."
+
+"Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."
+
+Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a
+pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if
+she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions
+amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne. Of
+that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of
+discoursing. Her "papaa" commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman,
+and her "mammaa" would once in a while forget, and go down the area steps
+instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived behind a brown
+stone front, which veneers everybody's antecedents with a facing of
+respectability.
+
+Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
+Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and they
+were letting in very queer folks.
+
+Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
+thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely
+nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons
+were quite familiar.
+
+There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens and
+Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally,
+perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone. One of
+the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.
+
+"Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."
+
+The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. "Tasted any!
+Why, I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story. Don't you think
+they're nice."
+
+Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't know
+anything about them.
+
+"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.
+
+"Oh, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the
+great trunk and its contents. "I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and
+'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'" (naughty girl!), "and the 'Castle of
+Otranto,' and the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of Wakefield,'
+and 'Don Quixote'--"
+
+The young lady burst out laughing. "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake," she
+cried. "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and come back
+to life again. Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat! You ought to
+powder your hair and wear patches."
+
+"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home. "She has
+n't read any book that is n't a thousand years old. One of the girls
+says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I
+believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is
+Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."
+
+Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled to
+lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few
+young gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month
+after Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best,
+and by and by they were to have a tableau. Myrtle came out in all her
+force. She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome
+woman of the past generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the
+dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the
+young girl whose position in the school was assured from that moment.
+She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or
+three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by
+some of their talk which has been given. There is no possible success
+without some opposition as a fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and
+crowds something or other, if it does not hit or trample on it.
+
+The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
+Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the
+great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at
+the gathering.
+
+"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara? By
+Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a
+first-class beauty. Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara. If a
+girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that, I
+know a good many who had better begin their nap without waiting. If I
+were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,--eh, Clara?"
+
+Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the
+depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own. A
+little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the same
+sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston Jenkins's
+repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with a change in
+the arrangement of the proper names. The two young ladies were left
+feeling comparatively comfortable with regard to each other, each
+intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins's remark about her friend to
+such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all
+comfortable with reference to Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered
+by the leading "swell" of their circle as the most noticeable personage
+of the assembly. The individual exception in each case did very well as
+a matter of politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.
+
+It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet on
+her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth. It was as if it had
+just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and
+tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked to
+her as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the
+water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river, and
+strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length afloat
+upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first time found
+her destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule with gentle
+sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,--to enchant with the
+commonest exercise of speech, through the rare quality of a voice which
+could not help being always gracious and winning, of a manner which came
+to her as an inheritance of which she had just found the title. She read
+in the eyes of all that she was more than any other the centre of
+admiration. Blame her who may, the world was a very splendid vision as
+it opened before her eyes in its long vista of pleasures and of triumphs.
+How different the light of these bright saloons from the glimmer of the
+dim chamber at The Poplars! Silence Withers was at that very moment
+looking at the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith Pride. "The old
+picture seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she was thinking.
+But when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to her that the
+picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile upon its lips
+was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it. A reflex,
+doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the martyr was
+weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that the beauty,
+changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company with which she
+had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing herself with the
+thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her news from the Satanic
+province overhead, where she herself had so long indulged in the
+profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.
+
+The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux. The
+girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look "stunning" or "gorgeous" or
+"jolly," or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas, was not far out
+of the way, and it was so evident to the managing heads that she would
+make a fine appearance in that character, that the "Rescue of Captain
+John Smith" was specially got up to show her off.
+
+Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of Indian
+blood in her veins. It was one of those family legends which some of the
+members are a little proud of, and others are willing to leave
+uninvestigated. But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she felt
+perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals, and she
+had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague recollections which
+must have come from the old warriors and hunters and their dusky brides.
+The Indians who visited the neighborhood recognized something of their
+own race in her dark eyes, as the reader may remember they told the
+persons who were searching after her. It had almost frightened her
+sometimes to find how like a wild creature she felt when alone in the
+woods. Her senses had much of that delicacy for which the red people are
+noted, and she often thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if
+she wished to track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were
+a Pequot or a Mohegan.
+
+It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her for
+the part she was to take. Had she never worn that painted robe before?
+Was it the first time that these strings of wampum had ever rattled upon
+her neck and arms? And could it be that the plume of eagle's feathers
+with which they crowned her dark, fast-lengthening locks had never
+shadowed her forehead until now? She felt herself carried back into the
+dim ages when the wilderness was yet untrodden save by the feet of its
+native lords. Think of her wild fancy as we may, she felt as if that
+dusky woman of her midnight vision on the river were breathing for one
+hour through her lips. If this belief had lasted, it is plain enough
+where it would have carried her. But it came into her imagination and
+vivifying consciousness with the putting on of her unwonted costume, and
+might well leave her when she put it off. It is not for us, who tell
+only what happened, to solve these mysteries of the seeming admission of
+unhoused souls into the fleshly tenements belonging to air-breathing
+personalities. A very little more, and from that evening forward the
+question would have been treated in full in all the works on medical
+jurisprudence published throughout the limits of Christendom. The story
+must be told or we should not be honest with the reader.
+
+TABLEAU 1. Captain John Smith (Miss Euphrosyne de Lacy) was to be
+represented prostrate and bound, ready for execution; Powhatan (Miss
+Florence Smythe) sitting upon a log; savages with clubs (Misses Clara
+Browne, A. Van Boodle, E. Van Boodle, Heister, Booster, etc., etc.)
+standing around; Pocahontas holding the knife in her hand, ready to cut
+the cords with which Captain John Smith is bound.--Curtain.
+
+TABLEAU 2. Captain John Smith released and kneeling before Pocahontas,
+whose hand is extended in the act of raising him and presenting him to
+her father. Savages in various attitudes of surprise. Clubs fallen from
+their hands. Strontian flame to be kindled.--Curtain.
+
+This was a portion of the programme for the evening, as arranged behind
+the scenes. The first part went off with wonderful eclat, and at its
+close there were loud cries for Pocahontas. She appeared for a moment.
+Bouquets were flung to her; and a wreath, which one of the young ladies
+had expected for herself in another part, was tossed upon the stage, and
+laid at her feet. The curtain fell.
+
+"Put the wreath on her for the next tableau," some of them whispered,
+just as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened to
+place it upon her head.
+
+The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of
+jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and
+trampled it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was rising.
+With a cry which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an Indian's
+battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her arm against the
+girl who had thus rudely assailed her. The girl sank to the ground,
+covering her eyes in her terror. Myrtle, with her arm still lifted, and
+the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her, rigid as if she had
+been suddenly changed to stone. Many of those looking on thought all
+this was a part of the show, and were thrilled with the wonderful acting.
+Before those immediately around her had had time to recover from the
+palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung the knife away from her, and was
+kneeling, her head bowed and her hands crossed upon her breast. The
+audience went into a rapture of applause as the curtain came suddenly
+down; but Myrtle had forgotten all but the dread peril she had just
+passed, and was thanking God that his angel--her own protecting spirit,
+as it seemed to her had stayed the arm which a passion such as her nature
+had never known, such as she believed was alien to her truest self, had
+lifted with deadliest purpose. She alone knew how extreme the danger had
+been. "She meant to scare her,--that 's all," they said. But Myrtle tore
+the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored beads,
+and threw off her painted robe. The metempsychosis was far too real for
+her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from whom, as she
+believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of which her soul
+recoiled in horror.
+
+"Pocahontas has got a horrid headache," the managing young ladies gave it
+out, "and can't come to time for the last tableau." So this all passed
+over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with no small
+addition to her local fame,--for it must have been acting; "and was n't
+it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if she was going to
+stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?"
+
+As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
+new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact with
+those who were least agreeable to meet. The low-bred youth who amuse
+themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls who try
+to show off their gentility to those whom they think less important than
+themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but they make themselves
+odiously prominent before the quiet and modest young people have had time
+to gain the new scholar's confidence. Myrtle found friends in due time,
+some of them daughters of rich people, some poor girls, who came with the
+same sincerity of purpose as herself. But not one was her match in the
+facility of acquiring knowledge. Not one promised to make such a mark in
+society, if she found an opening into its loftier circles. She was by no
+means ignorant of her natural gifts, and she cultivated them with the
+ambition which would not let her rest.
+
+During her stay at the great school, she made but one visit to Oxbow
+Village. She did not try to startle the good people with her
+accomplishments, but they were surprised at the change which had taken
+place in her. Her dress was hardly more showy, for she was but a
+school-girl, but it fitted her more gracefully. She had gained a
+softness of expression, and an ease in conversation, which produced their
+effect on all with whom she came in contact. Her aunt's voice lost
+something of its plaintiveness in talking with her. Miss Cynthia
+listened with involuntary interest to her stories of school and
+school-mates. Master Byles Gridley accepted her as the great success of
+his life, and determined to make her his chief heiress, if there was any
+occasion for so doing. Cyprian told Bathsheba that Myrtle must come to
+be a great lady. Gifted Hopkins confessed to Susan Posey that he was
+afraid of her, since she had been to the great city school. She knew too
+much and looked too much like a queen, for a village boy to talk with.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw tried all his fascinations upon her, but she
+parried compliments so well, and put off all his nearer advances so
+dexterously, that he could not advance beyond the region of florid
+courtesy, and never got a chance, if so disposed, to risk a question
+which he would not ask rashly, believing that, if Myrtle once said No,
+there would be little chance of her ever saying Yes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+MUSTERING OF FORCES.
+
+Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name
+famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she received
+the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24
+Carat Place. This was in consequence of a suggestion from Mr. Livingston
+Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.
+
+"They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there," he said to that
+lady, "made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there the
+other day. Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a row with
+another girl,--gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a knife.
+Festive,--hey? Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as if she meant
+to stick her, anyhow. Splendid style. Why can't you go over to the shop
+and make 'em trot her out?"
+
+The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would, just
+as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had nothing
+in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon. Myrtle in the mean
+time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an extraordinary
+honor was awaiting her.
+
+That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
+leisure morning, did at last occur. An elegant carriage, with a coachman
+in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and wearing a
+hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal of Madam
+Delacoste's establishment. A card was sent in bearing the open sesame
+of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place. Miss Myrtle
+Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the fashionable woman and
+the young girl sat half an hour together in lively conversation.
+
+Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
+which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
+unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful
+to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as artistically
+composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind of various
+rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray that nodded on her
+bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her sandal. As for the lady, she
+was captivated with Myrtle. There is nothing that your fashionable
+woman, who has ground and polished her own spark of life into as many and
+as glittering social facets as it will bear, has a greater passion for
+than a large rough diamond, which knows nothing of the sea of light it
+imprisons, and which it will be her pride to have cut into a brilliant
+under her own eye, and to show the world for its admiration and her own
+reflected glory. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire inventory of
+Myrtle's natural endowments before the interview was over. She had no
+marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait Myrtle
+would be at one of her stylish parties.
+
+She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
+explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all
+which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good
+part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.
+
+"I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school," he wrote.
+"There is a young girl there I take an interest in. She is handsome and
+interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a thing has
+possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued. Why can't you
+make her acquaintance and be civil to her? A country girl, but fine old
+stock, and will make a figure some time or other, I tell you. Myrtle
+Hazard,--that's her name. A mere schoolgirl. Don't be malicious and
+badger me about her, but be polite to her. Some of these country girls
+have got 'blue blood' in them, let me tell you, and show it plain
+enough."
+
+("In huckleberry season!") said Mrs. Ciymer Ketchum, in a
+parenthesis,--and went on reading.
+
+"Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head
+turned by a village beauty. I've got a career before me, Mrs. K., and I
+know it. But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an eye on
+her. Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking her to come
+and stay with you a little while. Possibly I may come and see how she is
+getting on if you do,--won't that tempt you, Mrs. C. K.?"
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already made
+the young lady's acquaintance.
+
+"Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole lot of
+girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.' That's his horrid way of
+talking. But your young milkmaid is really charming, and will come into
+form like a Derby three-year-old. There, now, I've caught that odious
+creature's horse-talk, myself. You're dead in love with this girl,
+Murray, you know you are.
+
+"After all, I don't know but you're right. You would make a good country
+lawyer enough, I don't doubt. I used to think you had your ambitions,
+but never mind. If you choose to risk yourself on 'possibilities,' it is
+not my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no mistake about that.
+
+"There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea. There
+'s Rose Bugbee. That last name is a good one to be married from. Rose
+is a nice girl,--there are only two of them. The estate will cut up like
+one of the animals it was made out of, you know,--the sandwich-quadruped.
+Then there 's Berengaria. Old Topping owns the Planet Hotel among other
+things,--so big, they say, there's always a bell ringing from somebody's
+room day and night the year round. Only child--unit and six
+ciphers carries diamonds loose in her pocket--that's the story
+--good-looking--lively--a little slangy called Livingston Jerkins
+'Living Jingo' to his face one day. I want you to see my lot before you
+do anything serious. You owe something to the family, Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw! But you must suit yourself, after all: if you are contented
+with a humble position in life, it is nobody's business that I know of.
+Only I know what life is, Murray B. Getting married is jumping
+overboard, any way you look at it, and if you must save some woman from
+drowning an old maid, try to find one with a cork jacket, or she 'll
+carry you down with her."
+
+Murray Bradshaw was calculating enough, but he shook his head over this
+letter. It was too demonish cold-blooded for him, he said to himself.
+(Men cannot pardon women for saying aloud what they do not hesitate to
+think in silence themselves.) Never mind,--he must have Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum's house and influence for his own purposes. Myrtle Hazard must
+become her guest, and then if circumstances were favorable, he was
+certain obtaining her aid in his project.
+
+The opportunity to invite Myrtle to the great mansion presented itself
+unexpectedly. Early in the spring of 1861 there were some cases of
+sickness in Madam Delacoste's establishment, which led to closing the
+school for a while. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum took advantage of the dispersion
+of the scholars to ask Myrtle to come and spend some weeks with her.
+There were reasons why this was more agreeable to the young girl than
+returning to Oxbow Village, and she very gladly accepted the invitation.
+
+It was very remarkable that a man living as Master Byles Gridley had
+lived for so long a time should all at once display such liberality as he
+showed to a young woman who had no claim upon him, except that he had
+rescued her from the consequences of her own imprudence and warned her
+against impending dangers. Perhaps he cared more for her than if the
+obligation had been the other way,--students of human nature say it is
+commonly so. At any rate, either he had ampler resources than it was
+commonly supposed, or he was imprudently giving way to his generous
+impulses, or he thought he was making advances which would in due time be
+returned to him. Whatever the reason was, he furnished her with means,
+not only for her necessary expenses, but sufficient to afford her many of
+the elegances which she would be like to want in the fashionable society
+with which she was for a short time to mingle.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was
+entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while
+Myrtle was staying with her. She had her jealousies and rivalries, as
+women of the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their share in
+leading her to take the trouble a large party involved. She was tired of
+the airs of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex family, and her
+terribly accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and wanted to crush the young
+lady, and jaundice her mother, with a girl twice as brilliant and ten
+times handsomer. She was very willing, also, to take the nonsense out of
+the Capsheaf girls, who thought themselves the most stylish personages of
+their city world, and would bite their lips well to see themselves
+distanced by a country miss.
+
+In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle's
+neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers. Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty
+milkmaid to come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on
+business, and only arrived in the city a day or two before the party. But
+other young fellows had found out the attractions of the girl who was
+"hanging out at the Clymer Ketchum concern," and callers were plenty,
+reducing tete-a-tetes in a corresponding ratio. He did get one
+opportunity, however, and used it well. They had so many things to talk
+about in common, that she could not help finding him good company. She
+might well be pleased, for he was an adept in the curious art of being
+agreeable, as other people are in chess or billiards, and had made a
+special study of her tastes, as a physician studies a patient's
+constitution. What he wanted was to get her thoroughly interested in
+himself, and to maintain her in a receptive condition until such time as
+he should be ready for a final move. Any day might furnish the decisive
+motive; in the mean time he wished only to hold her as against all
+others.
+
+It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a
+certain consciousness of her own value. She felt her veins full of the
+same rich blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome Judith
+in the long summer of her triumph. Whether it was vanity, or pride, or
+only the instinctive sense of inherited force and attraction, it was the
+best of defences. The golden bracelet on her wrist seemed to have
+brought as much protection with it as if it had been a shield over her
+heart.
+
+But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation. The
+"fugitive pieces" of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so
+considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with plenty
+of what the unpleasant printers call "fat,"--meaning thereby blank
+spaces,--upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they might
+perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear the
+title, printed lengthwise along the back, "Hopkins's Poems." Such a
+volume that author had in contemplation. It was to be the literary event
+of the year 1861.
+
+He could not mature such a project, one which he had been for some time
+contemplating, without consulting Mr. Byles Gridley, who, though he had
+not unfrequently repressed the young poet's too ardent ambition, had yet
+always been kind and helpful.
+
+Mr. Gridley was seated in his large arm-chair, indulging himself in the
+perusal of a page or two of his own work before repeatedly referred to.
+His eye was glistening, for it had dust rested on the following passage:
+
+"There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship. The book that
+perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature. The great asylum of
+Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in leaky
+garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves."
+
+He shut the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this
+elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt its
+truth than when it was written,--than on that memorable morning when he
+saw the advertisement in all the papers, "This day published, 'Thoughts
+on the Universe.' By Byles Gridley, A. M."
+
+At that moment he heard a knock at his door. He closed his eyelids
+forcibly for ten seconds, opened them, and said cheerfully, "Come in!"
+
+Gifted Hopkins entered. He had a collection of manuscripts in his hands
+which it seemed to him would fill a vast number of pages. He did not
+know that manuscript is to type what fresh dandelions are to the dish of
+greens that comes to table, of which last Nurse Byloe, who considered
+them very wholesome spring grazing for her patients, used to say that
+they "biled down dreadful."
+
+"I have brought the autographs of my poems, Master Gridley, to consult
+you about making arrangements for publication. They have been so well
+received by the public and the leading critics of this part of the State,
+that I think of having them printed in a volume. I am going to the city
+for that purpose. My mother has given her consent. I wish to ask you
+several business questions. Shall I part with the copyright for a
+downright sum of money, which I understand some prefer doing, or publish
+on shares, or take a percentage on the sales? These, I believe, are the
+different ways taken by authors."
+
+Mr. Gridley was altogether too considerate to reply with the words which
+would most naturally have come to his lips. He waited as if he were
+gravely pondering the important questions just put to him, all the while
+looking at Gifted with a tenderness which no one who had not buried one
+of his soul's children could have felt for a young author trying to get
+clothing for his new-born intellectual offspring.
+
+"I think," he said presently, "you had better talk with an intelligent
+and liberal publisher, and be guided by his advice. I can put you in
+correspondence with such a person, and you had better trust him than me a
+great deal. Why don't you send your manuscript by mail?"
+
+"What, Mr. Gridley? Trust my poems, some of which are unpublished, to
+the post-office? No, sir, I could never make up my mind to such a risk.
+I mean to go to the city myself, and read them to some of the leading
+publishers. I don't want to pledge myself to any one of them. I should
+like to set them bidding against each other for the copyright, if I sell
+it at all."
+
+Mr. Gridley gazed upon the innocent youth with a sweet wonder in his eyes
+that made him look like an angel, a little damaged in the features by
+time, but full of celestial feelings.
+
+"It will cost you something to make this trip, Gifted. Have you the
+means to pay for your journey and your stay at a city hotel?"
+
+Gifted blushed. "My mother has laid by a small sum for me," he said.
+"She knows some of my poems by heart, and she wants to see them all in
+print."
+
+Master Gridley closed his eyes very firmly again, as if thinking, and
+opened them as soon as the foolish film had left them. He had read many
+a page of "Thoughts on the Universe" to his own old mother, long, long
+years ago, and she had often listened with tears of modest pride that
+Heaven had favored her with a son so full of genius.
+
+"I 'll tell you what, Gifted," he said. "I have been thinking for a good
+while that I would make a visit to the city, and if you have made up your
+mind to try what you can do with the publishers, I will take you with me
+as a companion. It will be a saving to you and your good mother, for I
+shall bear the expenses of the expedition."
+
+Gifted Hopkins came very near going down on his knees. He was so
+overcome with gratitude that it seemed as if his very coattails wagged
+with his emotion.
+
+"Take it quietly," said Master Gridley. "Don't make a fool of yourself.
+Tell your mother to have some clean shirts and things ready for you, and
+we will be off day after to-morrow morning."
+
+Gifted hastened to impart the joyful news to his mother, and to break the
+fact to Susan Posey that he was about to leave them for a while, and rush
+into the deliriums and dangers of the great city.
+
+Susan smiled. Gifted hardly knew whether to be pleased with her
+sympathy, or vexed that she did not take his leaving more to heart. The
+smile held out bravely for about a quarter of a minute. Then there came
+on a little twitching at the corners of the mouth. Then. the blue eyes
+began to shine with a kind of veiled glimmer. Then the blood came up
+into her cheeks with a great rush, as if the heart had sent up a herald
+with a red flag from the citadel to know what was going on at the
+outworks. The message that went back was of discomfiture and
+capitulation. Poor Susan was overcome, and gave herself up to weeping
+and sobbing.
+
+The sight was too much for the young poet. In a wild burst of passion he
+seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming, "Would that you
+could be mine forever!" and Susan forgot all that she ought to have
+remembered, and, looking half reproachfully but half tenderly through her
+tears, said, in tones of infinite sweetness, "O Gifted!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+THE POET AND THE PUBLISHER.
+
+It was settled that Master Byles Gridley and Mr. Gifted Hopkins should
+leave early in the morning of the day appointed, to take the nearest
+train to the city. Mrs. Hopkins labored hard to get them ready, so that
+they might make a genteel appearance among the great people whom they
+would meet in society. She brushed up Mr. Gridley's best black suit, and
+bound the cuffs of his dress-coat, which were getting a little worried.
+She held his honest-looking hat to the fire, and smoothed it while it was
+warm, until one would have thought it had just been ironed by the hatter
+himself. She had his boots and shoes brought into a more brilliant
+condition than they had ever known: if Gifted helped, it was to his
+credit as much as if he had shown his gratitude by polishing off a copy
+of verses in praise of his benefactor.
+
+When she had got Mr. Gridley's encumbrances in readiness for the journey,
+she devoted herself to fitting out her son Gifted. First, she had down
+from the garret a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but covered with
+leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the cunning disposition
+of which, also, the paternal initials stood out on the rounded lid, in
+the most conspicuous manner. It was his father's trunk, and the first
+thing that went into it, as the widow lifted the cover, and the
+smothering shut-up smell struck an old chord of associations, was a
+single tear-drop. How well she remembered the time when she first
+unpacked it for her young husband, and the white shirt bosoms showed
+their snowy plaits! O dear, dear!
+
+But women decant their affection, sweet and sound, out of the old bottles
+into the new ones,--off from the lees of the past generation, clear and
+bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive it. Gifted
+Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder. She had not only the
+common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring, but she felt
+that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his genius, and thought
+proudly of the time when some future biographer would mention her own
+humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance as that of the mother of
+Hopkins.
+
+So she took great pains to equip this brilliant but inexperienced young
+man with everything he could by any possibility need during his absence.
+The great trunk filled itself until it bulged with its contents like a
+boa-constrictor who has swallowed his blanket. Best clothes and common
+clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels and linens, socks and
+collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the pickpockets busy for a
+week, with a paper of gingerbread and some lozenges for gastralgia, and
+"hot drops," and ruled paper to write letters on, and a little Bible, and
+a phial with hiera picra, and another with paregoric, and another with
+"camphire" for sprains and bruises,
+
+--Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the
+pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried
+also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large
+pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution,
+pinned into his breast-pocket. He talked about having a pistol, in case
+he were attacked by any of the ruffians who are so numerous in the city,
+but Mr. Gridley told him, No! he would certainly shoot himself, and he
+shouldn't think of letting him take a pistol.
+
+They went forth, Mentor and Telemachus, at the appointed time, to dare
+the perils of the railroad and the snares of the city. Mrs. Hopkins was
+firm up to near the last moment, when a little quiver in her voice set
+her eyes off, and her face broke up all at once, so that she had to hide
+it behind her handkerchief. Susan Posey showed the truthfulness of her
+character in her words to Gifted at parting. "Farewell," she said, "and
+think of me sometimes while absent. My heart is another's, but my
+friendship, Gifted--my friendship--"
+
+Both were deeply affected. He took her hand and would have raised it to
+his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it,
+exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach which
+made him feel like a profligate. He tore himself away, and when at a
+safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with a tearful smile.
+
+Master Byles Gridley must have had some good dividends from some of his
+property of late. There is no other way of accounting for the handsome
+style in which he did things on their arrival in the city. He went to a
+tailor's and ordered a new suit to be sent home as soon as possible, for
+he knew his wardrobe was a little rusty. He looked Gifted over from head
+to foot, and suggested such improvements as would recommend him to the
+fastidious eyes of the selecter sort of people, and put him in his own
+tailor's hands, at the same time saying that all bills were to be sent to
+him, B. Gridley, Esq., parlor No. 6, at the Planet Hotel. Thus it came
+to pass that in three days from their arrival they were both in an
+eminently presentable condition. In the mean time the prudent Mr.
+Gridley had been keeping the young man busy, and amusing himself by
+showing him such of the sights of the city and its suburbs as he thought
+would combine instruction with entertainment.
+
+When they were both properly equipped and ready for the best company, Mr.
+Gridley said to the young poet, who had found it very hard to contain his
+impatience, that they would now call together on the publisher to whom he
+wished to introduce him, and they set out accordingly.
+
+"My name is Gridley," he said with modest gravity, as he entered the
+publisher's private room. "I have a note of introduction here from one
+of your authors, as I think he called himself, a very popular writer for
+whom you publish."
+
+The publisher rose and came forward in the most cordial and respectful
+manner. "Mr. Gridley? Professor Byles Gridley,--author of 'Thoughts on
+the Universe'?"
+
+The brave-hearted old man colored as if he had been a young girl. His
+dead book rose before him like an apparition. He groped in modest
+confusion for an answer. "A child I buried long ago, my dear sir," he
+said. "Its title-page was its tombstone. I have brought this young
+friend with me,--this is Mr. Gifted Hopkins of Oxbow Village,--who wishes
+to converse with you about--"
+
+"I have come, sir--" the young poet began, interrupting him.
+
+"Let me look at your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Popkins," said the
+publisher, interrupting in his turn.
+
+"Hopkins, if you please, sir," Gifted suggested mildly, proceeding to
+extract the manuscript, which had got wedged into his pocket, and seemed
+to be holding on with all its might. He was wondering all the time over
+the extraordinary clairvoyance of the publisher, who had looked through
+so many thick folds, broadcloth, lining, brown paper, and seen his poems
+lying hidden in his breast-pocket. The idea that a young person coming
+on such an errand should have to explain his intentions would have seemed
+very odd to the publisher. He knew the look which belongs to this class
+of enthusiasts just as a horse-dealer knows the look of a green purchaser
+with the equine fever raging in his veins. If a young author had come to
+him with a scrap of manuscript hidden in his boots, like Major Andre's
+papers, the publisher would have taken one glance at him and said, "Out
+with it!"
+
+While he was battling for the refractory scroll with his pocket, which
+turned half wrong side out, and acted as things always do when people are
+nervous and in a hurry, the publisher directed his conversation again to
+Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"A remarkable book, that of yours, Mr. Gridley, would have a great run if
+it were well handled. Came out twenty years too soon,--that was the
+trouble. One of our leading scholars was speaking of it to me the other
+day. 'We must have a new edition,' he said; people are just ripe for
+that book.' Did you ever think of that? Change the form of it a little,
+and give it a new title, and it will be a popular book. Five thousand or
+more, very likely."
+
+Mr. Gridley felt as if he had been rapidly struck on the forehead with a
+dozen distinct blows from a hammer not quite big enough to stun him. He
+sat still without saying a word. He had forgotten for the moment all
+about poor Gifted Hopkins, who had got out his manuscript at last, and
+was calming the disturbed corners of it. Coming to himself a little, he
+took a large and beautiful silk handkerchief, one of his new purchases,
+from his pocket, and applied it to his face, for the weather seemed to
+have grown very warm all at once. Then he remembered the errand on which
+he had come, and thought of this youth, who had got to receive his first
+hard lesson in life, and whom he had brought to this kind man that it
+should be gently administered.
+
+"You surprise me," he said,--"you surprise me. Dead and buried. Dead and
+buried. I had sometimes thought that--at some future period, after I was
+gone, it might--but I hardly know what to say about your suggestions.
+But here is my young friend, Mr. Hopkins, who would like to talk with
+you, and I will leave him in your hands. I am at the Planet Hotel, if you
+should care to call upon me. Good morning. Mr. Hopkins will explain
+everything to you more at his ease, without me, I am confident."
+
+Master Gridley could not quite make up his mind to stay through the
+interview between the young poet and the publisher. The flush of hope
+was bright in Gifted's eye and cheek, and the good man knew that young
+hearts are apt to be over-sanguine, and that one who enters a shower-bath
+often feels very differently from the same person when he has pulled the
+string.
+
+"I have brought you my Poems in the original autographs, sir," said Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins.
+
+He laid the manuscript on the table, caressing the leaves still with one
+hand, as loath to let it go.
+
+"What disposition had you thought of making of them?" the publisher
+asked, in a pleasant tone. He was as kind a man as lived, though he
+worked the chief engine in a chamber of torture.
+
+"I wish to read you a few specimens of the poems," he said, "with
+reference to their proposed publication in a volume."
+
+"By all means," said the kind publisher, who determined to be very
+patient with the protege of the hitherto little-known, but remarkable
+writer, Professor Gridley. At the same time he extended his foot in an
+accidental sort of way, and pressed it on the right hand knob of three
+which were arranged in a line beneath the table. A little bell in a
+distant apartment--the little bell marked C--gave one slight note; loud
+enough to start a small boy up, who looked at the clock, and knew that he
+was to go and call the publisher in just twenty-five minutes. "A, five
+minutes; B, ten minutes; C, twenty-five minutes ";--that was the
+youngster's working formula. Mr. Hopkins was treated to the full
+allowance of time, as being introduced by Professor Gridley.
+
+The young man laid open the manuscript so that the title-page, written
+out very handsomely in his own hand, should win the eye of the publisher.
+
+ BLOSSOMS OF THE SOUL.
+ A WREATH OF VERSE; Original.
+
+ BY GIFTED HOPKINS.
+
+ "a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown."--Gray.
+
+"Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the
+blank-verse poems, sir?" Gifted asked.
+
+"Read what you think is best,--a specimen of your first-class style of
+composition."
+
+"I will read you the very last poem I have written," he said, and he
+began:
+
+ "THE TRIUMPH OF SONG.
+
+ "I met that gold-haired maiden, all too dear;
+ And I to her: Lo! thou art very fair,
+ Fairer than all the ladies in the world
+ That fan the sweetened air with scented fans,
+ And I am scorched with exceeding love,
+ Yea, crisped till my bones are dry as straw.
+ Look not away with that high-arched brow,
+ But turn its whiteness that I may behold,
+ And lift thy great eyes till they blaze on mine,
+ And lay thy finger on thy perfect mouth,
+ And let thy lucent ears of careen pearl
+ Drink in the murmured music of my soul,
+ As the lush grass drinks in the globed dew;
+ For I have many scrolls of sweetest rhyme
+ I will unroll and make thee glad to hear.
+
+ "Then she: O shaper of the marvellous phrase
+ That openeth woman's heart as Both a key,
+ I dare not hear thee--lest the bolt should slide
+ That locks another's heart within my own.
+ Go, leave me,--and she let her eyelids fall,
+ And the great tears rolled from her large blue eyes.
+
+ "Then I: If thou not hear me, I shall die,
+ Yea, in my desperate mood may lift my hand
+ And do myself a hurt no leach can mend;
+ For poets ever were of dark resolve,
+ And swift stern deed
+
+ "That maiden heard no more,
+ But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak,
+ And but for--Stay! And if some dreadful morn,
+ After great search and shouting thorough the wold,
+ We found thee missing,--strangled,--drowned i' the mere,
+ Then should I go distraught and be clean mad!
+
+ "O poet, read! read all thy wondrous scrolls.
+ Yea, read the verse that maketh glad to hear!
+ Then I began and read two sweet, brief hours,
+ And she forgot all love save only mine!"
+
+"Is all this from real life?" asked the publisher.
+
+"It--no, sir--not exactly from real life--that is, the leading female
+person is not wholly fictitious--and the incident is one which might have
+happened. Shall I read you the poems referred to in the one you have
+just heard, sir?"
+
+"Allow me, one moment. Two hours' reading, I think, you said. I fear I
+shall hardly be able to spare quite time to hear them all. Let me ask
+what you intend doing with these productions, Mr.---rr Poplins."
+
+"Hopkins, if you please, sir, not Poplins," said Gifted, plaintively. He
+expressed his willingness to dispose of the copyright, to publish on
+shares, or perhaps to receive a certain percentage on the profits.
+
+"Suppose we take a glass of wine together, Mr.--Hopkins, before we talk
+business," the publisher said, opening a little cupboard and taking
+therefrom a decanter and two glasses. He saw the young man was looking
+nervous. He waited a few minutes, until the wine had comforted his
+epigastrium, and diffused its gentle glow through his unspoiled and
+consequently susceptible organisation.
+
+"Come with me," he said.
+
+Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one sat at
+a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts. By him was a huge
+basket, ha'f full of manuscripts also. As they entered he dropped
+another manuscript into the basket and looked up.
+
+"Tell me," said Gifted, "what are these papers, and who is he that looks
+upon them and drops them into the basket?"
+
+"These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting at
+the table is commonly spoken of among us as 'The Butcher'. The poems he
+drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account"
+
+"But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?"
+
+"He tastes them. Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?"
+
+"And what becomes of all those that he drops into the basket?"
+
+"If they are not claimed by their author in proper season, they go to the
+devil."
+
+"What!" said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round.
+
+"To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the
+devil, that tears everything to bits,--as the critics treat our authors,
+sometimes, sometimes, Mr. Hopkins."
+
+Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection.
+
+After this instructive sight they returned together to the publisher's
+private room. The wine had now warmed the youthful poet's praecordia, so
+that he began to feel a renewed confidence in his genius and his
+fortunes.
+
+"I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to my
+manuscript," he said boldly.
+
+"You can try it if you want to," the publisher replied, with an ominous
+dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive, or,
+perceiving, did not heed.
+
+"How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?"
+
+"Oh, I'll arrange that. He always goes to his luncheon about this time.
+Raw meat and vitriol punch,--that 's what the authors say. Wait till we
+hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that he will come to
+it among the first after he gets back. You shall see with your own eyes
+what treatment it gets. I hope it may please him, but you shall see."
+
+They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile. Then
+the little office-boy came up with some vague message about a
+gentleman--business--wants to see you, sir, etc., according to the
+established programme; all in a vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if he
+were a talking-machine just running down.
+
+The publisher told the boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman must
+wait. Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he went out
+to get his raw meat and vitriol punch.
+
+"Now, then," said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary lamb
+once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.
+
+"Hand me your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Hopkins. I will lay it so
+that it shall be the third of these that are coming to hand. Our friend
+here is a pretty good judge of verse, and knows a merchantable article
+about as quick as any man in his line of business. If he forms a
+favorable opinion of your poems, we will talk over your propositions."
+
+Gifted was conscious of a very slight tremor as he saw his precious
+manuscript deposited on the table, under two others, and over a pile of
+similar productions. Still he could not help feeling that the critic
+would be struck by his title. The quotation from Gray must touch his
+feelings. The very first piece in the collection could not fail to
+arrest him. He looked a little excited, but he was in good spirits.
+
+"We will be looking about here when our friend comes back," the publisher
+said. " He is a very methodical person, and will sit down and go right to
+work just as if we were not here. We can watch him, and if he should
+express any particular interest in your poems, I will, if you say so,
+carry you up to him and reveal the fact that you are the author of the
+works that please him."
+
+They waited patiently until The Butcher returned, apparently refreshed by
+his ferocious refection, and sat down at his table. He looked comforted,
+and not in ill humor. The publisher and the poet talked in low tones, as
+if on business of their own, and watched him as he returned to his labor.
+
+The Butcher took the first manuscript that came to hand, read a stanza
+here and there, turned over the leaves, turned back and tried
+again,--shook his head--held it for an instant over the basket, as if
+doubtful,--and let it softly drop. He took up the second manuscript,
+opened it in several places, seemed rather pleased with what he read, and
+laid it aside for further examination.
+
+He took up the third. "Blossoms of the Soul," etc. He glared at it in a
+dreadfully ogreish way. Both the lockers-on held their breath. Gifted
+Hopkins felt as if half a glass more of that warm sherry would not hurt
+him. There was a sinking at the pit of his stomach, as if he was in a
+swing, as high as he could go, close up to the swallows' nests and
+spiders' webs. The Butcher opened the manuscript at random, read ten
+seconds, and gave a short low grunt. He opened again, read ten seconds,
+and gave another grunt, this time a little longer and louder. He opened
+once more, read five seconds, and, with something that sounded like the
+snort of a dangerous animal, cast it impatiently into the basket, and
+took up the manuscript that came next in order.
+
+Gifted Hopkins stood as if paralyzed for a moment.
+
+"Safe, perfectly safe," the publisher said to him in a whisper. "I'll get
+it for you presently. Come in and take another glass of wine," he said,
+leading him back to his own office.
+
+"No, I thank you," he said faintly, "I can bear it. But this is
+dreadful, sir. Is this the way that genius is welcomed to the world of
+letters?"
+
+The publisher explained to him, in the kindest manner, that there was an
+enormous over-production of verse, and that it took a great part of one
+man's time simply to overhaul the cart-loads of it that were trying to
+get themselves into print with the imprimatur of his famous house. "You
+are young, Mr. Hopkins. I advise you not to try to force your article of
+poetry on the market. The B----, our friend, there, that is, knows a
+thing that will sell as soon as he sees it. You are in independent
+circumstances, perhaps? If so, you can print--at your own
+expense--whatever you choose. May I take the liberty to ask
+your--profession?"
+
+Gifted explained that he was "clerk" in a "store," where they sold dry
+goods and West India goods, and goods promiscuous.
+
+"Oh, well, then," the publisher said, "you will understand me. Do you
+know a good article of brown sagas when you see it?"
+
+Gifted Hopkins rather thought he did. He knew at sight whether it was a
+fair, salable article or not.
+
+"Just so. Now our friend, there, knows verses that are salable and
+unsalable as well as you do brown sugar.--Keep quiet now, and I will go
+and get your manuscript for you.
+
+"There, Mr. Hopkins, take your poems,--they will give you a reputation in
+your village, I don't doubt, which, is pleasant, but it will cost you a
+good deal of money to print them in a volume. You are very young: you
+can afford to wait. Your genius is not ripe yet, I am confident, Mr.
+Hopkins. These verses are very well for a beginning, but a man of
+promise like you, Mr. Hopkins, must n't throw away his chance by
+premature publication! I should like to make you a present of a few of
+the books we publish. By and by, perhaps, we can work you into our
+series of poets; but the best pears ripen slowly, and so with
+genius.--Where shall I send the volumes?"
+
+Gifted answered, to parlor No. 6, Planet Hotel, where he soon presented
+himself to Master Gridley, who could guess pretty well what was coming.
+But he let him tell his story.
+
+"Shall I try the other publishers?" said the disconsolate youth.
+
+"I would n't, my young friend, I would n't. You have seen the best one
+of them--all. He is right about it, quite right: you are young, and had
+better wait. Look here, Gifted, here is something to please you. We are
+going to visit the gay world together. See what has been left here this
+forenoon."
+
+He showed him two elegant notes of invitation requesting the pleasure of
+Professor Byles Gridley's and of Mr. Gifted Hopkins's company on Thursday
+evening, as the guests of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+MRS. CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had flowered out as beyond question the handsomest girl of
+the season, There were hints from different quarters that she might
+possibly be an heiress. Vague stories were about of some contingency
+which might possibly throw a fortune into her lap. The young men about
+town talked of her at the clubs in their free-and-easy way, but all
+agreed that she was the girl of the new crop,--"best filly this grass,"
+as Livingston Jenkins put it. The general understanding seemed to be
+that the young lawyer who had followed her to the city was going to
+capture her. She seemed to favor him certainly as much as anybody. But
+Myrtle saw many young men now, and it was not so easy as it would once
+have been to make out who was an especial favorite.
+
+There had been times when Murray Bradshaw would have offered his heart
+and hand to Myrtle at once, if he had felt sure that she would accept
+him. But he preferred playing the safe game now, and only wanted to feel
+sure of her. He had done his best to be agreeable, and could hardly
+doubt that he had made an impression. He dressed well when in the
+city,--even elegantly,--he had many of the lesser social accomplishments,
+was a good dancer, and compared favorably in all such matters with the
+more dashing young fellows in society. He was a better talker than most
+of them, and he knew more about the girl he was dealing with than they
+could know. "You have only got to say the word, Murray," Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum said to her relative, "and you can have her. But don't be rash.
+I believe you can get Berengaria if you try; and there 's something
+better there than possibilities." Murray Bradshaw laughed, and told Mrs.
+Clymer Ketchum not to worry about him; he knew what he was doing.
+
+It so happened that Myrtle met Master Byles Gridley walking with Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins the day before the party. She longed to have a talk with
+her old friend, and was glad to have a chance of pleasing her poetical
+admirer. She therefore begged her hostess to invite them both to her
+party to please her, which she promised to do at once. Thus the two
+elegant notes were accounted for.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the world
+of fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weakness for what she called
+clever people. She therefore always variegated her parties with a streak
+of young artists and writers, and a literary lady or two; and, if she
+could lay hands on a first-class celebrity, was as happy as an Amazon who
+had captured a Centaur.
+
+"There's a demonish clever young fellow by the name of Lindsay," Mr.
+Livingston Jenkins said to her a little before the day of the party.
+"Better ask him. They say he 's the rising talent in his line,
+architecture mainly, but has done some remarkable things in the way of
+sculpture. There's some story about a bust he made that was quite
+wonderful. I'll find his address for you." So Mr. Clement Lindsay got
+his invitation, and thus Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party promised to bring
+together a number of persons with whom we are acquainted, and who were
+acquainted with each other.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum knew how to give a party. Let her only have carte
+blanche for flowers, music, and champagne, she used to tell her lord, and
+she would see to the rest,--lighting the rooms, tables, and toilet. He
+needn't be afraid: all he had to do was to keep out of the way.
+
+Subdivision of labor is one of the triumphs of modern civilization. Labor
+was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household. It was old
+Ketchum's business to make money, and he understood it. It was Mrs. K.'s
+business to spend money, and she knew how to do it. The rooms blazed
+with light like a conflagration; the flowers burned like lamps of
+many-colored flame; the music throbbed into the hearts of the promenaders
+and tingled through all the muscles of the dancers.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was in her glory. Her point d'Alenyon must have
+spoiled ever so many French girls' eyes. Her bosom heaved beneath a kind
+of breastplate glittering with a heavy dew of diamonds. She glistened
+and sparkled with every movement, so that the admirer forgot to question
+too closely whether the eyes matched the brilliants, or the cheeks glowed
+like the roses. Not far from the great lady stood Myrtle Hazard. She
+was dressed as the fashion of the day demanded, but she had added certain
+audacious touches of her own, reminiscences of the time when the dead
+beauty had flourished, and which first provoked the question and then the
+admiration of the young people who had a natural eye for effect. Over
+the long white glove on her left arm was clasped a rich bracelet, of so
+quaint an antique pattern that nobody had seen anything like it, and as
+some one whispered that it was "the last thing out," it was greatly
+admired by the fashion-plate multitude, as well as by the few who had a
+taste of their own. If the soul of Judith Pride, long divorced from its
+once beautifully moulded dust, ever lived in dim consciousness through
+any of those who inherited her blood, it was then and there that she
+breathed through the lips of Myrtle Hazard. The young girl almost
+trembled with the ecstasy of this new mode of being, soliciting every
+sense with light, with perfume, with melody,--all that could make her
+feel the wonderful complex music of a fresh life when all its chords
+first vibrate together in harmony. Miss Rhadamantha Pinnikle, whose
+mother was an Apex (of whose race it was said that they always made an
+obeisance when the family name was mentioned, and had all their portraits
+painted with halos round their heads), found herself extinguished in this
+new radiance. Miss Victoria Capsheaf stuck to the wall as if she had
+been a fresco on it. The fifty-year-old dynasties were dismayed and
+dismounted. Myrtle fossilized them as suddenly as if she had been a
+Gorgon instead of a beauty.
+
+The guests in whom we may have some interest were in the mean time making
+ready for the party, which was expected to be a brilliant one; for 24
+Carat Place was well known for the handsome style of its entertainments.
+
+Clement Lindsay was a little surprised by his invitation. He had,
+however, been made a lion of several times of late, and was very willing
+to amuse himself once in a while with a peep into the great world.
+
+It was but an empty show to him at best, for his lot was cast, and he
+expected to lead a quiet domestic life after his student days were over.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had known what society was in his earlier time, and
+understood very well that all a gentleman of his age had to do was to
+dress himself in his usual plain way, only taking a little more care in
+his arrangements than was needed in the latitude of Oxbow Village. But
+Gifted must be looked after, that he should not provoke the unamiable
+comments of the city youth by any defect or extravagance of costume. The
+young gentleman had bought a light sky-blue neckerchief, and a very large
+breast-pin containing a gem which he was assured by the vender was a
+genuine stone. He considered that both these would be eminently
+effective articles of dress, and Mr. Gridley had some trouble to convince
+him that a white tie and plain shirt-buttons would be more fitted to the
+occasion.
+
+On the morning of the day of the great party Mr. William Murray Bradshaw
+received a brief telegram, which seemed to cause him great emotion, as he
+changed color, uttered a forcible exclamation, and began walking up and
+down his room in a very nervous kind of way. It was a foreshadowing of a
+certain event now pretty sure to happen. Whatever bearing this telegram
+may have had upon his plans, he made up his mind that he would contrive
+an opportunity somehow that very evening to propose himself as a suitor
+to Myrtle Hazard. He could not say that he felt as absolutely certain of
+getting the right answer as he had felt at some previous periods. Myrtle
+knew her price, he said to himself, a great deal better than when she was
+a simple country girl. The flatteries with which she had been
+surrounded, and the effect of all the new appliances of beauty, which had
+set her off so that she could not help seeing her own attractions,
+rendered her harder to please and to satisfy. A little experience in
+society teaches a young girl the arts and the phrases which all the
+Lotharios have in common. Murray Bradshaw was ready to land his fish
+now, but he was not quite sure that she was yet hooked, and he had a
+feeling that by this time she knew every fly in his book. However, as he
+had made up his mind not to wait another day, he addressed himself to the
+trial before him with a determination to succeed, if any means at his
+command would insure success. He arrayed himself with faultless
+elegance: nothing must be neglected on such an occasion. He went forth
+firm and grave as a general going into a battle where all is to be lost
+or won. He entered the blazing saloon with the unfailing smile upon his
+lips, to which he set them as he set his watch to a particular hour and
+minute.
+
+The rooms were pretty well filled when he arrived and made his bow before
+the blazing, rustling, glistening, waving, blushing appearance under
+which palpitated, with the pleasing excitement of the magic scene over
+which its owner presided, the heart of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum. He turned to
+Myrtle Hazard, and if he had ever doubted which way his inclinations led
+him, he could doubt no longer. How much dress and how much light can a
+woman bear? That is the way to measure her beauty. A plain girl in a
+simple dress, if she has only a pleasant voice, may seem almost a beauty
+in the rosy twilight. The nearer she comes to being handsome, the more
+ornament she will bear, and the more she may defy the sunshine or the
+chandelier.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was fairly dazzled with the brilliant effect of Myrtle in
+full dress. He did not know before what handsome arms she had,--Judith
+Pride's famous arms--which the high-colored young men in top-boots used
+to swear were the handsomest pair in New England--right over again. He
+did not know before with what defiant effect she would light up, standing
+as she did directly under a huge lustre, in full flower of flame, like a
+burning azalea. He was not a man who intended to let his sentiments
+carry him away from the serious interests of his future, yet, as he
+looked upon Myrtle Hazard, his heart gave one throb which made him feel
+in every pulse that this way a woman who in her own right, simply as a
+woman, could challenge the homage of the proudest young man of her time.
+He hardly knew till this moment how much of passion mingled with other
+and calmer motives of admiration. He could say I love you as truly as
+such a man could ever speak these words, meaning that he admired her,
+that he was attracted to her, that he should be proud of her as his wife,
+that he should value himself always as the proprietor of so rare a
+person, that no appendage to his existence would take so high a place in
+his thoughts. This implied also, what is of great consequence to a young
+woman's happiness in the married state, that she would be treated with
+uniform politeness, with satisfactory evidences of affection, and with a
+degree of confidence quite equal to what a reasonable woman should expect
+from a very superior man, her husband.
+
+If Myrtle could have looked through the window in the breast against
+which only authors are privileged to flatten their features, it is for
+the reader to judge how far the programme would have satisfied her.
+
+Less than this, a great deal less, does appear to satisfy many young
+women; and it may be that the interior just drawn, fairly judged, belongs
+to a model lover and husband. Whether it does or not, Myrtle did not see
+this picture. There was a beautifully embroidered shirt-bosom in front
+of that window through which we have just looked, that intercepted all
+sight of what was going on within. She only saw a man, young, handsome,
+courtly, with a winning tongue, with an ambitious spirit, whose every
+look and tone implied his admiration of herself, and who was associated
+with her past life in such a way that they alone appeared like old
+friends in the midst of that cold alien throng. It seemed as if he could
+not have chosen a more auspicious hour than this; for she never looked so
+captivating, and her presence must inspire his lips with the eloquence of
+love. And she--was not this delirious atmosphere of light and music just
+the influence to which he would wish to subject her before trying the
+last experiment of all which can stir the soul of a woman? He knew the
+mechanism of that impressionable state which served Coleridge so
+excellently well,--
+
+ "All impulses of soul and sense
+ Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve
+ The music, and the doleful tale,
+ The rich and balmy eve,"--
+
+though he hardly expected such startling results as happened in that
+case,--which might be taken as an awful warning not to sing moving
+ballads to young ladies of susceptible feelings, unless one is prepared
+for very serious consequences. Without expecting that Myrtle would rush
+into his arms, he did think that she could not help listening to him in
+the intervals of the delicious music, in some recess where the roses and
+jasmines and heliotropes made the air heavy with sweetness, and the
+crimson curtains drooped in heavy folds that half hid their forms from
+the curious eyes all round them. Her heart would swell like Genevieve's
+as he told her in simple phrase that she was his life, his love, his
+all,--for in some two or three words like these he meant to put his
+appeal, and not in fine poetical phrases: that would do for Gifted
+Hopkins and rhyming tom-tits of that feather.
+
+Full of his purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying, as
+he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment, with a
+great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the spark ready
+to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a smile upon his
+lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would have said he was
+as vacant of any aim, except a sort of superficial good-matured
+disposition to be amused, as the blankest-eyed simpleton who had tied
+himself up in a white cravat and come to bore and be bored.
+
+Yet under this pleasant smile his mind was so busy with its thoughts that
+he had forgotten all about the guests from Oxbow Village who, as Myrtle
+had told him, were to come this evening. His eye was all at once caught
+by a familiar figure, and he recognized Master Byles Gridley, accompanied
+by Mr. Gifted Hopkins, at the door of the saloon. He stepped forward at
+once to meet, and to present them.
+
+Mr. Gridley in evening costume made an eminently dignified and
+respectable appearance. There was an unusual lock of benignity upon his
+firmly moulded features, and an air of ease which rather surprised Mr.
+Bradshaw, who did not know all the social experiences which had formed a
+part of the old Master's history. The greeting between them was
+courteous, but somewhat formal, as Mr. Bradshaw was acting as one of the
+masters of ceremony. He nodded to Gifted in an easy way, and led them
+both into the immediate Presence.
+
+"This is my friend Professor Gridley, Mrs. Ketchum, whom I have the honor
+of introducing to you,--a very distinguished scholar, as I have no doubt
+you are well aware. And this is my friend Mr. Gifted Hopkins, a young
+poet of distinction, whose fame will reach you by and by, if it has not
+come to your ears already."
+
+The two gentlemen went through the usual forms, the poet a little crushed
+by the Presence, but doing his best. While the lady was making polite
+speeches to them, Myrtle Hazard came forward. She was greatly delighted
+to meet her old friend, and even looked upon the young poet with a degree
+of pleasure she would hardly have expected to receive from his company.
+They both brought with them so many reminiscences of familiar scenes and
+events, that it was like going back for the moment to Oxbow Village. But
+Myrtle did not belong to herself that evening, and had no opportunity to
+enter into conversation just then with either of them. There was to be
+dancing by and by, and the younger people were getting impatient that it
+should begin. At last the music sounded the well-known summons, and the
+floors began to ring to the tread of the dancers. As usual on such
+occasions there were a large number of noncombatants, who stood as
+spectators around those who were engaged in the campaign of the evening.
+Mr. Byles Gridley looked on gravely, thinking of the minuets and the
+gavots of his younger days. Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who had never acquired
+the desirable accomplishment of dancing, gazed with dazzled and admiring
+eyes at the wonderful evolutions of the graceful performers. The music
+stirred him a good deal; he had also been introduced to one or two young
+persons as Mr. Hopkins, the poet, and he began to feel a kind of
+excitement, such as was often the prelude of a lyric burst from his pen.
+Others might have wealth and beauty, he thought to himself, but what were
+these to the gift of genius? In fifty years the wealth of these people
+would have passed into other hands. In fifty years all these beauties
+would be dead, or wrinkled and double-wrinkled great-grandmothers. And
+when they were all gone and forgotten, the name of Hopkins would be still
+fresh in the world's memory. Inspiring thought! A smile of triumph rose
+to his lips; he felt that the village boy who could look forward to fame
+as his inheritance was richer than all the millionnaires, and that the
+words he should set in verse would have an enduring lustre to which the
+whiteness of pearls was cloudy, and the sparkle of diamonds dull.
+
+He raised his eyes, which had been cast down in reflection, to look upon
+these less favored children of Fortune, to whom she had given nothing but
+perishable inheritances. Two or three pairs of eyes, he observed, were
+fastened upon him. His mouth perhaps betrayed a little
+self-consciousness, but he tried to show his features in an aspect of
+dignified self-possession. There seemed to be remarks and questionings
+going on, which he supposed to be something like the following:--
+
+Which is it? Which is it?--Why, that one, there,--that young
+fellow,--don't you see?--What young fellow are you two looking at? Who is
+he? What is he?--Why, that is Hopkins, the poet.--Hopkins, the poet!
+Let me see him! Let me see him! Hopkins? What! Gifted Hopkins? etc.,
+etc.
+
+Gifted Hopkins did not hear these words except in fancy, but he did
+unquestionably find a considerable number of eyes concentrated upon him,
+which he very naturally interpreted as an evidence that he had already
+begun to enjoy a foretaste of the fame of which he should hereafter have
+his full allowance. Some seemed to be glancing furtively, some appeared
+as if they wished to speak, and all the time the number of those looking
+at him seemed to be increasing. A vision came through his fancy of
+himself as standing on a platform, and having persons who wished to look
+upon him and shake hands with him presented, as he had heard was the way
+with great people when going about the country. But this was only a
+suggestion, and by no means a serious thought, for that would have
+implied infatuation.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was quite right in believing that he attracted many eyes.
+At last those of Myrtle Hazard were called to him, and she perceived that
+an accident was making him unenviably conspicuous. The bow of his rather
+large white neck-tie had slid round and got beneath his left ear. A not
+very good-natured or well-bred young fellow had pointed out the subject
+of this slight misfortune to one or two others of not much better taste
+or breeding, and thus the unusual attention the youthful poet was
+receiving explained itself. Myrtle no sooner saw the little accident of
+which her rural friend was the victim than she left her place in the
+dance with a simple courage which did her credit.
+
+"I want to speak to you a minute," she said. "Come into this alcove."
+
+And the courageous young lady not only told Gifted what had happened to
+him, but found a pin somehow, as women always do on a pinch, and had him
+in presentable condition again almost before the bewildered young man
+knew what was the matter. On reflection it occurred to him, as it has to
+other provincial young persons going to great cities, that he might
+perhaps have been hasty in thinking himself an object of general
+curiosity as yet. There had hardly been time for his name to have become
+very widely known. Still, the feeling had been pleasant for the moment,
+and had given him an idea of what the rapture would be, when, wherever he
+went, the monster digit (to hint a classical phrase) of the collective
+admiring public would be lifted to point him out, and the whisper would
+pass from one to another, "That's him! That's Hopkins!"
+
+Mr. Murray Bradshaw had been watching the opportunity for carrying out
+his intentions, with his pleasant smile covering up all that was passing
+in his mind, and Master Byles Gridley, looking equally unconcerned, had
+been watching him. The young man's time came at last. Some were at the
+supper-table, some were promenading, some were talking, when he managed
+to get Myrtle a little apart from the rest, and led her towards one of
+the recesses in the apartment, where two chairs were invitingly placed.
+Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling,--the influences to
+which he had trusted had not been thrown away upon her. He had no idea
+of letting his purpose be seen until he was fully ready. It required all
+his self-mastery to avoid betraying himself by look or tone, but he was
+so natural that Myrtle was thrown wholly off her guard. He meant to make
+her pleased with herself at the outset, and that not by point-blank
+flattery, of which she had had more than enough of late, but rather by
+suggestion and inference, so that she should find herself feeling happy
+without knowing how. It would be easy to glide from that to the
+impression she had produced upon him, and get the two feelings more or
+less mingled in her mind. And so the simple confession he meant to make
+would at length evolve itself logically, and hold by a natural connection
+to the first agreeable train of thought which he had called up. Not the
+way, certainly, that most young men would arrange their great trial
+scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a lawyer in love as much as in business,
+and considered himself as pleading a cause before a jury of Myrtle
+Hazard's conflicting motives. What would any lawyer do in a jury case
+but begin by giving the twelve honest men and true to understand, in the
+first place, that their intelligence and virtue were conceded by all, and
+that he himself had perfect confidence in them, and leave them to shape
+their verdict in accordance with these propositions and his own side of
+the case?
+
+Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the honeyed
+accents of the young pleader. He flattered her with so much tact, that
+she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips of an
+admiration which he only shared with all around him. But in him he made
+it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very real. This it
+evidently was which had led him to trust her with his ambitions and his
+plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never keep them from her,
+and she was the one woman in the world to whom he thought he could safely
+give his confidence.
+
+The dread moment was close at hand. Myrtle was listening with an
+instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and
+grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it all
+in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the sturdy
+savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down the primeval
+great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his hole in the rock, or
+into the tree where he had made his nest. Why should not the coming
+question announce itself by stirring in the pulses and thrilling in the
+nerves of the descendant of all these grandmothers?
+
+She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind
+elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallion.
+Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a
+girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William
+Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors tingling through them,
+as he came nearer and nearer the few simple words with which he was to
+make Myrtle Hazard the mistress of his destiny. His tones were becoming
+lower and more serious; there were slight breaks once or twice in the
+conversation; Myrtle had cast down her eyes.
+
+"There is but one word more to add," he murmured softly, as he bent
+towards her--
+
+A grave voice interrupted him. "Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw," said Master
+Bytes Gridley, "I wish to present a young gentleman to my friend here. I
+promised to show him the most charming young person I have the honor to
+be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge. Miss Hazard, I have the
+pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance my distinguished young
+friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay."
+
+Once mere, for the third time, these two young persons stood face to
+face. Myrtle was no longer liable to those nervous seizures which any
+sudden impression was liable to produce when she was in her half-hysteric
+state of mind and body. She turned to the new-comer, who found himself
+unexpectedly submitted to a test which he would never have risked of his
+own will. He must go through it, cruel as it was, with the easy
+self-command which belongs to a gentleman in the most trying social
+exigencies. He addressed her, therefore, in the usual terms of courtesy,
+and then turned and greeted Mr. Bradshaw, whom he had never met since
+their coming together at Oxbow Village. Myrtle was conscious, the
+instant she looked upon Clement Lindsay, of the existence of some
+peculiar relation between them; but what, she could not tell. Whatever
+it was, it broke the charm which had been weaving between her and Murray
+Bradshaw. He was not foolish enough to make a scene. What fault could
+he find with Clement Lindsay, who had only done as any gentleman would do
+with a lady to whom he had just been introduced, addressed a few polite
+words to her? After saying those words, Clement had turned very
+courteously to him, and they had spoken with each other. But Murray
+Bradshaw could not help seeing that Myrtle had transferred her attention,
+at least for the moment, from him to the new-comer. He folded his arms
+and waited,--but he waited in vain. The hidden attraction which drew
+Clement to the young girl with whom he had passed into the Valley of the
+Shadow of Death overmastered all other feelings, and he gave himself up
+to the fascination of her presence.
+
+The inward rage of Murray Bradshaw at being interrupted just at the
+moment when he was, as he thought, about to cry checkmate and finish the
+first great game he had ever played may well be imagined. But it could
+not be helped. Myrtle had exercised the customary privilege of young
+ladies at parties, and had turned from talking with one to talking with
+another,--that was all. Fortunately, for him the young man who had been
+introduced at such a most critical moment was not one from whom he need
+apprehend any serious interference. He felt grateful beyond measure to
+pretty Susan Posey, who, as he had good reason for believing, retained
+her hold upon her early lover, and was looking forward with bashful
+interest to the time when she should become Mrs. Lindsay. It was better
+to put up quietly with his disappointment; and, if he could get no
+favorable opportunity that evening to resume his conversation at the
+interesting point where he left it off, he would call the next day and
+bring matters to a conclusion.
+
+He called accordingly the next morning, but was disappointed in not
+seeing Myrtle. She had hardly slept that night, and was suffering from a
+bad headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing company.
+
+He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had just
+left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+MINE AND COUNTERMINE.
+
+What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect on
+the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody especially
+interested knew but himself. We may conjecture that it announced some
+fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely, relating to the issue of
+the great land-case in which the firm was interested. However that might
+be, Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard that Myrtle had suddenly left the city
+for Oxbow Village,--for what reason he puzzled himself to guess,--than he
+determined to follow her at once, and take up the conversation he had
+begun at the party where it left off. And as the young poet had received
+his quietus for the present at the publisher's, and as Master Gridley had
+nothing specially to detain him, they too returned at about the same
+time, and so our old acquaintances were once more together within the
+familiar precincts where we have been accustomed to see them.
+
+Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
+remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of the
+detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the habit of
+keeping an eye on mischievous students. If any underhand contrivance was
+at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he was interested, he
+was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he had plenty of time to
+attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind of pleasure in matching
+his wits against another crafty person's,--such a one, for instance, as
+Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.
+
+Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
+party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner. When he
+found that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he
+suspected something more than a coincidence. When he learned that he was
+assiduously visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close communication
+with Miss Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was pressing the siege of
+Myrtle's heart. But that there was some difficulty in the way was
+equally clear to him, for he ascertained, through channels which the
+attentive reader will soon have means of conjecturing, that Myrtle had
+seen him but once in the week following his return, and that in the
+presence of her dragons. She had various excuses when he
+called,--headaches, perhaps, among the rest, as these are staple articles
+on such occasions. But Master Gridley knew his man too well to think
+that slight obstacles would prevent his going forward to effect his
+purpose.
+
+"I think he will get her; if he holds on," the old man said to himself,
+"and he won't let go in a hurry, if there were any real love about
+it--but surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the tender
+passion. What does all this sudden concentration upon the girl mean? He
+knows something about her that we don't know,--that must be it. What did
+he hide that paper for, a year ago and more? Could that have anything to
+do with his pursuit of Myrtle Hazard today?"
+
+Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a
+luminous idea had struck him. Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam, was
+he? Could there be a conspiracy between these two persons to conceal
+some important fact, or to keep something back until it would be for
+their common interest to have it made known?
+
+Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle Hazard,
+and ever since she had received the young girl from Mr. Gridley's hands,
+when he brought her back safe and sound after her memorable adventure,
+had considered him as Myrtle's best friend and natural protector. These
+simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated
+people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick
+to see the live facts which are going on about them. Mr. Gridley had met
+her, more or less accidentally, several times of late, and inquired very
+particularly about Myrtle, and how she got along at the house since her
+return, and whether she was getting over her headaches, and how they
+treated her in the family.
+
+"Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley," Kitty said to him on one of these
+occasions, "it's ahltogither changed intirely. Sure Miss Myrtle does
+jist iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her at
+ahl, excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the
+hid-moorner at a funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this
+or that, or to go here or there. It's Miss Badlam that's ahlwiz after
+her, an' a-watchin' her,--she thinks she's cunnin'er than a cat, but
+there 's other folks that's got eyes an' ears as good as hers. It's that
+Mr. Bridshaw that's a puttin' his head together with Miss Badlam for
+somethin' or other, an' I don't believe there's no good in it, for what
+does the fox an' the cat be a whisperin' about, as if they was thaves an'
+incind'ries, if there ain't no mischief hatchin'?"
+
+"Why, Kitty," he said, "what mischief do you think is going on, and who
+is to be harmed?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she answered, "if there ain't somebody to be chated
+somehow, then I don't know an honest man and woman from two rogues. An'
+have n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was somethin'
+goin' on agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go out through the
+doors, an' up through the chimbley? I don't want to tell no tales, Mr.
+Gridley, nor to hurt no honest body, for I'm a poor woman, Mr. Gridley,
+but I comes of dacent folks, an' I vallies my repitation an' character as
+much as if I was dressed in silks and satins instead of this mane old
+gown, savin' your presence, which is the best I 've got, an' niver a
+dollar to buy another. But if I iver I hears a word, Mr. Gridley, that
+manes any kind of a mischief to Miss Myrtle,--the Lard bliss her soul an'
+keep ahl the divils away from her!--I'll be runnin' straight down here to
+tell ye ahl about it,--be right sure o' that, Mr. Gridley."
+
+"Nothing must happen to Myrtle," he said, "that we can help. If you see
+anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at once and
+let me know, as you say you will. At once, you understand. And, Kitty, I
+am a little particular about the dress of people who come to see me, so
+that if you would just take the trouble to get you a tidy pattern of
+gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that sort for a gown, you
+would please me; and perhaps this little trifle will be a convenience to
+you when you come to pay for it."
+
+Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted off
+to the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native amiability of
+his temper by fumbling down everything in the shape of ginghams and
+calicoes they had on the shelves, without a murmur at the taste of his
+customer, who found it hard to get a pattern sufficiently emphatic for
+her taste. She succeeded at last, and laid down a five-dollar bill as if
+she were as used to the pleasing figure on its face as to the sight of
+her own five digits.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his
+first countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples about
+the means of obtaining information which might have embarrassed a
+diplomatist of higher degree.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM
+
+"Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?"
+
+"Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody."
+
+"What's the meaning of that, Kitty? Here is the third time within three
+days you've told me I could n't see her. She saw Mr. Gridley yesterday,
+I know; why won't she see me to-day?"
+
+"Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is, it's none o' my business, Mr.
+Bridshaw. That's the order she give me."
+
+"Is Miss Badlam in?"
+
+Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her."
+
+"Bedad," said Kitty Fagan to herself, "the cat an' the fox is goin' to
+have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for the
+stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and Mistress
+Kitty retired to her kitchen. There was a deep closet belonging to this
+apartment, separated by a partition from the parlor. There was a round
+hole high up in this partition through which a stove-pipe had once
+passed. Mistress Kitty placed a stool just under this opening, upon
+which, as on a, pedestal, she posed herself with great precaution in the
+attitude of the goddess of other people's secrets, that is to say, with
+her head a little on one side, so as to bring her liveliest ear close to
+the opening. The conversation which took place in the hearing of the
+invisible third party began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr.
+Bradshaw's part.
+
+"What the d---is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?"
+
+"That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw. I can watch her goings
+on, but I can't account for her tantrums."
+
+"You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,--has the doctor been
+to see her?"
+
+"No indeed. She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think
+there's anything in particular the matter with her. She looks
+well enough, only she seems a little queer,--as girls do that
+have taken a fancy into their heads that they're in love, you
+know,--absent-minded,--does n't seem to be interested in things
+as you would expect after being away so long."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly. If he
+was the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.
+
+"Have you kept your eye on her steadily?"
+
+"I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,--Kitty and I
+between us."
+
+"Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?"
+
+["Depind on Kitty, is it? Oh, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty to
+kape watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's an'
+contrivin's to them that'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap for ye
+before ye catch any poor cratur in it." This was the inaudible comment
+of the unseen third party.]
+
+"Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her. All she knows is
+that she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run away or
+do herself a mischief. The Biddies don't know much, but they know enough
+to keep a watch on the--"
+
+"Chickens." Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss
+Cynthia.
+
+["An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, an' the hen-hahks, an'
+ahl the other bastes," added the invisible witness, in unheard
+soliloquy.]
+
+"I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks," said the
+suspicious young lawyer. "There's a little cunning twinkle in her eye
+sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on occasion.
+Does she ever listen about to hear what people are saying?"
+
+"Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan,' for pity's sake, Mr.
+Bradshaw. The Biddies are all alike, and they're all as stupid as owls,
+except when you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it. A pack of
+priest-ridden fools!"
+
+The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout
+muscles gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill
+all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked
+sharply under its burden.
+
+Murray Bradshaw started. He got up and opened softly all the doors
+leading from the room, one after another, and looked out.
+
+"I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia. It's just
+as well to keep our own matters to ourselves."
+
+"If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might as
+well wait till the river has run by. It's as full of rats and mice as an
+old cheese is of mites. There's a hundred old rats in this house, and
+that's what you hear."
+
+["An' one old cat; that's what I hear." Third party.]
+
+"I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow. I want
+to know that everything is safe before I go. And, besides, I have got
+something to say to you that's important, very important, mind you."
+
+He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out. He
+fixed his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the room,
+and went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and peeped
+under it, to see if there was any one hidden thereto listen. Then he came
+back and drew his chair close up to the table at which Miss Badlam had
+seated herself. The conversation which followed was in a low tone, and a
+portion of it must be given in another place in the words of the third
+party. The beginning of it we are able to supply in this connection.
+
+"Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for. It's all right, I
+feel sure, for I have had private means of finding out. It's a sure
+thing; but I must go once more to see that the other fellows don't try
+any trick on us. You understand what is for my advantage is for yours,
+and, if I go wrong, you go overboard with me. Now I must leave the--you
+know--behind me. I can't leave it in the house or the office: they might
+burn up. I won't have it about me when I am travelling. Draw your chair
+a little more this way. Now listen."
+
+["Indade I will," said the third party to herself. The reader will find
+out in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]
+
+In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
+restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had left
+behind her. The color came into her cheeks when she remembered the state
+of mind she was in when she was working on them for the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+She recollected Master Gridley's mistake about their destination, and
+determined to follow the hint he had given. It would please him better if
+she sent them to good Father Pemberton, she felt sure, than if he should
+get them himself. So she enlarged them somewhat, (for the old man did
+not pinch his feet, as the younger clergyman was in the habit of doing,
+and was, besides, of portly dimensions, as the old orthodox three-deckers
+were apt to be,) and worked E. P. very handsomely into the pattern, and
+sent them to him with her love and respect, to his great delight; for old
+ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection from fair hands
+as younger ones.
+
+What made Myrtle nervous and restless? Why had she quitted the city so
+abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties behind her
+which had so attracted and dazzled her?
+
+She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man who
+stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,--who had actually given
+her life from his own breath,--as when she met him for the second time.
+Whether his introduction to her at the party, just at the instant when
+Murray Bradshaw was about to make a declaration, saved her from being in
+another moment the promised bride of that young gentleman, or not, we
+will not be so rash as to say. It looked, certainly, as if he was in a
+fair way to carry his point; but perhaps she would have hesitated, or
+shrunk back, when the great question came to stare her in the face.
+
+She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when Clement
+was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all called away
+from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger of that sudden
+disturbance which had followed their second meeting. Whatever impression
+he made upon her developed itself gradually,--still, she felt strangely
+drawn towards him. It was not simply in his good looks, in his good
+manners, in his conversation, that she found this attraction, but there
+was a singular fascination which she felt might be dangerous to her
+peace, without explaining it to herself in words. She could hardly be in
+love with this young artist; she knew that his affections were plighted
+to another, a fact which keeps most young women from indulging unruly
+fancies; yet her mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that
+it left little room for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly vanity
+and ambition. It is hard to blame her, for we know how she came by the
+tendency. She had every quality, too, which fitted her to shine in the
+gay world; and the general law is, that those who have the power have the
+instinct to use it. We do not suppose that the bracelet on her arm was
+an amulet, but it was a symbol. It reminded her of her descent; it kept
+alive the desire to live over the joys and excitements of a bygone
+generation. If she had accepted Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged
+herself to a worldly life. If she had refused him, it would perhaps have
+given her a taste of power that might have turned her into a coquette.
+
+This new impression saved her for the time. She had come back to her
+nest in the village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing, her
+nerves were thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be quiet,
+and could not listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her old lover.
+
+It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their force
+and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart. Murray
+Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by any trivial
+hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept him, or even her
+repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had carried her so far. It
+was a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must become Mrs. Bradshaw; and nobody
+could deny that, if he gave her his name, they had a chance, at least,
+for a brilliant future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.
+
+"I 'd like to go down to the store this mornin', Miss Withers, plase.
+Sure I've niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I've got on,
+an' one other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm standin'
+in 'em I'm outside of 'em intirely."
+
+"You can go, Kitty," Miss Silence answered, funereally.
+
+Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy
+apparel, including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her
+description, and set out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins.
+Arrived at that respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley, and
+was informed that he was at home. Had a message for him,--could she see
+him in his study? She could if she would wait a little while. Mr.
+Gridley was busy just at this minute. Sit down, Kitty, and warm yourself
+at the cooking-stove.
+
+Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and presently
+began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself agreeable.
+The kindhearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her several other
+pensioners besides the twins. These two little people, it may be here
+mentioned, were just taking a morning airing in charge of Susan Posey,
+who strolled along in company with Gifted Hopkins on his way to the
+store.
+
+Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural to
+her good-humored race. "It's a little blarney that'll jist suit th' old
+lady," she said to herself, as she made her first conciliatory advance.
+
+"An' sure an' it's a beautiful kitten you've got there, Mrs. Hopkins. An'
+it's a splendid mouser she is, I'll be bound. Does n't she look as if
+she'd clans the house out o'them little bastes, bad luck to em."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
+slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
+Mistress Kitty. "Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would n't
+know a mouse by sight, if you showed her one. If I was a mouse, I'd as
+lieves have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere else. You
+couldn't find a safer place for one."
+
+"Indade, an' to be sure she's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be
+after wastin' her time on them little bastes. It's that little tarrier
+dog of yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the mice an' the
+rats, an' the thaves too, I 'll warrant. Is n't he a fust-rate-lookin'
+watch-dog, an' a rig'ler rat-hound?"
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded animal of
+miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and affection,
+mingled about half and half. "Worry 'em! If they wanted to sleep, I
+rather guess he would worry 'em! If barkin' would do their job for 'em,
+nary a mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my house as they do now.
+Noisy little good-for-nothing tike,--ain't you, Fret?"
+
+Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures. There
+was another chance, however, to make her point, which she presently
+availed herself of,--feeling pretty sure this time that she should effect
+a lodgement. Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing Kitty, first with
+one eye and then with the other, evidently preparing to make a remark,
+but awkward with a stranger. "That 's a beautiful part y 've got there,"
+Kitty said, buoyant with the certainty that she was on safe ground this
+time; "and tahks like a book, I 'll be bound. Poll! Poll! Poor Poll!"
+
+She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird, which,
+instead of responding as expected, "squawked," as our phonetic language
+has it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing instrument of
+the good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's forefinger. She drew it
+back with a jerk.
+
+"An' is that the way your part tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?"
+
+"Talks, bless you, Kitty! why, that parrot hasn't said a word this ten
+year. He used to say Poor Poll! when we first had him, but he found it
+was easier to squawk, and that's all he ever does nowadays,--except bite
+once in a while."
+
+"Well, an' to be sure," Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
+defeats, "if you'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she sees
+it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a part that only
+squawks an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-hearted
+woman that's alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good Catholic, the
+Holy Father 'd make a saint of ye in less than no time!"
+
+So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite of
+her three successive discomfitures.
+
+"You may come up now, Kitty," said Mr. Gridley over the stairs. He had
+just finished and sealed a letter.
+
+"Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars? And how does
+our young lady seem to be of late?"
+
+"Whisht! whisht! your honor."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive
+listener. She opened every door in the room, "by your lave," as she
+said. She looked all over the walls to see if there was any old
+stovepipe hole or other avenue to eye or ear. Then she went, in her
+excess of caution, to the window. She saw nothing noteworthy except Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins and the charge he convoyed, large and small, in the
+distance. The whole living fleet was stationary for the moment, he
+leaning on the fence with his cheek on his hand, in one of the attitudes
+of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him, listening, apparently, in the
+pose of Mignon aspirant au ciel, as rendered by Carlo Dolce Scheffer.
+
+Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr. Gridley,
+who told her to sit down, which she did, first making a catch at her
+apron to dust the chair with, and then remembering that she had left that
+part of her costume at home.--Automatic movements, curious.
+
+Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between Mr.
+Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for herself as
+the reporter of the occasion. She then repeated to him, in her own way,
+that part of the conversation which has been already laid before the
+reader. There is no need of going over the whole of this again in
+Kitty's version, but we may fit what followed into the joints of what has
+been already told.
+
+"He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist as
+asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he did. An'
+so, says he, I'm goin' away, says he, an' I'm goin' to be gahn siveral
+days, or perhaps longer, says he, an' you'd better kape it, says he."
+
+"Keep what, Kitty? What was it he wanted her to keep?" said Mr. Gridley,
+who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot, and meant to
+follow it. He was getting impatient with the "says he's" with which
+Kitty double-leaded her discourse.
+
+"An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my
+breath will let me? An' so, says he, you'd better kape it, says he,
+mixed up with your other paupers, says he," (Mr. Gridley started,) "an'
+thin we can find it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it, says he.
+An' if it all goes right out there, says he, it won't be lahng before we
+shall want to find it, says he. And I can dipind on you, says he, for
+we're both in the same boat, says he, an' you knows what I knows, says
+he, an' I knows what you knows, says be. And thin he taks a stack o'
+paupers out of his pocket, an' he pulls out one of 'em, an' he says to
+her, says he, that's the pauper, says he, an' if you die, says be, niver
+lose sight of that day or night, says he, for it's life an' dith to both
+of us, says he. An' thin he asks her if she has n't got one o' them
+paupers--what is 't they cahls 'em?--divilops, or some sich kind of a
+name--that they wraps up their letters in; an' she says no, she has n't
+got none that's big enough to hold it. So he says, give me a shate o'
+pauper, says he. An' thin he takes the pauper that she give him, an' he
+folds it up like one o' them--divilops, if that's the name of 'em; and
+thin he pulls a stick o' salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp, an'
+he takes the pauper an' puts it into th' other pauper, along with the
+rest of the paupers, an' thin he folds th' other pauper over the paupers,
+and thin he lights a candle, an' he milts the salin'-wax, and he sales up
+the pauper that was outside th' other paupers, an' he writes on the back
+of the pauper, an' thin he hands it to Miss Badlam."
+
+"Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up with
+the others, Kitty?"
+
+"I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I'm tellin' ye."
+
+"Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty?"
+
+"I did, indade, Mr. Gridley. It was a longish kind of a pauper, and
+there was some blotches of ink on the back of it,--an' they looked like a
+face without any mouth, for, says I, there's two spots for the eyes, says
+I, and there's a spot for the nose, says I, and there's niver a spot for
+the mouth, says I."
+
+This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty
+Fagan. It was enough, yes, it was too much. There was some deep-laid
+plot between Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the interests
+of some of the persons connected with the late Malachi Withers; for that
+the paper described by Kitty was the same that he had seen the young man
+conceal in the Corpus Juris Civilis, it was impossible to doubt. If it
+had been a single spot an the back of it, or two, he might have doubted.
+But three large spots "blotches" she had called them, disposed thus
+*.* --would not have happened to be on two different papers, in all human
+probability.
+
+After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of the
+whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,--that Miss Cynthia Badlam
+was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he felt it his
+business to defend, and of a document which was fraudulently withheld and
+meant to be used for some unfair purpose. And most assuredly, Master
+Gridley said to himself, he held a master-key, which, just so certainly
+as he could make up his mind to use it, would open any secret in the
+keeping of Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+
+He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to that
+lady at The Poplars. He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he was a very
+provident old gentleman. His weapons were not exactly of the kind which
+a housebreaker would provide himself with, but of a somewhat peculiar
+nature.
+
+Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words written
+upon it. "I think this will fetch the document," he said to himself, "if
+it comes to the worst. Not if I can help it,--not if I can help it. But
+if I cannot get at the heart of this thing otherwise, why, I must come to
+this. Poor woman!--Poor woman!"
+
+Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn, sal
+volatile, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like a
+stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the brain.
+Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as sometimes
+require the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold water, the cutting
+of stays, perhaps, with a scene of more or less tumultuous perturbation
+and afflux of clamorous womanhood.
+
+So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence,
+grasped his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The
+Poplars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.
+
+MISS Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was accustomed
+to consider her own during her long residences at The Poplars. The entry
+stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked pinched and cold, for the
+evenings were still pretty sharp, and the old house let in the chill
+blasts, as old houses are in the habit of doing. She was sitting at her
+table, with a little trunk open before her. She had taken some papers
+from it, which she was looking over, when a knock at her door announced a
+visitor, and Master Byles Gridley entered the parlor.
+
+As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and replaced
+them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished piece of
+needle-work over it, putting the key in her pocket, and gathering herself
+up for company. Something of all this Master Gridley saw through his
+round spectacles, but seemed not to see, and took his seat like a visitor
+making a call of politeness.
+
+A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special provocation,
+without social pretext, was an event in the life of the desolate
+spinster. Could it be--No, it could not--and yet--and yet! Miss Cynthia
+threw back the rather common-looking but comfortable shawl which covered
+her shoulders, and showed her quite presentable figure, arrayed with a
+still lingering thought of that remote contingency which might yet offer
+itself at some unexpected moment; she adjusted the carefully plaited cap,
+which was not yet of the lasciate ogni speranza pattern, and as she
+obeyed these instincts of her sex, she smiled a welcome to the
+respectable, learned, and independent bachelor. Mr. Gridley had a frosty
+but kindly age before him, with a score or so of years to run, which it
+was after all not strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by the
+companionship of a well-conserved and amiably disposed woman, if any such
+should happen to fall in his way.
+
+That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles Gridley.
+He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as he thought,
+against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down all resistance.
+He had come armed with an instrument of torture worse than the
+thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the miracle of adding a
+cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of live coals brought close
+to the naked soles of the feet,--an instrument which, instead of trifling
+with the nerves, would clutch all the nerve-centres and the heart itself
+in its gripe, and hold them until it got its answer, if the white lips
+had life enough left to shape one. And here was this unfortunate maiden
+lady smiling at him, setting her limited attractions in their best light,
+pleading with him in that natural language which makes any contumacious
+bachelor feel as guilty as Cain before any single woman. If Mr. Gridley
+had been alone, he would have taken a good sniff at his own bottle of sal
+volatile; for his kind heart sunk within him as he thought of the errand
+upon which he had come. It would not do to leave the subject of his
+vivisection under any illusion as to the nature of his designs.
+
+"Good evening, Miss Badlam," he said, "I have come to visit you on a
+matter of business."
+
+What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the instant
+of his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound of his
+serious voice and the look of his grave features? It cannot be
+reproduced, though pages were given to it; for some of the pictures were
+near, and some were distant; some were clearly seen, and some were only
+hinted; some were not recognized in the intellect at all, and yet they
+were implied, as it were, behind the others. Many times we have all found
+ourselves glad or sorry, and yet we could not tell what thought it was
+that reflected the sunbeam or cast the shadow. Took into Cynthia's
+suddenly exalted consciousness and see the picture, actual and potential,
+unroll itself in all its details of the natural, the ridiculous, the
+selfish, the pitiful, the human. Glimpses, hints, echoes, suggestions,
+involving tender sentiments hitherto unknown, we may suppose, to that
+unclaimed sister's breast,--pleasant excitement of receiving
+congratulations from suddenly cordial friends; the fussy delights of
+buying furniture and shopping for new dresses,--(it seemed as if she
+could hear herself saying, "Heavy silks,--best goods, if you
+please,")--with delectable thumping down of flat-sided pieces of calico,
+cambric, "rep," and other stiffs, and rhythmic evolution of measured
+yards, followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of rending
+tissues dearer to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she hears
+the voice of her own first-born,(much of this potentially,
+remember,)--thoughts of a comfortable settlement, an imposing social
+condition, a cheerful household, and by and by an Indian summer of serene
+widowhood,--all these, and infinite other involved possibilities had
+mapped themselves in one long swift flash before Cynthia's inward eye,
+and all vanished as the old man spoke those few words. The look on his
+face, and the tone of his cold speech, had instantly swept them all away,
+like a tea-set sliding in a single crash from a slippery tray.
+
+What could be the "business" on which he had come to her with that solemn
+face?--she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and offered him a
+chair. She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put this question to
+her own intelligence.
+
+"Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?" Mr. Gridley asked. It was a
+strange question,--men do act strangely sometimes. She hardly knew.
+whether to turn red or white.
+
+"Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present," she answered. She did
+not know what to make of it. What was coming next,--a declaration, or an
+accusation of murder?
+
+"My business," Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, "relates to this. I wish
+to inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and which have
+reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers. Can you help me to
+get sight of any of these papers not to be found at the Registry of Deeds
+or the Probate Office?"
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern you
+have with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers, that's been
+dead and buried these half-dozen years?"
+
+"Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
+Badlam. Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in, if
+not myself directly."
+
+"May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish to
+look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?"
+
+"You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be very
+much obliged if you would answer my question first. Can you help me to
+get a sight of any papers relating to the estate of Malachi Withers, not
+to be found at the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office,--any of which
+you may happen to have any private and particular knowledge?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come to
+me with such questions. Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I should
+think, to go to. He and his partner that was--Mr. Wibird, you
+know--settled the estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if there
+are any, that ain't to be found in the offices you mention."
+
+Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's face a
+little more squarely in view.
+
+"Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers, such as
+I am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?"
+
+The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and at
+the same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her answer
+came in a slightly altered tone which neither of them could help
+noticing.
+
+"You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that," she
+answered. She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising, partly with
+apprehension, partly with irritation.
+
+"Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
+relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
+keeping?"
+
+"What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley? I don't
+choose to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business. Go to him, if
+you please, if you want to find out about it."
+
+"Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to
+answer my question. Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered into
+your hands any papers relating to the affairs of the late Malachi
+Withers, for your safe keeping?"
+
+"Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are putting me
+because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley? Indeed I cha'n't. Ask him,
+if you please, whatever you wish to know about his doings."
+
+She drew herself up and looked savagely at him. She had talked herself
+into her courage. There was a color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her
+eye; she looked dangerous as a cobra.
+
+"Miss Cynthia Badlam," Master Gridley said, very deliberately, "I am
+afraid we do not entirely understand each other. You must answer my
+question precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant. Will
+you do this at once, or will you compel me to show you the absolute
+necessity of your doing it, at the expense of pain to both of us? Six
+words from me will make you answer all my questions."
+
+"You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me
+answer one question I do not choose to. I defy you!"
+
+"I will not say one, Miss Cynthia Badlam. There are some things one does
+not like to speak in words. But I will show you a scrap of paper,
+containing just six words and a date; not one word more nor one less.
+You shall read them. Then I will burn the paper in the flame of your
+lamp. As soon after that as you feel ready, I will ask the same question
+again."
+
+Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and handed
+it to Cynthia Badlam. Her hand shook as she received it, for she was
+frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley was in
+earnest and knew what he was doing.
+
+She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
+watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.
+
+No cry. No sound from her lips. She stared as if half stunned for one
+moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she would
+have murdered him if she dared. In another instant her face whitened,
+the scrap of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would have followed it
+but for the support of both Mr. Gridley's arms. He disengaged one of
+them presently, and felt in his pocket for the sal volatile. It served
+him excellently well, and stung her back again to her senses very
+quickly. All her defiant aspect had gone.
+
+"Look!" he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame. "You
+understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time I ask my
+question."
+
+She opened her lips as if to speak. It was as when a bell is rung in a
+vacuum,--no words came from them,--only a faint gasping sound, an effort
+at speech. She was caught tight in the heart-screw.
+
+"Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia," he said, with a certain relenting
+tenderness of manner. "Here, take another sniff of the smelling-salts.
+Be calm, be quiet,--I am well disposed towards you,--I don't like to give
+you trouble. There, now, I must have the answer to that question; but
+take your time, take your time."
+
+"Give me some water,--some water!" she said, in a strange hoarse whisper.
+There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble sideboard
+near by. He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as if she had
+just been taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a bucketful.
+
+"What do you want to know?" she asked.
+
+"I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or
+certain papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw committed to your keeping."
+
+"There is only one paper of any consequence. Do you want to make him
+kill me? or do you want to make me kill myself?"
+
+"Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither. I wish to see that paper, but not for
+any bad purpose. Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty good
+reason to trust me? I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia. Don't be
+afraid of me; only do what I ask,--it will be a great deal better for you
+in the end."
+
+She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key of
+the little trunk. She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in the
+lock, and opened it. It seemed like pressing a knife into her own bosom
+and turning the blade. That little trunk held all the records of her
+life the forlorn spinster most cherished;--a few letters that came nearer
+to love-letters than any others she had ever received; an album, with
+flowers of the summers of 1840 and 1841 fading between its leaves; two
+papers containing locks of hair, half of a broken ring, and other
+insignificant mementos which had their meaning, doubtless, to her,--such
+a collection as is often priceless to one human heart, and passed by as
+worthless in the auctioneer's inventory. She took the papers out
+mechanically, and laid them on the table. Among them was an oblong
+packet, sealed with what appeared to be the office seal of Messrs.
+Penhallow and Bradshaw.
+
+"Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss Badlam?"
+Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone and manner
+that showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless position.
+
+She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left. She
+passed the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he examined
+it. He read on the back of the package: "Withers Estate--old papers--of
+no importance apparently. Examine hereafter."
+
+"May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
+Badlam?"
+
+"Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,--have pity on me. I am a lost woman if
+you do not. Spare me! for God's sake, spare me! There will no wrong
+come of all this, if you will but wait a little while. The paper will
+come to light when it is wanted, and all will be right. But do not make
+me answer any more questions, and let me keep this paper. O Mr. Gridley!
+I am in the power of a dreadful man--"
+
+"You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?"
+
+"I mean him."
+
+"Has there not been some understanding between you that he should become
+the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?"
+
+Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in her
+misery, but answered not a word. What could she answer, if she had
+plotted with this "dreadful man" against a young and innocent girl, to
+deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her earthly hopes and
+happiness?
+
+Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might have
+the force to make. As she made none, he took upon himself to settle the
+whole matter without further torture of his helpless victim.
+
+"This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the
+settlement of the estate of the late Malachi Withers. Mr. Penhallow is
+the survivor of the two gentlemen to whom that business was intrusted.
+How long is Mr. William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?"
+
+"Perhaps a few days,--perhaps weeks,--and then he will come back and kill
+me,--or--or--worse! Don't take that paper, Mr. Gridley,--he isn't like
+you! you would n't--but he would--he would send me to everlasting misery
+to gain his own end, or to save himself. And yet he is n't every way
+bad, and if he did marry Myrtle she'd think there never was such a
+man,--for he can talk her heart out of her, and the wicked in him lies
+very deep and won't ever come out, perhaps, if the world goes right with
+him." The last part of this sentence showed how Cynthia talked with her
+own conscience; all her mental and moral machinery lay open before the
+calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had just
+got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would be
+shaping itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of "Thoughts on
+the Universe," something like this, "The greatest saint may be a sinner
+that never got down to "hard pan." It was not the time to be framing
+axioms.
+
+"Poh! poh!" he said to himself; "what are you about making phrases, when
+you have got a piece of work like this in hand?" Then to Cynthia, with
+great gentleness and kindness of manner: "Have no fear about any
+consequences to yourself. Mr. Penhallow must see that paper--I mean
+those papers. You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer if you do your
+duty now in these premises."
+
+Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like a
+gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either stealthily
+or violently. It must be with her consent. He had laid the package down
+upon the table, waiting for her to give him leave to take it. But just
+as he spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye had been glancing
+furtively at it while he was thinking out his axiom, and taking her
+bearings to it pretty carefully, stretched her hand out, and, seizing the
+package, thrust it into the sanctuary of her bosom.
+
+"Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam," Mr. Gridley
+repeated calmly. "If he says they or any of them can be returned to your
+keeping, well and good. But see them he must, for they have his office
+seal and belong in his custody, and, as you see by the writing on the
+back, they have not been examined. Now there may be something among them
+which is of immediate importance to the relatives of the late deceased
+Malachi Withers, and therefore they must be forthwith submitted to the
+inspection of the surviving partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow.
+This I propose to do, with your consent, this evening. It is now
+twenty-five minutes past eight by the true time, as my watch has it.
+At half past eight exactly I shall have the honor of bidding you good
+evening, Miss Cynthia Badlam, whether you give me those papers or not. I
+shall go to the office of Jacob Penhallow, Esquire, and there make one of
+two communications to him; to wit, these papers and the facts connected
+therewith, or another statement, the nature of which you may perhaps
+conjecture."
+
+There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
+honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been the
+nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative to the
+perplexed woman. He had not at any rate miscalculated the strength of
+his appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected. She bore the
+heart-screw about two minutes. Then she took the package from her bosom,
+and gave it with averted face to Master Byles Gridley, who, on receiving
+it, made her a formal but not unkindly bow, and bade her good evening.
+
+"One would think it had been lying out in the dew," he said, as he left
+the house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE
+
+Lawyer Penhallow was seated in his study, his day's work over, his feet
+in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which Sir Walter
+Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old Reports. He was a
+knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but honest, and therefore less
+ready to suspect the honesty of others. He had a great belief in his
+young partner's ability, and, though he knew him to be astute, did not
+think him capable of roguery.
+
+It was at his request that Mr. Bradshaw had undertaken his journey,
+which, as he believed,--and as Mr. Bradshaw had still stronger evidence
+of a strictly confidential nature which led him to feel sure,--would end
+in the final settlement of the great land claim in favor of their client.
+The case had been dragging along from year to year, like an English
+chancery suit; and while courts and lawyers and witnesses had been
+sleeping, the property had been steadily growing. A railroad had passed
+close to one margin of the township, some mines had been opened in the
+county, in which a village calling itself a city had grown big enough to
+have a newspaper and Fourth of July orations. It was plain that the
+successful issue of the long process would make the heirs of the late
+Malachi Withers possessors of an ample fortune, and it was also plain
+that the firm of Penhallow and Bradshaw were like to receive, in such
+case, the largest fee that had gladdened the professional existence of
+its members.
+
+Mr. Penhallow had his book open before him, but his thoughts were
+wandering from the page. He was thinking of his absent partner, and the
+probable results of his expedition. What would be the consequence if all
+this property came into the possession of Silence Withers? Could she
+have any liberal intentions with reference to Myrtle Hazard, the young
+girl who had grown up with her, or was the common impression true, that
+she was bent on endowing an institution, and thus securing for herself a
+favorable consideration in the higher courts, where her beneficiaries
+would be, it might be supposed, influential advocates? He could not help
+thinking that Mr. Bradshaw believed that Myrtle Hazard would eventually
+come to apart at least of this inheritance. For the story was, that he
+was paying his court to the young lady whenever he got an opportunity,
+and that he was cultivating an intimacy with Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+"Bradshaw would n'tmake a move in that direction," Mr. Penhallow said to
+himself, "until he felt pretty sure that it was going to be a paying
+business. If he was only a young minister now, there'd be no difficulty
+about it. Let any man, young or old, in a clerical white cravat, step up
+to Myrtle Hazard, and ask her to be miserable in his company through this
+wretched life, and aunt Silence would very likely give them her blessing,
+and add something to it that the man in the white cravat would think
+worth even more than that was. But I don't know what she'll say to
+Bradshaw. Perhaps he 'd better have a hint to go to meeting a little
+more regularly. However, I suppose he knows what he's about."
+
+He was thinking all this over when a visitor was announced, and Mr. Byles
+Gridley entered the study.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley said, wiping his forehead.
+"Quite warm, is n't it, this evening?"
+
+"Warm!" said Mr. Penhallow, "I should think it would freeze pretty thick
+to-night. I should have asked you to come up to the fire and warm
+yourself. But take off your coat, Mr. Gridley,--very glad to see you.
+You don't come to the house half as often as you come to the office. Sit
+down, sit down."
+
+Mr. Gridley took off his outside coat and sat down. "He does look warm,
+does n't he?" Mr. Penhallow thought. "Wonder what has heated up the old
+gentleman so. Find out quick enough, for he always goes straight to
+business."
+
+"Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley began at once, "I have come on a very grave
+matter, in which you are interested as well as myself, and I wish to lay
+the whole of it before you as explicitly as I can, so that we may settle
+this night before I go what is to be done. I am afraid the good standing
+of your partner, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, is concerned in the matter.
+Would it be a surprise to you, if he had carried his acuteness in some
+particular case like the one I am to mention beyond the prescribed
+limits?"
+
+The question was put so diplomatically that there was no chance for an
+indignant denial of the possibility of Mr. Bradshaw's being involved in
+any discreditable transaction.
+
+"It is possible," he answered, "that Bradshaw's keen wits may have
+betrayed him into sharper practice than I should altogether approve in
+any business we carried on together. He is a very knowing young man, but
+I can't think he is foolish enough, to say nothing of his honesty, to
+make any false step of the kind you seem to hint. I think he might on
+occasion go pretty near the line, but I don't believe he would cross it."
+
+"Permit me a few questions, Mr. Penhallow. You settled the estate of the
+late Malachi Withers, did you not?"
+
+"Mr. Wibird and myself settled it together."
+
+"Have you received any papers from any of the family since the settlement
+of the estate?"
+
+"Let me see. Yes; a roll of old plans of the Withers Place, and so
+forth,--not of much use, but labelled and kept. An old trunk with
+letters and account-books, some of them in Dutch,--mere curiosities. A
+year ago or more, I remember that Silence sent me over some papers she
+had found in an odd corner,--the old man hid things like a magpie. I
+looked over most of them,--trumpery not worth keeping,--old leases and so
+forth."
+
+"Do you recollect giving some of them to Mr. Bradshaw to look over?"
+
+"Now I come to think of it, I believe I did; but he reported to me, if I
+remember right, that they amounted to nothing."
+
+"If any of those papers were of importance, should you think your junior
+partner ought to keep them from your knowledge?"
+
+"I need not answer that question, Mr. Gridley. Will you be so good as to
+come at once to the facts on which you found your suspicions, and which
+lead you to put these questions to me?"
+
+Thereupon Mr. Gridley proceeded to state succinctly the singular behavior
+of Murray Bradshaw in taking one paper from a number handed to him by Mr.
+Penhallow, and concealing it in a volume. He related how he was just on
+the point of taking out the volume which contained the paper, when Mr.
+Bradshaw entered and disconcerted him. He had, however, noticed three
+spots on the paper by which he should know it anywhere. He then repeated
+the substance of Kitty Fagan's story, accenting the fact that she too
+noticed three remarkable spots on the paper which Mr. Bradshaw had
+pointed out to Miss Badlam as the one so important to both of them. Here
+he rested the case for the moment.
+
+Mr. Penhallow looked thoughtful. There was something questionable in the
+aspect of this business. It did obviously suggest the idea of an
+underhand arrangement with Miss Cynthia, possibly involving some very
+grave consequences. It would have been most desirable, he said, to have
+ascertained what these papers, or rather this particular paper, to which
+so much importance was attached, amounted to. Without that knowledge
+there was nothing, after all, which it might not be possible to explain.
+He might have laid aside the spotted paper to examine for some object of
+mere curiosity. It was certainly odd that the one the Fagan woman had
+seen should present three spots so like those on the other paper, but
+people did sometimes throw treys at backgammon, and that which not rarely
+happened with two dice of six faces might happen if they had sixty or six
+hundred faces. On the whole, he did not see that there was any ground,
+so far, for anything more than a vague suspicion. He thought it not
+unlikely that Mr. Bradshaw was a little smitten with the young lady up at
+The Poplars, and that he had made some diplomatic overtures to the
+duenna, after the approved method of suitors. She was young for
+Bradshaw,--very young,--but he knew his own affairs. If he chose to make
+love to a child, it was natural enough that he should begin by courting
+her nurse.
+
+Master Byles Gridley lost himself for half a minute in a most
+discreditable inward discussion as to whether Laura Penhallow was
+probably one or two years older than Mr. Bradshaw. That was his way, he
+could not help it. He could not think of anything without these mental
+parentheses. But he came back to business at the end of his half-minute.
+
+"I can lay the package before you at this moment, Mr. Penhallow. I have
+induced that woman in whose charge it was left to intrust it to my
+keeping, with the express intention of showing it to you. But it is
+protected by a seal, as I have told you, which I should on no account
+presume to meddle with."
+
+Mr. Gridley took out the package of papers.
+
+"How damp it is!" Mr. Penhallow said; "must have been lying in some very
+moist neighborhood."
+
+"Very," Mr. Gridley answered, with a peculiar expression which said,
+"Never mind about that."
+
+"Did the party give you possession of these documents without making any
+effort to retain them?" the lawyer asked.
+
+"Not precisely. It cost some effort to induce Miss Badlam to let them go
+out of her hands. I hope you think I was justified in making the effort
+I did, not without a considerable strain upon my feelings, as well as her
+own, to get hold of the papers?"
+
+"That will depend something on what the papers prove to be, Mr. Gridley.
+A man takes a certain responsibility in doing just what you have done.
+If, for instance, it should prove that this envelope contained matters
+relating solely to private transactions between Mr. Bradshaw and Miss
+Badlam, concerning no one but themselves,--and if the words on the back
+of the envelope and the seal had been put there merely as a protection
+for a package containing private papers of a delicate but perfectly
+legitimate character--"
+
+The lawyer paused, as careful experts do, after bending the bow of an
+hypothesis, before letting the arrow go. Mr. Gridley felt very warm
+indeed, uncomfortably so, and applied his handkerchief to his face. Could
+n't be anything in such a violent supposition as that, and yet such a
+crafty fellow as that Bradshaw,--what trick was he not up to? Absurd!
+Cynthia was not acting,--Rachel would n't be equal to such a
+performance!--"why then, Mr. Gridley," the lawyer continued, "I don't
+see but what my partner would have you at an advantage, and, if disposed
+to make you uncomfortable, could do so pretty effectively. But this, you
+understand, is only a supposed case, and not a very likely one. I don't
+think it would have been prudent in you to meddle with that seal. But
+it is a very different matter with regard to myself. It makes no
+difference, so far as I am concerned, where this package came from, or
+how it was obtained. It is just as absolutely within my control as any
+piece of property I call my own. I should not hesitate, if I saw fit, to
+break this seal at once, and proceed to the examination of any papers
+contained within the envelope. If I found any paper of the slightest
+importance relating to the estate, I should act as if it had never been
+out of my possession.
+
+"Suppose, however, I chose to know what was in the package, and, having
+ascertained, act my judgment about returning it to the party from whom
+you obtained it. In such case I might see fit to restore or cause it to
+be restored, to the party, without any marks of violence having been used
+being apparent. If everything is not right, probably no questions would
+be asked by the party having charge of the package. If there is no
+underhand work going on, and the papers are what they profess to be,
+nobody is compromised but yourself, so far as I can see, and you are
+compromised at any rate, Mr. Gridley, at least in the good graces of the
+party from whom you obtained the documents. Tell that party that I took
+the package without opening it, and shall return it, very likely, without
+breaking the seal. Will consider of the matter, say a couple of days.
+Then you shall hear from me, and she shall hear from you. So. So. Yes,
+that's it. A nice business. A thing to sleep on. You had better leave
+the whole matter of dealing with the package to me. If I see fit to send
+it back with the seal unbroken, that is my affair. But keep perfectly
+quiet, if you please, Mr. Gridley, about the whole matter. Mr. Bradshaw
+is off, as you know, and the business on which he is gone is
+important,--very important. He can be depended on for that; he has acted
+all along as if he had a personal interest in the success of our firm
+beyond his legal relation to it."
+
+Mr. Penhallow's light burned very late in the office that night, and the
+following one. He looked troubled and absent-minded, and when Miss Laura
+ventured to ask him how long Mr. Bradshaw was like to be gone, he
+answered her in such a way that the girl who waited at table concluded
+that he did n't mean to have Miss Laury keep company with Mr. Bradshaw,
+or he'd never have spoke so dreadful hash to her when she asked about
+him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL.
+
+A day or two after Myrtle Hazard returned to the village, Master Byles
+Gridley, accompanied by Gifted Hopkins, followed her, as has been already
+mentioned, to the same scene of the principal events of this narrative.
+The young man had been persuaded that it would be doing injustice to his
+talents to crowd their fruit prematurely upon the market. He carried his
+manuscript back with him, having relinquished the idea of publishing for
+the present. Master Byles Gridley, on the other hand, had in his pocket
+a very flattering proposal, from the same publisher to whom he had
+introduced the young poet, for a new and revised edition of his work,
+"Thoughts on the Universe," which was to be remodelled in some respects,
+and to have a new title not quite so formidable to the average reader.
+
+It would be hardly fair to Susan Posey to describe with what delight and
+innocent enthusiasm she welcomed back Gifted Hopkins. She had been so
+lonely since he was away? She had read such of his poems as she
+possessed--duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he had
+kindly written out for her--over and over again, not without the sweet
+tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of all
+testimonials to a poet's power over the heart. True, her love belonged
+to another,--but then she was so used to Gifted! She did so love to hear
+him read his poems,--and Clement had never written that "little bit of a
+poem to Susie," which she had asked him for so long ago! She received
+him therefore with open arms,--not literally, of course, which would have
+been a breach of duty and propriety, but in a figurative sense, which it
+is hoped no reader will interpret to her discredit.
+
+The young poet was in need of consolation. It is true that he had seen
+many remarkable sights during his visit to the city; that he had got
+"smarted up," as his mother called it, a good deal; that he had been to
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party, where he had looked upon life in all its
+splendors; and that he brought back many interesting experiences, which
+would serve to enliven his conversation for a long time. But he had
+failed in the great enterprise he had undertaken. He was forced to
+confess to his revered parent, and his esteemed friend Susan Posey, that
+his genius, which was freely acknowledged, was not thought to be quite
+ripe as yet. He told the young lady some particulars of his visit to the
+publisher, how he had listened with great interest to one of his poems,
+"The Triumph of Song,"--how he had treated him with marked and flattering
+attention; but that he advised him not to risk anything prematurely,
+giving him the hope that by and by he would be admitted into that series
+of illustrious authors which it was the publisher's privilege to present
+to the reading public. In short, he was advised not to print. That was
+the net total of the matter, and it was a pang to the susceptible heart
+of the poet. He had hoped to have come home enriched by the sale of his
+copyright, and with the prospect of seeing his name before long on the
+back of a handsome volume.
+
+Gifted's mother did all in her power to console him in his
+disappointment. There was plenty of jealous people always that wanted to
+keep young folks from rising in the world. Never mind, she did n't
+believe but what Gifted could make jest as good verses as any of them
+that they kept such a talk about. She had a fear that he might pine away
+in consequence of the mental excitement he had gone through, and
+solicited his appetite with her choicest appliances,--of which he partook
+in a measure which showed that there was no immediate cause of alarm.
+
+But Susan Posey was more than a consoler,--she was an angel to him in
+this time of his disappointment. "Read me all the poems over again," she
+said,--"it is almost the only pleasure I have left, to hear you read your
+beautiful verses." Clement Lindsay had not written to Susan quite so
+often of late as at some former periods of the history of their love.
+Perhaps it was that which had made her look paler than usual for some
+little time. Something was evidently preying on her. Her only delight
+seemed to be in listening to Gifted as he read, sometimes with fine
+declamatory emphasis, sometimes in low, tremulous tones, the various
+poems enshrined in his manuscript. At other times she was sad, and more
+than once Mrs. Hopkins had seen a tear steal down her innocent cheek,
+when there seemed to be no special cause for grief. She ventured to
+speak of it to Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"Our Susan's in trouble, Mr. Gridley, for some reason or other that's
+unbeknown to me, and I can't help wishing you could jest have a few words
+with her. You're a kind of a grandfather, you know, to all the young
+folks, and they'd tell you pretty much everything about themselves. I
+calc'late she is n't at ease in her mind about somethin' or other, and I
+kind o' think, Mr. Gridley, you could coax it out of her."
+
+"Was there ever anything like it?" said Master Byles Gridley to himself.
+"I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take care of at
+this rate. Susan Posey in trouble, too! Well, well, well, it's easier
+to get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a big ship off the rocks.
+Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily enough; but Myrtle Hazard
+floats in deeper water. We must make Susan Posey tell her own story, or
+let her tell it, for it will all come out of itself."
+
+"I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning. I wonder
+if Miss Susan Posey would n't like to help for half an hour or so,"
+Master Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.
+
+The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the thought of
+obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so liberal to her
+friend, the poet. She would be delighted to help him; she would dust
+them all for him, if he wanted her to. No, Master Gridley said, he
+always wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides, such a little body as
+she was could not lift those great folios out of the lower shelves
+without overstraining herself; she might handle the musketry and the
+light artillery, but he must deal with the heavy guns himself. "As low
+down as the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall govern; below that, the Salic
+law."
+
+Susan did not low much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant that he
+would dust the big books and she would attend to the little ones.
+
+A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
+costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive. Susan
+appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief of
+bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in spite of
+opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a white
+handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets protecting her
+hands, so that she suggested something between a gypsy, a jaunty
+soubrette, and the fille du regiment.
+
+Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,--a folio in
+massive oaken covers with clasps Like prison hinges, bearing the stately
+colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson and his
+associates. He opened the volume,--paused over its blue, and scarlet
+initial letter,--he turned page after page, admiring its brilliant
+characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the narrower white
+creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns, he turned back to the
+beginning and read the commendatory paragraph, "Nam ipsorum omnia fidgent
+tum correctione dignissima, tum cura imprimendo splendida ac miranda,"
+and began reading, "Incipit proemium super apparatum decretalium...."
+when it suddenly occurred to him that this was not exactly doing what he
+had undertaken to do, and he began whisking an ancient bandanna about the
+ears of the venerable volume. All this time Miss Susan Posey was
+catching the little books by the small of their backs, pulling them out,
+opening them, and clapping them together, 'p-'p-'p! 'p-'p-'p! and
+carefully caressing all their edges with a regular professional
+dusting-cloth, so persuasively that they yielded up every particle that a
+year had drifted upon them, and came forth refreshed and rejuvenated.
+This process went on for a while, until Susan had worked down among the
+octavos and Master Gridley had worked up among the quartos. He had got
+hold of Calmet's Dictionary, and was caught by the article Solomon, so
+that he forgot his occupation again. All at once it struck him that
+everything was very silent,--the 'p-'p-'p! of clapping the books had
+ceased, and the light rustle of Susan's dress was no longer heard. He
+looked up and saw her standing perfectly still, with a book in one hand
+and her duster in the other. She was lost in thought, and by the shadow
+on her face and the glistening of her blue eyes he knew it was her hidden
+sorrow that had just come back to her. Master Gridley shut up his book,
+leaving Solomon to his fate, like the worthy Benedictine he was reading,
+without discussing the question whether he was saved or not.
+
+"Susan Posey, child, what is your trouble?"
+
+Poor Susan was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least touch
+upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down the waves
+of emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it ventured
+out,--showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow, sinking
+into the hollow, and climbing again into notice.
+
+"O Mr. Grid-ley--I can't--I can't--tell you or--any-body--what 's the
+mat-mat-matter. My heart will br-br-break."
+
+"No, no, no, child," said Mr. Gridley, sympathetically stirred a little
+himself by the sight of Susan in tears and sobbing and catching her
+breath, "that mustn't be, Susan Posey. Come off the steps, Susan Posey,
+and stop dusting the books,--I can finish them,--and tell me all abort
+your troubles. I will try 'to help you out of them, and I have begun to
+think I know how to help young people pretty well. I have had some
+experience at it."
+
+But Susan cried and sobbed all the more uncontrollably and convulsively.
+Master Gridley thought he had better lead her at once to what he felt
+pretty sure was the source of her grief, and that, when she had had her
+cry out, she would probably make the hole in the ice he had broken big
+enough in a very few minutes.
+
+"I think something has gone wrong between you and your friend, the young
+gentleman with whom you are in intimate relations, my child, and I think
+you had better talk freely with me, for I can perhaps give you a little
+counsel that will be of service."
+
+Susan cried herself quiet at last. "There's nobody in the world like
+you, Mr. Gridley," she said, "and I've been wanting to tell you something
+ever so long. My friend--Mr. Clem--Clement Lindsay does n't care for me
+as he used to,--I know he does n't. He hasn't written to me for--I don't
+know but it's a month. And O Mr. Gridley! he's such a great man, and I
+am such a simple person,--I can't help thinking--he would be happier with
+somebody else than poor little Susan Posey!"
+
+This last touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do those
+who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly, as a
+horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before she
+recovered her conversational road-gait.
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she began again, at length, "if I only dared to tell him
+what I think,--that perhaps it would be happier for us both--if we could
+forget each other! Ought I not to tell him so? Don't you think he would
+find another to make him happy? Wouldn't he forgive me for telling him
+he was free? Were we not too young to know each other's hearts when we
+promised each other that we would love as long as we lived? Sha'n't I
+write him a letter this very day and tell him all? Do you think it would
+be wrong in me to do it? O Mr. Gridley, it makes me almost crazy to
+think about it. Clement must be free! I cannot, cannot hold him to a
+promise he does n't want to keep."
+
+There were so many questions in this eloquent rhapsody of Susan's that
+they neutralized each other, as one might say, and Master Gridley had
+time for reflection. His thoughts went on something in this way:
+
+"Pretty clear case! Guess Mr. Clement can make up his mind to it. Put it
+well, did n't she? Not a word about our little Gifted! That's the
+trouble. Poets! how they do bewitch these schoolgirls! And having a
+chance every day, too, how could you expect her to stand it?" Then
+aloud: "Susan Posey, you are a good, honest little girl as ever was. I
+think you and Clement were too hasty in coming together for life before
+you knew what life meant. I think if you write Clement a letter, telling
+him that you cannot help fearing that you two are not perfectly adapted
+to each other, on account of certain differences for which neither of you
+is responsible, and that you propose that each should release the other
+from the pledge given so long ago,--in that case, I say, I believe he
+will think no worse of you for so doing, and may perhaps agree that it is
+best for both of you to seek your happiness elsewhere than in each
+other."
+
+The book-dusting came to as abrupt a close as the reading of Lancelot.
+Susan went straight to her room, dried her tears so as to write in a fair
+hand, but had to stop every few lines and take a turn at the
+"dust-layers," as Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's friend used to call the fountains
+of sensibility. It would seem like betraying Susan's confidence to
+reveal the contents of this letter, but the reader may be assured that it
+was simple and sincere and very sweetly written, without the slightest
+allusion to any other young man, whether of the poetical or cheaper human
+varieties.
+
+It was not long before Susan received a reply from Clement Lindsay. It
+was as kind and generous and noble as she could have asked. It was
+affectionate, as a very amiable brother's letter might be, and candidly
+appreciative of the reasons Susan had assigned for her proposal. He gave
+her back her freedom, not that he should cease to feel an interest in
+her, always. He accepted his own release, not that he would ever think
+she could be indifferent to his future fortunes. And within a very brief
+period of time after sending his answer to Susan Posey, whether he wished
+to see her in person, or whether he had some other motive, he had packed
+his trunk, and made his excuses for an absence of uncertain length at the
+studio, and was on his way to Oxbow Village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+JUST AS YOU EXPECTED.
+
+The spring of 1861 had now arrived,--that eventful spring which was to
+lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the mighty
+drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody years. The
+little schemes of little people were going on in all our cities and
+villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which was soon coming
+to shatter the hopes and cloud the prospects of millions. Our little
+Oxbow Village, which held itself by no means the least of human centres,
+was the scene of its own commotions, as intense and exciting to those
+concerned as if the destiny of the nation had been involved in them.
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay appeared suddenly in that important locality, and
+repaired to his accustomed quarters at the house of Deacon Rumrill. That
+worthy person received him with a certain gravity of manner, caused by
+his recollections of the involuntary transgression into which Mr. Lindsay
+had led him by his present of "Ivanhoe."--He was, on the whole, glad to
+see him, for his finances were not yet wholly recovered from the injury
+inflicted on them by the devouring element. But he could not forget that
+his boarder had betrayed him into a breach of the fourth commandment, and
+that the strict eyes of his clergyman had detected him in the very
+commission of the offence. He had no sooner seen Mr. Clement comfortably
+installed, therefore, than he presented himself at the door of his
+chamber with the book, enveloped in strong paper and very securely tied
+round with a stout string.
+
+"Here is your vollum, Mr. Lindsay," the Deacon said. "I understand it is
+not the work of that great and good mahn who I thought wrote it. I did
+not see anything immoral in it as fur as I read, but it belongs to what I
+consider a very dangerous class of publications. These novels and
+romances are awfully destructive to our youth. I should recommend you,
+as a young man of principle, to burn the vollum. At least I hope you
+will not leave it about anywhere unless it is carefully tied up. I have
+written upon the paper round it to warn off all the young persons of my
+household from meddling with it."
+
+True enough, Mr. Clement saw in strong black letters on the back of the
+paper wrapping his unfortunate "Ivanhoe,"--
+
+ "DANGEROUS READING FOR CHRISTIAN YOUTH.
+
+ "TOUCH NOT THE UNCLEAN THING."
+
+"I thought you said you had Scott's picture hung up in your parlor,
+Deacon Rumrill," he said, a little amused with the worthy man's fear and
+precautions.
+
+"It is the great Scott's likeness that I have in my parlor," he said; "I
+will show it to you if you will come with me."
+
+Mr. Clement followed the Deacon into that sacred apartment.
+
+"That is the portrait of the great Scott," he said, pointing to an
+engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments were
+a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir Walter.
+
+"I will take good care that none of your young people see this volume,"
+Mr. Clement said; "I trust you read it yourself, however, and found
+something to please you in it. I am sure you are safe from being harmed
+by any such book. Did n't you have to finish it, Deacon, after you had
+once begun?"
+
+"Well, I--I--perused a consid'able portion of the work," the Deacon
+answered, in a way that led Mr. Clement to think he had not stopped much
+short of Finis. "Anything new in the city?"
+
+"Nothing except what you've all had,--Confederate States establishing an
+army and all that,--not very new either. What has been going on here
+lately, Deacon?"--
+
+"Well, Mr. Lindsay, not a great deal. My new barn is pretty nigh done.
+I've got as fine a litter of pigs as ever you see. I don't know whether
+you're a judge of pigs or no. The Hazard gal's come back, spilt, pooty
+much, I guess. Been to one o' them fashionable schools,--I 've heerd
+that she 's learnt to dance. I've heerd say that that Hopkins boy's
+round the Posey gal, come to think, she's the one you went with some when
+you was here,--I 'm gettin' kind o' forgetful. Old Doctor Hurlbut's
+pretty low,--ninety-four year old,--born in '67,--folks ain't ginerally
+very spry after they're ninety, but he held out wonderful."
+
+"How's Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"Well, the young squire, he's off travellin' somewhere in the West, or to
+Washin'ton, or somewhere else,--I don't jestly know where. They say that
+he's follerin' up the courts in the business about old Malachi's estate.
+I don' know much about it."
+
+The news got round Oxbow Village very speedily that Mr. Clement Lindsay,
+generally considered the accepted lover of Miss Susan Posey, had arrived
+in that place. Now it had come to be the common talk of the village that
+young Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were getting to be mighty thick with
+each other, and the prevailing idea was that Clement's visit had
+reference to that state of affairs. Some said that Susan had given her
+young man the mitten, meaning thereby that she had signified that his
+services as a suitor were dispensed with. Others thought there was only a
+wavering in her affection for her lover, and that he feared for her
+constancy, and had come to vindicate his rights.
+
+Some of the young fellows, who were doubtless envious of Gifted's
+popularity with the fair sex, attempted in the most unjustifiable manner
+to play upon his susceptible nature. One of them informed him that he
+had seen that Lindsay fellah raound taown with the darndest big stick y'
+ever did see. Looked kind o' savage and wild like. Another one told him
+that perhaps he'd better keep a little shady; that are chap that had got
+the mittin was praowlin' abaout--with a pistil,--one o' them
+Darringers,--abaout as long as your thumb, an' fire a bullet as big as a
+p'tatah-ball,--'a fellah carries one in his breeches-pocket, an' shoots
+y' right threugh his own pahnts, withaout ever takin' on it aout of his
+pocket. The stable-keeper, who, it may be remembered, once exchanged a
+few playful words with Mr. Gridley, got a hint from some of these
+unfeeling young men, and offered the resources of his stable to the youth
+supposed to be in peril.
+
+"I 've got a faast colt, Mr. Hopkins, that 'll put twenty mild betwixt
+you an' this here village, as quick as any four huffs 'll dew it in this
+here caounty, if you should want to get away suddin. I've heern tell
+there was some lookin' raound here that wouldn't be wholesome to
+meet,--jest say the word, Mr. Hopkins, an' I 'll have ye on that are
+colt's back in less than no time, an' start ye off full jump. There's a
+good many that's kind o' worried for fear something might happen to ye,
+Mr. Hopkins,--y' see fellahs don't like to have other chaps cuttin' on
+'em aout with their gals."
+
+Gifted Hopkins had become excessively nervous by this time. It is true
+that everything in his intimacy with Susan Posey, so far, might come
+under the general head of friendship; but he was conscious that something
+more was in both their thoughts. Susan had given him mysterious hints
+that her relations with Clement had undergone a change, but had never had
+quite courage enough, perhaps had too much delicacy, to reveal the whole
+truth.
+
+Gifted was walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by the hints
+which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his imagination, when
+all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement Lindsay coming straight
+towards him. Gifted was unarmed, except with a pair of blunt scissors,
+which he carried habitually in his pocket. What should he do? Should he
+fly? But he was never a good runner, being apt to find himself scant o'
+breath, like Hamlet, after violent exercise. His demeanor on the
+occasion did credit to his sense of his own virtuous conduct and his
+self-possession. He put his hand out, while yet at a considerable
+distance, and marched up towards Clement, smiling with all the native
+amiability which belonged to him.
+
+To his infinite relief, Clement put out his hand to grasp the one offered
+him, and greeted the young poet in the most frank and cordial manner.
+
+"And how is Miss Susan Posey, Mr. Hopkins?" asked Clement, in the most
+cheerful tone. "It is a long while since I have seen her, and you must
+tell her that I hope I shall not leave the village without finding time
+to call upon her. She and I are good friends always, Mr. Hopkins, though
+perhaps I shall not be quite so often at your mother's as I was during my
+last visit to Oxbow Village."
+
+Gifted felt somewhat as the subject of one of those old-fashioned forms
+of argument, formerly much employed to convince men of error in matters
+of religion, must have felt when the official who superintended the
+stretching-machine said, "Slack up!"
+
+He told Mr. Clement all about Susan, and was on the point of saying that
+if he, Mr. Clement, did not claim any engrossing interest in her, he,
+Gifted, was ready to offer her the devotion of a poet's heart. Mr.
+Clement, however, had so many other questions to ask him about everybody
+in the village, more particularly concerning certain young persons in
+whom he seemed to be specially interested, that there was no chance to
+work in his own revelations of sentiment.
+
+Clement Lindsay had come to Oxbow Village with a single purpose. He
+could now venture to trust himself in the presence of Myrtle Hazard. He
+was free, and he knew nothing to show that she had lost the liberty of
+disposing of her heart. But after an experience such as he had gone
+through, he was naturally distrustful of himself, and inclined to be
+cautious and reserved in yielding to a new passion. Should he tell her
+the true relations in which they stood to each other,--that she owed her
+life to him, and that he had very nearly sacrificed his own in saving
+hers? Why not? He had a claim on her gratitude for what he had done in
+her behalf, and out of this gratitude there might naturally spring a
+warmer feeling.
+
+No, he could not try to win her affections by showing that he had paid
+for them beforehand. She seemed to be utterly unconscious of the fact
+that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters. If the
+thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it would be time
+enough to tell her the story. If not, the moment might arrive when he
+could reveal to her the truth that he was her deliverer, without accusing
+himself of bribing her woman's heart to reward him for his services. He
+would wait for that moment.
+
+It was the most natural thing in the world that Mr. Lindsay, a young
+gentleman from the city, should call to see Miss Hazard, a young lady
+whom he had met recently at a party. To that pleasing duty he addressed
+himself the evening after his arrival.
+
+"The young gentleman's goin' a courtin', I calc'late," was the remark of
+the Deacon's wife when she saw what a comely figure Mr. Clement showed at
+the tea-table.
+
+"A very hahnsome young mahn," the Deacon replied, "and looks as if he
+might know consid'able. An architect, you know,--a sort of a builder.
+Wonder if he has n't got any good plans for a hahnsome pigsty. I suppose
+he 'd charge somethin' for one, but it couldn't be much, an' he could
+take it out in board."
+
+"Better ask him," his wife--said; "he looks mighty pleasant; there's
+nothin' lost by askin', an' a good deal got sometimes, grandma used to
+say."
+
+The Deacon followed her advice. Mr. Clement was perfectly good-natured
+about it, asked the Deacon the number of snouts in his menagerie, got an
+idea of the accommodations required, and sketched the plaza of a neat,
+and appropriate edifice for the Porcellarium, as Master Gridley
+afterwards pleasantly christened it, which was carried out by the
+carpenter, and stands to this day a monument of his obliging disposition,
+and a proof that there is nothing so humble that taste cannot be shown in
+it.
+
+"What'll be your charge for the plan of the pigsty, Mr. Lindsay?" the
+Deacon inquired with an air of interest,--he might have become involved
+more deeply than he had intended. "How much should you call about right
+for the picter an' figgerin'?"
+
+"Oh, you're quite welcome to my sketch of a plan, Deacon. I've seen much
+showier buildings tenanted by animals not very different from those your
+edifice is meant for."
+
+Mr. Clement found the three ladies sitting together in the chill, dim
+parlor at The Poplars. They had one of the city papers spread out on the
+table, and Myrtle was reading aloud the last news from Charleston Harbor.
+She rose as Mr. Clement entered, and stepped forward to meet him. It was
+a strange impression this young man produced upon her,--not through the
+common channels of the intelligence, not exactly that "magnetic"
+influence of which she had had experience at a former time. It did not
+over come her as at the moment of their second meeting. But it was
+something she must struggle against, and she had force and pride and
+training enough now to maintain her usual tranquillity, in spite of a
+certain inward commotion which seemed to reach her breathing and her
+pulse by some strange, inexplicable mechanism.
+
+Myrtle, it must be remembered, was no longer the simple country girl who
+had run away at fifteen, but a young lady of seventeen, who had learned
+all that more than a year's diligence at a great school could teach her,
+who had been much with girls of taste and of culture, and was familiar
+with the style and manners of those who came from what considered itself
+the supreme order in the social hierarchy. Her natural love for
+picturesque adornment was qualified by a knowledge of the prevailing
+modes not usual in so small a place as Oxbow Village. All this had not
+failed to produce its impression on those about her. Persons who, like
+Miss Silence Withers, believe, not in education, inasmuch as there is no
+healthy nature to be educated, but in transformation, worry about their
+charges up to a certain period of their lives. Then, if the
+transformation does not come, they seem to think their cares and duties
+are at an end, and, considering their theories of human destiny, usually
+accept the situation with wonderful complacency. This was the stage
+which Miss Silence Withers had reached with reference to Myrtle. It made
+her infinitely more agreeable, or less disagreeable, as the reader may
+choose one or the other statement, than when she was always fretting
+about her "responsibility." She even began to take an interest in some
+of Myrtle's worldly experiences, and something like a smile would now and
+then disarrange the chief-mourner stillness of her features, as Myrtle
+would tell some lively story she had brought away from the gay society
+she had frequented.
+
+Cynthia Badlam kept her keen eyes on her like a hawk. Murray Bradshaw
+was away, and here was this handsome and agreeable youth coming in to
+poach on the preserve of which she considered herself the gamekeeper.
+What did it mean? She had heard the story about Susan's being off with
+her old love and on with a new one. Ah ha! this is the game, is it?
+
+Clement Lindsay passed not so much a pleasant evening, as one of strange,
+perplexed, and mingled delight and inward conflict. He had found his
+marble once more turned to flesh and blood, and breathing before him.
+This was the woman he was born for; her form was fit to model his
+proudest ideal from, her eyes melted him when they rested for an instant
+on his face,--her voice reached the hidden sensibilities of his inmost
+nature; those which never betray their existence until the outward chord
+to which they vibrate in response sends its message to stir them. But
+was she not already pledged to that other,--that cold-blooded,
+contriving, venal, cynical, selfish, polished, fascinating man of the
+world, whose artful strategy would pass with nine women out of ten for
+the most romantic devotion?
+
+If he had known the impression he made, he would have felt less anxiety
+with reference to this particular possibility. Miss Silence expressed
+herself gratified with his appearance, and thought he looked like a good
+young man,--he reminded her of a young friend of hers who--[It was the
+same who had gone to one of the cannibal islands as a missionary,--and
+stayed there.] Myrtle was very quiet. She had nothing to say about
+Clement, except that she had met him at a party in the city, and found
+him agreeable. Miss Cynthia wrote a letter to Murray Bradshaw that very
+evening, telling him that he had better come back to Oxbow Village as
+quickly as he could, unless he wished to find his place occupied by an
+intruder.
+
+In the mean time, the country was watching the garrison in Charleston
+Harbor. All at once the first gun of the four years' cannonade hurled
+its ball against the walls of Fort Sumter. There was no hamlet in the
+land which the reverberations of that cannon-roar did not reach. There
+was no valley so darkened by overshadowing hills that it did not see the
+American flag hauled down on the 13th of April. There was no loyal heart
+in the North that did not answer to the call of the country to its
+defenders which went forth two days later. The great tide of feeling
+reached the locality where the lesser events of our narrative were
+occurring. A meeting of the citizens was instantly called. The
+venerable Father Pemberton opened it with a prayer that filled every soul
+with courage and high resolve. The young farmers and mechanics of that
+whole region joined the companies to which they belonged, or organized in
+squads and marched at once, or got ready to march, to the scene of
+conflict.
+
+The contagion of warlike patriotism reached the most peacefully inclined
+young persons.
+
+"My country calls me," Gifted Hopkins said to Susan Posey, "and I am
+preparing to obey her summons. If I can pass the medical examination,
+which it is possible I may, though I fear my constitution may be thought
+too weak, and if no obstacle impedes me, I think of marching in the ranks
+of the Oxbow Invincibles. If I go, Susan, and I fall, will you not
+remember me . . . as one who . . . cherished the tenderest . . .
+sentiments . . . towards you . . . and who had looked forward to the
+time when . . . when . ."
+
+His eyes told the rest. He loved!
+
+Susan forgot all the rules of reserve to which she had been trained. What
+were cold conventionalities at such a moment? "Never! never!" she said,
+throwing her arms about his neck and mingling her tears with his, which
+were flowing freely. "Your country does not need your sword .... but it
+does need . . . your pen. Your poems will inspire . . . our
+soldiers. . . . The Oxbow Invincibles will march to victory, singing
+your songs . . . . If you go . . . and if you.. . fall . . . O
+Gifted! . . . I . . . I . . . . yes, I shall die too!"
+
+His love was returned. He was blest!
+
+"Susan," he said, "my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every
+sacrifice. Henceforth they will be my law. Yes, I will stay and
+encourage my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field. My
+voice shall urge them on to the battle-ground. I will give my dearest
+breath to stimulate their ardor.
+
+"O Susan! My own, own Susan!"
+
+While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest roof
+of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a similar
+conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars. Clement Lindsay was
+so well received at his first visit that he ventured to repeat it several
+times, with so short intervals that it implied something more than a
+common interest in one of the members of the household. There was no
+room for doubt who this could be, and Myrtle Hazard could not help seeing
+that she was the object of his undisguised admiration. The belief was
+now general in the village that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were
+either engaged or on the point of being so; and it was equally understood
+that, whatever might be the explanation, she and her former lover had
+parted company in an amicable manner.
+
+Love works very strange transformations in young women. Sometimes it
+leads them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,--their whole
+thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so as to
+keep out all other images. Poor darlings! We smile at their little
+vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with the last
+Congressman's speech or the great Election Sermon; but Nature knows well
+what she is about. The maiden's ribbon or ruffle means a great deal more
+for her than the judge's wig or the priest's surplice.
+
+It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast of
+Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself. As the thought dawned in her
+consciousness that she was loved, a change came over her such as the
+spirit that protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had
+inherited, might have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow from
+angelic eyes. She forgot herself and her ambitions,--the thought of
+shining in the great world died out in the presence of new visions of a
+future in which she was not to be her own,--of feelings in the depth of
+which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young eyes to them for a
+while seemed less than nothing. Myrtle had not hitherto said to herself
+that Clement was her lover, yet her whole nature was expanding and
+deepening in the light of that friendship which any other eye could have
+known at a glance for the great passion.
+
+Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw. "There is no
+time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if this
+business is not put a stop to."
+
+Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the
+progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings two
+young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer
+together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an infinity
+between the moment when all is told and that which went just before.
+
+They were sitting together by themselves in the dimly lighted parlor.
+They had told each other many experiences of their past lives, very
+freely, as two intimate friends of different sex might do. Clement had
+happened to allude to Susan, speaking very kindly and tenderly of her.
+He hoped this youth to whom she was attached would make her life happy.
+"You know how simple-hearted and good she is; her image will always be a
+pleasant one in my memory,--second to but one other."
+
+Myrtle ought, according to the common rules of conversation, to have
+asked, What other? but she did not. She may have looked as if she wanted
+to ask,--she may have blushed or turned pale, perhaps she could not trust
+her voice; but whatever the reason was, she sat still, with downcast
+eyes. Clement waited a reasonable time, but, finding it was of no use,
+began again.
+
+"Your image is the one other,--the only one, let me say, for all else
+fades in its presence,--your image fills all my thought. Will you trust
+your life and happiness with one who can offer you so little beside his
+love? You know my whole heart is yours."
+
+Whether Myrtle said anything in reply or not, whether she acted like
+Coleridge's Genevieve,--that is, "fled to him and wept," or suffered her
+feelings to betray themselves in some less startling confession, we will
+leave untold. Her answer, spoken or silent, could not have been a cruel
+one, for in another moment Clement was pressing his lips to hers, after
+the manner of accepted lovers.
+
+"Our lips have met to-day for the second time," he said, presently.
+
+She looked at him in wonder. What did he mean? The second time! How
+assuredly he spoke! She looked him calmly in the face, and awaited his
+explanation.
+
+"I have a singular story to tell you. On the morning of the 16th of
+June, now nearly two years ago, I was sitting in my room at Alderbank,
+some twenty miles down the river, when I heard a cry for help coming from
+the river. I ran down to the bank, and there I saw a boy in an old
+boat--"
+
+When it came to the "boy" in the old boat, Myrtle's cheeks flamed so that
+she could not bear it, and she covered her face with both her hands. But
+Clement told his story calmly through to the end, sliding gently over its
+later incidents, for Myrtle's heart was throbbing violently, and her
+breath a little catching and sighing, as when she had first lived with
+the new life his breath had given her.
+
+"Why did you ask me for myself, when you could have claimed me?" she
+said.
+
+"I wanted a free gift, Myrtle," Clement answered, "and I have it."
+
+They sat in silence, lost in the sense of that new life which had
+suddenly risen on their souls.
+
+The door-bell rang sharply. Kitty Fagan answered its summons, and
+presently entered the parlor and announced that Mr. Bradshaw was in the
+library, and wished to see the ladies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST CARD.
+
+"How can I see that man this evening, Mr. Lindsay?"
+
+"May I not be Clement, dearest? I would not see him at all, Myrtle. I
+don't believe you will find much pleasure in listening to his fine
+speeches."
+
+"I cannot endure it.--Kitty, tell him I am engaged, and cannot see him
+this evening. No, no! don't say engaged, say very much occupied."
+
+Kitty departed, communing with herself in this wise:--"Ockipied, is it?
+An' that's what ye cahl it when ye 're kapin' company with one young
+gintleman an' don't want another young gintleman to come in an' help the
+two of ye? Ye won't get y'r pigs to market to-day, Mr. Bridshaw, no, nor
+to-morrow, nayther, Mr. Bridshaw. It's Mrs. Lindsay that Miss Myrtle is
+goin' to be,--an' a big cake there'll be at the weddin' frosted all
+over,--won't ye be plased with a slice o' that, Mr. Bridshaw?"
+
+With these reflections in her mind, Mistress Kitty delivered her message,
+not without a gleam of malicious intelligence in her look that stung Mr.
+Bradshaw sharply. He had noticed a hat in the entry, and a little stick
+by it which he remembered well as one he had seen carried by Clement
+Lindsay. But he was used to concealing his emotions, and he greeted the
+two older ladies who presently came into the library so pleasantly, that
+no one who had not studied his face long and carefully would have
+suspected the bitterness of heart that lay hidden far down beneath his
+deceptive smile. He told Miss Silence, with much apparent interest, the
+story of his journey. He gave her an account of the progress of the case
+in which the estate of which she inherited the principal portion was
+interested. He did not tell her that a final decision which would settle
+the right to the great claim might be expected at any moment, and he did
+not tell her that there was very little doubt that it would be in favor
+of the heirs of Malachi Withers. He was very sorry he could not see Miss
+Hazard that evening,--hoped he should be more fortunate to-morrow
+forenoon, when he intended to call again,--had a message for her from one
+of her former school friends, which he was anxious to give her. He
+exchanged certain looks and hints with Miss Cynthia, which led her to
+withdraw and bring down the papers he had entrusted to her. At the close
+of his visit, she followed him into the entry with a lamp, as was her
+common custom.
+
+"What's the meaning of all this, Cynthia? Is that fellow making love to
+Myrtle?"
+
+"I'm afraid so, Mr. Bradshaw. He's been here several times, and they
+seem to be getting intimate. I couldn't do anything to stop it."
+
+"Give me the papers,--quick!"
+
+Cynthia pulled the package from her pocket. Murray Bradshaw looked
+sharply at it. A little crumpled,--crowded into her pocket. Seal
+unbroken. All safe.
+
+"I shall come again to-morrow forenoon. Another day and it will be all
+up. The decision of the court will be known. It won't be my fault if
+one visit is not enough.--You don't suppose Myrtle is in love with this
+fellow?"
+
+"She acts as--if she might be. You know he's broke with Susan Posey, and
+there's nothing to hinder. If you ask my opinion, I think it's your last
+chance: she is n't a girl to half do things, and if she has taken to this
+man it will be hard to make her change her mind. But she's young, and
+she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it well there's no
+telling."
+
+Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that
+evening. Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide open,
+carried them.
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling. He had
+laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the certainty of
+their securing their end. These papers were to have been taken from the
+envelope, and found in the garret just at the right moment, either by
+Cynthia herself or one of the other members of the family, who was to be
+led on, as it were accidentally, to the discovery. The right moment must
+be close at hand. He was to offer his hand--and heart, of course--to
+Myrtle, and it was to be accepted. As soon as the decision of the land
+case was made known, or not long afterwards, there was to be a search in
+the garret for papers, and these were to be discovered in a certain dusty
+recess, where, of course, they would have been placed by Miss Cynthia.
+
+And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements
+seemed like to fail. This obscure youth--this poor fool, who had been on
+the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a boyish
+promise--was coming between him and the object of his long pursuit,--the
+woman who had every attraction to draw him to herself. It had been a
+matter of pride with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost his temper so as
+to interfere with the precise course of action which his cool judgment
+approved; but now he was almost beside himself with passion. His labors,
+as he believed, had secured the favorable issue of the great case so long
+pending. He had followed Myrtle through her whole career, if not as her
+avowed lover, at least as one whose friendship promised to flower in love
+in due season. The moment had come when the scene and the characters in
+this village drama were to undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as
+is seen in those fairy spectacles where the dark background changes to a
+golden palace and the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal
+splendor. The change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he
+had thought himself, found his wand broken, and his power given to
+another.
+
+He could not sleep during that night. He paced his room, a prey to
+jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him from
+feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour. He thought of all
+that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own intolerable anguish.
+Of revenge. If Myrtle rejected his suit, should he take her life on the
+spot, that she might never be another's,--that neither man nor woman
+should ever triumph over him,--the proud ambitious man, defeated,
+humbled, scorned? No! that was a meanness of egotism which only the most
+vulgar souls could be capable of. Should he challenge her lover? It was
+not the way of the people and time, and ended in absurd complications, if
+anybody was foolish enough to try it. Shoot him? The idea floated
+through his mind, for he thought of everything; but he was a lawyer, and
+not a fool, and had no idea of figuring in court as a criminal. Besides,
+he was not a murderer,--cunning was his natural weapon, not violence. He
+had a certain admiration of desperate crime in others, as showing nerve
+and force, but he did not feel it to be his own style of doing business.
+
+During the night he made every arrangement for leaving the village the
+next day, in case he failed to make any impression on Myrtle Hazard and
+found that his chance was gone. He wrote a letter to his partner,
+telling him that he had left to join one of the regiments forming in the
+city. He adjusted all his business matters so that his partner should
+find as little trouble as possible. A little before dawn he threw
+himself on the bed, but he could not sleep; and he rose at sunrise, and
+finished his preparations for his departure to the city.
+
+The morning dragged along slowly. He could not go to the office, not
+wishing to meet his partner again. After breakfast he dressed himself
+with great care, for he meant to show himself in the best possible
+aspect. Just before he left the house to go to The Poplars, he took the
+sealed package from his trunk, broke open the envelope, took from it a
+single paper,--it had some spots on it which distinguished it from all
+the rest,--put it separately in his pocket, and then the envelope
+containing the other papers. The calm smile he wore on his features as
+he set forth cost him a greater effort than he had ever made before to
+put it on. He was moulding his face to the look with which he meant to
+present himself; and the muscles had been sternly fixed so long that it
+was a task to bring them to their habitual expression in company,--that
+of ingenuous good-nature.
+
+He was shown into the parlor at The Poplars; and Kitty told Myrtle that
+he had called and inquired for her and was waiting down stairs.
+
+"Tell him I will be down presently," she said. "And, Kitty, now mind
+just what I tell you. Leave your kitchen door open, so that you can hear
+anything fall in the parlor. If you hear a book fall,--it will be a
+heavy one, and will make some noise,--run straight up here to my little
+chamber, and hang this red scarf out of the window. The left-hand
+side-sash, mind, so that anybody can see it from the road. If Mr.
+Gridley calls, show him into the parlor, no matter who is there."
+
+Kitty Fagan looked amazingly intelligent, and promised that she would do
+exactly as she was told. Myrtle followed her down stairs almost
+immediately, and went into the parlor, where Mr. Bradshaw was waiting.
+
+Never in his calmest moments had he worn a more insinuating smile on his
+features than that with which he now greeted Myrtle. So gentle, so
+gracious, so full of trust, such a completely natural expression of a
+kind, genial character did it seem, that to any but an expert it would
+have appeared impossible that such an effect could be produced by the
+skilful balancing of half a dozen pairs of little muscles that manage the
+lips and the corners of the mouth. The tones of his voice were subdued
+into accord with the look of his features; his whole manner was
+fascinating, as far as any conscious effort could make it so. It was
+just one of those artificially pleasing effects that so often pass with
+such as have little experience of life for the genuine expression of
+character and feeling. But Myrtle had learned the look that shapes
+itself on the features of one who loves with a love that seeketh not its
+own, and she knew the difference between acting and reality. She met his
+insinuating approach with a courtesy so carefully ordered that it was of
+itself a sentence without appeal. Artful persons often interpret sincere
+ones by their own standard. Murray Bradshaw thought little of this
+somewhat formal address,--a few minutes would break this thin film to
+pieces. He was not only a suitor with a prize to gain, he was a
+colloquial artist about to employ all the resources of his specialty.
+
+He introduced the conversation in the most natural and easy way, by
+giving her the message from a former school-mate to which he had
+referred, coloring it so delicately, as he delivered it, that it became
+an innocent-looking flattery. Myrtle found herself in a rose-colored
+atmosphere, not from Murray Bradshaw's admiration, as it seemed, but only
+reflected by his mind from another source. That was one of his arts,
+always, if possible, to associate himself incidentally, as it appeared,
+and unavoidably, with an agreeable impression.
+
+So Myrtle was betrayed into smiling and being pleased before he had said
+a word about himself or his affairs. Then he told her of the adventures
+and labors of his late expedition; of certain evidence which at the very
+last moment he had unearthed, and which was very probably the
+turning-point in the case. He could not help feeling that she must
+eventually reap some benefit from the good fortune with which his efforts
+had been attended. The thought that it might yet be so had been a great
+source of encouragement to him,--it would always be a great happiness to
+him to remember that he had done anything to make her happy.
+
+Myrtle was very glad that he had been so far successful,--she did not
+know that it made much difference to her, but she was obliged to him for
+the desire of serving her that he had expressed.
+
+"My services are always yours, Miss Hazard. There is no sacrifice I
+would not willingly make for your benefit. I have never had but one
+feeling toward you. You cannot be ignorant of what that feeling is."
+
+"I know, Mr. Bradshaw, it has been one of kindness. I have to thank you
+for many friendly attentions, for which I hope I have never been
+ungrateful."
+
+"Kindness is not all that I feel towards you, Miss Hazard. If that were
+all, my lips would not tremble as they do now in telling you my
+feelings.--I love you."
+
+He sprang the great confession on Myrtle a little sooner than he had
+meant. It was so hard to go on making phrases! Myrtle changed color a
+little, for she was startled.
+
+The seemingly involuntary movement she made brought her arm against a
+large dictionary, which lay very near the edge of the table on which it
+was resting. The book fell with a loud noise to the floor.
+
+There it lay. The young man awaited her answer; he did not think of
+polite forms at such a moment.
+
+"It cannot be, Mr. Bradshaw,--it must not be. I have known you long, and
+I am not ignorant of all your brilliant qualities, but you must not speak
+to me of love. Your regard,--your friendly interest, tell me that I
+shall always have these, but do not distress me with offering more than
+these."
+
+"I do not ask you to give me your love in return; I only ask you not to
+bid me despair. Let me believe that the time may come' when you will
+listen to me,--no matter how distant. You are young,--you have a tender
+heart,--you would not doom one who only lives for you to
+wretchedness,--so long that we have known each other. It cannot be that
+any other has come between us--"
+
+Myrtle blushed so deeply that there was no need of his finishing his
+question.
+
+"Do you mean, Myrtle Hazard, that you have cast me aside for
+another?--for this stranger--this artist--who was with you yesterday when
+I came, bringing with me the story of all I had done for you, yes, for
+you,--and was ignominiously refused the privilege of seeing you?" Rage
+and jealousy had got the better of him this time. He rose as he spoke,
+and looked upon her with such passion kindling in his eyes that he seemed
+ready for any desperate act.
+
+"I have thanked you for any services you may have rendered me, Mr.
+Bradshaw," Myrtle answered, very calmly, "and I hope you will add one
+more to them by sparing me this rude questioning. I wished to treat you
+as a friend; I hope you will not render that impossible."
+
+He had recovered himself for one more last effort. "I was impatient
+overlook it, I beg you. I was thinking of all the happiness I have
+labored to secure for you, and of the ruin to us both it would be if you
+scornfully rejected the love I offer you,--if you refuse to leave me any
+hope for the future,--if you insist on throwing yourself away on this
+man, so lately pledged to another. I hold the key of all your earthly
+fortunes in my hand. My love for you inspired me in all that I have
+done, and, now that I come to lay the result of my labors at your feet,
+you turn from me, and offer my reward to a stranger. I do not ask you to
+say this day that you will be mine,--I would not force your
+inclinations,--but I do ask you that you will hold yourself free of all
+others, and listen to me as one who may yet be more than a friend. Say
+so much as this, Myrtle, and you shall have such a future as you never
+dreamed of. Fortune, position, all that this world can give, shall be
+yours."
+
+"Never! never! If you could offer me the whole world, or take away from
+me all that the world can give, it would make no difference to me. I
+cannot tell what power you hold over me, whether of life and death, or of
+wealth and poverty; but after talking to me of love, I should not have
+thought you would have wronged me by suggesting any meaner motive. It is
+only because we have been on friendly terms so long that I have listened
+to you as I have done. You have said more than enough, and I beg you
+will allow me to put an end to this interview."
+
+She rose to leave the room. But Murray Bradshaw had gone too far to
+control himself,--he listened only to the rage which blinded him.
+
+"Not yet!" he said. "Stay one moment, and you shall know what your pride
+and self-will have cost you!"
+
+Myrtle stood, arrested, whether by fear, or curiosity, or the passive
+subjection of her muscles to his imperious will, it would be hard to say.
+
+Murray Bradshaw took out the spotted paper from his breast-pocket, and
+held it up before her. "Look here!" he exclaimed. "This would have made
+you rich,--it would have crowned you a queen in society,--it would have
+given you all, and more than all, that you ever dreamed of luxury, of
+splendor, of enjoyment; and I, who won it for you, would have taught you
+how to make life yield every bliss it had in store to your wishes. You
+reject my offer unconditionally?"
+
+Myrtle expressed her negative only by a slight contemptuous movement.
+
+Murray Bradshaw walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid the
+spotted paper upon the burning coals. It writhed and curled, blackened,
+flamed, and in a moment was a cinder dropping into ashes. He folded his
+arms, and stood looking at the wreck of Myrtle's future, the work of his
+cruel hand. Strangely enough, Myrtle herself was fascinated, as it were,
+by the apparent solemnity of this mysterious sacrifice. She had kept her
+eyes steadily on him all the time, and was still gazing at the altar on
+which her happiness had been in some way offered up, when the door was
+opened by Kitty Fagan, and Master Byles Gridley was ushered into the
+parlor.
+
+"Too late, old man! "Murray Bradshaw exclaimed, in a hoarse and savage
+voice, as he passed out of the room, and strode through the entry and
+down the avenue. It was the last time the old gate of The Poplars was to
+open or close for him. The same day he left the village; and the next
+time his name was mentioned it was as an officer in one of the regiments
+just raised and about marching to the seat of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+THE SPOTTED PAPER.
+
+What Master Gridley may have said to Myrtle Hazard that served to calm
+her after this exciting scene cannot now be recalled. That Murray
+Bradshaw thought he was inflicting a deadly injury on her was plain
+enough. That Master Gridley did succeed in convincing her that no great
+harm had probably been done her is equally certain.
+
+Like all bachelors who have lived a lonely life, Master Byles Gridley had
+his habits, which nothing short of some terrestrial convulsion--or
+perhaps, in his case, some instinct that drove him forth to help somebody
+in trouble--could possibly derange. After his breakfast, he always sat
+and read awhile,--the paper, if a new one came to hand, or some pleasant
+old author,--if a little neglected by the world of readers, he felt more
+at ease with him, and loved him all the better.
+
+But on the morning after his interview with Myrtle Hazard, he had
+received a letter which made him forget newspapers, old authors, almost
+everything, for the moment. It was from the publisher with whom he had
+had a conversation, it may be remembered, when he visited the city, and
+was to this effect: That Our Firm propose to print and stereotype the
+work originally published under the title of "Thoughts on the Universe";
+said work to be remodelled according to the plan suggested by the Author,
+with the corrections, alterations, omissions, and additions proposed by
+him; said work to be published under the following title, to wit:
+________ _________: said work to be printed in 12mo, on paper of good
+quality, from new types, etc., etc., and for every copy thereof printed
+the author to receive, etc., etc.
+
+Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over, to
+know if it could be really so. So it really was. His book had
+disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet the
+ground and never germinate disappear. At last it had got a certain value
+as a curiosity for book-hunters. Some one of them, keener-eyed than the
+rest, had seen that there was a meaning and virtue in this unsuccessful
+book, for which there was a new audience educated since it had tried to
+breathe before its time. Out of this had grown at last the publisher's
+proposal. It was too much: his heart swelled with joy, and his eyes
+filled with tears.
+
+How could he resist the temptation? He took down his own particular copy
+of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and began
+reading. As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he nodded
+approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if
+questioning whether this other were not to be modified or left out, he
+condemned a third as being no longer true for him as when it was written,
+and he sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval. The reader may like
+a few specimens from this early edition, now a rarity. He shall have
+them, with Master Gridley's verbal comments. The book, as its name
+implied, contained "Thoughts" rather than consecutive trains of reasoning
+or continuous disquisitions. What he read and remarked upon were a few
+of the more pointed statements which stood out in the chapters he was
+turning over. The worth of the book must not be judged by these almost
+random specimens.
+
+"THE BEST THOUGHT, LIKE THE MOST PERFECT DIGESTION, IS DONE
+UNCONSCIOUSLY.--Develop that.--Ideas at compound interest in the
+mind.--Be aye sticking in an idea,--while you're sleeping it'll be
+growing. Seed of a thought to-day,--flower to-morrow--next week--ten
+years from now, etc.--Article by and by for the....
+
+"CAN THE INFINITE BE SUPPOSED TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ULTIMATE
+DESTINY OF ANY CREATED THING TO THE FINITE? OUR THEOLOGIANS PRETEND THAT
+IT CAN. I DOUBT.--Heretical. Stet.
+
+"PROTESTANTISM MEANS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. BUT IT IS AFRAID OF ITS OWN
+LOGIC.--Stet. No logical resting-place short of None of your business.
+
+"THE SUPREME SELF-INDULGENCE IS TO SURRENDER THE WILL TO A SPIRITUAL
+DIRECTOR.--Protestantism gave up a great luxury.--Did it though?
+
+"ASIATIC MODES OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH DO NOT EXPRESS THE 'RELATIONS IN
+WHICH THE AMERICAN FEELS HIM SELF TO STAND TO HIS SUPERIORS IN THIS OR
+ANY OTHER SPHERE OF BEING. REPUBLICANISM MUST HAVE ITS OWN RELIGIOUS
+PHRASEOLOGY, WHICH IS NOT THAT BORROWED FROM ORIENTAL DESPOTISMS.
+
+"IDOLS AND DOGMAS IN PLACE OF CHARACTER; PILLS AND THEORIES IN PLACE OF
+WHOLESOME LIVING. SEE THE HISTORIES OF THEOLOGY AND MEDICINE
+PASSIM.--Hits 'em.
+
+"'OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.' DO YOU MEAN TO SAY JEAN CHAUVIN,
+THAT
+ 'HEAVEN LIES ABOUT US IN OUR INFANCY'?
+
+"WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN OF YOUR ORGANIZATION? YOUR SOUL WAS IN A HURRY, AND
+MADE A RUSH FOR A BODY. THERE ARE PATIENT SPIRITS THAT HAVE WAITED FROM
+ETERNITY, AND NEVER FOUND PARENTS FIT TO BE BORN OF.--How do you know
+anything about all that? Dele.
+
+"WHAT SWEET, SMOOTH VOICES THE NEGROES HAVE! A HUNDRED GENERATIONS FED
+ON BANANAS.--COMPARE THEM WITH OUR APPLE-EATING WHITE FOLKS!--It won't
+do. Bananas came from the West Indies.
+
+"TO TELL A MAN'S TEMPERAMENT BY HIS HANDWRITING. SEE IF THE DOTS OF HIS
+I'S RUN AHEAD OR NOT, AND IF THEY DO, HOW FAR.--I have tried that--on
+myself.
+
+"MARRYING INTO SOME FAMILIES IS THE NEXT THING TO BEING CANONIZED.--Not
+so true now as twenty or thirty years ago. As many bladders, but more
+pins.
+
+"FISH AND DANDIES ONLY KEEP ON ICE.--Who will take? Explain in note how
+all warmth approaching blood heat spoils fops and flounders.
+
+"FLYING IS A LOST ART AMONG MEN AND REPTILES. BATS FLY, AND MEN OUGHT
+TO. TRY A LIGHT TURBINE. RISE A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE
+SLANTING,--RISE HALF A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING, AND SO
+ON. OR SLANT UP AND SLANT DOWN.--Poh! You ain't such a fool as to think
+that is new,--are you?
+
+"Put in my telegraph project. Central station. Cables with insulated
+wires running to it from different quarters of the city. These form the
+centripetal system. From central station, wires to all the livery
+stables, messenger stands, provision shops, etc., etc. These form the
+centrifugal system. Any house may have a wire in the nearest cable at
+small cost.
+
+"DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AFTER THE CONTINENTS HAVE GONE UNDER, AND
+COME UP AGAIN, AND DRIED, AND BRED NEW RACES? HAVE YOUR NAME STAMPED ON
+ALL YOUR PLATES AND CUPS AND SAUCERS. NOTHING OF YOU OR YOURS WILL LAST
+LIKE THOSE. I NEVER SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CHINA
+SERVICE, AND SAYING, 'HERE ARE MY MONUMENTS. THAT BUTTER-DISH IS MY URN.
+THIS SOUP-PLATE IS MY MEMORIAL TABLET.' NO NEED OF A SKELETON AT MY
+BANQUETS! I FEED FROM MY TOMBSTONE AND READ MY EPITAPH AT THE BOTTOM OF
+EVERY TEACUP.--Good."
+
+He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence. He
+thought of the dim and dread future,--all the changes that it would bring
+to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the order of
+earthly things. He saw men of a new race, alien to all that had ever
+lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old ocean-bed now become
+habitable land. And as the great scoops turned out the earth they had
+fetched up from the unexplored depths, a relic of a former simple
+civilization revealed the fact that here a tribe of human beings had
+lived and perished.--Only the coffee-cup he had in his hand half an hour
+ago.--Where would he be then? and Mrs. Hopkins, and Gifted, and Susan,
+and everybody? and President Buchanan? and the Boston State-House? and
+Broadway?--O Lord, Lord, Lord! And the sun perceptibly smaller,
+according to the astronomers, and the earth cooled down a number of
+degrees, and inconceivable arts practised by men of a type yet undreamed
+of, and all the fighting creeds merged in one great universal--
+
+A knock at his door interrupted his revery. Miss Susan Posey informed
+him that a gentleman was waiting below who wished to see him.
+
+"Show him up to my study, Susan Posey, if you please," said Master
+Gridley.
+
+Mr. Penhallow presented himself at Mr. Gridley's door with a countenance
+expressive of a very high state of excitement.
+
+"You have heard the news, Mr. Gridley, I suppose?"
+
+"What news, Mr. Penhallow?"
+
+"First, that my partner has left very unexpectedly to enlist in a
+regiment just forming. Second, that the great land case is decided in
+favor of the heirs of the late Malachi Withers."
+
+"Your partner must have known about it yesterday?"
+
+"He did, even before I knew it. He thought himself possessed of a very
+important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means to make,
+some use. You are aware of the artifice I employed to prevent any
+possible evil consequences from any action of his. I have the genuine
+document, of course. I wish you to go over with me to The Poplars, and I
+should be glad to have good old Father Pemberton go with us; for it is a
+serious matter, and will be a great surprise to more than one of the
+family."
+
+They walked together to the old house, where the old clergyman had lived
+for more than half a century. He was used to being neglected by the
+people who ran after his younger colleague; and the attention paid him in
+asking him to be present on an important occasion, as he understood this
+to be, pleased him greatly. He smoothed his long white locks, and called
+a grand-daughter to help make him look fitly for such an occasion, and,
+being at last got into his grandest Sunday aspect, took his faithful
+staff, and set out with the two gentlemen for The Poplars. On the way,
+Mr. Penhallow explained to him the occasion of their visit, and the
+general character of the facts he had to announce. He wished the
+venerable minister to prepare Miss Silence Withers for a revelation which
+would materially change her future prospects. He thought it might be
+well, also, if he would say a few words to Myrtle Hazard, for whom a new
+life, with new and untried temptations, was about to open. His business
+was, as a lawyer, to make known to these parties the facts just come to
+his own knowledge affecting their interests. He had asked Mr. Gridley to
+go with him, as having intimate relations with one of the parties
+referred to, and as having been the principal agent in securing to that
+party the advantages which were to accrue to her from the new turn of
+events. "You are a second parent to her, Mr. Gridley," he said. "Your
+vigilance, your shrewdness, and your-spectacles have saved her. I hope
+she knows the full extent of her obligations to you, and that she will
+always look to you for counsel in all her needs. She will want a wise
+friend, for she is to begin the world anew."
+
+What had happened, when she saw the three grave gentlemen at the door
+early in the forenoon, Mistress Kitty Fagan could not guess. Something
+relating to Miss Myrtle, no doubt: she wasn't goin' to be married right
+off to Mr. Clement,--was she,--and no church, nor cake, nor anything?
+The gentlemen were shown into the parlor. "Ask Miss Withers to go into
+the library, Kitty," said Master Gridley. "Dr. Pemberton wishes to speak
+with her." The good old man was prepared for a scene with Miss Silence.
+He announced to her, in a kind and delicate way, that she must make up
+her mind to the disappointment of certain expectations which she had long
+entertained, and which, as her lawyer, Mr. Penhallow, had come to inform
+her and others, were to be finally relinquished from this hour.
+
+To his great surprise, Miss Silence received this communication almost
+cheerfully. It seemed more like a relief to her than anything else. Her
+one dread in this world was her "responsibility "; and the thought that
+she might have to account for ten talents hereafter, instead of one, had
+often of late been a positive distress to her. There was also in her mind
+a secret disgust at the thought of the hungry creatures who would swarm
+round her if she should ever be in a position to bestow patronage. This
+had grown upon her as the habits of lonely life gave her more and more of
+that fastidious dislike to males in general, as such, which is not rare
+in maidens who have seen the roses of more summers than politeness cares
+to mention.
+
+Father Pemberton then asked if he could see Miss Myrtle Hazard a few
+moments in the library before they went into the parlor, where they were
+to meet Mr. Penhallow and Mr. Gridley, for the purpose of receiving the
+lawyer's communication.
+
+What change was this which Myrtle had undergone since love had touched
+her heart, and her visions of worldly enjoyment had faded before the
+thought of sharing and ennobling the life of one who was worthy of her
+best affections,--of living for another, and of finding her own noblest
+self in that divine office of woman? She had laid aside the bracelet
+which she had so long worn as a kind of charm as well as an ornament.
+One would have said her features had lost something of that look of
+imperious beauty which had added to her resemblance to the dead woman
+whose glowing portrait hung upon her wall. And if it could be that,
+after so many generations, the blood of her who had died for her faith
+could show in her descendants veins, and the soul of that elect lady of
+her race look out from her far-removed offspring's dark eyes, such a
+transfusion of the martyr's life and spiritual being might well seem to
+manifest itself in Myrtle Hazard.
+
+The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human nature as
+he looked upon her face. He thought he saw in her the dawning of that
+grace which some are born with; which some, like Myrtle, only reach
+through many trials and dangers; which some seem to show for a while and
+then lose; which too many never reach while they wear the robes of earth,
+but which speaks of the kingdom of heaven already begun in the heart of a
+child of earth. He told her simply the story of the occurrences which
+had brought them together in the old house, with the message the lawyer
+was to deliver to its inmates. He wished to prepare her for what might
+have been too sudden a surprise.
+
+But Myrtle was not wholly unprepared for some such revelation. There was
+little danger that any such announcement would throw her mind from its
+balance after the inward conflict through which she had been passing.
+For her lover had left her almost as soon as he had told her the story of
+his passion, and the relation in which he stood to her. He, too, had
+gone to answer his country's call to her children, not driven away by
+crime and shame and despair, but quitting all--his new-born happiness,
+the art in which he was an enthusiast, his prospects of success and
+honor--to obey the higher command of duty. War was to him, as to so many
+of the noble youth who went forth, only organized barbarism, hateful but
+for the sacred cause which alone redeemed it from the curse that blasted
+the first murderer. God only knew the sacrifice such young men as he
+made.
+
+How brief Myrtle's dream had been! She almost doubted, at some moments,
+whether she would not awake from it, as from her other visions, and find
+it all unreal. There was no need of fearing any undue excitement of her
+mind after the alternations of feeling she had just experienced. Nothing
+seemed of much moment to her which could come from without,--her real
+world was within, and the light of its day and the breath of its life
+came from her love, made holy by the self-forgetfulness on both sides
+which was born with it.
+
+Only one member of the household was in danger of finding the excitement
+more than she could bear. Miss Cynthia knew that all Murray Bradshaw's
+plans, in which he had taken care that she should have a personal
+interest, had utterly failed. What he had done with the means of revenge
+in his power,--if, indeed, they were still in his power,--she did not
+know. She only knew that there had been a terrible scene, and that he
+had gone, leaving it uncertain whether he would ever return. It was with
+fear and trembling that she heard the summons which went forth, that the
+whole family should meet in the parlor to listen to a statement from Mr.
+Penhallow. They all gathered as requested, and sat round the room, with
+the exception of Mistress Kitty Fagan, who knew her place too well to be
+sittin' down with the likes o' them, and stood with attentive ears in the
+doorway.
+
+Mr. Penhallow then read from a printed paper the decision of the Supreme
+Court in the land case so long pending, where the estate of the late
+Malachi Withers was the claimant, against certain parties pretending to
+hold under an ancient grant. The decision was in favor of the estate.
+
+"This gives a great property to the heirs," Mr. Penhallow remarked, "and
+the question as to who these heirs are has to be opened. For the will
+under which Silence Withers, sister of the deceased, has inherited is
+dated some years previous to the decease, and it was not very strange
+that a will of later date should be discovered. Such a will has been
+discovered. It is the instrument I have here."
+
+Myrtle Hazard opened her eyes very widely, for the paper Mr. Penlallow
+held looked exactly like that which Murray Bradshaw had burned, and, what
+was curious, had some spots on it just like some she had noticed on that.
+
+"This will," Mr. Penhallow said, "signed by witnesses dead or absent from
+this place, makes a disposition of the testator's property in some
+respects similar to that of the previous one, but with a single change,
+which proves to be of very great importance."
+
+Mr. Penhallow proceeded to read the will. The important change in the
+disposition of the property was this: in case the land claim was decided
+in favor of the estate, then, in addition to the small provision made for
+Myrtle Hazard, the property so coming to the estate should all go to her.
+There was no question about the genuineness and the legal sufficiency of
+this instrument. Its date was not very long after the preceding one, at
+a period when, as was well known, he had almost given up the hope of
+gaining his case, and when the property was of little value compared to
+that which it had at present.
+
+A long silence followed this reading. Then, to the surprise of all, Miss
+Silence Withers rose, and went to Myrtle Hazard, and wished her joy with
+every appearance of sincerity. She was relieved of a great
+responsibility. Myrtle was young and could bear it better. She hoped
+that her young relative would live long to enjoy the blessings Providence
+had bestowed upon her, and to use them for the good of the community, and
+especially the promotion of the education of deserving youth. If some
+fitting person could be found to advise Myrtle, whose affairs would
+require much care, it would be a great relief to her.
+
+They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of
+fortune. Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed muster
+in the midst of the general excitement. As for Kitty Fagan, she could
+not say a word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as if it belonged
+to her own saint; and then, suddenly applying her apron to her eyes,
+retreated from a scene which was too much for her, in a state of complete
+mental beatitude and total bodily discomfiture.
+
+Then Silence asked the old minister to make a prayer, and he stretched
+his hands up to Heaven, and called down all the blessings of Providence
+upon all the household, and especially upon this young handmaiden, who
+was to be tried with prosperity, and would need all aid from above to
+keep her from its dangers.
+
+Then Mr. Penhallow asked Myrtle if she had any choice as to the friend
+who should have charge of her affairs. Myrtle turned to Master Byles
+Gridley, and said, "You have been my friend and protector so far, will
+you continue to be so hereafter?"
+
+Master Gridley tried very hard to begin a few words of thanks to her for
+her preference, but finding his voice a little uncertain, contented
+himself with pressing her hand and saying, "Most willingly, my dear
+daughter!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune came
+out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in marriage to Mr.
+Clement Lindsay. But her friends hardly knew how to congratulate her on
+this last event. Her lover was gone, to risk his life, not improbably to
+lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by wounds, or worn out with
+disease.
+
+Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of trial.
+They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's determination had
+nerved her for womanly endurance. They had not learned that a great
+cause makes great souls, or reveals them to themselves,--a lesson taught
+by so many noble examples in the times that followed. Myrtle's only
+desire seemed to be to labor in some way to help the soldiers and their
+families. She appeared to have forgotten everything for this duty; she
+had no time for regrets, if she were disposed to indulge them, and she
+hardly asked a question as to the extent of the fortune which had fallen
+to her.
+
+The next number of the "Banner and Oracle" contained two announcements
+which she read with some interest when her attention was called to them.
+They were as follows:
+
+"A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
+decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property estimated at
+a million of dollars or more. It consists of a large tract of land
+purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers, now become of
+immense value by the growth of a city in its neighborhood, the opening of
+mines, etc., etc. It is rumored that the lovely and highly educated
+heiress has formed a connection looking towards matrimony with a certain
+distinguished artist."
+
+"Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has
+been among the first to respond to the call of the country for champions
+to defend her from traitors. We understand that he has obtained a
+captaincy in the __th regiment, about to march to the threatened seat of
+war. May victory perch on his banners!"
+
+The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the very
+hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for the
+common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the camp
+and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the good
+women carried on at home, or wherever their services were needed.
+Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his first campaign
+charged with a special office. Some months later, after one of the great
+battles, he was sent home wounded. He wore the leaf on his shoulder
+which entitled him to be called Major Lindsay. He recovered from his
+wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle had visited him daily in the military
+hospital where he had resided for treatment; and it was bitter parting.
+The telegraph wires were thrilling almost hourly with messages of death,
+and the long pine boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking
+what they held.
+
+Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the eagle
+on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay. The lovers could not part
+again of their own free will. Some adventurous women had followed their
+husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she could play the part of
+the Maid of Saragossa on occasion. So Clement asked her if she would
+return with him as his wife; and Myrtle answered, with as much
+willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly show under such
+circumstances, that she would do his bidding. Thereupon, with the
+shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton was sent for, and the
+ceremony was performed in the presence of a few witnesses in the large
+parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with flowers, and hung round
+with all the portraits of the dead members of the family, summoned as
+witnesses to the celebration. One witness looked on with unmoved
+features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more heavenly smile on her faded
+lips than she had ever seen before beaming from the canvas,--it was Ann
+Holyoake, the martyr to her faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's
+visions, who seemed to breathe a holier benediction than any words--even
+those of the good old Father Pemberton himself--could convey.
+
+They went back together to the camp. From that period until the end of
+the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of
+the hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick
+and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be
+burned away. The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased. No
+lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene resolve which had grown
+strong by every exercise of its high prerogative. If she had been called
+now to die for any worthy cause, her race would have been ennobled by a
+second martyr, true to the blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.
+
+Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some
+months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten. An officer was brought
+into the ward where she was in attendance. "Shot through the
+lungs,--pretty nearly gone."
+
+She went softly to his bedside. He was breathing with great difficulty;
+his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she recognized him in
+a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain Bradshaw, as she knew by the
+bars on his coat flung upon the bed where he had just been laid.
+
+She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother; she
+saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would ever
+hear.
+
+He turned his glazing eyes upon her. "Who are you?" he said in a feeble
+voice.
+
+"An old friend," she answered; "you knew me as Myrtle Hazard."
+
+He started. "You by my bedside! You caring for me!--for me, that burned
+the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes! You can't forgive
+that,--I won't believe it! Don't you hate me, dying as I am?"
+
+Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
+countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down. "I have nothing to
+forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw. You may have meant to do me wrong, but
+Providence raised up a protector for me. The paper you burned was not
+the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--"
+
+"And did the old man outwit me after all?" he cried out, rising suddenly
+in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a few more
+gasps of breath. "I knew he was cunning, but I thought I was his match.
+It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else. And so the old man beat
+me after all, and saved you from ruin! Thank God that it came out so!
+Thank God! I can die now. Give me your hand, Myrtle."
+
+She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and he
+ceased to breathe. Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of trust
+and love in it than of systematized articles of belief. She cherished
+the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so miserably
+were a token of some blessed change which the influences of the better
+world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the sins and the
+weaknesses of his earthly career.
+
+Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp. From time to time
+they received stray copies of the "Banner and Oracle," which, to Myrtle
+especially, were full of interest, even to the last advertisement. A few
+paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate to persons who have
+figured in this narrative.
+
+ "TEMPLE OF HYMEN.
+
+"Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
+daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth. The editor of this paper returns
+his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-cake. May their
+shadows never be less!"
+
+Not many weeks after this appeared the following:
+
+"Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel Hurlbut,
+M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.
+
+"'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'"
+
+Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the tribute
+of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like his to call
+for any aching regret.
+
+The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the village
+paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and shocked by
+receiving a number containing the following paragraph:
+
+ CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT
+
+"It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house was
+struck by lightning about a month ago. The frame of the building was a
+good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended from the
+injury it had received. On Sunday last the congregation came together as
+usual. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit, the Rev. Doctor
+Pemberton having been detained by slight indisposition. The sermon was
+from the text, "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard
+shall lie down with the kid." (Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the
+millennium as--the reign of love and peace, in eloquent and impressive
+language. He was in the midst of the prayer which follows the sermon,
+and had jest put up a petition that the spirit of affection and faith and
+trust might grow up and prevail among the flock of which he was the
+shepherd, more especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his arm,
+and carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung
+safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which had
+fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with a loud
+crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its ruins. The
+scene that followed beggars description. Cries and shrieks resounded
+through the horse. Two or three young women fainted entirely away. Mr.
+Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward
+immediately, and after much effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the
+sounding-board, and extricating their unfortunate pastor. He was not
+fatally injured, it is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a
+violent blow upon the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower
+extremities is like to ensue. He is at present lying entirely helpless.
+Every attention is paid to him by his affectionately devoted family."
+
+Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this unfortunate
+occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the following
+pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent number of the
+village paper:
+
+ IMPOSING CEREMONY.
+
+"The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of baptism
+upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman, Gifted Hopkins,
+Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P. Hopkins, his amiable
+and respected lady. The babe conducted himself with singular propriety
+on this occasion. He received the Christian name of Byron Tennyson
+Browning. May be prove worthy of his name and his parentage!"
+
+The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
+unharmed survivors. He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and
+they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers, in
+the old family mansion. Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous
+allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she
+had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars. This was a
+convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them
+for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same
+roof keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old dame somewhat
+sharply remarked.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector, and,
+with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property she
+inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that, when
+Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt that at
+least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give himself to
+sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing by him to pinch
+the features of all his ideals, and give them something of her own
+likeness.
+
+Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
+responsibility. She embellished her spare person a little more than in
+former years. These young people looked so happy! Love was not so
+unendurable, perhaps, after all. No woman need despair,--especially if
+she has a house over her, and a snug little property. A worthy man, a
+former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and
+good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with
+the not insignificant, fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their
+mutual advantage. He came to the village, therefore, where Father
+Pemberton was very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of his
+unfortunate disabled colleague. The courtship soon began, and was brisk
+enough; for the good man knew there was no time to lose at his period of
+life,--or hers either, for that matter. It was a rather odd specimen of
+love-making; for he was constantly trying to subdue his features to a
+gravity which they were not used to, and she was as constantly
+endeavoring to be as lively as possible, with the innocent desire of
+pleasing her light-hearted suitor.
+
+"Vieille fille fait jeune mariee." Silence was ten years younger as a
+bride than she had seemed as a lone woman. One would have said she had
+got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some half a
+dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably cheerful
+conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the probable
+amount of his property, or the little slips he may have committed, and
+where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense sets the four
+waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-hour ago in the
+house of mourning. But Miss Silence, that was, thought that two
+families, with all the possible complications which time might bring,
+would be better in separate establishments. She therefore proposed
+selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and removing to a house in
+the village, which would be large enough for them, at least for the
+present. So the young folks bought the old house, and paid a mighty good
+price for it; and enlarged it, and beautified and glorified it, and one
+fine morning went together down to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence
+seemed in danger of being a little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with
+his Susan,--and what had happened might happen again,--and gave Master
+Byles Gridley a formal and most persuasively worded invitation to come up
+and make his home with them at The Poplars.
+
+Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
+weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are looking
+upon him almost for the last time before they part from him, and see his
+face no more. Let us not inquire too curiously, then, how he received
+this kind proposition. It is enough, that, when he found that a new
+study had been built on purpose for him, and a sleeping-room attached to
+it so that he could live there without disturbing anybody if he chose, he
+consented to remove there for a while, and that he was there established
+amidst great rejoicing.
+
+Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health. She found at last
+that she was going; and as she had a little property of her own,--as
+almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of it,--she was
+much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements to be made
+respecting its disposition. The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was one day surprised
+by a message, that she wished to have an interview with him. He rode
+over to the town in which she was residing, and there had a long
+conversation with her upon this matter. When this was settled, her mind
+seemed too be more at ease. She died with a comfortable assurance that
+she was going to a better world, and with a bitter conviction that it
+would be hard to find one that would offer her a worse lot than being a
+poor relation in this.
+
+Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
+Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes as
+they should elect, educational or other. Father Pemberton preached an
+admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her virtues, known to this
+people among whom she had long lived, and especially that crowning act by
+which she devoted all she had to purposes of charity-and benevolence.
+
+The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the misfortune
+of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor. He generally preached
+in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance of the people,--for the
+truth was that the honest minister who had married Miss Silence was not
+young enough or good-looking enough to be an object of personal
+attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, and the old minister
+appeared to great advantage contrasted with him in the pulpit. Poor Mr.
+Stoker was now helpless, faithfully and tenderly waited upon by his own
+wife, who had regained her health and strength,--in no small measure,
+perhaps, from the great need of sympathy and active aid which her
+unfortunate husband now experienced. It was an astonishment to herself
+when she found that she who had so long been served was able to serve
+another. Some who knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment;
+but others believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched
+him roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards
+her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to
+repentance and better thoughts. Bathsheba had long ago promised herself
+to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector of a parish
+in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.
+
+How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing! Clement
+loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength and fine
+humanity blended in them. He was so fascinated by their noble expression
+that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and looked at him more like
+an artist taking his portrait than like an admiring friend. He
+maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump of benevolence and as
+large a one of cautiousness as the two people most famous for the size of
+these organs on the phrenological chart he showed him, and proved it, or
+nearly proved it, by careful measurements of his head. Master Gridley
+laughed, and read him a passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.
+
+The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the village.
+Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the foundations of a public
+library. Others thought it should be applied for the relief of the
+families of soldiers who had fallen in the war. Still another set would
+take it to build a monument to the memory of those heroes. The trustees
+listened with the greatest candor to all these gratuitous hints. It was,
+however, suggested, in a well-written anonymous article which appeared in
+the village paper, that it was desirable to follow the general lead of
+the testator's apparent preference. The trustees were at liberty to do
+as they saw fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object
+should be selected.
+
+If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be very
+proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them. The
+trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion. Why not apply it to
+the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and promising
+children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs. Hopkins had cared
+for so long without any recompense, and at a cost which would soon become
+beyond her means? The good people of the neighborhood accepted this as
+the best solution of the difficulty. It was agreed upon at length by the
+trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam Fund for Educational Purposes should be
+applied for the benefit of the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and
+Helminthia Hopkins.
+
+Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two "preposterous
+names," as he called them, which in a moment of eccentric impulse he had
+given to these children of nature. He ventured to hint as much to Mrs.
+Hopkins. The good dame was vastly surprised. She thought they was about
+as pooty names as anybody had had given 'em in the village. And they was
+so handy, spoke short, Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to
+call 'em anything else.
+
+"But my dear Mrs. Hopkins," Master Gridley urged, "if you knew the
+meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did very
+wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures, and that
+I am bound to rectify my error. More than that, my dear madam, I mean to
+consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix upon proper and
+pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty legacy in my will to
+these interesting children."
+
+"Mr. Gridley," said Mrs. Hopkins, "you're the best man I ever see, or
+ever shall see, . . . except my poor dear Ammi . . . . I 'll do
+jest as you say about that, or about anything else in all this livin'
+world."
+
+"Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?"
+
+"Byles Gridley Hopkins!" she answered instantly.
+
+"Good Lord!" said Mr. Gridley, "think a minute, my dear madam. I will
+not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name that will
+not suggest quite so many winks and whispers."
+
+She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud, "Abraham
+Lincoln Hopkins."
+
+"Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past year,
+on a moderate computation."
+
+"Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything that
+you like. To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's the
+right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope they
+won't get that till they're a hundred year old!"
+
+"What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins? That means the
+gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather than a
+burden."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes. She was weeping.
+"Theodore!" she said, "Theodore! My little brother's name, that I buried
+when I was only eleven year old. Drownded. The dearest little child
+that ever you see. I have got his little mug with Theodore on it now.
+Kep' o' purpose. Our little Sossy shall have it. Theodore P.
+Hopkins,--sha'n't it be, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins? Theodore Parker, is
+it?"
+
+"Doesn't P. stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best man
+in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am. Now
+about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to call
+her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in naming one of
+the objects of her charity."
+
+"Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins," said the good woman triumphantly,--"is
+that what you mean?"
+
+"Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many. I think the
+general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of her two
+benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins."
+
+"Why, law! Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there
+ain't but one letter of difference! Poor Cynthy would be pleased if she
+could know that one of our babes was to be called after her. She was
+dreadful fond of children."
+
+On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely, the
+Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pembertan was summoned to officiate at three most
+interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of the
+latter a double one.
+
+The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between the
+Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named
+clergyman. He could not be present on account of his great infirmity,
+but the door of his chamber was left open that he might hear the marriage
+service performed. The old, white-haired minister, assisted, as the
+papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted the ceremony according
+to the Episcopal form. When he came to those solemn words in which the
+husband promises fidelity to the wife so long as they both shall live,
+the nurse, who was watching, near the poor father, saw him bury his face
+in his pillow, and heard him murmur the words, "God be merciful to me a
+sinner!"
+
+The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the old
+meeting-house. Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came in, and
+stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms. A slip of paper
+was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words were
+written:--"The name is Charles Hazard."
+
+The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
+disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of its
+consecration.
+
+Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the broad
+aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted Hopkins
+bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as Isosceles and
+Helminthia. They had been well schooled, and, as the mysterious and to
+them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted, maintained the most stoical
+aspect of tranquillity. In Mrs. Hopkins's words, "They looked like
+picters, and behaved like angels."
+
+That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of some
+few friends at The Poplars. It was such a great occasion that the
+Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was, strictly
+speaking, secular time,--were relaxed. Father Pemberton was there, and
+Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, with his
+son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her mother, now in
+comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband, Doctor Hurlbut and his
+wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her
+son and his wife (Susan Posey that was), the senior deacon of the old
+church (the admirer of the great Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the
+"Banner and Oracle," and in the background Nurse Byloe and the privileged
+servant, Mistress Kitty Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not
+mention.
+
+The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of two
+long services repaired by such simple refections as would not turn the
+holy day into a day of labor. A large paper copy of the new edition of
+Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table. He never looked
+so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller? In the course of the
+evening Clement spoke of the many trials through which they had passed in
+common with vast numbers of their countrymen, and some of those peculiar
+dangers which Myrtle had had to encounter in the course of a life more
+eventful, and attended with more risks, perhaps, than most of them
+imagined. But Myrtle, he said, had always been specially cared for. He
+wished them to look upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had
+been faithful to her in her gravest hours of trial and danger. If they
+would follow him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would
+have an opportunity to do so.
+
+Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest. They all ascended
+to the little projecting chamber, through the window of which her scarlet
+jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about on the river in those
+early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the name of the Fire-hang-bird's
+Nest.
+
+The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from which
+looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose continued
+presence with her descendants was the old family legend. But underneath
+it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some closely covered
+object upon it. It was a mysterious arrangement, made without any
+knowledge on her part.
+
+"Now, then, Kitty!" Mr. Lindsay said.
+
+Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward, and
+removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object. It was a lifelike
+marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?"
+Myrtle said.
+
+"Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?", he answered, smiling.
+
+Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
+forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel." forehead,
+saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A MORTAL ANTIPATHY
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+"A MORTAL ANTIPATHY" was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and
+very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he
+is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring to
+this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject." He did not explain
+himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the improbability of
+the, physiological or pathological occurrence on which the story is
+founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be rendered
+plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my readers,
+and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of
+extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character
+that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a
+narrative.
+
+I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not
+to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the
+reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured me
+that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable terror.
+While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall clocks had
+fallen with aloud crash and produced an impression on his nervous system
+which he had never got over.
+
+The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of
+hearing is conceivable enough.
+
+But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close relation
+with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the
+associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves, the
+olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and as
+related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as every
+other living organism, carries its own distinguishing atmosphere. If a
+man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and can track him anywhere
+by it. This personal peculiarity varies with the age and conditions of
+the individual. It may be agreeable or otherwise, a source of attraction
+or repulsion, but its influence is not less real, though far less obvious
+and less dominant, than in the lower animals. It was an atmospheric
+impression of this nature which associated itself with a terrible shock
+experienced by the infant which became the subject of this story. The
+impression could not be outgrown, but it might possibly be broken up by
+some sudden change in the nervous system effected by a cause as potent as
+the one which had produced the disordered condition.
+
+This is the best key that I can furnish to a story which must have
+puzzled some, repelled others, and failed to interest many who did not
+suspect the true cause of the mysterious antipathy.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August, 1891.
+O. W. H.
+
+
+
+
+A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
+
+FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+"And why the New Portfolio, I would ask?"
+
+Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in
+which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly
+spoken of as a baby? Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under all
+conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of as the
+baby? And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly spoken of as
+a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if there were no
+other in existence?
+
+Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my new-born
+thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully and show them to
+callers, namely, to the whole family of readers belonging to my list of
+intimates, and such other friends as may drop in by accident. And so it
+shall have the definite article, and not be lost in the mob of its
+fellows as a portfolio.
+
+There are a few personal and incidental matters of which I wish to say
+something before reaching the contents of the Portfolio, whatever these
+may be. I have had other portfolios before this,--two, more especially,
+and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to these.
+
+Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell you
+that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak, was
+opened more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous confession,
+for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned, without giving
+it the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred years, now, my
+readers would accept all I had to tell them with a curious interest; but
+fifty years ago,--there are too many talkative old people who know all
+about that time, and at best half a century is a half-baked bit of ware.
+A coin-fancier would say that your fifty-year-old facts have just enough
+of antiquity to spot them with rust, and not enough to give them--the
+delicate and durable patina which is time's exquisite enamel.
+
+When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its
+legend,--or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers could
+have had their way,--Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp. Caesar. Aug.
+Div., Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or silver with
+that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly acquainted with
+the precious metals at that period of my career, and, there might have
+been a good deal of such coin in circulation without my handling it, or
+knowing much about it.
+
+Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.
+
+In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of
+attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our
+first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the
+comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in
+that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.
+
+How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in
+the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in
+it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait
+of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated
+gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like gentlemen and ladies,
+too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and
+Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women,
+not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable
+rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival
+landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in
+those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal Soup's collection; and the
+portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a
+hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense and
+dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's
+coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing;
+and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with
+the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the
+Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or
+criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in
+those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned
+fish-horns?
+
+If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the
+Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in
+which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous
+Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary
+butterflies. The father was editor of the "Boston Recorder," a very
+respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by
+that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of
+the week as "the Sahbuth." The son was the editor of several different
+periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of
+many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he
+studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with a
+certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat
+frothed over by his worldly experiences.
+
+Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first
+Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published
+in his father's paper, I think, and signed "Roy." He had started the
+"American Magazine," afterwards merged in the "New York Mirror." He had
+then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of
+verse. He had just written
+
+ "I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two,
+ They idly give me joy,
+ As if I should be glad to know
+ That I was less a boy."
+
+He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being
+very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in
+luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to
+show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance. He was
+something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of
+Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture
+of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful young man, who had
+kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded
+me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared
+with the ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but
+the fresh-cheecked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded
+out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me at this
+moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of
+Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year
+1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young
+American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all
+done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a
+school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his
+way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was
+destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which
+have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books
+depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the
+orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's Thanatopsis,
+his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers, Halleck's Marco
+Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American Flag, and Percival's
+Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,--and not getting
+very wide awake, either. These could be depended upon. A few other
+copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's "Columbia, Columbia," and
+Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the
+favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave
+which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are
+legible.
+
+About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled
+"Truth, a Gift for Scribblers," which made some talk for a while, and is
+now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read
+the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The
+"London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described as a "tomahawk
+sort of satire." As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was
+familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners.
+Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West
+Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an
+article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review," and another on
+the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned article he
+tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was an
+incident of a fight with the Osages.
+
+"Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the
+scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously
+upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance
+through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my
+father. He said nothing, but looked pleased."
+
+This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of literary
+warfare. His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very
+much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the Osage. He tomahawked him
+in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous
+epigrams. Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one
+else escaped.
+
+If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating,
+some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find
+in the pages of "Truth" a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard
+of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the
+little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read
+the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing
+in spite of Mr. Spelling's exterminating onslaught. Time dealt as hardly
+with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had
+dealt with our authors. I think he found shelter at last under a roof
+which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of
+whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its
+friendly and not exclusive precincts. Such, at least, was the story I
+heard after he disappeared from general observation.
+
+That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all
+that class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel
+engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising
+establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,--to manifestations of
+this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years.
+The "Scarlet Letter" was an unhinted possibility. The "Voices of the
+Night" had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still
+in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes,
+which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk
+into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a
+scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.
+
+What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations, floating
+in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other
+in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any
+against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the
+small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use. His
+attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little
+discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with
+it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble writer
+Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or
+equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three survivors
+before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the
+Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey, an
+American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at fame," which must
+have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify
+him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not
+wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable
+writer of light verse,--all these are commended to the keeping of that
+venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load
+that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making
+a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept
+in sight.
+
+It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood
+written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship I
+had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen
+literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with demolition;
+a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked
+hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first
+Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the
+duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought which
+would have been otherwise expended in filling it.
+
+During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for the
+greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and
+opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
+particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a
+member.
+
+In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I had
+the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips &
+Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought
+that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which would be not
+unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle,
+which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness,
+and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome the
+new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the least provincial of
+American centres of learning and letters. The gilded covering where the
+emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so bright had faded; not
+wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become dim!---how was the most fine
+gold changed! Long devotion to other pursuits had left little time for
+literature, and the waifs and strays gathered from the old Portfolio had
+done little more than keep alive the memory that such a source of supply
+was still in existence. I looked at the old Portfolio, and said to
+myself, "Too late! too late. This tarnished gold will never brighten,
+these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and
+leave them to the spider and the book-worm."
+
+In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had
+condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period. When,
+a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the "Saturday
+Club" gathered about the long table at "Parker's," such a representation
+of all that was best in American literature had never been collected
+within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom educated
+foreigners cared to see-leaving out of consideration official
+dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects of
+curiosity--were seated at that board. But the club did not yet exist,
+and the "Atlantic Monthly" was an experiment. There had already been
+several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and permanent, among
+which "Putnam's Magazine" was conspicuous, owing its success largely to
+the contributions of that very accomplished and delightful writer, Mr.
+George William Curtis. That magazine, after a somewhat prolonged and
+very honorable existence, had gone where all periodicals go when they
+die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind recording angel whose
+name is Oblivion. It had so well deserved to live that its death was a
+surprise and a source of regret. Could another monthly take its place
+and keep it when that, with all its attractions and excellences, had died
+out, and left a blank in our periodical literature which it would be very
+hard to fill as well as that had filled it?
+
+This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured upon,
+and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the
+scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other
+studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my
+becoming a contributor. And so, yielding to a pressure which I could not
+understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a
+part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the
+new magazine.
+
+That was the way in which the second Portfolio found its way to my table,
+and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857. I was already at
+least
+
+ 'Nel mezzo del cammin di mia, vita,'
+
+when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of what
+looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did not
+meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the most
+dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me after his own fashion.
+
+The second Portfolio is closed and laid away. Perhaps it was hardly
+worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before me,
+and I hope I may find something between its covers which will justify me
+in coming once more before my old friends. But before I open it I want
+to claim a little further indulgence.
+
+There is a subject of profound interest to almost every writer, I might
+say to almost every human being. No matter what his culture or
+ignorance, no matter what his pursuit, no matter what his character, the
+subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think, and, if
+opportunity is offered, to talk. On this he is eloquent, if on nothing
+else. The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid listener becomes
+electric with vivacity, and alive all over with interest.
+
+The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude. He is
+accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who has a
+subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the depressing
+disclosure of his real errand. He is not unacquainted with the
+conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting stranger, who,
+having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in the cars, or of
+having his pocket picked at the station, finds himself without the means
+of reaching that distant home where affluence waits for him with its
+luxurious welcome, but to whom for the moment the loan of some five and
+twenty dollars would be a convenience and a favor for which his heart
+would ache with gratitude during the brief interval between the loan and
+its repayment.
+
+I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages in
+my own history, and more especially to some of the recent experiences
+through which I have been passing.
+
+What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as if it
+were his private correspondent? There are at least three sufficient
+reasons: first, if he has a story to tell that everybody wants to
+hear,--if he has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle, or has
+witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new about it;
+secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common experiences not
+already well told, so that readers will say, "Why, yes! I have had that
+sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times, but I never heard it spoken
+of before, and I never saw any mention of it in print;" and thirdly,
+anything one likes, provided he can so tell it as to make it interesting.
+
+I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself claim
+any general attention. My first pages relate the effect of a certain
+literary experience upon myself,--a series of partial metempsychoses of
+which I have been the subject. Next follows a brief tribute to the
+memory of a very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been
+parted. The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory
+of my birthplace.
+
+I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is
+written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is in
+the reader's hands. The experience of thinking another man's thoughts
+continuously for a long time; of living one's self into another man's
+life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one. No matter
+how much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who
+writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the
+person whose life he is writing. One cannot fight over the battles of
+Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself had
+a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his
+personality into that of the conqueror while he reads. Still more must
+this identification of "subject" and "object" take place when one is
+writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.
+
+Here are some of my metempsychoses: Ten years ago I wrote what I called A
+Memorial Outline of a remarkable student of nature. He was a born
+observer, and such are far from common. He was also a man of great
+enthusiasm and unwearying industry. His quick eye detected what others
+passed by without notice: the Indian relic, where another would see only
+pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his companion
+would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a prize at the
+end of it. Getting his single facts together with marvellous sagacity
+and long-breathed patience, he arranged them, classified them, described
+them, studied them in their relations, and before those around him were
+aware of it the collector was an accomplished naturalist. When--he died
+his collections remained, and they still remain, as his record in the
+hieratic language of science. In writing this memoir the spirit of his
+quiet pursuits, the even temper they bred in him, gained possession of my
+own mind, so that I seemed to look at nature through his gold-bowed
+spectacles, and to move about his beautifully ordered museum as if I had
+myself prepared and arranged its specimens. I felt wise with his wisdom,
+fair-minded with his calm impartiality; it seemed as if for the time his
+placid, observant, inquiring, keen-sighted nature "slid into my soul,"
+and if I had looked at myself in the glass I should almost have expected
+to see the image of the Hersey professor whose life and character I was
+sketching.
+
+A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing a
+Memoir of which he was the subject. I saw him, the beautiful,
+bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first at
+Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of
+Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist, and
+showing the elements which made his failures the promise of success in a
+larger field of literary labor; the delving historian, burying his fresh
+young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries, to come forth in
+the face of Europe and America as one of the leading historians of the
+time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating presence and manners,
+an ardent American, and in the time of trial an impassioned and eloquent
+advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching at last the summit of his
+ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James. All this I seemed to
+share with him as I tracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester,
+and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood, to the
+palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which struck him
+from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his later
+years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger, and after
+a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his most intimate
+daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own
+consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer itself into this
+brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record? I, too, seemed
+to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were my own, the
+charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared his
+heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social triumphs, I was
+honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him, I was
+wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with him in his
+sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his memory, I
+felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so long as my
+self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.
+
+The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships
+I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being.
+Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent
+member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long
+period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a
+work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the
+subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal
+disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were
+not supplied with food from without, he determined to write a treatise on
+a subject which had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to
+bestow much of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out
+to finish the work. During the period while he was engaged in writing
+it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of
+pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of death at
+a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to conceive a
+more terrible strain than that which he had to endure. When, in the hour
+of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the wife of many years of
+happy union, whose hand had smoothed his pillow, whose voice had consoled
+and cheered him, was torn from him after a few days of illness, I felt
+that my, friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many
+afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips: "I was
+at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck
+and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass
+me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he
+poureth out my gall upon the ground."
+
+I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow.
+What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful
+description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly! We have
+been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller, watching his
+faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard the words of pious
+resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison:
+but here was a trial, not of hours, or days, or weeks, but of months,
+even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst of its thick darkness the
+light of love, which had burned steadily at his bedside, was suddenly
+extinguished.
+
+There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my
+consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful
+experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of
+suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to kill
+in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking woes which
+make even that brief space of time an eternity? There can be but one
+answer that will meet this terrible question, which must arise in every
+thinking nature that would fain "justify the ways of God to men." So
+must it be until that
+
+ "one far-off divine event
+ To which the whole creation moves"
+
+has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant note
+shall be joined by a voice from every life made "perfect through
+sufferings."
+
+Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of
+companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which
+I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.
+
+And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy
+with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was
+here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a task I
+had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or almost
+all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and whom
+very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so
+forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper
+editor,--that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of
+other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been
+said of "transcendentalism" and of him who was regarded as its prophet;
+of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or
+thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and
+admired,--among these there being not a small number who went far beyond
+admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him
+as "the greatest man that ever lived," another, a friend, famous in the
+world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of
+overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American
+Montaigne, and nothing more.
+
+After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would
+gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought
+which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and
+the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle
+of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of
+prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity
+of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not
+ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline
+intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long
+before they were due,--all this made the task a grave one. But when I
+found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering
+judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from
+under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill;
+the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical,
+estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they
+whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very
+difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.
+
+It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a
+man. "He nothing common" said, "or mean." He was always the same pure
+and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural
+to man as its opposite did according to the old theologies. But how to
+let one's self down from the high level of such a character to one's own
+poor standard? I trust that the influence of this long intellectual and
+spiritual companionship never absolutely leaves one who has lived in it.
+It may come to him in the form of self-reproach that he falls so far
+short of the superior being who has been so long the object of his
+contemplation. But it also carries him at times into the other's
+personality, so that he finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his
+own, using phrases which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may
+be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting
+was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that
+he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far
+as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of
+the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune
+for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble
+thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant
+soul,--this is indeed the highest form of teaching and discipline.
+
+I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they
+have taught me. But let me write no more. There are but two biographers
+who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person
+himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer
+cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though he may tell nothing but
+the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets his book go out of his own
+hands. As for myself, I would say to my friends, in the Oriental phrase,
+"Live forever!" Yes, live forever, and I, at least, shall not have to
+wrong your memories by my imperfect record and unsatisfying commentary.
+
+In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in which
+I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will indulge me
+in another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored
+contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December
+13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel
+Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English
+biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm
+was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when
+those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth,
+August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great pre-contemporary
+entered this un-Christian universe and was made a member of the Christian
+church on the same day, for he was born and baptized on the 18th of
+September.
+
+Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great
+English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost month by
+month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last
+century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what
+Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing;
+what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in
+his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. It
+was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that
+old familiar air, "Life,"--one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an
+oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace
+with each other until the players both grew old and gray. At last the
+thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment
+rolls out its thunder no more.
+
+I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has
+left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many
+of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know him. I
+can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr.
+Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,--he
+hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too,
+I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and
+beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in
+front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence,
+involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the
+strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the
+massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear
+him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened
+to make room for his portly figure. "A fine day," says Sir Joshua.
+"Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and
+the skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles, shifts his
+trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.
+
+Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
+eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
+between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and
+dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the
+snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the
+shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the
+Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what
+I shall find when it is opened.
+
+Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear
+old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next
+Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find
+myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.
+
+Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has
+been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house,
+precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war
+of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my
+boyhood.
+
+The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer. I remember saying
+something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
+experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the soul
+dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house
+itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who
+has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him in
+dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real, I
+say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must
+outlast its perishing frame.
+
+The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit, a
+case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored by all
+who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are obliterated
+some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took the first steps
+in the long and bloody march which led us through the wilderness to the
+promised land of independent nationality. Personally, I have a right to
+mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My private grief for its
+loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion, were it not that the
+experience through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my
+fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections and feelings, I am
+repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the
+misfortune to outlive their birthplace.
+
+It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The
+Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural
+objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and
+some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a
+century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and
+the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view.
+But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common, beyond which
+the historical "Washington elm" and two companions in line with it,
+spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And far away
+rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and there of
+the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered,
+half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier
+remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails
+gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible.
+So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to
+wander over.
+
+I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us all
+our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their
+fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window,
+across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of
+my early visions. The "clouds of glory" which we trail with us in after
+life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account
+for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we
+have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months in
+which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in
+sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving "before the
+letter." I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not
+passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and
+unsympathetic pavement.
+
+Our university town was very much like the real country, in those days of
+which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries
+within half a mile of the house. Blackberries ripened in the fields,
+acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among the
+branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over the
+barnyard. Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form of
+that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good half
+mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively
+agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre
+has an unenviable reputation. I need not name the animal whose Parthian
+warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever
+roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert.
+Strange as it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far
+distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender
+reflections. A whole neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with its
+haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our
+apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis;
+the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism
+that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old
+outhouse, with the "corn-chamber" which the mice knew so well; the paved
+yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the hint
+of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more
+familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was that
+quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust.
+It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of
+the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder;
+the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,--the
+straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if
+it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that
+mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen
+to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men
+and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose
+parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"
+
+How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!
+From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of the
+family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much more
+than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of a hot
+summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could
+not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to
+the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too
+clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious,
+rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles
+and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge
+bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other
+exercises of the customary character,--after all this in the forenoon,
+the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as
+much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in
+Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years. It
+takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us,
+for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface. Who knows but
+that, after a certain number of ages, the planet we live on may seem to
+us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the
+sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb
+and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it
+from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned,
+puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud
+christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration,
+or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe?
+When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid
+of these accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute,
+does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the
+blackamoor by a similar proceeding? For space is the fluid in which he
+is washing, and time is the soap which he is using up in the process, and
+he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself in a mental
+vacuum.
+
+In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago,
+I said,
+
+"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself on
+this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so
+tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those
+who cherished them."
+
+What strides the great University has taken since those words were
+written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still
+and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once,
+like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall
+of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus
+played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and
+the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few
+plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my
+school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices which
+have sprung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble
+structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the
+portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.
+
+For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it. I
+have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has
+cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,--if I have
+overcome them, which others must decide. And I feel exactly as honest
+Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long journey with a
+good deal of up-hill work. He wants to rest a little, then to feed a
+little; then, if you will turn him loose in the pasture, he wants to
+roll. I have left my starry and ethereal companionship,--not for a long
+time, I hope, for it has lifted me above my common self, but for a while.
+And now I want, so to speak, to roll in the grass and among the
+dandelions with the other pachyderms. So I have kept to the outside of
+the portfolio as yet, and am disporting myself in reminiscences, and
+fancies, and vagaries, and parentheses.
+
+How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their
+vessels with earth from the Holy Land, and fill the area of the Campo
+Santo with that sacred soil! The old house stood upon about as perverse
+a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm.
+It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus. The rustic
+aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters
+"leached" through it. I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it
+with the best of terrestrial nourishment, until I became convinced that I
+was feeding the tea-plants of China, and then I gave over the attempt.
+And yet I did love, and do love, that arid patch of ground. I wonder if
+a single flower could not be made to grow in a pot of earth from that
+Campo Santo of my childhood! One noble product of nature did not refuse
+to flourish there,--the tall, stately, beautiful, soft-haired,
+many-jointed, generous maize or Indian corn, which thrives on sand and
+defies the blaze of our shrivelling summer. What child but loves to
+wander in its forest-like depths, amidst the rustling leaves and with the
+lofty tassels tossing their heads high above him! There are two aspects
+of the cornfield which always impress my imagination: the first when it
+has reached its full growth, and its ordered ranks look like an army on
+the march with its plumed and bannered battalions; the second when, after
+the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the field of
+slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,--say rather like the crazy widows
+and daughters of the dead soldiery.
+
+Once more let us come back to the old house. It was far along in its
+second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.
+
+The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human
+tenants. The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age.
+Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards
+that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or
+the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the
+floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale
+off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop
+from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl
+their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last
+there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had
+been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its
+own cellar. Only the chimney remains as its monument. Slowly, little by
+little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their
+chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty
+wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic
+crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived. So dies a human
+habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of
+the soil sinking gradually below it,
+
+ Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
+ Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.
+
+But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall
+by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept
+out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork,
+the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the
+progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and
+flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed
+and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of
+destruction it seems!
+
+Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it
+more than ten years ago? Alas! how many remember anything they read but
+once, and so long ago as that? How many would find it out if one should
+say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade? But
+there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be
+found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which
+it occupies the opening chapter.
+
+In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me
+remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the
+breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's
+Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the
+floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the butts
+of the soldiers' muskets. In that house, too, General Warren probably
+passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its threshold
+must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its shadow.
+
+But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day
+came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little
+universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity,
+with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable
+existence,--that house does not ask for any historical associations to
+make it the centre of the earth for him.
+
+If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who is
+born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions and the
+means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to his own
+taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic features which
+surrounded his earliest years. The American is, for the most part, a
+nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls up his tent-poles.
+If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would be something like this:
+
+His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained, large-hearted
+country minister, from whom he should inherit the temperament that
+predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the finer instincts which
+direct life to noble aims and make it rich with the gratification of pure
+and elevated tastes and the carrying out of plans for the good of his
+neighbors and his fellow-creatures. He should, if possible, have been
+born, at any rate have passed some of his early years, or a large part of
+them, under the roof of the good old minister. His father should be, we
+will say, a business man in one of our great cities,--a generous
+manipulator of millions, some of which have adhered to his private
+fortunes, in spite of his liberal use of his means. His heir, our
+ideally placed American, shall take possession of the old house, the home
+of his earliest memories, and preserve it sacredly, not exactly like the
+Santa Casa, but, as nearly as may be, just as he remembers it. He can
+add as many acres as he will to the narrow house-lot. He can build a
+grand mansion for himself, if he chooses, in the not distant
+neighborhood. But the old house, and all immediately round it, shall be
+as he recollects it when he had to stretch his little arm up to reach the
+door-handles. Then, having well provided for his own household, himself
+included, let him become the providence of the village or the town where
+he finds himself during at least a portion of every year. Its schools,
+its library, its poor,--and perhaps the new clergyman who has succeeded
+his grandfather's successor may be one of them,--all its interests, he
+shall make his own. And from this centre his beneficence shall radiate
+so far that all who hear of his wealth shall also hear of him as a friend
+to his race.
+
+Is not this a pleasing programme? Wealth is a steep hill, which the
+father climbs slowly and the son often tumbles down precipitately; but
+there is a table-land on a level with it, which may be found by those who
+do not lose their head in looking down from its sharply cloven
+summit.---Our dangerously rich men can make themselves hated, held as
+enemies of the race, or beloved and recognized as its benefactors. The
+clouds of discontent are threatening, but if the gold-pointed
+lightning-rods are rightly distributed the destructive element may be
+drawn off silently and harmlessly. For it cannot be repeated too often
+that the safety of great wealth with us lies in obedience to the new
+version of the Old World axiom, RICHESS oblige.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.
+
+
+
+
+A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
+I
+GETTING READY.
+
+It is impossible to begin a story which must of necessity tax the powers
+of belief of readers unacquainted with the class of facts to which its
+central point of interest belongs without some words in the nature of
+preparation. Readers of Charles Lamb remember that Sarah Battle insisted
+on a clean-swept hearth before sitting down to her favorite game of
+whist.
+
+The narrator wishes to sweep the hearth, as it were, in these opening
+pages, before sitting down to tell his story. He does not intend to
+frighten the reader away by prolix explanation, but he does mean to warn
+him against hasty judgments when facts are related which are not within
+the range of every-day experience. Did he ever see the Siamese twins, or
+any pair like them? Probably not, yet he feels sure that Chang and Eng
+really existed; and if he has taken the trouble to inquire, he has
+satisfied himself that similar cases have been recorded by credible
+witnesses, though at long intervals and in countries far apart from each
+other.
+
+This is the first sweep of the brush, to clear the hearth of the
+skepticism and incredulity which must be got out of the way before we can
+begin to tell and to listen in peace with ourselves and each other.
+
+One more stroke of the brush is needed before the stage will be ready for
+the chief characters and the leading circumstances to which the reader's
+attention is invited. If the principal personages made their entrance at
+once, the reader would have to create for himself the whole scenery of
+their surrounding conditions. In point of fact, no matter how a story is
+begun, many of its readers have already shaped its chief actors out of
+any hint the author may have dropped, and provided from their own
+resources a locality and a set of outward conditions to environ these
+imagined personalities. These are all to be brushed away, and the actual
+surroundings of the subject of the narrative represented as they were, at
+the risk of detaining the reader a little while from the events most
+likely to interest him. The choicest egg that ever was laid was not so
+big as the nest that held it. If a story were so interesting that a
+maiden would rather hear it than listen to the praise of her own beauty,
+or a poet would rather read it than recite his own verses, still it would
+have to be wrapped in some tissue of circumstance, or it would lose half
+its effectiveness.
+
+It may not be easy to find the exact locality referred to in this
+narrative by looking into the first gazetteer that is at hand. Recent
+experiences have shown that it is unsafe to be too exact in designating
+places and the people who live in them. There are, it may be added, so
+many advertisements disguised under the form of stories and other
+literary productions that one naturally desires to avoid the suspicion of
+being employed by the enterprising proprietors of this or that celebrated
+resort to use his gifts for their especial benefit. There are no doubt
+many persons who remember the old sign and the old tavern and its four
+chief personages presently to be mentioned. It is to be hoped that they
+will not furnish the public with a key to this narrative, and perhaps
+bring trouble to the writer of it, as has happened to other authors. If
+the real names are a little altered, it need not interfere with the
+important facts relating to those who bear them. It might not be safe to
+tell a damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if the slight
+change is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would never think
+of bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of them. The
+same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a p from the
+Thomsons without that letter.
+
+There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer
+residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by the
+name of Arrowhead Village. The Indians had found it out, as the relics
+they left behind them abundantly testified. The commonest of these were
+those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism, and from Which
+the place took its name,--the heads of arrows, of various sizes,
+material, and patterns: some small enough for killing fish and little
+birds, some large enough for such game as the moose and the bear, to say
+nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now
+and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper.
+The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have
+been a kind of factory village of the stone age,--which lasted up to near
+the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these relics
+are met with close to the surface of the ground.
+
+No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one of
+the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed, that
+those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the swarms
+of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it for itself,
+and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural cockneyism.
+
+There is the lake, in the first place,--Cedar Lake,--about five miles
+long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching from
+north to south. Near the northern extremity are the buildings of
+Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious name,
+but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the water.
+At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the Corinna
+Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large numbers of the
+daughters of America are fitted, so far as education can do it, for all
+stations in life, from camping out with a husband at the mines in Nevada
+to acting the part of chief lady of the land in the White House at
+Washington.
+
+Midway between the two extremities, on the eastern shore of the lake, is
+a valley between two hills, which come down to the very edge of the lake,
+leaving only room enough for a road between their base and the water.
+This valley, half a mile in width, has been long settled, and here for a
+century or more has stood the old Anchor Tavern. A famous place it was
+so long as its sign swung at the side of the road: famous for its
+landlord, portly, paternal, whose welcome to a guest that looked worthy
+of the attention was like that of a parent to a returning prodigal, and
+whose parting words were almost as good as a marriage benediction; famous
+for its landlady, ample in person, motherly, seeing to the whole
+household with her own eyes, mistress of all culinary secrets that
+Northern kitchens are most proud of; famous also for its ancient servant,
+as city people would call her,--help, as she was called in the tavern
+and would have called herself,--the unchanging, seemingly immortal
+Miranda, who cared for the guests as if she were their nursing mother,
+and pressed the specially favorite delicacies on their attention as a
+connoisseur calls the wandering eyes of an amateur to the beauties of a
+picture. Who that has ever been at the old Anchor Tavern forgets
+Miranda's
+
+ "A little of this fricassee?-it is ver-y nice;"
+
+or
+
+ "Some of these cakes? You will find them ver-y good."
+
+Nor would it be just to memory to forget that other notable and noted
+member of the household,--the unsleeping, unresting, omnipresent Pushee,
+ready for everybody and everything, everywhere within the limits of the
+establishment at all hours of the day and night. He fed, nobody could
+say accurately when or where. There were rumors of a "bunk," in which he
+lay down with his clothes on, but he seemed to be always wide awake, and
+at the service of as many guest, at once as if there had been half a
+dozen of him.
+
+So much for old reminiscences.
+
+The landlord of the Anchor Tavern had taken down his sign. He had had
+the house thoroughly renovated and furnished it anew, and kept it open in
+summer for a few boarders. It happened more than once that the summer
+boarders were so much pleased with the place that they stayed on through
+the autumn, and some of them through the winter. The attractions of the
+village were really remarkable. Boating in summer, and skating in
+winter; ice-boats, too, which the wild ducks could hardly keep up with;
+fishing, for which the lake was renowned; varied and beautiful walks
+through the valley and up the hillsides; houses sheltered from the north
+and northeasterly winds, and refreshed in the hot summer days by the
+breeze which came over the water,--all this made the frame for a pleasing
+picture of rest and happiness. But there was a great deal more than
+this. There was a fine library in the little village, presented and
+richly endowed by a wealthy native of the place. There was a small
+permanent population of a superior character to that of an everyday
+country town; there was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a
+good-hearted rector, broad enough for the Bishop of the diocese to be a
+little afraid of, and hospitable to all outsiders, of whom, in the summer
+season, there were always some who wanted a place of worship to keep
+their religion from dying out during the heathen months, while the
+shepherds of the flocks to which they belonged were away from their empty
+folds.
+
+What most helped to keep the place alive all through the year was the
+frequent coming together of the members of a certain literary
+association. Some time before the tavern took down its sign the landlord
+had built a hall, where many a ball had been held, to which the young
+folks of all the country round had resorted. It was still sometimes used
+for similar occasions, but it was especially notable as being the place
+of meeting of the famous PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
+
+This association, the name of which might be invidiously interpreted as
+signifying that its members knew everything, had no such pretensions,
+but, as its Constitution said very plainly and modestly, held itself open
+to accept knowledge on any and all subjects from such as had knowledge to
+impart. Its President was the rector of the little chapel, a man who, in
+spite of the Thirty-Nine Articles, could stand fire from the
+widest-mouthed heretical blunderbuss without flinching or losing his
+temper. The hall of the old Anchor Tavern was a convenient place of
+meeting for the students and instructors of the University and the
+Institute. Sometimes in boat-loads, sometimes in carriage-loads,
+sometimes in processions of skaters, they came to the meetings in
+Pansophian Hall, as it was now commonly called.
+
+These meetings had grown to be occasions of great interest. It was
+customary to have papers written by members of the Society, for the most
+part, but now and then by friends of the members, sometimes by the
+students of the College or the Institute, and in rarer instances by
+anonymous personages, whose papers, having been looked over and discussed
+by the Committee appointed for that purpose, were thought worth listening
+to. The variety of topics considered was very great. The young ladies of
+the village and the Institute had their favorite subjects, the young
+gentlemen a different set of topics, and the occasional outside
+contributors their own; so that one who happened to be admitted to a
+meeting never knew whether he was going to hear an account of recent
+arctic discoveries, or an essay on the freedom of the will, or a
+psychological experience, or a story, or even a poem.
+
+Of late there had been a tendency to discuss the questions relating to
+the true status and the legitimate social functions of woman. The most
+conflicting views were held on the subject. Many of the young ladies and
+some of the University students were strong in defence of all the
+"woman's rights" doctrines. Some of these young people were extreme in
+their views. They had read about Semiramis and Boadicea and Queen
+Elizabeth, until they were ready, if they could get the chance, to vote
+for a woman as President of the United States or as General of the United
+States Army. They were even disposed to assert the physical equality of
+woman to man, on the strength of the rather questionable history of the
+Amazons, and especially of the story, believed to be authentic, of the
+female body-guard of the King of Dahomey,--females frightful enough to
+need no other weapon than their looks to scare off an army of Cossacks.
+
+Miss Lurida Vincent, gold medallist of her year at the Corinna Institute,
+was the leader of these advocates of virile womanhood. It was rather
+singular that she should have elected to be the apostle of this extreme
+doctrine, for she was herself far better equipped with brain than
+muscles. In fact, she was a large-headed, large-eyed, long-eyelashed,
+slender-necked, slightly developed young woman; looking almost like a
+child at an age when many of the girls had reached their full stature and
+proportions. In her studies she was so far in advance of her different
+classes that there was always a wide gap between her and the second
+scholar. So fatal to all rivalry had she proved herself that she passed
+under the school name of The Terror. She learned so easily that she
+undervalued her own extraordinary gifts, and felt the deepest admiration
+for those of her friends endowed with faculties of an entirely different
+and almost opposite nature. After sitting at her desk until her head was
+hot and her feet were like ice, she would go and look at the blooming
+young girls exercising in the gymnasium of the school, and feel as if she
+would give all her knowledge, all her mathematics and strange tongues and
+history, all those accomplishments that made her the encyclopaedia of
+every class she belonged to, if she could go through the series of
+difficult and graceful exercises in which she saw her schoolmates
+delighting.
+
+One among them, especially, was the object of her admiration, as she was
+of all who knew her exceptional powers in the line for which nature had
+specially organized her. All the physical perfections which Miss Lurida
+had missed had been united in Miss Euthymia Tower, whose school name was
+The Wonder. Though of full womanly stature, there were several taller
+girls of her age. While all her contours and all her movements betrayed
+a fine muscular development, there was no lack of proportion, and her
+finely shaped hands and feet showed that her organization was one of
+those carefully finished masterpieces of nature which sculptors are
+always in search of, and find it hard to detect among the imperfect
+products of the living laboratory.
+
+This girl of eighteen was more famous than she cared to be for her
+performances in the gymnasium. She commonly contented herself with the
+same exercises that her companions were accustomed to. Only her
+dumb-bells, with which she exercised easily and gracefully, were too
+heavy for most of the girls to do more with than lift them from the
+floor. She was fond of daring feats on the trapeze, and had to be
+checked in her indulgence in them. The Professor of gymnastics at the
+University came over to the Institute now and then, and it was a source
+of great excitement to watch some of the athletic exercises in which the
+young lady showed her remarkable muscular strength and skill in managing
+herself in the accomplishment of feats which looked impossible at first
+sight. How often The Terror had thought to herself that she would gladly
+give up all her knowledge of Greek and the differential and integral
+calculus if she could only perform the least of those feats which were
+mere play to The Wonder! Miss Euthymia was not behind the rest in her
+attainments in classical or mathematical knowledge, and she was one of
+the very best students in the out-door branches,--botany, mineralogy,
+sketching from nature,--to be found among the scholars of the Institute.
+
+There was an eight-oared boat rowed by a crew of the young ladies, of
+which Miss Euthymia was the captain and pulled the bow oar. Poor little
+Lurida could not pull an oar, but on great occasions, when there were
+many boats out, she was wanted as coxswain, being a mere feather-weight,
+and quick-witted enough to serve well in the important office where
+brains are more needed than muscle.
+
+There was also an eight-oared boat belonging to the University, and rowed
+by a picked crew of stalwart young fellows. The bow oar and captain of
+the University crew was a powerful young man, who, like the captain of
+the girls' boat, was a noted gymnast. He had had one or two quiet trials
+with Miss Euthymia, in which, according to the ultras of the woman's
+rights party, he had not vindicated the superiority of his sex in the way
+which might have been expected. Indeed, it was claimed that he let a
+cannon-ball drop when he ought to have caught it, and it was not disputed
+that he had been ingloriously knocked over by a sand-bag projected by the
+strong arms of the young maiden. This was of course a story that was
+widely told and laughingly listened to, and the captain of the University
+crew had become a little sensitive on the subject. When there was a
+talk, therefore, about a race between the champion boats of the two
+institutions there was immense excitement in both of them, as well as
+among the members of the Pansophian Society and all the good people of
+the village.
+
+There were many objections to be overcome. Some thought it unladylike
+for the young maidens to take part in a competition which must attract
+many lookers-on, and which it seemed to them very hoidenish to venture
+upon. Some said it was a shame to let a crew of girls try their strength
+against an equal number of powerful young men. These objections were
+offset by the advocates of the race by the following arguments. They
+maintained that it was no more hoidenish to row a boat than it was to
+take a part in the calisthenic exercises, and that the girls had nothing
+to do with the young men's boat, except to keep as much ahead of it as
+possible. As to strength, the woman's righters believed that, weight for
+weight, their crew was as strong as the other, and of course due
+allowance would be made for the difference of weight and all other
+accidental hindrances. It was time to test the boasted superiority of
+masculine muscle. Here was a chance. If the girls beat, the whole
+country would know it, and after that female suffrage would be only a
+question of time. Such was the conclusion, from rather insufficient
+premises, it must be confessed; but if nature does nothing per
+saltum,--by jumps,--as the old adage has it, youth is very apt to take
+long leaps from a fact to a possible sequel or consequence. So it had
+come about that a contest between the two boat-crews was looked forward
+to with an interest almost equal to that with which the combat between
+the Horatii and Curiatii was regarded.
+
+The terms had been at last arranged between the two crews, after cautious
+protocols and many diplomatic discussions. It was so novel in its
+character that it naturally took a good deal of time to adjust it in such
+a way as to be fair to both parties. The course must not be too long for
+the lighter and weaker crew, for the staying power of the young persons
+who made it up could not be safely reckoned upon. A certain advantage
+must be allowed them at the start, and this was a delicate matter to
+settle. The weather was another important consideration. June would be
+early enough, in all probability, and if the lake should be tolerably
+smooth the grand affair might come off some time in that month. Any
+roughness of the water would be unfavorable to the weaker crew. The
+rowing-course was on the eastern side of the lake, the starting-point
+being opposite the Anchor Tavern; from that three quarters of a mile to
+the south, where the turning-stake was fixed, so that the whole course of
+one mile and a half would bring the boats back to their starting-point.
+
+The race was to be between the Algonquin, eight-oared boat with
+outriggers, rowed by young men, students of Stoughton University, and the
+Atalanta, also eight-oared and outrigger boat, by young ladies from the
+Corinna Institute. Their boat was three inches wider than the other, for
+various sufficient reasons, one of which was to make it a little less
+likely to go over and throw its crew into the water, which was a sound
+precaution, though all the girls could swim, and one at least, the bow
+oar, was a famous swimmer, who had pulled a drowning man out of the water
+after a hard struggle to keep him from carrying her down with him.
+
+Though the coming trial had not been advertised in the papers, so as to
+draw together a rabble of betting men and ill-conditioned lookers-on,
+there was a considerable gathering, made up chiefly of the villagers and
+the students of the two institutions. Among them were a few who were
+disposed to add to their interest in the trial by small wagers. The bets
+were rather in favor of the "Quins," as the University boat was commonly
+called, except where the natural sympathy of the young ladies or the
+gallantry of some of the young men led them to risk their gloves or
+cigars, or whatever it might be, on the Atalantas. The elements of
+judgment were these: average weight of the Algonquins one hundred and
+sixty-five pounds; average weight of the Atalantas, one hundred and
+forty-eight pounds; skill in practice about equal; advantage of the
+narrow boat equal to three lengths; whole distance allowed the Atalantas
+eight lengths,--a long stretch to be made up in a mile and a half.
+
+And so both crews began practising for the grand trial.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE BOAT-RACE.
+
+The 10th of June was a delicious summer day, rather warm, but still and
+bright. The water was smooth, and the crews were in the best possible
+condition. All was expectation, and for some time nothing but
+expectation. No boat-race or regatta ever began at the time appointed
+for the start. Somebody breaks an oar, or somebody fails to appear in
+season, or something is the matter with a seat or an outrigger; or if
+there is no such excuse, the crew of one or both or all the boats to take
+part in the race must paddle about to get themselves ready for work, to
+the infinite weariness of all the spectators, who naturally ask why all
+this getting ready is not attended to beforehand. The Algonquins wore
+plain gray flannel suits and white caps. The young ladies were all in
+dark blue dresses, touched up with a red ribbon here and there, and wore
+light straw hats. The little coxswain of the Atalanta was the last to
+step on board. As she took her place she carefully deposited at her feet
+a white handkerchief wrapped about something or other, perhaps a sponge,
+in case the boat should take in water.
+
+At last the Algonquin shot out from the little nook where she lay,
+--long, narrow, shining, swift as a pickerel when he darts from the reedy
+shore. It was a beautiful sight to see the eight young fellows in their
+close-fitting suits, their brown muscular arms bare, bending their backs
+for the stroke and recovering, as if they were parts of a single machine.
+
+"The gals can't stan' it agin them fellers," said the old blacksmith from
+the village.
+
+"You wait till the gals get a-goin'," said the carpenter, who had often
+worked in the gymnasium of the Corinna Institute, and knew something of
+their muscular accomplishments. "Y' ought to see 'em climb ropes, and
+swing dumb-bells, and pull in them rowin'-machines. Ask Jake there
+whether they can't row a mild in double-quick time,--he knows all abaout
+it."
+
+Jake was by profession a fisherman, and a freshwater fisherman in a
+country village is inspector-general of all that goes on out-of-doors,
+being a lazy, wandering sort of fellow, whose study of the habits and
+habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as
+dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race
+of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a
+rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation all its own.
+
+Jake made his usual preliminary signal, and delivered himself to the
+following effect:
+
+"Wahl, I don' know jest what to say. I've seed 'em both often enough
+when they was practisin', an' I tell ye the' wa'n't no slouch abaout
+neither on 'em. But them bats is all-fired long, 'n' eight on 'em
+stretched in a straight line eendways makes a consid'able piece aout 'f a
+mile 'n' a haaf. I'd bate on them gals if it wa'n't that them fellers is
+naterally longer winded, as the gals 'll find aout by the time they git
+raound the stake 'n' over agin the big ellum. I'll go ye a quarter on
+the pahnts agin the petticoats."
+
+The fresh-water fisherman had expressed the prevailing belief that the
+young ladies were overmatched. Still there were not wanting those who
+thought the advantage allowed the "Lantas," as they called the Corinna
+boatcrew, was too great, and that it would be impossible for the "Quins"
+to make it up and go by them.
+
+The Algonquins rowed up and down a few times before the spectators. They
+appeared in perfect training, neither too fat nor too fine, mettlesome as
+colts, steady as draught-horses, deep-breathed as oxen, disciplined to
+work together as symmetrically as a single sculler pulls his pair of
+oars. The fisherman offered to make his quarter fifty cents. No takers.
+
+Five minutes passed, and all eyes were strained to the south, looking for
+the Atalanta. A clump of trees hid the edge of the lake along which the
+Corinna's boat was stealing towards the starting-point. Presently the
+long shell swept into view, with its blooming rowers, who, with their
+ample dresses, seemed to fill it almost as full as Raphael fills his
+skiff on the edge of the Lake of Galilee. But how steadily the Atalanta
+came on!---no rocking, no splashing, no apparent strain; the bow oar
+turning to look ahead every now and then, and watching her course, which
+seemed to be straight as an arrow, the beat of the strokes as true and
+regular as the pulse of the healthiest rower among them all. And if the
+sight of the other boat and its crew was beautiful, how lovely was the
+look of this! Eight young girls,--young ladies, for those who prefer that
+more dignified and less attractive expression,--all in the flush of
+youth, all in vigorous health; every muscle taught its duty; each rower
+alert, not to be a tenth of a second out of time, or let her oar dally
+with the water so as to lose an ounce of its propelling virtue; every eye
+kindling with the hope of victory. Each of the boats was cheered as it
+came in sight, but the cheers for the Atalanta were naturally the
+loudest, as the gallantry of one sex and the clear, high voices of the
+other gave it life and vigor.
+
+"Take your places!" shouted the umpire, five minutes before the half
+hour. The two boats felt their way slowly and cautiously to their
+positions, which had been determined by careful measurement. After a
+little backing and filling they got into line, at the proper distance
+from each other, and sat motionless, their bodies bent forward, their
+arms outstretched, their oars in the water, waiting for the word.
+
+"Go!" shouted the umpire.
+
+Away sprang the Atalanta, and far behind her leaped the Algonquin, her
+oars bending like so many long Indian bows as their blades flashed
+through the water.
+
+"A stern chase is a long chase," especially when one craft is a great
+distance behind the other. It looked as if it would be impossible for
+the rear boat to overcome the odds against it. Of course the Algonquin
+kept gaining, but could it possibly gain enough? That was the question.
+As the boats got farther and farther away, it became more and more
+difficult to determine what change there was in the interval between
+them. But when they came to rounding the stake it was easier to guess at
+the amount of space which had been gained. It was clear that something
+like half the distance, four lengths, as nearly as could be estimated,
+had been made up in rowing the first three quarters of a mile. Could the
+Algonquins do a little better than this in the second half of the
+race-course, they would be sure of winning.
+
+The boats had turned the stake, and were coming in rapidly. Every minute
+the University boat was getting nearer the other.
+
+"Go it, Quins!" shouted the students.
+
+"Pull away, Lantas!" screamed the girls, who were crowding down to the
+edge of the water.
+
+Nearer,--nearer,--the rear boat is pressing the other more and more
+closely,--a few more strokes, and they will be even, for there is but one
+length between them, and thirty rods will carry them to the line. It
+looks desperate for the Atalantas. The bow oar of the Algonquin turns
+his head. He sees the little coxswain leaning forward at every stroke,
+as if her trivial weight were of such mighty consequence,--but a few
+ounces might turn the scale of victory. As he turned he got a glimpse of
+the stroke oar of the Atalanta. What a flash of loveliness it was! Her
+face was like the reddest of June roses, with the heat and the strain and
+the passion of expected triumph. The upper button of her close-fitting
+flannel suit had strangled her as her bosom heaved with exertion, and it
+had given way before the fierce clutch she made at it. The bow oar was a
+staunch and steady rower, but he was human. The blade of his oar
+lingered in the water; a little more and he would have caught a crab, and
+perhaps lost the race by his momentary bewilderment.
+
+The boat, which seemed as if it had all the life and nervousness of a
+Derby three-year-old, felt the slight check, and all her men bent more
+vigorously to their oars. The Atalantas saw the movement, and made a
+spurt to keep their lead and gain upon it if they could. It was of no
+use. The strong arms of the young men were too much for the young
+maidens; only a few lengths remained to be rowed, and they would
+certainly pass the Atalanta before she could reach the line.
+
+The little coxswain saw that it was all up with the girls' crew if she
+could not save them by some strategic device.
+
+ "Dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat?"
+
+she whispered to herself,--for The Terror remembered her Virgil as she
+did everything else she ever studied. As she stooped, she lifted the
+handkerchief at her feet, and took from it a flaming bouquet. "Look!" she
+cried, and flung it just forward of the track of the Algonquin. The
+captain of the University boat turned his head, and there was the lovely
+vision which had a moment before bewitched him. The owner of all that
+loveliness must, he thought, have flung the bouquet. It was a challenge:
+how could he be such a coward as to decline accepting it.
+
+He was sure he could win the race now, and he would sweep past the line
+in triumph with the great bunch of flowers at the stem of his boat, proud
+as Van Tromp in the British channel with the broom at his mast-head.
+
+He turned the boat's head a little by backing water. He came up with the
+floating flowers, and near enough to reach them. He stooped and snatched
+them up, with the loss perhaps of a second in all,--no more. He felt sure
+of his victory.
+
+How can one tell the story of the finish in cold-blooded preterites? Are
+we not there ourselves? Are not our muscles straining with those of
+these sixteen young creatures, full of hot, fresh blood, their nerves all
+tingling like so many tight-strained harp-strings, all their life
+concentrating itself in this passionate moment of supreme effort? No!
+We are seeing, not telling about what somebody else once saw!
+
+--The bow of the Algonquin passes the stern of the Atalanta!
+
+--The bow of the Algonquin is on a level with the middle of the Atalanta!
+
+--Three more lengths' rowing and the college crew will pass the girls!
+
+--"Hurrah for the Quins!" The Algonquin ranges up alongside of the
+Atalanta!
+
+"Through with her!" shouts the captain of the Algonquin.
+
+"Now, girls!" shrieks the captain of the Atalanta.
+
+They near the line, every rower straining desperately, almost madly.
+
+--Crack goes the oar of the Atalanta's captain, and up flash its
+splintered fragments, as the stem of her boat springs past the line,
+eighteen inches at least ahead of the Algonquin.
+
+Hooraw for the Lantas! Hooraw for the Girls! Hooraw for the Institoot!
+shout a hundred voices.
+
+"Hurrah for woman's rights and female suffrage!" pipes the small voice of
+The Terror, and there is loud laughing and cheering all round.
+
+She had not studied her classical dictionary and her mythology for
+nothing. "I have paid off one old score," she said. "Set down my damask
+roses against the golden apples of Hippomenes!"
+
+It was that one second lost in snatching up the bouquet which gave the
+race to the Atalantas.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE WHITE CANOE.
+
+While the two boats were racing, other boats with lookers-on in them were
+rowing or sailing in the neighborhood of the race-course. The scene on
+the water was a gay one, for the young people in the boats were, many of
+them, acquainted with each other. There was a good deal of lively talk
+until the race became too exciting. Then many fell silent, until, as the
+boats neared the line, and still more as they crossed it, the shouts
+burst forth which showed how a cramp of attention finds its natural
+relief in a fit of convulsive exclamation.
+
+But far away, on the other side of the lake, a birchbark canoe was to be
+seen, in which sat a young man, who paddled it skillfully and swiftly.
+It was evident enough that he was watching the race intently, but the
+spectators could see little more than that. One of them, however, who
+sat upon the stand, had a powerful spy-glass, and could distinguish his
+motions very minutely and exactly. It was seen by this curious observer
+that the young man had an opera-glass with him, which he used a good deal
+at intervals. The spectator thought he kept it directed to the girls'
+boat, chiefly, if not exclusively. He thought also that the opera-glass
+was more particularly pointed towards the bow of the boat, and came to
+the natural conclusion that the bow oar, Miss Euthymia Tower, captain of
+the Atalantas, "The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute, was the attraction
+which determined the direction of the instrument.
+
+"Who is that in the canoe over there?" asked the owner of the spy-glass.
+
+"That's just what we should like to know," answered the old landlord's
+wife. "He and his man boarded with us when they first came, but we could
+never find out anything about him only just his name and his ways of
+living. His name is Kirkwood, Maurice Kirkwood, Esq., it used to come on
+his letters. As for his ways of living, he was the solitariest human
+being that I ever came across. His man carried his meals up to him. He
+used to stay in his room pretty much all day, but at night he would be
+off, walking, or riding on horseback, or paddling about in the lake,
+sometimes till nigh morning. There's something very strange about that
+Mr. Kirkwood. But there don't seem to be any harm in him. Only nobody
+can guess what his business is. They got up a story about him at one
+time. What do you think? They said he was a counterfeiter! And so they
+went one night to his room, when he was out, and that man of his was away
+too, and they carried keys, and opened pretty much everything; and they
+found--well, they found just nothing at all except writings and
+letters,--letters from places in America and in England, and some with
+Italian postmarks: that was all. Since that time the sheriff and his
+folks have let him alone and minded their own business. He was a
+gentleman,--anybody ought to have known that; and anybody that knew about
+his nice ways of living and behaving, and knew the kind of wear he had
+for his underclothing, might have known it. I could have told those
+officers that they had better not bother him. I know the ways of real
+gentlemen and real ladies, and I know those fellows in store clothes that
+look a little too fine,--outside. Wait till washing-day comes!"
+
+The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they were
+not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to be
+relied on as the judgments of the travelling phrenologist, who sent his
+accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the
+village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps,
+with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.
+
+Even with the small amount of information obtained by the search among
+his papers and effects, the gossips of the village had constructed
+several distinct histories for the mysterious stranger. He was an agent
+of a great publishing house; a leading contributor to several important
+periodicals; the author of that anonymously published novel which had
+made so much talk; the poet of a large clothing establishment; a spy of
+the Italian, some said the Russian, some said the British, Government; a
+proscribed refugee from some country where he had been plotting; a
+school-master without a school, a minister without a pulpit, an actor
+without an engagement; in short, there was no end to the perfectly
+senseless stories that were told about him, from that which made him out
+an escaped convict to the whispered suggestion that he was the eccentric
+heir to a great English title and estate.
+
+The one unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion.
+Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his history.
+No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word from him.
+Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute were returning
+at dusk, their rowers would see the canoe stealing into the shadows as
+they drew near it. Sometimes on a moonlight night, when a party of the
+young ladies were out upon the lake, they would see the white canoe
+gliding ghost-like in the distance. And it had happened more than once
+that when a boat's crew had been out with singers among them, while they
+were in the midst of a song, the white canoe would suddenly appear and
+rest upon the water,--not very near them, but within hearing
+distance,--and so remain until the singing was over, when it would steal
+away and be lost sight of in some inlet or behind some jutting rock.
+
+Naturally enough, there was intense curiosity about this young man. The
+landlady had told her story, which explained nothing. There was nobody
+to be questioned about him except his servant, an Italian, whose name was
+Paolo, but who to the village was known as Mr. Paul.
+
+Mr. Paul would have seemed the easiest person in the world to worm a
+secret out of. He was good-natured, child-like as a Heathen Chinee,
+talked freely with everybody in such English as he had at command, knew
+all the little people of the village, and was followed round by them
+partly from his personal attraction for them, and partly because he was
+apt to have a stick of candy or a handful of peanuts or other desirable
+luxury in his pocket for any of his little friends he met with. He had
+that wholesome, happy look, so uncommon in our arid countrymen,--a look
+hardly to be found except where figs and oranges ripen in the open air.
+A kindly climate to grow up in, a religion which takes your money and
+gives you a stamped ticket good at Saint Peter's box office, a roomy
+chest and a good pair of lungs in it, an honest digestive apparatus, a
+lively temperament, a cheerful acceptance of the place in life assigned
+to one by nature and circumstance,--these are conditions under which life
+may be quite comfortable to endure, and certainly is very pleasant to
+contemplate. All these conditions were united in Paolo. He was the
+easiest; pleasantest creature to talk with that one could ask for a
+companion. His southern vivacity, his amusing English, his simplicity and
+openness, made him friends everywhere.
+
+It seemed as if it would be a very simple matter to get the history of
+his master out of this guileless and unsophisticated being. He had been
+tried by all the village experts. The rector had put a number of
+well-studied careless questions, which failed of their purpose. The old
+librarian of the town library had taken note of all the books he carried
+to his master, and asked about his studies and pursuits. Paolo found it
+hard to understand his English, apparently, and answered in the most
+irrelevant way. The leading gossip of the village tried her skill in
+pumping him for information. It was all in vain.
+
+His master's way of life was peculiar,--in fact, eccentric. He had hired
+rooms in an old-fashioned three-story house. He had two rooms in the
+second and third stories of this old wooden building: his study in the
+second, his sleeping-room in the one above it. Paolo lived in the
+basement, where he had all the conveniences for cooking, and played the
+part of chef for his master and himself. This was only a part of his
+duty, for he was a man-of-all-work, purveyor, steward, chambermaid,--as
+universal in his services for one man as Pushee at the Anchor Tavern used
+to be for everybody.
+
+It so happened that Paolo took a severe cold one winter's day, and had
+such threatening symptoms that he asked the baker, when he called, to
+send the village physician to see him. In the course of his visit the
+doctor naturally inquired about the health of Paolo's master.
+
+"Signor Kirkwood well,--molto bene," said Paolo. "Why does he keep out
+of sight as he does?" asked the doctor.
+
+"He always so," replied Paolo. "Una antipatia."
+
+Whether Paolo was off his guard with the doctor, whether he revealed it
+to him as to a father confessor, or whether he thought it time that the
+reason of his master's seclusion should be known, the doctor did not feel
+sure. At any rate, Paolo was not disposed to make any further
+revelations. Una antipatia,--an antipathy,--that was all the doctor
+learned. He thought the matter over, and the more he reflected the more
+he was puzzled. What could an antipathy be that made a young man a
+recluse! Was it a dread of blue sky and open air, of the smell of
+flowers, or some electrical impression to which he was unnaturally
+sensitive?
+
+Dr. Butts carried these questions home with him. His wife was a
+sensible, discreet woman, whom he could trust with many professional
+secrets. He told her of Paolo's revelation, and talked it over with her
+in the light of his experience and her own; for she had known some
+curious cases of constitutional likes and aversions.
+
+Mrs. Butts buried the information in the grave of her memory, where it
+lay for nearly a week. At the end of that time it emerged in a
+confidential whisper to her favorite sister-in-law, a perfectly safe
+person. Twenty-four hours later the story was all over the village that
+Maurice Kirkwood was the subject of a strange, mysterious, unheard-of
+antipathy to something, nobody knew what; and the whole neighborhood
+naturally resolved itself into an unorganized committee of investigation.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+What is a country village without its mysterious personage? Few are now
+living who can remember the advent of the handsome young man who was the
+mystery of our great university town "sixty years since,"--long enough
+ago for a romance to grow out of a narrative, as Waverley may remind us.
+The writer of this narrative remembers him well, and is not sure that he
+has not told the strange story in some form or other to the last
+generation, or to the one before the last. No matter: if he has told it
+they have forgotten it,--that is, if they have ever read it; and whether
+they have or have not, the story is singular enough to justify running
+the risk of repetition.
+
+This young man, with a curious name of Scandinavian origin, appeared
+unheralded in the town, as it was then, of Cantabridge. He wanted
+employment, and soon found it in the shape of manual labor, which he
+undertook and performed cheerfully. But his whole appearance showed
+plainly enough that he was bred to occupations of a very different
+nature, if, in deed, he had been accustomed to any kind of toil for his
+living. His aspect was that of one of gentle birth. His hands were not
+those of a laborer, and his features were delicate and refined, as well
+as of remarkable beauty. Who he was, where he came from, why he had come
+to Cantabridge, was never clearly explained. He was alone, without
+friends, except among the acquaintances he had made in his new residence.
+If he had any correspondents, they were not known to the neighborhood
+where he was living. But if he had neither friends nor correspondents,
+there was some reason for believing that he had enemies. Strange
+circumstances occurred which connected themselves with him in an ominous
+and unaccountable way. A threatening letter was slipped under the door
+of a house where he was visiting. He had a sudden attack of illness,
+which was thought to look very much like the effect of poison. At one
+time he disappeared, and was found wandering, bewildered, in a town many
+miles from that where he was residing. When questioned how he came
+there; he told a coherent story that he had been got, under some pretext,
+or in some not incredible way, into a boat, from which, at a certain
+landing-place, he had escaped and fled for his life, which he believed
+was in danger from his kidnappers.
+
+Whoever his enemies may have been,--if they really existed,--he did not
+fall a victim to their plots, so far as known to or remembered by this
+witness.
+
+Various interpretations were put upon his story. Conjectures were as
+abundant as they were in the case of Kaspar Hauser. That he was of good
+family seemed probable; that he was of distinguished birth, not
+impossible; that he was the dangerous rival of a candidate for a greatly
+coveted position in one of the northern states of Europe was a favorite
+speculation of some of the more romantic young persons. There was no
+dramatic ending to this story,--at least none is remembered by the
+present writer.
+
+"He left a name," like the royal Swede, of whose lineage he may have been
+for aught that the village people knew, but not a name at which anybody
+"grew pale;" for he had swindled no one, and broken no woman's heart with
+false vows. Possibly some withered cheeks may flush faintly as they
+recall the handsome young man who came before the Cantabridge maidens
+fully equipped for a hero of romance when the century was in its first
+quarter.
+
+The writer has been reminded of the handsome Swede by the incidents
+attending the advent of the unknown and interesting stranger who had made
+his appearance at Arrowhead Village.
+
+It was a very insufficient and unsatisfactory reason to assign for the
+young man's solitary habits that he was the subject of an antipathy. For
+what do we understand by that word? When a young lady screams at the
+sight of a spider, we accept her explanation that she has a natural
+antipathy to the creature. When a person expresses a repugnance to some
+wholesome article of food, agreeable to most people, we are satisfied if
+he gives the same reason. And so of various odors, which are pleasing to
+some persons and repulsive to others. We do not pretend to go behind the
+fact. It is an individual, and it may be a family, peculiarity. Even
+between different personalities there is an instinctive elective dislike
+as well as an elective affinity. We are not bound to give a reason why
+Dr. Fell is odious to us any more than the prisoner who peremptorily
+challenges a juryman is bound to say why he does it; it is enough that he
+"does not like his looks."
+
+There was nothing strange, then, that Maurice Kirkwood should have his
+special antipathy; a great many other people have odd likes and dislikes.
+But it was a very curious thing that this antipathy should be alleged as
+the reason for his singular mode of life. All sorts of explanations were
+suggested, not one of them in the least satisfactory, but serving to keep
+the curiosity of inquirers active until they were superseded by a new
+theory. One story was that Maurice had a great fear of dogs. It grew at
+last to a connected narrative, in which a fright in childhood from a
+rabid mongrel was said to have given him such a sensitiveness to the near
+presence of dogs that he was liable to convulsions if one came close to
+him.
+
+This hypothesis had some plausibility. No other creature would be so
+likely to trouble a person who had an antipathy to it. Dogs are very apt
+to make the acquaintance of strangers, in a free and easy way. They are
+met with everywhere,--in one's daily walk, at the thresholds of the doors
+one enters, in the gentleman's library, on the rug of my lady's
+sitting-room and on the cushion of her carriage. It is true that there
+are few persons who have an instinctive repugnance to this "friend of
+man." But what if this so-called antipathy were only a fear, a terror,
+which borrowed the less unmanly name? It was a fair question, if,
+indeed, the curiosity of the public had a right to ask any questions at
+all about a harmless individual who gave no offence, and seemed entitled
+to the right of choosing his way of living to suit himself, without being
+submitted to espionage.
+
+There was no positive evidence bearing on the point as yet. But one of
+the village people had a large Newfoundland dog, of a very sociable
+disposition, with which he determined to test the question. He watched
+for the time when Maurice should leave his house for the woods or the
+lake, and started with his dog to meet him. The animal walked up to the
+stranger in a very sociable fashion, and began making his acquaintance,
+after the usual manner of well-bred dogs; that is, with the courtesies
+and blandishments by which the canine Chesterfield is distinguished from
+the ill-conditioned cur. Maurice patted him in a friendly way, and spoke
+to him as one who was used to the fellowship of such companions. That
+idle question and foolish story were disposed of, therefore, and some
+other solution must be found, if possible.
+
+A much more common antipathy is that which is entertained with regard to
+cats. This has never been explained. It is not mere aversion to the
+look of the creature, or to any sensible quality known to the common
+observer. The cat is pleasing in aspect, graceful in movement, nice in
+personal habits, and of amiable disposition. No cause of offence is
+obvious, and yet there are many persons who cannot abide the presence of
+the most innocent little kitten. They can tell, in some mysterious way,
+that there is a cat in the room when they can neither see nor hear the
+creature. Whether it is an electrical or quasi-magnetic phenomenon, or
+whatever it may be, of the fact of this strange influence there are too
+many well-authenticated instances to allow its being questioned. But
+suppose Maurice Kirkwood to be the subject of this antipathy in its
+extremest degree, it would in no manner account for the isolation to
+which he had condemned himself. He might shun the firesides of the old
+women whose tabbies were purring by their footstools, but these worthy
+dames do not make up the whole population.
+
+These two antipathies having been disposed of, a new suggestion was
+started, and was talked over with a curious sort of half belief, very
+much as ghost stories are told in a circle of moderately instructed and
+inquiring persons. This was that Maurice was endowed with the unenviable
+gift of the evil eye. He was in frequent communication with Italy, as
+his letters showed, and had recently been residing in that country, as
+was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not
+rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba
+di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil
+eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No
+person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of
+the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign
+effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may
+assume that a monk is such as a matter of course. Certainly we have a
+right to take it for granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an
+eminently holy man, and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and
+dreaded jettatura as well as his blessing. If Maurice Kirkwood carried
+that destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be
+feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could easily be
+understood why he kept his look away from all around him whom he feared
+he might harm.
+
+No sensible person in Arrowhead Village really believed in the evil eye,
+but it served the purpose of a temporary hypothesis, as do many
+suppositions which we take as a nucleus for our observations without
+putting any real confidence in them. It was just suited to the romantic
+notions of the more flighty persons in the village, who had meddled more
+or less with Spiritualism, and were ready for any new fancy, if it were
+only wild enough.
+
+The riddle of the young stranger's peculiarity did not seem likely to
+find any very speedy solution. Every new suggestion furnished talk for
+the gossips of the village and the babble of the many tongues in the two
+educational institutions. Naturally, the discussion was liveliest among
+the young ladies. Here is an extract from a letter of one of these young
+ladies, who, having received at her birth the ever-pleasing name of Mary,
+saw fit to have herself called Mollie in the catalogue and in her
+letters. The old postmaster of the town to which her letter was directed
+took it up to stamp, and read on the envelope the direction to "Miss Lulu
+Pinrow." He brought the stamp down with a vicious emphasis, coming very
+near blotting out the nursery name, instead of cancelling the
+postage-stamp. "Lulu!" he exclaimed. "I should like to know if that
+great strapping girl isn't out of her cradle yet! I suppose Miss Louisa
+will think that belongs to her, but I saw her christened and I heard the
+name the minister gave her, and it was n't 'Lulu,' or any such baby
+nonsense." And so saying, he gave it a fling to the box marked P, as if
+it burned his fingers. Why a grown-up young woman allowed herself to be
+cheapened in the way so many of them do by the use of names which become
+them as well as the frock of a ten-year-old schoolgirl would become a
+graduate of the Corinna Institute, the old postmaster could not guess.
+He was a queer old man.
+
+The letter thus scornfully treated runs over with a young girl's written
+loquacity:
+
+"Oh, Lulu, there is such a sensation as you never saw or heard of 'in all
+your born days,' as mamma used to say. He has been at the village for
+some time, but lately we have had--oh, the weirdest stories about him!
+'The Mysterious Stranger is the name some give him, but we girls call him
+the Sachem, because he paddles about in an Indian canoe. If I should
+tell you all the things that are said about him I should use up all my
+paper ten times over. He has never made a visit to the Institute, and
+none of the girls have ever spoken to him, but the people at the village
+say he is very, very handsome. We are dying to get a look at him, of
+course--though there is a horrid story about him--that he has the evil
+eye did you ever hear about the evil eye? If a person who is born with
+it looks at you, you die, or something happens--awful--is n't it?
+
+"The rector says he never goes to church, but then you know a good many
+of the people that pass the summer at the village never do--they think
+their religion must have vacations--that's what I've heard they
+say--vacations, just like other hard work--it ought not to be hard work,
+I'm sure, but I suppose they feel so about it. Should you feel afraid to
+have him look at you? Some of the girls say they would n't have him for
+the whole world, but I shouldn't mind it--especially if I had on my
+eyeglasses. Do you suppose if there is anything in the evil eye it would
+go through glass? I don't believe it. Do you think blue eye-glasses
+would be better than common ones? Don't laugh at me--they tell such
+weird stories! The Terror--Lurida Vincent, you know-makes fun of all
+they say about it, but then she 'knows everything and doesn't believe
+anything,' the girls say--Well, I should be awfully scared, I know, if
+anybody that had the evil eye should look at me--but--oh, I don't
+know--but if it was a young man--and if he was very--very
+good-looking--I think--perhaps I would run the risk--but don't tell
+anybody I said any such horrid thing--and burn this letter right
+up--there 's a dear good girl."
+
+It is to be hoped that no reader will doubt the genuineness of this
+letter. There are not quite so many "awfuls" and "awfullys" as one
+expects to find in young ladies' letters, but there are two "weirds,"
+which may be considered a fair allowance. How it happened that "jolly"
+did not show itself can hardly be accounted for; no doubt it turns up two
+or three times at least in the postscript.
+
+Here is an extract from another letter. This was from one of the
+students of Stoughton University to a friend whose name as it was written
+on the envelope was Mr. Frank Mayfield. The old postmaster who found
+fault with Miss "Lulu's" designation would probably have quarrelled with
+this address, if it had come under his eye. "Frank" is a very pretty,
+pleasant-sounding name, and it is not strange that many persons use it in
+common conversation all their days when speaking of a friend. Were they
+really christened by that name, any of these numerous Franks? Perhaps
+they were, and if so there is nothing to be said. But if not, was the
+baptismal name Francis or Franklin? The mind is apt to fasten in a very
+perverse and unpleasant way upon this question, which too often there is
+no possible way of settling. One might hope, if he outlived the bearer
+of the appellation, to get at the fact; but since even gravestones have
+learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in their
+solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names in such an
+un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of riddles to
+posterity. How it will puzzle and distress the historians and
+antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real name of
+Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white marble slab,
+raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-ground in a town
+in Essex County, Massachusetts!
+
+But in the mean time we are forgetting the letter directed to Mr. Frank
+Mayfield.
+
+"DEAR FRANK,--Hooray! Hurrah! Rah!
+
+"I have made the acquaintance of 'The Mysterious Stranger'! It happened
+by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the
+duty of replying to this letter. I was out in my little boat, which
+carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered.
+One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck
+the sail suddenly, and over went my boat. My feet got tangled in the
+sheet somehow, and I could not get free. I had hard work to keep my head
+above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; for if
+the boat were to go down I should be dragged down with her. I thought of
+a good many things in the course of some four or five minutes, I can tell
+you, and I got a lesson about time better than anything Kant and all the
+rest of them have to say of it. After I had been there about an ordinary
+lifetime, I saw a white canoe making toward me, and I knew that our shy
+young gentleman was coming to help me, and that we should become
+acquainted without an introduction. So it was, sure enough. He saw what
+the trouble was, managed to disentangle my feet without drowning me in
+the process or upsetting his little flimsy craft, and, as I was somewhat
+tired with my struggle, took me in tow and carried me to the landing
+where he kept his canoe. I can't say that there is anything odd about
+his manners or his way of talk. I judge him to be a native of one of our
+Northern States,--perhaps a New Englander. He has lived abroad during
+some parts of his life. He is not an artist, as it was at one time
+thought he might be. He is a good-looking fellow, well developed, manly
+in appearance, with nothing to excite special remark unless it be a
+certain look of anxiety or apprehension which comes over him from time to
+time. You remember our old friend Squire B., whose companion was killed
+by lightning when he was standing close to him. You know the look he had
+whenever anything like a thundercloud came up in the sky. Well, I should
+say there was a look like that came over this Maurice Kirkwood's face
+every now and then. I noticed that he looked round once or twice as if to
+see whether some object or other was in sight. There was a little
+rustling in the grass as if of footsteps, and this look came over his
+features. A rabbit ran by us, and I watched to see if he showed any sign
+of that antipathy we have heard so much of, but he seemed to be pleased
+watching the creature.
+
+"If you ask me what my opinion is about this Maurice Kirkwood, I think he
+is eccentric in his habit of life, but not what they call a 'crank'
+exactly. He talked well enough about such matters as we spoke of,--the
+lake, the scenery in general, the climate. I asked him to come over and
+take a look at the college. He did n't promise, but I should not be
+surprised if I should get him over there some day. I asked him why he
+did n't go to the Pansophian meetings. He did n't give any reason, but
+he shook his head in a very peculiar way, as much as to say that it was
+impossible.
+
+"On the whole, I think it is nothing more than the same feeling of dread
+of human society, or dislike for it, which under the name of religion
+used to drive men into caves and deserts. What a pity that Protestantism
+does not make special provision for all the freaks of individual
+character! If we had a little more faith and a few more caverns, or
+convenient places for making them, we should have hermits in these holes
+as thick as woodchucks or prairie dogs. I should like to know if you
+never had the feeling,
+
+ "'Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place!'
+
+"I know what your answer will be, of course. You will say, 'Certainly,
+
+ "'With one fair spirit for my minister;'"
+
+"but I mean alone,--all alone. Don't you ever feel as if you should like
+to have been a pillar-saint in the days when faith was as strong as lye
+(spelt with a y), instead of being as weak as dish-water? (Jerry is
+looking over my shoulder, and says this pun is too bad to send, and a
+disgrace to the University--but never mind.) I often feel as if I should
+like to roost on a pillar a hundred feet high,--yes, and have it soaped
+from top to bottom. Wouldn't it be fun to look down at the bores and the
+duns? Let us get up a pillar-roosters' association. (Jerry--still
+looking over says there is an absurd contradiction in the idea.)
+
+"What a matter-of-fact idiot Jerry is!
+
+"How do you like looking over, Mr. Inspector general?"
+
+The reader will not get much information out of this lively young
+fellow's letter, but he may get a little. It is something to know that
+the mysterious resident of Arrowhead Village did not look nor talk like a
+crazy person; that he was of agreeable aspect and address, helpful when
+occasion offered, and had nothing about him, so far as yet appeared, to
+prevent his being an acceptable member of society.
+
+Of course the people in the village could never be contented without
+learning everything there was to be learned about their visitor. All the
+city papers were examined for advertisements. If a cashier had
+absconded, if a broker had disappeared, if a railroad president was
+missing, some of the old stories would wake up and get a fresh currency,
+until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious of
+all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his
+inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an
+unsolved enigma. The "Sachem" of the boating girls became the "Sphinx"
+of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did
+not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this
+young man's odd way of living.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ENIGMA STUDIED.
+
+It was a curious, if it was not a suspicious, circumstance that a young
+man, seemingly in good health, of comely aspect, looking as if made for
+companionship, should keep himself apart from all the world around him in
+a place where there was a general feeling of good neighborhood and a
+pleasant social atmosphere. The Public Library was a central point which
+brought people together. The Pansophian Society did a great deal to make
+them acquainted with each other for many of the meetings were open to
+outside visitors, and the subjects discussed in the meetings furnished
+the material for conversation in their intervals. A card of invitation
+had been sent by the Secretary to Maurice, in answer to which Paolo
+carried back a polite note of regret. The paper had a narrow rim of
+black, implying apparently some loss of relative or friend, but not any
+very recent and crushing bereavement. This refusal to come to the
+meetings of the society was only what was expected. It was proper to ask
+him, but his declining the invitation showed that he did not wish for
+attentions or courtesies. There was nothing further to be done to bring
+him out of his shell, and seemingly nothing more to be learned about him
+at present.
+
+In this state of things it was natural that all which had been previously
+gathered by the few who had seen or known anything of him should be
+worked over again. When there is no new ore to be dug, the old refuse
+heaps are looked over for what may still be found in them. The landlord
+of the Anchor Tavern, now the head of the boarding-house, talked about
+Maurice, as everybody in the village did at one time or another. He had
+not much to say, but he added a fact or two.
+
+The young gentleman was good pay,--so they all said. Sometimes he paid
+in gold; sometimes in fresh bills, just out of the bank. He trusted his
+man, Mr. Paul, with the money to pay his bills. He knew something about
+horses; he showed that by the way he handled that colt,--the one that
+threw the hostler and broke his collar-bone. "Mr. Paul come down to the
+stable. 'Let me see that cult you all 'fraid of,' says he. 'My master,
+he ride any hoss,' says Paul. 'You saddle him,' says be; and so they
+did, and Paul, he led that colt--the kickinest and ugliest young beast
+you ever see in your life--up to the place where his master, as he calls
+him, and he lives. What does that Kirkwood do but clap on a couple of
+long spurs and jump on to that colt's back, and off the beast goes, tail
+up, heels flying, standing up on end, trying all sorts of capers, and at
+last going it full run for a couple of miles, till he'd got about enough
+of it. That colt went off as ferce as a wild-cat, and come back as quiet
+as a cosset lamb. A man that pays his bills reg'lar, in good money, and
+knows how to handle a hoss is three quarters of a gentleman, if he is n't
+a whole one,--and most likely he is a whole one."
+
+So spake the patriarch of the Anchor Tavern. His wife had already given
+her favorable opinion of her former guest. She now added something to
+her description as a sequel to her husband's remarks.
+
+"I call him," she said, "about as likely a young gentleman as ever I
+clapped my eyes on. He is rather slighter than I like to see a young man
+of his age; if he was my sun, I should like to see him a little more
+fleshy. I don't believe he weighs more than a hundred and thirty or
+forty pounds. Did y' ever look at those eyes of his, M'randy? Just as
+blue as succory flowers. I do like those light-complected young fellows,
+with their fresh cheeks and their curly hair; somehow, curly hair doos
+set off anybody's face. He is n't any foreigner, for all that he talks
+Italian with that Mr. Paul that's his help. He looks just like our kind
+of folks, the college kind, that's brought up among books, and is
+handling 'em, and reading of 'em, and making of 'em, as like as not, all
+their lives. All that you say about his riding the mad colt is just what
+I should think he was up to, for he's as spry as a squirrel; you ought to
+see him go over that fence, as I did once. I don't believe there's any
+harm in that young gentleman,--I don't care what people say. I suppose
+he likes this place just as other people like it, and cares more for
+walking in the woods and paddling about in the water than he doos for
+company; and if he doos, whose business is it, I should like to know?"
+
+The third of the speakers was Miranda, who had her own way of judging
+people.
+
+"I never see him but two or three times," Miranda said. "I should like
+to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him when he was
+eatin' his vittles. That 's the time to watch folks, when their jaws get
+a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em. Do you remember that chap
+the sheriff come and took away when we kep' tahvern? Eleven year ago it
+was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time. A mighty grand gentleman from the City
+he set up for. I watched him, and I watched him. Says I, I don't
+believe you're no gentleman, says I. He eat with his knife, and that
+ain't the way city folks eats. Every time I handed him anything I looked
+closeter and closeter. Them whiskers never grooved on them cheeks, says
+I to myself. Them 's paper collars, says I. That dimun in your
+shirt-front hain't got no life to it, says I. I don't believe it's
+nothiri' more 'n a bit o' winderglass. So says I to Pushee, 'You jes'
+step out and get the sheriff to come in and take a look at that chap.' I
+knowed he was after a fellah. He come right in, an' he goes up to the
+chap. 'Why, Bill,' says he, 'I'm mighty glad to see yer. We've had the
+hole in the wall you got out of mended, and I want your company to come
+and look at the old place,' says he, and he pulls out a couple of
+handcuffs and has 'em on his wrists in less than no time, an' off they
+goes together! I know one thing about that young gentleman,
+anyhow,--there ain't no better judge of what's good eatin' than he is. I
+cooked him some maccaroni myself one day, and he sends word to me by that
+Mr. Paul, 'Tell Miss Miranda,' says he, I that the Pope o' Rome don't
+have no better cooked maccaroni than what she sent up to me yesterday,'
+says he. I don' know much about the Pope o' Rome except that he's a
+Roman Catholic, and I don' know who cooks for him, whether it's a man or
+a woman; but when it comes to a dish o' maccaroni, I ain't afeard of
+their shefs, as they call 'em,--them he-cooks that can't serve up a cold
+potater without callin' it by some name nobody can say after 'em. But
+this gentleman knows good cookin', and that's as good a sign of a
+gentleman as I want to tell 'em by."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+STILL AT FAULT.
+
+The house in which Maurice Kirkwood had taken up his abode was not a very
+inviting one. It was old, and had been left in a somewhat dilapidated
+and disorderly condition by the tenants who had lived in the part which
+Maurice now occupied. They had piled their packing-boxes in the cellar,
+with broken chairs, broken china, and other household wrecks. A cracked
+mirror lay on an old straw mattress, the contents of which were airing
+themselves through wide rips and rents. A lame clothes-horse was saddled
+with an old rug fringed with a ragged border, out of which all the colors
+had been completely trodden. No woman would have gone into a house in
+such a condition. But the young man did not trouble himself much about
+such matters, and was satisfied when the rooms which were to be occupied
+by himself and his servant were made decent and tolerably comfortable.
+During the fine season all this was not of much consequence, and if
+Maurice made up his mind to stay through the winter he would have his
+choice among many more eligible places.
+
+The summer vacation of the Corinna Institute had now arrived, and the
+young ladies had scattered to their homes. Among the graduates of the
+year were Miss Euthymia Tower and Miss Lurida Vincent, who had now
+returned to their homes in Arrowhead Village. They were both glad to
+rest after the long final examinations and the exercises of the closing
+day, in which each of them had borne a conspicuous part. It was a
+pleasant life they led in the village, which was lively enough at this
+season. Walking, riding, driving, boating, visits to the Library,
+meetings of the Pansophian Society, hops, and picnics made the time pass
+very cheerfully, and soon showed their restoring influences. The
+Terror's large eyes did not wear the dull, glazed look by which they had
+too often betrayed the after effects of over-excitement of the strong and
+active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked
+full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a
+boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the
+lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, dreaming of
+what might be.
+
+The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and
+visited often by strangers. The old Librarian was a peculiar character,
+as these officials are apt to be. They have a curious kind of knowledge,
+sometimes immense in its way. They know the backs of books, their
+title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the class of readers who
+call for particular works, the value of different editions, and a good
+deal besides. Their minds catch up hints from all manner of works on all
+kinds of subjects. They will give a visitor a fact and a reference which
+they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might have
+hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who
+has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every
+bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These
+nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not
+like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have
+their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of a
+great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, though
+they are only the agents for their distribution, but that they are, as it
+were, outlying portions of their own organization. The old Librarian was
+getting a miserly feeling about his books, as he called them.
+Fortunately, he had a young lady for his assistant, who was never so
+happy as when she could find the work any visitor wanted and put it in
+his hands,--or her hands, for there were more readers among the wives
+and--daughters, and especially among the aunts, than there were among
+their male relatives. The old Librarian knew the books, but the books
+seemed to know the young assistant; so it looked, at least, to the
+impatient young people who wanted their services.
+
+Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,--a great many, according to
+Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-filled
+shelves seemed a very large collection to him. His master frequently
+sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat enlarged his
+notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he was certain, and
+some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly gilt) were more
+splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the Library.
+
+There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that Maurice
+was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record was carefully
+searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved
+to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of
+modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and
+physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a
+fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling
+these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the
+Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De
+Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and
+modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of
+novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for
+granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in the
+habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this
+beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but
+at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read
+very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new
+ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters.
+But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary
+purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a
+novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the
+talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists
+and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better than any other
+persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the
+picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some
+story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from
+science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and
+miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or
+possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?
+
+The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers
+to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The two
+learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These two
+worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which grows
+out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and the other
+from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a
+squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll
+their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted that theological
+students developed a third eyelid,--the nictitating membrane, which is so
+well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all
+the light they do not want. Their little skirmishes did not prevent
+their being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things
+and many persons. Both were on the committee which had the care of the
+Library and attended to the purchase of books. Each was scholar enough
+to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the judgment of the
+other as to what books should be purchased. Consequently, the clergyman
+secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works
+which the physician would have called brimstone divinity, and held to be
+just the thing to kindle fires with,--good books still for those who know
+how to use them, oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of
+disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous
+belief has strangled the natural human instincts. The physician, in the
+mean time, acquired for the collection some of those medical works where
+one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may
+not have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so
+as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be
+looked upon as fables.
+
+Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the
+young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present,
+perhaps for a long period. The rector would have been glad to see him at
+church. He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his
+sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was
+meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he
+could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any false
+habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the
+power of being useful to him.
+
+Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead
+Village, but of all the surrounding region. He was an excellent specimen
+of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great
+deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the
+laboring classes,--as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the
+use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do. He had that
+sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a
+fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller
+with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards.
+He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that oftentimes
+very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees
+of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term;
+that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week
+or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an
+advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may signify the
+morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which
+calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous
+malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to
+the south of France. He knew too well that what is spoken lightly of as
+a "nervous disturbance" may imply that the whole machinery of life is in
+a deranged condition, and that every individual organ would groan aloud
+if it had any other language than the terrible inarticulate one of pain
+by which to communicate with the consciousness.
+
+When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile, and
+say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which the
+young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down
+everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition
+might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps
+anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of
+objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the
+subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical
+machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of
+antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on which he could
+lay his hands.
+
+ ------------------------------
+
+The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval.
+He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some
+verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.
+
+If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually,
+representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty or
+fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of
+aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of
+threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as
+sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking
+at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola, which
+betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription
+is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or
+marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a
+countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a
+continuous series of photographs would not only be curious; it would
+teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from
+casual and unconnected observations.
+
+The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found in
+them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle
+life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to
+remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is
+no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems read
+during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one
+interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or
+remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the
+scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates and
+friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then in
+the flush of ardent manhood:--
+
+ THE OLD SONG.
+
+ The minstrel of the classic lay
+ Of love and wine who sings
+ Still found the fingers run astray
+ That touched the rebel strings.
+
+ Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
+ Of Atreus and his line;
+ But all the jocund echoes rung
+ With songs of love and wine.
+
+ Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught
+ Some fresher fancy's gleam;
+ My truant accents find, unsought,
+ The old familiar theme.
+
+ Love, Love! but not the sportive child
+ With shaft and twanging bow,
+ Whose random arrows drove us wild
+ Some threescore years ago;
+
+ Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
+ The urchin blind and bare,
+ But Love, with spectacles and staff,
+ And scanty, silvered hair.
+
+ Our heads with frosted locks are white,
+ Our roofs are thatched with snow,
+ But red, in chilling winter's spite,
+ Our hearts and hearthstones glow.
+
+ Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
+ And while the running sands
+ Their golden thread unheeded spin,
+ He warms his frozen hands.
+
+ Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
+ And waft this message o'er
+ To all we miss, from all we meet
+ On life's fast-crumbling shore:
+
+ Say that to old affection true
+ We hug the narrowing chain
+ That binds our hearts,--alas, how few
+ The links that yet remain!
+
+ The fatal touch awaits them all
+ That turns the rocks to dust;
+ From year to year they break and fall,
+ They break, but never rust.
+
+ Say if one note of happier strain
+ This worn-out harp afford,
+ --One throb that trembles, not in vain,
+ Their memory lent its chord.
+
+ Say that when Fancy closed her wings
+ And Passion quenched his fire,
+ Love, Love, still echoed from the strings
+ As from Anacreon's lyre!
+
+ January 8, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES
+
+In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with
+care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the
+secret, which so far bad yielded nothing but a single word. It might be
+asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the
+young stranger was unwilling to explain. He may have been to some extent
+infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which
+good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by
+revealing the word dropped by Paolo. But this was not really his chief
+motive. He could not look upon this young man, living a life of
+unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his science
+and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards bringing
+him into healthy relations with the world about him. Still, he would not
+intrude upon him in any way. He would only make certain general
+investigations, which might prove serviceable in case circumstances
+should give him the right to counsel the young man as to his course of
+life. The first thing to be done was to study systematically the whole
+subject of antipathies. Then, if any further occasion offered itself, he
+would be ready to take advantage of it. The resources of the Public
+Library of the place and his own private collection were put in
+requisition to furnish him the singular and widely scattered facts of
+which he was in search.
+
+It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study of
+the natural history of antipathies. The stories told about them are,
+however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned, there is no
+doubt that many of the strangest are true, and consequently take away
+from the improbability of others which we are disposed to doubt.
+
+But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy? It is an
+aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike to
+mortal horror. What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say. It acts
+sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the imagination,
+sometimes through an unknown channel. The relations which exist between
+the human being and all that surrounds him vary in consequence of some
+adjustment peculiar to each individual. The brute fact is expressed in
+the phrase "One man's meat is another man's poison."
+
+In studying the history of antipathies the doctor began with those
+referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common. In any
+collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who cannot make
+use of certain articles of food generally acceptable. This may be from
+the disgust they occasion or the effects they have been found to produce.
+Every one knows individuals who cannot venture on honey, or cheese, or
+veal, with impunity. Carlyle, for example, complains of having veal set
+before him,--a meat he could not endure. There is a whole family
+connection in New England, and that a very famous one, to many of whose
+members, in different generations, all the products of the dairy are the
+subjects of a congenital antipathy. Montaigne says there are persons who
+dread the smell of apples more than they would dread being exposed to a
+fire of musketry. The readers of the charming story "A Week in a French
+Country-House" will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's piteous cry in the
+night: "Ursula, art thou asleep? Oh, Ursula, thou sleepest, but I cannot
+close my eyes. Dearest Ursula, there is such a dreadful smell! Oh,
+Ursula, it is such a smell! I do so wish thou couldst smell it!
+Good-night, my angel!----Dearest! I have found them! They are apples!"
+The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has been known to cause
+faintness. The sight of various objects has had singular effects on some
+persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table of great people
+in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one. It
+is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood.
+One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates
+confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far more awkward than
+this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of
+the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color. There
+are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals. Among
+the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of
+sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects in different cases have
+been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,--all showing a
+profound disturbance of the nervous system.
+
+All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense,
+seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is
+another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in
+the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two
+very distinguished personages.
+
+Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge
+into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy
+and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a
+bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in
+spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story
+told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.
+As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his
+horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness
+and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on
+the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the
+terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall
+over.
+
+What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to
+shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The
+old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that
+it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the
+holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the
+sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came out of" her. A very
+singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may
+accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front
+stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately
+presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front
+door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that
+clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a
+profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular
+idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms
+of his nurse.
+
+She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which
+supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came
+crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been
+produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.
+Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may
+be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of "The
+Ancient Mariner:"
+
+ "I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
+ And fell down in a fit;
+ The holy hermit raised his eyes
+ And prayed where he did sit.
+ I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
+ Who now doth crazy go,
+ Laughed loud and long, and all the while
+ His eyes went to and fro."
+
+This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description
+from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases
+where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.
+
+More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person,
+a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death, literally.
+Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being
+intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life
+depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like
+these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences
+less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and
+there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight
+or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is
+produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls
+short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a
+lasting effect upon the subject of it.
+
+This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as
+a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human
+being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change
+of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may
+not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to
+himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced
+by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some
+spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to
+account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could
+any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man
+aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the
+human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great kindness,
+and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had talked
+naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his
+dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that he had
+once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the
+University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary.
+What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that
+the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which
+acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not
+look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the
+same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to
+where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be
+pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in
+the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.
+
+Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or
+gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story
+had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an
+"antipathy," whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the
+people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had
+reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the
+country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a
+domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as
+to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it.
+But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling
+one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be
+thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the
+next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to
+be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that
+the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put
+their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
+
+The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the
+office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred to
+the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into it
+might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman
+suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of
+course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they made
+domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and finally
+announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and worn the
+school name of "The Terror," who was elected. She was just the person
+for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every
+kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details
+of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do
+which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The President,
+the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of the common
+moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled if anything
+came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The Terror had
+schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute, and would
+set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward question, as
+easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.
+
+It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received
+communications from time to time from writers outside of its own
+organization. Of late these had been becoming more frequent. Many of
+them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors to the
+village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both full of
+ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often impossible to trace
+the papers to their authors. The new Secretary was alive with curiosity,
+and as sagacious a little body as one might find if in want of a
+detective. She could make a pretty shrewd guess whether a paper was
+written by a young or old person, by one of her own sex or the other, by
+an experienced hand or a novice.
+
+Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her
+curiosity to an extraordinary degree. She felt a strong suspicion that
+"the Sachem," as the boat-crews used to call him, "the Recluse," "the
+Night-Hawk," "the Sphinx," as others named him, must be the author of it.
+It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective,
+poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least, so
+thought the Secretary. The writer had travelled much; had resided in
+Italy, among other places. But so had many of the summer visitors and
+residents of Arrowhead Village. The handwriting was not decisive; it had
+some points of resemblance with the pencilled orders for books which
+Maurice sent to the Library, but there were certain differences,
+intentional or accidental, which weakened this evidence. There was an
+undertone in the essay which was in keeping with the mode of life of the
+solitary stranger. It might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the
+dreamy sadness of a young person who sees the future he is to climb, not
+as a smooth ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush
+him, with all his hopes and prospects. This interpretation may have been
+too imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own
+opinion:
+
+ MY THREE COMPANIONS.
+
+"I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer. I do not mean constantly
+flitting from one place to another, for my residence has often been fixed
+for considerable periods. From time to time I have put down in a
+notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes through which I have
+passed. I have long hesitated whether to let any of my notes appear
+before the public. My fear has been that they were too subjective, to
+use the metaphysician's term,--that I have seen myself reflected in
+Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature as she was meant to be
+understood. One who should visit the Harz Mountains would see--might
+see, rather his own colossal image shape itself on the morning mist. But
+if in every mist that rises from the meadows, in every cloud that hangs
+upon the mountain, he always finds his own reflection, we cannot accept
+him as an interpreter of the landscape.
+
+"There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to
+which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its
+author. They have visited the same localities, they have had many of the
+same thoughts and feelings. Many, I have no doubt. Not all,--no, not
+all. Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have been driven
+to it. Much of my life has been passed in that communion. These pages
+record some of the intimacies I have formed with her under some of her
+various manifestations.
+
+"I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke
+wildest and its voice rose loudest.
+
+"I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous rivers.
+
+"I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through many
+a long, long summer day on its clear waters.
+
+"I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has
+spoken,--at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it. I will
+translate some of these as I best may into common speech.
+
+"The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:--
+
+"You are neither welcome nor unwelcome. I do not trouble myself with the
+living tribes that come down to my waters. I have my own people, of an
+older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than your
+mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that fill the
+air or move over the thin crust of the earth. Who are you that build
+your palaces on my margin? I see your white faces as I saw the dark
+faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall look upon the
+unknown family of mankind that will come after you. And what is your
+whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history? The
+raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature
+left his footprints there. This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is
+of older lineage than your Adam,--perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam as
+one of his descendants. What feeling have I for you? Not scorn, not
+hatred,--not love,--not loathing. No!---indifference,--blank
+indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather
+absence of feeling, as regards you.---Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I
+will cool you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong
+arms, I will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his
+cradle. Am I not gentle? Am I not kind? Am I not harmless? But hark!
+The wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates! What do you
+say to my voice now? Do you see my foaming lips? Do you feel the rocks
+tremble as my huge billows crash against them? Is not my anger terrible
+as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into fragments, as
+you would crack an eggshell?--No, not anger; deaf, blind, unheeding
+indifference,--that is all. Out of me all things arose; sooner or later,
+into me all things subside. All changes around me; I change not. I look
+not at you, vain man, and your frail transitory concerns, save in
+momentary glimpses: I look on the white face of my dead mistress, whom I
+follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her
+nuptial raiment for the shroud.
+
+"Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side. Continents and
+islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock crumbles;
+vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great, decline, and
+perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and nations and
+races come and go. Look on me! "Time writes no wrinkle" on my forehead.
+Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I have only one
+language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and the sands
+schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are mine but I
+have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes
+from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful
+presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come with
+it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his
+rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if
+anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice
+speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.
+
+"To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices
+of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare,
+who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the
+deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation, the
+RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.
+
+"Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural
+talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except
+occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a
+fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my
+changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles
+that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I
+am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe,
+but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with
+wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you
+shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of
+the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far
+on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass.
+If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility
+behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my side toward
+the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and you shall
+feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being like
+yourself. You will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I drain
+you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your
+dwelling and its grounds."
+
+But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen
+indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and
+never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest
+for his soul.
+
+"'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,' it
+says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave the
+ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the
+solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too talkative
+about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile will cheer
+you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the morning sun
+blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me in the still
+midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with
+jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my
+ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will you find a
+sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean share your
+grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave, that called
+to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks
+of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has
+swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its
+grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid
+crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one
+season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same,
+from year to year? We both change, but we know each other through all
+changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And does not Nature
+plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the
+glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface
+when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'
+
+"I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life
+not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match
+in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous
+urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human
+destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden
+of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal
+for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there, all ready,
+asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages, downward
+through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface,
+wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one
+remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built
+into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor
+of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off
+ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy
+sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled
+collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed
+creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green
+abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,--what a
+company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No! Ocean claims
+great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid
+of himself.
+
+"Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I
+have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do
+not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature,
+when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That
+must not be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know
+me as an unwelcome object.
+
+"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead me
+out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly,
+pleasantly companionable river.
+
+"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods of
+human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should
+consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives
+his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of
+mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped
+and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a
+vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere
+of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the
+aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.
+
+"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid
+limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have
+thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then
+he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It is
+individual, which the ocean, with all its gulfs and inlets and
+multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very
+dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin;
+but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves,
+and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your
+thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream
+to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose
+itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.
+
+"In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which
+have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the
+lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and
+hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit. I am
+not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the features
+and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as
+our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer
+visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand
+acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern
+sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural
+home in the near neighborhood of one of these tranquil basins."
+
+Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we look
+carefully their affinities betray themselves. The youth will carry his
+Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well. The
+man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope
+which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames. The old
+man, as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth, will recognize the
+affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he
+wrote,--the stainless and sleepy Windermere.
+
+"The dwellers by Cedar Lake may find it an amusement to compare their own
+feelings with those of one who has lived by the Atlantic and the
+Mediterranean, by the Nile and the Tiber, by Lake Leman and by one of the
+fairest sheets of water that our own North America embosoms in its
+forests."
+
+Miss Lurida Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, read this
+paper, and pondered long upon it. She was thinking very seriously of
+studying medicine, and had been for some time in frequent communication
+with Dr. Butts, under whose direction she had begun reading certain
+treatises, which added to such knowledge of the laws of life in health
+and in disease as she had brought with her from the Corinna Institute.
+Naturally enough, she carried the anonymous paper to the doctor, to get
+his opinion about it, and compare it with her own. They both agreed that
+it was probably, they would not say certainly, the work of the solitary
+visitor. There was room for doubt, for there were visitors who might
+well have travelled to all the places mentioned, and resided long enough
+on the shores of the waters the writer spoke of to have had all the
+experiences mentioned in the paper. The Terror remembered a young lady,
+a former schoolmate, who belonged to one of those nomadic families common
+in this generation, the heads of which, especially the female heads, can
+never be easy where they are, but keep going between America and Europe,
+like so many pith-balls in the electrical experiment, alternately
+attracted and repelled, never in contented equilibrium. Every few years
+they pull their families up by the roots, and by the time they have begun
+to take hold a little with their radicles in the spots to which they have
+been successively transplanted up they come again, so that they never get
+a tap-root anywhere. The Terror suspected the daughter of one of these
+families of sending certain anonymous articles of not dissimilar
+character to the one she had just received. But she knew the style of
+composition common among the young girls, and she could hardly believe
+that it was one of them who had sent this paper. Could a brother of this
+young lady have written it? Possibly; she knew nothing more than that
+the young lady had a brother, then a student at the University. All the
+chances were that Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was the author. So thought
+Lurida, and so thought Dr. Butts.
+
+Whatever faults there were in this essay, it interested them both. There
+was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on the part
+of the writer, whoever he or she might be. There were references to
+suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely speculative nature, and
+did not look to any practical purpose in that direction. Besides, if the
+stranger were the author of the paper, he certainly would not choose a
+sheet of water like Cedar Lake to perform the last offices for him, in
+case he seriously meditated taking unceremonious leave of life and its
+accidents. He could find a river easily enough, to say nothing of other
+methods of effecting his purpose; but he had committed himself as to the
+impropriety of selecting a lake, so they need not be anxious about the
+white canoe and its occupant, as they watched it skimming the surface of
+the deep waters.
+
+The holder of the Portfolio would never have ventured to come before the
+public if he had not counted among his resources certain papers belonging
+to the records of the Pansophian Society, which he can make free use of,
+either for the illustration of the narrative, or for a diversion during
+those intervals in which the flow of events is languid, or even ceases
+for the time to manifest any progress. The reader can hardly have failed
+to notice that the old Anchor Tavern had become the focal point where a
+good deal of mental activity converged. There were the village people,
+including a number of cultivated families; there were the visitors, among
+them many accomplished and widely travelled persons; there was the
+University, with its learned teachers and aspiring young men; there was
+the Corinna Institute, with its eager, ambitious, hungry-souled young
+women, crowding on, class after class coming forward on the broad stream
+of liberal culture, and rounding the point which, once passed, the
+boundless possibilities of womanhood opened before them. All this
+furnished material enough and to spare for the records and the archives
+of the society.
+
+The new Secretary infused fresh life into the meetings. It may be
+remembered that the girls had said of her, when she was The Terror, that
+"she knew everything and didn't believe anything." That was just the
+kind of person for a secretary of such an association. Properly
+interpreted, the saying meant that she knew a great deal, and wanted to
+know a great deal more, and was consequently always on the lookout for
+information; that she believed nothing without sufficient proof that it
+was true, and therefore was perpetually asking for evidence where, others
+took assertions on trust.
+
+It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror could
+accomplish in the course of a single season. She found out what each
+member could do and wanted to do. She wrote to the outside visitors whom
+she suspected of capacity, and urged them to speak at the meetings, or
+send written papers to be read. As an official, with the printed title
+at the head of her notes, PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY, she was a privileged
+personage. She begged the young persons who had travelled to tell
+something of their experiences. She had contemplated getting up a
+discussion on the woman's rights question, but being a wary little body,
+and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the members
+into two hostile camps, she deferred this project indefinitely. It would
+be time enough after she had her team well in hand, she said to
+herself,--had felt their mouths and tried their paces. This expression,
+as she used it in her thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but
+there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and
+an ample vocabulary. She could not do much with her own muscles, but she
+had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road
+behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and thought of
+herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver on his box. A
+few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store itself up, and
+the same powers which had distanced competition in the classes of her
+school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous action in her
+new office.
+
+Her appeals had their effect. A number of papers were very soon sent in;
+some with names, some anonymously. She looked these papers over, and
+marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to at
+the meetings. One of them has just been presented to the reader. As to
+the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures. A
+well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village, was
+generally suspected of being its author. Some, however, questioned
+whether it was not the work of a new hand, who wrote, not from
+experience, but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a
+story-teller, a novelist, must in all probability be sooner or later
+reduced. The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is
+the work of an old hand or a novice.
+
+ SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.
+
+"I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I think.
+Let me see. For twelve years two novels a year regularly: that makes
+twenty-four. In three different years I have written three
+stories annually: that makes thirty-three. In five years one a
+year,--thirty-eight. That is all, is n't it? Yes. Thirty-eight, not
+forty. I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as Mr.
+Galton does his faces.
+
+"Hero--heroine--mamma--papa--uncle--sister, and so on. Love
+--obstacles--misery--tears--despair--glimmer of hope--unexpected solution
+of difficulties--happy finale.
+
+"Landscape for background according to season. Plants of each month got
+up from botanical calendars.
+
+"I should like much to see the composite novel. Why not apply Mr.
+Galton's process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one? All the
+Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P----West Britons into one
+Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!
+
+"I got along pretty well with my first few stories. I had some
+characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.
+There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster
+either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old
+uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading
+peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches. I
+clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall
+gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other
+things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken
+together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but
+did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but by
+and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite
+of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious
+person published what he called a 'key' to several of my earlier stories,
+in which I found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases
+of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called them, represented by
+these personages of my story had come to be recognized, each as standing
+for one and the same individual of my acquaintance. It had been of no
+use to change the costume. Even changing the sex did no good. I had a
+famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling Widow Sertingly.
+'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon Spinner, the same he told about
+in that other story of his,--only the deacon's got on a petticoat and a
+mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must
+have some new characters. I had no trouble with young characters; they
+are all pretty much alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits
+belonging to their complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt,
+who was a tip-top eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in
+books. So I said, I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and,
+sure enough, I fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which
+I got from the directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised, as
+I supposed, beyond the possibility of recognition. The book sold well,
+and the eccentric personage was voted a novelty. A few weeks after it
+was published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the person in the
+directory, whose family name I had used, as he maintained, to his and all
+his relatives' great damage, wrong, loss, grief, shame, and irreparable
+injury, for which the sum of blank thousand dollars would be a modest
+compensation. The story made the book sell, but not enough to pay blank
+thousand dollars. In the mean time a cousin of mine had sniffed out the
+resemblance between the character in my book and our great-aunt. We were
+rivals in her good graces. 'Cousin Pansie' spoke to her of my book and
+the trouble it was bringing on me,--she was so sorry about it! She liked
+my story,--only those personalities, you know. 'What personalities?'
+says old granny-aunt. 'Why, auntie, dear, they do say that he has
+brought in everybody we know,--did n't anybody tell you about--well,--I
+suppose you ought to know it,--did n't anybody tell you you were made fun
+of in that novel?' Somebody--no matter who--happened to hear all this,
+and told me. She said granny-aunt's withered old face had two red spots
+come to it, as if she had been painting her cheeks from a pink saucer.
+No, she said, not a pink saucer, but as if they were two coals of fire.
+She sent out and got the book, and made her (the somebody that I was
+speaking of) read it to her. When she had heard as much as she could
+stand,--for 'Cousin Pansie' explained passages to her,--explained, you
+know,--she sent for her lawyer, and that same somebody had to be a
+witness to a new will she had drawn up. It was not to my advantage.
+'Cousin Pansie' got the corner lot where the grocery is, and pretty much
+everything else. The old woman left me a legacy. What do you think it
+was? An old set of my own books, that looked as if it had been bought
+out of a bankrupt circulating library.
+
+"After that I grew more careful. I studied my disguises much more
+diligently. But after all, what could I do? Here I was, writing stories
+for my living and my reputation. I made a pretty sum enough, and worked
+hard enough to earn it. No tale, no money. Then every story that went
+from my workshop had to come up to the standard of my reputation, and
+there was a set of critics,--there is a set of critics now and
+everywhere,--that watch as narrowly for the decline of a man's reputation
+as ever a village half drowned out by an inundation watched for the
+falling of the waters. The fame I had won, such as it was, seemed to
+attend me,--not going before me in the shape of a woman with a trumpet,
+but rather following me like one of Actaeon's hounds, his throat open,
+ready to pull me down and tear me. What a fierce enemy is that which bays
+behind us in the voice of our proudest bygone achievement!
+
+"But, as I said above, what could I do? I must write novels, and I must
+have characters. 'Then why not invent them?' asks some novice. Oh, yes!
+Invent them! You can invent a human being that in certain aspects of
+humanity will answer every purpose for which your invention was intended.
+A basket of straw, an old coat and pair of breeches, a hat which has been
+soaked, sat upon, stuffed a broken window, and had a brood of chickens
+raised in it,--these elements, duly adjusted to each other, will
+represent humanity so truthfully that the crows will avoid the cornfield
+when your scarecrow displays his personality. Do you think you can make
+your heroes and heroines,--nay, even your scrappy supernumeraries,--out
+of refuse material, as you made your scarecrow? You can't do it. You
+must study living people and reproduce them. And whom do you know so
+well as your friends? You will show up your friends, then, one after
+another. When your friends give out, who is left for you? Why, nobody
+but your own family, of course. When you have used up your family, there
+is nothing left for you but to write your autobiography.
+
+"After my experience with my grand-aunt, I be came more cautious, very
+naturally. I kept traits of character, but I mixed ages as well as
+sexes. In this way I continued to use up a large amount of material,
+which looked as if it were as dangerous as dynamite to meddle with. Who
+would have expected to meet my maternal uncle in the guise of a
+schoolboy? Yet I managed to decant his characteristics as nicely as the
+old gentleman would have decanted a bottle of Juno Madeira through that
+long siphon which he always used when the most sacred vintages were
+summoned from their crypts to render an account of themselves on his
+hospitable board. It was a nice business, I confess, but I did it, and I
+drink cheerfully to that good uncle's memory in a glass of wine from his
+own cellar, which, with many other more important tokens of his good
+will, I call my own since his lamented demise.
+
+"I succeeded so well with my uncle that I thought I would try a course of
+cousins. I had enough of them to furnish out a whole gallery of
+portraits. There was cousin 'Creeshy,' as we called her; Lucretia, more
+correctly. She was a cripple. Her left lower limb had had something
+happen to it, and she walked with a crutch. Her patience under her trial
+was very pathetic and picturesque, so to speak,--I mean adapted to the
+tender parts of a story; nothing could work up better in a melting
+paragraph. But I could not, of course, describe her particular
+infirmity; that would point her out at once. I thought of shifting the
+lameness to the right lower limb, but even that would be seen through.
+So I gave the young woman that stood for her in my story a lame elbow,
+and put her arm in a sling, and made her such a model of uncomplaining
+endurance that my grandmother cried over her as if her poor old heart
+would break. She cried very easily, my grandmother; in fact, she had
+such a gift for tears that I availed myself of it, and if you remember
+old Judy, in my novel "Honi Soit" (Honey Sweet, the booksellers called
+it),--old Judy, the black-nurse,--that was my grandmother. She had
+various other peculiarities, which I brought out one by one, and saddled
+on to different characters. You see she was a perfect mine of
+singularities and idiosyncrasies. After I had used her up pretty well, I
+came dawn upon my poor relations. They were perfectly fair game; what
+better use could I put them to? I studied them up very carefully, and as
+there were a good many of them I helped myself freely. They lasted me,
+with occasional intermissions, I should say, three or four years. I had
+to be very careful with my poor relations,--they were as touchy as they
+could be; and as I felt bound to send a copy of my novel, whatever it
+might be, to each one of them,--there were as many as a dozen,--I took
+care to mix their characteristic features, so that, though each might
+suspect I meant the other, no one should think I meant him or her. I got
+through all my relations at last except my father and mother. I had
+treated my brothers and sisters pretty fairly, all except Elisha and
+Joanna. The truth is they both had lots of odd ways,--family traits, I
+suppose, but were just different enough from each other to figure
+separately in two different stories. These two novels made me some
+little trouble; for Elisha said he felt sure that I meant Joanna in one
+of them, and quarrelled with me about it; and Joanna vowed and declared
+that Elnathan, in the other, stood for brother 'Lisha, and that it was a
+real mean thing to make fun of folks' own flesh and blood, and treated me
+to one of her cries. She was n't handsome when she cried, poor, dear
+Joanna; in fact, that was one of the personal traits I had made use of in
+the story that Elisha found fault with.
+
+"So as there was nobody left but my father and mother, you see for
+yourself I had no choice. There was one great advantage in dealing with
+them,--I knew them so thoroughly. One naturally feels a certain delicacy
+it handling from a purely artistic point of view persons who have been so
+near to him. One's mother, for instance: suppose some of her little ways
+were so peculiar that the accurate delineation of them would furnish
+amusement to great numbers of readers; it would not be without hesitation
+that a writer of delicate sensibility would draw her portrait, with all
+its whimsicalities, so plainly that it should be generally recognized.
+One's father is commonly of tougher fibre than one's mother, and one
+would not feel the same scruples, perhaps, in using him professionally as
+material in a novel; still, while you are employing him as bait,--you see
+I am honest and plain-spoken, for your characters are baits to catch
+readers with,--I would follow kind Izaak Walton's humane counsel about
+the frog you are fastening to your fish-hook: fix him artistically, as he
+directs, but in so doing I use him as though you loved him.'
+
+"I have at length shown up, in one form and another, all my townsmen who
+have anything effective in their bodily or mental make-up, all my
+friends, all my relatives; that is, all my blood relatives. It has
+occurred to me that I might open a new field in the family connection of
+my father-in-law and mother-in-law. We have been thinking of paying them
+a visit, and I shall have an admirable opportunity of studying them and
+their relatives and visitors. I have long wanted a good chance for
+getting acquainted with the social sphere several grades below that to
+which I am accustomed, and I have no doubt that I shall find matter for
+half a dozen new stories among those connections of mine. Besides, they
+live in a Western city, and one doesn't mind much how he cuts up the
+people of places he does n't himself live in. I suppose there is not
+really so much difference in people's feelings, whether they live in
+Bangor or Omaha, but one's nerves can't be expected to stretch across the
+continent. It is all a matter of greater or less distance. I read this
+morning that a Chinese fleet was sunk, but I did n't think half so much
+about it as I did about losing my sleeve button, confound it! People
+have accused me of want of feeling; they misunderstand the artist-nature,
+--that is all. I obey that implicitly; I am sorry if people don't like
+my descriptions, but I have done my best. I have pulled to pieces all
+the persons I am acquainted with, and put them together again in my
+characters. The quills I write with come from live geese, I would have
+you know. I expect to get some first-rate pluckings from those people I
+was speaking of, and I mean to begin my thirty-ninth novel as soon as I
+have got through my visit."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.
+
+There is no use in trying to hurry the natural course of events, in a
+narrative like this. June passed away, and July, and August had come,
+and as yet the enigma which had completely puzzled Arrowhead Village and
+its visitors remained unsolved. The white canoe still wandered over the
+lake, alone, ghostly, always avoiding the near approach of the boats
+which seemed to be coming in its direction. Now and then a circumstance
+would happen which helped to keep inquiry alive. Good horsemanship was
+not so common among the young men of the place and its neighborhood that
+Maurice's accomplishment in that way could be overlooked. If there was a
+wicked horse or a wild colt whose owner was afraid of him, he would be
+commended to Maurice's attention. Paolo would lead him to his master
+with all due precaution,--for he had no idea of risking his neck on the
+back of any ill-conditioned beast,--and Maurice would fasten on his long
+spurs, spring into the saddle, and very speedily teach the creature good
+behavior. There soon got about a story that he was what the fresh-water
+fisherman called "one o' them whisperers." It is a common legend enough,
+coming from the Old World, but known in American horse-talking circles,
+that some persons will whisper certain words in a horse's ear which will
+tame him if he is as wild and furious as ever Cruiser was. All this
+added to the mystery which surrounded the young man. A single improbable
+or absurd story amounts to very little, but when half a dozen such
+stories are told about the same individual or the same event, they begin
+to produce the effect of credible evidence. If the year had been 1692
+and the place had been Salem Village, Maurice Kirkwood would have run the
+risk of being treated like the Reverend George Burroughs.
+
+Miss Lurida Vincent's curiosity had been intensely excited with reference
+to the young man of whom so many stories were told. She had pretty
+nearly convinced herself that he was the author of the paper on Ocean,
+Lake, and River, which had been read at one of the meetings of the
+Pansophian Society. She was very desirous of meeting him, if it were
+possible. It seemed as if she might, as Secretary of the Society,
+request the cooperation of any of the visitors, without impropriety. So,
+after much deliberation, she wrote a careful note, of which the following
+is an exact copy. Her hand was bold, almost masculine, a curious
+contrast to that of Euthymia, which was delicately feminine.
+PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
+
+ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 3, 18-.
+MAURICE KIRKWOOD, ESQ.
+
+DEAR SIR,--You have received, I trust, a card of invitation to the
+meetings of our Society, but I think we have not yet had the pleasure of
+seeing you at any of them. We have supposed that we might be indebted to
+you for a paper read at the last meeting, and listened to with much
+interest. As it was anonymous, we do not wish to be inquisitive
+respecting its authorship; but we desire to say that any papers kindly
+sent us by the temporary residents of our village will be welcome, and if
+adapted to the wants of our Association will be read at one of its
+meetings or printed in its records, or perhaps both read and printed.
+May we not hope for your presence at the meeting, which is to take place
+next Wednesday evening? Respectfully yours,
+
+LURIDA VINCENT, Secretary of the Pansophian Society.
+
+To this note the Secretary received the following reply:
+MISS LURIDA VINCENT,
+
+ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 4, 18-.
+
+Secretary of the Pansophian Society:
+
+DEAR MISS VINCENT,--I have received the ticket you refer to, and desire
+to express my acknowledgments for the polite attention. I regret that I
+have not been and I fear shall not be able to attend the meetings of the
+Society; but if any subject occurs to me on which I feel an inclination
+to write, it will give me pleasure to send a paper, to be disposed of as
+the Society may see fit.
+
+Very respectfully yours,
+MAURICE KIRKWOOD.
+
+"He says nothing about the authorship of the paper that was read the
+other evening," the Secretary said to herself. "No matter,--he wrote
+it,--there is no mistaking his handwriting. We know something about him,
+now, at any rate. But why doesn't he come to our meetings? What has his
+antipathy to do with his staying away? I must find out what his secret
+is, and I will. I don't believe it's harder than it was to solve that
+prize problem which puzzled so many teachers, or than beating Crakowitz,
+the great chess-player."
+
+To this enigma, then, The Terror determined to bend all the faculties
+which had excited the admiration and sometimes the amazement of those who
+knew her in her school-days. It was a very delicate piece of business;
+for though Lurida was an intrepid woman's rights advocate, and believed
+she was entitled to do almost everything that men dared to, she knew very
+well there were certain limits which a young woman like herself must not
+pass.
+
+In the mean time Maurice had received a visit from the young student at
+the University,--the same whom he had rescued from his dangerous
+predicament in the lake. With him had called one of the teachers,--an
+instructor in modern languages, a native of Italy. Maurice and the
+instructor exchanged a few words in Italian. The young man spoke it with
+the ease which implied long familiarity with its use.
+
+After they left, the instructor asked many curious questions about
+him,--who he was, how long he had been in the village, whether anything
+was known of his history,--all these inquiries with an eagerness which
+implied some special and peculiar reason for the interest they evinced.
+
+"I feel satisfied," the instructor said, "that I have met that young man
+in my own country. It was a number of years ago, and of course he has
+altered in appearance a good deal; but there is a look about him of--what
+shall I call it?---apprehension,--as if he were fearing the approach of
+something or somebody. I think it is the way a man would look that was
+haunted; you know what I mean,--followed by a spirit or ghost. He does
+not suggest the idea of a murderer,--very far from it; but if he did, I
+should think he was every minute in fear of seeing the murdered man's
+spirit."
+
+The student was curious, in his turn, to know all the instructor could
+recall. He had seen him in Rome, he thought, at the Fountain of Trevi,
+where so many strangers go before leaving the city. The youth was in the
+company of a man who looked like a priest. He could not mistake the
+peculiar expression of his countenance, but that was all he now
+remembered about his appearance. His attention had been called to this
+young man by seeing that some of the bystanders were pointing at him, and
+noticing that they were whispering with each other as if with reference
+to him. He should say that the youth was at that time fifteen or sixteen
+years old, and the time was about ten years ago.
+
+After all, this evidence was of little or no value. Suppose the youth
+were Maurice; what then? We know that he had been in Italy, and had been
+there a good while,--or at least we infer so much from his familiarity
+with the language, and are confirmed in the belief by his having an
+Italian servant, whom he probably brought from Italy when he returned.
+If he wrote the paper which was read the other evening, that settles it,
+for the writer says he had lived by the Tiber. We must put this scrap of
+evidence furnished by the Professor with the other scraps; it may turn
+out of some consequence, sooner or later. It is like a piece of a
+dissected map; it means almost nothing by itself, but when we find the
+pieces it joins with we may discover a very important meaning in it.
+
+In a small, concentrated community like that which centred in and
+immediately around Arrowhead Village, every day must have its local
+gossip as well as its general news. The newspaper tells the small
+community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues of
+male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the occurrences and
+comments of the ever-stirring microcosm. The fact that the Italian
+teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten years before was
+circulated and made the most of,--turned over and over like a cake, until
+it was thoroughly done on both sides and all through. It was a very
+small cake, but better than nothing. Miss Vincent heard this story, as
+others did, and talked about it with her friend, Miss Tower. Here was
+one more fact to help along.
+
+The two young ladies who had recently graduated at the Corinna Institute
+remained, as they had always been, intimate friends. They were the
+natural complements of each other. Euthymia represented a complete,
+symmetrical womanhood. Her outward presence was only an index of a
+large, wholesome, affluent life. She could not help being courageous,
+with such a firm organization. She could not help being generous,
+cheerful, active. She had been told often enough that she was fair to
+look upon. She knew that she was called The Wonder by the schoolmates
+who were dazzled by her singular accomplishments, but she did not
+overvalue them. She rather tended to depreciate her own gifts, in
+comparison with those of her friend, Miss Lurida Vincent. The two agreed
+all the better for differing as they did. The octave makes a perfect
+chord, when shorter intervals jar more or less on the ear. Each admired
+the other with a heartiness which if they had been less unlike, would
+have been impossible.
+
+It was a pleasant thing to observe their dependence on each other. The
+Terror of the schoolroom was the oracle in her relations with her friend.
+All the freedom of movement which The Wonder showed in her bodily
+exercises The Terror manifested in the world of thought. She would fling
+open a book, and decide in a swift glance whether it had any message for
+her. Her teachers had compared her way of reading to the taking of an
+instantaneous photograph. When she took up the first book on Physiology
+which Dr. Butts handed her, it seemed to him that if she only opened at
+any place, and gave one look, her mind drank its meaning up, as a moist
+sponge absorbs water. "What can I do with such a creature as this?" he
+said to himself. "There is only one way to deal with her, treat her as
+one treats a silkworm: give it its mulberry leaf, and it will spin its
+own cocoon. Give her the books, and she will spin her own web of
+knowledge."
+
+"Do you really think of studying medicine?" said Dr. Butts to her.
+
+"I have n't made up my mind about that," she answered, "but I want to
+know a little more about this terrible machinery of life and death we are
+all tangled in. I know something about it, but not enough. I find some
+very strange beliefs among the women I meet with, and I want to be able
+to silence them when they attempt to proselyte me to their whims and
+fancies. Besides, I want to know everything."
+
+"They tell me you do, already," said Dr. Butts.
+
+"I am the most ignorant little wretch that draws the breath of life!"
+exclaimed The Terror.
+
+The doctor smiled. He knew what it meant. She had reached that stage of
+education in which the vast domain of the unknown opens its illimitable
+expanse before the eyes of the student. We never know the extent of
+darkness until it is partially illuminated.
+
+"You did not leave the Institute with the reputation of being the most
+ignorant young lady that ever graduated there," said the doctor. "They
+tell me you got the highest marks of any pupil on their record since the
+school was founded."
+
+"What a grand thing it was to be the biggest fish in our small aquarium,
+to be sure!" answered The Terror. "He was six inches long, the
+monster,--a little too big for bait to catch a pickerel with! What did
+you hand me that schoolbook for? Did you think I did n't know anything
+about the human body?"
+
+"You said you were such an ignorant creature I thought I would try you
+with an easy book, by way of introduction."
+
+The Terror was not confused by her apparent self-contradiction.
+
+"I meant what I said, and I mean what I say. When I talk about my
+ignorance, I don't measure myself with schoolgirls, doctor. I don't
+measure myself with my teachers, either. You must talk to me as if I
+were a man, a grown man, if you mean to teach me anything. Where is your
+hat, doctor? Let me try it on."
+
+The doctor handed her his wide-awake. The Terror's hair was not
+naturally abundant, like Euthymia's, and she kept it cut rather short.
+Her head used to get very hot when she studied hard. She tried to put
+the hat on.
+
+"Do you see that?" she said. "I could n't wear it--it would squeeze my
+eyes out of my head. The books told me that women's brains were smaller
+than men's: perhaps they are,--most of them,--I never measured a great
+many. But when they try to settle what women are good for, by
+phrenology, I like to have them put their tape round my head. I don't
+believe in their nonsense, for all that. You might as well tell me that
+if one horse weighs more than another horse he is worth more,--a
+cart-horse that weighs twelve or fourteen hundred pounds better than
+Eclipse, that may have weighed a thousand. Give me a list of the best
+books you can think of, and turn me loose in your library. I can find
+what I want, if you have it; and what I don't find there I will get at
+the Public Library. I shall want to ask you a question now and then."
+
+The doctor looked at her with a kind of admiration, but thoughtfully, as
+if he feared she was thinking of a task too formidable for her slight
+constitutional resource.
+
+She returned, instinctively, to the apparent contradiction in her
+statements about herself.
+
+"I am not a fool, if I am ignorant. Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide sea of
+ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows and some of
+its depths. Your profession deals with the facts of life that interest
+me most just now, and I want to know something of it. Perhaps I may find
+it a calling such as would suit me."
+
+"Do you seriously think of becoming a practitioner of medicine?" said the
+doctor.
+
+"Certainly, I seriously think of it as a possibility, but I want to know
+something more about it first. Perhaps I sha'n't believe in medicine
+enough to practise it. Perhaps I sha'n't like it well enough. No matter
+about that. I wish to study some of your best books on some of the
+subjects that most interest me. I know about bones and muscles and all
+that, and about digestion and respiration and such things. I want to
+study up the nervous system, and learn all about it. I am of the nervous
+temperament myself, and perhaps that is the reason. I want to read about
+insanity and all that relates to it."
+
+A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The Terror
+said this.
+
+"Nervous system. Insanity. She has headaches, I know,--all those
+large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what has
+set her off about insanity and the nervous system? I wonder if any of
+her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder. Bright people
+very often have crazy relations. Perhaps some of her friends are in that
+way. I wonder whether"--the doctor did not speak any of these thoughts,
+and in fact hardly shaped his "whether," for The Terror interrupted his
+train of reflection, or rather struck into it in a way which startled
+him.
+
+"Where is the first volume of this Medical Cyclopaedia?" she asked,
+looking at its empty place on the shelf.
+
+"On my table," the doctor answered. "I have been consulting it."
+
+Lurida flung it open, in her eager way, and turned the pages rapidly
+until she came to the one she wanted. The doctor cast his eye on the
+beading of the page, and saw the large letters A N T.
+
+"I thought so," he said to himself. "We shall know everything there is
+in the books about antipathies now, if we never did before. She has a
+special object in studying the nervous system, just as I suspected. I
+think she does not care to mention it at this time; but if she finds out
+anything of interest she will tell me, if she does anybody. Perhaps she
+does not mean to tell anybody. It is a rather delicate business,--a
+young girl studying the natural history of a young man. Not quite so
+safe as botany or palaeontology!"
+
+Lurida, lately The Terror, now Miss Vincent, had her own plans, and chose
+to keep them to herself, for the present, at least. Her hands were full
+enough, it might seem, without undertaking the solution of the great
+Arrowhead Village enigma. But she was in the most perfect training, so
+far as her intelligence was concerned; and the summer rest had restored
+her bodily vigor, so that her brain was like an overcharged battery which
+will find conductors somewhere to carry off its crowded energy.
+
+At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful season it
+had ever known. The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary
+degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary. The rector was a
+good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was the life of the
+Society. Communications came in abundantly: some from the village and
+its neighborhood, some from the University and the Institute, some from
+distant and unknown sources. The new Secretary was very busy with the
+work of examining these papers. After a forenoon so employed, the carpet
+of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match. A glance at
+the manuscripts strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened
+any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business. If
+the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection
+and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately. A paper of
+twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please read
+through, carefully. That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn
+any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing; but the
+Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in
+dealing with manuscripts. The looker-on might have seen her take up the
+paper, cast one flashing glance at its title, read the first sentence and
+the last, dip at a venture into two or three pages, and decide as swiftly
+as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures what was to
+be its destination. If rejected, it went into the heap on the left; if
+approved, it was laid apart, to be submitted to the Committee for their
+judgment. The foolish writers who insist on one's reading through their
+manuscript poems and stories ought to know how fatal the request is to
+their prospects. It provokes the reader, to begin with. The reading of
+manuscript is frightful work, at the best; the reading of worthless
+manuscript--and most of that which one is requested to read through is
+worthless--would add to the terrors of Tartarus, if any infernal deity
+were ingenious enough to suggest it as a punishment.
+
+If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the
+Committee, but was returned to the author, if he sent for it, which he
+commonly did. Its natural course was to try for admission into some one
+of the popular magazines: into "The Sifter," the most fastidious of them
+all; if that declined it, into "The Second Best;" and if that returned
+it, into "The Omnivorous." If it was refused admittance at the doors of
+all the magazines, it might at length find shelter in the corner of a
+newspaper, where a good deal of very readable verse is to be met with
+nowadays, some of which has been, no doubt, presented to the Pansophian
+Society, but was not considered up to its standard.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A NEW ARRIVAL.
+
+There was a recent accession to the transient population of the village
+which gave rise to some speculation. The new-comer was a young fellow,
+rather careless in his exterior, but apparently as much at home as if he
+owned Arrowhead Village and everything in it. He commonly had a cigar in
+his mouth, carried a pocket pistol, of the non-explosive sort, and a
+stick with a bulldog's bead for its knob; wore a soft bat, a coarse check
+suit, a little baggy, and gaiterboots which had been half-soled,--a
+Bohemian-looking personage, altogether.
+
+This individual began making explorations in every direction. He was
+very curious about the place and all the people in it. He was especially
+interested in the Pansophian Society, concerning which he made all sorts
+of inquiries. This led him to form a summer acquaintance with the
+Secretary, who was pleased to give him whatever information he asked for;
+being proud of the Society, as she had a right to be, and knowing more
+about it than anybody else.
+
+The visitor could not have been long in the village without hearing
+something of Maurice Kirkwood, and the stories, true and false, connected
+with his name. He questioned everybody who could tell him anything about
+Maurice, and set down the answers in a little note-book he always had
+with him.
+
+All this naturally excited the curiosity of the village about this new
+visitor. Among the rest, Miss Vincent, not wanting in an attribute
+thought to belong more especially to her sex, became somewhat interested
+to know more exactly who this inquiring, note-taking personage, who
+seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody, might himself be. Meeting
+him at the Public Library at a fortunate moment, when there was nobody
+but the old Librarian, who was hard of hearing, to interfere with their
+conversation, the little Secretary had a chance to try to find out
+something about him.
+
+"This is a very remarkable library for a small village to possess," he
+remarked to Miss Lurida.
+
+"It is, indeed," she said. "Have you found it well furnished with the
+books you most want?"
+
+"Oh, yes,--books enough. I don't care so much for the books as I do for
+the Newspapers. I like a Review well enough,--it tells you all there is
+in a book; but a good abstract of the Review in a Newspaper saves a
+fellow the trouble of reading it."
+
+"You find the papers you want, here, I hope," said the young lady.
+
+"Oh, I get along pretty well. It's my off-time, and I don't do much
+reading or writing. Who is the city correspondent of this place?"
+
+"I don't think we have any one who writes regularly. Now and then, there
+is a letter, with the gossip of the place in it, or an account of some of
+the doings at our Society. The city papers are always glad to get the
+reports of our meetings, and to know what is going on in the village."
+
+"I suppose you write about the Society to the papers, as you are the
+Secretary."
+
+This was a point-blank shot. She meant to question the young man about
+his business, and here she was on the witness-stand. She ducked her
+head, and let the question go over her.
+
+"Oh, there are plenty of members who are willing enough to write,
+--especially to give an account of their own papers. I think they like
+to have me put in the applause, when they get any. I do that sometimes."
+(How much more, she did not say.)
+
+"I have seen some very well written articles, which, from what they tell
+me of the Secretary, I should have thought she might have written
+herself."
+
+He looked her straight in the eyes.
+
+"I have transmitted some good papers," she said, without winking, or
+swallowing, or changing color, precious little color she had to change;
+her brain wanted all the blood it could borrow or steal, and more too.
+"You spoke of Newspapers," she said, without any change of tone or
+manner: "do you not frequently write for them yourself?"
+
+"I should think I did," answered the young man. "I am a regular
+correspondent of 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"
+
+"The regular correspondent from where?"
+
+"Where! Oh, anywhere,--the place does not make much difference. I have
+been writing chiefly from Naples and St. Petersburg, and now and then
+from Constantinople."
+
+"How long since your return to this country, may I ask?"
+
+"My return? I have never been out of this country. I travel with a
+gazetteer and some guide-books. It is the cheapest way, and you can get
+the facts much better from them than by trusting your own observation. I
+have made the tour of Europe by the help of them and the newspapers. But
+of late I have taken to interviewing. I find that a very pleasant
+specialty. It is about as good sport as trout-tickling, and much the
+same kind of business. I should like to send the Society an account of
+one of my interviews. Don't you think they would like to hear it?"
+
+"I have no doubt they would. Send it to me, and I will look it over; and
+if the Committee approve it, we will have it at the next meeting. You
+know everything has to be examined and voted on by the Committee," said
+the cautious Secretary.
+
+"Very well,--I will risk it. After it is read, if it is read, please
+send it back to me, as I want to sell it to 'The Sifter,' or 'The Second
+Best,' or some of the paying magazines."
+
+This is the paper, which was read at the next meeting of the Pansophian
+Society.
+
+"I was ordered by the editor of the newspaper to which I am attached,
+'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor,' to make a visit to a
+certain well-known writer, and obtain all the particulars I could
+concerning him and all that related to him. I have interviewed a good
+many politicians, who I thought rather liked the process; but I had never
+tried any of these literary people, and I was not quite sure how this one
+would feel about it. I said as much to the chief, but he pooh-poohed my
+scruples. 'It is n't our business whether they like it or not,' said he;
+'the public wants it, and what the public wants it's bound to have, and
+we are bound to furnish it. Don't be afraid of your man; he 's used to
+it,--he's been pumped often enough to take it easy, and what you've got
+to do is to pump him dry. You need n't be modest,--ask him what you
+like; he is n't bound to answer, you know.'
+
+"As he lived in a rather nice quarter of the town, I smarted myself up a
+little, put on a fresh collar and cuffs, and got a five-cent shine on my
+best high-lows. I said to myself, as I was walking towards the house
+where he lived, that I would keep very shady for a while and pass for a
+visitor from a distance; one of those 'admiring strangers' who call in to
+pay their respects, to get an autograph, and go home and say that they
+have met the distinguished So and So, which gives them a certain
+distinction in the village circle to which they belong.
+
+"My man, the celebrated writer, received me in what was evidently his
+reception-room. I observed that he managed to get the light full on my
+face, while his own was in the shade. I had meant to have his face in
+the light, but he knew the localities, and had arranged things so as to
+give him that advantage. It was like two frigates manoeuvring,--each
+trying to get to windward of the other. I never take out my note-book
+until I and my man have got engaged in artless and earnest
+conversation,--always about himself and his works, of course, if he is an
+author.
+
+"I began by saying that he must receive a good many callers. Those who
+had read his books were naturally curious to see the writer of them.
+
+"He assented, emphatically, to this statement. He had, he said, a great
+many callers.
+
+"I remarked that there was a quality in his books which made his readers
+feel as if they knew him personally, and caused them to cherish a certain
+attachment to him.
+
+"He smiled, as if pleased. He was himself disposed to think so, he said.
+In fact, a great many persons, strangers writing to him, had told him so.
+
+"My dear sir, I said, there is nothing wonderful in the fact you mention.
+You reach a responsive chord in many human breasts.
+
+ 'One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.'
+
+"Everybody feels as if he, and especially she (his eyes sparkled), were
+your blood relation. Do they not name their children after you very
+frequently?
+
+"He blushed perceptibly. 'Sometimes,' he answered. 'I hope they will
+all turn out well.'
+
+"I am afraid I am taking up too much of your time, I said.
+
+"No, not at all,' he replied. 'Come up into my library; it is warmer and
+pleasanter there.'
+
+"I felt confident that I had him by the right handle then; for an
+author's library, which is commonly his working-room, is, like a lady's
+boudoir, a sacred apartment.
+
+"So we went upstairs, and again he got me with the daylight on my face,
+when I wanted it on has.
+
+"You have a fine library, I remarked. There were books all round the
+room, and one of those whirligig square book-cases. I saw in front a
+Bible and a Concordance, Shakespeare and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's book, and
+other classical works and books of grave aspect. I contrived to give it
+a turn, and on the side next the wall I got a glimpse of Barnum's Rhyming
+Dictionary, and several Dictionaries of Quotations and cheap compends of
+knowledge. Always twirl one of those revolving book-cases when you visit
+a scholar's library. That is the way to find out what books he does n't
+want you to see, which of course are the ones you particularly wish to
+see.
+
+"Some may call all this impertinent and inquisitive. What do you suppose
+is an interviewer's business? Did you ever see an oyster opened? Yes?
+Well, an interviewer's business is the same thing. His man is his oyster,
+which he, not with sword, but with pencil and note-book, must open. Mark
+how the oysterman's thin blade insinuates itself,--how gently at first,
+how strenuously when once fairly between the shells!
+
+"And here, I said, you write your books,--those books which have carried
+your name to all parts of the world, and will convey it down to
+posterity! Is this the desk at which you write? And is this the pen you
+write with?
+
+"'It is the desk and the very pen,' he replied.
+
+"He was pleased with my questions and my way of putting them. I took up
+the pen as reverentially as if it had been made of the feather which the
+angel I used to read about in Young's "Night Thoughts" ought to have
+dropped, and did n't.
+
+"Would you kindly write your autograph in my note-book, with that pen? I
+asked him. Yes, he would, with great pleasure.
+
+"So I got out my note-book.
+
+"It was a spick and span new one, bought on purpose for this interview.
+I admire your bookcases, said I. Can you tell me just how high they are?
+
+"'They are about eight feet, with the cornice.'
+
+"I should like to have some like those, if I ever get rich enough, said
+I. Eight feet,--eight feet, with the cornice. I must put that down.
+
+"So I got out my pencil.
+
+"I sat there with my pencil and note-book in my hand, all ready, but not
+using them as yet.
+
+"I have heard it said, I observed, that you began writing poems at a very
+early age. Is it taking too great a liberty to ask how early you began
+to write in verse?
+
+"He was getting interested, as people are apt to be when they are
+themselves the subjects of conversation.
+
+"'Very early,--I hardly know how early. I can say truly, as Louise Colet
+said,
+
+ "'Je fis mes premiers vers sans savoir les ecrire.'"
+
+"I am not a very good French scholar, said I; perhaps you will be kind
+enough to translate that line for me.
+
+"'Certainly. With pleasure. I made my first verses without knowing how
+to write them.'
+
+"How interesting! But I never heard of Louise Colet. Who was she?
+
+"My man was pleased to gi-ve me a piece of literary information.
+
+"'Louise the lioness! Never heard of her? You have heard of Alphonse
+Karr?'
+
+"Why,--yes,--more or less. To tell the truth, I am not very well up in
+French literature. What had he to do with your lioness?
+
+"'A good deal. He satirized her, and she waited at his door with a
+case-knife in her hand, intending to stick him with it. By and by he
+came down, smoking a cigarette, and was met by this woman flourishing her
+case-knife. He took it from her, after getting a cut in his
+dressing-gown, put it in his pocket, and went on with his cigarette. He
+keeps it with an inscription:
+
+ "Donne a Alphonse Karr
+ Par Madame Louise Colet....
+ Dans le dos.
+
+"Lively little female!'
+
+"I could n't help thinking that I should n't have cared to interview the
+lively little female. He was evidently tickled with the interest I
+appeared to take in the story he told me. That made him feel amiably
+disposed toward me.
+
+"I began with very general questions, but by degrees I got at everything
+about his family history and the small events of his boyhood. Some of
+the points touched upon were delicate, but I put a good bold face on my
+most audacious questions, and so I wormed out a great deal that was new
+concerning my subject. He had been written about considerably, and the
+public wouldn't have been satisfied without some new facts; and these I
+meant to have, and I got. No matter about many of them now, but here are
+some questions and answers that may be thought worth reading or listening
+to:
+
+"How do you enjoy being what they call 'a celebrity,' or a celebrated
+man?
+
+"'So far as one's vanity is concerned it is well enough. But self-love
+is a cup without any bottom, and you might pour the Great Lakes all
+through it, and never fill it up. It breeds an appetite for more of the
+same kind. It tends to make the celebrity a mere lump of egotism. It
+generates a craving for high-seasoned personalities which is in danger of
+becoming slavery, like that following the abuse of alcohol, or opium, or
+tobacco. Think of a man's having every day, by every post, letters that
+tell him he is this and that and the other, with epithets and
+endearments, one tenth part of which would have made him blush red hot
+before he began to be what you call a celebrity!'
+
+"Are there not some special inconveniences connected with what is called
+celebrity?
+
+"'I should think so! Suppose you were obliged every day of your life to
+stand and shake hands, as the President of the United States has to after
+his inauguration: how do you think your hand would feel after a few
+months' practice of that exercise? Suppose you had given you thirty-five
+millions of money a year, in hundred-dollar coupons, on condition that
+you cut them all off yourself in the usual manner: how do you think you
+should like the look of a pair of scissors at the end of a year, in which
+you had worked ten hours a day every day but Sunday, cutting off a
+hundred coupons an hour, and found you had not finished your task, after
+all? You have addressed me as what you are pleased to call "a literary
+celebrity." I won't dispute with you as to whether or not I deserve that
+title. I will take it for granted I am what you call me, and give you
+some few hints on my experience.
+
+"'You know there was formed a while ago an Association of Authors for
+Self-Protection. It meant well, and it was hoped that something would
+come of it in the way of relieving that oppressed class, but I am sorry
+to say that it has not effected its purpose.'
+
+"I suspected he had a hand in drawing up the Constitution and Laws of
+that Association. Yes, I said, an admirable Association it was, and as
+much needed as the one for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I am
+sorry to hear that it has not proved effectual in putting a stop to the
+abuse of a deserving class of men. It ought to have done it; it was well
+conceived, and its public manifesto was a masterpiece. (I saw by his
+expression that he was its author.)
+
+"'I see I can trust you,' he said. 'I will unbosom myself freely of some
+of the grievances attaching to the position of the individual to whom you
+have applied the term "Literary Celebrity."
+
+"'He is supposed to be a millionaire, in virtue of the immense sales of
+his books, all the money from which, it is taken for granted, goes into
+his pocket. Consequently, all subscription papers are handed to him for
+his signature, and every needy stranger who has heard his name comes to
+him for assistance.
+
+"'He is expected to subscribe for all periodicals, and is goaded by
+receiving blank formulae, which, with their promises to pay, he is
+expected to fill up.
+
+"'He receives two or three books daily, with requests to read and give
+his opinion about each of them, which opinion, if it has a word which can
+be used as an advertisement, he will find quoted in all the newspapers.
+
+"'He receives thick masses of manuscript, prose and verse, which he is
+called upon to examine and pronounce on their merits; these manuscripts
+having almost invariably been rejected by the editors to whom they have
+been sent, and having as a rule no literary value whatever.
+
+"'He is expected to sign petitions, to contribute to journals, to write
+for fairs, to attend celebrations, to make after-dinner speeches, to send
+money for objects he does not believe in to places he never heard of.
+
+"'He is called on to keep up correspondences with unknown admirers, who
+begin by saying they have no claim upon his time, and then appropriate it
+by writing page after page, if of the male sex; and sheet after sheet, if
+of the other.
+
+"'If a poet, it is taken for granted that he can sit down at any moment
+and spin off any number of verses on any subject which may be suggested
+to him; such as congratulations to the writer's great-grandmother on her
+reaching her hundredth year, an elegy on an infant aged six weeks, an ode
+for the Fourth of July in a Western township not to be found in
+Lippincott's last edition, perhaps a valentine for some bucolic lover who
+believes that wooing in rhyme is the way to win the object of his
+affections.'
+
+"Is n't it so? I asked the Celebrity.
+
+"'I would bet on the prose lover. She will show the verses to him, and
+they will both have a good laugh over them.'
+
+"I have only reported a small part of the conversation I had with the
+Literary Celebrity. He was so much taken up with his pleasing
+self-contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and
+spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his linen on
+the clothes-line, that I don't believe it ever occurred to him that he
+had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found himself exposed to
+the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the columns of The People's
+Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"
+
+After the reading of this paper, much curiosity was shown as to who the
+person spoken of as the "Literary Celebrity" might be. Among the various
+suppositions the startling idea was suggested that he was neither more
+nor less than the unexplained personage known in the village as Maurice
+Kirkwood. Why should that be his real name? Why should not he be the
+Celebrity, who had taken this name and fled to this retreat to escape
+from the persecutions of kind friends, who were pricking him and stabbing
+him nigh to death with their daggers of sugar candy?
+
+The Secretary of the Pansophian Society determined to question the
+Interviewer the next time she met him at the Library, which happened soon
+after the meeting when his paper was read.
+
+"I do not know," she said, in the course of a conversation in which she
+had spoken warmly of his contribution to the literary entertainment of
+the Society, "that you mentioned the name of the Literary Celebrity whom
+you interviewed so successfully."
+
+"I did not mention him, Miss Vincent," he answered, "nor do I think it
+worth while to name him. He might not care to have the whole story told
+of how he was handled so as to make him communicative. Besides, if I did,
+it would bring him a new batch of sympathetic letters, regretting that he
+was bothered by those horrid correspondents, full of indignation at the
+bores who presumed to intrude upon him with their pages of trash, all the
+writers of which would expect answers to their letters of condolence."
+
+The Secretary asked the Interviewer if he knew the young gentleman who
+called himself Maurice Kirkwood.
+
+"What," he answered, "the man that paddles a birch canoe, and rides all
+the wild horses of the neighborhood? No, I don't know him, but I have
+met him once or twice, out walking. A mighty shy fellow, they tell me.
+Do you know anything particular about him?"
+
+"Not much. None of us do, but we should like to. The story is that he
+has a queer antipathy to something or to somebody, nobody knows what or
+whom."
+
+"To newspaper correspondents, perhaps," said the interviewer. "What made
+you ask me about him? You did n't think he was my 'Literary Celebrity,'
+did you?"
+
+"I did not know. I thought he might be. Why don't you interview this
+mysterious personage? He would make a good sensation for your paper, I
+should think."
+
+"Why, what is there to be interviewed in him? Is there any story of
+crime, or anything else to spice a column or so, or even a few
+paragraphs, with? If there is, I am willing to handle him
+professionally."
+
+"I told you he has what they call an antipathy. I don't know how much
+wiser you are for that piece of information."
+
+"An antipathy! Why, so have I an antipathy. I hate a spider, and as for
+a naked caterpillar,--I believe I should go into a fit if I had to touch
+one. I know I turn pale at the sight of some of those great green
+caterpillars that come down from the elm-trees in August and early
+autumn."
+
+"Afraid of them?" asked the young lady.
+
+"Afraid? What should I be afraid of? They can't bite or sting. I can't
+give any reason. All I know is that when I come across one of these
+creatures in my path I jump to one side, and cry out,--sometimes using
+very improper words. The fact is, they make me crazy for the moment."
+
+"I understand what you mean," said Miss Vincent. "I used to have the
+same feeling about spiders, but I was ashamed of it, and kept a little
+menagerie of spiders until I had got over the feeling; that is, pretty
+much got over it, for I don't love the creatures very dearly, though I
+don't scream when I see one."
+
+"What did you tell me, Miss Vincent, was this fellow's particular
+antipathy?"
+
+That is just the question. I told you that we don't know and we can't
+guess what it is. The people here are tired out with trying to discover
+some good reason for the young man's keeping out of the way of everybody,
+as he does. They say he is odd or crazy, and they don't seem to be able
+to tell which. It would make the old ladies of the village sleep a great
+deal sounder,--yes, and some of the young ladies, too,--if they could
+find out what this Mr. Kirkwood has got into his head, that he never
+comes near any of the people here."
+
+"I think I can find out," said the Interviewer, whose professional
+ambition was beginning to be excited. "I never came across anybody yet
+that I could n't get something out of. I am going to stay here a week or
+two, and before I go I will find out the secret, if there is any, of this
+Mr. Maurice Kirkwood."
+
+We must leave the Interviewer to his contrivances until they present us
+with some kind of result, either in the shape of success or failure.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE INTERVIEWER ATTACKS THE SPHINX.
+
+When Miss Euthymia Tower sent her oar off in flashing splinters, as she
+pulled her last stroke in the boat-race, she did not know what a strain
+she was putting upon it. She did know that she was doing her best, but
+how great the force of her best was she was not aware until she saw its
+effects. Unconsciousness belonged to her robust nature, in all its
+manifestations. She did not pride herself on her knowledge, nor reproach
+herself for her ignorance. In every way she formed a striking contrast
+to her friend, Miss Vincent. Every word they spoke betrayed the
+difference between them: the sharp tones of Lurida's head-voice,
+penetrative, aggressive, sometimes irritating, revealed the corresponding
+traits of mental and moral character; the quiet, conversational contralto
+of Euthymia was the index of a nature restful and sympathetic.
+
+The friendships of young girls prefigure the closer relations which will
+one day come in and dissolve their earlier intimacies. The dependence of
+two young friends may be mutual, but one will always lean more heavily
+than the other; the masculine and feminine elements will be as sure to
+assert themselves as if the friends were of different sexes.
+
+On all common occasions Euthymia looked up to her friend as her superior.
+She fully appreciated all her varied gifts and knowledge, and deferred to
+her opinion in every-day matters, not exactly as an oracle, but as wiser
+than herself or any of her other companions. It was a different thing,
+however, when the graver questions of life came up. Lurida was full of
+suggestions, plans, projects, which were too liable to run into whims
+before she knew where they were tending. She would lay out her ideas
+before Euthymia so fluently and eloquently that she could not help
+believing them herself, and feeling as if her friend must accept them
+with an enthusiasm like her own. Then Euthymia would take them up with
+her sweet, deliberate accents, and bring her calmer judgment to bear on
+them.
+
+Lurida was in an excited condition, in the midst of all her new interests
+and occupations. She was constantly on the lookout for papers to be read
+at the meetings of her Society,--for she made it her own in great
+measure, by her zeal and enthusiasm,--and in the mean time she was
+reading in various books which Dr. Butts selected for her, all bearing on
+the profession to which, at least as a possibility, she was looking
+forward. Privately and in a very still way, she was occupying herself
+with the problem of the young stranger, the subject of some delusion, or
+disease, or obliquity of unknown nature, to which the vague name of
+antipathy had been attached. Euthymia kept an eye upon her, partly in
+the fear that over-excitement would produce some mental injury, and
+partly from anxiety lest she should compromise her womanly dignity in her
+desire to get at the truth of a very puzzling question.
+
+"How do you like the books I see you reading?" said Euthymia to Lurida,
+one day, as they met at the Library.
+
+"Better than all the novels I ever read," she answered. "I have been
+reading about the nervous system, and it seems to me I have come nearer
+the springs of life than ever before in all my studies. I feel just as
+if I were a telegraph operator. I was sure that I had a battery in my
+head, for I know my brain works like one; but I did not know how many
+centres of energy there are, and how they are played upon by all sorts of
+influences, external and internal. Do you know, I believe I could solve
+the riddle of the 'Arrowhead Village Sphinx,' as the paper called him, if
+he would only stay here long enough?"
+
+"What paper has had anything about it, Lurida? I have not seen or heard
+of its being mentioned in any of the papers."
+
+"You know that rather queer-looking young man who has been about here for
+some time,--the same one who gave the account of his interview with a
+celebrated author? Well, he has handed me a copy of a paper in which he
+writes, 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.' He talks about
+this village in a very free and easy way. He says there is a Sphinx here,
+who has mystified us all."
+
+"And you have been chatting with that fellow! Don't you know that he'll
+have you and all of us in his paper? Don't you know that nothing is safe
+where one of those fellows gets in with his note-book and pencil? Oh,
+Lurida, Lurida, do be careful!" What with this mysterious young man and
+this very questionable newspaper-paragraph writer, you will be talked
+about, if you don't mind, before you know it. You had better let the
+riddle of the Sphinx alone. If you must deal with such dangerous people,
+the safest way is to set one of them to find out the other.--I wonder if
+we can't get this new man to interview the visitor you have so much
+curiosity about. That might be managed easily enough without your having
+anything to do with it. Let me alone, and I will arrange it. But mind,
+now, you must not meddle; if you do, you will spoil everything, and get
+your name in the 'Household Inquisitor' in a way you won't like."
+
+"Don't be frightened about me, Euthymia. I don't mean to give him a
+chance to work me into his paper, if I can help it. But if you can get
+him to try his skill upon this interesting personage and his antipathy,
+so much the better. I am very curious about it, and therefore about him.
+I want to know what has produced this strange state of feeling in a young
+man who ought to have all the common instincts of a social being. I
+believe there are unexplained facts in the region of sympathies and
+antipathies which will repay study with a deeper insight into the
+mysteries of life than we have dreamed of hitherto. I often wonder
+whether there are not heart-waves and soul-waves as well as
+'brain-waves,' which some have already recognized."
+
+Euthymia wondered, as well she might, to hear this young woman talking
+the language of science like an adept. The truth is, Lurida was one of
+those persons who never are young, and who, by way of compensation, will
+never be old. They are found in both sexes. Two well-known graduates of
+one of our great universities are living examples of this precocious but
+enduring intellectual development. If the readers of this narrative
+cannot pick them out, they need not expect the writer of it to help them.
+If they guess rightly who they are, they will recognize the fact that
+just such exceptional individuals as the young woman we are dealing with
+are met with from time to time in families where intelligence has been
+cumulative for two or three generations.
+
+Euthymia was very willing that the questioning and questionable visitor
+should learn all that was known in the village about the nebulous
+individual whose misty environment all the eyes in the village were
+trying to penetrate, but that he should learn it from some other
+informant than Lurida.
+
+The next morning, as the Interviewer took his seat on a bench outside his
+door, to smoke his after-breakfast cigar, a bright-looking and handsome
+youth, whose features recalled those of Euthymia so strikingly that one
+might feel pretty sure he was her brother, took a seat by his side.
+Presently the two were engaged in conversation. The Interviewer asked all
+sorts of questions about everybody in the village. When he came to
+inquire about Maurice, the youth showed a remarkable interest regarding
+him. The greatest curiosity, he said, existed with reference to this
+personage. Everybody was trying to find out what his story was,--for a
+story, and a strange one, he must surely have,--and nobody had succeeded.
+
+The Interviewer began to be unusually attentive. The young man told him
+the various antipathy stories, about the evil-eye hypothesis, about his
+horse-taming exploits, his rescuing the student whose boat was
+overturned, and every occurrence he could recall which would help out the
+effect of his narrative.
+
+The Interviewer was becoming excited. "Can't find out anything about
+him, you said, did n-'t you? How do you know there's anything to find?
+Do you want to know what I think he is? I'll tell you. I think he is an
+actor,--a fellow from one of the city theatres. Those fellows go off in
+their summer vacation, and like to puzzle the country folks. They are
+the very same chaps, like as not, the visitors have seen in plays at the
+city theatres; but of course they don't know 'em in plain clothes. Kings
+and Emperors look pretty shabby off the stage sometimes, I can tell you."
+
+The young man followed the Interviewer's lead. "I shouldn't wonder if
+you were right," he said. "I remember seeing a young fellow in Romeo
+that looked a good deal like this one. But I never met the Sphinx, as
+they call him, face to face. He is as shy as a woodchuck. I believe
+there are people here that would give a hundred dollars to find out who
+he is, and where he came from, and what he is here for, and why he does
+n't act like other folks. I wonder why some of those newspaper men don't
+come up here and get hold of this story. It would be just the thing for
+a sensational writer."
+
+To all this the Interviewer listened with true professional interest.
+Always on the lookout for something to make up a paragraph or a column
+about; driven oftentimes to the stalest of repetitions,--to the biggest
+pumpkin story, the tall cornstalk, the fat ox, the live frog from the
+human stomach story, the third set of teeth and reading without
+spectacles at ninety story, and the rest of the marvellous commonplaces
+which are kept in type with e o y or e 6 m (every other year or every
+six months) at the foot; always in want of a fresh incident, a new story,
+an undescribed character, an unexplained mystery, it is no wonder that
+the Interviewer fastened eagerly upon this most tempting subject for an
+inventive and emotional correspondent.
+
+He had seen Paolo several times, and knew that he was Maurice's
+confidential servant, but had never spoken to him. So he said to himself
+that he must make Paolo's acquaintance, to begin with. In the summer
+season many kinds of small traffic were always carried on in Arrowhead
+Village. Among the rest, the sellers of fruits--oranges, bananas, and
+others, according to the seasons--did an active business. The
+Interviewer watched one of these fruit-sellers, and saw that his
+hand-cart stopped opposite the house where, as he knew, Maurice Kirkwood
+was living. Presently Paolo came out of the door, and began examining
+the contents of the hand-cart. The Interviewer saw his opportunity.
+Here was an introduction to the man, and the man must introduce him to
+the master.
+
+He knew very well how to ingratiate himself with the man,--there was no
+difficulty about that. He had learned his name, and that he was an
+Italian whom Maurice had brought to this country with him.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Paul," he said. "How do you like the look of these
+oranges?"
+
+"They pretty fair," said Paolo: "no so good as them las' week; no sweet
+as them was."
+
+"Why, how do you know without tasting them?" said the Interviewer.
+
+"I know by his look,--I know by his smell,--he no good yaller,--he no
+smell ripe,--I know orange ever since my head no bigger than he is," and
+Paolo laughed at his own comparison.
+
+The Interviewer laughed louder than Paolo.
+
+"Good!" said he,--"first-rate! Of course you know all about 'em. Why
+can't you pick me out a couple of what you think are the best of 'em? I
+shall be greatly obliged to you. I have a sick friend, and I want to get
+two nice sweet ones for him."
+
+Paolo was pleased. His skill and judgment were recognized. He felt
+grateful to the stranger, who had given him, an opportunity of conferring
+a favor. He selected two, after careful examination and grave
+deliberation. The Interviewer had sense and tact enough not to offer him
+an orange, and so shift the balance of obligation.
+
+"How is Mr. Kirkwood, to-day?" he asked.
+
+"Signor? He very well. He always well. Why you ask? Anybody tell you
+he sick?"
+
+"No, nobody said he was sick. I have n't seen him going about for a day
+or two, and I thought he might have something the matter with him. Is he
+in the house now?"
+
+"No: he off riding. He take long, long rides, sometime gone all day.
+Sometime he go on lake, paddle, paddle in the morning, very, very
+early,--in night when the moon shine; sometime stay in house, and read,
+and study, and write,--he great scholar, Misser Kirkwood."
+
+"A good many books, has n't he?"
+
+"He got whole shelfs full of books. Great books, little books, old
+books, new books, all sorts of books. He great scholar, I tell you."
+
+"Has n't he some curiosities,--old figures, old jewelry, old coins, or
+things of that sort?"
+
+Paolo looked at the young man cautiously, almost suspiciously. "He don't
+keep no jewels nor no money in his chamber. He got some old things,--old
+jugs, old brass figgers, old money, such as they used to have in old
+times: she don't pass now." Paolo's genders were apt to be somewhat
+indiscriminately distributed.
+
+A lucky thought struck the Interviewer. "I wonder if he would examine
+some old coins of mine?" said he, in a modestly tentative manner.
+
+"I think he like to see anything curious. When he come home I ask him.
+Who will I tell him wants to ask him about old coin?"
+
+"Tell him a gentleman visiting Arrowhead Village would like to call and
+show him some old pieces of money, said to be Roman ones."
+
+The Interviewer had just remembered that he had two or three old battered
+bits of copper which he had picked up at a tollman's, where they had been
+passed off for cents. He had bought them as curiosities. One had the
+name of Gallienus upon it, tolerably distinct,--a common little Roman
+penny; but it would serve his purpose of asking a question, as would two
+or three others with less legible legends. Paolo told him that if he
+came the next morning he would stand a fair chance of seeing Mr.
+Kirkwood. At any rate, he would speak to his master.
+
+The Interviewer presented himself the next morning, after finishing his
+breakfast and his cigar, feeling reasonably sure of finding Mr. Kirkwood
+at home, as he proved to be. He had told Paolo to show the stranger up
+to his library,--or study, as he modestly called it.
+
+It was a pleasant room enough, with a lookout on the lake in one
+direction, and the wooded hill in another. The tenant had fitted it up
+in scholarly fashion. The books Paolo spoke of were conspicuous, many of
+them, by their white vellum binding and tasteful gilding, showing that
+probably they had been bound in Rome, or some other Italian city. With
+these were older volumes in their dark original leather, and recent ones
+in cloth or paper. As the Interviewer ran his eye over them, he found
+that he could make very little out of what their backs taught him. Some
+of the paper-covered books, some of the cloth-covered ones, had names
+which he knew; but those on the backs of many of the others were strange
+to his eyes. The classics of Greek and Latin and Italian literature were
+there; and he saw enough to feel convinced that he had better not attempt
+to display his erudition in the company of this young scholar.
+
+The first thing the Interviewer had to do was to account for his visiting
+a person who had not asked to make his acquaintance, and who was living
+as a recluse. He took out his battered coppers, and showed them to
+Maurice.
+
+"I understood that you were very skilful in antiquities, and had a good
+many yourself. So I took the liberty of calling upon you, hoping that
+you could tell me something about some ancient coins I have had for a
+good while." So saying, he pointed to the copper with the name of
+Gallienus.
+
+"Is this very rare and valuable? I have heard that great prices have
+been paid for some of these ancient coins,--ever so many guineas,
+sometimes. I suppose this is as much as a thousand years old."
+
+"More than a thousand years old," said Maurice.
+
+"And worth a great deal of money?" asked the Interviewer.
+
+"No, not a great deal of money," answered Maurice.
+
+"How much, should you say?" said the Interviewer.
+
+Maurice smiled. "A little more than the value of its weight in
+copper,--I am afraid not much more. There are a good many of these coins
+of Gallienus knocking about. The peddlers and the shopkeepers take such
+pieces occasionally, and sell them, sometimes for five or ten cents, to
+young collectors. No, it is not very precious in money value, but as a
+relic any piece of money that was passed from hand to hand a thousand or
+fifteen hundred years ago is interesting. The value of such relics is a
+good deal a matter of imagination."
+
+"And what do you say to these others?" asked the Interviewer. Poor old
+worn-out things they were, with a letter or two only, and some faint
+trace of a figure on one or two of them.
+
+"Very interesting, always, if they carry your imagination back to the
+times when you may suppose they were current. Perhaps Horace tossed one
+of them to a beggar. Perhaps one of these was the coin that was brought
+when One said to those about Him, 'Bring me a penny, that I may see it.'
+But the market price is a different matter. That depends on the beauty
+and preservation, and above all the rarity, of the specimen. Here is a
+coin, now,"--he opened a small cabinet, and took one from it. "Here is a
+Syracusan decadrachm with the head of Persephone, which is at once rare,
+well preserved, and beautiful. I am afraid to tell what I paid for it."
+
+The Interviewer was not an expert in numismatics. He cared very little
+more for an old coin than he did for an old button, but he had thought
+his purchase at the tollman's might prove a good speculation. No matter
+about the battered old pieces: he had found out, at any rate, that
+Maurice must have money and could be extravagant, or what he himself
+considered so; also that he was familiar with ancient coins. That would
+do for a beginning.
+
+"May I ask where you picked up the coin you are showing me?" he said
+
+"That is a question which provokes a negative answer. One does not 'pick
+up' first-class coins or paintings, very often, in these times. I bought
+this of a great dealer in Rome."
+
+"Lived in Rome once?" said the Interviewer.
+
+"For some years. Perhaps you have been there yourself?"
+
+The Interviewer said he had never been there yet, but he hoped he should
+go there, one of these years, "suppose you studied art and antiquities
+while you were there?" he continued.
+
+"Everybody who goes to Rome must learn something of art and antiquities.
+Before you go there I advise you to review Roman history and the classic
+authors. You had better make a study of ancient and modern art, and not
+have everything to learn while you are going about among ruins, and
+churches, and galleries. You know your Horace and Virgil well, I take it
+for granted?"
+
+The Interviewer hesitated. The names sounded as if he had heard them.
+"Not so well as I mean to before going to Rome," he answered. "May I ask
+how long you lived in Rome?"
+
+"Long enough to know something of what is to be seen in it. No one
+should go there without careful preparation beforehand. You are familiar
+with Vasari, of course?"
+
+The Interviewer felt a slight moisture on his forehead. He took out his
+handkerchief. "It is a warm day," he said. "I have not had time to read
+all--the works I mean to. I have had too much writing to do, myself, to
+find all the time for reading and study I could have wished."
+
+"In what literary occupation have you been engaged, if you will pardon my
+inquiry? said Maurice.
+
+"I am connected with the press. I understood that you were a man of
+letters, and I hoped I might have the privilege of hearing from your own
+lips some account of your literary experiences."
+
+"Perhaps that might be interesting, but I think I shall reserve it for my
+autobiography. You said you were connected with the press. Do I
+understand that you are an author?"
+
+By this time the Interviewer had come to the conclusion that it was a
+very warm day. He did not seem to be getting hold of his pitcher by the
+right handle, somehow. But he could not help answering Maurice's very
+simple question.
+
+"If writing for a newspaper gives one a right to be called an author, I
+may call myself one. I write for the "People's Perennial and Household
+Inquisitor."
+
+"Are you the literary critic of that well-known journal, or do you manage
+the political column?"
+
+"I am a correspondent from different places and on various matters of
+interest."
+
+"Places you have been to, and people you have known?"
+
+"Well, yes,-generally, that is. Sometimes I have to compile my
+articles."
+
+"Did you write the letter from Rome, published a few weeks ago?"
+
+The Interviewer was in what he would call a tight place. However, he had
+found that his man was too much for him, and saw that the best thing he
+could do was to submit to be interviewed himself. He thought that he
+should be able to pick up something or other which he could work into his
+report of his visit.
+
+"Well, I--prepared that article for our columns. You know one does not
+have to see everything he describes. You found it accurate, I hope, in
+its descriptions?"
+
+"Yes, Murray is generally accurate. Sometimes he makes mistakes, but I
+can't say how far you have copied them. You got the Ponte Molle--the
+old Milvian bridge--a good deal too far down the stream, if I remember.
+I happened to notice that, but I did not read the article carefully. May
+I ask whether you propose to do me the honor of reporting this visit and
+the conversation we have had, for the columns of the newspaper with which
+you are connected?"
+
+The Interviewer thought he saw an opening. "If you have no objections,"
+he said, "I should like very much to ask a few questions." He was
+recovering his professional audacity.
+
+"You can ask as many questions as you consider proper and discreet,
+--after you have answered one or two of mine: Who commissioned you to
+submit me to examination?"
+
+"The curiosity of the public wishes to be gratified, and I am the humble
+agent of its investigations."
+
+"What has the public to do with my private affairs?"
+
+"I suppose it is a question of majority and minority. That settles
+everything in this country. You are a minority of one opposed to a large
+number of curious people that form a majority against you. That is the
+way I've heard the chief put it."
+
+Maurice could not help smiling at the quiet assumption of the American
+citizen. The Interviewer smiled, too, and thought he had his man, sure,
+at last. Maurice calmly answered, "There is nothing left for minorities,
+then, but the right of rebellion. I don't care about being made the
+subject of an article for your paper. I am here for my pleasure, minding
+my own business, and content with that occupation. I rebel against your
+system of forced publicity. Whenever I am ready I shall tell the public
+all it has any right to know about me. In the mean time I shall request
+to be spared reading my biography while I am living. I wish you a
+good-morning."
+
+The Interviewer had not taken out his note-book and pencil. In his next
+communication from Arrowhead Village he contented himself with a brief
+mention of the distinguished and accomplished gentleman now visiting the
+place, whose library and cabinet of coins he had had the privilege of
+examining, and whose courtesy was equalled only by the modesty that
+shunned the public notoriety which the organs of popular intelligence
+would otherwise confer upon him.
+
+The Interviewer had attempted the riddle of the Sphinx, and had failed to
+get the first hint of its solution.
+
+The many tongues of the village and its visitors could not remain idle.
+The whole subject of antipathies had been talked over, and the various
+cases recorded had become more or less familiar to the conversational
+circles which met every evening in the different centres of social life.
+The prevalent hypothesis for the moment was that Maurice had a congenital
+aversion to some color, the effects of which upon him were so painful or
+disagreeable that he habitually avoided exposure to it. It was known,
+and it has already been mentioned, that such cases were on record. There
+had been a great deal of discussion, of late, with reference to a fact
+long known to a few individuals, but only recently made a matter of
+careful scientific observation and brought to the notice of the public.
+This was the now well-known phenomenon of color-blindness. It did not
+seem very strange that if one person in every score or two could not tell
+red from green there might be other curious individual peculiarities
+relating to color. A case has already been referred to where the subject
+of observation fainted at the sight of any red object. What if this were
+the trouble with Maurice Kirkwood? It will be seen at once how such a
+congenital antipathy would tend to isolate the person who was its
+unfortunate victim. It was an hypothesis not difficult to test, but it
+was a rather delicate business to be experimenting on an inoffensive
+stranger. Miss Vincent was thinking it over, but said nothing, even to
+Euthymia, of any projects she might entertain.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.
+
+The young lady whom we have known as The Terror, as Lurida, as Miss
+Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, had been reading various
+works selected for her by Dr. Butts,--works chiefly relating to the
+nervous system and its different affections. She thought it was about
+time to talk over the general subject of the medical profession with her
+new teacher,--if such a self-directing person as Lurida could be said to
+recognize anybody as teacher.
+
+She began at the beginning. "What is the first book you would put in a
+student's hands, doctor?" she said to him one day. They were in his
+study, and Lurida had just brought back a thick volume on Insanity, one
+of Bucknill and Puke's, which she had devoured as if it had been a
+pamphlet.
+
+"Not that book, certainly," he said. "I am afraid it will put all sorts
+of notions into your head. Who or what set you to reading that, I should
+like to know?"
+
+"I found it on one of your shelves, and as I thought I might perhaps be
+crazy some time or other, I felt as if I should like to know what kind of
+a condition insanity is. I don't believe they were ever very bright,
+those insane people, most of them. I hope I am not stupid enough ever to
+lose my wits."
+
+"There is no telling, my dear, what may happen if you overwork that busy
+brain of yours. But did n't it make you nervous, reading about so many
+people possessed with such strange notions?"
+
+"Nervous? Not a bit. I could n't help thinking, though, how many people
+I had known that had a little touch of craziness about them. Take that
+poor woman that says she is Her Majesty's Person,--not Her Majesty, but
+Her Majesty's Person,--a very important distinction, according to her:
+how she does remind me of more than one girl I have known! She would let
+her skirts down so as to make a kind of train, and pile things on her
+head like a sort of crown, fold her arms and throw her head back, and
+feel as grand as a queen. I have seen more than one girl act very much
+in that way. Are not most of us a little crazy, doctor,--just a little?
+I think so. It seems to me I never saw but one girl who was free from
+every hint of craziness."
+
+"And who was that, pray?"
+
+"Why, Euthymia,--nobody else, of course. She never loses her head,--I
+don't believe she would in an earthquake. Whenever we were at work with
+our microscopes at the Institute I always told her that her mind was the
+only achromatic one I ever looked into,--I did n't say looked
+through.---But I did n't come to talk about that. I read in one of your
+books that when Sydenham was asked by a student what books he should
+read, the great physician said, 'Read "Don Quixote."' I want you to
+explain that to me; and then I want you to tell me what is the first
+book, according to your idea, that a student ought to read."
+
+"What do you say to my taking your question as the subject of a paper to
+be read before the Society? I think there may be other young ladies at
+the meeting, besides yourself, who are thinking of pursuing the study of
+medicine. At any rate, there are a good many who are interested in the
+subject; in fact, most people listen readily to anything doctors tell
+them about their calling."
+
+"I wish you would, doctor. I want Euthymia to hear it, and I don't doubt
+there will be others who will be glad to hear everything you have to say
+about it. But oh, doctor, if you could only persuade Eutbymia to become
+a physician! What a doctor she would make! So strong, so calm, so full
+of wisdom! I believe she could take the wheel of a steamboat in a storm,
+or the hose of a fire-engine in a conflagration, and handle it as well as
+the captain of the boat or of the fire-company."
+
+"Have you ever talked with her about studying medicine?"
+
+"Indeed I have. Oh, if she would only begin with me! What good times we
+would have studying together!"
+
+"I don't doubt it. Medicine is a very pleasant study. But how do you
+think practice would be? How would you like being called up to ride ten
+miles in a midnight snow-storm, just when one of your raging headaches
+was racking you?"
+
+"Oh, but we could go into partnership, and Euthymia is n't afraid of
+storms or anything else. If she would only study medicine with me!"
+
+"Well, what does she say to it?"
+
+"She does n't like the thought of it. She does n't believe in women
+doctors. She thinks that now and then a woman may be fitted for it by
+nature, but she does n't think there are many who are. She gives me a
+good many reasons against their practising medicine, you know what most
+of them are, doctor,--and ends by saying that the same woman who would be
+a poor sort of doctor would make a first-rate nurse; and that, she
+thinks, is a woman's business, if her instinct carries her to the
+hospital or sick-chamber. I can't argue her ideas out of her."
+
+"Neither can I argue you out of your feeling about the matter; but I am
+disposed to agree with your friend, that you will often spoil a good
+nurse to make a poor doctor. Doctors and side-saddles don't seem to me
+to go together. Riding habits would be awkward things for practitioners.
+But come, we won't have a controversy just now. I am for giving women
+every chance for a good education, and if they think medicine is one of
+their proper callings let them try it. I think they will find that they
+had better at least limit themselves to certain specialties, and always
+have an expert of the other sex to fall back upon. The trouble is that
+they are so impressible and imaginative that they are at the mercy of all
+sorts of fancy systems. You have only to see what kinds of instruction
+they very commonly flock to in order to guess whether they would be
+likely to prove sensible practitioners. Charlatanism always hobbles on
+two crutches, the tattle of women, and the certificates of clergymen, and
+I am afraid that half the women doctors will be too much under both those
+influences."
+
+Lurida believed in Dr. Butts, who, to use the common language of the
+village, had "carried her through" a fever, brought on by over-excitement
+and exhausting study. She took no offence at his reference to nursery
+gossip, which she had learned to hold cheap. Nobody so despises the
+weaknesses of women as the champion of woman's rights. She accepted the
+doctor's concession of a fair field and open trial of the fitness of her
+sex for medical practice, and did not trouble herself about his suggested
+limitations. As to the imaginative tendencies of women, she knew too
+well the truth of the doctor's remark relating to them to wish to
+contradict it.
+
+"Be sure you let me have your paper in season for the next meeting,
+doctor," she said; and in due season it came, and was of course approved
+for reading.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.
+
+"Next to the interest we take in all that relates to our immortal souls
+is that which we feel for our mortal bodies. I am afraid my very first
+statement may be open to criticism. The care of the body is the first
+thought with a great many,--in fact, with the larger part of the world.
+They send for the physician first, and not until he gives them up do they
+commonly call in the clergyman. Even the minister himself is not so very
+different from other people. We must not blame him if he is not always
+impatient to exchange a world of multiplied interests and ever-changing
+sources of excitement for that which tradition has delivered to us as one
+eminently deficient in the stimulus of variety. Besides, these bodily
+frames, even when worn and disfigured by long years of service, hang
+about our consciousness like old garments. They are used to us, and we
+are used to them. And all the accidents of our lives,--the house we dwell
+in, the living people round us, the landscape we look over, all, up to
+the sky that covers us like a bell glass,--all these are but looser
+outside garments which we have worn until they seem a part of us, and we
+do not like the thought of changing them for a new suit which we have
+never yet tried on. How well I remember that dear ancient lady, who
+lived well into the last decade of her century, as she repeated the verse
+which, if I had but one to choose, I would select from that string of
+pearls, Gray's 'Elegy'!
+
+ "'For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey
+ This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
+ Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
+ Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?'
+
+"Plotinus was ashamed of his body, we are told. Better so, it may be,
+than to live solely for it, as so many do. But it may be well doubted if
+there is any disciple of Plotinus in this Society. On the contrary,
+there are many who think a great deal of their bodies, many who have come
+here to regain the health they have lost in the wear and tear of city
+life, and very few who have not at some time or other of their lives had
+occasion to call in the services of a physician.
+
+"There is, therefore, no impropriety in my offering to the members some
+remarks upon the peculiar difficulties which beset the medical
+practitioner in the discharge of his laborious and important duties.
+
+"A young friend of mine, who has taken an interest in medical studies,
+happened to meet with a very familiar story about one of the greatest and
+most celebrated of all English physicians, Thomas Sydenham. The story is
+that, when a student asked him what books he should read, the great
+doctor told him to read 'Don Quixote.'
+
+"This piece of advice has been used to throw contempt upon the study of
+books, and furnishes a convenient shield for ignorant pretenders. But
+Sydenham left many writings in which he has recorded his medical
+experience, and he surely would not have published them if he had not
+thought they would be better reading for the medical student than the
+story of Cervantes. His own works are esteemed to this day, and he
+certainly could not have supposed that they contained all the wisdom of
+all the past. No remedy is good, it was said of old, unless applied at
+the right time in the right way. So we may say of all anecdotes, like
+this which I have told you about Sydenham and the young man. It is very
+likely that he carried him to the bedside of some patients, and talked to
+him about the cases he showed him, instead of putting a Latin volume in
+his hand. I would as soon begin in that way as any other, with a student
+who had already mastered the preliminary branches,--who knew enough about
+the structure and functions of the body in health.
+
+"But if you ask me what reading I would commend to the medical student of
+a philosophical habit of mind, you may be surprised to hear me say it
+would be certain passages in 'Rasselas.' They are the ones where the
+astronomer gives an account to Imlac of his management of the elements,
+the control of which, as he had persuaded himself, had been committed to
+him. Let me read you a few sentences from this story, which is commonly
+bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken
+mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which
+sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before
+their tramping platoons.
+
+"The astronomer has taken Imlac into his confidence, and reveals to him
+the secret of his wonderful powers:--
+
+"'Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit. I have
+possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the
+distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and
+passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call,
+have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I
+have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of
+the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto
+eluded my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial
+tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.'
+
+"The reader naturally wishes to know how the astronomer, a sincere,
+devoted, and most benevolent man, for forty years a student of the
+heavens, came to the strange belief that he possessed these miraculous
+powers. This is his account:
+
+"'One day, as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I felt in
+my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the southern mountains,
+and raise the Nile to an inundation. In the hurry of my imagination I
+commanded rain to fall, and by comparing the time of my command with that
+of the inundation I found that the clouds had listened to my lips.'
+
+"'Might not some other cause,' said I, 'produce this concurrence? The
+Nile does not always rise on the same day.'
+
+"'Do not believe,' said he, with impatience, I that such objections could
+escape me: I reasoned long against my own conviction, and labored against
+truth with the utmost obstinacy. I sometimes suspected myself of
+madness, and should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man
+like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the impossible and
+the incredible from the false.'
+
+"The good old astronomer gives his parting directions to Imlac, whom he
+has adopted as his successor in the government of the elements and the
+seasons, in these impressive words:
+
+"Do not, in the administration of the year, indulge thy pride by
+innovation; do not please thyself with thinking that thou canst make
+thyself renowned to all future ages by disordering the seasons. The
+memory of mischief is no desirable fame. Much less will it become thee
+to let kindness or interest prevail. Never rob other countries of rain
+to pour it on thine own. For us the Nile is sufficient.'
+
+"Do you wonder, my friends, why I have chosen these passages, in which
+the delusions of an insane astronomer are related with all the pomp of
+the Johnsonian vocabulary, as the first lesson for the young person about
+to enter on the study of the science and art of healing? Listen to me
+while I show you the parallel of the story of the astronomer in the
+history of medicine.
+
+"This history is luminous with intelligence, radiant with benevolence,
+but all its wisdom and all its virtue have had to struggle with the
+ever-rising mists of delusion. The agencies which waste and destroy the
+race of mankind are vast and resistless as the elemental forces of
+nature; nay, they are themselves elemental forces. They may be to some
+extent avoided, to some extent diverted from their aim, to some extent
+resisted. So may the changes of the seasons, from cold that freezes to
+heats that strike with sudden death, be guarded against. So may the
+tides be in some small measure restrained in their inroads. So may the
+storms be breasted by walls they cannot shake from their foundations.
+But the seasons and the tides and the tempests work their will on the
+great scale upon whatever stands in their way; they feed or starve the
+tillers of the soil; they spare or drown the dwellers by the shore; they
+waft the seaman to his harbor or bury him in the angry billows.
+
+"The art of the physician can do much to remove its subjects from deadly
+and dangerous influences, and something to control or arrest the effects
+of these influences. But look at the records of the life-insurance
+offices, and see how uniform is the action of nature's destroying
+agencies. Look at the annual reports of the deaths in any of our great
+cities, and see how their regularity approaches the uniformity of the
+tides, and their variations keep pace with those of the seasons. The
+inundations of the Nile are not more certainly to be predicted than the
+vast wave of infantile disease which flows in upon all our great cities
+with the growing heats of July,--than the fevers and dysenteries which
+visit our rural districts in the months of the falling leaf.
+
+"The physician watches these changes as the astronomer watched the rise
+of the great river. He longs to rescue individuals, to protect
+communities from the inroads of these destroying agencies. He uses all
+the means which experience has approved, tries every rational method
+which ingenuity can suggest. Some fortunate recovery leads him to
+believe he has hit upon a preventive or a cure for a malady which had
+resisted all known remedies. His rescued patient sounds his praises, and
+a wide circle of his patient's friends joins in a chorus of eulogies.
+Self-love applauds him for his sagacity. Self-interest congratulates him
+on his having found the road to fortune; the sense of having proved a
+benefactor of his race smooths the pillow on which he lays his head to
+dream of the brilliant future opening before him. If a single
+coincidence may lead a person of sanguine disposition to believe that he
+has mastered a disease which had baffled all who were before his time,
+and on which his contemporaries looked in hopeless impotence, what must
+be the effect of a series of such coincidences even on a mind of calmer
+temper! Such series of coincidences will happen, and they may well
+deceive the very elect. Think of Dr. Rush,--you know what a famous man
+he was, the very head and front of American medical science in his day,
+--and remember how he spoke about yellow fever, which he thought he had
+mastered!
+
+"Thus the physician is entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy, in
+which he and his patient and their friends, and-Nature herself, are
+involved. What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to so great
+an extent a record of self-delusion!
+
+"If this seems a dangerous concession to the enemies of the true science
+and art of healing, I will remind you that it is all implied in the first
+aphorism of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. Do not draw a wrong
+inference from the frank statement of the difficulties which beset the
+medical practitioner. Think rather, if truth is so hard of attainment,
+how precious are the results which the consent of the wisest and most
+experienced among the healers of men agrees in accepting. Think what
+folly it is to cast them aside in favor of palpable impositions stolen
+from the records of forgotten charlatanism, or of fantastic speculations
+spun from the squinting brains of theorists as wild as the Egyptian
+astronomer.
+
+"Begin your medical studies, then, by reading the fortieth and the
+following four chapters of 'Rasselas.' Your first lesson will teach you
+modesty and caution in the pursuit of the most deceptive of all practical
+branches of knowledge. Faith will come later, when you learn how much
+medical science and art have actually achieved for the relief of mankind,
+and how great are the promises it holds out of still larger triumphs over
+the enemies of human health and happiness."
+
+After the reading of this paper there was a lively discussion, which we
+have no room to report here, and the Society adjourned.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+MISS VINCENT'S STARTLING DISCOVERY.
+
+The sober-minded, sensible, well-instructed Dr. Butts was not a little
+exercised in mind by the demands made upon his knowledge by his young
+friend, and for the time being his pupil, Miss Lurida Vincent.
+
+"I don't wonder they called her The Terror," he said to himself. "She is
+enough to frighten anybody. She has taken down old books from my shelves
+that I had almost forgotten the backs of, and as to the medical journals,
+I believe the girl could index them from memory. She is in pursuit of
+some special point of knowledge, I feel sure, and I cannot doubt what
+direction she is working in, but her wonderful way of dealing with books
+amazes me."
+
+What marvels those "first scholars" in the classes of our great
+universities and colleges are, to be sure! They are not, as a rule, the
+most distinguished of their class in the long struggle of life. The
+chances are that "the field" will beat "the favorite" over the long
+race-course. Others will develop a longer stride and more staying power.
+But what fine gifts those "first scholars" have received from nature!
+How dull we writers, famous or obscure, are in the acquisition of
+knowledge as compared with them! To lead their classmates they must have
+quick apprehension, fine memories, thorough control of their mental
+faculties, strong will, power of concentration, facility of
+expression,--a wonderful equipment of mental faculties. I always want to
+take my hat off to the first scholar of his year.
+
+Dr. Butts felt somewhat in the same way as he contemplated The Terror.
+She surprised him so often with her knowledge that he was ready to
+receive her without astonishment when she burst in upon him one allay
+with a cry of triumph, "Eureka! Eureka!"
+
+"And what have you found, my dear?" said the doctor.
+
+Lurida was flushed and panting with the excitement of her new discovery.
+
+"I do believe that I have found the secret of our strange visitor's dread
+of all human intercourse!"
+
+The seasoned practitioner was not easily thrown off his balance.
+
+"Wait a minute and get your breath," said the doctor. "Are you not a
+little overstating his peculiarity? It is not quite so bad as that. He
+keeps a man to serve him, he was civil with the people at the Old Tavern,
+he was affable enough, I understand, with the young fellow he pulled out
+of the water, or rescued somehow,--I don't believe be avoids the whole
+human race. He does not look as if he hated them, so far as I have
+remarked his expression. I passed a few words with him when his man was
+ailing, and found him polite enough. No, I don't believe it is much more
+than an extreme case of shyness, connected, perhaps, with some congenital
+or other personal repugnance to which has been given the name of an
+antipathy."
+
+Lurida could hardly keep still while the doctor was speaking. When he
+finished, she began the account of her discovery:
+
+"I do certainly believe I have found an account of his case in an Italian
+medical journal of about fourteen years ago. I met with a reference
+which led me to look over a file of the Giornale degli Ospitali lying
+among the old pamphlets in the medical section of the Library. I have
+made a translation of it, which you must read and then tell me if you do
+not agree with me in my conclusion."
+
+"Tell me what your conclusion is, and I will read your paper and see for
+myself whether I think the evidence justifies the conviction you seem to
+have reached."
+
+Lurida's large eyes showed their whole rounds like the two halves of a
+map of the world, as she said,
+
+"I believe that Maurice Kirkwood is suffering from the effects of the
+bite of a TARANTULA!"
+
+The doctor drew a long breath. He remembered in a vague sort of way the
+stories which used to be told of the terrible Apulian spider, but he had
+consigned them to the limbo of medical fable where so many fictions have
+clothed themselves with a local habitation and a name. He looked into the
+round eyes and wide pupils a little anxiously, as if he feared that she
+was in a state of undue excitement, but, true to his professional
+training, he waited for another symptom, if indeed her mind was in any
+measure off its balance.
+
+"I know what you are thinking," Lurida said, "but it is not so. 'I am
+not mad, most noble Festus.' You shall see the evidence and judge for
+yourself. Read the whole case,--you can read my hand almost as if it
+were print, and tell me if you do not agree with me that this young man
+is in all probability the same person as the boy described in the Italian
+journal,
+
+"One thing you might say is against the supposition. The young patient
+is spoken of as Signorino M . . . Ch. . . . But you must remember
+that ch is pronounced hard in Italian, like k, which letter is wanting in
+the Italian alphabet; and it is natural enough that the initial of the
+second name should have got changed in the record to its Italian
+equivalent."
+
+Before inviting the reader to follow the details of this extraordinary
+case as found in a medical journal, the narrator wishes to be indulged in
+a few words of explanation, in order that he may not have to apologize
+for allowing the introduction of a subject which may be thought to belong
+to the professional student rather than to the readers of this record.
+There is a great deal in medical books which it is very unbecoming to
+bring before the general public,--a great deal to repel, to disgust, to
+alarm, to excite unwholesome curiosity. It is not the men whose duties
+have made them familiar with this class of subjects who are most likely
+to offend by scenes and descriptions which belong to the physician's
+private library, and not to the shelves devoted to polite literature.
+Goldsmith and even Smollett, both having studied and practised medicine,
+could not by any possibility have outraged all the natural feelings of
+delicacy and decency as Swift and Zola have outraged them. But without
+handling doubtful subjects, there are many curious medical experiences
+which have interest for every one as extreme illustrations of ordinary
+conditions with which all are acquainted. No one can study the now
+familiar history of clairvoyance profitably who has not learned something
+of the vagaries of hysteria. No one can read understandingly the life of
+Cowper and that of Carlyle without having some idea of the influence of
+hypochondriasis and of dyspepsia upon the disposition and intellect of
+the subjects of these maladies. I need not apologize, therefore, for
+giving publicity to that part of this narrative which deals with one of
+the most singular maladies to be found in the records of bodily and
+mental infirmities.
+
+The following is the account of the case as translated by Miss Vincent.
+For obvious reasons the whole name was not given in the original paper,
+and for similar reasons the date of the event and the birthplace of the
+patient are not precisely indicated here.
+
+[Giornale degli Ospitali, Luglio 21, 18-.]
+REMARKABLE CASE OF TARANTISM.
+
+"The great interest attaching to the very singular and exceptional
+instance of this rare affection induces us to give a full account of the
+extraordinary example of its occurrence in a patient who was the subject
+of a recent medical consultation in this city.
+
+"Signorino M . . . Ch . . . is the only son of a gentleman
+travelling in Italy at this time. He is eleven years of age, of
+sanguine-nervous temperament, light hair, blue eyes, intelligent
+countenance, well grown, but rather slight in form, to all appearance in
+good health, but subject to certain peculiar and anomalous nervous
+symptoms, of which his father gives this history.
+
+"Nine years ago, the father informs us, he was travelling in Italy with
+his wife, this child, and a nurse. They were passing a few days in a
+country village near the city of Bari, capital of the province of the
+same name in the division (compartamento) of Apulia. The child was in
+perfect health and had never been affected by any serious illness. On
+the 10th of July he was playing out in the field near the house where the
+family was staying when he was heard to scream suddenly and violently.
+The nurse rushing to him found him in great pain, saying that something
+had bitten him in one of his feet. A laborer, one Tommaso, ran up at the
+moment and perceived in the grass, near where the boy was standing, an
+enormous spider, which he at once recognized as a tarantula. He managed
+to catch the creature in a large leaf, from which he was afterwards
+transferred to a wide-mouthed bottle, where he lived without any food for
+a month or more. The creature was covered with short hairs, and had a
+pair of nipper-like jaws, with which he could inflict an ugly wound. His
+body measured about an inch in length, and from the extremity of one of
+the longest limbs to the other was between two and three inches. Such was
+the account given by the physician to whom the peasant carried the great
+spider.
+
+"The boy who had been bitten continued screaming violently while his
+stocking was being removed and the foot examined. The place of the bite
+was easily found and the two marks of the claw-like jaws already showed
+the effects of the poison, a small livid circle extending around them,
+with some puffy swelling. The distinguished Dr. Amadei was immediately
+sent for, and applied cups over the wounds in the hope of drawing forth
+the poison. In vain all his skill and efforts! Soon, ataxic (irregular)
+nervous symptoms declared themselves, and it became plain that the system
+had been infected by the poison.
+
+"The symptoms were very much like those of malignant fever, such as
+distress about the region of the heart, difficulty of breathing, collapse
+of all the vital powers, threatening immediate death. From these first
+symptoms the child rallied, but his entire organism had been profoundly
+affected by the venom circulating through it. His constitution has never
+thrown off the malady resulting from this toxic (poisonous) agent. The
+phenomena which have been observed in this young patient correspond so
+nearly with those enumerated in the elaborate essay of the celebrated
+Baglivi that one might think they had been transcribed from his pages.
+
+"He is very fond of solitude,--of wandering about in churchyards and
+other lonely places. He was once found hiding in an empty tomb, which
+had been left open. His aversion to certain colors is remarkable.
+Generally speaking, he prefers bright tints to darker ones, but his likes
+and dislikes are capricious, and with regard to some colors his antipathy
+amounts to positive horror. Some shades have such an effect upon him
+that he cannot remain in the room with them, and if he meets any one
+whose dress has any of that particular color he will turn away or retreat
+so as to avoid passing that person. Among these, purple and dark green
+are the least endurable. He cannot explain the sensations which these
+obnoxious colors produce except by saying that it is like the deadly
+feeling from a blow on the epigastrium (pit of the stomach).
+
+"About the same season of the year at which the tarantular poisoning took
+place he is liable to certain nervous seizures, not exactly like fainting
+or epilepsy, but reminding the physician of those affections. All the
+other symptoms are aggravated at this time.
+
+"In other respects than those mentioned the boy is in good health. He is
+fond of riding, and has a pony on which he takes a great deal of
+exercise, which seems to do him more good than any other remedy.
+
+"The influence of music, to which so much has been attributed by popular
+belief and even by the distinguished Professor to whom we shall again
+refer, has not as yet furnished any satisfactory results. If the graver
+symptoms recur while the patient is under our observation, we propose to
+make use of an agency discredited by modern skepticism, but deserving of
+a fair trial as an exceptional remedy for an exceptional disease.
+
+"The following extracts from the work of the celebrated Italian physician
+of the last century are given by the writer of the paper in the Giornale
+in the original Latin, with a translation into Italian, subjoined. Here
+are the extracts, or rather here is a selection from them, with a
+translation of them into English.
+
+"After mentioning the singular aversion to certain colors shown by the
+subject of Tarantism, Baglivi writes as follows: "'Et si astantes
+incedant vestibus eo colore difusis, qui Tarantatis ingrates est, necesse
+est ut ab illorum aspectu recedant; nam ad intuitum molesti coloris
+angore cordis, et symptomatum recrudescantia stating corripiuntur.' (G.
+Baglivi, Op. Omnia, page 614. Lugduni, 1745.)
+
+"That is, 'if the persons about the patient wear dresses of the color
+which is offensive to him, he must get away from the sight of them, for
+on seeing the obnoxious color he is at once seized with distress in the
+region of the heart, and a renewal of his symptoms.'
+
+"As to the recurrence of the malady, Baglivi says: "'Dam calor solis
+ardentius exurere incip at, quod contingit circa initia Julii et Augusti,
+Tarantati lente venientem recrudescentiam veneni percipiunt.' (Ibid.,
+page 619.)
+
+"Which I render, 'When the heat of the sun begins to burn more fiercely,
+which happens about the beginning of July and August, the subjects of
+Tarantism perceive the gradually approaching recrudescence (returning
+symptoms) of the poisoning. Among the remedies most valued by this
+illustrious physician is that mentioned in the following sentence:
+
+"'Laudo magnopere equitationes in aere rusticano factas singulis diebus,
+hord potissimum matutina, quibus equitationibus morbos chronicos pene
+incurabiles protanus eliminavi.'
+
+"Or in translation, 'I commend especially riding on horseback in country
+air, every day, by preference in the morning hours, by the aid of which
+horseback riding I have driven off chronic diseases which were almost
+incurable.'"
+
+Miss Vincent read this paper aloud to Dr. Butts, and handed it to him to
+examine and consider. He listened with a grave countenance and devout
+attention.
+
+As she finished reading her account, she exclaimed in the passionate
+tones of the deepest conviction,
+
+"There, doctor! Have n't I found the true story of this strange visitor?
+Have n't I solved the riddle of the Sphinx? Who can this man be but the
+boy of that story? Look at the date of the journal when he was eleven
+years old, it would make him twenty-five now, and that is just about the
+age the people here think he must be of. What could account so entirely
+for his ways and actions as that strange poisoning which produces the
+state they call Tarantism? I am just as sure it must be that as I am
+that I am alive. Oh, doctor, doctor, I must be right,--this Signprino M
+. . . Ch . . . was the boy Maurice Kirkwood, and the story accounts
+for everything,--his solitary habits, his dread of people,--it must be
+because they wear the colors he can't bear. His morning rides on
+horseback, his coming here just as the season was approaching which would
+aggravate all his symptoms, does n't all this prove that I must be right
+in my conjecture,--no, my conviction?"
+
+The doctor knew too much to interrupt the young enthusiast, and so he let
+her run on until she ran down. He was more used to the rules of evidence
+than she was, and could not accept her positive conclusion so readily as
+she would have liked to have him. He knew that beginners are very apt to
+make what they think are discoveries. But he had been an angler and knew
+the meaning of a yielding rod and an easy-running reel. He said quietly,
+
+"You are a most sagacious young lady, and a very pretty prima facie case
+it is that you make out. I can see no proof that Mr. Kirkwood is not the
+same person as the M . . . Ch . . . of the medical journal,--that
+is, if I accept your explanation of the difference in the initials of
+these two names. Even if there were a difference, that would not
+disprove their identity, for the initials of patients whose cases are
+reported by their physicians are often altered for the purpose of
+concealment. I do not know, however, that Mr. Kirkwood has shown any
+special aversion to any particular color. It might be interesting to
+inquire whether it is so, but it is a delicate matter. I don't exactly
+see whose business it is to investigate Mr. Maurice Kirkwood's
+idiosyncrasies and constitutional history. If he should have occasion to
+send for me at any time, he might tell me all about himself, in
+confidence, you know. These old accounts from Baglivi are curious and
+interesting, but I am cautious about receiving any stories a hundred
+years old, if they involve an improbability, as his stories about the
+cure of the tarantula bite by music certainly do. I am disposed to wait
+for future developments, bearing in mind, of course, the very singular
+case you have unearthed. It wouldn't be very strange if our young
+gentleman had to send for me before the season is over. He is out a good
+deal before the dew is off the grass, which is rather risky in this
+neighborhood as autumn comes on. I am somewhat curious, I confess, about
+the young man, but I do not meddle where I am not asked for or wanted,
+and I have found that eggs hatch just as well if you let them alone in
+the nest as if you take them out and shake them every day. This is a
+wonderfully interesting supposition of yours, and may prove to be
+strictly in accordance with the facts. But I do not think we have all
+the facts in this young man's case. If it were proved that he had an
+aversion to any color, it would greatly strengthen your case. His
+'antipatia,' as his man called it, must be one which covers a wide
+ground, to account for his self-isolation,--and the color hypothesis
+seems as plausible as any. But, my dear Miss Vincent, I think you had
+better leave your singular and striking hypothesis in my keeping for a
+while, rather than let it get abroad in a community like this, where so
+many tongues are in active exercise. I will carefully study this paper,
+if you will leave it with me, and we will talk the whole matter over. It
+is a fair subject for speculation, only we must keep quiet about it."
+
+This long speech gave Lurida's perfervid brain time to cool off a little.
+She left the paper with the doctor, telling him she would come for it the
+next day, and went off to tell the result of this visit to her bosom
+friend, Miss Euthymia Tower.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+DR. BUTTS CALLS ON EUTHYMIA.
+
+The doctor was troubled in thinking over his interview with the young
+lady. She was fully possessed with the idea that she had discovered the
+secret which had defied the most sagacious heads of the village. It was
+of no use to oppose her while her mind was in an excited state. But he
+felt it his duty to guard her against any possible results of
+indiscretion into which her eagerness and her theory of the equality,
+almost the identity, of the sexes might betray her. Too much of the woman
+in a daughter of our race leads her to forget danger. Too little of the
+woman prompts her to defy it. Fortunately for this last class of women,
+they are not quite so likely to be perilously seductive as their more
+emphatically feminine sisters.
+
+Dr. Butts had known Lurida and her friend from the days of their infancy.
+He had watched the development of Lurida's intelligence from its
+precocious nursery-life to the full vigor of its trained faculties. He
+had looked with admiration on the childish beauty of Euthymia, and had
+seen her grow up to womanhood, every year making her more attractive. He
+knew that if anything was to be done with his self-willed young scholar
+and friend, it would be more easily effected through the medium of
+Euthymia than by direct advice to the young lady herself. So the
+thoughtful doctor made up his mind to have a good talk with Euthymia, and
+put her on her guard, if Lurida showed any tendency to forget the
+conventionalities in her eager pursuit of knowledge.
+
+For the doctor's horse and chaise to stop at the door of Miss Euthymia
+Tower's parental home was an event strange enough to set all the tongues
+in the village going. This was one of those families where illness was
+hardly looked for among the possibilities of life. There were other
+families where a call from the doctor was hardly more thought of than a
+call from the baker. But here he was a stranger, at least on his
+professional rounds, and when he asked for Miss Euthymia the servant, who
+knew his face well, stared as if he had held in his hand a warrant for
+her apprehension.
+
+Euthymia did not keep the doctor waiting very long while she made ready
+to meet him. One look at her glass to make sure that a lock had not run
+astray, or a ribbon got out of place, and her toilet for a morning call
+was finished. Perhaps if Mr. Maurice Kirkwood had been announced, she
+might have taken a second look, but with the good middle-aged, married
+doctor one was enough for a young lady who had the gift of making all the
+dresses she wore look well, and had no occasion to treat her chamber like
+the laboratory where an actress compounds herself.
+
+Euthymia welcomed the doctor very heartily. She could not help
+suspecting his errand, and she was very glad to have a chance to talk
+over her friend's schemes and fancies with him.
+
+The doctor began without any roundabout prelude.
+
+"I want to confer with you about our friend Lurida. Does she tell you
+all her plans and projects?"
+
+"Why, as to that, doctor, I can hardly say, positively, but I do not
+believe she keeps back anything of importance from me. I know what she
+has been busy with lately, and the queer idea she has got into her head.
+What do you think of the Tarantula business? She has shown you the
+paper, she has written, I suppose."
+
+"Indeed she has. It is a very curious case she has got hold of, and I do
+not wonder at all that she should have felt convinced that she had come
+at the true solution of the village riddle. It may be that this young
+man is the same person as the boy mentioned in the Italian medical
+journal. But it is very far from clear that he is so. You know all her
+reasons, of course, as you have read the story. The times seem to agree
+well enough. It is easy to conceive that Ch might be substituted for K
+in the report. The singular solitary habits of this young man entirely
+coincide with the story. If we could only find out whether he has any of
+those feelings with reference to certain colors, we might guess with more
+chance of guessing right than we have at present. But I don't see
+exactly how we are going to submit him to examination on this point. If
+he were only a chemical compound, we could analyze him. If he were only
+a bird or a quadruped, we could find out his likes and dislikes. But
+being, as he is, a young man, with ways of his own, and a will of his
+own, which he may not choose to have interfered with, the problem becomes
+more complicated. I hear that a newspaper correspondent has visited him
+so as to make a report to his paper,--do you know what he found out?"
+
+"Certainly I do, very well. My brother has heard his own story, which
+was this: He found out he had got hold of the wrong person to interview.
+The young gentleman, he says, interviewed him, so that he did not learn
+much about the Sphinx. But the newspaper man told Willy about the
+Sphinx's library and a cabinet of coins he had; and said he should make
+an article out of him, anyhow. I wish the man would take himself off. I
+am afraid Lurida's love of knowledge will get her into trouble!"
+
+"Which of the men do you wish would take himself off?"
+
+"I was thinking of the newspaper man."
+
+She blushed a little as she said, "I can't help feeling a strange sort of
+interest about the other, Mr. Kirkwood. Do you know that I met him this
+morning, and had a good look at him, full in the face?"
+
+"Well, to be sure! That was an interesting experience. And how did you
+like his looks?"
+
+"I thought his face a very remarkable one. But he looked very pale as he
+passed me, and I noticed that he put his hand to his left side as if he
+had a twinge of pain, or something of that sort,--spasm or neuralgia,--I
+don't know what. I wondered whether he had what you call angina
+pectoris. It was the same kind of look and movement, I remember, as you
+trust, too, in my uncle who died with that complaint."
+
+The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he asked, "Were you dressed as
+you are now?"
+
+"Yes, I was, except that I had a thin mantle over my shoulders. I was
+out early, and I have always remembered your caution."
+
+"What color was your mantle?"
+
+"It was black. I have been over all this with Lucinda. A black mantle
+on a white dress. A straw hat with an old faded ribbon. There can't be
+much in those colors to trouble him, I should think, for his man wears a
+black coat and white linen,--more or less white, as you must have
+noticed, and he must have seen ribbons of all colors often enough. But
+Lurida believes it was the ribbon, or something in the combination of
+colors. Her head is full of Tarantulas and Tarantism. I fear that she
+will never be easy until the question is settled by actual trial. And
+will you believe it? the girl is determined in some way to test her
+supposition!"
+
+"Believe it, Euthymia? I can believe almost anything of Lurida. She is
+the most irrepressible creature I ever knew. You know as well as I do
+what a complete possession any ruling idea takes of her whole nature. I
+have had some fears lest her zeal might run away with her discretion. It
+is a great deal easier to get into a false position than to get out of
+it."
+
+"I know it well enough. I want you to tell me what you think about the
+whole business. I don't like the look of it at all, and yet I can do
+nothing with the girl except let her follow her fancy, until I can show
+her plainly that she will get herself into trouble in some way or other.
+But she is ingenious,--full of all sorts of devices, innocent enough in
+themselves, but liable to be misconstrued. You remember how she won us
+the boat-race?"
+
+"To be sure I do. It was rather sharp practice, but she felt she was
+paying off an old score. The classical story of Atalanta, told, like
+that of Eve, as illustrating the weakness of woman, provoked her to make
+trial of the powers of resistance in the other sex. But it was
+audacious. I hope her audacity will not go too far. You must watch her.
+Keep an eye on her correspondence."
+
+The doctor had great confidence in the good sense of Lurida's friend. He
+felt sure that she would not let Lurida commit herself by writing foolish
+letters to the subject of her speculations, or similar indiscreet
+performances. The boldness of young girls, who think no evil, in opening
+correspondence with idealized personages is something quite astonishing
+to those who have had an opportunity of knowing the facts. Lurida had
+passed the most dangerous age, but her theory of the equality of the
+sexes made her indifferent to the by-laws of social usage. She required
+watching, and her two guardians were ready to check her, in case of need.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+MISS VINCENT WRITES A LETTER.
+
+Euthymia noticed that her friend had been very much preoccupied for two
+or three days. She found her more than once busy at her desk, with a
+manuscript before her, which she turned over and placed inside the desk,
+as Euthymia entered.
+
+This desire of concealment was not what either of the friends expected to
+see in the other. It showed that some project was under way, which, at
+least in its present stage, the Machiavellian young lady did not wish to
+disclose. It had cost her a good deal of thought and care, apparently,
+for her waste-basket was full of scraps of paper, which looked as if they
+were the remains of a manuscript like that at which she was at work.
+"Copying and recopying, probably," thought Euthymia, but she was willing
+to wait to learn what Lurida was busy about, though she had a suspicion
+that it was something in which she might feel called upon to interest
+herself.
+
+"Do you know what I think?" said Euthymia to the doctor, meeting him as
+he left his door. "I believe Lurida is writing to this man, and I don't
+like the thought of her doing such a thing. Of course she is not like
+other girls in many respects, but other people will judge her by the
+common rules of life."
+
+"I am glad that you spoke of it," answered the doctor; "she would write
+to him just as quickly as to any woman of his age. Besides, under the
+cover of her office, she has got into the way of writing to anybody. I
+think she has already written to Mr. Kirkwood, asking him to contribute a
+paper for the Society. She can find a pretext easily enough if she has
+made up her mind to write. In fact, I doubt if she would trouble herself
+for any pretext at all if she decided to write. Watch her well. Don't
+let any letter go without seeing it, if you can help it."
+
+Young women are much given to writing letters to persons whom they only
+know indirectly, for the most part through their books, and especially to
+romancers and poets. Nothing can be more innocent and simple-hearted
+than most of these letters. They are the spontaneous outflow of young
+hearts easily excited to gratitude for the pleasure which some story or
+poem has given them, and recognizing their own thoughts, their own
+feelings, in those expressed by the author, as if on purpose for them to
+read. Undoubtedly they give great relief to solitary young persons, who
+must have some ideal reflection of themselves, and know not where to look
+since Protestantism has taken away the crucifix and the Madonna. The
+recipient of these letters sometimes wonders, after reading through one
+of them, how it is that his young correspondent has managed to fill so
+much space with her simple message of admiration or of sympathy.
+
+Lurida did not belong to this particular class of correspondents, but she
+could not resist the law of her sex, whose thoughts naturally surround
+themselves with superabundant drapery of language, as their persons float
+in a wide superfluity of woven tissues. Was she indeed writing to this
+unknown gentleman? Euthymia questioned her point-blank.
+
+"Are you going to open a correspondence with Mr. Maurice Kirkwood,
+Lurida? You seem to be so busy writing, I can think of nothing else. Or
+are you going to write a novel, or a paper for the Society,--do tell me
+what you are so much taken up with."
+
+"I will tell you, Euthymia, if you will promise not to find fault with me
+for carrying out my plan as I have made up my mind to do. You may read
+this letter before I seal it, and if you find anything in it you don't
+like you can suggest any change that you think will improve it. I hope
+you will see that it explains itself. I don't believe that you will find
+anything to frighten you in it."
+
+This is the letter, as submitted to Miss Tower by her friend. The bold
+handwriting made it look like a man's letter, and gave it consequently a
+less dangerous expression than that which belongs to the tinted and often
+fragrant sheet with its delicate thready characters, which slant across
+the page like an April shower with a south wind chasing it.
+
+ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August--, 18--.
+
+MY DEAR SIR,--You will doubtless be surprised at the sight of a letter
+like this from one whom you only know as the Secretary of the Pansophian
+Society. There is a very common feeling that it is unbecoming in one of
+my sex to address one of your own with whom she is unacquainted, unless
+she has some special claim upon his attention. I am by no means disposed
+to concede to the vulgar prejudice on this point. If one human being has
+anything to communicate to another,--anything which deserves being
+communicated,--I see no occasion for bringing in the question of sex. I
+do not think the homo sum of Terence can be claimed for the male sex as
+its private property on general any more than on grammatical grounds,
+
+I have sometimes thought of devoting myself to the noble art of healing.
+If I did so, it would be with the fixed purpose of giving my whole powers
+to the service of humanity. And if I should carry out that idea, should
+I refuse my care and skill to a suffering fellow-mortal because that
+mortal happened to be a brother, and not a sister? My whole nature
+protests against such one-sided humanity! No! I am blind to all
+distinctions when my eyes are opened to any form of suffering, to any
+spectacle of want.
+
+You may ask me why I address you, whom I know little or nothing of, and
+to whom such an advance may seem presumptuous and intrusive. It is
+because I was deeply impressed by the paper which I attributed to
+you,--that on Ocean, River, and Lake, which was read at one of our
+meetings. I say that I was deeply impressed, but I do not mean this as a
+compliment to that paper. I am not bandying compliments now, but
+thinking of better things than praises or phrases. I was interested in
+the paper, partly because I recognized some of the feelings expressed in
+it as my own,--partly because there was an undertone of sadness in all
+the voices of nature as you echoed them which made me sad to hear, and
+which I could not help longing to cheer and enliven. I said to myself, I
+should like to hold communion with the writer of that paper. I have had
+my lonely hours and days, as he has had. I have had some of his
+experiences in my intercourse with nature. And oh! if I could draw him
+into those better human relations which await us all, if we come with the
+right dispositions, I should blush if I stopped to inquire whether I
+violated any conventional rule or not.
+
+You will understand me, I feel sure. You believe, do you not? in the
+insignificance of the barrier which divides the sisterhood from the
+brotherhood of mankind. You believe, do you not? that they should be
+educated side by side, that they should share the same pursuits, due
+regard being had to the fitness of the particular individual for hard or
+light work, as it must always be, whether we are dealing with the
+"stronger" or the "weaker" sex. I mark these words because,
+notwithstanding their common use, they involve so much that is not true.
+Stronger! Yes, to lift a barrel of flour, or a barrel of cider,--though
+there have been women who could do that, and though when John Wesley was
+mobbed in Staffordshire a woman knocked down three or four men, one after
+another, until she was at last overpowered and nearly murdered. Talk
+about the weaker sex! Go and see Miss Euthymia Tower at the gymnasium!
+But no matter about which sex has the strongest muscles. Which has most
+to suffer, and which has most endurance and vitality? We go through many
+ordeals which you are spared, but we outlast you in mind and body. I
+have been led away into one of my accustomed trains of thought, but not
+so far away from it as you might at first suppose.
+
+My brother! Are you not ready to recognize in me a friend, an equal, a
+sister, who can speak to you as if she had been reared under the same
+roof? And is not the sky that covers us one roof, which makes us all one
+family? You are lonely, you must be longing for some human fellowship.
+Take me into your confidence. What is there that you can tell me to
+which I cannot respond with sympathy? What saddest note in your
+spiritual dirges which will not find its chord in mine?
+
+I long to know what influence has cast its shadow over your existence. I
+myself have known what it is to carry a brain that never rests in a body
+that is always tired. I have defied its infirmities, and forced it to do
+my bidding. You have no such hindrance, if we may judge by your aspect
+and habits. You deal with horses like a Homeric hero. No wild Indian
+could handle his bark canoe more dexterously or more vigorously than we
+have seen you handling yours. There must be some reason for your
+seclusion which curiosity has not reached, and into which it is not the
+province of curiosity to inquire. But in the irresistible desire which I
+have to bring you into kindly relations with those around you, I must run
+the risk of giving offence that I may know in what direction to look for
+those restorative influences which the sympathy of a friend and sister
+can offer to a brother in need of some kindly impulse to change the
+course of a life which is not, which cannot be, in accordance with his
+true nature.
+
+I have thought that there may be something in the conditions with which
+you are here surrounded which is repugnant to your feelings,--something
+which can be avoided only by keeping yourself apart from the people whose
+acquaintance you would naturally have formed. There can hardly be
+anything in the place itself, or you would not have voluntarily sought it
+as a residence, even for a single season there might be individuals here
+whom you would not care to meet, there must be such, but you cannot have
+a personal aversion to everybody. I have heard of cases in which certain
+sights and sounds, which have no particular significance for most
+persons, produced feelings of distress or aversion that made, them
+unbearable to the subjects of the constitutional dislike. It has
+occurred to me that possibly you might have some such natural aversion to
+the sounds of the street, or such as are heard in most houses, especially
+where a piano is kept, as it is in fact in almost all of those in the
+village. Or it might be, I imagined, that some color in the dresses of
+women or the furniture of our rooms affected you unpleasantly. I know
+that instances of such antipathy have been recorded, and they would
+account for the seclusion of those who are subject to it.
+
+If there is any removable condition which interferes with your free
+entrance into and enjoyment of the social life around you, tell me, I beg
+of you, tell me what it is, and it shall be eliminated. Think it not
+strange, O my brother, that I thus venture to introduce myself into the
+hidden chambers of your life. I will never suffer myself to be
+frightened from the carrying out of any thought which promises to be of
+use to a fellow-mortal by a fear lest it should be considered
+"unfeminine." I can bear to be considered unfeminine, but I cannot
+endure to think of myself as inhuman. Can I help you, my brother'?
+
+Believe me your most sincere well-wisher,
+LURIDA VINCENT.
+
+Euthymia had carried off this letter and read it by herself. As she
+finished it, her feelings found expression in an old phrase of her
+grandmother's, which came up of itself, as such survivals of early days
+are apt to do, on great occasions.
+
+"Well, I never!"
+
+Then she loosened some button or string that was too tight, and went to
+the window for a breath of outdoor air. Then she began at the beginning
+and read the whole letter all over again.
+
+What should she do about it? She could not let this young girl send a
+letter like that to a stranger of whose character little was known except
+by inference,--to a young man, who would consider it a most extraordinary
+advance on the part of the sender. She would have liked to tear it into
+a thousand pieces, but she had no right to treat it in that way. Lurida
+meant to send it the next morning, and in the mean time Euthymia had the
+night to think over what she should do about it.
+
+There is nothing like the pillow for an oracle. There is no voice like
+that which breaks the silence--of the stagnant hours of the night with
+its sudden suggestions and luminous counsels. When Euthymia awoke in the
+morning, her course of action was as clear before her as if it bad been
+dictated by her guardian angel. She went straight over to the home of
+Lurida, who was just dressed for breakfast.
+
+She was naturally a little surprised at this early visit. She was struck
+with the excited look of Euthymia, being herself quite calm, and
+contemplating her project with entire complacency.
+
+Euthymia began, in tones that expressed deep anxiety.
+
+"I have read your letter, my dear, and admired its spirit and force. It
+is a fine letter, and does you great credit as an expression of the
+truest human feeling. But it must not be sent to Mr. Kirkwood. If you
+were sixty years old, perhaps if you were fifty, it might be admissible
+to send it. But if you were forty, I should question its propriety; if
+you were thirty, I should veto it, and you are but a little more than
+twenty. How do you know that this stranger will not show your letter to
+anybody or everybody? How do you know that he will not send it to one of
+the gossiping journals like the 'Household Inquisitor'? But supposing he
+keeps it to himself, which is more than you have a right to expect, what
+opinion is he likely to form of a young lady who invades his privacy with
+such freedom? Ten to one he will think curiosity is at the bottom of
+it,--and,--come, don't be angry at me for suggesting it,--may there not
+be a little of that same motive mingled with the others? No, don't
+interrupt me quite yet; you do want to know whether your hypothesis is
+correct. You are full of the best and kindest feelings in the world, but
+your desire for knowledge is the ferment under them just now, perhaps
+more than you know."
+
+Lurida's pale cheeks flushed and whitened more than once while her friend
+was speaking. She loved her too sincerely and respected her intelligence
+too much to take offence at her advice, but she could not give up her
+humane and sisterly intentions merely from the fear of some awkward
+consequences to herself. She had persuaded herself that she was playing
+the part of a Protestant sister of charity, and that the fact of her not
+wearing the costume of these ministering angels made no difference in her
+relations to those who needed her aid.
+
+"I cannot see your objections in the light in which they appear to you,"
+she said gravely. "It seems to me that I give up everything when I
+hesitate to help a fellow-creature because I am a woman. I am not afraid
+to send this letter and take all the consequences."
+
+"Will you go with me to the doctor's, and let him read it in our
+presence? And will you agree to abide by his opinion, if it coincides
+with mine?"
+
+Lurida winced a little at this proposal. "I don't quite like," she said,
+"showing this letter to--to" she hesitated, but it had to come out--"to a
+man, that is, to another man than the one for whom it was intended."
+
+The neuter gender business had got a pretty damaging side-hit.
+
+"Well, never mind about letting him read the letter. Will you go over to
+his house with me at noon, when he comes back after his morning visits,
+and have a talk over the whole matter with him? You know I have
+sometimes had to say must to you, Lurida, and now I say you must go to
+the doctor's with me and carry that letter."
+
+There was no resisting the potent monosyllable as the sweet but firm
+voice delivered it. At noon the two maidens rang at the doctor's door.
+The servant said he had been at the house after his morning visits, but
+found a hasty summons to Mr. Kirkwood, who had been taken suddenly ill
+and wished to see him at once. Was the illness dangerous? The
+servant-maid did n't know, but thought it was pretty bad, for Mr. Paul
+came in as white as a sheet, and talked all sorts of languages which she
+couldn't understand, and took on as if he thought Mr. Kirkwood was going
+to die right off.
+
+And so the hazardous question about sending the letter was disposed of,
+at least for the present.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Dr. BUTTS'S PATIENT.
+
+The physician found Maurice just regaining his heat after a chill of a
+somewhat severe character. He knew too well what this meant, and the
+probable series of symptoms of which it was the prelude. His patient was
+not the only one in the neighborhood who was attacked in this way. The
+autumnal fevers to which our country towns are subject, in the place of
+those "agues," or intermittents, so largely prevalent in the South and
+West, were already beginning, and Maurice, who had exposed himself in the
+early and late hours of the dangerous season, must be expected to go
+through the regular stages of this always serious and not rarely fatal
+disease.
+
+Paolo, his faithful servant, would fain have taken the sole charge of his
+master during his illness. But the doctor insisted that he must have a
+nurse to help him in his task, which was likely to be long and
+exhausting.
+
+At the mention of the word "nurse" Paolo turned white, and exclaimed in
+an agitated and thoroughly frightened way,
+
+"No! no nuss! no woman! She kill him! I stay by him day and night, but
+don' let no woman come near him,--if you do, he die!"
+
+The doctor explained that he intended to send a man who was used to
+taking care of sick people, and with no little effort at last succeeded
+in convincing Paolo that, as he could not be awake day and night for a
+fortnight or three weeks, it was absolutely necessary to call in some
+assistance from without. And so Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was to play the
+leading part in that drama of nature's composing called a typhoid fever,
+with its regular bedchamber scenery, its properties of phials and
+pill-boxes, its little company of stock actors, its gradual evolution of
+a very simple plot, its familiar incidents, its emotional alternations,
+and its denouement, sometimes tragic, oftener happy.
+
+It is needless to say that the sympathies of all the good people of the
+village, residents and strangers, were actively awakened for the young
+man about whom they knew so little and conjectured so much. Tokens of
+their kindness came to him daily: flowers from the woods and from the
+gardens; choice fruit grown in the open air or under glass, for there
+were some fine houses surrounded by well-kept grounds, and greenhouses
+and graperies were not unknown in the small but favored settlement.
+
+On all these luxuries Maurice looked with dull and languid eyes. A faint
+smile of gratitude sometimes struggled through the stillness of his
+features, or a murmured word of thanks found its way through his parched
+lips, and he would relapse into the partial stupor or the fitful sleep in
+which, with intervals of slight wandering, the slow hours dragged along
+the sluggish days one after another. With no violent symptoms, but with
+steady persistency, the disease moved on in its accustomed course. It
+was at no time immediately threatening, but the experienced physician
+knew its uncertainties only too well. He had known fever patients
+suddenly seized with violent internal inflammation, and carried off with
+frightful rapidity. He remembered the case of a convalescent, a young
+woman who had been attacked while in apparently vigorous general health,
+who, on being lifted too suddenly to a sitting position, while still
+confined to her bed, fainted, and in a few moments ceased to breathe. It
+may well be supposed that he took every possible precaution to avert the
+accidents which tend to throw from its track a disease the regular course
+of which is arranged by nature as carefully as the route of a railroad
+from one city to another. The most natural interpretation which the
+common observer would put upon the manifestations of one of these
+autumnal maladies would be that some noxious combustible element had
+found its way into the system which must be burned to ashes before the
+heat which pervades the whole body can subside. Sometimes the fire may
+smoulder and seem as if it were going out, or were quite extinguished,
+and again it will find some new material to seize upon, and flame up as
+fiercely as ever. Its coming on most frequently at the season when the
+brush fires which are consuming the dead branches, and withered leaves,
+and all the refuse of vegetation are sending up their smoke is
+suggestive. Sometimes it seems as if the body, relieved of its effete
+materials, renewed its youth after one of these quiet, expurgating,
+internal fractional cremations. Lean, pallid students have found
+themselves plump and blooming, and it has happened that one whose hair
+was straight as gnat of an Indian has been startled to behold himself in
+his mirror with a fringe of hyacinthine curls about his rejuvenated
+countenance.
+
+There was nothing of what medical men call malignity in the case of
+Maurice Kirkwood. The most alarming symptom was a profound prostration,
+which at last reached such a point that he lay utterly helpless, as
+unable to move without aid as the feeblest of paralytics. In this state
+he lay for many days, not suffering pain, but with the sense of great
+weariness, and the feeling that he should never rise from his bed again.
+For the most part his intellect was unclouded when his attention was
+aroused. He spoke only in whispers, a few words at a time. The doctor
+felt sure, by the expression which passed over his features from time to
+time, that something was worrying and oppressing him; something which he
+wished to communicate, and had not the force, or the tenacity of purpose,
+to make perfectly clear. His eyes often wandered to a certain desk, and
+once he had found strength to lift his emaciated arm and point to it. The
+doctor went towards it as if to fetch it to him, but he slowly shook his
+head. He had not the power to say at that time what he wished. The next
+day he felt a little less prostrated; and succeeded in explaining to the
+doctor what he wanted. His words, so far as the physician could make
+them out, were these which follow. Dr. Butts looked upon them as
+possibly expressing wishes which would be his last, and noted them down
+carefully immediately after leaving his chamber.
+
+"I commit the secret of my life to your charge. My whole story is told
+in a paper locked in that desk. The key is--put your hand under my
+pillow. If I die, let the story be known. It will show that I
+was--human--and save my memory from reproach."
+
+He was silent for a little time. A single tear stole down his hollow
+cheek. The doctor turned his head away, for his own eyes were full. But
+he said to himself, "It is a good sign; I begin to feel strong hopes that
+he will recover."
+
+Maurice spoke once more. "Doctor, I put full trust in you. You are wise
+and kind. Do what you will with this paper, but open it at once and
+read. I want you to know the story of my life before it is finished--if
+the end is at hand. Take it with you and read it before you sleep." He
+was exhausted and presently his eyes closed, but the doctor saw a
+tranquil look on his features which added encouragement to his hopes.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE.
+
+I am an American by birth, but a large part of my life has been passed in
+foreign lands. My father was a man of education, possessed of an ample
+fortune; my mother was considered, a very accomplished and amiable woman.
+I was their first and only child. She died while I was yet an infant.
+If I remember her at all it is as a vision, more like a glimpse of a
+pre-natal existence than as a part of my earthly life. At the death of
+my mother I was left in the charge of the old nurse who had enjoyed her
+perfect confidence. She was devoted to me, and I became absolutely
+dependent on her, who had for me all the love and all the care of a
+mother. I was naturally the object of the attentions and caresses of the
+family relatives. I have been told that I was a pleasant, smiling
+infant, with nothing to indicate any peculiar nervous susceptibility; not
+afraid of strangers, but on the contrary ready to make their
+acquaintance. My father was devoted to me and did all in his power to
+promote my health and comfort.
+
+I was still a babe, often carried in arms, when the event happened which
+changed my whole future and destined me to a strange and lonely
+existence. I cannot relate it even now without a sense of terror. I
+must force myself to recall the circumstances as told me and vaguely
+remembered, for I am not willing that my doomed and wholly exceptional
+life should pass away unrecorded, unexplained, unvindicated. My nature
+is, I feel sure, a kind and social one, but I have lived apart, as if my
+heart were filled with hatred of my fellow-creatures. If there are any
+readers who look without pity, without sympathy, upon those who shun the
+fellowship of their fellow men and women, who show by their downcast or
+averted eyes that they dread companionship and long for solitude, I pray
+them, if this paper ever reaches them, to stop at this point. Follow me
+no further, for you will not believe my story, nor enter into the
+feelings which I am about to reveal. But if there are any to whom all
+that is human is of interest, who have felt in their own consciousness
+some stirrings of invincible attraction to one individual and equally
+invincible repugnance to another, who know by their own experience that
+elective affinities have as their necessary counterpart, and, as it were,
+their polar opposites, currents not less strong of elective repulsions,
+let them read with unquestioning faith the story of a blighted life I am
+about to relate, much of it, of course, received from the lips of others.
+
+My cousin Laura, a girl of seventeen, lately returned from Europe, was
+considered eminently beautiful. It was in my second summer that she
+visited my father's house, where he was living with his servants and my
+old nurse, my mother having but recently left him a widower. Laura was
+full of vivacity, impulsive, quick in her movements, thoughtless
+occasionally, as it is not strange that a young girl of her age should
+be. It was a beautiful summer day when she saw me for the first time.
+My nurse had me in her arms, walking back and forward on a balcony with a
+low railing, upon which opened the windows of the second story of my
+father's house. While the nurse was thus carrying me, Laura came
+suddenly upon the balcony. She no sooner saw me than with all the
+delighted eagerness of her youthful nature she rushed toward me, and,
+catching me from the nurse's arms, began tossing me after the fashion of
+young girls who have been so lately playing with dolls that they feel as
+if babies were very much of the same nature. The abrupt seizure
+frightened me; I sprang from her arms in my terror, and fell over the
+railing of the balcony. I should probably enough have been killed on the
+spot but for the fact that a low thorn-bush grew just beneath the
+balcony, into which I fell and thus had the violence of the shock broken.
+But the thorns tore my tender flesh, and I bear to this day marks of the
+deep wounds they inflicted.
+
+That dreadful experience is burned deep into my memory. The sudden
+apparition of the girl; the sense of being torn away from the protecting
+arms around me; the frantic effort to escape; the shriek that accompanied
+my fall through what must have seemed unmeasurable space; the cruel
+lacerations of the piercing and rending thorns,--all these fearful
+impressions blended in one paralyzing terror.
+
+When I was taken up I was thought to be dead. I was perfectly white, and
+the physician who first saw me said that no pulse was perceptible. But
+after a time consciousness returned; the wounds, though painful, were
+none of them dangerous, and the most alarming effects of the accident
+passed away. My old nurse cared for me tenderly day and night, and my
+father, who had been almost distracted in the first hours which followed
+the injury, hoped and believed that no permanent evil results would be
+found to result from it. My cousin Laura was of course deeply distressed
+to feel that her thoughtlessness had been the cause of so grave an
+accident. As soon as I had somewhat recovered she came to see me, very
+penitent, very anxious to make me forget the alarm she had caused me,
+with all its consequences. I was in the nursery sitting up in my bed,
+bandaged, but not in any pain, as it seemed, for I was quiet and to all
+appearance in a perfectly natural state of feeling. As Laura came near
+me I shrieked and instantly changed color. I put my hand upon my heart
+as if I had been stabbed, and fell over, unconscious. It was very much
+the same state as that in which I was found immediately after my fall.
+
+The cause of this violent and appalling seizure was but too obvious. The
+approach of the young girl and the dread that she was about to lay her
+hand upon me had called up the same train of effects which the moment of
+terror and pain had already occasioned. The old nurse saw this in a
+moment. "Go! go!" she cried to Laura, "go, or the child will die!" Her
+command did not have to be repeated. After Laura had gone I lay
+senseless, white and cold as marble, for some time. The doctor soon
+came, and by the use of smart rubbing and stimulants the color came back
+slowly to my cheeks and the arrested circulation was again set in motion.
+
+It was hard to believe that this was anything more than a temporary
+effect of the accident. There could be little doubt, it was thought by
+the doctor and by my father, that after a few days I should recover from
+this morbid sensibility and receive my cousin as other infants receive
+pleasant-looking young persons. The old nurse shook her head. "The girl
+will be the death of the child," she said, "if she touches him or comes
+near him. His heart stopped beating just as when the girl snatched him
+out of my arms, and he fell over the balcony railing." Once more the
+experiment was tried, cautiously, almost insidiously. The same alarming
+consequences followed. It was too evident that a chain of nervous
+disturbances had been set up in my system which repeated itself whenever
+the original impression gave the first impulse. I never saw my cousin
+Laura after this last trial. Its result had so distressed her that she
+never ventured again to show herself to me.
+
+If the effect of the nervous shock had stopped there, it would have been
+a misfortune for my cousin and myself, but hardly a calamity. The world
+is wide, and a cousin or two more or less can hardly be considered an
+essential of existence. I often heard Laura's name mentioned, but never
+by any one who was acquainted with all the circumstances, for it was
+noticed that I changed color and caught at my breast as if I wanted to
+grasp my heart in my hand whenever that fatal name was mentioned.
+
+Alas! this was not all. While I was suffering from the effects of my
+fall among the thorns I was attended by my old nurse, assisted by another
+old woman, by a physician, and my father, who would take his share in
+caring for me. It was thought best to keep--me perfectly quiet, and
+strangers and friends were alike excluded from my nursery, with one
+exception, that my old grandmother came in now and then. With her it
+seems that I was somewhat timid and shy, following her with rather
+anxious eyes, as if not quite certain whether or not she was dangerous.
+But one day, when I was far advanced towards recovery, my father brought
+in a young lady, a relative of his, who had expressed a great desire to
+see me. She was, as I have been told, a very handsome girl, of about the
+same age as my cousin Laura, but bearing no personal resemblance to her
+in form, features, or complexion. She had no sooner entered the room
+than the same sudden changes which had followed my cousin's visit began
+to show themselves, and before she had reached my bedside I was in a
+state of deadly collapse, as on the occasions already mentioned.
+
+Some time passed before any recurrence of these terrifying seizures. A
+little girl of five or six years old was allowed to come into the nursery
+one day and bring me some flowers. I took them from her hand, but turned
+away and shut my eyes. There was no seizure, but there was a certain
+dread and aversion, nothing more than a feeling which it might be hoped
+that time would overcome. Those around me were gradually finding out the
+circumstances which brought on the deadly attack to which I was subject.
+
+The daughter of one of our near neighbors was considered the prettiest
+girl of the village where we were passing the summer. She was very
+anxious to see me, and as I was now nearly well it was determined that
+she should be permitted to pay me a short visit. I had always delighted
+in seeing her and being caressed by her. I was sleeping when she entered
+the nursery and came and took a seat at my side in perfect silence.
+Presently I became restless, and a moment later I opened my eyes and saw
+her stooping over me. My hand went to my left breast,--the color faded
+from my cheeks,--I was again the cold marble image so like death that it
+had well-nigh been mistaken for it.
+
+Could it be possible that the fright which had chilled my blood had left
+me with an unconquerable fear of woman at the period when she is most
+attractive not only to adolescents, but to children of tender age, who
+feel the fascination of her flowing locks, her bright eyes, her blooming
+cheeks, and that mysterious magnetism of sex which draws all life into
+its warm and potently vitalized atmosphere? So it did indeed seem. The
+dangerous experiment could not be repeated indefinitely. It was not
+intentionally tried again, but accident brought about more than one
+renewal of it during the following years, until it became fully
+recognized that I was the unhappy subject of a mortal dread of
+woman,--not absolutely of the human female, for I had no fear of my old
+nurse or of my grandmother, or of any old wrinkled face, and I had become
+accustomed to the occasional meeting of a little girl or two, whom I
+nevertheless regarded with a certain ill-defined feeling that there was
+danger in their presence. I was sent to a boys' school very early, and
+during the first ten or twelve years of my life I had rarely any occasion
+to be reminded of my strange idiosyncrasy.
+
+As I grew out of boyhood into youth, a change came over the feelings
+which had so long held complete possession of me. This was what my
+father and his advisers had always anticipated, and was the ground of
+their confident hope in my return to natural conditions before I should
+have grown to mature manhood.
+
+How shall I describe the conflicts of those dreamy, bewildering, dreadful
+years? Visions of loveliness haunted me sleeping and waking. Sometimes
+a graceful girlish figure would so draw my eyes towards it that I lost
+sight of all else, and was ready to forget all my fears and find myself
+at her side, like other youths by the side of young maidens,--happy in
+their cheerful companionship, while I,--I, under the curse of one
+blighting moment, looked on, hopeless. Sometimes the glimpse of a fair
+face or the tone of a sweet voice stirred within me all the instincts
+that make the morning of life beautiful to adolescence. I reasoned with
+myself:
+
+Why should I not have outgrown that idle apprehension which had been the
+nightmare of my earlier years? Why should not the rising tide of life
+have drowned out the feeble growths that infested the shallows of
+childhood? How many children there are who tremble at being left alone
+in the dark, but who, a few years later, will smile at their foolish
+terrors and brave all the ghosts of a haunted chamber! Why should I any
+longer be the slave of a foolish fancy that has grown into a half insane
+habit of mind? I was familiarly acquainted with all the stories of the
+strange antipathies and invincible repugnances to which others, some of
+them famous men, had been subject. I said to myself, Why should not I
+overcome this dread of woman as Peter the Great fought down his dread of
+wheels rolling over a bridge? Was I, alone of all mankind, to be doomed
+to perpetual exclusion from the society which, as it seemed to me, was
+all that rendered existence worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to
+the vulgar need of supplying the waste of the system and working at the
+task of respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night
+as the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?
+
+Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely, and without regard to
+any possible danger, some one of those fair maidens whose far-off smile,
+whose graceful movements, at once attracted and agitated me? I can only
+answer this question to the satisfaction of any really inquiring reader
+by giving him the true interpretation of the singular phenomenon of which
+I was the subject. For this I shall have to refer to a paper of which I
+have made a copy, and which will be found included with this manuscript.
+It is enough to say here, without entering into the explanation of the
+fact, which will be found simple enough as seen by the light of modern
+physiological science, that the "nervous disturbance" which the presence
+of a woman in the flower of her age produced in my system was a sense of
+impending death, sudden, overwhelming, unconquerable, appalling. It was
+a reversed action of the nervous centres,--the opposite of that which
+flushes the young lover's cheek and hurries his bounding pulses as he
+comes into the presence of the object of his passion. No one who has
+ever felt the sensation can have failed to recognize it as an imperative
+summons, which commands instant and terrified submission.
+
+It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the
+effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily and
+mental condition. I say bodily as well as mental, for I was too slender
+for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were a cause of
+anxiety. That the mind was largely concerned in these there was no
+doubt, but the mutual interactions of mind and body are often too complex
+to admit of satisfactory analysis. Each is in part cause and each also
+in part effect.
+
+We passed some years in Italy, chiefly in Rome, where I was placed in a
+school conducted by priests, and where of course I met only those of my
+own sex. There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences under
+which certain young Catholics, destined for the priesthood, are led to
+separate themselves from all communion with the sex associated in their
+minds with the most subtle dangers to which the human soul can be
+exposed. I became in some degree reconciled to the thought of exclusion
+from the society of women by seeing around me so many who were
+self-devoted to celibacy. The thought sometimes occurred to me whether I
+should not find the best and the only natural solution of the problem of
+existence, as submitted to myself, in taking upon me the vows which
+settle the whole question and raise an impassable barrier between the
+devotee and the object of his dangerous attraction.
+
+How often I talked this whole matter over with the young priest who was
+at once my special instructor and my favorite companion! But accustomed
+as I had become to the forms of the Roman Church, and impressed as I was
+with the purity and excellence of many of its young members with whom I
+was acquainted, my early training rendered it impossible for me to accept
+the credentials which it offered me as authoritative. My friend and
+instructor had to set me down as a case of "invincible ignorance." This
+was the loop-hole through which he crept out of the prison-house of his
+creed, and was enabled to look upon me without the feeling of absolute
+despair with which his sterner brethren would, I fear, have regarded me.
+
+I have said that accident exposed me at times to the influence which I
+had such reasons for dreading. Here is one example of such an
+occurrence, which I relate as simply as possible, vividly as it is
+impressed upon my memory. A young friend whose acquaintance I had made
+in Rome asked me one day to come to his rooms and look at a cabinet of
+gems and medals which he had collected. I had been but a short time in
+his library when a vague sense of uneasiness came over me. My heart
+became restless,--I could feel it stirring irregularly, as if it were
+some frightened creature caged in my breast. There was nothing that I
+could see to account for it. A door was partly open, but not so that I
+could see into the next room. The feeling grew upon me of some influence
+which was paralyzing my circulation. I begged my friend to open a
+window. As he did so, the door swung in the draught, and I saw a
+blooming young woman,--it was my friend's sister, who had been sitting
+with a book in her hand, and who rose at the opening of the door.
+Something had warned me of the presence of a woman, that occult and
+potent aura of individuality, call it personal magnetism, spiritual
+effluence, or reduce it to a simpler expression if you will; whatever it
+was, it had warned me of the nearness of the dread attraction which
+allured at a distance and revealed itself with all the terrors of the
+Lorelei if approached too recklessly. A sign from her brother caused her
+to withdraw at once, but not before I had felt the impression which
+betrayed itself in my change of color, anxiety about the region of the
+heart, and sudden failure as if about to fall in a deadly fainting-fit.
+
+Does all this seem strange and incredible to the reader of my manuscript?
+Nothing in the history of life is so strange or exceptional as it seems
+to those who have not made a long study of its mysteries. I have never
+known just such a case as my own, and yet there must have been such, and
+if the whole history of mankind were unfolded I cannot doubt that there
+have been many like it. Let my reader suspend his judgment until he has
+read the paper I have referred to, which was drawn up by a Committee of
+the Royal Academy of the Biological Sciences. In this paper the
+mechanism of the series of nervous derangements to which I have been
+subject since the fatal shock experienced in my infancy is explained in
+language not hard to understand. It will be seen that such a change of
+polarity in the nervous centres is only a permanent form and an extreme
+degree of an emotional disturbance, which as a temporary and
+comparatively unimportant personal accident is far from being
+uncommon,--is so frequent, in fact, that every one must have known
+instances of it, and not a few must have had more or less serious
+experiences of it in their own private history.
+
+It must not be supposed that my imagination dealt with me as I am now
+dealing with the reader. I was full of strange fancies and wild
+superstitions. One of my Catholic friends gave me a silver medal which
+had been blessed by the Pope, and which I was to wear next my body. I
+was told that this would turn black after a time, in virtue of a power
+which it possessed of drawing out original sin, or certain portions of
+it, together with the evil and morbid tendencies which had been engrafted
+on the corrupt nature. I wore the medal faithfully, as directed, and
+watched it carefully. It became tarnished and after a time darkened, but
+it wrought no change in my unnatural condition.
+
+There was an old gypsy who had the reputation of knowing more of futurity
+than she had any right to know. The story was that she had foretold the
+assassination of Count Rossi and the death of Cavour.
+
+However that may have been, I was persuaded to let her try her black art
+upon my future. I shall never forget the strange, wild look of the
+wrinkled hag as she took my hand and studied its lines and fixed her
+wicked old eyes on my young countenance. After this examination she
+shook her head and muttered some words, which as nearly as I could get
+them would be in English like these:
+
+ Fair lady cast a spell on thee,
+ Fair lady's hand shall set thee free.
+
+Strange as it may seem, these words of a withered old creature, whose
+palm had to be crossed with silver to bring forth her oracular response,
+have always clung to my memory as if they were destined to fulfilment.
+The extraordinary nature of the affliction to which I was subject
+disposed me to believe the incredible with reference to all that relates
+to it. I have never ceased to have the feeling that, sooner or later, I
+should find myself freed from the blight laid upon me in my infancy. It
+seems as if it would naturally come through the influence of some young
+and fair woman, to whom that merciful errand should be assigned by the
+Providence that governs our destiny. With strange hopes, with trembling
+fears, with mingled belief and doubt, wherever I have found myself I have
+sought with longing yet half-averted eyes for the "elect lady," as I have
+learned to call her, who was to lift the curse from my ruined life.
+
+Three times I have been led to the hope, if not the belief, that I had
+found the object of my superstitious belief.--Singularly enough it was
+always on the water that the phantom of my hope appeared before my
+bewildered vision. Once it was an English girl who was a fellow
+passenger with me in one of my ocean voyages. I need not say that she
+was beautiful, for she was my dream realized. I heard her singing, I saw
+her walking the deck on some of the fair days when sea-sickness was
+forgotten. The passengers were a social company enough, but I had kept
+myself apart, as was my wont. At last the attraction became too strong
+to resist any longer. "I will venture into the charmed circle if it
+kills me," I said to my father. I did venture, and it did not kill me,
+or I should not be telling this story. But there was a repetition of the
+old experiences. I need not relate the series of alarming consequences
+of my venture. The English girl was very lovely, and I have no doubt has
+made some one supremely happy before this, but she was not the "elect
+lady" of the prophecy and of my dreams.
+
+A second time I thought myself for a moment in the presence of the
+destined deliverer who was to restore me to my natural place among my
+fellow men and women. It was on the Tiber that I met the young maiden
+who drew me once more into that inner circle which surrounded young
+womanhood with deadly peril for me, if I dared to pass its limits. I was
+floating with the stream in the little boat in which I passed many long
+hours of reverie when I saw another small boat with a boy and a young
+girl in it. The boy had been rowing, and one of his oars had slipped
+from his grasp. He did not know how to paddle with a single oar, and was
+hopelessly rowing round and round, his oar all the time floating farther
+away from him. I could not refuse my assistance. I picked up the oar
+and brought my skiff alongside of the boat. When I handed the oar to the
+boy the young girl lifted her veil and thanked me in the exquisite music
+of the language which
+
+ 'Sounds as if it should be writ on satin.'
+
+She was a type of Italian beauty,--a nocturne in flesh and blood, if I
+may borrow a term certain artists are fond of; but it was her voice which
+captivated me and for a moment made me believe that I was no longer shut
+off from all relations with the social life of my race. An hour later I
+was found lying insensible on the floor of my boat, white, cold, almost
+pulseless. It cost much patient labor to bring me back to consciousness.
+Had not such extreme efforts been made, it seems probable that I should
+never have waked from a slumber which was hardly distinguishable from
+that of death.
+
+Why should I provoke a catastrophe which appears inevitable if I invite
+it by exposing myself to its too well ascertained cause? The habit of
+these deadly seizures has become a second nature. The strongest and the
+ablest men have found it impossible to resist the impression produced by
+the most insignificant object, by the most harmless sight or sound to
+which they had a congenital or acquired antipathy. What prospect have I
+of ever being rid of this long and deep-seated infirmity? I may well ask
+myself these questions, but my answer is that I will never give up the
+hope that time will yet bring its remedy. It may be that the wild
+prediction which so haunts me shall find itself fulfilled. I have had of
+late strange premonitions, to which if I were superstitious I could not
+help giving heed. But I have seen too much of the faith that deals in
+miracles to accept the supernatural in any shape,--assuredly when it
+comes from an old witch-like creature who takes pay for her revelations
+of the future. Be it so: though I am not superstitious, I have a right
+to be imaginative, and my imagination will hold to those words of the old
+zingara with an irresistible feeling that, sooner or later, they will
+prove true.
+
+Can it be possible that her prediction is not far from its realization?
+I have had both waking and sleeping visions within these last months and
+weeks which have taken possession of me and filled my life with new
+thoughts, new hopes, new resolves.
+
+Sometimes on the bosom of the lake by which I am dreaming away this
+season of bloom and fragrance, sometimes in the fields or woods in a
+distant glimpse, once in a nearer glance, which left me pale and
+tremulous, yet was followed by a swift reaction, so that my cheeks
+flushed and my pulse bounded, I have seen her who--how do I dare to tell
+it so that my own eyes can read it?---I cannot help believing is to be my
+deliverer, my saviour.
+
+I have been warned in the most solemn and impressive language by the
+experts most deeply read in the laws of life and the history of its
+disturbing and destroying influences, that it would be at the imminent
+risk of my existence if I should expose myself to the repetition of my
+former experiences. I was reminded that unexplained sudden deaths were
+of constant, of daily occurrence; that any emotion is liable to arrest
+the movements of life: terror, joy, good news or bad news,--anything that
+reaches the deeper nervous centres. I had already died once, as Sir
+Charles Napier said of himself; yes, more than once, died and been
+resuscitated. The next time, I might very probably fail to get my return
+ticket after my visit to Hades. It was a rather grim stroke of humor,
+but I understood its meaning full well, and felt the force of its menace.
+
+After all, what had I to live for if the great primal instinct which
+strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated,
+suppressed, crushed out of existence? Why not as well die in the attempt
+to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted nervous movement as in
+any other way? I am alone in the world,--alone save for my faithful
+servant, through whom I seem to hold to the human race as it were by a
+single filament. My father, who was my instructor, my companion, my
+dearest and best friend through all my later youth and my earlier
+manhood, died three years ago and left me my own master, with the means
+of living as might best please my fancy. This season shall decide my
+fate. One more experiment, and I shall find myself restored to my place
+among my fellow-beings, or, as I devoutly hope, in a sphere where all our
+mortal infirmities are past and forgotten.
+
+I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve, so that there
+shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected with my
+memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly. It has cost me an effort
+to do it, but now that my life is on record I feel more reconciled to my
+lot, with all its possibilities, and among these possibilities is a gleam
+of a better future. I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise,
+deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should
+be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and
+especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human
+character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they
+are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of
+the closely connected nervous centres.
+
+For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility
+left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me. I have
+passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it, as I
+have developed from infancy to manhood. At first it was mere blind
+instinct about which I had no thought, living like other infants the life
+of impressions without language to connect them in series. In my boyhood
+I began to be deeply conscious of the infirmity which separated me from
+those around me. In youth began that conflict of emotions and impulses
+with the antagonistic influence of which I have already spoken, a
+conflict which has never ceased, but to which I have necessarily become
+to a certain degree accustomed; and against the dangers of which I have
+learned to guard myself habitually. That is the meaning of my isolation.
+You, young man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my melancholy
+record,--you at least will understand me. Does not your heart throb, in
+the presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if it "were
+ready to crack" with its own excess of strain? What if instead of
+throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat again?
+You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy will look
+upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know what it is
+when your breast heaves with uncontrollable emotion and the grip of the
+bodice seems unendurable as the embrace of the iron virgin of the
+Inquisition. Think what it would be if the grasp were tightened so that
+no breath of air could enter your panting chest!
+
+Does your heart beat in the same way, young man, when your honored
+friend, a venerable matron of seventy years, greets you with her kindly
+smile as it does in the presence of youthful loveliness? When a pretty
+child brings you her doll and looks into your eyes with artless grace and
+trustful simplicity, does your pulse quicken, do you tremble, does life
+palpitate through your whole being, as when the maiden of seventeen meets
+your enamored sight in the glow of her rosebud beauty? Wonder not, then,
+if the period of mystic attraction for you should be that of agitation,
+terror, danger, to one in whom the natural current of the instincts has
+had its course changed as that of a stream is changed by a convulsion of
+nature, so that the impression which is new life to you is death to him.
+
+I am now twenty-five years old. I have reached the time of life which I
+have dreamed, nay even ventured to hope, might be the limit of the
+sentence which was pronounced upon me in my infancy. I can assign no
+good reason for this anticipation. But in writing this paper I feel as
+if I were preparing to begin a renewed existence. There is nothing for me
+to be ashamed of in the story I have told. There is no man living who
+would not have yielded to the sense of instantly impending death which
+seized upon me under the conditions I have mentioned. Martyrs have gone
+singing to their flaming shrouds, but never a man could hold his breath
+long enough to kill himself; he must have rope or water, or some
+mechanical help, or nature will make him draw in a breath of air, and
+would make him do so though he knew the salvation of the human race would
+be forfeited by that one gasp.
+
+This paper may never reach the eye of any one afflicted in the same way
+that I have been. It probably never will; but for all that, there are
+many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in themselves in the
+direction of my unhappy susceptibility. Others, to whom such weakness
+seems inconceivable, will find their scepticism shaken, if not removed,
+by the calm, judicial statement of the Report drawn up for the Royal
+Academy. It will make little difference to me whether my story is
+accepted unhesitatingly or looked upon as largely a product of the
+imagination. I am but a bird of passage that lights on the boughs of
+different nationalities. I belong to no flock; my home may be among the
+palms of Syria, the olives of Italy, the oaks of England, the elms that
+shadow the Hudson or the Connecticut; I build no nest; to-day I am here,
+to-morrow on the wing.
+
+If I quit my native land before the trees have dropped their leaves I
+shall place this manuscript in the safe hands of one whom I feel sure
+that I can trust; to do with it as he shall see fit. If it is only
+curious and has no bearing on human welfare, he may think it well to let
+it remain unread until I shall have passed away. If in his judgment it
+throws any light on one of the deeper mysteries of our nature,--the
+repulsions which play such a formidable part in social life, and which
+must be recognized as the correlatives of the affinities that distribute
+the individuals governed by them in the face of impediments which seem to
+be impossibilities,--then it may be freely given to the world.
+
+But if I am here when the leaves are all fallen, the programme of my life
+will have changed, and this story of the dead past will be illuminated by
+the light of a living present which will irradiate all its saddening
+features. Who would not pray that my last gleam of light and hope may be
+that of dawn and not of departing day?
+
+The reader who finds it hard to accept the reality of a story so far from
+the common range of experience is once more requested to suspend his
+judgment until he has read the paper which will next be offered for his
+consideration.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.
+
+
+Perhaps it is too much to expect a reader who wishes to be entertained,
+excited, amused, and does not want to work his passage through pages
+which he cannot understand without some effort of his own, to read the
+paper which follows and Dr. Butts's reflections upon it. If he has no
+curiosity in the direction of these chapters, he can afford to leave them
+to such as relish a slight flavor of science. But if he does so leave
+them he will very probably remain sceptical as to the truth of the story
+to which they are meant to furnish him with a key.
+
+Of course the case of Maurice Kirkwood is a remarkable and exceptional
+one, and it is hardly probable that any reader's experience will furnish
+him with its parallel. But let him look back over all his acquaintances,
+if he has reached middle life, and see if he cannot recall more than one
+who, for some reason or other, shunned the society of young women, as if
+they had a deadly fear of their company. If he remembers any such, he
+can understand the simple statements and natural reflections which are
+laid before him.
+
+One of the most singular facts connected with the history of Maurice
+Kirkwood was the philosophical equanimity with which he submitted to the
+fate which had fallen upon him. He did not choose to be pumped by the
+Interviewer, who would show him up in the sensational columns of his
+prying newspaper. He lived chiefly by himself, as the easiest mode of
+avoiding those meetings to which he would be exposed in almost every
+society into which he might venture. But he had learned to look upon
+himself very much as he would upon an intimate not himself,--upon a
+different personality. A young man will naturally enough be ashamed of
+his shyness. It is something which others believe, and perhaps he
+himself thinks, he might overcome. But in the case of Maurice Kirkwood
+there was no room for doubt as to the reality and gravity of the long
+enduring effects of his first convulsive terror. He had accepted the
+fact as he would have accepted the calamity of losing his sight or his
+hearing. When he was questioned by the experts to whom his case was
+submitted, he told them all that he knew about it almost without a sign
+of emotion. Nature was so peremptory with him,--saying in language that
+had no double meaning: "If you violate the condition on which you hold my
+gift of existence I slay you on the spot,"--that he became as decisive in
+his obedience as she was in her command, and accepted his fate without
+repining.
+
+Yet it must not be thought for a moment,--it cannot be supposed,--that
+he was insensible because he looked upon himself with the coolness of an
+enforced philosophy. He bore his burden manfully, hard as it was to live
+under it, for he lived, as we have seen, in hope. The thought of
+throwing it off with his life, as too grievous to be borne, was familiar
+to his lonely hours, but he rejected it as unworthy of his manhood. How
+he had speculated and dreamed about it is plain enough from the paper the
+reader may remember on Ocean, River, and Lake.
+
+With these preliminary hints the paper promised is submitted to such as
+may find any interest in them.
+
+ ACCOUNT OF A CASE OF GYNOPHOBIA.
+
+ WITH REMARKS.
+
+Being the Substance of a Report to the Royal Academy of the Biological
+Sciences by a Committee of that Institution.
+
+"The singular nature of the case we are about to narrate and comment upon
+will, we feel confident, arrest the attention of those who have learned
+the great fact that Nature often throws the strongest light upon her laws
+by the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from time to time are
+observed. We have done with the lusus naturae of earlier generations.
+We pay little attention to the stories of 'miracles,' except so far as we
+receive them ready-made at the hands of the churches which still hold to
+them. Not the less do we meet with strange and surprising facts, which a
+century or two ago would have been handled by the clergy and the courts,
+but today are calmly recorded and judged by the best light our knowledge
+of the laws of life can throw upon them. It must be owned that there are
+stories which we can hardly dispute, so clear and full is the evidence in
+their support, which do, notwithstanding, tax our faith and sometimes
+leave us sceptical in spite of all the testimony which supports them.
+
+"In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend to
+the candid attention of the Academy. If one were told that a young man,
+a gentleman by birth and training, well formed, in apparently perfect
+health, of agreeable physiognomy and manners, could not endure the
+presence of the most attractive young woman, but was seized with deadly
+terror and sudden collapse of all the powers of life, if he came into her
+immediate presence; if it were added that this same young man did not
+shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain
+timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of
+their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at
+the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the
+fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of
+some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out.
+A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making
+love to her grandmother! This would, of course, be overstating the truth
+of the story, but to such a misinterpretation the plain facts lend
+themselves too easily. We will relate the leading circumstances of the
+case, as they were told us with perfect simplicity and frankness by the
+subject of an affection which, if classified, would come under the
+general head of Antipathy, but to which, if we give it a name, we shall
+have to apply the term Gynophobia, or Fear of Woman."
+
+Here follows the account furnished to the writer of the paper, which is
+in all essentials identical with that already laid before the reader.
+
+"Such is the case offered to our consideration. Assuming its
+truthfulness in all its particulars, it remains to see in the first place
+whether or not it is as entirely exceptional and anomalous as it seems at
+first sight, or whether it is only the last term of a series of cases
+which in their less formidable aspect are well known to us in literature,
+in the records of science, and even in our common experience.
+
+"To most of those among us the explanations we are now about to give are
+entirely superfluous. But there are some whose chief studies have been
+in different directions, and who will not complain if certain facts are
+mentioned which to the expert will seem rudimentary, and which hardly
+require recapitulation to those who are familiarly acquainted with the
+common text-books.
+
+"The heart is the centre of every living movement in the higher animals,
+and in man, furnishing in varying amount, or withholding to a greater or
+less extent, the needful supplies to all parts of the system. If its
+action is diminished to a certain degree, faintness is the immediate
+consequence; if it is arrested, loss of consciousness; if its action is
+not soon restored, death, of which fainting plants the white flag,
+remains in possession of the system.
+
+"How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need not
+go to science to learn, for all human experience and all literature are
+overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation.
+Scripture is full of it; the heart in Hebrew poetry represents the entire
+life, we might almost say. Not less forcible is the language of
+Shakespeare, as for instance, in 'Measure for Measure:'
+
+ "'Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,
+ Making it both unable for itself
+ And dispossessing all my other parts
+ Of necessary fitness?'
+
+"More especially is the heart associated in every literature with the
+passion of love. A famous old story is that of Galen, who was called to
+the case of a young lady long ailing, and wasting away from some cause
+the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make out. The
+shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the bottom of the
+young lady's malady. Many relatives and friends of both sexes, all of
+them ready with their sympathy, came to see her. The physician sat by her
+bedside during one of these visits, and in an easy, natural way took her
+hand and placed a finger on her pulse. It beat quietly enough until a
+certain comely young gentleman entered the apartment, when it suddenly
+rose infrequency, and at the same moment her hurried breathing, her
+changing color, pale and flushed by turns, betrayed the profound
+agitation his presence excited. This was enough for the sagacious Greek;
+love was the disease, the cure of which by its like may be claimed as an
+anticipation of homoeopathy. In the frontispiece to the fine old 'Junta'
+edition of the works of Galen, you may find among the wood-cuts a
+representation of the interesting scene, with the title Amantas
+Dignotio,--the diagnosis, or recognition, of the lover.
+
+"Love has many languages, but the heart talks through all of them. The
+pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain which
+gives it color. The lovers at the 'Brookside' could hear each other's
+hearts beating. When Genevieve, in Coleridge's poem, forgot herself, and
+was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,
+
+ "'T was partly love and partly fear,
+ And partly 't was a bashful art,
+ That I might rather feel than see
+ The swelling of her heart'
+
+"Always the heart, whether its hurried action is seen, or heard, or felt.
+But it is not always in this way that the 'deceitful' organ treats the
+lover.
+
+ "'Faint heart never won fair lady.'
+
+"This saying was not meant, perhaps, to be taken literally, but it has
+its literal truth. Many a lover has found his heart sink within
+him,--lose all its force, and leave him weak as a child in his emotion at
+the sight of the object of his affections. When Porphyro looked upon
+Madeline at her prayers in the chapel, it was too much for him:
+
+ "'She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,
+ Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint,
+ She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint.'
+
+"And in Balzac's novel, 'Cesar Birotteau,' the hero of the story 'fainted
+away for-joy at the moment when, under a linden-tree, at Sceaux,
+Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future husband.'
+
+"One who faints is dead if he does not I come to,' and nothing is more
+likely than that too susceptible lovers have actually gone off in this
+way. Everything depends on how the heart behaves itself in these and
+similar trying moments. The mechanism of its actions becomes an
+interesting subject, therefore, to lovers of both sexes, and to all who
+are capable of intense emotions.
+
+"The heart is a great reservoir, which distributes food, drink, air, and
+heat to every part of the system, in exchange for its waste material. It
+knocks at the gate of every organ seventy or eighty times in a minute,
+calling upon it to receive its supplies and unload its refuse. Between
+it and the brain there is the closest relation. The emotions, which act
+upon it as we have seen, govern it by a mechanism only of late years
+thoroughly understood. This mechanism can be made plain enough to the
+reader who is not afraid to believe that he can understand it.
+
+"The brain, as all know, is the seat of ideas, emotions, volition. It is
+the great central telegraphic station with which many lesser centres are
+in close relation, from which they receive, and to which they transmit,
+their messages. The heart has its own little brains, so to speak,--small
+collections of nervous substance which govern its rhythmical motions
+under ordinary conditions. But these lesser nervous centres are to a
+large extent dominated by influences transmitted from certain groups of
+nerve-cells in the brain and its immediate dependencies.
+
+"There are two among the special groups of nerve-cells which produce
+directly opposite effects. One of these has the power of accelerating
+the action of the heart, while the other has the power of retarding or
+arresting this action. One acts as the spur, the other as the bridle.
+According as one or the other predominates, the action of the heart will
+be stimulated or restrained. Among the great modern discoveries in
+physiology is that of the existence of a distinct centre of inhibition,
+as the restraining influence over the heart is called.
+
+"The centre of inhibition plays a terrible part in the history of
+cowardice and of unsuccessful love. No man can be brave without blood to
+sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the German
+materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus. The fainting lover
+must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend him her
+smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks. Porphyro got
+over his faintness before he ran away with Madeline, and Cesar Birotteau
+was an accepted lover when he swooned with happiness: but many an officer
+has been cashiered, and many a suitor has been rejected, because the
+centre of inhibition has got the upper hand of the centre of stimulation.
+
+"In the well-known cases of deadly antipathy which have been recorded,
+the most frequent cause has been the disturbed and depressing influence
+of the centre of inhibition. Fainting at the sight of blood is one of
+the commonest examples of this influence. A single impression, in a very
+early period of atmospheric existence,--perhaps, indirectly, before that
+period, as was said to have happened in the case of James the First of
+England,--may establish a communication between this centre and the heart
+which will remain open ever afterwards. How does a footpath across a
+field establish itself? Its curves are arbitrary, and what we call
+accidental, but one after another follows it as if he were guided by a
+chart on which it was laid down. So it is with this dangerous transit
+between the centre of inhibition and the great organ of life. If once
+the path is opened by the track of some profound impression, that same
+impression, if repeated, or a similar one, is likely to find the old
+footmarks and follow them. Habit only makes the path easier to traverse,
+and thus the unreasoning terror of a child, of an infant, may perpetuate
+itself in a timidity which shames the manhood of its subject.
+
+"The case before us is an exceptional and most remarkable example of the
+effect of inhibition on the heart.
+
+"We will not say that we believe it to be unique in the history of the
+human race; on the contrary, we do not doubt that there have been similar
+cases, and that in some rare instances sudden death has been the
+consequence of seizures like that of the subject of this Report. The case
+most like it is that of Colone Townsend, which is too well known to
+require any lengthened description in this paper. It is enough to recall
+the main facts. He could by a voluntary effort suspend the action of his
+heart for a considerable period, during which he lay like one dead,
+pulseless, and without motion. After a time the circulation returned,
+and he does not seem to have been the worse for his dangerous, or
+seemingly dangerous, experiment. But in his case it was by an act of the
+will that the heart's action was suspended. In the case before us it is
+an involuntary impulse transmitted from the brain to the inhibiting
+centre, which arrests the cardiac movements.
+
+"What is like to be the further history of the case?
+
+"The subject of this anomalous affliction is now more than twenty years
+old. The chain of nervous actions has become firmly established. It
+might have been hoped that the changes of adolescence would have effected
+a transformation of the perverted instinct. On the contrary, the whole
+force of this instinct throws itself on the centre of inhibition, instead
+of quickening the heart-beats, and sending the rush of youthful blood
+with fresh life through the entire system to the throbbing finger-tips.
+
+"Is it probable that time and circumstances will alter a habit of nervous
+interactions so long established? We are disposed to think that there is
+a chance of its being broken up. And we are not afraid to say that we
+suspect the old gypsy woman, whose prophecy took such hold of the
+patient's imagination, has hit upon the way in which the 'spell,' as she
+called it, is to be dissolved. She must, in all probability, have had a
+hint of the 'antipatia' to which the youth before her was a victim, and
+its cause, and if so, her guess as to the probable mode in which the
+young man would obtain relief from his unfortunate condition was the one
+which would naturally suggest itself.
+
+"If once the nervous impression which falls on the centre of inhibition
+can be made to change its course, so as to follow its natural channel, it
+will probably keep to that channel ever afterwards. And this will, it is
+most likely, be effected by some sudden, unexpected impression. If he
+were drowning, and a young woman should rescue him, it is by no means
+impossible that the change in the nervous current we have referred to
+might be brought about as rapidly, as easily, as the reversal of the
+poles in a magnet, which is effected in an instant. But he cannot be
+expected to throw himself into the water just at the right moment when
+the 'fair lady' of the gitana's prophecy is passing on the shore.
+Accident may effect the cure which art seems incompetent to perform. It
+would not be strange if in some future seizure he should never come back
+to consciousness. But it is quite conceivable, on the other hand, that a
+happier event may occur, that in a single moment the nervous polarity may
+be reversed, the whole course of his life changed, and his past terrible
+experiences be to him like a scarce-remembered dream.
+
+"This is one, of those cases in which it is very hard to determine the
+wisest course to be pursued. The question is not unlike that which
+arises in certain cases of dislocation of the bones of the neck. Shall
+the unfortunate sufferer go all his days with his face turned far round
+to the right or the left, or shall an attempt be made to replace the
+dislocated bones? an attempt which may succeed, or may cause instant
+death. The patient must be consulted as to whether he will take the
+chance. The practitioner may be unwilling to risk it, if the patient
+consents. Each case must be judged on its own special grounds. We
+cannot think that this young man is doomed to perpetual separation from
+the society of womanhood during the period of its bloom and attraction.
+But to provoke another seizure after his past experiences would be too
+much like committing suicide. We fear that we must trust to the chapter
+of accidents. The strange malady--for such it is--has become a second
+nature, and may require as energetic a shock to displace it as it did to
+bring it into existence. Time alone can solve this question, on which
+depends the well-being and, it may be, the existence of a young man every
+way fitted to be happy, and to give happiness, if restored to his true
+nature."
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.
+
+Dr. Butts sat up late at night reading these papers and reflecting upon
+them. He was profoundly impressed and tenderly affected by the entire
+frankness, the absence of all attempt at concealment, which Maurice
+showed in placing these papers at his disposal. He believed that his
+patient would recover from this illness for which he had been taking care
+of him. He thought deeply and earnestly of what he could do for him
+after he should have regained his health and strength.
+
+There were references, in Maurice's own account of himself, which the
+doctor called to mind with great interest after reading his brief
+autobiography. Some one person--some young woman, it must be--had
+produced a singular impression upon him since those earlier perilous
+experiences through which he had passed. The doctor could not help
+thinking of that meeting with Euthymia of which she had spoken to him.
+Maurice, as she said, turned pale,--he clapped his hand to his breast.
+He might have done so if he had met her chambermaid, or any straggling
+damsel of the village. But Euthymia was not a young woman to be looked
+upon with indifference. She held herself like a queen, and walked like
+one, not a stage queen, but one born and bred to self-reliance, and
+command of herself as well as others. One could not pass her without
+being struck with her noble bearing and spirited features. If she had
+known how Maurice trembled as he looked upon her, in that conflict of
+attraction and uncontrollable dread,--if she had known it! But what,
+even then, could she have done? Nothing but get away from him as fast as
+she could. As it was, it was a long time before his agitation subsided,
+and his heart beat with its common force and frequency.
+
+Dr. Butts was not a male gossip nor a matchmaking go-between. But he
+could not help thinking what a pity it was that these two young persons
+could not come together as other young people do in the pairing season,
+and find out whether they cared for and were fitted for each other. He
+did not pretend to settle this question in his own mind, but the thought
+was a natural one. And here was a gulf between them as deep and wide as
+that between Lazarus and Dives. Would it ever be bridged over? This
+thought took possession of the doctor's mind, and he imagined all sorts
+of ways of effecting some experimental approximation between Maurice and
+Euthymia. From this delicate subject he glanced off to certain general
+considerations suggested by the extraordinary history he had been
+reading. He began by speculating as to the possibility of the personal
+presence of an individual making itself perceived by some channel other
+than any of the five senses. The study of the natural sciences teaches
+those who are devoted to them that the most insignificant facts may lead
+the way to the discovery of the most important, all-pervading laws of the
+universe. From the kick of a frog's hind leg to the amazing triumphs
+which began with that seemingly trivial incident is a long, a very long
+stride if Madam Galvani had not been in delicate health, which was the
+occasion of her having some frog-broth prepared for her, the world of
+to-day might not be in possession of the electric telegraph and the light
+which blazes like the sun at high noon. A common-looking occurrence, one
+seemingly unimportant, which had hitherto passed unnoticed with the
+ordinary course of things, was the means of introducing us to a new and
+vast realm of closely related phenomena. It was like a key that we might
+have picked up, looking so simple that it could hardly fit any lock but
+one of like simplicity, but which should all at once throw back the bolts
+of the one lock which had defied the most ingenious of our complex
+implements and open our way into a hitherto unexplored territory.
+
+It certainly was not through the eye alone that Maurice felt the
+paralyzing influence. He could contemplate Euthymia from a distance, as
+he did on the day of the boat-race, without any nervous disturbance. A
+certain proximity was necessary for the influence to be felt, as in the
+case of magnetism and electricity. An atmosphere of danger surrounded
+every woman he approached during the period when her sex exercises its
+most powerful attractions. How far did that atmosphere extend, and
+through what channel did it act?
+
+The key to the phenomena of this case, he believed, was to be found in a
+fact as humble as that which gave birth to the science of galvanism and
+its practical applications. The circumstances connected with the very
+common antipathy to cats were as remarkable in many points of view as the
+similar circumstances in the case of Maurice Kirkwood. The subjects of
+that antipathy could not tell what it was which disturbed their nervous
+system. All they knew was that a sense of uneasiness, restlessness,
+oppression, came over them in the presence of one of these animals. He
+remembered the fact already mentioned, that persons sensitive to this
+impression can tell by their feelings if a cat is concealed in the
+apartment in which they may happen to be. It may be through some
+emanation. It may be through the medium of some electrical disturbance.
+What if the nerve-thrills passing through the whole system of the animal
+propagate themselves to a certain distance without any more regard to
+intervening solids than is shown by magnetism? A sieve lets sand pass
+through it; a filter arrests sand, but lets fluids pass, glass holds
+fluids, but lets light through; wood shuts out light, but magnetic
+attraction goes through it as sand went through the sieve. No good
+reasons can be given why the presence of a cat should not betray itself
+to certain organizations, at a distance, through the walls of a box in
+which the animal is shut up. We need not disbelieve the stories which
+allege such an occurrence as a fact and a not very infrequent one.
+
+If the presence of a cat can produce its effects under these
+circumstances, why should not that of a human being under similar
+conditions, acting on certain constitutions, exercise its specific
+influence? The doctor recalled a story told him by one of his friends, a
+story which the friend himself heard from the lips of the distinguished
+actor, the late Mr. Fechter. The actor maintained that Rachel had no
+genius as an actress. It was all Samson's training and study, according
+to him, which explained the secret of her wonderful effectiveness on the
+stage. But magnetism, he said,--magnetism, she was full of. He declared
+that he was made aware of her presence on the stage, when he could not
+see her or know of her presence otherwise, by this magnetic emanation.
+The doctor took the story for what it was worth. There might very
+probably be exaggeration, perhaps high imaginative coloring about it, but
+it was not a whit more unlikely than the cat-stories, accepted as
+authentic. He continued this train of thought into further developments.
+Into this series of reflections we will try to follow him.
+
+What is the meaning of the halo with which artists have surrounded the
+heads of their pictured saints, of the aureoles which wraps them like a
+luminous cloud? Is it not a recognition of the fact that these holy
+personages diffuse their personality in the form of a visible emanation,
+which reminds us of Milton's definition of light:
+
+ "Bright effluence of bright essence increate"?
+
+The common use of the term influence would seem to imply the existence of
+its correlative, effluence. There is no good reason that I can see, the
+doctor said to himself, why among the forces which work upon the nervous
+centres there should not be one which acts at various distances from its
+source. It may not be visible like the "glory" of the painters, it may
+not be appreciable by any one of the five senses, and yet it may be felt
+by the person reached by it as much as if it were a palpable
+presence,--more powerfully, perhaps, from the mystery which belongs to
+its mode of action.
+
+Why should not Maurice have been rendered restless and anxious by the
+unseen nearness of a young woman who was in the next room to him, just as
+the persons who have the dread of cats are made conscious of their
+presence through some unknown channel? Is it anything strange that the
+larger and more powerful organism should diffuse a consciousness of its
+presence to some distance as well as the slighter and feebler one? Is it
+strange that this mysterious influence or effluence should belong
+especially or exclusively to the period of complete womanhood in
+distinction from that of immaturity or decadence? On the contrary, it
+seems to be in accordance with all the analogies of nature,--analogies
+too often cruel in the sentence they pass upon the human female.
+
+Among the many curious thoughts which came up in the doctor's mind was
+this, which made him smile as if it were a jest, but which he felt very
+strongly had its serious side, and was involved with the happiness or
+suffering of multitudes of youthful persons who die without telling their
+secret:
+
+How many young men have a mortal fear of woman, as woman, which they
+never overcome, and in consequence of which the attraction which draws
+man towards her, as strong in them as in others,--oftentimes, in virtue
+of their peculiarly sensitive organizations, more potent in them than in
+others of like age and conditions,--in consequence of which fear, this
+attraction is completely neutralized, and all the possibilities of
+doubled and indefinitely extended life depending upon it are left
+unrealized! Think what numbers of young men in Catholic countries devote
+themselves to lives of celibacy. Think how many young men lose all their
+confidence in the presence of the young woman to whom they are most
+attracted, and at last steal away from a companionship which it is
+rapture to dream of and torture to endure, so does the presence of the
+beloved object paralyze all the powers of expression. Sorcerers have in
+all time and countries played on the hopes and terrors of lovers. Once
+let loose a strong impulse on the centre of inhibition, and the warrior
+who had faced bayonets and batteries becomes a coward whom the
+well-dressed hero of the ball-room and leader of the German will put to
+ignominious flight in five minutes of easy, audacious familiarity with
+his lady-love.
+
+Yes, the doctor went on with his reflections, I do not know that I have
+seen the term Gynophobia before I opened this manuscript, but I have seen
+the malady many times. Only one word has stood between many a pair of
+young people and their lifelong happiness, and that word has got as far
+as the lips, but the lips trembled and would not, could not, shape that
+little word. All young women are not like Coleridge's Genevieve, who
+knew how to help her lover out of his difficulty, and said yes before he
+had asked for an answer. So the wave which was to have wafted them on to
+the shore of Elysium has just failed of landing them, and back they have
+been drawn into the desolate ocean to meet no more on earth.
+
+Love is the master-key, he went on thinking, love is the master-key that
+opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of
+all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!--not only
+the historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the topless towers of Ilium"
+for the smile of Helen, and fired the palaces of Babylon by the hand of
+Thais, but the beauty which springs up in all times and places, and
+carries a torch and wears a serpent for a wreath as truly as any of the
+Eumenides. Paint Beauty with her foot upon a skull and a dragon coiled
+around her.
+
+The doctor smiled at his own imposing classical allusions and pictorial
+imagery. Drifting along from thought to thought, he reflected on the
+probable consequences of the general knowledge of Maurice Kirkwood's
+story, if it came before the public.
+
+What a piece of work it would make among the lively youths of the
+village, to be sure! What scoffing, what ridicule, what embellishments,
+what fables, would follow in the trail of the story! If the Interviewer
+got hold of it, how "The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor"
+would blaze with capitals in its next issue! The young fellows' of the
+place would be disposed to make fun of the whole matter. The young
+girls-the doctor hardly dared to think what would happen when the story
+got about among them. "The Sachem" of the solitary canoe, the bold
+horseman, the handsome hermit,--handsome so far as the glimpses they had
+got of him went,--must needs be an object of tender interest among them,
+now that he was ailing, suffering, in danger of his life, away from
+friends,--poor fellow! Little tokens of their regard had reached his
+sick-chamber; bunches of flowers with dainty little notes, some of them
+pinkish, some three-cornered, some of them with brief messages, others
+"criss-crossed," were growing more frequent as it was understood that the
+patient was likely to be convalescent before many days had passed. If it
+should come to be understood that there was a deadly obstacle to their
+coming into any personal relations with him, the doctor had his doubts
+whether there were not those who would subject him to the risk; for there
+were coquettes in the village,--strangers, visitors, let us hope,--who
+would sacrifice anything or anybody to their vanity and love of conquest.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.
+
+The illness from which Maurice had suffered left him in a state of
+profound prostration. The doctor, who remembered the extreme danger of
+any overexertion in such cases, hardly allowed him to lift his head from
+the pillow. But his mind was gradually recovering its balance, and he
+was able to hold some conversation with those about him. His faithful
+Paolo had grown so thin in waiting upon him and watching with him that
+the village children had to take a second look at his face when they
+passed him to make sure that it was indeed their old friend and no other.
+But as his master advanced towards convalescence and the doctor assured
+him that he was going in all probability to get well, Paolo's face began
+to recover something of its old look and expression, and once more his
+pockets filled themselves with comfits for his little circle of
+worshipping three and four year old followers.
+
+"How is Mr. Kirkwood?" was the question with which he was always greeted.
+In the worst periods of the fever be rarely left his master. When he
+did, and the question was put to him, he would shake his head sadly,
+sometimes without a word, sometimes with tears and sobs and faltering
+words,--more like a brokenhearted child than a stalwart man as he was,
+such a man as soldiers are made of in the great Continental armies.
+
+"He very bad,--he no eat nothing,--he--no say nothing,--he never be no
+better," and all his Southern nature betrayed itself in a passionate
+burst of lamentation. But now that he began to feel easy about his
+master, his ready optimism declared itself no less transparently.
+
+"He better every day now. He get well in few weeks, sure. You see him
+on hoss in little while." The kind-hearted creature's life was bound up
+in that of his "master," as he loved to call him, in sovereign disregard
+of the comments of the natives, who held themselves too high for any such
+recognition of another as their better. They could not understand how
+he, so much their superior in bodily presence, in air and manner, could
+speak of the man who employed him in any other way than as "Kirkwood,"
+without even demeaning himself so far as to prefix a "Mr." to it. But
+"my master" Maurice remained for Paolo in spite of the fact that all men
+are born free and equal. And never was a servant more devoted to a
+master than was Paolo to Maurice during the days of doubt and danger.
+Since his improvement Maurice insisted upon his leaving his chamber and
+getting out of the house, so as to breathe the fresh air of which he was
+in so much need. It worried him to see his servant returning after too
+short an absence. The attendant who had helped him in the care of the
+patient was within call, and Paolo was almost driven out of the house by
+the urgency of his master's command that he should take plenty of
+exercise in the open air.
+
+Notwithstanding the fact of Maurice's improved condition, although the
+force of the disease had spent itself, the state of weakness to which he
+had been reduced was a cause of some anxiety, and required great
+precautions to be taken. He lay in bed, wasted, enfeebled to such a
+degree that he had to be cared for very much as a child is tended.
+Gradually his voice was coming back to him, so that he could hold some
+conversation, as was before mentioned, with those about him. The doctor
+waited for the right moment to make mention of the manuscript which
+Maurice had submitted to him. Up to this time, although it had been
+alluded to and the doctor had told him of the intense interest with which
+he had read it, he had never ventured to make it the subject of any long
+talk, such as would be liable to fatigue his patient. But now he thought
+the time had come.
+
+"I have been thinking," the doctor said, "of the singular seizures to
+which you are liable, and as it is my business not merely to think about
+such cases, but to do what I can to help any who may be capable of
+receiving aid from my art, I wish to have some additional facts about
+your history. And in the first place, will you allow me to ask what led
+you to this particular place? It is so much less known to the public at
+large than many other resorts that we naturally ask, What brings this or
+that new visitor among us? We have no ill-tasting, natural spring of bad
+water to be analyzed by the state chemist and proclaimed as a specific.
+We have no great gambling-houses, no racecourse (except that fox boats on
+the lake); we have no coaching-club, no great balls, few lions of any
+kind, so we ask, What brings this or that stranger here? And I think I
+may venture to ask you whether any, special motive brought you among us,
+or whether it was accident that determined your coming to this place."
+
+"Certainly, doctor," Maurice answered, "I will tell you with great
+pleasure. Last year I passed on the border of a great river. The year
+before I lived in a lonely cottage at the side of the ocean. I wanted
+this year to be by a lake. You heard the paper read at the meeting of
+your society, or at least you heard of it,--for such matters are always
+talked over in a village like this. You can judge by that paper, or
+could, if it were before you, of the frame of mind in which I came here.
+I was tired of the sullen indifference of the ocean and the babbling
+egotism of the river, always hurrying along on its own private business.
+I wanted the dreamy stillness of a large, tranquil sheet of water that
+had nothing in particular to do, and would leave me to myself and my
+thoughts. I had read somewhere about the place, and the old Anchor
+Tavern, with its paternal landlord and motherly landlady and
+old-fashioned household, and that, though it was no longer open as a
+tavern, I could find a resting-place there early in the season, at least
+for a few days, while I looked about me for a quiet place in which I
+might pass my summer. I have found this a pleasant residence. By being
+up early and out late I have kept myself mainly in the solitude which has
+become my enforced habit of life. The season has gone by too swiftly for
+me since my dream has become a vision."
+
+The doctor was sitting with his hand round Maurice's wrist, three fingers
+on his pulse. As he spoke these last words he noticed that the pulse
+fluttered a little,--beat irregularly a few times; intermitted; became
+feeble and thready; while his cheek grew whiter than the pallid
+bloodlessness of his long illness had left it.
+
+"No more talk, now," he said. "You are too tired to be using your voice.
+I will hear all the rest another time."
+
+The doctor had interrupted Maurice at an interesting point. What did he
+mean by saying that his dream had become a vision? This is what the
+doctor was naturally curious, and professionally anxious, to know. But
+his hand was still on his patient's pulse, which told him unmistakably
+that the heart had taken the alarm and was losing its energy under the
+depressing nervous influence. Presently, however, it recovered its
+natural force and rhythm, and a faint flush came back to the pale cheek.
+The doctor remembered the story of Galen, and the young maiden whose
+complaint had puzzled the physicians.
+
+The next day his patient was well enough to enter once more into
+conversation.
+
+"You said something about a dream of yours which had become a vision,"
+said the doctor, with his fingers on his patient's wrist, as before. He
+felt the artery leap, under his pressure, falter a little, stop, then
+begin again, growing fuller in its beat. The heart had felt the pull of
+the bridle, but the spur had roused it to swift reaction.
+
+"You know the story of my past life, doctor," Maurice answered; "and, I
+will tell you what is the vision which has taken the place of my dreams.
+You remember the boat-race? I watched it from a distance, but I held a
+powerful opera-glass in my hand, which brought the whole crew of the
+young ladies' boat so close to me that I could see the features, the
+figures, the movements, of every one of the rowers. I saw the little
+coxswain fling her bouquet in the track of the other boat,--you remember
+how the race was lost and won,--but I saw one face among those young
+girls which drew me away from all the rest. It was that of the young lady
+who pulled the bow oar, the captain of the boat's crew. I have since
+learned her name, you know it well,--I need not name her. Since that day
+I have had many distant glimpses of her; and once I met her so squarely
+that the deadly sensation came over me, and I felt that in another moment
+I should fall senseless at her feet. But she passed on her way and I on
+mine, and the spasm which had clutched my heart gradually left it, and I
+was as well as before. You know that young lady, doctor?"
+
+"I do; and she is a very noble creature. You are not the first young man
+who has been fascinated, almost at a glance, by Miss Euthymia Tower. And
+she is well worth knowing more intimately."
+
+The doctor gave him a full account of the young lady, of her early days,
+her character, her accomplishments. To all this he listened devoutly,
+and when the doctor left him he said to himself, "I will see her and
+speak with her, if it costs me my life."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+EUTHYMIA.
+
+"The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute had never willingly made a show of
+her gymnastic accomplishments. Her feats, which were so much admired,
+were only her natural exercise. Gradually the dumb-bells others used
+became too light for her, the ropes she climbed too short, the clubs she
+exercised with seemed as if they were made of cork instead of being heavy
+wood, and all the tests and meters of strength and agility had been
+strained beyond the standards which the records of the school had marked
+as their historic maxima. It was not her fault that she broke a
+dynamometer one day; she apologized for it, but the teacher said he
+wished he could have a dozen broken every year in the same way. The
+consciousness of her bodily strength had made her very careful in her
+movements. The pressure of her hand was never too hard for the tenderest
+little maiden whose palm was against her own. So far from priding
+herself on her special gifts, she was disposed to be ashamed of them.
+There were times and places in which she could give full play to her
+muscles without fear or reproach. She had her special costume for the
+boat and for the woods. She would climb the rugged old hemlocks now and
+then for the sake of a wide outlook, or to peep into the large nest where
+a hawk, or it may be an eagle, was raising her little brood of
+air-pirates.
+
+There were those who spoke of her wanderings in lonely places as an
+unsafe exposure. One sometimes met doubtful characters about the
+neighborhood, and stories were--told of occurrences which might well
+frighten a young girl, and make her cautious of trusting herself alone in
+the wild solitudes which surrounded the little village.. Those who knew
+Euthymia thought her quite equal to taking care of herself. Her very
+look was enough to ensure the respect of any vagabond who might cross her
+path, and if matters came to the worst she would prove as dangerous as a
+panther.
+
+But it was a pity to associate this class of thoughts with a noble
+specimen of true womanhood. Health, beauty, strength, were fine
+qualities, and in all these she was rich. She enjoyed all her natural
+gifts, and thought little about them. Unwillingly, but over-persuaded by
+some of her friends, she had allowed her arm and hand to be modelled.
+The artists who saw the cast wondered if it would be possible to get the
+bust of the maiden from whom it was taken. Nobody would have dared to
+suggest such an idea to her except Lurida. For Lurida sex was a trifling
+accident, to be disregarded not only in the interests of humanity, but
+for the sake of art.
+
+"It is a shame," she said to Euthymia, "that you will not let your
+exquisitely moulded form be perpetuated in marble. You have no right to
+withhold such a model from the contemplation of your fellow-creatures.
+Think how rare it is to see a woman who truly represents the divine idea!
+You belong to your race, and not to yourself,--at least, your beauty is a
+gift not to be considered as a piece of private property. Look at the
+so-called Venus of Milo. Do you suppose the noble woman who was the
+original of that divinely chaste statue felt any scruple about allowing
+the sculptor to reproduce her pure, unblemished perfections?"
+
+Euthymia was always patient with her imaginative friend. She listened to
+her eloquent discourse, but she could not help blushing, used as she was
+to Lurida's audacities. "The Terror's" brain had run away with a large
+share of the blood which ought to have gone to the nourishment of her
+general system. She could not help admiring, almost worshipping, a
+companion whose being was rich in the womanly developments with which
+nature had so economically endowed herself. An impoverished organization
+carries with it certain neutral qualities which make its subject appear,
+in the presence of complete manhood and womanhood, like a deaf-mute among
+speaking persons. The deep blush which crimsoned Euthymia's cheek at
+Lurida's suggestion was in a strange contrast to her own undisturbed
+expression. There was a range of sensibilities of which Lurida knew far
+less than she did of those many and difficult studies which had absorbed
+her vital forces. She was startled to see what an effect her proposal
+had produced, for Euthymia was not only blushing, but there was a flame
+in her eyes which she had hardly ever seen before.
+
+"Is this only your own suggestion?" Euthymia said, "or has some one been
+putting the idea into your head?" The truth was that she had happened to
+meet the Interviewer at the Library, one day, and she was offended by the
+long, searching stare with which that individual had honored her. It
+occurred to her that he, or some such visitor to the place, might have
+spoken of her to Lurida, or to some other person who had repeated what
+was said to Lurida, as a good subject for the art of the sculptor, and
+she felt all her maiden sensibilities offended by the proposition.
+Lurida could not understand her excitement, but she was startled by it.
+Natures which are complementary of each other are liable to these
+accidental collisions of feeling. They get along very well together,
+none the worse for their differences, until all at once the tender spot
+of one or the other is carelessly handled in utter unconsciousness on the
+part of the aggressor, and the exclamation, the outcry, or the explosion
+explains the situation altogether too emphatically. Such scenes did not
+frequently occur between the two friends, and this little flurry was soon
+over; but it served to warn Lurida that Miss Euthymia Tower was not of
+that class of self-conscious beauties who would be ready to dispute the
+empire of the Venus of Milo on her own ground, in defences as scanty and
+insufficient as those of the marble divinity.
+
+Euthymia had had admirers enough, at a distance, while at school, and in
+the long vacations, near enough to find out that she was anything but
+easy to make love to. She fairly frightened more than one rash youth who
+was disposed to be too sentimental in her company. They overdid
+flattery, which she was used to and tolerated, but which cheapened the
+admirer in her estimation, and now and then betrayed her into an
+expression which made him aware of the fact, and was a discouragement to
+aggressive amiability. The real difficulty was that not one of her
+adorers had ever greatly interested her. It could not be that nature had
+made her insensible. It must have been because the man who was made for
+her had never yet shown himself. She was not easy to please, that was
+certain; and she was one of those young women who will not accept as a
+lover one who but half pleases them. She could not pick up the first
+stick that fell in her way and take it to shape her ideal out of. Many
+of the good people of the village doubted whether Euthymia would ever be
+married.
+
+"There 's nothing good enough for her in this village," said the old
+landlord of what had been the Anchor Tavern.
+
+"She must wait till a prince comes along," the old landlady said in
+reply. "She'd make as pretty a queen as any of them that's born to it.
+Wouldn't she be splendid with a gold crown on her head, and di'monds a
+glitterin' all over her! D' you remember how handsome she looked in the
+tableau, when the fair was held for the Dorcas Society? She had on an old
+dress of her grandma's,--they don't make anything half so handsome
+nowadays,--and she was just as pretty as a pictur'. But what's the use of
+good looks if they scare away folks? The young fellows think that such a
+handsome girl as that would cost ten times as much to keep as a plain
+one. She must be dressed up like an empress,--so they seem to think. It
+ain't so with Euthymy: she'd look like a great lady dressed anyhow, and
+she has n't got any more notions than the homeliest girl that ever stood
+before a glass to look at herself."
+
+In the humbler walks of Arrowhead Village society, similar opinions were
+entertained of Miss Euthymia. The fresh-water fisherman represented
+pretty well the average estimate of the class to which he belonged. "I
+tell ye," said he to another gentleman of leisure, whose chief occupation
+was to watch the coming and going of the visitors to Arrowhead
+Village,--"I tell ye that girl ain't a gon to put up with any o' them
+slab-sided fellahs that you see hangin' raound to look at her every
+Sunday when she comes aout o' meetin'. It's one o' them big gents from
+Boston or New York that'll step up an' kerry her off."
+
+In the mean time nothing could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia
+than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young
+women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very
+often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly
+trying to force upon them, in spite of their obvious unfitness. The
+higher the ideal, the less likely is the commonplace neighbor who has the
+great advantage of easy access, or the boarding-house acquaintance who
+can profit by those vacant hours when the least interesting of visitors
+is better than absolute loneliness,--the less likely are these
+undesirable personages to be endured, pitied, and, if not embraced,
+accepted, for want of something better. Euthymia found so much pleasure
+in the intellectual companionship of Lurida, and felt her own prudence
+and reserve so necessary to that independent young lady, that she had
+been contented, so far, with friendship, and thought of love only in an
+abstract sort of way. Beneath her abstractions there was a capacity of
+loving which might have been inferred from the expression of her
+features, the light that shone in her eyes, the tones of her voice, all
+of which were full of the language which belongs to susceptible natures.
+How many women never say to themselves that they were born to love, until
+all at once the discovery opens upon them, as the sense that he was born
+a painter is said to have dawned suddenly upon Correggio!
+
+Like all the rest of the village and its visitors, she could not help
+thinking a good deal about the young man lying ill amongst strangers. She
+was not one of those who had sent him the three-cornered notes or even a
+bunch of flowers. She knew that he was receiving abounding tokens of
+kindness and sympathy from different quarters, and a certain inward
+feeling restrained her from joining in these demonstrations. If he had
+been suffering from some deadly and contagious malady she would have
+risked her life to help him, without a thought that there was any
+wonderful heroism in such self-devotion. Her friend Lurida might have
+been capable of the same sacrifice, but it would be after reasoning with
+herself as to the obligations which her sense of human rights and duties
+laid upon her, and fortifying her courage with the memory of noble deeds
+recorded of women in ancient and modern history. With Euthymia the
+primary human instincts took precedence of all reasoning or reflection
+about them. All her sympathies were excited by the thought of this
+forlorn stranger in his solitude, but she felt the impossibility of
+giving any complete expression to them. She thought of Mungo Park in the
+African desert, and she envied the poor negress who not only pitied him,
+but had the blessed opportunity of helping and consoling him. How near
+were these two human creatures, each needing the other! How near in
+bodily presence, how far apart in their lives, with a barrier seemingly
+impassable between them!
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.
+
+These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young people
+every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases. Not only are they
+liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental complications which
+may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after convalescence seems to be
+established, relapses occur which are more serious than the disease had
+appeared to be in its previous course. One morning Dr. Butts found
+Maurice worse instead of better, as he had hoped and expected to find
+him. Weak as he was, there was every reason to fear the issue of this
+return of his threatening symptoms. There was not much to do besides
+keeping up the little strength which still remained. It was all needed.
+
+Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much
+as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking
+what we call his "rest"? More than a thousand times an hour, between a
+hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he has to lift
+the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined, to save
+himself from asphyxia. Rest! There is no rest until the last long sigh
+tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task, to
+rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves,
+pulling at the levers of respiration,--which, rising and falling like so
+many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore
+to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these
+four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life
+long.
+
+The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this
+relapse. It presently occurred to him that there might be some local
+source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still
+keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm. He determined to
+remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure of pure air, and
+where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient during
+this critical period of his disease. It was a risk to take, but he could
+be carried on a litter by careful men, and remain wholly passive during
+the removal. Maurice signified his assent, as he could hardly help
+doing,--for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the form of a
+command. He thought it a matter of life and death, and was gently urgent
+for his patient's immediate change of residence. The doctor insisted on
+having Maurice's books and other movable articles carried to his own
+house, so that he should be surrounded by familiar sights, and not worry
+himself about what might happen to objects which he valued, if they were
+left behind him.
+
+All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything was
+ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable
+physician. Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the arrangement of
+Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master. The nurse in
+attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main, finding his patient in
+a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a little fresh air. While he was
+at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity, and he
+followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake. It
+was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting. A Newfoundland
+dog had been showing off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers were
+betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his master the
+various floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as
+possible. He watched the dog a few minutes, when his attention was drawn
+to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and steered by another. It
+was making for the shore, which it would soon reach. The attendant
+remembered all at once, that he had left his charge, and just before the
+boat came to land he turned and hurried back to the patient. Exactly how
+long he had been absent he could not have said,--perhaps a quarter of an
+hour, perhaps longer; the time appeared short to him, wearied with long
+sitting and watching.
+
+It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was not
+in the least needed. The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to all
+appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone. It was such a comfort
+to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to hear
+something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered words,
+that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had
+proved irresistible.
+
+Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the
+absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began
+quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams
+are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing,
+terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him,
+fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at
+the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or
+rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their
+lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of
+some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through
+which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery
+sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow
+niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him
+waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air
+seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc,
+it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well
+as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont
+Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla
+that he was climbing.
+
+The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was
+choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he
+felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.
+
+The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the
+smothering oven which his chamber had become.
+
+The house was on fire!
+
+He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a
+whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed
+for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back
+upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could
+not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could
+hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to
+another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the fate
+that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and then
+burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young
+persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes
+wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had
+come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected and
+appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live. All
+his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid
+flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and
+past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The
+dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He
+felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the
+rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which
+he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which
+had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat
+themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures
+passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if
+simultaneous. The vision of the "inward eye" was so intensified in this
+moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence.
+Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description
+means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it
+illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of
+the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look at
+a scene, and remembers it all,
+
+Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in flight,
+the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but invisible;
+potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not existing at
+all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes out in all its
+perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death stares a man
+suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped
+pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory, the vast panorama
+of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as
+if it were again the present. So it was at this moment with the sick
+man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die. For he saw no
+hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the
+flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it
+was all over with him.
+
+His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought
+of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he had
+cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him.
+There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new
+life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of
+all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of
+love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of
+death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness
+for him.
+
+All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and
+visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly
+fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those
+nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air
+he was breathing.
+
+What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles
+to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the
+rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had been
+left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy
+natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown the
+burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention of
+doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is the
+next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened to
+fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open. The
+smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no
+other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw was in
+a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the
+stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the
+entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was
+lying.
+
+The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a
+mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture,
+and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score
+or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the
+newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and would probably be a heap
+of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick
+man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected
+assistance should come to his rescue.
+
+As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was
+horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower
+windows. It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows,
+also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along
+the side of the house. The man shrieked Fire! Fire! with all his might,
+and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice's room
+and save him. He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and
+choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of
+despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human
+voice. Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village.
+The shout of Fire! Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and
+old. Some caught up pails and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling
+them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer
+the burning building.
+
+Is the sick man moved?
+
+This was the awful question first asked,--for in the little village all
+knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor's house. The
+attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where he had left him,
+and gasped out,
+
+"He is there!"
+
+A ladder! A ladder! was the general cry, and men and boys rushed off in
+search of one. But a single minute was an age now, and there was no
+ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes. The sick man was going
+to be swallowed up in the flames before it could possibly arrive. Some
+were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the hope that the young man
+might have strength enough to leap from the window and be safely caught
+in it. The attendant shook his head, and said faintly,
+
+"He cannot move from his bed."
+
+One of the visitors at the village,--a millionaire, it was said,--a
+kind-hearted man, spoke in hoarse, broken tones:
+
+"A thousand dollars to the man that will bring him from his chamber!"
+
+The fresh-water fisherman muttered, "I should like to save the man and to
+see the money, but it ain't a thaousan' dollars, nor ten thaousan'
+dollars, that'll pay a fellah for burnin' to death,--or even chokin' to
+death, anyhaow."
+
+The carpenter, who knew the framework of every house in the village,
+recent or old, shook his head.
+
+"The stairs have been shored up," he said, "and when the fists that holds
+'em up goes, down they'll come. It ain't safe for no man to go over them
+stairs. Hurry along your ladder,--that's your only chance."
+
+All was wild confusion around the burning house. The ladder they had
+gone for was missing from its case,--a neighbor had carried it off for
+the workmen who were shingling his roof. It would never get there in
+time. There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a mile from the
+lakeside settlement. Some were throwing on water in an aimless, useless
+way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden syringe: it seemed
+like doing something, at least. But all hope of saving Maurice was fast
+giving way, so rapid was the progress of the flames, so thick the cloud
+of smoke that filled the house and poured from the windows. Nothing was
+heard but confused cries, shrieks of women, all sorts of orders to do
+this and that, no one knowing what was to be done. The ladder! The
+ladder! Five minutes more and it will be too late!
+
+In the mean time the alarm of fire had reached Paolo, and he had stopped
+his work of arranging Maurice's books in the same way as that in which
+they had stood in his apartment, and followed in the direction of the
+sound, little thinking that his master was lying helpless in the burning
+house. "Some chimney afire," he said to himself; but he would go and
+take a look, at any rate.
+
+Before Paolo had reached the scene of destruction and impending death,
+two young women, in boating dresses of decidedly Bloomerish aspect, had
+suddenly joined the throng. "The Wonder" and "The Terror" of their
+school-days--Miss Euthymia rower and Miss Lurida Vincent had just come
+from the shore, where they had left their wherry. A few hurried words
+told them the fearful story. Maurice Kirkwood was lying in the chamber
+to which every eye was turned, unable to move, doomed to a dreadful
+death. All that could be hoped was that he would perish by suffocation
+rather than by the flames, which would soon be upon him. The man who had
+attended him had just tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back out
+of the door, almost strangled by the smoke. A thousand dollars had been
+offered to any one who would rescue the sick man, but no one had dared to
+make the attempt; for the stairs might fall at any moment, if the smoke
+did not blind and smother the man who passed them before they fell.
+
+The two young women looked each other in the face for one swift moment.
+
+"How can he be reached?" asked Lurida. "Is there nobody that will
+venture his life to save a brother like that?"
+
+"I will venture mine," said Euthymia.
+
+"No! no!" shrieked Lurida,--"not you! not you! It is a man's work, not
+yours! You shall not go!" Poor Lurida had forgotten all her theories in
+this supreme moment. But Euthymia was not to be held back. Taking a
+handkerchief from her neck, she dipped it in a pail of water and bound it
+about her head. Then she took several deep breaths of air, and filled
+her lungs as full as they would hold. She knew she must not take a
+single breath in the choking atmosphere if she could possibly help it,
+and Euthymia was noted for her power of staying under water so long that
+more than once those who saw her dive thought she would never come up
+again. So rapid were her movements that they paralyzed the bystanders,
+who would forcibly have prevented her from carrying out her purpose. Her
+imperious determination was not to be resisted. And so Euthymia, a
+willing martyr, if martyr she was to be, and not saviour, passed within
+the veil that hid the sufferer.
+
+Lurida turned deadly pale, and sank fainting to the ground. She was the
+first, but not the only one, of her sex that fainted as Euthymia
+disappeared in the smoke of the burning building. Even the rector grew
+very white in the face,--so white that one of his vestry-men begged him
+to sit down at once, and sprinkled a few drops of water on his forehead,
+to his great disgust and manifest advantage. The old landlady was crying
+and moaning, and her husband was wiping his eyes and shaking his head
+sadly.
+
+"She will nevar come out alive," he said solemnly.
+
+"Nor dead, neither," added the carpenter. "Ther' won't be nothing left
+of neither of 'em but ashes." And the carpenter hid his face in his
+hands.
+
+The fresh-water fisherman had pulled out a rag which he called a
+"hangkercher,"--it had served to carry bait that morning,--and was making
+use of its best corner to dry the tears which were running down his
+cheeks. The whole village was proud of Euthymia, and with these more
+quiet signs of grief were mingled loud lamentations, coming alike from
+old and young.
+
+All this was not so much like a succession of events as it was like a
+tableau. The lookers-on were stunned with its suddenness, and before
+they had time to recover their bewildered senses all was lost, or seemed
+lost. They felt that they should never look again on either of those
+young faces.
+
+The rector, not unfeeling by nature, but inveterately professional by
+habit, had already recovered enough to be thinking of a text for the
+funeral sermon. The first that occurred to him was this,--vaguely, of
+course, in the background of consciousness:
+
+"Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the
+fire."
+
+The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective
+disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a
+funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies,
+but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how
+he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of
+attraction would be wanting,--perhaps his own services uncalled for.
+
+Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of
+mourners. The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every
+sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to
+the wail of the De Profundis. Not always,--not always; let us not be
+cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is
+subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and
+soul-subduing influences.
+
+It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are
+contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances
+and individual thoughts and feelings. But linger as we may, we cannot
+compress into a chapter--we could not crowd into a volume--all that
+passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck
+company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror. We
+are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness is a surface; narrative
+is a line.
+
+Maurice had given himself up for lost. His breathing was becoming every
+moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but a
+few minutes longer.
+
+"Robert!" he called in faint accents. But the attendant was not there to
+answer.
+
+"Paolo! Paolo!" But the faithful servant, who would have given his life
+for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was
+gathered.
+
+"Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed! Too
+late! Too late!" he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying
+expiration.
+
+"Not too late!" The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if
+it had come down to him from heaven.
+
+In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms
+of--a woman!
+
+Out of the stifling chamber,--over the burning stairs,--close by the
+tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,--out into the
+open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,--carried as easily as if he
+had been a babe, in the strong arms of "The Wonder" of the gymnasium, the
+captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was to
+make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.
+
+Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers! It was a sound that
+none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again,
+unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking
+vessel. Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who
+had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives soon
+to be wrapped in their burning shroud,--those stern men--the old
+sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the city
+counting-room--sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion that
+overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are
+capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.
+
+This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared at
+the same moment.
+
+As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his eyes
+opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural
+lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting
+him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses
+stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the wavelike
+movements of respiration, the soft susurrus of the air that entered with
+every breath, the double beat of the heart which throbbed close to his
+ear. And every sense, and every instinct, and every reviving pulse told
+him in language like a revelation from another world that a woman's arms
+were around him, and that it was life, and not death, which her embrace
+had brought him.
+
+She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the doctor
+made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp command:--
+
+"Do not move him a hair's breadth," he said. "Wait until the litter
+comes. Any sudden movement might be dangerous. Has anybody a brandy
+flask about him?"
+
+One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather awkward,
+but did not come forward.
+
+The fresh-water fisherman was the first who spoke.
+
+"I han't got no brandy," he said, "but there's a drop or two of old
+Medford rum in this here that you're welcome to, if it'll be of any help.
+I alliz kerry a little on 't in case o' gettin' wet 'n' chilled."
+
+So saying he held forth a flat bottle with the word Sarsaparilla stamped
+on the green glass, but which contained half a pint or more of the
+specific on which he relied in those very frequent exposures which happen
+to persons of his calling.
+
+The doctor motioned back Paolo, who would have rushed at once to the aid
+of Maurice, and who was not wanted at that moment. So poor Paolo, in an
+agony of fear for his master, was kept as quiet as possible, and had to
+content himself with asking all sorts of questions and repeating all the
+prayers he could think of to Our Lady and to his holy namesake the
+Apostle.
+
+The doctor wiped the mouth of the fisherman's bottle very carefully.
+"Take a few drops of this cordial," he said, as he held it to his
+patient's lips. "Hold him just so, Euthymia, without stirring. I will
+watch him, and say when he is ready to be moved. The litter is near by,
+waiting." Dr. Butts watched Maurice's pulse and color. The "Old
+Medford" knew its business. It had knocked over its tens of thousands;
+it had its redeeming virtue, and helped to set up a poor fellow now and
+then. It did this for Maurice very effectively. When he seemed somewhat
+restored, the doctor had the litter brought to his side, and Euthymia
+softly resigned her helpless burden, which Paolo and the attendant Robert
+lifted with the aid of the doctor, who walked by the patient as he was
+borne to the home where Mrs. Butts had made all ready for his reception.
+
+As for poor Lurida, who had thought herself equal to the sanguinary
+duties of the surgeon, she was left lying on the grass with an old woman
+over her, working hard with fan and smelling-salts to bring her back from
+her long fainting fit.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+THE INEVITABLE.
+
+Why should not human nature be the same in Arrowhead Village as
+elsewhere? It could not seem strange to the good people of that place
+and their visitors that these two young persons, brought together under
+circumstances that stirred up the deepest emotions of which the human
+soul is capable, should become attached to each other. But the bond
+between them was stronger than any knew, except the good doctor, who had
+learned the great secret of Maurice's life. For the first time since his
+infancy he had fully felt the charm which the immediate presence of
+youthful womanhood carries with it. He could hardly believe the fact when
+he found himself no longer the subject of the terrifying seizures of
+which he had had many and threatening experiences.
+
+It was the doctor's business to save his patient's life, if he could
+possibly do it. Maurice had been reduced to the most perilous state of
+debility by the relapse which had interrupted his convalescence. Only by
+what seemed almost a miracle had he survived the exposure to suffocation
+and the mental anguish through which he had passed. It was perfectly
+clear to Dr. Butts that if Maurice could see the young woman to whom he
+owed his life, and, as the doctor felt assured, the revolution in his
+nervous system which would be the beginning of a new existence, it would
+be of far more value as a restorative agency than any or all of the drugs
+in the pharmacopoeia. He told this to Euthymia, and explained the matter
+to her parents and friends. She must go with him on some of his visits.
+Her mother should go with her, or her sister; but this was a case of life
+and death, and no maidenly scruples must keep her from doing her duty.
+
+The first of her visits to the sick, perhaps dying, man presented a scene
+not unlike the picture before spoken of on the title-page of the old
+edition of Galen. The doctor was perhaps the most agitated of the little
+group. He went before the others, took his seat by the bedside, and held
+the patient's wrist with his finger on the pulse. As Euthymia entered it
+gave a single bound, fluttered for an instant as if with a faint memory
+of its old habit, then throbbed full and strong, comparatively, as if
+under the spur of some powerful stimulus. Euthymia's task was a delicate
+one, but she knew how to disguise its difficulty.
+
+"Here is a flower I have brought you, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, and handed
+him a white chrysanthemum. He took it from her hand, and before she knew
+it he took her hand into his own, and held it with a gentle constraint.
+What could she do? Here was the young man whose life she had saved, at
+least for the moment, and who was yet in danger from the disease which
+had almost worn out his powers of resistance.
+
+"Sit down by Mr. Kirkwood's side," said the doctor. "He wants to thank
+you, if he has strength to do it, for saving him from the death which
+seemed inevitable."
+
+Not many words could Maurice command. He was weak enough for womanly
+tears, but their fountains no longer flowed; it was with him as with the
+dying, whose eyes may light up, but rarely shed a tear.
+
+The river which has found a new channel widens and deepens--it; it lets
+the old water-course fill up, and never returns to its forsaken bed. The
+tyrannous habit was broken. The prophecy of the gitana had verified
+itself, and the ill a fair woman had wrought a fairer woman bad conquered
+and abolished.
+
+The history of Maurice Kirkwood loses its exceptional character from the
+time of his restoration to his natural conditions. His convalescence was
+very slow and gradual, but no further accident interrupted its even
+progress. The season was over, the summer visitors had left Arrowhead
+Village; the chrysanthemums were going out of flower, the frosts had
+come, and Maurice was still beneath the roof of the kind physician. The
+relation between him and his preserver was so entirely apart from all
+common acquaintances and friendships that no ordinary rules could apply
+to it. Euthymia visited him often during the period of his extreme
+prostration.
+
+"You must come every day," the doctor said. "He gains with every visit
+you make him; he pines if you miss him for a single day." So she came
+and sat by him, the doctor or good Mrs. Butts keeping her company in his
+presence. He grew stronger,--began to sit up in bed; and at last
+Euthymia found him dressed as in health, and beginning to walk about the
+room. She was startled. She had thought of herself as a kind of nurse,
+but the young gentleman could hardly be said to need a nurse any longer.
+She had scruples about making any further visits. She asked Lurida what
+she thought about it.
+
+"Think about it?" said Lurida. "Why should n't you go to see a brother
+as well as a sister, I should like to know? If you are afraid to go to
+see Maurice Kirkwood, I am not afraid, at any rate. If you would rather
+have me go than go yourself, I will do it, and let people talk just as
+much as they want to. Shall I go instead of you?"
+
+Euthymia was not quite sure that this would be the best thing for the
+patient. The doctor had told her he thought there were special reasons
+for her own course in coming daily to see him. "I am afraid," she said,
+"you are too bright to be safe for him in his weak state. Your mind is
+such a stimulating one, you know. A dull sort of person like myself is
+better for him just now. I will continue visiting him as long as the
+doctor says it is important that I should; but you must defend me,
+Lurida,--I know you can explain it all so that people will not blame me."
+
+Euthymia knew full well what the effect of Lurida's penetrating
+head-voice would be in a convalescent's chamber. She knew how that
+active mind of hers would set the young man's thoughts at work, when what
+he wanted was rest of every faculty. Were not these good and sufficient
+reasons for her decision? What others could there be?
+
+So Euthymia kept on with her visits, until she blushed to see that she
+was continuing her charitable office for one who was beginning to look
+too well to be called an invalid. It was a dangerous condition of
+affairs, and the busy tongues of the village gossips were free in their
+comments. Free, but kindly, for the story of the rescue had melted every
+heart; and what could be more natural than that these two young people
+whom God had brought together in the dread moment of peril should find it
+hard to tear themselves asunder after the hour of danger was past? When
+gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can pay his debts; and if Maurice gave
+his heart to Euthymia, would not she receive it as payment in full?
+
+The change which had taken place in the vital currents of Maurice
+Kirkwood's system was as simple and solid a fact as the change in a
+magnetic needle when the boreal becomes the austral pole, and the austral
+the boreal. It was well, perhaps, that this change took place while he
+was enfeebled by the wasting effects of long illness. For all the
+long-defeated, disturbed, perverted instincts had found their natural
+channel from the centre of consciousness to the organ which throbs in
+response to every profound emotion. As his health gradually returned,
+Euthymia could not help perceiving a flush in his cheek, a glitter in his
+eyes, a something in the tone of his voice, which altogether were a
+warning to the young maiden that the highway of friendly intercourse was
+fast narrowing to a lane, at the head of which her woman's eye could read
+plainly enough, "Dangerous passing."
+
+"You look so much better to-day, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, "that I think I
+had better not play Sister of Charity any longer. The next time we meet
+I hope you will be strong enough to call on me."
+
+She was frightened to see how pale he turned,--he was weaker than she
+thought. There was a silence so profound and so long that Mrs. Butts
+looked up from the stocking she was knitting. They had forgotten the
+good woman's presence.
+
+Presently Maurice spoke,--very faintly, but Mrs. Butts dropped a stitch
+at the first word, and her knitting fell into her lap as she listened to
+what followed.
+
+"No! you must not leave me. You must never leave me. You saved my life.
+But you have done more than that,--more than you know or can ever know.
+To you I owe it that I am living; with you I live henceforth, if I am to
+live at all. All I am, all I hope,--will you take this poor offering
+from one who owes you everything, whose lips never touched those of woman
+or breathed a word of love before you?"
+
+What could Euthymia reply to this question, uttered with all the depth of
+a passion which had never before found expression.
+
+Not one syllable of answer did listening Mrs. Butts overhear. But she
+told her husband afterwards that there was nothing in the tableaux they
+had had in September to compare with what she then saw. It was indeed a
+pleasing picture which those two young heads presented as Euthymia gave
+her inarticulate but infinitely expressive answer to the question of
+Maurice Kirkwood. The good-hearted woman thought it time to leave the
+young people. Down went the stocking with the needles in it; out of her
+lap tumbled the ball of worsted, rolling along the floor with its yarn
+trailing after it, like some village matron who goes about circulating
+from hearth to hearth, leaving all along her track the story of the new
+engagement or of the arrival of the last "little stranger."
+
+Not many suns had set before it was told all through Arrowhead Village
+that Maurice Kirkwood was the accepted lover of Euthymia Tower.
+
+
+
+
+POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.
+
+MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD. ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, May 18.
+
+MY DEAREST EUTHYMIA,--Who would have thought, when you broke your oar as
+the Atalanta flashed by the Algonquin, last June, that before the roses
+came again you would find yourself the wife of a fine scholar and grand
+gentleman, and the head of a household such as that of which you are the
+mistress? You must not forget your old Arrowhead Village friends. What
+am I saying?---you forget them! No, dearest, I know your heart too well
+for that! You are not one of those who lay aside their old friendships
+as they do last years bonnet when they get a new one. You have told me
+all about yourself and your happiness, and now you want me to tell you
+about myself and what is going on in our little place.
+
+And first about myself. I have given up the idea of becoming a doctor.
+I have studied mathematics so much that I have grown fond of certainties,
+of demonstrations, and medicine deals chiefly in probabilities. The
+practice of the art is so mixed up with the deepest human interests that
+it is hard to pursue it with that even poise of the intellect which is
+demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,--I do not fancy
+having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in
+going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for
+such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation.
+I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see
+another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one
+asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present. Yes, I
+think I might make a pretty good doctor's wife. I could teach him a good
+deal about headaches and backaches and all sorts of nervous revolutions,
+as the doctor says the French women call their tantrums. I don't know
+but I should be willing to let him try his new medicines on me. If he
+were a homeopath, I know I should; for if a billionth of a grain of sugar
+won't begin to sweeten my tea or coffee, I don't feel afraid that a
+billionth of a grain of anything would poison me,--no, not if it were
+snake-venom; and if it were not disgusting, I would swallow a handful of
+his lachesis globules, to please my husband. But if I ever become a
+doctor's wife, my husband will not be one of that kind of practitioners,
+you may be sure of that, nor an "eclectic," nor a "faith-cure man." On
+the whole, I don't think I want to be married at all. I don't like the
+male animal very well (except such noble specimens as your husband).
+They are all tyrants,--almost all,--so far as our sex is concerned, and I
+often think we could get on better without them.
+
+However, the creatures are useful in the Society. They send us papers,
+some of them well worth reading. You have told me so often that you
+would like to know how the Society is getting on, and to read some of the
+papers sent to it if they happened to be interesting, that I have laid
+aside one or two manuscripts expressly for your perusal. You will get
+them by and by.
+
+I am delighted to know that you keep Paolo with you. Arrowhead Village
+misses him dreadfully, I can tell you. That is the reason people become
+so attached to these servants with Southern sunlight in their natures? I
+suppose life is not long enough to cool their blood down to our Northern
+standard. Then they are so child-like, whereas the native of these
+latitudes is never young after he is ten or twelve years old. Mother
+says,--you know mother's old-fashioned notions, and how shrewd and
+sensible she is in spite of them,--mother says that when she was a girl
+families used to import young men and young women from the country towns,
+who called themselves "helps," not servants,--no, that was Scriptural;
+"but they did n't know everything down in Judee," and it is not good
+American language. She says that these people would live in the same
+household until they were married, and the women often remain in the same
+service until they died or were old and worn out, and then, what with the
+money they had saved and the care and assistance they got from their
+former employers, would pass a decent and comfortable old age, and be
+buried in the family lot. Mother has made up her mind to the change, but
+grandmother is bitter about it. She says there never was a country yet
+where the population was made up of "ladies" and "gentlemen," and she
+does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a
+copper makes a gold dollar of it. She is a pessimist after her own
+fashion. She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people. No
+loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she
+says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no reverence of
+the humbler members of a household for its heads; and to make sure of
+continued corruption and misery, what she calls "universal suffrage"
+emptying all the sewers into the great aqueduct we all must drink from.
+"Universal suffrage!" I suppose we women don't belong to the universe!
+Wait until we get a chance at the ballot-box, I tell grandma, and see if
+we don't wash out the sewers before they reach the aqueduct! But my pen
+has run away with men I was thinking of Paolo, and what a pleasant thing
+it is to have one of those child-like, warm-hearted, attachable,
+cheerful, contented, humble, faithful, companionable, but never presuming
+grownup children of the South waiting on one, as if everything he could
+do for one was a pleasure, and carrying a look of content in his face
+which makes every one who meets him happier for a glimpse of his
+features.
+
+It does seem a shame that the charming relation of master and servant,
+intelligent authority and cheerful obedience, mutual interest in each
+other's welfare, thankful recognition of all the advantages which belong
+to domestic service in the better class of families, should be almost
+wholly confined to aliens and their immediate descendants. Why should
+Hannah think herself so much better than Bridget? When they meet at the
+polls together, as they will before long, they will begin to feel more of
+an equality than is recognized at present. The native female turns her
+nose up at the idea of "living out;" does she think herself so much
+superior to the women of other nationalities? Our women will have to
+come to it,--so grandmother says,--in another generation or two, and in a
+hundred years, according to her prophecy, there will be a new set of old
+"Miss Pollys" and "Miss Betseys" who have lived half a century in the
+same families, respectful and respected, cherished, cared for in time of
+need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well as a broom,
+I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot virtues of
+contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet the barren and
+hungry thoroughfare of our unstratified existence.
+
+There, I have got a-going, and am forgetting all the news I have to tell
+you. There is an engagement you will want to know all about. It came to
+pass through our famous boat-race, which you and I remember, and shall
+never forget as long as we live. It seems that the young fellow who
+pulled the bow oar of that men's college boat which we had the pleasure
+of beating got some glimpses of Georgina, our handsome stroke oar. I
+believe he took it into his head that it was she who threw the bouquet
+that won the race for us. He was, as you know, greatly mistaken, and
+ought to have made love to me, only he did n't. Well, it seems he came
+posting down to the Institute just before the vacation was over, and
+there got a sight of Georgina. I wonder whether she told him she didn't
+fling the bouquet! Anyhow, the acquaintance began in that way, and now
+it seems that this young fellow, good-looking and a bright scholar, but
+with a good many months more to pass in college, is her captive. It was
+too bad. Just think of my bouquet's going to another girl's credit! No
+matter, the old Atalanta story was paid off, at any rate.
+
+You want to know all about dear Dr. Butts. They say he has just been
+offered a Professorship in one of the great medical colleges. I asked
+him about it, and he did not say that he had or had not. "But," said be,
+"suppose that I had been offered such a place; do you think I ought to
+accept it and leave Arrowhead Village? Let us talk it over," said he,
+"just as if I had had such an offer." I told him he ought to stay.
+There are plenty of men that can get into a Professor's chair, I said,
+and talk like Solomons to a class of wondering pupils: but once get a
+really good doctor in a place, a man who knows all about everybody,
+whether they have this or that tendency, whether when they are sick they
+have a way of dying or a way of getting well, what medicines agree with
+them and what drugs they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that
+think nothing is the matter with them until they are dead as smoked
+herring, or of the sort that send for the minister if they get a
+stomach-ache from eating too many cucumbers,--who knows all about all the
+people within half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who
+employ a regular practitioner),--such a man as that, I say, is not to be
+replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a Waltham
+watch. Don't go! said I. Stay here and save our precious lives, if you
+can, or at least put us through in the proper way, so that we needn't be
+ashamed of ourselves for dying, if we must die. Well, Dr. Butts is not
+going to leave us. I hope you will have no unwelcome occasion for his
+services,--you are never ill, you know,--but, anyhow, he is going to be
+here, and no matter what happens he will be on hand.
+
+The village news is not of a very exciting character. Item 1. A new
+house is put up over the ashes of the one in which your husband lived
+while he was here. It was planned by one of the autochthonous
+inhabitants with the most ingenious combination of inconveniences that
+the natural man could educe from his original perversity of intellect.
+To get at any one room you must pass through every other. It is blind, or
+nearly so, on the only side which has a good prospect, and commands a
+fine view of the barn and pigsty through numerous windows. Item 2. We
+have a small fire-engine near the new house which can be worked by a man
+or two, and would be equal to the emergency of putting out a bunch of
+fire-crackers. Item 3. We have a new ladder, in a bog, close to the new
+fire-engine, so if the new house catches fire, like its predecessor, and
+there should happen to, be a sick man on an upper floor, he can be got
+out without running the risk of going up and down a burning staircase.
+What a blessed thing it was that there was no fire-engine near by and no
+ladder at hand on the day of the great rescue! If there had been, what a
+change in your programme of life! You remember that "cup of tea spilt on
+Mrs. Masham's apron," which we used to read of in one of Everett's
+Orations, and all its wide-reaching consequences in the affairs of
+Europe. I hunted up that cup of tea as diligently as ever a Boston
+matron sought for the last leaves in her old caddy after the tea-chests
+had been flung overboard at Griffin's wharf,--but no matter about that,
+now. That is the way things come about in this world. I must write a
+lecture on lucky mishaps, or, more elegantly, fortunate calamities. It
+will be just the converse of that odd essay of Swift's we read together,
+the awkward and stupid things done with the best intentions. Perhaps I
+shall deliver the lecture in your city: you will come and hear it, and
+bring him, won't you, dearest? Always, your loving
+
+LURIDA.
+
+
+
+
+MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.
+
+It seems forever since you left us, dearest Euthymia! And are you, and
+is your husband, and Paolo,--good Paolo,--are you all as well and happy
+as you have been and as you ought to be? I suppose our small village
+seems a very quiet sort of place to pass the winter in, now that you have
+become accustomed to the noise and gayety of a great city. For all that,
+it is a pretty busy place this winter, I can tell you. We have sleighing
+parties,--I never go to them, myself, because I can't keep warm, and my
+mind freezes up when my blood cools down below 95 or 96 deg. Fahrenheit.
+I had a great deal rather sit by a good fire and read about Arctic
+discoveries. But I like very well to hear the bells' jingling and to see
+the young people trying to have a good time as hard as they do at a
+picnic. It may be that they do, but to me a picnic is purgatory and a
+sleigh-ride that other place, where, as my favorite Milton says, "frost
+performs the effect of fire." I believe I have quoted him correctly; I
+ought to, for I could repeat half his poems from memory once, if I cannot
+now.
+
+You must have plenty of excitement in your city life. I suppose you
+recognized yourself in one of the society columns of the "Household
+Inquisitor:" "Mrs. E. K., very beautiful, in an elegant," etc., etc,
+"with pearls," etc., etc.,--as if you were not the ornament of all that
+you wear, no matter what it is!
+
+I am so glad that you have married a scholar! Why should not
+Maurice--you both tell me to call him so--take the diplomatic office
+which has been offered him? It seems to me that he would find himself in
+exactly the right place. He can talk in two or three languages, has good
+manners, and a wife who--well, what shall I say of Mrs. Kirkwood but that
+"she would be good company for a queen," as our old friend the quondam
+landlady of the Anchor Tavern used to say? I should so like to see you
+presented at Court! It seems to me that I should be willing to hold your
+train for the sake of seeing you in your court feathers and things.
+
+As for myself, I have been thinking of late that I would become either a
+professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or college for
+girls. I have tried the first business a little. Last month I delivered
+a lecture on Quaternions. I got three for my audience; two came over
+from the Institute, and one from that men's college which they try to
+make out to be a university, and where no female is admitted unless she
+belongs among the quadrupeds. I enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is a
+difficult one, and I don't think any one of them had any very clear
+notion of what I was talking about, except Rhodora,--and I know she did
+n't. To tell the truth, I was lecturing to instruct myself. I mean to
+try something easier next time. I have thought of the Basque language
+and literature. What do you say to that?
+
+The Society goes on famously. We have had a paper presented and read
+lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the
+weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres
+at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor
+"poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young
+persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the
+Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to sending
+him their rhymed productions to be criticised,--expecting to be praised,
+no doubt, every one of them. I must give you one of the sauciest
+extracts from his paper in his own words:
+
+"It takes half my time to read the 'poems' sent me by young people of
+both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I
+recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and
+the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of
+ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions
+to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always
+against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about
+him or her, busy with some useful calling,--too busy to be tagging
+rhymed commonplaces together. Just now there seems to be an epidemic of
+rhyming as bad as the dancing mania, or the sweating sickness. After
+reading a certain amount of manuscript verse one is disposed to
+anathematize the inventor of homophonous syllabification. [This phrase
+made a great laugh when it was read.] This, that is rhyming, must have
+been found out very early,
+
+ "'Where are you, Adam?'
+
+ "'Here am I, Madam;'
+
+"but it can never have been habitually practised until after the Fall.
+The intrusion of tintinnabulating terminations into the conversational
+intercourse of men and angels would have spoiled Paradise itself. Milton
+would not have them even in Paradise Lost, you remember. For my own
+part, I wish certain rhymes could be declared contraband of written or
+printed language. Nothing should be allowed to be hurled at the world or
+whirled with it, or furled upon it or curled over it; all eyes should be
+kept away from the skies, in spite of os homini sublime dedit; youth
+should be coupled with all the virtues except truth; earth should never
+be reminded of her birth; death should never be allowed to stop a
+mortal's breath, nor the bell to sound his knell, nor flowers from
+blossoming bowers to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his
+tomb. We have rhyming dictionaries,--let us have one from which all
+rhymes are rigorously excluded. The sight of a poor creature grubbing
+for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious,
+rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical
+operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with
+jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel. Work, work of some
+kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles!
+No,--no,--no! I want to see the young people in our schools and
+academies and colleges, and the graduates of these institutions, lifted
+up out of the little Dismal Swamp of self-contemplating and
+self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism which is surfeiting
+the land with those literary sandwiches,--thin slices of tinkling
+sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked gilt
+gingerbread. But what faces these young folks make up at my good advice!
+They get tipsy on their rhymes. Nothing intoxicates one like his--or
+her--own verses, and they hold on to their metre-ballad-mongering as the
+fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold on to the gas-bag."
+
+We laughed over this essay of the old Professor; though it hit us pretty
+hard. The best part of the joke is that the old man himself published a
+thin volume of poems when he was young, which there is good reason to
+think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up all the copies he
+can find in the shops. No matter what they say, I can't help agreeing
+with him about this great flood of "poetry," as it calls itself, and
+looking at the rhyming mania much as he does.
+
+How I do love real poetry! That is the reason hate rhymes which have not
+a particle of it in them. The foolish scribblers that deal in them are
+like bad workmen in a carpenter's shop. They not only turn out bad jobs
+of work, but they spoil the tools for better workmen. There is hardly a
+pair of rhymes in the English language that is not so dulled and hacked
+and gapped by these 'prentice hands that a master of the craft hates to
+touch them, and yet he cannot very well do without them. I have not been
+besieged as the old Professor has been with such multitudes of
+would-be-poetical aspirants that he could not even read their
+manuscripts, but I have had a good many letters containing verses, and I
+have warned the writers of the delusion under which they were laboring.
+
+You may like to know that I have just been translating some extracts from
+the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a
+Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the
+Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of
+inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in
+this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my
+manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred
+the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, or given
+rhythmical expression to my own rapturous feelings with regard to them.
+I must read you my Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I cannot help
+thinking that you will like it better than either of my last two, The
+Song of the Roses, or The Wail of the Weeds.
+
+How I do miss you, dearest! I want you: I want you to listen to what I
+have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future; I
+want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one's self to
+be such a noble and beautiful-creature; I want to wander in the woods
+with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk over every
+day's doings with you. Alas! I feel that we have parted as two friends
+part at a port of embarkation: they embrace, they kiss each other's
+cheeks, they cover their faces and weep, they try to speak good-by to
+each other, they watch from the pier and from the deck; the two forms
+grow less and less, fainter and fainter in the distance, two white
+handkerchiefs flutter once and again, and yet once more, and the last
+visible link of the chain which binds them has parted. Dear, dear,
+dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over with tears when I think that
+we may never, never meet again.
+
+Don't you want some more items of village news? We are threatened with
+an influx of stylish people: "Buttons" to answer the door-bell, in place
+of the chamber-maid; "butler," in place of the "hired man;" footman in
+top-boots and breeches, cockade on hat, arms folded a la Napoleon;
+tandems, "drags," dogcarts, and go-carts of all sorts. It is rather
+amusing to look at their ambitious displays, but it takes away the good
+old country flavor of the place.
+
+I don't believe you mean to try to astonish us when you come back to
+spend your summers here. I suppose you must have a large house, and I am
+sure you will have a beautiful one. I suppose you will have some fine
+horses, and who would n't be glad to? But I do not believe you will try
+to make your old Arrowhead Village friends stare their eyes out of their
+heads with a display meant to outshine everybody else that comes here.
+You can have a yacht on the lake, if you like, but I hope you will pull a
+pair of oars in our old boat once in a while, with me to steer you. I
+know you will be just the same dear-Euthymia you always were and always
+must be. How happy you must make such a man as Maurice Kirkwood! And
+how happy you ought to be with him!--a man who knows what is in books,
+and who has seen for himself, what is in men. If he has not seen so much
+of women, where could he study all that is best in womanhood as he can in
+his own wife? Only one thing that dear Euthymia lacks. She is not quite
+pronounced enough in her views as to the rights and the wrongs of the
+sex. When I visit you, as you say I shall, I mean to indoctrinate
+Maurice with sound views on that subject. I have written an essay for
+the Society, which I hope will go a good way towards answering all the
+objections to female suffrage. I mean to read it to your husband, if you
+will let me, as I know you will, and perhaps you would like to hear
+it,--only you know my thoughts on the subject pretty well already.
+
+With all sorts of kind messages to your dear husband, and love to your
+precious self, I am ever your
+LURIDA.
+
+
+
+
+DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.
+
+MY DEAR EUTHYMIA,--My pen refuses to call you by any other name.
+Sweet-souled you are, and your Latinized Greek name is--the one which
+truly designates you. I cannot tell you how we have followed you, with
+what interest and delight through your travels, as you have told their
+story in your letters to your mother. She has let us have the privilege
+of reading them, and we have been with you in steamer, yacht, felucca,
+gondola, Nile-boat; in all sorts of places, from crowded capitals to
+"deserts where no men abide,"--everywhere keeping company with you in
+your natural and pleasant descriptions of your experiences. And now that
+you have returned to your home in the great city I must write you a few
+lines of welcome, if nothing more.
+
+You will find Arrowhead Village a good deal changed since you left it.
+We are discovered by some of those over-rich people who make the little
+place upon which they swarm a kind of rural city. When this happens the
+consequences are striking,--some of them desirable and some far
+otherwise. The effect of well-built, well-furnished, well-kept houses
+and of handsome grounds always maintained in good order about them shows
+itself in a large circuit around the fashionable centre. Houses get on a
+new coat of paint, fences are kept in better order, little plots of
+flowers show themselves where only ragged weeds had rioted, the
+inhabitants present themselves in more comely attire and drive in
+handsomer vehicles with more carefully groomed horses. On the other
+hand, there is a natural jealousy on the part of the natives of the
+region suddenly become fashionable. They have seen the land they sold at
+farm prices by the acre coming to be valued by the foot, like the corner
+lots in a city. Their simple and humble modes of life look almost
+poverty-stricken in the glare of wealth and luxury which so outshines
+their plain way of living. It is true that many of them have found them
+selves richer than in former days, when the neighborhood lived on its own
+resources. They know how to avail themselves of their altered position,
+and soon learn to charge city prices for country products; but nothing
+can make people feel rich who see themselves surrounded by men whose
+yearly income is many times their own whole capital. I think it would be
+better if our rich men scattered themselves more than they do,--buying
+large country estates, building houses and stables which will make it
+easy to entertain their friends, and depending for society on chosen
+guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who come together for
+social rivalry. But I do not fret myself about it. Society will stratify
+itself according to the laws of social gravitation. It will take a
+generation or two more, perhaps, to arrange the strata by precipitation
+and settlement, but we can always depend on one principle to govern the
+arrangement of the layers. People interested in the same things will
+naturally come together. The youthful heirs of fortunes who keep splendid
+yachts have little to talk about with the oarsman who pulls about on the
+lake or the river. What does young Dives, who drives his four-in-hand
+and keeps a stable full of horses, care about Lazarus, who feels rich in
+the possession of a horse-railroad ticket? You know how we live at our
+house, plainly, but with a certain degree of cultivated propriety. We
+make no pretensions to what is called "style." We are still in that
+social stratum where the article called "a napkin-ring" is recognized as
+admissible at the dinner-table. That fact sufficiently defines our
+modest pretensions. The napkin-ring is the boundary mark between certain
+classes. But one evening Mrs. Butts and I went out to a party given by
+the lady of a worthy family, where the napkin itself was a newly
+introduced luxury. The conversation of the hostess and her guests turned
+upon details of the kitchen and the laundry; upon the best mode of
+raising bread, whether with "emptins" (emptyings, yeast) or baking
+powder; about "bluing" and starching and crimping, and similar matters.
+Poor Mrs. Butts! She knew nothing more about such things than her
+hostess did about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. What was the use
+of trying to enforce social intercourse under such conditions?
+Incompatibility of temper has been considered ground for a divorce;
+incompatibility of interests is a sufficient warrant for social
+separation. The multimillionaires have so much that is common among
+themselves, and so little that they share with us of moderate means, that
+they will naturally form a specialized class, and in virtue of their
+palaces, their picture-galleries, their equipages, their yachts, their
+large hospitality, constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy. Religion,
+which ought to be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the
+same grade. You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in
+hither not having a wedding garment?" The modern version would be, "How
+came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your back which
+came from Paris?"
+
+The little church has got a new stained window, a saint who reminds me of
+Hamlet's uncle,--a thing "of shreds and patches," but rather pretty to
+look at, with an inscription under it which is supposed to be the name of
+the person in whose honor the window was placed in the church. Smith was
+a worthy man and a faithful churchwarden, and I hope posterity will be
+able to spell out his name on his monumental window; but that old English
+lettering would puzzle Mephistopheles himself, if he found himself before
+this memorial tribute, on the inside,--you know he goes to church
+sometimes, if you remember your Faust.
+
+The rector has come out, in a quiet way, as an evolutionist. He has
+always been rather "broad" in his views, but cautious in their
+expression. You can tell the three branches of the mother-island church
+by the way they carry their heads. The low-church clergy look down, as
+if they felt themselves to be worms of the dust; the high-church priest
+drops his head on one side, after the pattern of the mediaeval saints;
+the broad-church preacher looks forward and round about him, as if he
+felt himself the heir of creation. Our rector carries his head in the
+broad-church aspect, which I suppose is the least open to the charge of
+affectation,--in fact, is the natural and manly way of carrying it.
+
+The Society has justified its name of Pansophian of late as never before.
+Lurida has stirred up our little community and its neighbors, so that we
+get essays on all sorts of subjects, poems and stories in large numbers.
+I know all about it, for she often consults me as to the merits of a
+particular contribution.
+
+What is to be the fate of Lurida? I often think, with no little interest
+and some degree of anxiety, about her future. Her body is so frail and
+her mind so excessively and constantly active that I am afraid one or the
+other will give way. I do not suppose she thinks seriously of ever being
+married. She grows more and more zealous in behalf of her own sex, and
+sterner in her judgment of the other. She declares that she never would
+marry any man who was not an advocate of female suffrage, and as these
+gentlemen are not very common hereabouts the chance is against her
+capturing any one of the hostile sex.
+
+What do you think? I happened, just as I was writing the last sentence,
+to look out of my window, and whom should I see but Lurida, with a young
+man in tow, listening very eagerly to her conversation, according to all
+appearance! I think he must be a friend of the rector, as I have seen a
+young man like this one in his company. Who knows?
+
+Affectionately yours, etc.
+
+
+
+
+DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.
+
+MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would have
+thought could have been got together in this little village during the
+short time you have been staying away from it.
+
+Lurida Vincent is engaged! He is a clergyman with a mathematical turn.
+The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the mathematical
+journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution that the young
+man fell in love with her on the strength of it. I don't think the story
+is literally true, nor do I believe that other report that he offered
+himself to her in the form of an equation chalked on the blackboard; but
+that it was an intellectual rather than a sentimental courtship I do not
+doubt. Lurida has given up the idea of becoming a professional
+lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking that her future husband's parish
+will find her work enough to do. A certain amount of daily domestic
+drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded people will be the
+best thing in the world for that brain of hers, always simmering with
+some new project in its least fervid condition.
+
+All our summer visitors have arrived. Euthymia Mrs. Maurice Kirkwood and
+her husband and little Maurice are here in their beautiful house looking
+out on the lake. They gave a grand party the other evening. You ought
+to have been there, but I suppose you could not very well have left your
+sister in the middle of your visit: All the grand folks were there, of
+course. Lurida and her young man--Gabriel is what she calls him--were
+naturally the objects of special attention. Paolo acted as major-domo,
+and looked as if he ought to be a major-general. Nothing could be
+pleasanter than the way in which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their
+plain country neighbors; that is, just as they did the others of more
+pretensions, as if they were really glad to see them, as I am sure they
+were. The old landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves,
+and I saw Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at the
+dancers and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently
+enjoying it as much as her old employers. It was a most charming and
+successful party. We had two sensations in the course of the evening.
+One was pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of
+strange and startling interest.
+
+You remember how emaciated poor Maurice Kirkwood was left after his
+fever, in that first season when he was among us. He was out in a boat
+one day, when a ring slipped off his thin finger and sunk in a place
+where the water was rather shallow. "Jake"--you know Jake,--everybody
+knows Jake--was rowing him. He promised to come to the spot and fish up
+the ring if he could possibly find it. He was seen poking about with
+fish-hooks at the end of a pole, but nothing was ever heard from him
+about the ring. It was an antique intaglio stone in an Etruscan
+setting,--a wild goose flying over the Campagna. Mr. Kirkwood valued it
+highly, and regretted its loss very much.
+
+While we were in the garden, who should appear at the gate but Jake, with
+a great basket, inquiring for Mr. Kirkwood. "Come," said Maurice to me,
+"let us see what our old friend the fisherman has brought us. What have
+you got there, Jake?"
+
+"What I 've got? Wall, I 'll tell y' what I've got: I 've got the
+biggest pickerel that's been ketched in this pond for these ten year. An'
+I 've got somethin' else besides the pickerel. When I come to cut him
+open, what do you think I faound in his insides but this here ring o'
+yourn,"--and he showed the one Maurice had lost so long before. There it
+was, as good as new, after having tried Jonah's style of housekeeping for
+all that time. There are those who discredit Jake's story about finding
+the ring in the fish; anyhow, there was the ring and there was the
+pickerel. I need not say that Jake went off well paid for his pickerel
+and the precious contents of its stomach. Now comes the chief event of
+the evening. I went early by special invitation. Maurice took me into
+his library, and we sat down together.
+
+"I have something of great importance," he said, "to say to you. I
+learned within a few days that my cousin Laura is staying with a friend
+in the next town to this. You know, doctor, that we have never met since
+the last, almost fatal, experience of my early years. I have determined
+to defy the strength of that deadly chain of associations connected with
+her presence, and I have begged her to come this evening with the friends
+with whom she is staying. Several letters passed between us, for it was
+hard to persuade her that there was no longer any risk in my meeting her.
+Her imagination was almost as deeply impressed as mine had been at those
+alarming interviews, and I had to explain to her fully that I had become
+quite indifferent to the disturbing impressions of former years. So, as
+the result of our correspondence, Laura is coming this evening, and I
+wish you to be present at our meeting. There is another reason why I
+wish you to be here. My little boy is not far from the--age at which I
+received my terrifying, almost disorganizing shock. I mean to have
+little Maurice brought into the presence of Laura, who is said to be
+still a very handsome woman, and see if he betrays any hint of that
+peculiar sensitiveness which showed itself in my threatening seizure. It
+seemed to me not impossible that he might inherit some tendency of that
+nature, and I wanted you to be at hand if any sign of danger should
+declare itself. For myself I have no fear. Some radical change has
+taken place in my nervous system. I have been born again, as it were, in
+my susceptibilities, and am in certain respects a new man. But I must
+know how it is with my little Maurice."
+
+Imagine with what interest I looked forward to this experiment; for
+experiment it was, and not without its sources of anxiety, as it seemed
+to me. The evening wore along; friends and neighbors came in, but no
+Laura as yet. At last I heard the sound of wheels, and a carriage
+stopped at the door. Two ladies and a gentleman got out, and soon
+entered the drawing room.
+
+"My cousin Laura!" whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to meet her.
+A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the thirties,--one of
+those women so thoroughly constituted that they cannot help being
+handsome at every period of life. I watched them both as they approached
+each other. Both looked pale at first, but Maurice soon recovered his
+usual color, and Laura's natural, rich bloom came back by degrees. Their
+emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there was no trace in
+it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of life which had
+once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head which turned the
+looker-on into a stone.
+
+"Is the boy still awake?" said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to say
+of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on that gay
+and busy evening.
+
+"What! Mahser Maurice asleep an' all this racket going on? I hear him
+crowing like young cockerel when he fus' smell daylight."
+
+"Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that leads
+out of the library."
+
+The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake, wondering
+apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think was for his
+special amusement.
+
+"See if he will go to that lady," said his father. Both of us held our
+breath as Laura stretched her arms towards little Maurice.
+
+The child looked for an instant searchingly, but fearlessly, at her
+glowing cheeks, her bright eyes, her welcoming smile, and met her embrace
+as she clasped him to her bosom as if he had known her all his days.
+
+The mortal antipathy had died out of the soul and the blood of Maurice
+Kirkwood at that supreme moment when he found himself snatched from the
+grasp of death and cradled in the arms of Euthymia.
+
+ --------------------------
+
+In closing the New Portfolio I remember that it began with a prefix which
+the reader may by this time have forgotten, namely, the First Opening.
+It was perhaps presumptuous to thus imply the probability of a second
+opening.
+
+I am reminded from time to time by the correspondents who ask a certain
+small favor of me that, as I can only expect to be with my surviving
+contemporaries a very little while longer, they would be much obliged if
+I would hurry up my answer before it is too late. They are right, these
+delicious unknown friends of mine, in reminding me of a fact which I
+cannot gainsay and might suffer to pass from my recollection. I thank
+them for recalling my attention to a truth which I shall be wiser, if not
+more hilarious, for remembering.
+
+No, I had no right to say the First Opening. How do I know that I shall
+have a chance to open it again? How do I know that anybody will want it
+to be opened a second time? How do I know that I shall feel like opening
+it? It is safest neither to promise to open the New Portfolio once more,
+nor yet to pledge myself to keep it closed hereafter. There are many
+papers potentially existent in it, some of which might interest a reader
+here and there. The Records of the Pansophian Society contain a
+considerable number of essays, poems, stories, and hints capable of being
+expanded into presentable dimensions. In the mean time I will say with
+Prospero, addressing my old readers, and my new ones, if such I have,
+
+ "If you be pleased, retire into my cell
+ And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
+ To still my beating mind."
+
+When it has got quiet I may take up the New Portfolio again, and consider
+whether it is worth while to open it consider whether it is worth while
+to open it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE
+
+A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+ BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER
+ MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN"
+ THE INEVITABLE TRIAL
+ CINDERS FROM ASHES
+ THE PULPIT AND THE PEW
+
+
+
+
+BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.
+
+(September, 1861.)
+
+This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace.
+It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have something to
+eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have something to eat, and
+the papers to read.
+
+Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our
+carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to
+Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new
+dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with.
+If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its
+respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a
+caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed
+nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one,
+if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a
+pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the
+newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.
+
+How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions,
+as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his
+fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would
+have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely
+repulsive.
+
+All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
+experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
+betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among
+us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which
+diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible
+emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec
+tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where
+all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled in the
+most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after their
+entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years' attendance, all the
+inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones. He
+does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered to
+those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.
+
+So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
+system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants. Take the
+first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad disaster
+to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of two
+gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden feeling
+at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, changed
+color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a
+"grande revolution," as French patients say,--went home, and kept her bed
+for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of
+such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself
+follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old, gentleman fell
+senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba.
+One of our early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was
+thought to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements
+of the time.
+
+We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a devouring
+passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire of
+it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of
+adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
+participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
+distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we
+often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most
+ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different
+form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a
+drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families. Some
+of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain
+in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that
+is prevailing.
+
+The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men
+cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll
+up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We
+confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his
+work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as interesting
+as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light
+of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he
+confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had
+closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more
+than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony
+and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.
+
+Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen
+into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over
+and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as
+if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not
+often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?
+Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the
+noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he
+wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great
+capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.
+
+When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in
+our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go
+tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that
+make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round
+through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a
+track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.
+This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of
+April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto
+operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we
+once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the
+leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already
+turned.
+
+Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not
+wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from
+peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we
+cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about through the
+twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like
+some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us
+on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?
+
+The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the
+feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is,
+after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and
+shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed
+grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact
+always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the
+dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.
+
+Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,--at least, he suspects
+himself of indisposition. Nothing serious,--let us just rub our
+fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs his
+hands, and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar twisting
+movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No! all is not quite right
+yet. Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought to be. Let
+us settle that where it should be, and then we shall certainly be in good
+trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old lady adjusts her cap,
+and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten washing herself. Poor
+fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he has to deal with. If he
+could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were
+Fly-Paper.--So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we
+dream! Perhaps very young persons may not understand this; as we grow
+older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.
+
+Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of
+old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be
+had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must
+go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner
+nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand
+on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine
+right of its telegraphic dispatches.
+
+War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
+Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the
+Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
+which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that
+time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the
+neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower of
+Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As
+for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and everybody
+knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in its
+political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us who are not in
+the last quarter of their century. We are learning many strange matters
+from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of
+existence which make war as it is with us very different from war as it
+has been.
+
+The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
+nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves
+which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns
+and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body.
+The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the
+limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was the
+railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of
+April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a
+clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?
+
+This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous
+action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless
+courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight of
+for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know for
+a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden with
+truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always for the
+last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of our
+armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their
+own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the
+tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned
+like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;
+now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And
+this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another
+singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We
+may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a
+week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would
+have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
+organized.
+
+ "As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
+ Thou only teachest all that man can be!"
+
+We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of
+long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful
+prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.
+
+Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind, we
+have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially when one
+of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and
+keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us a
+new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in our
+poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can be
+and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all
+back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more or less
+kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or
+literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and
+women.
+
+It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
+distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the
+preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out
+that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility.
+All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.
+The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like
+a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy
+and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his
+straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or
+leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs
+as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.
+
+Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the
+same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed
+antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the, "bloated
+aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy,
+sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for
+learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of an
+organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their courage
+is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their slender
+figures.
+
+A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our
+windows. A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the water's
+edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who
+looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall,"
+he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange
+physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our
+present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the
+surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared
+over Charleston harbor.
+
+Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable
+grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
+the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
+unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of
+fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed
+by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.
+
+It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not
+unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times
+had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern people as
+the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
+French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
+Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
+again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
+the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that
+Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and
+Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging
+iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free
+working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned.
+The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change
+their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer
+the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build
+towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute
+matter into every shape civilization can ask for.
+
+Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new
+shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a man
+in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones
+and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop,
+marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little startled to
+find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth
+Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to
+do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed
+over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own
+soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment
+of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental
+provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of
+Broadway, New York.
+
+Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
+chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When the
+masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his heart
+that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist"
+Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young
+fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the
+Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoousians
+translated from the battle-field to the abodes of everlasting woe? War
+not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not
+be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of
+judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man
+should have but two thoughts: to do his duty, and trust his Maker. Let
+our brave dead come back from the fields where they have fallen for law
+and liberty, and if you will follow them to their graves, you will find
+out what the Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its
+exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen
+heroes had defended! Very little comparatively do we hear at such times
+of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in
+which all sincere Christians can agree. It is a noble lesson, and
+nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it shall
+be heard over all the angry cries of theological disputants.
+
+Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and to
+get at their principles of judgment. Perhaps most, of us, will agree
+that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the experience
+of the last six months. We had the notable predictions attributed to the
+Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused to fulfil themselves.
+We were infested at one time with a set of ominous-looking seers, who
+shook their heads and muttered obscurely about some mighty preparations
+that were making to substitute the rule of the minority for that of the
+majority. Organizations were darkly hinted at; some thought our armories
+would be seized; and there are not wanting ancient women in the
+neighboring University town who consider that the country was saved by
+the intrepid band of students who stood guard, night after night, over
+the G. R. cannon and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.
+
+As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are those
+which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come to pass,
+and remind us that they have made long ago. Those who, are rash enough
+to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they hope, or what
+they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of their own, or some
+guess founded on private information not half so good as what everybody
+gets who reads the papers,--never by any possibility a word that we can
+depend on, simply because there are cobwebs of contingency between every
+to-day and to-morrow that no field-glass can penetrate when fifty of them
+lie woven one over another. Prophesy as much as you like, but always
+hedge. Say that you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly
+supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger
+than is anticipated. Say what you like,--only don't be too peremptory
+and dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been notoriously
+deceived in their predictions in this very matter.
+
+ Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis.
+
+Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as a
+prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.
+
+There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that already
+referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation to the great
+events passing around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to have
+elapsed since this war began. The buds were then swelling which held the
+leaves that are still green. It seems as old as Time himself. We cannot
+fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes of to-day and
+those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into each other
+like the joints of a pocket-telescope. When the young men from Middlesex
+dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the
+other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always been the mint in
+which the world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or
+month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that the first impression
+bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face
+hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields are alike in their
+main features. The young fellows who fell in our earlier struggle seemed
+like old men to us until within these few months; now we remember they
+were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they go to the fight; it
+seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was crimsoned but yesterday,
+and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-tower would feel warm, if we
+laid our hand upon it.
+
+Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
+earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are
+but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the
+field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right
+against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a movement
+onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its
+mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we
+think. Our bullets and cannonballs have lengthened into bolts like those
+which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons,
+such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly
+invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.
+
+Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we
+trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness,
+our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better,
+because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and
+our people are rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is
+the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, if need
+be, to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this world, that the
+generations to follow you may inherit a whole country whose natural
+condition shall be peace, and not a broken province which must live under
+the perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and all
+that war brings with it? If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles
+may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object must be won.
+
+Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are
+not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view of the
+momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up
+all, but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear
+to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it is called for. The
+time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our
+means cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once
+the marketplace to the voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory.
+Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to
+read and nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a
+compromise. At present we have all that nature absolutely demands,--we
+can live on bread and the newspaper.
+
+
+
+
+MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."
+
+In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam,
+my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a
+telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of
+battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with
+throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might
+bring.
+
+We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the
+envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:
+
+HAGERSTOWN 17th
+
+To__________ H ______
+
+Capt H______ wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at
+Keedysville
+WILLIAM G. LEDUC
+
+Through the neck,--no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, food-pipe,
+carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable vessels, a
+great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,--ought
+to kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought
+mortal,--which was it? The first; that is better than the second would
+be.--"Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland." Leduc?
+Leduc? Don't remember that name. The boy is waiting for his money. A
+dollar and thirteen cents. Has nobody got thirteen cents? Don't keep
+that boy waiting,--how do we know what messages he has got to carry?
+
+The boy had another message to carry. It was to the father of
+Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was
+grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a
+town a few miles this side of Keedysville. This I learned the next
+morning from the civil and attentive officials at the Central Telegraph
+Office.
+
+Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the
+quarter past two o'clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an
+accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or
+pressing emergency. I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the cars.
+I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose society
+would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, and
+whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim.
+
+It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished apart,
+that I mean to give my "Atlantic" readers an account. They must let me
+tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little matters that
+interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely class of elderly
+persons, who sit at their firesides and never travel, will, I hope,
+follow with a kind of interest. For, besides the main object of my
+excursion, I could not help being excited by the incidental sights and
+occurrences of a trip which to a commercial traveller or a
+newspaper-reporter would seem quite commonplace and undeserving of
+record. There are periods in which all places and people seem to be in a
+conspiracy to impress us with their individuality, in which every
+ordinary locality seems to assume a special significance and to claim a
+particular notice, in which every person we meet is either an old
+acquaintance or a character; days in which the strangest coincidences are
+continually happening, so that they get to be the rule, and not the
+exception. Some might naturally think that anxiety and the weariness of
+a prolonged search after a near relative would have prevented my taking
+any interest in or paying any regard to the little matters around me.
+Perhaps it had just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused
+stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide-awake in
+pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing
+emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in
+respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly
+illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has
+developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous
+story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.
+
+Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though
+many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless and unwise
+fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about them,
+which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young
+fellows to leave his sweetheart and go into a Peninsular campaign, though
+I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was
+thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all
+the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth
+that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed,
+that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I
+did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity,
+and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked
+with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.
+
+By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative
+friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad
+journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself
+agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many
+times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an
+hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations
+into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in
+curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous
+experiment,--fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when
+a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,--all this without
+volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as
+the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound
+up,--many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum
+with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend,
+cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and
+opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the
+flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old
+weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and
+attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry
+during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of
+fresh juices. My friends spared me this trial.
+
+So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced
+by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the
+exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in
+what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it
+pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near
+objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a
+right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly
+backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear
+to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if
+they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape
+becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the
+middle-distance.
+
+My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and
+longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied
+them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The
+traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of
+Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found "his
+warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of the
+great city hotels. The unheralded guest who is honored by mere
+indifference may think himself blessed with singular good-fortune. If
+the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his
+manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. The coldest
+welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the door of a bishop's
+palace, the most icy reception that a country cousin ever received at the
+city mansion of a mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to
+that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated
+circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your
+name on his dog's-eared register. I have less hesitation in unburdening
+myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met
+with more than one exception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I
+suppose, as a matter of course. One cannot expect an office clerk to
+embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a
+telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he
+receives for transmission. Still, humanity is not always totally
+extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in a telegraph
+office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in
+conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as
+if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not made.
+
+On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with
+sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole side of the
+car maybe made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a
+traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust
+looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees are
+common, and champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by,
+feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty
+passion come over me to be the captain of one,--to glide back and forward
+upon a sea never roughened by storms,--to float where I could not
+sink,--to navigate where there is no shipwreck,--to lie languidly on the
+deck and govern the huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger:
+there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has
+not often envied a cobbler in his stall?
+
+The boys cry the "N'-York Heddle," instead of "Herald"; I remember that
+years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther end of the
+dumb-bell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the waters,
+so we must approach Philadelphia by the river. Her physiognomy is not
+distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious
+steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking
+bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails
+on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves,
+elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the
+walls of a hock-glass.
+
+I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be
+heard of, if anywhere in this region. His lieutenant-colonel was there,
+gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son of the
+house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of
+the last, was there, prostrate with fever. A fourth bed was waiting
+ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though
+inquiries had been made in the towns from and through which the father
+had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel. And so my search is,
+like a "Ledger" story, to be continued.
+
+I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon-train for Baltimore.
+Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards. We had found upon
+the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the wife of one of our
+most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave Colonel of the __th
+Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at Middletown, a place lying
+directly in our track. She was the light of our party while we were
+together on our pilgrimage, a fair, gracious woman, gentle, but
+courageous,
+
+ ---"ful plesant and amiable of port,
+ ---estatelich of manere,
+ And to ben holden digne of reverence."
+
+On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party Dr.
+William Hunt of Philadelphia, who had most kindly and faithfully attended
+the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at Ball's Bluff,
+which came very near being mortal. He was going upon an errand of mercy
+to the wounded, and found he had in his memorandum-book the name of our
+lady's husband, the Colonel, who had been commended to his particular
+attention.
+
+Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry keeping
+guard over a short railroad bridge. It was the first evidence that we
+were approaching the perilous borders, the marches where the North and
+the South mingle their angry hosts, where the extremes of our so-called
+civilization meet in conflict, and the fierce slave-driver of the Lower
+Mississippi stares into the stern eyes of the forest-feller from the
+banks of the Aroostook. All the way along, the bridges were guarded more
+or less strongly. In a vast country like ours, communications play a far
+more complex part than in Europe, where the whole territory available for
+strategic purposes is so comparatively limited. Belgium, for instance,
+has long been the bowling-alley where kings roll cannon-balls at each
+other's armies; but here we are playing the game of live ninepins without
+any alley.
+
+We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, as we were too late for
+the train to Frederick. At the Eutaw House, where we found both comfort
+and courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled the evening hours
+for us in the most agreeable manner. We devoted some time to procuring
+surgical and other articles, such as might be useful to our friends, or
+to others, if our friends should not need them. In the morning, I found
+myself seated at the breakfast-table next to General Wool. It did not
+surprise me to find the General very far from expansive. With Fort
+McHenry on his shoulders and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and the
+weight of a military department loading down his social safety-valves, I
+thought it a great deal for an officer in his trying position to select
+so very obliging and affable an aid as the gentleman who relieved him of
+the burden of attending to strangers.
+
+We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Frederick. As we stood
+waiting on the platform, a telegraphic message was handed in silence to
+my companion. Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was hastening to
+see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. It was no time for
+empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and that now was not
+the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, felt as women feel
+it.
+
+Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me as the friend of a
+beloved relative of my own, who was with him during a severe illness in
+Switzerland; and for whom while living, and for whose memory when dead,
+he retained the warmest affection. Since that the story of his noble
+deeds of daring, of his capture and escape, and a brief visit home before
+he was able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name familiar to many
+among us, myself among the number. His memory has been honored by those
+who had the largest opportunity of knowing his rare promise, as a man of
+talents and energy of nature. His abounding vitality must have produced
+its impression on all who met him; there was a still fire about him which
+any one could see would blaze up to melt all difficulties and recast
+obstacles into implements in the mould of an heroic will. These elements
+of his character many had the chance of knowing; but I shall always
+associate him with the memory of that pure and noble friendship which
+made me feel that I knew him before I looked upon his face, and added a
+personal tenderness to the sense of loss which I share with the whole
+community.
+
+Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the companions with whom I set
+out on my journey.
+
+In one of the cars, at the same station, we met General Shriver of
+Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose name is synonymous with a hearty
+welcome to all whom he can aid by his counsel and his hospitality. He
+took great pains to give us all the information we needed, and expressed
+the hope, which was afterwards fulfilled, to the great gratification of
+some of us, that we should meet again when he should return to his home.
+
+There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip to Frederick, except
+our passing a squad of Rebel prisoners, whom I missed seeing, as they
+flashed by, but who were said to be a most forlorn-looking crowd of
+scarecrows. Arrived at the Monocacy River, about three miles this side
+of Frederick, we came to a halt, for the railroad bridge had been blown
+up by the Rebels, and its iron pillars and arches were lying in the bed
+of the river. The unfortunate wretch who fired the train was killed by
+the explosion, and lay buried hard by, his hands sticking out of the
+shallow grave into which he had been huddled. This was the story they
+told us, but whether true or not I must leave to the correspondents of
+"Notes and Queries" to settle.
+
+There was a great confusion of carriages and wagons at the stopping-place
+of the train, so that it was a long time before I could get anything that
+would carry us. At last I was lucky enough to light on a sturdy wagon,
+drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and driven by James Grayden, with
+whom I was destined to have a somewhat continued acquaintance. We took
+up a little girl who had been in Baltimore during the late Rebel inroad.
+It made me think of the time when my own mother, at that time six years
+old, was hurried off from Boston, then occupied by the British soldiers,
+to Newburyport, and heard the people saying that "the redcoats were
+coming, killing and murdering everybody as they went along." Frederick
+looked cheerful for a place that had so recently been in an enemy's
+hands. Here and there a house or shop was shut up, but the national
+colors were waving in all directions, and the general aspect was peaceful
+and contented. I saw no bullet-marks or other sign of the fighting which
+had gone on in the streets. The Colonel's lady was taken in charge by a
+daughter of that hospitable family to which we had been commended by its
+head, and I proceeded to inquire for wounded officers at the various
+temporary hospitals.
+
+At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, I heard mention of an
+officer in an upper chamber, and, going there, found Lieutenant Abbott,
+of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with what looked
+like typhoid fever. While there, who should come in but the almost
+ubiquitous Lieutenant Wilkins, of the same Twentieth, whom I had met
+repeatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and who was just from
+the battle-ground. He was going to Boston in charge of the body of the
+lamented Dr. Revere, the Assistant Surgeon of the regiment, killed on the
+field. From his lips I learned something of the mishaps of the regiment.
+My Captain's wound he spoke of as less grave than at first thought; but
+he mentioned incidentally having heard a story recently that he was
+killed,--a fiction, doubtless,--a mistake,--a palpable absurdity,--not to
+be remembered or made any account of. Oh no! but what dull ache is this
+in that obscurely sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the
+nervous centre called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself
+until a great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the
+non-conductors which isolate it from ordinary impressions? I talked
+awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who lay prostrate, feeble, but
+soldier-like and uncomplaining, carefully waited upon by a most excellent
+lady, a captain's wife, New England born, loyal as the Liberty on a
+golden ten-dollar piece, and of lofty bearing enough to have sat for that
+goddess's portrait. She had stayed in Frederick through the Rebel
+inroad, and kept the star-spangled banner where it would be safe, to
+unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off from the pavement of the
+town.
+
+Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentleman, occupying a small
+chamber, and filling it with his troubles. When he gets well and plump,
+I know he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help smiling in
+the midst of my sympathy for him. He had been a well-favored man, he
+said, sweeping his hand in a semicircle, which implied that his
+acute-angled countenance had once filled the goodly curve he described.
+He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look upon. Weakness had made him
+querulous, as it does all of us, and he piped his grievances to me in a
+thin voice, with that finish of detail which chronic invalidism alone can
+command. He was starving,--he could not get what he wanted to eat. He
+was in need of stimulants, and he held up a pitiful two-ounce phial
+containing three thimblefuls--of brandy,--his whole stock of that
+encouraging article. Him I consoled to the best of my ability, and
+afterwards, in some slight measure, supplied his wants. Feed this poor
+gentleman up, as these good people soon will, and I should not know him,
+nor he himself. We are all egotists in sickness and debility. An animal
+has been defined as "a stomach ministered to by organs;" and the greatest
+man comes very near this simple formula after a month or two of fever and
+starvation.
+
+James Grayden and his team pleased me well enough, and so I made a
+bargain with him to take us, the lady and myself, on our further journey
+as far as Middletown. As we were about starting from the front of the
+United States Hotel, two gentlemen presented themselves and expressed a
+wish to be allowed to share our conveyance. I looked at them and
+convinced myself that they were neither Rebels in disguise, nor
+deserters, nor camp-followers, nor miscreants, but plain, honest men on a
+proper errand. The first of them I will pass over briefly. He was a
+young man of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a Pennsylvania
+regiment, which he was going to rejoin. He belonged to the Moravian
+Church, of which I had the misfortune to know little more than what I had
+learned from Southey's "Life of Wesley." and from the exquisite hymns we
+have borrowed from its rhapsodists. The other stranger was a New
+Englander of respectable appearance, with a grave, hard, honest,
+hay-bearded face, who had come to serve the sick and wounded on the
+battle-field and in its immediate neighborhood. There is no reason why I
+should not mention his name, but I shall content myself with calling him
+the Philanthropist.
+
+So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James
+Grayden their driver, the gentle lady, whose serene patience bore up
+through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist, and
+myself, the teller of this story.
+
+And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the trail
+from the great battle-field. The road was filled with straggling and
+wounded soldiers. All who could travel on foot,--multitudes with slight
+wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face,--were told to take up
+their beds,--alight burden or none at all,--and walk. Just as the
+battle-field sucks everything into its red vortex for the conflict, so
+does it drive everything off in long, diverging rays after the fierce
+centripetal forces have met and neutralized each other. For more than a
+week there had been sharp fighting all along this road. Through the
+streets of Frederick, through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain,
+sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the
+Antietam, the long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes
+which tear their path through our fields and villages. The slain of
+higher condition, "embalmed" and iron-cased, were sliding off on the
+railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being
+gathered up and committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were
+cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to
+the neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as
+I have said, at every step in the road. It was a pitiable sight, truly
+pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many
+single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more
+than the sight of this great caravan of maimed pilgrims. The
+companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of their suffering;
+it was next to impossible to individualize it, and so bring it home, as
+one can do with a single broken limb or aching wound. Then they were all
+of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime of their strength.
+Though they tramped so wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing
+in store for them. These wounds they bore would be the medals they would
+show their children and grandchildren by and by. Who would not rather
+wear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?
+
+Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and sympathy.
+Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed with fever or pale
+with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary limbs
+along as if each step would exhaust their slender store of strength. At
+the roadside sat or lay others, quite spent with their journey. Here and
+there was a house at which the wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear
+often vain, of getting refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool
+spring, where the little bands of the long procession halted for a few
+moments, as the trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains.
+My companions had brought a few peaches along with them, which the
+Philanthropist bestowed upon the tired and thirsty soldiers with a
+satisfaction which we all shared. I had with me a small flask of strong
+waters, to be used as a medicine in case of inward grief. From this,
+also, he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor fellow who
+looked as if he needed it. I rather admired the simplicity with which he
+applied my limited means of solace to the first-comer who wanted it more
+than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on ceremony, and had
+I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I should not have
+reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any more than I grudged my other
+ardent friend the two dollars and more which it cost me to send the
+charitable message he left in my hands.
+
+It was a lovely country through which we were riding. The hillsides
+rolled away into the distance, slanting up fair and broad to the sun, as
+one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at Lanesborough,
+for instance, or in the many-hued mountain chalice at the bottom of which
+the Shaker houses of Lebanon have shaped themselves like a sediment of
+cubical crystals. The wheat was all garnered, and the land ploughed for
+a new crop. There was Indian corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins
+warming their yellow carapaces in the sunshine like so many turtles; only
+in a single instance did I notice some wretched little miniature
+specimens in form and hue not unlike those colossal oranges of our
+cornfields. The rail fences were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of
+extinguished fires showed the use to which they had been applied. The
+houses along the road were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden
+fences were poorly built of laths or long slats, and very rarely of trim
+aspect. The men of this region seemed to ride in the saddle very
+generally, rather than drive. They looked sober and stern, less curious
+and lively than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features familiar
+to us in the countenance of the late John Tyler, our accidental
+President, was frequently met with. The women were still more
+distinguishable from our New England pattern. Soft, sallow, succulent,
+delicately finished about the mouth and firmly shaped about the chin,
+dark-eyed, full-throated, they looked as if they had been grown in a land
+of olives. There was a little toss in their movement, full of
+muliebrity. I fancied there was something more of the duck and less of
+the chicken about them, as compared with the daughters of our leaner
+soil; but these are mere impressions caught from stray glances, and if
+there is any offence in them, my fair readers may consider them all
+retracted.
+
+At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields,
+unburied, not grateful to gods or men. I saw no bird of prey, no
+ill-omened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place
+where it had been held. The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera, the
+"twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature, doubtless; but
+no black wing was spread over these animal ruins, and no call to the
+banquet pierced through the heavy-laden and sickening air.
+
+Full in the middle of the road, caring little for whom or what they met,
+came long strings of army wagons, returning empty from the front after
+supplies. James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they had a
+little rather run into a fellow than not. I liked the looks of these
+equipages and their drivers; they meant business. Drawn by mules mostly,
+six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and
+driver, they came jogging along the road, turning neither to right nor
+left,--some driven by bearded, solemn white men, some by careless,
+saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or
+obsidian. There seemed to be nothing about them, dead or alive, that was
+not serviceable. Sometimes a mule would give out on the road; then he
+was left where he lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and
+get up, when the first public wagon that came along would hitch him on,
+and restore him to the sphere of duty.
+
+It was evening when we got to Middletown. The gentle lady who had graced
+our homely conveyance with her company here left us. She found her
+husband, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quarters, well cared
+for, very weak from the effects of the fearful operation he had been
+compelled to undergo, but showing calm courage to endure as he had shown
+manly energy to act. It was a meeting full of heroism and tenderness, of
+which I heard more than there is need to tell. Health to the brave
+soldier, and peace to the household over which so fair a spirit presides!
+
+Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent surgical director of the
+hospitals of the place, took me in charge. He carried me to the house of
+a worthy and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed Church, where I
+was to take tea and pass the night. What became of the Moravian chaplain
+I did not know; but my friend the Philanthropist had evidently made up
+his mind to adhere to my fortunes. He followed me, therefore, to the
+house of the "Dominie." as a newspaper correspondent calls my kind host,
+and partook of the fare there furnished me. He withdrew with me to the
+apartment assigned for my slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow
+where I waked and tossed. Nay, I do affirm that he did, unconsciously, I
+believe, encroach on that moiety of the couch which I had flattered
+myself was to be my own through the watches of the night, and that I was
+in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be gradually, but
+irresistibly, expelled from the bed which I had supposed destined for my
+sole possession. As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the
+Philanthropist clave unto me. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where
+thou lodgest, I will lodge." A really kind, good man, full of zeal,
+determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought, he doubted
+nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a purely
+benevolent errand. When he reads this, as I hope he will, let him be
+assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any accommodation from
+being in my company, let me tell him that I learned a lesson from his
+active benevolence. I could, however, have wished to hear him laugh once
+before we parted, perhaps forever. He did not, to the best of my
+recollection, even smile during the whole period that we were in company.
+I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not
+so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of
+sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in
+passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a practical
+specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with its peculiar
+sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an
+organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a
+constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of
+hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave,
+occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social
+force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its
+legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it
+whistles and sings at its work. When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled
+with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospitals, he found
+his temper and manners very different from what would have been expected.
+
+My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration of
+the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as above
+mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them. The authorities
+of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of that place, for
+such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I have never seen in
+the streets of a civilized town. It was getting late in the evening when
+we began our rounds. The principal collections of the wounded were in
+the churches. Boards were laid over the tops of the pews, on these some
+straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with little or no covering
+other than such scanty clothes as they had on. There were wounds of all
+degrees of severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs. Most of the
+sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all
+had, I presume, received such attention as was required. Still, it was
+but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals
+suggested. I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but they
+were used to camp life, and did not complain. The men who watched were
+not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One of them was smoking his
+pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw one poor fellow who had been shot
+through the breast; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing,
+anxious and restless. The men were debating about the opiate he was to
+take, and I was thankful that I happened there at the right moment to see
+that he was well narcotized for the night. Was it possible that my
+Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these places? Certainly
+possible, but not probable; but as the lantern was held over each bed, it
+was with a kind of thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated.
+Many times as I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I
+started as some faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man's hair, the
+outline of his half-turned face,--recalled the presence I was in search
+of. The face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would
+pass away, but still the fancy clung to me. There was no figure huddled
+up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling
+languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance, that
+I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was making my
+pilgrimage to the battlefield.
+
+"There are two wounded Secesh," said my companion. I walked to the
+bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember
+right, from North Carolina. He was of good family, son of a judge in one
+of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle,
+intelligent. One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying helpless
+and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards
+those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in
+deadly strife. The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this
+Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race
+in the men of the North and South. It would be worth a year of battles to
+abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it out
+were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of slight,
+scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among
+the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in
+the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and
+the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others of
+like training with his own,--a man who, but for the curse which our
+generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the
+beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral
+standard of a peaceful and united people.
+
+On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having engaged James Grayden and his
+team, I set out with the Chaplain and the Philanthropist for Keedysville.
+Our track lay through the South Mountain Gap, and led us first to the
+town of Boonsborough, where, it will be remembered, Colonel Dwight had
+been brought after the battle. We saw the positions occupied in the
+battle of South Mountain, and many traces of the conflict. In one
+situation a group of young trees was marked with shot, hardly one having
+escaped. As we walked by the side of the wagon, the Philanthropist left
+us for a while and climbed a hill, where, along the line of a fence, he
+found traces of the most desperate fighting. A ride of some three hours
+brought us to Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army surgeon
+who had charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little sleep
+after his fatigues and watchings. He bore this cross very creditably,
+and helped me to explore all places where my soldier might be lying among
+the crowds of wounded. After the useless search, I resumed my journey,
+fortified with a note of introduction to Dr. Letterman; also with a bale
+of oakum which I was to carry to that gentleman, this substance being
+employed as a substitute for lint. We were obliged also to procure a
+pass to Keedysville from the Provost Marshal of Boonsborough. As we came
+near the place, we learned that General McClellan's head quarters had
+been removed from this village some miles farther to the front.
+
+On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a familiar face and
+figure blocked the way, like one of Bunyan's giants. The tall form and
+benevolent countenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged to the
+excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay of Chelsea, who, like my Philanthropist,
+only still more promptly, had come to succor the wounded of the great
+battle. It was wonderful to see how his single personality pervaded this
+torpid little village; he seemed to be the centre of all its activities.
+All my questions he answered clearly and decisively, as one who knew
+everything that was going on in the place. But the one question I had
+come five hundred miles to ask,--Where is Captain H.?--he could not
+answer. There were some thousands of wounded in the place, he told me,
+scattered about everywhere. It would be a long job to hunt up my
+Captain; the only way would be to go to every house and ask for him.
+Just then a medical officer came up.
+
+"Do you know anything of Captain H. of the Massachusetts Twentieth?"
+
+"Oh yes; he is staying in that house. I saw him there, doing very well."
+
+A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself. Now,
+then, for our twice-wounded volunteer, our young centurion whose
+double-barred shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon. Let us
+observe the proprieties, however; no swelling upward of the mother,--no
+hysterica passio, we do not like scenes. A calm salutation,--then
+swallow and hold hard. That is about the programme.
+
+A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and whitewashed. A
+little yard before it, with a gate swinging. The door of the cottage
+ajar,--no one visible as yet. I push open the door and enter. An old
+woman, Margaret Kitzmuller her name proves to be, is the first person I
+see.
+
+"Captain H. here?"
+
+"Oh no, sir,--left yesterday morning for Hagerstown,--in a milk-cart."
+
+The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking ancient woman, answers
+questions with a rising inflection, and gives a good account of the
+Captain, who got into the vehicle without assistance, and was in
+excellent spirits. Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as the
+terminus of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and was on his way to
+Philadelphia, via Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already in
+the hospitable home of Walnut Street, where his friends were expecting
+him.
+
+I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was the
+same to Philadelphia through Harrisburg as through Baltimore. But it was
+very difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of conveyance to
+Hagerstown; and, on the other hand, I had James Grayden and his wagon to
+carry me back to Frederick. It was not likely that I should overtake the
+object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six hours start, even if I could
+procure a conveyance that day. In the mean time James was getting
+impatient to be on his return, according to the direction of his
+employers. So I decided to go back with him.
+
+But there was the great battle-field only about three miles from
+Keedysville, and it was impossible to go without seeing that. James
+Grayden's directions were peremptory, but it was a case for the higher
+law. I must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours, such as
+would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and enforce it by a personal
+motive. I did this handsomely, and succeeded without difficulty. To add
+brilliancy to my enterprise, I invited the Chaplain and the
+Philanthropist to take a free passage with me.
+
+We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off to
+the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions,
+over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek in which
+soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did not then
+know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we met a
+party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had picked up
+on the battlefield. Still wandering along, we were at last pointed to a
+hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was covered with
+Indian corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest fighting of the
+day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to make a passage
+across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days looked
+like old roads. We passed a fresh grave under a tree near the road. A
+board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make
+it out, of Gardiner, of a New Hampshire regiment.
+
+On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks and
+spades. "How many?" "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried, then,
+in this region of the field of strife. We stopped the wagon, and,
+getting out, began to look around us. Hard by was a large pile of
+muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up, and were
+guarded for the Government. A long ridge of fresh gravel rose before us.
+A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription, the first part of
+which was, I believe, not correct: "The Rebel General Anderson and 80
+Rebels are buried in this hole." Other smaller ridges were marked with
+the number of dead lying under them. The whole ground was strewed with
+fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets,
+cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat.
+I saw two soldiers' caps that looked as though their owners had been shot
+through the head. In several places I noticed dark red patches where a
+pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life
+out on the sod. I then wandered about in the cornfield. It surprised me
+to notice, that, though there was every mark of hard fighting having
+taken place here, the Indian corn was not generally trodden down. One of
+our cornfields is a kind of forest, and even when fighting, men avoid the
+tall stalks as if they were trees. At the edge of this cornfield lay a
+gray horse, said to have belonged to a Rebel colonel, who was killed near
+the same place. Not far off were two dead artillery horses in their
+harness. Another had been attended to by a burying-party, who had thrown
+some earth over him but his last bed-clothes were too short, and his legs
+stuck out stark and stiff from beneath the gravel coverlet. It was a
+great pity that we had no intelligent guide to explain to us the position
+of that portion of the two armies which fought over this ground. There
+was a shallow trench before we came to the cornfield, too narrow for a
+road, as I should think, too elevated for a water-course, and which
+seemed to have been used as a rifle-pit. At any rate, there had been
+hard fighting in and about it. This and the cornfield may serve to
+identify the part of the ground we visited, if any who fought there
+should ever look over this paper. The opposing tides of battle must have
+blended their waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform were
+mingled with the "garments rolled in blood" torn from our own dead and
+wounded soldiers. I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own,--but
+there was something repulsive about the trodden and stained relics of the
+stale battle-field. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left
+uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and
+muddy heeltaps. A bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a
+soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos of my visit, with a
+letter which I picked up, directed to Richmond, Virginia, its seal
+unbroken. "N. C. Cleveland County. E. Wright to J. Wright." On the
+other side, "A few lines from W. L. Vaughn." who has just been writing
+for the wife to her husband, and continues on his own account. The
+postscript, "tell John that nancy's folks are all well and has a verry
+good Little Crop of corn a growing." I wonder, if, by one of those
+strange chances of which I have seen so many, this number or leaf of the
+"Atlantic" will not sooner or later find its way to Cleveland County,
+North Carolina, and E. Wright, widow of James Wright, and Nancy's folks,
+get from these sentences the last glimpse of husband and friend as he
+threw up his arms and fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam? I will
+keep this stained letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in
+my time, and my pleasant North Carolina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital
+will, perhaps look these poor people up, and tell them where to send for
+it.
+
+On the battle-field I parted with my two companions, the Chaplain and the
+Philanthropist. They were going to the front, the one to find his
+regiment, the other to look for those who needed his assistance. We
+exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses' heads
+were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I saw them
+no more. On my way back, I fell into talk with James Grayden. Born in
+England, Lancashire; in this country since he was four years old. Had
+nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't know what he should do if
+he lost her. Though so long in this country, he had all the simplicity
+and childlike lightheartedness which belong to the Old World's people.
+He laughed at the smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white English
+teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very
+limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small store of
+information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me. His quiet
+animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of
+anxiety, and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don't know, sir." better than
+I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other
+very wise men.
+
+I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the
+second time. Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded
+Colonel and his lady. She gave me a most touching account of all the
+suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he succeeded
+in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper means of
+transportation of the wounded after the battle. It occurred to me, while
+at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the first time
+in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with whom the
+Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.
+
+After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth,
+educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk.
+He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous
+Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in
+the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch
+from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those
+frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard,
+who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light
+of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of
+Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the
+rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the "sudabit multum."
+and others,--also of our New York Professor Carnochan's handiwork, a
+specimen of which I once admired at the New York College. But the doctor
+was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed willing to forget the
+present in the past: things went wrong, somehow, and the time was out of
+joint with him.
+
+Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own wide
+bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in Middletown. Here I
+lay awake again another night. Close to the house stood an ambulance in
+which was a wounded Rebel officer, attended by one of their own surgeons.
+He was calling out in a loud voice, all night long, as it seemed to me,
+"Doctor! Doctor! Driver! Water!" in loud, complaining tones, I have no
+doubt of real suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent patience
+which was the almost universal rule.
+
+The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence,
+trivial, but having its interest as one of a series. The Doctor and
+myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on the
+sofa, At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the
+Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau, just
+where I could put my hand upon it. I was the last of the three to rise
+in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I found it was
+gone. This was rather awkward,--not on account of the loss, but of the
+unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must have taken it. I
+must try to find out what it meant.
+
+"By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern
+match-box?"
+
+The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise and
+my great gratification, pulled out two match-boxes exactly alike, both
+printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he
+had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into
+his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In
+memory of which event, we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes.
+
+This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases of
+plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured. When a
+little poem called "The Two Streams" was first printed, a writer in the
+New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of it of borrowing
+the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President Hopkins of
+Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as I
+thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as establishing a fair
+presumption that it was so borrowed. I was at the same time wholly
+unconscious of ever having met with the discourse or the sentence which
+the verses were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen or heard
+either. Some time after this, happening to meet my eloquent cousin,
+Wendell Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that he had
+once used the special image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered
+at Williamstown. On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he
+informed me that he too, had used the image,--perhaps referring to his
+poem called "The Twins." He thought Tennyson had used it also. The
+parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage
+attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript" for
+October 23, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the
+showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic,
+one to the Pacific. I found the image running loose in my mind, without
+a halter. It suggested itself as an illustration of the will, and I
+worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School Atlas.--The spores of
+a great many ideas are floating about in the atmosphere. We no more know
+where all the growths of our mind came from, than where the lichens which
+eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them
+birth. The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was a
+plagiarism.
+
+In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of James
+Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his name
+"Phillip Ottenheimer" and whose features at once showed him to be an
+Israelite. I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk. So I
+asked him many questions about his religion, and got some answers that
+sound strangely in Christian ears. He was from Wittenberg, and had been
+educated in strict Jewish fashion. From his childhood he had read
+Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar otherwise. A young person of his
+race lost caste utterly by marrying a Christian. The Founder of our
+religion was considered by the Israelites to have been "a right smart man
+and a great doctor." But the horror with which the reading of the New
+Testament by any young person of their faith would be regarded was as
+great, I judged by his language, as that of one of our straitest
+sectaries would be, if he found his son or daughter perusing the "Age of
+Reason."
+
+In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires
+struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find "Fair-View" laid
+down about this point on a railroad map. I wish some wandering
+photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one, if
+possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of steeples
+nestles among the Maryland hills. The town had a poetical look from a
+distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there. The first sign I
+read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as
+confirming my remote impression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past,
+Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the
+attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my
+parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as
+Spiritus Vini Gallici. I took advantage of General Shriver's always open
+door to write a letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered
+hospitality. The railroad bridge over the Monocacy had been rebuilt since
+I passed through Frederick, and we trundled along over the track toward
+Baltimore.
+
+It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had ordered
+all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic message from
+Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had arrived at the former
+place, "wound doing well in good spirits expects to leave soon for
+Boston." After all, it was no great matter; the Captain was, no doubt,
+snugly lodged before this in the house called Beautiful, at * * * *
+Walnut Street, where that "grave and beautiful damsel named Discretion"
+had already welcomed him, smiling, though "the water stood in her eyes,"
+and had "called out Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little
+more discourse with him, had him into the family."
+
+The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the lady
+of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable, and whose
+benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the invalids I had
+left suffering at Frederick. General Wool still walked the corridors,
+inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his
+breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind
+offices. About the doors of the hotel the news-boys cried the papers in
+plaintive, wailing tones, as different from the sharp accents of their
+Boston counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern
+breeze. To understand what they said was, of course, impossible to any
+but an educated ear, and if I made out "Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was
+because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising
+coranach.
+
+I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third, there
+beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his brave wounded
+companions under that roof which covers a household of as noble hearts as
+ever throbbed with human sympathies. Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder
+Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory has
+cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes with
+their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,--the broad, the
+beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,--the river of
+Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where
+
+ "Aye those sunny mountains half-way down
+ Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--
+
+did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it lovely
+to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified his fame with
+the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame forever?" The
+prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a great
+sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting in the car,
+on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's dolphin,--also that
+mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the season, and ducks of
+lower degree at other periods.
+
+At Philadelphia again at last! Drive fast, O colored man and brother, to
+the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting
+for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to his bedside the face
+and the voice nearer than any save one to his heart in this his hour of
+pain and weakness! Up a long street with white shutters and white steps
+to all the houses. Off at right angles into another long street with
+white shutters and white steps to all the houses. Off again at another
+right angle into still another long street with white shutters and white
+steps to all the houses. The natives of this city pretend to know one
+street from another by some individual differences of aspect; but the
+best way for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from
+others is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.
+
+This corner-house is the one. Ring softly,--for the Lieutenant-Colonel
+lies there with a dreadfully wounded arm, and two sons of the family, one
+wounded like the Colonel, one fighting with death in the fog of a typhoid
+fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least sound you can make. I
+entered the house, but no cheerful smile met me. The sufferers were each
+of them thought to be in a critical condition. The fourth bed, waiting
+its tenant day after day, was still empty. Not a word from my Captain.
+
+Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank within me. Had he
+been taken ill on the road, perhaps been attacked with those formidable
+symptoms which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds that seemed to be
+doing well enough, and was his life ebbing away in some lonely cottage,
+nay, in some cold barn or shed, or at the wayside, unknown, uncared for?
+Somewhere between Philadelphia and Hagerstown, if not at the latter town,
+he must be, at any rate. I must sweep the hundred and eighty miles
+between these places as one would sweep a chamber where a precious pearl
+had been dropped. I must have a companion in my search, partly to help
+me look about, and partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely.
+Charley said he would go with me,--Charley, my Captain's beloved friend,
+gentle, but full of spirit and liveliness, cultivated, social,
+affectionate, a good talker, a most agreeable letter-writer, observing,
+with large relish of life, and keen sense of humor. He was not well
+enough to go, some of the timid ones said; but he answered by packing his
+carpet-bag, and in an hour or two we were on the Pennsylvania Central
+Railroad in full blast for Harrisburg.
+
+I should have been a forlorn creature but for the presence of my
+companion. In his delightful company I half forgot my anxieties, which,
+exaggerated as they may seem now, were not unnatural after what I had
+seen of the confusion and distress that had followed the great battle,
+nay, which seem almost justified by the recent statement that "high
+officers" were buried after that battle whose names were never
+ascertained. I noticed little matters, as usual. The road was filled in
+between the rails with cracked stones, such as are used for macadamizing
+streets. They keep the dust down, I suppose, for I could not think of
+any other use for them. By and by the glorious valley which stretches
+along through Chester and Lancaster Counties opened upon us. Much as I
+had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the
+uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me. The grazing pastures
+were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle
+looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the
+fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this
+region was called the England of Pennsylvania. The people whom we saw
+were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked round and
+wholesome.
+
+"Grass makes girls." I said to my companion, and left him to work out my
+Orphic saying, thinking to myself, that as guano makes grass, it was a
+legitimate conclusion that Ichaboe must be a nursery of female
+loveliness.
+
+As the train stopped at the different stations, I inquired at each if
+they had any wounded officers. None as yet; the red rays of the
+battle-field had not streamed off so far as this. Evening found us in
+the cars; they lighted candles in spring-candle-sticks; odd enough I
+thought it in the land of oil-wells and unmeasured floods of kerosene.
+Some fellows turned up the back of a seat so as to make it horizontal,
+and began gambling, or pretending to gamble; it looked as if they were
+trying to pluck a young countryman; but appearances are deceptive, and no
+deeper stake than "drinks for the crowd" seemed at last to be involved.
+But remembering that murder has tried of late years to establish itself
+as an institution in the cars, I was less tolerant of the doings of these
+"sportsmen" who tried to turn our public conveyance into a travelling
+Frascati. They acted as if they were used to it, and nobody seemed to
+pay much attention to their manoeuvres.
+
+We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the evening, and attempted to
+find our way to the Jones House, to which we had been commended. By some
+mistake, intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have been, or
+purely accidental, we went to the Herr House instead. I entered my name
+in the book, with that of my companion. A plain, middle-aged man stepped
+up, read it to himself in low tones, and coupled to it a literary title
+by which I have been sometimes known. He proved to be a graduate of Brown
+University, and had heard a certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered there a
+good many years ago. I remembered it, too; Professor Goddard, whose
+sudden and singular death left such lasting regret, was the Orator. I
+recollect that while I was speaking a drum went by the church, and how I
+was disgusted to see all the heads near the windows thrust out of them,
+as if the building were on fire. Cedat armis toga. The clerk in the
+office, a mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite in his
+manners, and did all he could to make us comfortable. He was of a
+literary turn, and knew one of his guests in his character of author. At
+tea, a mild old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next us. He,
+too, had come hunting after his son, a lieutenant in a Pennsylvania
+regiment. Of these, father and son, more presently.
+
+After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief medical officer of the
+hospitals in the place, who was staying at the Brady House. A
+magnificent old toddy-mixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect, as
+all grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to dive through the
+features of men to the bottom of their souls and pockets to see whether
+they are solvent to the amount of sixpence, answered my question by a
+wave of one hand, the other being engaged in carrying a dram to his lips.
+His superb indifference gratified my artistic feeling more than it
+wounded my personal sensibilities. Anything really superior in its line
+claims my homage, and this man was the ideal bartender, above all vulgar
+passions, untouched by commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the
+liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those
+lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the
+roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the cheap, all-powerful
+substitute.
+
+Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having
+slept for I don't know how many nights.
+
+"Take my card up to him, if you please." "This way, sir."
+
+A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not expected to be as
+affable, when attacked in his bed, as a French Princess of old time at
+her morning receptions. Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I entered,
+without effusion, but without rudeness. His thick, dark moustache was
+chopped off square at the lower edge of the upper lip, which implied a
+decisive, if not a peremptory, style of character.
+
+I am Dr. So-and-So of Hubtown, looking after my wounded son. (I gave my
+name and said Boston, of course, in reality.)
+
+Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features
+growing cordial. Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly excused
+his reception of me. The day before, as he told me, he had dismissed
+from the service a medical man hailing from ******, Pennsylvania, bearing
+my last name, preceded by the same two initials; and he supposed, when my
+card came up, it was this individual who was disturbing his slumbers.
+The coincidence was so unlikely a priori, unless some forlorn parent
+without antecedents had named, a child after me, that I could not help
+cross-questioning the Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact
+was just as he had said, even to the somewhat unusual initials. Dr.
+Wilson very kindly furnished me all the information in his power, gave me
+directions for telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every disposition
+to serve me.
+
+On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old
+gentleman in a very happy state. He had just discovered his son, in a
+comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel. He thought that he
+could probably give us some information which would prove interesting.
+To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in company with our
+kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see me as happy as
+himself. He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and presently came down
+to conduct us there.
+
+Lieutenant P________, of the Pennsylvania __th, was a very fresh,
+bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent
+injury received in action. A grape-shot, after passing through a post
+and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not penetrating or
+breaking. He had good news for me.
+
+That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through
+Harrisburg, going East. He had conversed in the bar-room of this hotel
+with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder (it might be the
+lower part of the neck), and had his arm in a sling. He belonged to the
+Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that he was a Captain, by the
+two bars on his shoulder-strap. His name was my family-name; he was tall
+and youthful, like my Captain. At four o'clock he left in the train for
+Philadelphia. Closely questioned, the Lieutenant's evidence was as
+round, complete, and lucid as a Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.
+
+TE DEUM LAUDAMUS! The Lord's name be praised! The dead pain in the
+semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of stupid,
+unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to man and
+beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when the dam loses
+her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped short. There was a
+feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or cut a strangling
+garter,--only it was all over my system. What more could I ask to assure
+me of the Captain's safety? As soon as the telegraph office opens
+tomorrow morning we will send a message to our friends in Philadelphia,
+and get a reply, doubtless, which will settle the whole matter.
+
+The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the message was sent accordingly.
+In due time, the following reply was received: "Phil Sept 24 I think the
+report you have heard that W [the Captain] has gone East must be an error
+we have not seen or heard of him here M L H"
+
+DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI! He could not have passed through Philadelphia
+without visiting the house called Beautiful, where he had been so
+tenderly cared for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those whom
+he loved were lying in grave peril of life or limb. Yet he did pass
+through Harrisburg, going East, going to Philadelphia, on his way home.
+Ah, this is it! He must have taken the late night-train from
+Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home. There is such
+a train, not down in the guide-book, but we were assured of the fact at
+the Harrisburg depot. By and by came the reply from Dr. Wilson's
+telegraphic message: nothing had been heard of the Captain at
+Chambersburg. Still later, another message came from our Philadelphia
+friend, saying that he was seen on Friday last at the house of Mrs.
+K________, a well-known Union lady in Hagerstown. Now this could not be
+true, for he did not leave Keedysville until Saturday; but the name of
+the lady furnished a clew by which we could probably track him. A
+telegram was at once sent to Mrs. K_______, asking information. It was
+transmitted immediately, but when the answer would be received was
+uncertain, as the Government almost monopolized the line. I was, on the
+whole, so well satisfied that the Captain had gone East, that, unless
+something were heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the
+late train leaving a little after midnight for Philadelphia.
+
+This same morning we visited several of the temporary hospitals, churches
+and school-houses, where the wounded were lying. In one of these, after
+looking round as usual, I asked aloud, "Any Massachusetts men here?" Two
+bright faces lifted themselves from their pillows and welcomed me by
+name. The one nearest me was private John B. Noyes of Company B,
+Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of my old college class-tutor, now the
+reverend and learned Professor of Hebrew, etc., in Harvard University.
+His neighbor was Corporal Armstrong of the same Company. Both were
+slightly wounded, doing well. I learned then and since from Mr. Noyes
+that they and their comrades were completely overwhelmed by the
+attentions of the good people of Harrisburg,--that the ladies brought
+them fruits and flowers, and smiles, better than either,--and that the
+little boys of the place were almost fighting for the privilege of doing
+their errands. I am afraid there will be a good many hearts pierced in
+this war that will have no bulletmark to show.
+
+There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to Camp
+Curtin might lighten some of them. A rickety wagon carried us to the
+camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a basket of good
+things with her for a sick brother. "Poor boy! he will be sure to die,"
+she said. The rustic sentries uncrossed their muskets and let us in.
+The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with hills, spacious, well kept
+apparently, but did not present any peculiar attraction for us. The
+visit would have been a dull one, had we not happened to get sight of a
+singular-looking set of human beings in the distance. They were clad in
+stuff of different hues, gray and brown being the leading shades, but
+both subdued by a neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize the
+variegated apparel of travel-stained vagabonds. They looked slouchy,
+listless, torpid,--an ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of
+such fellows as an old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a
+broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery army which has given
+our generals so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a bystander told
+us. A talk with them might be profitable and entertaining. But they
+were tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of
+the line which separated us from them.
+
+A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were referred.
+Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for
+anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it,
+and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit
+hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend
+as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian
+origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch
+type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious in the
+hold, and calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make fast
+time. He must have been in politics at some time or other, for he made
+orations to all the "Secesh," in which he explained to them that the
+United States considered and treated them like children, and enforced
+upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels attempting to do
+anything against such a power as that of the National Government.
+
+Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered
+somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly talk
+with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help feeling a kind
+of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion as
+one is like to find under the stars and stripes. It is fair to take a
+man prisoner. It is fair to make speeches to a man. But to take a man
+prisoner and then make speeches to him while in durance is not fair.
+
+I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to something
+but for the reason assigned.
+
+One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay pipe
+in his mouth. He was a Scotchman from Ayr, dour enough, and little
+disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa Briggs,"
+and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns." He professed to
+feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting, and was in the
+army, I judged, only from compulsion. There was a wild-haired, unsoaped
+boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who looked as if he might be
+about seventeen, as he said he was. I give my questions and his answers
+literally.
+
+"What State do you come from?"
+
+"Georgy."
+
+"What part of Georgia?"
+
+"Midway."
+
+--[How odd that is! My father was settled for seven years as pastor over
+the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a grandson
+or great grandson of one of his parishioners.]
+
+"Where did you go to church when you were at home?"
+
+"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."
+
+"What did you do before you became a soldier?"
+
+"Nothin'."
+
+"What do you mean to do when you get back?"
+
+"Nothin'."
+
+Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed, this
+dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but one
+degree above that of the idiot?
+
+With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--one
+button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom.
+A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the "subject race" by
+any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his exposed surfaces. He
+did not say much, possibly because he was convinced by the statements and
+arguments of the Dutch captain. He had on strong, iron-heeled shoes, of
+English make, which he said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond.
+
+I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the
+prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, "For our homes."
+Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great
+indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a
+sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory to
+those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting for. A
+feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such it could
+be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence. It was
+cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity from the
+body politic to make a soldier of.
+
+We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the party.
+"That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion. A young
+fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly
+smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine,
+almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we turned
+towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the loose
+canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk. He was
+from Mississippi, he said, had been at Georgetown College, and was so far
+imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility before
+him was not new to his ears. Of course I found it easy to come into
+magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility what he was
+fighting for. "Because I like the excitement of it," he answered. I
+know those fighters with women's mouths and boys' cheeks. One such from
+the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped away from his
+nursery, and dashed in under, an assumed name among the red-legged
+Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the
+earliest conflicts of the war.
+
+"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to the
+young Mississippian.
+
+"I have shot at a good many of them," he replied, modestly, his woman's
+mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.
+
+The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his
+ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs
+of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for
+the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there
+was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into
+the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking how much
+pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with
+unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it
+would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair
+proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him
+before he had time to say dunder and blixum.
+
+We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message.
+Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us
+hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.
+
+We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but
+of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened
+in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his broad-brimmed,
+steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,--a
+sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified person like
+him, business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted while occupied
+with another, but giving himself up heartily to the claimant who held him
+for the time. He was so genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it
+seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all the morning, broke away
+as we came into his presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled
+the air all around us. He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were
+his own private affair. In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic
+message on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown, sent through the Government
+channel from the State Capitol,--one so direct and urgent that I should
+be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had sent in the
+morning.
+
+While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an
+odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 't is almost an
+apple," who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled faintly
+at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion, and a
+gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in the atmosphere of
+horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with tents,
+which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in huge letters,
+thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S HOLE, and similar
+inscriptions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which looks upon
+the Susquehanna instead of the Common, and shows a long front of handsome
+houses with fair gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile across here,
+but very shallow now. The codling told us that a Rebel spy had been
+caught trying its fords a little while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin
+with a heavy ball chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a lie, Dr.
+Wilson said. A little farther along we came to the barkless stump of the
+tree to which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named after him, was
+tied by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of scalping or
+roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who paddled across the
+stream to save him. Our youngling pointed out a very respectable-looking
+stone house as having been "built by the Indians" about those times.
+Guides have queer notions occasionally.
+
+I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions and
+dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.
+
+"Who are those?" I said to my conductor.
+
+"Them?" he answered. "Them's the men that's been out West, out to
+Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin."
+
+Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever
+it is called, seems most worth notice. Its facade is imposing, with a
+row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a
+crag over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower floor only appeared
+to be open to the public. Its tessellated pavement and ample courts
+suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel
+uncrowded at their devotions; but from appearances about the place where
+the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked the officiating priest
+for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be
+unanswered. The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once
+looked upon,--the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua. It was the same
+thing in Italy and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and
+calls it a place of entertainment. The fragrance of innumerable
+libations and the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall
+ascend day and night through the arches of his funereal monument. What
+are the poor dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that
+stand at the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to
+this perpetual offering of sacrifice?
+
+Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching. The telegraph office would
+presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown. Let
+us step over and see for ourselves. A message! A message!
+
+"Captain H. still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is
+doing well Mrs HK--."
+
+A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the
+hotel.
+
+We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or,
+if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently
+narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber
+like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over-tense nerves
+are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over
+one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the
+whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost
+fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so
+magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently
+confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging
+from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer
+that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as I
+could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with
+protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers are
+supposed to possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of his
+ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means
+the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had
+nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest
+consciousness of most abundantly deserving.
+
+Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday. The train from
+Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A. M: We took another ride behind the
+codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again. Being in a
+gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the
+town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as
+seen by the different lights of evening and morning. After this, we
+visited the school-house hospital. A fine young fellow, whose arm had
+been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lock-jaw. The beads
+of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and contracted features.
+He was under the effect of opiates,--why not (if his case was desperate,
+as it seemed to be considered) stop his sufferings with chloroform? It
+was suggested that it might shorten life. "What then?" I said. "Are a
+dozen additional spasms worth living for?"
+
+The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went
+to the station. I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to
+me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round.
+Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed a
+car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine,
+without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so
+silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near it
+came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel
+pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The train
+was late,--fifteen minutes, half an hour late, and I began to get
+nervous, lest something had happened. While I was looking for it, out
+started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was
+expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked an
+employee of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few
+minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train
+with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and
+answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.
+
+Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did
+occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven
+persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and
+crippled!
+
+To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected
+train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the
+track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.
+
+In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;
+there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many
+cities.
+
+"How are you, Boy?"
+
+"How are you, Dad?"
+
+Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us
+Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural
+impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so
+that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once
+overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his
+brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women.
+But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears,
+while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film
+of moisture.
+
+These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or
+griefs. I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice
+addressed me by name. I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed
+in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time. I should have
+yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might
+well call forth.
+
+"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once
+in Boston?"
+
+"I do remember him well."
+
+"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I am carrying his body back
+with me on this train. He was my only child. If you could come to my
+house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a pleasure to me."
+
+This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New
+System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship and
+capacity. It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and
+I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth. Some time
+afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to
+President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course of
+independent study he was proposing to himself. I was most happy to
+smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and
+express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at
+Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a
+trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never
+saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his
+mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer
+would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words
+spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's
+chambers. For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of
+contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to
+me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must
+now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil
+sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed
+the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has
+died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation
+and to mankind.
+
+So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded
+soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come once
+more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same region
+I had left! No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart warm with
+the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought of that
+lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by Evangeline
+upon the great river. Ah, me! if that railroad crash had been a few
+hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so close
+to each other!
+
+The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough. The
+Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for
+Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I took it for
+granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some
+ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity, and
+pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their
+invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion
+was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some
+of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares,
+and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the
+piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,--and all this after the
+swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the
+dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting
+ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart! Thanks, uncounted
+thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him from
+Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite
+bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well
+under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging
+everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time and
+leave him as well as ever.
+
+At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of
+the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind
+companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these
+benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was no
+longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were Kool Slaa and
+Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet,
+simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant of
+Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in that
+marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!
+
+Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known
+to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also
+approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom we
+passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so
+good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it
+as an illumination.
+
+A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of
+that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the
+country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by
+its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our
+economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences,
+and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American
+city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. Many of its characteristics
+are accounted for to some extent by its geographical position. It is the
+great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the
+South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits,
+and result in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric
+brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out
+Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its
+famous water-works. In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was
+with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial
+fountain. Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and
+diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I
+looked upon their giant mechanism. But in the place of "Pratt's Garden"
+was an open park, and the old house where Robert Morris held his court in
+a former generation was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension
+bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch
+used to leap the river at a single bound,--an arch of greater span, as
+they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry
+Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of
+Rhodes. It had an air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming
+the dead level of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of
+the rectangular city. Philadelphia will never be herself again until
+another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new
+palladium. She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly
+shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple,
+remembering the glories of that which it replaced.
+
+There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not
+charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same Friday
+evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated. As I
+was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast
+my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a
+bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange
+intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces. I
+called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was
+irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing
+luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for
+down the firmament.
+
+On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr.
+Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad,
+had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious look on his
+face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and meant to do
+it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch spread for
+the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with no visits,
+but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I saw on the
+route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite
+sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I
+have ever seen,--each length being of a special pattern, ramified,
+reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust
+some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with
+the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of
+my journey.
+
+I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people
+whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time or
+other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a group
+by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I
+found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on
+the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at New Haven.
+The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various
+ways to our comfort.
+
+It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in
+the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then
+before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show. Suppose that I
+should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this everlasting
+circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like
+of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some
+one of them was not a neighbor.
+
+A little less than a year before, after the Ball's Bluff accident, the
+Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our
+homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the
+ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate
+this time, the house being really very full. Farther from the flowers and
+nearer to the stars,--to reach the neighborhood of which last the per
+ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any mortal,
+wounded or well.
+
+The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however. It is a giant
+corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine judgment,
+is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending
+and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is
+watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is
+said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus.
+
+I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels
+that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's. My
+Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards.
+I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested at
+our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds the citizens had been
+arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen. The Central Park is an
+expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to form ridges which will
+give views and hollows that will hold water. The hips and elbows and
+other bones of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of rocks
+which give character to the scenery, and an unchangeable, unpurchasable
+look to a landscape that without them would have been in danger of being
+fattened by art and money out of all its native features. The roads were
+fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans
+elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast
+horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by
+clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,--but it cost
+me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of
+Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends
+on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as
+Brookline is central to Boston.
+
+The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but remote
+pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his
+Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial
+reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond. I say this not
+invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our own
+metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the
+great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden,
+the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth
+Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer
+clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her
+right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be
+ashamed of.
+
+On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for
+home. Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling
+houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford: then
+NORWALK. Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of
+the great disaster. But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my
+readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my
+friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them
+hanging over the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of
+two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.
+
+Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its
+phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown
+again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes
+cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that
+look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for
+balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a
+detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so
+murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the
+frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its neat
+carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, its
+vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows; Hartford,
+substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every conical spire an
+extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so onward, by and across
+the broad, shallow Connecticut,--dull red road and dark river woven in
+like warp and woof by the shuttle of the darting engine; then
+Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving, hot-summered,
+giant-treed town,--city among villages, village among cities; Worcester,
+with its Daedalian labyrinth of crossing railroad-bars, where the
+snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled
+in their dens; Framingham, fair cup-bearer, leaf-cinctured Hebe of the
+deep-bosomed Queen sitting by the seaside on the throne of the Six
+Nations. And now I begin to know the road, not by towns, but by single
+dwellings; not by miles, but by rods. The poles of the great magnet that
+draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains
+must be near at hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and
+screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall granite obelisk
+comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp
+against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge
+flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of
+the three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as
+when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half-open chlamys
+before her worshippers.
+
+Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters
+and towards the western sun! Let the joyous light shine in upon the
+pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the
+names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our
+boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side of
+honor and of duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his
+aches and weariness. So comes down another night over this household,
+unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings,--a night of peaceful rest and
+grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive
+again, and was lost and is found.
+
+
+
+
+THE INEVITABLE TRIAL
+
+[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the 4th
+of July, 1863.]
+
+It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's birth,
+to recall whatever is happiest and noblest in our past history, and to
+join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the heroes, the men of
+thought and the men of action, to whom that history owes its existence.
+In other years this pleasing office may have been all that was required
+of the holiday speaker. But to-day, when the very life of the nation is
+threatened, when clouds are thick about us, and men's hearts are
+throbbing with passion, or failing with fear, it is the living question
+of the hour, and not the dead story of the past, which forces itself into
+all minds, and will find unrebuked debate in all assemblies.
+
+In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who sincerely
+love their country and mean to do their duty to her disappoint the hopes
+and expectations of those who are actively working in her cause. They
+seem to have lost whatever moral force they may have once possessed, and
+to go drifting about from one profitless discontent to another, at a time
+when every citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service. It is
+because their minds are bewildered, and they are no longer truly
+themselves. Show them the path of duty, inspire them with hope for the
+future, lead them upwards from the turbid stream of events to the bright,
+translucent springs of eternal principles, strengthen their trust in
+humanity and their faith in God, and you may yet restore them to their
+manhood and their country.
+
+At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious
+recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should try to judge the weak and
+wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously. The conditions in
+which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find themselves are new
+and unprovided for. Our quiet burghers and farmers are in the position
+of river-boats blown from their moorings out upon a vast ocean, where
+such a typhoon is raging as no mariner who sails its waters ever before
+looked upon. If their beliefs change with the veering of the blast, if
+their trust in their fellow-men, and in the course of Divine Providence,
+seems well-nigh shipwrecked, we must remember that they were taken
+unawares, and without the preparation which could fit them to struggle
+with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith is the
+man; and they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to
+those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech, feeble
+in effort, and purposeless in aim.
+
+Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,--that
+self-government is the natural condition of an adult society, as
+distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary
+arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences;
+that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every
+child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the
+best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two
+claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves and
+divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union; that the
+contest in which we are engaged is one of principles overlaid by
+circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we study the
+movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral nature
+of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the study; that all
+honest persons with average natural sensibility, with respectable
+understanding, educated in the school of northern teaching, will have
+eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed host which fights
+or pleads for freedom, as against every form of tyranny; if not in the
+front rank now, then in the rear rank by and by;--assuming these
+propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are ready to do, and believing
+that the more they are debated before the public the more they will gain
+converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting to keep the great
+questions of the time in unceasing and untiring agitation. They must be
+discussed, in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by different
+classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen; by statesmen and simple
+voters; by moralists and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated
+hand-laborers; by men of facts and figures, and by men of theories and
+aspirations; in the abstract and in the concrete; discussed and
+rediscussed every month, every week, every day, and almost every hour, as
+the telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky
+base of our political order.
+
+Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions of
+the great body of loyal citizens. They may do nothing toward changing
+the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who
+follow politics as a trade. They may have no hold upon that class of
+persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as other persons are
+wanting in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds, the
+tender consciences supported by the tremulous knees of an infirm
+intelligence, the timid compromisers who are always trying to curve the
+straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual
+debate of these living questions is the one offered means of grace and
+hope of earthly redemption. And thus a true, unhesitating patriot may be
+willing to listen with patience to arguments which he does not need, to
+appeals which have no special significance for him, in the hope that some
+less clear in mind or less courageous in temper may profit by them.
+
+As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth day
+of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of American
+Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge in
+public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental
+one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any
+ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are
+madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe
+and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are
+in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to an irresponsible
+tyranny; if we are moving in the narrow circles which are to ingulf us in
+national ruin,--then we had better sing a dirge, and leave this idle
+assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are reverberating through the
+air, and tear down the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery
+symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there
+should be silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets;
+and the emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its
+future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.
+
+If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result
+of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away
+the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy
+end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for the
+kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to such
+dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right
+throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but a
+peace proclaimed from the capital of every revolted province in the name
+of the sacred, inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm,
+conjured up by the imagination of the weak, acted on by the craft of the
+cunning; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our perdition, the
+movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution carries us
+farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's
+blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of
+the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make
+them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's
+discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant
+festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our
+harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to inherit the
+fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making day
+and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.
+
+The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come a
+little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come. The disease of
+the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery of
+war was its only remedy.
+
+In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse
+into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if
+this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have
+gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the glories
+of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his heresies; if
+Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr. Phillips, the
+Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never
+uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr. Clay had
+still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention;
+if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to
+fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,--we might have
+been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but simple
+Martha's faith, without the reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst
+been here, my brother had not died."
+
+They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling, who
+believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride their
+waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to
+continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own
+bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human
+progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the
+intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in the
+more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more familiar than that there
+is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once, so
+that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star. You
+may trace a common motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the
+earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek architecture, and
+in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth
+and following centuries, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and
+blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the
+flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven. You may see the
+same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the
+names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in
+the painters, the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the
+authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this
+century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of
+Cowper and the song of Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that
+Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same
+reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived
+independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity
+with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their
+hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness
+beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that
+Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce,
+were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. You
+see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were
+startling the crown officials with the same accents of liberty, and why
+the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the
+Province of Massachusetts. This law of simultaneous intellectual
+movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay
+and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable
+to that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the
+present conflict.
+
+The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this
+or that enthusiast or fanatic. It was the consequence of a movement in
+mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions, and
+the men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it most
+completely, or who talked longest and loudest about it. Long before the
+accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the halls
+of the Capitol, long before the "Liberator" opened its batteries, the
+controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and
+predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional
+divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the
+seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon
+the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a
+quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would
+be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight
+which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union
+was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but through
+the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two
+sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half a
+century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the
+system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the
+sight of his descendants, that "by an inevitable chain of causes and
+effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." The
+Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he
+saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of
+Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year
+when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.
+
+The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned
+us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the
+cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The
+descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny," the "petty tyrants"
+as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to
+love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they
+tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet
+where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous
+emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become changed
+by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness.
+
+At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden
+harvest of crime. Violence stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and
+perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly organized
+conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief
+stronghold of the Union. That the principle which underlay these acts of
+fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed
+sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government
+to be its Messiah to the listening world. As with Pharaoh, the Lord
+hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened that
+of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. Then spake Mr.
+"Vice-President" Stephens those memorable words which fixed forever the
+theory of the new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism to
+the dignity of a philosophic system. He first proclaimed the gospel of
+eternal tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved for
+the western Palestine. Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! The
+corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized inequality of
+races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men protect women and
+children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and of
+God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward of
+his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary
+curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon
+whose darkness has dawned the star of the occidental Bethlehem!
+
+After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave States,
+we read in the "Richmond Examiner": "The establishment of the
+Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course of the
+mistaken civilization of the age. For 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,'
+we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination, and Government."
+
+A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to look
+for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency in
+dividing the country. Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you
+will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half across
+the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its splintery
+projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to
+the limitations of particular States, but as a county or other limited
+section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. Add to this the
+official statement made in 1862, that "there is not one regiment or
+battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in or derived from
+the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union"; throw in
+gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit declaration in the speech referred
+to, and we will consider the evidence closed for the present on this
+count of the indictment.
+
+In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of
+fracture, this precise statement, testimony from so many sources,
+extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of
+slavery, a priori, and its actual influence as shown by the facts, few
+will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed its
+course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on the
+white subjects of its corrupting dominion. Northern acquiescence or even
+sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily on the
+consciences of its supporters. Many profess to think that Northern
+fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing the black dye
+of slavery in regions which would but for that have washed themselves
+free of its stain in tears of penitence. It is a delusion and a snare to
+trust in any such false and flimsy reasons where there is enough and more
+than enough in the institution itself to account for its growth. Slavery
+gratifies at once the love of power, the love of money, and the love of
+ease; it finds a victim for anger who cannot smite back his oppressor;
+and it offers to all, without measure, the seductive privileges which the
+Mormon gospel reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible of
+Mahomet only dares promise to the saints in heaven.
+
+Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that the
+same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and the
+leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not
+satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross also for
+the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its conservative
+traditions! It is asserted that the fault was quite as much on our side
+as on the other; that our agitators and abolishers kindled the flame for
+which the combustibles were all ready on the other side of the border.
+If these men could have been silenced, our brothers had not died.
+
+Who are the persons that use this argument? They are the very ones who
+are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right of free
+discussion. At a time when every power the nation can summon is needed
+to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their force upon its
+foes,--when a false traitor at home may lose us a battle by a word, and a
+lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or weekly
+stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the liberty of
+speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to deal with government,
+with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any terms they
+choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and assail the
+only men who have any claim at all to rule over the country, as the very
+ones who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposition members of
+society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault with those
+persons who spoke their minds freely in the past on that great question
+which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present dissensions.
+
+It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards
+reformers. They are never general favorites. They are apt to interfere
+with vested rights and time-hallowed interests. They often wear an
+unlovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to that of
+Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances. It
+is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty.
+It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark
+plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of
+eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious
+analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the
+general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral
+nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they
+please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them or
+not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.
+They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but
+they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as
+soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die. To quarrel with
+them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far
+from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden
+upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of
+court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the
+bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule
+of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which
+will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one
+of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him
+at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of
+Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the
+Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of Slavery! They hunted
+another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within
+a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the
+marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, marched out before a
+vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the
+streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and
+Liberty!
+
+The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at
+their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
+emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is
+charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
+understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with them,
+as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed
+characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act from
+sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon
+them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any
+two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.
+It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in the
+keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left the hard
+intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant presence of
+beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman is the
+ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or
+later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion; which will
+by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last
+thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters. Woman herself
+borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and
+childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the
+picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our
+home." To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively
+attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the
+sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is
+merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural
+sensibilities.
+
+With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
+direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the
+other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally
+inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics. For what is
+meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his convictions of
+what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his
+fractional share of the government extends. If one has come to the
+conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or
+statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected
+that he will choose to be represented by those who share his belief, and
+who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get rid of
+the wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents involved.
+To prevent opinion from organizing itself under political forms may be
+very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice of
+self-government. And if at last organized opinions become arrayed in
+hostile shape against each other, we shall find that a just war is only
+the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected impulses of
+which the original source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and
+uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing
+through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of
+material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the
+statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender
+conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks upon
+the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because
+of thine enemies."
+
+The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the order of
+Nature and the Being who established it. Unless the law of moral
+progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it
+would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience
+against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the words of so
+calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents
+"such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have
+been totally perverted." Until the infinite selfishness of the powers
+that hate and fear the principles of free government swallowed up their
+convenient virtues, that system was hissed at by all the old-world
+civilization. While in one section of our land the attempt has been
+going on to lift it out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the
+sphere of the world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the
+protest of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow louder and stronger
+until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces. The
+moral uprising of the North came with the logical precision of destiny;
+the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to erect a slave
+empire followed with fated certainty; and the only question left for us
+of the North was, whether we should suffer the cause of the Nation to go
+by default, or maintain its existence by the argument of cannon and
+musket, of bayonet and sabre.
+
+The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy
+purpose. It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the preservation
+of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a
+civil request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation
+would commit suicide, without making any unnecessary trouble about it.
+It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that there
+were constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying violent
+hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone,
+that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from food until the
+natural consequences of that proceeding should manifest themselves. All
+this was done as between a single State and an isolated fortress; but it
+was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast
+conspiracy uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of
+treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the doors were
+opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle their wild
+natures to frenzy, was the sight of flowing blood.
+
+As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated
+beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice
+aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into
+the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was
+literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the
+southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the
+trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom
+history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient
+Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote
+every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to
+torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that
+she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the
+smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the
+representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the
+North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid
+hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's
+Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved
+the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope for in
+the future,--the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next
+to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to
+all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.
+
+Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of
+events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
+humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please
+themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under
+any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence of
+South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat,
+in which we must either die or give the last and finishing stroke.
+
+By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida
+would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia
+the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored
+under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of
+the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have
+perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis
+shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of
+secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the
+red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the ships
+and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the
+traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States
+have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now
+triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
+Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
+fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the
+Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation
+as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of the
+volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the
+first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that in
+the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not
+sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe to
+strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its golden
+scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.
+Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can
+forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be
+found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own
+streets, against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were
+to defend her sacred heritage?
+
+Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had
+suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish
+the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on
+the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud
+labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of
+freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands
+of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.
+
+Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and
+to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are our
+enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating.
+We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us. We know
+what the West End of London wishes may be result of this controversy.
+The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears,
+threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut
+into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult if they
+could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless
+weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of
+knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great
+Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in
+struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to
+abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then
+become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect
+way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict
+made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence."
+
+So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the
+Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than
+those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same
+position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.
+
+"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our
+national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied that
+the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places,
+is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds,
+"everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of
+free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an
+oligarchy." These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose
+generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by
+the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever
+spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which
+infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.
+
+It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of
+British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms of
+the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt,
+very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a strife
+which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one side
+the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in earnest, and
+on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her own poet, one of
+the truest and purest of her children, had said of his countrymen, in
+words which might well have been spoken by the British Premier to the
+American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind feeling on the part
+of his government:
+
+ "Alas I expect it not. We found no bait
+ To tempt us in thy country. Doing good,
+ Disinterested good, is not our trade."
+
+We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest lines.
+We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why they are
+our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, which, in
+spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs so long
+associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne. One of
+these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the purchased army;
+the third is the long-suffering people. Whenever the third caryatid
+comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe
+will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder that our
+ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic
+split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and
+standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be
+pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that
+broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!
+
+We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know
+our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social
+progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both
+been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has
+been true to the cause of the people. That deep and generous thinker,
+who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher
+thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which
+none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to
+listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from
+liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations
+embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.
+Italy,--would you know on which side the rights of the people and the
+hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what
+surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager
+sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling
+many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the
+heroic Garibaldi?
+
+But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is
+granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the nation,
+and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind,
+for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against
+oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the
+unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be
+that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it too
+much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North depends
+chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and
+manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold
+out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can never be told until they
+are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of
+these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns of either. We have
+a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to
+give up a just and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown
+to be unattainable for want of material agencies. What was the end to be
+attained by accepting the gage of battle? It was to get the better of
+our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps which we
+should then consider necessary to our present and future safety. The
+more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must it be subdued.
+It may not even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long since,
+that the victory over the rebellion should have been easily and speedily
+won, and so have failed to develop the true meaning of the conflict, to
+bring out the full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the
+means which would have served it for a still more desperate future
+effort. We cannot complain that our task has proved too easy. We give
+our Southern army,--for we must remember that it is our army, after all,
+only in a state of mutiny,--we give our Southern army credit for
+excellent spirit and perseverance in the face of many disadvantages. But
+we have a few plain facts which show the probable course of events; the
+gradual but sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of
+the boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even
+of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting with
+their long lines of bayonets,--may God grant them victory!--the progress
+of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold and currency
+at Richmond and Washington. If the index-hands of force and credit
+continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where will the
+Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?
+
+Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of
+the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources of our
+opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own.
+The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but runs as freely
+as ever when its last grains are about to fall. The merchant wears as
+bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at the
+height of his fortunes. If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy "a
+mere shell," so far as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we
+say how soon the shell will collapse? It seems impossible that our own
+dissensions can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the
+Morristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his
+faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is
+ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure
+on every inch of the containing surface. Now we know the tremendous
+force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern people. There
+are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence
+which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds, and
+drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what is
+the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the
+remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of
+destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of the
+fabric of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason
+from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of the
+people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible that
+the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious
+recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans,
+their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and
+protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the
+same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical
+organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and
+eternal alienation. Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite
+sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other
+prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the
+plotters have managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to be
+doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in
+Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of
+deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the enemies,"
+as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the
+prison-cells of Paul and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the
+aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is
+material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it, to
+overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from
+impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its
+new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan
+which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue with
+blood-vessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.
+
+Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say
+absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of those
+whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of discouragement. Can
+we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands? As honor
+comes before safety, let us look at that first. We have undertaken to
+resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and
+aggressions, even to the direct menace of our national capital. The
+blood which our best and bravest have shed will never sink into the
+ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is shown
+to be insufficient. If we stop now, all the loss of life has been
+butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the
+outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of
+honor blooms forever where it was shed. To accept less than indemnity
+for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can
+afford it, and security for the future, would discredit us in our own
+eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to despise us.
+But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the
+surrender of our fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on
+the banks of the national river,--and this and much more would surely be
+demanded of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a level
+with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open
+to be plundered by all comers!
+
+If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would
+be safe and lasting? We could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough
+for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to knit
+together. But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace, in
+which the grass would have time to grow in the war-paths, and the bruised
+arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State arsenal,
+sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many sucking lambs?
+It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers would be again
+summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we have seen
+enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us
+contented with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is whether
+we could leave our children and our children's children with any secure
+trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are
+enduring, probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated
+form.
+
+It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is
+established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace
+possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who
+already call the Southern whites their masters. We know what the
+prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those people
+have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and
+bitter warfare. We know what their tone is to the people of the North;
+if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are schoolmasters who will
+teach us to our heart's content. We see how easily their social
+organization adapts itself to a state of warfare. They breed a superior
+order of men for leaders, an ignorant commonalty ready to follow them as
+the vassals of feudal times followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen,
+who, unless this war changes them from chattels to human beings, will
+continue to add vastly to their military strength in raising their food,
+in building their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in
+fact, except, it may be, the handling of weapons. The institution
+proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not
+merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human
+instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of the
+desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah. They call
+themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North, yet there is
+as much difference between their Christianity and that of Wesley or of
+Channing, as between creeds that in past times have vowed mutual
+extermination. Still we must not call them barbarians because they
+cherish an institution hostile to civilization. Their highest culture
+stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark background of ignorance
+against which it is seen; but it would be injustice to deny that they
+have always shone in political science, or that their military capacity
+makes them most formidable antagonists, and that, however inferior they
+may be to their Northern fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature
+and science, the social elegances and personal graces lend their outward
+show to the best circles among their dominant class.
+
+Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,--our
+neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands of
+miles,--but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce, intolerant,
+fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual standing army;
+hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his swarthy boy to hate
+the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile nation on our frontier
+is incompatible with our peaceful development? Their wealth, the proceeds
+of enforced labor, multiplied by the breaking up of new cottonfields, and
+in due time by the reopening of the slave-trade, will go to purchase
+arms, to construct fortresses, to fit out navies. The old Saracens,
+fanatics for a religion which professed to grow by conquest, were a
+nation of predatory and migrating warriors. The Southern people,
+fanatics for a system essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which
+cannot remain stationary, but must grow by alternate appropriations of
+labor and of land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes.
+Already, even, the insolence of their language to the people of the North
+is a close imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics
+affected toward all the nations of Europe. What the "Christian dogs"
+were to the followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the "Northern
+mud-sills" are to the followers of the Southern Moloch. The
+accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were prefigured in
+the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train of Painim knights
+who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent. In all branches of
+culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond them. The schools of
+mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian teachers. The heavens
+declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers, as Algorab and Aldebaran
+repeat their Arabic names to the students of the starry firmament. The
+sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of the nineteenth century, to hold
+the treasures of its Industry, could show nothing fairer than the court
+which copies the Moorish palace that crowns the summit of Granada. Yet
+this was the power which Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity
+and civilization, had to break like a potter's vessel; these were the
+people whom Spain had to utterly extirpate from the land where they had
+ruled for centuries.
+
+Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous Afrit of
+Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will be to you
+what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shattered their
+armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their broken strength upon
+the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms. Prepare for the possible fate
+of Christian Spain; for a slave-market in Philadelphia; for the Alhambra
+of a Southern caliph on the grounds consecrated by the domestic virtues
+of a long line of Presidents and their exemplary families. Remember the
+ages of border warfare between England and Scotland, closed at last by
+the union of the two kingdoms. Recollect the hunting of the deer on the
+Cheviot hills, and all that it led to; then think of the game which the
+dogs will follow open-mouthed across our Southern border, and all that is
+like to follow which the child may rue that is unborn; think of these
+possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are
+ready to make a peace which will give you such a neighbor; which may
+betray your civilization as that of half the Peninsula was given up to
+the Moors; which may leave your fair border provinces to be crushed under
+the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left to be trodden down by the Duke
+of Alva!
+
+No! no! fellow-citizens! We must fight in this quarrel until one side or
+the other is exhausted. Rather than suffer all that we have poured out
+of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance, to have been
+expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question, an unfinished
+conflict, an unavenged insult, an unrighted wrong, a stained escutcheon,
+a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an unheroic memory to the
+descendants of those who have always claimed that their fathers were
+heroes; rather than do all this, it were hardly an American exaggeration
+to say, better that the last man and the last dollar should be followed
+by the last woman and the last dime, the last child and the last copper!
+
+There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a
+mere irresponsible tyranny. If there are any who really believe that our
+present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and family,
+that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become ABRAHAM,
+DEI GRATIA REX,--they cannot have duly pondered his letter of June 12th,
+in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a rustic lover called
+upon by an anxious parent to explain his intentions. The force of his
+argument is not at all injured by the homeliness of his illustrations.
+The American people are not much afraid that their liberties will be
+usurped. An army of legislators is not very likely to throw away its
+political privileges, and the idea of a despotism resting on an open
+ballot-box, is like that of Bunker Hill Monument built on the waves of
+Boston Harbor. We know pretty well how much of sincerity there is in the
+fears so clamorously expressed, and how far they are found in company
+with uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the nation. We
+have learned to put a true value on the services of the watch-dog who
+bays the moon, but does not bite the thief!
+
+The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands are
+wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it that
+would be very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal man,
+however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such as
+emergencies always give rise to. If any half-loyal man forgets his code
+of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become obnoxious to the
+peremptory justice which takes the place of slower forms in all centres
+of conflagration, there is no sympathy for him among the soldiers who are
+risking their lives for us; perhaps there is even more satisfaction than
+when an avowed traitor is caught and punished. For of all men who are
+loathed by generous natures, such as fill the ranks of the armies of the
+Union, none are so thoroughly loathed as the men who contrive to keep
+just within the limits of the law, while their whole conduct provokes
+others to break it; whose patriotism consists in stopping an inch short
+of treason, and whose political morality has for its safeguard a just
+respect for the jailer and the hangman! The simple preventive against
+all possible injustice a citizen is like to suffer at the hands of a
+government which in its need and haste must of course commit many errors,
+is to take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly help the
+enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war. When the clamor
+against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can claim this
+negative merit, it may be listened to. When it comes from those who have
+done what they could to serve their country, it will receive the
+attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which
+demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for changing the essential
+principle of our self-governing system is a figment which its contrivers
+laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of
+Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality of an executive act
+meant in good faith for their protection against the invader? We are all
+citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of
+their peril, and with the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to
+understand the difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that
+helps and the man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in
+sight, complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who
+violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they
+jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, and
+bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged twenty
+buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!
+
+We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the
+whirlpool of national destruction. If our borders are invaded, it is
+only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his
+slumbering mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that
+liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for. We are pouring out
+the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always
+the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we
+to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets
+are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry is
+abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of
+employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an
+inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of
+heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the
+inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages,
+whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of
+golden sand,--what have we to complain of?
+
+Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and
+bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and
+over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with
+Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under
+the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.? Was she content to
+negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in
+depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our national
+stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the "five-twenty"
+war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount of nearly two
+hundred millions, without any check to the flow of the current pressing
+inwards against the doors of the Treasury? Except in those portions of
+the country which are the immediate seat of war, or liable to be made so,
+and which, having the greatest interest not to become the border states
+of hostile nations, can best afford to suffer now, the state of
+prosperity and comfort is such as to astonish those who visit us from
+other countries. What are war taxes to a nation which, as we are assured
+on good authority, has more men worth a million now than it had worth ten
+thousand dollars at the close of the Revolution,--whose whole property is
+a hundred times, and whose commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred
+times, what it was then? But we need not study Mr. Still's pamphlet and
+"Thompson's Bank-Note Reporter" to show us what we know well enough,
+that, so far from having occasion to tremble in fear of our impending
+ruin, we must rather blush for our material prosperity. For the
+multitudes who are unfortunate enough to be taxed for a million or more,
+of course we must feel deeply, at the same time suggesting that the more
+largely they report their incomes to the tax-gatherer, the more
+consolation they will find in the feeling that they have served their
+country. But,--let us say it plainly,--it will not hurt our people to be
+taught that there are other things to be cared for besides money-making
+and money-spending; that the time has come when manhood must assert
+itself by brave deeds and noble thoughts; when womanhood must assume its
+most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort," and, if need be, "to command,"
+those whose services their country calls for. This Northern section of
+the land has become a great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities
+are the long-extended counter. We have grown rich for what? To put gilt
+bands on coachmen's hats? To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest
+silks which the toiling artisans of France can send us? To look through
+plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the black
+ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its
+old minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in
+diamonds? to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust? to float through
+life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the
+beaches, and back again from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for this
+that the broad domain of the Western hemisphere was kept so long
+unvisited by civilization?--for this, that Time, the father of empires,
+unbound the virgin zone of this youngest of his daughters, and gave her,
+beautiful in the long veil of her forests, to the rude embrace of the
+adventurous Colonist? All this is what we see around us, now, now while
+we are actually fighting this great battle, and supporting this great
+load of indebtedness. Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of
+Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement, For
+Sale or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed, as she sings,
+
+ "Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"
+
+till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy
+bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform
+of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay
+them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a
+dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the
+street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and
+it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves,
+the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy;
+then let us talk of the Maelstrom;--but till then, let us not be cowards
+with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth
+for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed
+current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every
+hour, out of the influence of the great failing which was born of our
+wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal inheritance!
+
+Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we are
+just leaving.
+
+On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our Lord
+eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock in the
+morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South Carolina
+at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States. Its ball
+carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled
+in the mould of malignant deliberation. Its wad was the charter of our
+national existence. Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which bore the
+symbol of our national sovereignty. As the echoes of its thunder died
+away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office of the land.
+That word was WAR!
+
+War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is
+claimed by its true parents. This war has eaten its way backward through
+all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of
+ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts
+in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands
+revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two
+incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must
+dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the
+hemisphere for its development.
+
+We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms
+which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as above
+all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum
+acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: "Necessity itself which
+reduces things to the mere right of Nature." The old rules which were
+enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless "as
+moonlight on the dial of the day." We have followed precedents as long
+as they could guide us; now we must make precedents for the ages which
+are to succeed us.
+
+If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the
+current prices of United States stocks show that we value our nationality
+at only a small fraction of our wealth. If we feel that we are paying
+too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall those grand
+words of Samuel Adams:
+
+"I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it were
+revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to perish,
+and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty!"
+
+What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he
+said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will be
+done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,--because my will is Thine.
+We want the virile energy of determination which made the oath of Andrew
+Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint that the recording
+angel might have entered it unquestioned among the prayers of the
+faithful.
+
+War is a grim business. Two years ago our women's fingers were busy
+making "Havelocks." It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half
+the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and
+illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead
+ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and noble
+principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought we were
+fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and what we
+are fighting against.
+
+We are fighting for our existence. We say to those who would take back
+their several contributions to that undivided unity which we call the
+Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot
+reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible! There are rights,
+possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties, acquired, retained,
+called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute
+solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic whole, which
+cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim as its
+own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of
+rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or confess
+self-government itself a failure.
+
+We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence
+reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on which it was
+written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the
+necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the
+venerable charter of our wide Republic.
+
+We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause
+of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms. Whether we know it or not,
+whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system
+that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the
+Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate. And this ought to
+make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of
+old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim was
+to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The
+sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burial-place
+more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his
+brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in
+his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the
+rights which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we
+must fight it against that great General who will bring to it all the
+powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down
+from heaven. He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him;
+he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has
+engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the
+profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler natures by
+motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we pity as we ought
+always to pity the error of those who know not what they do. Against him
+or for him we are all called upon to declare ourselves. There is no
+neutrality for any single true-born American. If any seek such a
+position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse points them to their
+place in the antechamber of the Halls of Despair,--
+
+ "--With that ill band
+ Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
+ Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
+ Were only."
+
+ "--Fame of them the world hath none
+ Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both.
+ Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."
+
+We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve him
+against the enemies of civilization. We must make and keep the great
+river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the forefoot of the
+wild, untamable rebellion. We must not be too nice in the choice of our
+agents. Non eget Mauri jaculis,--no African bayonets wanted,--was well
+enough while we did not yet know the might of that desperate giant we had
+to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,--white or black,--is the safer motto
+now; for a good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
+The iron-skins, as well as the iron-clads, have already done us noble
+service, and many a mother will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will
+welcome back the war-worn husband, whose smile would never again have
+gladdened his home, but that, cold in the shallow trench of the
+battle-field, lies the half-buried form of the unchained bondsman whose
+dusky bosom sheathes the bullet which would else have claimed that
+darling as his country's sacrifice.
+
+We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise. It may be
+long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we
+may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed
+and led to victory. We must be patient, as our fathers were patient;
+even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be
+a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it
+costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty,
+this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if
+we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a
+nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who
+vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her
+assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.
+
+Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of
+the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you
+have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood
+for your temporal salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely
+through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are
+starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark
+them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of
+the soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the
+victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as
+children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under
+nameless mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them.
+By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by
+the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children
+yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated
+sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men
+everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the
+advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to stand
+by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and in
+defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization,
+Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's
+emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the wall of Fort
+Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient inheritance,
+every fortress, every capital, every ship, and this warring land is once
+more a, United Nation!
+
+
+
+
+CINDERS FROM THE ASHES.
+
+The personal revelations contained in my report of certain
+breakfast-table conversations were so charitably listened to and so
+good-naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming
+over-communicative. Still, I should never have ventured to tell the
+trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my brief
+story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining
+figure that trod the same path with me for a time, or crossed it,
+leaving a momentary or lasting brightness in its track. I remember
+that, in furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its
+dull aspect as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead
+and bureau. "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to
+the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher. It
+was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment
+as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving
+reader,--and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed,
+--I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with
+which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is
+merely personal in my recollections.
+
+After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine
+loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great
+forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by
+the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken
+in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish faculties or
+check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample
+chair,--a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present
+Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William Biglow. This
+generation is not familiar with his title to renown, although he fills
+three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American
+Literature." He was a humorist hardly robust enough for more than a
+brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for
+I do not remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our
+benches.
+
+At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the
+"Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the
+College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much
+of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared
+with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful
+mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and
+Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the
+"Opposition House" and the "Clark House," these roads were almost all the
+way bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" of Main Street, or
+were abreast of that forlorn "First Row" of Harvard Street. We called
+the boys of that locality "Port-chucks." They called us
+"Cambridge-chucks," but we got along very well together in the main.
+
+Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular
+loveliness. I once before referred to her as "the golden blonde," but did
+not trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her appearance in
+the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys as the appearance
+of Miranda was to Caliban. Her abounding natural curls were so full of
+sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile and her voice were
+so all-subduing, that half our heads were turned. Her fascinations were
+everywhere confessed a few years afterwards; and when I last met her,
+though she said she was a grandmother, I questioned her statement, for
+her winning looks and ways would still have made her admired in any
+company.
+
+Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very
+small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet,
+reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning
+to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer years. One of
+these two boys was destined to be widely known, first in literature, as
+author of one of the most popular books of its time and which is
+freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer; a man who, if his
+countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the national councils.
+Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears; he found it
+famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.
+
+Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of
+unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary
+and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.
+She came with the reputation of being "smart," as we should have called
+it, clever as we say nowadays. This was Margaret Fuller, the only one
+among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke," like "Bettina," has
+slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored,
+and floats on the waves of speech as "Margaret." Her air to her
+schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she
+had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a great
+student and a great reader of what she used to call "naw-vels." I
+remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret
+that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of
+her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living.
+Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair
+complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which
+she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A
+remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and
+undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would
+compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the
+ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,
+magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing
+the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened
+and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a
+fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative,
+showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the
+viraginian aspect.
+
+Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a
+celebrity as Margaret. I remember being greatly awed once, in our
+school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes
+were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among
+them one of hers. I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I
+fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one,
+at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first
+words.
+
+"It is a trite remark," she began.
+
+I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever
+judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?
+I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about
+the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders
+with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!
+
+After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was
+to enter college. It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher
+training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer
+advantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us. We had
+been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries. Some Boston boys
+of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very
+lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel
+Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise.
+
+I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of
+quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was not.
+Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true;
+but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the exceptional
+kind. I had tendencies in the direction of flageolets and octave flutes.
+I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty
+nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and
+smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol,
+by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for
+no maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread
+implement in search of contraband commodities.
+
+It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and
+preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning of
+the autumn.
+
+In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized
+from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly
+along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the seat of
+learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now
+North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and
+swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical
+ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the
+ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square
+boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through
+the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then
+darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its
+lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village
+centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the
+rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into the
+hallowed borders of the academic town.
+
+It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just at
+the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very worthy
+professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable, exemplary, but
+thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of
+homoousianism, or some such doctrine. There was a great rock that showed
+its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but it
+hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling to get
+uppermost in my youthful bosom; for I was not too old for
+home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave
+me at last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then
+climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the window in the back
+of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to
+some widowed heart.
+
+Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but
+time. Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy. There was an
+ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf,
+rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous
+fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the
+poor-relation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not with
+apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her benevolence,
+and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same in water, and
+encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific for
+seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a mockery,
+and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.
+I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on
+the water often cures seasickness.
+
+There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began
+to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions
+surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the
+most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life. My
+room-mate came later. He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring
+town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons at
+Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I
+suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was
+slightly indisposed, he administered to me,--with the best intentions, no
+doubt,--a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time,
+as Mr. Morrissey would say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it
+that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had
+come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a
+word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so
+brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look any
+whiter when I was laid out as a corpse." After my room-mate and I had
+been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen and
+acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close literary
+neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him,
+in the last number of the "Galaxy." Does it not sometimes seem as if we
+were all marching round and round in a circle, like the supernumeraries
+who constitute the "army" of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is
+met by the same and only the same people, or their doubles, twice,
+thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts
+off its borrowed clothes?
+
+The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and
+uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge, since the
+piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the
+ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to "Harvard
+Hall." Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--the principal and
+his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the
+late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who
+looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a
+clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant
+of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised
+myself to be amiable.
+
+On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these words:
+
+ YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.
+
+I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the
+budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with
+its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.
+
+I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a
+fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly
+malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous
+violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His
+delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at
+all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.
+Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and
+profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very
+distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his
+choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late
+homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up presently, and
+cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so? If
+the son of that boy's father could not be trusted, what boy in
+Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be
+slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him
+out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for
+safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of
+one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle in my
+bosom! I parted from him, however, none the worse for his companionship
+so far as I can remember.
+
+Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great
+distinction among the scholars of the land. One day I observed a new boy
+in a seat not very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as I
+recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at length
+I got a chance to look at them. Of all the new-comers during my whole
+year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, but
+there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the morning
+of his entrance. His head was between his hands (I wonder if he does not
+sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes were
+fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him heir
+to a million. I feel sure that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not
+find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive portrait.
+Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less familiarly
+have faded from my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful
+student, sitting there entranced over the page of his text-book,--the
+child-father of the distinguished scholar that was to be,--is not a
+picture framed and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its
+walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.
+
+My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of
+speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble
+manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas
+Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the State
+of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any honest and
+intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question. This
+was one of two or three friendships that lasted. There were other friends
+and classmates, one of them a natural humorist of the liveliest sort, who
+would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was so
+potently contagious.
+
+Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was Professor
+Moses Stuart. His house was nearly opposite the one in which I resided
+and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the Seminary. I
+have seen few more striking figures in my life than his, as I remember
+it. Tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly,
+accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and
+impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic
+orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like Cicero's, and his
+toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever
+might have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid grace that he
+might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the
+side of the antiques of the Vatican.
+
+Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
+throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking
+of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health gives
+a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed course
+which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest and the
+fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the transient
+ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before the
+procession has passed.
+
+Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
+Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to
+be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy,
+as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as old
+doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their later
+days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long and so
+exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the mediaeval
+schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.
+
+All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world is
+waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these
+wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of
+an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part heard
+of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which was the
+more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we debated.
+Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away early, and
+padding the other with prosperity so that his course was comparatively
+noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one in particular,
+"The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong
+obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan, which the
+community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger of
+the ground upon which I am treading.
+
+There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a
+season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking
+students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for
+them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual
+exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of
+football were followed with some spirit.
+
+A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in very
+shallow and simple sources. Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the sober
+tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact with a
+world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting
+impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen
+hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village
+paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis
+descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum.
+I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much
+wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed
+with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious,
+perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies.
+The little Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack,
+the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning
+stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities,
+for he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living
+protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality. It did not
+take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this is apt
+to be so with young people. What else could have made us think it great
+sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter and "camp out,"--on
+the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed tent-wise, except the fact
+that to a boy a new discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a
+luxury.
+
+More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the
+preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying. He had
+a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and
+told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him in
+turn, as one whom they were soon to lose. More than one boy kept his eye
+on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man
+had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say
+the hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.
+
+Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with my
+room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the Merrimack
+which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old meetinghouse,
+where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient parsonage, with the
+bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by
+the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when I
+awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped
+the towers and spires of a great city!--for such was my fancy, and
+whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate to
+inquire too nicely.
+
+My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have survived
+so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil, out of which I
+remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of
+beginners:
+
+ "Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm
+ The boiling ocean trembled into calm."
+
+Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary, Queen
+of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and
+sentimentally. My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted.
+Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large
+hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof, suspended by iron
+rods. Subject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive, illustrating
+the magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life into
+forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,--the gift of Heaven
+to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon to
+the monarch on his throne; from the burning sands of the desert to the
+frozen icebergs of the poles, from--but I forget myself.
+
+This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. I went from the Academy
+to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again for a long
+time.
+
+On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for many
+years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more found
+myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill. My first
+pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing by
+the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held, buried
+in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the
+Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks. I then began the once
+familiar toil of ascending the long declivity. Academic villages seem to
+change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns down with
+all its books. A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new library
+begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor, for
+the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old barracks.
+
+These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story
+of them must be told succinctly. It is like the opium-smoker's showing
+you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the
+precious extract which has given him his dream.
+
+I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the
+new library building on my left. But for these it was surprising to see
+how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. The
+Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach
+landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old. The pale brick
+seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and
+"Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--carried there in the
+night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my left
+again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and
+in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I
+lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.
+
+The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he knew
+so well. I went to the front of the house. There was the great rock
+showing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on that,
+whispered the small ghost. I looked in at the upper window in the
+farther part of the house. I looked out of that on four long changing
+seasons, said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, but,
+while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or what used to be
+the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted from my investigation
+and went on my way. The apparition that put me and my little ghost to
+flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a gun in its hand. I think
+it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun, which drove me off.
+
+And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after
+passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and here
+is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy building.
+
+Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a
+gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the crash of
+tumbling pins from those precincts? The little ghost said, Never! It
+cannot be. But it was. "Have they a billiard-room in the upper story?"
+I asked myself. "Do the theological professors take a hand at all-fours
+or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular columns of the
+'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoralized for the moment, it is
+plain; but now that I have recovered from the shock, I must say that the
+fact mentioned seems to show a great advance in common sense from the
+notions prevailing in my time.
+
+I sauntered,--we, rather, my ghost and I,--until we came to a broken
+field where there was quarrying and digging going on,--our old base-ball
+ground, hard by the burial-place. There I paused; and if any thoughtful
+boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has sown with
+memories of the time when he was young shall follow my footsteps, I need
+not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be enchained by the noble
+view before him. Far to the north and west the mountains of New
+Hampshire lifted their summits in along encircling ridge of pale blue
+waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline
+with perfect definition against the sky. This was a sight which had more
+virtue and refreshment in it than any aspect of nature that I had looked
+upon, I am afraid I must say for years. I have been by the seaside now
+and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running
+here and there, listening to what the winds have to say and getting angry
+with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief
+to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging
+mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls!--and
+the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments
+of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her
+bravest and hardiest children,--I can never look at them without feeling
+that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward
+heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a
+vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. It is more than a year since I
+have looked on those blue mountains, and they "are to me as a feeling"
+now, and have been ever since.
+
+I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground. It was thinly
+tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent immigrants of
+more than a whole generation. There lay the dead I had left, the two or
+three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose house
+I lived, for whom in those days hearts were still aching, and by whose
+memory the house still seemed haunted. A few upright stones were all
+that I recollect. But now, around them were the monuments of many of the
+dead whom I remembered as living. I doubt if there has been a more
+faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long day.
+I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often
+heard as they thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like
+desk. Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from
+an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's Concordance, but there
+was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never known.
+There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but none so
+beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the resting-place of
+one of the children of the very learned Professor Robinson: "Is it well
+with the child? And she answered, It is well."
+
+While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old
+men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to
+the gravedigger and his companion. They christened a mountain or two for
+me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of
+which the most curious was "Basil's Cave." The story was recent, when I
+was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his name
+might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally
+extravagant, and of more or less lawless habits. He had commanded a cave
+to be secretly dug, and furnished it sumptuously, and there with his
+companions indulged in revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated
+locality had never looked upon. How much truth there was in it all I
+will not pretend to say, but I seem to remember stamping over every rock
+that sounded hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once
+Basil's Cave.
+
+The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter under
+which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me. Following the
+slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a pleasant clump
+of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so as to give a seat, a
+table, and a shade. I left my benediction on this pretty little natural
+caravansera, and a brief record on one of its white birches, hoping to
+visit it again on some sweet summer or autumn day.
+
+Two scenes remained to look upon,--the Shawshine River and the Indian
+Ridge. The streamlet proved to have about the width with which it flowed
+through my memory. The young men and the boys were bathing in its
+shallow current, or dressing and undressing upon its banks as in the days
+of old; the same river, only the water changed; "The same boys, only the
+names and the accidents of local memory different," I whispered to my
+little ghost.
+
+The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I expected of it. It is well
+worth a long ride to visit. The lofty wooded bank is a mile and a half
+in extent, with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general running
+nearly parallel with it, one of them still longer. These singular
+formations are supposed to have been built up by the eddies of
+conflicting currents scattering sand and gravel and stones as they swept
+over the continent. But I think they pleased me better when I was taught
+that the Indians built them; and while I thank Professor Hitchcock, I
+sometimes feel as if I should like to found a chair to teach the
+ignorance of what people do not want to know.
+
+"Two tickets to Boston." I said to the man at the station.
+
+But the little ghost whispered, "When you leave this place you leave me
+behind you."
+
+"One ticket to Boston, if you please. Good by, little ghost."
+
+I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around the well-remembered scenes
+I traversed on that day, and that, whenever I revisit them, I shall find
+him again as my companion.
+
+
+
+
+THE PULPIT AND THE PEW.
+
+The priest is dead for the Protestant world. Luther's inkstand did not
+kill the devil, but it killed the priest, at least for us: He is a loss
+in many respects to be regretted. He kept alive the spirit of reverence.
+He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhuman in their nature,
+and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and their defence against
+the strong. If one end of religion is to make men happier in this world
+as well as in the next, mankind lost a great source of happiness when the
+priest was reduced to the common level of humanity, and became only a
+minister. Priest, which was presbyter, corresponded to senator, and was
+a title to respect and honor. Minister is but the diminutive of
+magister, and implies an obligation to render service.
+
+It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine
+mission they should have the power of casting out devils and talking in
+strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink poisons with
+impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and they should recover.
+The Roman Church claims some of these powers for its clergy and its
+sacred objects to this day. Miracles, it is professed, are wrought by
+them, or through them, as in the days of the apostles. Protestantism
+proclaims that the age of such occurrences as the apostles witnessed is
+past. What does it know about miracles? It knows a great many records
+of miracles, but this is a different kind of knowledge.
+
+The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his
+eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities, but
+he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in the
+Roman Church. Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault with, but it
+has a very real meaning. "The essential point in the notion of a priest
+is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God,
+without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,--an unreasonable,
+immoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of course, that the
+priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a
+teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite independent
+of his personal character, which could act, as it were, mechanically;
+that out of him went a virtue, as from the hem of his Master's raiment,
+to those with whom his sacred office brought him in contact.
+
+It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible
+personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator between them and
+the heavenly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing, the
+suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly through
+human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the channel of
+communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege
+of those who looked and those who still look up to a priesthood. It has
+been said, and many who have walked the hospitals or served in the
+dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the
+Roman Catholics know how to die. The same thing is less confidently to
+be said of Protestants. How frequently is the story told of the most
+exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the
+lives of the most exemplary Protestant ministers, that they were beset
+with doubts and terrors in their last days! The blessing of the viaticum
+is unknown to them. Man is essentially an idolater,--that is, in bondage
+to his imagination,--for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon
+than in the Latin word imago. He wants a visible image to fix his
+thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to
+our own time what these were to the ancient Egyptians. He wants a
+vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on
+his last journey. Who but such an immediate representative of the
+Divinity would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on
+the block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"?
+
+It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize the
+American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood. The history of
+the Congregationalists in New England would show us how this change has
+gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall open to all sorts of
+purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of the rostrum, and the
+clergyman take on the character of a popular lecturer who deals with
+every kind of subject, including religion.
+
+Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a right to
+be proud of our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers among the clergy. They were
+ready to do and to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith which
+breeds heroes is better than an unbelief which leaves nothing worth being
+a hero for. Only let us be fair, and not defend the creed of Mohammed
+because it nurtured brave men and enlightened scholars, or refrain from
+condemning polygamy in our admiration of the indomitable spirit and
+perseverance of the Pilgrim Fathers of Mormonism, or justify an inhuman
+belief, or a cruel or foolish superstition, because it was once held or
+acquiesced in by men whose nobility of character we heartily recognize.
+The New England clergy can look back to a noble record, but the pulpit
+has sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may sometimes find it
+worth its while to listen to one even in our own days.
+
+From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers
+have furnished the highest type of character to the people among whom
+they have lived. They have lost to a considerable extent the position of
+leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked upon as
+representatives of their congregations, they represent what is best among
+those of whom they are the speaking organs. We have a right to expect
+them to be models as well as teachers of all that makes the best citizens
+for this world and the next, and they have not been, and are not in these
+later days unworthy of their high calling. They have worked hard for
+small earthly compensation. They have been the most learned men the
+country had to show, when learning was a scarce commodity. Called by
+their consciences to self-denying labors, living simply, often
+half-supported by the toil of their own hands, they have let the light,
+such light as shone for them, into the minds of our communities as the
+settler's axe let the sunshine into their log-huts and farm-houses.
+
+Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a few
+instances will illustrate. Often, as was just said, they toiled like
+day-laborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small inclosures of
+land, for the New England soil is not one that "laughs when tickled with
+a hoe," but rather one that sulks when appealed to with that persuasive
+implement. The father of the eminent Boston physician whose recent loss
+is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt Clarke, forty-two years pastor
+of the small fold in the town of Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical
+example of this union of the two callings, and it would be hard to find a
+story of a more wholesome and useful life, within a limited and isolated
+circle, than that which the pious care of one of his children
+commemorated. Sometimes the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward
+of Stratford-on-Avon, in old England, joined the practice of medicine to
+the offices of his holy profession. Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of
+"The Day of Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard
+College, were instances of this twofold service. In politics their
+influence has always been felt, and in many cases their drums
+ecclesiastic have beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good
+purpose, as it ever sounded in the slumbering camp. Samuel Cooper sat in
+council with the leaders of the Revolution in Boston. The three
+Northampton-born brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their
+voices, and, when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty. In
+later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics into their
+pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times
+still more recent.
+
+The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office,
+tended, to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of
+aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days
+when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at present.
+Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence, as the old
+portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember the last of the
+"fair, white, curly" wigs, as it graced the imposing figure of the
+Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can testify. They were
+not only learned in the history of the past, but they were the
+interpreters of the prophecy, and announced coming events with a
+confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau warns us of a
+coming storm. The numbers of the book of Daniel and the visions of the
+Revelation were not too hard for them. In the commonplace book of the
+Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, made, as it
+appears, about the year 1773: "Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the
+downfall of Antichrist, after many things had been said upon the subject,
+the Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this manner: 'Tell
+your children to tell their children that in the year 1866 something
+notable will happen in the church; tell them the old man says so.'"
+
+The "old man" came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if we
+consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870. In 1864 the
+Pope issued the "Syllabus of Errors," which "must be considered by
+Romanists--as an infallible official document, and which arrays the
+papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and religious
+freedom." The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to be the bishop
+of bishops, and immediately after this began the decisive movement of the
+party known as the "Old Catholics." In the exact year looked forward to
+by the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of Rome by the French
+and the publication of "Ecce Homo" appear to be the most remarkable
+events having Special relation to the religious world. Perhaps the
+National Council of the Congregationalists, held at Boston in 1865, may
+be reckoned as one of the occurrences which the oracle just missed.
+
+The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later
+period. "In half a century," said the venerable Dr. Porter of Conway,
+New Hampshire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans,
+Unitarians, or Methodists." The half-century has more than elapsed, and
+the prediction seems to stand in need of an extension, like many other
+prophetic utterances.
+
+The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of
+Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul in
+two thousand would be saved. Seeing a knot of his parishioners in
+debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that they
+were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected one, the
+population being just two thousand, and that opinion was divided whether
+it would be the minister or one of his deacons. The story may or may not
+be literally true, but it illustrates the popular belief of those days,
+that the clergyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of the
+Almighty than his successors could claim the power of doing.
+
+The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied
+accomplishments of some of the New England clergy. The face of the
+Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon
+me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which
+makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience of
+eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: "Ezroe
+Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both
+were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before me was
+imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John
+Prince of Salem, an earlier student of science in the town since
+distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute. Jeremy Belknap holds
+an honored place in that unpretending row of local historians. And in
+the pages of his "History of New Hampshire" may be found a chapter
+contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects, among
+all the older clergymen preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer,
+botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in state and
+national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme
+Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington
+offered it to him. This manifold individual was the minister of
+Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,--the
+Reverend Manasseh Cutler. These reminiscences from surrounding objects
+came up unexpectedly, of themselves: and have a right here, as showing
+how wide is the range of intelligence in the clerical body thus
+accidentally represented in a single library making no special
+pretensions.
+
+It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added that
+they were often the wits and humorists of their localities. Mather
+Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these
+were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an
+outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in
+old clergymen and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's "Annals of the
+American Pulpit" tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean
+Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences." He has not recorded the following,
+which is to be found in Miss Larned's excellent and most interesting
+History of Windham County, Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was
+the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not
+old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers.
+The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the
+drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader to
+turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. "If
+unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy
+as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial
+associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of
+admonition to the offending clergyman. "Mr. Dwight received their
+reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and
+promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for
+the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that they might so hitch their
+horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of everlasting
+salvation.'"
+
+It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old
+ministers in one's veins. An English bishop proclaimed the fact before
+an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say
+that he had a son who was a doctor. Very kind that was in the bishop,
+and very proud his medical audience must have felt. Perhaps he was not
+ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, "the beloved physician," or even of the
+teachings which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the
+son of a carpenter. So a New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need
+not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a
+minister. On the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable
+inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a
+library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was
+hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios. What are
+the names of ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory as
+illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens
+Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth,
+James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all
+ministers' boys. John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the clergyman
+after whom he was named. George Ticknor was next door to such a descent,
+for his father was a deacon. This is a group which it did not take a
+long or a wide search to bring together.
+
+Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to
+exercise a good deal of authority in the communities to which they
+belonged. The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a
+tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism levels in
+religion as in everything. It might have been expected, therefore, that
+soon after civil liberty had been established there would be conflicts
+between the traditional, authority of the minister and the claims of the
+now free and independent congregation. So it was, in fact, as for
+instance in the case which follows, for which the reader is indebted to
+Miss Lamed's book, before cited.
+
+The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in the
+year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret, Connecticut.
+Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham "Herald,"
+in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with all the emphasis of
+italics and small capitals. Was it not time, he said, for people to look
+about them and see whether "such despotism was founded in Scripture, in
+reason, in policy, or on the rights of man! A minister, by his vote, by
+his single voice, may negative the unanimous vote of the church! Are
+ministers composed of finer clay than the rest of mankind, that entitles
+them to this preeminence? Does a license to preach transform a man into a
+higher order of beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern?
+Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to
+be governed? Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to such
+degrading vassalage and abject submission? Reason, common sense, and the
+Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that they are all born
+free and equal; that every member of a church or Christian congregation
+must be on the same footing in respect of church government, and that the
+CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one the power to negative the vote of
+all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND REPUGNANT
+TO THE WORD OF GOD."
+
+The Reverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing him
+to be "destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound judgment,
+honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat's-paw, the infamous
+tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock, and a ragamuffin."
+
+No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no
+clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch.
+The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or
+three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion of
+their special dignities or privileges. The public is better bred than to
+carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political brawlers
+would hardly think admissible. The minister of religion is generally
+treated with something more than respect; he is allowed to say undisputed
+what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. Bishop Gilbert
+Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject with a
+friend who was not convinced by his arguments. "Wait till you hear me
+from the pulpit," he said; "there you cannot answer me." The
+preacher--if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself
+to him--has his hearer's head in chancery, and can administer punishment
+ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar,
+stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to
+without a word of comment or a look of disapprobation.
+
+One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen has
+lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren
+invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been
+sharply criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits silent in his pew,
+has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of questioning
+that which has been addressed to him from the privileged eminence of the
+pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher. It is nearly
+two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote these words: "I am not
+ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do
+not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them
+to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoods, in such an unfair
+manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine
+these men have profest to be nothing but a mere trick."
+
+So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend
+Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the
+college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out
+earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those
+judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely
+attributable to the clergy.
+
+Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors.
+The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them
+together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that
+which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered
+it. Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the
+medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and
+diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of
+divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible,
+or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual
+efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal
+wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given
+conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where
+wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where
+sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of
+torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being
+tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same
+Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been
+pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently
+repudiated him as a monstrosity.
+
+On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as
+well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led upward by
+what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his
+own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of praise
+which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if
+this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need
+not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the
+crowd of medical "atheists."
+
+No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations
+as those to which belong the healers of the body and the headers of the
+mind. There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them
+into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view
+the welfare of their fellow-creatures. But there is a territory always
+liable to be differed about between them. There are patients who never
+tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their
+ailments. He goes through his accustomed routine with them, and thinks
+he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no
+deeper into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than
+the wrist. A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient's
+bedside,--not with the professional look on his face which suggests the
+undertaker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a
+sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right
+moment,--will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the
+sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily
+symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul is
+a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world. And, on
+the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive natures which
+have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual exercises until their
+best confessor would be a sagacious and wholesome-minded physician.
+
+Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants that
+he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as
+hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears,
+and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn in
+pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose that his mental conflicts,
+after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to
+a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and
+debates with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison, and
+after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit
+suicide. Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as
+melancholia? Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under
+the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least,
+partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental
+condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart has
+been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of
+self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the
+allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is,
+next to the Bible and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the
+best-known religious work of Christendom. If Bunyan and his
+contemporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over the case of
+Christian at the time when he was meditating self-murder, it is very
+possible that there might have been a difference of judgment. The
+physician would have one advantage in such a consultation. He would
+pretty certainly have received a Christian education, while the clergyman
+would probably know next to nothing of the laws or manifestations of
+mental or bodily disease. It does not seem as if any theological student
+was really prepared for his practical duties until he had learned
+something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all, had
+become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an
+insane asylum.
+
+It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to the
+divine in the same light as the divine stands to the physician, so far as
+each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to the other's
+profession. Many physicians know a great deal more about religious
+matters than they do about medicine. They have read the Bible ten times
+as much as they ever read any medical author. They have heard scores of
+sermons for one medical lecture to which they have listened. They often
+hear much better preaching than the average minister, for he hears
+himself chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of them. They
+have now and then been distinguished in theology as well as in their own
+profession. The name of Servetus might call up unpleasant recollections,
+but that of another medical practitioner may be safely mentioned. "It
+was not till the middle of the last century that the question as to the
+authorship of the Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discerning
+criticism. The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might
+have supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation."
+This layman was "Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal
+College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV." The quotation is
+from the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible,"
+which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed clergyman.
+The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor by giving the
+practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tar-water," and
+the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman whose sands of
+life"----but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton
+Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the
+practice of inoculation into America. The professions should be cordial
+allies, but the church-going, Bible-reading physician ought to know a
+great deal more of the subjects included under the general name of
+theology than the clergyman can be expected to know of medicine. To say,
+as has been said not long since, that a young divinity student is as
+competent to deal with the latter as an old physician is to meddle with
+the former, suggests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the
+family of the one who says it. What a set of idiots our clerical
+teachers must have been and be, if, after a quarter or half a century of
+their instruction, a person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent
+to form any opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or
+trying to teach him, so long!
+
+A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not
+believe, or only half believe, what he preaches. But pews without heads
+in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the
+doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on
+pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as he
+looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being useful.
+It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith and of
+place of worship should be far from infrequent. It is not less natural
+that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on the other,
+when such changes occur. It even happens occasionally that the regrets
+become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side which receives
+the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite
+conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true
+one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great
+offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and
+Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves,
+alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its
+members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the
+Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that it is
+not a deadly defection to pass from one to another.
+
+So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to
+happen a great deal oftener than they do. All the larger bodies of
+Christians should be constantly exchanging members. All men are born
+with conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally with
+the idol-worshippers or the idol-breakers. Some wear their fathers' old
+clothes, and some will have a new suit. One class of men must have their
+faith hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have it
+worked in like a screw, by argument. Members of one of these classes
+often find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other. The late
+Orestes A. Brownson used to preach at one time to a little handful of
+persons, in a small upper room, where some of them got from him their
+first lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing
+with the books they hold sacred. But after a time Mr. Brownson found he
+had mistaken his church, and went over to the Roman Catholic
+establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one of
+the most stalwart champions. Nature is prolific and ambidextrous. While
+this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the ancient faith,
+another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying just as hard
+to provide a new church for the future. One was driving the sheep into
+the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the bars that kept them
+out of the new pasture. Neither of these powerful men could do the
+other's work, and each had to find the task for which he was destined.
+
+The "old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls it, carries many who
+would steer by the wake of their vessel. But there are many others who
+do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having their eyes fixed
+on the light-house in the distance before them. In less figurative
+language, there are multitudes of persons who are perfectly contented
+with the old formulae of the church with which they and their fathers
+before them have been and are connected, for the simple reason that they
+fit, like old shoes, because they have been worn so long, and mingled
+with these, in the most conservative religious body, are here and there
+those who are restless in the fetters of a confession of faith to which
+they have pledged themselves without believing in it. This has been true
+of the Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more
+or less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson, stood alone in
+wishing the church were well rid of it. In fact, it has happened to the
+present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles summarily disposed of by
+one of the most zealous members of the American branch of that communion,
+in a verb of one syllable, more familiar to the ears of the forecastle
+than to those of the vestry.
+
+But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons among
+the so-called "liberal" denominations who are uneasy for want of a more
+definite ritual and a more formal organization than they find in their
+own body. Now, the rector or the minister must be well aware that there
+are such cases, and each of them must be aware that there are individuals
+under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by argument, and who really
+belong by all their instincts to another communion. It seems as if a
+thoroughly honest, straight-collared clergyman would say frankly to his
+restless parishioner: "You do not believe the central doctrines of the
+church which you are in the habit of attending. You belong properly to
+Brother A.'s or Brother B.'s fold, and it will be more manly and probably
+more profitable for you to go there than to stay with us." And, again,
+the rolling-collared clergyman might be expected to say to this or that
+uneasy listener: "You are longing for a church which will settle your
+beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the task, to
+which you seem to be unequal, of working out your own salvation with fear
+and trembling. Go over the way to Brother C.'s or Brother D.'s; your
+spine is weak, and they will furnish you a back-board which will keep you
+straight and make you comfortable." Patients are not the property of
+their physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers.
+
+As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will
+adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers. But they do not
+lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world all
+before them to choose their creed from, like other persons. They are
+sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are supposed to
+have heard preached from their childhood. They cannot defend themselves,
+for various good reasons. If they did, one would have to say he got more
+preaching than was good for him, and came at last to feel about sermons
+and their doctrines as confectioners' children do about candy. Another
+would have to own that he got his religious belief, not from his father,
+but from his mother. That would account for a great deal, for the milk
+in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as
+the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that
+its mark survives only as the seal of immunity. Another would plead
+atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his
+great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper. Others
+would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had
+displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to
+go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an
+ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face,
+as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the
+light of a new generation. Common delicacy would prevent him from saying
+that he did not get his faith from his father, but from somebody else,
+perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, like the young
+man whom the Apostle cautioned against total abstinence.
+
+It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman to
+call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors, not
+only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of which
+they are the intellectual and moral product. This is especially true
+when the authority of great names is fallen back upon as a defence of
+opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld. It may be very
+important to show that the champions of this or that set of dogmas, some
+of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs, while others retain their
+vitality, held certain general notions which vitiated their conclusions.
+And in proportion to the eminence of such champions, and the frequency
+with which their names are appealed to as a bulwark of any particular
+creed or set of doctrines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or
+extravagances or contradictions of thought they have been betrayed.
+
+In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just and
+proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the
+witchcraft delusion. It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf the
+common beliefs of their time. It would be an extenuation of their acts
+that, not many years before, the great and good magistrate, Sir Matthew
+Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witchcraft.
+To fall back on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying
+our predecessors in foro conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have
+had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their
+shelter, at any rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten
+timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more,
+if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation,
+the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it
+if we can. And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a
+warning and not as a guide.
+
+Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of
+Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay. The "Edwardsian"
+theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination to
+which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it is thrown
+into the scale of theological belief as if it added great strength to the
+party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments
+and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most
+acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as
+patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession
+from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing
+ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing
+attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of
+beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so
+remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his
+inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he presents us
+a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions,
+"are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;" when he
+gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless
+tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for "the
+bulk of mankind;" when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are
+to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the
+furnace, where they are to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to
+say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations
+and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed
+with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached
+the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of
+language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian
+pessimism.
+
+If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some
+appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in
+catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief
+from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in the
+newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy because they
+could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be so
+or not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan Edwards does at this
+day carry a certain authority with it for many persons, so that anything
+he believed gains for them some degree of probability from that
+circumstance. It would, therefore, be of much interest to know whether
+he was trustworthy in his theological speculations, and whether he ever
+changed his belief with reference to any of the great questions above
+alluded to.
+
+Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years ago
+that a certain M. Babinet, a scientific Frenchman of note, had predicted
+a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live by the
+collision with it of a great comet then approaching us, or some such
+occurrence. There is no doubt that this prediction produced anxiety and
+alarm in many timid persons. It became a very interesting question with
+them who this M. Babinet might be. Was he a sound observer, who had made
+other observations and predictions which had proved accurate? Or was he
+one of those men who are always making blunders for other people to
+correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching
+disastrous event?
+
+So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so
+long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and his
+nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its monuments,
+were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly shivered into
+fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence that this prophet
+of evil was a man who held many extravagant and even monstrous opinions.
+Still more satisfactory would it be if it could be shown that he had
+reconsidered his predictions, and declared that he could not abide by his
+former alarming conclusions. And we should think very ill of any
+astronomer who would not rejoice for the sake of his fellow-creatures, if
+not for his own, to find the threatening presage invalidated in either or
+both of the ways just mentioned, even though he had committed himself to
+M. Babinet's dire belief.
+
+But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a planet
+and its inhabitants to the infinite catastrophe which shall establish a
+mighty world of eternal despair? And which is it most desirable for
+mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of the threat of M.
+Babinet, or those of the other infinitely more terrible comminations, so
+far as they rest on the authority of Jonathan Edwards?
+
+The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of the
+writings of Edwards, with reference to the essay he had in contemplation,
+when, on speaking of the subject to a very distinguished orthodox divine,
+this gentleman mentioned the existence of a manuscript of Edwards which
+had been held back from the public on account of some opinions or
+tendencies it contained, or was suspected of containing "High Arianism"
+was the exact expression he used with reference to it. On relating this
+fact to an illustrious man of science, whose name is best known to
+botanists, but is justly held in great honor by the orthodox body to
+which he belongs, it appeared that he, too, had heard of such a
+manuscript, and the questionable doctrine associated with it in his
+memory was Sabellianism. It was of course proper in the writer of an
+essay on Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged existence of such a
+manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have been
+exercised as that which led, the editor of his collected works to
+suppress the language Edwards had used about children.
+
+This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and one
+of the professors in the theological school at Andover, and finally to
+the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason, had been
+withheld from publication for more than a century. Its title is
+"Observations concerning the Scripture OEconomy of the Trinity and
+Covenant of Redemption. By Jonathan Edwards." It contains thirty-six
+pages and a half, each small page having about two hundred words. The
+pages before the reader will be found to average about three hundred and
+twenty-five words. An introduction and an appendix by the editor,
+Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the contents to nearly a hundred pages,
+but these additions, and the circumstance that it is bound in boards,
+must not lead us to overlook the fact that the little volume is nothing
+more than a pamphlet in book's clothing.
+
+A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the
+arrangements entered into by the three persons of the Trinity, in as bald
+and matter-of-fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the author
+had been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership between three
+retail tradesmen. But, lest a layman's judgment might be considered
+insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer to one of the most
+learned of our theological experts,--the same who once informed a church
+dignitary, who had been attempting to define his theological position,
+that he was a Eutychian,--a fact which he seems to have been no more
+aware of than M. Jourdain was conscious that he had been speaking prose
+all his life. The treatise appeared to this professor anti-trinitarian,
+not in the direction of Unitarianism, however, but of Tritheism. Its
+anthropomorphism affected him like blasphemy, and the paper produced in
+him the sense of "great disgust," which its whole character might well
+excite in the unlearned reader.
+
+All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work of
+Edwards referred to by the present writer in his previous essay. The
+tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by Dr.
+Bushnell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer never heard
+until after his own essay was already printed. The manuscript of the
+"Observations" was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us in his
+introduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend William T.
+Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his brother, the Reverend Dr.
+Sereno E. Dwight.
+
+But the reference of the present writer was to another production of the
+great logician, thus spoken of in a quotation from "the accomplished
+editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'" to be found in Professor Smyth's
+introduction:
+
+"It has long been a matter of private information that Professor Edwards
+A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an published manuscript of
+Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two thirds as long as his
+treatise on the will. As few have ever seen the manuscript, its contents
+are only known by vague reports.... It is said that it contains a
+departure from his published views on the Trinity and a modification of
+the view of original sin. One account of it says that the manuscript
+leans toward Sabellianism, and that it even approaches Pelagianism."
+
+It was to this "suppressed" manuscript the present writer referred, and
+not to the slender brochure recently given to the public. He is bound,
+therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be still in
+doubt with reference to Edwards's theological views, it would be
+necessary to submit this manuscript, and all manuscripts of his which
+have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if possible, so
+that all could form their own opinion about it or them.
+
+The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an
+eternity of unimaginable horrors for "the bulk of mankind." His
+authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects great
+numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: "Je n'y crois
+pas, mais je les crains." This belief is one which it is infinitely
+desirable to the human race should be shown to be possibly, probably, or
+certainly erroneous. It is, therefore, desirable in the interest of
+humanity that any force the argument in its favor may derive from
+Edwards's authority should be weakened by showing that he was capable of
+writing most unwisely, and if it should be proved that he changed his
+opinions, or ran into any "heretical" vagaries, by using these facts
+against the validity of his judgment. That he was capable of writing
+most unwisely has been sufficiently shown by the recent publication of
+his "Observations." Whether he, anywhere contradicted what were generally
+accepted as his theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed into
+heresies, the public will never rest satisfied until it sees and
+interprets for itself everything that is open to question which may be
+contained in his yet unpublished manuscripts. All this is not in the
+least a personal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his
+studies of Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable
+sources sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have
+been familiar to many, that there was unpublished matter bearing on the
+opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been
+toiling. And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as Edwards
+has been considered, so good a man as he is recognized to have been, had,
+possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think of children as
+vipers, and of parents as shouting hallelujahs while their lost darlings
+were being driven into the flames, where is the theologian who would not
+rejoice to hope so with him or who would be willing to tell his wife or
+his daughter that he did not?
+
+The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant
+communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists. The
+Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by a
+cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised enjoyment
+of earthly comforts, and a short confession of faith. His theory of the
+universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a Father with all the
+true paternal attributes, of man that he is destined to come into harmony
+with the key-note of divine order, of this earth that it is a training
+school for a better sphere of existence. The Christian pessimist in his
+most typical manifestation is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak,
+especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to undervalue the lesser
+enjoyments of life, to insist on a more extended list of articles of
+belief. His theory of the universe recognizes this corner of it as a
+moral ruin; his idea of the Creator is that of a ruler whose pardoning
+power is subject to the veto of what is called "justice;" his notion of
+man is that he is born a natural hater of God and goodness, and that his
+natural destiny is eternal misery. The line dividing these two great
+classes zigzags its way through the religious community, sometimes
+following denominational layers and cleavages, sometimes going, like a
+geological fracture, through many different strata. The natural
+antagonists of the religious pessimists are the men of science,
+especially the evolutionists, and the poets. It was but a conditioned
+prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was in Milton's mind when he sang, in
+one of the divinest of his strains, that
+
+ "Hell itself will pass away,
+ And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day."
+
+And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after giving
+mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a
+hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge
+of self-murder,--painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and
+a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,--kind
+Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman,
+whose songs have done more to humanize the hard theology of Scotland than
+all the rationalistic sermons that were ever preached. Our own Whittier
+has done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit than Burns,
+for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New
+England belongs. Let me sweeten these closing paragraphs of an essay not
+meaning to hold a word of bitterness with a passage or two from the
+lay-preacher who is listened to by a larger congregation than any man who
+speaks from the pulpit. Who will not hear his words with comfort and
+rejoicing when he speaks of "that larger hope which, secretly cherished
+from the times of Origen and Duns Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice,
+has found its fitting utterance in the noblest poem of the age?"
+
+It is Tennyson's "In Memoriam" to which he refers, and from which he
+quotes four verses, of which this is the last:
+
+ "Behold! we know not anything
+ I can but trust that good shall fall
+ At last,--far off,--at last, to all,
+ And every winter change to spring."
+
+If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and the
+rapidly growing change of opinion renders unnecessary any further effort
+to humanize "the Gospel of dread tidings;" if any believe the doctrines
+of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster divines are so far
+obsolete as to require no further handling; if there are any who thank
+these subjects have lost their interest for living souls ever since they
+themselves have learned to stay at home on Sundays, with their cakes and
+ale instead of going to meeting,--not such is Mr. Whittier's opinion,
+as we may infer from his recent beautiful poem, "The Minister's
+Daughter." It is not science alone that the old Christian pessimism has
+got to struggle with, but the instincts of childhood, the affections of
+maternity, the intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the
+philanthropist,--in short, human nature and the advance of civilization.
+The pulpit has long helped the world, and is still one of the chief
+defences against the dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now,
+as it always has been in its best representation, of all love and honor.
+But many of its professed creeds imperatively demand revision, and the
+pews which call for it must be listened to, or the preacher will by and
+by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes by and by
+find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEDICAL ESSAYS
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+1842-1882
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+I. HOMEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS
+
+II. THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER
+
+III. CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE
+
+IV. BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE
+
+V. SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING
+
+VI. THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS
+
+VII. THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER
+
+VIII. MEDICAL LIBRARIES
+
+IX. SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+The character of the opposition which some of these papers have met with
+suggests the inference that they contain really important, but unwelcome
+truths. Negatives multiplied into each other change their sign and
+become positives. Hostile criticisms meeting together are often
+equivalent to praise, and the square of fault-finding turns out to be the
+same thing as eulogy.
+
+But a writer has rarely so many enemies as it pleases him to believe.
+Self-love leads us to overrate the numbers of our negative constituency.
+The larger portion of my limited circle of readers must be quite
+indifferent to, if not ignorant of, the adverse opinions which have been
+expressed or recorded concerning any of these Addresses or Essays now
+submitted to their own judgment. It is proper, however, to inform them,
+that some of the positions maintained in these pages have been
+unsparingly attacked, with various degrees of ability, scholarship, and
+good-breeding. The tone of criticism naturally changes with local
+conditions in different parts of a country extended like our own, so that
+it is one of the most convenient gauges of the partial movements in the
+direction of civilization. It is satisfactory to add, that the views
+assailed have also been unflinchingly defended by unsought champions,
+among the ablest of whom it is pleasant to mention, at this moment of
+political alienation, the Editor of the Charleston Medical Journal.
+
+"Currents and Counter-Currents" was written and delivered as an Oration,
+a florid rhetorical composition, expressly intended to secure the
+attention of an audience not easy to hold as listeners. It succeeded in
+doing this, and also in being as curiously misunderstood and
+misrepresented as if it had been a political harangue. This gave it more
+local notoriety than it might otherwise have attained, so that, as I
+learn, one ingenious person made use of its title as an advertisement to
+a production of his own.
+
+The commonest mode of misrepresentation was this: qualified propositions,
+the whole meaning of which depended on the qualifications, were stripped
+of these and taken as absolute. Thus, the attempt to establish a
+presumption against giving poisons to sick persons was considered as
+equivalent to condemning the use of these substances. The only important
+inference the writer has been able to draw from the greater number of the
+refutations of his opinions which have been kindly sent him, is that the
+preliminary education of the Medical Profession is not always what it
+ought to be.
+
+One concession he is willing to make, whatever sacrifice of pride it may
+involve. The story of Massasoit, which has furnished a coral, as it
+were, for some teething critics, when subjected to a powerful logical
+analysis, though correct in its essentials, proves to have been told with
+exceptionable breadth of statement, and therefore (to resume the
+metaphor) has been slightly rounded off at its edges, so as to be
+smoother for any who may wish to bite upon it hereafter. In other
+respects the Discourse has hardly been touched. It is only an
+individual's expression, in his own way, of opinions entertained by
+hundreds of the Medical Profession in every civilized country, and has
+nothing in it which on revision the writer sees cause to retract or
+modify. The superstitions it attacks lie at the very foundation of
+Homoeopathy, and of almost every form of medical charlatanism. Still the
+mere routinists and unthinking artisans in most callings dislike whatever
+shakes the dust out of their traditions, and it may be unreasonable to
+expect that Medicine will always prove an exception to the rule. One
+half the opposition which the numerical system of Louis has met with, as
+applied to the results of treatment, has been owing to the fact that it
+showed the movements of disease to be far more independent of the kind of
+practice pursued than was agreeable to the pride of those whose
+self-confidence it abated.
+
+The statement, that medicines are more sparingly used in physicians'
+families than in most others, admits of a very natural explanation,
+without putting a harsh construction upon it, which it was not intended
+to admit. Outside pressure is less felt in the physician's own
+household; that is all. If this does not sometimes influence him to give
+medicine, or what seems to be medicine, when among those who have more
+confidence in drugging than his own family commonly has, the learned
+Professor Dunglison is hereby requested to apologize for his definition
+of the word Placebo, or to expunge it from his Medical Dictionary.
+
+One thing is certain. A loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the weak
+spot in a profession, as well as in a patient. It is a doubtful policy
+to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are trying to
+show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies. Vast as are the
+advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly prove on examination
+that we retain other old barbarisms beside the use of the astrological
+sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to insure good luck to our
+prescriptions? Is it the act of a friend or a foe to try to point them
+out to our brethren when asked to address them, and is the speaker to
+subdue the constitutional habit of his style to a given standard, under
+penalty of giving offence to a grave assembly?
+
+"Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions" was published nearly twenty years
+ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried in vain to
+procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him with the only
+one he has had for years. A foolish story reached his ears that he was
+attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it. This
+edition was in the press at that very time.
+
+Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever
+novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted
+to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far,
+about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require
+much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their
+readings of the ancient Prophets.
+
+If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made
+very slow progress in Europe.
+
+In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more Homoeopathic
+practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at the
+Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has
+undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it
+has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially
+valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is
+seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a regular
+practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic counsellor
+overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and capricious
+persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of pretentious
+novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments, closeted with
+uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over seas to put
+themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as
+they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many
+to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the
+hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated
+with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever
+the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found
+for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now
+merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be
+specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ignominiously in those cases
+where we would thankfully sacrifice all our prejudices and give the world
+to have them true to their promises.
+
+Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was
+well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing
+faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made
+proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to
+medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of
+treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous notion that sick
+people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow-poison, obtained from a
+serpent (Pulte). Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard). The
+less dangerous Pediculus capitis is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the
+English "Apostle of Homoeopathy." These are examples of the retrograde
+current setting towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse
+at the beginning of this volume is directed.
+
+The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like
+Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and
+Prophecy. If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety years,
+as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they do, the "not
+many years" of my prediction may be stretched out a generation or two
+beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy will no doubt prove
+true.
+
+It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on the
+Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. But the whole question I consider to
+be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to the
+consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries. For the
+justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must refer the
+reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to have been forced
+to place on permanent record.
+
+BOSTON, January, 1861.
+
+
+
+
+A SECOND PREFACE.
+
+These Lectures and Essays are arranged in the order corresponding to the
+date of their delivery or publication. They must, of course, be read
+with a constant reference to these dates, by such as care to read them.
+I have not attempted to modernize their aspect or character in presenting
+them, in this somewhat altered connection, to the public. Several of
+them were contained in a former volume which received its name from the
+Address called "Currents and Counter-Currents." Some of those contained
+in the former volume have been replaced by others. The Essay called
+"Mechanism of Vital Actions" has been transferred to a distinct
+collection of Miscellaneous essays, forming a separate volume.
+
+I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on
+Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston
+prizes in 1837, and was published in the following year. But as this was
+upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken up a good
+deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting that the stray
+copies to be met with in musty book-shops would sufficiently supply the
+not very extensive or urgent demand for a paper almost half a century
+old.
+
+Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from the
+press into the pool of public consciousness. They will slide in very
+quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves whether the
+waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live for a time as not
+wholly unvalued reminiscences.
+
+March 21, 1883.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch in
+the shape of Prefaces. A very few words may be a convenience to the
+reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely to find
+in it.
+
+ HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS.
+
+Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be so
+will surely exist,--as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other methods
+of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and
+womankind. Though it has no pretensions to be considered as belonging
+among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a scientific man as a
+curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind. Its
+influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm
+investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, under
+the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative creation of its
+founder. Since that first essay was written, nearly half a century ago,
+we have all had a chance to witness its practical working. Two opposite
+inferences may be drawn from its doctrines and practice. The first is
+that which is accepted by its disciples. This is that all diseases are
+"cured" by drugs. The opposite conclusion is drawn by a much larger
+number of persons. As they see that patients are very commonly getting
+well under treatment by infinitesimal drugging, which they consider
+equivalent to no medication at all, they come to disbelieve in every form
+of drugging and put their whole trust in "nature." Thus experience,
+
+ "From seeming evil still educing good,"
+
+has shown that the dealers in this preposterous system of
+pseudo-therapeutics have cooperated with the wiser class of practitioners
+in breaking up the system of over-dosing and over-drugging which has been
+one of the standing reproaches of medical practice. While. keeping up
+the miserable delusion that diseases were all to be "cured" by drugging,
+Homoeopathy has been unintentionally showing that they would very
+generally get well without any drugging at all. In the mean time the
+newer doctrines of the "mind cure," the "faith cure," and the rest are
+encroaching on the territory so long monopolized by that most ingenious
+of the pseudo-sciences. It would not be surprising if its whole ground
+should be taken possession of by these new claimants with their
+flattering appeals to the imaginative class of persons open to such
+attacks. Similia similabus may prove fatally true for once, if
+Homoeopathy is killed out by its new-born rivals.
+
+It takes a very moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan like
+the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system. The real
+inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of Butler.
+The whole story is to be found in the "Ortus Medicinm" of Van Helmont. I
+have given some account of his chapter "Butler" in different articles,
+but I would refer the students of our Homoeopathic educational
+institutions to the original, which they will find very interesting and
+curious.
+
+ CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS
+
+My attack on over-drugging brought out some hostile comments and
+treatment. Thirty years ago I expressed myself with more vivacity than I
+should show if I were writing on the same subjects today. Some of my more
+lively remarks called out very sharp animadversion. Thus my illustration
+of prevention as often better than treatment in the mother's words to her
+child which had got a poisonous berry in its mouth,--"Spit it out!" gave
+mortal offence to a well-known New York practitioner and writer, who
+advised the Massachusetts Medical Society to spit out the offending
+speaker. Worse than this was my statement of my belief that if a
+ship-load of miscellaneous drugs, with certain very important
+exceptions,--drugs, many of which were then often given needlessly and in
+excess, as then used "could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be
+all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." This was
+too bad. The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying
+conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as
+much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs. But for the
+epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless
+overstatement at the very worst.
+
+Since this lecture was delivered a great and, as I think, beneficial
+change has taken place in the practice of medicine. The habit of the
+English "general practitioner" of making his profit out of the pills and
+potions he administered was ruinous to professional advancement and the
+dignity of the physician. When a half-starving medical man felt that he
+must give his patient draught and boluses for which he could charge him,
+he was in a pitiable position and too likely to persuade himself that his
+drugs were useful to his patient because they were profitable to him.
+This practice has prevailed a good deal in America, and was doubtless the
+source in some measure of the errors I combated.
+
+ THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.
+
+This Essay was read before a small Association called "The Society for
+Medical Improvement," and published in a Medical Journal which lasted but
+a single year. It naturally attracted less attention than it would have
+done if published in such a periodical as the "American Journal of
+Medical Sciences." Still it had its effect, as I have every reason to
+believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young
+mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of
+"Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying down rules for
+taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been
+decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote
+two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country
+opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and
+position.
+
+This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation.
+If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I
+prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression. I could not,
+if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the
+attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward
+and the necessary conclusions to which they led. Of course the whole
+matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as a
+vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the
+mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not
+blind or who did not shut their eyes.
+
+O. W. H.
+
+BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891
+
+
+
+
+HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS
+
+[Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of
+Useful Knowledge. 1842.]
+
+[When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into the
+Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is often
+answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are thought
+to have effected wonderful cures. The main object of the first of these
+Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such statements, made by
+persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies
+of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value
+in establishing the truth of a medical doctrine or the utility of a
+method of practice.
+
+Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious
+complaint, that he "Had better try Homoeopathy," are apt to enforce their
+suggestion by adding, that "at any rate it can do no harm." This may or
+may not be true as regards the individual. But it always does very great
+harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or deception in a
+profession which deals with the life and health of our fellow-creatures.
+Whether or not those who countenance Homoeopathy are guilty of this
+injustice towards others, the second of these Lectures may afford them
+some means of determining.
+
+To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and
+regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would be
+very unfair to them. But to suppose that men with minds so constituted
+as to accept such statements and embrace such doctrines as make up the
+so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent than others to
+regulate the circumstances which influence the human body in health and
+disease, would be judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary
+practitioners.
+
+To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through the
+influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse to
+Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those
+numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an
+opprobrious title.
+
+So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device,
+even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing
+occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial
+faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as
+applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his
+base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor
+man's necessities.
+
+Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period when the growing
+spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to
+listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into
+weakness. It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and
+mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have enticed a
+few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague belief that
+matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches nearer to a
+spiritual nature as it requires a more powerful microscope for its
+detection.
+
+However this may be, some persons seem disposed to take the ground of
+Menzel that the Laity must pass formal judgment between the Physician and
+the Homoeopathist, as it once did between Luther and the Romanists. The
+practitioner and the scholar must not, therefore, smile at the amount of
+time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy system;
+which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest members of
+the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has ever said or
+done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the honors of
+critical martyrdom.]
+
+
+
+I
+
+I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I
+shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are
+
+1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.
+
+2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder.
+
+3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.
+
+4. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.
+
+The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are
+accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.
+
+The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom, immaculate
+honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good physician of a
+great bishop.
+
+The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion, which
+flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as being a
+rich and comparatively recent illustration of the pretensions, the
+arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy errors have long been,
+and will long continue to be, swollen into transient consequence. All
+display in superfluous abundance the boundless credulity and excitability
+of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.
+
+"From the time of Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, the monarchs of
+England were in the habit of touching those who were brought to them
+suffering with the scrofula, for the cure of that distemper. William the
+Third had good sense enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne resumed
+it, and, among her other patients, performed the royal operation upon a
+child, who, in spite of his, disease, grew up at last into Samuel
+Johnson. After laying his hand upon the sufferers, it was customary for
+the monarch to hang a gold piece around the neck of each patient. Very
+strict precautions were adopted to prevent those who thought more of the
+golden angel hung round the neck by a white ribbon, than of relief of
+their bodily infirmities, from making too many calls, as they sometimes
+attempted to do. According to the statement of the advocates and
+contemporaries of this remedy, none ever failed of receiving benefit
+unless their little faith and credulity starved their merits. Some are
+said to have been cured immediately on the very touch, others did not so
+easily get rid of their swellings, until they were touched a second time.
+Several cases are related, of persons who had been blind for several
+weeks, and months, and obliged even to be led to Whitehall, yet recovered
+their sight immediately upon being touched, so as to walk away without
+any guide." So widely, at one period, was the belief diffused, that, in
+the course of twelve years, nearly a hundred thousand persons were
+touched by Charles the Second. Catholic divines; in disputes upon the
+orthodoxy of their church, did not deny that the power had descended to
+protestant princes;--Dr. Harpsfield, in his "Ecclesiastical History of
+England," admitted it, and in Wiseman's words, "when Bishop Tooker would
+make use of this Argument to prove the Truth of our Church, Smitheus doth
+not thereupon go about to deny the Matter of fact; nay, both he and Cope
+acknowledge it." "I myself," says Wiseman, the best English surgical
+writer of his day,[Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. iii. p.
+103.]--"I my self have been a frequent Eye-witness of many hundred of
+Cures performed by his Majesties Touch alone, without any assistance of
+Chirurgery; and those, many of them such as had tired out the endeavours
+of able Chirurgeons before they came hither. It were endless to recite
+what I myself have seen, and what I have received acknowledgments of by
+Letter, not only from the severall parts of this Nation, but also from
+Ireland, Scotland, Jersey, Garnsey. It is needless also to remember what
+Miracles of this nature were performed by the very Bloud of his late
+Majesty of Blessed memory, after whose decollation by the inhuman
+Barbarity of the Regicides, the reliques of that were gathered on Chips
+and in Handkerchieffs by the pious Devotes, who could not but think so
+great a suffering in so honourable and pious a Cause, would be attended
+by an extraordinary assistance of God, and some more then ordinary a
+miracle: nor did their Faith deceive them in this there point, being so
+many hundred that found the benefit of it." [Severall Chirurgicall
+Treatises. London.1676. p. 246.]
+
+Obstinate and incredulous men, as he tells us, accounted for these cures
+in three ways: by the journey and change of air the patients obtained in
+coming to London; by the influence of imagination; and the wearing of
+gold.
+
+To these objections he answers, 1st. That many of those cured were
+inhabitants of the city. 2d. That the subjects of treatment were
+frequently infants. 3d. That sometimes silver was given, and sometimes
+nothing, yet the patients were cured.
+
+A superstition resembling this probably exists at the present time in
+some ignorant districts of England and this country. A writer in a
+Medical Journal in the year 1807, speaks of a farmer in Devonshire, who,
+being a ninth son of a ninth son, is thought endowed with healing powers
+like those of ancient royalty, and who is accustomed one day in every
+week to strike for the evil.
+
+I remember that one of my schoolmates told me, when a boy, of a seventh
+son of a seventh son, somewhere in Essex County, who touched for the
+scrofula, and who used to hang a silver fourpence halfpenny about the
+neck of those who came to him, which fourpence halfpenny it was solemnly
+affirmed became of a remarkably black color after having been some time
+worn, and that his own brother had been subjected to this extraordinary
+treatment; but I must add that my schoolmate drew a bow of remarkable
+length, strength, and toughness for his tender years.
+
+One of the most curious examples of the fallacy of popular belief and the
+uncertainty of asserted facts in medical experience is to be found in the
+history of the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM, or WEAPON OINTMENT.
+
+Fabricius Hildanus, whose name is familiar to every surgical scholar, and
+Lord Bacon, who frequently dipped a little into medicine, are my
+principal authorities for the few circumstances I shall mention regarding
+it. The Weapon Ointment was a preparation used for the healing of
+wounds, but instead of its being applied to them, the injured part was
+washed and bandaged, and the weapon with which the wound was inflicted
+was carefully anointed with the unguent. Empirics, ignorant barbers, and
+men of that sort, are said to have especially employed it. Still there
+were not wanting some among the more respectable members of the medical
+profession who supported its claims. The composition of this ointment
+was complicated, in the different formulae given by different
+authorities; but some substances addressed to the imagination, rather
+than the wound or weapon, entered into all. Such were portions of mummy,
+of human blood, and of moss from the skull of a thief hung in chains.
+
+Hildanus was a wise and learned man, one of the best surgeons of his
+time. He was fully aware that a part of the real secret of the Unguentum
+Armarium consisted in the washing and bandaging the wound and then
+letting it alone. But he could not resist the solemn assertions
+respecting its efficacy; he gave way before the outcry of facts, and
+therefore, instead of denying all their pretensions, he admitted and
+tried to account for them upon supernatural grounds. As the virtue of
+those applications, he says, which are made to the weapon cannot reach
+the wound, and as they can produce no effect without contact, it follows,
+of necessity, that the Devil must have a hand in the business; and as he
+is by far the most long headed and experienced of practitioners, he
+cannot find this a matter of any great difficulty. Hildanus himself
+reports, in detail, the case of a lady who had received a moderate wound,
+for which the Unguentum Armarium was employed without the slightest use.
+Yet instead of receiving this flat case of failure as any evidence
+against the remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding by the devout
+character of the lady, and her freedom from that superstitious and
+over-imaginative tendency which the Devil requires in those who are to be
+benefited by his devices.
+
+Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his Natural History, as
+having in its favor the testimony of men of credit, though, in his own
+language, he himself "as yet is not fully inclined to believe it." His
+remarks upon the asserted facts respecting it show a mixture of wise
+suspicion and partial belief. He does not like the precise directions
+given as to the circumstances under which the animals from which some of
+the materials were obtained were to be killed; for he thought it looked
+like a provision for an excuse in case of failure, by laying the fault to
+the omission of some of these circumstances. But he likes well that
+"they do not observe the confecting of the Ointment under any certain
+constellation; which is commonly the excuse of magical medicines, when
+they fail, that they were not made under a fit figure of heaven." [This
+was a mistake, however, since the two recipes given by Hildanus are both
+very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different
+stages of the process.] "It was pretended that if the offending weapon
+could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made
+like it." "This," says Bacon, "I should doubt to be a device to keep
+this strange form of cure in request and use; because many times you
+cannot come by the weapon itself." And in closing his remarks on the
+statements of the advocates of the ointment, he says, "Lastly, it will
+cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of all the rest, because
+it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial." It is worth remembering,
+that more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and fantastic remedy
+was asserted to possess wonderful power, and when sensible persons
+ascribed its pretended influence to imagination, it was boldly answered
+that the cure took place when the wounded party did not know of the
+application made to the weapon, and even when a brute animal was the
+subject of the experiment, and that this assertion, as we all know it
+was, came in such a shape as to shake the incredulity of the keenest
+thinker of his time. The very same assertion has been since repeated in
+favor of Perkinism, and, since that, of Homoeopathy.
+
+The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment reproduced itself
+in the still more famous SYMPATHETIC POWDER. This Powder was said to
+have the faculty, if applied to the blood-stained garments of a wounded
+person, to cure his injuries, even though he were at a great distance at
+the time. A friar, returning from the East, brought the recipe to Europe
+somewhat before the middle of the seventeenth century. The Grand Duke of
+Florence, in which city the friar was residing, heard of his cures, and
+tried, but without success, to obtain his secret. Sir Kenehn Digby, an
+Englishman well known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor,
+which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his
+benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Powder. This English
+knight was at different periods of his life an admiral, a theologian, a
+critic, a metaphysician, a politician, and a disciple of Alchemy. As is
+not unfrequent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire at
+the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner got home to
+England than he began to spread the conflagration.
+
+An opportunity soon offered itself to try the powers of the famous
+powder. Mr. J. Howell, having been wounded in endeavoring to part two of
+his friends who were fighting a duel, submitted himself to a trial of the
+Sympathetic Powder. Four days after he received his wounds, Sir Kenehn
+dipped one of Mr. Howell's gaiters in a solution of the Powder, and
+immediately, it is said, the wounds, which were very painful, grew easy,
+although the patient, who was conversing in a corner of the chamber, had
+not, the least idea of what was doing with his garter. He then returned
+home, leaving his garter in the hands of Sir Kenelm, who had hung it up
+to dry, when Mr. Howell sent his servant in a great hurry to tell him
+that his wounds were paining him horribly; the garter was therefore
+replaced in the solution of the Powder, "and the patient got well after
+five or six days of its continued immersion."
+
+King James First, his son Charles the First, the Duke of Buckingham, then
+prime minister, and all the principal personages of the time, were
+cognizant of this fact; and James himself, being curious to know the
+secret of this remedy, asked it of Sir Kenelm, who revealed it to him,
+and his Majesty had the opportunity of making several trials of its
+efficacy, "which all succeeded in a surprising manner." [Dict. des
+Sciences Medieales.]
+
+The king's physician, Dr. Mayerne, was made master of the secret, which
+he carried to France and communicated to the Duke of Mayenne, who
+performed many cures by means of it, and taught it to his surgeon, who,
+after the Duke's death, sold it to many distinguished persons, by whose
+agency it soon ceased to be a secret. What was this wonderful substance
+which so astonished kings, princes, dukes, knights, and doctors? Nothing
+but powdered blue vitriol. But it was made to undergo several processes
+that conferred on it extraordinary virtues. Twice or thrice it was to be
+dissolved, filtered, and crystallized. The crystals were to be laid in
+the sun during the months of June, July, and August, taking care to turn
+them carefully that all should be exposed. Then they were to be
+powdered, triturated, and again exposed to the sun, again reduced to a
+very fine powder, and secured in a vessel, while hot, from the sunshine.
+If there seem anything remarkable in the fact of such astonishing
+properties being developed by this process, it must be from our
+short-sightedness, for common salt and charcoal develop powers quite as
+marvellous after a certain number of thumps, stirs, and shakes, from the
+hands of modern workers of miracles. In fact the Unguentum Armarium and
+Sympathetic Powder resemble some more recent prescriptions; the latter
+consisting in an infinite dilution of the common dose in which remedies
+are given, and the two former in an infinite dilution of the common
+distance at which they are applied.
+
+Whether philosophers, and more especially metaphysicians, have any
+peculiar tendency to dabble in drugs and dose themselves with physic, is
+a question which might suggest itself to the reader of their biographies.
+
+When Bishop Berkeley visited the illustrious Malebranche at Paris, he
+found him in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for an
+inflammation of the lungs, from which he was suffering; and the disease,
+being unfortunately aggravated by the vehemence of their discussion, or
+the contents of the pipkin, carried him off in the course of a few days.
+Berkeley himself afforded a remarkable illustration of a truth which has
+long been known to the members of one of the learned professions, namely,
+that no amount of talent, or of acquirements in other departments, can
+rescue from lamentable folly those who, without something of the
+requisite preparation, undertake to experiment with nostrums upon
+themselves and their neighbors. The exalted character of Berkeley is
+thus drawn by Sir James Mackintosh: Ancient learning, exact science,
+polished society, modern literature, and the fine arts, contributed to
+adorn and enrich the mind of this accomplished man. All his
+contemporaries agreed with the satirist in ascribing
+
+ "'To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.'
+
+"Even the discerning, fastidious, and turbulent Atterbury said, after an
+interview with him, 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much
+innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any
+but angels, till I saw this gentleman.'"
+
+But among the writings of this great and good man is an Essay of the most
+curious character, illustrating his weakness upon the point in question,
+and entitled, "Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries
+concerning the Virtues of TAR WATER, and divers other Subjects,"--an
+essay which begins with a recipe for his favorite fluid, and slides by
+gentle gradations into an examination of the sublimest doctrines of
+Plato. To show how far a man of honesty and benevolence, and with a mind
+of singular acuteness and depth, may be run away with by a favorite
+notion on a subject which his habits and education do not fit him to
+investigate, I shall give a short account of this Essay, merely stating
+that as all the supposed virtues of Tar Water, made public in successive
+editions of his treatise by so illustrious an author, have not saved it
+from neglect and disgrace, it may be fairly assumed that they were mainly
+imaginary.
+
+The bishop, as is usual in such cases, speaks of himself as indispensably
+obliged, by the duty he owes to mankind, to make his experience public.
+Now this was by no means evident, nor does it follow in general, that
+because a man has formed a favorable opinion of a person or a thing he
+has not the proper means of thoroughly understanding, he shall be bound
+to print it, and thus give currency to his impressions, which may be
+erroneous, and therefore injurious. He would have done much better to
+have laid his impressions before some experienced physicians and
+surgeons, such as Dr. Mead and Mr. Cheselden, to have asked them to try
+his experiment over again, and have been guided by their answers. But
+the good bishop got excited; he pleased himself with the thought that he
+had discovered a great panacea; and having once tasted the bewitching cup
+of self-quackery, like many before and since his time, he was so
+infatuated with the draught that he would insist on pouring it down the
+throats of his neighbors and all mankind.
+
+The precious fluid was made by stirring a gallon of water with a quart of
+tar, leaving it forty-eight hours, and pouring off the clear water. Such
+was the specific which the great metaphysician recommended for averting
+and curing all manner of diseases. It was, if he might be believed, a
+preventive of the small-pox, and of great use in the course of the
+disease. It was a cure for impurities of the blood, coughs, pleurisy,
+peripneumony, erysipelas, asthma, indigestion, carchexia, hysterics,
+dropsy, mortification, scurvy, and hypochondria. It was of great use in
+gout and fevers, and was an excellent preservative of the teeth and gums;
+answered all the purpose of Elixir Proprietatis, Stoughton's drops, diet
+drinks, and mineral waters; was particularly to be recommended to
+sea-faring persons, ladies, and men of studious and sedentary lives;
+could never be taken too long, but, on the contrary, produced advantages
+which sometimes did not begin to show themselves for two or three months.
+
+"From my representing Tar Water as good for so many things," says
+Berkeley, "some perhaps may conclude it is good for nothing. But charity
+obligeth me to say what I know, and what I think, however it may be
+taken. Men may censure and object as they please, but I appeal to time
+and experiment. Effects misimputed, cases wrong told, circumstances
+overlooked, perhaps, too, prejudices and partialities against truth, may
+for a time prevail and keep her at the bottom of her well, from whence
+nevertheless she emergeth sooner or later, and strikes the eyes of all
+who do not keep them shut." I cannot resist the temptation of
+illustrating the bishop's belief in the wonderful powers of his remedy,
+by a few sentences from different parts of his essay. "The hardness of
+stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them insensible of a thousand things
+that fret and gall those delicate people, who, as if their skin was
+peeled off, feel to the quick everything that touches them. The tender
+nerves and low spirits of such poor creatures would be much relieved by
+the use of Tar Water, which might prolong and cheer their lives." "It
+[the Tar Water] may be made stronger for brute beasts, as horses, in
+whose disorders I have found it very useful." "This same water will also
+give charitable relief to the ladies, who often want it more than the
+parish poor; being many of them never able to make a good meal, and
+sitting pale, puny, and forbidden, like ghosts, at their own table,
+victims of vapors and indigestion." It does not appear among the virtues
+of Tar Water that "children cried for it," as for some of our modern
+remedies, but the bishop says, "I have known children take it for above
+six months together with great benefit, and without any inconvenience;
+and after long and repeated experience I do esteem it a most excellent
+diet drink, fitted to all seasons and ages." After mentioning its
+usefulness in febrile complaints, he says: "I have had all this confirmed
+by my own experience in the late sickly season of the year one thousand
+seven hundred and forty-one, having had twenty-five fevers in my own
+family cured by this medicinal water, drunk copiously." And to finish
+these extracts with a most important suggestion for the improvement of
+the British nation: "It is much to be lamented that our Insulars who act
+and think so much for themselves, should yet, from grossness of air and
+diet, grow stupid or doat sooner than other people, who, by virtue of
+elastic air, water-drinking, and light food, preserve their faculties to
+extreme old age; an advantage which may perhaps be approached, if not
+equaled, even in these regions, by Tar Water, temperance, and early
+hours."
+
+Berkeley died at the age of about seventy; he might have lived longer,
+but his fatal illness was so sudden that there was not time enough to
+stir up a quart of the panacea. He was an illustrious man, but he held
+two very odd opinions; that tar water was everything, and that the whole
+material universe was nothing.
+
+ --------------------------
+
+Most of those present have at some time in their lives heard mention made
+of the METALLIC TRACTORS, invented by one Dr. Perkins, an American, and
+formerly enjoying great repute for the cure of various diseases. Many
+have seen or heard of a satirical poem, written by one of our own
+countrymen also, about forty years since, and called "Terrible
+Tractoration." The Metallic Tractors are now so utterly abandoned that I
+have only by good fortune fallen upon a single one of a pair, to show for
+the sake of illustration. For more than thirty years this great
+discovery, which was to banish at least half the evils which afflict
+humanity, has been sleeping undisturbed in the grave of oblivion. Not a
+voice has, for this long period, been raised in its favor; its noble and
+learned patrons, its public institutions, its eloquent advocates, its
+brilliant promises are all covered with the dust of silent neglect; and
+of the generation which has sprung up since the period when it
+flourished, very few know anything of its history, and hardly even the
+title which in its palmy days it bore of PERKINISM. Taking it as
+settled, then, as no one appears to answer for it, that Perkinism is
+entirely dead and gone, that both in public and private, officially and
+individually, its former adherents even allow it to be absolutely
+defunct, I select it for anatomical examination. If this pretended
+discovery was made public; if it was long kept before the public; if it
+was addressed to the people of different countries; if it was formally
+investigated by scientific men, and systematically adopted by benevolent
+persons, who did everything in their power to diffuse the knowledge and
+practice of it; if various collateral motives, such as interest and
+vanity, were embarked in its cause; if, notwithstanding all these things,
+it gradually sickened and died, then the conclusion seems a fair one,
+that it did not deserve to live. Contrasting its failure with its high
+pretensions, it is fair to call it an imposition; whether an expressly
+fraudulent contrivance or not, some might be ready to question.
+Everything historically shown to have happened concerning the mode of
+promulgation, the wide diffusion, the apparent success of this delusion,
+the respectability and enthusiasm of its advocates, is of great interest
+in showing to what extent and by what means a considerable part of the
+community may be led into the belief of that which is to be eventually
+considered' as an idle folly. If there is any existing folly, fraudulent
+or innocent in its origin, which appeals to certain arguments for its
+support; provided that the very same arguments can be shown to have been
+used for Perkinism with as good reason, they will at once fall to the
+ground. Still more, if it shall appear that the general course of any
+existing delusion bears a strong resemblance to that of Perkinism, that
+the former is most frequently advocated by the same class of persons who
+were conspicuous in behalf of the latter, and treated with contempt or
+opposed by the same kind of persons who thus treated Perkinism; if the
+facts in favor of both have a similar aspect; if the motives of their
+originators and propagators may be presumed to have been similar; then
+there is every reason to suppose that the existing folly will follow in
+the footsteps of the past, and after displaying a given amount of cunning
+and credulity in those deceiving and deceived, will drop from the public
+view like a fruit which has ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be
+succeeded by the fresh bloom of some other delusion required by the same
+excitable portion of the community.
+
+Dr. Elisha Perkins was born at Norwich, Connecticut, in the year 1740.
+He had practised his profession with a good local reputation for many
+years, when he fell upon a course of experiments, as it is related, which
+led to his great discovery. He conceived the idea that metallic
+substances might have the effect of removing diseases, if applied in a
+certain manner; a notion probably suggested by the then recent
+experiments of Galvani, in which muscular contractions were found to be
+produced by the contact of two metals with the living fibre. It was in
+1796 that his discovery was promulgated in the shape of the Metallic
+Tractors, two pieces of metal, one apparently iron and the other brass,
+about three inches long, blunt at one end and pointed at the other.
+These instruments were applied for the cure of different complaints, such
+as rheumatism, local pains, inflammations, and even tumors, by drawing
+them over the affected part very lightly for about twenty minutes. Dr.
+Perkins took out a patent for his discovery, and travelled about the
+country to diffuse the new practice. He soon found numerous advocates of
+his discovery, many of them of high standing and influence. In the year
+1798 the tractors had crossed the Atlantic, and were publicly employed in
+the Royal Hospital at Copenhagen. About the same time the son of the
+inventor, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, carried them to London, where
+they soon attracted attention. The Danish physicians published an
+account of their cases, containing numerous instances of alleged success,
+in a respectable octavo volume. In the year 1804 an establishment,
+honored with the name of the Perkinean Institution, was founded in
+London. The transactions of this institution were published in
+pamphlets, the Perkinean Society had public dinners at the Crown and
+Anchor, and a poet celebrated their medical triumph in strains like
+these:
+
+ "See, pointed metals, blest with power t' appease
+ The ruthless rage of merciless disease,
+ O'er the frail part a subtle fluid pour,
+ Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower,
+ Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego,
+ And leap exulting like the bounding roe!"
+
+While all these things were going on, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins was
+calmly pocketing money, so that after some half a dozen years he left the
+country with more than ten thousand pounds, which had been paid him by
+the believers in Great Britain. But in spite of all this success, and
+the number of those interested and committed in its behalf, Perkinism
+soon began to decline, and in 1811 the Tractors are spoken of by an
+intelligent writer as being almost forgotten. Such was the origin and
+duration of this doctrine and practice, into the history of which we will
+now look a little more narrowly.
+
+Let us see, then, by whose agency this delusion was established and kept
+up; whether it was principally by those who were accustomed to medical
+pursuits, or those whose habits and modes of reasoning were different;
+whether it was with the approbation of those learned bodies usually
+supposed to take an interest in scientific discoveries, or only of
+individuals whose claims to distinction were founded upon their position
+in society, or political station, or literary eminence; whether the
+judicious or excitable classes entered most deeply into it; whether, in
+short, the scientific men of that time were deceived, or only intruded
+upon, and shouted down for the moment by persons who had no particular
+call to invade their precincts.
+
+Not much, perhaps, was to be expected of the Medical Profession in the
+way of encouragement. One Dr. Fuller, who wrote in England, himself a
+Perkinist, thus expressed his opinion: "It must be an extraordinary
+exertion of virtue and humanity for a medical man, whose livelihood
+depends either on the sale of drugs, or on receiving a guinea for writing
+a prescription, which must relate to those drugs, to say to his patient,
+'You had better purchase a set of Tractors to keep in your family; they
+will cure you without the expense of my attendance, or the danger of the
+common medical practice.' For very obvious reasons medical men must
+never be expected to recommend the use of Perkinism. The Tractors must
+trust for their patronage to the enlightened and philanthropic out of the
+profession, or to medical men retired from practice, and who know of no
+other interest than the luxury of relieving the distressed. And I do not
+despair of seeing the day when but very few of this description as well
+as private families will be without them."
+
+Whether the motives assigned by this medical man to his professional
+brethren existed or not, it is true that Dr. Perkins did not gain a great
+deal at their hands. The Connecticut Medical Society expelled him in
+1797 for violating their law against the use of nostrums, or secret
+remedies. The leading English physicians appear to have looked on with
+singular apathy or contempt at the miracles which it was pretended were
+enacting in the hands of the apostles of the new practice. In looking
+over the reviews of the time, I have found little beyond brief occasional
+notices of their pretensions; the columns of these journals being
+occupied with subjects of more permanent interest. The state of things
+in London is best learned, however, from the satirical poem to which I
+have already alluded as having been written at the period referred to.
+This was entitled, "Terrible Tractoration!! A Poetical Petition against
+Galvanizing Trumpery and the Perkinistic Institution. Most respectfully
+addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic, M.
+D., LL. D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians,
+Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of no less than nineteen very learned
+Societies." Two editions of this work were published in London in the
+years 1803 and 1804, and one or two have been published in this country.
+
+"Terrible Tractoration" is supposed, by those who never read it, to be a
+satire upon the follies of Perkins and his followers. It is, on the
+contrary, a most zealous defence of Perkinism, and a fierce attack upon
+its opponents, most especially upon such of the medical profession as
+treated the subject with neglect or ridicule. The Royal College of
+Physicians was the more peculiar object of the attack, but with this
+body, the editors of some of the leading periodicals, and several
+physicians distinguished at that time, and even now remembered for their
+services to science and humanity, were involved in unsparing
+denunciations. The work is by no means of the simply humorous character
+it might be supposed, but is overloaded with notes of the most seriously
+polemical nature. Much of the history of the subject, indeed, is to be
+looked for in this volume.
+
+It appears from this work that the principal members of the medical
+profession, so far from hailing Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins as another
+Harvey or Jenner, looked very coldly upon him and his Tractors; and it is
+now evident that, though they were much abused for so doing, they knew
+very well what they had to deal with, and were altogether in the right.
+The delusion at last attracted such an amount of attention as to induce
+Dr. Haygarth and some others of respectable standing to institute some
+experiments which I shall mention in their proper place, the result of
+which might have seemed sufficient to show the emptiness of the whole
+contrivance.
+
+The Royal Society, that learned body which for ages has constituted the
+best tribunal to which Britain can appeal in questions of science,
+accepted Mr. Perkins's Tractors and the book written about them, passed
+the customary vote of thanks, and never thought of troubling itself
+further in the investigation of pretensions of such an aspect. It is not
+to be denied that a considerable number of physicians did avow themselves
+advocates of the new practice; but out of the whole catalogue of those
+who were publicly proclaimed as such, no one has ever been known, so far
+as I am aware, to the scientific world, except in connection with the
+short-lived notoriety of Perkinism. Who were the people, then, to whose
+activity, influence, or standing with the community was owing all the
+temporary excitement produced by the Metallic Tractors?
+
+First, those persons who had been induced to purchase a pair of Tractors.
+These little bits of brass and iron, the intrinsic value of which might,
+perhaps, amount to ninepence, were sold at five guineas a pair! A man
+who has paid twenty-five dollars for his whistle is apt to blow it louder
+and longer than other people. So it appeared that when the "Perkinean
+Society" applied to the possessors of Tractors in the metropolis to
+concur in the establishment of a public institution for the use of these
+instruments upon the poor, "it was found that only five out of above a
+hundred objected to subscribe, on account of their want of confidence in
+the efficacy of the practice; and these," the committee observes, "there
+is reason to believe, never gave them a fair trial, probably never used
+them in more than one case, and that perhaps a case in which the Tractors
+had never been recommended as serviceable." "Purchasers of the
+Tractors," said one of their ardent advocates, "would be among the last
+to approve of them if they had reason to suppose themselves defrauded of
+five guineas." He forgot poor Moses, with his "gross of green
+spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases." "Dear mother," cried
+the boy, "why won't you listen to reason? I had them a dead bargain, or
+I should not have bought them. The silver rims alone will sell for
+double the money."
+
+But it is an undeniable fact, that many persons of considerable standing,
+and in some instances holding the most elevated positions in society,
+openly patronized the new practice. In a translation of a work entitled
+"Experiments with the Metallic Tractors," originally published in Danish,
+thence rendered successively into German and English, Mr. Benjamin
+Perkins, who edited the English edition, has given a copious enumeration
+of the distinguished individuals, both in America and Europe, whose
+patronage he enjoyed. He goes so far as to signify that ROYALTY itself
+was to be included among the number. When the Perkinean Institution was
+founded, no less a person than Lord Rivers was elected President, and
+eleven other individuals of distinction, among them Governor Franklin,
+son of Dr. Franklin, figured as Vice-Presidents. Lord Henniker, a member
+of the Royal Society, who is spoken of as a man of judgment and talents,
+condescended to patronize the astonishing discovery, and at different
+times bought three pairs of Tractors. When the Tractors were introduced
+into Europe, a large number of testimonials accompanied them from various
+distinguished characters in America, the list of whom is given in the
+translation of the Danish work referred to as follows:
+
+"Those who have individually stated cases, or who have presented their
+names to the public as men who approved of this remedy, and acknowledged
+themselves instrumental in circulating the Tractors, are fifty-six in
+number; thirty-four of whom are physicians and surgeons, and many of them
+of the first eminence, thirteen clergymen, most of whom are doctors of
+divinity, and connected with the literary institutions of America; among
+the remainder are two members of Congress, one professor of natural
+philosophy in a college, etc., etc." It seemed to be taken rather hardly
+by Mr. Perkins that the translators of the work which he edited, in
+citing the names of the advocates of the Metallic Practice, frequently
+omitted the honorary titles which should have been annexed. The
+testimonials were obtained by the Danish writer, from a pamphlet
+published in America, in which these titles were given in full. Thus one
+of these testimonials is from "John Tyler, Esq., a magistrate in the
+county of New London, and late Brigadier-General of the militia in that
+State." The "omission of the General's title" is the subject of
+complaint, as if this title were sufficient evidence of the commanding
+powers of one of the patrons of tractoration. A similar complaint is
+made when "Calvin Goddard, Esq., of Plainfield, Attorney at Law, and a
+member of the Legislature of the State of Connecticut," is mentioned
+without his titular honors, and even on account of the omission of the
+proper official titles belonging to "Nathan Pierce, Esq., Governor and
+Manager of the Almshouse of Newburyport." These instances show the great
+importance to be attached to civil and military dignities, in qualifying
+their holders to judge of scientific subjects, a truth which has not been
+overlooked by the legitimate successors of the Perkinists. In Great
+Britain, the Tractors were not less honored than in America, by the
+learned and the illustrious. The "Perkinistic Committee" made this
+statement in their report: "Mr. Perkins has annually laid before the
+public a large collection of new cases communicated to him for that
+purpose by disinterested and intelligent characters, from almost every
+quarter of Great Britain. In regard to the competency of these vouchers,
+it will be sufficient simply to state that, amongst others whose names
+have been attached to their communications, are eight professors, in four
+different universities, twenty-one regular Physicians, nineteen Surgeons,
+thirty Clergymen, twelve of whom are Doctors of Divinity, and numerous
+other characters of equal respectability."
+
+It cannot but excite our notice and surprise that the number of clergymen
+both in America and Great Britain who thrust forward their evidence on
+this medical topic was singularly large in proportion to that of the
+members of the medical profession. Whole pages are contributed by such
+worthies as the Rev. Dr. Trotter of Hans Place, the Rear. Waring
+Willett, Chaplain to the Earl of Dunmore, the Rev. Dr. Clarke, Chaplain
+to the Prince of Wales. The style of these theologico-medical
+communications may be seen in the following from a divine who was also
+professor in one of the colleges of New England. "I have used the
+Tractors with success in several other cases in my own family, and
+although, like Naaman the Syrian, I cannot tell why the waters of Jordan
+should be better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus; yet since
+experience has proved them so, no reasoning can change the opinion.
+Indeed, the causes of all common facts are, we think, perfectly well
+known to us; and it is very probable, fifty or a hundred years hence, we
+shall as well know why the Metallic Tractors should in a few minutes
+remove violent pains, as we now know why cantharides and opium will
+produce opposite effects, namely, we shall know very little about either
+excepting facts." Fifty or a hundred years hence! if he could have
+looked forward forty years, he would have seen the descendants of the
+"Perkinistic" philosophers swallowing infinitesimal globules, and knowing
+and caring as much about the Tractors as the people at Saratoga Springs
+do about the waters of Abana and Pharpar.
+
+I trust it will not be thought in any degree disrespectful to a
+profession which we all honor, that I have mentioned the great zeal of
+many clergymen in the cause of Perkinism. I hope, too, that I may
+without offence suggest the causes which have often led them out of their
+own province into one to which their education has no special reference.
+The members of that profession ought to be, and commonly are, persons of
+benevolent character. Their duties carry them into the midst of
+families, and particularly at times when the members of them are
+suffering from bodily illness. It is natural enough that a strong desire
+should be excited to alleviate sufferings which may have defied the
+efforts of professional skill; as natural that any remedy which
+recommends itself to the belief or the fancy of the spiritual physician
+should be applied with the hope of benefit; and perfectly certain that
+the weakness of human nature, from which no profession is exempt, will
+lead him to take the most flattering view of its effects upon the
+patient; his own sagacity and judgment being staked upon the success of
+the trial. The inventor of the Tractors was aware of these truths. He
+therefore sent the Tractors gratuitously to many clergymen, accompanied
+with a formal certificate that the holder had become entitled to their
+possession by the payment of five guineas. This was practised in our own
+neighborhood, and I remember finding one of these certificates, so
+presented, which proved that amongst the risks of infancy I had to
+encounter Perkins's Tractors. Two clergymen of Boston and the vicinity,
+both well known to local fame, gave in their testimony to the value of
+the instruments thus presented to them; an unusually moderate proportion,
+when it is remembered that to the common motives of which I have spoken
+was added the seduction of a gift for which the profane public was
+expected to pay so largely.
+
+It was remarkable, also, that Perkinism, which had so little success with
+the medical and scientific part of the community, found great favor in
+the eyes of its more lovely and less obstinate portion. "The lady of
+Major Oxholin,"--I quote from Mr. Perkins's volume,--"having been lately
+in America, had seen and heard much of the great effects of Perkinism.
+Influenced by a most benevolent disposition, she brought these Tractors
+and the pamphlet with her to Europe, with a laudable desire of extending
+their utility to her suffering countrymen." Such was the channel by
+which the Tractors were conveyed to Denmark, where they soon became the
+ruling passion. The workmen, says a French writer, could not manufacture
+them fast enough. Women carried them about their persons, and delighted
+in bringing them into general use. To what extent the Tractors were
+favored with the patronage of English and American ladies, it is of
+course not easy to say, except on general principles, as their names were
+not brought before the public. But one of Dr. Haygarth's stories may
+lead us to conjecture that there was a class of female practitioners who
+went about doing good with the Tractors in England as well as in Denmark.
+A certain lady had the misfortune to have a spot as big as a silver penny
+at the corner of her eye, caused by a bruise, or some such injury.
+Another lady, who was a friend of hers, and a strong believer in
+Perkinism, was very anxious to try the effects of tractoration upon this
+unfortunate blemish. The patient consented; the lady "produced the
+instruments, and, after drawing them four or five times over the spot,
+declared that it changed to a paler color, and on repeating the use of
+them a few minutes longer, that it had almost vanished, and was scarcely
+visible, and departed in high triumph at her success." The lady who
+underwent the operation assured the narrator "that she looked in the
+glass immediately after, and that not the least visible alteration had
+taken place."
+
+It would be a very interesting question, what was the intellectual
+character of those persons most conspicuous in behalf of the Perkinistic
+delusion? Such an inquiry might bring to light some principles which we
+could hereafter apply to the study of other popular errors. But the
+obscurity into which nearly all these enthusiasts have subsided renders
+the question easier to ask than to answer. I believe it would have been
+found that most of these persons were of ardent temperament and of
+considerable imagination, and that their history would show that
+Perkinism was not the first nor the last hobby-horse they rode furiously.
+Many of them may very probably have been persons of more than common
+talent, of active and ingenious minds, of versatile powers and various
+acquirements. Such, for instance, was the estimable man to whom I have
+repeatedly referred as a warm defender of tractoration, and a bitter
+assailant of its enemies. The story tells itself in the biographical
+preface to his poem. He went to London with the view of introducing a
+hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont friends regarded as a very
+important invention. He found, however, that the machine was already in
+common use in that metropolis. A brother Yankee, then in London, had
+started the project of a mill, which was to be carried by the water of
+the Thames. He was sanguine enough to purchase one fifth of this
+concern, which also proved a failure. At about the same period he wrote
+the work which proved the great excitement of his mind upon the subject
+of the transient folly then before the public. Originally a lawyer, he
+was in succession a mechanician, a poet, and an editor, meeting with far
+less success in each of these departments than usually attends men of
+less varied gifts, but of more tranquil and phlegmatic composition. But
+who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities
+like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful
+traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every
+gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to
+another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the
+icy air of truth!
+
+Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments addressed by
+believers to sceptics and opponents. Foremost of all, emblazoned at the
+head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held
+up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an
+impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause
+against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable
+which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from
+time immemorial,--Facts! Facts! Facts! First came the published cases
+of the American clergymen, brigadier-generals, almshouse governors,
+representatives, attorneys, and esquires. Then came the published cases
+of the surgeons of Copenhagen. Then followed reports of about one
+hundred and fifty cases published in England, "demonstrating the efficacy
+of the metallic practice in a variety of complaints both upon the human
+body and on horses, etc." But the progress of facts in Great Britain did
+not stop here. Let those who rely upon the numbers of their
+testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and
+stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from the report of
+the Perkinistic Committee. "The cases published [in Great Britain]
+amounted, in March last, the date of Mr. Perkins's last publication, to
+about five thousand. Supposing that not more than one cure in three
+hundred which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the
+proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that the number, to
+March last, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand!"
+
+Next in order after the appeal to what were called facts, came a series
+of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the
+cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously
+impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific
+scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less
+reputable classes, to the officers of police.
+
+No doubt many of my hearers will recognize, in the following passages,
+arguments they may have heard brought forward with triumphant confidence
+in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have
+honestly thought they proved something; may have used them with the
+purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the opponents of
+their favorite doctrine, whatever that might be. But any train of
+arguments which was contrived for Perkinism, which was just as applicable
+to it as to any other new doctrine in the same branch of science, and
+which was fully employed against its adversaries forty years since,
+might, in common charity, be suffered to slumber in the grave of
+Perkinism. Whether or not the following sentences, taken literally from
+the work of Mr. Perkins, were the originals of some of the idle
+propositions we hear bandied about from time to time, let those who
+listen judge.
+
+The following is the test assumed for the new practice: "If diseases are
+really removed, as those persons who have practised extensively with the
+Tractors declare, it should seem there would be but little doubt of their
+being generally adopted; but if the numerous reports of their efficacy
+which have been published are forgeries, or are unfounded, the practice
+ought to be crushed." To this I merely add, it has been crushed.
+
+The following sentence applies to that a priori judging and uncandid
+class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the food
+there is in the market. "On all discoveries there are persons who,
+without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it
+were by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest
+errors. These were those who knew that Harvey's report of the
+circulation of the blood was a preposterous and ridiculous suggestion,
+and in latter later days there were others who knew that Franklin
+deserved reproach for declaring that points were preferable to balls for
+protecting buildings from lightning."
+
+Again: "This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion for proof, so
+unauthorized and even unprecedented except in the condemnation of a
+Galileo, the persecution of a Copernicus, and a few other acts of
+inquisitorial authority, in the times of ignorance and superstition,
+affords but a lamentable instance of one of his remarks, that this is far
+from being the Age of Reason."
+
+"The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles of
+which we are totally ignorant. None have ever yet been able to explain
+how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures intermittent fevers; and yet
+few, it is hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from the use of these
+important articles because they know nothing of the principle of their
+operations." Or if the argument is preferred, in the eloquent language
+of the Perkinistic poet:
+
+ "What though the CAUSES may not be explained,
+ Since these EFFECTS are duly ascertained,
+ Let not self-interest, prejudice, or pride,
+ Induce mankind to set the means aside;
+ Means which, though simple, are by
+ Heaven designed to alleviate the woes of human kind."
+
+This course of argument is so often employed, that it deserves to be
+expanded a little, so that its length and breadth may be fairly seen. A
+series of what are called facts is brought forward to prove some very
+improbable doctrine. It is objected by judicious people, or such as have
+devoted themselves to analogous subjects, that these assumed facts are in
+direct opposition to all that is known of the course of nature, that the
+universal experience of the past affords a powerful presumption against
+their truth, and that in proportion to the gravity of these objections,
+should be the number and competence of the witnesses. The answer is a
+ready one. What do we know of the mysteries of Nature? Do we understand
+the intricate machinery of the Universe? When to this is added the
+never-failing quotation,
+
+ "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,"--
+
+the question is thought to be finally disposed of.
+
+Take the case of astrology as an example. It is in itself strange and
+incredible that the relations of the heavenly bodies to each other at a
+given moment of time, perhaps half a century ago, should have anything to
+do with my success or misfortune in any undertaking of to-day. But what
+right have I to say it cannot be so? Can I bind the sweet influences of
+Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? I do not know by what mighty
+magic the planets roll in their fluid paths, confined to circles as
+unchanging as if they were rings of steel, nor why the great wave of
+ocean follows in a sleepless round upon the skirts of moonlight; nor cam
+I say from any certain knowledge that the phases of the heavenly bodies,
+or even the falling of the leaves of the forest, or the manner in which
+the sands lie upon the sea-shore, may not be knit up by invisible threads
+with the web of human destiny. There is a class of minds much more ready
+to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is
+incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia
+impossibile est,--"I believe, because it is impossible,"--is an old
+paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of
+persons. And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call
+out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic teachers
+maintained that there was not a verse, line, word, or even letter in the
+Bible which had not a special efficacy either to defend the person who
+rightly employed it, or to injure his enemies; always provided the
+original Hebrew was made use of. In the hands of modern Cabalists every
+substance, no matter how inert, acquires wonderful medicinal virtues,
+provided it be used in a proper state of purity and subdivision.
+
+I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the Perkinists to the
+Medical Profession, as preventing its members from receiving the new but
+unwelcome truths. This accusation is repeated in different forms and
+places, as, for instance, in the following passage: "Will the medical man
+who has spent much money and labor in the pursuit of the arcana of
+Physic, and on the exercise of which depends his support in life,
+proclaim the inefficacy of his art, and recommend a remedy to his patient
+which the most unlettered in society can employ as advantageously as
+himself? and a remedy, too, which, unlike the drops, the pills, the
+powders, etc., of the Materia Medica, is inconsumable, and ever in
+readiness to be employed in successive diseases?"
+
+As usual with these people, much indignation was expressed at any
+parallel between their particular doctrine and practice and those of
+their exploded predecessors. "The motives," says the disinterested Mr.
+Perkins, "which must have impelled to this attempt at classing the
+METALLIC PRACTICE with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are but too
+thinly veiled to escape detection."
+
+To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, an appeal to the
+feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffering humanity, in the shape
+of a notice that the poor would be treated gratis. It is pretty well
+understood that this gratuitous treatment of the poor does not
+necessarily imply an excess of benevolence, any more than the gratuitous
+distribution of a trader's shop-bills is an evidence of remarkable
+generosity; in short, that it is one of those things which honest men
+often do from the best motives, but which rogues and impostors never fail
+to announce as one of their special recommendations. It is astonishing
+to see how these things brighten up at the touch of Mr. Perkins's poet:
+
+ "Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few,
+ The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you,
+ Who in Humanity's bland cause unite,
+ Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite;
+ Like the great Pattern of Benevolence,
+ Hygeia's blessings to the poor dispense;
+ And though opposed by folly's servile brood,
+ ENJOY THE LUXURY OF DOING GOOD."
+
+Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days of prosperity;
+having seen how it sprung into being, and by what means it maintained its
+influence, it only remains to tell the brief story of its discomfiture
+and final downfall. The vast majority of the sensible part of the
+medical profession were contented, so far as we can judge, to let it die
+out of itself. It was in vain that the advocates of this invaluable
+discovery exclaimed over their perverse and interested obstinacy,--in
+vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey, Galileo, and
+Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation; the Baillies and the
+Heberdens,--men whose names have come down to us as synonymous with honor
+and wisdom,--bore their reproaches in meek silence, and left them
+unanswered to their fate. There were some others, however, who, believing
+the public to labor under a delusion, thought it worth while to see
+whether the charm would be broken by an open trial of its virtue, as
+compared with that of some less hallowed formula. It must be remembered
+that a peculiar value was attached to the Metallic Tractors, as made and
+patented by Mr. Perkins. Dr. Haygarth, of Bath, performed various
+experiments upon patients afflicted with different complaints,--the
+patients supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors were employed.
+Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects with Tractors of
+lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate pencil, and
+tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of wood, and
+produced such effects upon five patients that they returned solemn thanks
+in church for their cures. A single specimen of these cases may stand
+for all of them. Ann Hill had suffered for some months from pain in the
+right arm and shoulder. The Tractors (wooden ones) were applied, and in
+the space of five minutes she expressed herself relieved in the following
+apostrophe: "Bless me! why, who could have thought it, that them little
+things could pull the pain from one. Well, to be sure, the longer one
+lives, the more one sees; ah, dear!"
+
+These experiments did not result in the immediate extinction of
+Perkinism. Doubtless they were a great comfort to many obstinate
+unbelievers, and helped to settle some sceptical minds; but for the real
+Perkinistic enthusiasts, it may be questioned whether they would at that
+time have changed their opinion though one had risen from the dead to
+assure them that it was an error. It perished without violence, by an
+easy and natural process. Like the famous toy of Mongolfier, it rose by
+means of heated air,--the fevered breath of enthusiastic ignorance,--and
+when this grew cool, as it always does in a little while, it collapsed
+and fell.
+
+And now, on reviewing the whole subject, how shall we account for the
+extraordinary prevalence of the belief in Perkinism among a portion of
+what is supposed to be the thinking part of the community?
+
+Could the cures have been real ones, produced by the principle of ANIMAL
+MAGNETISM? To this it may be answered that the Perkinists ridiculed the
+idea of approximating Mesmer and the founder of their own doctrine, that
+nothing like the somnambulic condition seems to have followed the use of
+the Tractors, and that neither the exertion of the will nor the powers of
+the individual who operated seem to have been considered of any
+consequence. Besides, the absolute neglect into which the Tractors soon
+declined is good evidence that they were incapable of affording any
+considerable and permanent relief in the complaints for the cure of which
+they were applied.
+
+Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature;
+which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical. Of
+course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the strong
+impression made upon their minds by this novel and marvellous method of
+treatment.
+
+Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those about them, like
+dying people, who often say sincerely, from day to day, that they are
+getting better, cheated themselves into a false and short-lived belief
+that they were cured; and as happens in such cases, the public never knew
+more than the first half of the story.
+
+When it was said to the Perkinists, that whatever effects they produced
+were merely through the imagination, they declared (like the advocates of
+the ROYAL TOUCH and the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM) that this explanation was
+sufficiently disproved by the fact of numerous and successful cures which
+had been witnessed in infants and brute animals. Dr. Haygarth replied to
+this, that "in these cases it is not the Patient, but the Observer, who
+is deceived by his own imagination," and that such may be the fact, we
+have seen in the case of the good lady who thought she had conjured away
+the spot from her friend's countenance, when it remained just as before.
+
+As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Tractors, the facts
+must be allowed to speak for themselves. But when two little bits of
+brass and iron are patented, as an invention, as the result of numerous
+experiments, when people are led, or even allowed, to infer that they are
+a peculiar compound, when they are artfully associated with a new and
+brilliant discovery (which then happened to be Galvanism), when they are
+sold at many hundred times their value, and the seller prints his opinion
+that a Hospital will suffer inconvenience, "unless it possesses many sets
+of the Tractors, and these placed in the hands of the patients to
+practise on each other," one cannot but suspect that they were contrived
+in the neighborhood of a wooden nutmeg factory; that legs of ham in that
+region are not made of the best mahogany; and that such as buy their
+cucumber seed in that vicinity have to wait for the fruit as long as the
+Indians for their crop of gunpowder.
+
+ --------------------------
+
+The succeeding lecture will be devoted to an examination of the doctrines
+of Samuel Hahnemann and his disciples; doctrines which some consider new
+and others old; the common title of which is variously known as
+Ho-moeopathy, Homoe-op-athy, Homoeo-paith-y, or Hom'pathy, and the claims
+of which are considered by some as infinitely important, and by many as
+immeasurably ridiculous.
+
+I wish to state, for the sake of any who may be interested in the
+subject, that I shall treat it, not by ridicule, but by argument; perhaps
+with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable language; with
+very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no desire of making
+enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions and assertions
+cannot stand before a single hour of calm investigation.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It may be thought that a direct attack upon the pretensions of
+HOMOEOPATHY is an uncalled-for aggression upon an unoffending doctrine
+and its peaceful advocates.
+
+But a little inquiry will show that it has long assumed so hostile a
+position with respect to the Medical Profession, that any trouble I, or
+any other member of that profession, may choose to bestow upon it may be
+considered merely as a matter of self-defence. It began with an attempt
+to show the insignificance of all existing medical knowledge. It not
+only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own, but it declared the
+common practice to be attended with the most positively injurious
+effects, that by it acute diseases are aggravated, and chronic diseases
+rendered incurable. It has at various times brought forward collections
+of figures having the air of statistical documents, pretending to show a
+great proportional mortality among the patients of the Medical
+Profession, as compared with those treated according to its own rules.
+Not contented with choosing a name of classical origin for itself, it
+invented one for the whole community of innocent physicians, assuring
+them, to their great surprise, that they were all ALLOPATHISTS, whether
+they knew it or not, and including all the illustrious masters of the
+past, from Hippocrates down to Hunter, under the same gratuitous title.
+The line, then, has been drawn by the champions of the new doctrine; they
+have lifted the lance, they have sounded the charge, and are responsible
+for any little skirmishing which may happen.
+
+But, independently of any such grounds of active resistance, the subject
+involves interests so disproportioned to its intrinsic claims, that it is
+no more than an act of humanity to give it a public examination. If the
+new doctrine is not truth, it is a dangerous, a deadly error. If it is a
+mere illusion, and acquires the same degree of influence that we have
+often seen obtained by other illusions, there is not one of my audience
+who may not have occasion to deplore the fatal credulity which listened
+to its promises.
+
+I shall therefore undertake a sober examination of its principles, its
+facts, and some points of its history. The limited time at my disposal
+requires me to condense as much as possible what I have to say, but I
+shall endeavor to be plain and direct in expressing it. Not one statement
+shall be made which cannot be supported by unimpeachable reference: not
+one word shall be uttered which I am not as willing to print as to speak.
+I have no quibbles to utter, and I shall stoop to answer none; but, with
+full faith in the sufficiency of a plain statement of facts and reasons,
+I submit the subject to the discernment of my audience.
+
+The question may be asked in the outset,--Have you submitted the
+doctrines you are professing to examine to the test of long-repeated and
+careful experiment; have you tried to see whether they were true or not?
+To this I answer, that it is abundantly evident, from what has often
+happened, that it would be of no manner of use for me to allege the
+results of any experiments I might have instituted. Again and again have
+the most explicit statements been made by the most competent persons of
+the utter failure of all their trials, and there were the same abundant
+explanations offered as used to be for the Unguentum Armarium and the
+Metallic Tractors. I could by no possibility perform any experiments the
+result of which could not be easily explained away so as to be of no
+conclusive significance. Besides, as arguments in favor of Homoeopathy
+are constantly addressed to the public in journals, pamphlets, and even
+lectures, by inexperienced dilettanti, the same channel must be open to
+all its opponents.
+
+It is necessary, for the sake of those to whom the whole subject may be
+new, to give in the smallest possible compass the substance of the
+Homoeopathic Doctrine. Samuel Hahnemann, its founder, is a German
+physician, now living in Paris, [Hahnemann died in 1843.] at the age of
+eighty-seven years. In 1796 he published the first paper containing his
+peculiar notions; in 1805 his first work on the subject; in 1810 his
+somewhat famous "Organon of the Healing Art;" the next year what he
+called the "Pure Materia Medica;" and in 1828 his last work, the
+"Treatise on Chronic Diseases." He has therefore been writing at
+intervals on his favorite subject for nearly half a century.
+
+The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of Homoeopathy as a
+system is expressed by the Latin aphorism,
+
+ "SIMILIA SIBILIBUS CURANTUR,"
+
+or like cures like, that is, diseases are cured by agents capable of
+producing symptoms resembling those found in the disease under treatment.
+A disease for Hahnemann consists essentially in a group of symptoms. The
+proper medicine for any disease is the one which is capable of producing
+a similar group of symptoms when given to a healthy person.
+
+It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of symptoms excited
+by different substances, when administered to persons in health, if any
+such can be shown to exist. Hahnemann and his disciples give catalogues
+of the symptoms which they affirm were produced upon themselves or others
+by a large number of drugs which they submitted to experiment.
+
+The second great fact which Hahnemann professes to have established is
+the efficacy of medicinal substances reduced to a wonderful degree of
+minuteness or dilution. The following account of his mode of preparing
+his medicines is from his work on Chronic Diseases, which has not, I
+believe, yet been translated into English. A grain of the substance, if
+it is solid, a drop if it is liquid, is to be added to about a third part
+of one hundred grains of sugar of milk in an unglazed porcelain capsule
+which has had the polish removed from the lower part of its cavity by
+rubbing it with wet sand; they are to be mingled for an instant with a
+bone or horn spatula, and then rubbed together for six minutes; then the
+mass is to be scraped together from the mortar and pestle, which is to
+take four minutes; then to be again rubbed for six minutes. Four minutes
+are then to be devoted to scraping the powder into a heap, and the second
+third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk to be added. Then they are
+to be stirred an instant and rubbed six minutes,--again to be scraped
+together four minutes and forcibly rubbed six; once more scraped together
+for four minutes, when the last third of the hundred grains of sugar of
+milk is to be added and mingled by stirring with the spatula; six minutes
+of forcible rubbing, four of scraping together, and six more (positively
+the last six) of rubbing, finish this part of the process.
+
+Every grain of this powder contains the hundredth of a grain of the
+medicinal substance mingled with the sugar of milk. If, therefore, a
+grain of the powder just prepared is mingled with another hundred grains
+of sugar of milk, and the process just described repeated, we shall have
+a powder of which every grain contains the hundredth of the hundredth, or
+the ten thousandth part of a grain of the medicinal substance. Repeat
+the same process with the same quantity of fresh sugar of milk, and every
+grain of your powder will contain the millionth of a grain of the
+medicinal substance. When the powder is of this strength, it is ready to
+employ in the further solutions and dilutions to be made use of in
+practice.
+
+A grain of the powder is to be taken, a hundred drops of alcohol are to
+be poured on it, the vial is to be slowly turned for a few minutes, until
+the powder is dissolved, and two shakes are to be given to it. On this
+point I will quote Hahnemann's own words. "A long experience and
+multiplied observations upon the sick lead me within the last few years
+to prefer giving only two shakes to medicinal liquids, whereas I formerly
+used to give ten." The process of dilution is carried on in the same way
+as the attenuation of the powder was done; each successive dilution with
+alcohol reducing the medicine to a hundredth part of the quantity of that
+which preceded it. In this way the dilution of the original millionth of
+a grain of medicine contained in the grain of powder operated on is
+carried successively to the billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth,
+quintillionth, and very often much higher fractional divisions. A dose
+of any of these medicines is a minute fraction of a drop, obtained by
+moistening with them one or more little globules of sugar, of which
+Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred to weigh a grain.
+
+As an instance of the strength of the medicines prescribed by Hahnemann,
+I will mention carbonate of lime. He does not employ common chalk, but
+prefers a little portion of the friable part of an oystershell. Of this
+substance, carried to the sextillionth degree, so much as one or two
+globules of the size mentioned can convey is a common dose. But for
+persons of very delicate nerves it is proper that the dilution should be
+carried to the decillionth degree. That is, an important medicinal
+effect is to be expected from the two hundredth or hundredth part of the
+millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the
+millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the
+millionth of the millionth of a grain of oyster-shell. This is only the
+tenth degree of potency, but some of his disciples profess to have
+obtained palpable effects from "much higher dilutions."
+
+The third great doctrine of Hahnemann is the following. Seven eighths at
+least of all chronic diseases are produced by the existence in the system
+of that infectious disorder known in the language of science by the
+appellation of PSORA, but to the less refined portion of the community by
+the name of ITCH. In the words of Hahnemann's "Organon," "This Psora is
+the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all the other countless
+forms of disease, which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria,
+hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, and
+spasms of all kinds, softening of the bones, or rickets, scoliosis and
+cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungua haematodes, gout,--yellow jaundice and
+cyanosis, dropsy,--"
+
+["The degrees of DILUTION must not be confounded with those of POTENCY.
+Their relations may be seen by this table:
+
+lst dilution,--One hundredth of a drop or grain.
+
+2d " One ten thousandth.
+
+3d " One millionth, marked I.
+
+4th " One hundred millionth.
+
+5th " One ten thousand millionth.
+
+6th " One million millionth, or one billionth, marked II.
+
+7th " One hundred billionth.
+
+8th " One ten thousand billionth.
+
+9th " One million billionth, or one trillionth, marked III.
+
+10th " One hundred trillionth.
+
+11th " One ten thousand trillionth.
+
+12th " One million trillionth, or one quadrillionth, marked
+ IV.,--and so on indefinitely.
+
+The large figures denote the degrees of POTENCY.]
+
+"gastralgia, epistaxis, haemoptysis,--asthma and suppuration of the
+lungs,--megrim, deafness, cataract and amaurosis,--paralysis, loss of
+sense, pains of every kind, etc., appear in our pathology as so many
+peculiar, distinct, and independent diseases."
+
+For the last three centuries, if the same authority may be trusted, under
+the influence of the more refined personal habits which have prevailed,
+and the application of various external remedies which repel the
+affection from the skin; Psora has revealed itself in these numerous
+forms of internal disease, instead of appearing, as in former periods,
+under the aspect of an external malady.
+
+These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as laid down in
+those standard works of Homoeopathy, the "Organon" and the "Treatise on
+Chronic Diseases."
+
+Several other principles may be added, upon all of which he insists with
+great force, and which are very generally received by his disciples.
+
+1. Very little power is allowed to the curative efforts of nature.
+Hahnemann goes so far as to say that no one has ever seen the simple
+efforts of nature effect the durable recovery of a patient from a chronic
+disease. In general, the Homoeopathist calls every recovery which
+happens under his treatment a cure.
+
+2. Every medicinal substance must be administered in a state of the most
+perfect purity, and uncombined with any other. The union of several
+remedies in a single prescription destroys its utility, and, according to
+the "Organon," frequently adds a new disease.
+
+3. A large number of substances commonly thought to be inert develop
+great medicinal powers when prepared in the manner already described; and
+a great proportion of them are ascertained to have specific antidotes in
+case their excessive effects require to be neutralized.
+
+4. Diseases should be recognized, as far as possible, not by any of the
+common names imposed upon them, as fever or epilepsy, but as individual
+collections of symptoms, each of which differs from every other
+collection.
+
+5. The symptoms of any complaint must be described with the most minute
+exactness, and so far as possible in the patient's own words. To
+illustrate the kind of circumstances the patient is expected to record, I
+will mention one or two from the 313th page of the "Treatise on Chronic
+Diseases,"--being the first one at which I opened accidentally.
+
+"After dinner, disposition to sleep; the patient winks."
+
+"After dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine days after
+taking the remedy)."
+
+This remedy was that same oyster-shell which is to be prescribed
+"fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree." According to
+Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the size mentioned does not
+fully display itself in some cases until twenty-four or even thirty days
+after it is taken, and in such instances has not exhausted its good
+effects until towards the fortieth or fiftieth day,--before which time it
+would be absurd and injurious to administer a new remedy.
+
+So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have been stated without
+comment, or exaggeration of any of their features, very much as any
+adherent of his opinions might have stated them, if obliged to compress
+them into so narrow a space.
+
+Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it now exists? He
+certainly ought to be its best representative, after having created it,
+and devoted his life to it for half a century. He is spoken of as the
+great physician of the time, in most, if not all Homoeopathic works. If
+he is not authority on the subject of his own doctrines, who is? So far
+as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the so-called science has
+ever been ascribed to any other observer; at least, no general principle
+or law, of consequence enough to claim any prominence in Homoeopathic
+works, has ever been pretended to have originated with any of his
+illustrious disciples. He is one of the only two Homoeopathic writers
+with whom, as I shall mention, the Paris publisher will have anything to
+do upon his own account. The other is Jahr, whose Manual is little more
+than a catalogue of symptoms and remedies. If any persons choose to
+reject Hahnemann as not in the main representing Homoeopathy, if they
+strike at his authority, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and
+formally announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness; for upon
+his sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as embodied in
+his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, repose the foundations
+of Homoeopathy as a practical system.
+
+So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made upon the
+subject, the following is the present condition of belief.
+
+1. All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is the only
+fundamental principle in medicine. Of course if any man does not agree
+to this the name Homoeopathist can no longer be applied to him with
+propriety.
+
+2. The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses is general,
+and in some places universal, among the advocates of Homoeopathy; but a
+distinct movement has been made in Germany to get rid of any restriction
+to the use of these doses, and to employ medicines with the same license
+as other practitioners.
+
+3. The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in Psora,
+notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve years of study and
+research to establish the fact and its practical consequences, has met
+with great neglect and even opposition from very many of his own
+disciples.
+
+It is true, notwithstanding, that, throughout most of their writings
+which I have seen, there runs a prevailing tone of great deference to
+Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to his authority, a general
+agreement with the minor points of his belief, and a pretence of
+harmonious union in a common faith. [Those who will take the trouble to
+look over Hull's Translation of Jahr's Manual may observe how little
+comparative space is given to remedies resting upon any other authority
+than that of Hahnemann.]
+
+Many persons, and most physicians and scientific men, would be satisfied
+with the statement of these doctrines, and examine them no further. They
+would consider it vastly more probable that any observer in so fallacious
+and difficult a field of inquiry as medicine had been led into error, or
+walked into it of his own accord, than that such numerous and
+extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They would feel a
+right to exercise the same obduracy towards them as the French Institute
+is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it
+relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is
+the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and
+natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago, an
+unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to
+Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a distance of
+a little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so they would not
+even look into Homoeopathy, though all its advocates should exclaim in
+the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic
+Tractors, that "On all discoveries there are persons who, without
+descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by
+intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest errors."
+And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a perfectly clear
+conscience, although they were assured that they were behaving in the
+same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus,
+the identical great names which were invoked by Mr. Benjamin Douglass
+Perkins.
+
+But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is not
+sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief. I
+therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme apparent
+singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them, but on the
+whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument to suggest the
+vast complication of improbabilities involved in the statements
+enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to the weight
+of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as a proof of
+the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to a brief
+consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our scrutiny.
+
+The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely
+unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural
+relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery of
+the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be a
+fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms
+like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and the
+next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And
+allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to the
+third new doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic
+diseases to be owing to Psora.
+
+This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal
+doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is
+often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their
+own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state
+of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as
+his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their
+faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a
+parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that
+three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a
+complete revolution of all that ages of the most varied experience had
+been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a
+single individual.
+
+Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it
+may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the
+proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like
+symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a
+degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained
+facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under
+certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects,
+one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief.
+I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in
+which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the
+agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms.
+But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded
+upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that
+the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the sole law of nature
+in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse
+ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a
+dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a
+corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast
+pretensions.
+
+So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the minute
+doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of
+conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the
+powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these
+comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on
+simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any
+intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet
+made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground
+that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of
+alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution
+he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on which
+he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only
+prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of it,
+all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute
+portion of the drop with which he began. But now let us suppose we take
+one single drop of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this
+were to be carried through the common series of dilutions.
+
+A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and may
+be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who chooses.
+
+For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.
+
+For the second dilution it would take 10;000 drops, or about a pint.
+
+For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.
+
+For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000
+gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion
+gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of
+water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course
+fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of
+dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity
+the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Trifling errors must be
+expected, but they are as likely to be on one side as the other, and any
+little matter like Lake Superior or the Caspian would be but a drop in
+the bucket.
+
+Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the
+mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in
+circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture of
+Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that
+medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, "against the most sudden,
+frightful, and fatal diseases!" [In the French edition of 1834, the
+proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked IV.
+Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three
+instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the
+promise in the preface that "some remarks upon the doses used may be
+found at the head of each medicine"? Possibly because it makes no
+difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or another;
+but then it is very singular that such precise directions were formerly
+given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's "experience" should have led
+him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a former part of this
+Lecture (p. 44).]
+
+And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation which
+shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the
+quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every individual
+of the whole human family, past and present, with more than five billion
+doses each, the action of each dose lasting about four days.
+
+Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of potency,
+and various substances are frequently administered at the decillionth or
+tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher attenuations with
+professed medicinal results. Is there not in this as great an exception
+to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the miracle of the
+loaves and fishes? Ask this question of a Homoeopathist, and he will
+answer by referring to the effects produced by a very minute portion of
+vaccine matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But the vaccine
+matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of which it is a
+peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced into the
+system, as a seed does in the soil. Therefore the hundredth part of a
+grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed, soon
+increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a
+grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what is a
+very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most.
+characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity not
+merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use. The
+thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a
+product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when
+conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such as
+silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may produce a
+mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.
+
+As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action of the
+infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some odorous substances
+which possess the extraordinary power of diffusing their imponderable
+emanations through a very wide space, however it may be abused in
+argument, and rapidly as it evaporates on examination, it is not like
+that just mentioned, wholly without meaning. The fact of the vast
+diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has
+long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisibility
+of matter, and the nicety of the senses. And if this were compared with
+the effects of a very minute dose of morphia on the whole system, or the
+sudden and fatal impression of a single drop of prussic acid, or, with
+what comes still nearer, the poisonous influence of an atmosphere
+impregnated with invisible malaria, we should find in each of these
+examples an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few
+instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or subtile forms of
+matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle and mortar in his hand,
+and tells me that he will take a little speck of some substance which
+nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain
+of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of
+rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion of it an odor which, if the
+whole grain were used, would be capable of pervading an apartment, a
+house, a village, a province, an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of
+this broad planet upon which we tread; and that from each of fifty or
+sixty substances he can in this way develop a distinct and hitherto
+unknown odor: and if he tries to show that all this is rendered quite
+reasonable by the analogy of musk and roses, I shall certainly be
+justified in considering him incapable of reasoning, and beyond the reach
+of my argument. What if, instead of this, he professes to develop new
+and wonderful medicinal powers from the same speck of chalk or charcoal,
+in such proportions as would impregnate every pond, lake, river, sea, and
+ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in favor of the
+probability of his assertion.
+
+All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so
+extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which a
+child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy
+mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that
+nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters,
+secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing
+to repeated experiments in public, with every precaution to guard against
+error, and with the most plain and peremptory results, should induce us
+to lend any credence to such pretensions.
+
+The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember, is
+the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a startling one,
+to say the least. That an affection always recognized as a very
+unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a mere temporary
+incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those unfortunate enough to
+suffer from it, and hardly known among the better classes of society,
+should be all at once found out by a German physician to be the great
+scourge of mankind, the cause of their severest bodily and mental
+calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy and madness, must excite our
+unqualified surprise. And when the originator of this singular truth
+ascribes, as in the page now open before me, the declining health of a
+disgraced courtier, the chronic malady of a bereaved mother, even the
+melancholy of the love-sick and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less
+than the insignificant, unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it
+not seem as if the very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into
+chaos, over the earthquake-heaving of discovery?
+
+And when one man claims to have established these three independent
+truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery of the
+law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the mariner's
+compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming and unanimous,
+the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving himself, or
+trying to deceive others?
+
+I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his
+school.
+
+In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured
+by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--"the sole law of nature in
+therapeutics,"--it is necessary,
+
+1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be
+faithfully studied and recorded.
+
+2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those
+diseases most like their own symptoms.
+
+3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not
+produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.
+
+1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by
+Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were made known in his
+Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation,
+published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to
+have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute
+doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little movement
+of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours or days, as
+being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have enumerated
+some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs taken, you will
+be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the assertions of
+such observers.
+
+The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of
+Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing to
+be responsible. He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not
+selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the work. I
+shall be very brief in my citations.
+
+"After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon
+resuming the erect posture."
+
+"An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the left
+hand, which obliges the person to scratch." The medicine was acetate of
+lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last twenty-eight
+days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last might be supposed
+to happen.
+
+Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh,
+sighing, pimples; "after having written a long time with the back a
+little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as if
+from a strain,"--"dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to mental
+dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight."
+
+I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited
+these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous,
+which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show
+that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences
+to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically ascribed
+to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the minute doses I
+have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.
+
+To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether
+deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be
+produced by the substance in question.
+
+The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one or
+both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica of Hahnemann,
+which may be considered as the basis of practical Homoeopathy. In the
+Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so far as I know, of those who
+practise Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred remedies are
+enumerated, many of which, however, have never been employed in practice.
+In at least one edition there were no means of distinguishing those which
+had been tried upon the sick from the others. It is true that marks have
+been added in the edition employed here, which serve to distinguish them;
+but what are we to think of a standard practical author on Materia
+Medica, who at one time omits to designate the proper doses of his
+remedies, and at another to let us have any means of knowing whether a
+remedy has ever been tried or not, while he is recommending its
+employment in the most critical and threatening diseases?
+
+I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's
+experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to know
+whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look with confidence,
+confirm these pretended facts. Now there are many individuals, long and
+well known to the scientific world, who have tried these experiments upon
+healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their effects have at all
+corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.
+
+I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not
+referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as to the
+result of his own trials. This distinguished physician is Professor of
+Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most widely known and
+valued authors upon practical and theoretical subjects the profession can
+claim in any country. He is a man of great kindness of character, a most
+liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned integrity, and is
+called, in the leading article of the first number of the "Homoepathic
+Examiner," "an eminent and very enlightened allopathist." Assisted by a
+number of other persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of
+cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly extolled
+remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated publicly to the
+Academy of Medicine that they never produced the slightest appearance of
+the symptoms attributed to them. The results of a man like this, so
+extensively known as one of the most philosophical and candid, as well as
+brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable abilities and signal
+liberality are generally conceded, ought to be of great weight in
+deciding the question.
+
+M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing
+in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of
+Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and
+several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and
+the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.
+
+M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had
+occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made use
+of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he never
+found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.
+
+If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to the
+express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which were
+given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by
+M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of the pretended
+consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that the same
+quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of the
+unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into six
+hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in the two
+cases.
+
+This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
+what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.
+
+In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
+physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the
+most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot
+without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or
+any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time, to
+come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge
+was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of
+trial arrived.
+
+From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of symptoms
+attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various drugs upon
+healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.
+
+2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances
+are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms. For
+facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the recorded
+experience of the medical profession in general, and the results of
+trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable of testing
+the truth of the doctrine.
+
+No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there
+exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms of
+diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as
+Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according
+to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto
+interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful
+remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that
+the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to
+their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.
+
+Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the
+proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the works
+of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the
+operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure,
+although without the physician's knowledge that this was the real secret.
+And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a degree of
+plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted somewhat
+with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather say, with
+the relative value of medical evidence, according to the sources whence
+it is derived, would be almost frightened into the belief, at seeing the
+pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as his witnesses.
+
+It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of authors of
+preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less enlightened than
+ourselves, and which they were very liable to misrepresent, to exercise
+some little discretion; to discriminate, in some measure, between writers
+deserving confidence and those not entitled to it. But there is not the
+least appearance of any such delicacy on the part of Hahnemann. A large
+majority of the names of old authors he cites are wholly unknown to
+science. With some of them I have been long acquainted, and I know that
+their accounts of diseases are no more to be trusted than their
+contemporary Ambroise Pare's stories of mermen, and similar absurdities.
+But if my judgment is rejected, as being a prejudiced one, I can refer to
+Cullen, who mentioned three of Hahnemann's authors in one sentence, as
+being "not necessarily bad authorities; but certainly such when they
+delivered very improbable events;" and as this was said more than half a
+century ago, it could not have had any reference to Hahnemann. But
+although not the slightest sign of discrimination is visible in his
+quotations,--although for him a handful of chaff from Schenck is all the
+same thing as a measure of wheat from Morgagni,--there is a formidable
+display of authorities, and an abundant proof of ingenious researches to
+be found in each of the great works of Hahnemann with which I am
+familiar. [Some painful surmises might arise as to the erudition of
+Hahnemann's English Translator, who makes two individuals of "Zacutus,
+Lucitanus," as well as respecting that of the conductors of an American
+Homoeopathic periodical, who suffer the name of the world-renowned
+Cardanus to be spelt Cardamus in at least three places, were not this
+gross ignorance of course attributable only to the printer.]
+
+It is stated by Dr. Leo-Wolf, that Professor Joerg, of Leipsic, has
+proved many of Hahnemann's quotations from old authors to be adulterate
+and false. What particular instances he has pointed out I have no means
+of learning. And it is probably wholly impossible on this side of the
+Atlantic, and even in most of the public libraries of Europe, to find
+anything more than a small fraction of the innumerable obscure
+publications which the neglect of grocers and trunkmakers has spared to
+be ransacked by the all-devouring genius of Homoeopathy. I have
+endeavored to verify such passages as my own library afforded me the
+means of doing. For some I have looked in vain, for want, as I am
+willing to believe, of more exact references. But this I am able to
+affirm, that, out of the very small number which I have been able, to
+trace back to their original authors, I have found two to be wrongly
+quoted, one of them being a gross misrepresentation.
+
+The first is from the ancient Roman author, Caelius Aurelianus; the
+second from the venerable folio of Forestus. Hahnemann uses the
+following expressions,--if he is not misrepresented in the English
+Translation of the 'Organon': "Asclepiades on one occasion cured an
+inflammation of the brain by administering a small quantity of wine."
+After correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can find no
+such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two
+modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of
+wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous."
+[Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi.
+Amsterdam. Wetstein, 1755.]
+
+In speaking of the oil of anise-seed, Hahnemann says that Forestus
+observed violent colic caused by its administration. But, as the author
+tells the story, a young man took, by the counsel of a surgeon, an acrid
+and virulent medicine, the name of which is not given, which brought on a
+most cruel fit of the gripes and colic. After this another surgeon was
+called, who gave him oil of anise-seed and wine, "which increased his
+suffering." [Observ. et Curat. Med. lib. XXI obs. xiii. Frankfort,
+1614.] Now if this was the Homoeopathic remedy, as Hahnemann pretends,
+it might be a fair question why the young man was not cured by it. But
+it is a much graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning
+enough to go so far after his facts, should think it right to treat them
+with such astonishing negligence or such artful unfairness.
+
+Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities were
+to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these authors
+were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used to prove
+whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of credibility. Let me
+give one instance to illustrate the character of this man's mind.
+Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th paragraph of the
+"Organon," that the smell of the rose will cause certain persons to
+faint. And he says in the text that substances which produce peculiar
+effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same symptoms
+in people in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph he
+quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have
+looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.
+
+"It was by these means (i.e. Homoeopathically) that the Princess Eudosia
+with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!"
+
+Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as
+this,--a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a
+recovery as this,--a recovery which is happening every day, from a breath
+of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string, loosening a
+stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever is done,--is it
+possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there one, but hundreds
+upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, is the Newton, the
+Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth century!
+
+The whole process of demonstration he employs is this. An experiment is
+instituted with some drug upon one or more healthy persons. Everything
+that happens for a number of days or weeks is, as we have seen, set down
+as an effect of the medicine. Old volumes are then ransacked
+promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change that anybody ever
+said was produced by the drug in question is added to the list of
+symptoms. By one or both of these methods, each of the sixty-four
+substances enumerated by Hahnemann is shown to produce a very large
+number of symptoms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-seven, and the
+highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one. And having made out this list
+respecting any drug, a catalogue which, as you may observe in any
+Homoeopathic manual, contains various symptoms belonging to every organ
+of the body, what can be easier than to find alleged cures in every
+medical author which can at once be attributed to the Homoeopathic
+principle; still more if the grave of extinguished credulity is called
+upon to give up its dead bones as living witnesses; and worst of all, if
+the monuments of the past are to be mutilated in favor of "the sole law
+of Nature in therapeutics"?
+
+There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been made as an
+entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine. They have been suffered to
+pass current so long that it is time they should be nailed to the
+counter, a little operation which I undertake, with perfect cheerfulness,
+to perform for them.
+
+The first is a supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law found in the
+precept given for the treatment of parts which have been frozen, by
+friction with snow or similar means. But we deceive ourselves by names,
+if we suppose the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat.
+The snow may even be actually warmer than the part to which it is
+applied. But even if it were at the same temperature when applied, it
+never did and never could do the least good to a frozen part, except as a
+mode of regulating the application of what? of heat. But the heat must
+be applied gradually, just as food must be given a little at a time to
+those perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm
+room, heat would be applied very rapidly, were not something interposed
+to prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is
+exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly
+warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not
+melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain
+frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in
+large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy.
+
+The next supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged
+successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. This is a
+popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence
+to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of
+themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a
+most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of
+sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and
+the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is
+capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be
+attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords
+any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it
+as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron
+that the fire does not literally "draw the fire out," which is her
+hypothesis.
+
+But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by
+heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle
+of Homoeopathy.
+
+For you will remember that this principle is that Like cures Like, and
+not that Same cures Same; that there is resemblance and not identity
+between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which
+cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction than
+the Homoeopathists themselves. For if Same cures Same, then every poison
+must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor
+their so-called experience. They have been asked often enough, why it
+was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused,
+and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it
+had produced, and then the; were ready enough to see the distinction I
+have pointed out. O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of
+one very much like him!
+
+A third instance in proof of the Homoeopathic law is sought for in the
+acknowledged efficacy of vaccination. And how does the law apply to
+this? It is granted by the advocates of Homoeopathy that there is a
+resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in
+health and the symptoms of small-pox. Therefore, according to the rule,
+the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody knows, is
+entirely untrue. But it prevents small-pox, say the Homoeopathists.
+Yes, and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever happening again, and
+we know just as much of the principle involved in the one case as in the
+other. For this is only one of a series of facts which we are wholly
+unable to explain. Small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough,
+protect those who have them once from future attacks; but nettle-rash and
+catarrh and lung fever, each of which is just as Homoeopathic to itself
+as any one of the others, have no such preservative power. We are
+obliged to accept the fact, unexplained, and we can do no more for
+vaccination than for the rest.
+
+I come now to the most directly practical point connected with the
+subject, namely,--
+
+What is the state of the evidence as to the efficacy of the proper
+Homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases.
+
+As the treatment adopted by the Homoeopathists has been almost
+universally by means of the infinitesimal doses, the question of their
+efficacy is thrown open, in common with that of the truth of their
+fundamental axiom, as both are tested in practice.
+
+We must look for facts as to the actual working of Homoeopathy to three
+sources.
+
+1. The statements of the unprofessional public.
+
+2. The assertions of Homoeopathic practitioners.
+
+3. The results of trials by competent and honest physicians, not pledged
+to the system.
+
+I think, after what we have seen of medical facts, as they are
+represented by incompetent persons, we are disposed to attribute little
+value to all statements of wonderful cures, coming from those who have
+never been accustomed to watch the caprices of disease, and have not
+cooled down their young enthusiasm by the habit of tranquil observation.
+Those who know nothing of the natural progress of a malady, of its
+ordinary duration, of its various modes of terminating, of its liability
+to accidental complications, of the signs which mark its insignificance
+or severity, of what is to be expected of it when left to itself, of how
+much or how little is to be anticipated from remedies, those who know
+nothing or next to nothing of all these things, and who are in a great
+state of excitement from benevolence, sympathy, or zeal for a new medical
+discovery, can hardly be expected to be sound judges of facts which have
+misled so many sagacious men, who have spent their lives in the daily
+study and observation of them. I believe that, after having drawn the
+portrait of defunct Perkinism, with its five thousand printed cures, and
+its million and a half computed ones, its miracles blazoned about through
+America, Denmark, and England; after relating that forty years ago women
+carried the Tractors about in their pockets, and workmen could not make
+them fast enough for the public demand; and then showing you, as a
+curiosity, a single one of these instruments, an odd one of a pair, which
+I obtained only by a lucky accident, so utterly lost is the memory of all
+their wonderful achievements; I believe, after all this, I need not waste
+time in showing that medical accuracy is not to be looked for in the
+florid reports of benevolent associations, the assertions of illustrious
+patrons, the lax effusions of daily journals, or the effervescent gossip
+of the tea-table.
+
+Dr. Hering, whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of
+Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by
+its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in
+general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature of its innate
+principles."
+
+We have seen something of "the incontrovertible nature of its innate
+principles," and it seems probable, on the whole, that its success in
+general must be made up of its success in isolated cases. Some attempts
+have been made, however, to finish the whole matter by sweeping
+statistical documents, which are intended to prove its triumphant success
+over the common practice.
+
+It is well known to those who have had the good fortune to see the
+"Homoeopathic Examiner," that this journal led off, in its first number,
+with a grand display of everything the newly imported doctrine had to
+show for itself. It is well remarked, on the twenty-third page of this
+article, that "the comparison of bills of mortality among an equal number
+of sick, treated by divers methods, is a most poor and lame way to get at
+conclusions touching principles of the healing art." In confirmation of
+which, the author proceeds upon the twenty-fifth page to prove the
+superiority of the Homoeopathic treatment of cholera, by precisely these
+very bills of mortality. Now, every intelligent physician is aware that
+the poison of cholera differed so much in its activity at different times
+and, places, that it was next to impossible to form any opinion as to the
+results of treatment, unless every precaution was taken to secure the
+most perfectly corresponding conditions in the patients treated, and
+hardly even then. Of course, then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of
+Mordvinov, backed by a number of so-called physicians practising in
+Russian villages, is singularly competent to the task of settling the
+whole question of the utility of this or that kind of treatment; to prove
+that, if not more than eight and a half per cent. of those attacked with
+the disease perished, the rest owed their immunity to Hahnemann. I can
+remember when more than a hundred patients in a public institution were
+attacked with what, I doubt not, many Homoeopathic physicians (to say
+nothing of Homoeopathic admirals) would have called cholera, and not one
+of them died, though treated in the common way, and it is my firm belief
+that, if such a result had followed the administration of the omnipotent
+globules, it would have been in the mouth of every adept in Europe, from
+Quin of London to Spohr of Gandersheim. No longer ago than yesterday, in
+one of the most widely circulated papers of this city, there was
+published an assertion that the mortality in several Homoeopathic
+Hospitals was not quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by
+the writer Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hundred. An
+honest man should be ashamed of such an argumentum ad ignorantiam. The
+mortality of a hospital depends not merely on the treatment of the
+patients, but on the class of diseases it is in the habit of receiving,
+on the place where it is, on the season, and many other circumstances.
+For instance, there are many hospitals in the great cities of Europe that
+receive few diseases of a nature to endanger life, and, on the other
+hand, there are others where dangerous diseases are accumulated out of
+the common proportion. Thus, in the wards of Louis, at the Hospital of
+La Pitie, a vast number of patients in the last stages of consumption
+were constantly entering, to swell the mortality of that hospital. It
+was because he was known to pay particular attention to the diseases of
+the chest that patients laboring under those fatal affections to an
+incurable extent were so constantly coming in upon him. It is always a
+miserable appeal to the thoughtlessness of the vulgar, to allege the
+naked fact of the less comparative mortality in the practice of one
+hospital or of one physician than another, as an evidence of the
+superiority of their treatment. Other things being equal, it must always
+be expected that those institutions and individuals enjoying to the
+highest degree the confidence of the community will lose the largest
+proportion of their patients; for the simple reason that they will
+naturally be looked to by those suffering from the gravest class of
+diseases; that many, who know that they are affected with mortal disease,
+will choose to die under their care or shelter, while the subjects of
+trifling maladies, and merely troublesome symptoms, amuse themselves to
+any extent among the fancy practitioners. When, therefore, Dr.
+Mublenbein, as stated in the "Homoeopathic Examiner," and quoted in
+yesterday's "Daily Advertiser," asserts that the mortality among his
+patients is only one per cent. since he has practised Homoeopathy,
+whereas it was six per cent. when he employed the common mode of
+practice, I am convinced by this, his own statement, that the citizens of
+Brunswick, whenever they are seriously sick, take good care not to send
+for Dr. Muhlenbein!
+
+It is evidently impossible that I should attempt, within the compass of a
+single lecture, any detailed examination of the very numerous cases
+reported in the Homoeopathic Treatises and Journals. Having been in the
+habit of receiving the French "Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine" until
+the premature decease of that Journal, I have had the opportunity of
+becoming acquainted somewhat with the style of these documents, and
+experiencing whatever degree of conviction they were calculated to
+produce. Although of course I do not wish any value to be assumed for my
+opinion, such as it is, I consider that you are entitled to hear it. So
+far, then, as I am acquainted with the general character of the cases
+reported by the Homoeopathic physicians, they would for the most part be
+considered as wholly undeserving a place in any English, French, or
+American periodical of high standing, if, instead of favoring the
+doctrine they were intended to support, they were brought forward to
+prove the efficacy of any common remedy administered by any common
+practitioner. There are occasional exceptions to this remark; but the
+general truth of it is rendered probable by the fact that these cases are
+always, or almost always, written with the single object of showing the
+efficacy of the medicine used, or the skill of the practitioner, and it
+is recognized as a general rule that such cases deserve very little
+confidence. Yet they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those who
+are not fully aware of the fallacies of medical evidence. Let me state a
+case in illustration. Nobody doubts that some patients recover under
+every form of practice. Probably all are willing to allow that a large
+majority, for instance, ninety in a hundred, of such cases as a physician
+is called to in daily practice, would recover, sooner or later, with more
+or less difficulty, provided nothing were done to interfere seriously
+with the efforts of nature.
+
+Suppose, then, a physician who has a hundred patients prescribes to each
+of them pills made of some entirely inert substance, as starch, for
+instance. Ninety of them get well, or if he chooses to use such
+language, he cures ninety of them. It is evident, according to the
+doctrine of chances, that there must be a considerable number of
+coincidences between the relief of the patient and the administration of
+the remedy. It is altogether probable that there will happen two or
+three very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in which
+it would seem evident that the medicine produced the relief, though it
+had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it. Now suppose that the
+physician publishes these cases, will they not have a plausible
+appearance of proving that which, as we granted at the outset, was
+entirely false? Suppose that instead of pills of starch he employs
+microscopic sugarplums, with the five' million billion trillionth part of
+a suspicion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then publishes his successful
+cases, through the leaden lips of the press, or the living ones of his
+female acquaintances,--does that make the impression a less erroneous
+one? But so it is that in Homoeopathic works and journals and gossip one
+can never, or next to never, find anything but successful cases, which
+might do very well as a proof of superior skill, did it not prove as much
+for the swindling advertisers whose certificates disgrace so many of our
+newspapers. How long will it take mankind to learn that while they listen
+to "the speaking hundreds and units," who make the world ring with the
+pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the "dumb millions" of deluded
+and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of their misplaced
+confidence!
+
+I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural
+course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which,
+although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys an
+unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with the subject. Thus
+a young woman affected with jaundice is mentioned in the German "Annals
+of Clinical Homoeopathy" as having been cured in twenty-nine days by
+pulsatilla and nux vomica. Rummel, a well-known writer of the same
+school, speaks of curing a case of jaundice in thirty-four days by
+Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, and cinchona. I happened to
+have a case in my own household, a few weeks since, which lasted about
+ten days, and this was longer than I have repeatedly seen it in hospital
+practice, so that it was nothing to boast of.
+
+Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a patient with
+sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under the common treatment. The
+patient gets well by the use of arnica in a little more than a month
+longer, and this extraordinary fact is published in the French "Archives
+of Homoeopathic Medicine."
+
+In the same Journal is recorded the case of a patient who with nothing
+more, so far as any proof goes, than inluenza, gets down to her shop upon
+the sixth day.
+
+And again, the cool way in which everything favorable in a case is set
+down by these people entirely to their treatment, may be seen in a case
+of croup reported in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, in which
+leeches, blistering, inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful internal
+medicine had been employed, and yet the merit was all attributed to one
+drop of some Homoeopathic fluid.
+
+I need not multiply these quotations, which illustrate the grounds of an
+opinion which the time does not allow me to justify more at length; other
+such cases are lying open before me; there is no end to them if more were
+wanted; for nothing is necessary but to look into any of the numerous
+broken-down Journals of Homoeopathy, the volumes of which may be found on
+the shelves of those curious in such matters.
+
+A number of public trials of Homoeopathy have been made in different
+parts of the world. Six of these are mentioned in the Manifesto of the
+"Homoeopathic Examiner." Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely
+silence people, would be to forget the whole experience of the past. Dr.
+Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of the five-guinea
+Tractors, although they proved that they could work the same miracles
+with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate
+as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of
+these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those
+who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is
+attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner"
+itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the
+opening flourish of that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of
+these public trials at all, having abundant other evidence on the point.
+But I think it best, on the whole, to mention two of them in a few
+words,--that instituted at Naples and that of Andral.
+
+There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last half
+century, so widely known throughout the world of science as that of M.
+Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the treatment of insanity, and who
+was without a rival in that department of practical medicine. It is from
+an analysis communicated by him to the "Gazette Medicale de Paris" that I
+derive my acquaintance with the account of the trial at Naples by Dr.
+Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace. This account seems to be
+entirely deserving of credit. Ten patients were set apart, and not
+allowed to take any medicine at all,--much against the wish of the
+Homoeopathic physician. All of them got well, and of course all of them
+would have been claimed as triumphs if they had been submitted to the
+treatment. Six other slight cases (each of which is specified) got well
+under the Homoeopathic treatment, none of its asserted specific effects
+being manifested.
+
+All the rest were cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial, which
+was interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew
+worse, or received no benefit. A case is reported on the page before me
+of a soldier affected with acute inflammation in the chest, who took
+successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica, and pulsatilla, and after
+thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any important change in
+his disease. The Homoeopathic physician who treated these patients was
+M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year been announcing his wonderful
+cures. And M. Esquirol asserted to the Academy of Medicine in 1835, that
+this M. de Horatiis, who is one of the prominent personages in the
+"Examiner's" Manifesto published in 1840, had subsequently renounced
+Homoeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that this same periodical, which
+is so very easy in explaining away the results of these trials, makes a
+mistake of only six years or a little more as to the time when this at
+Naples was instituted.
+
+M. Andral, the "eminent and very enlightened allopathist" of the
+"Homoeopathic Examiner," made the following statement in March, 1835, to
+the Academy of Medicine: "I have submitted this doctrine to experiment; I
+can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and
+forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under
+the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every objection--I obtained my
+remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose
+strict exactness is well known; the regimen has been scrupulously
+observed, and I obtained from the sisters attached to the hospital a
+special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders. I was told, however, some
+months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the
+doctrine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied
+the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had studied their
+books, and I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had
+treated mine, and I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the
+treatment as any other person."
+
+And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all the
+Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could
+observe, the progress or termination of diseases. It deserves notice
+that he experimented with the most boasted substances,--cinchona,
+aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he
+administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish
+symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and in
+not one of them did it have the slightest influence, the pulse and heat
+remaining as before.
+
+These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be explained
+away, but it is calmly said that he "did not know enough of the method to
+select the remedies with any tolerable precision." ["Homoeopathic
+Examiner, vol. i. p. 22.]
+
+"Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician." (In a word, instead
+of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law,
+guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.')
+['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.] Who are they that practice
+Homoeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia Medica of Hahnemann
+lying before him? Who are they that send these same globules, on which
+he experimented, accompanied by a little book, into families, whose
+members are thought competent to employ them, when they deny any such
+capacity to a man whose life has been passed at the bedside of patients,
+the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world, the
+consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most renowned
+practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age? I leave the
+quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from under the
+crushing weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who suppose that
+a reply is equivalent to an answer.
+
+Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris,
+invited two Homoeopathic practitioners to experiment in his wards. One of
+these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the counters of some
+of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some of my audience.
+This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened man, and
+perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own medicines from the
+pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann himself, and employed them for four or
+five months upon patients in his ward, and with results equally
+unsatisfactory, as appears from Dr. Baillie's statement at a meeting of
+the Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was permitted by the
+Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the same complete
+failure.
+
+But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, then take the
+statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated
+homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases which
+it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of
+precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the state
+of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans of the
+doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced by the medicines.
+And more than this, read nine of these cases, which he has published, as
+I have just done, and observe the absolute nullity of aconite,
+belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over which they are
+pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing
+influences. In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to
+realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted
+science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. Were
+all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves,
+for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results to
+be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in
+practice, this slippery delusion would slide through their fingers
+without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had
+crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.
+
+3. I have said, that to show the truth of the Homoeopathic doctrine, as
+announced by Hahnemann, it would be necessary to show, in the third
+place, that remedies never cure diseases when they are not capable of
+producing similar symptoms! The burden of this somewhat comprehensive
+demonstration lying entirely upon the advocates of this doctrine, it may
+be left to their mature reflections.
+
+It entered into my original plan to treat of the doctrine relating to
+Psora, or itch,--an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get rid
+of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without gloves. I
+am saved this trouble, however, by finding that many of the disciples of
+Hahnemann, those disciples the very gospel of whose faith stands upon his
+word, make very light of his authority on this point, although he himself
+says, "It has cost me twelve years of study and research to trace out the
+source of this incredible number of chronic affections, to discover this
+great truth, which remained concealed from all my predecessors and
+contemporaries, to establish the basis of its demonstration, and find
+out, at the same time, the curative medicines that were fit to combat
+this hydra in all its different forms."
+
+But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made by Wolff, of
+Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor of the "Homoeopathic
+Examiner," "represent the opinions of a large majority of Homoeopathists
+in Europe."
+
+"It cannot be unknown to any one at all familiar with Homoeopathic
+literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the large majority of
+chronic diseases to actual itch has met with the greatest opposition from
+Homoeopathic physicians themselves." And again, "If the Psoric theory
+has led to no proper schism, the reason is to be found in the fact that
+it is almost without any influence in practice."
+
+We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, "Surgeon to the Grand Duke of
+Baden," and a "distinguished" Homoeopathist, actually asked Hahnemann for
+the proof that chronic diseases, such as dropsy, for instance, never
+arise from any other cause than itch; and that, according to common
+report, the venerable sage was highly incensed (fort courrouce) with Dr.
+Hartmann, of Leipsic, another "distinguished" Homoeopathist, for
+maintaining that they certainly did arise from other causes.
+
+And Dr. Fielitz, in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, after saying,
+in a good-natured way, that Psora is the Devil in medicine, and that
+physicians are divided on this point into diabolists and exorcists,
+declares that, according to a remark of Hahnemann, the whole civilized
+world is affected with Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate
+of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a
+doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy
+to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle
+with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would
+be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed;
+time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too
+heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.
+
+I will close the subject with a brief examination of some of the
+statements made in Homoeopathic works, and more particularly in the
+brilliant Manifesto of the "Examiner," before referred to. And first, it
+is there stated under the head of "Homoeopathic Literature," that "SEVEN
+HUNDRED volumes have been issued from the press developing the
+peculiarities of the system, and many of them possessed of a scientific
+character that savans know well how to respect." If my assertion were
+proper evidence in the case, I should declare, that, having seen a good
+many of these publications, from the year 1834, when I bought the work of
+the Rev. Thomas Everest, [Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as
+having been published in 1835.] to within a few weeks, when I received my
+last importation of Homaeopathic literature, I have found that all, with
+a very few exceptions, were stitched pamphlets varying from twenty or
+thirty pages to somewhat less than a hundred, and generally resembling
+each other as much as so many spelling-books.
+
+But not being evidence in the case, I will give you the testimony of Dr.
+Trinks, of Dresden, who flourishes on the fifteenth page of the same
+Manifesto as one of the most distinguished among the Homoeopathists of
+Europe. I translate the sentence literally from the "Archives de la
+Medecine Homoeopathique."
+
+"The literature of Homoeopathy, if that honorable name must be applied to
+all kinds of book-making, has been degraded to the condition of the
+humblest servitude. Productions without talent, without spirit, without
+discrimination, flat and pitiful eulogies, exaggerations surpassing the
+limits of the most robust faith, invectives against such as dared to
+doubt the dogmas which had been proclaimed, or catalogues of remedies; of
+such materials is it composed! From distance to distance only, have
+appeared some memoirs useful to science or practice, which appear as so
+many green oases in the midst of this literary desert."
+
+It is a very natural as well as a curious question to ask, What has been
+the success of Homoeopathy in the different countries of Europe, and what
+is its present condition?
+
+The greatest reliance of the advocates of Homoeopathy is of course on
+Germany. We know very little of its medical schools, its medical
+doctrines, or its medical men, compared with those of England and France.
+And, therefore, when an intelligent traveller gives a direct account from
+personal inspection of the miserable condition of the Homoeopathic
+hospital at Leipsic, the first established in Europe, and the first on
+the list of the ever-memorable Manifesto, it is easy enough answer or
+elude the fact by citing various hard names of "distinguished"
+practitioners, which sound just as well to the uninformed public as if
+they were Meckel, or Tiedemann, or Langenbeck. Dr. Leo-Wolf, who, to be
+sure, is opposed to Homoeopathy, but who is a scholar, and ought to know
+something of his own countrymen, assures us that "Dr. Kopp is the only
+German Homoeopathist, if we can call him so, who has been distinguished
+as an author and practitioner before he examined this method." And Dr.
+Lee, the same gentleman in whose travels the paragraph relating to the
+Leipsic Hospital is to be found, says the same thing. And I will
+cheerfully expose myself to any impertinent remark which it might
+suggest, to assure my audience that I never heard or saw one authentic
+Homoeopathic name of any country in Europe, which I had ever heard
+mentioned before as connected with medical science by a single word or
+deed sufficient to make it in any degree familiar to my ears, unless
+Arnold of Heidelberg is the anatomist who discovered a little nervous
+centre, called the otic ganglion. But you need ask no better proof of
+who and what the German adherents of this doctrine must be, than the
+testimony of a German Homoeopathist as to the wretched character of the
+works they manufacture to enforce its claims.
+
+As for the act of this or that government tolerating or encouraging
+Homoeopathy, every person of common intelligence knows that it is a mere
+form granted or denied according to the general principles of policy
+adopted in different states, or the degree of influence which some few
+persons who have adopted it may happen to have at court. What may be the
+value of certain pompous titles with which many of the advocates of
+Homoeopathy are honored, it might be disrespectful to question. But in
+the mean time the judicious inquirer may ponder over an extract which I
+translate from a paper relating to a personage well known to the
+community as Williams the Oculist, with whom I had the honor of crossing
+the Atlantic some years since, and who himself handed me two copies of
+the paper in question.
+
+"To say that he was oculist of Louis XVIII. and of Charles X., and that
+he now enjoys the same title with respect to His Majesty, Louis Philippe,
+and the King of the Belgians, is unquestionably to say a great deal; and
+yet it is one of the least of his titles to public confidence. His
+reputation rests upon a basis more substantial even than the numerous
+diplomas with which he is provided, than the membership of the different
+medical societies which have chosen him as their associate," etc., etc.
+
+And as to one more point, it is time that the public should fully
+understand that the common method of supporting barefaced imposture at
+the present day, both in Europe and in this country, consists in trumping
+up "Dispensaries," "Colleges of Health," and other advertising charitable
+clap-traps, which use the poor as decoy-ducks for the rich, and the
+proprietors of which have a strong predilection for the title of
+"Professor." These names, therefore, have come to be of little or no
+value as evidence of the good character, still less of the high
+pretensions of those who invoke their authority. Nor does it follow, even
+when a chair is founded in connection with a well-known institution, that
+it has either a salary or an occupant; so that it may be, and probably
+is, a mere harmless piece of toleration on the part of the government if
+a Professorship of Homoeopathy is really in existence at Jena or
+Heidelberg. And finally, in order to correct the error of any who might
+suppose that the whole Medical Profession of Germany has long since
+fallen into the delusions of Hahnemann, I will quote two lines which a
+celebrated anatomist and surgeon (whose name will occur again in this
+lecture in connection with a very pleasing letter) addressed to the
+French Academy of Medicine in 1835. "I happened to be in Germany some
+months since, at a meeting of nearly six hundred physicians; one of them
+wished to bring up the question of Homoeopathy; they would not even
+listen to him." This may have been very impolite and bigoted, but that
+is not precisely the point in reference to which I mention the
+circumstance.
+
+But if we cannot easily get at Germany, we can very easily obtain exact
+information from France and England. I took the trouble to write some
+months ago to two friends in Paris, in whom I could place confidence, for
+information upon the subject. One of them answered briefly to the effect
+that nothing was said about it. When the late Curator of the Lowell
+Institute, at his request, asked about the works upon the subject, he was
+told that they had remained a long time on the shelves quite unsalable,
+and never spoken of.
+
+The other gentleman, [Dr. Henry T. Bigelow, now Professor of Surgery in
+Harvard University] whose name is well known to my audience, and who
+needs no commendation of mine, had the kindness to procure for me many
+publications upon the subject, and some information which sets the whole
+matter at rest, so far as Paris is concerned. He went directly to the
+Baillieres, the principal and almost the only publishers of all the
+Homoeopathic books and journals in that city. The following facts were
+taken by him from the account-books of this publishing firm. Four
+Homoeopathic Journals have been published in Paris; three of them by the
+Baillieres.
+
+The reception they met with may be judged of by showing the number of
+subscribers to each on the books of the publishing firm.
+
+A Review published by some other house, which lasted one year, and had
+about fifty subscribers, appeared in 1834, 1835.
+
+There were only four Journals of Homoeopathy ever published in Paris. The
+Baillieres informed my correspondent that the sale of Homoeopathic books
+was much less than formerly, and that consequently they should undertake
+to publish no new books upon the subject, except those of Jahr or
+Hahnemann. "This man," says my correspondent,--referring to one of the
+brothers,--"the publisher and headquarters of Homoeopathy in Paris,
+informs me that it is going down in England and Germany as well as in
+Paris." For all the facts he had stated he pledged himself as
+responsible.
+
+Homoeopathy was in its prime in Paris, he said, in 1836 and 1837, and
+since then has been going down.
+
+Louis told my correspondent that no person of distinction in Paris had
+embraced Homoeopathy, and that it was declining. If you ask who Louis
+is, I refer you to the well-known Homoeopathist, Peschier of Geneva, who
+says, addressing him, "I respect no one more than yourself; the feeling
+which guides your researches, your labors, and your pen, is so honorable
+and rare, that I could not but bow down before it; and I own, if there
+were any allopathist who inspired me with higher veneration, it would be
+him and not yourself whom I should address."
+
+Among the names of "Distinguished Homoeopathists," however, displayed in
+imposing columns, in the index of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," are those
+of MARJOLIN, AMUSSAT, and BRESCHET, names well known to the world of
+science, and the last of them identified with some of the most valuable
+contributions which anatomical knowledge has received since the
+commencement of the present century. One Dr. Chrysaora, who stands
+sponsor for many facts in that Journal, makes the following statement
+among the rest: "Professors, who are esteemed among the most
+distinguished of the Faculty (Faculty de Medicine), both as to knowledge
+and reputation, have openly confessed the power of Homoeopathia in forms
+of disease where the ordinary method of practice proved totally
+insufficient. It affords me the highest pleasure to select from among
+these gentlemen, Marjolin, Amussat, and Breschet."
+
+Here is a literal translation of an original letter, now in my
+possession, from one of these Homoeopathists to my correspondent:--
+
+"DEAR SIR, AND RESPECTED PROFESSIONAL BROTHER:
+
+"You have had the kindness to inform me in your letter that a new
+American Journal, the 'New World,' has made use of my name in support of
+the pretended Homoeopathic doctrines, and that I am represented as one of
+the warmest partisans of Homoeopathy in France.
+
+"I am vastly surprised at the reputation manufactured for me upon the new
+continent; but I am obliged, in deference to truth, to reject it with my
+whole energy. I spurn far from me everything which relates to that
+charlatanism called Homoeopathy, for these pretended doctrines cannot
+endure the scrutiny of wise and enlightened persons, who are guided by
+honorable sentiments in the practice of the noblest of arts.
+
+"PARIS, 3d November, 1841
+
+"I am, etc., etc.,
+"G. BRESCHET,
+
+"Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Member of the Institute, Surgeon
+of Hotel Dieu, and Consulting Surgeon to the King, etc." [I first saw M.
+Breschet's name mentioned in that Journal]
+
+Concerning Amussat, my correspondent writes, that he was informed by
+Madame Hahnemann, who converses in French more readily than her husband,
+and therefore often speaks for him, that "he was not a physician, neither
+Homoeopathist nor Allopathist, but that he was the surgeon of their own
+establishment; that is, performed as a surgeon all the operations they
+had occasion for in their practice."
+
+I regret not having made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, I doubt not,
+would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it resounded like the Grecian
+horse, at hearing such a doctrine associated with his respectable name.
+I was not aware, when writing to Paris, that this worthy Professor, whose
+lectures I long attended, was included in these audacious claims; but
+after the specimens I have given of the accuracy of the foreign
+correspondence of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," any further information I
+might obtain would seem so superfluous as hardly to be worth the postage.
+
+Homoeopathy may be said, then, to be in a sufficiently miserable
+condition in Paris. Yet there lives, and there has lived for years, the
+illustrious Samuel Hahnemann, who himself assured my correspondent that
+no place offered the advantages of Paris in its investigation, by reason
+of the attention there paid to it.
+
+In England, it appears by the statement of Dr. Curie in October, 1839,
+about eight years after its introduction into the country, that there
+were eighteen Homoeopathic physicians in the United Kingdom, of whom only
+three were to be found out of London, and that many of these practised
+Homoeopathy in secret.
+
+It will be seen, therefore, that, according to the recent statement of
+one of its leading English advocates, Homoeopathy had obtained not quite
+half as many practical disciples in England as Perkinism could show for
+itself in a somewhat less period from the time of its first promulgation
+in that country.
+
+Dr. Curie's letter, dated London, October 30, 1839, says there is "one in
+Dublin, Dr. Luther; at Glasgow, Dr. Scott." The "distinguished"
+Chrysaora writes from Paris, dating October 20, 1839, "On the other hand,
+Homoeopathy is commencing to make an inroad into England by the way of
+Ireland. At Dublin, distinguished physicians have already embraced the
+new system, and a great part of the nobility and gentry of that city have
+emancipated themselves from the English fashion and professional
+authority."
+
+But the Marquis of Anglesea and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer patronize
+Homoeopathy; the Queen Dowager Adelaide has been treated by a
+Homoeopathic physician. "Jarley is the delight of the nobility and
+gentry." "The Royal Family are the patrons of Jarley."
+
+Let me ask if a Marquis and a Knight are better than two Lords, and if
+the Dowager of Royalty is better than Royalty itself, all of which
+illustrious dignities were claimed in behalf of Benjamin Douglass
+Perkins?
+
+But if the balance is thought too evenly suspended in this case, another
+instance can be given in which the evidence of British noblemen and their
+ladies is shown to be as valuable in establishing the character of a
+medical man or doctrine, as would be the testimony of the Marquis of
+Waterford concerning the present condition and prospects of missionary
+enterprise. I have before me an octavo volume of more than four hundred
+pages, in which, among much similar matter, I find highly commendatory
+letters from the Marchioness of Ormond, Lady Harriet Kavanagh, the
+Countess of Buckinghamshire, the Right Hon. Viscount Ingestre, M. P., and
+the Most Noble, the Marquis of Sligo,--all addressed to "John St. John
+Long, Esq," a wretched charlatan, twice tried for, and once convicted of,
+manslaughter at the Old Bailey.
+
+This poor creature, too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical
+profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists. He, too,
+says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in
+despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as
+irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric
+and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and
+Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery of
+Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who was visited with
+the punishment of other heretics by the ecclesiastical authorities of a
+Catholic country some centuries since, there is no very direct inference
+to be drawn to the medical profession of the present time. His name
+should be babbled no longer, after having been placarded for the
+hundredth time in the pages of St. John Long. But if we are doomed to
+see constant reference to the names of Harvey and Jenner in every
+worthless pamphlet containing the prospectus of some new trick upon the
+public, let us, once for all, stare the facts in the face, and see how
+the discoveries of these great men were actually received by the medical
+profession.
+
+In 1628, Harvey published his first work upon the circulation. His
+doctrines were a complete revolution of the prevailing opinions of all
+antiquity. They immediately found both champions and opponents; of which
+last, one only, Riolanus, seemed to Harvey worthy of an answer, on
+account of his "rank, fame, and learning." Controversy in science, as in
+religion, was not, in those days, carried on with all the courtesy which
+our present habits demand, and it is possible that some hard words may
+have been applied to Harvey, as it is very certain that he used the most
+contemptuous expressions towards others.
+
+Harvey declares in his second letter to Riolanus, "Since the first
+discovery of the circulation, hardly a day, or a moment, has passed
+without my hearing it both well and ill spoken of; some attack it with
+great hostility, others defend it with high encomiums; one party believe
+that I have abundantly proved the truth of the doctrine against all the
+weight of opposing arguments, by experiments, observations, and
+dissections; others think it not yet sufficiently cleared up, and free
+from objections." Two really eminent Professors, Plempius of Louvain,
+and Walaeus of Leyden, were among its early advocates.
+
+The opinions sanctioned by the authority of long ages, and the names of
+Hippocrates and Galen, dissolved away, gradually, but certainly, before
+the demonstrations of Harvey. Twenty-four years after the publication of
+his first work, and six years before his death, his bust in marble was
+placed in the Hall of the College of Physicians, with a suitable
+inscription recording his discoveries.
+
+Two years after this he was unanimously invited to accept the Presidency
+of that body; and he lived to see his doctrine established, and all
+reputable opposition withdrawn.
+
+There were many circumstances connected with the discovery of Dr. Jenner
+which were of a nature to excite repugnance and opposition. The practice
+of inoculation for the small-pox had already disarmed that disease of
+many of its terrors. The introduction of a contagious disease from a
+brute creature into the human system naturally struck the public mind
+with a sensation of disgust and apprehension, and a part of the medical
+public may have shared these feelings. I find that Jenner's discovery of
+vaccination was made public in June, 1798. In July of the same year the
+celebrated surgeon, Mr. Cline, vaccinated a child with virus received
+from Dr. Jenner, and in communicating the success of this experiment, he
+mentions that Dr. Lister, formerly of the Small-Pox Hospital, and
+himself, are convinced of the efficacy of the cow-pox. In November of
+the same year, Dr. Pearson published his "Inquiry," containing the
+testimony of numerous practitioners in different parts of the kingdom, to
+the efficacy of the practice. Dr. HAYGARTH, who was so conspicuous in
+exposing the follies of Perkinism, was among the very earliest to express
+his opinion in favor of vaccination. In 1801, Dr. Lettsom mentions the
+circumstance "as being to the honor of the medical professors, that they
+have very generally encouraged this salutary practice, although it is
+certainly calculated to lessen their pecuniary advantages by its tendency
+to extirpate a fertile source of professional practice."
+
+In the same year the Medical Committee of Paris spoke of vaccination in a
+public letter, as "the most brilliant and most important discovery of the
+eighteenth century." The Directors of a Society for the Extermination of
+the Small-Pox, in a Report dated October 1st, 1807, "congratulate the
+public on the very favorable opinion which the Royal College of
+Physicians of London, after a most minute and laborious investigation
+made by the command of his Majesty, have a second time expressed on the
+subject of vaccination, in their Report laid before the House of Commons,
+in the last session of Parliament; in consequence of which the sum of
+twenty thousand pounds was voted to Dr. Jenner, as a remuneration for his
+discovery, in addition to ten thousand pounds before granted." (In June,
+1802.)
+
+These and similar accusations, so often brought up against the Medical
+Profession, are only one mode in which is manifested a spirit of
+opposition not merely to medical science, but to all science, and to all
+sound knowledge. It is a spirit which neither understands itself nor the
+object at which it is aiming. It gropes among the loose records of the
+past, and the floating fables of the moment, to glean a few truths or
+falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove anything, that the persons who
+have passed their lives in the study of a branch of knowledge the very
+essence of which must always consist in long and accurate observation,
+are less competent to judge of new doctrines in their own department than
+the rest of the community. It belongs to the clown in society, the
+destructive in politics, and the rogue in practice.
+
+The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result of
+his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to check
+the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance. The example of Jenner, who
+gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two years of experiment
+and researches, unpurchased, to the public,--when, as was said in
+Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand pounds by it as well as
+any smaller sum,--should be referred to only to rebuke the selfish
+venders of secret remedies, among whom his early history obliges us
+reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann. Those who speak of the great body
+of physicians as if they were united in a league to support the
+superannuated notions of the past against the progress of improvement,
+have read the history of medicine to little purpose. The prevalent
+failing of this profession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too
+credulous ear to ambitious and plausible innovators. If at the present
+time ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine
+professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it has not
+succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious
+advocates for its claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in
+the medical profession.
+
+Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this, and
+we have seen with what results. It only remains to throw out a few
+conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break up and
+disappear.
+
+1. The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never
+survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a
+treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy. It is doubtful how far
+cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever it
+acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with them
+the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly valued life be thus
+sacrificed.
+
+2. After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals
+who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to
+visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.
+
+3. The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from the
+rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his
+connection with it.
+
+4. The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the
+medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible equally
+extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go down with his
+sinking doctrine. Very few will pursue the course last mentioned.
+
+A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will
+probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy. On the
+13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the "Examiner" I read
+the following stately paragraph:
+
+"Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated
+reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate of
+Hahnemann's doctrines for several years. He abandoned Allopathia for
+Homoeopathia." The date of this statement is January, 1840. I find on
+looking at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel, or Bigelius, to
+speak more classically, has been at various times publishing Homoeopathic
+books for some years.
+
+Again, on looking into the "Encyclographie des Sciences Medicales" for
+April, 1840, I find a work entitled "Manual of HYDROSUDOPATHY, or the
+Treatment of Diseases by Cold Water, etc., etc., by Dr. Bigel, Physician
+of the School of Strasburg, Member of the Medico-Chirurgical Institute of
+Naples, of the Academy of St. Petersburg,--Assessor of the College of
+the Empire of Russia, Physician of his late Imperial Highness the Grand
+Duke Constantine, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, etc." Hydrosudopathy
+or Hydropathy, as it is sometimes called, is a new medical doctrine or
+practice which has sprung up in Germany since Homoeopathy, which it bids
+fair to drive out of the market, if, as Dr. Bigel says, fourteen
+physicians afflicted with diseases which defied themselves and their
+colleagues came to Graefenberg, in the year 1836 alone, and were cured.
+Now Dr. Bigel, "whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe,"
+writes as follows: "The reader will not fail to see in this defence of
+the curative method of Graefenberg a profession of medical faith, and he
+will be correct in so doing." And his work closes with the following
+sentence, worthy of so distinguished an individual: "We believe, with
+religion, that the water of baptism purifies the soul from its original
+sin; let us believe also, with experience, that it is for our corporeal
+sins the redeemer of the human body." If Bigel, Physician to the late
+Grand Duke Constantine, is identical with Bigel whom the "Examiner" calls
+Physician to the Emperor of Russia, it appears that he is now actively
+engaged in throwing cold water at once upon his patients and the future
+prospects of Homoeopathy.
+
+If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doctrines is received with
+tolerable unanimity among his disciples, except the central axiom,
+Similia similibus curantur; if this axiom itself relies mainly for its
+support upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we think of
+those who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated
+treasures of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these
+fantastic theories? What shall we think of professed practitioners of
+medicine, if, in the words of Jahr, "from ignorance, for their personal
+convenience, or through charlatanism, they treat their patients one day
+Homoeopathically and the next Allopathically;" if they parade their
+pretended new science before the unguarded portion of the community; if
+they suffer their names to be coupled with it wherever it may gain a
+credulous patient; and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse
+all argument for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance
+and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when
+they are questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an
+answer?
+
+Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to
+trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass
+of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of
+artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust
+the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition.
+Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the public,
+because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some are weak
+enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and
+oblivion. Not many years can pass away before the same curiosity excited
+by one of Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of the
+Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer existence, it can
+only be by falling into the hands of the sordid wretches who wring their
+bread from the cold grasp of disease and death in the hovels of ignorant
+poverty.
+
+As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand
+years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of
+mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are
+ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in
+unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday,
+and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself
+and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted my
+voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the
+path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, or to injure.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER
+
+Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.
+
+THE POINT AT ISSUE.
+
+
+THE AFFIRMATIVE.
+
+"The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
+frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses."
+O. W. Holmes, 1843.
+
+
+THE NEGATIVE.
+
+"The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to
+exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to
+divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become,
+especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of
+gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever
+convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in its
+effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to
+puerperal fever."--Professor Hodge, 1852.
+
+"I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can
+form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any
+clear idea, at least as to this particular malady."--Professor Meigs,
+1852.
+
+" . . . in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with
+the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from
+Mauritius to St. Petersburg."--Professor Meigs, 1854.
+
+ ---------------------
+
+"I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to
+foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by
+what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be
+attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance, my
+prediction was verified."--Gordon, 1795.
+
+"A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of
+puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants."
+Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843.
+
+". . . boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the medical
+institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing, or of
+inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go from cases
+of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females, without using due
+precaution; and who, having been shown the risk, criminally encounter it,
+and convey pestilence and death to the persons they are employed to aid
+in the most interesting and suffering period of female existence."
+--Copland's Medical Dictionary, Art. Puerperal States and Diseases, 1852.
+
+"We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious
+nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American practitioners
+who do not believe in this doctrine."--Dr. Lee, in Additions to Article
+last cited.
+
+ -----------------------
+
+[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.] It happened, some years ago, that a discussion arose
+in a Medical Society of which I was a member, involving the subject of a
+certain supposed cause of disease, about which something was known, a
+good deal suspected, and not a little feared. The discussion was
+suggested by a case, reported at the preceding meeting, of a physician
+who made an examination of the body of a patient who had died with
+puerperal fever, and who himself died in less than a week, apparently in
+consequence of a wound received at the examination, having attended
+several women in confinement in the mean time, all of whom, as it was
+alleged, were attacked with puerperal fever.
+
+Whatever apprehensions and beliefs were entertained, it was plain that a
+fuller knowledge of the facts relating to the subject would be acceptable
+to all present. I therefore felt that it would be doing a good service
+to look into the best records I could find, and inquire of the most
+trustworthy practitioners I knew, to learn what experience had to teach
+in the matter, and arrived at the results contained in the following
+pages.
+
+The Essay was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement,
+and, at the request of the Society, printed in the "New England Quarterly
+Journal of Medicine and Surgery" for April, 1843. As this Journal never
+obtained a large circulation, and ceased to be published after a year's
+existence, and as the few copies I had struck off separately were soon
+lost sight of among the friends to whom they were sent, the Essay can
+hardly be said to have been fully brought before the Profession.
+
+The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at the
+present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible
+evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of
+reason could not help shaping the truth it involved. It is not merely on
+account of the bearing of the question,--if there is a question,--on all
+that is most sacred in human life and happiness, that the subject cannot
+lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement
+of the facts must produce its proper influence on a very large proportion
+of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds. Individuals may, here and
+there, resist the practical bearing of the evidence on their own feelings
+or interests; some may fail to see its meaning, as some persons may be
+found who cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt that most
+readers will be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long before they
+have finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.
+
+I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of
+being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which
+produced this Essay. For I have abundant evidence that it has made many
+practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal females,
+and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance of being
+read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts, proving to the
+satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing. And for my part, I
+had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than
+claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried the
+disease. Thus, I am willing to avail myself of any hint coming from
+without to offer this paper once more to the press. The occasion has
+presented itself, as will be seen, in a convenient if not in a flattering
+form.
+
+I send this Essay again to the MEDICAL PROFESSION, without the change of
+a word or syllable. I find, on reviewing it, that it anticipates and
+eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be entertained for a
+moment until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled. In its
+very statement of the doctrine maintained it avoids all discussion of the
+nature of the disease "known as puerperal fever," and all the somewhat
+stale philology of the word contagion. It mentions, fairly enough, the
+names of sceptics, or unbelievers as to the reality of personal
+transmission; of Dewees, of Tonnelle, of Duges, of Baudelocque, and
+others; of course, not including those whose works were then unwritten or
+unpublished; nor enumerating all the Continental writers who, in
+ignorance of the great mass of evidence accumulated by British
+practitioners, could hardly be called well informed on this subject. It
+meets all the array of negative cases,--those in which disease did not
+follow exposure,--by the striking example of small-pox, which, although
+one of the most contagious of diseases, is subject to the most remarkable
+irregularities and seeming caprices in its transmission. It makes full
+allowance for other causes besides personal transmission, especially for
+epidemic influences. It allows for the possibility of different modes of
+conveyance of the destructive principle. It recognizes and supports the
+belief that a series of cases may originate from a single primitive
+source which affects each new patient in turn; and especially from cases
+of Erysipelas. It does not undertake to discuss the theoretical aspect
+of the subject; that is a secondary matter of consideration. Where facts
+are numerous, and unquestionable, and unequivocal in their significance,
+theory must follow them as it best may, keeping time with their step, and
+not go before them, marching to the sound of its own drum and trumpet.
+Having thus narrowed its area to a limited practical platform of
+discussion, a matter of life and death, and not of phrases or theories,
+it covers every inch of it with a mass of evidence which I conceive a
+Committee of Husbands, who can count coincidences and draw conclusions as
+well as a Synod of Accoucheurs, would justly consider as affording ample
+reasons for an unceremonious dismissal of a practitioner (if it is
+conceivable that such a step could be waited for), after five or six
+funerals had marked the path of his daily visits, while other
+practitioners were not thus escorted. To the Profession, therefore, I
+submit the paper in its original form, and leave it to take care of
+itself.
+
+To the MEDICAL STUDENTS, into whose hands this Essay may fall, some words
+of introduction may be appropriate, and perhaps, to a small number of
+them, necessary. There are some among them who, from youth, or want of
+training, are easily bewildered and confused in any conflict of opinions
+into which their studies lead them. They are liable to lose sight of the
+main question in collateral issues, and to be run away with by suggestive
+speculations. They confound belief with evidence, often trusting the
+first because it is expressed with energy, and slighting the latter
+because it is calm and unimpassioned. They are not satisfied with proof;
+they cannot believe a point is settled so long as everybody is not
+silenced. They have not learned that error is got out of the minds that
+cherish it, as the taenia is removed from the body, one joint, or a few
+joints at a time, for the most part, rarely the whole evil at once. They
+naturally have faith in their instructors, turning to them for truth, and
+taking what they may choose to give them; babes in knowledge, not yet
+able to tell the breast from the bottle, pumping away for the milk of
+truth at all that offers, were it nothing better than a Professor's
+shrivelled forefinger.
+
+In the earliest and embryonic stage of professional development, any
+violent impression on the instructor's mind is apt to be followed by some
+lasting effect on that of the pupil. No mother's mark is more permanent
+than the mental naevi and moles, and excrescences, and mutilations, that
+students carry with them out of the lecture-room, if once the teeming
+intellect which nourishes theirs has been scared from its propriety by
+any misshapen fantasy. Even an impatient or petulant expression, which
+to a philosopher would be a mere index of the low state of amiability of
+the speaker at the moment of its utterance, may pass into the young mind
+as an element of its future constitution, to injure its temper or corrupt
+its judgment. It is a duty, therefore, which we owe to this younger
+class of students, to clear any important truth which may have been
+rendered questionable in their minds by such language, or any
+truth-teller against whom they may have been prejudiced by hasty
+epithets, from the impressions such words have left. Until this is done,
+they are not ready for the question, where there is a question, for them
+to decide. Even if we ourselves are the subjects of the prejudice, there
+seems to be no impropriety in showing that this prejudice is local or
+personal, and not an acknowledged conviction with the public at large.
+It may be necessary to break through our usual habits of reserve to do
+this, but this is the fault of the position in which others have placed
+us.
+
+Two widely-known and highly-esteemed practitioners, Professors in two of
+the largest Medical Schools of the Union, teaching the branch of art
+which includes the Diseases of Women, and therefore speaking with
+authority; addressing in their lectures and printed publications large
+numbers of young men, many of them in the tenderest immaturity of
+knowledge, have recently taken ground in a formal way against the
+doctrine maintained in this paper:
+
+On the Non-Contagious Character of Puerperal Fever: An Introductory
+Lecture. By Hugh L. Hodge, M. D., Professor of Obstetrics in the
+University of Pennsylvania. Delivered Monday, October 11, 1852.
+Philadelphia, 1852.
+
+On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers: in a Series of
+Letters addressed to the Students of his Class. By Charles D. Meigs, M.
+D., Professor of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in
+Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, etc., etc. Philadelphia, 1854.
+Letter VI.
+
+The first of the two publications, Dr. Hodge's Lecture, while its
+theoretical considerations and negative experiences do not seem to me to
+require any further notice than such as lay ready for them in my Essay
+written long before, is, I am pleased to say, unobjectionable in tone and
+language, and may be read without offence.
+
+This can hardly be said of the chapter of Dr. Meigs's volume which treats
+of Contagion in Childbed Fever. There are expressions used in it which
+might well put a stop to all scientific discussions, were they to form
+the current coin in our exchange of opinions. I leave the "very young
+gentlemen," whose careful expositions of the results of practice in more
+than six thousand cases are characterized as "the jejune and fizenless
+dreamings of sophomore writers," to the sympathies of those "dear young
+friends," and "dear young gentlemen," who will judge how much to value
+their instructor's counsel to think for themselves, knowing what they are
+to expect if they happen not to think as he does.
+
+One unpalatable expression I suppose the laws of construction oblige me
+to appropriate to myself, as my reward for a certain amount of labor
+bestowed on the investigation of a very important question of evidence,
+and a statement of my own practical conclusions. I take no offence, and
+attempt no retort. No man makes a quarrel with me over the counterpane
+that covers a mother, with her new-born infant at her breast. There is
+no epithet in the vocabulary of slight and sarcasm that can reach my
+personal sensibilities in such a controversy. Only just so far as a
+disrespectful phrase may turn the student aside from the examination of
+the evidence, by discrediting or dishonoring the witness, does it call
+for any word of notice.
+
+I appeal from the disparaging language by which the Professor in the
+Jefferson School of Philadelphia world dispose of my claims to be
+listened to. I appeal, not to the vote of the Society for Medical
+Improvement, although this was an unusual evidence of interest in the
+paper in question, for it was a vote passed among my own townsmen; nor to
+the opinion of any American, for none know better than the Professors in
+the great Schools of Philadelphia how cheaply the praise of native
+contemporary criticism is obtained. I appeal to the recorded opinions of
+those whom I do not know, and who do not know me, nor care for me, except
+for the truth that I may have uttered; to Copland, in his "Medical
+Dictionary," who has spoken of my Essay in phrases to which the pamphlets
+of American "scribblers" are seldom used from European authorities; to
+Ramsbotham, whose compendious eulogy is all that self-love could ask; to
+the "Fifth Annual Report" of the Registrar-General of England, in which
+the second-hand abstract of my Essay figures largely, and not without
+favorable comment, in an important appended paper. These testimonies,
+half forgotten until this circumstance recalled them, are dragged into
+the light, not in a paroxysm of vanity, but to show that there may be
+food for thought in the small pamphlet which the Philadelphia Teacher
+treats so lightly. They were at least unsought for, and would never have
+been proclaimed but for the sake of securing the privilege of a decent
+and unprejudiced hearing.
+
+I will take it for granted that they have so far counterpoised the
+depreciating language of my fellow-countryman and fellow-teacher as to
+gain me a reader here and there among the youthful class of students I am
+now addressing. It is only for their sake that I think it necessary to
+analyze, or explain, or illustrate, or corroborate any portion of the
+following Essay. But I know that nothing can be made too plain for
+beginners; and as I do not expect the practitioner, or even the more
+mature student, to take the trouble to follow me through an Introduction
+which I consider wholly unnecessary and superfluous for them, I shall not
+hesitate to stoop to the most elementary simplicity for the benefit of
+the younger student. I do this more willingly because it affords a good
+opportunity, as it seems to me, of exercising the untrained mind in that
+medical logic which does not seem to have been either taught or practised
+in our schools of late, to the extent that might be desired.
+
+I will now exhibit, in a series of propositions reduced to their simplest
+expression, the same essential statements and conclusions as are
+contained in the Essay, with such commentaries and explanations as may be
+profitable to the inexperienced class of readers addressed.
+
+I. It has been long believed, by many competent observers, that
+Puerperal Fever (so called) is sometimes carried from patient to patient
+by medical assistants.
+
+II. The express object of this Essay is to prove that it is so carried.
+
+III. In order to prove this point, it is not necessary to consult any
+medical theorist as to whether or not it is consistent with his
+preconceived notions that such a mode of transfer should exist.
+
+IV. If the medical theorist insists on being consulted, and we see fit
+to indulge him, he cannot be allowed to assume that the alleged laws of
+contagion, deduced from observation in other diseases, shall be cited to
+disprove the alleged laws deduced from observation in this. Science
+would never make progress under such conditions. Neither the long
+incubation of hydrophobia, nor the protecting power of vaccination, would
+ever have been admitted, if the results of observation in these
+affections had been rejected as contradictory to the previously
+ascertained laws of contagion.
+
+V. The disease in question is not a common one; producing, on the
+average, about three deaths in a thousand births, according to the
+English Registration returns which I have examined.
+
+VI. When an unusually large number of cases of this disease occur about
+the same time, it is inferred, therefore, that there exists some special
+cause for this increased frequency. If the disease prevails extensively
+over a wide region of country, it is attributed without dispute to an
+epidemic influence. If it prevails in a single locality, as in a
+hospital, and not elsewhere, this is considered proof that some local
+cause is there active in its production.
+
+VII. When a large number of cases of this disease occur in rapid
+succession, in one individual's ordinary practice, and few or none
+elsewhere, these cases appearing in scattered localities, in patients of
+the same average condition as those who escape under the care of others,
+there is the same reason for connecting the cause of the disease with the
+person in this instance, as with the place in that last mentioned.
+
+VIII. Many series of cases, answering to these conditions, are given in
+this Essay, and many others will be referred to which have occurred since
+it was written.
+
+IX. The alleged results of observation may be set aside; first, because
+the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because
+they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not
+sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking
+and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested in
+denying and disbelieving the facts; the number of consecutive cases in
+many instances frightful, and the number of series of cases such that I
+have no room for many of them except by mere reference.
+
+X. These results of observation, being admitted, may, we will suppose,
+be interpreted in different methods. Thus the coincidences may be
+considered the effect of chance. I have had the chances calculated by a
+competent person, that a given practitioner, A., shall have sixteen fatal
+cases in a month, on the following data: A. to average attendance upon
+two hundred and fifty births in a year; three deaths in one thousand
+births to be assumed as the average from puerperal fever; no epidemic to
+be at the time prevailing. It follows, from the answer given me, that if
+we suppose every one of the five hundred thousand annual births of
+England to have been recorded during the last half-century, there would
+not be one chance in a million million million millions that one such
+series should be noted. No possible fractional error in this calculation
+can render the chance a working probability. Applied to dozens of series
+of various lengths, it is obviously an absurdity. Chance, therefore, is
+out of the question as an explanation of the admitted coincidences.
+
+XI. There is, therefore, some relation of cause and effect between the
+physician's presence and the patient's disease.
+
+XII. Until it is proved to what removable condition attaching to the
+attendant the disease is owing, he is bound to stay away from his
+patients so soon as he finds himself singled out to be tracked by the
+disease. How long, and with what other precautions, I have suggested,
+without dictating, at the close of my Essay. If the physician does not
+at once act on any reasonable suspicion of his being the medium of
+transfer, the families where he is engaged, if they are allowed to know
+the facts, should decline his services for the time. His feelings on the
+occasion, however interesting to himself, should not be even named in
+this connection. A physician who talks about ceremony and gratitude, and
+services rendered, and the treatment he got, surely forgets himself; it
+is impossible that he should seriously think of these small matters where
+there is even a question whether he may not carry disease, and death, and
+bereavement into any one of "his families," as they are sometimes called.
+
+I will now point out to the young student the mode in which he may
+relieve his mind of any confusion, or possibly, if very young, any doubt,
+which the perusal of Dr. Meigs's Sixth Letter may have raised in his
+mind.
+
+The most prominent ideas of the Letter are, first, that the transmissible
+nature of puerperal fever appears improbable, and, secondly, that it
+would be very inconvenient to the writer. Dr. Woodville, Physician to the
+Small-Pox and Inoculation Hospital in London, found it improbable, and
+exceedingly inconvenient to himself, that cow pox should prevent
+small-pox; but Dr. Jenner took the liberty to prove the fact,
+notwithstanding.
+
+I will first call the young student's attention to the show of negative
+facts (exposure without subsequent disease), of which much seems to be
+thought. And I may at the same time refer him to Dr. Hodge's Lecture,
+where he will find the same kind of facts and reasoning. Let him now
+take up Watson's Lectures, the good sense and spirit of which have made
+his book a universal favorite, and open to the chapter on Continued
+Fever. He will find a paragraph containing the following sentence: "A
+man might say, 'I was in the battle of Waterloo, and saw many men around
+me fall down and die, and it was said that they were struck down by
+musket-balls; but I know better than that, for I was there all the time,
+and so were many of my friends, and we were never hit by any
+musket-balls. Musket-balls, therefore, could not have been the cause of
+the deaths we witnessed.' And if, like contagion, they were not palpable
+to the senses, such a person might go on to affirm that no proof existed
+of there being any such thing as musket-balls." Now let the student turn
+back to the chapter on Hydrophobia in the same volume. He will find that
+John Hunter knew a case in which, of twenty-one persons bitten, only one
+died of the disease. He will find that one dog at Charenton was bitten
+at different times by thirty different mad dogs, and outlived it all. Is
+there no such thing, then, as hydrophobia? Would one take no especial
+precautions if his wife, about to become a mother, had been bitten by a
+rabid animal, because so many escape? Or let him look at "Underwood on
+Diseases of Children," [Philadelphia, 1842, p. 244, note.] and he will
+find the case of a young woman who was inoculated eight times in thirty
+days, at the same time attending several children with smallpox, and yet
+was not infected. But seven weeks afterwards she took the disease and
+died.
+
+It would seem as if the force of this argument could hardly fail to be
+seen, if it were granted that every one of these series of cases were so
+reported as to prove that there could have been no transfer of disease.
+There is not one of them so reported, in the Lecture or the Letter, as to
+prove that the disease may not have been carried by the practitioner. I
+strongly suspect that it was so carried in some of these cases, but from
+the character of the very imperfect evidence the question can never be
+settled without further disclosures.
+
+Although the Letter is, as I have implied, principally taken up with
+secondary and collateral questions, and might therefore be set aside as
+in the main irrelevant, I am willing, for the student's sake, to touch
+some of these questions briefly, as an illustration of its logical
+character.
+
+The first thing to be done, as I thought when I wrote my Essay, was to
+throw out all discussions of the word contagion, and this I did
+effectually by the careful wording of my statement of the subject to be
+discussed. My object was not to settle the etymology or definition of a
+word, but to show that women had often died in childbed, poisoned in some
+way by their medical attendants. On the other point, I, at least, have
+no controversy with anybody, and I think the student will do well to
+avoid it in this connection. If I must define my position, however, as
+well as the term in question, I am contented with Worcester's definition;
+provided always this avowal do not open another side controversy on the
+merits of his Dictionary, which Dr. Meigs has not cited, as compared with
+Webster's, which he has.
+
+I cannot see the propriety of insisting that all the laws of the eruptive
+fevers must necessarily hold true of this peculiar disease of puerperal
+women. If there were any such propriety, the laws of the eruptive fevers
+must at least be stated correctly. It is not true, for instance, as Dr.
+Meigs states, that contagion is "no respecter of persons;" that "it
+attacks all individuals alike." To give one example: Dr. Gregory, of the
+Small-Pox Hospital, who ought to know, says that persons pass through
+life apparently insensible to or unsusceptible of the small-pox virus,
+and that the same persons do not take the vaccine disease.
+
+As to the short time of incubation, of which so much is made, we have no
+right to decide beforehand whether it shall be long or short, in the
+cases we are considering. A dissection wound may produce symptoms of
+poisoning in six hours; the bite of a rabid animal may take as many
+months.
+
+After the student has read the case in Dr. Meigs's 136th paragraph, and
+the following one, in which he exclaims against the idea of contagion,
+because the patient, delivered on the 26th of December, was attacked in
+twenty-four hours, and died on the third day, let him read what happened
+at the "Black Assizes" of 1577 and 1750. In the first case, six hundred
+persons sickened the same night of the exposure, and three hundred more
+in three days. [Elliotson's Practice, p. 298.] Of those attacked in the
+latter year, the exposure being on the 11th of May, Alderman Lambert died
+on the 13th, Under-Sheriff Cox on the 14th, and many of note before the
+20th. But these are old stories. Let the student listen then to Dr.
+Gerhard, whose reputation as a cautious observer he may be supposed to
+know. "The nurse was shaving a man, who died in a few hours after his
+entrance; he inhaled his breath, which had a nauseous taste, and in an
+hour afterwards was taken with nausea, cephalalgia, and singing of the
+ears. From that moment the attack began, and assumed a severe character.
+The assistant was supporting another patient, who died soon afterwards;
+he felt the pungent heat upon his skin, and was taken immediately with
+the symptoms of typhus." [Am. Jour. Med. Sciences, Feb. 1837, p. 299.]
+It is by notes of cases, rather than notes of admiration, that we must
+be guided, when we study the Revised Statutes of Nature, as laid down
+from the curule chairs of Medicine.
+
+Let the student read Dr. Meigs's 140th paragraph soberly, and then
+remember, that not only does he infer, suspect, and surmise, but he
+actually asserts (page 154), "there was poison in the house," because
+three out of five patients admitted into a ward had puerperal fever and
+died. Have I not as much right to draw a positive inference from "Dr.
+A.'s" seventy exclusive cases as he from the three cases in the ward of
+the Dublin Hospital? All practical medicine, and all action in common
+affairs, is founded on inferences. How does Dr. Meigs know that the
+patients he bled in puerperal fever would not have all got well if he had
+not bled them?
+
+"You see a man discharge a gun at another; you see the flash, you hear
+the report, you see the person fall a lifeless corpse; and you infer,
+from all these circumstances, that there was a ball discharged from the
+gun, which entered his body and caused his death, because such is the
+usual and natural cause of such an effect. But you did not see the ball
+leave the gun, pass through the air, and enter the body of the slain; and
+your testimony to the fact of killing is, therefore, only
+inferential,--in other words, circumstantial. It is possible that no
+ball was in the gun; and we infer that there was, only because we cannot
+account for death on any other supposition." [Chief Justice Gibson, in
+Am. Law Journal, vol. vi. p. 123.]
+
+"The question always comes to this: Is the circumstance of intercourse
+with the sick followed by the appearance of the disease in a proportion
+of cases so much greater than any other circumstance common to any
+portion of the inhabitants of the place under observation, as to make it
+inconceivable that the succession of cases occurring in persons having
+that intercourse should have been the result of chance? If so, the
+inference is unavoidable, that that intercourse must have acted as a
+cause of the disease. All observations which do not bear strictly on
+that point are irrelevant, and, in the case of an epidemic first
+appearing in a town or district, a succession of two cases is sometimes
+sufficient to furnish evidence which, on the principle I have stated, is
+nearly irresistible."
+
+Possibly an inexperienced youth may be awe-struck by the quotation from
+Cuvier. These words, or their equivalent, are certainly to be found in
+his Introduction. So are the words "top not come down"! to be found in
+the Bible, and they were as much meant for the ladies' head-dresses as
+the words of Cuvier were meant to make clinical observation wait for a
+permit from anybody to look with its eyes and count on its fingers. Let
+the inquiring youth read the whole Introduction, and he will see what
+they mean.
+
+I intend no breach of courtesy, but this is a proper place to warn the
+student against skimming the prefaces and introductions of works for
+mottoes and embellishments to his thesis. He cannot learn anatomy by
+thrusting an exploring needle into the body. He will be very liable to
+misquote his author's meaning while he is picking off his outside
+sentences. He may make as great a blunder as that simple prince who
+praised the conductor of his orchestra for the piece just before the
+overture; the musician was too good a courtier to tell him that it was
+only the tuning of the instruments.
+
+To the six propositions in the 142d paragraph, and the remarks about
+"specific" diseases, the answer, if any is necessary, seems very simple.
+An inflammation of a serous membrane may give rise to secretions which
+act as a poison, whether that be a "specific" poison or not, as Dr. Homer
+has told his young readers, and as dissectors know too well; and that
+poison may produce its symptoms in a few hours after the system has
+received it, as any may see in Druitt's "Surgery," if they care to look.
+Puerperal peritonitis may produce such a poison, and puerperal women may
+be very sensible to its influences, conveyed by contact or exhalation.
+Whether this is so or not, facts alone can determine, and to facts we
+have had recourse to settle it.
+
+The following statement is made by Dr. Meigs in his 142d paragraph, and
+developed more at length, with rhetorical amplifications, in the 134th.
+"No human being, save a pregnant or parturient woman, is susceptible to
+the poison." This statement is wholly incorrect, as I am sorry to have
+to point out to a Teacher in Dr. Meigs's position. I do not object to the
+erudition which quotes Willis and Fernelius, the last of whom was
+pleasantly said to have "preserved the dregs of the Arabs in the honey of
+his Latinity." But I could wish that more modern authorities had not
+been overlooked. On this point, for instance, among the numerous facts
+disproving the statement, the "American Journal of Medical Sciences,"
+published not far from his lecture-room, would have presented him with a
+respectable catalog of such cases. Thus he might refer to Mr. Storrs's
+paper "On the Contagious Effects of Puerperal Fever on the Male Subject;
+or on Persons not Childbearing" (Jan. 1846), or to Dr. Reid's case
+(April, 1846), or to Dr. Barron's statement of the children's dying of
+peritonitis in an epidemic of puerperal fever at the Philadelphia
+Hospital (Oct. 1842), or to various instances cited in Dr. Kneeland's
+article (April, 186). Or, if he would have referred to the "New York
+Journal," he might have seen Prof. Austin Flint's cases. Or, if he had
+honored my Essay so far, he might have found striking instances of the
+same kind in the first of the new series of cases there reported and
+elsewhere. I do not see the bearing of his proposition, if it were true.
+But it is one of those assertions that fall in a moment before a slight
+examination of the facts; and I confess my surprise, that a professor who
+lectures on the Diseases of Women should have ventured to make it.
+
+Nearly seven pages are devoted to showing that I was wrong in saying I
+would not be "understood to imply that there exists a doubt in the mind
+of any well-informed member of the medical profession as to the fact that
+puerperal fever is sometimes communicated from one person to another,
+both directly and indirectly." I will devote seven lines to these seven
+pages, which seven lines, if I may say it without offence, are, as it
+seems to me, six more than are strictly necessary.
+
+The following authors are cited as sceptics by Dr. Meigs: Dewees.--I
+cited the same passage. Did not know half the facts. Robert
+Lee.--Believes the disease is sometimes communicable by contagion.
+Tonnelle, Baudelocque. Both cited by me. Jacquemier.--Published three
+years after my Essay. Kiwisch. " Behindhand in knowledge of Puerperal
+Fever." [B. & F. Med. Rev. Jan. 1842.] Paul Dubois.--Scanzoni.
+
+These Continental writers not well informed on this point.[See Dr.
+Simpson's Remarks at Meeting of Edin. Med. Chir. Soc. (Am. Jour.
+Oct. 1851.)]
+
+The story of Von Busch is of interest and value, but there is nothing in
+it which need perplex the student. It is not pretended that the disease
+is always, or even, it may be, in the majority of cases, carried about by
+attendants; only that it is so carried in certain cases. That it may
+have local and epidemic causes, as well as that depending on personal
+transmission, is not disputed. Remember how small-pox often disappears
+from a community in spite of its contagious character, and the necessary
+exposure of many persons to those suffering from it; in both diseases
+contagion is only one of the coefficients of the disease.
+
+I have already spoken of the possibility that Dr. Meigs may have been the
+medium of transfer of puerperal fever in some of the cases he has briefly
+catalogued. Of Dr. Rutter's cases I do not know how to speak. I only
+ask the student to read the facts stated by Dr. Condie, as given in my
+Essay, and say whether or not a man should allow his wife to be attended
+by a practitioner in whose hands "scarcely a female that has been
+delivered for weeks past has escaped an attack," "while no instance of
+the disease has occurred in the patients of any other accoucheur
+practising in the same district." If I understand Dr. Meigs and Dr.
+Hodge, they would not warn the physician or spare the patient under such
+circumstances. They would "go on," if I understand them, not to seven,
+or seventy, only, but to seventy times seven, if they could find
+patients. If this is not what they mean, may we respectfully ask them to
+state what they do mean, to their next classes, in the name of humanity,
+if not of science!
+
+I might repeat the question asked concerning Dr. Rutter's cases, with
+reference to those reported by Dr. Roberton. Perhaps, however, the
+student would like to know the opinion of a person in the habit of
+working at matters of this kind in a practical point of view. To satisfy
+him on this ground, I addressed the following question to the President
+of one of our principal Insurance Companies, leaving Dr. Meigs's book and
+my Essay in his hands at the same time.
+
+Question. "If such facts as Roberton's cases were before you, and the
+attendant had had ten, or even five fatal cases, or three, or two even,
+would you, or would you not, if insuring the life of the next patient to
+be taken care of by that attendant, expect an extra premium over that of
+an average case of childbirth?"
+
+Answer. "Of course I should require a very large extra premium, if I
+would take take risk at all."
+
+But I do not choose to add the expressions of indignation which the
+examination of the facts before him called out. I was satisfied from the
+effect they produced on him, that if all the hideous catalogues of cases
+now accumulated were fully brought to the knowledge of the public,
+nothing, since the days of Burke and Hare, has raised such a cry of
+horror as would be shrieked in the ears of the Profession.
+
+Dr. Meigs has elsewhere invoked "Providence" as the alternative of
+accident, to account for the "coincidences." ("Obstetrics," Phil. 1852,
+p. 631.) If so, Providence either acts through the agency of secondary
+causes, as in other diseases, or not. If through such causes, let us
+find out what they are, as we try to do in other cases. It may be true
+that offences, or diseases, will come, but "woe unto him through whom
+they come," if we catch him in the voluntary or careless act of bringing
+them! But if Providence does not act through secondary causes in this
+particular sphere of etiology, then why does Dr. Meigs take such pains to
+reason so extensively about the laws of contagion, which, on that
+supposition, have no more to do with this case than with the plague which
+destroyed the people after David had numbered them? Above all, what
+becomes of the theological aspect of the question, when he asserts that a
+practitioner was "only unlucky in meeting with the epidemic cases?" (Op.
+cit. p. 633.) We do not deny that the God of battles decides the fate of
+nations; but we like to have the biggest squadrons on our side, and we
+are particular that our soldiers should not only say their prayers, but
+also keep their powder dry. We do not deny the agency of Providence in
+the disaster at Norwalk, but we turn off the engineer, and charge the
+Company five thousand dollars apiece for every life that is sacrificed.
+
+Why a grand jury should not bring in a bill against a physician who
+switches off a score of women one after the other along his private
+track, when he knows that there is a black gulf at the end of it, down
+which they are to plunge, while the great highway is clear, is more than
+I can answer. It is not by laying the open draw to Providence that he is
+to escape the charge of manslaughter.
+
+To finish with all these lesser matters of question, I am unable to see
+why a female must necessarily be unattended in her confinement, because
+she declines the services of a particular practitioner. In all the
+series of cases mentioned, the death-carrying attendant was surrounded by
+others not tracked by disease and its consequences. Which, I would ask,
+is worse,--to call in another, even a rival practitioner, or to submit an
+unsuspecting female to a risk which an Insurance Company would have
+nothing to do with?
+
+I do not expect ever to return to this subject. There is a point of
+mental saturation, beyond which argument cannot be forced without
+breeding impatient, if not harsh, feelings towards those who refuse to be
+convinced. If I have so far manifested neither, it is well to stop here,
+and leave the rest to those younger friends who may have more stomach for
+the dregs of a stale argument.
+
+The extent of my prefatory remarks may lead some to think that I attach
+too much importance to my own Essay. Others may wonder that I should
+expend so many words upon the two productions referred to, the Letter and
+the Lecture. I do consider my Essay of much importance so long as the
+doctrine it maintains is treated as a question, and so long as any
+important part of the defence of that doctrine is thought to rest on its
+evidence or arguments. I cannot treat as insignificant any opinions
+bearing on life, and interests dearer than life, proclaimed yearly to
+hundreds of young men, who will carry them to their legitimate results in
+practice.
+
+The teachings of the two Professors in the great schools of Philadelphia
+are sure to be listened to, not only by their immediate pupils, but by
+the Profession at large. I am too much in earnest for either humility or
+vanity, but I do entreat those who hold the keys of life and death to
+listen to me also for this once. I ask no personal favor; but I beg to
+be heard in behalf of the women whose lives are at stake, until some
+stronger voice shall plead for them.
+
+I trust that I have made the issue perfectly distinct and intelligible.
+And let it be remembered that this is no subject to be smoothed over by
+nicely adjusted phrases of half-assent and half-censure divided between
+the parties. The balance must be struck boldly and the result declared
+plainly. If I have been hasty, presumptuous, ill-informed, illogical; if
+my array of facts means nothing; if there is no reason for any caution in
+the view of these facts; let me be told so on such authority that I must
+believe it, and I will be silent henceforth, recognizing that my mind is
+in a state of disorganization. If the doctrine I have maintained is a
+mournful truth; if to disbelieve it, and to practise on this disbelief,
+and to teach others so to disbelieve and practise, is to carry
+desolation, and to charter others to carry it, into confiding families,
+let it be proclaimed as plainly what is to be thought of the teachings of
+those who sneer at the alleged dangers, and scout the very idea of
+precaution. Let it be remembered that persons are nothing in this
+matter; better that twenty pamphleteers should be silenced, or as many
+professors unseated, than that one mother's life should be taken. There
+is no quarrel here between men, but there is deadly incompatibility and
+exterminating warfare between doctrines. Coincidences meaning nothing,
+though a man have a monopoly of the disease for weeks or months; or cause
+and effect, the cause being in some way connected with the person; this
+is the question. If I am wrong, let me be put down by such a rebuke as
+no rash declaimer has received since there has been a public opinion in
+the medical profession of America; if I am right, let doctrines which
+lead to professional homicide be no longer taught from the chairs of
+those two great Institutions. Indifference will not do here; our
+Journalists and Committees have no right to take up their pages with
+minute anatomy and tediously detailed cases, while it is a question
+whether or not the "blackdeath" of child-bed is to be scattered broadcast
+by the agency of the mother's friend and adviser. Let the men who mould
+opinions look to it; if there is any voluntary blindness, any interested
+oversight, any culpable negligence, even, in such a matter, and the facts
+shall reach the public ear; the pestilence-carrier of the lying-in
+chamber must look to God for pardon, for man will never forgive him.
+
+ THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.
+
+In collecting, enforcing, and adding to the evidence accumulated upon
+this most serious subject, I would not be understood to imply that there
+exists a doubt in the mind of any well-informed member of the medical
+profession as to the fact that puerperal fever is sometimes communicated
+from one person to another, both directly and indirectly. In the present
+state of our knowledge upon this point I should consider such doubts
+merely as a proof that the sceptic had either not examined the evidence,
+or, having examined it, refused to accept its plain and unavoidable
+consequences. I should be sorry to think, with Dr. Rigby, that it was a
+case of "oblique vision;" I should be unwilling to force home the
+argumentum ad hominem of Dr. Blundell, but I would not consent to make a
+question of a momentous fact which is no longer to be considered as a
+subject for trivial discussions, but to be acted upon with silent
+promptitude. It signifies nothing that wise and experienced
+practitioners have sometimes doubted the reality of the danger in
+question; no man has the right to doubt it any longer. No negative
+facts, no opposing opinions, be they what they may, or whose they may,
+can form any answer to the series of cases now within the reach of all
+who choose to explore the records of medical science.
+
+If there are some who conceive that any important end would be answered
+by recording such opinions, or by collecting the history of all the cases
+they could find in which no evidence of the influence of contagion
+existed, I believe they are in error. Suppose a few writers of authority
+can be found to profess a disbelief in contagion,--and they are very few
+compared with those who think differently,--is it quite clear that they
+formed their opinions on a view of all the facts, or is it not apparent
+that they relied mostly on their own solitary experience? Still further,
+of those whose names are quoted, is it not true that scarcely a single
+one could by any possibility have known the half or the tenth of the
+facts bearing on the subject which have reached such a frightful amount
+within the last few years? Again, as to the utility of negative facts,
+as we may briefly call them,--instances, namely, in which exposure has
+not been followed by disease,--although, like other truths, they may be
+worth knowing, I do not see that they are like to shed any important
+light upon the subject before us. Every such instance requires a good
+deal of circumstantial explanation before it can be accepted. It is not
+enough that a practitioner should have had a single case of puerperal
+fever not followed by others. It must be known whether he attended
+others while this case was in progress, whether he went directly from one
+chamber to others, whether he took any, and what precautions. It is
+important to know that several women were exposed to infection derived
+from the patient, so that allowance may be made for want of
+predisposition. Now if of negative facts so sifted there could be
+accumulated a hundred for every one plain instance of communication here
+recorded, I trust it need not be said that we are bound to guard and
+watch over the hundredth tenant of our fold, though the ninety and nine
+may be sure of escaping the wolf at its entrance. If any one is
+disposed, then, to take a hundred instances of lives endangered or
+sacrificed out of those I have mentioned, and make it reasonably clear
+that within a similar time and compass ten thousand escaped the same
+exposure, I shall thank him for his industry, but I must be permitted to
+hold to my own practical conclusions, and beg him to adopt or at least to
+examine them also. Children that walk in calico before open fires are not
+always burned to death; the instances to the contrary may be worth
+recording; but by no means if they are to be used as arguments against
+woollen frocks and high fenders.
+
+I am not sure that this paper will escape another remark which it might
+be wished were founded in justice. It may be said that the facts are too
+generally known and acknowledged to require any formal argument or
+exposition, that there is nothing new in the positions advanced, and no
+need of laying additional statements before the Profession. But on
+turning to two works, one almost universally, and the other extensively
+appealed to as authority in this country, I see ample reason to overlook
+this objection. In the last edition of Dewees's Treatise on the
+"Diseases of Females," it is expressly said, "In this country, under no
+circumstance that puerperal fever has appeared hitherto, does it afford
+the slightest ground for the belief that it is contagious." In the
+"Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery" not one word can be found in the
+chapter devoted to this disease which would lead the reader to suspect
+that the idea of contagion had ever been entertained. It seems proper,
+therefore, to remind those who are in the habit of referring to these
+works for guidance, that there may possibly be some sources of danger
+they have slighted or omitted, quite as important as a trifling
+irregularity of diet, or a confined state of the bowels, and that
+whatever confidence a physician may have in his own mode of treatment,
+his services are of questionable value whenever he carries the bane as
+well as the antidote about his person.
+
+The practical point to be illustrated is the following:
+
+The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
+frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.
+
+Let me begin by throwing out certain incidental questions, which, without
+being absolutely essential, would render the subject more complicated,
+and by making such concessions and assumptions as may be fairly supposed
+to be without the pale of discussion.
+
+1. It is granted that all the forms of what is called puerperal fever
+may not be, and probably are not, equally contagious or infectious. I do
+not enter into the distinctions which have been drawn by authors, because
+the facts do not appear to me sufficient to establish any absolute line
+of demarcation between such forms as may be propagated by contagion and
+those which are never so propagated. This general result I shall only
+support by the authority of Dr. Ramsbotham, who gives, as the result of
+his experience, that the same symptoms belong to what he calls the
+infectious and the sporadic forms of the disease, and the opinion of
+Armstrong in his original Essay. If others can show any such
+distinction, I leave it to them to do it. But there are cases enough
+that show the prevalence of the disease among the patients of a single
+practitioner when it was in no degree epidemic, in the proper sense of
+the term. I may refer to those of Mr. Roberton and of Dr. Peirson,
+hereafter to be cited, as examples.
+
+2. I shall not enter into any dispute about the particular mode of
+infection, whether it be by the atmosphere the physician carries about
+him into the sick-chamber, or by the direct application of the virus to
+the absorbing surfaces with which his hand comes in contact. Many facts
+and opinions are in favor of each of these modes of transmission. But it
+is obvious that in the majority of cases it must be impossible to decide
+by which of these channels the disease is conveyed, from the nature of
+the intercourse between the physician and the patient.
+
+3. It is not pretended that the contagion of puerperal fever must always
+be followed by the disease. It is true of all contagious diseases, that
+they frequently spare those who appear to be fully submitted to their
+influence. Even the vaccine virus, fresh from the subject, fails every
+day to produce its legitimate effect, though every precaution is taken to
+insure its action. This is still more remarkably the case with scarlet
+fever and some other diseases.
+
+4. It is granted that the disease may be produced and variously modified
+by many causes besides contagion, and more especially by epidemic and
+endemic influences. But this is not peculiar to the disease in question.
+There is no doubt that small-pox is propagated to a great extent by
+contagion, yet it goes through the same periods of periodical increase
+and diminution which have been remarked in puerperal fever. If the
+question is asked how we are to reconcile the great variations in the
+mortality of puerperal fever in different seasons and places with the
+supposition of contagion, I will answer it by another question from Mr.
+Farr's letter to the Registrar-General. He makes the statement that
+"five die weekly of small-pox in the metropolis when the disease is not
+epidemic,"--and adds, "The problem for solution is,--Why do the five
+deaths become 10, 15, 20, 31, 58, 88, weekly, and then progressively fall
+through the same measured steps?"
+
+5. I take it for granted, that if it can be shown that great numbers of
+lives have been and are sacrificed to ignorance or blindness on this
+point, no other error of which physicians or nurses may be occasionally
+suspected will be alleged in palliation of this; but that whenever and
+wherever they can be shown to carry disease and death instead of health
+and safety, the common instincts of humanity will silence every attempt
+to explain away their responsibility.
+
+The treatise of Dr. Gordon of Aberdeen was published in the year 1795,
+being among the earlier special works upon the disease. Apart of his
+testimony has been occasionally copied into other works, but his
+expressions are so clear, his experience is given with such manly
+distinctness and disinterested honesty, that it may be quoted as a model
+which might have been often followed with advantage.
+
+"This disease seized such women only as were visited, or delivered by a
+practitioner, or taken care of by a nurse, who had previously attended
+patients affected with the disease."
+
+"I had evident proofs of its infectious nature, and that the infection
+was as readily communicated as that of the small-pox or measles, and
+operated more speedily than any other infection with which I am
+acquainted."
+
+"I had evident proofs that every person who had been with a patient in
+the puerperal fever became charged with an atmosphere of infection, which
+was communicated to every pregnant woman who happened to come within its
+sphere. This is not an assertion, but a fact, admitting of
+demonstration, as may be seen by a perusal of the foregoing
+table,"--referring to a table of seventy-seven cases, in many of which
+the channel of propagation was evident.
+
+He adds, "It is a disagreeable declaration for me to mention, that I
+myself was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of
+women." He then enumerates a number of instances in which the disease
+was conveyed by midwives and others to the neighboring villages, and
+declares that "these facts fully prove that the cause of the puerperal
+fever, of which I treat, was a specific contagion, or infection,
+altogether unconnected with a noxious constitution of the atmosphere."
+
+But his most terrible evidence is given in these words: "I ARRIVED AT
+THAT CERTAINTY IN THE MATTER, THAT I COULD VENTURE TO FORETELL WHAT WOMEN
+WOULD BE AFFECTED WITH THE DISEASE, UPON HEARING BY WHAT MIDWIFE THEY
+WERE TO BE DELIVERED, OR BY WHAT NURSE THEY WERE TO BE ATTENDED, DURING
+THEIR LYING-IN: AND ALMOST IN EVERY INSTANCE, MY PREDICTION WAS
+VERIFIED."
+
+Even previously to Gordon, Mr. White of Manchester had said, "I am
+acquainted with two gentlemen in another town, where the whole business
+of midwifery is divided betwixt them, and it is very remarkable that one
+of them loses several patients every year of the puerperal fever, and the
+other never so much as meets with the disorder,"--a difference which he
+seems to attribute to their various modes of treatment. [On the
+Management of Lying-in Women, p. 120.]
+
+Dr. Armstrong has given a number of instances in his Essay on Puerperal
+Fever, of the prevalence of the disease among the patients of a single
+practitioner. At Sunderland, "in all, forty-three cases occurred from
+the 1st of January to the 1st of October, when the disease ceased; and of
+this number forty were witnessed by Mr. Gregson and his assistant, Mr.
+Gregory, the remainder having been separately seen by three accoucheurs."
+There is appended to the London edition of this Essay, a letter from Mr.
+Gregson, in which that gentleman says, in reference to the great number
+of cases occurring in his practice, "The cause of this I cannot pretend
+fully to explain, but I should be wanting in common liberality if I were
+to make any hesitation in asserting, that the disease which appeared in
+my practice was highly contagious, and communicable from one puerperal
+woman to another." "It is customary among the lower and middle ranks of
+people to make frequent personal visits to puerperal women resident in
+the same neighborhood, and I have ample evidence for affirming that the
+infection of the disease was often carried about in that manner; and,
+however painful to my feelings, I must in candor declare, that it is very
+probable the contagion was conveyed, in some instances, by myself, though
+I took every possible care to prevent such a thing from happening, the
+moment that I ascertained that the distemper was infectious." Dr.
+Armstrong goes on to mention six other instances within his knowledge, in
+which the disease had at different times and places been limited, in the
+same singular manner, to the practice of individuals, while it existed
+scarcely if at all among the patients of others around them. Two of the
+gentlemen became so convinced of their conveying the contagion, that they
+withdrew for a time from practice.
+
+I find a brief notice, in an American Journal, of another series of
+cases, first mentioned by Mr. Davies, in the "Medical Repository." This
+gentleman stated his conviction that the disease is contagious.
+
+"In the autumn of 1822 he met with twelve cases, while his medical
+friends in the neighborhood did not meet with any, 'or at least very
+few.' He could attribute this circumstance to no other cause than his
+having been present at the examination, after death, of two cases, some
+time previous, and of his having imparted the disease to his patients,
+notwithstanding every precaution."
+
+Dr. Gooch says, "It is not uncommon for the greater number of cases to
+occur in the practice of one man, whilst the other practitioners of the
+neighborhood, who are not more skilful or more busy, meet with few or
+none. A practitioner opened the body of a woman who had died of
+puerperal fever, and continued to wear the same clothes. A lady whom he
+delivered a few days afterwards was attacked with and died of a similar
+disease; two more of his lying-in patients, in rapid succession, met with
+the same fate; struck by the thought, that he might have carried
+contagion in his clothes, he instantly changed them, and 'met with no
+more cases of the kind.' A woman in the country, who was employed as
+washerwoman and nurse, washed the linen of one who had died of puerperal
+fever; the next lying-in patient she nursed died of the same disease; a
+third nursed by her met with the same fate, till the neighborhood,
+getting afraid of her, ceased to employ her."
+
+In the winter of the year 1824, "Several instances occurred of its
+prevalence among the patients of particular practitioners, whilst others
+who were equally busy met with few or none. One instance of this kind
+was very remarkable. A general practitioner, in large midwifery
+practice, lost so many patients from puerperal fever, that he determined
+to deliver no more for some time, but that his partner should attend in
+his place. This plan was pursued for one month, during which not a case
+of the disease occurred in their practice. The elder practitioner, being
+then sufficiently recovered, returned to his practice, but the first
+patient he attended was attacked by the disease and died. A physician,
+who met him in consultation soon afterwards, about a case of a different
+kind, and who knew nothing of his misfortune, asked him whether puerperal
+fever was at all prevalent in his neighborhood, on which he burst into
+tears, and related the above circumstances.
+
+"Among the cases which I saw this season in consultation, four occurred
+in one month in the practice of one medical man, and all of them
+terminated fatally." [Lond. Med. Gaz. May 2, 1835.]
+
+Dr. Ramsbotham asserted, in a Lecture at the London Hospital, that he had
+known the disease spread through a particular district, or be confined to
+the practice of a particular person, almost every patient being attacked
+with it, while others had not a single case. It seemed capable, he
+thought, of conveyance, not only by common modes; but through the dress
+of the attendants upon the patient.
+
+In a letter to be found in the "London Medical Gazette" for January,
+1840, Mr. Roberton of Manchester makes the statement which I here give in
+a somewhat condensed form.
+
+A midwife delivered a woman on the 4th of December, 1830, who died soon
+after with the symptoms of puerperal fever. In one month from this date
+the same midwife delivered thirty women, residing in different parts of
+an extensive suburb, of which number sixteen caught the disease and all
+died. These were the only cases which had occurred for a considerable
+time in Manchester. The other midwives connected with the same
+charitable institution as the woman already mentioned are twenty-five in
+number, and deliver, on an average, ninety women a week, or about three
+hundred and eighty a month. None of these women had a case of puerperal
+fever. "Yet all this time this woman was crossing the other midwives in
+every direction, scores of the patients of the charity being delivered by
+them in the very same quarters where her cases of fever were happening."
+
+Mr. Roberton remarks, that little more than half the women she delivered
+during this month took the fever; that on some days all escaped, on
+others only one or more out of three or four; a circumstance similar to
+what is seen in other infectious maladies.
+
+Dr. Blundell says, "Those who have never made the experiment can have but
+a faint conception how difficult it is to obtain the exact truth
+respecting any occurrence in which feelings and interests are concerned.
+Omitting particulars, then, I content myself with remarking, generally,
+that from more than one district I have received accounts of the
+prevalence of puerperal fever in the practice of some individuals, while
+its occurrence in that of others, in the same neighborhood, was not
+observed. Some, as I have been told, have lost ten, twelve, or a greater
+number of patients, in scarcely broken succession; like their evil
+genius, the puerperal fever has seemed to stalk behind them wherever they
+went. Some have deemed it prudent to retire for a time from practice.
+In fine, that this fever may occur spontaneously, I admit; that its
+infectious nature may be plausibly disputed, I do not deny; but I add,
+considerately, that in my own family I had rather that those I esteemed
+the most should be delivered, unaided, in a stable, by the manger-side,
+than that they should receive the best help, in the fairest apartment,
+but exposed to the vapors of this pitiless disease. Gossiping friends,
+wet-nurses, monthly nurses, the practitioner himself, these are the
+channels by which, as I suspect, the infection is principally conveyed."
+
+At a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, Dr. King
+mentioned that some years since a practitioner at Woolwich lost sixteen
+patients from puerperal fever in the same year. He was compelled to give
+up practice for one or two years, his business being divided among the
+neighboring practitioners. No case of puerperal fever occurred
+afterwards, neither had any of the neighboring surgeons any cases of this
+disease.
+
+At the same meeting Mr. Hutchinson mentioned the occurrence of three
+consecutive cases of puerperal fever, followed subsequently by two
+others, all in the practice of one accoucheur.[Lancet, May 2, 1840.]
+
+Dr. Lee makes the following statement: "In the last two weeks of
+September, 1827, five fatal cases of uterine inflammation came under our
+observation. All the individuals so attacked had been attended in labor
+by the same midwife, and no example of a febrile or inflammatory disease
+of a serious nature occurred during that period among the other patients
+of the Westminster General Dispensary, who had been attended by the other
+midwives belonging to that institution."
+
+The recurrence of long series of cases like those I have cited, reported
+by those most interested to disbelieve in contagion, scattered along
+through an interval of half a century, might have been thought sufficient
+to satisfy the minds of all inquirers that here was something more than a
+singular coincidence. But if, on a more extended observation, it should
+be found that the same ominous groups of cases clustering about
+individual practitioners were observed in a remote country, at different
+times, and in widely separated regions, it would seem incredible that any
+should be found too prejudiced or indolent to accept the solemn truth
+knelled into their ears by the funeral bells from both sides of the
+ocean,--the plain conclusion that the physician and the disease entered,
+hand in hand, into the chamber of the unsuspecting patient.
+
+That such series of cases have been observed in this country, and in this
+neighborhood, I proceed to show.
+
+In Dr. Francis's "Notes to Denman's Midwifery," a passage is cited from
+Dr. Hosack, in which he refers to certain puerperal cases which proved
+fatal to several lying-in women, and in some of which the disease was
+supposed to be conveyed by the accoucheurs themselves.
+
+A writer in the "New York Medical and Physical Journal" for October,
+1829, in speaking of the occurrence of puerperal fever, confined to one
+man's practice, remarks, "We have known cases of this kind occur, though
+rarely, in New York."
+
+I mention these little hints about the occurrence of such cases, partly
+because they are the first I have met with in American medical
+literature, but more especially because they serve to remind us that
+behind the fearful array of published facts there lies a dark list of
+similar events, unwritten in the records of science, but long remembered
+by many a desolated fireside.
+
+Certainly nothing can be more open and explicit than the account given by
+Dr. Peirson of Salem, of the cases seen by him. In the first nineteen
+days of January, 1829, he had five consecutive cases of puerperal fever,
+every patient he attended being attacked, and the three first cases
+proving fatal. In March of the same year he had two moderate cases, in
+June, another case, and in July, another, which proved fatal. "Up to
+this period," he remarks, "I am not informed that a single case had
+occurred in the practice of any other physician. Since that period I
+have had no fatal case in my practice, although I have had several
+dangerous cases. I have attended in all twenty cases of this disease, of
+which four have been fatal. I am not aware that there has been any other
+case in the town of distinct puerperal peritonitis, although I am willing
+to admit my information may be very defective on this point. I have been
+told of some I 'mixed cases,' and 'morbid affections after delivery.'"
+
+In the "Quarterly Summary of the Transactions of the College of
+Physicians of Philadelphia" may be found some most extraordinary
+developments respecting a series of cases occurring in the practice of a
+member of that body.
+
+Dr. Condie called the attention of the Society to the prevalence, at the
+present time, of puerperal fever of a peculiarly insidious and malignant
+character. "In the practice of one gentleman extensively engaged as an
+obstetrician, nearly every female he has attended in confinement, during
+several weeks past, within the above limits" (the southern sections and
+neighboring districts), "had been attacked by the fever."
+
+"An important query presents itself, the Doctor observed, in reference to
+the particular form of fever now prevalent. Is it, namely, capable of
+being propagated by contagion, and is a physician who has been in
+attendance upon a case of the disease warranted in continuing, without
+interruption, his practice as an obstetrician? Dr. C., although not a
+believer in the contagious character of many of those affections
+generally supposed to be propagated in this manner, has nevertheless
+become convinced by the facts that have fallen under his notice, that the
+puerperal fever now prevailing is capable of being communicated by
+contagion. How otherwise can be explained the very curious circumstance
+of the disease in one district being exclusively confined to the practice
+of a single physician, a Fellow of this College, extensively engaged in
+obstetrical practice,--while no instance of the disease has occurred in
+the patients under the care of any other accoucheur practising within the
+same district; scarcely a female that has been delivered for weeks past
+has escaped an attack?"
+
+Dr. Rutter, the practitioner referred to, "observed that, after the
+occurrence of a number of cases of the disease in his practice, he had
+left the city and remained absent for a week, but on returning, no
+article of clothing he then wore having been used by him before, one of
+the very first cases of parturition he attended was followed by an attack
+of the fever, and terminated fatally; he cannot, readily, therefore,
+believe in the transmission of the disease from female to female, in the
+person or clothes of the physician."
+
+The meeting at which these remarks were made was held on the 3d of May,
+1842. In a letter dated December 20, 1842, addressed to Dr. Meigs, and
+to be found in the "Medical Examiner," he speaks of "those horrible
+cases of puerperal fever, some of which you did me the favor to see with
+me during the past summer," and talks of his experience in the disease,
+"now numbering nearly seventy cases, all of which have occurred within
+less than a twelvemonth past."
+
+And Dr. Meigs asserts, on the same page, "Indeed, I believe that his
+practice in that department of the profession was greater than that of
+any other gentleman, which was probably the cause of his seeing a greater
+number of the cases." This from a professor of midwifery, who some time
+ago assured a gentleman whom he met in consultation, that the night on
+which they met was the eighteenth in succession that he himself had been
+summoned from his repose, seems hardly satisfactory.
+
+I must call the attention of the inquirer most particularly to the
+Quarterly Report above referred to, and the letters of Dr. Meigs and Dr.
+Rutter, to be found in the "Medical Examiner." Whatever impression they
+may produce upon his mind, I trust they will at least convince him that
+there is some reason for looking into this apparently uninviting subject.
+
+At a meeting of the College of Physicians just mentioned, Dr. Warrington
+stated, that a few days after assisting at an autopsy of puerperal
+peritonitis, in which he laded out the contents of the abdominal cavity
+with his hands, he was called upon to deliver three women in rapid
+succession. All of these women were attacked with different forms of
+what is commonly called puerperal fever. Soon after these he saw two
+other patients, both on the same day, with the same disease. Of these
+five patients two died.
+
+At the same meeting, Dr. West mentioned a fact related to him by Dr.
+Samuel Jackson of Northumberland. Seven females, delivered by Dr.
+Jackson in rapid succession, while practising in Northumberland County,
+were all attacked with puerperal fever, and five of them died. "Women,"
+he said, "who had expected me to attend upon them, now becoming alarmed,
+removed out of my reach, and others sent for a physician residing several
+miles distant. These women, as well as those attended by midwives; all
+did well; nor did we hear of any deaths in child-bed within a radius of
+fifty miles, excepting two, and these I afterwards ascertained to have
+been caused by other diseases." He underwent, as he thought, a thorough
+purification, and still his next patient was attacked with the disease
+and died. He was led to suspect that the contagion might have been
+carried in the gloves which he had worn in attendance upon the previous
+cases. Two months or more after this he had two other cases. He could
+find nothing to account for these, unless it were the instruments for
+giving enemata, which had been used in two of the former cases, and were
+employed by these patients. When the first case occurred, he was
+attending and dressing a limb extensively mortified from erysipelas, and
+went immediately to the accouchement with his clothes and gloves most
+thoroughly imbued with its efluvia. And here I may mention, that this
+very Dr. Samuel Jackson of Northumberland is one of Dr. Dewees's
+authorities against contagion.
+
+The three following statements are now for the first time given to the
+public. All of the cases referred to occurred within this State, and two
+of the three series in Boston and its immediate vicinity.
+
+I. The first is a series of cases which took place during the last
+spring in a town at some distance from this neighborhood. A physician of
+that town, Dr. C., had the following consecutive cases.
+
+ No. 1, delivered March 20, died March 24.
+ " 2, " April 9, " April 14.
+ " 3, " " 10, " " 14.
+ " 4, " " 11, " " 18.
+ " 5, " " 27, " May 3.
+ " 6, " " 28, had some symptoms,(recovered.)
+ " 7, " May 8, had some symptoms,(also recovered.)
+
+These were the only cases attended by this physician during the period
+referred to. "They were all attended by him until their termination,
+with the exception of the patient No. 6, who fell into the hands of
+another physician on the 2d of May. (Dr. C. left town for a few days at
+this time.) Dr. C. attended cases immediately before and after the
+above-named periods, none of which, however, presented any peculiar
+symptoms of the disease."
+
+About the 1st of July he attended another patient in a neighboring
+village, who died two or three days after delivery.
+
+The first patient, it is stated, was delivered on the 20th of March. "On
+the 19th, Dr. C. made the autopsy of a man who died suddenly, sick only
+forty-eight hours; had oedema of the thigh, and gangrene extending from a
+little above the ankle into the cavity of the abdomen." Dr. C. wounded
+himself, very slightly, in the right hand during the autopsy. The hand
+was quite painful the night following, during his attendance on the
+patient No. 1. He did not see this patient after the 20th, being
+confined to the house, and very sick from the wound just mentioned, from
+this time until the 3d of April.
+
+Several cases of erysipelas occurred in the house where the autopsy
+mentioned above took place, soon after the examination. There were also
+many cases of erysipelas in town at the time of the fatal puerperal cases
+which have been mentioned.
+
+The nurse who laid out the body of the patient No. 3 was taken on the
+evening of the same day with sore throat and erysipelas, and died in ten
+days from the first attack.
+
+The nurse who laid out the body of the patient No. 4 was taken on the day
+following with symptoms like those of this patient, and died in a week,
+without any external marks of erysipelas.
+
+"No other cases of similar character with those of Dr. C. occurred in the
+practice of any of the physicians in the town or vicinity at the time.
+Deaths following confinement have occurred in the practice of other
+physicians during the past year, but they were not cases of puerperal
+fever. No post-mortem examinations were held in any of these puerperal
+cases."
+
+Some additional statements in this letter are deserving of insertion.
+
+"A physician attended a woman in the immediate neighborhood of the cases
+numbered 2, 3, and 4. This patient was confined the morning of March
+1st, and died on the night of March 7th. It is doubtful whether this
+should be considered a case of puerperal fever. She had suffered from
+canker, indigestion, and diarrhoea for a year previous to her delivery.
+Her complaints were much aggravated for two or three months previous to
+delivery; she had become greatly emaciated, and weakened to such an
+extent that it had not been expected that she would long survive her
+confinement, if indeed she reached that period. Her labor was easy
+enough; she flowed a good deal, seemed exceedingly prostrated, had
+ringing in the ears, and other symptoms of exhaustion; the pulse was
+quick and small. On the second and third day there was some tenderness
+and tumefaction of the abdomen, which increased somewhat on the fourth
+and fifth. He had cases in midwifery before and after this, which
+presented nothing peculiar."
+
+It is also mentioned in the same letter, that another physician had a
+case during the last summer and another last fall, both of which
+recovered.
+
+Another gentleman reports a case last December, a second case five weeks,
+and another three weeks since. All these recovered. A case also
+occurred very recently in the practice of a physician in the village
+where the eighth patient of Dr. C. resides, which proved fatal. "This
+patient had some patches of erysipelas on the legs and arms. The same
+physician has delivered three cases since, which have all done well.
+There have been no other cases in this town or its vicinity recently.
+There have been some few cases of erysipelas." It deserves notice that
+the partner of Dr. C., who attended the autopsy of the man above
+mentioned and took an active part in it; who also suffered very slightly
+from a prick under the thumb-nail received during the examination, had
+twelve cases of midwifery between March 26th and April 12th, all of which
+did well, and presented no peculiar symptoms. It should also be stated,
+that during these seventeen days he was in attendance on all the cases of
+erysipelas in the house where the autopsy had been performed.
+
+I owe these facts to the prompt kindness of a gentleman whose
+intelligence and character are sufficient guaranty for their accuracy.
+
+The two following letters were addressed to my friend Dr. Scorer, by the
+gentleman in whose practice the cases of puerperal fever occurred. His
+name renders it unnecessary to refer more particularly to these
+gentlemen, who on their part have manifested the most perfect freedom and
+courtesy in affording these accounts of their painful experience.
+
+"January 28, 1843.
+
+II. . . . "The time to which you allude was in 1830. The first case
+was in February, during a very cold time. She was confined the 4th, and
+died the 12th. Between the 10th and 28th of this month, I attended six
+women in labor, all of whom did well except the last, as also two who
+were confined March 1st and 5th. Mrs. E., confined February 28th,
+sickened, and died March 8th. The next day, 9th, I inspected the body,
+and the night after attended a lady, Mrs. B., who sickened, and died
+16th. The 10th, I attended another, Mrs. G., who sickened, but
+recovered. March 16th, I went from Mrs. G.'s room to attend a Mrs. H.,
+who sickened, and died 21st. The 17th, I inspected Mrs. B. On the 19th,
+I went directly from Mrs. H.'s room to attend another lady, Mrs. G., who
+also sickened, and died 22d. While Mrs. B. was sick, on 15th, I went
+directly from her room a few rods, and attended another woman, who was
+not sick. Up to 20th of this month I wore the same clothes. I now
+refused to attend any labor, and did not till April 21st, when, having
+thoroughly cleansed myself, I resumed my practice, and had no more
+puerperal fever.
+
+"The cases were not confined to a narrow space. The two nearest were
+half a mile from each other, and half that distance from my residence.
+The others were from two to three miles apart, and nearly that distance
+from my residence. There were no other cases in their immediate vicinity
+which came to my knowledge. The general health of all the women was
+pretty good, and all the labors as good as common, except the first.
+This woman, in consequence of my not arriving in season, and the child
+being half-born at some time before I arrived, was very much exposed to
+the cold at the time of confinement, and afterwards, being confined in a
+very open, cold room. Of the six cases you perceive only one recovered.
+
+"In the winter of 1817 two of my patients had puerperal fever, one very
+badly, the other not so badly. Both recovered. One other had swelled
+leg, or phlegmasia dolens, and one or two others did not recover as well
+as usual.
+
+"In the summer of 1835 another disastrous period occurred in my practice.
+July 1st, I attended a lady in labor, who was afterwards quite ill and
+feverish; but at the time I did not consider her case a decided puerperal
+fever. On the 8th, I attended one who did well. On the 12th, one who was
+seriously sick. This was also an equivocal case, apparently arising from
+constipation and irritation of the rectum. These women were ten miles
+apart and five from my residence. On 15th and 20th, two who did well. On
+25th, I attended another. This was a severe labor, and followed by
+unequivocal puerperal fever, or peritonitis. She recovered. August 2d
+and 3d, in about twenty-four hours I attended four persons. Two of them
+did very well; one was attacked with some of the common symptoms, which
+however subsided in a day or two, and the other had decided puerperal
+fever, but recovered. This woman resided five miles from me. Up to this
+time I wore the same coat. All my other clothes had frequently been
+changed. On 6th, I attended two women, one of whom was not sick at all;
+but the other, Mrs. L., was afterwards taken ill. On 10th, I attended a
+lady, who did very well. I had previously changed all my clothes, and
+had no garment on which had been in a puerperal room. On 12th, I was
+called to Mrs. S., in labor. While she was ill, I left her to visit Mrs.
+L., one of the ladies who was confined on 6th. Mrs. L. had been more
+unwell than usual, but I had not considered her case anything more than
+common till this visit. I had on a surtout at this visit, which, on my
+return to Mrs. S., I left in another room. Mrs. S. was delivered on
+13th with forceps. These women both died of decided puerperal fever.
+
+"While I attended these women in their fevers, I changed my clothes, and
+washed my hands in a solution of chloride of lime after each visit. I
+attended seven women in labor during this period, all of whom recovered
+without sickness.
+
+"In my practice I have had several single cases of puerperal fever, some
+of whom have died and some have recovered. Until the year 1830 I had no
+suspicion that the disease could be communicated from one patient to
+another by a nurse or midwife; but I now think the foregoing facts
+strongly favor that idea. I was so much convinced of this fact, that I
+adopted the plan before related.
+
+"I believe my own health was as good as usual at each of the above
+periods. I have no recollections to the contrary.
+
+"I believe I have answered all your questions. I have been more
+particular on some points perhaps than necessary; but I thought you could
+form your own opinion better than to take mine. In 1830 I wrote to Dr.
+Charming a more particular statement of my cases. If I have not answered
+your questions sufficiently, perhaps Dr. C. may have my letter to him,
+and you can find your answer there." [In a letter to myself, this
+gentleman also stated, "I do not recollect that there was any erysipelas
+or any other disease particularly prevalent at the time."]
+
+"BOSTON, February 3, 1843.
+
+III. "MY DEAR SIR,--I received a note from you last evening, requesting
+me to answer certain questions therein proposed, touching the cases of
+puerperal fever which came under my observation the past summer. It
+gives me pleasure to comply with your request, so far as it is in my
+power so to do, but, owing to the hurry in preparing for a journey, the
+notes of the cases I had then taken were lost or mislaid. The principal
+facts, however, are too vivid upon my recollection to be soon forgotten.
+I think, therefore, that I shall be able to give you all the information
+you may require.
+
+"All the cases that occurred in my practice took place between the 7th of
+May and the 17th of June 1842.
+
+"They were not confined to any particular part of the city. The first
+two cases were patients residing at the South End, the next was at the
+extreme North End, one living in Sea Street and the other in Roxbury.
+The following is the order in which they occurred:
+
+"Case 1. Mrs._____ was confined on the 7th of May, at 5 o'clock, P. M.,
+after a natural labor of six hours. At 12 o'clock at night, on the 9th
+(thirty-one hours after confinement), she was taken with severe chill,
+previous to which she was as comfortable as women usually are under the
+circumstances. She died on the 10th.
+
+"Case 2. Mrs._____ was confined on the 10th of June (four weeks after
+Mrs. C.), at 11 A. M., after a natural, but somewhat severe labor of
+five hours. At 7 o'clock, on the morning of the 11th, she had a chill.
+Died on the 12th.
+
+"Case 3. Mrs._____ , confined on the 14th of June, was comfortable until
+the 18th, when symptoms of puerperal fever were manifest. She died on
+the 20th.
+
+"Case 4. Mrs._____ , confined June 17th, at 5 o'clock, A. M., was doing
+well until the morning of the 19th. She died on the evening of the 21st.
+
+"Case 5. Mrs._____ was confined with her fifth child on the 17th of
+June, at 6 o'clock in the evening. This patient had been attacked with
+puerperal fever, at three of her previous confinements, but the disease
+yielded to depletion and other remedies without difficulty. This time, I
+regret to say, I was not so fortunate. She was not attacked, as were the
+other patients, with a chill, but complained of extreme pain in abdomen,
+and tenderness on pressure, almost from the moment of her confinement.
+In this as in the other cases, the disease resisted all remedies, and she
+died in great distress on the 22d of the same month. Owing to the
+extreme heat of the season, and my own indisposition, none of the
+subjects were examined after death. Dr. Channing, who was in attendance
+with me on the three last cases, proposed to have a post-mortem
+examination of the subject of case No. 5, but from some cause which I do
+not now recollect it was not obtained.
+
+"You wish to know whether I wore the same clothes when attending the
+different cases. I cannot positively say, but I should think I did not,
+as the weather became warmer after the first two cases; I therefore think
+it probable that I made a change of at least a part of my dress. I have
+had no other case of puerperal fever in my own practice for three years,
+save those above related, and I do not remember to have lost a patient
+before with this disease. While absent, last July, I visited two
+patients sick with puerperal fever, with a friend of mine in the country.
+Both of them recovered.
+
+"The cases that I have recorded were not confined to any particular
+constitution or temperament, but it seized upon the strong and the weak,
+the old and the young,--one being over forty years, and the youngest
+under eighteen years of age . . . . If the disease is of an
+erysipelatous nature, as many suppose, contagionists may perhaps find
+some ground for their belief in the fact, that, for two weeks previous to
+my first case of puerperal fever, I had been attending a severe case of
+erysipelas, and the infection may have been conveyed through me to the
+patient; but, on the other hand, why is not this the case with other
+physicians, or with the same physician at all times, for since my return
+from the country I have had a more inveterate case of erysipelas than
+ever before, and no difficulty whatever has attended any of my midwifery
+cases?"
+
+I am assured, on unquestionable authority, that "About three years since,
+a gentleman in extensive midwifery business, in a neighboring State, lost
+in the course of a few weeks eight patients in child-bed, seven of them
+being undoubted cases of puerperal fever. No other physician of the town
+lost a single patient of this disease during the same period." And from
+what I have heard in conversation with some of our most experienced
+practitioners, I am inclined to think many cases of the kind might be
+brought to light by extensive inquiry.
+
+This long catalogue of melancholy histories assumes a still darker aspect
+when we remember how kindly nature deals with the parturient female, when
+she is not immersed in the virulent atmosphere of an impure lying-in
+hospital, or poisoned in her chamber by the unsuspected breath of
+contagion. From all causes together, not more than four deaths in a
+thousand births and miscarriages happened in England and Wales during the
+period embraced by the first "Report of the Registrar-General." In the
+second Report the mortality was shown to be about five in one thousand.
+In the Dublin Lying-in Hospital, during the seven years of Dr. Collins's
+mastership, there was one case of puerperal fever to 178 deliveries, or
+less than six to the thousand, and one death from this disease in 278
+cases, or between three and four to the thousand a yet during this period
+the disease was endemic in the hospital, and might have gone on to rival
+the horrors of the pestilence of the Maternite, had not the poison been
+destroyed by a thorough purification.
+
+In private practice, leaving out of view the cases that are to be
+ascribed to the self-acting system of propagation, it would seem that the
+disease must be far from common. Mr. White of Manchester says, "Out of
+the whole number of lying-in patients whom I have delivered (and I may
+safely call it a great one), I have never lost one, nor to the best of my
+recollection has one been greatly endangered, by the puerperal, miliary,
+low nervous, putrid malignant, or milk fever." Dr. Joseph Clarke informed
+Dr. Collins, that in the course of forty-five years' most extensive
+practice he lost but four patients from this disease. One of the most
+eminent practitioners of Glasgow, who has been engaged in very extensive
+practice for upwards of a quarter of a century, testifies that he never
+saw more than twelve cases of real puerperal fever.[Lancet, May 4, 1833]
+
+I have myself been told by two gentlemen practising in this city, and
+having for many years a large midwifery business, that they had neither
+of them lost a patient from this disease, and by one of them that he had
+only seen it in consultation with other physicians. In five hundred
+cases of midwifery, of which Dr. Storer has given an abstract in the
+first number of this Journal, there was only one instance of fatal
+puerperal peritonitis.
+
+In the view of these facts, it does appear a singular coincidence, that
+one man or woman should have ten, twenty, thirty, or seventy cases of
+this rare disease following his or her footsteps with the keenness of a
+beagle, through the streets and lanes of a crowded city, while the scores
+that cross the same paths on the same errands know it only by name. It
+is a series of similar coincidences which has led us to consider the
+dagger, the musket, and certain innocent-looking white powders as having
+some little claim to be regarded as dangerous. It is the practical
+inattention to similar coincidences which has given rise to the
+unpleasant but often necessary documents called indictments, which has
+sharpened a form of the cephalotome sometimes employed in the case of
+adults, and adjusted that modification of the fillet which delivers the
+world of those who happen to be too much in the way while such striking
+coincidences are taking place.
+
+I shall now mention a few instances in which the disease appears to have
+been conveyed by the process of direct inoculation.
+
+Dr. Campbell of Edinburgh states that in October, 1821, he assisted at
+the post-mortem examination of a patient who died with puerperal fever.
+He carried the pelvic viscera in his pocket to the class-room. The same
+evening he attended a woman in labor without previously changing his
+clothes; this patient died. The next morning he delivered a woman with
+the forceps; she died also, and of many others who were seized with the
+disease within a few weeks, three shared the same fate in succession.
+
+In June, 1823, he assisted some of his pupils at the autopsy of a case of
+puerperal fever. He was unable to wash his hands with proper care, for
+want of the necessary accommodations. On getting home he found that two
+patients required his assistance. He went without further ablution, or
+changing his clothes; both these patients died with puerperal fever.
+This same Dr. Campbell is one of Dr. Churchill's authorities against
+contagion.
+
+Mr. Roberton says that in one instance within his knowledge a
+practitioner passed the catheter for a patient with puerperal fever late
+in the evening; the same night he attended a lady who had the symptoms of
+the disease on the second day. In another instance a surgeon was called
+while in the act of inspecting the body of a woman who had died of this
+fever, to attend a labor; within forty-eight hours this patient was
+seized with the fever.'
+
+On the 16th of March, 1831, a medical practitioner examined the body of a
+woman who had died a few days after delivery, from puerperal peritonitis.
+On the evening of the 17th he delivered a patient, who was seized with
+puerperal fever on the 19th, and died on the 24th. Between this period
+and the 6th of April, the same practitioner attended two other patients,
+both of whom were attacked with the same disease and died.
+
+In the autumn of 1829 a physician was present at the examination of a
+case of puerperal fever, dissected out the organs, and assisted in sewing
+up the body. He had scarcely reached home when he was summoned to attend
+a young lady in labor. In sixteen hours she was attacked with the
+symptoms of puerperal fever, and narrowly escaped with her life.
+
+In December, 1830, a midwife, who had attended two fatal cases of
+puerperal fever at the British Lying-in Hospital, examined a patient who
+had just been admitted, to ascertain if labor had commenced. This patient
+remained two days in the expectation that labor would come on, when she
+returned home and was then suddenly taken in labor and delivered before
+she could set out for the hospital. She went on favorably for two days,
+and was then taken with puerperal fever and died in thirty-six hours.
+
+"A young practitioner, contrary to advice, examined the body of a patient
+who had died from puerperal fever; there was no epidemic at the time; the
+case appeared to be purely sporadic. He delivered three other women
+shortly afterwards; they all died with puerperal fever, the symptoms of
+which broke out very soon after labor. The patients of his colleague did
+well, except one, where he assisted to remove some coagula from the
+uterus; she was attacked in the same manner as those whom he had
+attended, and died also." The writer in the "British and Foreign Medical
+Review," from whom I quote this statement,--and who is no other than Dr.
+Rigby, adds, "We trust that this fact alone will forever silence such
+doubts, and stamp the well-merited epithet of 'criminal,' as above
+quoted, upon such attempts." [Brit. and For. Medical Review for Jan.
+1842, p. 112.]
+
+From the cases given by Mr. Ingleby, I select the following. Two
+gentlemen, after having been engaged in conducting the post-mortem
+examination of a case of puerperal fever, went in the same dress, each
+respectively, to a case of midwifery. "The one patient was seized with
+the rigor about thirty hours afterwards. The other patient was seized
+with a rigor the third morning after delivery. One recovered, one died."
+[Edin. Med. and Surg. Journal, April, 1838.]
+
+One of these same gentlemen attended another woman in the same clothes
+two days after the autopsy referred to. "The rigor did not take place
+until the evening of the fifth day from the first visit. Result fatal."
+These cases belonged to a series of seven, the first of which was thought
+to have originated in a case of erysipelas. "Several cases of a mild
+character followed the foregoing seven, and their nature being now most
+unequivocal, my friend declined visiting all midwifery cases for a time,
+and there was no recurrence of the disease." These cases occurred in
+1833. Five of them proved fatal. Mr. Ingleby gives another series of
+seven eases which occurred to a practitioner in 1836, the first of which
+was also attributed to his having opened several erysipelatous abscesses
+a short time previously.
+
+I need not refer to the case lately read before this Society, in which a
+physician went, soon after performing an autopsy of a case of puerperal
+fever, to a woman in labor, who was seized with the same disease and
+perished. The forfeit of that error has been already paid.
+
+At a meeting of the Medical and Chirurgical Society before referred to,
+Dr. Merriman related an instance occurring in his own practice, which
+excites a reasonable suspicion that two lives were sacrificed to a still
+less dangerous experiment. He was at the examination of a case of
+puerperal fever at two o'clock in the afternoon. He took care not to
+touch the body. At nine o'clock the same evening he attended a woman in
+labor; she was so nearly delivered that he had scarcely anything to do.
+The next morning she had severe rigors, and in forty-eight hours she was
+a corpse. Her infant had erysipelas and died in two days. [Lancet, May
+2, 1840.]
+
+In connection with the facts which have been stated, it seems proper to
+allude to the dangerous and often fatal effects which have followed from
+wounds received in the post-mortem examination of patients who have died
+of puerperal fever. The fact that such wounds are attended with peculiar
+risk has been long noticed. I find that Chaussier was in the habit of
+cautioning his students against the danger to which they were exposed in
+these dissections. [Stein, L'Art d'Accoucher, 1794; Dict. des Sciences
+Medicales, art. "Puerperal."] The head pharmacien of the Hotel Dieu, in
+his analysis of the fluid effused in puerperal peritonitis, says that
+practitioners are convinced of its deleterious qualities, and that it is
+very dangerous to apply it to the denuded skin. [Journal de Pharmacie,
+January, 1836.] Sir Benjamin Brodie speaks of it as being well known
+that the inoculation of lymph or pus from the peritoneum of a puerperal
+patient is often attended with dangerous and even fatal symptoms. Three
+cases in confirmation of this statement, two of them fatal, have been
+reported to this Society within a few months.
+
+Of about fifty cases of injuries of this kind, of various degrees of
+severity, which I have collected from different sources, at least twelve
+were instances of infection from puerperal peritonitis. Some of the
+others are so stated as to render it probable that they may have been of
+the same nature. Five other cases were of peritoneal inflammation; three
+in males. Three were what was called enteritis, in one instance
+complicated with erysipelas; but it is well known that this term has been
+often used to signify inflammation of the peritoneum covering the
+intestines. On the other hand, no case of typhus or typhoid fever is
+mentioned as giving rise to dangerous consequences, with the exception of
+the single instance of an undertaker mentioned by Mr. Travers, who seems
+to have been poisoned by a fluid which exuded from the body. The other
+accidents were produced by dissection, or some other mode of contact with
+bodies of patients who had died of various affections. They also
+differed much in severity, the cases of puerperal origin being among the
+most formidable and fatal. Now a moment's reflection will show that the
+number of cases of serious consequences ensuing from the dissection of
+the bodies of those who had perished of puerperal fever is so vastly
+disproportioned to the relatively small number of autopsies made in this
+complaint as compared with typhus or pneumonia (from which last disease
+not one case of poisoning happened), and still more from all diseases put
+together, that the conclusion is irresistible that a most fearful morbid
+poison is often generated in the course of this disease. Whether or not
+it is sui generis, confined to this disease, or produced in some others,
+as, for instance, erysipelas, I need, not stop to inquire.
+
+In connection with this may be taken the following statement of Dr.
+Rigby. "That the discharges from a patient under puerperal fever are in
+the highest degree contagious we have abundant evidence in the history of
+lying-in hospitals. The puerperal abscesses are also contagious, and may
+be communicated to healthy lying-in women by washing with the same
+sponge; this fact has been repeatedly proved in the Vienna Hospital; but
+they are equally communicable to women not pregnant; on more than one
+occasion the women engaged in washing the soiled bed-linen of the General
+Lying-in Hospital have been attacked with abscess in the fingers or
+hands, attended with rapidly spreading inflammation of the cellular
+tissue."
+
+Now add to all this the undisputed fact, that within the walls of
+lying-in hospitals there is often generated a miasm, palpable as the
+chlorine used to destroy it, tenacious so as in some cases almost to defy
+extirpation, deadly in some institutions as the plague; which has killed
+women in a private hospital of London so fast that they were buried two
+in one coffin to conceal its horrors; which enabled Tonnelle to record
+two hundred and twenty-two autopsies at the Maternite of Paris; which has
+led Dr. Lee to express his deliberate conviction that the loss of life
+occasioned by these institutions completely defeats the objects of their
+founders; and out of this train of cumulative evidence, the multiplied
+groups of cases clustering about individuals, the deadly results of
+autopsies, the inoculation by fluids from the living patient, the
+murderous poison of hospitals,--does there not result a conclusion that
+laughs all sophistry to scorn, and renders all argument an insult?
+
+I have had occasion to mention some instances in which there was an
+apparent relation between puerperal fever and erysipelas. The length to
+which this paper has extended does not allow me to enter into the
+consideration of this most important subject. I will only say, that the
+evidence appears to me altogether satisfactory that some most fatal
+series of puerperal fever have been produced by an infection originating
+in the matter or effluvia of erysipelas. In evidence of some connection
+between the two diseases, I need not go back to the older authors, as
+Pouteau or Gordon, but will content myself with giving the following
+references, with their dates; from which it will be seen that the
+testimony has been constantly coming before the profession for the last
+few years.
+
+"London Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine," article Puerperal Fever,
+1833.
+
+Mr. Ceeley's Account of the Puerperal Fever at Aylesbury. "Lancet,"
+1835.
+
+Dr. Ramsbotham's Lecture. "London Medical Gazette," 1835.
+
+Mr. Yates Ackerly's Letter in the same Journal, 1838.
+
+Mr. Ingleby on Epidemic Puerperal Fever. "Edinburgh Medical and Surgical
+Journal," 1838.
+
+Mr. Paley's Letter. "London Medical Gazette," 1839.
+
+Remarks at the Medical and Chirurgical Society. "Lancet," 1840.
+
+Dr. Rigby's "System of Midwifery." 1841.
+
+"Nunneley on Erysipelas,"--a work which contains a large number of
+references on the subject. 1841.
+
+"British and Foreign Quarterly Review," 1842.
+
+Dr. S. Jackson of Northumberland, as already quoted from the Summary of
+the College of Physicians, 1842.
+
+And lastly, a startling series of cases by Mr. Storrs of Doncaster, to
+be, found in the "American Journal of the Medical Sciences" for January,
+1843.
+
+The relation of puerperal fever with other continued fevers would seem to
+be remote and rarely obvious. Hey refers to two cases of synochus
+occurring in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, in women who had attended
+upon puerperal patients. Dr. Collins refers to several instances in
+which puerperal fever has appeared to originate from a continued
+proximity to patients suffering with typhus.
+
+Such occurrences as those just mentioned, though most important to be
+remembered and guarded against, hardly attract our notice in the midst of
+the gloomy facts by which they are surrounded. Of these facts, at the
+risk of fatiguing repetitions, I have summoned a sufficient number, as I
+believe, to convince the most incredulous that every attempt to disguise
+the truth which underlies them all is useless.
+
+It is true that some of the historians of the disease, especially Hulme,
+Hull, and Leake, in England; Tonnelle, Duges, and Baudelocque, in France,
+profess not to have found puerperal fever contagious. At the most they
+give us mere negative facts, worthless against an extent of evidence
+which now overlaps the widest range of doubt, and doubles upon itself in
+the redundancy of superfluous demonstration. Examined in detail, this and
+much of the show of testimony brought up to stare the daylight of
+conviction out of countenance, proves to be in a great measure unmeaning
+and inapplicable, as might be easily shown were it necessary. Nor do I
+feel the necessity of enforcing the conclusion which arises spontaneously
+from the facts which have been enumerated, by formally citing the
+opinions of those grave authorities who have for the last half-century
+been sounding the unwelcome truth it has cost so many lives to establish.
+
+"It is to the British practitioner," says Dr. Rigby, "that we are
+indebted for strongly insisting upon this important and dangerous
+character of puerperal fever."
+
+The names of Gordon, John Clarke, Denman, Burns, Young, Hamilton,
+Haighton, Good, Waller; Blundell, Gooch, Ramsbotham, Douglas, Lee,
+Ingleby, Locock, Abercrombie, Alison; Travers, Rigby, and Watson, many of
+whose writings I have already referred to, may have some influence with
+those who prefer the weight of authorities to the simple deductions of
+their own reason from the facts laid before them. A few Continental
+writers have adopted similar conclusions. It gives me pleasure to
+remember, that while the doctrine has been unceremoniously discredited in
+one of the leading Journals, and made very light of by teachers in two of
+the principal Medical Schools, of this country, Dr. Channing has for many
+years inculcated, and enforced by examples, the danger to be apprehended
+and the precautions to be taken in the disease under consideration.
+
+I have no wish to express any harsh feeling with regard to the painful
+subject which has come before us. If there are any so far excited by the
+story of these dreadful events that they ask for some word of indignant
+remonstrance to show that science does not turn the hearts of its
+followers into ice or stone, let me remind them that such words have been
+uttered by those who speak with an authority I could not claim. It is as
+a lesson rather than as a reproach that I call up the memory of these
+irreparable errors and wrongs. No tongue can tell the heart-breaking
+calamity they have caused; they have closed the eyes just opened upon a
+new world of love and happiness; they have bowed the strength of manhood
+into the dust; they have cast the helplessness of infancy into the
+stranger's arms, or bequeathed it, with less cruelty, the death of its
+dying parent. There is no tone deep enough for regret, and no voice loud
+enough for warning. The woman about to become a mother, or with her
+new-born infant upon her bosom, should be the object of trembling care
+and sympathy wherever she bears her tender burden, or stretches her
+aching limbs. The very outcast of the streets has pity upon her sister in
+degradation, when the seal of promised maternity is impressed upon her.
+The remorseless vengeance of the law, brought down upon its victim by a
+machinery as sure as destiny, is arrested in its fall at a word which
+reveals her transient claim for mercy. The solemn prayer of the liturgy
+singles out her sorrows from the multiplied trials of life, to plead for
+her in the hour of peril. God forbid that any member of the profession
+to which she trusts her life, doubly precious at that eventful period,
+should hazard it negligently, unadvisedly, or selfishly!
+
+There may be some among those whom I address who are disposed to ask the
+question, What course are we to follow in relation to this matter? The
+facts are before them, and the answer must be left to their own judgment
+and conscience. If any should care to know my own conclusions, they are
+the following; and in taking the liberty to state them very freely and
+broadly, I would ask the inquirer to examine them as freely in the light
+of the evidence which has been laid before him.
+
+1. A physician holding himself in readiness to attend cases of midwifery
+should never take any active part in the post-mortem examination of cases
+of puerperal fever.
+
+2. If a physician is present at such autopsies, he should use thorough
+ablution, change every article of dress, and allow twenty-four hours or
+more to elapse before attending to any case of midwifery. It may be well
+to extend the same caution to cases of simple peritonitis.
+
+3. Similar precautions should be taken after the autopsy or surgical
+treatment of cases of erysipelas, if the physician is obliged to unite
+such offices with his obstetrical duties, which is in the highest degree
+inexpedient.
+
+4. On the occurrence of a single case of puerperal fever in his
+practice, the physician is bound to consider the next female he attends
+in labor, unless some weeks at least have elapsed, as in danger of being
+infected by him, and it is his duty to take every precaution to diminish
+her risk of disease and death.
+
+5. If within a short period two cases of puerperal fever happen close to
+each other, in the practice of the same physician, the disease not
+existing or prevailing in the neighborhood, he would do wisely to
+relinquish his obstetrical practice for at least one month, and endeavor
+to free himself by every available means from any noxious influence he
+may carry about with him.
+
+6. The occurrence of three or more closely connected cases, in the
+practice of one individual, no others existing in the neighborhood, and
+no other sufficient cause being alleged for the coincidence, is prima
+facie evidence that he is the vehicle of contagion.
+
+7. It is the duty of the physician to take every precaution that the
+disease shall not be introduced by nurses or other assistants, by making
+proper inquiries concerning them, and giving timely warning of every
+suspected source of danger.
+
+8. Whatever indulgence may be granted to those who have heretofore been
+the ignorant causes of so much misery, the time has come when the
+existence of a private pestilence in the sphere of a single physician
+should be looked upon, not as a misfortune, but a crime; and in the
+knowledge of such occurrences the duties of the practitioner to his
+profession should give way to his paramount obligations to society.
+ADDITIONAL REFERENCES AND CASES.
+
+Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar-General of England.
+
+1843. Appendix. Letter from William Farr, Esq.--Several new series of
+cases are given in the Letter of Mr. Stows, contained in the Appendix to
+this Report. Mr. Stows suggests precautions similar to those I have laid
+down, and these precautions are strongly enforced by Mr. Farr, who is,
+therefore, obnoxious to the same criticisms as myself.
+
+Hall and Dexter, in Am. Journal of Med. Sc. for January, 1844.--Cases
+of puerperal fever seeming to originate in erysipelas.
+
+Elkington, of Birmingham, in Provincial Med. Journal, cited in Am.
+Journ. Med. Se. for April, 1844.--Six cases in less than a fortnight,
+seeming to originate in a case of erysipelas.
+
+West's Reports, in Brit. and For. Med. Review for October, 1845, and
+January, 1847.--Affection of the arm, resembling malignant pustule, after
+removing the placenta of a patient who died from puerperal fever.
+Reference to cases at Wurzburg, as proving contagion, and to Keiller's
+cases in the Monthly Journal for February, 1846, as showing connection of
+puerperal fever and erysipelas.
+
+Kneeland.--Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. Am. Jour. Med. Se.,
+January, 1846. Also, Connection between Puerperal Fever and Epidemic
+Erysipelas. Ibid., April, 1846.
+
+Robert Storrs.--Contagious Effects of Puerperal Fever on the Male
+Subject; or on Persons not Child-bearing. (From Provincial Med. and
+Surg. Journal.) Am. Jour. Med. Sc., January, 184,6. Numerous cases.
+See also Dr. Reid's case in same Journal for April, 1846.
+
+Routh's paper in Proc. of Royal Med. Chir. Soc., Am. Jour. Med. Sc.,
+April, 1849, also in B. and F. Med. Chir. Review, April, 1850.
+
+Hill, of Leuchars.--A Series of Cases illustrating the Contagious Nature
+of Erysipelas and of Puerperal Fever, and their Intimate Pathological
+Connection. (From Monthly Journal of Med. Sc.) Am. Jour. Med. Se.,
+July, 1850.
+
+Skoda on the Causes of Puerperal Fever. (Peritonitis in rabbits, from
+inoculation with different morbid secretions.) Am. Jour. Med. Se.,
+October, 1850.
+
+Arneth. Paper read before the National Academy of Medicine. Annales
+d'Hygiene, Tome LXV. 2e Partie. (Means of Disinfection proposed by M.
+"Semmeliveis" (Semmelweiss.) Lotions of chloride of lime and use of
+nail-brush before admission to lying-in wards. Alleged sudden and great
+decrease of mortality from puerperal fever. Cause of disease attributed
+to inoculation with cadaveric matters.) See also Routh's paper, mentioned
+above.
+
+Moir. Remarks at a meeting of the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society.
+Refers to cases of Dr. Kellie, of Leith. Sixteen in succession, all
+fatal. Also to several instances of individual pupils having had a
+succession of cases in various quarters of the town, while others,
+practising as extensively in the same localities, had none. Also to
+several special cases not mentioned elsewhere. Am. Jour. Med. Se. for
+October, 1851. (From New Monthly Journal of Med. Science.)
+
+Simpson.--Observations at a Meeting of the Edinburgh Obstetrical Society.
+(An "eminent gentleman," according to Dr. Meigs, whose "name is as well
+known in America as in (his) native land." Obstetrics. Phil. 1852, pp.
+368, 375.) The student is referred to this paper for a valuable resume of
+many of the facts, and the necessary inferences, relating to this
+subject. Also for another series of cases, Mr. Sidey's, five or six in
+rapid succession. Dr. Simpson attended the dissection of two of Dr.
+Sidey's cases, and freely handled the diseased parts. His next four
+child-bed patients were affected with puerperal fever, and it was the
+first time he had seen it in practice. As Dr. Simpson is a gentleman
+(Dr. Meigs, as above), and as "a gentleman's hands are clean" (Dr. Meigs'
+Sixth Letter), it follows that a gentleman with clean hands may carry the
+disease. Am. Jour. Med. Sc., October, 1851.
+
+Peddle.--The five or six cases of Dr. Sidey, followed by the four of Dr.
+Simpson, did not end the series. A practitioner in Leith having examined
+in Dr. Simpson's house, a portion of the uterus obtained from one of the
+patients, had immediately afterwards three fatal cases of puerperal
+fever. Dr. Veddie referred to two distinct series of consecutive cases
+in his own practice. He had since taken precautions, and not met with
+any such cases. Am. Jour. Med. Sc., October, 1851.
+
+Copland. Considers it proved that puerperal fever maybe propagated by
+the hands and the clothes, or either, of a third person, the bed-clothes
+or body-clothes of a patient. Mentions a new series of cases, one of
+which he saw, with the practitioner who had attended them. She was the
+sixth he had had within a few days. All died. Dr. Copland insisted that
+contagion had caused these cases; advised precautionary measures, and the
+practitioner had no other cases for a considerable time. Considers it
+criminal, after the evidence adduced,--which he could have
+quadrupled,--and the weight of authority brought forward, for a
+practitioner to be the medium of transmitting contagion and death to his
+patients. Dr. Copland lays down rules similar to those suggested by
+myself, and is therefore entitled to the same epithet for so doing.
+Medical Dictionary, New York, 1852. Article, Puerperal States and
+Diseases.
+
+If there is any appetite for facts so craving as to be yet
+unappeased,--Lesotho, necdum satiata,--more can be obtained. Dr. Hodge
+remarks that "the frequency and importance of this singular circumstance
+(that the disease is occasionally more prevalent with one practitioner
+than another) has been exceedingly overrated." More than thirty strings
+of cases, more than two hundred and fifty sufferers from puerperal fever,
+more than one hundred and thirty deaths appear as the results of a
+sparing estimate of such among the facts I have gleaned as could be
+numerically valued. These facts constitute, we may take it for granted,
+but a small fraction of those that have actually occurred. The number of
+them might be greater, but "'t is enough, 't will serve," in Mercutio's
+modest phrase, so far as frequency is concerned. For a just estimate of
+the importance of the singular circumstance, it might be proper to
+consult the languid survivors, the widowed husbands, and the motherless
+children, as well as "the unfortunate accoucheur."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE
+
+An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the
+Annual Meeting, May 30, 1860.
+
+ "Facultate magis quam violentia."
+ HIPPOCRATES.
+
+Our Annual Meeting never fails to teach us at least one lesson. The art
+whose province it is to heal and to save cannot protect its own ranks
+from the inroads of disease and the waste of the Destroyer.
+
+Seventeen of our associates have been taken from us since our last
+Anniversary. Most of them followed their calling in the villages or
+towns that lie among the hills or along the inland streams. Only those
+who have lived the kindly, mutually dependent life of the country, can
+tell how near the physician who is the main reliance in sickness of all
+the families throughout a thinly settled region comes to the hearts of
+the people among whom he labors, how they value him while living, how
+they cherish his memory when dead. For these friends of ours who have
+gone before, there is now no more toil; they start from their slumbers no
+more at the cry of pain; they sally forth no more into the storms; they
+ride no longer over the lonely roads that knew them so well; their wheels
+are rusting on their axles or rolling with other burdens; their watchful
+eyes are closed to all the sorrows they lived to soothe. Not one of
+these was famous in the great world; some were almost unknown beyond
+their own immediate circle. But they have left behind them that loving
+remembrance which is better than fame, and if their epitaphs are
+chiselled briefly in stone, they are written at full length on living
+tablets in a thousand homes to which they carried their ever-welcome aid
+and sympathy.
+
+One whom we have lost, very widely known and honored, was a leading
+practitioner of this city. His image can hardly be dimmed in your
+recollection, as he stood before you only three years ago, filling the
+same place with which I am now honored. To speak of him at all worthily,
+would be to write the history of professional success, won without
+special aid at starting, by toil, patience, good sense, pure character,
+and pleasing manners; won in a straight uphill ascent, without one
+breathing-space until he sat down, not to rest, but to die. If prayers
+could have shielded him from the stroke, if love could have drawn forth
+the weapon, and skill could have healed the wound, this passing tribute
+might have been left to other lips and to another generation.
+
+Let us hope that our dead have at last found that rest which neither
+summer nor winter, nor day nor night, had granted to their unending
+earthly labors! And let us remember that our duties to our brethren do
+not cease when they become unable to share our toils, or leave behind
+them in want and woe those whom their labor had supported. It is
+honorable to the Profession that it has organized an Association a for
+the relief of its suffering members and their families; it owes this
+tribute to the ill-rewarded industry and sacrifices of its less fortunate
+brothers who wear out health and life in the service of humanity. I have
+great pleasure in referring to this excellent movement, which gives our
+liberal profession a chance to show its liberality, and serves to unite
+us all, the successful and those whom fortune has cast down, in the bonds
+of a true brotherhood.
+
+A medical man, as he goes about his daily business after twenty years of
+practice, is apt to suppose that he treats his patients according to the
+teachings of his experience. No doubt this is true to some extent; to
+what extent depending much on the qualities of the individual. But it is
+easy to prove that the prescriptions of even wise physicians are very
+commonly founded on something quite different from experience.
+Experience must be based on the permanent facts of nature. But a glance
+at the prevalent modes of treatment of any two successive generations
+will show that there is a changeable as well as a permanent element in
+the art of healing; not merely changeable as diseases vary, or as new
+remedies are introduced, but changeable by the going out of fashion of
+special remedies, by the decadence of a popular theory from which their
+fitness was deduced, or other cause not more significant. There is no
+reason to suppose that the present time is essentially different in this
+respect from any other. Much, therefore, which is now very commonly
+considered to be the result of experience, will be recognized in the
+next, or in some succeeding generation, as no such result at all, but as
+a foregone conclusion, based on some prevalent belief or fashion of the
+time.
+
+There are, of course, in every calling, those who go about the work of
+the day before them, doing it according to the rules of their craft, and
+asking no questions of the past or of the future, or of the aim and end
+to which their special labor is contributing. These often consider and
+call themselves practical men. They pull the oars of society, and have
+no leisure to watch the currents running this or that way; let theorists
+and philosophers attend to them. In the mean time, however, these
+currents are carrying the practical men, too, and all their work may be
+thrown away, and worse than thrown away, if they do not take knowledge of
+them and get out of the wrong ones and into the right ones as soon as
+they may. Sir Edward Parry and his party were going straight towards the
+pole in one of their arctic expeditions, travelling at the rate of ten
+miles a day. But the ice over which they travelled was drifting straight
+towards the equator, at the rate of twelve miles a day, and yet no man
+among them would have known that he was travelling two miles a day
+backward unless he had lifted his eyes from the track in which he was
+plodding. It is not only going backward that the plain practical workman
+is liable to, if he will not look up and look around; he may go forward
+to ends he little dreams of. It is a simple business for a mason to
+build up a niche in a wall; but what if, a hundred years afterwards when
+the wall is torn down, the skeleton of a murdered man drop out of the
+niche? It was a plain practical piece of carpentry for a Jewish artisan
+to fit two pieces of timber together according to the legal pattern in
+the time of Pontius Pilate; he asked no questions, perhaps, but we know
+what burden the cross bore on the morrow! And so, with subtler tools
+than trowels or axes, the statesman who works in policy without
+principle, the theologian who works in forms without a soul, the
+physician who, calling himself a practical man, refuses to recognize the
+larger laws which govern his changing practice, may all find that they
+have been building truth into the wall, and hanging humanity upon the
+cross.
+
+The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as
+sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical,
+imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density.
+Theoretically it ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path,
+without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public
+opinion. But look a moment while I clash a few facts together, and see
+if some sparks do not reveal by their light a closer relation between the
+Medical Sciences and the conditions of Society and the general thought of
+the time, than would at first be suspected.
+
+Observe the coincidences between certain great political and intellectual
+periods and the appearance of illustrious medical reformers and teachers.
+It was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, of Phidias, that
+Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the form which it retained for
+twenty centuries. With the world-conquering Alexander, the
+world-embracing Aristotle, appropriating anatomy and physiology, among
+his manifold spoils of study, marched abreast of his royal pupil to wider
+conquests. Under the same Ptolemies who founded the Alexandrian Library
+and Museum, and ordered the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures,
+the infallible Herophilus ["Contradicere Herophilo in anatomicis, est
+contradicere evangelium," was a saying of Fallopius.] made those six
+hundred dissections of which Tertullian accused him, and the sagacious
+Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treatment in opposition
+to the polypharmacy and antidotal practice of his time. It is significant
+that the large-minded Galen should have been the physician and friend of
+the imperial philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The Arabs gave laws in various
+branches of knowledge to those whom their arms had invaded, or the terror
+of their spreading dominion had reached, and the point from which they
+started was, as Humboldt acknowledges, "the study of medicine, by which
+they long ruled the Christian Schools," and to which they added the
+department of chemical pharmacy.
+
+Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther. Who can fail to see one
+common spirit in the radical ecclesiastic and the reforming
+court-physician? Both still to some extent under the dominion of the
+letter: Luther holding to the real presence; Vesalius actually causing to
+be drawn and engraved two muscles which he knew were not found in the
+human subject, because they had been described by Galen, from dissections
+of the lower animals. Both breaking through old traditions in the search
+of truth; one, knife in hand, at the risk of life and reputation, the
+other at the risk of fire and fagot, with that mightier weapon which all
+the devils could not silence, though they had been thicker than the tiles
+on the house-tops. How much the physician of the Catholic Charles V. had
+in common with the great religious destructive, may be guessed by the
+relish with which he tells the story how certain Pavian students exhumed
+the body of an "elegans scortum," or lovely dame of ill repute, the
+favorite of a monk of the order of St. Anthony, who does not seem to have
+resisted temptation so well as the founder of his order. We have always
+ranked the physician Rabelais among the early reformers, but I do not
+know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his hit at the morals of the
+religious orders, or for turning to the good of science what was intended
+for the "benefit of clergy."
+
+Our unfortunate medical brother, Michael Servetus, the spiritual patient
+to whom the theological moxa was applied over the entire surface for the
+cure of his heresy, came very near anticipating Harvey. The same
+quickened thought of the time which led him to dispute the dogma of the
+Church, opened his mind to the facts which contradicted the dogmas of the
+Faculty.
+
+Harvey himself was but the posthumous child of the great Elizabethan
+period. Bacon was at once his teacher and his patient. The founder of
+the new inductive philosophy had only been dead two years when the
+treatise on the Circulation, the first-fruit of the Restoration of
+Science, was given to the world.
+
+And is it to be looked at as a mere accidental coincidence, that while
+Napoleon was modernizing the political world, Bichat was revolutionizing
+the science of life and the art that is based upon it; that while the
+young general was scaling the Alps, the young surgeon was climbing the
+steeper summits of unexplored nature; that the same year read the
+announcement of those admirable "Researches on Life and Death," and the
+bulletins of the battle of Marengo?
+
+If we come to our own country, who can fail to recognize that Benjamin
+Rush, the most conspicuous of American physicians, was the intellectual
+offspring of the movement which produced the Revolution? "The same hand,"
+says one of his biographers, "which subscribed the declaration of the
+political independence of these States, accomplished their emancipation
+from medical systems formed in foreign countries, and wholly unsuitable
+to the state of diseases in America."
+
+Following this general course of remark, I propose to indicate in a few
+words the direction of the main intellectual current of the time, and to
+point out more particularly some of the eddies which tend to keep the
+science and art of medicine from moving with it, or even to carry them
+backwards.
+
+The two dominant words of our time are law and average, both pointing to
+the uniformity of the order of being in which we live. Statistics have
+tabulated everything,--population, growth, wealth, crime, disease. We
+have shaded maps showing the geographical distribution of larceny and
+suicide. Analysis and classification have been at work upon all tangible
+and visible objects. The Positive Philosophy of Comte has only given
+expression to the observing and computing mind of the nineteenth century.
+
+In the mean time, the great stronghold of intellectual conservatism,
+traditional belief, has been assailed by facts which would have been
+indicted as blasphemy but a few generations ago. Those new tables of the
+law, placed in the hands of the geologist by the same living God who
+spoke from Sinai to the Israelites of old, have remodelled the beliefs of
+half the civilized world. The solemn scepticism of science has replaced
+the sneering doubts of witty philosophers. The more positive knowledge
+we gain, the more we incline to question all that has been received
+without absolute proof.
+
+As a matter of course, this movement has its partial reactions. The
+province of faith is claimed as a port free of entry to unsupported
+individual convictions. The tendency to question is met by the
+unanalyzing instinct of reverence. The old church calls back its
+frightened truants. Some who have lost their hereditary religious belief
+find a resource in the revelations of Spiritualism. By a parallel
+movement, some of those who have become medical infidels pass over to the
+mystic band of believers in the fancied miracles of Homoeopathy.
+
+Under these influences transmitted to, or at least shared by, the medical
+profession, the old question between "Nature," so called, and "Art," or
+professional tradition, has reappeared with new interest. I say the old
+question, for Hippocrates stated the case on the side of "Nature" more
+than two thousand years ago. Miss Florence Nightingale,--and if I name
+her next to the august Father of the Healing Art, its noblest daughter
+well deserves that place of honor,--Miss Florence Nightingale begins her
+late volume with a paraphrase of his statement. But from a very early
+time to this there has always been a strong party against "Nature."
+Themison called the practice of Hippocrates "a meditation upon death."
+Dr. Rush says: "It is impossible to calculate the mischief which
+Hippocrates, has done, by first marking Nature with his name and
+afterwards letting her loose upon sick people. Millions have perished by
+her hands in all ages and countries." Sir John Forbes, whose defence of
+"Nature" in disease you all know, and to the testimonial in whose honor
+four of your Presidents have contributed, has been recently greeted, on
+retiring from the profession, with a wish that his retirement had been
+twenty years sooner, and the opinion that no man had done so much to
+destroy the confidence of the public in the medical profession.
+
+In this Society we have had the Hippocratic and the Themisonic side
+fairly represented. The treatise of one of your early Presidents on the
+Mercurial Treatment is familiar to my older listeners. Others who have
+held the same office have been noted for the boldness of their practice,
+and even for partiality to the use of complex medication.
+
+On the side of "Nature" we have had, first of all, that remarkable
+discourse on Self-Limited Diseases, [On Self-Limited Diseases. A
+Discourse delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at their
+Annual Meeting, May 27, 1835. By Jacob Bigelow, M. D.] which has given
+the key-note to the prevailing medical tendency of this neighborhood, at
+least, for the quarter of a century since it was delivered. Nor have we
+forgotten the address delivered at Springfield twenty years later,
+[Search out the Secrets, of Nature. By Augustus A. Gould, M. D. Read
+at the Annual Meeting, June 27, 1855.] full of good sense and useful
+suggestions, to one of which suggestions we owe the learned, impartial,
+judicious, well-written Prize Essay of Dr. Worthington Hooker. [Rational
+Therapeutics. A Prize Essay. By Worthington Hooker, M. D., of New
+Haven. Boston. 1857.] We should not omit from the list the important
+address of another of our colleagues, [On the Treatment of Compound and
+Complicated Fractures. By William J. Walker, M. D. Read at the Annual
+Meeting, May 29, 1845.] showing by numerous cases the power of Nature in
+healing compound fractures to be much greater than is frequently
+supposed,--affording, indeed, more striking illustrations than can be
+obtained from the history of visceral disease, of the supreme wisdom,
+forethought, and adaptive dexterity of that divine Architect, as shown in
+repairing the shattered columns which support the living temple of the
+body.
+
+We who are on the side of "Nature" please ourselves with the idea that we
+are in the great current in which the true intelligence of the time is
+moving. We believe that some who oppose, or fear, or denounce our
+movement are themselves caught in various eddies that set back against
+the truth. And we do most earnestly desire and most actively strive,
+that Medicine, which, it is painful to remember, has been spoken of as
+"the withered branch of science" at a meeting of the British Association,
+shall be at length brought fully to share, if not to lead, the great wave
+of knowledge which rolls with the tides that circle the globe.
+
+If there is any State or city which might claim to be the American
+headquarters of the nature-trusting heresy, provided it be one, that
+State is Massachusetts, and that city is its capital. The effect which
+these doctrines have upon the confidence reposed in the profession is a
+matter of opinion. For myself, I do not believe this confidence can be
+impaired by any investigations which tend to limit the application of
+troublesome, painful, uncertain, or dangerous remedies. Nay, I will
+venture to say this, that if every specific were to fail utterly, if the
+cinchona trees all died out, and the arsenic mines were exhausted, and
+the sulphur regions were burned up, if every drug from the vegetable,
+animal, and mineral kingdom were to disappear from the market, a body of
+enlightened men, organized as a distinct profession, would be required
+just as much as now, and respected and trusted as now, whose province
+should be to guard against the causes of disease, to eliminate them if
+possible when still present, to order all the conditions of the patient
+so as to favor the efforts of the system to right itself, and to give
+those predictions of the course of disease which only experience can
+warrant, and which in so many cases relieve the exaggerated fears of
+sufferers and their friends, or warn them in season of impending danger.
+Great as the loss would be if certain active remedies could no longer be
+obtained, it would leave the medical profession the most essential part
+of it's duties, and all, and more than all, its present share of honors;
+for it would be the death-blow to charlatanism, which depends for its
+success almost entirely on drugs, or at least on a nomenclature that
+suggests them.
+
+There is no offence, then, or danger in expressing the opinion, that,
+after all which has been said, the community is still overdosed: The best
+proof of it is, that "no families take so little medicine as those of
+doctors, except those of apothecaries, and that old practitioners are
+more sparing of active medicines than younger ones." [Dr. James Jackson
+has kindly permitted me to make the following extract from a letter just
+received by him from Sir James Clark, and dated May 26, 1860: "As a
+physician advances in age, he generally, I think, places less confidence
+in the ordinary medical treatment than he did, not only during his early,
+but even his middle period of life."] The conclusion from these facts is
+one which the least promising of Dr. Howe's pupils in the mental
+department could hardly help drawing.
+
+Part of the blame of over-medication must, I fear, rest with the
+profession, for yielding to the tendency to self-delusion, which seems
+inseparable from the practice of the art of healing. I need only touch
+on the common modes of misunderstanding or misapplying the evidence of
+nature.
+
+First, there is the natural incapacity for sound observation, which is
+like a faulty ear in music. We see this in many persons who know a good
+deal about books, but who are not sharp-sighted enough to buy a horse or
+deal with human diseases.
+
+Secondly, there is in some persons a singular inability to weigh the
+value of testimony; of which, I think, from a pretty careful examination
+of his books, Hahnemann affords the best specimen outside the walls of
+Bedlam.
+
+The inveterate logical errors to which physicians have always been
+subject are chiefly these:
+
+The mode of inference per enumerationem simplicem, in scholastic phrase;
+that is, counting only their favorable cases. This is the old trick
+illustrated in Lord Bacon's story of the gifts of the shipwrecked people,
+hung up in the temple.--Behold! they vowed these gifts to the altar, and
+the gods saved them. Ay, said a doubting bystander, but how many made
+vows of gifts and were shipwrecked notwithstanding? The numerical system
+is the best corrective of this and similar errors. The arguments
+commonly brought against its application to all matters of medical
+observation, treatment included, seem to apply rather to the tabulation
+of facts ill observed, or improperly classified, than to the method
+itself.
+
+The post hoc ergo propter hoc error: he got well after taking my
+medicine; therefore in consequence of taking it.
+
+The false induction from genuine facts of observation, leading to the
+construction of theories which are then deductively applied in the face
+of the results of direct observation. The school of Broussais has
+furnished us with a good example of this error.
+
+And lastly, the error which Sir Thomas Browne calls giving "a reason of
+the golden tooth;" that is, assuming a falsehood as a fact, and giving
+reasons for it, commonly fanciful ones, as is constantly done by that
+class of incompetent observers who find their "golden tooth" in the
+fabulous effects of the homoeopathie materia medica,--which consists of
+sugar of milk and a nomenclature.
+
+Another portion of the blame rests with the public itself, which insists
+on being poisoned. Somebody buys all the quack medicines that build
+palaces for the mushroom, say rather, the toadstool millionaires. Who is
+it? These people have a constituency of millions. The popular belief is
+all but universal that sick persons should feed on noxious substances.
+One of our members was called not long since to a man with a terribly
+sore mouth. On inquiry he found that the man had picked up a box of
+unknown pills, in Howard Street, and had proceeded to take them, on
+general principles, pills being good for people. They happened to
+contain mercury, and hence the trouble for which he consulted our
+associate.
+
+The outside pressure, therefore, is immense upon the physician, tending
+to force him to active treatment of some kind. Certain old
+superstitions, still lingering in the mind of the public, and not yet
+utterly expelled from that of the profession, are at the bottom of this,
+or contribute to it largely. One of the most ancient is, that disease is
+a malignant agency, or entity, to be driven out of the body by offensive
+substances, as the smoke of the fish's heart and liver drove the devil
+out of Tobit's bridal chamber, according to the Apochrypha. Epileptics
+used to suck the blood from the wounds of dying gladiators. [Plinii Hist.
+Mundi. lib. xxviii. c. 4.] The Hon. Robert Boyle's little book was
+published some twenty or thirty years before our late President, Dr.
+Holyoke, was born. [A Collection of Choice and Safe Remedies. The Fifth
+Edition, corrected. London, 1712. Dr. Holyoke was born in 1728.] In it
+he recommends, as internal medicines, most of the substances commonly
+used as fertilizers of the soil. His "Album Graecum" is best left
+untranslated, and his "Zebethum Occidentale" is still more
+transcendentally unmentionable except in a strange dialect. It sounds
+odiously to us to hear him recommend for dysentery a powder made from
+"the sole of an old shoe worn by some man that walks much." Perhaps
+nobody here ever heard of tying a stocking, which had been worn during
+the day, round the neck at night for a sore throat. The same idea of
+virtue in unlovely secretions! [The idea is very ancient. "Sordes
+hominis" "Sudore et oleo medicinam facientibus."--Plin. xxviii. 4.]
+
+Even now the Homoeopathists have been introducing the venom of serpents,
+under the learned title of Lachesis, and outraging human nature with
+infusions of the pediculus capitis; that is, of course, as we understand
+their dilutions, the names of these things; for if a fine-tooth-comb
+insect were drowned in Lake Superior, we cannot agree with them in
+thinking that every drop of its waters would be impregnated with all the
+pedicular virtues they so highly value. They know what they are doing.
+They are appealing to the detestable old superstitious presumption in
+favor of whatever is nauseous and noxious as being good for the sick.
+
+Again, we all occasionally meet persons stained with nitrate of silver,
+given for epilepsy. Read what Dr. Martin says, about the way in which it
+came to be used, in his excellent address before the Norfolk County
+Medical Society, and the evidence I can show, but have not time for now,
+and then say what you think of the practice which on such presumptions
+turns a white man as blue as the double-tattooed King of the Cannibal
+Islands! [Note A.]
+
+If medical superstitions have fought their way down through all the
+rationalism and scepticism of the nineteenth century, of course the
+theories of the schools, supported by great names, adopted into the
+popular belief and incorporated with the general mass of misapprehension
+with reference to disease, must be expected to meet us at every turn in
+the shape of bad practice founded on false doctrine. A French patient
+complains that his blood heats him, and expects his doctor to bleed him.
+An English or American one says he is bilious, and will not be easy
+without a dose of calomel. A doctor looks at a patient's tongue, sees it
+coated, and says the stomach is foul; his head full of the old saburral
+notion which the extreme inflammation-doctrine of Broussais did so much
+to root out, but which still leads, probably, to much needless and
+injurious wrong of the stomach and bowels by evacuants, when all they
+want is to be let alone. It is so hard to get anything out of the dead
+hand of medical tradition! The mortmain of theorists extinct in science
+clings as close as that of ecclesiastics defunct in law.
+
+One practical hint may not be out of place here. It seems to be
+sometimes forgotten, by those who must know the fact, that the tongue is
+very different, anatomically and physiologically, from the stomach. Its
+condition does not in the least imply a similar one of the stomach, which
+is a very different structure, covered with a different kind of
+epithelium, and furnished with entirely different secretions. A
+silversmith will, for a dollar, make a small hoe, of solid silver, which
+will last for centuries, and will give a patient more comfort, used for
+the removal of the accumulated epithelium and fungous growths which
+constitute the "fur," than many a prescription with a split-footed Rx
+before it, addressed to the parts out of reach.
+
+I think more of this little implement on account of its agency in saving
+the Colony at Plymouth in the year 1623. Edward Winslow heard that
+Massasoit was sick and like to die. He found him with a houseful of
+people about him, women rubbing his arms and legs, and friends "making
+such a hellish noise" as they probably thought would scare away the devil
+of sickness. Winslow gave him some conserve, washed his mouth, scraped
+his tongue, which was in a horrid state, got down some drink, made him
+some broth, dosed him with an infusion of strawberry leaves and sassafras
+root, and had the satisfaction of seeing him rapidly recover. Massasoit,
+full of gratitude, revealed the plot which had been formed to destroy the
+colonists, whereupon the Governor ordered Captain Miles Standish to see
+to them; who thereupon, as everybody remembers, stabbed Pecksuot with his
+own knife, broke up the plot, saved the colony, and thus rendered
+Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Medical Society a possibility, as
+they now are a fact before us. So much for this parenthesis of the
+tongue-scraper, which helped to save the young colony from a much more
+serious scrape, and may save the Union yet, if a Presidential candidate
+should happen to be taken sick as Massasoit was, and his tongue wanted
+cleaning,--which process would not hurt a good many politicians, with or
+without a typhoid fever.
+
+Again, see how the "bilious" theory works in every-day life here and now,
+illustrated by a case from actual life. A youthful practitioner, whose
+last molars have not been a great while cut, meets an experienced and
+noted physician in consultation. This is the case. A slender, lymphatic
+young woman is suckling two lusty twins, the intervals of suction being
+occupied on her part with palpitations, headaches, giddiness, throbbing
+in the head, and various nervous symptoms, her cheeks meantime getting
+bloodless, and her strength running away in company with her milk. The
+old experienced physician, seeing the yellowish waxy look which is common
+in anaemic patients, considers it a "bilious" case, and is for giving a
+rousing emetic. Of course, he has to be wheedled out of this, a recipe
+is written for beefsteaks and porter, the twins are ignominiously
+expelled from the anaemic bosom, and forced to take prematurely to the
+bottle, and this prolific mother is saved for future usefulness in the
+line of maternity.
+
+The practice of making a profit on the medicine ordered has been held up
+to reprobation by one at least of the orators who have preceded me. That
+the effect of this has been ruinous in English practice I cannot doubt,
+and that in this country the standard of practice was in former
+generations lowered through the same agency is not unlikely. I have seen
+an old account-book in which the physician charged an extra price for
+gilding his rich patients' pills. If all medicine were very costly, and
+the expense of it always came out of the physician's fee, it would really
+be a less objectionable arrangement than this other most pernicious one.
+He would naturally think twice before he gave an emetic or cathartic
+which evacuated his own pocket, and be sparing of the cholagogues that
+emptied the biliary ducts of his own wallet, unless he were sure they
+were needed. If there is any temptation, it should not be in favor of
+giving noxious agents, as it clearly must be in the case of English
+druggists and "General Practitioners." The complaint against the other
+course is a very old one. Pliny, inspired with as truly Roman horror of
+quackery as the elder Cato,--who declared that the Greek doctors had
+sworn to exterminate all barbarians, including the Romans, with their
+drugs, but is said to have physicked his own wife to death,
+notwithstanding,--Pliny says, in so many words, that the cerates and
+cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so abundant in his time,
+as in more recent days, were mere tricks to make money.
+
+A pretty strong eddy, then, or rather many eddies, setting constantly
+back from the current of sober observation of nature, in the direction of
+old superstitions and fancies, of exploded theories, of old ways of
+making money, which are very slow to pass out of fashion.
+
+But there are other special American influences which we are bound to
+take cognizance of. If I wished to show a student the difficulties of
+getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of
+epilepsy to read. If I wished him to understand the tendencies of the
+American medical mind, its sanguine enterprise, its self-confidence, its
+audacious handling of Nature, its impatience with her old-fashioned ways
+of taking time to get a sick man well, I would make him read the life and
+writings of Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush thought and said that there were
+twenty times more intellect and a hundred times more knowledge in the
+country in 1799 than before the Revolution. His own mind was in a
+perpetual state of exaltation produced by the stirring scenes in which he
+had taken a part, and the quickened life of the time in which he lived.
+It was not the state to favor sound, calm observation. He was impatient,
+and Nature is profoundly imperturbable. We may adjust the beating of our
+hearts to her pendulum if we will and can, but we may be very sure that
+she will not change the pendulum's rate of going because our hearts are
+palpitating. He thought he had mastered yellow-fever. "Thank God," he
+said, "out of one hundred patients whom I have visited or prescribed for
+this day, I have lost none." Where was all his legacy of knowledge when
+Norfolk was decimated? Where was it when the blue flies were buzzing
+over the coffins of the unburied dead piled up in the cemetery of New
+Orleans, at the edge of the huge trenches yawning to receive them?
+
+One such instance will do as well as twenty. Dr. Rush must have been a
+charming teacher, as he was an admirable man. He was observing, rather
+than a sound observer; eminently observing, curious, even, about all
+manner of things. But he could not help feeling as if Nature had been a
+good deal shaken by the Declaration of Independence, and that American
+art was getting to be rather too much for her,--especially as illustrated
+in his own practice. He taught thousands of American students, he gave a
+direction to the medical mind of the country more than any other one man;
+perhaps he typifies it better than any other. It has clearly tended to
+extravagance in remedies and trust in remedies, as in everything else.
+How could a people which has a revolution once in four years, which has
+contrived the Bowie-knife and the revolver, which has chewed the juice
+out of all the superlatives in the language in Fourth of July orations,
+and so used up its epithets in the rhetoric of abuse that it takes two
+great quarto dictionaries to supply the demand; which insists in sending
+out yachts and horses and boys to out-sail, out-run, out-fight, and
+checkmate all the rest of creation; how could such a people be content
+with any but "heroic" practice? What wonder that the stars and stripes
+wave over doses of ninety grains of sulphate of quinine, [More strictly,
+ninety-six grains in two hours. Dunglison's Practice, 1842, vol. ii. p.
+520. Eighty grains in one dose. Ibid. p. 536. Ninety-six grains of
+sulphate of quinine are equal to eight ounces of good bark.--Wood &
+Bache.] and that the American eagle screams with delight to see three
+drachms of calomel given at a single mouthful?
+
+Add to this the great number of Medical Journals, all useful, we hope,
+most of them necessary, we trust, many of them excellently well
+conducted, but which must find something to fill their columns, and so
+print all the new plans of treatment and new remedies they can get hold
+of, as the newspapers, from a similar necessity, print the shocking
+catastrophes and terrible murders.
+
+Besides all this, here are we, the great body of teachers in the
+numberless medical schools of the Union, some of us lecturing to crowds
+who clap and stamp in the cities, some of us wandering over the country,
+like other professional fertilizers, to fecundate the minds of less
+demonstrative audiences at various scientific stations; all of us talking
+habitually to those supposed to know less than ourselves, and loving to
+claim as much for our art as we can, not to say for our own schools, and
+possibly indirectly for our own practical skill. Hence that annual crop
+of introductory lectures; the useful blossoming into the ornamental, as
+the cabbage becomes glorified in the cauliflower; that lecture-room
+literature of adjectives, that declamatory exaggeration, that splendid
+show of erudition borrowed from D'Israeli, and credited to Lord Bacon and
+the rest, which have suggested to our friends of the Medical Journals an
+occasional epigram at our expense. Hence the tendency in these
+productions, and in medical lectures generally, to overstate the efficacy
+of favorite methods of cure, and hence the premium offered for showy
+talkers rather than sagacious observers, for the men of adjectives rather
+than of nouns substantive in the more ambitious of these institutions.
+
+Such are some of the eddies in which we are liable to become involved and
+carried back out of the broad stream of philosophical, or, in other
+words, truth-loving, investigations. The causes of disease, in the mean
+time, have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of the search for
+remedies. Speak softly! Women have been borne out from an old-world
+hospital, two in one coffin, that the horrors of their prison-house might
+not be known, while the very men who were discussing the treatment of the
+disease were stupidly conveying the infection from bed to bed, as
+rat-killers carry their poisons from one household to another. Do not
+some of you remember that I have had to fight this private-pestilence
+question against a scepticism which sneered in the face of a mass of
+evidence such as the calm statisticians of the Insurance office could not
+listen to without horror and indignation? ["The Contagiousness of
+Puerperal Fever."--N. E. Quar. Jour. of Medicine and Surgery, April,
+1843. Reprinted, with Additions. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1855.] Have
+we forgotten what is told in one of the books published under our own
+sanction, that a simple measure of ventilation, proposed by Dr. John
+Clark, had saved more than sixteen thousand children's lives in a single
+hospital? How long would it have taken small doses of calomel and
+rhubarb to save as many children? These may be useful in prudent hands,
+but how insignificant compared to the great hygienic conditions! Causes,
+causes, and again causes,--more and more we fall back on these as the
+chief objects of our attention. The shortest system of medical practice
+that I know of is the oldest, but not the worst. It is older than
+Hippocrates, older than Chiron the Centaur. Nature taught it to the first
+mother when she saw her first-born child putting some ugly pebble or
+lurid berry into its mouth. I know not in what language it was spoken,
+but I know that in English it would sound thus: Spit it out!
+
+Art can do something more than say this. It can sometimes reach the
+pebble or berry after it has been swallowed. But the great thing is to
+keep these things out of children's mouths, and as soon as they are
+beyond our reach, to be reasonable and patient with Nature, who means
+well, but does not like to hurry, and who took nine calendar months, more
+or less, to every mother's son among us, before she thought he was fit to
+be shown to the public.
+
+Suffer me now to lay down a few propositions, whether old or new it
+matters little, not for your immediate acceptance, nor yet for your hasty
+rejection, but for your calm consideration.
+
+But first, there are a number of terms which we are in the habit of using
+in a vague though not unintelligible way, and which it is as well now to
+define. These terms are the tools with which we are to work, and the
+first thing is to sharpen them. It is nothing to us that they have been
+sharpened a thousand times before; they always get dull in the using, and
+every new workman has a right to carry them to the grindstone and sharpen
+them to suit himself.
+
+Nature, in medical language, as opposed to Art, means trust in the
+reactions of the living system against, ordinary normal impressions.
+
+Art, in the same language, as opposed to Nature, means an intentional
+resort to extraordinary abnormal impressions for the relief of disease.
+
+The reaction of the living system is the essence of both. Food is
+nothing, if there is no digestive act to respond to it. We cannot raise
+a blister on a dead man, or hope that a carminative forced between his
+lips will produce its ordinary happy effect.
+
+Disease, dis-ease,--disturbed quiet, uncomfortableness,--means imperfect
+or abnormal reaction of the living system, and its more or less permanent
+results.
+
+Food, in its largest sense, is whatever helps to build up the normal
+structures, or to maintain their natural actions.
+
+Medicine, in distinction from food, is every unnatural or noxious agent
+applied for the relief of disease.
+
+Physic means properly the Natural art, and Physician is only the Greek
+synonyme of Naturalist.
+
+With these few explanations I proceed to unfold the propositions I have
+mentioned.
+
+Disease and death, if we may judge by the records of creation, are
+inherently and essentially necessary in the present order of things. A
+perfect intelligence, trained by a perfect education, could do no more
+than keep the laws of the physical and spiritual universe. An imperfect
+intelligence, imperfectly taught,--and this is the condition of our
+finite humanity,--will certainly fail to keep all these laws perfectly.
+Disease is one of the penalties of one of the forms of such failure. It
+is prefigured in the perturbations of the planets, in the disintegration
+of the elemental masses; it has left its traces in the fossil organisms
+of extinct creations. [Professor Agassiz has kindly handed me the
+following note: "There are abnormal structures in animals of all ages
+anterior to the creation of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids are
+known from the Triassic and Jurassic deposits. Malformed and diseased
+bones of tertiary mammalia have been collected in the caverns of
+Gailenreuth with traces of healing."]
+
+But it is especially the prerogative, I had almost said privilege, of
+educated and domesticated beings, from man down to the potato, serving to
+teach them, and such as train them, the laws of life, and to get rid of
+those who will not mind or cannot be kept subject to these laws.
+
+Disease, being always an effect, is always in exact proportion to the sum
+of its causes, as much in the case of Spigelius, who dies of a scratch,
+as in that of the man who recovers after an iron bar has been shot
+through his brain. The one prevalent failing of the medical art is to
+neglect the causes and quarrel with the effect.
+
+There are certain general facts which include a good deal of what is
+called and treated as disease. Thus, there are two opposite movements of
+life to be seen in cities and elsewhere, belonging to races which, from
+various persistent causes, are breeding down and tending to run out, and
+to races which are breeding up, or accumulating vital capital,--a
+descending and an ascending series. Let me give an example of each; and
+that I may incidentally remove a common impression about this country as
+compared with the Old World, an impression which got tipsy with conceit
+and staggered into the attitude of a formal proposition in the work of
+Dr. Robert Knox, I will illustrate the downward movement from English
+experience, and the upward movement from a family history belonging to
+this immediate neighborhood.
+
+Miss Nightingale speaks of "the fact so often seen of a
+great-grandmother, who was a tower of physical vigor, descending into a
+grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous, but still sound as a bell,
+and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and confined to her
+carriage and house; and lastly into a daughter sickly and confined to her
+bed." So much for the descending English series; now for the ascending
+American series.
+
+Something more than one hundred and thirty years ago there graduated at
+Harvard College a delicate youth, who lived an invalid life and died at
+the age of about fifty. His two children were both of moderate physical
+power, and one of them diminutive in stature. The next generation rose
+in physical development, and reached eighty years of age and more in some
+of its members. The fourth generation was of fair average endowment.
+The fifth generation, great-great-grandchildren of the slender invalid,
+are several of, them of extraordinary bodily and mental power; large in
+stature, formidable alike with their brains and their arms, organized on
+a more extensive scale than either of their parents.
+
+This brief account illustrates incidentally the fallacy of the
+universal-degeneration theory applied to American life; the same on which
+one of our countrymen has lately brought some very forcible facts to bear
+in a muscular discussion of which we have heard rather more than is good
+for us. But the two series, American and English, ascending and
+descending, were adduced with the main purpose of showing the immense
+difference of vital endowments in different strains of blood; a
+difference to which all ordinary medication is in all probability a
+matter of comparatively trivial purport. Many affections which art has
+to strive against might be easily shown to be vital to the well-being of
+society. Hydrocephalus, tabes mesenterica, and other similar maladies,
+are natural agencies which cut off the children of races that are sinking
+below the decent minimum which nature has established as the condition of
+viability, before they reach the age of reproduction. They are really
+not so much diseases, as manifestations of congenital incapacity for
+life; the race would be ruined if art could ever learn always to preserve
+the individuals subject to them. We must do the best we can for them,
+but we ought also to know what these "diseases" mean.
+
+Again, invalidism is the normal state of many organizations. It can be
+changed to disease, but never to absolute health by medicinal appliances.
+There are many ladies, ancient and recent, who are perpetually taking
+remedies for irremediable pains and aches. They ought to have headaches
+and back-aches and stomach-aches; they are not well if they do not have
+them. To expect them to live without frequent twinges is like expecting
+a doctor's old chaise to go without creaking; if it did, we might be sure
+the springs were broken. There is no doubt that the constant demand for
+medicinal remedies from patients of this class leads to their over-use;
+often in the case of cathartics, sometimes in that of opiates. I have
+been told by an intelligent practitioner in a Western town, that the
+constant prescription of opiates by certain physicians in his vicinity
+has rendered the habitual use of that drug in all that region very
+prevalent; more common, I should think, than alcoholic drunkenness in the
+most intemperate localities of which I have known anything. A frightful
+endemic demoralization betrays itself in the frequency with which the
+haggard features and drooping shoulders of the opium-drunkards are met
+with in the streets.
+
+The next proposition I would ask you to consider is this: The presumption
+always is that every noxious agent, including medicines proper, which
+hurts a well man, hurts a sick one. [ Note B.]
+
+Let me illustrate this proposition before you decide upon it. If it were
+known that a prize-fighter were to have a drastic purgative administered
+two or three days before a contest, or a large blister applied to his
+back, no one will question that it would affect the betting on his side
+unfavorably; we will say to the amount of five per cent. Now the drain
+upon the resources of the system produced in such a case must be at its
+minimum, for the subject is a powerful man, in the prime of life, and in
+admirable condition. If the drug or the blister takes five per cent.
+from his force of resistance, it will take at least as large a fraction
+from any invalid. But this invalid has to fight a champion who strikes
+hard but cannot be hit in return, who will press him sharply for breath,
+but will never pant himself while the wind can whistle through his
+fleshless ribs. The suffering combatant is liable to want all his
+stamina, and five per cent. may lose him the battle.
+
+All noxious agents, all appliances which are not natural food or stimuli,
+all medicines proper, cost a patient, on the average, five per cent. of
+his vital force, let us say. Twenty times as much waste of force
+produced by any of them, that is, would exactly kill him, nothing less
+than kill him, and nothing more. If this, or something like this, is
+true, then all these medications are, prima facie, injurious.
+
+In the game of Life-or-Death, Rouge et Noir, as played between the Doctor
+and the Sexton, this five per cent., this certain small injury entering
+into the chances is clearly the sexton's perquisite for keeping the green
+table, over which the game is played, and where he hoards up his gains.
+Suppose a blister to diminish a man's pain, effusion or dyspnoea to the
+saving of twenty per cent. in vital force; his profit from it is fifteen,
+in that case, for it always hurts him five to begin with, according to
+our previous assumption.
+
+Presumptions are of vast importance in medicine, as in law. A man is
+presumed innocent until he is proved guilty. A medicine--that is, a
+noxious agent, like a blister, a seton, an emetic, or a cathartic
+--should always be presumed to be hurtful. It always is directly
+hurtful; it may sometimes be indirectly beneficial. If this presumption
+were established, and disease always assumed to be the innocent victim of
+circumstances, and not punishable by medicines, that is, noxious agents,
+or poisons, until the contrary was shown, we should not so frequently
+hear the remark commonly, perhaps erroneously, attributed to Sir Astley
+Cooper, but often repeated by sensible persons, that, on the whole, more
+harm than good is done by medication. Throw out opium, which the Creator
+himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in
+the cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to
+be fed there must also be pain to be soothed; throw out a few specifics
+which our art did not discover, and is hardly needed to apply [ Note C.];
+throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle
+of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as
+now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the
+better for mankind,--and all the worse for the fishes.
+
+But to justify this proposition, I must add that the injuries inflicted
+by over-medication are to a great extent masked by disease. Dr. Hooker
+believes that the typhus syncopatia of a preceding generation in New
+England "was often in fact a brandy and opium disease." How is a
+physician to distinguish the irritation produced by his blister from that
+caused by the inflammation it was meant to cure? How can he tell the
+exhaustion produced by his evacuants from the collapse belonging to the
+disease they were meant to remove?
+
+Lastly, medication without insuring favorable hygienic conditions is like
+amputation without ligatures. I had a chance to learn this well of old,
+when physician to the Broad Street district of the Boston Dispensary.
+There, there was no help for the utter want of wholesome conditions, and
+if anybody got well under my care, it must have been in virtue of the
+rough-and-tumble constitution which emerges from the struggle for life in
+the street gutters, rather than by the aid of my prescriptions.
+
+But if the materia medica were lost overboard, how much more pains would
+be taken in ordering all the circumstances surrounding the patient (as
+can be done everywhere out of the crowded pauper districts), than are
+taken now by too many who think they do their duty and earn their money
+when they write a recipe for a patient left in an atmosphere of domestic
+malaria, or to the most negligent kind of nursing! I confess that I
+should think my chance of recovery from illness less with Hippocrates for
+my physician and Mrs. Gamp for my nurse, than if I were in the hands of
+Hahnemann himself, with Florence Nightingale or good Rebecca Taylor to
+care for me.
+
+If I am right in maintaining that the presumption is always against the
+use of noxious agents in disease, and if any whom I might influence
+should adopt this as a principle of practice, they will often find
+themselves embarrassed by the imperative demand of patients and their
+friends for such agents where a case is not made out against this
+standing presumption. I must be permitted to say, that I think the
+French, a not wholly uncivilized people, are in advance of the English
+and ourselves in the art of prescribing for the sick without hurting
+them. And I do confess that I think their varied ptisans and syrups are
+as much preferable to the mineral regimen of bug-poison and ratsbane, so
+long in favor on the other side of the Channel, as their art of preparing
+food for the table to the rude cookery of those hard-feeding and
+much-dosing islanders. We want a reorganized cuisine of invalidism
+perhaps as much as the culinary, reform, for which our lyceum lecturers,
+and others who live much at hotels and taverns, are so urgent. Will you
+think I am disrespectful if I ask whether, even in Massachusetts, a dose
+of calomel is not sometimes given by a physician on the same principle as
+that upon which a landlord occasionally prescribes bacon and
+eggs,--because he cannot think of anything else quite so handy? I leave
+my suggestion of borrowing a hint from French practice to your mature
+consideration.
+
+I may, however, call your attention, briefly, to the singular fact, that
+English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French medical
+practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of unnecessary
+activity. Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical treatment, with
+certain exceptions, as "decidedly less effective" than that of his own
+country. Mr. S. Cooper, again, defends the simple British practice of
+procuring union by the first intention against the attacks of M. Roux and
+Baron Larrey. [Cooper's Surg. Diet. art. "Wounds." Yet Mr. John Bell
+gives the French surgeons credit for introducing this doctrine of
+adhesion, and accuses O'Halloran of "rudeness and ignorance," and "bold,
+uncivil language," in disputing their teaching. Princ. of Surgery, vol.
+i. p. 42. Mr. Hunter succeeded at last in naturalizing the doctrine and
+practice, but even he had to struggle against the perpetual jealousy of
+rivals, and died at length assassinated by an insult.] We have often
+heard similar opinions maintained by our own countrymen. While
+Anglo-American criticism blows hot or cold on the two departments of
+French practice, it is not, I hope, indecent to question whether all the
+wisdom is necessarily with us in both cases.
+
+Our art has had two or three lessons which have a deep meaning to those
+who are willing to read them honestly. The use of water-dressings in
+surgery completed the series of reforms by which was abolished the
+"coarse and cruel practice" of the older surgeons, who with their
+dressings and acrid balsams, their tents and leaden tubes, "absolutely
+delayed the cure." The doctrine of Broussais, transient as was its
+empire, reversed the practice of half of Christendom for a season, and
+taught its hasty disciples to shun their old favorite remedies as mortal
+poisons. This was not enough permanently to shift the presumption about
+drugs where it belonged, and so at last, just as the sympathetic powder
+and the Unguentum Armarium came in a superstitious age to kill out the
+abuses of external over-medication, the solemn farce of Homoeopathy was
+enacted in the face of our own too credulous civilization, that under
+shelter of its pretences the "inward bruises" of over-drugged viscera
+might be allowed to heal by the first intention. Its lesson we must
+accept, whether we will or not; its follies we are tired of talking
+about. The security of the medical profession against this and all
+similar fancies is in the average constitution of the human mind with
+regard to the laws of evidence.
+
+My friends and brothers in Art! There is nothing to be feared from the
+utterance of any seeming heresy to which you may have listened. I cannot
+compromise your collective wisdom. If I have strained the truth one
+hair's breadth for the sake of an epigram or an antithesis, you are
+accustomed to count the normal pulse-beats of sound judgment, and know
+full well how to recognize the fever-throbs of conceit and the nervous
+palpitations of rhetoric.
+
+The freedom with which each of us speaks his thought in this presence,
+belongs in part to the assured position of the Profession in our
+Commonwealth, to the attitude of Science, which is always fearless, and
+to the genius of the soil on which we stand, from which Nature withheld
+the fatal gift of malaria only to fill it with exhalations that breed the
+fever of inquiry in our blood and in our brain. But mainly we owe the
+large license of speech we enjoy to those influences and privileges
+common to us all as self-governing Americans.
+
+This Republic is the chosen home of minorities, of the less power in the
+presence of the greater. It is a common error to speak of our
+distinction as consisting in the rule of the majority. Majorities, the
+greater material powers, have always ruled before. The history of most
+countries has been that of majorities, mounted majorities, clad in iron,
+armed with death treading down the tenfold more numerous minorities. In
+the old civilizations they root themselves like oaks in the soil; men
+must live in their shadow or cut them down. With us the majority is only
+the flower of the passing noon, and the minority is the bud which may
+open in the next morning's sun. We must be tolerant, for the thought
+which stammers on a single tongue today may organize itself in the
+growing consciousness of the time, and come back to us like the voice of
+the multitudinous waves of the ocean on the morrow.
+
+Twenty-five years have passed since one of your honored Presidents spoke
+to this Society of certain limitations to the power of our Art, now very
+generally conceded. Some were troubled, some were almost angry, thinking
+the Profession might suffer from such concessions. It has certainly not
+suffered here; if, as some affirm, it has lost respect anywhere, it was
+probably for other, and no doubt sufficient reasons.
+
+Since that time the civilization of this planet has changed hands. Strike
+out of existence at this moment every person who was breathing on that
+day, May 27, 1835, and every institution of society, every art and every
+science would remain intact and complete in the living that would be
+left. Every idea the world then held has been since dissolved and
+recrystallized.
+
+We are repeating the same process. Not to make silver shrines for our
+old divinities, even though by this craft we should have our wealth, was
+this Society organized and carried on by the good men and true who went
+before us. Not for this, but to melt the gold out of the past, though
+its dross should fly in dust to all the winds of heaven, to save all our
+old treasures of knowledge and mine deeply for new, to cultivate that
+mutual respect of which outward courtesy is the sign, to work together,
+to feel together, to take counsel together, and to stand together for the
+truth, now, always, here, everywhere; for this our fathers instituted,
+and we accept, the offices and duties of this time-honored Society.
+
+
+
+
+BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.
+
+An Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard
+University, November 6, 1861.
+
+[This Lecture appears as it would have been delivered had the time
+allowed been less strictly, limited. Passages necessarily omitted have
+been restored, and points briefly touched have been more fully
+considered. A few notes have been added for the benefit of that limited
+class of students who care to track an author through the highways and
+by-ways of his reading. I owe my thanks to several of my professional
+brethren who have communicated with me on subjects with which they are
+familiar; especially to Dr. John Dean, for the opportunity of profiting
+by his unpublished labors, and to Dr. Hasket Derby, for information and
+references to recent authorities relating to the anatomy and physiology
+of the eye.]
+
+The entrance upon a new course of Lectures is always a period of interest
+to instructors and pupils. As the birth of a child to a parent, so is
+the advent of a new class to a teacher. As the light of the untried
+world to the infant, so is the dawning of the light resting over the
+unexplored realms of science to the student. In the name of the Faculty
+I welcome you, Gentlemen of the Medical Class, new-born babes of science,
+or lustier nurslings, to this morning of your medical life, and to the
+arms and the bosom of this ancient University. Fourteen years ago I
+stood in this place for the first time to address those who occupied
+these benches. As I recall these past seasons of our joint labors, I
+feel that they have been on the whole prosperous, and not undeserving of
+their prosperity.
+
+For it has been my privilege to be associated with a body of true and
+faithful workers; I cannot praise them freely to their faces, or I should
+be proud to discourse of the harmonious diligence and the noble spirit in
+which they have toiled together, not merely to teach their several
+branches, but to elevate the whole standard of teaching.
+
+I may speak with less restraint of those gentlemen who have aided me in
+the most laborious part of my daily duties, the Demonstrators, to whom
+the successive classes have owed so much of their instruction. They rise
+before me, the dead and the living, in the midst of the most grateful
+recollections. The fair, manly face and stately figure of my friend, Dr.
+Samuel Parkman, himself fit for the highest offices of teaching, yet
+willing to be my faithful assistant in the time of need, come back to me
+with the long sigh of regret for his early loss to our earthly
+companionship. Every year I speak the eulogy of Dr. Ainsworth's patient
+toil as I show his elaborate preparations: When I take down my "American
+Cyclopaedia" and borrow instruction from the learned articles of Dr.
+Kneeland, I cease to regret that his indefatigable and intelligent
+industry was turned into a broader channel. And what can I say too
+cordial of my long associated companion and friend, Dr. Hodges, whose
+admirable skill, working through the swiftest and surest fingers that
+ever held a scalpel among us, has delighted class after class, and filled
+our Museum with monuments which will convey his name to unborn
+generations?
+
+This day belongs, however, not to myself and my recollections, but to all
+of us who teach and all of you who listen, whether experts in our
+specialties or aliens to their mysteries, or timid neophytes just
+entering the portals of the hall of science. Look in with me, then,
+while I attempt to throw some rays into its interior, which shall
+illuminate a few of its pillars and cornices, and show at the same time
+how many niches and alcoves remain in darkness.
+
+SCIENCE is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we
+triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the
+lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our
+dredges.
+
+The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge
+leaves off and ignorance begins. Nothing more clearly separates a vulgar
+from a superior mind, than the confusion in the first between the little
+that it truly knows, on the one hand, and what it half knows and what it
+thinks it knows on the other.
+
+That which is true of every subject is especially true of the branch of
+knowledge which deals with living beings. Their existence is a perpetual
+death and reanimation. Their identity is only an idea, for we put off
+our bodies many times during our lives, and dress in new suits of bones
+and muscles.
+
+ "Thou art not thyself;
+ For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
+ That issue out of dust."
+
+If it is true that we understand ourselves but imperfectly in health,
+this truth is more signally manifested in disease, where natural actions
+imperfectly understood, disturbed in an obscure way by half-seen causes,
+are creeping and winding along in the dark toward their destined issue,
+sometimes using our remedies as safe stepping-stones, occasionally, it
+may be, stumbling over them as obstacles.
+
+I propose in this lecture to show you some points of contact between our
+ignorance and our knowledge in several of the branches upon the study of
+which you are entering. I may teach you a very little directly, but I
+hope much more from the trains of thought I shall suggest. Do not expect
+too much ground to be covered in this rapid survey. Our task is only
+that of sending out a few pickets under the starry flag of science to the
+edge of that dark domain where the ensigns of the obstinate rebel,
+Ignorance, are flying undisputed. We are not making a reconnoissance in
+force, still less advancing with the main column. But here are a few
+roads along which we have to march together, and we wish to see clearly
+how far our lines extend, and where the enemy's outposts begin.
+
+Before touching the branches of knowledge that deal with organization and
+vital functions, let us glance at that science which meets you at the
+threshold of your study, and prepares you in some measure to deal with
+the more complex problems of the living laboratory.
+
+CHEMISTRY. includes the art of separating and combining the elements of
+matter, and the study of the changes produced by these operations. We can
+hardly say too much of what it has contributed to our knowledge of the
+universe and our power of dealing with its materials. It has given us a
+catalogue raisonne of the substances found upon our planet, and shown how
+everything living and dead is put together from them. It is
+accomplishing wonders before us every day, such as Arabian story-tellers
+used to string together in their fables. It spreads the, sensitive film
+on the artificial retina which looks upon us through the optician's lens
+for a few seconds, and fixes an image that will outlive its original. It
+questions the light of the sun, and detects the vaporized metals floating
+around the great luminary,--iron, sodium, lithium, and the rest,--as if
+the chemist of our remote planet could fill his bell-glasses from its
+fiery atmosphere. It lends the power which flashes our messages in
+thrills that leave the lazy chariot of day behind them. It seals up a
+few dark grains in iron vases, and lo! at the touch of a single spark,
+rises in smoke and flame a mighty Afrit with a voice like thunder and an
+arm that shatters like an earthquake. The dreams of Oriental fancy have
+become the sober facts of our every-day life, and the chemist is the
+magician to whom we owe them.
+
+To return to the colder scientific aspect of chemistry. It has shown us
+how bodies stand affected to each other through an almost boundless range
+of combinations. It has given us a most ingenious theory to account for
+certain fixed relations in these combinations. It has successfully
+eliminated a great number of proximate compounds, more or less stable,
+from organic structures. It has invented others which form the basis of
+long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps
+becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, demonstrated
+and hypothetical.
+
+How much nearer have we come to the secret of force than Lully and Geber
+and the whole crew of juggling alchemists? We have learned a great deal
+about the how, what have we learned about the why?
+
+Why does iron rust, while gold remains untarnished, and gold amalgamate,
+while iron refuses the alliance of mercury?
+
+The alchemists called gold Sol, the sun, and iron Mars, and pleased
+themselves with fancied relations between these substances and the
+heavenly bodies, by which they pretended to explain the facts they
+observed. Some of their superstitions have lingered in practical
+medicine to the present day, but chemistry has grown wise enough to
+confess the fact of absolute ignorance.
+
+What is it that makes common salt crystallize in the form of cubes, and
+saltpetre in the shape of six-sided prisms? We see no reason why it
+should not have been just the other way, salt in prisms and saltpetre in
+cubes, or why either should take an exact geometrical outline, any more
+than coagulating albumen.
+
+But although we had given up attempting to explain the essential nature
+of affinities and of crystalline types, we might have supposed that we
+had at least fixed the identity of the substances with which we deal, and
+determined the laws of their combination. All at once we find that a
+simple substance changes face, puts off its characteristic qualities and
+resumes them at will;--not merely when we liquefy or vaporize a solid, or
+reverse the process; but that a solid is literally transformed into
+another solid under our own eyes. We thought we knew phosphorus. We warm
+a portion of it sealed in an empty tube, for about a week. It has become
+a brown infusible substance, which does not shine in the dark nor oxidate
+in the air. We heat it to 500 F., and it becomes common phosphorus again.
+We transmute sulphur in the same singular way. Nature, you know, gives
+us carbon in the shape of coal and in that of the diamond. It is easy to
+call these changes by the name allotropism, but not the less do they
+confound our hasty generalizations.
+
+These facts of allotropism have some corollaries connected with them
+rather startling to us of the nineteenth century. There may be other
+transmutations possible besides those of phosphorus and sulphur. When Dr.
+Prout, in 1840, talked about azote and carbon being "formed" in the
+living system, it was looked upon as one of those freaks of fancy to
+which philosophers, like other men, are subject. But when Professor
+Faraday, in 1851, says, at a meeting of the British Association, that
+"his hopes are in the direction of proving that bodies called simple were
+really compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as we are
+masters of the laws influencing their combinations,"--when he comes
+forward and says that he has tried experiments at transmutation, and
+means, if his life is spared, to try them again,--how can we be surprised
+at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a
+gold-factory and is glutting the mints of Europe with bullion of his own
+making?
+
+And so with reference to the law of combinations. The old maxim was,
+Corpora non agunt nisi soluta. If two substances, a and b, are inclosed
+in a glass vessel, c, we do not expect the glass to change them, unless a
+or b or the compound a b has the power of dissolving the glass. But if
+for a I take oxygen, for b hydrogen, and for c a piece of spongy
+platinum, I find the first two combine with the common signs of
+combustion and form water, the third in the mean time undergoing no
+perceptible change. It has played the part of the unwedded priest, who
+marries a pair without taking a fee or having any further relation with
+the parties. We call this catalysis, catalytic action, the action of
+presence, or by what learned name we choose. Give what name to it we
+will, it is a manifestation of power which crosses our established laws
+of combination at a very open angle of intersection. I think we may find
+an analogy for it in electrical induction, the disturbance of the
+equilibrium of the electricity of a body by the approach of a charged
+body to it, without interchange of electrical conditions between the two
+bodies. But an analogy is not an explanation, and why a few drops of
+yeast should change a saccharine mixture to carbonic acid and alcohol,--a
+little leaven leavening the whole lump,--not by combining with it, but by
+setting a movement at work, we not only cannot explain, but the fact is
+such an exception to the recognized laws of combination that Liebig is
+unwilling to admit the new force at all to which Berzelius had given the
+name so generally accepted.
+
+The phenomena of isomerism, or identity of composition and proportions of
+constituents with difference of qualities, and of isomorphism, or
+identity of form in crystals which have one element substituted for
+another, were equally surprises to science; and although the mechanism by
+which they are brought about can be to a certain extent explained by a
+reference to the hypothetical atoms of which the elements are
+constituted, yet this is only turning the difficulty into a fraction with
+an infinitesimal denominator and an infinite numerator.
+
+So far we have studied the working of force and its seeming anomalies in
+purely chemical phenomena. But we soon find that chemical force is
+developed by various other physical agencies,--by heat, by light, by
+electricity, by magnetism, by mechanical agencies; and, vice versa, that
+chemical action develops heat, light, electricity, magnetism, mechanical
+force, as we see in our matches, galvanic batteries, and explosive
+compounds. Proceeding with our experiments, we find that every kind of
+force is capable of producing all other kinds, or, in Mr. Faraday's
+language, that "the various forms under which the forces of matter are
+made manifest have a common origin, or, in other words, are so directly
+related and mutually dependent that they are convertible one into
+another."
+
+Out of this doctrine naturally springs that of the conservation of force,
+so ably illustrated by Mr. Grove, Dr. Carpenter, and Mr. Faraday. This
+idea is no novelty, though it seems so at first sight. It was maintained
+and disputed among the giants of philosophy. Des Cartes and Leibnitz
+denied that any new motion originated in nature, or that any ever ceased
+to exist; all motion being in a circle, passing from one body to another,
+one losing what the other gained. Newton, on the other hand, believed
+that new motions were generated and existing ones destroyed. On the
+first supposition, there is a fixed amount of force always circulating in
+the universe. On the second, the total amount may be increasing or
+diminishing. You will find in the "Annual of Scientific Discovery" for
+1858 a very interesting lecture by Professor Helmholtz of Bonn, in which
+it is maintained that a certain portion of force is lost in every natural
+process, being converted into unchangeable heat, so that the universe
+will come to a stand-still at last, all force passing into heat, and all
+heat into a state of equilibrium.
+
+The doctrines of the convertibility or specific equivalence of the
+various forms of force, and of its conservation, which is its logical
+consequence, are very generally accepted, as I believe, at the present
+time, among physicists. We are naturally led to the question, What is
+the nature of force? The three illustrious philosophers just referred to
+agree in attributing the general movements of the universe to the
+immediate Divine action. The doctrine of "preestablished harmony" was an
+especial contrivance of Leibnitz to remove the Creator from unworthy
+association with the less divine acts of living beings. Obsolete as this
+expression sounds to our ears, the phrase laws of the universe, which we
+use so constantly with a wider application, appears to me essentially
+identical with it.
+
+Force does not admit of explanation, nor of proper definition, any more
+than the hypothetical substratum of matter. If we assume the Infinite as
+omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, we cannot suppose Him excluded from
+any part of His creation, except from rebellious souls which voluntarily
+exclude Him by the exercise of their fatal prerogative of free-will.
+Force, then, is the act of immanent Divinity. I find no meaning in
+mechanical explanations. Newton's hypothesis of an ether filling the
+heavenly spaces does not, I confess, help my conceptions. I will, and
+the muscles of my vocal organs shape my speech. God wills, and the
+universe articulates His power, wisdom, and goodness. That is all I
+know. There is no bridge my mind can throw from the "immaterial" cause
+to the "material" effect.
+
+The problem of force meets us everywhere, and I prefer to encounter it in
+the world of physical phenomena before reaching that of living actions.
+It is only the name for the incomprehensible cause of certain changes
+known to our consciousness, and assumed to be outside of it. For me it
+is the Deity Himself in action.
+
+I can therefore see a large significance in the somewhat bold language of
+Burdach: "There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence,
+and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the
+infinite. So soon as we recognize this incomprehensible act as the
+general and primordial miracle, of which our reason perceives the
+necessity, but the manner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon
+as we contemplate the nature known to us by experience in this light,
+there is for us no other impenetrable miracle or mystery."
+
+Let us turn to a branch of knowledge which deals with certainties up to
+the limit of the senses, and is involved in no speculations beyond them.
+In certain points of view, HUMAN ANATOMY may be considered an almost
+exhausted science. From time to time some small organ which had escaped
+earlier observers has been pointed out,--such parts as the tensor tarsi,
+the otic ganglion, or the Pacinian bodies; but some of our best
+anatomical works are those which have been classic for many generations.
+The plates of the bones in Vesalius, three centuries old, are still
+masterpieces of accuracy, as of art. The magnificent work of Albinus on
+the muscles, published in 1747, is still supreme in its department, as
+the constant references of the most thorough recent treatise on the
+subject, that of Theile, sufficiently show. More has been done in
+unravelling the mysteries of the fasciae, but there has been a tendency
+to overdo this kind of material analysis. Alexander Thomson split them
+up into cobwebs, as you may see in the plates to Velpeau's Surgical
+Anatomy. I well remember how he used to shake his head over the coarse
+work of Scarpa and Astley Cooper,--as if Denner, who painted the separate
+hairs of the beard and pores of the skin in his portraits, had spoken
+lightly of the pictures of Rubens and Vandyk.
+
+Not only has little been added to the catalogue of parts, but some things
+long known had become half-forgotten. Louis and others confounded the
+solitary glands of the lower part of the small intestine with those which
+"the great Brunner," as Haller calls him, described in 1687 as being
+found in the duodenum. The display of the fibrous structure of the brain
+seemed a novelty as shown by Spurzheim. One is startled to find the
+method anticipated by Raymond Vieussens nearly two centuries ago. I can
+hardly think Gordon had ever looked at his figures, though he names their
+author, when he wrote the captious and sneering article which attracted
+so much attention in the pages of the "Edinburgh Review."
+
+This is the place, if anywhere, to mention any observations I could
+pretend to have made in the course of my teaching the structure of the
+human body. I can make no better show than most of my predecessors in
+this well-reaped field. The nucleated cells found connected with the
+cancellated structure of the bones, which I first pointed out and had
+figured in 1847, and have shown yearly from that time to the present, and
+the fossa masseterica, a shallow concavity on the ramus of the lower jaw,
+for the lodgment of the masseter muscle, which acquires significance when
+examined by the side of the deep cavity on the corresponding part in some
+carnivora to which it answers, may perhaps be claimed as deserving
+attention. I have also pleased myself by making a special group of the
+six radiating muscles which diverge from the spine of the axis, or second
+cervical vertebra, and by giving to it the name stella musculosa nuchaee.
+But this scanty catalogue is only an evidence that one may teach long and
+see little that has not been noted by those who have gone before him. Of
+course I do not think it necessary to include rare, but already described
+anomalies, such as the episternal bones, the rectus sternalis, and other
+interesting exceptional formations I have encountered, which have shown a
+curious tendency to present themselves several times in the same season,
+perhaps because the first specimen found calls our attention to any we
+may subsequently meet with.
+
+The anatomy of the scalpel and the amphitheatre was, then, becoming an
+exhausted branch of investigation. But during the present century the
+study of the human body has changed its old aspect, and become fertile in
+new observations. This rejuvenescence was effected by means of two
+principal agencies,--new methods and a new instrument.
+
+Descriptive anatomy, as known from an early date, is to the body what
+geography is to the planet. Now geography was pretty well known so long
+ago as when Arrowsmith, who was born in 1750, published his admirable
+maps. But in that same year was born Werner, who taught a new way of
+studying the earth, since become familiar to us all under the name of
+Geology.
+
+What geology has done for our knowledge of the earth, has been done for
+our knowledge of the body by that method of study to which is given the
+name of General Anatomy. It studies, not the organs as such, but the
+elements out of which the organs are constructed. It is the geology of
+the body, as that is the general anatomy of the earth. The extraordinary
+genius of Bichat, to whom more than any other we owe this new method of
+study, does not require Mr. Buckle's testimony to impress the
+practitioner with the importance of its achievements. I have heard a
+very wise physician question whether any important result had accrued to
+practical medicine from Harvey's discovery of the circulation. But
+Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology have received a new light from this
+novel method of contemplating the living structures, which has had a vast
+influence in enabling the practitioner at least to distinguish and
+predict the course of disease. We know as well what differences to
+expect in the habits of a mucous and of a serous membrane, as what
+mineral substances to look for in the chalk or the coal measures. You
+have only to read Cullen's description of inflammation of the lungs or of
+the bowels, and compare it with such as you may find in Laennec or
+Watson, to see the immense gain which diagnosis and prognosis have
+derived from general anatomy.
+
+The second new method of studying the human structure, beginning with the
+labors of Scarpa, Burns, and Colles, grew up principally during the first
+third of this century. It does not deal with organs, as did the earlier
+anatomists, nor with tissues, after the manner of Bichat. It maps the
+whole surface of the body into an arbitrary number of regions, and
+studies each region successively from the surface to the bone, or beneath
+it. This hardly deserves the name of a science, although Velpeau has
+dignified it with that title, but it furnishes an admirable practical way
+for the surgeon who has to operate on a particular region of the body to
+study that region. If we are buying a farm, we are not content with the
+State map or a geological chart including the estate in question. We
+demand an exact survey of that particular property, so that we may know
+what we are dealing with. This is just what regional, or, as it is
+sometimes called, surgical anatomy, does for the surgeon with reference
+to the part on which his skill is to be exercised. It enables him to see
+with the mind's eye through the opaque tissues down to the bone on which
+they lie, as if the skin were transparent as the cornea, and the organs
+it covers translucent as the gelatinous pulp of a medusa.
+
+It is curious that the Japanese should have anticipated Europe in a kind
+of rude regional anatomy. I have seen a manikin of Japanese make traced
+all over with lines, and points marking their intersection. By this
+their doctors are guided in the performance of acupuncture, marking the
+safe places to thrust in needles, as we buoy out our ship-channels, and
+doubtless indicating to learned eyes the spots where incautious meddling
+had led to those little accidents of shipwreck to which patients are
+unfortunately liable.
+
+A change of method, then, has given us General and Regional Anatomy.
+These, too, have been worked so thoroughly, that, if not exhausted, they
+have at least become to a great extent fixed and positive branches of
+knowledge. But the first of them, General Anatomy, would never, have
+reached this positive condition but for the introduction of that,
+instrument which I have mentioned as the second great aid to modern
+progress.
+
+This instrument is the achromatic microscope. For the history of the
+successive steps by which it became the effective scientific implement we
+now possess, I must refer you to the work of Mr. Quekett, to an excellent
+article in the "Penny Cyclopaedia," or to that of Sir David Brewster in
+the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." It is a most interesting piece of
+scientific history, which shows how the problem which Biot in 1821
+pronounced insolvable was in the course of a few years practically
+solved, with a success equal to that which Dollond had long before
+obtained with the telescope. It is enough for our purpose that we are
+now in possession of an instrument freed from all confusions and
+illusions, which magnifies a thousand diameters,--a million times in
+surface,--without serious distortion or discoloration of its object.
+
+A quarter of a century ago, or a little more, an instructor would not
+have hesitated to put John Bell's "Anatomy" and Bostock's "Physiology"
+into a student's hands, as good authority on their respective subjects.
+Let us not be unjust to either of these authors. John Bell is the
+liveliest medical writer that I can remember who has written since the
+days of delightful old Ambroise Pare. His picturesque descriptions and
+bold figures are as good now as they ever were, and his book can never
+become obsolete. But listen to what John Bell says of the microscope:
+
+"Philosophers of the last age had been at infinite pains to find the
+ultimate fibre of muscles, thinking to discover its properties in its
+form; but they saw just in proportion to the glasses which they used, or
+to their practice and skill in that art, which is now almost forsaken."
+
+Dr. Bostock's work, neglected as it is, is one which I value very highly
+as a really learned compilation, full of original references. But Dr.
+Bostock says: "Much as the naturalist has been indebted to the
+microscope, by bringing into view many beings of which he could not
+otherwise have ascertained the existence, the physiologist has not yet
+derived any great benefit from the instrument."
+
+These are only specimens of the manner in which the microscope and its
+results were generally regarded by the generation just preceding our own.
+
+I have referred you to the proper authorities for the account of those
+improvements which about the year 1830 rendered the compound microscope
+an efficient and trustworthy instrument. It was now for the first time
+that a true general anatomy became possible. As early as 1816 Treviranus
+had attempted to resolve the tissues, of which Bichat had admitted no
+less than twenty-one, into their simple microscopic elements. How could
+such an attempt succeed, Henle well asks, at a time when the most
+extensively diffused of all the tissues, the areolar, was not at all
+understood? All that method could do had been accomplished by Bichat and
+his followers. It was for the optician to take the next step. The
+future of anatomy and physiology, as an enthusiastic micrologist of the
+time said, was in the hands of Messrs. Schieck and Pistor, famous
+opticians of Berlin.
+
+In those earlier days of which I am speaking, all the points of minute
+anatomy were involved in obscurity. Some found globules everywhere, some
+fibres. Students disputed whether the conjunctiva extended over the
+cornea or not, and worried themselves over Gaultier de Claubry's
+stratified layers of the skin, or Breschet's blennogenous and
+chromatogenous organs. The dartos was a puzzle, the central spinal canal
+a myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as the golden fleece. The
+structure of bone, now so beautifully made out,--even that of the teeth,
+in which old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with his octogenarian eyes through the
+minute lenses wrought with his own hands, had long ago seen the "pipes,"
+as he called them,--was hardly known at all. The minute structure of the
+viscera lay in the mists of an uncertain microscopic vision. The
+intimate recesses of the animal system were to the students of anatomy
+what the anterior of Africa long was to geographers, and the stories of
+microscopic explorers were as much sneered at as those of Bruce or Du
+Chailly, and with better reason.
+
+Now what have we come to in our own day? In the first place, the minute
+structure of all the organs has been made out in the most satisfactory
+way. The special arrangements of the vessels and the ducts of all the
+glands, of the air-tubes and vesicles of the lungs, of the parts which
+make up the skin and other membranes, all the details of those complex
+parenchymatous organs which had confounded investigation so long, have
+been lifted out of the invisible into the sight of all observers. It is
+fair to mention here, that we owe a great deal to the art of minute
+injection, by which we are enabled to trace the smallest vessels in the
+midst of the tissues where they are distributed. This is an old artifice
+of anatomists. The famous Ruysch, who died a hundred and thirty years
+ago, showed that each of the viscera has its terminal vessels arranged in
+its own peculiar way; the same fact which you may see illustrated in
+Gerber's figures after the minute injections of Berres. I hope to show
+you many specimens of this kind in the microscope, the work of English
+and American hands. Professor Agassiz allows me also to make use of a
+very rich collection of injected preparations sent him by Professor
+Hyrtl, formerly of Prague, now of Vienna, for the proper exhibition of
+which I had a number of microscopes made expressly, by Mr. Grunow, during
+the past season. All this illustrates what has been done for the
+elucidation of the intimate details of formation of the organs.
+
+But the great triumph of the microscope as applied to anatomy has been in
+the resolution of the organs and the tissues into their simple
+constituent anatomical elements. It has taken up general anatomy where
+Bichat left it. He had succeeded in reducing the structural language of
+nature to syllables, if you will permit me to use so bold an image. The
+microscopic observers who have come after him have analyzed these into
+letters, as we may call them,--the simple elements by the combination of
+which Nature spells out successively tissues, which are her syllables,
+organs which are her words, systems which are her chapters, and so goes
+on from the simple to the complex, until she binds up in one living whole
+that wondrous volume of power and wisdom which we call the human body.
+
+The alphabet of the organization is so short and simple, that I will risk
+fatiguing your attention by repeating it, according to the plan I have
+long adopted.
+
+A. Cells, either floating, as in the blood, or fixed, like those in the
+cancellated structure of bone, already referred to. Very commonly they
+have undergone a change of figure, most frequently a flattening which
+reduces them to scales, as in the epidermis and the epithelium.
+
+B. Simple, translucent, homogeneous solid, such as is found at the back
+of the cornea, or forming the intercellular substance of cartilage.
+
+C. The white fibrous element, consisting of very delicate, tenacious
+threads. This is the long staple textile substance of the body. It is
+to the organism what cotton is pretended to be to our Southern States.
+It pervades the whole animal fabric as areolar tissue, which is the
+universal packing and wrapping material. It forms the ligaments which
+bind the whole frame-work together. It furnishes the sinews, which are
+the channels of power. It enfolds every muscle. It wraps the brain in
+its hard, insensible folds, and the heart itself beats in a purse that is
+made of it.
+
+D. The yellow elastic, fibrous element, the caoutchouc of the animal
+mechanism, which pulls things back into place, as the India-rubber band
+shuts the door we have opened.
+
+E. The striped muscular fibre,--the red flesh, which shortens itself in
+obedience to the will, and thus produces all voluntary active motion.
+
+F. The unstriped muscular fibre, more properly the fusiform-cell fibre,
+which carries on the involuntary internal movements.
+
+G. The nerve-cylinder, a glassy tube, with a pith of some firmness,
+which conveys sensation to the brain and the principle which induces
+motion from it.
+
+H. The nerve-corpuscle, the centre of nervous power.
+
+I. The mucous tissue, as Virchow calls it, common in embryonic
+structures, seen in the vitreous humor of the adult.
+
+To these add X, granules, of indeterminate shape and size, Y, for
+inorganic matters, such as the salts of bone and teeth, and Z, to stand
+as a symbol of the fluids, and you have the letters of what I have
+ventured to call the alphabet of the body.
+
+But just as in language certain diphthongs and syllables are frequently
+recurring, so we have in the body certain secondary and tertiary
+combinations, which we meet more frequently than the solitary elements of
+which they are composed.
+
+Thus A B, or a collection of cells united by simple structureless solid,
+is seen to be extensively employed in the body under the name of
+cartilage. Out of this the surfaces of the articulations and the springs
+of the breathing apparatus are formed. But when Nature came to the
+buffers of the spinal column (intervertebral disks) and the washers of
+the joints (semilunar fibrocartilages of the knee, etc.), she required
+more tenacity than common cartilage possessed. What did she do? What
+does man do in a similar case of need? I need hardly tell you. The
+mason lays his bricks in simple mortar. But the plasterer works some
+hair into the mortar which he is going to lay in large sheets on the
+walls. The children of Israel complained that they had no straw to make
+their bricks with, though portions of it may still be seen in the
+crumbling pyramid of Darshour, which they are said to have built. I
+visited the old house on Witch Hill in Salem a year or two ago, and there
+I found the walls coated with clay in which straw was abundantly
+mingled;--the old Judaizing witch-hangers copied the Israelites in a good
+many things. The Chinese and the Corsicans blend the fibres of amianthus
+in their pottery to give it tenacity. Now to return to Nature. To make
+her buffers and washers hold together in the shocks to which they would
+be subjected, she took common cartilage and mingled the white fibrous
+tissue with it, to serve the same purpose as the hair in the mortar, the
+straw in the bricks and in the plaster of the old wall, and the amianthus
+in the earthen vessels. Thus we have the combination A B C, or
+fibro-cartilage. Again, the bones were once only gristle or cartilage, A
+B. To give them solidity they were infiltrated with stone, in the form
+of salts of lime, an inorganic element, so that bone would be spelt out
+by the letters A, B, and Y.
+
+If from these organic syllables we proceed to form organic words, we
+shall find that Nature employs three principal forms; namely, Vessels,
+Membranes, and Parenchyma, or visceral tissue. The most complex of them
+can be resolved into a combination of these few simple anatomical
+constituents.
+
+Passing for a moment into the domain of PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY, we find the
+same elements in morbid growths that we have met with in normal
+structures. The pus-corpuscle and the white blood-corpuscle can only be
+distinguished by tracing them to their origin. A frequent form of
+so-called malignant disease proves to be only a collection of altered
+epithelium-cells. Even cancer itself has no specific anatomical element,
+and the diagnosis of a cancerous tumor by the microscope, though
+tolerably sure under the eye of an expert, is based upon accidental, and
+not essential points,--the crowding together of the elements, the size of
+the cell-nuclei, and similar variable characters.
+
+Let us turn to PHYSIOLOGY. The microscope, which has made a new science
+of the intimate structure of the organs, has at the same time cleared up
+many uncertainties concerning the mechanism of the special functions. Up
+to the time of the living generation of observers, Nature had kept over
+all her inner workshops the forbidding inscription, No Admittance! If
+any prying observer ventured to spy through his magnifying tubes into the
+mysteries of her glands and canals and fluids, she covered up her work in
+blinding mists and bewildering halos, as the deities of old concealed
+their favored heroes in the moment of danger.
+
+Science has at length sifted the turbid light of her lenses, and blanched
+their delusive rainbows.
+
+Anatomy studies the organism in space. Physiology studies it also in
+time. After the study of form and composition follows close that of
+action, and this leads us along back to the first moment of the germ, and
+forward to the resolution of the living frame into its lifeless elements.
+In this way Anatomy, or rather that branch of it which we call Histology,
+has become inseparably blended with the study of function. The
+connection between the science of life and that of intimate structure on
+the one hand, and composition on the other, is illustrated in the titles
+of two recent works of remarkable excellence,--"the Physiological
+Anatomy" of Todd and Bowman, and the "Physiological Chemistry" of
+Lehmann.
+
+Let me briefly recapitulate a few of our acquisitions in Physiology, due
+in large measure to our new instruments and methods of research, and at
+the same time indicate the limits which form the permanent or the
+temporary boundaries of our knowledge. I will begin with the largest
+fact and with the most absolute and universally encountered limitation.
+
+The "largest truth in Physiology" Mr. Paget considers to be "the
+development of ova through multiplication and division of their cells."
+I would state it more broadly as the agency of the cell in all living
+processes. It seems at present necessary to abandon the original idea of
+Schwann, that we can observe the building up of a cell from the simple
+granules of a blastema, or formative fluid. The evidence points rather
+towards the axiom, Omnis cellula a cellula; that is, the germ of a new
+cell is always derived from a preexisting cell. The doctrine of Schwann,
+as I remarked long ago (1844), runs parallel with the nebular theory in
+astronomy, and they may yet stand or fall together.
+
+As we have seen Nature anticipating the plasterer in fibro-cartilage, so
+we see her beforehand with the glassblower in her dealings with the cell.
+The artisan blows his vitreous bubbles, large or small, to be used
+afterwards as may be wanted. So Nature shapes her hyaline vesicles and
+modifies them to serve the needs of the part where they are found. The
+artisan whirls his rod, and his glass bubble becomes a flattened disk,
+with its bull's-eye for a nucleus. These lips of ours are all glazed
+with microscopic tiles formed of flattened cells, each one of them with
+its nucleus still as plain and relatively as prominent, to the eye of the
+microscopist, as the bull's-eye in the old-fashioned windowpane.
+Everywhere we find cells, modified or unchanged. They roll in
+inconceivable multitudes (five millions and more to the cubic millimetre,
+according to Vierordt) as blood-disks through our vessels. A
+close-fitting mail of flattened cells coats our surface with a panoply of
+imbricated scales (more than twelve thousand millions), as Harting has
+computed, as true a defence against our enemies as the buckler of the
+armadillo or the carapace of the tortoise against theirs. The same
+little protecting organs pave all the great highways of the interior
+system. Cells, again, preside over the chemical processes which
+elaborate the living fluids; they change their form to become the agents
+of voluntary and involuntary motion; the soul itself sits on a throne of
+nucleated cells, and flashes its mandates through skeins of glassy
+filaments which once were simple chains of vesicles. And, as if to
+reduce the problem of living force to its simplest expression, we see the
+yolk of a transparent egg dividing itself in whole or in part, and again
+dividing and subdividing, until it becomes a mass of cells, out of which
+the harmonious diversity of the organs arranges itself, worm or man, as
+God has willed from the beginning.
+
+This differentiation having been effected, each several part assumes its
+special office, having a life of its own adjusted to that of other parts
+and the whole. "Just as a tree constitutes a mass arranged in a definite
+manner, in which, in every single part, in the leaves as in the root, in
+the trunk as in the blossom, cells are discovered to be the ultimate
+elements, so is it also with the forms of animal life. Every animal
+presents itself as a sum of vital unities, every one of which manifests
+all the characteristics of life."
+
+The mechanism is as clear, as unquestionable, as absolutely settled and
+universally accepted, as the order of movement of the heavenly bodies,
+which we compute backward to the days of the observatories on the plains
+of Shinar, and on the faith of which we regulate the movements of war and
+trade by the predictions of our ephemeris.
+
+The mechanism, and that is all. We see the workman and the tools, but
+the skill that guides the work and the power that performs it are as
+invisible as ever. I fear that not every listener took the significance
+of those pregnant words in the passage I quoted from John
+Bell,--"thinking to discover its properties in its form." We have
+discovered the working bee in this great hive of organization. We have
+detected the cell in the very act of forming itself from a nucleus, of
+transforming itself into various tissues, of selecting the elements of
+various secretions. But why one cell becomes nerve and another muscle,
+why one selects bile and another fat, we can no more pretend to tell,
+than why one grape sucks out of the soil the generous juice which princes
+hoard in their cellars, and another the wine which it takes three men to
+drink,--one to pour it down, another to swallow it, and a third to hold
+him while it is going down. Certain analogies between this selecting
+power and the phenomena of endosmosis in the elective affinities of
+chemistry we can find, but the problem of force remains here, as
+everywhere, unsolved and insolvable.
+
+Do we gain anything by attempting to get rid of the idea of a special
+vital force because we find certain mutually convertible relations
+between forces in the body and out of it? I think not, any more than we
+should gain by getting rid of the idea and expression Magnetism because
+of its correlation with electricity. We may concede the unity of all
+forms of force, but we cannot overlook the fixed differences of its
+manifestations according to the conditions under which it acts. It is a
+mistake, however, to think the mystery is greater in an organized body
+than in any other. We see a stone fall or a crystal form, and there is
+nothing stranger left to wonder at, for we have seen the Infinite in
+action.
+
+Just so far as we can recognize the ordinary modes of operation of the
+common forces of nature,--gravity, cohesion, elasticity, transudation,
+chemical action, and the rest,--we see the so-called vital acts in the
+light of a larger range of known facts and familiar analogies.
+Matteuecci's well-remembered lectures contain many and striking examples
+of the working of physical forces in physiological processes. Wherever
+rigid experiment carries us, we are safe in following this lead; but the
+moment we begin to theorize beyond our strict observation, we are in
+danger of falling into those mechanical follies which true science has
+long outgrown.
+
+Recognizing the fact, then, that we have learned nothing but the
+machinery of life, and are no nearer to its essence, what is it that we
+have gained by this great discovery of the cell formation and function?
+
+It would have been reward enough to learn the method Nature pursues for
+its own sake. If the sovereign Artificer lets us into his own
+laboratories and workshops, we need not ask more than the privilege of
+looking on at his work. We do not know where we now stand in the
+hierarchy of created intelligences. We were made a little lower than the
+angels. I speak it not irreverently; as the lower animals surpass man in
+some of their attributes, so it may be that not every angel's eye can see
+as broadly and as deeply into the material works of God as man himself,
+looking at the firmament through an equatorial of fifteen inches'
+aperture, and searching into the tissues with a twelfth of an inch
+objective.
+
+But there are other positive gains of a more practical character. Thus we
+are no longer permitted to place the seat of the living actions in the
+extreme vessels, which are only the carriers from which each part takes
+what it wants by the divine right of the omnipotent nucleated cell. The
+organism has become, in the words already borrowed from Virchow, "a sum
+of vital unities." The strictum and laxum, the increased and diminished
+action of the vessels, out of which medical theories and methods of
+treatment have grown up, have yielded to the doctrine of local
+cell-communities, belonging to this or that vascular district, from which
+they help themselves, as contractors are wont to do from the national
+treasury.
+
+I cannot promise to do more than to select a few of the points of contact
+between our ignorance and our knowledge which present particular interest
+in the existing state of our physiological acquisitions. Some of them
+involve the microscopic discoveries of which I have been speaking, some
+belong to the domain of chemistry, and some have relations with other
+departments of physical science.
+
+If we should begin with the digestive function, we should find that the
+long-agitated question of the nature of the acid of the gastric juice is
+becoming settled in favor of the lactic. But the whole solvent agency of
+the digestive fluid enters into the category of that exceptional mode of
+action already familiar to us in chemistry as catalysis. It is therefore
+doubly difficult of explanation; first, as being, like all reactions, a
+fact not to be accounted for except by the imaginative appeal to
+"affinity," and secondly, as being one of those peculiar reactions
+provoked by an element which stands outside and looks on without
+compromising itself.
+
+The doctrine of Mulder, so widely diffused in popular and scientific
+belief, of the existence of a common base of all albuminous substances,
+the so-called protein, has not stood the test of rigorous analysis. The
+division of food into azotized and non-azotized is no doubt important,
+but the attempt to show that the first only is plastic or nutritive,
+while the second is simply calorifacient, or heat-producing, fails
+entirely in the face of the facts revealed by the study of man in
+different climates, and of numerous experiments in the feeding of
+animals. I must return to this subject in connection with the
+respiratory function.
+
+The sugar-making faculty of the liver is another "catalytic" mystery, as
+great as the rest of them, and no greater. Liver-tissue brings sugar out
+of the blood, or out of its own substance;--why?
+
+ Quia est in eo
+ Virtus saccharitiva.
+
+Just what becomes of the sugar beyond the fact of its disappearance
+before it can get into the general circulation and sweeten our tempers,
+it is hard to say.
+
+The pancreatic fluid makes an emulsion of the fat contained in our food,
+but just how the fatty particles get into the villi we must leave Brucke
+and Kolliker to settle if they can.
+
+No one has shown satisfactorily the process by which the blood-corpuscles
+are formed out of the lymph-corpuscles, nor what becomes of them. These
+two questions are like those famous household puzzles,--Where do the
+flies come from? and, Where do the pins go to?
+
+There is a series of organs in the body which has long puzzled
+physiologists,--organs of glandular aspect, but having no ducts,--the
+spleen, the thyroid and thymus bodies, and the suprarenal capsules. We
+call them vascular glands, and we believe that they elaborate colored and
+uncolored blood-cells; but just what changes they effect, and just how
+they effect them, it has proved a very difficult matter to determine. So
+of the noted glandules which form Peyer's patches, their precise office,
+though seemingly like those of the lymphatic glands, cannot be positively
+assigned, so far as I know, at the present time. It is of obvious
+interest to learn it with reference to the pathology of typhoid fever.
+It will be remarked that the coincidence of their changes in this disease
+with enlargement of the spleen suggests the idea of a similarity of
+function in these two organs.
+
+The theories of the production of animal heat, from the times of Black,
+Lavoisier, and Crawford to those of Liebig, are familiar to all who have
+paid any attention to physiological studies. The simplicity of Liebig's
+views, and the popular form in which they have been presented, have given
+them wide currency, and incorporated them in the common belief and
+language of our text-books. Direct oxidation or combustion of the carbon
+and hydrogen contained in the food, or in the tissues themselves; the
+division of alimentary substances into respiratory, or non-azotized, and
+azotized,--these doctrines are familiar even to the classes in our
+high-schools. But this simple statement is boldly questioned. Nothing
+proves that oxygen combines (in the system) with hydrogen and carbon in
+particular, rather than with sulphur and azote. Such is the
+well-grounded statement of Robin and Verdeil. "It is very probable that
+animal heat is entirely produced by the chemical actions which take place
+in the organism, but the phenomenon is too complex to admit of our
+calculating it according to the quality of oxygen consumed." These last
+are the words of Regnault, as cited by Mr. Lewes, whose intelligent
+discussion of this and many of the most interesting physiological
+problems I strongly recommend to your attention.
+
+This single illustration covers a wider ground than the special function
+to which it belongs. We are learning that the chemistry of the body must
+be studied, not simply by its ingesta and egesta, but that there is a
+long intermediate series of changes which must be investigated in their
+own light, under their own special conditions. The expression "sum of
+vital unities" applies to the chemical actions, as well as to other
+actions localized in special parts; and when the distinguished chemists
+whom I have just cited entitle their work a treatise on the immediate
+principles of the body, they only indicate the nature of that profound
+and subtile analysis which must take the place of all hasty
+generalizations founded on a comparison of the food with residual
+products.
+
+I will only call your attention to the fact, that the exceptional
+phenomenon of the laboratory is the prevailing law of the organism.
+Nutrition itself is but one great catalytic process. As the blood
+travels its rounds, each part selects its appropriate element and
+transforms it to its own likeness. Whether the appropriating agent be
+cell or nucleus, or a structureless solid like the intercellular
+substance of cartilage, the fact of its presence determines the
+separation of its proper constituents from the circulating fluid, so that
+even when we are wounded bone is replaced by bone, skin by skin, and
+nerve by nerve.
+
+It is hardly without a smile that we resuscitate the old question of the
+'vis insita' of the muscular fibre, so famous in the discussions of
+Haller and his contemporaries. Speaking generally, I think we may say
+that Haller's doctrine is the one now commonly received; namely, that the
+muscles contract in virtue of their own inherent endowments. It is true
+that Kolliker says no perfectly decisive fact has been brought forward to
+prove that the striated muscles contract without having been acted on
+by nerves. Yet Mr. Bowman's observations on the contraction of isolated
+fibres appear decisive enough (unless we consider them invalidated by Dr.
+Lionel Beale's recent researches), tending to show that each elementary
+fibre is supplied with nerves; and as to the smooth muscular fibres, we
+have Virchow's statement respecting the contractility of those of the
+umbilical cord, where there is not a trace of any nerves.
+
+In the investigation of the nervous system, anatomy and physiology have
+gone hand in hand. It is very singular that so important, and seemingly
+simple, a fact as the connection of the nerve-tubes, at their origin or
+in their course, with the nerve-cells, should have so long remained open
+to doubt, as you may see that it did by referring to the very complete
+work of Sharpey and Quain (edition of 1849), the histological portion of
+which is cordially approved by Kolliker himself.
+
+Several most interesting points of the minute anatomy of the nervous
+centres have been laboriously and skilfully worked out by a recent
+graduate of this Medical School, in a monograph worthy to stand in line
+with those of Lockhart Clarke, Stilling, and Schroder van der Kolk. I
+have had the privilege of examining and of showing some of you a number
+of Dr. Dean's skilful preparations. I have no space to give even an
+abstract of his conclusions. I can only refer to his proof of the fact,
+that a single cell may send its processes into several different bundles
+of nerve-roots, and to his demonstration of the curved ascending and
+descending fibres from the posterior nerveroots, to reach what he has
+called the longitudinal columns of the cornea. I must also mention Dr.
+Dean's exquisite microscopic photographs from sections of the medulla
+oblongata, which appear to me to promise a new development, if not a new
+epoch, in anatomical art.
+
+It having been settled that the nerve-tubes can very commonly be traced
+directly to the nerve-cells, the object of all the observers in this
+department of anatomy is to follow these tubes to their origin. We have
+an infinite snarl of telegraph wires, and we may be reasonably sure,
+that, if we can follow them up, we shall find each of them ends in a
+battery somewhere. One of the most interesting problems is to find the
+ganglionic origin of the great nerves of the medulla oblongata, and this
+is the end to which, by the aid of the most delicate sections, colored so
+as to bring out their details, mounted so as to be imperishable,
+magnified by the best instruments, and now self-recorded in the light of
+the truth-telling sunbeam, our fellow-student is making a steady progress
+in a labor which I think bids fair to rank with the most valuable
+contributions to histology that we have had from this side of the
+Atlantic.
+
+It is interesting to see how old questions are incidentally settled in
+the course of these new investigations. Thus, Mr. Clarke's dissections,
+confirmed by preparations of Mr. Dean's which I have myself examined,
+placed the fact of the decussation of the pyramids--denied by Haller, by
+Morgagni, and even by Stilling--beyond doubt. So the spinal canal, the
+existence of which, at least in the adult, has been so often disputed,
+appears as a coarse and unequivocal anatomical fact in many of the
+preparations referred to.
+
+While these studies of the structure of the cord have been going on, the
+ingenious and indefatigable Brown-Sequard has been investigating the
+functions of its different parts with equal diligence. The microscopic
+anatomists had shown that the ganglionic corpuscles of the gray matter of
+the cord are connected with each other by their processes, as well as
+with the nerve-roots. M. Brown-Sequard has proved by numerous
+experiments that the gray substance transmits sensitive impressions and
+muscular stimulation. The oblique ascending and descending fibres from
+the posterior nerve-roots, joining the "longitudinal columns of the
+cornua," account for the results of Brown-Sequard's sections of the
+posterior columns. The physiological experimenter has also made it
+evident that the decussation of the conductors of sensitive impressions
+has its seat in the spinal core, and not in the encephalon, as had been
+supposed. Not less remarkable than these results are the facts, which I
+with others of my audience have had the opportunity of observing, as
+shown by M. Brown-Sequard, of the artificial production of epilepsy in
+animals by injuring the spinal cord, and the induction of the paroxysm by
+pinching a certain portion of the skin. I would also call the student's
+attention to his account of the relations of the nervous centres to
+nutrition and secretion, the last of which relations has been made the
+subject of an extended essay by our fellow countryman, Dr. H. F. Campbell
+of Georgia.
+
+The physiology of the spinal cord seems a simple matter as you study it
+in Longet. The experiments of Brown-Sequard have shown the problem to be
+a complex one, and raised almost as many doubts as they have solved
+questions; at any rate, I believe all lecturers on physiology agree that
+there is no part of their task they dread so much as the analysis of the
+evidence relating to the special offices of the different portions of the
+medulla spinalis. In the brain we are sure that we do not know how to
+localize functions; in the spinal cord, we think we do know something;
+but there are so many anomalies, and seeming contradictions, and sources
+of fallacy, that beyond the facts of crossed paralysis of sensation, and
+the conducting agency of the gray substance, I am afraid we retain no
+cardinal principles discovered since the development of the reflex
+function took its place by Sir Charles Bell's great discovery.
+
+By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you will see that I am
+obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,--out in the cold,--as not one of
+the household of science. I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I
+am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I love to amuse myself
+in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he
+discovers by his manipulations
+
+ "All that disgraced my betters met in me."
+
+I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurzheim make a brain
+flower out into a corolla of marrowy filaments, as Vieussens had done
+before him, and to hear the dry-fibred but human-hearted George Combe
+teach good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system. But the
+pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem to me only appeals to weak
+minds and the weak points of strong ones. There is a pica or false
+appetite in many intelligences; they take to odd fancies in place of
+wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal. Phrenology juggles
+with nature. It is so adjusted as to soak up all evidence that helps it,
+and shed all that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like
+Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand at the boundary of our
+ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its
+undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have
+devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown
+on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies. Its maps
+of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but
+its studies of individual character are always interesting and
+instructive.
+
+The "snapping-turtle" strikes after its natural fashion when it first
+comes out of the egg. Children betray their tendencies in their way of
+dealing with the breasts that nourish them; nay, lean venture to affirm,
+that long before they are born they teach their mothers something of
+their turbulent or quiet tempers.
+
+ "Castor gaudet equis, ovo proanatus eodem
+ Pugnis."
+
+Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology; call it anthropology; let
+it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction, the
+metaphysical or theological lay-figure; and it becomes "the proper study
+of mankind," one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.
+
+The whole physiology of the nervous system, from the simplest
+manifestation of its power in an insect up to the supreme act of the
+human intelligence working through the brain, is full of the most
+difficult yet profoundly interesting questions. The singular relations
+between electricity and nerve-force, relations which it has been
+attempted to interpret as meaning identity, in the face of palpable
+differences, require still more extended studies. You may be interested
+by Professor Faraday's statement of his opinion on the matter. "Though I
+am not satisfied that the nervous fluid is only electricity, still I
+think that the agent in the nervous system maybe an inorganic force; and
+if there be reason for supposing that magnetism is a higher relation of
+force than electricity, so it may well be imagined that the nervous power
+may be of a still more exalted character, and yet within the reach of
+experiment."
+
+In connection with this statement, it is interesting to refer to the
+experiments of Helmholtz on the rapidity of transmission of the nervous
+actions. The rate is given differently in Valentin's report of these
+experiments and in that found in the "Scientific Annual" for 1858. One
+hundred and eighty to three hundred feet per second is the rate of
+movement assigned for sensation, but all such results must be very
+vaguely approximative. Boxers, fencers, players at the Italian game of
+morn, "prestidigitators," and all who depend for their success on
+rapidity of motion, know what differences there are in the personal
+equation of movement.
+
+Reflex action, the mechanical sympathy, if I may so call it, of distant
+parts; Instinct, which is crystallized intelligence,--an absolute law
+with its invariable planes and angles introduced into the sphere of
+consciousness, as raphides are inclosed in the living cells of plants;
+Intellect,--the operation of the thinking principle through material
+organs, with an appreciable waste of tissue in every act of thought, so
+that our clergymen's blood has more phosphates to get rid of on Monday
+than on any other day of the week; Will,--theoretically the absolute
+determining power, practically limited in different degrees by the
+varying organization of races and individuals, annulled or perverted by
+different ill-understood organic changes; on all these subjects our
+knowledge is in its infancy, and from the study of some of them the
+interdict of the Vatican is hardly yet removed.
+
+I must allude to one or two points in the histology and physiology of the
+organs of sense. The anterior continuation of the retina beyond the ora
+serrata has been a subject of much discussion. If H. Muller and Kolliker
+can be relied upon, this question is settled by recognizing that a layer
+of cells, continued from the retina, passes over the surface of the
+zonula Zinnii, but that no proper nervous element is so prolonged
+forward.
+
+I observe that Kolliker calls the true nervous elements of the retina
+"the layer of gray cerebral substance." In fact, the ganglionic
+corpuscles of each eye may be considered as constituting a little brain,
+connected with the masses behind by the commissure, commonly called the
+optic nerve. We are prepared, therefore, to find these two little brains
+in the most intimate relations with each other, as we find the cerebral
+hemispheres. We know that they are directly connected by fibres that
+arch round through the chiasma.
+
+I mention these anatomical facts to introduce a physiological observation
+of my own, first announced in one of the lectures before the Medical
+Class, subsequently communicated to the American Academy of Arts and
+Sciences, and printed in its "Transactions" for February 14, 1860. I
+refer to the apparent transfer of impressions from one retina to the
+other, to which I have given the name reflex vision. The idea was
+suggested to me in consequence of certain effects noticed in employing
+the stereoscope. Professor William B. Rodgers has since called the
+attention of the American Scientific Association to some facts bearing on
+the subject, and to a very curious experiment of Leonardo da Vinci's,
+which enables the observer to look through the palm of his hand (or seem
+to), as if it had a hole bored through it. As he and others hesitated to
+accept my explanation, I was not sorry to find recently the following
+words in the "Observations on Man" of that acute observer and thinker,
+David Hartley. "An impression made on the right eye alone by a single
+object may propagate itself into the left, and there raise up an image
+almost equal in vividness to itself; and consequently when we see with
+one eye only, we may, however, have pictures in both eyes." Hartley, in
+1784, had anticipated many of the doctrines which have since been
+systematized into the theory of reflex actions, and with which I have
+attempted to associate this act of reflex vision. My sixth experiment,
+however, in the communication referred to, appears to me to be a crucial
+one, proving the correctness of my explanation, and I am not aware that
+it has been before instituted.
+
+Another point of great interest connected with the physiology of vision,
+and involved for a long time in great obscurity, is that of the
+adjustment of the eye to different distances. Dr. Clay Wallace of New
+York, who published a very ingenious little book on the eye about twenty
+years ago, with vignettes reminding one of Bewick, was among the first,
+if not the first, to describe the ciliary muscle, to which the power of
+adjustment is generally ascribed. It is ascertained, by exact experiment
+with the phacueidoscope, that accommodation depends on change of form of
+the crystalline lens. Where the crystalline is wanting, as Mr. Ware long
+ago taught, no power of accommodation remains. The ciliary muscle is
+generally thought to effect the change of form of the crystalline. The
+power of accommodation is lost after the application of atropine, in
+consequence, as is supposed, of the paralysis of this muscle. This, I
+believe, is the nearest approach to a demonstration we have on this
+point.
+
+I have only time briefly to refer to Professor Draper's most ingenious
+theory as to the photographic nature of vision, for an account of which I
+must refer to his original and interesting Treatise on Physiology.
+
+It were to be wished that the elaborate and very interesting researches
+of the Marquis Corti, which have revealed such singular complexity of
+structure in the cochlea of the ear, had done more to clear up its
+doubtful physiology; but I am afraid we have nothing but hypotheses for
+the special part it plays in the act of hearing, and that we must say the
+same respecting the office of the semicircular canals.
+
+The microscope has achieved some of its greatest triumphs in teaching us
+the changes which occur in the development of the embryo. No more
+interesting discovery stands recorded in the voluminous literature of
+this subject than the one originally announced by Martin Barry,
+afterwards discredited, and still later confirmed by Mr. Newport and
+others; namely the fact that the fertilizing filament reaches the
+interior of the ovum in various animals;--a striking parallel to the
+action of the pollen-tube in the vegetable. But beyond the mechanical
+facts all is mystery in the movements of organization, as profound as in
+the fall of a stone or the formation of a crystal.
+
+To the chemist and the microscopist the living body presents the same
+difficulties, arising from the fact that everything is in perpetual
+change in the organism. The fibrine of the blood puzzles the one as much
+as its globules puzzle the other. The difference between the branches of
+science which deal with space only, and those which deal with space and
+time, is this: we have no glasses that can magnify time. The figure I
+here show you a was photographed from an object (pleurosigma angulatum)
+magnified a thousand diameters, or presenting a million times its natural
+surface. This other figure of the same object, enlarged from the one
+just shown, is magnified seven thousand diameters, or forty-nine million
+times in surface. When we can make the forty-nine millionth of a second
+as long as its integer, physiology and chemistry will approach nearer the
+completeness of anatomy.
+
+Our reverence becomes more worthy, or, if you will, less unworthy of its
+Infinite Object in proportion as our intelligence is lifted and expanded
+to a higher and broader understanding of the Divine methods of action.
+If Galen called his heathen readers to admire, the power, the wisdom, the
+providence, the goodness of the "Framer of the animal body,"--if Mr.
+Boyle, the student of nature, as Addison and that friend of his who had
+known him for forty years tell us, never uttered the name of the Supreme
+Being without making a distinct pause in his speech, in token of his
+devout recognition of its awful meaning,--surely we, who inherit the
+accumulated wisdom of nearly two hundred years since the time of the
+British philosopher, and of almost two thousand since the Greek
+physician, may well lift our thoughts from the works we study to their
+great Artificer. These wonderful discoveries which we owe to that mighty
+little instrument, the telescope of the inner firmament with all its
+included worlds; these simple formulae by which we condense the
+observations of a generation in a single axiom; these logical analyses by
+which we fence out the ignorance we cannot reclaim, and fix the limits of
+our knowledge,--all lead us up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which
+gives understanding to the world's great teachers. To fear science or
+knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx of the
+Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is science but
+the piecemeal revelation,--uncovering,--of the plan of creation, by the
+agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from
+the central light of truth for that single purpose?
+
+The studies which we have glanced at are preliminary in your education to
+the practical arts which make use of them,--the arts of healing,--surgery
+and medicine. The more you examine the structure of the organs and the
+laws of life, the more you will find how resolutely each of the
+cell-republics which make up the E pluribus unum of the body maintains
+its independence. Guard it, feed it, air it, warm it, exercise or rest
+it properly, and the working elements will do their best to keep well or
+to get well. What do we do with ailing vegetables? Dr. Warren, my
+honored predecessor in this chair, bought a country-place, including half
+of an old orchard. A few years afterwards I saw the trees on his side of
+the fence looking in good health, while those on the other side were
+scraggy and miserable. How do you suppose this change was brought about?
+By watering them with Fowler's solution? By digging in calomel freely
+about their roots? Not at all; but by loosening the soil round them, and
+supplying them with the right kind of food in fitting quantities.
+
+Now a man is not a plant, or, at least, he is a very curious one, for he
+carries his soil in his stomach, which is a kind--of portable flower-pot,
+and he grows round it, instead of out of it. He has, besides, a
+singularly complex nutritive apparatus and a nervous system. But
+recollect the doctrine already enunciated in the language of Virchow,
+that an animal, like a tree, is a sum of vital unities, of which the cell
+is the ultimate element. Every healthy cell, whether in a vegetable or
+an animal, necessarily performs its function properly so long as it is
+supplied with its proper materials and stimuli. A cell may, it is true,
+be congenitally defective, in which case disease is, so to speak, its
+normal state. But if originally sound and subsequently diseased, there
+has certainly been some excess, deficiency, or wrong quality in the
+materials or stimuli applied to it. You remove this injurious influence
+and substitute a normal one; remove the baked coal-ashes, for instance,
+from the roots of a tree, and replace them with loam; take away the salt
+meat from the patient's table, and replace it with fresh meat and
+vegetables, and the cells of the tree or the man return to their duty.
+
+I do not know that we ever apply to a plant any element which is not a
+natural constituent of the vegetable structure, except perhaps
+externally, for the accidental purpose of killing parasites. The whole
+art of cultivation consists in learning the proper food and conditions of
+plants, and supplying them. We give them water, earths, salts of various
+kinds such as they are made of, with a chance to help themselves to air
+and light. The farmer would be laughed at who undertook to manure his
+fields or his trees with a salt of lead or of arsenic. These elements
+are not constituents of healthy plants. The gardener uses the waste of
+the arsenic furnaces to kill the weeds in his walks.
+
+If the law of the animal cell, and of the animal organism, which is built
+up of such cells, is like that of the vegetable, we might expect that we
+should treat all morbid conditions of any of the vital unities belonging
+to an animal in the same way, by increasing, diminishing, or changing its
+natural food or stimuli.
+
+That is an aliment which nourishes; whatever we find in the organism, as
+a constant and integral element, either forming part of its structure, or
+one of the conditions of vital processes, that and that only deserves the
+name of aliment. I see no reason, therefore, why iron, phosphate of
+lime, sulphur, should not be considered food for man, as much as guano or
+poudrette for vegetables. Whether one or another of them is best in any
+given case,--whether they shall be taken alone or in combination, in
+large or small quantities, are separate questions. But they are elements
+belonging to the body, and even in moderate excess will produce little
+disturbance. There is no presumption against any of this class of
+substances, any more than against water or salt, provided they are used
+in fitting combinations, proportions, and forms.
+
+But when it comes to substances alien to the healthy system, which never
+belong to it as normal constituents, the case is very different. There
+is a presumption against putting lead or arsenic into the human body, as
+against putting them into plants, because they do not belong there, any
+more than pounded glass, which, it is said, used to be given as a poison.
+The same thing is true of mercury and silver. What becomes of these
+alien substances after they get into the system we cannot always tell.
+But in the case of silver, from the accident of its changing color under
+the influence of light, we do know what happens. It is thrown out, in
+part at least, under the epidermis, and there it remains to the patient's
+dying day. This is a striking illustration of the difficulty which the
+system finds in dealing with non-assimilable elements, and justifies in
+some measure the vulgar prejudice against mineral poisons.
+
+I trust the youngest student on these benches will not commit the
+childish error of confounding a presumption against a particular class of
+agents with a condemnation of them. Mercury, for instance, is alien to
+the system, and eminently disturbing in its influence. Yet its efficacy
+in certain forms of specific disease is acknowledged by all but the most
+sceptical theorists. Even the esprit moqueur of Ricord, the Voltaire of
+pelvic literature, submits to the time-honored constitutional authority
+of this great panacea in the class of cases to which he has devoted his
+brilliant intelligence. Still, there is no telling what evils have
+arisen from the abuse of this mineral. Dr. Armstrong long ago pointed
+out some of them, and they have become matters of common notoriety. I am
+pleased, therefore, when I find so able and experienced a practitioner as
+Dr. Williams of this city proving that iritis is best treated without
+mercury, and Dr. Vanderpoel showing the same thing to be true for
+pericarditis.
+
+Whatever elements nature does not introduce into vegetables, the natural
+food of all animal life,--directly of herbivorous, indirectly of
+carnivorous animals,--are to be regarded with suspicion. Arsenic-eating
+may seem to improve the condition of horses for a time,--and even of
+human beings, if Tschudi's stories can be trusted,--but it soon appears
+that its alien qualities are at war with the animal organization. So of
+copper, antimony, and other non-alimentary simple substances; everyone of
+them is an intruder in the living system, as much as a constable would
+be, quartered in our household. This does not mean that they may not, any
+of them, be called in for a special need, as we send for the constable
+when we have good reason to think we have a thief under our roof; but a
+man's body is his castle, as well as his house, and the presumption is
+that we are to keep our alimentary doors bolted against these perturbing
+agents.
+
+Now the feeling is very apt to be just contrary to this. The habit has
+been very general with well-taught practitioners, to have recourse to the
+introduction of these alien elements into the system on the occasion of
+any slight disturbance. The tongue was a little coated, and mercury must
+be given; the skin was a little dry, and the patient must take antimony.
+It was like sending for the constable and the posse comitatus when there
+is only a carpet to shake or a refuse-barrel to empty. [Dr. James Johnson
+advises persons not ailing to take five grains of blue pill with one or
+two of aloes twice a week for three or four months in the year, with half
+a pint of compound decoction of sarsaparilla every day for the same
+period, to preserve health and prolong life. Pract. Treatise on Dis.
+of Liver, etc. p. 272.] The constitution bears slow poisoning a great
+deal better than might be expected; yet the most intelligent men in the
+profession have gradually got out of the habit of prescribing these
+powerful alien substances in the old routine way. Mr. Metcalf will tell
+you how much more sparingly they are given by our practitioners at the
+present time, than when he first inaugurated the new era of pharmacy
+among us. Still, the presumption in favor of poisoning out every
+spontaneous reaction of outraged nature is not extinct in those who are
+trusted with the lives of their fellow-citizens. "On examining the file
+of prescriptions at the hospital, I discovered that they were rudely
+written, and indicated a treatment, as they consisted chiefly of tartar
+emetic, ipecacuanha, and epsom salts, hardly favorable to the cure of the
+prevailing diarrhoea and dysenteries." In a report of a poisoning case
+now on trial, where we are told that arsenic enough was found in the
+stomach to produce death in twenty-four hours, the patient is said to
+have been treated by arsenic, phosphorus, bryonia, aconite, nux vomica,
+and muriatic acid,--by a practitioner of what school it may be imagined.
+
+The traditional idea of always poisoning out disease, as we smoke out
+vermin, is now seeking its last refuge behind the wooden cannon and
+painted port-holes of that unblushing system of false scientific
+pretences which I do not care to name in a discourse addressed to an
+audience devoted to the study of the laws of nature in the light of the
+laws of evidence. It is extraordinary to observe that the system which,
+by its reducing medicine to a name and a farce, has accustomed all who
+have sense enough to see through its thin artifices to the idea that
+diseases get well without being "cured," should now be the main support
+of the tottering poison-cure doctrine. It has unquestionably helped to
+teach wise people that nature heals most diseases without help from
+pharmaceutic art, but it continues to persuade fools that art can arrest
+them all with its specifics.
+
+It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to check the freest
+expression of opinion as to the efficacy of any or all of the "heroic"
+means of treatment employed by practitioners of different schools and
+periods. Medical experience is a great thing, but we must not forget
+that there is a higher experience, which tries its results in a court of
+a still larger jurisdiction; that, namely, in which the laws of human
+belief are summoned to the witness-box, and obliged to testify to the
+sources of error which beset the medical practitioner. The verdict is as
+old as the father of medicine, who announces it in the words, "judgment
+is difficult." Physicians differed so in his time, that some denied that
+there was any such thing as an art of medicine.
+
+One man's best remedies were held as mischievous by another. The art of
+healing was like soothsaying, so the common people said; "the same bird
+was lucky or unlucky, according as he flew to the right or left."
+
+The practice of medicine has undergone great changes within the period of
+my own observation. Venesection, for instance, has so far gone out of
+fashion, that, as I am told by residents of the New York Bellevue and the
+Massachusetts General Hospitals, it is almost obsolete in these
+institutions, at least in medical practice. The old Brunonian
+stimulating treatment has come into vogue again in the practice of Dr.
+Todd and his followers. The compounds of mercury have yielded their
+place as drugs of all work, and specifics for that very frequent
+subjective complaint, nescio quid faciam,--to compounds of iodine. [Sir
+Astley Cooper has the boldness,--or honesty,--to speak of medicines which
+"are given as much to assist the medical man as his patient." Lectures
+(London, 1832), p. 14.] Opium is believed in, and quinine, and "rum,"
+using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alcoholic cordials. If
+Moliere were writing now, instead of saignare, purgare, and the other, he
+would be more like to say, Stimulare, opium dare et potassio-iodizare.
+
+I have been in relation successively with the English and American
+evacuant and alterative practice, in which calomel and antimony figured
+so largely that, as you may see in Dr. Jackson's last "Letter," Dr.
+Holyoke, a good representative of sterling old-fashioned medical art,
+counted them with opium and Peruvian bark as his chief remedies; with the
+moderately expectant practice of Louis; the blood-letting "coup sur coup"
+of Bouillaud; the contra-stimulant method of Rasori and his followers;
+the anti-irritant system of Broussais, with its leeching and gum-water; I
+have heard from our own students of the simple opium practice of the
+renowned German teacher, Oppolzer; and now I find the medical community
+brought round by the revolving cycle of opinion to that same old plan of
+treatment which John Brown taught in Edinburgh in the last quarter of the
+last century, and Miner and Tully fiercely advocated among ourselves in
+the early years of the present. The worthy physicians last mentioned,
+and their antagonist Dr. Gallup, used stronger language than we of these
+degenerate days permit ourselves. "The lancet is a weapon which annually
+slays more than the sword," says Dr. Tully. "It is probable that, for
+forty years past, opium and its preparations have done seven times the
+injury they have rendered benefit, on the great scale of the world," says
+Dr. Gallup.
+
+What is the meaning of these perpetual changes and conflicts of medical
+opinion and practice, from an early antiquity to our own time? Simply
+this: all "methods" of treatment end in disappointment of those
+extravagant expectations which men are wont to entertain of medical art.
+The bills of mortality are more obviously affected by drainage, than by
+this or that method of practice. The insurance companies do not commonly
+charge a different percentage on the lives of the patients of this or
+that physician. In the course of a generation, more or less, physicians
+themselves are liable to get tired of a practice which has so little
+effect upon the average movement of vital decomposition. Then they are
+ready for a change, even if it were back again to a method which has
+already been tried, and found wanting.
+
+Our practitioners, or many of them, have got back to the ways of old Dr.
+Samuel Danforth, who, as it is well known, had strong objections to the
+use of the lancet. By and by a new reputation will be made by some
+discontented practitioner, who, tired of seeing patients die with their
+skins full of whiskey and their brains muddy with opium, returns to a
+bold antiphlogistic treatment, and has the luck to see a few patients of
+note get well under it. So of the remedies which have gone out of
+fashion and been superseded by others. It can hardly be doubted that
+they will come into vogue again, more or less extensively, under the
+influence of that irresistible demand for change just referred to.
+
+Then will come the usual talk about a change in the character of disease,
+which has about as much meaning as that concerning "old-fashioned
+snow-storms." "Epidemic constitutions" of disease mean something, no
+doubt; a great deal as applied to malarious affections; but that the
+whole type of diseases undergoes such changes that the practice must be
+reversed from depleting to stimulating, and vice versa, is much less
+likely than that methods of treatment go out of fashion and come in
+again. If there is any disease which claims its percentage with
+reasonable uniformity, it is phthisis. Yet I remember that the reverend
+and venerable Dr. Prince of Salem told me one Commencement day, as I was
+jogging along towards Cambridge with him, that he recollected the time
+when that disease was hardly hardly known; and in confirmation of his
+statement mentioned a case in which it was told as a great event, that
+somebody down on "the Cape" had died of "a consumption." This story does
+not sound probable to myself, as I repeat it, yet I assure you it is
+true, and it shows how cautiously we must receive all popular stories of
+great changes in the habits of disease.
+
+Is there no progress, then, but do we return to the same beliefs and
+practices which our forefathers wore out and threw away? I trust and
+believe that there is a real progress. We may, for instance, return in a
+measure to the Brunonian stimulating system, but it must be in a modified
+way, for we cannot go back to the simple Brunonian pathology, since we
+have learned too much of diseased action to accept its convenient
+dualism. So of other doctrines, each new Avatar strips them of some of
+their old pretensions, until they take their fitting place at last, if
+they have any truth in them, or disappear, if they were mere phantasms of
+the imagination.
+
+In the mean time, while medical theories are coming in and going out,
+there is a set of sensible men who are never run away with by them, but
+practise their art sagaciously and faithfully in much the same way from
+generation to generation. From the time of Hippocrates to that of our
+own medical patriarch, there has been an apostolic succession of wise and
+good practitioners. If you will look at the first aphorism of the
+ancient Master you will see that before all remedies he places the proper
+conduct of the patient and his attendants, and the fit ordering of all
+the conditions surrounding him. The class of practitioners I have
+referred to have always been the most faithful in attending to these
+points. No doubt they have sometimes prescribed unwisely, in compliance
+with the prejudices of their time, but they have grown wiser as they have
+grown older, and learned to trust more in nature and less in their plans
+of interference. I believe common opinion confirms Sir James Clark's
+observation to this effect.
+
+The experience of the profession must, I think, run parallel with that of
+the wisest of its individual members. Each time a plan of treatment or a
+particular remedy comes up for trial, it is submitted to a sharper
+scrutiny. When Cullen wrote his Materia Medica, he had seriously to
+assail the practice of giving burnt toad, which was still countenanced by
+at least one medical authority of note. I have read recently in some
+medical journal, that an American practitioner, whose name is known to
+the country, is prescribing the hoof of a horse for epilepsy. It was
+doubtless suggested by that old fancy of wearing a portion of elk's hoof
+hung round the neck or in a ring, for this disease. But it is hard to
+persuade reasonable people to swallow the abominations of a former
+period. The evidence which satisfied Fernelius will not serve one of our
+hospital physicians.
+
+In this way those articles of the Materia Medica which had nothing but
+loathsomeness to recommend them have been gradually dropped, and are not
+like to obtain any general favor again with civilized communities. The
+next culprits to be tried are the poisons. I have never been in the
+least sceptical as to the utility of some of them, when properly
+employed. Though I believe that at present, taking the world at large,
+and leaving out a few powerful agents of such immense value that they
+rank next to food in importance, the poisons prescribed for disease do
+more hurt than good, I have no doubt, and never professed to have any,
+that they do much good in prudent and instructed hands. But I am very
+willing to confess a great jealousy of many agents, and I could almost
+wish to see the Materia Medica so classed as to call suspicion upon
+certain ones among them.
+
+Thus the alien elements, those which do not properly enter into the
+composition of any living tissue, are the most to be suspected,
+--mercury, lead, antimony, silver, and the rest, for the reasons I have
+before mentioned. Even iodine, which, as it is found in certain plants,
+seems less remote from the animal tissues, gives unequivocal proofs from
+time to time that it is hostile to some portions of the glandular system.
+
+There is, of course, less prima facie objection to those agents which
+consist of assimilable elements, such as are found making a part of
+healthy tissues. These are divisible into three classes,--foods,
+poisons, and inert, mostly because insoluble, substances. The food of
+one animal or of one human being is sometimes poison to another, and vice
+versa; inert substances may act mechanically, so as to produce the effect
+of poisons; but this division holds exactly enough for our purpose.
+
+Strictly speaking, every poison consisting of assimilable elements may be
+considered as unwholesome food. It is rejected by the stomach, or it
+produces diarrhoea, or it causes vertigo or disturbance of the heart's
+action, or some other symptom for which the subject of it would consult
+the physician, if it came on from any other cause than taking it under
+the name of medicine. Yet portions of this unwholesome food which we
+call medicine, we have reason to believe, are assimilated; thus,
+castor-oil appears to be partially digested by infants, so that they
+require large doses to affect them medicinally. Even that deadliest of
+poisons, hydrocyanic acid, is probably assimilated, and helps to make
+living tissue, if it do not kill the patient, for the assimilable
+elements which it contains, given in the separate forms of amygdalin and
+emulsin, produce no disturbance, unless, as in Bernard's experiments,
+they are suffered to meet in the digestive organs. A medicine consisting
+of assimilable substances being then simply unwholesome food, we
+understand what is meant by those cumulative effects of such remedies
+often observed, as in the case of digitalis and strychnia. They are
+precisely similar to the cumulative effects of a salt diet in producing
+scurvy, or of spurred rye in producing dry gangrene. As the effects of
+such substances are a violence to the organs, we should exercise the same
+caution with regard to their use that we would exercise about any other
+kind of poisonous food,--partridges at certain seasons, for instance.
+Even where these poisonous kinds of food seem to be useful, we should
+still regard them with great jealousy. Digitalis lowers the pulse in
+febrile conditions. Veratrum viride does the same thing. How do we know
+that a rapid pulse is not a normal adjustment of nature to the condition
+it accompanies? Digitalis has gone out of favor; how sure are we that
+Veratrum viride will not be found to do more harm than good in a case of
+internal inflammation, taking the whole course of the disease into
+consideration? Think of the change of opinion with regard to the use of
+opium in delirium tremens (which you remember is sometimes called
+delirium vigilans), where it seemed so obviously indicated, since the
+publication of Dr. Ware's admirable essay. I respect the evidence of my
+contemporaries, but I cannot forget the sayings of the Father of
+medicine,--Ars longa, judicium diffcile.
+
+I am not presuming to express an opinion concerning Veratrum viride,
+which was little heard of when I was still practising medicine. I am
+only appealing to that higher court of experience which sits in judgment
+on all decisions of the lower medical tribunals, and which requires more
+than one generation for its final verdict.
+
+Once change the habit of mind so long prevalent among practitioners of
+medicine; once let it be everywhere understood that the presumption is in
+favor of food, and not of alien substances, of innocuous, and not of
+unwholesome food, for the sick; that this presumption requires very
+strong evidence in each particular case to overcome it; but that, when
+such evidence is afforded, the alien substance or the unwholesome food
+should be given boldly, in sufficient quantities, in the same spirit as
+that with which the surgeon lifts his knife against a patient,--that is,
+with the same reluctance and the same determination,--and I think we
+shall have and hear much less of charlatanism in and out of the
+profession. The disgrace of medicine has been that colossal system of
+self-deception, in obedience to which mines have been emptied of their
+cankering minerals, the vegetable kingdom robbed of all its noxious
+growths, the entrails of animals taxed for their impurities, the
+poison-bags of reptiles drained of their venom, and all the inconceivable
+abominations thus obtained thrust down the throats of human beings
+suffering from some fault of organization, nourishment, or vital
+stimulation.
+
+Much as we have gained, we have not yet thoroughly shaken off the notion
+that poison is the natural food of disease, as wholesome aliment is the
+support of health. Cowper's lines, in "The Task," show the
+matter-of-course practice of his time:
+
+ "He does not scorn it, who has long endured
+ A fever's agonies, and fed on drugs."
+
+Dr. Kimball of Lowell, who has been in the habit of seeing a great deal
+more of typhoid fever than most practitioners, and whose surgical
+exploits show him not to be wanting in boldness or enterprise, can tell
+you whether he finds it necessary to feed his patients on drugs or not.
+His experience is, I believe, that of the most enlightened and advanced
+portion of the profession; yet I think that even in typhoid fever, and
+certainly in many other complaints, the effects of ancient habits and
+prejudices may still be seen in the practice of some educated physicians.
+
+To you, young men, it belongs to judge all that has gone before you. You
+come nearer to the great fathers of modern medicine than some of you
+imagine. Three of my own instructors attended Dr. Rush's Lectures. The
+illustrious Haller mentions Rush's inaugural thesis in his "Bibliotheca
+Anatomica;" and this same Haller, brought so close to us, tells us he
+remembers Ruysch, then an old man, and used to carry letters between him
+and Boerhaave. Look through the history of medicine from Boerhaave to
+this present day. You will see at once that medical doctrine and
+practice have undergone a long series of changes. You will see that the
+doctrine and practice of our own time must probably change in their turn,
+and that, if we can trust at all to the indications of their course, it
+will be in the direction of an improved hygiene and a simplified
+treatment. Especially will the old habit of violating the instincts of
+the sick give place to a judicious study of these same instincts. It
+will be found that bodily, like mental insanity, is best managed, for the
+most part, by natural soothing agencies. Two centuries ago there was a
+prescription for scurvy containing "stercoris taurini et anserini par,
+quantitas trium magnarum nucum," of the hell-broth containing which
+"guoties-cumque sitit oeger, large bibit." When I have recalled the
+humane common-sense of Captain Cook in the matter of preventing this
+disease; when I have heard my friend, Mr. Dana, describing the avidity
+with which the scurvy-stricken sailors snuffed up the earthy fragrance of
+fresh raw potatoes, the food which was to supply the elements wanting to
+their spongy tissues, I have recognized that the perfection of art is
+often a return to nature, and seen in this single instance the germ of
+innumerable beneficent future medical reforms.
+
+I cannot help believing that medical curative treatment will by and by
+resolve itself in great measure into modifications of the food, swallowed
+and breathed, and of the natural stimuli, and that less will be expected
+from specifics and noxious disturbing agents, either alien or
+assimilable. The noted mineral-waters containing iron, sulphur, carbonic
+acid, supply nutritious or stimulating materials to the body as much as
+phosphate of lime and ammoniacal compounds do to the cereal plants. The
+effects of a milk and vegetable diet, of gluten bread in diabetes, of
+cod-liver oil in phthisis, even of such audacious innovations as the
+water-cure and the grape-cure, are only hints of what will be
+accomplished when we have learned to discover what organic elements are
+deficient or in excess in a case of chronic disease, and the best way of
+correcting the abnormal condition, just as an agriculturist ascertains
+the wants of his crops and modifies the composition of his soil. In
+acute febrile diseases we have long ago discovered that far above all
+drug-medication is the use of mild liquid diet in the period of
+excitement, and of stimulant and nutritious food in that of exhaustion.
+Hippocrates himself was as particular about his barley-ptisan as any
+Florence Nightingale of our time could be.
+
+The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession,
+belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the direction
+of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies. What is it that
+makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English physicians?
+His prescriptions consisted principally of simples. An aperient or an
+opiate, a "cardiac" or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst of a
+somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. It was not by his
+pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great name. It was by
+daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horseback
+for consumptives, in place of the smothering system, and the noxious and
+often loathsome rubbish of the established schools. Of course Sydenham
+was much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently takes occasion to
+remind his reader. "I must needs conclude," he says, "either that I am
+void of merit, or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who are
+formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to be no strangers to
+gratitude, make a very small part of the whole." If in the fearless
+pursuit of truth you should find the world as ungracious in the
+nineteenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you may learn a
+lesson of self-reliance from another utterance of the same illustrious
+physician: "'T is none of my business to inquire what other persons
+think, but to establish my own observations; in order to which, I ask no
+favor of the reader but to peruse my writings with temper."
+
+The physician has learned a great deal from the surgeon, who is naturally
+in advance of him, because he has a better opportunity of seeing the
+effects of his remedies. Let me shorten one of Ambroise Pare's stories
+for you. There had been a great victory at the pass of Susa, and they
+were riding into the city. The wounded cried out as the horses trampled
+them under their hoofs, which caused good Ambroise great pity, and made
+him wish himself back in Paris. Going into a stable he saw four dead
+soldiers, and three desperately wounded, placed with their backs against
+the wall. An old campaigner came up.--"Can these fellows get well?" he
+said. "No!" answered the surgeon. Thereupon, the old soldier walked up
+to them and cut all their throats, sweetly, and without wrath (doulcement
+et sans cholere). Ambroise told him he was a bad man to do such a thing.
+"I hope to God;" he said, "somebody will do as much for me if I ever get
+into such a scrape" (accoustre de telle facon). "I was not much salted
+in those days" (bien doux de sel), says Ambroise, "and little acquainted
+with the treatment of wounds." However, as he tells us, he proceeded to
+apply boiling oil of Sambuc (elder) after the approved fashion of the
+time,--with what torture to the patient may be guessed. At last his
+precious oil gave out, and he used instead an insignificant mixture of
+his own contrivance. He could not sleep that night for fear his patients
+who had not been scalded with the boiling oil would be poisoned by the
+gunpowder conveyed into their wounds by the balls. To his surprise, he
+found them much better than the others the next morning, and resolved
+never again to burn his patients with hot oil for gun-shot wounds.
+
+This was the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, of that reform which
+has introduced plain water-dressings in the place of the farrago of
+external applications which had been a source of profit to apothecaries
+and disgrace to art from, and before, the time when Pliny complained of
+them. A young surgeon who was at Sudley Church, laboring among the
+wounded of Bull Run, tells me they had nothing but water for dressing,
+and he (being also doux de sel) was astonished to see how well the wounds
+did under that simple treatment.
+
+Let me here mention a fact or two which may be of use to some of you who
+mean to enter the public service. You will, as it seems, have gun-shot
+wounds almost exclusively to deal with. Three different surgeons, the
+one just mentioned and two who saw the wounded of Big Bethel, assured me
+that they found no sabre-cuts or bayonet wounds. It is the rifle-bullet
+from a safe distance which pierces the breasts of our soldiers, and not
+the gallant charge of broad platoons and sweeping squadrons, such as we
+have been in the habit of considering the chosen mode of warfare of
+ancient and modern chivalry. [Sir Charles James Napier had the same
+experience in Virginia in 1813. "Potomac. We have nasty sort of fighting
+here, amongst creeks and bushes, and lose men without show." "Yankee
+never shows himself, he keeps in the thickest wood, fires and runs
+off."--"These five thousand in the open field might be attacked, but
+behind works it would be throwing away lives." He calls it "an
+inglorious warfare,"--says one of the leaders is "a little deficient in
+gumption,"--but--still my opinion is, that if we tuck up our sleeves and
+lay our ears back we might thrash them; that is, if we caught them out of
+their trees, so as to slap at them with the bayonet."--Life, etc. vol.
+i. p. 218 et seq.]
+
+Another fact parallels the story of the old campaigner, and may teach
+some of you caution in selecting your assistants. A chaplain told it to
+two of our officers personally known to myself. He overheard the
+examination of a man who wished to drive one of the "avalanche" wagons,
+as they call them. The man was asked if he knew how to deal with wounded
+men. "Oh yes," he answered; "if they're hit here," pointing to the
+abdomen, "knock 'em on the head,--they can't get well."
+
+In art and outside of it you will meet the same barbarisms that Ambroise
+Pare met with,--for men differ less from century to century than we are
+apt to suppose; you will encounter the same opposition, if you attack any
+prevailing opinion, that Sydenham complained of. So far as possible, let
+not such experiences breed in you a contempt for those who are the
+subjects of folly or prejudice, or foster any love of dispute for its own
+sake. Should you become authors, express your opinions freely; defend
+them rarely. It is not often that an opinion is worth expressing, which
+cannot take care of itself. Opposition is the best mordant to fix the
+color of your thought in the general belief.
+
+It is time to bring these crowded remarks to a close. The day has been
+when at the beginning of a course of Lectures I should have thought it
+fitting to exhort you to diligence and entire devotion to your tasks as
+students. It is not so now. The young man who has not heard the
+clarion-voices of honor and of duty now sounding throughout the land,
+will heed no word of mine. In the camp or the city, in the field or the
+hospital, under sheltering roof, or half-protecting canvas, or open sky,
+shedding our own blood or stanching that of our wounded defenders,
+students or teachers, whatever our calling and our ability, we belong,
+not to ourselves, but to our imperilled country, whose danger is our
+calamity, whose ruin would be our enslavement, whose rescue shall be our
+earthly salvation!
+
+
+
+
+SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING.
+
+An Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard
+University, November 6, 1867.
+
+The idea is entertained by some of our most sincere professional
+brethren, that to lengthen and multiply our Winter Lectures will be of
+necessity to advance the cause of medical education. It is a fair
+subject for consideration whether they do not overrate the relative
+importance of that particular mode of instruction which forms the larger
+part of these courses.
+
+As this School could only lengthen its lecture term at the expense of its
+"Summer Session," in which more direct, personal, and familiar teaching
+takes the place of our academic discourses, and in which more time can be
+given to hospitals, infirmaries, and practical instruction in various
+important specialties, whatever might be gained, a good deal would
+certainly be lost in our case by the exchange.
+
+The most essential part of a student's instruction is obtained, as I
+believe, not in the lecture-room, but at the bedside. Nothing seen there
+is lost; the rhythms of disease are learned by frequent repetition; its
+unforeseen occurrences stamp themselves indelibly in the memory. Before
+the student is aware of what he has acquired, he has learned the aspects
+and course and probable issue of the diseases he has seen with his
+teacher, and the proper mode of dealing with them, so far as his master
+knows it. On the other hand, our ex cathedra prelections have a strong
+tendency to run into details which, however interesting they may be to
+ourselves and a few of our more curious listeners, have nothing in them
+which will ever be of use to the student as a practitioner. It is a
+perfectly fair question whether I and some other American Professors do
+not teach quite enough that is useless already. Is it not well to remind
+the student from time to time that a physician's business is to avert
+disease, to heal the sick, to prolong life, and to diminish suffering?
+Is it not true that the young man of average ability will find it as much
+as he can do to fit himself for these simple duties? Is it not best to
+begin, at any rate, by making sure of such knowledge as he will require
+in his daily walk, by no means discouraging him from any study for which
+his genius fits him when he once feels that he has become master of his
+chosen art.
+
+I know that many branches of science are of the greatest value as feeders
+of our medical reservoirs. But the practising physician's office is to
+draw the healing waters, and while he gives his time to this labor he can
+hardly be expected to explore all the sources that spread themselves over
+the wide domain of science. The traveller who would not drink of the
+Nile until he had tracked it to its parent lakes, would be like to die of
+thirst; and the medical practitioner who would not use the results of
+many laborers in other departments without sharing their special toils,
+would find life far too short and art immeasurably too long.
+
+We owe much to Chemistry, one of the most captivating as well as
+important of studies; but the medical man must as a general rule content
+himself with a clear view of its principles and a limited acquaintance
+with its facts; such especially as are pertinent to his pursuits. I am
+in little danger of underrating Anatomy or Physiology; but as each of
+these branches splits up into specialties, any one of which may take up a
+scientific life-time, I would have them taught with a certain judgment
+and reserve, so that they shall not crowd the more immediately practical
+branches. So of all the other ancillary and auxiliary kinds of
+knowledge, I would have them strictly subordinated to that particular
+kind of knowledge for which the community looks to its medical advisers.
+
+A medical school is not a scientific school, except just so far as
+medicine itself is a science. On the natural history side, medicine is a
+science; on the curative side, chiefly an art. This is implied in
+Hufeland's aphorism: "The physician must generalize the disease and
+individualize the patient."
+
+The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in
+distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we know
+about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of sickness.
+We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away its fruit; we eat
+the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw away its root. Nothing
+but vulgar experience has taught us to reject the potato ball and cook
+the tomato. So of most of our remedies. The subchloride of mercury,
+calomel, is the great British specific; the protochloride of mercury,
+corrosive sublimate, kills like arsenic, but no chemist could have told
+us it would be so.
+
+From observations like these we can obtain certain principles from which
+we can argue deductively to facts of a like nature, but the process is
+limited, and we are suspicious of all reasoning in that direction applied
+to the processes of healthy and diseased life. We are continually
+appealing to special facts. We are willing to give Liebig's artificial
+milk when we cannot do better, but we watch the child anxiously whose
+wet-nurse is a chemist's pipkin. A pair of substantial mammary glands
+has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned
+Professor's brain, in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid for
+infants.
+
+The bedside is always the true centre of medical teaching. Certain
+branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily involve
+a good deal that is not directly useful to the future practitioner. But
+the over ambitious and active student must not be led away by the
+seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal pursuit. The
+humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of knowledge opened to
+him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a very slender
+provision of science, in distinction from practical skill, he may be a
+useful and acceptable member of the profession to which the health of the
+community is intrusted.
+
+To those who are not to engage in practice, the various pursuits of
+science hardly require to be commended. Only they must not be
+disappointed if they find many subjects treated in our courses as a
+medical class requires, rather than as a scientific class would expect,
+that is, with special limitations and constant reference to practical
+ends. Fortunately they are within easy reach of the highest scientific
+instruction. The business of a school like this is to make useful
+working physicians, and to succeed in this it is almost as important not
+to overcrowd the mind of the pupil with merely curious knowledge as it is
+to store it with useful information.
+
+In this direction I have written my lecture, not to undervalue any form
+of scientific labor in its place, an unworthy thought from which I hope I
+need not defend myself,--but to discourage any undue inflation of the
+scholastic programme, which even now asks more of the student than the
+teacher is able to obtain from the great majority of those who present
+themselves for examination. I wish to take a hint in education from the
+Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, who regards the
+cultivation of too much land as a great defect in our New England
+farming. I hope that our Medical Institutions may never lay themselves
+open to the kind of accusation Mr. Lowe brings against the English
+Universities, when he says that their education is made up "of words that
+few understand and most will shortly forget; of arts that can never be
+used, if indeed they can even be learnt; of histories inapplicable to our
+times; of languages dead and even mouldy; of grammatical rules that never
+had living use and are only post mortem examinations; and of statements
+fagoted with utter disregard of their comparative value."
+
+This general thought will be kept in view throughout my somewhat
+discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical lesson
+from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the portrait
+from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner, was long
+loved and honored among us. If I somewhat overrun my hour, you must
+pardon me, for I can say with Pascal that I have not had the time to make
+my lecture shorter.
+
+In the year 1647, that good man John Eliot, commonly called the Apostle
+Eliot, writing to Mr. Thomas Shepherd, the pious minister of Cambridge,
+referring to the great need of medical instruction for the Indians, used
+these words:
+
+"I have thought in my heart that it were a singular good work, if the
+Lord would stirre up the hearts of some or other of his people in England
+to give some maintenance toward some Schoole or Collegiate exercise this
+way, wherein there should be Anatomies and other instructions that way,
+and where there might be some recompence given to any that should bring
+in any vegetable or other thing that is vertuous in the way of Physick.
+
+"There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way,
+namely that our young students in Physick may be trained up better then
+they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are forced to
+fall to practise before ever they saw an Anatomy made, or duely trained
+up in making experiments, for we never had but one Anatomy in the
+countrey, which Mr. Giles Firman [Firmin] now in England, did make and
+read upon very well, but no more of that now."
+
+Since the time of the Apostle Eliot the Lord has stirred up the hearts of
+our people to the building of many Schools and Colleges where medicine is
+taught in all its branches. Mr. Giles Firmin's "Anatomy" may be
+considered the first ancestor of a long line of skeletons which have been
+dangling and rattling in our lecture-rooms for more than a century.
+
+Teaching in New England in 1647 was a grave but simple matter. A single
+person, combining in many cases, as in that of Mr. Giles Firmin, the
+offices of physician and preacher, taught what he knew to a few disciples
+whom he gathered about him. Of the making of that "Anatomy" on which my
+first predecessor in the branch I teach "did read very well" we can know
+nothing. The body of some poor wretch who had swung upon the gallows,
+was probably conveyed by night to some lonely dwelling at the outskirts
+of the village, and there by the light of flaring torches hastily
+dissected by hands that trembled over the unwonted task. And ever and
+anon the master turned to his book, as he laid bare the mysteries of the
+hidden organs; to his precious Vesalius, it might be, or his figures
+repeated in the multifarious volume of Ambroise Pare; to the Aldine
+octavo in which Fallopius recorded his fresh observations; or that giant
+folio of Spigelius just issued from the press of Amsterdam, in which
+lovely ladies display their viscera with a coquettish grace implying that
+it is rather a pleasure than otherwise to show the lace-like omentum, and
+hold up their appendices epiploicae as if they were saying "these are our
+jewels."
+
+His teaching of medicine was no doubt chiefly clinical, and received with
+the same kind of faith as that which accepted his words from the pulpit.
+His notions of disease were based on what he had observed, seen always in
+the light of the traditional doctrines in which he was bred. His
+discourse savored of the weighty doctrines of Hippocrates, diluted by the
+subtle speculations of Galen, reinforced by the curious comments of the
+Arabian schoolmen as they were conveyed in the mellifluous language of
+Fernelius, blended, it may be, with something of the lofty mysticism of
+Van Helmont, and perhaps stealing a flavor of that earlier form of
+Homoeopathy which had lately come to light in Sir Kenelm Digby's
+"Discourse concerning the Cure of Wounds by the Sympathetic Powder."
+
+His Pathology was mythology. A malformed foetus, as the readers of
+Winthrop's Journal may remember, was enough to scare the colonists from
+their propriety, and suggest the gravest fears of portended disaster.
+The student of the seventeenth century opened his Licetus and saw figures
+of a lion with the head of a woman, and a man with the head of an
+elephant. He had offered to his gaze, as born of a human mother, the
+effigy of a winged cherub, a pterocephalous specimen, which our Professor
+of Pathological Anatomy would hardly know whether to treat with the
+reverence due to its celestial aspect, or to imprison in one of his
+immortalizing jars of alcohol.
+
+His pharmacopoeia consisted mainly of simples, such as the venerable
+"Herball" of Gerard describes and figures in abounding affluence. St.
+John's wort and Clown's All-heal, with Spurge and Fennel, Saffron and
+Parsley, Elder and Snake-root, with opium in some form, and roasted
+rhubarb and the Four Great Cold Seeds, and the two Resins, of which it
+used to be said that whatever the Tacamahaca has not cured, the Caranna
+will, with the more familiar Scammony and Jalap and Black Hellebore, made
+up a good part of his probable list of remedies. He would have ordered
+Iron now and then, and possibly an occasional dose of Antimony. He would
+perhaps have had a rheumatic patient wrapped in the skin of a wolf or a
+wild cat, and in case of a malignant fever with "purples" or petechiae,
+or of an obstinate king's evil, he might have prescribed a certain black
+powder, which had been made by calcining toads in an earthen pot; a
+choice remedy, taken internally, or applied to any outward grief.
+
+Except for the toad-powder and the peremptory drastics, one might have
+borne up against this herb doctoring as well as against some more modern
+styles of medication. Barbeyrac and his scholar Sydenham had not yet
+cleansed the Pharmacopoeia of its perilous stuff, but there is no doubt
+that the more sensible physicians of that day knew well enough that a
+good honest herb-tea which amused the patient and his nurses was all that
+was required to carry him through all common disorders.
+
+The student soon learned the physiognomy of disease by going about with
+his master; fevers, pleurisies, asthmas, dropsies, fluxes, small-pox,
+sore-throats, measles, consumptions. He saw what was done for them. He
+put up the medicines, gathered the herbs, and so learned something of
+materia medico and botany. He learned these few things easily and well,
+for he could give his whole attention to them. Chirurgery was a separate
+specialty. Women in child-birth were cared for by midwives. There was
+no chemistry deserving the name to require his study. He did not learn a
+great deal, perhaps, but what he did learn was his business, namely, how
+to take care of sick people.
+
+Let me give you a picture of the old=fashioned way of instruction, by
+carrying you with me in imagination in the company of worthy Master Giles
+Firmin as he makes his round of visits among the good folk of Ipswich,
+followed by his one student, who shall answer to the scriptural name of
+Luke. It will not be for entertainment chiefly, but to illustrate the
+one mode of teaching which can never be superseded, and which, I venture
+to say, is more important than all the rest put together. The student is
+a green hand, as you will perceive.
+
+In the first dwelling they come to, a stout fellow is bellowing with
+colic.
+
+"He will die, Master, of a surety, methinks," says the timid youth in a
+whisper.
+
+"Nay, Luke," the Master answers, "'t is but a dry belly-ache. Didst thou
+not mark that he stayed his roaring when I did press hard over the lesser
+bowels? Note that he hath not the pulse of them with fevers, and by what
+Dorcas telleth me there hath been no long shutting up of the vice
+naturales. We will steep certain comforting herbs which I will shew
+thee, and put them in a bag and lay them on his belly. Likewise he shall
+have my cordial julep with a portion of this confection which we do call
+Theriaca Andromachi, which hath juice of poppy in it, and is a great
+stayer of anguish. This fellow is at his prayers to-day, but I warrant
+thee he shall be swearing with the best of them to-morrow."
+
+They jog along the bridle-path on their horses until they come to another
+lowly dwelling. They sit a while with a delicate looking girl in whom
+the ingenuous youth naturally takes a special interest. The good
+physician talks cheerfully with her, asks her a few questions. Then to
+her mother: "Good-wife, Margaret hath somewhat profited, as she telleth,
+by the goat's milk she hath taken night and morning. Do thou pluck a
+maniple--that is an handful--of the plant called Maidenhair, and make a
+syrup therewith as I have shewed thee. Let her take a cup full of the
+same, fasting, before she sleepeth, also before she riseth from her bed."
+And so they leave the house.
+
+"What thinkest thou, Luke, of the maid we have been visiting?" "She
+seemeth not much ailing, Master, according to my poor judgment. For she
+did say she was better. And she had a red cheek and a bright eye, and
+she spake of being soon able to walk unto the meeting, and did seem
+greatly hopeful, but spare of flesh, methought, and her voice something
+hoarse, as of one that hath a defluxion, with some small coughing from a
+cold, as she did say. Speak I not truly, Master, that she will be well
+speedily?"
+
+"Yea, Luke, I do think she shall be well, and mayhap speedily. But it is
+not here with us she shall be well. For that redness of the cheek is but
+the sign of the fever which, after the Grecians, we do call the hectical;
+and that shining of the eyes is but a sickly glazing, and they which do
+every day get better and likewise thinner and weaker shall find that way
+leadeth to the church-yard gate. This is the malady which the ancients
+did call tubes, or the wasting disease, and some do name the consumption.
+A disease whereof most that fall ailing do perish. This Margaret is not
+long for earth--but she knoweth it not, and still hopeth."
+
+"Why, then, Master, didst thou give her of thy medicine, seeing that her
+ail is unto death?"
+
+"Thou shalt learn, boy, that they which are sick must have somewhat
+wherewith to busy their thoughts. There be some who do give these tabid
+or consumptives a certain posset made with lime-water and anise and
+liquorice and raisins of the sun, and there be other some who do give the
+juice of craw-fishes boiled in barley-water with chicken-broth, but these
+be toys, as I do think, and ye shall find as good virtue, nay better, in
+this syrup of the simple called Maidenhair."
+
+Something after this manner might Master Giles Firmin have delivered his
+clinical instructions. Somewhat in this way, a century and a half later,
+another New England physician, Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke, taught a
+young man who came to study with him, a very diligent and intelligent
+youth, James Jackson by name, the same whose portrait in his advanced
+years hangs upon this wall, long the honored Professor of Theory and
+Practice in this Institution, of whom I shall say something in this
+Lecture. Our venerated Teacher studied assiduously afterwards in the
+great London Hospitals, but I think he used to quote his "old Master" ten
+times where he quoted Mr. Cline or Dr. Woodville once.
+
+When I compare this direct transfer of the practical experience of a wise
+man into the mind of a student,--every fact one that he can use in the
+battle of life and death,--with the far off, unserviceable "scientific"
+truths that I and some others are in the habit of teaching, I cannot help
+asking myself whether, if we concede that our forefathers taught too
+little, there is not--a possibility that we may sometimes attempt to
+teach too much. I almost blush when I think of myself as describing the
+eight several facets on two slender processes of the palate bone, or the
+seven little twigs that branch off from the minute tympanic nerve, and I
+wonder whether my excellent colleague feels in the same way when he
+pictures himself as giving the constitution of neurin, which as he and I
+know very well is that of the hydrate of trimethyle-oxethyle-ammonium, or
+the formula for the production of alloxan, which, though none but the
+Professors and older students can be expected to remember it, is C10 H4
+N4 O6+ 2HO, NO5=C8 H4 N2 O10+2CO2+N2+NH4 O, NO5.
+
+I can bear the voice of some rough iconoclast addressing the Anatomist
+and the Chemist in tones of contemptuous indignation: "What is this stuff
+with which you are cramming the brains of young men who are to hold the
+lives of the community in their hands? Here is a man fallen in a fit;
+you can tell me all about the eight surfaces of the two processes of the
+palate bone, but you have not had the sense to loosen that man's
+neck-cloth, and the old women are all calling you a fool? Here is a
+fellow that has just swallowed poison. I want something to turn his
+stomach inside out at the shortest notice. Oh, you have forgotten the
+dose of the sulphate of zinc, but you remember the formula for the
+production of alloxan!"
+
+"Look you, Master Doctor,--if I go to a carpenter to come and stop a leak
+in my roof that is flooding the house, do you suppose I care whether he
+is a botanist or not? Cannot a man work in wood without knowing all
+about endogens and exogens, or must he attend Professor Gray's Lectures
+before he can be trusted to make a box-trap? If my horse casts a shoe,
+do you think I will not trust a blacksmith to shoe him until I have made
+sure that he is sound on the distinction between the sesquioxide and the
+protosesquioxide of iron?"
+
+--But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in the
+next generation, or in some possible remote future.--
+
+"Diavolo!" as your Dr. Rabelais has it,--answers the iconoclast,--"what
+is that to me and my colic, to me and my strangury? I pay the Captain of
+the Cunard steamship to carry me quickly and safely to Liverpool, not to
+make a chart of the Atlantic for after voyagers! If Professor Peirce
+undertakes to pilot me into Boston Harbor and runs me on Cohasset rocks,
+what answer is it to tell me that he is Superintendent of the Coast
+Survey? No, Sir! I want a plain man in a pea-jacket and a sou'wester,
+who knows the channel of Boston Harbor, and the rocks of Boston Harbor,
+and the distinguished Professor is quite of my mind as to the matter, for
+I took the pains to ask him before I ventured to use his name in the way
+of illustration."
+
+I do not know how the remarks of the image-breaker may strike others, but
+I feel that they put me on my defence with regard to much of my teaching.
+Some years ago I ventured to show in an introductory Lecture how very
+small a proportion of the anatomical facts taught in a regular course, as
+delivered by myself and others, had any practical bearing whatever on the
+treatment of disease. How can I, how can any medical teacher justify
+himself in teaching anything that is not like to be of practical use to a
+class of young men who are to hold in their hands the balance in which
+life and death, ease and anguish, happiness and wretchedness are to be
+daily weighed?
+
+I hope we are not all wrong. Oftentimes in finding how sadly ignorant of
+really essential and vital facts and rules were some of those whom we had
+been larding with the choicest scraps of science, I have doubted whether
+the old one-man system of teaching, when the one man was of the right
+sort, did not turn out better working physicians than our more elaborate
+method. The best practitioner I ever knew was mainly shaped to
+excellence in that way. I can understand perfectly the regrets of my
+friend Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, for the good that was lost with the
+old apprenticeship system. I understand as well Dr. Latham's fear "that
+many men of the best abilities and good education will be deterred from
+prosecuting physic as a profession, in consequence of the necessity
+indiscriminately laid upon all for impossible attainments."
+
+I feel therefore impelled to say a very few words in defence of that
+system of teaching adopted in our Colleges, by which we wish to
+supplement and complete the instruction given by private individuals or
+by what are often called Summer Schools.
+
+The reason why we teach so much that is not practical and in itself
+useful, is because we find that the easiest way of teaching what is
+practical and useful. If we could in any way eliminate all that would
+help a man to deal successfully with disease, and teach it by itself so
+that it should be as tenaciously rooted in the memory, as easily summoned
+when wanted, as fertile in suggestion of related facts, as satisfactory
+to the peremptory demands of the intelligence as if taught in its
+scientific connections, I think it would be our duty so to teach the
+momentous truths of medicine, and to regard all useless additions as an
+intrusion on the time which should be otherwise occupied.
+
+But we cannot successfully eliminate and teach by itself that which is
+purely practical. The easiest and surest why of acquiring facts is to
+learn them in groups, in systems, and systematized knowledge is science.
+You can very often carry two facts fastened together more easily than one
+by itself, as a housemaid can carry two pails of water with a hoop more
+easily than one without it. You can remember a man's face, made up of
+many features, better than you can his nose or his mouth or his eye-brow.
+Scores of proverbs show you that you can remember two lines that rhyme
+better than one without the jingle. The ancients, who knew the laws of
+memory, grouped the seven cities that contended for the honor of being
+Homer's birthplace in a line thus given by Aulus Gellius:
+
+Smurna, Rodos, Colophon, Salamin, Ios, Argos, Athenai.
+
+I remember, in the earlier political days of Martin Van Buren, that
+Colonel Stone, of the "New York Commercial," or one of his
+correspondents, said that six towns of New York would claim in the same
+way to have been the birth-place of the "Little Magician," as he was then
+called; and thus he gave their names, any one of which I should long ago
+have forgotten, but which as a group have stuck tight in my memory from
+that day to this;
+
+Catskill, Saugerties, Redhook, Kinderhook, Scaghticoke, Schodac.
+
+If the memory gains so much by mere rhythmical association, how much more
+will it gain when isolated facts are brought together under laws and
+principles, when organs are examined in their natural connections, when
+structure is coupled with function, and healthy and diseased action are
+studied as they pass one into the other! Systematic, or scientific study
+is invaluable as supplying a natural kind of mnemonics, if for nothing
+else. You cannot properly learn the facts you want from Anatomy and
+Chemistry in any way so easily as by taking them in their regular order,
+with other allied facts, only there must be common sense exercised in
+leaving out a great deal which belongs to each of the two branches as
+pure science. The dullest of teachers is the one who does not know what
+to omit.
+
+The larger aim of scientific training is to furnish you with principles
+to which you will be able to refer isolated facts, and so bring these
+within the range of recorded experience. See what the "London Times"
+said about the three Germans who cracked open John Bull Chatwood's
+strong-box at the Fair the other day, while the three Englishmen hammered
+away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented
+brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The
+Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"--science, which
+would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two
+hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times"
+attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of
+the Continent.
+
+Granting all this, we must not expect too much from "science" as
+distinguished from common experience. There are ten thousand
+experimenters without special apparatus for every one in the laboratory.
+Accident is the great chemist and toxicologist. Battle is the great
+vivisector. Hunger has instituted researches on food such as no Liebig,
+no Academic Commission has ever recorded.
+
+Medicine, sometimes impertinently, often ignorantly, often carelessly
+called "allopathy," appropriates everything from every source that can be
+of the slightest use to anybody who is ailing in any way, or like to be
+ailing from any cause. It learned from a monk how to use antimony, from
+a Jesuit how to cure agues, from a friar how to cut for stone, from a
+soldier how to treat gout, from a sailor how to keep off scurvy, from a
+postmaster how to sound the Eustachian tube, from a dairy-maid how to
+prevent small-pox, and from an old market-woman how to catch the
+itch-insect. It borrowed acupuncture and the moxa from the Japanese
+heathen, and was taught the use of lobelia by the American savage. It
+stands ready to-day to accept anything from any theorist, from any
+empiric who can make out a good case for his discovery or his remedy.
+"Science" is one of its benefactors, but only one, out of many. Ask the
+wisest practising physician you know, what branches of science help him
+habitually, and what amount of knowledge relating to each branch he
+requires for his professional duties. He will tell you that scientific
+training has a value independent of all the special knowledge acquired.
+He will tell you that many facts are explained by studying them in the
+wider range of related facts to which they belong. He will gratefully
+recognize that the anatomist has furnished him with indispensable data,
+that the physiologist has sometimes put him on the track of new modes of
+treatment, that the chemist has isolated the active principles of his
+medicines, has taught him how to combine them, has from time to time
+offered him new remedial agencies, and so of others of his allies. But he
+will also tell you, if I am not mistaken, that his own branch of
+knowledge is so extensive and so perplexing that he must accept most of
+his facts ready made at their hands. He will own to you that in the
+struggle for life which goes on day and night in our thoughts as in the
+outside world of nature, much that he learned under the name of science
+has died out, and that simple homely experience has largely taken the
+place of that scholastic knowledge to which he and perhaps some of his
+instructors once attached a paremount importance.
+
+This, then, is my view of scientific training as conducted in courses
+such as you are entering on. Up to a certain point I believe in set
+Lectures as excellent adjuncts to what is far more important, practical
+instruction at the bedside, in the operating room, and under the eye of
+the Demonstrator. But I am so far from wishing these courses extended,
+that I think some of them--suppose I say my own--would almost bear
+curtailing. Do you want me to describe more branches of the sciatic and
+crural nerves? I can take Fischer's plates, and lecturing on that scale
+fill up my whole course and not finish the nerves alone. We must stop
+somewhere, and for my own part I think the scholastic exercises of our
+colleges have already claimed their full share of the student's time
+without our seeking to extend them.
+
+I trust I have vindicated the apparent inconsequence of teaching young
+students a good deal that seems at first sight profitless, but which
+helps them to learn and retain what is profitable. But this is an
+inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain height
+knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man whose life is
+to be one long fight with death and disease, there will be some sharp
+questions asked by and by, and our quick-witted people will perhaps find
+they can get along as well without the professor's cap as without the
+bishop's mitre and the monarch's crown.
+
+I myself have nothing to do with clinical teaching. Yet I do not
+hesitate to say it is more essential than all the rest put together, so
+far as the ordinary practice of medicine is concerned; and this is by far
+the most important thing to be learned, because it deals with so many
+more lives than any other branch of the profession. So of personal
+instruction, such as we give and others give in the interval of lectures,
+much of it at the bedside, some of it in the laboratory, some in the
+microscope-room, some in the recitation-room, I think it has many
+advantages of its own over the winter course, and I do not wish to see it
+shortened for the sake of prolonging what seems to me long enough
+already.
+
+If I am jealous of the tendency to expand the time given to the
+acquisition of curious knowledge, at the expense of the plain
+old-fashioned bedside teachings, I only share the feeling which Sydenham
+expressed two hundred years ago, using an image I have already borrowed.
+"He would be no honest and successful pilot who was to apply himself with
+less industry to avoid rocks and sands and bring his vessel safely home,
+than to search into the causes of the ebbing and flowing of the sea,
+which, though very well for a philosopher, is foreign to him whose
+business it is to secure the ship. So neither will a physician, whose
+province it is to cure diseases, be able to do so, though he be a person
+of great genius, who bestows less time on the hidden and intricate method
+of nature, and adapting his means thereto, than on curious and subtle
+speculation."
+
+"Medicine is my wife and Science is my mistress," said Dr. Rush. I do
+not think that the breach of the seventh commandment can be shown to have
+been of advantage to the legitimate owner of his affections. Read what
+Dr. Elisha Bartlett says of him as a practitioner, or ask one of our own
+honored ex-professors, who studied under him, whether Dr. Rush had ever
+learned the meaning of that saying of Lord Bacon, that man is the
+minister and interpreter of Nature, or whether he did not speak
+habitually of Nature as an intruder in the sick room, from which his art
+was to expel her as an incompetent and a meddler.
+
+All a man's powers are not too much for such a profession as Medicine.
+"He is a learned man," said old Parson Emmons of Franklin, "who
+understands one subject, and he is a very learned man who understands two
+subjects." Schonbein says he has been studying oxygen for thirty years.
+Mitscherlich said it took fourteen years to establish a new fact in
+chemistry. Aubrey says of Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation,
+that "though all his profession would allow him to be an excellent
+anatomist, I have never heard of any who admired his therapeutic way."
+My learned and excellent friend before referred to, Dr. Brown of
+Edinburgh, from whose very lively and sensible Essay, "Locke and
+Sydenham," I have borrowed several of my citations, contrasts Sir Charles
+Bell, the discoverer, the man of science, with Dr. Abercrombie, the
+master in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. It is through one of
+the rarest of combinations that we have in our Faculty a teacher on whom
+the scientific mantle of Bell has fallen, and who yet stands preeminent
+in the practical treatment of the class of diseases which his inventive
+and ardent experimental genius has illustrated. M. Brown-Sequard's
+example is as, eloquent as his teaching in proof of the advantages of
+well directed scientific investigation. But those who emulate his
+success at once as a discoverer and a practitioner must be content like
+him to limit their field of practice. The highest genius cannot afford
+in our time to forget the ancient precept, Divide et impera.
+
+"I suppose I must go and earn this guinea," said a medical man who was
+sent for while he was dissecting an animal. I should not have cared to
+be his patient. His dissection would do me no good, and his thoughts
+would be too much upon it. I want a whole man for my doctor, not a half
+one. I would have sent for a humbler practitioner, who would have given
+himself entirely to me, and told the other--who was no less a man than
+John Hunter--to go on and finish the dissection of his tiger.
+
+Sydenham's "Read Don Quixote" should be addressed not to the student, but
+to the Professor of today. Aimed at him it means, "Do not be too
+learned."
+
+Do not think you are going to lecture to picked young men who are
+training themselves to be scientific discoverers. They are of fair
+average capacity, and they are going to be working doctors.
+
+These young men are to have some very serious vital facts to deal with.
+I will mention a few of them.
+
+Every other resident adult you meet in these streets is or will be more
+or less tuberculous. This is not an extravagant estimate, as very nearly
+one third of the deaths of adults in Boston last year were from phthisis.
+If the relative number is less in our other northern cities, it is
+probably in a great measure because they are more unhealthy; that is,
+they have as much, or nearly as much, consumption, but they have more
+fevers or other fatal diseases.
+
+These heavy-eyed men with the alcoholized brains, these pallid youths
+with the nicotized optic ganglia and thinking-marrows brown as their own
+meerschaums, of whom you meet too many,--will ask all your wisdom to deal
+with their poisoned nerves and their enfeebled wills.
+
+Nearly seventeen hundred children under five years of age died last year
+in this city. A poor human article, no doubt, in many cases, still,
+worth an attempt to save them, especially when we remember the effect of
+Dr. Clarke's suggestion at the Dublin Hospital, by which some twenty-five
+or thirty thousand children's lives have probably been saved in a single
+city.
+
+Again, the complaint is often heard that the native population is not
+increasing so rapidly as in former generations. The breeding and nursing
+period of American women is one of peculiar delicacy and frequent
+infirmity. Many of them must require a considerable interval between the
+reproductive efforts, to repair damages and regain strength. This
+matter is not to be decided by an appeal to unschooled nature. It is the
+same question as that of the deformed pelvis,--one of degree. The facts
+of mal-vitalization are as much to be attended to as those of
+mal-formation. If the woman with a twisted pelvis is to be considered an
+exempt, the woman with a defective organization should be recognized as
+belonging to the invalid corps. We shudder to hear what is alleged as to
+the prevalence of criminal practices; if back of these there can be shown
+organic incapacity or overtaxing of too limited powers, the facts belong
+to the province of the practical physician, as well as of the moralist
+and the legislator, and require his gravest consideration.
+
+Take the important question of bleeding. Is venesection done with
+forever? Six years ago it was said here in an introductory Lecture that
+it would doubtless come back again sooner or later. A fortnight ago I
+found myself in the cars with one of the most sensible and esteemed
+practitioners in New England. He took out his wallet and showed me two
+lancets, which he carried with him; he had never given up their use.
+This is a point you will have to consider.
+
+Or, to mention one out of many questionable remedies, shall you give
+Veratrum Viride in fevers and inflammations? It makes the pulse slower
+in these affections. Then the presumption would naturally be that it
+does harm. The caution with reference to it on this ground was long ago
+recorded in the Lecture above referred to. See what Dr. John Hughes
+Bennett says of it in the recent edition of his work on Medicine.
+Nothing but the most careful clinical experience can settle this and such
+points of treatment.
+
+These are all practical questions--questions of life and death, and every
+day will be full of just such questions. Take the problem of climate. A
+patient comes to you with asthma and wants to know where he can breathe;
+another comes to you with phthisis and wants to know where he can live.
+What boy's play is nine tenths of all that is taught in many a
+pretentious course of lectures, compared with what an accurate and
+extensive knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of different
+residences in these and other complaints would be to a practising
+physician.
+
+I saw the other day a gentleman living in Canada, who had spent seven
+successive winters in Egypt, with the entire relief of certain obscure
+thoracic symptoms which troubled him while at home. I saw, two months
+ago, another gentleman from Minnesota, an observer and a man of sense,
+who considered that State as the great sanatorium for all pulmonary
+complaints. If half our grown population are or will be more or less
+tuberculous, the question of colonizing Florida assumes a new aspect.
+Even within the borders of our own State, the very interesting researches
+of Dr. Bowditch show that there is a great variation in the amount of
+tuberculous disease in different towns, apparently connected with local
+conditions. The hygienic map of a State is quite as valuable as its
+geological map, and it is the business of every practising physician to
+know it thoroughly. They understand this in England, and send a patient
+with a dry irritating cough to Torquay or Penzance, while they send
+another with relaxed bronchial membranes to Clifton or Brighton. Here is
+another great field for practical study.
+
+So as to the all-important question of diet. "Of all the means of cure
+at our command," says Dr. Bennett, "a regulation of the quantity and
+quality of the diet is by far the most powerful." Dr. MacCormac would
+perhaps except the air we breathe, for he thinks that impure air,
+especially in sleeping rooms, is the great cause of tubercle. It is
+sufficiently proved that the American,--the New Englander,--the
+Bostonian, can breed strong and sound children, generation after
+generation,--nay, I have shown by the record of a particular family that
+vital losses may be retrieved, and a feeble race grow to lusty vigor in
+this very climate and locality. Is not the question why our young men
+and women so often break down, and how they can be kept from breaking
+down, far more important for physicians to settle than whether there is
+one cranial vertebra, or whether there are four, or none?
+
+--But I have a taste for the homologies, I want to go deeply into the
+subject of embryology, I want to analyze the protonihilates precipitated
+from pigeon's milk by the action of the lunar spectrum,--shall I not
+follow my star,--shall I not obey my instinct,--shall I not give myself
+to the lofty pursuits of science for its own sake?
+
+Certainly you may, if you like. But take down your sign, or never put it
+up. That is the way Dr. Owen and Dr. Huxley, Dr. Agassiz and Dr.
+Jeffries Wyman, Dr. Gray and Dr. Charles T. Jackson settled the
+difficulty. We all admire the achievements of this band of distinguished
+doctors who do not practise. But we say of their work and of all pure
+science, as the French officer said of the charge of the six hundred at
+Balaclava, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,"--it is very
+splendid, but it is not a practising doctor's business. His patient has
+a right to the cream of his life and not merely to the thin milk that is
+left after "science" has skimmed it off. The best a physician can give
+is never too good for the patient.
+
+It is often a disadvantage to a young practitioner to be known for any
+accomplishment outside of his profession. Haller lost his election as
+Physician to the Hospital in his native city of Berne, principally on the
+ground that he was a poet. In his later years the physician may venture
+more boldly. Astruc was sixty-nine years old when he published his
+"Conjectures," the first attempt, we are told, to decide the authorship
+of the Pentateuch showing anything like a discerning criticism. Sir
+Benjamin Brodie was seventy years old before he left his physiological
+and surgical studies to indulge in psychological speculations. The
+period of pupilage will be busy enough in acquiring the knowledge needed,
+and the season of active practice will leave little leisure for any but
+professional studies.
+
+Dr. Graves of Dublin, one of the first clinical teachers of our time,
+always insisted on his students' beginning at once to visit the hospital.
+At the bedside the student must learn to treat disease, and just as
+certainly as we spin out and multiply our academic prelections we shall
+work in more and more stuffing, more and more rubbish, more and more
+irrelevant, useless detail which the student will get rid of just as soon
+as he leaves us. Then the next thing will be a new organization, with an
+examining board of first-rate practical men, who will ask the candidate
+questions that mean business,--who will make him operate if he is to be a
+surgeon, and try him at the bedside if he is to be a physician,--and not
+puzzle him with scientific conundrums which not more than one of the
+questioners could answer himself or ever heard of since he graduated.
+
+Or these women who are hammering at the gates on which is written "No
+admittance for the mothers of mankind," will by and by organize an
+institution, which starting from that skilful kind of nursing which
+Florence Nightingale taught so well, will work backwards through
+anodynes, palliatives, curatives, preventives, until with little show of
+science it imparts most of what is most valuable in those branches of the
+healing art it professes to teach. When that time comes, the fitness of
+women for certain medical duties, which Hecquet advocated in 1708, which
+Douglas maintained in 1736, which Dr. John Ware, long the honored
+Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution, upheld within our
+own recollection in the face of his own recorded opinion to the contrary,
+will very possibly be recognized.
+
+My advice to every teacher less experienced than myself would be,
+therefore: Do not fret over the details you have to omit; you probably
+teach altogether too many as it is. Individuals may learn a thing with
+once hearing it, but the only way of teaching a whole class is by
+enormous repetition, representation, and illustration in all possible
+forms. Now and then you will have a young man on your benches like the
+late Waldo Burnett,--not very often, if you lecture half a century. You
+cannot pretend to lecture chiefly for men like that,--a Mississippi raft
+might as well take an ocean-steamer in tow. To meet his wants you would
+have to leave the rest of your class behind and that you must not do.
+President Allen of Jefferson College says that his instruction has been
+successful in proportion as it has been elementary. It may be a
+humiliating statement, but it is one which I have found true in my own
+experience.
+
+To the student I would say, that however plain and simple may be our
+teaching, he must expect to forget much which he follows intelligently in
+the lecture-room. But it is not the same as if he had never learned it.
+A man must get a thing before he can forget it. There is a great world
+of ideas we cannot voluntarily recall,--they are outside the limits of
+the will. But they sway our conscious thought as the unseen planets
+influence the movements of those within the sphere of vision. No man
+knows how much he knows,--how many ideas he has,--any more than he knows
+how many blood-globules roll in his veins. Sometimes accident brings
+back here and there one, but the mind is full of irrevocable remembrances
+and unthinkable thoughts, which take a part in all its judgments as
+indestructible forces. Some of you must feel your scientific
+deficiencies painfully after your best efforts. But every one can
+acquire what is most essential. A man of very moderate ability may be a
+good physician, if he devotes himself faithfully to the work. More than
+this, a positively dull man, in the ordinary acceptation of the term,
+sometimes makes a safer practitioner than one who has, we will say, five
+per cent. more brains than his average neighbor, but who thinks it is
+fifty per cent. more. Skulls belonging to this last variety of the human
+race are more common, I may remark, than specimens like the Neanderthal
+cranium, a cast of which you will find on the table in the Museum.
+
+Whether the average talent be high or low, the Colleges of the land must
+make the best commodity they can out of such material as the country and
+the cities furnish them. The community must have Doctors as it must have
+bread. It uses up its Doctors just as it wears out its shoes, and
+requires new ones. All the bread need not be French rolls, all the shoes
+need not be patent leather ones; but the bread must be something that can
+be eaten, and the shoes must be something that can be worn. Life must
+somehow find food for the two forces that rub everything to pieces, or
+burn it to ashes,--friction and oxygen. Doctors are oxydable products,
+and the schools must keep furnishing new ones as the old ones turn into
+oxyds; some of first-rate quality that burn with a great light, some of a
+lower grade of brilliancy, some honestly, unmistakably, by the grace of
+God, of moderate gifts, or in simpler phrase, dull.
+
+The public will give every honest and reasonably competent worker in the
+healing art a hearty welcome. It is on the whole very loyal to the
+Medical Profession. Three successive years have borne witness to the
+feeling with which this Institution, representing it in its educational
+aspect, is regarded by those who are themselves most honored and
+esteemed. The great Master of Natural Science bade the last year's class
+farewell in our behalf, in those accents which delight every audience.
+The Head of our ancient University honored us in the same way in the
+preceding season. And how can we forget that other occasion when the
+Chief Magistrate of the Commonwealth, that noble citizen whom we have
+just lost, large-souled, sweet-natured, always ready for every kind
+office, came among us at our bidding, and talked to us of our duties in
+words as full of wisdom as his heart was of goodness?
+
+You have not much to fear, I think, from the fancy practitioners. The
+vulgar quackeries drop off, atrophied, one after another. Homoeopathy has
+long been encysted, and is carried on the body medical as quietly as an
+old wen. Every year gives you a more reasoning and reasonable people to
+deal with. See how it is in Literature. The dynasty of British
+dogmatists, after lasting a hundred years and more, is on its last legs.
+Thomas Carlyle, third in the line of descent, finds an audience very
+different from those which listened to the silver speech of Samuel Taylor
+Coleridge and the sonorous phrases of Samuel Johnson. We read him, we
+smile at his clotted English, his "swarmery" and other picturesque
+expressions, but we lay down his tirade as we do one of Dr. Cumming's
+interpretations of prophecy, which tells us that the world is coming to
+an end next week or next month, if the weather permits,--not
+otherwise,--feeling very sure that the weather will be unfavorable.
+
+It is the same common-sense public you will appeal to. The less
+pretension you make, the better they will like you in the long run. I
+hope we shall make everything as plain and as simple to you as we can. I
+would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the
+purpose. I know there are professors in this country who "ligate"
+arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just
+as well. It is the familiarity and simplicity of bedside instruction
+which makes it so pleasant as well as so profitable. A good clinical
+teacher is himself a Medical School. We need not wonder that our young
+men are beginning to announce themselves not only as graduates of this or
+that College, but also as pupils of some one distinguished master.
+
+I wish to close this Lecture, if you will allow me a few moments longer,
+with a brief sketch of an instructor and practitioner whose character was
+as nearly a model one in both capacities as I can find anywhere recorded.
+
+Dr. JAMES JACKSON, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in
+this University from 1812 to 1846, and whose name has been since retained
+on our rolls as Professor Emeritus, died on the 27th of August last, in
+the ninetieth year of his age. He studied his profession, as I have
+already mentioned, with Dr. Holyoke of Salem, one of the few physicians
+who have borne witness to their knowledge of the laws of life by living
+to complete their hundredth year. I think the student took his Old
+Master, as he always loved to call him, as his model; each was worthy of
+the other, and both were bright examples to all who come after them.
+
+I remember that in the sermon preached by Dr. Grazer after Dr. Holyoke's
+death, one of the points most insisted upon as characteristic of that
+wise and good old man was the perfect balance of all his faculties. The
+same harmonious adjustment of powers, the same symmetrical arrangement of
+life, the same complete fulfilment of every day's duties, without haste
+and without needless delay, which characterized the master, equally
+distinguished the scholar. A glance at the life of our own Old Master,
+if I can do any justice at all to his excellences, will give you
+something to carry away from this hour's meeting not unworthy to be
+remembered.
+
+From December, 1797, to October, 1799, he remained with Dr. Holyoke as a
+student, a period which he has spoken of as a most interesting and most
+gratifying part of his life. After this he passed eight months in
+London, and on his return, in October, 1800, he began business in Boston.
+
+He had followed Mr. Cline, as I have mentioned, and was competent to
+practise Surgery. But he found Dr. John Collins Warren had already
+occupied the ground which at that day hardly called for more than one
+leading practitioner, and wisely chose the Medical branch of the
+profession. He had only himself to rely upon, but he had confidence in
+his prospects, conscious, doubtless, of his own powers, knowing his own
+industry and determination, and being of an eminently cheerful and
+hopeful disposition. No better proof of his spirit can be given than
+that, just a year from the time when he began to practise as a physician,
+he took that eventful step which in such a man implies that he sees his
+way clear to a position; he married a lady blessed with many gifts, but
+not bringing him a fortune to paralyze his industry.
+
+He had not miscalculated his chances in life. He very soon rose into a
+good practice, and began the founding of that reputation which grew with
+his years, until he stood by general consent at the head of his chosen
+branch of the profession, to say the least, in this city and in all this
+region of country. His skill and wisdom were the last tribunal to which
+the sick and suffering could appeal. The community trusted and loved
+him, the profession recognized him as the noblest type of the physician.
+The young men whom he had taught wandered through foreign hospitals;
+where they learned many things that were valuable, and many that were
+curious; but as they grew older and began to think more of their ability
+to help the sick than their power of talking about phenomena, they began
+to look back to the teaching of Dr. Jackson, as he, after his London
+experience, looked back to that of Dr. Holyoke. And so it came to be at
+last that the bare mention of his name in any of our medical assemblies
+would call forth such a tribute of affectionate regard as is only yielded
+to age when it brings with it the record of a life spent in well doing.
+
+No accident ever carries a man to eminence such as his in the medical
+profession. He who looks for it must want it earnestly and work for it
+vigorously; Nature must have qualified him in many ways, and education
+must have equipped him with various knowledge, or his reputation will
+evaporate before it reaches the noon-day blaze of fame. How did Dr.
+Jackson gain the position which all conceded to him? In the answer to
+this question some among you may find a key that shall unlock the gate
+opening on that fair field of the future of which all dream but which not
+all will ever reach.
+
+First of all, he truly loved his profession. He had no intellectual
+ambitions outside of it, literary, scientific or political. To him it
+was occupation enough to apply at the bedside the best of all that he
+knew for the good of his patient; to protect the community against the
+inroads of pestilence; to teach the young all that he himself had been
+taught, with all that his own experience had added; to leave on record
+some of the most important results of his long observation.
+
+With his patients he was so perfect at all points that it is hard to
+overpraise him. I have seen many noted British and French and American
+practitioners, but I never saw the man so altogether admirable at the
+bedside of the sick as Dr. James Jackson. His smile was itself a remedy
+better than the potable gold and the dissolved pearls that comforted the
+praecordia of mediaeval monarchs. Did a patient, alarmed without cause,
+need encouragement, it carried the sunshine of hope into his heart and
+put all his whims to flight, as David's harp cleared the haunted chamber
+of the sullen king. Had the hour come, not for encouragement, but for
+sympathy, his face, his voice, his manner all showed it, because his
+heart felt it. So gentle was he, so thoughtful, so calm, so absorbed in
+the case before him, not to turn round and look for a tribute to his
+sagacity, not to bolster himself in a favorite theory, but to find out
+all he could, and to weigh gravely and cautiously all that he found, that
+to follow him in his morning visit was not only to take a lesson in the
+healing art, it was learning how to learn, how to move, how to look, how
+to feel, if that can be learned. To visit with Dr. Jackson was a medical
+education.
+
+He was very firm, with all his kindness. He would have the truth about
+his patients. The nurses found it out; and the shrewder ones never
+ventured to tell him anything but a straight story. A clinical dialogue
+between Dr. Jackson and Miss Rebecca Taylor, sometime nurse in the
+Massachusetts General Hospital, a mistress in her calling, was as good
+questioning and answering as one would be like to hear outside of the
+court-room.
+
+Of his practice you can form an opinion from his book called "Letters to
+a Young Physician." Like all sensible men from the days of Hippocrates
+to the present, he knew that diet and regimen were more important than
+any drug or than all drugs put together. Witness his treatment of
+phthisis and of epilepsy. He retained, however, more confidence in some
+remedial agents than most of the younger generation would concede to
+them. Yet his materia medica was a simple one.
+
+"When I first went to live with Dr. Holyoke," he says, "in 1797, showing
+me his shop, he said, 'There seems to you to be a great variety of
+medicines here, and that it will take you long to get acquainted with
+them, but most of them are unimportant. There are four which are equal
+to all the rest, namely, Mercury, Antimony, Bark and Opium.'" And Dr.
+Jackson adds, "I can only say of his practice, the longer I have lived, I
+have thought better and better of it." When he thought it necessary to
+give medicine, he gave it in earnest. He hated half-practice--giving a
+little of this or that, so as to be able to say that one had done
+something, in case a consultation was held, or a still more ominous event
+occurred. He would give opium, for instance, as boldly as the late Dr.
+Fisher of Beverly, but he followed the aphorism of the Father of
+Medicine, and kept extreme remedies for extreme cases.
+
+When it came to the "non-naturals," as he would sometimes call them,
+after the old physicians,--namely, air, meat and drink, sleep and
+watching, motion and rest, the retentions and excretions, and the
+affections of the mind,--he was, as I have said, of the school of
+sensible practitioners, in distinction from that vast community of
+quacks, with or without the diploma, who think the chief end of man is to
+support apothecaries, and are never easy until they can get every patient
+upon a regular course of something nasty or noxious. Nobody was so
+precise in his directions about diet, air, and exercise, as Dr. Jackson.
+He had the same dislike to the a peu pres, the about so much, about so
+often, about so long, which I afterwards found among the punctilious
+adherents of the numerical system at La Pitie.
+
+He used to insist on one small point with a certain philological
+precision, namely, the true meaning of the word "cure." He would have it
+that to cure a patient was simply to care for him. I refer to it as
+showing what his idea was of the relation of the physician to the
+patient. It was indeed to care for him, as if his life were bound up in
+him, to watch his incomings and outgoings, to stand guard at every avenue
+that disease might enter, to leave nothing to chance; not merely to throw
+a few pills and powders into one pan of the scales of Fate, while Death
+the skeleton was seated in the other, but to lean with his whole weight
+on the side of life, and shift the balance in its favor if it lay in
+human power to do it. Such devotion as this is only to be looked for in
+the man who gives himself wholly up to the business of healing, who
+considers Medicine itself a Science, or if not a science, is willing to
+follow it as an art,--the noblest of arts, which the gods and demigods of
+ancient religions did not disdain to practise and to teach.
+
+The same zeal made him always ready to listen to any new suggestion which
+promised to be useful, at a period of life when many men find it hard to
+learn new methods and accept new doctrines. Few of his generation became
+so accomplished as he in the arts of direct exploration; coming straight
+from the Parisian experts, I have examined many patients with him, and
+have had frequent opportunities of observing his skill in percussion and
+auscultation.
+
+One element in his success, a trivial one compared with others, but not
+to be despised, was his punctuality. He always carried two watches,--I
+doubt if he told why, any more than Dr. Johnson told what he did with the
+orange-peel,--but probably with reference to this virtue. He was as much
+to be depended upon at the appointed time as the solstice or the equinox.
+There was another point I have heard him speak of as an important rule
+with him; to come at the hour when he was expected; if he had made his
+visit for several days successively at ten o'clock, for instance, not to
+put it off, if he could possibly help it, until eleven, and so keep a
+nervous patient and an anxious family waiting for him through a long,
+weary hour.
+
+If I should attempt to characterize his teaching, I should say that while
+it conveyed the best results of his sagacious and extended observation,
+it was singularly modest, cautious, simple, sincere. Nothing was for
+show, for self-love; there was no rhetoric, no declamation, no triumphant
+"I told you so," but the plain statement of a clear-headed honest man,
+who knows that he is handling one of the gravest subjects that interest
+humanity. His positive instructions were full of value, but the spirit
+in which he taught inspired that loyal love of truth which lies at the
+bottom of all real excellence.
+
+I will not say that, during his long career, Dr. Jackson never made an
+enemy. I have heard him tell how, in his very early days, old Dr.
+Danforth got into a towering passion with him about some professional
+consultation, and exploded a monosyllable or two of the more energetic
+kind on the occasion. I remember that that somewhat peculiar personage,
+Dr. Waterhouse, took it hardly when Dr. Jackson succeeded to his place as
+Professor of Theory and Practice. A young man of Dr. Jackson's talent
+and energy could hardly take the position that belonged to him without
+crowding somebody in a profession where three in a bed is the common rule
+of the household. But he was a peaceful man and a peace-maker all his
+days. No man ever did more, if so much, to produce and maintain the
+spirit of harmony for which we consider our medical community as somewhat
+exceptionally distinguished.
+
+If this harmony should ever be threatened, I could wish that every
+impatient and irritable member of the profession would read that
+beautiful, that noble Preface to the "Letters," addressed to John Collins
+Warren. I know nothing finer in the medical literature of all time than
+this Prefatory Introduction. It is a golden prelude, fit to go with the
+three great Prefaces which challenge the admiration of scholars,
+--Calvin's to his Institutes, De Thou's to his History, and
+Casaubon's to his Polybius,--not because of any learning or rhetoric,
+though it is charmingly written, but for a spirit flowing through it to
+which learning and rhetoric are but as the breath that is wasted on the
+air to the Mood that warms the heart.
+
+Of a similar character is this short extract which I am permitted to make
+from a private letter of his to a dear young friend. He was eighty-three
+years old at the time of writing it.
+
+"I have not loved everybody whom I have known, but I have striven to see
+the good points in the characters of all men and women. At first I must
+have done this from something in my own nature, for I was not aware of
+it, and yet was doing it without any plan, when one day, sixty years ago,
+a friend whom I loved and respected said this to me, 'Ah, James, I see
+that you are destined to succeed in the world, and to make friends,
+because you are so ready to see the good point in the characters of those
+you meet.'"
+
+I close this imperfect notice of some features in the character of this
+most honored and beloved of physicians by applying to him the words which
+were written of William Heberden, whose career was not unlike his own,
+and who lived to the same patriarchal age.
+
+"From his early youth he had always entertained a deep sense of religion,
+a consummate love of virtue, an ardent thirst after knowledge, and an
+earnest desire to promote the welfare and happiness of all mankind. By
+these qualities, accompanied with great sweetness of manners, he acquired
+the love and esteem of all good men, in a degree which perhaps very few
+have experienced; and after passing an active life with the uniform
+testimony of a good conscience, he became an eminent example of its
+influence, in the cheerfulness and serenity of his latest age."
+
+Such was the man whom I offer to you as a model, young gentlemen, at the
+outset of your medical career. I hope that many of you will recognize
+some traits of your own special teachers scattered through various parts
+of the land in the picture I have drawn. Let me assure you that whatever
+you may learn in this or any other course of public lectures,--and I
+trust you will learn a great deal,--the daily guidance, counsel, example,
+of your medical father, for such the Oath of Hippocrates tells you to
+consider your preceptor, will, if he is in any degree like him of whom I
+have spoken, be the foundation on which all that we teach is reared, and
+perhaps outlive most of our teachings, as in Dr. Jackson's memory the
+last lessons that remained with him were those of his Old Master.
+
+
+
+
+THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS.
+
+A Lecture of a Course by members of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
+delivered before the Lowell Institute, January 29, 1869.
+
+The medical history of eight generations, told in an hour, must be in
+many parts a mere outline. The details I shall give will relate chiefly
+to the first century. I shall only indicate the leading occurrences,
+with the more prominent names of the two centuries which follow, and add
+some considerations suggested by the facts which have been passed in
+review.
+
+A geographer who was asked to describe the tides of Massachusetts Bay,
+would have to recognize the circumstance that they are a limited
+manifestation of a great oceanic movement. To consider them apart from
+this, would be to localize a planetary phenomenon, and to provincialize a
+law of the universe. The art of healing in Massachusetts has shared more
+or less fully and readily the movement which, with its periods of ebb and
+flow, has been raising its level from age to age throughout the better
+part of Christendom. Its practitioners brought with them much of the
+knowledge and many of the errors of the Old World; they have always been
+in communication with its wisdom and its folly; it is not without
+interest to see how far the new conditions in which they found themselves
+have been favorable or unfavorable to the growth of sound medical
+knowledge and practice.
+
+The state of medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and
+country,--one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged. Surgery
+invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences of
+the age of stone,--a relic of which we may find in the practice of
+Zipporah, the wife of Moses,--to the delicate operations of to-day upon
+patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress which
+presupposes a skill in metallurgy and in the labors of the workshop and
+the laboratory it has taken uncounted generations to accumulate. Before
+the morphia which deadens the pain of neuralgia, or the quinine which
+arrests the fit of an ague, can find their place in our pharmacies,
+commerce must have perfected its machinery, and science must have refined
+its processes, through periods only to be counted by the life of nations.
+Before the means which nature and art have put in the hands of the
+medical practitioner can be fairly brought into use, the prejudices of
+the vulgar must be overcome, the intrusions of false philosophy must be
+fenced out, and the partnership with the priesthood dissolved. All this
+implies that freedom and activity of thought which belong only to the
+most advanced conditions of society; and the progress towards this is by
+gradations as significant of wide-spread changes, as are the varying
+states of the barometer of far-extended conditions of the atmosphere.
+
+Apart, then, from its special and technical interest, my subject has a
+meaning which gives a certain importance, and even dignity, to details in
+themselves trivial and almost unworthy of record. A medical entry in
+Governor Winthrop's journal may seem at first sight a mere curiosity;
+but, rightly interpreted, it is a key to his whole system of belief as to
+the order of the universe and the relations between man and his Maker.
+Nothing sheds such light on the superstitions of an age as the prevailing
+interpretation and treatment of disease. When the touch of a profligate
+monarch was a cure for one of the most inveterate of maladies, when the
+common symptoms of hysteria were prayed over as marks of demoniacal
+possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of thought to be
+peopled with still stranger delusions.
+
+Let us go before the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and look at the shores on
+which they were soon to land. A wasting pestilence had so thinned the
+savage tribes that it was sometimes piously interpreted as having
+providentially prepared the way for the feeble band of exiles. Cotton
+Mather, who, next to the witches, hated the "tawnies," "wild beasts,"
+"blood-hounds," "rattlesnakes," "infidels," as in different places he
+calls the unhappy Aborigines, describes the condition of things in his
+lively way, thus: "The Indians in these Parts had newly, even about a
+Year or Two before, been visited with such a prodigious Pestilence; as
+carried away not a Tenth, but Nine Parts of Ten (yea't is said Nineteen
+of Twenty) among them so that the Woods were almost cleared of those
+pernicious Creatures to make Room for a better Growth."
+
+What this pestilence was has been much discussed. It is variously
+mentioned by different early writers as "the plague," "a great and
+grievous plague," "a sore consumption," as attended with spots which left
+unhealed places on those who recovered, as making the "whole surface
+yellow as with a garment." Perhaps no disease answers all these
+conditions so well as smallpox. We know from different sources what
+frightful havoc it made among the Indians in after years,--in 1631, for
+instance, when it swept away the aboriginal inhabitants of "whole towns,"
+and in 1633. We have seen a whole tribe, the Mandans, extirpated by it
+in our own day. The word "plague" was used very vaguely, as in the
+description of the "great sickness" found among the Indians by the
+expedition of 1622. This same great sickness could hardly have been
+yellow fever, as it occurred in the month of November. I cannot think,
+therefore, that either the scourge of the East or our Southern malarial
+pestilence was the disease that wasted the Indians. As for the
+yellowness like a garment, that is too familiar to the eyes of all who
+have ever looked on the hideous mask of confluent variola.
+
+Without the presence or the fear of these exotic maladies, the forlorn
+voyagers of the Mayflower had sickness enough to contend with. At their
+first landing at Cape Cod, gaunt and hungry and longing for fresh food,
+they found upon the sandy shore "great mussel's, and very fat and full of
+sea-pearl." Sailors and passengers indulged in the treacherous delicacy;
+which seems to have been the sea-clam; and found that these mollusks,
+like the shell the poet tells of, remembered their august abode, and
+treated the way-worn adventurers to a gastric reminiscence of the heaving
+billows. In the mean time it blew and snowed and froze. The water turned
+to ice on their clothes, and made them many times like coats of iron.
+Edward Tilley had like to have "sounded" with cold. The gunner, too, was
+sick unto death, but "hope of trucking" kept him on his feet,--a Yankee,
+it should seem, when he first touched the shore of New England. Most, if
+not all, got colds and coughs, which afterwards turned to scurvy, whereof
+many died.
+
+How can we wonder that the crowded and tempest-tossed voyagers, many of
+them already suffering, should have fallen before the trials of the first
+winter in Plymouth? Their imperfect shelter, their insufficient supply
+of bread, their salted food, now in unwholesome condition, account too
+well for the diseases and the mortality that marked this first dreadful
+season; weakness, swelling of the limbs, and other signs of scurvy,
+betrayed the want of proper nourishment and protection from the elements.
+In December six of their number died, in January eight, in February,
+seventeen, in March thirteen. With the advance of spring the mortality
+diminished, the sick and lame began to recover, and the colonists,
+saddened but not disheartened, applied themselves to the labors of the
+opening year.
+
+One of the most pressing needs of the early colonists must have been that
+of physicians and surgeons. In Mr. Savage's remarkable Genealogical
+Dictionary of the first settlers who came over before 1692 and their
+descendants to the third generation, I find scattered through the four
+crowded volumes the names of one hundred and thirty-four medical
+practitioners. Of these, twelve, and probably many more, practised
+surgery; three were barber-surgeons. A little incident throws a glimmer
+from the dark lantern of memory upon William Direly, one of these
+practitioners with the razor and the lancet. He was lost between Boston
+and Roxbury in a violent tempest of wind and snow; ten days afterwards a
+son was born to his widow, and with a touch of homely sentiment, I had
+almost said poetry, they called the little creature "Fathergone" Direly.
+Six or seven, probably a larger number, were ministers as well as
+physicians, one of whom, I am sorry to say, took to drink and tumbled
+into the Connecticut River, and so ended. One was not only doctor, but
+also schoolmaster and poet. One practised medicine and kept a tavern.
+One was a butcher, but calls himself a surgeon in his will, a union of
+callings which suggests an obvious pleasantry. One female practitioner,
+employed by her own sex,--Ann Moore,--was the precursor of that intrepid
+sisterhood whose cause it has long been my pleasure and privilege to
+advocate on all fitting occasions.
+
+Outside of this list I must place the name of Thomas Wilkinson, who was
+complained of, is 1676, for practising contrary to law.
+
+Many names in the catalogue of these early physicians have been
+associated, in later periods, with the practice of the profession,
+--among them, Boylston, Clark, Danforth, Homan, Jeffrey, Kittredge,
+Oliver, Peaslee, Randall, Shattuck, Thacher, Wellington, Williams,
+Woodward. Touton was a Huguenot, Burchsted a German from Silesia,
+Lunerus a German or a Pole; "Pighogg Churrergeon," I hope, for the honor
+of the profession, was only Peacock disguised under this alias, which
+would not, I fear, prove very attractive to patients.
+
+What doctrines and practice were these colonists likely to bring, with
+them?
+
+Two principal schools of medical practice prevailed in the Old World
+during the greater part of the seventeenth century. The first held to
+the old methods of Galen: its theory was that the body, the microcosm,
+like the macrocosm, was made up of the four elements--fire, air, water,
+earth; having respectively the qualities hot, dry, moist, cold. The body
+was to be preserved in health by keeping each of these qualities in its
+natural proportion; heat, by the proper temperature; moisture, by the due
+amount of fluid; and so as to the rest. Diseases which arose from excess
+of heat were to be attacked by cooling remedies; those from excess of
+cold, by heating ones; and so of the other derangements of balance. This
+was truly the principle of contraries contrariis, which ill-informed
+persons have attempted to make out to be the general doctrine of
+medicine, whereas there is no general dogma other than this: disease is
+to be treated by anything that is proved to cure it. The means the
+Galenist employed were chiefly diet and vegetable remedies, with the use
+of the lancet and other depleting agents. He attributed the four
+fundamental qualities to different vegetables, in four different degrees;
+thus chicory was cold in the fourth degree, pepper was hot in the fourth,
+endive was cold and dry in the second, and bitter almonds were hot in the
+first and dry in the second degree. When we say "cool as a cucumber," we
+are talking Galenism. The seeds of that vegetable ranked as one of "the
+four greater cold seeds" of this system.
+
+Galenism prevailed mostly in the south of Europe and France. The readers
+of Moliere will have no difficulty in recalling some of its favorite
+modes of treatment, and the abundant mirth he extracted from them.
+
+These Galenists were what we should call "herb-doctors" to-day. Their
+insignificant infusions lost credit after a time; their absurdly
+complicated mixtures excited contempt, and their nauseous prescriptions
+provoked loathing and disgust. A simpler and bolder practice found
+welcome in Germany, depending chiefly on mineral remedies, mercury,
+antimony, sulphur, arsenic, and the use, sometimes the secret use, of
+opium. Whatever we think of Paracelsus, the chief agent in the
+introduction of these remedies, and whatever limits we may assign to the
+use of these long-trusted mineral drugs, there can be no doubt that the
+chemical school, as it was called, did a great deal towards the
+expurgation of the old, overloaded, and repulsive pharmacopoeia. We
+shall find evidence in the practice of our New-England physicians of the
+first century, that they often employed chemical remedies, and that, by
+the early part of the following century, their chief trust was in the few
+simple, potent drugs of Paracelsus.
+
+We have seen that many of the practitioners of medicine, during the first
+century of New England, were clergymen. This relation between medicine
+and theology has existed from a very early period; from the Egyptian
+priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been maintained in
+one form or another. The partnership was very common among our British
+ancestors. Mr. Ward, the Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, himself a notable
+example of the union of the two characters, writing about 1660, says,
+
+"The Saxons had their blood-letters, but under the Normans physicke,
+begunne in England; 300 years agoe itt was not a distinct profession by
+itself, but practised by men in orders, witness Nicholas de Ternham, the
+chief English physician and Bishop of Durham; Hugh of Evesham, a
+physician and cardinal; Grysant, physician and pope; John Chambers, Dr.
+of Physick, was the first Bishop of Peterborough; Paul Bush, a bachelor
+of divinitie in Oxford, was a man well read in physick as well as
+divinitie, he was the first bishop of Bristol."
+
+"Again in King Richard the Second's time physicians and divines were not
+distinct professions; for one Tydeman, Bishop of Landaph and Worcester,
+was physician to King Richard the Second."
+
+This alliance may have had its share in creating and keeping up the many
+superstitions which have figured so largely in the history of medicine.
+It is curious to see that a medical work left in manuscript by the Rev.
+Cotton Mather and hereafter to be referred to, is running over with
+follies and superstitious fancies; while his contemporary and
+fellow-townsman, William Douglass, relied on the same few simple remedies
+which, through Dr. Edward Holyoke and Dr. James Jackson, have come down
+to our own time, as the most important articles of the materia medica.
+
+Let us now take a general glance at some of the conditions of the early
+settlers; and first, as to the healthfulness of the climate. The
+mortality of the season that followed the landing of the Pilgrims at
+Plymouth has been sufficiently accounted for. After this, the colonists
+seem to have found the new country agreeing very well with their English
+constitutions. Its clear air is the subject of eulogy. Its dainty
+springs of sweet water are praised not only by Higginson and Wood, but
+even the mischievous Morton says, that for its delicate waters "Canaan
+came not near this country." There is a tendency to dilate on these
+simple blessings, which reminds one a little of the Marchioness in
+Dickens's story, with her orange-peel-and-water beverage. Still more
+does one feel the warmth of coloring,--such as we expect from converts to
+a new faith, and settlers who want to entice others over to their
+clearings, when Winslow speaks, in 1621, of "abundance of roses, white,
+red, and damask; single, but very sweet indeed;" a most of all, however,
+when, in the same connection, he says, "Here are grapes white and red,
+and very sweet and strong also." This of our wild grape, a little
+vegetable Indian, which scalps a civilized man's mouth, as his animal
+representative scalps his cranium. But there is something quite charming
+in Winslow's picture of the luxury in which they are living. Lobsters,
+oysters, eels, mussels, fish and fowl, delicious fruit, including the
+grapes aforesaid,--if they only had "kine, horses, and sheep," he makes
+no question but men would live as contented here as in any part of the
+world. We cannot help admiring the way in which they took their trials,
+and made the most of their blessings.
+
+"And how Content they were," says Cotton Mather, "when an Honest Man, as
+I have heard, inviting his Friends to a Dish of Clams, at the Table gave
+Thanks to Heaven, who had given them to suck the abundance of the Seas,
+and of the Treasures Aid in the Sands!"
+
+Strangely enough, as it would seem, except for this buoyant determination
+to make the best of everything, they hardly appear to recognize the
+difference of the climate from that which they had left. After almost
+three years' experience, Winslow says, he can scarce distinguish New
+England from Old England, in respect of heat and cold, frost, snow, rain,
+winds, etc. The winter, he thinks (if there is a difference), is sharper
+and longer; but yet he may be deceived by the want of the comforts he
+enjoyed at home. He cannot conceive any climate to agree better with the
+constitution of the English, not being oppressed with extremity of heats,
+nor nipped by biting cold:
+
+"By which means, blessed be God, we enjoy our health, notwithstanding
+those difficulties we have undergone, in such a measure as would have
+been admired, if we had lived in England with the like means."
+
+Edward Johnson, after mentioning the shifts to which they were put for
+food, says,--
+
+"And yet, methinks, our children are as cheerful, fat, and lusty, with
+feeding upon those mussels, clams, and other fish, as they were in
+England with their fill of bread."
+
+Higginson, himself a dyspeptic, "continually in physic," as he says, and
+accustomed to dress in thick clothing, and to comfort his stomach with
+drink that was "both strong and stale,"--the "jolly good ale and old," I
+suppose, of free and easy Bishop Still's song,--found that he both could
+and did oftentimes drink New England water very well,--which he seems to
+look upon as a remarkable feat. He could go as lightclad as any, too,
+with only a light stuff cassock upon his shirt, and stuff breeches
+without linings. Two of his children were sickly: one,--little misshapen
+Mary,--died on the passage, and, in her father's words, "was the first in
+our ship that was buried in the bowels of the great Atlantic sea;" the
+other, who had been "most lamentably handled" by disease, recovered
+almost entirely "by the very wholesomeness of the air, altering,
+digesting, and drying up the cold and crude humors of the body."
+Wherefore, he thinks it a wise course for all cold complexions to come to
+take physic in New England, and ends with those often quoted words, that
+"a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draught of Old
+England's ale." Mr. Higginson died, however, "of a hectic fever," a
+little more than a year after his arrival.
+
+The medical records which I shall cite show that the colonists were not
+exempt from the complaints of the Old World. Besides the common diseases
+to which their descendants are subject, there were two others, to say
+nothing of the dreaded small-pox, which later medical science has
+disarmed,--little known among us at the present day, but frequent among
+the first settlers. The first of these was the scurvy, already
+mentioned, of which Winthrop speaks in 1630, saying, that it proved fatal
+to those who fell into discontent, and lingered after their former
+conditions in England; the poor homesick creatures in fact, whom we so
+forget in our florid pictures of the early times of the little band in
+the wilderness. Many who were suffering from scurvy got well when the
+Lyon arrived from England, bringing store of juice of lemons. The
+Governor speaks of another case in 1644; and it seems probable that the
+disease was not of rare occurrence.
+
+The other complaint from which they suffered, but which has nearly
+disappeared from among us, was intermittent fever, or fever and ague. I
+investigated the question as to the prevalence of this disease in New
+England, in a dissertation, which was published in a volume with other
+papers, in the year 1838. I can add little to the facts there recorded.
+One which escaped me was, that Joshua Scottow, in "Old Men's Tears,"
+dated 1691, speaks of "shaking agues," as among the trials to which they
+had been subjected. The outline map of New England, accompanying the
+dissertation above referred to, indicates all the places where I had
+evidence that the disease had originated. It was plain enough that it
+used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be
+feared. Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of
+health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its
+sterility. There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain,
+and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory
+of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are
+harmless enough, for the most part, unless the millers dam them, when
+they are apt to retaliate with a whiff from their meadows, that sets the
+whole neighborhood shaking with fever and ague.
+
+The Pilgrims of the Mayflower had with them a good physician, a man of
+standing, a deacon of their church, one whom they loved and trusted, Dr.
+Samuel Fuller. But no medical skill could keep cold and hunger and bad
+food, and, probably enough, desperate homesickness in some of the feebler
+sort, from doing their work. No detailed record remains of what they
+suffered or what was attempted for their relief during the first sad
+winter. The graves of those who died were levelled and sowed with grain
+that the losses of the little band might not be suspected by the savage
+tenants of the wilderness, and their story remains untold.
+
+Of Dr. Fuller's practice, at a later period, we have an account in a
+letter of his to Governor Bradford, dated June, 1630. "I have been to
+Matapan" (now Dorchester), he says, "and let some twenty of those people
+blood." Such wholesale depletion as this, except with avowed homicidal
+intent, is quite unknown in these days; though I once saw the noted
+French surgeon, Lisfranc, in a fine phlebotomizing frenzy, order some ten
+or fifteen patients, taken almost indiscriminately, to be bled in a
+single morning.
+
+Dr. Fuller's two visits to Salem, at the request of Governor Endicott,
+seem to have been very satisfactory to that gentleman. Morton, the wild
+fellow of Merry Mount, gives a rather questionable reason for the
+Governor's being so well pleased with the physician's doings. The names
+under which he mentions the two personages, it will be seen, are not
+intended to be complimentary. "Dr. Noddy did a great cure for Captain
+Littleworth. He cured him of a disease called a wife." William Gager,
+who came out with Winthrop, is spoken of as "a right godly man and
+skilful chyrurgeon, but died of a malignant fever not very long after his
+arrival."
+
+Two practitioners of the ancient town of Newbury are entitled to special
+notice, for different reasons. The first is Dr. John Clark, who is said
+by tradition to have been the first regularly educated physician who
+resided in New England. His portrait, in close-fitting skull-cap, with
+long locks and venerable flowing beard, is familiar to our eyes on the
+wall of our Society's antechamber. His left hand rests upon a skull, his
+right hand holds an instrument which deserves a passing comment. It is a
+trephine, a surgical implement for cutting round pieces out of broken
+skulls, so as to get at the fragments which have been driven in, and lift
+them up. It has a handle like that of a gimlet, with a claw like a
+hammer, to lift with, I suppose, which last contrivance I do not see
+figured in my books. But the point I refer to is this: the old
+instrument, the trepan, had a handle like a wimble, what we call a brace
+or bit-stock. The trephine is not mentioned at all in Peter Lowe's book,
+London, 1634; nor in Wiseman's great work on Surgery, London, 1676; nor
+in the translation of Dionis, published by Jacob Tonson, in 1710. In fact
+it was only brought into more general use by Cheselden and Sharpe so late
+as the beginning of the last century. As John Clark died in 1661, it is
+remarkable to see the last fashion in the way of skull-sawing
+contrivances in his hands,--to say nothing of the claw on the handle, and
+a Hey's saw, so called in England, lying on the table by him, and painted
+there more than a hundred years before Hey was born. This saw is an old
+invention, perhaps as old as Hippocrates, and may be seen figured in the
+"Armamentarium Chirurgicum" of Scultetus, or in the Works of Ambroise
+Pare.
+
+Dr. Clark is said to have received a diploma before he came, for skill in
+lithotomy. He loved horses, as a good many doctors do, and left a good
+property, as they all ought to do. His grave and noble presence, with
+the few facts concerning him, told with more or less traditional
+authority, give us the feeling that the people of Newbury, and afterwards
+of Boston, had a wise and skilful medical adviser and surgeon in Dr. John
+Clark.
+
+The venerable town of Newbury had another physician who was less
+fortunate. The following is a court record of 1652:
+
+"This is to certify whom it may concern, that we the subscribers, being
+called upon to testify against doctor William Snelling for words by him
+uttered, affirm that being in way of merry discourse, a health being
+drank to all friends, he answered,
+
+ "I'll pledge my friends,
+ And for my foes
+ A plague for their heels
+ And,'----
+
+[a similar malediction on the other extremity of their feet.]
+
+"Since when he hath affirmed that he only intended the proverb used in
+the west country, nor do we believe he intended otherwise.
+
+"[Signed] "WILLIAM THOMAS. "THOMAS MILWARD.
+
+"March 12th 1651, All which I acknowledge, and am sorry I did not
+expresse my intent, or that I was so weak as to use so foolish a proverb.
+
+"[Signed] "GULIELMUS SNELLING."
+
+Notwithstanding this confession and apology, the record tells us that
+"William Snelling in his presentment for cursing is fined ten shillings
+and the fees of court."
+
+I will mention one other name among those of the Fathers of the medical
+profession in New England. The "apostle" Eliot says, writing in 1647,
+"We never had but one anatomy in the country, which Mr. Giles Firman, now
+in England, did make and read upon very well."
+
+Giles Firmin, as the name is commonly spelled, practised physic in this
+country for a time. He seems to have found it a poor business; for, in a
+letter to Governor Winthrop, he says, "I am strongly sett upon to studye
+divinitie: my studyes else must be lost, for physick is but a meene
+helpe."
+
+Giles Firmin's Lectures on Anatomy were the first scientific teachings of
+the New World. While the Fathers were enlightened enough to permit such
+instructions, they were severe in dealing with quackery; for, in 1631,
+our court records show that one Nicholas Knopp, or Knapp, was sentenced
+to be fined or whipped "for taking upon him to cure the scurvey by a
+water of noe worth nor value, which he solde att a very deare rate."
+Empty purses or sore backs would be common with us to-day if such a rule
+were enforced.
+
+Besides the few worthies spoken of, and others whose names I have not
+space to record, we must remember that there were many clergymen who took
+charge of the bodies as well as the souls of their patients, among them
+two Presidents of Harvard College, Charles Chauncy and Leonard Hoar,--and
+Thomas Thacher, first minister of the "Old South," author of the earliest
+medical treatises printed in the country,[A Brief Rule to Guide the
+Common People in Small pox and Measles. 1674.] whose epitaph in Latin
+and Greek, said to have been written by Eleazer, an "Indian Youth" and a
+member of the Senior Class of Harvard College, may be found in the
+"Magnalia." I miss this noble savage's name in our triennial catalogue;
+and as there is many a slip between the cup and lip, one is tempted to
+guess that he may have lost his degree by some display of his native
+instinct,--possibly a flourish of the tomahawk or scalping-knife.
+However this may have been, the good man he celebrated was a notable
+instance of the Angelical Conjunction, as the author of the "Magnalia"
+calls it, of the offices of clergyman and medical practitioner.
+
+Michael Wigglesworth, author of the "Day of Doom," attended the sick,
+"not only as a Pastor, but as a Physician too, and this, not only in his
+own town, but also in all those of the vicinity." Mather says of the
+sons of Charles Chauncy, "All of these did, while they had Opportunity,
+Preach the Gospel; and most, if not all of them, like their excellent
+Father before them, had an eminent skill in physick added unto their
+other accomplishments," etc. Roger Williams is said to have saved many
+in a kind of pestilence which swept away many Indians.
+
+To these names must be added, as sustaining a certain relation to the
+healing art, that of the first Governor Winthrop, who is said by John
+Cotton to have been "Help for our Bodies by Physick [and] for our Estates
+by Law," and that of his son, the Governor of Connecticut, who, as we
+shall see, was as much physician as magistrate.
+
+I had submitted to me for examination, in 1862, a manuscript found among
+the Winthrop Papers, marked with the superscription, "For my worthy
+friend Mr. Wintrop," dated in 1643, London, signed Edward Stafford, and
+containing medical directions and prescriptions. It may be remembered by
+some present that I wrote a report on this paper, which was published in
+the "Proceedings" of this Society. Whether the paper was written for
+Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, or for his son, Governor John of
+Connecticut, there is no positive evidence that I have been able to
+obtain. It is very interesting, however, as giving short and simple
+practical directions, such as would be most like to be wanted and most
+useful, in the opinion of a physician in repute of that day.
+
+The diseases prescribed for are plague, small-pox, fevers, king's evil,
+insanity, falling-sickness, and the like; with such injuries as broken
+bones, dislocations, and burning with gunpowder. The remedies are of
+three kinds: simples, such as St. John's wort, Clown's all-heal, elder,
+parsley, maidenhair, mineral drugs, such as lime, saltpetre, Armenian
+bole, crocus metallorum, or sulphuret of antimony; and thaumaturgic or
+mystical, of which the chief is, "My black powder against the plague,
+small-pox; purples, all sorts of feavers; Poyson; either, by Way of
+Prevention or after Infection." This marvellous remedy was made by
+putting live toads into an earthen pot so as to half fill it, and baking
+and burning them "in the open ayre, not in an house,"--concerning which
+latter possibility I suspect Madam Winthrop would have had something to
+say,--until they could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown, and
+then into a black, powder. Blood-letting in some inflammations, fasting
+in the early stage of fevers, and some of those peremptory drugs with
+which most of us have been well acquainted in our time, the infragrant
+memories of which I will not pursue beyond this slight allusion, are
+among his remedies.
+
+The Winthrops, to one of whom Dr. Stafford's directions were addressed,
+were the medical as well as the political advisers of their
+fellow-citizens for three or four successive generations. One of them,
+Governor John of Connecticut, practised so extensively, that, but for his
+more distinguished title in the State, he would have been remembered as
+the Doctor. The fact that he practised in another colony, for the most
+part, makes little difference in the value of the records we have of his
+medical experience, which have fortunately been preserved, and give a
+very fair idea, in all probability, of the way in which patients were
+treated in Massachusetts, when they fell into intelligent and somewhat
+educated hands, a little after the middle of the seventeenth century:
+
+I have before me, while writing, a manuscript collection of the medical
+cases treated by him, and recorded at the time in his own hand, which has
+been intrusted to me by our President, his descendant.
+
+They are generally marked Hartford, and extend from the year 1657 to
+1669. From these, manuscripts, and from the letters printed in the
+Winthrop Papers published by our Society, I have endeavored to obtain
+some idea of the practice of Governor John Winthrop, Junior. The learned
+eye of Mr. Pulsifer would have helped me, no doubt, as it has done in
+other cases; but I have ventured this time to attempt finding my own way
+among the hieroglyphics of these old pages. By careful comparison of
+many prescriptions, and by the aid of Schroder, Salmon, Culpeper, and
+other old compilers, I have deciphered many of his difficult paragraphs
+with their mysterious recipes.
+
+The Governor employed a number of the simples dear to ancient women,
+--elecampane and elder and wormwood and anise and the rest; but he also
+employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always indicates by
+their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave them a mystery to
+the vulgar. I am now prepared to reveal the mystic secrets of the
+Governor's beneficent art, which rendered so many good and great as well
+as so many poor and dependent people his debtors,--at least, in their
+simple belief,--for their health and their lives.
+
+His great remedy, which he gave oftener than any other, was nitre; which
+he ordered in doses of twenty or thirty grains to adults, and of three
+grains to infants. Measles, colics, sciatica, headache, giddiness, and
+many other ailments, all found themselves treated, and I trust bettered,
+by nitre; a pretty safe medicine in moderate doses, and one not likely to
+keep the good Governor awake at night, thinking whether it might not
+kill, if it did not cure. We may say as much for spermaceti, which he
+seems to have considered "the sovereign'st thing on earth" for inward
+bruises, and often prescribes after falls and similar injuries.
+
+One of the next remedies, in point of frequency, which he was in the
+habit of giving, was (probably diaphoretic) antimony; a mild form of that
+very active metal, and which, mild as it was, left his patients very
+commonly with a pretty strong conviction that they had been taking
+something that did not exactly agree with them. Now and then he gave a
+little iron or sulphur or calomel, but very rarely; occasionally, a good,
+honest dose of rhubarb or jalap; a taste of stinging horseradish, oftener
+of warming guiacum; sometimes an anodyne, in the shape of
+mithridate,--the famous old farrago, which owed its virtue to poppy
+juice; [This is the remedy which a Boston divine tried to simplify. See
+Electuarium Novum Alexipharmacum, by Rev. Thomas Harward, lecturer at
+the Royal Chappell. Boston, 1732. This tract is in our Society's
+library.] very often, a harmless powder of coral; less frequently, an
+inert prescription of pleasing amber; and (let me say it softly within
+possible hearing of his honored descendant), twice or oftener,--let us
+hope as a last resort,--an electuary of millipedes,--sowbugs, if we must
+give them their homely English name. One or two other prescriptions, of
+the many unmentionable ones which disgraced the pharmacopoeia of the
+seventeenth century, are to be found, but only in very rare instances, in
+the faded characters of the manuscript.
+
+The excellent Governor's accounts of diseases are so brief, that we get
+only a very general notion of the complaints for which he prescribed.
+Measles and their consequences are at first more prominent than any other
+one affection, but the common infirmities of both sexes and of all ages
+seem to have come under his healing hand. Fever and ague appears to have
+been of frequent occurrence.
+
+His published correspondence shows that many noted people were in
+communication with him as his patients. Roger Williams wants a little of
+his medicine for Mrs. Weekes's daughter; worshipful John Haynes is in
+receipt of his powders; troublesome Captain Underhill wants "a little
+white vitterall" for his wife, and something to cure his wife's friend's
+neuralgia, (I think his wife's friend's husband had a little rather have
+had it sent by the hands of Mrs. Underhill, than by those of the gallant
+and discursive captain); and pious John Davenport says, his wife "tooke
+but one halfe of one of the papers" (which probably contained the
+medicine he called rubila), "but could not beare the taste of it, and is
+discouraged from taking any more;" and honored William Leete asks for
+more powders for his "poore little daughter Graciana," though he found it
+"hard to make her take it," delicate, and of course sensitive, child as
+she was, languishing and dying before her time, in spite of all the
+bitter things she swallowed,--God help all little children in the hands
+of dosing doctors and howling dervishes! Restless Samuel Gorton, now
+tamed by the burden of fourscore and two years, writes so touching an
+account of his infirmities, and expresses such overflowing gratitude for
+the relief he has obtained from the Governor's prescriptions, wondering
+how "a thing so little in quantity, so little in sent, so little in
+taste, and so little to sence in operation, should beget and bring forth
+such efects," that we repent our hasty exclamation, and bless the memory
+of the good Governor, who gave relief to the worn-out frame of our
+long-departed brother, the sturdy old heretic of Rhode Island.
+
+What was that medicine which so frequently occurs in the printed letters
+under the name of "rubila"? It is evidently a secret remedy, and, so far
+as I know, has not yet been made out. I had almost given it up in
+despair, when I found what appears to be a key to the mystery. In the
+vast multitude of prescriptions contained in the manuscripts, most of
+them written in symbols, I find one which I thus interpret:
+
+"Four grains of (diaphoretic) antimony, with twenty grains of nitre, with
+a little salt of tin, making rubila." Perhaps something was added to
+redden the powder, as he constantly speaks of "rubifying" or "viridating"
+his prescriptions; a very common practice of prescribers, when their
+powders look a little too much like plain salt or sugar.
+
+Waitstill Winthrop, the Governor's son, "was a skilful physician," says
+Mr. Sewall, in his funeral sermon; "and generously gave, not only his
+advice, but also his Medicines, for the healing of the Sick, which, by
+the Blessing of God, were made successful for the recovery of many."
+"His son John, a member of the Royal Society, speaks of himself as 'Dr.
+Winthrop,' and mentions one of his own prescriptions in a letter to
+Cotton Mather." Our President tells me that there was an heirloom of the
+ancient skill in his family, within his own remembrance, in the form of a
+certain precious eye-water, to which the late President John Quincy Adams
+ascribed rare virtue, and which he used to obtain from the possessor of
+the ancient recipe.
+
+These inherited prescriptions are often treasured in families, I do not
+doubt, for many generations. When I was yet of trivial age, and
+suffering occasionally, as many children do, from what one of my
+Cambridgeport schoolmates used to call the "ager,"--meaning thereby
+toothache or face-ache,--I used to get relief from a certain plaster
+which never went by any other name in the family than "Dr. Oliver."
+
+Dr. James Oliver was my great-great-grandfather, graduated in 1680, and
+died in 1703. This was, no doubt, one of his nostrums; for nostrum, as
+is well known, means nothing more than our own or my own particular
+medicine, or other possession or secret, and physicians in old times used
+to keep their choice recipes to themselves a good deal, as we have had
+occasion to see.
+
+Some years ago I found among my old books a small manuscript marked
+"James Oliver. This Book Begun Aug. 12, 1685." It is a rough sort of
+account-book, containing among other things prescriptions for patients,
+and charges for the same, with counter-charges for the purchase of
+medicines and other matters. Dr. Oliver practised in Cambridge, where
+may be seen his tomb with inscriptions, and with sculptured figures that
+look more like Diana of the Ephesians, as given in Calmet's Dictionary,
+than like any angels admitted into good society here or elsewhere.
+
+I do not find any particular record of what his patients suffered from,
+but I have carefully copied out the remedies he mentions, and find that
+they form a very respectable catalogue. Besides the usual simples,
+elder, parsley, fennel, saffron, snake-root, wormwood, I find the Elixir
+Proprietatis, with other elixire and cordials, as if he rather fancied
+warming medicines; but he called in the aid of some of the more energetic
+remedies, including iron, and probably mercury, as he bought two pounds
+of it at one time.
+
+The most interesting item is his bill against the estate of Samuel Pason
+of Roxbury, for services during his last illness. He attended this
+gentleman,--for such he must have been, by the amount of physic which he
+took, and which his heirs paid for,--from June 4th, 1696, to September 3d
+of the same year, three months. I observe he charges for visits as well
+as for medicines, which is not the case in most of his bills. He opens
+the attack with a carminative appeal to the visceral conscience, and
+follows it up with good hard-hitting remedies for dropsy,--as I suppose
+the disease would have been called,--and finishes off with a rallying
+dose of hartshorn and iron.
+
+It is a source of honest pride to his descendant that his bill, which was
+honestly paid, as it seems to have been honorably earned, amounted to the
+handsome total of seven pounds and two shillings. Let me add that he
+repeatedly prescribes plaster, one of which was very probably the "Dr.
+Oliver" that soothed my infant griefs, and for which I blush to say that
+my venerated ancestor received from Goodman Hancock the painfully
+exiguous sum of no pounds, no shillings, and sixpence.
+
+I have illustrated the practice of the first century, from the two
+manuscripts I have examined, as giving an impartial idea of its every-day
+methods. The Governor, Johannes Secundus, it is fair to remember, was an
+amateur practitioner, while my ancestor was a professed physician.
+Comparing their modes of treatment with the many scientific follies still
+prevailing in the Old World, and still more with the extraordinary
+theological superstitions of the community in which they lived, we shall
+find reason, I think, to consider the art of healing as in a
+comparatively creditable state during the first century of New England.
+
+In addition to the evidence as to methods of treatment furnished by the
+manuscripts I have cited, I subjoin the following document, to which my
+attention was called by Dr. Shurtleff, our present Mayor. This is a
+letter of which the original is to be found in vol. lxix. page 10 of the
+"Archives" preserved at the State House in Boston. It will be seen that
+what the surgeon wanted consisted chiefly of opiates, stimulants,
+cathartics, plasters, and materials for bandages. The complex and varied
+formulae have given place to simpler and often more effective forms of
+the same remedies; but the list and the manner in which it is made out
+are proofs of the good sense and schooling of the surgeon, who, it may be
+noted, was in such haste that he neglected all his stops. He might well
+be in a hurry, as on the very day upon which he wrote, a great body of
+Indians--supposed to be six or seven hundred--appeared before Hatfield;
+and twenty-five resolute young men of Hadley, from which town he wrote,
+crossed the river and drove them away.
+
+HADLY May 30: 76
+
+Mr RAWSON Sr
+
+What we have recd by Tho: Houey the past month is not the cheifest of our
+wants as you have love for poor wounded I pray let us not want for these
+following medicines if you have not a speedy conveyance of them I pray
+send on purpose they are those things mentioned in my former letter but
+to prevent future mistakes I have wrote them att large wee have great
+want with the greatest halt and speed let us be supplyed. Sr Yr Sert WILL
+LOCHS
+
+(Endorsed)
+
+Mr. Lockes Letter Recd from the Governor 13 Jane & acquainted ye Council
+with it but could not obtaine any thing to be sent in answer thereto.
+13 June 1676
+
+I have given some idea of the chief remedies used by our earlier
+physicians, which were both Galenic and chemical; that is, vegetable and
+mineral. They, of course, employed the usual perturbing medicines which
+Montaigne says are the chief reliance of their craft. There were,
+doubtless, individual practitioners who employed special remedies with
+exceptional boldness and perhaps success. Mr. Eliot is spoken of, in a
+letter of William Leete to Winthrop, Junior, as being under Mr.
+Greenland's mercurial administrations. The latter was probably enough
+one of these specialists.
+
+There is another class of remedies which appears to have been employed
+occasionally, but, on the whole, is so little prominent as to imply a
+good deal of common sense among the medical practitioners, as compared
+with the superstitions prevailing around them. I have said that I have
+caught the good Governor, now and then, prescribing the electuary of
+millipedes; but he is entirely excused by the almost incredible fact that
+they were retained in the materia medica so late as when Rees's
+Cyclopaedia was published, and we there find the directions formerly
+given by the College of Edinburgh for their preparation. Once or twice
+we have found him admitting still more objectionable articles into his
+materia medica; in doing which, I am sorry to say that he could plead
+grave and learned authority. But these instances are very rare
+exceptions in a medical practice of many years, which is, on the whole,
+very respectable, considering the time and circumstances.
+
+Some remedies of questionable though not odious character appear
+occasionally to have been employed by the early practitioners, but they
+were such as still had the support of the medical profession. Governor
+John Winthrop, the first, sends for East Indian bezoar, with other
+commodities he is writing for. Governor Endicott sends him one he had of
+Mr. Humfrey. I hope it was genuine, for they cheated infamously in the
+matter of this concretion, which ought to come out of an animal's
+stomach, but the real history of which resembles what is sometimes told
+of modern sausages.
+
+There is a famous law-case of James the First's time, in which a
+goldsmith sold a hundred pounds' worth of what he called bezoar, which
+was proved to be false, and the purchaser got a verdict against him.
+Governor Endicott also sends Winthrop a unicorn's horn, which was the
+property of a certain Mrs. Beggarly, who, in spite of her name, seems to
+have been rich in medical knowledge and possessions. The famous Thomas
+Bartholinus wrote a treatise on the virtues of this fabulous-sounding
+remedy, which was published in 1641, and republished in 1678.
+
+The "antimonial cup," a drinking vessel made of that metal, which, like
+our quassia-wood cups, might be filled and emptied in saecula saeculorum
+without exhausting its virtues, is mentioned by Matthew Cradock, in a
+letter to the elder Winthrop, but in a doubtful way, as it was thought,
+he says, to have shortened the days of Sir Nathaniel Riche; and Winthrop
+himself, as I think, refers to its use, calling it simply "the cup." An
+antimonial cup is included in the inventory of Samuel Seabury, who died
+1680, and is valued at five shillings. There is a treatise entitled "The
+Universall Remedy, or the Vertues of the Antimoniall Cup, By John Evans,
+Minister and Preacher of God's Word, London, 1634," in our own Society's
+library.
+
+One other special remedy deserves notice, because of native growth. I do
+not know when Culver's root, Leptandra Virginica of our National
+Pharmacopoeia, became noted, but Cotton Mather, writing in 1716 to John
+Winthrop of New London, speaks of it as famous for the cure of
+consumptions, and wishes to get some of it, through his mediation, for
+Katharine, his eldest daughter. He gets it, and gives it to the "poor
+damsel," who is languishing, as he says, and who dies the next
+month,--all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and
+violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that
+spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing
+without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at length
+the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we shall see
+by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and infirmities for
+its wise purposes.
+
+Externally, I find the practitioners on whom I have chiefly relied used
+the plasters of Paracelsus, of melilot, diachylon, and probably
+diaphoenicon, all well known to the old pharmacopoeias, and some of them
+to the modern ones,--to say nothing of "my yellow salve," of Governor
+John, the second, for the composition of which we must apply to his
+respected descendant.
+
+The authors I find quoted are Barbette's Surgery, Camerarius on Gout, and
+Wecherus, of all whom notices may be found in the pages of Haller and
+Vanderlinden; also, Reed's Surgery, and Nicholas Culpeper's Practice of
+Physic and Anatomy, the last as belonging to Samuel Seabury, chirurgeon,
+before mentioned. Nicholas Culpeper was a shrewd charlatan, and as
+impudent a varlet as ever prescribed for a colic; but knew very well what
+he was about, and badgers the College with great vigor. A copy of
+Spigelius's famous Anatomy, in the Boston Athenaeum, has the names of
+Increase and Samuel Mather written in it, and was doubtless early
+overhauled by the youthful Cotton, who refers to the great anatomist's
+singular death, among his curious stories in the "Magnalia," and quotes
+him among nearly a hundred authors whom he cites in his manuscript "The
+Angel of Bethesda." Dr. John Clark's "books and instruments, with
+several chirurgery materials in the closet," a were valued in his
+inventory at sixty pounds; Dr. Matthew Fuller, who died in 1678, left a
+library valued at ten pounds; and a surgeon's chest and drugs valued at
+sixteen pounds.'
+
+Here we leave the first century and all attempts at any further detailed
+accounts of medicine and its practitioners. It is necessary to show in a
+brief glance what had been going on in Europe during the latter part of
+that century, the first quarter of which had been made illustrious in the
+history of medical science by the discovery of the circulation.
+
+Charles Barbeyrac, a Protestant in his religion, was a practitioner and
+teacher of medicine at Montpellier. His creed was in the way of his
+obtaining office; but the young men followed his instructions with
+enthusiasm. Religious and scientific freedom breed in and in, until it
+becomes hard to tell the family of one from that of the other. Barbeyrac
+threw overboard the old complex medical farragos of the pharmacopoeias,
+as his church had disburdened itself of the popish ceremonies.
+
+Among the students who followed his instructions were two Englishmen: one
+of them, John Locke, afterwards author of an "Essay on the Human
+Understanding," three years younger than his teacher; the other, Thomas
+Sydenham, five years older. Both returned to England. Locke, whose
+medical knowledge is borne witness to by Sydenham, had the good fortune
+to form a correct opinion on a disease from which the Earl of Shaftesbury
+was suffering, which led to an operation that saved his life. Less
+felicitous was his experience with a certain ancilla culinaria
+virgo,--which I am afraid would in those days have been translated
+kitchen-wench, instead of lady of the culinary department,--who turned
+him off after she had got tired of him, and called in another
+practitioner. [Locke and Sydenham, p. 124. By John Brown, M. D.
+Edinburgh, 1866.] This helped, perhaps, to spoil a promising doctor, and
+make an immortal metaphysician. At any rate, Locke laid down the
+professional wig and cane, and took to other studies.
+
+The name of Thomas Sydenham is as distinguished in the history of
+medicine as that of John Locke in philosophy. As Barbeyrac was found in
+opposition to the established religion, as Locke took the rational side
+against orthodox Bishop Stillingfleet, so Sydenham went with Parliament
+against Charles, and was never admitted a Fellow by the College of
+Physicians, which, after he was dead, placed his bust in their hall by
+the side of that of Harvey.
+
+What Sydenham did for medicine was briefly this he studied the course of
+diseases carefully, and especially as affected by the particular season;
+to patients with fever he gave air and cooling drinks, instead of
+smothering and heating them, with the idea of sweating out their disease;
+he ordered horseback exercise to consumptives; he, like his teacher, used
+few and comparatively simple remedies; he did not give any drug at all,
+if he thought none was needed, but let well enough alone. He was a
+sensible man, in short, who applied his common sense to diseases which he
+had studied with the best light of science that he could obtain.
+
+The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or less
+felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the eighteenth
+century, as his great work was not published until 1675, and then in
+Latin. I very strongly suspect that there was not so much to reform in
+the simple practice of the physicians of the new community, as there was
+in that of the learned big-wigs of the "College," who valued their
+remedies too much in proportion to their complexity, and the extravagant
+and fantastic ingredients which went to their making.
+
+During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the
+medical profession gave great names to our history. But John Brooks
+belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and
+mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited--subject.
+There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin
+Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the
+early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston,
+in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their
+patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making
+speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his
+corporeal republic.
+
+One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth
+century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
+small-pox. Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the
+course of a hundred years. Prayers had been asked in the churches for
+more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times. About a
+thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and, as we may
+infer, chiefly from this cause.
+
+In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again appeared
+as an epidemic. In that year it was that Cotton Mather, browsing, as was
+his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within reach of his
+ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of inoculation as practised
+in Turkey, contained in the "Philosophical Transactions." He spoke of it
+to several physicians, who paid little heed to his story; for they knew
+his medical whims, and had probably been bored, as we say now-a-days,
+many of them, with listening to his "Angel of Bethesda," and satiated
+with his speculations on the Nishmath Chajim.
+
+The Reverend Mather,--I use a mode of expression he often employed when
+speaking of his honored brethren,--the Reverend Mather was right this
+time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong. One only
+of their number disputes his claim to giving the first impulse to the
+practice, in Boston. This is what that person says: "The Small-Pox
+spread in Boston, New England, A.1721, and the Reverend Dr. Cotton
+Mather, having had the use of these Communications from Dr. William
+Douglass (that is, the writer of these words); surreptitiously, without
+the knowledge of his Informer, that he might have the honour of a New
+fangled notion, sets an Undaunted Operator to work, and in this Country
+about 290 were inoculated."
+
+All this has not deprived Cotton Mather of the credit of suggesting, and
+a bold and intelligent physician of the honor of carrying out, the new
+practice. On the twenty-seventh day of June, 1721, Zabdiel Boylston of
+Boston inoculated his only son for smallpox,--the first person ever
+submitted to the operation in the New World. The story of the fierce
+resistance to the introduction of the practice; of how Boylston was
+mobbed, and Mather had a hand-grenade thrown in at his window; of how
+William Douglass, the Scotchman, "always positive, and sometimes
+accurate," as was neatly said of him, at once depreciated the practice
+and tried to get the credit of suggesting it, and how Lawrence Dalhonde,
+the Frenchman, testified to its destructive consequences; of how Edmund
+Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to
+alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would
+leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while
+in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our
+New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,--all this
+has been told so well and so often that I spare you its details. Set
+this good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John
+Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the application
+of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother into the water,
+if she has a mole on her arm;--if she swims, she is a witch and must be
+hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on her soul!
+
+Thus did America receive this great discovery, destined to save thousands
+of lives, via Boston, from the hands of one of our own Massachusetts
+physicians.
+
+The year 1735 was rendered sadly memorable by the epidemic of the
+terrible disease known as "throat distemper," and regarded by many as the
+same as our "diphtheria." Dr. Holyoke thinks the more general use of
+mercurials in inflammatory complaints dates from the time of their
+employment in this disease, in which they were thought to have proved
+specially useful.
+
+At some time in the course of this century medical practice had settled
+down on four remedies as its chief reliance. I must repeat an incident
+which I have related in another of these Essays. When Dr. Holyoke,
+nearly seventy years ago, received young Mr. James Jackson as his
+student, he showed him the formidable array of bottles, jars, and drawers
+around his office, and then named the four remedies referred to as being
+of more importance than all the rest put together. These were "Mercury,
+Antimony, Opium, and Peruvian Bark." I doubt if either of them
+remembered that, nearly seventy years before, in 1730, Dr. William
+Douglass, the disputatious Scotchman, mentioned those same four remedies,
+in the dedication of his quarrelsome essay on inoculation, as the most
+important ones in the hands of the physicians of his time.
+
+In the "Proceedings" of this Society for the year 1863 is a very pleasant
+paper by the late Dr. Ephraim Eliot, giving an account of the leading
+physicians of Boston during the last quarter of the last century. The
+names of Lloyd, Gardiner, Welsh, Rand, Bulfinch, Danforth, John Warren,
+Jeffries, are all famous in local history, and are commemorated in our
+medical biographies. One of them, at least, appears to have been more
+widely known, not only as one of the first aerial voyagers, but as an
+explorer in the almost equally hazardous realm of medical theory. Dr.
+John Jeffries, the first of that name, is considered by Broussais as a
+leader of medical opinion in America, and so referred to in his famous
+"Examen des Doctrines Medicales."
+
+Two great movements took place in this eighteenth century, the effect of
+which has been chiefly felt in our own time; namely, the establishment of
+the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the founding of the Medical School
+of Harvard University.
+
+The third century of our medical history began with the introduction of
+the second great medical discovery of modern times,--of all time up to
+that date, I may say,--once more via Boston, if we count the University
+village as its suburb, and once more by one of our Massachusetts
+physicians. In the month of July, 1800, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of
+Cambridge submitted four of his own children to the new process of
+vaccination,--the first persons vaccinated, as Dr. Zabdiel Boylston's son
+had been the first person inoculated in the New World.
+
+A little before the first half of this century was completed, in the
+autumn of 1846, the great discovery went forth from the Massachusetts
+General Hospital, which repaid the debt of America to the science of the
+Old World, and gave immortality to the place of its origin in the memory
+and the heart of mankind. The production of temporary insensibility at
+will--tuto, cito, jucunde, safely, quickly, pleasantly--is one of those
+triumphs over the infirmities of our mortal condition which change the
+aspect of life ever afterwards. Rhetoric can add nothing to its glory;
+gratitude, and the pride permitted to human weakness, that our Bethlehem
+should have been chosen as the birthplace of this new embodiment of the
+divine mercy, are all we can yet find room for.
+
+The present century has seen the establishment of all those great
+charitable institutions for the cure of diseases of the body and of the
+mind, which our State and our city have a right to consider as among the
+chief ornaments of their civilization.
+
+The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of
+medical literature. The worthies who took care of our grandfathers and
+great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with disease)
+and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own remedies); but
+their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare intervals. Honored in
+their day, not unremembered by a few solitary students of the past, their
+memories are going sweetly to sleep in the arms of the patient old
+dry-nurse, whose "blackdrop" is the never-failing anodyne of the restless
+generations of men. Except the lively controversy on inoculation, and
+floating papers in journals, we have not much of value for that long
+period, in the shape of medical records.
+
+But while the trouble with the last century is to find authors to
+mention, the trouble of this would be to name all that we find. Of
+these, a very few claim unquestioned preeminence.
+
+Nathan Smith, born in Rehoboth, Mass., a graduate of the Medical School
+of our University, did a great work for the advancement of medicine and
+surgery in New England, by his labors as teacher and author, greater, it
+is claimed by some, than was ever done by any other man. The two
+Warrens, of our time, each left a large and permanent record of a most
+extended surgical practice. James Jackson not only educated a whole
+generation by his lessons of wisdom, but bequeathed some of the most
+valuable results of his experience to those who came after him, in a
+series of letters singularly pleasant and kindly as well as instructive.
+John Ware, keen and cautious, earnest and deliberate, wrote the two
+remarkable essays which have identified his name, for all time, with two
+important diseases, on which he has shed new light by his original
+observations.
+
+I must do violence to the modesty of the living by referring to the many
+important contributions to medical science by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, and
+especially to his discourse on "Self-limited Diseases," an address which
+can be read in a single hour, but the influence of which will be felt for
+a century.
+
+Nor would the profession forgive me if I forgot to mention the admirable
+museum of pathological anatomy, created almost entirely by the hands of
+Dr. John Barnard Swett Jackson, and illustrated by his own printed
+descriptive catalogue, justly spoken of by a distinguished professor in
+the University of Pennsylvania as the most important contribution which
+had ever been made in this country to the branch to which it relates.
+
+When we look at the literature of mental disease, as seen in hospital
+reports and special treatises, we can mention the names of Wyman,
+Woodward, Brigham, Bell, and Ray, all either natives of Massachusetts or
+placed at the head of her institutions for the treatment of the insane.
+
+We have a right to claim also one who is known all over the civilized
+world as a philanthropist, to us as a townsman and a graduate of our own
+Medical School, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the guide and benefactor of a
+great multitude who were born to a world of inward or of outward
+darkness.
+
+I cannot pass over in silence the part taken by our own physicians in
+those sanitary movements which are assuming every year greater
+importance. Two diseases especially have attracted attention, above all
+others, with reference to their causes and prevention; cholera, the
+"black death" of the nineteenth century, and consumption, the white
+plague of the North, both of which have been faithfully studied and
+reported on by physicians of our own State and city. The cultivation of
+medical and surgical specialties, which is fast becoming prevalent, is
+beginning to show its effects in the literature of the profession, which
+is every year growing richer in original observations and investigations.
+
+To these benefactors who have labored for us in their peaceful vocation,
+we must add the noble army of surgeons, who went with the soldiers who
+fought the battles of their country, sharing many of their dangers, not
+rarely falling victims to fatigue, disease, or the deadly volleys to
+which they often exposed themselves in the discharge of their duties.
+
+The pleasant biographies of the venerable Dr. Thacher, and the worthy and
+kind-hearted gleaner, Dr. Stephen W. Williams, who came after him, are
+filled with the names of men who served their generation well, and rest
+from their labors, followed by the blessing of those for whom they
+endured the toils and fatigues inseparable from their calling. The
+hardworking, intelligent country physician more especially deserves the
+gratitude of his own generation, for he rarely leaves any permanent
+record in the literature of his profession. Books are hard to obtain;
+hospitals, which are always centres of intelligence, are remote;
+thoroughly educated and superior men are separated by wide intervals; and
+long rides, though favorable to reflection, take up much of the time
+which might otherwise be given to the labors of the study. So it is that
+men of ability and vast experience, like the late Dr. Twitchell, for
+instance, make a great and deserved reputation, become the oracles of
+large districts, and yet leave nothing, or next to nothing, by which
+their names shall be preserved from blank oblivion.
+
+One or two other facts deserve mention, as showing the readiness of our
+medical community to receive and adopt any important idea or discovery.
+The new science of Histology, as it is now called, was first brought
+fully before the profession of this country by the translation of
+Bichat's great work, "Anatomie Generale," by the late Dr. George Hayward.
+
+The first work printed in this country on Auscultation,--that wonderful
+art of discovering disease, which, as it were, puts a window in the
+breast, through which the vital organs can be seen, to all intents and
+purposes, was the manual published anonymously by "A Member of the
+Massachusetts Medical Society."
+
+We are now in some slight measure prepared to weigh the record of the
+medical profession in Massachusetts, and pass our judgment upon it. But
+in-order to do justice to the first generation of practitioners, we must
+compare what we know of their treatment of disease with the state of the
+art in England, and the superstitions which they saw all around them in
+other departments of knowledge or belief.
+
+English medical literature must have been at a pretty low ebb when
+Sydenham recommended Don Quixote to Sir Richard Blackmore for
+professional reading. The College Pharmacopoeia was loaded with the most
+absurd compound mixtures, one of the most complex of which (the same
+which the Reverend Mr. Harward, "Lecturer at the Royal Chappel in
+Boston," tried to simplify), was not dropped until the year 1801. Sir
+Kenelm Digby was playing his fantastic tricks with the Sympathetic
+powder, and teaching Governor Winthrop, the second, how to cure fever and
+ague, which some may like to know. "Pare the patient's nails; put the
+parings in a little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel,
+and put him in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will
+recover."
+
+Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the efficacy of
+the royal touch in scrofula. The founder of the Ashmolean Museum at
+Oxford, consorting with alchemists and astrologers, was treasuring the
+manuscripts of the late pious Dr. Richard Napier, in which certain
+letters (Rx Ris) were understood to mean Responsum Raphaelis,--the answer
+of the angel Raphael to the good man's medical questions. The
+illustrious Robert Boyle was making his collection of choice and safe
+remedies, including the sole of an old shoe, the thigh bone of a hanged
+man, and things far worse than these, as articles of his materia medica.
+Dr. Stafford, whose paper of directions to his "friend, Mr. Wintrop," I
+cited, was probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his
+sovereign remedy.
+
+See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most
+intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen. Jonathan
+Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest letters to John
+Winthrop about alchemy,--"mad for making gold as the Lynn rock-borers are
+for finding it."
+
+Remember the theology and the diabology of the time. Mr. Cotton's
+Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its nominal
+head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous opposition in
+the lower house; the leader of which may have been equalled, but cannot
+have been surpassed by any of our earth-born politicians. The demons
+were prowling round the houses every night, as the foxes were sneaking
+about the hen-roosts. The men of Gloucester fired whole flasks of
+gunpowder at devils disguised as Indians and Frenchmen.
+
+How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of
+nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about
+earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father
+of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge people
+remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent
+Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing their phenomena as if
+they belonged to the province of natural science:
+
+Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the noble men who founded our
+State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions, but to
+show against what influences the common sense of the medical profession
+had to assert itself.
+
+Think, then, of the blazing stars, that shook their horrid hair in the
+sky; the phantom ship, that brought its message direct from the other
+world; the story of the mouse and the snake at Watertown; of the mice
+and the prayer-book; of the snake in church; of the calf with two heads;
+and of the cabbage in the perfect form of a cutlash,--all which innocent
+occurrences were accepted or feared as alarming portents.
+
+We can smile at these: but we cannot smile at the account of unhappy Mary
+Dyer's malformed offspring; or of Mrs. Hutchinson's domestic misfortune
+of similar character, in the story of which the physician, Dr. John Clark
+of Rhode Island, alone appears to advantage; or as we read the Rev.
+Samuel Willard's fifteen alarming pages about an unfortunate young woman
+suffering with hysteria. Or go a little deeper into tragedy, and see
+poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at
+last, taking her own little daughter's life; put on trial, and standing
+mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying
+to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.
+
+The cooper's crazy wife--crazy in the belief that she has committed the
+unpardonable sin--tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and
+the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet
+asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself.
+Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,"
+full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands; a
+story in which the awful image of the man in the cage might well turn the
+nursery where it is read into a madhouse?
+
+The miserable delusion of witchcraft illustrates, in a still more
+impressive way, the false ideas which governed the supposed relation of
+men with the spiritual world. I have no doubt many physicians shared in
+these superstitions. Mr. Upham says they--that is, some of them--were in
+the habit of attributing their want of success to the fact, that an "evil
+hand" was on their patient. The temptation was strong, no doubt, when
+magistrates and ministers and all that followed their lead were contented
+with such an explanation. But how was it in Salem, according to Mr.
+Upham's own statement? Dr. John Swinnerton was, he says, for many years
+the principal physician of Salem. And he says, also, "The Swinnerton
+family were all along opposed to Mr. Parris, and kept remarkably clear
+from the witchcraft delusion." Dr. John Swinnerton--the same, by the
+way, whose memory is illuminated by a ray from the genius of
+Hawthorne--died the very year before the great witchcraft explosion took
+place. But who can doubt that it was from him that the family had
+learned to despise and to resist the base superstition; or that Bridget
+Bishop, whose house he rented, as Mr. Upham tells me, the first person
+hanged in the time of the delusion, would have found an efficient
+protector in her tenant, had he been living, to head the opposition of
+his family to the misguided clergymen and magistrates?
+
+I cannot doubt that our early physicians brought with them many Old-World
+medical superstitions, and I have no question that they were more or less
+involved in the prevailing errors of the community in which they lived.
+But, on the whole, their record is a clean one, so far as we can get at
+it; and where it is questionable we must remember that there must have
+been many little-educated persons among them; and that all must have
+felt, to some extent, the influence of those sincere and devoted but
+unsafe men, the physic-practising clergymen, who often used spiritual
+means as a substitute for temporal ones, who looked upon a hysteric
+patient as possessed by the devil, and treated a fractured skull by
+prayers and plasters, following the advice of a ruling elder in
+opposition to the "unanimous opinion of seven surgeons."
+
+To what results the union of the two professions was liable to lead, may
+be seen by the example of a learned and famous person, who has left on
+record the product of his labors in the double capacity of clergyman and
+physician.
+
+I have had the privilege of examining a manuscript of Cotton Mather's
+relating to medicine, by the kindness of the librarian of the American
+Antiquarian Society, to which society it belongs. A brief notice of this
+curious document may prove not uninteresting.
+
+It is entitled "The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay upon the Common Maladies
+of Mankind, offering, first, the sentiments of Piety," etc., etc., and "a
+collection of plain but potent and Approved REMEDIES for the Maladies."
+There are sixty-six "Capsula's," as he calls them, or chapters, in his
+table of contents; of which, five--from the fifteenth to the nineteenth,
+inclusive--are missing. This is a most unfortunate loss, as the
+eighteenth capsula treated of agues, and we could have learned from it
+something of their degree of frequency in this part of New England.
+There is no date to the manuscript; which, however, refers to a case
+observed Nov. 14, 1724.
+
+The divine takes precedence of the physician in this extraordinary
+production. He begins by preaching a sermon at his unfortunate patient.
+Having thrown him into a cold sweat by his spiritual sudorific, he
+attacks him with his material remedies, which are often quite as
+unpalatable. The simple and cleanly practice of Sydenham, with whose
+works he was acquainted, seems to have been thrown away upon him.
+Everything he could find mentioned in the seventy or eighty authors he
+cites, all that the old women of both sexes had ever told him of, gets
+into his text, or squeezes itself into his margin.
+
+Evolving disease out of sin, he hates it, one would say, as he hates its
+cause, and would drive it out of the body with all noisome appliances.
+"Sickness is in Fact Flagellum Dei pro peccatis mundi." So saying, he
+encourages the young mother whose babe is wasting away upon her breast
+with these reflections:
+
+"Think; oh the grievous Effects of Sin! This wretched Infant has not
+arrived unto years of sense enough, to sin after the similitude of the
+transgression committed by Adam. Nevertheless the Transgression of Adam,
+who had all mankind Foederally, yea, Naturally, in him, has involved this
+Infant in the guilt of it. And the poison of the old serpent, which
+infected Adam when he fell into his Transgression, by hearkening to the
+Tempter, has corrupted all mankind, and is a seed unto such diseases as
+this Infant is now laboring under. Lord, what are we, and what are our
+children, but a Generation of Vipers?"
+
+Many of his remedies are at least harmless, but his pedantry and utter
+want of judgment betray themselves everywhere. He piles his
+prescriptions one upon another, without the least discrimination. He is
+run away with by all sorts of fancies and superstitions. He prescribes
+euphrasia, eye-bright, for disease of the eyes; appealing confidently to
+the strange old doctrine of signatures, which inferred its use from the
+resemblance of its flower to the organ of vision. For the scattering of
+wens, the efficacy of a Dead Hand has been out of measure wonderful.
+But when he once comes to the odious class of remedies, he revels in them
+like a scarabeus. This allusion will bring us quite near enough to the
+inconceivable abominations with which he proposed to outrage the sinful
+stomachs of the unhappy confederates and accomplices of Adam.
+
+It is well that the treatise was never printed, yet there are passages in
+it worth preserving. He speaks of some remedies which have since become
+more universally known:
+
+"Among the plants of our soyl, Sir William Temple singles out Five [Six]
+as being of the greatest virtue and most friendly to health: and his
+favorite plants, Sage, Rue, Saffron, Alehoof, Garlick, and Elder."
+
+"But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some competitors. The
+QUINQUINA--How celebrated: Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!"
+
+Of Ipecacuanha, he says,--"This is now in its reign; the most
+fashionable vomit."
+
+"I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused."
+
+He quotes "Mr. Lock" as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence from
+flesh as often useful in children's diseases.
+
+One of his "Capsula's" is devoted to the animalcular origin of diseases,
+at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this supposed
+source of our distempers:
+
+"Mercury we know thee: But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we
+employ thee to kill them that kill us.
+
+"And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making way
+for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph--there is nothing like
+Mercurial Deobstruents."
+
+From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the
+subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.
+
+His poetical turn shows itself here and there:
+
+"O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a Cough,
+what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...
+
+If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the
+millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing virtues of
+that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take "half a pound,
+putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with saffron and other
+drugs, and take two ounces twice a day.
+
+The "Capsula" entitled "Nishmath Chajim" was printed in 1722, at New
+London, and is in the possession of our own Society. He means, by these
+words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which he discourses
+in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson in the "Vicar of
+Wakefield." "Many of the Ancients thought there was much of a Real
+History in the Parable, and their Opinion was that there is, DIAPHORA
+KATA TAS MORPHAS, A Distinction (and so a Resemblance) of men as to their
+Shapes after Death." And so on, with Ireaeus, Tertullian, Thespesius,
+and "the TA TONE PSEUCONE CROMATA," in the place of "Sanconiathon,
+Manetho, Berosus," and "Anarchon ara kai ateleutaion to pan."
+
+One other passage deserves notice, as it relates to the single medical
+suggestion which does honor to Cotton Mather's memory. It does not
+appear that he availed himself of the information which he says, he
+obtained from his slave, for such I suppose he was.
+
+In his appendix to "Variolae Triumphatae," he says,--
+
+"There has been a wonderful practice lately used in several parts of the
+world, which indeed is not yet become common in our nation.
+
+"I was first informed of it by a Garamantee servant of my own, long
+before I knew that any Europeans or Asiaticks had the least acquaintance
+with it, and some years before I was enriched with the communications of
+the learned Foreigners, whose accounts I found agreeing with what I
+received of my servant, when he shewed me the Scar of the Wound made for
+the operation; and said, That no person ever died of the smallpox, in
+their countrey, that had the courage to use it.
+
+"I have since met with a considerable Number of these Africans, who all
+agree in one story; That in their countrey grandy-many dy of the
+small-pox: But now they learn this way: people take juice of smallpox and
+cutty-skin and put in a Drop; then by'nd by a little sicky, sicky: then
+very few little things like small-pox; and nobody dy of it; and nobody
+have small-pox any more. Thus, in Africa, where the poor creatures dy of
+the smallpox like Rotten Sheep, a merciful God has taught them an
+Infallible preservative. 'T is a common practice, and is attended with a
+constant success."
+
+What has come down to us of the first century of medical practice, in the
+hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and reasonable. I
+suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in which the colonists
+found themselves in the wilderness, took the nonsense out of them, as the
+exigencies of a campaign did out of our physicians and surgeons in the
+late war. Good food and enough of it, pure air and water, cleanliness,
+good attendance, an anaesthetic, an opiate, a stimulant, quinine, and two
+or three common drugs, proved to be the marrow of medical treatment; and
+the fopperies of the pharmacopoeia went the way of embroidered shirts and
+white kid gloves and malacca joints, in their time of need. "Good wine
+is the best cordiall for her," said Governor John Winthrop, Junior, to
+Samuel Symonds, speaking of that gentleman's wife,--just as Sydenham,
+instead of physic, once ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary for
+his patient in male hysterics.
+
+But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development
+until it became entirely separated from that of divinity. The spiritual
+guide, the consoler in affliction, the confessor who is admitted into the
+secrets of our souls, has his own noble sphere of duties; but the healer
+of men must confine himself solely to the revelations of God in nature,
+as he sees their miracles with his own eyes. No doctrine of prayer or
+special providence is to be his excuse for not looking straight at
+secondary causes, and acting, exactly so far as experience justifies him,
+as if he were himself the divine agent which antiquity fabled him to be.
+While pious men were praying--humbly, sincerely, rightly, according to
+their knowledge--over the endless succession of little children dying of
+spasms in the great Dublin Hospital, a sagacious physician knocked some
+holes in the walls of the ward, let God's blessed air in on the little
+creatures, and so had already saved in that single hospital, as it was
+soberly calculated thirty years ago, more than sixteen thousand lives of
+these infant heirs of immortality. [Collins's Midwifery, p. 312.
+Published by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Boston, 1841.]
+
+Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician was
+granted in virtue of the clergyman's supplications. Still, the habit of
+dealing with things seen generates another kind of knowledge, and another
+way of thought, from that of dealing with things unseen; which knowledge
+and way of thought are special means granted by Providence, and to be
+thankfully accepted.
+
+The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying, so
+often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici, duo
+athei,"--"Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists."
+
+It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very commonly, if
+not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of ecclesiastical
+commerce. The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he spoke those
+memorable words, which you may read over the professor's chair in the
+French School of Medicine, "Te le pensay, et Dieu le guarit," "I dressed
+his wound, and God healed it,"--is a different being from the God that
+scholastic theologians have projected from their consciousness, or shaped
+even from the sacred pages which have proved so plastic in their hands.
+He is a God who never leaves himself without witness, who repenteth him
+of the evil, who never allows a disease or an injury, compatible with the
+enjoyment of life, to take its course without establishing an effort,
+limited by certain fixed conditions, it is true, but an effort, always,
+to restore the broken body or the shattered mind. In the perpetual
+presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds,
+who knits the fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural
+process, who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital
+organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who
+sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due
+order, according to its need,--sleep, fainting, death; in this perpetual
+presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize the
+theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe, where no
+organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound heals kindly,
+where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power, and mercy forgets
+its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies,
+and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the God
+of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged lunatic. If this is atheism,
+call three, instead of two of the trio, atheists, and it will probably
+come nearer the truth.
+
+I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the
+materializing influences to which the physician is subjected. A spiritual
+guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us all, from becoming
+the "fingering slaves" that Wordsworth treats with such shrivelling
+scorn. But it is well that the two callings have been separated, and it
+is fitting that they remain apart. In settling the affairs of the late
+concern, I am afraid our good friends remain a little in our debt. We
+lent them our physician Michael Servetus in fair condition, and they
+returned him so damaged by fire as to be quite useless for our purposes.
+Their Reverend Samuel Willard wrote us a not over-wise report of a case
+of hysteria; and our Jean Astruc gave them (if we may trust Dr. Smith's
+Dictionary of the Bible) the first discerning criticism on the authorship
+of the Pentateuch. Our John Locke enlightened them with his letters
+concerning toleration; and their Cotton Mather obscured our twilight with
+his "Nishmath Chajim."
+
+Yet we must remember that the name of Basil Valentine, the monk, is
+associated with whatever good and harm we can ascribe to antimony; and
+that the most remarkable of our specifics long bore the name of "Jesuit's
+Bark," from an old legend connected with its introduction. "Frere
+Jacques," who taught the lithotomists of Paris, owes his ecclesiastical
+title to courtesy, as he did not belong to a religious order.
+
+Medical science, and especially the study of mental disease, is destined,
+I believe, to react to much greater advantage on the theology of the
+future than theology has acted on medicine in the past. The liberal
+spirit very generally prevailing in both professions, and the good
+understanding between their most enlightened members, promise well for
+the future of both in a community which holds every point of human
+belief, every institution in human hands, and every word written in a
+human dialect, open to free discussion today, to-morrow, and to the end
+of time. Whether the world at large will ever be cured of trusting to
+specifics as a substitute for observing the laws of health, and to
+mechanical or intellectual formula as a substitute for character, may
+admit of question. Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal.
+
+We can find most of the old beliefs alive amongst us to-day, only having
+changed their dresses and the social spheres in which they thrive. We
+think the quarrels of Galenists and chemists belong to the past,
+forgetting that Thomsonism has its numerous apostles in our community;
+that it is common to see remedies vaunted as purely vegetable, and that
+the prejudice against "mineral poisons," especially mercury, is as strong
+in many quarters now as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth
+century. Names are only air, and blow away with a change of wind; but
+beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard. The oaks
+of Dodona are prostrate, and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the
+Pythoness and the Sibyl may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very
+moderate compensation. Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time;
+but we have seen the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers
+year after year, which seems to imply that he found believers and
+patrons. You smiled when I related Sir Kenelm Digby's prescription with
+the live eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets,
+would there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut,
+carried about as a cure for rheumatism? The brazen head of Roger Bacon
+is mute; but is not "Planchette" uttering her responses in a hundred
+houses of this city? We think of palmistry or chiromancy as belonging to
+the days of Albertus Magnus, or, if existing in our time, as given over
+to the gypsies; but a very distinguished person has recently shown me the
+line of life, and the line of fortune, on the palm of his hand, with a
+seeming confidence in the sanguine predictions of his career which had
+been drawn from them. What shall we say of the plausible and
+well-dressed charlatans of our own time, who trade in false pretences,
+like Nicholas Knapp of old, but without any fear of being fined or
+whipped; or of the many follies and inanities, imposing on the credulous
+part of the community, each of them gaping with eager, open mouth for a
+gratuitous advertisement by the mention of its foolish name in any
+respectable connection?
+
+I turn from this less pleasing aspect of the common intelligence which
+renders such follies possible, to close the honorable record of the
+medical profession in this, our ancient Commonwealth.
+
+We have seen it in the first century divided among clergymen,
+magistrates, and regular practitioners; yet, on the whole, for the time,
+and under the circumstances, respectable, except where it invoked
+supernatural agencies to account for natural phenomena.
+
+In the second century it simplified its practice, educated many
+intelligent practitioners, and began the work of organizing for concerted
+action, and for medical teaching.
+
+In this, our own century, it has built hospitals, perfected and
+multiplied its associations and educational institutions, enlarged and
+created museums, and challenged a place in the world of science by its
+literature.
+
+In reviewing the whole course of its history we read a long list of
+honored names, and a precious record written in private memories, in
+public charities, in permanent contributions to medical science, in
+generous sacrifices for the country. We can point to our capital as the
+port of entry for the New World of the great medical discoveries of two
+successive centuries, and we can claim for it the triumph over the most
+dreaded foe that assails the human body,--a triumph which the annals of
+the race can hardly match in three thousand years of medical history.
+
+
+
+
+THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER
+
+[A Valedictory Address delivered to the Graduating Class of the Bellevue
+Hospital College, March 2, 1871.]
+
+The occasion which calls us together reminds us not a little of that
+other ceremony which unites a man and woman for life. The banns have
+already been pronounced which have wedded our young friends to the
+profession of their choice. It remains only to address to them some
+friendly words of cheering counsel, and to bestow upon them the parting
+benediction.
+
+This is not the time for rhetorical display or ambitious eloquence. We
+must forget ourselves, and think only of them. To us it is an occasion;
+to them it is an epoch. The spectators at the wedding look curiously at
+the bride and bridegroom; at the bridal veil, the orange-flower garland,
+the giving and receiving of the ring; they listen for the tremulous "I
+will," and wonder what are the mysterious syllables the clergyman
+whispers in the ear of the married maiden. But to the newly-wedded pair
+what meaning in those words, "for better, for worse," "in sickness and in
+health," "till death us do part!" To the father, to the mother, who know
+too well how often the deadly nightshade is interwoven with the wreath of
+orange-blossoms, how empty the pageant, how momentous the reality!
+
+You will not wonder that I address myself chiefly to those who are just
+leaving academic life for the sterner struggle and the larger tasks of
+matured and instructed manhood. The hour belongs to them; if others find
+patience to listen, they will kindly remember that, after all, they are
+but as the spectators at the wedding, and that the priest is thinking
+less of them than of their friends who are kneeling at the altar.
+
+I speak more directly to you, then, gentlemen of the graduating class.
+The days of your education, as pupils of trained instructors, are over.
+Your first harvest is all garnered. Henceforth you are to be sowers as
+well as reapers, and your field is the world. How does your knowledge
+stand to-day? What have you gained as a permanent possession? What must
+you expect to forget? What remains for you yet to learn? These are
+questions which it may interest you to consider.
+
+There is another question which must force itself on the thoughts of many
+among you: "How am I to obtain patients and to keep their confidence?"
+You have chosen a laborious calling, and made many sacrifices to fit
+yourselves for its successful pursuit. You wish to be employed that you
+may be useful, and that you may receive the reward of your industry. I
+would take advantage of these most receptive moments to give you some
+hints which may help you to realize your hopes and expectations. Such is
+the outline of the familiar talk I shall offer you.
+
+Your acquaintance with some of the accessory branches is probably greater
+now than it will be in a year from now,--much greater than it will by ten
+years from now. The progress of knowledge, it may be feared, or hoped,
+will have outrun the text-books in which you studied these branches.
+Chemistry, for instance, is very apt to spoil on one's hands. "Nous
+avons change tout cela" might serve as the standing motto of many of our
+manuals. Science is a great traveller, and wears her shoes out pretty
+fast, as might be expected.
+
+You are now fresh from the lecture-room and the laboratory. You can pass
+an examination in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, which
+the men in large practice all around you would find a more potent
+sudorific than any in the Pharmacopceia. These masters of the art of
+healing were once as ready with their answers as you are now, but they
+have got rid of a great deal of the less immediately practical part of
+their acquisitions, and you must undergo the same depleting process.
+Hard work will train it off, as sharp exercise trains off the fat of a
+prize-fighter.
+
+Yet, pause a moment before you infer that your teachers must have been in
+fault when they furnished you with mental stores not directly convertible
+to practical purposes, and likely in a few years to lose their place in
+your memory. All systematic knowledge involves much that is not
+practical, yet it is the only kind of knowledge which satisfies the mind,
+and systematic study proves, in the long-run, the easiest way of
+acquiring and retaining facts which are practical. There are many things
+which we can afford to forget, which yet it was well to learn. Your
+mental condition is not the same as if you had never known what you now
+try in vain to recall. There is a perpetual metempsychosis of thought,
+and the knowledge of to-day finds a soil in the forgotten facts of
+yesterday. You cannot see anything in the new season of the guano you
+placed last year about the roots of your climbing plants, but it is
+blushing and breathing fragrance in your trellised roses; it has scaled
+your porch in the bee-haunted honey-suckle; it has found its way where
+the ivy is green; it is gone where the woodbine expands its luxuriant
+foliage.
+
+Your diploma seems very broad to-day with your list of accomplishments,
+but it begins to shrink from this hour like the Peau de Chagrin of
+Balzac's story. Do not worry about it, for all the while there will be
+making out for you an ampler and fairer parchment, signed by old Father
+Time himself as President of that great University in which experience is
+the one perpetual and all-sufficient professor.
+
+Your present plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself. Knowledge
+that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of the Mammoth
+Cave. When you come to handle life and death as your daily business,
+your memory will of itself bid good-by to such inmates as the well-known
+foramina of the sphenoid bone and the familiar oxides of
+methyl-ethylamyl-phenyl-ammonium. Be thankful that you have once known
+them, and remember that even the learned ignorance of a nomenclature is
+something to have mastered, and may furnish pegs to hang facts upon which
+would otherwise have strewed the floor of memory in loose disorder.
+
+But your education has, after all, been very largely practical. You have
+studied medicine and surgery, not chiefly in books, but at the bedside
+and in the operating amphitheatre. It is the special advantage of large
+cities that they afford the opportunity of seeing a great deal of disease
+in a short space of time, and of seeing many cases of the same kind of
+disease brought together. Let us not be unjust to the claims of the
+schools remote from the larger centres of population. Who among us has
+taught better than Nathan Smith, better than Elisha Bartlett? who teaches
+better than some of our living contemporaries who divide their time
+between city and country schools? I am afraid we do not always do
+justice to our country brethren, whose merits are less conspicuously
+exhibited than those of the great city physicians and surgeons, such
+especially as have charge of large hospitals. There are modest
+practitioners living in remote rural districts who are gifted by nature
+with such sagacity and wisdom, trained so well in what is most essential
+to the practice of their art, taught so thoroughly by varied experience,
+forced to such manly self-reliance by their comparative isolation, that,
+from converse with them alone, from riding with them on their long rounds
+as they pass from village to village, from talking over cases with them,
+putting up their prescriptions, watching their expedients, listening to
+their cautions, marking the event of their predictions, hearing them tell
+of their mistakes, and now and then glory a little in the detection of
+another's blunder, a young man would find himself better fitted for his
+real work than many who have followed long courses of lectures and passed
+a showy examination. But the young man is exceptionally fortunate who
+enjoys the intimacy of such a teacher. And it must be confessed that the
+great hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries of large cities, where men
+of well-sifted reputations are in constant attendance, are the true
+centres of medical education. No students, I believe, are more
+thoroughly aware of this than those who have graduated at this
+institution. Here, as in all our larger city schools, the greatest pains
+are taken to teach things as well as names. You have entered into the
+inheritance of a vast amount of transmitted skill and wisdom, which you
+have taken, warm, as it were, with the life of your well-schooled
+instructors. You have not learned all that art has to teach you, but you
+are safer practitioners to-day than were many of those whose names we
+hardly mention without a genuflection. I had rather be cared for in a
+fever by the best-taught among you than by the renowned Fernelius or the
+illustrious Boerhaave, could they come back to us from that better world
+where there are no physicians needed, and, if the old adage can be
+trusted, not many within call. I had rather have one of you exercise his
+surgical skill upon me than find myself in the hands of a resuscitated
+Fabricius Hildanus, or even of a wise Ambroise Pare, revisiting earth in
+the light of the nineteenth century.
+
+You will not accuse me of underrating your accomplishments. You know
+what to do for a child in a fit, for an alderman in an apoplexy, for a
+girl that has fainted, for a woman in hysterics, for a leg that is
+broken, for an arm that is out of joint, for fevers of every color, for
+the sailor's rheumatism, and the tailor's cachexy. In fact you do really
+know so much at this very hour, that nothing but the searching test of
+time can fully teach you the limitations of your knowledge.
+
+Of some of these you will permit me to remind you. You will never have
+outgrown the possibility of new acquisitions, for Nature is endless in
+her variety. But even the knowledge which you may be said to possess
+will be a different thing after long habit has made it a part of your
+existence. The tactus eruditus extends to the mind as well as to the
+finger-ends. Experience means the knowledge gained by habitual trial,
+and an expert is one who has been in the habit of trying. This is the
+kind of knowledge that made Ulysses wise in the ways of men. Many cities
+had he seen, and known the minds of those who dwelt in them. This
+knowledge it was that Chaucer's Shipman brought home with him from the
+sea--
+
+ "In many a tempest had his berd be shake."
+
+This is the knowledge we place most confidence in, in the practical
+affairs of life.
+
+Our training has two stages. The first stage deals with our
+intelligence, which takes the idea of what is to be done with the most
+charming ease and readiness. Let it be a game of billiards, for
+instance, which the marker is going to teach us. We have nothing to do
+but to make this ball glance from that ball and hit that other ball, and
+to knock that ball with this ball into a certain caecal sacculus or
+diverticulum which our professional friend calls a pocket. Nothing can
+be clearer; it is as easy as "playing upon this pipe," for which Hamlet
+gives Guildenstern such lucid directions. But this intelligent Me, who
+steps forward as the senior partner in our dual personality, turns out to
+be a terrible bungler. He misses those glancing hits which the
+hard-featured young professional person calls "carroms," and insists on
+pocketing his own ball instead of the other one.
+
+It is the unintelligent Me, stupid as an idiot, that has to try a thing a
+thousand times before he can do it, and then never knows how he does it,
+that at last does it well. We have to educate ourselves through the
+pretentious claims of intellect, into the humble accuracy of instinct,
+and we end at last by acquiring the dexterity, the perfection, the
+certainty, which those masters of arts, the bee and the spider, inherit
+from Nature.
+
+Book-knowledge, lecture-knowledge, examination-knowledge, are all in the
+brain. But work-knowledge is not only in the brain, it is in the senses,
+in the muscles, in the ganglia of the sympathetic nerves,--all over the
+man, as one may say, as instinct seems diffused through every part of
+those lower animals that have no such distinct organ as a brain. See a
+skilful surgeon handle a broken limb; see a wise old physician smile away
+a case that looks to a novice as if the sexton would soon be sent for;
+mark what a large experience has done for those who were fitted to profit
+by it, and you will feel convinced that, much as you know, something is
+still left for you to learn.
+
+May I venture to contrast youth and experience in medical practice,
+something in the way the man painted the lion, that is, the lion under?
+
+The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows-the exceptions. The
+young man knows his patient, but the old man knows also his patient's
+family, dead and alive, up and down for generations. He can tell
+beforehand what diseases their unborn children will be subject to, what
+they will die of if they live long enough, and whether they had better
+live at all, or remain unrealized possibilities, as belonging to a stock
+not worth being perpetuated. The young man feels uneasy if he is not
+continually doing something to stir up his patient's internal
+arrangements. The old man takes things more quietly, and is much more
+willing to let well enough alone: All these superiorities, if such they
+are,'you must wait for time to bring you. In the meanwhile (if we will
+let the lion be uppermost for a moment), the young man's senses are
+quicker than those of his older rival. His education in all the
+accessory branches is more recent, and therefore nearer the existing
+condition of knowledge. He finds it easier than his seniors to accept
+the improvements which every year is bringing forward. New ideas build
+their nests in young men's brains. "Revolutions are not made by men in
+spectacles," as I once heard it remarked, and the first whispers of a new
+truth are not caught by those who begin to feel the need of an
+ear-trumpet. Granting all these advantages to the young man, he ought,
+nevertheless, to go on improving, on the whole, as a medical
+practitioner, with every year, until he has ripened into a well-mellowed
+maturity. But, to improve, he must be good for something at the start.
+If you ship a poor cask of wine to India and back, if you keep it a half
+a century, it only grows thinner and sharper.
+
+You are soon to enter into relations with the public, to expend your
+skill and knowledge for its benefit, and find your support in the rewards
+of your labor. What kind of a constituency is this which is to look to
+you as its authorized champions in the struggle of life against its
+numerous enemies?
+
+In the first place, the persons who seek the aid of the physician are
+very honest and sincere in their wish to get rid of their complaints,
+and, generally speaking, to live as long as they can. However
+attractively the future is painted to them, they are attached to the
+planet with which they are already acquainted. They are addicted to the
+daily use of this empirical and unchemical mixture which we call air; and
+would hold on to it as a tippler does to his alcoholic drinks. There is
+nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover
+their health and save their lives. They have submitted to be
+half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to be buried up to
+their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like galley-slaves, to
+be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have needles thrust into their
+flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow all sorts of
+abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded
+were a costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, and leeches were
+a luxury. What more can be asked to prove their honesty and sincerity?
+
+This same community is very intelligent with respect to a great many
+subjects-commerce, mechanics, manufactures, politics. But with regard to
+medicine it is hopelessly ignorant and never finds it out. I do not know
+that it is any worse in this country than in Great Britain, where Mr.
+Huxley speaks very freely of "the utter ignorance of the simplest laws of
+their own animal life, which prevails among even the most highly educated
+persons." And Cullen said before him "Neither the acutest genius nor the
+soundest judgment will avail in judging of a particular science, in
+regard to which they have not been exercised. I have been obliged to
+please my patients sometimes with reasons, and I have found that any will
+pass, even with able divines and acute lawyers; the same will pass with
+the husbands as with the wives." If the community could only be made
+aware of its own utter ignorance, and incompetence to form opinions on
+medical subjects, difficult enough to those who give their lives to the
+study of them, the practitioner would have an easier task. But it will
+form opinions of its own, it cannot help it, and we cannot blame it, even
+though we know how slight and deceptive are their foundations.
+
+This is the way it happens: Every grown-up person has either been ill
+himself or had a friend suffer from illness, from which he has recovered.
+Every sick person has done something or other by somebody's advice, or of
+his own accord, a little before getting better. There is an irresistible
+tendency to associate the thing done, and the improvement which followed
+it, as cause and effect. This is the great source of fallacy in medical
+practice. But the physician has some chance of correcting his hasty
+inference. He thinks his prescription cured a single case of a
+particular complaint; he tries it in twenty similar cases without effect,
+and sets down the first as probably nothing more than a coincidence. The
+unprofessional experimenter or observer has no large experience to
+correct his hasty generalization. He wants to believe that the means he
+employed effected his cure. He feels grateful to the person who advised
+it, he loves to praise the pill or potion which helped him, and he has a
+kind of monumental pride in himself as a living testimony to its
+efficacy. So it is that you will find the community in which you live,
+be it in town or country, full of brands plucked from the burning, as
+they believe, by some agency which, with your better training, you feel
+reasonably confident had nothing to do with it. Their disease went out
+of itself, and the stream from the medical fire-annihilator had never
+even touched it.
+
+You cannot and need not expect to disturb the public in the possession of
+its medical superstitions. A man's ignorance is as much his private
+property, and as precious in his own eyes, as his family Bible. You have
+only to open your own Bible at the ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel,
+and you will find that the logic of a restored patient was very simple
+then, as it is now, and very hard to deal with. My clerical friends will
+forgive me for poaching on their sacred territory, in return for an
+occasional raid upon the medical domain of which they have now and then
+been accused.
+
+A blind man was said to have been restored to sight by a young person
+whom the learned doctors of the Jewish law considered a sinner, and, as
+such, very unlikely to have been endowed with a divine gift of healing.
+They visited the patient repeatedly, and evidently teased him with their
+questions about the treatment, and their insinuations about the young
+man, until he lost his temper. At last he turned sharply upon them:
+"Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that,
+whereas I was blind, now I see."
+
+This is the answer that always has been and always will be given by most
+persons when they find themselves getting well after doing anything, no
+matter what,--recommended by anybody, no matter whom. Lord Bacon, Robert
+Boyle, Bishop Berkeley, all put their faith in panaceas which we should
+laugh to scorn. They had seen people get well after using them. Are we
+any wiser than those great men? Two years ago, in a lecture before the
+Massachusetts Historical Society, I mentioned this recipe of Sir Kenelm
+Digby for fever and ague: Pare the patient's nails; put the parings in a
+little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel, and place him
+in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will recover.
+
+Referring to this prescription in the course of the same lecture, I said:
+"You smiled when I related Sir Kenehn Digby's prescription, with the live
+eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets, would
+there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut, carried
+about as a cure for rheumatism?" Nobody saw fit to empty his or her
+pockets, and my question brought no response. But two months ago I was in
+a company of educated persons, college graduates every one of them, when
+a gentleman, well known in our community, a man of superior ability and
+strong common-sense, on the occasion of some talk arising about
+rheumatism, took a couple of very shiny horse-chestnuts from his
+breeches-pocket, and laid them on the table, telling us how, having
+suffered from the complaint in question, he had, by the advice of a
+friend, procured these two horse-chestnuts on a certain time a year or
+more ago, and carried them about him ever since; from which very day he
+had been entirely free from rheumatism.
+
+This argument, from what looks like cause and effect, whether it be so or
+not, is what you will have to meet wherever you go, and you need not
+think you can answer it. In the natural course of things some thousands
+of persons must be getting well or better of slight attacks of colds, of
+rheumatic pains, every week, in this city alone. Hundreds of them do
+something or other in the way of remedy, by medical or other advice, or
+of their own motion, and the last thing they do gets the credit of the
+recovery. Think what a crop of remedies this must furnish, if it were
+all harvested!
+
+Experience has taught, or will teach you, that most of the wonderful
+stories patients and others tell of sudden and signal cures are like Owen
+Glendower's story of the portents that announced his birth. The earth
+shook at your nativity, did it? Very likely, and
+
+ "So it would have done,
+ At the same season, if your mother's cat
+ Had kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born."
+
+You must listen more meekly than Hotspur did to the babbling Welshman,
+for ignorance is a solemn and sacred fact, and, like infancy, which it
+resembles, should be respected. Once in a while you will have a patient
+of sense, born with the gift of observation, from whom you may learn
+something. When you find yourself in the presence of one who is fertile
+of medical opinions, and affluent in stories of marvellous cures,--of a
+member of Congress whose name figures in certificates to the value of
+patent medicines, of a voluble dame who discourses on the miracles she
+has wrought or seen wrought with the little jokers of the sugar-of-milk
+globule-box, take out your watch and count the pulse; also note the time
+of day, and charge the price of a visit for every extra fifteen, or, if
+you are not very busy, every twenty minutes. In this way you will turn
+what seems a serious dispensation into a double blessing, for this class
+of patients loves dearly to talk, and it does them a deal of good, and
+you feel as if you had earned your money by the dose you have taken,
+quite as honestly as by any dose you may have ordered.
+
+You must take the community just as it is, and make the best of it. You
+wish to obtain its confidence; there is a short rule for doing this which
+you will find useful,--deserve it. But, to deserve it in full measure,
+you must unite many excellences, natural and acquired.
+
+As the basis of all the rest, you must have all those traits of character
+which fit you to enter into the most intimate and confidential relations
+with the families of which you are the privileged friend and counsellor.
+Medical Christianity, if I may use such a term, is of very early date.
+By the oath of Hippocrates, the practitioner of ancient times bound
+himself to enter his patient's house with the sole purpose of doing him
+good, and so to conduct himself as to avoid the very appearance of evil.
+Let the physician of to-day begin by coming up to this standard, and add
+to it all the more recently discovered virtues and graces.
+
+A certain amount of natural ability is requisite to make you a good
+physician, but by no means that disproportionate development of some
+special faculty which goes by the name of genius. A just balance of the
+mental powers is a great deal more likely to be useful than any single
+talent, even were it the power of observation; in excess. For a mere
+observer is liable to be too fond of facts for their own sake, so that,
+if he told the real truth, he would confess that he takes more pleasure
+in a post-mortem examination which shows him what was the matter with a
+patient, than in a case which insists on getting well and leaving him in
+the dark as to its nature. Far more likely to interfere with the sound
+practical balance of the mind is that speculative, theoretical tendency
+which has made so many men noted in their day, whose fame has passed away
+with their dissolving theories. Read Dr. Bartlett's comparison of the
+famous Benjamin Rush with his modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie,
+and see the dangers into which a passion for grandiose generalizations
+betrayed a man of many admirable qualities.
+
+I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your profession.
+Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most laborious of
+arts. It will task all your powers of body and mind if you are faithful
+to it. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the
+enchanted streams of literature, nor dig in far-off fields for the hidden
+waters of alien sciences. The great practitioners are generally those
+who concentrate all their powers on their business. If there are here
+and there brilliant exceptions, it is only in virtue of extraordinary
+gifts, and industry to which very few are equal.
+
+To get business a man mast really want it; and do you suppose that when
+you are in the middle of a heated caucus, or half-way through a delicate
+analysis, or in the spasm of an unfinished ode, your eyes rolling in the
+fine frenzy of poetical composition, you want to be called to a teething
+infant, or an ancient person groaning under the griefs of a lumbago? I
+think I have known more than one young man whose doctor's sign proclaimed
+his readiness to serve mankind in that capacity, but who hated the sound
+of a patient's knock, and as he sat with his book or his microscope, felt
+exactly as the old party expressed himself in my friend Mr. Brownell's
+poem--
+
+ "All I axes is, let me alone."
+
+The community soon finds out whether you are in earnest, and really mean
+business, or whether you are one of those diplomaed dilettanti who like
+the amusement of quasi medical studies, but have no idea of wasting their
+precious time in putting their knowledge in practice for the benefit of
+their suffering fellow-creatures.
+
+The public is a very incompetent judge of your skill and knowledge, but
+it gives its confidence most readily to those who stand well with their
+professional brethren, whom they call upon when they themselves or their
+families are sick, whom they choose to honorable offices, whose writings
+and teachings they hold in esteem. A man may be much valued by the
+profession and yet have defects which prevent his becoming a favorite
+practitioner, but no popularity can be depended upon as permanent which
+is not sanctioned by the judgment of professional experts, and with these
+you will always stand on your substantial merits.
+
+What shall I say of the personal habits you must form if you wish for
+success? Temperance is first upon the list. Intemperance in a physician
+partakes of the guilt of homicide, for the muddled brain may easily make
+a fatal blunder in a prescription and the unsteady hand transfix an
+artery in an operation. Tippling doctors have been too common in the
+history of medicine. Paracelsus was a sot, Radcliffe was much too fond
+of his glass, and Dr. James Hurlbut of Wethersfield, Connecticut, a
+famous man in his time, used to drink a square bottle of rum a day, with
+a corresponding allowance of opium to help steady his nerves. We
+commonly speak of a man as being the worse for liquor, but I was asking
+an Irish laborer one day about his doctor, who, as he said, was somewhat
+given to drink. "I like him best when he's a little that way," he said;
+"then I can spake to him." I pitied the poor patient who could not
+venture to allude to his colic or his pleurisy until his physician was
+tipsy.
+
+There are personal habits of less gravity than the one I have mentioned
+which it is well to guard against, or, if they are formed, to relinquish.
+A man who may be called at a moment's warning into the fragrant boudoir
+of suffering loveliness should not unsweeten its atmosphere with
+reminiscences of extinguished meerschaums. He should remember that the
+sick are sensitive and fastidious, that they love the sweet odors and the
+pure tints of flowers, and if his presence is not like the breath of the
+rose, if his hands are not like the leaf of the lily, his visit may be
+unwelcome, and if he looks behind him he may see a window thrown open
+after he has left the sick-chamber. I remember too well the old doctor
+who sometimes came to help me through those inward griefs to which
+childhood is liable. "Far off his coming "--shall I say "shone," and
+finish the Miltonic phrase, or leave the verb to the happy conjectures of
+my audience? Before him came a soul-subduing whiff of ipecacuanha, and
+after him lingered a shuddering consciousness of rhubarb. He had lived
+so much among his medicaments that he had at last become himself a drug,
+and to have him pass through a sick-chamber was a stronger dose than a
+conscientious disciple of Hahnemann would think it safe to administer.
+
+Need I remind you of the importance of punctuality in your engagements,
+and of the worry and distress to patients and their friends which the
+want of it occasions? One of my old teachers always carried two watches,
+to make quite sure of being exact, and not only kept his appointments
+with the regularity of a chronometer, but took great pains to be at his
+patient's house at the time when he had reason to believe he was
+expected, even if no express appointment was made. It is a good rule; if
+you call too early, my lady's hair may not be so smooth as could be
+wished, and, if you keep her waiting too long, her hair may be smooth,
+but her temper otherwise.
+
+You will remember, of course, always to get the weather-gage of your
+patient. I mean, to place him so that the light falls on his face and
+not on yours. It is a kind of, ocular duel that is about to take place
+between you; you are going to look through his features into his
+pulmonary and hepatic and other internal machinery, and he is going to
+look into yours quite as sharply to see what you think about his
+probabilities for time or eternity.
+
+No matter how hard he stares at your countenance, he should never be able
+to read his fate in it. It should be cheerful as long as there is hope,
+and serene in its gravity when nothing is left but resignation. The face
+of a physician, like that of a diplomatist, should be impenetrable.
+Nature is a benevolent old hypocrite; she cheats the sick and the dying
+with illusions better than any anodynes. If there are cogent reasons why
+a patient should be undeceived, do it deliberately and advisedly, but do
+not betray your apprehensions through your tell-tale features.
+
+We had a physician in our city whose smile was commonly reckoned as being
+worth five thousand dollars a year to him, in the days, too, of moderate
+incomes. You cannot put on such a smile as that any more than you can
+get sunshine without sun; there was a tranquil and kindly nature under it
+that irradiated the pleasant face it made one happier to meet on his
+daily rounds. But you can cultivate the disposition, and it will work
+its way through to the surface, nay, more,--you can try to wear a quiet
+and encouraging look, and it will react on your disposition and make you
+like what you seem to be, or at least bring you nearer to its own
+likeness.
+
+Your patient has no more right to all the truth you know than he has to
+all the medicine in your saddlebags, if you carry that kind of
+cartridge-box for the ammunition that slays disease. He should get only
+just so much as is good for him. I have seen a physician examining a
+patient's chest stop all at once, as he brought out a particular sound
+with a tap on the collarbone, in the attitude of a pointer who has just
+come on the scent or sight of a woodcock. You remember the Spartan boy,
+who, with unmoved countenance, hid the fox that was tearing his vitals
+beneath his mantle. What he could do in his own suffering you must learn
+to do for others on whose vital organs disease has fastened its devouring
+teeth. It is a terrible thing to take away hope, even earthly hope, from
+a fellow-creature. Be very careful what names you let fall before your
+patient. He knows what it means when you tell him he has tubercles or
+Bright's disease, and, if he hears the word carcinoma, he will certainly
+look it out in a medical dictionary, if he does not interpret its dread
+significance on the instant. Tell him he has asthmatic symptoms, or a
+tendency to the gouty diathesis, and he will at once think of all the
+asthmatic and gouty old patriarchs he has ever heard of, and be
+comforted. You need not be so cautious in speaking of the health of rich
+and remote relatives, if he is in the line of succession.
+
+Some shrewd old doctors have a few phrases always on hand for patients
+that will insist on knowing the pathology of their complaints without the
+slightest capacity of understanding the scientific explanation. I have
+known the term "spinal irritation" serve well on such occasions, but I
+think nothing on the whole has covered so much ground, and meant so
+little, and given such profound satisfaction to all parties, as the
+magnificent phrase "congestion of the portal system."
+
+Once more, let me recommend you, as far as possible, to keep your doubts
+to yourself, and give the patient the benefit of your decision.
+Firmness, gentle firmness, is absolutely necessary in this and certain
+other relations. Mr. Rarey with Cruiser, Richard with Lady Ann, Pinel
+with his crazy people, show what steady nerves can do with the most
+intractable of animals, the most irresistible of despots, and the most
+unmanageable of invalids.
+
+If you cannot acquire and keep the confidence of your patient, it is time
+for you to give place to some other practitioner who can. If you are
+wise and diligent, you can establish relations with the best of them
+which they will find it very hard to break. But, if they wish to employ
+another person, who, as they think, knows more than you do, do not take
+it as a personal wrong. A patient believes another man can save his
+life, can restore him to health, which, as he thinks, you have not the
+skill to do. No matter whether the patient is right or wrong, it is a
+great impertinence to think you have any property in him. Your estimate
+of your own ability is not the question, it is what the patient thinks of
+it. All your wisdom is to him like the lady's virtue in Raleigh's song:
+
+ "If she seem not chaste to me,
+ What care I how chaste she be?"
+
+What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician,
+sticks to him till he dies. But there are many very good people who are
+not what I call good patients. I was once requested to call on a lady
+suffering from nervous and other symptoms. It came out in the
+preliminary conversational skirmish, half medical, half social, that I
+was the twenty-sixth member of the faculty into whose arms,
+professionally speaking, she had successively thrown herself. Not being
+a believer in such a rapid rotation of scientific crops, I gently
+deposited the burden, commending it to the care of number twenty-seven,
+and, him, whoever he might be, to the care of Heaven.
+
+If there happened to be among my audience any person who wished to know
+on what principles the patient should choose his physician, I should give
+him these few precepts to think over:
+
+Choose a man who is personally agreeable, for a daily visit from an
+intelligent, amiable, pleasant, sympathetic person will cost you no more
+than one from a sloven or a boor, and his presence will do more for you
+than any prescription the other will order.
+
+Let him be a man of recognized good sense in other matters, and the
+chance is that he will be sensible as a practitioner.
+
+Let him be a man who stands well with his professional brethren, whom
+they approve as honest, able, courteous.
+
+Let him be one whose patients are willing to die in his hands, not one
+whom they go to for trifles, and leave as soon as they are in danger, and
+who can say, therefore, that he never loses a patient.
+
+Do not leave the ranks of what is called the regular profession, unless
+you wish to go farther and fare worse, for you may be assured that its
+members recognize no principle which hinders their accepting any remedial
+agent proved to be useful, no matter from what quarter it comes. The
+difficulty is that the stragglers, organized under fantastic names in
+pretentious associations, or lurking in solitary dens behind doors left
+ajar, make no real contributions to the art of healing. When they bring
+forward a remedial agent like chloral, like the bromide of potassium,
+like ether, used as an anesthetic, they will find no difficulty in
+procuring its recognition.
+
+Some of you will probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions of
+that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of hereditary
+depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of transubstantiation in
+the mystery of its triturations and dilutions, its church in the people
+who have mistaken their century, and its priests in those who have
+mistaken their calling. You can do little with persons who are disposed
+to accept these curious medical superstitions. The saturation-point of
+individual minds with reference to evidence, and especially medical
+evidence, differs, and must always continue to differ, very widely.
+There are those whose minds are satisfied with the decillionth dilution
+of a scientific proof. No wonder they believe in the efficacy of a
+similar attenuation of bryony or pulsatilla. You have no fulcrum you can
+rest upon to lift an error out of such minds as these, often highly
+endowed with knowledge and talent, sometimes with genius, but commonly
+richer in the imaginative than the observing and reasoning faculties.
+
+Let me return once more to the young graduate. Your relations to your
+professional brethren may be a source of lifelong happiness and growth in
+knowledge and character, or they may make you wretched and end by leaving
+you isolated from those who should be your friends and counsellors. The
+life of a physician becomes ignoble when he suffers himself to feed on
+petty jealousies and sours his temper in perpetual quarrels. You will be
+liable to meet an uncomfortable man here and there in the
+profession,--one who is so fond of being in hot water that it is a wonder
+all the albumen in his body is not coagulated. There are common barrators
+among doctors as there are among lawyers,--stirrers up of strife under
+one pretext and another, but in reality because they like it. They are
+their own worst enemies, and do themselves a mischief each time they
+assail their neighbors. In my student days I remember a good deal of
+this Donnybrook-Fair style of quarrelling, more especially in Paris,
+where some of the noted surgeons were always at loggerheads, and in one
+of our lively Western cities. Soon after I had set up an office, I had a
+trifling experience which may serve to point a moral in this direction.
+I had placed a lamp behind the glass in the entry to indicate to the
+passer-by where relief from all curable infirmities was to be sought and
+found. Its brilliancy attracted the attention of a devious youth, who
+dashed his fist through the glass and upset my modest luminary. All he
+got by his vivacious assault was that he left portions of integument from
+his knuckles upon the glass, had a lame hand, was very easily identified,
+and had to pay the glazier's bill. The moral is that, if the brilliancy
+of another's reputation excites your belligerent instincts, it is not
+worth your while to strike at it, without calculating which of you is
+likely to suffer most, if you do.
+
+You may be assured that when an ill-conditioned neighbor is always
+complaining of a bad taste in his mouth and an evil atmosphere about him,
+there is something wrong about his own secretions. In such cases there
+is an alterative regimen of remarkable efficacy: it is a starvation-diet
+of letting alone. The great majority of the profession are peacefully
+inclined. Their pursuits are eminently humanizing, and they look with
+disgust on the personalities which intrude themselves into the placid
+domain of an art whose province it is to heal and not to wound.
+
+The intercourse of teacher and student in a large school is necessarily
+limited, but it should be, and, so far as my experience goes, it is,
+eminently cordial and kindly. You will leave with regret, and hold in
+tender remembrance, those who have taken you by the hand at your entrance
+on your chosen path, and led you patiently and faithfully, until the
+great gates at its end have swung upon their hinges, and the world lies
+open before you. That venerable oath to which I have before referred
+bound the student to regard his instructor in the light of a parent, to
+treat his children like brothers, to succor him in his day of need. I
+trust the spirit of the oath of Hippocrates is not dead in the hearts of
+the students of to-day. They will remember with gratitude every earnest
+effort, every encouraging word, which has helped them in their difficult
+and laborious career of study. The names they read on their diplomas
+will recall faces that are like family-portraits in their memory, and the
+echo of voices they have listened to so long will linger in their
+memories far into the still evening of their lives.
+
+One voice will be heard no more which has been familiar to many among
+you. It is not for me, a stranger to these scenes, to speak his eulogy.
+I have no right to sadden this hour by dwelling on the deep regrets of
+friendship, or to bid the bitter tears of sorrow flow afresh. Yet I
+cannot help remembering what a void the death of such a practitioner as
+your late instructor must leave in the wide circle of those who leaned
+upon his counsel and assistance in their hour of need, in a community
+where he was so widely known and esteemed, in a school where he bore so
+important a part. There is no exemption from the common doom for him who
+holds the shield to protect others. The student is called from his
+bench, the professor from his chair, the practitioner in his busiest
+period hears a knock more peremptory than any patient's midnight summons,
+and goes on that unreturning visit which admits of no excuse, and suffers
+no delay. The call of such a man away from us is the bereavement of a
+great family. Nor can we help regretting the loss for him of a bright
+and cheerful earthly future; for the old age of a physician is one of the
+happiest periods of his life. He is loved and cherished for what he has
+been, and even in the decline of his faculties there are occasions when
+his experience is still appealed to, and his trembling hands are looked
+to with renewing hope and trust, as being yet able to stay the arm of the
+destroyer.
+
+But if there is so much left for age, how beautiful, how inspiring is the
+hope of youth! I see among those whom I count as listeners one by whose
+side I have sat as a fellow-teacher, and by whose instructions I have
+felt myself not too old to profit. As we borrowed him from your city, I
+must take this opportunity of telling you that his zeal, intelligence,
+and admirable faculty as an instructor were heartily and universally
+recognized among us. We return him, as we trust, uninjured, to the
+fellow-citizens who have the privilege of claiming him as their own.
+
+And now, gentlemen of the graduating class, nothing remains but for me to
+bid you, in the name of those for whom I am commissioned and privileged
+to speak, farewell as students, and welcome as practitioners. I
+pronounce the two benedictions in the same breath, as the late king's
+demise and the new king's accession are proclaimed by the same voice at
+the same moment. You would hardly excuse me if I stooped to any meaner
+dialect than the classical and familiar language of your prescriptions,
+the same in which your title to the name of physician is, if, like our
+own institution, you follow the ancient usage, engraved upon your
+diplomas.
+
+Valete, JUVENES, artis medicae studiosi; valete, discipuli, valete,
+filii!
+
+Salvete, VIRI, artis medicae magister; Salvete amici; salvete fratres!
+
+
+
+
+MEDICAL LIBRARIES.
+
+[Dedicatory Address at the opening of the Medical Library in Boston,
+December 3, 1878.]
+
+It is my appointed task, my honorable privilege, this evening, to speak
+of what has been done by others. No one can bring his tribute of words
+into the presence of great deeds, or try with them to embellish the
+memory of any inspiring achievement, without feeling and leaving with
+others a sense of their insufficiency. So felt Alexander when he
+compared even his adored Homer with the hero the poet had sung. So felt
+Webster when he contrasted the phrases of rhetoric with the eloquence of
+patriotism and of self-devotion. So felt Lincoln when on the field of
+Gettysburg he spoke those immortal words which Pericles could not have
+bettered, which Aristotle could not have criticised. So felt he who
+wrote the epitaph of the builder of the dome which looks down on the
+crosses and weathercocks that glitter over London.
+
+We are not met upon a battle-field, except so far as every laborious
+achievement means a victory over opposition, indifference, selfishness,
+faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as well as
+matter,--inertia. We are not met in a cathedral, except so far as every
+building whose walls are lined with the products of useful and ennobling
+thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose inspiration has given us
+understanding. But we have gathered within walls which bear testimony to
+the self-sacrificing, persevering efforts of a few young men, to whom we
+owe the origin and development of all that excites our admiration in this
+completed enterprise; and I might consider my task as finished if I
+contented myself with borrowing the last word of the architect's epitaph
+and only saying, Look around you!
+
+The reports of the librarian have told or will tell you, in some detail,
+what has been accomplished since the 21st of December, 1874, when six
+gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch to discuss
+different projects for a medical library. In less than four years from
+that time, by the liberality of associations and of individuals, this
+collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five thousand pamphlets,
+and of one hundred and twenty-five journals, regularly received,--all
+worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof,--has come into being under
+our eyes. It has sprung up, as it were; in the night like a mushroom; it
+stands before us in full daylight as lusty as an oak, and promising to
+grow and flourish in the perennial freshness of an evergreen.
+
+To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of books,
+exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive medical
+libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well adapted to its
+present needs? We will not point out individually all those younger
+members of the profession who have accomplished what their fathers and
+elder brethren had attempted and partially achieved. We need not write
+their names on these walls, after the fashion of those civic dignitaries
+who immortalize themselves on tablets of marble and gates of iron. But
+their contemporaries know them well, and their descendants will not
+forget them,--the men who first met together, the men who have given
+their time and their money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of
+the strenuous agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to his
+eyelids, until he had gained his ends; the untiring, imperturbable,
+tenacious, irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested nor
+let others rest until the success of the project was assured. If,
+against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only my
+revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while he was
+urging on the undertaking in which he has been preeminently active and
+triumphantly successful.
+
+We must not forget the various medical libraries which preceded this:
+that of an earlier period, when Boston contained about seventy regular
+practitioners, the collection afterwards transferred to the Boston
+Athenaeum; the two collections belonging to the University; the Treadwell
+Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital; the collections of the two
+societies, that for Medical Improvement and that for Medical Observation;
+and more especially the ten thousand volumes relating to medicine
+belonging to our noble public city library,--too many blossoms on the
+tree of knowledge, perhaps, for the best fruit to ripen. But the
+Massachusetts Medical Society now numbers nearly four hundred members in
+the city of Boston. The time had arrived for a new and larger movement.
+There was needed a place to which every respectable member of the medical
+profession could obtain easy access; where, under one roof, all might
+find the special information they were seeking; where the latest medical
+intelligence should be spread out daily as the shipping news is posted on
+the bulletins of the exchange; where men engaged in a common pursuit
+could meet, surrounded by the mute oracles of science and art; where the
+whole atmosphere should be as full of professional knowledge as the
+apothecary's shop is of the odor of his medicaments. This was what the
+old men longed for,--the prophets and kings of the profession, who
+
+ "Desired it long,
+ But died without the sight."
+
+This is what the young men and those who worked under their guidance
+undertook to give us. And now such a library, such a reading-room, such
+an exchange, such an intellectual and social meeting place, we be hold a
+fact, plain before us. The medical profession of our city, and, let us
+add, of all those neighboring places which it can reach with its iron
+arms, is united as never before by the commune vinculum, the common bond
+of a large, enduring, ennobling, unselfish interest. It breathes a new
+air of awakened intelligence. It marches abreast of the other learned
+professions, which have long had their extensive and valuable centralized
+libraries; abreast of them, but not promising to be content with that
+position. What glorifies a town like a cathedral? What dignifies a
+province like a university? What illuminates a country like its
+scholarship, and what is the nest that hatches scholars but a library?
+
+The physician, some may say, is a practical man and has little use for
+all this book-learning. Every student has heard Sydenham's reply to Sir
+Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,--meaning
+medical books. "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer. But Sydenham
+himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at
+least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in
+reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books,
+great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense
+without erudition is better than a learned one without common sense, but
+the thorough master of his profession must have learning added to his
+natural gifts.
+
+It is not necessary to maintain the direct practical utility of all kinds
+of learning. Our shelves contain many books which only a certain class
+of medical scholars will be likely to consult. There is a dead medical
+literature, and there is a live one. The dead is not all ancient, the
+live is not all modern. There is none, modern or ancient, which, if it
+has no living value for the student, will not teach him something by its
+autopsy. But it is with the live literature of his profession that the
+medical practitioner is first of all concerned.
+
+Now there has come a great change in our time over the form in which
+living thought presents itself. The first printed books,--the
+incunabula,--were inclosed in boards of solid oak, with brazen clasps and
+corners; the boards by and by were replaced by pasteboard covered with
+calf or sheepskin; then cloth came in and took the place of leather; then
+the pasteboard was covered with paper instead of cloth; and at this day
+the quarterly, the monthly, the weekly periodical in its flimsy
+unsupported dress of paper, and the daily journal, naked as it came from
+the womb of the press, hold the larger part of the fresh reading we live
+upon. We must have the latest thought in its latest expression; the page
+must be newly turned like the morning bannock; the pamphlet must be newly
+opened like the ante-prandial oyster.
+
+Thus a library, to meet the need of our time, must take, and must spread
+out in a convenient form, a great array of periodicals. Our active
+practitioners read these by preference over almost everything else. Our
+specialists, more particularly, depend on the month's product, on the
+yearly crop of new facts, new suggestions, new contrivances, as much as
+the farmer on the annual yield of his acres. One of the first wants,
+then, of the profession is supplied by our library in its great array of
+periodicals from many lands, in many languages. Such a number of medical
+periodicals no private library would have room for, no private person
+would pay for, or flood his tables with if they were sent him for
+nothing. These, I think, with the reports of medical societies and the
+papers contributed to them, will form the most attractive part of our
+accumulated medical treasures. They will be also one of our chief
+expenses, for these journals must be bound in volumes and they require a
+great amount of shelf-room; all this, in addition to the cost of
+subscription for those which are not furnished us gratuitously.
+
+It is true that the value of old scientific periodicals is, other things
+being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the obvious reason
+that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a series is drained
+off into the standard works with which the intelligent practitioner is
+supposed to be familiar. But no extended record of facts grows too old
+to be useful, provided only that we have a ready and sure way of getting
+at the particular fact or facts we are in search of.
+
+And this leads me to speak of what I conceive to be one of the principal
+tasks to be performed by the present and the coming generation of
+scholars, not only in the medical, but in every department of knowledge.
+I mean the formation of indexes, and more especially of indexes to
+periodical literature.
+
+This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who
+have had occasion to follow out any special subject. I have a right to
+speak of it, for I long ago attempted to supply the want of indexes in
+some small measure for my own need. I had a very complete set of the
+"American Journal of the Medical Sciences;" an entire set of the "North
+American Review," and many volumes of the reprints of the three leading
+British quarterlies. Of what use were they to me without general
+indexes? I looked them all through carefully and made classified lists
+of all the articles I thought I should most care to read. But they soon
+outgrew my lists. The "North American Review" kept filling up shelf
+after shelf, rich in articles which I often wanted to consult, but what a
+labor to find them, until the index of Mr. Gushing, published a few
+months since, made the contents of these hundred and twenty volumes as
+easily accessible as the words in a dictionary! I had a, copy of good
+Dr. Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia, a treasure-house to my boyhood which has
+not lost its value for me in later years. But where to look for what I
+wanted? I wished to know, for instance, what Dr. Burney had to say about
+singing. Who would have looked for it under the Italian word cantare? I
+was curious to learn something of the etchings of Rembrandt, and where
+should I find it but under the head "Low Countries, Engravers of
+the,"--an elaborate and most valuable article of a hundred
+double-columned close-printed quarto pages, to which no reference, even,
+is made under the title Rembrandt.
+
+There was nothing to be done, if I wanted to know where that which I
+specially cared for was to be found in my Rees's Cyclopaedia, but to look
+over every page of its forty-one quarto volumes and make out a brief list
+of matters of interest which I could not find by their titles, and this I
+did, at no small expense of time and trouble.
+
+Nothing, therefore, could be more pleasing to me than to see the
+attention which has been given of late years to the great work of
+indexing. It is a quarter of a century since Mr. Poole published his
+"Index to Periodical Literature," which it is much to be hoped is soon to
+appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable dimensions by
+the additions of so long a period. The "British and Foreign Medical
+Review," edited by the late Sir John Forties, contributed to by Huxley,
+Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most distinguished scientific men
+of Great Britain, has an index to its twenty-four volumes, and by its aid
+I find this valuable series as manageable as a lexicon. The last edition
+of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" had a complete index in a separate
+volume, and the publishers of Appletons' "American Cyclopaedia" have
+recently issued an index to their useful work, which must greatly add to
+its value. I have already referred to the index to the "North American
+Review," which to an American, and especially to a New Englander, is the
+most interesting and most valuable addition of its kind to our literary
+apparatus since the publication of Mr. Allibone's "Dictionary of
+Authors." I might almost dare to parody Mr. Webster's words in speaking
+of Hamilton, to describe what Mr. Gushing did for the solemn rows of back
+volumes of our honored old Review which had been long fossilizing on our
+shelves: "He touched the dead corpse of the 'North American,' and it
+sprang to its feet." A library of the best thought of the best American
+scholars during the greater portion of the century was brought to light
+by the work of the indexmaker as truly as were the Assyrian tablets by
+the labors of Layard.
+
+A great portion of the best writing and reading literary, scientific,
+professional, miscellaneous--comes to us now, at stated intervals, in
+paper covers. The writer appears, as it were, in his shirt-sleeves. As
+soon as he has delivered his message the book-binder puts a coat on his
+back, and he joins the forlorn brotherhood of "back volumes," than which,
+so long as they are unindexed, nothing can be more exasperating. Who
+wants a lock without a key, a ship without a rudder, a binnacle without a
+compass, a check without a signature, a greenback without a goldback
+behind it?
+
+I have referred chiefly to the medical journals, but I would include with
+these the reports of medical associations, and those separate
+publications which, coming in the form of pamphlets, heap themselves into
+chaotic piles and bundles which are worse than useless, taking up a great
+deal of room, and frightening everything away but mice and mousing
+antiquarians, or possibly at long intervals some terebrating specialist.
+
+Arranged, bound, indexed, all these at once become accessible and
+valuable. I will take the first instance which happens to suggest
+itself. How many who know all about osteoblasts and the experiments of
+Ollier, and all that has grown out of them, know where to go for a paper
+by the late Dr. A. L. Peirson of Salem, published in the year 1840, under
+the modest title, Remarks on Fractures? And if any practitioner who has
+to deal with broken bones does not know that most excellent and practical
+essay, it is a great pity, for it answers very numerous questions which
+will be sure to suggest themselves to the surgeon and the patient as no
+one of the recent treatises, on my own shelves, at least, can do.
+
+But if indexing is the special need of our time in medical literature, as
+in every department of knowledge, it must be remembered that it is not
+only an immense labor, but one that never ends. It requires, therefore,
+the cooperation of a large number of individuals to do the work, and a
+large amount of money to pay for making its results public through the
+press. When it is remembered that the catalogue of the library of the
+British Museum is contained in nearly three thousand large folios of
+manuscript, and not all its books are yet included, the task of indexing
+any considerable branch of science or literature looks as if it were well
+nigh impossible. But many hands make light work. An "Index Society" has
+been formed in England, already numbering about one hundred and seventy
+members. It aims at "supplying thorough indexes to valuable works and
+collections which have hitherto lacked them; at issuing indexes to the
+literature of special subjects; and at gathering materials for a general
+reference index." This society has published a little treatise setting
+forth the history and the art of indexing, which I trust is in the hands
+of some of our members, if not upon our shelves.
+
+Something has been done in the same direction by individuals in our own
+country, as we have already seen. The need of it in the department of
+medicine is beginning to be clearly felt. Our library has already an
+admirable catalogue with cross references, the work of a number of its
+younger members cooperating in the task. A very intelligent medical
+student, Mr. William D. Chapin, whose excellent project is indorsed by
+well-known New York physicians and professors, proposes to publish a
+yearly index to original communications in the medical journals of the
+United States, classified by authors and subjects. But it is from the
+National Medical Library at Washington that we have the best promise and
+the largest expectations. That great and growing collection of fifty
+thousand volumes is under the eye and hand of a librarian who knows books
+and how to manage them. For libraries are the standing armies of
+civilization, and an army is but a mob without a general who can organize
+and marshal it so as to make it effective. The "Specimen Fasciculus of a
+Catalogue of the National Medical Library," prepared under the direction
+of Dr. Billings, the librarian, would have excited the admiration of
+Haller, the master scholar in medical science of the last century, or
+rather of the profession in all centuries, and if carried out as it is
+begun will be to the nineteenth all and more than all that the three
+Bibliothecae--Anatomica, Chirurgica, and Medicinae-Practicae--were to the
+eighteenth century. I cannot forget the story that Agassiz was so fond
+of telling of the king of Prussia and Fichte. It was after the
+humiliation and spoliation of the kingdom by Napoleon that the monarch
+asked the philosopher what could be done to regain the lost position of
+the nation. "Found a great university, Sire," was the answer, and so it
+was that in the year 1810 the world-renowned University of Berlin came
+into being. I believe that we in this country can do better than found a
+national university, whose professors shall be nominated in caucuses, go
+in and out, perhaps, like postmasters, with every change of
+administration, and deal with science in the face of their constituency
+as the courtier did with time when his sovereign asked him what o'clock
+it was: "Whatever hour your majesty pleases." But when we have a noble
+library like that at Washington, and a librarian of exceptional
+qualifications like the gentleman who now holds that office, I believe
+that a liberal appropriation by Congress to carry out a conscientious
+work for the advancement of sound knowledge and the bettering of human
+conditions, like this which Dr. Billings has so well begun, would redound
+greatly to the honor of the nation. It ought to be willing to be at some
+charge to make its treasures useful to its citizens, and, for its own
+sake, especially to that class which has charge of health, public and
+private. This country abounds in what are called "self-made men," and is
+justly proud of many whom it thus designates. In one sense no man is
+self-made who breathes the air of a civilized community. In another
+sense every man who is anything other than a phonograph on legs is
+self-made. But if we award his just praise to the man who has attained
+any kind of excellence without having had the same advantages as others
+whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or surpassed, let us not be betrayed
+into undervaluing the mechanic's careful training to his business, the
+thorough and laborious education of the scholar and the professional man.
+
+Our American atmosphere is vocal with the flippant loquacity of half
+knowledge. We must accept whatever good can be got out of it, and keep
+it under as we do sorrel and mullein and witchgrass, by enriching the
+soil, and sowing good seed in plenty; by good teaching and good books,
+rather than by wasting our time in talking against it. Half knowledge
+dreads nothing but whole knowledge.
+
+I have spoken of the importance and the predominance of periodical
+literature, and have attempted to do justice to its value. But the
+almost exclusive reading of it is not without its dangers. The journals
+contain much that is crude and unsound; the presumption; it might be
+maintained, is against their novelties, unless they come from observers
+of established credit. Yet I have known a practitioner,--perhaps more
+than one,--who was as much under the dominant influence of the last
+article he had read in his favorite medical journal as a milliner under
+the sway of the last fashion-plate. The difference between green and
+seasoned knowledge is very great, and such practitioners never hold long
+enough to any of their knowledge to have it get seasoned.
+
+It is needless to say, then, that all the substantial and permanent
+literature of the profession should be represented upon our shelves. Much
+of it is there already, and as one private library after another falls
+into this by the natural law of gravitation, it will gradually acquire
+all that is most valuable almost without effort. A scholar should not be
+in a hurry to part with his books. They are probably more valuable to
+him than they can be to any other individual. What Swedenborg called
+"correspondence" has established itself between his intelligence and the
+volumes which wall him within their sacred inclosure. Napoleon said that
+his mind was as if furnished with drawers,--he drew out each as he wanted
+its contents, and closed it at will when done with them. The scholar's
+mind, to use a similar comparison, is furnished with shelves, like his
+library. Each book knows its place in the brain as well as against the
+wall or in the alcove. His consciousness is doubled by the books which
+encircle him, as the trees that surround a lake repeat themselves in its
+unruffled waters. Men talk of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but one
+who loves his books, and has lived long with them, has a nervous filament
+which runs from his sensorium to every one of them. Or, if I may still
+let my fancy draw its pictures, a scholar's library is to him what a
+temple is to the worshipper who frequents it. There is the altar sacred
+to his holiest experiences. There is the font where his new-born thought
+was baptized and first had a name in his consciousness. There is the
+monumental tablet of a dead belief, sacred still in the memory of what it
+was while yet alive. No visitor can read all this on the lettered backs
+of the books that have gathered around the scholar, but for him, from the
+Aldus on the lowest shelf to the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has
+a language which none but he can interpret. Be patient with the
+book-collector who loves his companions too well to let them go. Books
+are not buried with their owners, and the veriest book-miser that ever
+lived was probably doing far more for his successors than his more
+liberal neighbor who despised his learned or unlearned avarice. Let the
+fruit fall with the leaves still clinging round it. Who would have
+stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them, when, his mind no
+longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would still pat and fondle
+them with the vague loving sense of what they had once been to him,--to
+him, the great scholar, now like a little child among his playthings?
+
+We need in this country not only the scholar, but the virtuoso, who
+hoards the treasures which he loves, it may be chiefly for their rarity
+and because others who know more than he does of their value set a high
+price upon them. As the wine of old vintages is gently decanted out of
+its cobwebbed bottles with their rotten corks into clean new receptacles,
+so the wealth of the New World is quietly emptying many of the libraries
+and galleries of the Old World into its newly formed collections and
+newly raised edifices. And this process must go on in an accelerating
+ratio. No Englishman will be offended if I say that before the New
+Zealander takes his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the
+ruins of St. Paul's in the midst of a vast solitude, the treasures of the
+British Museum will have found a new shelter in the halls of New York or
+Boston. No Catholic will think hardly of my saying that before the
+Coliseum falls, and with it the imperial city, whose doom prophecy has
+linked with that of the almost eternal amphitheatre, the marbles, the
+bronzes, the paintings, the manuscripts of the Vatican will have left the
+shores of the Tiber for those of the Potomac, the Hudson, the
+Mississippi, or the Sacramento. And what a delight in the pursuit of the
+rarities which the eager book-hunter follows with the scent of a beagle!
+
+Shall I ever forget that rainy day in Lyons, that dingy bookshop, where I
+found the Aetius, long missing from my Artis bledicae Principes, and
+where I bought for a small pecuniary consideration, though it was marked
+rare, and was really tres rare, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, edited by
+and with a preface from the hand of Francis Rabelais? And the
+vellum-bound Tulpius, which I came upon in Venice, afterwards my only
+reading when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two
+hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to this
+day still fresh in my memory. And the Schenckius,--the folio filled with
+casus rariores, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall
+on the boulevard,--and the noble old Vesalius with its grand frontispiece
+not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Pare, long waited for
+even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius with his
+eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of fine
+engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of all
+would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
+Berengarius Carpensis,--but why multiply names, every one of which brings
+back the accession of a book which was an event almost like the birth of
+an infant?
+
+A library like ours must exercise the largest hospitality. A great many
+books may be found in every large collection which remind us of those
+apostolic looking old men who figure on the platform at our political and
+other assemblages. Some of them have spoken words of wisdom in their
+day, but they have ceased to be oracles; some of them never had any
+particularly important message for humanity, but they add dignity to the
+meeting by their presence; they look wise, whether they are so or not,
+and no one grudges them their places of honor. Venerable figure-heads,
+what would our platforms be without you?
+
+Just so with our libraries. Without their rows of folios in creamy
+vellum, or showing their black backs with antique lettering of tarnished
+gold, our shelves would look as insufficient and unbalanced as a column
+without its base, as a statue without its pedestal. And do not think
+they are kept only to be spanked and dusted during that dreadful period
+when their owner is but too thankful to become an exile and a wanderer
+from the scene of single combats between dead authors and living
+housemaids. Men were not all cowards before Agamemnon or all fools
+before the days of Virchow and Billroth. And apart from any practical
+use to be derived from the older medical authors, is there not a true
+pleasure in reading the accounts of great discoverers in their own words?
+I do not pretend to hoist up the Bibliotheca Anatomica of Mangetus and
+spread it on my table every day. I do not get out my great Albinus
+before every lecture on the muscles, nor disturb the majestic repose of
+Vesalius every time I speak of the bones he has so admirably described
+and figured. But it does please me to read the first descriptions of
+parts to which the names of their discoverers or those who have first
+described them have become so joined that not even modern science can
+part them; to listen to the talk of my old volume as Willis describes his
+circle and Fallopius his aqueduct and Varolius his bridge and Eustachius
+his tube and Monro his foramen,--all so well known to us in the human
+body; it does please me to know the very words in which Winslow described
+the opening which bears his name, and Glisson his capsule and De Graaf
+his vesicle; I am not content until I know in what language Harvey
+announced his discovery of the circulation, and how Spigelius made the
+liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a monument more enduring
+than brass in the corpuscles of the spleen and the kidney.
+
+But after all, the readers who care most for the early records of medical
+science and art are the specialists who are dividing up the practice of
+medicine and surgery as they were parcelled out, according to Herodotus,
+by the Egyptians. For them nothing is too old, nothing is too new, for
+to their books of all others is applicable the saying of D'Alembert that
+the author kills himself in lengthening out what the reader kills himself
+in trying to shorten.
+
+There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never
+grow old. Would you know how to recognize "male hysteria" and to treat
+it, take down your Sydenham; would you read the experience of a physician
+who was himself the subject of asthma, and who, notwithstanding that, in
+the words of Dr. Johnson, "panted on till ninety," you will find it in
+the venerable treatise of Sir John Floyer; would you listen to the story
+of the King's Evil cured by the royal touch, as told by a famous
+chirurgeon who fully believed in it, go to Wiseman; would you get at
+first hand the description of the spinal disease which long bore his
+name, do not be startled if I tell you to go to Pott,--to Percival Pott,
+the great surgeon of the last century.
+
+There comes a time for every book in a library when it is wanted by
+somebody. It is but a few weeks since one of the most celebrated
+physicians in the country wrote to me from a great centre of medical
+education to know if I had the works of Sanctorius, which he had tried in
+vain to find. I could have lent him the "Medicina Statica," with its
+frontispiece showing Sanctorius with his dinner on the table before him,
+in his balanced chair which sunk with him below the level of his
+banquet-board when he had swallowed a certain number of ounces,--an early
+foreshadowing of Pettenkofer's chamber and quantitative physiology,--but
+the "Opera Omnia" of Sanctorius I had never met with, and I fear he had
+to do without it.
+
+I would extend the hospitality of these shelves to a class of works which
+we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale of
+medical science, properly so called, and sometimes of coupling with a
+disrespectful name. Such has always been my own practice. I have
+welcomed Culpeper and Salmon to my bookcase as willingly as Dioscorides
+or Quincy, or Paris or Wood and Bache. I have found a place for St. John
+Long, and read the story of his trial for manslaughter with as much
+interest as the laurel-water case in which John Hunter figured as a
+witness. I would give Samuel Hahnemann a place by the side of Samuel
+Thomson. Am I not afraid that some student of imaginative turn and not
+provided with the needful cerebral strainers without which all the refuse
+of gimcrack intelligences gets into the mental drains and chokes them
+up,--am I not afraid that some such student will get hold of the
+"Organon" or the "Maladies Chroniques" and be won over by their
+delusions, and so be lost to those that love him as a man of common sense
+and a brother in their high calling? Not in the least. If he showed any
+symptoms of infection I would for once have recourse to the principle of
+similia similibus. To cure him of Hahnemann I would prescribe my
+favorite homoeopathic antidote, Okie's Bonninghausen. If that failed, I
+would order Grauvogl as a heroic remedy, and if he survived that uncured,
+I would give him my blessing, if I thought him honest, and bid him depart
+in peace. For me he is no longer an individual. He belongs to a class of
+minds which we are bound to be patient with if their Maker sees fit to
+indulge them with existence. We must accept the conjuring
+ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist, the erratic spiritualist,
+the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy of philosophic study; not
+more unworthy of it than the squarers of the circle and the inventors of
+perpetual motion, and the other whimsical visionaries to whom De Morgan
+has devoted his most instructive and entertaining "Budget of Paradoxes."
+I hope, therefore, that our library will admit the works of the so-called
+Eclectics, of the Thomsonians, if any are in existence, of the
+Clairvoyants, if they have a literature, and especially of the
+Homoeopathists. This country seems to be the place for such a
+collection, which will by and by be curious and of more value than at
+present, for Homoeopathy seems to be following the pathological law of
+erysipelas, fading out where it originated as it spreads to new regions.
+At least I judge so by the following translated extract from a criticism
+of an American work in the "Homoeopatische Rundschau" of Leipzig for
+October, 1878, which I find in the "Homoeopathic Bulletin" for the month
+of November just passed: "While we feel proud of the spread and rise of
+Homoeopathy across the ocean, and while the Homoeopathic works reaching
+us from there, and published in a style such as is unknown in Germany,
+bear eloquent testimony to the eminent activity of our transatlantic
+colleagues, we are overcome by sorrowful regrets at the position
+Homoeopathy occupies in Germany. Such a work [as the American one
+referred to] with us would be impossible; it would lack the necessary
+support."
+
+By all means let our library secure a good representation of the
+literature of Homoeopathy before it leaves us its "sorrowful regrets" and
+migrates with its sugar of milk pellets, which have taken the place of
+the old pilulae micae panis, to Alaska, to "Nova Zembla, or the Lord
+knows where."
+
+What shall I say in this presence of the duties of a Librarian? Where
+have they ever been better performed than in our own public city library,
+where the late Mr. Jewett and the living Mr. Winsor have shown us what a
+librarian ought to be,--the organizing head, the vigilant guardian, the
+seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor? His work is not merely that of
+administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are. He must have a
+quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a public carrier of
+knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which naturalists
+attribute to the bumble-bee,--he lays up little honey for himself, but
+he conveys the fertilizing pollen from flower to flower.
+
+Our undertaking, just completed,--and just begun--has come at the right
+time, not a day too soon. Our practitioners need a library like this,
+for with all their skill and devotion there is too little genuine
+erudition, such as a liberal profession ought to be able to claim for
+many of its members. In reading the recent obituary notices of the late
+Dr. Geddings of South Carolina, I recalled what our lamented friend Dr.
+Coale used to tell me of his learning and accomplishments, and I could
+not help reflecting how few such medical scholars we had to show in
+Boston or New England. We must clear up this unilluminated atmosphere,
+and here,--here is the true electric light which will irradiate its
+darkness.
+
+The public will catch the rays reflected from the same source of light,
+and it needs instruction on the great subjects of health and
+disease,--needs it sadly. It is preyed upon by every kind of imposition
+almost without hindrance. Its ignorance and prejudices react upon the
+profession to the great injury of both. The jealous feeling, for
+instance, with regard to such provisions for the study of anatomy as are
+sanctioned by the laws in this State and carried out with strict regard
+to those laws, threatens the welfare, if not the existence of
+institutions for medical instruction wherever it is not held in check by
+enlightened intelligence. And on the other hand the profession has just
+been startled by a verdict against a physician, ruinous in its
+amount,--enough to drive many a hard-working young practitioner out of
+house and home,--a verdict which leads to the fear that suits for
+malpractice may take the place of the panel game and child-stealing as a
+means of extorting money. If the profession in this State, which claims
+a high standard of civilization, is to be crushed and ground beneath the
+upper millstone of the dearth of educational advantages and the lower
+millstone of ruinous penalties for what the ignorant ignorantly shall
+decide to be ignorance, all I can say is
+
+ God save the Commonhealth of Massachusetts!
+
+Once more, we cannot fail to see that just as astrology has given place
+to astronomy, so theology, the science of Him whom by searching no man
+can find out, is fast being replaced by what we may not improperly call
+theonomy, or the science of the laws according to which the Creator acts.
+And since these laws find their fullest manifestations for us, at least,
+in rational human natures, the study of anthropology is largely replacing
+that of scholastic divinity. We must contemplate our Maker indirectly in
+human attributes as we talk of Him in human parts of speech. And this
+gives a sacredness to the study of man in his physical, mental, moral,
+social, and religious nature which elevates the faithful students of
+anthropology to the dignity of a priesthood, and sheds a holy light on
+the recorded results of their labors, brought together as they are in
+such a collection as this which is now spread out before us.
+
+Thus, then, our library is a temple as truly as the dome-crowned
+cathedral hallowed by the breath of prayer and praise, where the dead
+repose and the living worship. May it, with all its treasures, be
+consecrated like that to the glory of God, through the contributions it
+shall make to the advancement of sound knowledge, to the relief of human
+suffering, to the promotion of harmonious relations between the members
+of the two noble professions which deal with the diseases of the soul and
+with those of the body, and to the common cause in which all good men are
+working, the furtherance of the well-being of their fellow-creatures!
+
+NOTE.--As an illustration of the statement in the last paragraph but one,
+I take the following notice from the "Boston Daily Advertiser," of
+December 4th, the day after the delivery of the address: "Prince Lucien
+Bonaparte is now living in London, and is devoting himself to the work of
+collecting the creeds of all religions and sects, with a view to their
+classification,--his object being simply scientific or anthropological."
+
+Since delivering the address, also, I find a leading article in the
+"Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic" of November 30th, headed "The Decadence of
+Homoeopathy," abundantly illustrated by extracts from the "Homoeopathic
+Times," the leading American organ of that sect.
+
+In the New York "Medical Record" of the same date, which I had not seen
+before the delivery of my address, is an account of the action of the
+Homoeopathic Medical Society of Northern New York, in which Hahnemann's
+theory of "dynamization" is characterized in a formal resolve as
+"unworthy the confidence of the Homoeopathic profession."
+
+It will be a disappointment to the German Homoeopathists to read in the
+"Homoeopathic Times" such a statement as the following: "Whatever the
+influences have been which have checked the outward development of
+Homoeopathy, it is plainly evident that the Homoeopathic school, as
+regards the number of its openly avowed representatives, has attained its
+majority, and has begun to decline both in this country and in England."
+
+All which is an additional reason for making a collection of the
+incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological
+inanity has faded out like so many other delusions.
+
+
+
+
+SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS
+
+[A Farewell Address to the Medical School of Harvard University, November
+28, 1882.]
+
+I had intended that the recitation of Friday last should be followed by a
+few parting words to my class and any friends who might happen to be in
+the lecture-room. But I learned on the preceding evening that there was
+an expectation, a desire, that my farewell should take a somewhat
+different form; and not to disappoint the wishes of those whom I was
+anxious to gratify, I made up my mind to appear before you with such
+hasty preparation as the scanty time admitted.
+
+There are three occasions upon which a human being has a right to
+consider himself as a centre of interest to those about him: when he is
+christened, when he is married, and when he is buried. Every one is the
+chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own wedding, and his
+own funeral.
+
+There are other occasions, less momentous, in which one may make more of
+himself than under ordinary circumstances he would think it proper to do;
+when he may talk about himself, and tell his own experiences, in fact,
+indulge in a more or less egotistic monologue without fear or reproach.
+
+I think I may claim that this is one of those occasions. I have
+delivered my last anatomical lecture and heard my class recite for the
+last time. They wish to hear from me again in a less scholastic mood
+than that in which they have known me. Will you not indulge me in
+telling you something of my own story?
+
+This is the thirty-sixth Course of Lectures in which I have taken my
+place and performed my duties as Professor of Anatomy. For more than
+half of my term of office I gave instruction in Physiology, after the
+fashion of my predecessors and in the manner then generally prevalent in
+our schools, where the physiological laboratory was not a necessary part
+of the apparatus of instruction. It was with my hearty approval that the
+teaching of Physiology was constituted a separate department and made an
+independent Professorship. Before my time, Dr. Warren had taught
+Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery in the same course of Lectures, lasting
+only three or four months. As the boundaries of science are enlarged,
+new divisions and subdivisions of its territories become necessary. In
+the place of six Professors in 1847, when I first became a member of the
+Faculty, I count twelve upon the Catalogue before me, and I find the
+whole number engaged in the work of instruction in the Medical School
+amounts to no less than fifty.
+
+Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect of many branches of
+science has undergone a very remarkable transformation. Chemistry and
+Physiology are no longer what they were, as taught by the instructors of
+that time. We are looking forward to the synthesis of new organic
+compounds; our artificial madder is already in the market, and the
+indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop will be supplanted by the
+manufactured article. In the living body we talk of fuel supplied and
+work done, in movement, in heat, just as if we were dealing with a
+machine of our own contrivance.
+
+A physiological laboratory of to-day is equipped with instruments of
+research of such ingenious contrivance, such elaborate construction, that
+one might suppose himself in a workshop where some exquisite fabric was
+to be wrought, such as Queens love to wear, and Kings do not always love
+to pay for. They are, indeed, weaving a charmed web, for these are the
+looms from which comes the knowledge that clothes the nakedness of the
+intellect. Here are the mills that grind food for its hunger, and "is
+not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"
+
+But while many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of the
+past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I teach,
+or, rather, with that division of it which is chiefly taught in this
+amphitheatre. General anatomy, or histology, on the other hand, is
+almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my medical
+studies. I never saw a compound microscope during my years of study in
+Paris. Individuals had begun to use the instrument, but I never heard it
+alluded to by either Professors or students. In descriptive anatomy I
+have found little to unlearn, and not a great deal that was both new and
+important to learn. Trifling additions are made from year to year, not
+to be despised and not to be overvalued. Some of the older anatomical
+works are still admirable, some of the newer ones very much the contrary.
+I have had recent anatomical plates brought me for inspection, and I have
+actually button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as hard to get rid
+of as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put him to shame
+with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles in the great
+folio of Albinus, published in 1747, and the unapproached figures of the
+lymphatic system of Mascagni, now within a very few years of a century
+old, and still copied, or, rather, pretended to be copied, in the most
+recent works on anatomy.
+
+I am afraid that it is a good plan to get rid of old Professors, and I am
+thankful to hear that there is a movement for making provision for those
+who are left in need when they lose their offices and their salaries. I
+remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked me to get into
+his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously, half sadly, that he
+was like an old horse,--they had taken off his saddle and turned him out
+to pasture. I fear the grass was pretty short where that old servant of
+the public found himself grazing. If I myself needed an apology for
+holding my office so long, I should find it in the fact that human
+anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius and
+Fallopius, and that the greater part of my teaching was of such a nature
+that it could never become antiquated.
+
+Let me begin with my first experience as a medical student. I had come
+from the lessons of Judge Story and Mr. Ashmun in the Law School at
+Cambridge. I had been busy, more or less, with the pages of Blackstone
+and Chitty, and other text-books of the first year of legal study. More
+or less, I say, but I am afraid it was less rather than more. For during
+that year I first tasted the intoxicating pleasure of authorship. A
+college periodical, conducted by friends of mine, still undergraduates,
+tempted me into print, and there is no form of lead-poisoning which more
+rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow than that
+which reaches the young author through mental contact with type-metal.
+Qui a bu, boira,--he who has once been a drinker will drink again, says
+the French proverb. So the man or woman who has tasted type is sure to
+return to his old indulgence sooner or later. In that fatal year I had
+my first attack of authors' lead-poisoning, and I have never got quite
+rid of it from that day to this. But for that I might have applied
+myself more diligently to my legal studies, and carried a green bag in
+place of a stethoscope and a thermometer up to the present day.
+
+What determined me to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine I can
+hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon that year's study as an
+experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon found myself
+introduced to new scenes and new companionships.
+
+I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions
+produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could
+no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day experiences.
+The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked grimly at me as
+I entered the room devoted to the students of the school I had joined,
+just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass and scythe,
+used to glare upon me in my childhood from the "New England Primer." The
+white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their reflection in my own
+cheeks, which lost their color as I looked upon them. All this had to
+pass away in a little time; I had chosen my profession, and must meet its
+painful and repulsive aspects until they lost their power over my
+sensibilities.
+
+The private medical school which I had joined was one established by Dr.
+James Jackson, Dr. Walter Channing, Dr. John Ware, Dr. Winslow Lewis, and
+Dr. George W. Otis. Of the first three gentlemen I have either spoken
+elsewhere or may find occasion to speak hereafter. The two younger
+members of this association of teachers were both graduates of our
+University, one of the year 1819, the other of 1818.
+
+Dr. Lewis was a great favorite with students. He was a man of very
+lively temperament, fond of old books and young people, open-hearted,
+free-spoken, an enthusiast in teaching, and especially at home in that
+apartment of the temple of science where nature is seen in undress, the
+anthropotomic laboratory, known to common speech as the dissecting-room.
+He had that quality which is the special gift of the man born for a
+teacher,--the power of exciting an interest in that which he taught.
+While he was present the apartment I speak of was the sunniest of studios
+in spite of its mortuary spectacles. Of the students I met there I best
+remember James Jackson, Junior, full of zeal and playful as a boy, a
+young man whose early death was a calamity to the profession of which he
+promised to be a chief ornament; the late Reverend J. S. C. Greene, who,
+as the prefix to his name signifies, afterwards changed his profession,
+but one of whose dissections I remember looking upon with admiration; and
+my friend Mr. Charles Amory, as we call him, Dr. Charles Amory, as he is
+entitled to be called, then, as now and always, a favorite with all about
+him. He had come to us from the schools of Germany, and brought with him
+recollections of the teachings of Blumenbach and the elder Langenbeck,
+father of him whose portrait hangs in our Museum. Dr. Lewis was our
+companion as well as our teacher. A good demonstrator is,--I will not
+say as important as a good Professor in the teaching of Anatomy, because
+I am not sure that he is not more important. He comes into direct
+personal relations with the students,--he is one of them, in fact, as the
+Professor cannot be from the nature of his duties. The Professor's chair
+is an insulating stool, so to speak; his age, his knowledge, real or
+supposed, his official station, are like the glass legs which support the
+electrician's piece of furniture, and cut it off from the common currents
+of the floor upon which it stands. Dr. Lewis enjoyed teaching and made
+his students enjoy being taught. He delighted in those anatomical
+conundrums to answer which keeps the student's eyes open and his wits
+awake. He was happy as he dexterously performed the tour de maitre of
+the old barber-surgeons, or applied the spica bandage and taught his
+scholars to do it, so neatly and symmetrically that the aesthetic
+missionary from the older centre of civilization would bend over it in
+blissful contemplation, as if it were a sunflower. Dr. Lewis had many
+other tastes, and was a favorite, not only with students, but in a wide
+circle, professional, antiquarian, masonic, and social.
+
+Dr. Otis was less widely known, but was a fluent and agreeable lecturer,
+and esteemed as a good surgeon.
+
+I must content myself with this glimpse at myself and a few of my
+fellow-students in Boston. After attending two courses of Lectures in
+the school of the University, I went to Europe to continue my studies.
+
+You may like to hear something of the famous Professors of Paris in the
+days when I was a student in the Ecole de Medicine, and following the
+great Hospital teachers.
+
+I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners
+and Professors who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled
+with the train of students that attended the morning visits. See that
+bent old man who is groping his way through the wards of La Charity.
+That is the famous Baron Boyer, author of the great work on surgery in
+nine volumes, a writer whose clearness of style commends his treatise to
+general admiration, and makes it a kind of classic. He slashes away at a
+terrible rate, they say, when he gets hold of the subject of fistula in
+its most frequent habitat,--but I never saw him do more than look as if
+he wanted to cut a good dollop out of a patient he was examining. The
+short, square, substantial man with iron-gray hair, ruddy face, and white
+apron is Baron Larrey, Napoleon's favorite surgeon, the most honest man
+he ever saw,--it is reputed that he called him. To go round the Hotel
+des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns of Napoleon, to
+look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannons of Marengo, to
+struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the snows
+of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon the
+last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of Waterloo. Larrey
+was still strong and sturdy as I saw him, and few portraits remain
+printed in livelier colors on the tablet of my memory.
+
+Leave the little group of students which gathers about Larrey beneath the
+gilded dome of the Invalides and follow me to the Hotel Dieu, where rules
+and reigns the master-surgeon of his day, at least so far as Paris and
+France are concerned,--the illustrious Baron Dupuytren. No man disputed
+his reign, some envied his supremacy. Lisfranc shrugged his shoulders as
+he spoke of "ce grand homme de l'autre cots de la riviere," that great
+man on the other side of the river, but the great man he remained, until
+he bowed before the mandate which none may disobey. "Three times," said
+Bouillaud, "did the apoplectic thunderbolt fall on that robust
+brain,"--it yielded at last as the old bald cliff that is riven and
+crashes down into the valley. I saw him before the first thunderbolt had
+descended: a square, solid man, with a high and full-domed head, oracular
+in his utterances, indifferent to those around him, sometimes, it was
+said, very rough with them. He spoke in low, even tones, with quiet
+fluency, and was listened to with that hush of rapt attention which I
+have hardly seen in any circle of listeners unless when such men as
+ex-President John Quincy Adams or Daniel Webster were the speakers. I do
+not think that Dupuytren has left a record which explains his influence,
+but in point of fact he dominated those around him in a remarkable
+manner. You must have all witnessed something of the same kind. The
+personal presence of some men carries command with it, and their accents
+silence the crowd around them, when the same words from other lips might
+fall comparatively unheeded.
+
+As for Lisfranc, I can say little more of him than that he was a great
+drawer of blood and hewer of members. I remember his ordering a
+wholesale bleeding of his patients, right and left, whatever might be the
+matter with them, one morning when a phlebotomizing fit was on him. I
+recollect his regretting the splendid guardsmen of the old Empire,--for
+what? because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate. I got along
+about as far as that with him, when I ceased to be a follower of M.
+Lisfranc.
+
+The name of Velpeau must have reached many of you, for he died in 1867,
+and his many works made his name widely known. Coming to Paris in wooden
+shoes, starving, almost, at first, he raised himself to great eminence as
+a surgeon and as an author, and at last obtained the Professorship to
+which his talents and learning entitled him. His example may be an
+encouragement to some of my younger hearers who are born, not with the
+silver spoon in their mouths, but with the two-tined iron fork in their
+hands. It is a poor thing to take up their milk porridge with in their
+young days, but in after years it will often transfix the solid dumplings
+that roll out of the silver spoon. So Velpeau found it. He had not what
+is called genius, he was far from prepossessing in aspect, looking as if
+he might have wielded the sledge-hammer (as I think he had done in early
+life) rather than the lancet, but he had industry, determination,
+intelligence, character, and he made his way to distinction and
+prosperity, as some of you sitting on these benches and wondering
+anxiously what is to become of you in the struggle for life will have
+done before the twentieth century has got halfway through its first
+quarter. A good sound head over a pair of wooden shoes is a great deal
+better than a wooden head belonging to an owner who cases his feet in
+calf-skin, but a good brain is not enough without a stout heart to fill
+the four great conduits which carry at once fuel and fire to that
+mightiest of engines.
+
+How many of you who are before me are familiarly acquainted with the name
+of Broussais, or even with that of Andral? Both were lecturing at the
+Ecole de Medicine, and I often heard them. Broussais was in those days
+like an old volcano, which has pretty nearly used up its fire and
+brimstone, but is still boiling and bubbling in its interior, and now and
+then sends up a spirt of lava and a volley of pebbles. His theories of
+gastro-enteritis, of irritation and inflammation as the cause of disease,
+and the practice which sprang from them, ran over the fields of medicine
+for a time like flame over the grass of the prairies. The way in which
+that knotty-featured, savage old man would bring out the word
+irritation--with rattling and rolling reduplication of the resonant
+letter r--might have taught a lesson in articulation to Salvini. But
+Broussais's theory was languishing and well-nigh become obsolete, and
+this, no doubt, added vehemence to his defence of his cherished dogmas.
+
+Old theories, and old men who cling to them, must take themselves out of
+the way as the new generation with its fresh thoughts and altered habits
+of mind comes forward to take the place of that which is dying out. This
+was a truth which the fiery old theorist found it very hard to learn, and
+harder to bear, as it was forced upon him. For the hour of his lecture
+was succeeded by that of a younger and far more popular professor. As
+his lecture drew towards its close, the benches, thinly sprinkled with
+students, began to fill up; the doors creaked open and banged back
+oftener and oftener, until at last the sound grew almost continuous, and
+the voice of the lecturer became a leonine growl as he strove in vain to
+be heard over the noise of doors and footsteps.
+
+Broussais was now sixty-two years old. The new generation had outgrown
+his doctrines, and the Professor for whose hour the benches had filled
+themselves belonged to that new generation. Gabriel Andral was little
+more than half the age of Broussais, in the full prime and vigor of
+manhood at thirty-seven years. He was a rapid, fluent, fervid, and
+imaginative speaker, pleasing in aspect and manner,--a strong contrast to
+the harsh, vituperative old man who had just preceded him. His Clinique
+Medicale is still valuable as a collection of cases, and his researches
+on the blood, conducted in association with Gavarret, contributed new and
+valuable facts to science. But I remember him chiefly as one of those
+instructors whose natural eloquence made it delightful to listen to him.
+I doubt if I or my fellow-students did full justice either to him or to
+the famous physician of Hotel Dieu, Chomel. We had addicted ourselves
+almost too closely to the words of another master, by whom we were ready
+to swear as against all teachers that ever were or ever would be.
+
+This object of our reverence, I might almost say idolatry, was one whose
+name is well known to most of the young men before me, even to those who
+may know comparatively little of his works and teachings. Pierre Charles
+Alexandre Louis, at the age of forty-seven, as I recall him, was a tall,
+rather spare, dignified personage, of serene and grave aspect, but with a
+pleasant smile and kindly voice for the student with whom he came into
+personal relations. If I summed up the lessons of Louis in two
+expressions, they would be these; I do not hold him answerable for the
+words, but I will condense them after my own fashion in French, and then
+give them to you, expanded somewhat, in English:
+
+ Formez toujours des idees nettes.
+ Fuyez toujours les a peu pres.
+
+Always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea of the matter
+you are considering.
+
+Always avoid vague approximations where exact estimates are possible;
+about so many,--about so much, instead of the precise number and
+quantity.
+
+Now, if there is anything on which the biological sciences have prided
+themselves in these latter years it is the substitution of quantitative
+for qualitative formulae. The "numerical system," of which Louis was the
+great advocate, if not the absolute originator, was an attempt to
+substitute series of carefully recorded facts, rigidly counted and
+closely compared, for those never-ending records of vague, unverifiable
+conclusions with which the classics of the healing art were overloaded.
+The history of practical medicine had been like the story of the
+Danaides. "Experience" had been, from time immemorial, pouring its
+flowing treasures into buckets full of holes. At the existing rate of
+supply and leakage they would never be filled; nothing would ever be
+settled in medicine. But cases thoroughly recorded and mathematically
+analyzed would always be available for future use, and when accumulated
+in sufficient number would lead to results which would be trustworthy,
+and belong to science.
+
+You young men who are following the hospitals hardly know how much you
+are indebted to Louis. I say nothing of his Researches on Phthisis or
+his great work on Typhoid Fever. But I consider his modest and brief
+Essay on Bleeding in some Inflammatory Diseases, based on cases carefully
+observed and numerically analyzed, one of the most important written
+contributions to practical medicine, to the treatment of internal
+disease, of this century, if not since the days of Sydenham. The lancet
+was the magician's wand of the dark ages of medicine. The old physicians
+not only believed in its general efficacy as a wonder-worker in disease,
+but they believed that each malady could be successfully attacked from
+some special part of the body,--the strategic point which commanded the
+seat of the morbid affection. On a figure given in the curious old work
+of John de Ketam, no less than thirty-eight separate places are marked as
+the proper ones to bleed from, in different diseases. Even Louis, who
+had not wholly given up venesection, used now and then to order that a
+patient suffering from headache should be bled in the foot, in preference
+to any other part.
+
+But what Louis did was this: he showed by a strict analysis of numerous
+cases that bleeding did not strangle,--jugulate was the word then
+used,--acute diseases, more especially pneumonia. This was not a
+reform,--it was a revolution. It was followed up in this country by the
+remarkable Discourse of Dr. Jacob Bigelow upon Self-Limited Diseases,
+which has, I believe, done more than any other work or essay in our own
+language to rescue the practice of medicine from the slavery to the
+drugging system which was a part of the inheritance of the profession.
+
+Yes, I say, as I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent in
+the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one of the
+attending physicians,--yes, Louis did a great work for practical
+medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of
+authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any
+student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend,
+and yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I feel
+that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and
+study.
+
+There is one part of their business which certain medical practitioners
+are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most of all try to
+do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to preserve life, or
+at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the slightest interest
+to the patient to know whether three or three and a quarter cubic inches
+of his lung are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with thinking of the
+curious problems which are to be solved by his own autopsy,--whether this
+or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of this or that form of
+degeneration. He wants something to relieve his pain, to mitigate the
+anguish of dyspnea, to bring back motion and sensibility to the dead
+limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What is it to him that you can
+localize and name by some uncouth term the disease which you could not
+prevent and which you cannot cure? An old woman who knows how to make a
+poultice and how to put it on, and does it tuto, eito, jucunde, just when
+and where it is wanted, is better,--a thousand times better in many
+cases,--than a staring pathologist, who explores and thumps and doubts
+and guesses, and tells his patient be will be better tomorrow, and so
+goes home to tumble his books over and make out a diagnosis.
+
+But in those days, I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much
+more of "science" than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not
+clung so closely to the skirts of Louis and had followed some of the
+courses of men like Trousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special attention
+to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis,--it would have been
+better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn in the
+wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of diseases get
+well of themselves, without any special medication,--the great fact
+formulated, enforced, and popularized by Dr. Jacob Bigelow in the
+Discourse referred to. We unlearned the habit of drugging for its own
+sake. This detestable practice, which I was almost proscribed for
+condemning somewhat too epigrammatically a little more than twenty years
+ago, came to us, I suspect, in a considerable measure from the English
+"general practitioners," a sort of prescribing apothecaries. You
+remember how, when the city was besieged, each artisan who was called
+upon in council to suggest the best means of defence recommended the
+articles he dealt in: the carpenter, wood; the blacksmith, iron; the
+mason, brick; until it came to be a puzzle to know which to adopt. Then
+the shoemaker said, "Hang your walls with new boots," and gave good
+reasons why these should be the best of all possible defences. Now the
+"general practitioner" charged, as I understand, for his medicine, and
+in that way got paid for his visit. Wherever this is the practice,
+medicine is sure to become a trade, and the people learn to expect
+drugging, and to consider it necessary, because drugs are so universally
+given to the patients of the man who gets his living by them.
+
+It was something to have unlearned the pernicious habit of constantly
+giving poisons to a patient, as if they were good in themselves, of
+drawing off the blood which he would want in his struggle with disease,
+of making him sore and wretched with needless blisters, of turning his
+stomach with unnecessary nauseous draught and mixtures,--only because he
+was sick and something must be done. But there were positive as well as
+negative facts to be learned, and some of us, I fear, came home rich in
+the negatives of the expectant practice, poor in the resources which many
+a plain country practitioner had ready in abundance for the relief and
+the cure of disease. No one instructor can be expected to do all for a
+student which he requires. Louis taught us who followed him the love of
+truth, the habit of passionless listening to the teachings of nature, the
+most careful and searching methods of observation, and the sure means of
+getting at the results to be obtained from them in the constant
+employment of accurate tabulation. He was not a showy, or eloquent, or,
+I should say, a very generally popular man, though the favorite, almost
+the idol, of many students, especially Genevese and Bostonians. But he
+was a man of lofty and admirable scientific character, and his work will
+endure in its influences long after his name is lost sight of save to the
+faded eyes of the student of medical literature.
+
+Many other names of men more or less famous in their day, and who were
+teaching while I was in Paris, come up before me. They are but empty
+sounds for the most part in the ears of persons of not more than middle
+age. Who of you knows anything of Richerand, author of a very popular
+work on Physiology, commonly put into the student's hands when I first
+began to ask for medical text-books? I heard him lecture once, and have
+had his image with me ever since as that of an old, worn-out man,--a
+venerable but dilapidated relic of an effete antiquity. To verify this
+impression I have just looked out the dates of his birth and death, and
+find that he was eighteen years younger than the speaker who is now
+addressing you. There is a terrible parallax between the period before
+thirty and that after threescore and ten, as two men of those ages look,
+one with naked eyes, one through his spectacles, at the man of fifty and
+thereabout. Magendie, I doubt not you have all heard of. I attended but
+one of his lectures. I question if one here, unless some contemporary of
+my own has strayed into the amphitheatre,--knows anything about Marjolin.
+I remember two things about his lectures on surgery, the deep tones of
+his voice as he referred to his oracle,--the earlier writer, Jean Louis
+Petit,--and his formidable snuffbox. What he taught me lies far down, I
+doubt not, among the roots of my knowledge, but it does not flower out in
+any noticeable blossoms, or offer me any very obvious fruits. Where now
+is the fame of Bouillaud, Professor and Deputy, the Sangrado of his time?
+Where is the renown of Piorry, percussionist and poet, expert alike in
+the resonances of the thoracic cavity and those of the rhyming
+vocabulary?--I think life has not yet done with the vivacious Ricord,
+whom I remember calling the Voltaire of pelvic literature,--a sceptic as
+to the morality of the race in general, who would have submitted Diana to
+treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills
+for the vestal virgins.
+
+Ricord was born at the beginning of the century, and Piorry some years
+earlier. Cruveilhier, who died in 1874, is still remembered by his great
+work on pathological anatomy; his work on descriptive anatomy has some
+things which I look in vain for elsewhere. But where is Civiale,--where
+are Orfila, Gendrin, Rostan, Biett, Alibert,--jolly old Baron Alibert,
+whom I remember so well in his broad-brimmed hat, worn a little jauntily
+on one side, calling out to the students in the court-yard of the
+Hospital St. Louis, "Enfans de la methode naturelle, etes-vous tous
+ici?" "Children of the natural method [his own method of classification
+of skin diseases,] are you all here?" All here, then, perhaps; all
+where, now?
+
+My show of ghosts is over. It is always the same story that old men tell
+to younger ones, some few of whom will in their turn repeat the tale,
+only with altered names, to their children's children.
+
+ Like phantoms painted on the magic slide,
+ Forth from the darkness of the past we glide,
+ As living shadows for a moment seen
+ In airy pageant on the eternal screen,
+ Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame,
+ Then seek the dust and stillness whence we came.
+
+Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, whom I well remember, came back from Leyden,
+where he had written his Latin graduating thesis, talking of the learned
+Gaubius and the late illustrious Boerhaave and other dead Dutchmen, of
+whom you know as much, most of you, as you do of Noah's apothecary and
+the family physician of Methuselah, whose prescriptions seem to have been
+lost to posterity. Dr. Lloyd came back to Boston full of the teachings
+of Cheselden and Sharpe, William Hunter, Smellie, and Warner; Dr. James
+Jackson loved to tell of Mr. Cline and to talk of Mr. John Hunter; Dr.
+Reynolds would give you his recollections of Sir Astley Cooper and Mr.
+Abernethy; I have named the famous Frenchmen of my student days; Leyden,
+Edinburgh, London, Paris, were each in turn the Mecca of medical
+students, just as at the present day Vienna and Berlin are the centres
+where our young men crowd for instruction. These also must sooner or
+later yield their precedence and pass the torch they hold to other hands.
+Where shall it next flame at the head of the long procession? Shall it
+find its old place on the shores of the Gulf of Salerno, or shall it
+mingle its rays with the northern aurora up among the fiords of
+Norway,--or shall it be borne across the Atlantic and reach the banks of
+the Charles, where Agassiz and Wyman have taught, where Hagen still
+teaches, glowing like his own Lampyris splendidula, with enthusiasm,
+where the first of American botanists and the ablest of American surgeons
+are still counted in the roll of honor of our great University?
+
+Let me add a few words which shall not be other than cheerful, as I bid
+farewell to this edifice which I have known so long. I am grateful to
+the roof which has sheltered me, to the floors which have sustained me,
+though I have thought it safest always to abstain from anything like
+eloquence, lest a burst of too emphatic applause might land my class and
+myself in the cellar of the collapsing structure, and bury us in the fate
+of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. I have helped to wear these stairs into
+hollows,--stairs which I trod when they were smooth and level, fresh from
+the plane. There are just thirty-two of them, as there were five and
+thirty years ago, but they are steeper and harder to climb, it seems to
+me, than they were then. I remember that in the early youth of this
+building, the late Dr. John K. Mitchell, father of our famous Dr. Weir
+Mitchell, said to me as we came out of the Demonstrator's room, that some
+day or other a whole class would go heels over head down this graded
+precipice, like the herd told of in Scripture story. This has never
+happened as yet; I trust it never will. I have never been proud of the
+apartment beneath the seats, in which my preparations for lecture were
+made. But I chose it because I could have it to myself, and I resign it,
+with a wish that it were more worthy of regret, into the hands of my
+successor, with my parting benediction. Within its twilight precincts I
+have often prayed for light, like Ajax, for the daylight found scanty
+entrance, and the gaslight never illuminated its dark recesses. May it
+prove to him who comes after me like the cave of the Sibyl, out of the
+gloomy depths of which came the oracles which shone with the rays of
+truth and wisdom!
+
+This temple of learning is not surrounded by the mansions of the great
+and the wealthy. No stately avenues lead up to its facades and
+porticoes. I have sometimes felt, when convoying a distinguished
+stranger through its precincts to its door, that he might question
+whether star-eyed Science had not missed her way when she found herself
+in this not too attractive locality. I cannot regret that we--you, I
+should say--are soon to migrate to a more favored region, and carry on
+your work as teachers and as learners in ampler halls and under far more
+favorable conditions.
+
+I hope that I may have the privilege of meeting you there, possibly may
+be allowed to add my words of welcome to those of my former colleagues,
+and in that pleasing anticipation I bid good-by to this scene of my long
+labors, and, for the present at least, to the friends with whom I have
+been associated.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDUM
+
+
+
+
+NOTES TO THE ADDRESS ON CURRENTS AND COUNTER
+CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE.
+
+Some passages contained in the original manuscript of the Address, and
+omitted in the delivery on account of its length, are restored in the
+text or incorporated with these Notes.
+
+
+
+NOTE A.--
+
+There is good reason to doubt whether the nitrate of silver has any real
+efficacy in epilepsy. It has seemed to cure many cases, but epilepsy is
+a very uncertain disease, and there is hardly anything which has not been
+supposed to cure it. Dr. Copland cites many authorities in its favor,
+most especially Lombard's cases. But De la Berge and Monneret (Comp. de
+Med. Paris), 1839, analyze these same cases, eleven in number, and can
+only draw the inference of a very questionable value in the supposed
+remedy. Dr. James Jackson says that relief of epilepsy is not to be
+attained by any medicine with which he is acquainted, but by diet.
+(Letters to a Young Physician, p. 67.) Guy Patin, Dean of the Faculty of
+Paris, Professor at the Royal College, Author of the Antimonial
+Martyrology, a wit and a man of sense and learning, who died almost two
+hundred years ago, had come to the same conclusion, though the chemists
+of his time boasted of their remedies. "Did, you ever see a case of
+epilepsy cured by nitrate of silver?" I said to one of the oldest and
+most experienced surgeons in this country. "Never," was his instant
+reply. Dr. Twitchell's experience was very similar. How, then, did
+nitrate of silver come to be given for epilepsy? Because, as Dr. Martin
+has so well reminded us, lunatics were considered formerly to be under
+the special influence of Luna, the moon (which Esquirol, be it observed,
+utterly denies), and lunar caustic, or nitrate of silver, is a salt of
+that metal which was called luna from its whiteness, and of course must
+be in the closest relations with the moon. It follows beyond all
+reasonable question that the moon's metal, silver, and its preparations,
+must be the specific remedy for moonblasted maniacs and epileptics!
+
+Yet the practitioner who prescribes the nitrate of silver supposes he is
+guided by the solemn experience of the past, instead of by its idle
+fancies. He laughs at those old physicians who placed such confidence in
+the right hind hoof of an elk as a remedy for the same disease, and
+leaves the record of his own belief in a treatment quite as fanciful and
+far more objectionable, written in indelible ink upon a living tablet
+where he who runs may read it for a whole generation, if nature spares
+his walking advertisement so long.
+
+
+
+NOTE B.--
+
+The presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, does
+not mean that there are no rogues, but lays the onus probandi on the
+party to which it properly belongs. So with this proposition. A noxious
+agent should never be employed in sickness unless there is ample evidence
+in the particular case to overcome the general presumption against all
+such agents, and the evidence is very apt to be defective.
+
+The miserable delusion of Homoeopathy builds itself upon an axiom
+directly the opposite of this; namely, that the sick are to be cured by
+poisons. Similia similibus curantur means exactly this. It is simply a
+theory of universal poisoning, nullified in practice by the infinitesimal
+contrivance. The only way to kill it and all similar fancies, and to
+throw every quack nostrum into discredit, is to root out completely the
+suckers of the old rotten superstition that whatever is odious or noxious
+is likely to be good for disease. The current of sound practice with
+ourselves is, I believe, setting fast in the direction I have indicated
+in the above proposition. To uphold the exhibition of noxious agents in
+disease, as the rule, instead of admitting them cautiously and
+reluctantly as the exception, is, as I think, an eddy of opinion in the
+direction of the barbarism out of which we believe our art is escaping.
+It is only through the enlightened sentiment and action of the Medical
+Profession that the community can be brought to acknowledge that drugs
+should always be regarded as evils.
+
+It is true that some suppose, and our scientific and thoughtful
+associate, Dr. Gould, has half countenanced the opinion, that there may
+yet be discovered a specific for every disease. Let us not despair of
+the future, but let us be moderate in our expectations. When an oil is
+discovered that will make a bad watch keep good time; when a recipe is
+given which will turn an acephalous foetus into a promising child; when a
+man can enter the second time into his mother's womb and give her back
+the infirmities which twenty generations have stirred into her blood, and
+infused into his own through hers, we may be prepared to enlarge the
+National Pharmacopoeia with a list of specifies for everything but old
+age,--and possibly for that also.
+
+
+
+NOTE C.--
+
+The term specific is used here in its ordinary sense, without raising the
+question of the propriety of its application to these or other remedies.
+
+The credit of introducing Cinchona rests between the Jesuits, the
+Countess of Chinchon, the Cardinal de Lugo, and Sir Robert Talbor, who
+employed it as a secret remedy. (Pereira.) Mercury as an internal
+specific remedy was brought into use by that impudent and presumptuous
+quack, as he was considered, Paracelsus. (Encyc. Brit. art.
+"Paracelsus.") Arsenic was introduced into England as a remedy for
+intermittents by Dr. Fowler, in consequence of the success of a patent
+medicine, the Tasteless Ague Drops, which were supposed, "probably with
+reason," to be a preparation of that mineral. (Rees's Cyc. art.
+"Arsenic.") Colchicum came into notice in a similar way, from the
+success of the Eau Medicinale of M. Husson, a French military officer.
+(Pereira.) Iodine was discovered by a saltpetre manufacturer, but applied
+by a physician in place of the old remedy, burnt sponge, which seems to
+owe its efficacy to it. (Dunglison, New Remedies.) As for Sulphur, "the
+common people have long used it as an ointment" for scabies. (Rees's
+Cyc. art. "Scabies.") The modern cantiscorbutic regimen is credited to
+Captain Cook. "To his sagacity we are indebted for the first impulse to
+those regulations by which scorbutus is so successfully prevented in our
+navy." (Lond. Cyc. Prac. Med. art. "Scorbutus.") Iron and various
+salts which enter into the normal composition of the human body do not
+belong to the materia medica by our definition, but to the materia
+alimentaria.
+
+For the first introduction of iron as a remedy, see Pereira, who gives a
+very curious old story.
+
+The statement in the text concerning a portion of the materia medica
+stands exactly as delivered, and is meant exactly as it stands. No
+denunciation of drugs, as sparingly employed by a wise physician, was or
+is intended. If, however, as Dr. Gould stated in his "valuable and
+practical discourse" to which the Massachusetts Medical Society "listened
+with profit as well as interest," "Drugs, in themselves considered, may
+always be regarded as evils,"--any one who chooses may question whether
+the evils from their abuse are, on the whole, greater or less than the
+undoubted benefits obtained from their proper use. The large exception
+of opium, wine, specifics, and anaesthetics, made in the text, takes off
+enough from the useful side, as I fully believe, to turn the balance; so
+that a vessel containing none of these, but loaded with antimony,
+strychnine, acetate of lead, aloes, aconite, lobelia, lapis infernalis,
+stercus diaboli, tormentilla, and other approved, and, in skilful hands,
+really useful remedies, brings, on the whole, more harm than good to the
+port it enters.
+
+It is a very narrow and unjust view of the practice of medicine, to
+suppose it to consist altogether in the use of powerful drugs, or of
+drugs of any kind. Far from it. "The physician may do very much for the
+welfare of the sick, more than others can do, although he does not, even
+in the major part of cases, undertake to control and overcome the disease
+by art. It was with these views that I never reported any patient cured
+at our hospital. Those who recovered their health were reported as well;
+not implying that they were made so by the active treatment they had
+received there. But it was to be understood that all patients received
+in that house were to be cured, that is, taken care of." (Letters to a
+Young Physician, by James Jackson, M. D., Boston, 1855.)
+
+"Hygienic rules, properly enforced, fresh air, change of air, travel,
+attention to diet, good and appropriate food judiciously regulated,
+together with the administration of our tonics, porter, ale, wine, iron,
+etc., supply the diseased or impoverished system with what Mr. Gull, of
+St. Bartholomew's Hospital, aptly calls the 'raw material of the blood;'
+and we believe that if any real improvement has taken place in medical
+practice, independently of those truly valuable contributions we have
+before described, it is in the substitution of tonics, stimulants, and
+general management, for drastic cathartics, for bleeding, depressing
+agents, including mercury, tartar emetics, etc., so much in vogue during
+the early part even of this century." (F. P. Porcher, in Charleston Med.
+Journal and Review for January, 1860.) 1860.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
+
+A MEMOIR, Complete
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+
+
+Volume I.
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+The Memoir here given to the public is based on a biographical sketch
+prepared by the writer at the request of the Massachusetts Historical
+Society for its Proceedings. The questions involving controversies into
+which the Society could not feel called to enter are treated at
+considerable length in the following pages. Many details are also given
+which would have carried the paper written for the Society beyond the
+customary limits of such tributes to the memory of its deceased members.
+It is still but an outline which may serve a present need and perhaps be
+of some assistance to a future biographer.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+1814-1827. To AEt. 13.
+BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS.
+
+John Motley, the great-grandfather of the subject of this Memoir, came in
+the earlier part of the last century from Belfast in Ireland to Falmouth,
+now Portland, in the District, now the State of Maine. He was twice
+married, and had ten children, four of the first marriage and six of the
+last. Thomas, the youngest son by his first wife, married Emma, a
+daughter of John Wait, the first Sheriff of Cumberland County under the
+government of the United States. Two of their seven sons, Thomas and
+Edward, removed from Portland to Boston in 1802 and established
+themselves as partners in commercial business, continuing united and
+prosperous for nearly half a century before the firm was dissolved.
+
+The earlier records of New England have preserved the memory of an
+incident which deserves mention as showing how the historian's life was
+saved by a quickwitted handmaid, more than a hundred years before he was
+born. On the 29th of August, 1708, the French and Indians from Canada
+made an attack upon the town of Haverhill, in Massachusetts. Thirty or
+forty persons were slaughtered, and many others were carried captive into
+Canada.
+
+The minister of the town, Rev. Benjamin Rolfe, was killed by a bullet
+through the door of his house. Two of his daughters, Mary, aged thirteen,
+and Elizabeth, aged nine, were sleeping in a room with the maid-servant,
+Hagar. When Hagar heard the whoop of the savages she seized the children,
+ran with them into the cellar, and, after concealing them under two large
+washtubs, hid herself. The Indians ransacked the cellar, but missed the
+prey. Elizabeth, the younger of the two girls, grew up and married the
+Rev. Samuel Checkley, first minister of the "New South" Church, Boston.
+Her son, Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, was minister of the Second Church,
+and his successor, Rev. John Lothrop, or Lathrop, as it was more commonly
+spelled, married his daughter. Dr. Lothrop was great-grandson of Rev.
+John Lothrop, of Scituate, who had been imprisoned in England for
+nonconformity. The Checkleys were from Preston Capes, in
+Northamptonshire. The name is probably identical with that of the
+Chicheles or Chichleys, a well-known Northamptonshire family.
+
+Thomas Motley married Anna, daughter of the Rev. John Lothrop,
+granddaughter of the Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, the two ministers
+mentioned above, both honored in their day and generation. Eight children
+were born of this marriage, of whom four are still living.
+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, the second of these children, was born in
+Dorchester, now a part of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 15th of April,
+1814. A member of his family gives a most pleasing and interesting
+picture, from his own recollections and from what his mother told him, of
+the childhood which was to develop into such rich maturity. The boy was
+rather delicate in organization, and not much given to outdoor
+amusements, except skating and swimming, of which last exercise he was
+very fond in his young days, and in which he excelled. He was a great
+reader, never idle, but always had a book in his hand,--a volume of
+poetry or one of the novels of Scott or Cooper. His fondness for plays
+and declamation is illustrated by the story told by a younger brother,
+who remembers being wrapped up in a shawl and kept quiet by sweetmeats,
+while he figured as the dead Caesar, and his brother, the future
+historian, delivered the speech of Antony over his prostrate body. He was
+of a most sensitive nature, easily excited, but not tenacious of any
+irritated feelings, with a quick sense of honor, and the most entirely
+truthful child, his mother used to say, that she had ever seen. Such are
+some of the recollections of those who knew him in his earliest years and
+in the most intimate relations.
+
+His father's family was at this time living in the house No. 7 Walnut
+Street, looking down Chestnut Street over the water to the western hills.
+Near by, at the corner of Beacon Street, was the residence of the family
+of the first mayor of Boston, and at a little distance from the opposite
+corner was the house of one of the fathers of New England manufacturing
+enterprise, a man of superior intellect, who built up a great name and
+fortune in our city. The children from these three homes naturally became
+playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very hospitable one, and Lothrop and
+two of his young companions were allowed to carry out their schemes of
+amusement in the garden and the garret. If one with a prescient glance
+could have looked into that garret on some Saturday afternoon while our
+century was not far advanced in its second score of years, he might have
+found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed hats, heroes and
+bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas. In one of the boys
+he would have seen the embryo dramatist of a nation's life history, John
+Lothrop Motley; in the second, a famous talker and wit who has spilled
+more good things on the wasteful air in conversation than would carry a
+"diner-out" through half a dozen London seasons, and waked up somewhat
+after the usual flowering-time of authorship to find himself a very
+agreeable and cordially welcomed writer,--Thomas Gold Appleton. In the
+third he would have recognized a champion of liberty known wherever that
+word is spoken, an orator whom to hear is to revive all the traditions of
+the grace, the address, the commanding sway of the silver-tongued
+eloquence of the most renowned speakers,--Wendell Phillips.
+
+Both of young Motley's playmates have furnished me with recollections of
+him and of those around him at this period of his life, and I cannot do
+better than borrow freely from their communications. His father was a man
+of decided character, social, vivacious, witty, a lover of books, and
+himself not unknown as a writer, being the author of one or more of the
+well remembered "Jack Downing" letters. He was fond of having the boys
+read to him from such authors as Channing and Irving, and criticised
+their way of reading with discriminating judgment and taste. Mrs. Motley
+was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration. I remember
+well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her "regal beauty," as Mr. Phillips
+truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which
+made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to
+the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of
+mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped
+and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story
+used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were
+the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show. This son of theirs was
+"rather tall," says Mr. Phillips, "lithe, very graceful in movement and
+gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of his
+head on his shoulders,"--a peculiar elegance which was most noticeable in
+those later days when I knew him. Lady Byron long afterwards spoke of him
+as more like her husband in appearance than any other person she had met;
+but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom of his boyhood and youth,
+thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of Byron represents the poet.
+"He could not have been eleven years old," says the same correspondent,
+"when he began writing a novel. It opened, I remember, not with one
+solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an inn in the valley of the
+Housatonic. Neither of us had ever seen the Housatonic, but it sounded
+grand and romantic. Two chapters were finished."
+
+There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr.
+Green's school at Jamaica Plain. From that school he went to Round Hill,
+Northampton, then under the care of Mr. Cogswell and Mr. Bancroft. The
+historian of the United States could hardly have dreamed that the
+handsome boy of ten years was to take his place at the side of his
+teacher in the first rank of writers in his own department. Motley came
+to Round Hill, as one of his schoolmates tells me, with a great
+reputation, especially as a declaimer. He had a remarkable facility for
+acquiring languages, excelled as a reader and as a writer, and was the
+object of general admiration for his many gifts. There is some reason to
+think that the flattery he received was for a time a hindrance to his
+progress and the development of his character. He obtained praise too
+easily, and learned to trust too much to his genius. He had everything to
+spoil him,--beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm which
+might have made him a universal favorite. Yet he does not seem to have
+been generally popular at this period of his life. He was wilful,
+impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious. He would study as
+he liked, and not by rule. His school and college mates believed in his
+great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted
+if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed
+that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, the
+long-breathed tenacity of purpose, which in after years gave effect to
+his brilliant mental endowments. "I did wonder," says Mr. Wendell
+Phillips, "at the diligence and painstaking, the drudgery shown in his
+historical works. In early life he had no industry, not needing it. All
+he cared for in a book he caught quickly,--the spirit of it, and all his
+mind needed or would use. This quickness of apprehension was marvellous."
+I do not find from the recollections of his schoolmates at Northampton
+that he was reproached for any grave offences, though he may have
+wandered beyond the prescribed boundaries now and then, and studied
+according to his inclinations rather than by rule. While at that school
+he made one acquisition much less common then than now,--a knowledge of
+the German language and some degree of acquaintance with its literature,
+under the guidance of one of the few thorough German scholars this
+country then possessed, Mr. George Bancroft.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+1827-1831. AEt. 13-17.
+COLLEGE LIFE.
+
+Such then was the boy who at the immature, we might almost say the
+tender, age of thirteen entered Harvard College. Though two years after
+me in college standing, I remember the boyish reputation which he brought
+with him, especially that of a wonderful linguist, and the impression
+which his striking personal beauty produced upon us as he took his seat
+in the college chapel. But it was not until long after this period that I
+became intimately acquainted with him, and I must again have recourse to
+the classmates and friends who have favored me with their reminiscences
+of this period of his life. Mr. Phillips says:
+
+ "During our first year in college, though the youngest in the class,
+ he stood third, I think, or second in college rank, and ours was an
+ especially able class. Yet to maintain this rank he neither cared
+ nor needed to make any effort. Too young to feel any
+ responsibilities, and not yet awake to any ambition, he became so
+ negligent that he was 'rusticated' [that is, sent away from college
+ for a time]. He came back sobered, and worked rather more, but with
+ no effort for college rank thenceforward."
+
+I must finish the portrait of the collegian with all its lights and
+shadows by the help of the same friends from whom I have borrowed the
+preceding outlines.
+
+He did not care to make acquaintances, was haughty in manner and cynical
+in mood, at least as he appeared to those in whom he felt no special
+interest. It is no wonder, therefore, that he was not a popular favorite,
+although recognized as having very brilliant qualities. During all this
+period his mind was doubtless fermenting with projects which kept him in
+a fevered and irritable condition. "He had a small writing-table," Mr.
+Phillips says, "with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it half full of
+sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a play, prose
+portraits of some pet character, etc. These he would read to me, though
+he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt the whole
+and began to fill the drawer again."
+
+My friend, Mr. John Osborne Sargent, who was a year before him in
+college, says, in a very interesting letter with which he has favored me:
+
+ "My first acquaintance with him [Motley] was at Cambridge, when he
+ came from Mr. Cogswell's school at Round Hill. He then had a good
+ deal of the shyness that was just pronounced enough to make him
+ interesting, and which did not entirely wear off till he left
+ college. . . I soon became acquainted with him, and we used to take
+ long walks together, sometimes taxing each other's memory for poems
+ or passages from poems that had struck our fancy. Shelley was then
+ a great favorite of his, and I remember that Praed's verses then
+ appearing in the 'New Monthly' he thought very clever and brilliant,
+ and was fond of repeating them. You have forgotten, or perhaps
+ never knew, that Motley's first appearance in print was in the
+ 'Collegian.' He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a
+ translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by
+ inserting. It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity.
+ . . . How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not
+ remember. I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a
+ member of the Knights of the Square Table,--always my favorite
+ college club, for the reason, perhaps, that I was a sometime Grand
+ Master. He was always a genial and jovial companion at our supper-
+ parties at Fresh Pond and Gallagher's."
+
+We who live in the days of photographs know how many faces belong to
+every individual. We know too under what different aspects the same
+character appears to those who study it from different points of view and
+with different prepossessions. I do not hesitate, therefore, to place
+side by side the impressions of two of his classmates as to one of his
+personal traits as they observed him at this period of his youth.
+
+ "He was a manly boy, with no love for or leaning to girls' company;
+ no care for dress; not a trace of personal vanity. . . . He was,
+ or at least seemed, wholly unconscious of his rare beauty and of the
+ fascination of his manner; not a trace of pretence, the simplest and
+ most natural creature in the world."
+
+Look on that picture and on this:--
+
+ "He seemed to have a passion for dress. But as in everything else,
+ so in this, his fancy was a fitful one. At one time he would excite
+ our admiration by the splendor of his outfit, and perhaps the next
+ week he would seem to take equal pleasure in his slovenly or
+ careless appearance."
+
+It is not very difficult to reconcile these two portraitures. I recollect
+it was said by a witty lady of a handsome clergyman well remembered among
+us, that he had dressy eyes. Motley so well became everything he wore,
+that if he had sprung from his bed and slipped his clothes on at an alarm
+of fire, his costume would have looked like a prince's undress. His
+natural presentment, like that of Count D'Orsay, was of the kind which
+suggests the intentional effects of an elaborate toilet, no matter how
+little thought or care may have been given to make it effective. I think
+the "passion for dress" was really only a seeming, and that he often
+excited admiration when he had not taken half the pains to adorn himself
+that many a youth less favored by nature has wasted upon his unblest
+exterior only to be laughed at.
+
+I gather some other interesting facts from a letter which I have received
+from his early playmate and school and college classmate, Mr. T. G.
+Appleton.
+
+ "In his Sophomore year he kept abreast of the prescribed studies,
+ but his heart was out of bounds, as it often had been at Round Hill
+ when chasing squirrels or rabbits through forbidden forests.
+ Already his historical interest was shaping his life. A tutor
+ coming-by chance, let us hope--to his room remonstrated with him
+ upon the heaps of novels upon his table.
+
+"'Yes,' said Motley, 'I am reading historically, and have come to the
+novels of the nineteenth century. Taken in the lump, they are very hard
+reading.'"
+
+All Old Cambridge people know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof,
+its tall trees, its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and
+hospitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivant, Major Brattle.
+In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a
+part of their college course.
+
+ "Motley's room was on the ground floor, the room to the left of the
+ entrance. He led a very pleasant life there, tempering his college
+ duties with the literature he loved, and receiving his friends
+ amidst elegant surroundings, which added to the charm of his
+ society. Occasionally we amused ourselves by writing for the
+ magazines and papers of the day. Mr. Willis had just started a slim
+ monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine
+ flavor. We wrote for that, and sometimes verses in the corner of a
+ paper called 'The Anti-Masonic Mirror,' and in which corner was a
+ woodcut of Apollo, and inviting to destruction ambitious youths by
+ the legend underneath,--
+
+ 'Much yet remains unsung.'
+
+ These pieces were usually dictated to each other, the poet recumbent
+ upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for
+ the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its
+ glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the
+ humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs
+ and Cockney poets by Christopher North, intoxicated us youths.
+
+ "It was young writing, and made for the young. The opinions were
+ charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet. But this
+ delighted the boys. There were no reprints then, and to pass the
+ paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the
+ heather arm in arm with Christopher himself. It is a little
+ singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley
+ rarely if ever wrote for it. I remember a translation from Goethe,
+ 'The Ghost-Seer,' which he may have written for it, and a poem upon
+ the White Mountains. Motley spoke at one of the college exhibitions
+ an essay on Goethe so excellent that Mr. Joseph Cogswell sent it to
+ Madam Goethe, who, after reading it, said, 'I wish to see the first
+ book that young man will write.'"
+
+Although Motley did not aim at or attain a high college rank, the rules
+of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which confine the number of members to the
+first sixteen of each class, were stretched so as to include him,--a
+tribute to his recognized ability, and an evidence that a distinguished
+future was anticipated for him.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+1832-1833. AEt. 18-19.
+STUDY AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE.
+
+Of the two years divided between the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen
+I have little to record. That he studied hard I cannot doubt; that he
+found himself in pleasant social relations with some of his
+fellow-students seems probable from the portraits he has drawn in his
+first story, "Morton's Hope," and is rendered certain so far as one of
+his companions is concerned. Among the records of the past to which he
+referred during his last visit to this country was a letter which he took
+from a collection of papers and handed me to read one day when I was
+visiting him. The letter was written in a very lively and exceedingly
+familiar vein. It implied such intimacy, and called up in such a lively
+way the gay times Motley and himself had had together in their youthful
+days, that I was puzzled to guess who could have addressed him from
+Germany in that easy and off-hand fashion. I knew most of his old friends
+who would be likely to call him by his baptismal name in its most
+colloquial form, and exhausted my stock of guesses unsuccessfully before
+looking at the signature. I confess that I was surprised, after laughing
+at the hearty and almost boyish tone of the letter, to read at the bottom
+of the page the signature of Bismarck. I will not say that I suspect
+Motley of having drawn the portrait of his friend in one of the
+characters of "Morton's Hope," but it is not hard to point out traits in
+one of them which we can believe may have belonged to the great
+Chancellor at an earlier period of life than that at which the world
+contemplates his overshadowing proportions.
+
+Hoping to learn something of Motley during the two years while we had
+lost sight of him, I addressed a letter to His Highness Prince Bismarck,
+to which I received the following reply:--
+
+ FOREIGN OFFICE, BERLIN, March 11, 1878.
+
+ SIR,--I am directed by Prince Bismarck to acknowledge the receipt of
+ your letter of the 1st of January, relating to the biography of the
+ late Mr. Motley. His Highness deeply regrets that the state of his
+ health and pressure of business do not allow him to contribute
+ personally, and as largely as he would be delighted to do, to your
+ depicting of a friend whose memory will be ever dear to him. Since
+ I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. Motley at
+ Varzin, I have been intrusted with communicating to you a few
+ details I have gathered from the mouth of the Prince. I enclose
+ them as they are jotted down, without any attempt of digestion.
+
+ I have the honor to be
+ Your obedient servant,
+ LOTHAIR BUCHER.
+
+ "Prince Bismarck said:--
+
+ "'I met Motley at Gottingen in 1832, I am not sure if at the
+ beginning of Easter Term or Michaelmas Term. He kept company with
+ German students, though more addicted to study than we members of
+ the fighting clubs (corps). Although not having mastered yet the
+ German language, he exercised a marked attraction by a conversation
+ sparkling with wit, humor, and originality. In autumn of 1833,
+ having both of us migrated from Gottingen to Berlin for the
+ prosecution of our studies, we became fellow-lodgers in the house
+ No. 161 Friedrich Strasse. There we lived in the closest intimacy,
+ sharing meals and outdoor exercise. Motley by that time had arrived
+ at talking German fluently; he occupied himself not only in
+ translating Goethe's poem "Faust," but tried his hand even in
+ composing German verses. Enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,
+ Byron, Goethe, he used to spice his conversation abundantly with
+ quotations from these his favorite authors. A pertinacious arguer,
+ so much so that sometimes he watched my awakening in order to
+ continue a discussion on some topic of science, poetry, or practical
+ life, cut short by the chime of the small hours, he never lost his
+ mild and amiable temper. Our faithful companion was Count Alexander
+ Keyserling, a native of Courland, who has since achieved distinction
+ as a botanist.
+
+ "'Motley having entered the diplomatic service of his country, we
+ had frequently the opportunity of renewing our friendly intercourse;
+ at Frankfort he used to stay with me, the welcome guest of my wife;
+ we also met at Vienna, and, later, here. The last time I saw him
+ was in 1872 at Varzin, at the celebration of my "silver wedding,"
+ namely, the twenty-fifth anniversary.
+
+ "'The most striking feature of his handsome and delicate appearance
+ was uncommonly large and beautiful eyes. He never entered a
+ drawing-room without exciting the curiosity and sympathy of the
+ ladies.'"
+
+It is but a glimpse of their young life which the great statesman gives
+us, but a bright and pleasing one. Here were three students, one of whom
+was to range in the flowery fields of the loveliest of the sciences,
+another to make the dead past live over again in his burning pages, and a
+third to extend an empire as the botanist spread out a plant and the
+historian laid open a manuscript.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+1834-1839. 2ET. 20-25.
+
+RETURN TO AMERICA.--STUDY OF LAW.--MARRIAGE.--HIS FIRST NOVEL, "MORTON'S
+HOPE."
+
+Of the years passed in the study of law after his return from Germany I
+have very little recollection, and nothing of importance to record. He
+never became seriously engaged in the practice of the profession he had
+chosen. I had known him pleasantly rather than intimately, and our
+different callings tended to separate us. I met him, however, not very
+rarely, at one house where we were both received with the greatest
+cordiality, and where the attractions brought together many both young
+and old to enjoy the society of its charming and brilliant inmates. This
+was at No. 14 Temple Place, where Mr. Park Benjamin was then living with
+his two sisters, both in the bloom of young womanhood. Here Motley found
+the wife to whom his life owed so much of its success and its happiness.
+Those who remember Mary Benjamin find it hard to speak of her in the
+common terms of praise which they award to the good and the lovely. She
+was not only handsome and amiable and agreeable, but there was a cordial
+frankness, an openhearted sincerity about her which made her seem like a
+sister to those who could help becoming her lovers. She stands quite
+apart in the memory of the friends who knew her best, even from the
+circle of young persons whose recollections they most cherish. Yet hardly
+could one of them have foreseen all that she was to be to him whose life
+she was to share. They were married on the 2d of March, 1837. His
+intimate friend, Mr. Joseph Lewis Stackpole, was married at about the
+same time to her sister, thus joining still more closely in friendship
+the two young men who were already like brothers in their mutual
+affection.
+
+Two years after his marriage, in 1839, appeared his first work, a novel
+in two volumes, called "Morton's Hope." He had little reason to be
+gratified with its reception. The general verdict was not favorable to
+it, and the leading critical journal of America, not usually harsh or
+cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a
+place among its "Critical Notices," but dropped a small-print
+extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its "List of New
+Publications." Nothing could be more utterly disheartening than the
+unqualified condemnation passed upon the story. At the same time the
+critic says that "no one can read 'Morton's Hope' without perceiving it
+to have been written by a person of uncommon resources of mind and
+scholarship."
+
+It must be confessed that, as a story, "Morton's Hope" cannot endure a
+searching or even a moderately careful criticism. It is wanting in
+cohesion, in character, even in a proper regard to circumstances of time
+and place; it is a map of dissected incidents which has been flung out of
+its box and has arranged itself without the least regard to chronology or
+geography. It is not difficult to trace in it many of the influences
+which had helped in forming or deforming the mind of the young man of
+twenty-five, not yet come into possession of his full inheritance of the
+slowly ripening qualities which were yet to assert their robust
+independence. How could he help admiring Byron and falling into more or
+less unconscious imitation of his moods if not of his special
+affectations? Passion showing itself off against a dark foil of cynicism;
+sentiment, ashamed of its own self-betrayal, and sneering at itself from
+time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,--how
+many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad
+copies of a bad ideal! The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian
+Grey and of Pelham. But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the
+intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which
+these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be
+something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way
+of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the
+plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these
+influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his
+familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the
+story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it
+aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as
+"Vivian Grey" is now read, in the light of the career which it heralded.
+
+"Morton's Hope" is not to be read as a novel: it is to be studied as an
+autobiography, a prophecy, a record of aspirations, disguised under a
+series of incidents which are flung together with no more regard to the
+unities than a pack of shuffled playing-cards. I can do nothing better
+than let him picture himself, for it is impossible not to recognize the
+portrait. It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact
+copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines
+are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of
+many others. Let us compare his fictitious hero's story with what we have
+read of his own life.
+
+In early boyhood Morton amused himself and astonished those about him by
+enacting plays for a puppet theatre. This was at six years old, and at
+twelve we find him acting in a play with other boys, just as Motley's
+playmates have already described him. The hero may now speak for himself,
+but we shall all perceive that we are listening to the writer's own
+story.
+
+ "I was always a huge reader; my mind was essentially craving and
+ insatiable. Its appetite was enormous, and it devoured too greedily
+ for health. I rejected all guidance in my studies. I already
+ fancied myself a misanthrope. I had taken a step very common for
+ boys of my age, and strove with all my might to be a cynic."
+
+He goes on to describe, under the perfectly transparent mask of his hero,
+the course of his studies. "To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most
+of my time." From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources,
+first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and
+Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself "in a dismal swamp of
+barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the
+Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman
+authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every
+one of them." One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says,
+his attention to foreign languages,--French, Spanish, German, especially
+in their earliest and rudest forms of literature. From these he ascended
+to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek. He would have taken up the
+study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who
+begged him seriously to turn his attention to history. The paragraph
+which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned
+heading.
+
+ "The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.
+ I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with
+ my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the
+ study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous
+ habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as
+ gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of
+ knowledge. I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and
+ impartial investigation of the sources of history. I was inspired
+ with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of
+ knowing as much as their masters. I imagined it necessary for me,
+ stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the
+ strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid
+ pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the
+ bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic
+ acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to
+ a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of
+ Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory
+ and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of
+ Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I
+ presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the
+ strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and
+ labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for
+ myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had
+ already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice
+ was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only
+ delving amidst rubbish.
+
+ "This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.
+ The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise
+ of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved
+ by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,
+ instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.
+ Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want
+ of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education
+ were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only
+ dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course
+ of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were
+ vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and
+ even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but
+ I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.
+
+ "I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor
+ be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual
+ must perform his portion of work:--happy enough if he can choose it
+ according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of
+ observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .
+
+ "From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own
+ eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern
+ writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I
+ came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as
+ I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .
+
+ "It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts
+ and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I
+ was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without
+ compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,
+ what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?
+
+ "Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,
+ more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day
+ to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed
+ upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted
+ with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger
+ than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary
+ consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my
+ time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the
+ learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out
+ mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.
+
+ "In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the
+ perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their
+ effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed
+ some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and
+ marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting
+ sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never
+ read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one
+ upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.
+ It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic
+ mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its
+ various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I
+ discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is
+ fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his
+ ambition and his powers.
+
+ "My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to
+ authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the
+ intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before
+ me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous
+ dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change
+ the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing
+ to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I
+ fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had
+ no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely
+ beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her
+ kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,
+ fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious
+ anticipations were as boundless as they were various and
+ conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I
+ was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer
+ and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern
+ it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my
+ leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.
+
+ "In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are
+ called young men of genius,--men who are the pride of their sisters
+ and the glory of their grandmothers,--men of whom unheard-of things
+ are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous
+ failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent
+ apprentices and attorneys' clerks.
+
+ "Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and
+ beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive
+ the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most
+ secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which
+ the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them
+ the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?"
+
+The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth
+whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his
+earlier years. If his hero says, "I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear
+and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table," one of his
+family says of the boy Motley that "if there were five minutes before
+dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at
+hand and began to read until dinner was announced." The same unbounded
+thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various
+failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself
+in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.
+
+Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius. Nothing can be
+more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than "Morton's Hope."
+But in no other of Motley's writings do we get such an inside view of his
+character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its
+unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With
+all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with
+a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been
+a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work
+quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at
+him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato
+nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly
+prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him. Too many
+brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their
+admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed
+birthright of "genius," have ended where they began; flattered into the
+vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at
+fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was
+but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five,
+and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off
+in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded
+together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and
+consequently never began to weave.
+
+The more this first work of Motley's is examined, the more are its faults
+as a story and its interest as a self-revelation made manifest to the
+reader. The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls
+into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter. Brutus
+in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more
+incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of
+thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them
+in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our
+Revolutionary period. He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up
+dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over
+his own manuscript or proofs. His hero is in Prague in June, 1777,
+reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the
+date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the
+American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel
+Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom
+he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months,
+having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to
+say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous
+account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did
+Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of
+contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore
+which may be found in "A Winter's Tale," but not in the map of Europe.
+
+And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and
+there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of
+noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a
+loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The
+novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the
+writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the
+creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the
+firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at
+work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant
+movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those
+which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which
+habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over
+this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a
+self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns
+of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of
+pointing out their inevitable and too manifest imperfections. They are to
+be carefully studied as the earliest efforts of the hand which painted
+the Marriage at Cana, of the art which taught the rude fabrics made to be
+trodden under foot to rival the glowing canvas of the great painters.
+None of Motley's subsequent writings give such an insight into his
+character and mental history. It took many years to train the as yet
+undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged
+materials into the organic connection which was needed in the
+construction of a work that should endure. There was a long interval
+between his early manhood and the middle term of life, during which the
+slow process of evolution was going on. There are plants which open their
+flowers with the first rays of the sun; there are others that wait until
+evening to spread their petals. It was already the high noon of life with
+him before his genius had truly shown itself; if he had not lived beyond
+this period, he would have left nothing to give him a lasting name.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+1841-1842. AEt. 27-28.
+
+FIRST DIPLOMATIC APPOINTMENT, SECRETARY OF LEGATION TO THE RUSSIAN
+MISSION.--BRIEF RESIDENCE AT ST. PETERSBURG.--LETTER TO HIS MOTHER.
+--RETURN.
+
+In the autumn of 1841, Mr. Motley received the appointment of Secretary
+of Legation to the Russian Mission, Mr. Todd being then the Minister.
+Arriving at St. Petersburg just at the beginning of winter, he found the
+climate acting very unfavorably upon his spirits if not upon his health,
+and was unwilling that his wife and his two young children should be
+exposed to its rigors. The expense of living, also, was out of proportion
+to his income, and his letters show that he had hardly established
+himself in St. Petersburg before he had made up his mind to leave a place
+where he found he had nothing to do and little to enjoy. He was homesick,
+too, as a young husband and father with an affectionate nature like his
+ought to have been under these circumstances. He did not regret having
+made the experiment, for he knew that he should not have been satisfied
+with himself if he had not made it. It was his first trial of a career in
+which he contemplated embarking, and in which afterwards he had an
+eventful experience. In his private letters to his family, many of which
+I have had the privilege of looking over, he mentions in detail all the
+reasons which influenced him in forming his own opinion about the
+expediency of a continued residence at St. Petersburg, and leaves the
+decision to her in whose judgment he always had the greatest confidence.
+No unpleasant circumstance attended his resignation of his secretaryship,
+and though it must have been a disappointment to find that the place did
+not suit him, as he and his family were then situated, it was only at the
+worst an experiment fairly tried and not proving satisfactory. He left
+St. Petersburg after a few months' residence, and returned to America. On
+reaching New York he was met by the sad tidings of the death of his
+first-born child, a boy of great promise, who had called out all the
+affections of his ardent nature. It was long before he recovered from the
+shock of this great affliction. The boy had shown a very quick and bright
+intelligence, and his father often betrayed a pride in his gifts and
+graces which he never for a moment made apparent in regard to his own.
+
+Among the letters which he wrote from St. Petersburg are two miniature
+ones directed to this little boy. His affectionate disposition shows
+itself very sweetly in these touching mementos of a love of which his
+first great sorrow was so soon to be born. Not less charming are his
+letters to his mother, showing the tenderness with which he always
+regarded her, and full of all the details which he thought would
+entertain one to whom all that related to her children was always
+interesting. Of the letters to his wife it is needless to say more than
+that they always show the depth of the love he bore her and the absolute
+trust he placed in her, consulting her at all times as his nearest and
+wisest friend and adviser,--one in all respects fitted "To warn, to
+comfort, and command."
+
+I extract a passage from one of his letters to his mother, as much for
+the sake of lending a character of reality to his brief residence at St.
+Petersburg as for that of the pleasant picture it gives us of an interior
+in that Northern capital.
+
+ "We entered through a small vestibule, with the usual arrangement of
+ treble doors, padded with leather to exclude the cold and guarded by
+ two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable
+ batons, into a broad hall,--threw off our furred boots and cloaks,
+ ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood
+ a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables,
+ and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with
+ servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long,
+ high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered room, in which a dozen
+ card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This
+ was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the
+ walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted
+ with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The
+ massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson
+ satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the
+ Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere.
+ This crimson room had two doors upon the side facing the three
+ windows: The innermost opened into a large supper-room, in which a
+ table was spread covered with the usual refreshments of European
+ parties,--tea, ices, lemonade, and et ceteras,--and the other opened
+ into a ball-room which is a sort of miniature of the 'salle blanche'
+ of the Winter Palace, being white and gold, and very brilliantly
+ lighted with 'ormolu' chandeliers filled with myriads of candles.
+ This room (at least forty feet long by perhaps twenty-five) opened
+ into a carpeted conservatory of about the same size, filled with
+ orange-trees and japonica plants covered with fruit and flowers,
+ arranged very gracefully into arbors, with luxurious seats under the
+ pendent boughs, and with here and there a pretty marble statue
+ gleaming through the green and glossy leaves. One might almost have
+ imagined one's self in the 'land of the cypress and myrtle' instead
+ of our actual whereabout upon the polar banks of the Neva.
+ Wandering through these mimic groves, or reposing from the fatigues
+ of the dance, was many a fair and graceful form, while the
+ brilliantly lighted ballroom, filled with hundreds of exquisitely
+ dressed women (for the Russian ladies, if not very pretty, are
+ graceful, and make admirable toilettes), formed a dazzling contrast
+ with the tempered light of the 'Winter Garden.' The conservatory
+ opened into a library, and from the library you reach the
+ antechamber, thus completing the 'giro' of one of the prettiest
+ houses in St. Petersburg. I waltzed one waltz and quadrilled one
+ quadrille, but it was hard work; and as the sole occupation of these
+ parties is dancing and card-playing--conversation apparently not
+ being customary--they are to me not very attractive."
+
+He could not be happy alone, and there were good reasons against his
+being joined by his wife and children.
+
+ "With my reserved habits," he says, "it would take a great deal
+ longer to become intimate here than to thaw the Baltic. I have only
+ to 'knock that it shall be opened to me,' but that is just what I
+ hate to do. . . . 'Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.'"
+
+Disappointed in his expectations, but happy in the thought of meeting his
+wife and children, he came back to his household to find it clad in
+mourning for the loss of its first-born.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+1844. AEt. 30.
+LETTER TO PARK BENJAMIN.--POLITICAL VIEWS AND FEELINGS.
+
+A letter to Mr. Park Benjamin, dated December 17, 1844, which has been
+kindly lent me by Mrs. Mary Lanman Douw of Poughkeepsie, gives a very
+complete and spirited account of himself at this period. He begins with a
+quiet, but tender reference to the death of his younger brother, Preble,
+one of the most beautiful youths seen or remembered among us, "a great
+favorite," as he says, "in the family and in deed with every one who knew
+him." He mentions the fact that his friends and near connections, the
+Stackpoles, are in Washington, which place he considers as exceptionally
+odious at the time when he is writing. The election of Mr. Polk as the
+opponent of Henry Clay gives him a discouraged feeling about our
+institutions. The question, he thinks, is now settled that a statesman
+can never again be called to administer the government of the country. He
+is almost if not quite in despair "because it is now proved that a man,
+take him for all in all, better qualified by intellectual power, energy
+and purity of character, knowledge of men, a great combination of
+personal qualities, a frank, high-spirited, manly bearing, keen sense of
+honor, the power of attracting and winning men, united with a vast
+experience in affairs, such as no man (but John Quincy Adams) now living
+has had and no man in this country can ever have again,--I say it is
+proved that a man better qualified by an extraordinary combination of
+advantages to administer the government than any man now living, or any
+man we can ever produce again, can be beaten by anybody. . . . . It has
+taken forty years of public life to prepare such a man for the
+Presidency, and the result is that he can be beaten by anybody,--Mr. Polk
+is anybody,--he is Mr. Quelconque."
+
+I do not venture to quote the most burning sentences of this impassioned
+letter. It shows that Motley had not only become interested most
+profoundly in the general movements of parties, but that he had followed
+the course of political events which resulted in the election of Mr. Polk
+with careful study, and that he was already looking forward to the revolt
+of the slave States which occurred sixteen years later. The letter is
+full of fiery eloquence, now and then extravagant and even violent in
+expression, but throbbing with a generous heat which shows the excitable
+spirit of a man who wishes to be proud of his country and does not wish
+to keep his temper when its acts make him ashamed of it. He is disgusted
+and indignant to the last degree at seeing "Mr. Quelconque" chosen over
+the illustrious statesman who was his favorite candidate. But all his
+indignation cannot repress a sense of humor which was one of his marked
+characteristics. After fatiguing his vocabulary with hard usage, after
+his unsparing denunciation of "the very dirty politics" which he finds
+mixed up with our popular institutions, he says,--it must be remembered
+that this was an offhand letter to one nearly connected with him,--
+
+ "All these things must in short, to use the energetic language of
+ the Balm of Columbia advertisement, 'bring every generous thinking
+ youth to that heavy sinking gloom which not even the loss of
+ property can produce, but only the loss of hair, which brings on
+ premature decay, causing many to shrink from being uncovered, and
+ even to shun society, to avoid the jests and sneers of their
+ acquaintances. The remainder of their lives is consequently spent
+ in retirement.'"
+
+He continues:--
+
+ "Before dropping the subject, and to show the perfect purity of my
+ motives, I will add that I am not at all anxious about the
+ legislation of the new government. I desired the election of Clay
+ as a moral triumph, and because the administration of the country,
+ at this moment of ten thousand times more importance than its
+ legislation, would have been placed in pure, strong, and determined
+ hands."
+
+Then comes a dash of that satirical and somewhat cynical way of feeling
+which he had not as yet outgrown. He had been speaking about the general
+want of attachment to the Union and the absence of the sentiment of
+loyalty as bearing on the probable dissolution of the Union.
+
+ "I don't mean to express any opinions on these matters,--I haven't
+ got any. It seems to me that the best way is to look at the
+ hodge-podge, be good-natured if possible, and laugh,
+
+ 'As from the height of contemplation
+ We view the feeble joints men totter on.'
+
+ I began a tremendous political career during the election, having
+ made two stump speeches of an hour and a half each,--after you went
+ away,--one in Dedham town-hall and one in Jamaica Plain, with such
+ eminent success that many invitations came to me from the
+ surrounding villages, and if I had continued in active political
+ life I might have risen to be vote-distributor, or fence-viewer, or
+ selectman, or hog-reeve, or something of the kind."
+
+The letter from which the above passages are quoted gives the same
+portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have
+already seen drawn in full face in the story of "Morton's Hope." It is
+charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on
+misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited
+young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts
+which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real
+conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his
+bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but
+now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or
+grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on
+the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the Dean of
+Saint Patrick's.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+1845-1847. AEt. 31-33.
+
+FIRST HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS.--PETER THE GREAT.--NOVELS OF
+BALZAC.--POLITY OF THE PURITANS.
+
+Mr. Motley's first serious effort in historical composition was an
+article of fifty pages in "The North American Review" for October, 1845.
+This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other "A
+Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great." It is, however, a narrative
+rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic
+narrative. If there had been any question as to whether the young
+novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which
+might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the
+question. It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study
+of his subject, but it is written with an easy and abundant, yet
+scholarly freedom, not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and
+picking out his material piece by piece, but rather as if it were the
+overflow of long-pursued and well-remembered studies recalled without
+effort and poured forth almost as a recreation.
+
+As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this
+first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his
+qualities as a historian and a biographer. The hero of his narrative
+makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam,
+on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait
+instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such
+a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features,
+that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the
+story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the
+imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, was
+given in the few opening sentences, showed the movement of the hand, the
+glow of the color, that were in due time to display on a broader canvas
+the full-length portraits of William the Silent and of John of Barneveld.
+The style of the whole article is rich, fluent, picturesque, with light
+touches of humor here and there, and perhaps a trace or two of youthful
+jauntiness, not quite as yet outgrown. His illustrative poetical
+quotations are mostly from Shakespeare,--from Milton and Byron also in a
+passage or two,--and now and then one is reminded that he is not
+unfamiliar with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" and the "French Revolution"
+of the same unmistakable writer, more perhaps by the way in which phrases
+borrowed from other authorities are set in the text than by any more
+important evidence of unconscious imitation.
+
+The readers who had shaken their heads over the unsuccessful story of
+"Morton's Hope" were startled by the appearance of this manly and
+scholarly essay. This young man, it seemed, had been studying,--studying
+with careful accuracy, with broad purpose. He could paint a character
+with the ruddy life-blood coloring it as warmly as it glows in the cheeks
+of one of Van der Helst's burgomasters. He could sweep the horizon in a
+wide general outlook, and manage his perspective and his lights and
+shadows so as to place and accent his special subject with its due relief
+and just relations. It was a sketch, or rather a study for a larger
+picture, but it betrayed the hand of a master. The feeling of many was
+that expressed in the words of Mr. Longfellow in his review of the
+"Twice-Told Tales" of the unknown young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne:
+"When a new star rises in the heavens, people gaze after it for a season
+with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. . . . This
+star is but newly risen; and erelong the observation of numerous
+star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editor's tables, will inform
+the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of"--not poetry in
+this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament
+where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides. Those who
+had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt
+themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed
+picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to
+larger tasks. There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the
+young essayist. He must redeem his pledge, he can and will redeem it, if
+he will only follow the bent of his genius and grapple with the heroic
+labor of writing a great history.
+
+And this was the achievement he was already meditating.
+
+In the mean time he was studying history for its facts and principles,
+and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In "The North American Review"
+for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom
+he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great
+story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who "made twenty
+assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him" before he
+achieved success, will find his genius fully appreciated and fairly
+weighed in this discriminating essay. A few brief extracts will show its
+quality.
+
+ "Balzac is an artist, and only an artist. In his tranquil,
+ unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his
+ cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his
+ curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and
+ painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse,
+ eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every
+ sound and every breath, and in the scientific accuracy with which he
+ portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his
+ investigation,--in all this calm and conscientious study of nature
+ he often reminds us of Goethe. Balzac, however, is only an artist
+ . . . He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound
+ observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient,
+ and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before
+ his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves. . . . It
+ is, perhaps, his defective style more than anything else which will
+ prevent his becoming a classic, for style above all other qualities
+ seems to embalm for posterity. As for his philosophy, his
+ principles, moral, political, or social, we repeat that he seems to
+ have none whatever. He looks for the picturesque and the striking.
+ He studies sentiments and sensations from an artistic point of view.
+ He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit
+ of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an
+ upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher;
+ but he is no moralist, and certainly no reformer."
+
+Another article contributed by Mr. Motley to "The North American Review"
+is to be found in the number for October, 1849. It is nominally a review
+of Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson's) "Geschichte der Colonisation von New
+England," but in reality an essay on the Polity of the Puritans,--an
+historical disquisition on the principles of self-government evolved in
+New England, broad in its views, eloquent in its language. Its spirit is
+thoroughly American, and its estimate of the Puritan character is not
+narrowed by the nearsighted liberalism which sees the past in the
+pitiless light of the present,--which looks around at high noon and finds
+fault with early dawn for its long and dark shadows. Here is a sentence
+or two from the article:--
+
+ "With all the faults of the system devised by the Puritans, it was a
+ practical system. With all their foibles, with all their teasing,
+ tyrannical, and arbitrary notions, the Pilgrims were lovers of
+ liberty as well as sticklers for authority. . . . Nowhere can a
+ better description of liberty be found than that given by Winthrop,
+ in his defence of himself before the General Court on a charge of
+ arbitrary conduct. 'Nor would I have you mistake your own liberty,'
+ he says. 'There is a freedom of doing what we list, without regard
+ to law or justice; this liberty is indeed inconsistent with
+ authority; but civil, moral, and federal liberty consists in every
+ man's enjoying his property and having the benefit of the laws of
+ his country; which is very consistent with a due subjection to the
+ civil magistrate.' . . .
+
+ "We enjoy an inestimable advantage in America. One can be a
+ republican, a democrat, without being a radical. A radical, one who
+ would uproot, is a man whose trade is dangerous to society. Here is
+ but little to uproot. The trade cannot flourish. All classes are
+ conservative by necessity, for none can wish to change the structure
+ of our polity. . .
+
+ "The country without a past cannot be intoxicated by visions of the
+ past of other lands. Upon this absence of the past it seems to us
+ that much of the security of our institutions depends. Nothing
+ interferes with the development of what is now felt to be the true
+ principle of government, the will of the people legitimately
+ expressed. To establish that great truth, nothing was to be torn
+ down, nothing to be uprooted. It grew up in New England out of the
+ seed unconsciously planted by the first Pilgrims, was not crushed
+ out by the weight of a thousand years of error spread over the whole
+ continent, and the Revolution was proclaimed and recognized."
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+1847-1849. AEt. 33-35.
+
+JOSEPH LEWIS STACKPOLE, THE FRIEND OF MOTLEY. HIS SUDDEN DEATH.--MOTLEY
+IN THE MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.--SECOND NOVEL,
+"MERRY-MOUNT, A ROMANCE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY."
+
+The intimate friendships of early manhood are not very often kept up
+among our people. The eager pursuit of fortune, position, office,
+separates young friends, and the indoor home life imprisons them in the
+domestic circle so generally that it is quite exceptional to find two
+grown men who are like brothers,--or rather unlike most brothers, in
+being constantly found together. An exceptional instance of such a more
+than fraternal relation was seen in the friendship of Mr. Motley and Mr.
+Joseph Lewis Stackpole. Mr. William Amory, who knew them both well, has
+kindly furnished me with some recollections, which I cannot improve by
+changing his own language.
+
+ "Their intimacy began in Europe, and they returned to this country
+ in 1835. In 1837 they married sisters, and this cemented their
+ intimacy, which continued to Stackpole's death in 1847. The
+ contrast in the temperament of the two friends--the one sensitive
+ and irritable, and the other always cool and good-natured--only
+ increased their mutual attachment to each other, and Motley's
+ dependence upon Stackpole. Never were two friends more constantly
+ together or more affectionately fond of each other. As Stackpole
+ was about eight years older than Motley, and much less impulsive and
+ more discreet, his death was to his friend irreparable, and at the
+ time an overwhelming blow."
+
+Mr. Stackpole was a man of great intelligence, of remarkable personal
+attractions, and amiable character. His death was a loss to Motley even
+greater than he knew, for he needed just such a friend, older, calmer,
+more experienced in the ways of the world, and above all capable of
+thoroughly understanding him and exercising a wholesome influence over
+his excitable nature without the seeming of a Mentor preaching to a
+Telemachus. Mr. Stackpole was killed by a railroad accident on the 20th
+of July, 1847.
+
+In the same letter Mr. Amory refers to a very different experience in Mr.
+Motley's life,--his one year of service as a member of the Massachusetts
+House of Representatives, 1849.
+
+ "In respect to the one term during which he was a member of the
+ Massachusetts House of Representatives, I can recall only one thing,
+ to which he often and laughingly alluded. Motley, as the Chairman
+ of the Committee on Education, made, as he thought, a most masterly
+ report. It was very elaborate, and, as he supposed, unanswerable;
+ but Boutwell, then a young man from some country town [Groton,
+ Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so
+ that he was unable to defend it against the attack. You can imagine
+ his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable,
+ to find himself, as he expressed it, 'on his own dunghill,'
+ ignominiously beaten. While the result exalted his opinion of the
+ speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school
+ education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for
+ political promotion in Massachusetts."
+
+To my letter of inquiry about this matter, Hon. George S. Boutwell
+courteously returned the following answer:--
+
+ BOSTON, October 14, 1878.
+
+ MY DEAR SIR,--As my memory serves me, Mr. Motley was a member of the
+ Massachusetts House of Representatives in the year 1847 1849. It
+ may be well to consult the manual for that year. I recollect the
+ controversy over the report from the Committee on Education.
+
+ His failure was not due to his want of faculty or to the vigor of
+ his opponents.
+
+ In truth he espoused the weak side of the question and the unpopular
+ one also. His proposition was to endow the colleges at the expense
+ of the fund for the support of the common schools. Failure was
+ inevitable. Neither Webster nor Choate could have carried the bill.
+
+ Very truly,
+ GEO. S. BOUTWELL.
+
+No one could be more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than
+Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with
+the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb,
+who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when
+his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common
+feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was
+what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too
+severe in judging itself.
+
+The commendation bestowed upon Motley's historical essays in "The North
+American Review" must have gone far towards compensating him for the ill
+success of his earlier venture. It pointed clearly towards the field in
+which he was to gather his laurels. And it was in the year following the
+publication of the first essay, or about that time (1846), that he began
+collecting materials for a history of Holland. Whether to tell the story
+of men that have lived and of events that have happened, or to create the
+characters and invent the incidents of an imaginary tale be the higher
+task, we need not stop to discuss. But the young author was just now like
+the great actor in Sir Joshua's picture, between the allurements of
+Thalia and Melpomene, still doubtful whether he was to be a romancer or a
+historian.
+
+The tale of which the title is given at the beginning of this section had
+been written several years before the date of its publication. It is a
+great advance in certain respects over the first novel, but wants the
+peculiar interest which belonged to that as a partially autobiographical
+memoir. The story is no longer disjointed and impossible. It is carefully
+studied in regard to its main facts. It has less to remind us of "Vivian
+Grey" and "Pelham," and more that recalls "Woodstock" and "Kenilworth."
+The personages were many of them historical, though idealized; the
+occurrences were many of them such as the record authenticated; the
+localities were drawn largely from nature. The story betrays marks of
+haste or carelessness in some portions, though others are elaborately
+studied. His preface shows that the reception of his first book had made
+him timid and sensitive about the fate of the second, and explains and
+excuses what might be found fault with, to disarm the criticism he had
+some reason to fear.
+
+That old watch-dog of our American literature, "The North American
+Review," always ready with lambent phrases in stately "Articles" for
+native talent of a certain pretension, and wagging its appendix of
+"Critical Notices" kindly at the advent of humbler merit, treated
+"Merry-Mount" with the distinction implied in a review of nearly twenty
+pages. This was a great contrast to the brief and slighting notice of
+"Morton's Hope." The reviewer thinks the author's descriptive power
+wholly exceeds his conception of character and invention of
+circumstances.
+
+ "He dwells, perhaps, too long and fondly upon his imagination of the
+ landscape as it was before the stillness of the forest had been
+ broken by the axe of the settler; but the picture is so finely
+ drawn, with so much beauty of language and purity of sentiment, that
+ we cannot blame him for lingering upon the scene. . . . The
+ story is not managed with much skill, but it has variety enough of
+ incident and character, and is told with so much liveliness that few
+ will be inclined to lay it down before reaching the conclusion. .
+ . . The writer certainly needs practice in elaborating the details
+ of a consistent and interesting novel; but in many respects he is
+ well qualified for the task, and we shall be glad to meet him again
+ on the half-historical ground he has chosen. His present work,
+ certainly, is not a fair specimen of what he is able to accomplish,
+ and its failure, or partial success, ought only to inspirit him for
+ further effort."
+
+The "half-historical ground" he had chosen had already led him to the
+entrance into the broader domain of history. The "further effort" for
+which he was to be inspirited had already begun. He had been for some
+time, as was before mentioned, collecting materials for the work which
+was to cast all his former attempts into the kindly shadow of oblivion,
+save when from time to time the light of his brilliant after success is
+thrown upon them to illustrate the path by which it was at length
+attained.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+1850. AEt. 36.
+PLAN OF A HISTORY.--LETTERS.
+
+The reputation of Mr. Prescott was now coextensive with the realm of
+scholarship. The histories of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and of
+the conquest of Mexico had met with a reception which might well tempt
+the ambition of a young writer to emulate it, but which was not likely to
+be awarded to any second candidate who should enter the field in rivalry
+with the great and universally popular historian. But this was the field
+on which Mr. Motley was to venture.
+
+After he had chosen the subject of the history he contemplated, he found
+that Mr. Prescott was occupied with a kindred one, so that there might be
+too near a coincidence between them. I must borrow from Mr. Ticknor's
+beautiful life of Prescott the words which introduce a letter of Motley's
+to Mr. William Amory, who has kindly allowed me also to make use of it.
+
+ "The moment, therefore, that he [Mr. Motley] was aware of this
+ condition of things, and the consequent possibility that there might
+ be an untoward interference in their plans, he took the same frank
+ and honorable course with Mr. Prescott that Mr. Prescott had taken
+ in relation to Mr. Irving, when he found that they had both been
+ contemplating a 'History of the Conquest of Mexico.' The result was
+ the same. Mr. Prescott, instead of treating the matter as an
+ interference, earnestly encouraged Mr. Motley to go on, and placed
+ at his disposition such of the books in his library as could be most
+ useful to him. How amply and promptly he did it, Mr. Motley's own
+ account will best show. It is in a letter dated at Rome, 26th
+ February, 1859, the day he heard of Mr. Prescott's death, and was
+ addressed to his intimate friend, Mr. William Amory, of Boston, Mr.
+ Prescott's much-loved brother-in-law."
+
+ "It seems to me but as yesterday," Mr. Motley writes, "though it
+ must be now twelve years ago, that I was talking with our
+ ever-lamented friend Stackpole about my intention of writing a history
+ upon a subject to which I have since that time been devoting myself.
+ I had then made already some general studies in reference to it,
+ without being in the least aware that Prescott had the intention of
+ writing the 'History of Philip the Second.' Stackpole had heard the
+ fact, and that large preparations had already been made for the
+ work, although 'Peru' had not yet been published. I felt naturally
+ much disappointed. I was conscious of the immense disadvantage to
+ myself of making my appearance, probably at the same time, before
+ the public, with a work not at all similar in plan to 'Philip the
+ Second,' but which must of necessity traverse a portion of the same
+ ground.
+
+ "My first thought was inevitably, as it were, only of myself.
+ It seemed to me that I had nothing to do but to abandon at once a
+ cherished dream, and probably to renounce authorship. For I had not
+ first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to
+ take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and
+ absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to
+ write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined
+ to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to
+ write any other. When I had made up my mind accordingly, it then
+ occurred to me that Prescott might not be pleased that I should come
+ forward upon his ground. It is true that no announcement of his
+ intentions had been made, and that he had not, I believe, even
+ commenced his preliminary studies for Philip. At the same time I
+ thought it would be disloyal on my part not to go to him at once,
+ confer with him on the subject, and if I should find a shadow of
+ dissatisfaction on his mind at my proposition, to abandon my plan
+ altogether.
+
+ "I had only the slightest acquaintance with him at that time. I was
+ comparatively a young man, and certainly not entitled on any ground
+ to more than the common courtesy which Prescott never could refuse
+ to any one. But he received me with such a frank and ready and
+ liberal sympathy, and such an open-hearted, guileless expansiveness,
+ that I felt a personal affection for him from that hour. I remember
+ the interview as if it had taken place yesterday. It was in his
+ father's house, in his own library, looking on the garden-house and
+ garden,--honored father and illustrious son,--alas! all numbered
+ with the things that were! He assured me that he had not the
+ slightest objection whatever to my plan, that he wished me every
+ success, and that, if there were any books in his library bearing on
+ my subject that I liked to use, they were entirely at my service.
+ After I had expressed my gratitude for his kindness and cordiality,
+ by which I had been in a very few moments set completely at ease,
+ --so far as my fears of his disapprobation went,--I also very
+ naturally stated my opinion that the danger was entirely mine, and
+ that it was rather wilful of me thus to risk such a collision at my
+ first venture, the probable consequence of which was utter
+ shipwreck. I recollect how kindly and warmly he combated this
+ opinion, assuring me that no two books, as he said, ever injured
+ each other, and encouraging me in the warmest and most earnest
+ manner to proceed on the course I had marked out for myself.
+
+ "Had the result of that interview been different,--had he distinctly
+ stated, or even vaguely hinted, that it would be as well if I should
+ select some other topic, or had he only sprinkled me with the cold
+ water of conventional and commonplace encouragement,--I should have
+ gone from him with a chill upon my mind, and, no doubt, have laid
+ down the pen at once; for, as I have already said, it was not that I
+ cared about writing a history, but that I felt an inevitable impulse
+ to write one particular history.
+
+ "You know how kindly he always spoke of and to me; and the generous
+ manner in which, without the slightest hint from me, and entirely
+ unexpected by me, he attracted the eyes of his hosts of readers to
+ my forthcoming work, by so handsomely alluding to it in the Preface
+ to his own, must be almost as fresh in your memory as it is in mine.
+
+ "And although it seems easy enough for a man of world-wide
+ reputation thus to extend the right hand of fellowship to an unknown
+ and struggling aspirant, yet I fear that the history of literature
+ will show that such instances of disinterested kindness are as rare
+ as they are noble."
+
+It was not from any feeling that Mr. Motley was a young writer from whose
+rivalry he had nothing to apprehend. Mr. Amory says that Prescott
+expressed himself very decidedly to the effect that an author who had
+written such descriptive passages as were to be found in Mr. Motley's
+published writings was not to be undervalued as a competitor by any one.
+The reader who will turn to the description of Charles River in the
+eighth chapter of the second volume of "Merry-Mount," or of the autumnal
+woods in the sixteenth chapter of the same volume, will see good reason
+for Mr. Prescott's appreciation of the force of the rival whose advent he
+so heartily and generously welcomed.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+1851-1856. AEt. 37-42.
+HISTORICAL STUDIES IN EUROPE.-LETTER FROM BRUSSELS.
+
+After working for several years on his projected "History of the Dutch
+Republic," he found that, in order to do justice to his subject, he must
+have recourse to the authorities to be found only in the libraries and
+state archives of Europe. In the year 1851 he left America with his
+family, to begin his task over again, throwing aside all that he had
+already done, and following up his new course of investigations at
+Berlin, Dresden, the Hague, and Brussels during several succeeding years.
+I do not know that I can give a better idea of his mode of life during
+this busy period, his occupations, his state of mind, his objects of
+interest outside of his special work, than by making the following
+extracts from a long letter to myself, dated Brussels, 20th November,
+1853.
+
+After some personal matters he continued:--
+
+ "I don't really know what to say to you. I am in a town which, for
+ aught I know, may be very gay. I don't know a living soul in it.
+ We have not a single acquaintance in the place, and we glory in the
+ fact. There is something rather sublime in thus floating on a
+ single spar in the wide sea of a populous, busy, fuming, fussy world
+ like this. At any rate it is consonant to both our tastes. You may
+ suppose, however, that I find it rather difficult to amuse my
+ friends out of the incidents of so isolated an existence. Our daily
+ career is very regular and monotonous. Our life is as stagnant as a
+ Dutch canal. Not that I complain of it,--on the contrary, the canal
+ may be richly freighted with merchandise and be a short cut to the
+ ocean of abundant and perpetual knowledge; but, at the same time,
+ few points rise above the level of so regular a life, to be worthy
+ of your notice. You must, therefore, allow me to meander along the
+ meadows of commonplace. Don't expect anything of the impetuous and
+ boiling style. We go it weak here. I don't know whether you were
+ ever in Brussels. It is a striking, picturesque town, built up a
+ steep promontory, the old part at the bottom, very dingy and mouldy,
+ the new part at the top, very showy and elegant. Nothing can be
+ more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of
+ the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied
+ buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar
+ to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side,
+ with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet
+ into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle-
+ work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place
+ because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so many deep
+ tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which
+ have been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself
+ invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if
+ it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery,
+ etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and
+ which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually
+ moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.
+ When I say that I knew no soul in Brussels I am perhaps wrong. With
+ the present generation I am not familiar. 'En revanche,' the dead
+ men of the place are my intimate friends. I am at home in any
+ cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the
+ most familiar terms. Any ghost that ever flits by night across the
+ moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I
+ call him by his Christian name at once. When you come out of this
+ place, however, which, as I said, is in the heart of the town,--the
+ antique gem in the modern setting,--you may go either up or down.
+ If you go down, you will find yourself in the very nastiest
+ complications of lanes and culs-de-sac possible, a dark entanglement
+ of gin-shops, beer-houses, and hovels, through which charming valley
+ dribbles the Senne (whence, I suppose, is derived Senna), the most
+ nauseous little river in the world, which receives all the
+ outpourings of all the drains and houses, and is then converted into
+ beer for the inhabitants, all the many breweries being directly upon
+ its edge. If you go up the hill instead of down, you come to an
+ arrangement of squares, palaces, and gardens as trim and fashionable
+ as you will find in Europe. Thus you see that our Cybele sits with
+ her head crowned with very stately towers and her feet in a tub of
+ very dirty water.
+
+ "My habits here for the present year are very regular. I came here,
+ having, as I thought, finished my work, or rather the first Part
+ (something like three or four volumes, 8vo), but I find so much
+ original matter here, and so many emendations to make, that I am
+ ready to despair. However, there is nothing for it but to
+ penelopize, pull to pieces, and stitch away again. Whatever may be
+ the result of my labor, nobody can say that I have not worked like
+ a brute beast,--but I don't care for the result. The labor is in
+ itself its own reward and all I want. I go day after day to the
+ archives here (as I went all summer at the Hague), studying the old
+ letters and documents of the fifteenth century. Here I remain among
+ my fellow-worms, feeding on these musty mulberry-leaves, out of
+ which we are afterwards to spin our silk. How can you expect
+ anything interesting from such a human cocoon? It is, however, not
+ without its amusement in a mouldy sort of way, this reading of dead
+ letters. It is something to read the real, bona fide signs-manual
+ of such fellows as William of Orange, Count Egmont, Alexander
+ Farnese, Philip II., Cardinal Granvelle, and the rest of them. It
+ gives a 'realizing sense,' as the Americans have it. . . . There
+ are not many public resources of amusement in this place,--if we
+ wanted them,--which we don't. I miss the Dresden Gallery very much,
+ and it makes me sad to think that I shall never look at the face of
+ the Sistine Madonna again,--that picture beyond all pictures in the
+ world, in which the artist certainly did get to heaven and painted a
+ face which was never seen on earth--so pathetic, so gentle, so
+ passionless, so prophetic. . . . There are a few good Rubenses
+ here,--but the great wealth of that master is in Antwerp. The great
+ picture of the Descent from the Cross is free again, after having
+ been ten years in the repairing room. It has come out in very good
+ condition. What a picture? It seems to me as if I had really stood
+ at the cross and seen Mary weeping on John's shoulder, and Magdalen
+ receiving the dead body of the Saviour in her arms. Never was the
+ grand tragedy represented in so profound and dramatic a manner. For
+ it is not only in his color in which this man so easily surpasses
+ all the world, but in his life-like, flesh-and-blood action,--the
+ tragic power of his composition. And is it not appalling to think
+ of the 'large constitution of this man,' when you reflect on the
+ acres of canvas which he has covered? How inspiriting to see with
+ what muscular, masculine vigor this splendid Fleming rushed in and
+ plucked up drowning Art by the locks when it was sinking in the
+ trashy sea of such creatures as the Luca Giordanos and Pietro
+ Cortonas and the like. Well might Guido exclaim, 'The fellow mixes
+ blood with his colors! . . . How providentially did the man come
+ in and invoke living, breathing, moving men and women out of his
+ canvas! Sometimes he is ranting and exaggerated, as are all men of
+ great genius who wrestle with Nature so boldly. No doubt his
+ heroines are more expansively endowed than would be thought genteel
+ in our country, where cryptogams are so much in fashion,
+ nevertheless there is always something very tremendous about him,
+ and very often much that is sublime, pathetic, and moving. I defy
+ any one of the average amount of imagination and sentiment to stand
+ long before the Descent from the Cross without being moved more
+ nearly to tears than he would care to acknowledge. As for color,
+ his effects are as sure as those of the sun rising in a tropical
+ landscape. There is something quite genial in the cheerful sense of
+ his own omnipotence which always inspired him. There are a few fine
+ pictures of his here, and I go in sometimes of a raw, foggy morning
+ merely to warm myself in the blaze of their beauty."
+
+I have been more willing to give room to this description of Rubens's
+pictures and the effect they produced upon Motley, because there is a
+certain affinity between those sumptuous and glowing works of art and the
+prose pictures of the historian who so admired them. He was himself a
+colorist in language, and called up the image of a great personage or a
+splendid pageant of the past with the same affluence, the same rich
+vitality, that floods and warms the vast areas of canvas over which the
+full-fed genius of Rubens disported itself in the luxury of imaginative
+creation.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+1856-1857. AEt. 42-43.
+
+PUBLICATION OF HIS FIRST HISTORICAL WORK, "RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC."
+--ITS RECEPTION.--CRITICAL NOTICES.
+
+The labor of ten years was at last finished. Carrying his formidable
+manuscript with him,--and how formidable the manuscript which melts down
+into three solid octavo volumes is, only writers and publishers know,--he
+knocked at the gate of that terrible fortress from which Lintot and Curll
+and Tonson looked down on the authors of an older generation. So large a
+work as the "History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic," offered for the
+press by an author as yet unknown to the British public, could hardly
+expect a warm welcome from the great dealers in literature as
+merchandise. Mr. Murray civilly declined the manuscript which was offered
+to him, and it was published at its author's expense by Mr. John Chapman.
+The time came when the positions of the first-named celebrated publisher
+and the unknown writer were reversed. Mr. Murray wrote to Mr. Motley
+asking to be allowed to publish his second great work, the "History of
+the United Netherlands," expressing at the same time his regret at what
+he candidly called his mistake in the first instance, and thus they were
+at length brought into business connection as well as the most agreeable
+and friendly relations. An American edition was published by the Harpers
+at the same time as the London one.
+
+If the new work of the unknown author found it difficult to obtain a
+publisher, it was no sooner given to the public than it found an
+approving, an admiring, an enthusiastic world of readers, and a noble
+welcome at the colder hands of the critics.
+
+"The Westminster Review" for April, 1856, had for its leading article a
+paper by Mr. Froude, in which the critic awarded the highest praise to
+the work of the new historian. As one of the earliest as well as one of
+the most important recognitions of the work, I quote some of its
+judgments.
+
+ "A history as complete as industry and genius can make it now lies
+ before us of the first twenty years of the Revolt of the United
+ Provinces; of the period in which those provinces finally conquered
+ their independence and established the Republic of Holland. It has
+ been the result of many years of silent, thoughtful, unobtrusive
+ labor, and unless we are strangely mistaken, unless we are ourselves
+ altogether unfit for this office of criticising which we have here
+ undertaken, the book is one which will take its place among the
+ finest histories in this or in any language. . . . All the
+ essentials of a great writer Mr. Motley eminently possesses. His
+ mind is broad, his industry unwearied. In power of dramatic
+ description no modern historian, except perhaps Mr. Carlyle,
+ surpasses him, and in analysis of character he is elaborate and
+ distinct. His principles are those of honest love for all which is
+ good and admirable in human character wherever he finds it, while he
+ unaffectedly hates oppression, and despises selfishness with all his
+ heart."
+
+After giving a slight analytical sketch of the series of events related
+in the history, Mr. Froude objects to only one of the historian's
+estimates, that, namely, of the course of Queen Elizabeth.
+
+ "It is ungracious, however," he says, "even to find so slight a
+ fault with these admirable volumes. Mr. Motley has written without
+ haste, with the leisurely composure of a master. . . . We now
+ take our leave of Mr. Motley, desiring him only to accept our hearty
+ thanks for these volumes, which we trust will soon take their place
+ in every English library. Our quotations will have sufficed to show
+ the ability of the writer. Of the scope and general character of
+ his work we have given but a languid conception. The true merit of
+ a great book must be learned from the book itself. Our part has
+ been rather to select varied specimens of style and power. Of Mr.
+ Motley's antecedents we know nothing. If he has previously appeared
+ before the public, his reputation has not crossed the Atlantic. It
+ will not be so now. We believe that we may promise him as warm a
+ welcome among ourselves as he will receive even in America; that his
+ place will be at once conceded to him among the first historians in
+ our common language."
+
+The faithful and unwearied Mr. Allibone has swept the whole field of
+contemporary criticism, and shown how wide and universal was the welcome
+accorded to the hitherto unknown author. An article headed "Prescott and
+Motley," attributed to M. Guizot, which must have been translated, I
+suppose, from his own language, judging by its freedom from French
+idioms, is to be found in "The Edinburgh Review" for January, 1857. The
+praise, not unmingled with criticisms, which that great historian
+bestowed upon Motley is less significant than the fact that he
+superintended a translation of the "Rise of the Dutch Republic," and
+himself wrote the Introduction to it.
+
+A general chorus of approbation followed or accompanied these leading
+voices. The reception of the work in Great Britain was a triumph. On the
+Continent, in addition to the tribute paid to it by M. Guizot, it was
+translated into Dutch, into German, and into Russian. At home his
+reception was not less hearty. "The North American Review," which had set
+its foot on the semi-autobiographical medley which he called "Morton's
+Hope," which had granted a decent space and a tepid recognition to his
+"semi-historical" romance, in which he had already given the reading
+public a taste of his quality as a narrator of real events and a
+delineator of real personages,--this old and awe-inspiring New England
+and more than New England representative of the Fates, found room for a
+long and most laudatory article, in which the son of one of our most
+distinguished historians did the honors of the venerable literary
+periodical to the new-comer, for whom the folding-doors of all the
+critical headquarters were flying open as if of themselves. Mr. Allibone
+has recorded the opinions of some of our best scholars as expressed to
+him.
+
+Dr. Lieber wrote a letter to Mr. Allibone in the strongest terms of
+praise. I quote one passage which in the light of after events borrows a
+cruel significance:--
+
+ "Congress and Parliament decree thanks for military exploits,
+ --rarely for diplomatic achievements. If they ever voted their thanks
+ for books,--and what deeds have influenced the course of human
+ events more than some books?--Motley ought to have the thanks of our
+ Congress; but I doubt not that he has already the thanks of every
+ American who has read the work. It will leave its distinct mark
+ upon the American mind."
+
+Mr. Everett writes:--
+
+ "Mr. Motley's 'History of the Dutch Republic' is in my judgment a
+ work of the highest merit. Unwearying research for years in the
+ libraries of Europe, patience and judgment in arranging and
+ digesting his materials, a fine historical tact, much skill in
+ characterization, the perspective of narration, as it may be called,
+ and a vigorous style unite to make it a very capital work, and place
+ the name of Motley by the side of those of our great historical
+ trio,--Bancroft, Irving, and Prescott."
+
+Mr. Irving, Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Sumner, Mr. Hillard, united their voices in
+the same strain of commendation. Mr. Prescott, whose estimate of the new
+history is of peculiar value for obvious reasons, writes to Mr. Allibone
+thus:--
+
+ "The opinion of any individual seems superfluous in respect to a
+ work on the merits of which the public both at home and abroad have
+ pronounced so unanimous a verdict. As Motley's path crosses my own
+ historic field, I may be thought to possess some advantage over most
+ critics in my familiarity with the ground.
+
+ "However this may be, I can honestly bear my testimony to the extent
+ of his researches and to the accuracy with which he has given the
+ results of them to the public. Far from making his book a mere
+ register of events, he has penetrated deep below the surface and
+ explored the cause of these events. He has carefully studied the
+ physiognomy of the times and given finished portraits of the great
+ men who conducted the march of the revolution. Every page is
+ instinct with the love of freedom and with that personal knowledge
+ of the working of free institutions which could alone enable him to
+ do justice to his subject. We may congratulate ourselves that it
+ was reserved for one of our countrymen to tell the story-better than
+ it had yet been told--of this memorable revolution, which in so many
+ of its features bears a striking resemblance to our own."
+
+The public welcomed the work as cordially as the critics. Fifteen
+thousand copies had already been sold in London in 1857. In America it
+was equally popular. Its author saw his name enrolled by common consent
+among those of the great writers of his time. Europe accepted him, his
+country was proud to claim him, scholarship set its jealously guarded
+seal upon the result of his labors, the reading world, which had not
+cared greatly for his stories, hung in delight over a narrative more
+exciting than romances; and the lonely student, who had almost forgotten
+the look of living men in the solitude of archives haunted by dead
+memories, found himself suddenly in the full blaze of a great reputation.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+1856-1857. AEt. 42-43.
+VISIT TO AMERICA.--RESIDENCE IN BOYLSTON PLACE.
+
+He visited this country in 1856, and spent the winter of 1856-57 in
+Boston, living with his family in a house in Boylston Place. At this time
+I had the pleasure of meeting him often, and of seeing the changes which
+maturity, success, the opening of a great literary and social career, had
+wrought in his character and bearing. He was in every way greatly
+improved; the interesting, impulsive youth had ripened into a noble
+manhood. Dealing with great themes, his own mind had gained their
+dignity. Accustomed to the company of dead statesmen and heroes, his own
+ideas had risen to a higher standard. The flattery of society had added a
+new grace to his natural modesty. He was now a citizen of the world by
+his reputation; the past was his province, in which he was recognized as
+a master; the idol's pedestal was ready for him, but he betrayed no
+desire to show himself upon it.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+1858-1860. AEt. 44-46.
+RETURN TO ENGLAND.--SOCIAL RELATIONS.--LADY HARCOURT'S LETTER.
+
+During the years spent in Europe in writing his first history, from 1851
+to 1856, Mr. Motley had lived a life of great retirement and simplicity,
+devoting himself to his work and to the education of his children, to
+which last object he was always ready to give the most careful
+supervision. He was as yet unknown beyond the circle of his friends, and
+he did not seek society. In this quiet way he had passed the two years of
+residence in Dresden, the year divided between Brussels and the Hague,
+and a very tranquil year spent at Vevay on the Lake of Geneva. His health
+at this time was tolerably good, except for nervous headaches, which
+frequently recurred and were of great severity. His visit to England with
+his manuscript in search of a publisher has already been mentioned.
+
+In 1858 he revisited England. His fame as a successful author was there
+before him, and he naturally became the object of many attentions. He now
+made many acquaintances who afterwards became his kind and valued
+friends. Among those mentioned by his daughter, Lady Harcourt, are Lord
+Lyndhurst, Lord Carlisle, Lady William Russell, Lord and Lady Palmerston,
+Dean Milman, with many others. The following winter was passed in Rome,
+among many English and American friends.
+
+ "In the course of the next summer," his daughter writes to me, "we
+ all went to England, and for the next two years, marked chiefly by
+ the success of the 'United Netherlands,' our social life was most
+ agreeable and most interesting. He was in the fulness of his health
+ and powers; his works had made him known in intellectual society,
+ and I think his presence, on the other hand, increased their
+ effects. As no one knows better than you do, his belief in his own
+ country and in its institutions at their best was so passionate and
+ intense that it was a part of his nature, yet his refined and
+ fastidious tastes were deeply gratified by the influences of his
+ life in England, and the spontaneous kindness which he received
+ added much to his happiness. At that time Lord Palmerston was Prime
+ Minister; the weekly receptions at Cambridge House were the centre
+ of all that was brilliant in the political and social world, while
+ Lansdowne House, Holland House, and others were open to the
+ 'sommites' in all branches of literature, science, rank, and
+ politics. . . . It was the last year of Lord Macaulay's life,
+ and as a few out of many names which I recall come Dean Milman, Mr.
+ Froude (whose review of the 'Dutch Republic' in the 'Westminster'
+ was one of the first warm recognitions it ever received), the Duke
+ and Duchess of Argyll, Sir William Stirling Maxwell, then Mr.
+ Stirling of Keir, the Sheridan family in its different brilliant
+ members, Lord Wensleydale, and many more."
+
+There was no society to which Motley would not have added grace and
+attraction by his presence, and to say that he was a welcome guest in the
+best houses of England is only saying that these houses are always open
+to those whose abilities, characters, achievements, are commended to the
+circles that have the best choice by the personal gifts which are
+nature's passport everywhere.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+1859. AEt. 45.
+
+LETTER TO MR. FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD.--PLAN OF MR. MOTLEY'S HISTORICAL
+WORKS.--SECOND GREAT WORK, "HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS."
+
+I am enabled by the kindness of Mr. Francis H. Underwood to avail myself
+of a letter addressed to him by Mr. Motley in the year before the
+publication of this second work, which gives us an insight into his mode
+of working and the plan he proposed to follow. It begins with an allusion
+which recalls a literary event interesting to many of his American
+friends.
+
+ ROME, March 4, 1859.
+
+ F. H. UNDERWOOD, ESQ.
+
+ My dear Sir,--. . . I am delighted to hear of the great success
+ of "The Atlantic Monthly." In this remote region I have not the
+ chance of reading it as often as I should like, but from the
+ specimens which I have seen I am quite sure it deserves its wide
+ circulation. A serial publication, the contents of which are purely
+ original and of such remarkable merit, is a novelty in our country,
+ and I am delighted to find that it has already taken so prominent a
+ position before the reading world. . .
+
+ The whole work [his history], of which the three volumes already
+ published form a part, will be called "The Eighty Years' War for
+ Liberty."
+
+ Epoch I. is the Rise of the Dutch Republic.
+
+ Epoch II. Independence Achieved. From the Death of William the
+ Silent till the Twelve Years' Truce. 1584-1609.
+
+ Epoch III. Independence Recognized. From the Twelve Years' Truce
+ to the Peace of Westphalia. 1609-1648.
+
+ My subject is a very vast one, for the struggle of the United
+ Provinces with Spain was one in which all the leading states of
+ Europe were more or less involved. After the death of William the
+ Silent, the history assumes world-wide proportions. Thus the volume
+ which I am just about terminating . . . is almost as much English
+ history as Dutch. The Earl of Leicester, very soon after the death
+ of Orange, was appointed governor of the provinces, and the alliance
+ between the two countries almost amounted to a political union. I
+ shall try to get the whole of the Leicester administration,
+ terminating with the grand drama of the Invincible Armada, into one
+ volume; but I doubt, my materials are so enormous. I have been
+ personally very hard at work, nearly two years, ransacking the
+ British State Paper Office, the British Museum, and the Holland
+ archives, and I have had two copyists constantly engaged in London,
+ and two others at the Hague. Besides this, I passed the whole of
+ last winter at Brussels, where, by special favor of the Belgian
+ Government, I was allowed to read what no one else has ever been
+ permitted to see,--the great mass of copies taken by that government
+ from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been
+ published by Gachard. This correspondence reaches to the death of
+ Philip II., and is of immense extent and importance. Had I not
+ obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose,
+ indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain,
+ for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in
+ a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form.
+ I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious
+ notes of it. In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to
+ that purpose alone.
+
+ The materials I have collected from the English archives are also
+ extremely important and curious. I have hundreds of interesting
+ letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth,
+ Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and
+ others. For the whole of that portion of my subject in which
+ Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in
+ its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant
+ collections. For the history of the United Provinces is not at all
+ a provincial history. It is the history of European liberty.
+ Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all
+ Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish. It was Holland that
+ saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured
+ the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the
+ various states of Europe upon a sure foundation. Of course, the
+ materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance. As
+ a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there
+ an immense and confused mass of papers, which turned out to be the
+ autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of
+ his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period
+ which preceded his execution. These letters are in such an
+ intolerable handwriting that no one has ever attempted to read them.
+ I could read them only imperfectly myself, and it would have taken
+ me a very long time to have acquired the power to do so; but my
+ copyist and reader there is the most patient and indefatigable
+ person alive, and he has quite mastered the handwriting, and he
+ writes me that they are a mine of historical wealth for me. I shall
+ have complete copies before I get to that period, one of signal
+ interest, and which has never been described. I mention these
+ matters that you may see that my work, whatever its other value may
+ be, is built upon the only foundation fit for history,--original
+ contemporary documents. These are all unpublished. Of course, I
+ use the contemporary historians and pamphleteers,--Dutch, Spanish,
+ French, Italian, German, and English,--but the most valuable of my
+ sources are manuscript ones. I have said the little which I have
+ said in order to vindicate the largeness of the subject. The
+ kingdom of Holland is a small power now, but the Eighty Years' War,
+ which secured the civil and religious independence of the Dutch
+ Commonwealth and of Europe, was the great event of that whole age.
+
+ The whole work will therefore cover a most remarkable epoch in human
+ history, from the abdication of Charles Fifth to the Peace of
+ Westphalia, at which last point the political and geographical
+ arrangements of Europe were established on a permanent basis,--in
+ the main undisturbed until the French Revolution. . . .
+
+ I will mention that I received yesterday a letter from the
+ distinguished M. Guizot, informing me that the first volume of the
+ French translation, edited by him, with an introduction, has just
+ been published. The publication was hastened in consequence of the
+ appearance of a rival translation at Brussels. The German
+ translation is very elegantly and expensively printed in handsome
+ octavos; and the Dutch translation, under the editorship of the
+ archivist general of Holland, Bakhuyzen v. d. Brink, is enriched
+ with copious notes and comments by that distinguished scholar.
+
+ There are also three different piratical reprints of the original
+ work at Amsterdam, Leipzig, and London. I must add that I had
+ nothing to do with the translation in any case. In fact, with the
+ exception of M. Guizot, no one ever obtained permission of me to
+ publish translations, and I never knew of the existence of them
+ until I read of it in the journals. . . . I forgot to say that
+ among the collections already thoroughly examined by me is that
+ portion of the Simancas archives still retained in the Imperial
+ archives of France. I spent a considerable time in Paris for the
+ purpose of reading these documents. There are many letters of
+ Philip II. there, with apostilles by his own hand. . . . I
+ would add that I am going to pass this summer at Venice for the
+ purpose of reading and procuring copies from the very rich archives
+ of that Republic, of the correspondence of their envoys in Madrid,
+ London, and Brussels during the epoch of which I am treating.
+
+ I am also not without hope of gaining access to the archives of the
+ Vatican here, although there are some difficulties in the way.
+
+ With kind regards . . .
+ I remain very truly yours,
+ J. L. MOTLEY.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+1860. AT. 46.
+
+PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF THE "HISTORY OF THE UNITED
+NETHERLANDS."--THEIR RECEPTION.
+
+We know something of the manner in which Mr. Motley collected his
+materials. We know the labors, the difficulties, the cost of his toils
+among the dusty records of the past. What he gained by the years he spent
+in his researches is so well stated by himself that I shall borrow his
+own words:--
+
+ "Thanks to the liberality of many modern governments of Europe, the
+ archives where the state secrets of the buried centuries have so
+ long mouldered are now open to the student of history. To him who
+ has patience and industry, many mysteries are thus revealed which no
+ political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined. He leans
+ over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the
+ King spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most
+ concealed hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza. He reads
+ the secret thoughts of 'Fabius' [Philip II.] as that cunctative
+ Roman scrawls his marginal apostilles on each dispatch; he pries
+ into all the stratagems of Camillus, Hortensius, Mucius, Julius,
+ Tullius, and the rest of those ancient heroes who lent their names
+ to the diplomatic masqueraders of the sixteenth century; he enters
+ the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghley, and takes from the
+ most private drawer the memoranda which record that minister's
+ unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the
+ stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has
+ picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the Pope's pocket, and
+ which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord
+ Treasurer is to see,--nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits
+ invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveld
+ and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast
+ schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal,
+ the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the
+ gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after all
+ this prying and eavesdropping, having seen the cross-purposes, the
+ bribings, the windings in the dark, he is not surprised if those who
+ were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct
+ conclusions."
+
+The fascination of such a quest is readily conceivable. A drama with real
+characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and look
+upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the
+scenery, to handle the properties, to study the "make up" of the imposing
+personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray
+has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,--this
+would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one
+knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish
+occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of
+entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of
+antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities
+of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however, in the way of all but the
+resolute and unwearied scholar. These difficulties, in all their complex
+obstinacy, had been met and overcome by the heroic efforts, the
+concentrated devotion, of the new laborer in the unbroken fields of
+secret history.
+
+Without stopping to take breath, as it were,--for his was a task 'de
+longue haleine,'--he proceeded to his second great undertaking.
+
+The first portion--consisting of two volumes--of the "History of the
+United Netherlands" was published in the year 1860. It maintained and
+increased the reputation he had already gained by his first history.
+
+"The London Quarterly Review" devoted a long article to it, beginning
+with this handsome tribute to his earlier and later volumes:--
+
+ "Mr. Motley's 'History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic' is already
+ known and valued for the grasp of mind which it displays, for the
+ earnest and manly spirit in which he has communicated the results of
+ deep research and careful reflection. Again he appears before us,
+ rich with the spoils of time, to tell the story of the United
+ Netherlands from the time of William the Silent to the end of the
+ eventful year of the Spanish Armada, and we still find him in every
+ way worthy of this 'great argument.' Indeed, it seems to us that he
+ proceeds with an increased facility of style, and with a more
+ complete and easy command over his materials. These materials are
+ indeed splendid, and of them most excellent use has been made. The
+ English State Paper Office, the Spanish archives from Simancas, and
+ the Dutch and Belgian repositories, have all yielded up their
+ secrets; and Mr. Motley has enjoyed the advantage of dealing with a
+ vast mass of unpublished documents, of which he has not failed to
+ avail himself to an extent which places his work in the foremost
+ rank as an authority for the period to which it relates. By means
+ of his labor and his art we can sit at the council board of Philip
+ and Elizabeth, we can read their most private dispatches. Guided by
+ his demonstration, we are enabled to dissect out to their ultimate
+ issues the minutest ramifications of intrigue. We join in the
+ amusement of the popular lampoon; we visit the prison-house; we
+ stand by the scaffold; we are present at the battle and the siege.
+ We can scan the inmost characters of men and can view them in their.
+ habits as they lived."
+
+After a few criticisms upon lesser points of form and style, the writer
+says:--
+
+ "But the work itself must be read to appreciate the vast and
+ conscientious industry bestowed upon it. His delineations are true
+ and life-like, because they are not mere compositions written to
+ please the ear, but are really taken from the facts and traits
+ preserved in those authentic records to which he has devoted the
+ labor of many years. Diligent and painstaking as the humblest
+ chronicler, he has availed himself of many sources of information
+ which have not been made use of by any previous historical writer.
+ At the same time he is not oppressed by his materials, but has
+ sagacity to estimate their real value, and he has combined with
+ scholarly power the facts which they contain. He has rescued the
+ story of the Netherlands from the domain of vague and general
+ narrative, and has labored, with much judgment and ability, to
+ unfold the 'Belli causas, et vitia, et modos,' and to assign to
+ every man and every event their own share in the contest, and their
+ own influence upon its fortunes. We do not wonder that his earlier
+ publication has been received as a valuable addition, not only to
+ English, but to European literature."
+
+One or two other contemporary criticisms may help us with their side
+lights. A critic in "The Edinburgh Review" for January, 1861, thinks that
+"Mr. Motley has not always been successful in keeping the graphic variety
+of his details subordinate to the main theme of his work." Still, he
+excuses the fault, as he accounts it, in consideration of the new light
+thrown on various obscure points of history, and--
+
+ "it is atoned for by striking merits, by many narratives of great
+ events faithfully, powerfully, and vividly executed, by the clearest
+ and most life-like conceptions of character, and by a style which,
+ if it sacrifices the severer principles of composition to a desire
+ to be striking and picturesque, is always vigorous, full of
+ animation, and glowing with the genuine enthusiasm of the writer.
+ Mr. Motley combines as an historian two qualifications seldom found
+ united,--to great capacity for historical research he adds much
+ power of pictorial representation. In his pages we find characters
+ and scenes minutely set forth in elaborate and characteristic
+ detail, which is relieved and heightened in effect by the artistic
+ breadth of light and shade thrown across the broader prospects of
+ history. In an American author, too, we must commend the hearty
+ English spirit in which the book is written; and fertile as the
+ present age has been in historical works of the highest merit, none
+ of them can be ranked above these volumes in the grand qualities of
+ interest, accuracy, and truth."
+
+A writer in "Blackwood" (May, 1861) contrasts Motley with Froude somewhat
+in the way in which another critic had contrasted him with Prescott.
+Froude, he says, remembers that there are some golden threads in the
+black robe of the Dominican. Motley "finds it black and thrusts it
+farther into the darkness."
+
+Every writer carries more or less of his own character into his book, of
+course. A great professor has told me that there is a personal flavor in
+the mathematical work of a man of genius like Poisson. Those who have
+known Motley and Prescott would feel sure beforehand that the impulsive
+nature of the one and the judicial serenity of the other would as surely
+betray themselves in their writings as in their conversation and in their
+every movement. Another point which the critic of "Blackwood's Magazine"
+has noticed has not been so generally observed: it is what he calls "a
+dashing, offhand, rattling style,"--"fast" writing. It cannot be denied
+that here and there may be detected slight vestiges of the way of writing
+of an earlier period of Motley's literary life, with which I have no
+reason to think the writer just mentioned was acquainted. Now and then I
+can trace in the turn of a phrase, in the twinkle of an epithet, a faint
+reminiscence of a certain satirical levity, airiness, jauntiness, if I
+may hint such a word, which is just enough to remind me of those perilous
+shallows of his early time through which his richly freighted argosy had
+passed with such wonderful escape from their dangers and such very slight
+marks of injury. That which is pleasant gayety in conversation may be
+quite out of place in formal composition, and Motley's wit must have had
+a hard time of it struggling to show its spangles in the processions
+while his gorgeous tragedies went sweeping by.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
+
+A MEMOIR
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Volume II.
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+1860-1866. AEt. 46-52.
+
+RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND.--OUTBREAK OF THE CIVIL WAR.--LETTERS TO THE LONDON
+"TIMES."--VISIT TO AMERICA.--APPOINTED MINISTER TO AUSTRIA.--LADY
+HARCOURT'S LETTER.--MISS MOTLEY'S MEMORANDUM.
+
+The winter of 1859-60 was passed chiefly at Oatlands Hotel,
+Walton-on-Thames. In 1860 Mr. Motley hired the house No. 31 Hertford
+Street, May Fair, London. He had just published the first two volumes of
+his "History of the Netherlands," and was ready for the further labors of
+its continuation, when the threats, followed by the outbreak, of the
+great civil contention in his native land brought him back from the
+struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the conflict of
+the nineteenth.
+
+His love of country, which had grown upon him so remarkably of late
+years, would not suffer him to be silent at such a moment. All around him
+he found ignorance and prejudice. The quarrel was like to be prejudged in
+default of a champion of the cause which to him was that of Liberty and
+Justice. He wrote two long letters to the London "Times," in which he
+attempted to make clear to Englishmen and to Europe the nature and
+conditions of our complex system of government, the real cause of the
+strife, and the mighty issues at stake. Nothing could have been more
+timely, nothing more needed. Mr. William Everett, who was then in
+England, bears strong testimony to the effect these letters produced. Had
+Mr. Motley done no other service to his country, this alone would entitle
+him to honorable remembrance as among the first defenders of the flag,
+which at that moment had more to fear from what was going on in the
+cabinet councils of Europe than from all the armed hosts that were
+gathering against it.
+
+He returned to America in 1861, and soon afterwards was appointed by Mr.
+Lincoln Minister to Austria. Mr. Burlingame had been previously appointed
+to the office, but having been objected to by the Austrian Government for
+political reasons, the place unexpectedly left vacant was conferred upon
+Motley, who had no expectation of any diplomatic appointment when he left
+Europe. For some interesting particulars relating to his residence in
+Vienna I must refer to the communications addressed to me by his
+daughter, Lady Harcourt, and her youngest sister, and the letters I
+received from him while at the Austrian capital. Lady Harcourt writes:--
+
+ "He held the post for six years, seeing the civil war fought out and
+ brought to a triumphant conclusion, and enjoying, as I have every
+ reason to believe, the full confidence and esteem of Mr. Lincoln to
+ the last hour of the President's life. In the first dark years the
+ painful interest of the great national drama was so all-absorbing
+ that literary work was entirely put aside, and with his countrymen
+ at home he lived only in the varying fortunes of the day, his
+ profound faith and enthusiasm sustaining him and lifting him above
+ the natural influence of a by no means sanguine temperament. Later,
+ when the tide was turning and success was nearing, he was more able
+ to work. His social relations during the whole period of his
+ mission were of the most agreeable character. The society of Vienna
+ was at that time, and I believe is still, the absolute reverse of
+ that of England, where all claims to distinction are recognized and
+ welcomed. There the old feudal traditions were still in full force,
+ and diplomatic representatives admitted to the court society by
+ right of official position found it to consist exclusively of an
+ aristocracy of birth, sixteen quarterings of nobility being
+ necessary to a right of presentation to the Emperor and Empress.
+ The society thus constituted was distinguished by great charm and
+ grace of manner, the exclusion of all outer elements not only
+ limiting the numbers, but giving the ease of a family party within
+ the charmed circle. On the other hand, larger interests suffered
+ under the rigid exclusion of all occupations except the army,
+ diplomacy, and court place. The intimacy among the different
+ members of the society was so close that, beyond a courtesy of
+ manner that never failed, the tendency was to resist the approach of
+ any stranger as a 'gene'. A single new face was instantly remarked
+ and commented on in a Vienna saloon to an extent unknown in any
+ other large capital. This peculiarity, however, worked in favor of
+ the old resident. Kindliness of feeling increased with familiarity
+ and grew into something better than acquaintance, and the parting
+ with most sincere and affectionately disposed friends in the end was
+ deeply felt on both sides. Those years were passed in a pleasant
+ house in the Weiden Faubourg, with a large garden at the back, and I
+ do not think that during this time there was one disagreeable
+ incident in his relations to his colleagues, while in several cases
+ the relations, agreeable with all, became those of close friendship.
+ We lived constantly, of course, in diplomatic and Austrian society,
+ and during the latter part of the time particularly his house was as
+ much frequented and the centre of as many dancing and other
+ receptions as any in the place. His official relations with the
+ Foreign Office were courteous and agreeable, the successive Foreign
+ Ministers during his stay being Count Richberg, Count Mensdorff, and
+ Baron Beust. Austria was so far removed from any real contact with
+ our own country that, though the interest in our war may have been
+ languid, they did not pretend to a knowledge which might have
+ inclined them to controversy, while an instinct that we were acting
+ as a constituted government against rebellion rather inclined them
+ to sympathy. I think I may say that as he became known among them
+ his keen patriotism and high sense of honor and truth were fully
+ understood and appreciated, and that what he said always commanded a
+ sympathetic hearing among men with totally different political
+ ideas, but with chivalrous and loyal instincts to comprehend his
+ own. I shall never forget his account of the terrible day when the
+ news of Mr. Lincoln's death came. By some accident a rumor of it
+ reached him first through a colleague. He went straight to the
+ Foreign Office for news, hoping against hope, was received by Count
+ Mensdorff, who merely came forward and laid his arm about his
+ shoulder with an intense sympathy beyond words."
+
+Miss Motley, the historian's youngest daughter, has added a note to her
+sister's communication:--
+
+ "During his residence in Vienna the most important negotiations
+ which he had to carry on with the Austrian Government were those
+ connected with the Mexican affair. Maximilian at one time applied
+ to his brother the Emperor for assistance, and he promised to accede
+ to his demand. Accordingly a large number of volunteers were
+ equipped and had actually embarked at Trieste, when a dispatch from
+ Seward arrived, instructing the American Minister to give notice to
+ the Austrian Government that if the troops sailed for Mexico he was
+ to leave Vienna at once. My father had to go at once to Count
+ Mensdorff with these instructions, and in spite of the Foreign
+ Minister being annoyed that the United States Government had not
+ sooner intimated that this extreme course would be taken, the
+ interview was quite amicable and the troops were not allowed to
+ sail. We were in Vienna during the war in which Denmark fought
+ alone against Austria and Prussia, and when it was over Bismarck
+ came to Vienna to settle the terms of peace with the Emperor. He
+ dined with us twice during his short stay, and was most delightful
+ and agreeable. When he and my father were together they seemed to
+ live over the youthful days they had spent together as students,
+ and many were the anecdotes of their boyish frolics which Bismarck
+ related."
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+1861-1863. AEt. 47-49.
+LETTERS FROM VIENNA.
+
+Soon after Mr. Motley's arrival in Vienna I received a long letter from
+him, most of which relates to personal matters, but which contains a few
+sentences of interest to the general reader as showing his zealous
+labors, wherever he found himself, in behalf of the great cause then in
+bloody debate in his own country:
+
+ November 14, 1861.
+
+ . . . What can I say to you of cis-Atlantic things? I am almost
+ ashamed to be away from home. You know that I had decided to
+ remain, and had sent for my family to come to America, when my
+ present appointment altered my plans. I do what good I can. I
+ think I made some impression on Lord John Russell, with whom I spent
+ two days soon after my arrival in England, and I talked very frankly
+ and as strongly as I could to Palmerston, and I have had long
+ conversations and correspondences with other leading men in England.
+ I have also had an hour's [conversation] with Thouvenel in Paris. I
+ hammered the Northern view into him as soundly as I could. For this
+ year there will be no foreign interference with us. I don't
+ anticipate it at any time, unless we bring it on ourselves by bad
+ management, which I don't expect. Our fate is in our own hands, and
+ Europe is looking on to see which side is strongest,--when it has
+ made the discovery it will back it as also the best and the most
+ moral. Yesterday I had my audience with the Emperor. He received
+ me with much cordiality, and seemed interested in a long account
+ which I gave him of our affairs. You may suppose I inculcated the
+ Northern views. We spoke in his vernacular, and he asked me
+ afterwards if I was a German. I mention this not from vanity, but
+ because he asked it with earnestness, and as if it had a political
+ significance. Of course I undeceived him. His appearance
+ interested me, and his manner is very pleasing.
+
+I continued to receive long and interesting letters from him at intervals
+during his residence as Minister at Vienna. Relating as they often did to
+public matters, about which he had private sources of information, his
+anxiety that they should not get into print was perfectly natural. As,
+however, I was at liberty to read his letters to others at my discretion,
+and as many parts of these letters have an interest as showing how
+American affairs looked to one who was behind the scenes in Europe, I may
+venture to give some extracts without fear of violating the spirit of his
+injunctions, or of giving offence to individuals. The time may come when
+his extended correspondence can be printed in full with propriety, but it
+must be in a future year and after it has passed into the hands of a
+younger generation. Meanwhile these few glimpses at his life and records
+of his feelings and opinions will help to make the portrait of the man we
+are studying present itself somewhat more clearly.
+
+ LEGATION of THE U. S. A., VIENNA, January 14, 1862.
+
+ MY DEAR HOLMES,--I have two letters of yours, November 29 and
+ December 17, to express my thanks for. It is quite true that it is
+ difficult for me to write with the same feeling that inspires you,
+ --that everything around the inkstand within a radius of a thousand
+ miles is full of deepest interest to writer and reader. I don't
+ even intend to try to amuse you with Vienna matters. What is it to
+ you that we had a very pleasant dinner-party last week at Prince
+ Esterhazy's, and another this week at Prince Liechtenstein's, and
+ that to-morrow I am to put on my cocked hat and laced coat to make a
+ visit to her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Mother, and that to-night
+ there is to be the first of the assembly balls, the Vienna Almack's,
+ at which--I shall be allowed to absent myself altogether?
+
+ It strikes me that there is likely to be left a fair field for us a
+ few months longer, say till midsummer. The Trent affair I shall not
+ say much about, except to state that I have always been for giving
+ up the prisoners. I was awfully afraid, knowing that the demand had
+ gone forth,--
+
+ "Send us your prisoners or you'll hear of it,"
+
+ that the answer would have come back in the Hotspur vein--
+
+ 'And if the Devil come and roar for them,
+ We will not send them."
+
+ The result would have been most disastrous, for in order to secure a
+ most trifling advantage,--that of keeping Mason and Slidell at Fort
+ Warren a little longer,--we should have turned our backs on all the
+ principles maintained by us when neutral, and should have been
+ obliged to accept a war at an enormous disadvantage. . . .
+
+ But I hardly dared to hope that we should have obtained such a
+ victory as we have done. To have disavowed the illegal transaction
+ at once,--before any demand came from England,--to have placed that
+ disavowal on the broad ground of principle which we have always
+ cherished, and thus with a clear conscience, and to our entire
+ honor, to have kept ourselves clear from a war which must have given
+ the Confederacy the invincible alliance of England,--was exactly
+ what our enemies in Europe did not suppose us capable of doing. But
+ we have done it in the handsomest manner, and there is not one
+ liberal heart in this hemisphere that is not rejoiced, nor one hater
+ of us and of our institutions that is not gnashing his teeth with
+ rage.
+
+The letter of ten close pages from which I have quoted these passages is
+full of confidential information, and contains extracts from letters of
+leading statesmen. If its date had been 1762, I might feel authorized in
+disobeying its injunctions of privacy. I must quote one other sentence,
+as it shows his animus at that time towards a distinguished statesman of
+whom he was afterwards accused of speaking in very hard terms by an
+obscure writer whose intent was to harm him. In speaking of the Trent
+affair, Mr. Motley says: "The English premier has been foiled by our much
+maligned Secretary of State, of whom, on this occasion at least, one has
+the right to say, with Sir Henry Wotton,--
+
+ 'His armor was his honest thought,
+ And simple truth his utmost skill.'"
+
+"He says at the close of this long letter:
+
+ 'I wish I could bore you about something else but American politics.
+ But there is nothing else worth thinking of in the world. All else
+ is leather and prunella. We are living over again the days of the
+ Dutchmen or the seventeenth-century Englishmen.'"
+
+My next letter, of fourteen closely written pages, was of similar
+character to the last. Motley could think of nothing but the great
+conflict. He was alive to every report from America, listening too with
+passionate fears or hopes, as the case might be, to the whispers not yet
+audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who
+were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic
+with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often
+rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an
+organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established
+order of things in their older communities.
+
+A few extracts from this very long letter will be found to have a special
+interest from the time at which they were written.
+
+ LEGATION OF U. S. A., VIENNA, February 26, 1862.
+
+ MY DEAR HOLMES,--. . . I take great pleasure in reading your
+ prophecies, and intend to be just as free in hazarding my own, for,
+ as you say, our mortal life is but a string of guesses at the
+ future, and no one but an idiot would be discouraged at finding
+ himself sometimes far out in his calculations. If I find you
+ signally right in any of your predictions, be sure that I will
+ congratulate and applaud. If you make mistakes, you shall never
+ hear of them again, and I promise to forget them. Let me ask the
+ same indulgence from you in return. This is what makes letter-
+ writing a comfort and journalizing dangerous. . . The ides of March
+ will be upon us before this letter reaches you. We have got to
+ squash the rebellion soon, or be squashed forever as a nation. I
+ don't pretend to judge military plans or the capacities of generals.
+ But, as you suggest, perhaps I can take a more just view of the
+ whole picture of the eventful struggle at this great distance than
+ do those absolutely acting and suffering on the scene. Nor can I
+ resist the desire to prophesy any more than you can do, knowing that
+ I may prove utterly mistaken. I say, then, that one great danger
+ comes from the chance of foreign interference. What will prevent
+ that?
+
+ Our utterly defeating the Confederates in some great and conclusive
+ battle; or,
+
+ Our possession of the cotton ports and opening them to European
+ trade; or,
+
+ A most unequivocal policy of slave emancipation.
+
+ Any one of these three conditions would stave off recognition by
+ foreign powers, until we had ourselves abandoned the attempt to
+ reduce the South to obedience.
+
+ The last measure is to my mind the most important. The South has,
+ by going to war with the United States government, thrust into our
+ hands against our will the invincible weapon which constitutional
+ reasons had hitherto forbidden us to employ. At the same time it
+ has given us the power to remedy a great wrong to four millions of
+ the human race, in which we had hitherto been obliged to acquiesce.
+ We are threatened with national annihilation, and defied to use the
+ only means of national preservation. The question is distinctly
+ proposed to us, Shall Slavery die, or the great Republic? It is
+ most astounding to me that there can be two opinions in the free
+ States as to the answer.
+
+ If we do fall, we deserve our fate. At the beginning of the
+ contest, constitutional scruples might be respectable. But now we
+ are fighting to subjugate the South; that is, Slavery. We are
+ fighting for nothing else that I know of. We are fighting for the
+ Union. Who wishes to destroy the Union? The slaveholder, nobody
+ else. Are we to spend twelve hundred millions, and raise six
+ hundred thousand soldiers, in order to protect slavery? It really
+ does seem to me too simple for argument. I am anxiously waiting for
+ the coming Columbus who will set this egg of ours on end by smashing
+ in the slavery end. We shall be rolling about in every direction
+ until that is done. I don't know that it is to be done by
+ proclamation. Rather perhaps by facts. . . . Well, I console
+ myself with thinking that the people--the American people, at least
+ --is about as wise collectively as less numerous collections of
+ individuals, and that the people has really declared emancipation,
+ and is only puzzling how to carry it into effect. After all, it
+ seems to be a law of Providence, that progress should be by a spiral
+ movement; so that when it seems most tortuous, we may perhaps be
+ going ahead. I am firm in the faith that slavery is now wriggling
+ itself to death. With slavery in its pristine vigor, I should think
+ the restored Union neither possible nor desirable. Don't understand
+ me as not taking into account all the strategical considerations
+ against premature governmental utterances on this great subject.
+ But are there any trustworthy friends to the Union among the
+ slaveholders? Should we lose many Kentuckians and Virginians who
+ are now with us, if we boldly confiscated the slaves of all rebels?
+ --and a confiscation of property which has legs and so confiscates
+ itself, at command, is not only a legal, but would prove a very
+ practical measure in time of war. In brief, the time is fast
+ approaching, I think, when 'Thorough' should be written on all our
+ banners. Slavery will never accept a subordinate position. The
+ great Republic and Slavery cannot both survive. We have been defied
+ to mortal combat, and yet we hesitate to strike. These are my poor
+ thoughts on this great subject. Perhaps you will think them crude.
+ I was much struck with what you quote from Mr. Conway, that if
+ emancipation was proclaimed on the Upper Mississippi it would be
+ known to the negroes of Louisiana in advance of the telegraph. And
+ if once the blacks had leave to run, how many whites would have to
+ stay at home to guard their dissolving property?
+
+ You have had enough of my maunderings. But before I conclude them,
+ may I ask you to give all our kindest regards to Lowell, and to
+ express our admiration for the Yankee Idyl. I am afraid of using
+ too extravagant language if I say all I think about it. Was there
+ ever anything more stinging, more concentrated, more vigorous, more
+ just? He has condensed into those few pages the essence of a
+ hundred diplomatic papers and historical disquisitions and Fourth of
+ July orations. I was dining a day or two since with his friend
+ Lytton (Bulwer's son, attache here) and Julian Fane (secretary of
+ the embassy), both great admirers of him,--and especially of the
+ "Biglow Papers;" they begged me to send them the Mason and Slidell
+ Idyl, but I wouldn't,--I don't think it is in English nature
+ (although theirs is very cosmopolitan and liberal) to take such
+ punishment and come up smiling. I would rather they got it in some
+ other way, and then told me what they thought voluntarily.
+
+ I have very pleasant relations with all the J. B.'s here. They are
+ all friendly and well disposed to the North,--I speak of the
+ embassy, which, with the ambassador and---dress, numbers eight or
+ ten souls, some of them very intellectual ones. There are no other
+ J. B.'s here. I have no fear at present of foreign interference.
+ We have got three or four months to do our work in,--a fair field
+ and no favor. There is no question whatever that the Southern
+ commissioners have been thoroughly snubbed in London and Paris.
+ There is to be a blockade debate in Parliament next week, but no bad
+ consequences are to be apprehended. The Duke de Gramont (French
+ ambassador, and an intimate friend of the Emperor) told my wife last
+ night that it was entirely false that the Emperor had ever urged the
+ English government to break the blockade. "Don't believe it,--don't
+ believe a word of it," he said. He has always held that language to
+ me. He added that Prince Napoleon had just come out with a strong
+ speech about us,--you will see it, doubtless, before you get this
+ letter,--but it has not yet reached us.
+
+ Shall I say anything of Austria,--what can I say that would interest
+ you? That's the reason why I hate to write. All my thoughts are in
+ America. Do you care to know about the Archduke Ferdinand
+ Maximilian, that shall be King hereafter of Mexico (if L. N. has his
+ way)? He is next brother to the Emperor, but although I have had
+ the honor of private audiences of many archdukes here, this one is a
+ resident of Trieste.
+
+ He is about thirty,--has an adventurous disposition,--some
+ imagination,--a turn for poetry,--has voyaged a good deal about the
+ world in the Austrian ship-of-war,--for in one respect he much
+ resembles that unfortunate but anonymous ancestor of his, the King
+ of Bohemia with the seven castles, who, according to Corporal Trim,
+ had such a passion for navigation and sea-affairs, "with never a
+ seaport in all his dominions." But now the present King of Bohemia
+ has got the sway of Trieste, and is Lord High Admiral and Chief of
+ the Marine Department. He has been much in Spain, also in South
+ America; I have read some travels, "Reise Skizzen," of his--printed,
+ not published. They are not without talent, and he ever and anon
+ relieves his prose jog-trot by breaking into a canter of poetry. He
+ adores bull-fights, and rather regrets the Inquisition, and
+ considers the Duke of Alva everything noble and chivalrous, and the
+ most abused of men. It would do your heart good to hear his
+ invocations to that deeply injured shade, and his denunciations of
+ the ignorant and vulgar protestants who have defamed him. (N.B.
+ Let me observe that the R. of the D. R. was not published until long
+ after the "Reise Skizzen" were written.) 'Du armer Alva! weil du
+ dem Willen deines Herrn unerschiitterlich treu vast, weil die
+ festbestimmten grundsatze der Regierung,' etc., etc., etc. You
+ can imagine the rest. Dear me! I wish I could get back to the
+ sixteenth and seventeenth century. . . . But alas! the events
+ of the nineteenth are too engrossing.
+
+ If Lowell cares to read this letter, will you allow me to "make it
+ over to him jointly," as Captain Cuttle says. I wished to write to
+ him, but I am afraid only you would tolerate my writing so much when
+ I have nothing to say. If he would ever send me a line I should be
+ infinitely obliged, and would quickly respond. We read the "Washers
+ of the Shroud" with fervid admiration.
+
+ Always remember me most sincerely to the Club, one and all. It
+ touches me nearly when you assure me that I am not forgotten by
+ them. To-morrow is Saturday and the last of the month.--[See
+ Appendix A.]--We are going to dine with our Spanish colleague. But
+ the first bumper of the Don's champagne I shall drain to the health
+ of my Parker House friends.
+
+From another long letter dated August 31, 1862, I extract the following
+passages:--
+
+ "I quite agree in all that you said in your last letter. 'The imp
+ of secession can't reenter its mother's womb.' It is merely
+ childish to talk of the Union 'as it was.' You might as well bring
+ back the Saxon Heptarchy. But the great Republic is destined to
+ live and flourish, I can't doubt. . . . Do you remember that
+ wonderful scene in Faust in which Mephistopheles draws wine for the
+ rabble with a gimlet out of the wooden table; and how it changes to
+ fire as they drink it, and how they all go mad, draw their knives,
+ grasp each other by the nose, and think they are cutting off bunches
+ of grapes at every blow, and how foolish they all look when they
+ awake from the spell and see how the Devil has been mocking them?
+ It always seems to me a parable of the great Secession.
+
+ "I repeat, I can't doubt as to the ultimate result. But I dare say
+ we have all been much mistaken in our calculations as to time.
+ Days, months, years, are nothing in history. Men die, man is
+ immortal, practically, even on this earth. We are so impatient,
+ --and we are always watching for the last scene of the tragedy. Now I
+ humbly opine that the drop is only about falling on the first act,
+ or perhaps only the prologue. This act or prologue will be called,
+ in after days, War for the status quo. Such enthusiasm, heroism,
+ and manslaughter as status quo could inspire, has, I trust, been not
+ entirely in vain, but it has been proved insufficient.
+
+ "I firmly believe that when the slaveholders declared war on the
+ United States government they began a series of events that, in the
+ logical chain of history, cannot come to a conclusion until the last
+ vestige of slavery is gone. Looking at the whole field for a moment
+ dispassionately, objectively, as the dear Teutonic philosophers say,
+ and merely as an exhibition of phenomena, I cannot imagine any other
+ issue. Everything else may happen. This alone must happen.
+
+ "But after all this isn't a war. It is a revolution. It is n't
+ strategists that are wanted so much as believers. In revolutions
+ the men who win are those who are in earnest. Jeff and Stonewall
+ and the other Devil-worshippers are in earnest, but it was not
+ written in the book of fate that the slaveholders' rebellion should
+ be vanquished by a pro-slavery general. History is never so
+ illogical. No, the coming 'man on horseback' on our side must be a
+ great strategist, with the soul of that insane lion, mad old John
+ Brown, in his belly. That is your only Promethean recipe:--
+
+ 'et insani leonis
+ Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.'
+
+ "I don't know why Horace runs so in my head this morning. . . .
+
+ "There will be work enough for all; but I feel awfully fidgety just
+ now about Port Royal and Hilton Head, and about affairs generally
+ for the next three months. After that iron-clads and the new levies
+ must make us invincible."
+
+In another letter, dated November 2, 1862, he expresses himself very
+warmly about his disappointment in the attitude of many of his old
+English friends with reference to our civil conflict. He had recently
+heard the details of the death of "the noble Wilder Dwight."
+
+ "It is unnecessary," he says, "to say how deeply we were moved. I
+ had the pleasure of knowing him well, and I always appreciated his
+ energy, his manliness, and his intelligent cheerful heroism. I look
+ back upon him now as a kind of heroic type of what a young New
+ Englander ought to be and was. I tell you that one of these days
+ --after a generation of mankind has passed away--these youths will
+ take their places in our history, and be regarded by the young men
+ and women now unborn with the admiration which the Philip Sidneys
+ and the Max Piccolominis now inspire. After all, what was your
+ Chevy Chace to stir blood with like a trumpet? What noble
+ principle, what deathless interest, was there at stake? Nothing but
+ a bloody fight between a lot of noble gamekeepers on one side and of
+ noble poachers on the other. And because they fought well and
+ hacked each other to pieces like devils, they have been heroes for
+ centuries."
+
+The letter was written in a very excited state of feeling, and runs over
+with passionate love of country and indignation at the want of sympathy
+with the cause of freedom which he had found in quarters where he had not
+expected such coldness or hostile tendencies.
+
+From a letter dated Vienna, September 22, 1863.
+
+ . . . "When you wrote me last you said on general matters this:
+ 'In a few days we shall get the news of the success or failure of
+ the attacks on Port Hudson and Vicksburg. If both are successful,
+ many will say that the whole matter is about settled.' You may
+ suppose that when I got the great news I shook hands warmly with you
+ in the spirit across the Atlantic. Day by day for so long we had
+ been hoping to hear the fall of Vicksburg. At last when that little
+ concentrated telegram came, announcing Vicksburg and Gettysburg on
+ the same day and in two lines, I found myself almost alone. . . .
+ There was nobody in the house to join in my huzzahs but my youngest
+ infant. And my conduct very much resembled that of the excellent
+ Philip II. when he heard the fall of Antwerp,--for I went to her
+ door, screeching through the key-hole 'Vicksburg is ours!' just as
+ that other 'pere de famille,' more potent, but I trust not more
+ respectable than I, conveyed the news to his Infanta. (Fide, for
+ the incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and
+ the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to
+ speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden
+ letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate
+ the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people
+ grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each
+ other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their
+ eyes and triumph in their hearts, can picture my isolation.
+
+ "I have never faltered in my faith, and in the darkest hours, when
+ misfortunes seemed thronging most thickly upon us, I have never felt
+ the want of anything to lean against; but I own I did feel like
+ shaking hands with a few hundred people when I heard of our Fourth
+ of July, 1863, work, and should like to have heard and joined in an
+ American cheer or two.
+
+ "I have not much to say of matters here to interest you. We have
+ had an intensely hot, historically hot, and very long and very dry
+ summer. I never knew before what a drought meant. In Hungary the
+ suffering is great, and the people are killing the sheep to feed the
+ pigs with the mutton. Here about Vienna the trees have been almost
+ stripped of foliage ever since the end of August. There is no glory
+ in the grass nor verdure in anything.
+
+ "In fact, we have nothing green here but the Archduke Max, who
+ firmly believes that he is going forth to Mexico to establish an
+ American empire, and that it is his divine mission to destroy the
+ dragon of democracy and reestablish the true Church, the Right
+ Divine, and all sorts of games. Poor young man! . . .
+
+ "Our information from home is to the 12th. Charleston seems to be
+ in 'articulo mortis,' but how forts nowadays seem to fly in the face
+ of Scripture. Those founded on a rock, and built of it, fall easily
+ enough under the rain of Parrotts and Dahlgrens, while the house
+ built of sand seems to bid defiance to the storm."
+
+In quoting from these confidential letters I have been restrained from
+doing full justice to their writer by the fact that he spoke with such
+entire freedom of persons as well as events. But if they could be read
+from beginning to end, no one could help feeling that his love for his
+own country, and passionate absorption of every thought in the strife
+upon which its existence as a nation depended, were his very life during
+all this agonizing period. He can think and talk of nothing else, or, if
+he turns for a moment to other subjects, he reverts to the one great
+central interest of "American politics," of which he says in one of the
+letters from which I have quoted, "There is nothing else worth thinking
+of in the world."
+
+But in spite of his public record as the historian of the struggle for
+liberty and the champion of its defenders, and while every letter he
+wrote betrayed in every word the intensity of his patriotic feeling, he
+was not safe against the attacks of malevolence. A train laid by unseen
+hands was waiting for the spark to kindle it, and this came at last in
+the shape of a letter from an unknown individual,--a letter the existence
+of which ought never to have been a matter of official recognition.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+1866-1867. AEt. 52-43.
+RESIGNATION OF HIS OFFICE.--CAUSES OF HIS RESIGNATION.
+
+It is a relief to me that just here, where I come to the first of two
+painful episodes in this brilliant and fortunate career, I can preface my
+statement with the generous words of one who speaks with authority of his
+predecessor in office.
+
+The Hon. John Jay, Ex-Minister to Austria, in the tribute to the memory
+of Motley read at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, wrote as
+follows:--
+
+ "In singular contrast to Mr. Motley's brilliant career as an
+ historian stands the fact recorded in our diplomatic annals that he
+ was twice forced from the service as one who had forfeited the
+ confidence of the American government. This society, while he was
+ living, recognized his fame as a statesman, diplomatist, and
+ patriot, as belonging to America, and now that death has closed the
+ career of Seward, Sumner, and Motley, it will be remembered that the
+ great historian, twice humiliated, by orders from Washington, before
+ the diplomacy and culture of Europe, appealed from the passions of
+ the hour to the verdict of history.
+
+ "Having succeeded Mr. Motley at Vienna some two years after his
+ departure, I had occasion to read most of his dispatches, which
+ exhibited a mastery of the subjects of which they treated, with much
+ of the clear perception, the scholarly and philosophic tone and
+ decided judgment, which, supplemented by his picturesque
+ description, full of life and color, have given character to his
+ histories. They are features which might well have served to extend
+ the remark of Madame de Stael that a great historian is almost a
+ statesman. I can speak also from my own observation of the
+ reputation which Motley left in the Austrian capital.
+ Notwithstanding the decision with which, under the direction of Mr.
+ Seward, he had addressed the minister of foreign affairs, Count
+ Mensdorff, afterwards the Prince Diedrickstein, protesting against
+ the departure of an Austrian force of one thousand volunteers, who
+ were about to embark for Mexico in aid of the ill-fated Maximilian,
+ --a protest which at the last moment arrested the project,--Mr.
+ Motley and his amiable family were always spoken of in terms of
+ cordial regard and respect by members of the imperial family and
+ those eminent statesmen, Count de Beust and Count Andrassy. His
+ death, I am sure, is mourned to-day by the representatives of the
+ historic names of Austria and Hungary, and by the surviving
+ diplomats then residing near the Court of Vienna, wherever they may
+ still be found, headed by their venerable Doyen, the Baron de
+ Heckeren."
+
+The story of Mr. Motley's resignation of his office and its acceptance by
+the government is this.
+
+The President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, received a letter
+professing to be written from the Hotel Meurice, Paris, dated October 23,
+1866, and signed "George W. M'Crackin, of New York." This letter was
+filled with accusations directed against various public agents,
+ministers, and consuls, representing the United States in different
+countries. Its language was coarse, its assertions were improbable, its
+spirit that of the lowest of party scribblers. It was bitter against New
+England, especially so against Massachusetts, and it singled out Motley
+for the most particular abuse. I think it is still questioned whether
+there was any such person as the one named,--at any rate, it bore the
+characteristic marks of those vulgar anonymous communications which
+rarely receive any attention unless they are important enough to have the
+police set on the track of the writer to find his rathole, if possible. A
+paragraph in the "Daily Advertiser" of June 7, 1869, quotes from a
+Western paper a story to the effect that one William R. M'Crackin, who
+had recently died at-----confessed to having written the M' Crackin
+letter. Motley, he said, had snubbed him and refused to lend him money.
+"He appears to have been a Bohemian of the lowest order." Between such
+authorship and the anonymous there does not seem to be much to choose.
+But the dying confession sounds in my ears as decidedly apocryphal. As
+for the letter, I had rather characterize it than reproduce it. It is an
+offence to decency and a disgrace to the national record on which it is
+found. This letter of "George W. M'Crackin" passed into the hands of Mr.
+Seward, the Secretary of State. Most gentlemen, I think, would have
+destroyed it on the spot, as it was not fit for the waste-basket. Some,
+more cautious, might have smothered it among the piles of their private
+communications. If any notice was taken of it, one would say that a
+private note to each of the gentlemen attacked might have warned him that
+there were malicious eavesdroppers about, ready to catch up any careless
+expression he might let fall and make a scandalous report of it to his
+detriment.
+
+The secretary, acquiescing without resistance in a suggestion of the
+President, saw fit to address a formal note to several of the gentlemen
+mentioned in the M'Crackin letter, repeating some of its offensive
+expressions, and requesting those officials to deny or confirm the report
+that they had uttered them.
+
+A gentleman who is asked whether he has spoken in a "malignant" or
+"offensive" manner, whether he has "railed violently and shamefully"
+against the President of the United States, or against anybody else,
+might well wonder who would address such a question to the humblest
+citizen not supposed to be wanting in a common measure of self-respect. A
+gentleman holding an important official station in a foreign country,
+receiving a letter containing such questions, signed by the prime
+minister of his government, if he did not think himself imposed upon by a
+forgery, might well consider himself outraged. It was a letter of this
+kind which was sent by the Secretary of State to the Minister
+Plenipotentiary to the Empire of Austria. Not quite all the vulgar
+insolence of the M'Crackin letter was repeated. Mr. Seward did not ask
+Mr. Motley to deny or confirm the assertion of the letter that he was a
+"thorough flunky" and "un-American functionary." But he did insult him
+with various questions suggested by the anonymous letter,--questions that
+must have been felt as an indignity by the most thick-skinned of battered
+politicians.
+
+Mr. Motley was very sensitive, very high-spirited, very impulsive, very
+patriotic, and singularly truthful. The letter of Mr. Seward to such a
+man was like a buffet on the cheek of an unarmed officer. It stung like
+the thrust of a stiletto. It roused a resentment that could not find any
+words to give it expression. He could not wait to turn the insult over in
+his mind, to weigh the exact amount of affront in each question, to take
+counsel, to sleep over it, and reply to it with diplomatic measure and
+suavity. One hour had scarcely elapsed before his answer was written. As
+to his feelings as an American, he appeals to his record. This might have
+shown that if he erred it was on the side of enthusiasm and extravagant
+expressions of reverence for the American people during the heroic years
+just passed. He denounces the accusations as pitiful fabrications and
+vile calumny. He blushes that such charges could have been uttered; he is
+deeply wounded that Mr. Seward could have listened to such falsehood. He
+does not hesitate to say what his opinions are with reference to home
+questions, and especially to that of reconstruction.
+
+ "These opinions," he says, "in the privacy of my own household, and
+ to occasional American visitors, I have not concealed. The great
+ question now presenting itself for solution demands the
+ conscientious scrutiny of every American who loves his country and
+ believes in the human progress of which that country is one of the
+ foremost representatives. I have never thought, during my residence
+ at Vienna, that because I have the honor of being a public servant
+ of the American people I am deprived of the right of discussing
+ within my own walls the gravest subjects that can interest freemen.
+ A minister of the United States does not cease to be a citizen of
+ the United States, as deeply interested as others in all that
+ relates to the welfare of his country."
+
+Among the "occasional American visitors" spoken of above must have been
+some of those self-appointed or hired agents called "interviewers," who
+do for the American public what the Venetian spies did for the Council of
+Ten, what the familiars of the Inquisition did for the priesthood, who
+invade every public man's privacy, who listen at every key-hole, who
+tamper with every guardian of secrets; purveyors to the insatiable
+appetite of a public which must have a slain reputation to devour with
+its breakfast, as the monster of antiquity called regularly for his
+tribute of a spotless virgin.
+
+The "interviewer" has his use, undoubtedly, and often instructs and
+amuses his public with gossip they could not otherwise listen to. He
+serves the politician by repeating the artless and unstudied remarks
+which fall from his lips in a conversation which the reporter has been
+invited to take notes of. He tickles the author's vanity by showing him
+off as he sits in his library unconsciously uttering the engaging items
+of self-portraiture which, as he well knows, are to be given to the
+public in next week's illustrated paper. The feathered end of his shaft
+titillates harmlessly enough, but too often the arrowhead is crusted with
+a poison worse than the Indian gets by mingling the wolf's gall with the
+rattlesnake's venom. No man is safe whose unguarded threshold the
+mischief-making questioner has crossed. The more unsuspecting, the more
+frank, the more courageous, the more social is the subject of his
+vivisection, the more easily does he get at his vital secrets, if he has
+any to be extracted. No man is safe if the hearsay reports of his
+conversation are to be given to the public without his own careful
+revision. When we remember that a proof-text bearing on the mighty
+question of the future life, words of supreme significance, uttered as
+they were in the last hour, and by the lips to which we listen as to none
+other,--that this text depends for its interpretation on the position of
+a single comma, we can readily see what wrong may be done by the
+unintentional blunder of the most conscientious reporter. But too
+frequently it happens that the careless talk of an honest and high-minded
+man only reaches the public after filtering through the drain of some
+reckless hireling's memory,--one who has played so long with other men's
+characters and good name that he forgets they have any value except to
+fill out his morning paragraphs.
+
+Whether the author of the scandalous letter which it was disgraceful to
+the government to recognize was a professional interviewer or only a
+malicious amateur, or whether he was a paid "spotter," sent by some
+jealous official to report on the foreign ministers as is sometimes done
+in the case of conductors of city horsecars, or whether the dying
+miscreant before mentioned told the truth, cannot be certainly known. But
+those who remember Mr. Hawthorne's account of his consular experiences at
+Liverpool are fully aware to what intrusions and impertinences and
+impositions our national representatives in other countries are
+subjected. Those fellow-citizens who "often came to the consulate in
+parties of half a dozen or more, on no business whatever, but merely to
+subject their public servant to a rigid examination, and see how he was
+getting on with his duties," may very possibly have included among them
+some such mischief-maker as the author of the odious letter which
+received official recognition. Mr. Motley had spoken in one of his
+histories of "a set of venomous familiars who glided through every
+chamber and coiled themselves at every fireside." He little thought that
+under his own roof he himself was to be the victim of an equally base
+espionage.
+
+It was an insult on the part of the government to have sent Mr. Motley
+such a letter with such questions as were annexed to it. No very exact
+rule can be laid down as to the manner in which an insult shall be dealt
+with. Something depends on temperament, and his was of the warmer
+complexion. His first impulse, he says, was to content himself with a
+flat denial of the truth of the accusations. But his scrupulous honesty
+compelled him to make a plain statement of his opinions, and to avow the
+fact that he had made no secret of them in conversation under conditions
+where he had a right to speak freely of matters quite apart from his
+official duties. His answer to the accusation was denial of its charges;
+his reply to the insult was his resignation.
+
+It may be questioned whether this was the wisest course, but wisdom is
+often disconcerted by an indignity, and even a meek Christian may forget
+to turn the other cheek after receiving the first blow until the natural
+man has asserted himself by a retort in kind. But the wrong was
+committed; his resignation was accepted; the vulgar letter, not fit to be
+spread out on these pages, is enrolled in the records of the nation, and
+the first deep wound was inflicted on the proud spirit of one whose
+renown had shed lustre on the whole country.
+
+That the burden of this wrong may rest where it belongs, I quote the
+following statement from Mr. Jay's paper, already referred to.
+
+ "It is due to the memory of Mr. Seward to say, and there would seem
+ now no further motive for concealing the truth, that I was told in
+ Europe, on what I regarded as reliable authority, that there was
+ reason to believe that on the receipt of Mr. Motley's resignation
+ Mr. Seward had written to him declining to accept it, and that this
+ letter, by a telegraphic order of President Johnson, had been
+ arrested in the hands of a dispatch agent before its delivery to Mr.
+ Motley, and that the curt letter of the 18th of April had been
+ substituted in its stead."
+
+The Hon. John Bigelow, late Minister to France, has published an article
+in "The International Review" for July-August, 1878, in which he defends
+his late friend Mr. Seward's action in this matter at the expense of the
+President, Mr. Andrew Johnson, and not without inferences unfavorable to
+the discretion of Mr. Motley. Many readers will think that the simple
+record of Mr. Seward's unresisting acquiescence in the action of the
+President is far from being to his advantage. I quote from his own
+conversation as carefully reported by his friend Mr. Bigelow. "Mr.
+Johnson was in a state of intense irritation, and more or less suspicious
+of everybody about him."--"Instead of throwing the letter into the fire,"
+the President handed it to him, the secretary, and suggested answering
+it, and without a word, so far as appears, he simply answered,
+"Certainly, sir." Again, the secretary having already written to Mr.
+Motley that "his answer was satisfactory," the President, on reaching the
+last paragraph of Mr. Motley's letter, in which he begged respectfully to
+resign his post, "without waiting to learn what Mr. Seward had done or
+proposed to do, exclaimed, with a not unnatural asperity, 'Well, let him
+go,' and 'on hearing this,' said Mr. Seward, laughing, 'I did not read my
+dispatch.'" Many persons will think that the counsel for the defence has
+stated the plaintiff's case so strongly that there is nothing left for
+him but to show his ingenuity and his friendship for the late secretary
+in a hopeless argument. At any rate, Mr. Seward appears not to have made
+the slightest effort to protect Mr. Motley against his coarse and jealous
+chief at two critical moments, and though his own continuance in office
+may have been more important to the State than that of the Vicar of Bray
+was to the Church, he ought to have risked something, as it seems to me,
+to shield such a patriot, such a gentleman, such a scholar, from ignoble
+treatment; he ought to have been as ready to guard Mr. Motley from wrong
+as Mr. Bigelow has shown himself to shield Mr. Seward from reproach, and
+his task, if more delicate, was not more difficult. I am willing to
+accept Mr. Bigelow's loyal and honorable defence of his friend's memory
+as the best that could be said for Mr. Seward, but the best defence in
+this case is little better than an impeachment. As for Mr. Johnson, he
+had held the weapon of the most relentless of the 'Parcae' so long that
+his suddenly clipping the thread of a foreign minister's tenure of office
+in a fit of jealous anger is not at all surprising.
+
+Thus finished Mr. Motley's long and successful diplomatic service at the
+Court of Austria. He may have been judged hasty in resigning his place;
+he may have committed himself in expressing his opinions too strongly
+before strangers, whose true character as spies and eavesdroppers he was
+too high-minded to suspect. But no caution could have protected him
+against a slanderer who hated the place he came from, the company he
+kept, the name he had made famous, to whom his very look and bearing
+--such as belong to a gentleman of natural refinement and good breeding
+--must have been a personal grievance and an unpardonable offence.
+
+I will add, in illustration of what has been said, and as showing his
+feeling with reference to the matter, an extract from a letter to me from
+Vienna, dated the 12th of March, 1867.
+
+ . . . "As so many friends and so many strangers have said so much
+ that is gratifying to me in public and private on this very painful
+ subject, it would be like affectation, in writing to so old a friend
+ as you, not to touch upon it. I shall confine myself, however, to
+ one fact, which, so far as I know, may be new to you.
+
+ "Geo. W. M'Cracken is a man and a name utterly unknown to me.
+
+ "With the necessary qualification which every man who values truth
+ must make when asserting such a negation,--viz., to the very best of
+ my memory and belief,--I never set eyes on him nor heard of him
+ until now, in the whole course of my life. Not a member of my
+ family or of the legation has the faintest recollection of any such
+ person. I am quite convinced that he never saw me nor heard the
+ sound of my voice. That his letter was a tissue of vile calumnies,
+ shameless fabrications, and unblushing and contemptible falsehoods,
+ --by whomsoever uttered,--I have stated in a reply to what ought
+ never to have been an official letter. No man can regret more than
+ I do that such a correspondence is enrolled in the capital among
+ American state papers. I shall not trust myself to speak of the
+ matter. It has been a sufficiently public scandal."
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+1867-1868. AEt. 53-54.
+
+LAST TWO VOLUMES OF THE "HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS."--GENERAL
+CRITICISMS OF DUTCH SCHOLARS ON MOTLEY'S HISTORICAL WORKS.
+
+In his letter to me of March 12, 1867, just cited, Mr. Motley writes:--
+
+ "My two concluding volumes of the United Netherlands are passing
+ rapidly through the press. Indeed, Volume III. is entirely printed
+ and a third of Volume IV.
+
+ "If I live ten years longer I shall have probably written the
+ natural sequel to the first two works,--viz., the Thirty Years' War.
+ After that I shall cease to scourge the public.
+
+ "I don't know whether my last two volumes are good or bad; I only
+ know that they are true--but that need n't make them amusing.
+
+ "Alas! one never knows when one becomes a bore."
+
+In 1868 the two concluding volumes of the "History of the Netherlands"
+were published at the same time in London and in New York. The events
+described and the characters delineated in these two volumes had,
+perhaps, less peculiar interest for English and American readers than
+some of those which had lent attraction to the preceding ones. There was
+no scene like the siege of Antwerp, no story like that of the Spanish
+Armada. There were no names that sounded to our ears like those of Sir
+Philip Sidney and Leicester and Amy Robsart. But the main course of his
+narrative flowed on with the same breadth and depth of learning and the
+same brilliancy of expression. The monumental work continued as nobly as
+it had begun. The facts had been slowly, quietly gathered, one by one,
+like pebbles from the empty channel of a brook. The style was fluent,
+impetuous, abundant, impatient, as it were, at times, and leaping the
+sober boundaries prescribed to it, like the torrent which rushes through
+the same channel when the rains have filled it. Thus there was matter for
+criticism in his use of language. He was not always careful in the
+construction of his sentences. He introduced expressions now and then
+into his vocabulary which reminded one of his earlier literary efforts.
+He used stronger language at times than was necessary, coloring too
+highly, shading too deeply in his pictorial delineations. To come to the
+matter of his narrative, it must be granted that not every reader will
+care to follow him through all the details of diplomatic intrigues which
+he has with such industry and sagacity extricated from the old
+manuscripts in which they had long lain hidden. But we turn a few pages
+and we come to one of those descriptions which arrest us at once and show
+him in his power and brilliancy as a literary artist. His characters move
+before us with the features of life; we can see Elizabeth, or Philip, or
+Maurice, not as a name connected with events, but as a breathing and
+acting human being, to be loved or hated, admired or despised, as if he
+or she were our contemporary. That all his judgments would not be
+accepted as final we might easily anticipate; he could not help writing
+more or less as a partisan, but he was a partisan on the side of freedom
+in politics and religion, of human nature as against every form of
+tyranny, secular or priestly, of noble manhood wherever he saw it as
+against meanness and violence and imposture, whether clad in the
+soldier's mail or the emperor's purple. His sternest critics, and even
+these admiring ones, were yet to be found among those who with
+fundamental beliefs at variance with his own followed him in his long
+researches among the dusty annals of the past.
+
+The work of the learned M. Groen van Prinsterer,--[Maurice et Barnevelt,
+Etude Historique. Utrecht, 1875.]--devoted expressly to the revision and
+correction of what the author considers the erroneous views of Mr. Motley
+on certain important points, bears, notwithstanding, such sincere and
+hearty tribute to his industry, his acquisitions, his brilliant qualities
+as a historian, that some extracts from it will be read, I think, with
+interest.
+
+ "My first interview, more than twenty years ago, with Mr. Lothrop
+ Motley, has left an indelible impression on my memory.
+
+ "It was the 8th of August, 1853. A note is handed me from our
+ eminent archivist Bakhuyzen van den Brink. It informs me that I am
+ to receive a visit from an American, who, having been struck by the
+ analogies between the United Provinces and the United States,
+ between Washington and the founder of our independence, has
+ interrupted his diplomatic career to write the life of William the
+ First; that he has already given proof of ardor and perseverance,
+ having worked in libraries and among collections of manuscripts,
+ and that he is coming to pursue his studies at the Hague.
+
+ "While I am surprised and delighted with this intelligence, I am
+ informed that Mr. Motley himself is waiting for my answer. My
+ eagerness to make the acquaintance of such an associate in my
+ sympathies and my labors may be well imagined. But how shall I
+ picture my surprise, in presently discovering that this unknown and
+ indefatigable fellow-worker has really read, I say read and reread,
+ our Quartos, our Folios, the enormous volumes of Bor, of van
+ Meteren, besides a multitude of books, of pamphlets, and even of
+ unedited documents. Already he is familiar with the events, the
+ changes of condition, the characteristic details of the life of his
+ and my hero. Not only is he acquainted with my Archives, but it
+ seems as if there was nothing in this voluminous collection of which
+ he was ignorant. . . .
+
+ "In sending me the last volume of his 'History of the Foundation of
+ the Republic of the Netherlands,' Mr. Motley wrote to me: 'Without
+ the help of the Archives I could never have undertaken the difficult
+ task I had set myself, and you will have seen at least from my
+ numerous citations that I have made a sincere and conscientious
+ study of them.' Certainly in reading such a testimonial I
+ congratulated myself on the excellent fruit of my labors, but the
+ gratitude expressed to me by Mr. Motley was sincerely reciprocated.
+ The Archives are a scientific collection, and my 'Manual of National
+ History,' written in Dutch, hardly gets beyond the limits of my own
+ country. And here is a stranger, become our compatriot in virtue of
+ the warmth of his sympathies, who has accomplished what was not in
+ my power. By the detail and the charm of his narrative, by the
+ matter and form of a work which the universality of the English
+ language and numerous translations were to render cosmopolitan, Mr.
+ Motley, like that other illustrious historian, Prescott, lost to
+ science by too early death, has popularized in both hemispheres the
+ sublime devotion of the Prince of Orange, the exceptional and
+ providential destinies of my country, and the benedictions of the
+ Eternal for all those who trust in Him and tremble only at his
+ Word."
+
+The old Dutch scholar differs in many important points from Mr. Motley,
+as might be expected from his creed and his life-long pursuits. This I
+shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, "John of
+Barneveld." An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of
+Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs
+the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may
+flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing
+themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ability) could teach
+him many things that he has overlooked and correct him in many mistakes.
+But the ants will labor ingloriously without an observer to chronicle
+their doings, and the archivists and annalists will pile up facts forever
+like so many articulates or mollusks or radiates, until the vertebrate
+historian comes with his generalizing ideas, his beliefs, his prejudices,
+his idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and brings the facts into a more or less
+imperfect, but still organic series of relations. The history which is
+not open to adverse criticism is worth little, except as material, for it
+is written without taking cognizance of those higher facts about which
+men must differ; of which Guizot writes as follows, as quoted in the work
+of M. Groen van Prinsterer himself.
+
+ "It is with facts that our minds are exercised, it has nothing but
+ facts as its materials, and when it discovers general laws these
+ laws are themselves facts which it determines. . . . In the
+ study of facts the intelligence may allow itself to be crushed; it
+ may lower, narrow, materialize itself; it may come to believe that
+ there are no facts except those which strike us at the first glance,
+ which come close to us, which fall, as we say, under our senses; a
+ great and gross error; there are remote facts, immense, obscure,
+ sublime, very difficult to reach, to observe, to describe, and which
+ are not any less facts for these reasons, and which man is not less
+ obliged to study and to know; and if he fails to recognize them or
+ forgets them, his thought will be prodigiously abashed, and all his
+ ideas carry the stamp of this deterioration."
+
+In that higher region of facts which belongs to the historian, whose task
+it is to interpret as well as to transcribe, Mr. Motley showed, of
+course, the political and religious school in which he had been brought
+up. Every man has a right to his "personal equation" of prejudice, and
+Mr. Motley, whose ardent temperament gave life to his writings, betrayed
+his sympathies in the disputes of which he told the story, in a way to
+insure sharp criticism from those of a different way of thinking. Thus it
+is that in the work of M. Groen van Prinsterer, from which I have quoted,
+he is considered as having been betrayed into error, while his critic
+recognizes "his manifest desire to be scrupulously impartial and
+truth-telling." And M. Fruin, another of his Dutch critics, says, "His
+sincerity, his perspicacity, the accuracy of his laborious researches,
+are incontestable."
+
+Some of the criticisms of Dutch scholars will be considered in the pages
+which deal with his last work, "The Life of John of Barneveld."
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+1868-1869. AEt. 54-55.
+
+VISIT TO AMERICA.--RESIDENCE AT NO. 2 PARK STREET, BOSTON.--ADDRESS ON
+THE COMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.--ADDRESS ON HISTORIC PROGRESS AND
+AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.--APPOINTED MINISTER TO ENGLAND.
+
+In June, 1868, Mr. Motley returned with his family to Boston, and
+established himself in the house No. 2 Park Street. During his residence
+here he entered a good deal into society, and entertained many visitors
+in a most hospitable and agreeable way.
+
+On the 20th of October, 1868, he delivered an address before the Parker
+Fraternity, in the Music Hall, by special invitation. Its title was "Four
+Questions for the People, at the Presidential Election." This was of
+course what is commonly called an electioneering speech, but a speech
+full of noble sentiments and eloquent expression. Here are two of its
+paragraphs:--
+
+ "Certainly there have been bitterly contested elections in this
+ country before. Party spirit is always rife, and in such vivid,
+ excitable, disputatious communities as ours are, and I trust always
+ will be, it is the very soul of freedom. To those who reflect upon
+ the means and end of popular government, nothing seems more stupid
+ than in grand generalities to deprecate party spirit. Why,
+ government by parties and through party machinery is the only
+ possible method by which a free government can accomplish the
+ purpose of its existence. The old republics of the past may be said
+ to have fallen, not because of party spirit, but because there was
+ no adequate machinery by which party spirit could develop itself
+ with facility and regularity.
+
+ "And if our Republic be true to herself, the future of the human
+ race is assured by our example. No sweep of overwhelming armies, no
+ ponderous treatises on the rights of man, no hymns to liberty,
+ though set to martial music and resounding with the full diapason of
+ a million human throats, can exert so persuasive an influence as
+ does the spectacle of a great republic, occupying a quarter of the
+ civilized globe, and governed quietly and sagely by the people
+ itself."
+
+A large portion of this address is devoted to the proposition that it is
+just and reasonable to pay our debts rather than to repudiate them, and
+that the nation is as much bound to be honest as is the individual. "It
+is an awful thing," he says, "that this should be a question at all," but
+it was one of the points on which the election turned, for all that.
+
+In his advocacy of the candidate with whom, and the government of which
+he became the head, his relations became afterwards so full of personal
+antagonism, he spoke as a man of his ardent nature might be expected to
+speak on such an occasion. No one doubts that his admiration of General
+Grant's career was perfectly sincere, and no one at the present day can
+deny that the great captain stood before the historian with such a record
+as one familiar with the deeds of heroes and patriots might well consider
+as entitling him to the honors too often grudged to the living to be
+wasted on the dead. The speaker only gave voice to the widely prevailing
+feelings which had led to his receiving the invitation to speak. The time
+was one which called for outspoken utterance, and there was not a
+listener whose heart did not warm as he heard the glowing words in which
+the speaker recorded the noble achievements of the soldier who must in so
+many ways have reminded him of his favorite character, William the
+Silent.
+
+On the 16th of December of this same year, 1868, Mr. Motley delivered an
+address before the New York Historical Society, on the occasion of the
+sixty-fourth anniversary of its foundation. The president of the society,
+Mr. Hamilton Fish, introduced the speaker as one "whose name belongs to
+no single country, and to no single age. As a statesman and diplomatist
+and patriot, he belongs to America; as a scholar, to the world of
+letters; as a historian, all ages will claim him in the future."
+
+His subject was "Historic Progress and American Democracy." The discourse
+is, to use his own words, "a rapid sweep through the eons and the
+centuries," illustrating the great truth of the development of the race
+from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long distance
+from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which gave the
+earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if not the
+existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the surrender of
+General Lee under the apple-tree at Appomattox Court-House. No one but a
+scholar familiar with the course of history could have marshalled such a
+procession of events into a connected and intelligible sequence. It is
+indeed a flight rather than a march; the reader is borne along as on the
+wings of a soaring poem, and sees the rising and decaying empires of
+history beneath him as a bird of passage marks the succession of cities
+and wilds and deserts as he keeps pace with the sun in his journey.
+
+Its eloquence, its patriotism, its crowded illustrations, drawn from vast
+resources of knowledge, its epigrammatic axioms, its occasional
+pleasantries, are all characteristic of the writer.
+
+Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, the venerable senior member of the society,
+proposed the vote of thanks to Mr. Motley with words of warm
+commendation.
+
+Mr. William Cullen Bryant rose and said:--
+
+ "I take great pleasure in seconding the resolution which has just
+ been read. The eminent historian of the Dutch Republic, who has
+ made the story of its earlier days as interesting as that of Athens
+ and Sparta, and who has infused into the narrative the generous glow
+ of his own genius, has the highest of titles to be heard with
+ respectful attention by the citizens of a community which, in its
+ origin, was an offshoot of that renowned republic. And cheerfully
+ has that title been recognized, as the vast audience assembled here
+ to-night, in spite of the storm, fully testifies; and well has our
+ illustrious friend spoken of the growth of civilization and of the
+ improvement in the condition of mankind, both in the Old World--the
+ institutions of which he has so lately observed--and in the country
+ which is proud to claim him as one of her children."
+
+Soon after the election of General Grant, Mr. Motley received the
+appointment of Minister to England. That the position was one which was
+in many respects most agreeable to him cannot be doubted. Yet it was not
+with unmingled feelings of satisfaction, not without misgivings which
+warned him but too truly of the dangers about to encompass him, that he
+accepted the place. He writes to me on April 16, 1869:--
+
+ "I feel anything but exultation at present,--rather the opposite
+ sensation. I feel that I am placed higher than I deserve, and at
+ the same time that I am taking greater responsibilities than ever
+ were assumed by me before. You will be indulgent to my mistakes and
+ shortcomings,--and who can expect to avoid them? But the world will
+ be cruel, and the times are threatening. I shall do my best,--but
+ the best may be poor enough,--and keep 'a heart for any fate.'"
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+1869-1870. AEt. 55-56.
+RECALL FROM THE ENGLISH MISSION.--ITS ALLEGED AND ITS PROBABLE REASONS.
+
+The misgivings thus expressed to me in confidence, natural enough in one
+who had already known what it is to fall on evil days and evil tongues,
+were but too well justified by after events. I could have wished to leave
+untold the story of the English mission, an episode in Motley's life full
+of heart-burnings, and long to be regretted as a passage of American
+history. But his living appeal to my indulgence comes to me from his
+grave as a call for his defence, however little needed, at least as a
+part of my tribute to his memory. It is little needed, because the case
+is clear enough to all intelligent readers of our diplomatic history, and
+because his cause has been amply sustained by others in many ways better
+qualified than myself to do it justice. The task is painful, for if a
+wrong was done him it must be laid at the doors of those whom the nation
+has delighted to honor, and whose services no error of judgment or
+feeling or conduct can ever induce us to forget. If he confessed him,
+self-liable, like the rest of us, to mistakes and shortcomings, we must
+remember that the great officers of the government who decreed his
+downfall were not less the subjects of human infirmity.
+
+The outline to be filled up is this: A new administration had just been
+elected. The "Alabama Treaty," negotiated by Motley's predecessor, Mr.
+Reverdy Johnson, had been rejected by the Senate. The minister was
+recalled, and Motley, nominated without opposition and unanimously
+confirmed by the Senate, was sent to England in his place. He was
+welcomed most cordially on his arrival at Liverpool, and replied in a
+similar strain of good feeling, expressing the same kindly sentiments
+which may be found in his instructions. Soon after arriving in London he
+had a conversation with Lord Clarendon, the British Foreign Secretary, of
+which he sent a full report to his own government. While the reported
+conversation was generally approved of in the government's dispatch
+acknowledging it, it was hinted that some of its expressions were
+stronger than were required by the instructions, and that one of its
+points was not conveyed in precise conformity with the President's view.
+The criticism was very gently worded, and the dispatch closed with a
+somewhat guarded paragraph repeating the government's approbation.
+
+This was the first offence alleged against Mr. Motley. The second ground
+of complaint was that he had shown written minutes of this conversation
+to Lord Clarendon to obtain his confirmation of its exactness, and that
+he had--as he said, inadvertently,--omitted to make mention to the
+government of this circumstance until some weeks after the time of the
+interview.
+
+He was requested to explain to Lord Clarendon that a portion of his
+presentation and treatment of the subject discussed at the interview
+immediately after his arrival was disapproved by the Secretary of State,
+and he did so in a written communication, in which he used the very words
+employed by Mr. Fish in his criticism of the conversation with Lord
+Clarendon. An alleged mistake; a temperate criticism, coupled with a
+general approval; a rectification of the mistake criticised. All this
+within the first two months of Mr. Motley's official residence in London.
+
+No further fault was found with him, so far as appears, in the discharge
+of his duties, to which he must have devoted himself faithfully, for he
+writes to me, under the date of December 27, 1870: "I have worked harder
+in the discharge of this mission than I ever did in my life." This from a
+man whose working powers astonished the old Dutch archivist, Groen van
+Prinsterer, means a good deal.
+
+More than a year had elapsed since the interview with Lord Clarendon,
+which had been the subject of criticism. In the mean time a paper of
+instructions was sent to Motley, dated September 25, 1869, in which the
+points in the report of his interview which had been found fault with are
+so nearly covered by similar expressions, that there seemed no real
+ground left for difference between the government and the minister.
+Whatever over-statement there had been, these new instructions would
+imply that the government was now ready to go quite as far as the
+minister had gone, and in some points to put the case still more
+strongly. Everything was going on quietly. Important business had been
+transacted, with no sign of distrust or discontent on the part of the
+government as regarded Motley. Whatever mistake he was thought to have
+committed was condoned by amicable treatment, neutralized by the virtual
+indorsement of the government in the instructions of the 25th of
+September, and obsolete as a ground of quarrel by lapse of time. The
+question about which the misunderstanding, if such it deserves to be
+called, had taken place, was no longer a possible source of disagreement,
+as it had long been settled that the Alabama case should only be opened
+again at the suggestion of the British government, and that it should be
+transferred to Washington whenever that suggestion should again bring it
+up for consideration.
+
+Such was the aspect of affairs at the American Legation in London. No
+foreign minister felt more secure in his place than Mr. Motley. "I
+thought myself," he says in the letter of December 27, "entirely in the
+confidence of my own government, and I know that I had the thorough
+confidence and the friendship of the leading personages in England." All
+at once, on the first of July, 1870, a letter was written by the
+Secretary of State, requesting him to resign. This gentle form of
+violence is well understood in the diplomatic service. Horace Walpole
+says, speaking of Lady Archibald Hamilton: "They have civilly asked her
+and grossly forced her to ask civilly to go away, which she has done,
+with a pension of twelve hundred a year." Such a request is like the
+embrace of the "virgin" in old torture-chambers. She is robed in soft
+raiment, but beneath it are the knife-blades which are ready to lacerate
+and kill the victim, if he awaits the pressure of the machinery already
+in motion.
+
+Mr. Motley knew well what was the logical order in an official execution,
+and saw fit to let the government work its will upon him as its servant.
+In November he was recalled.
+
+The recall of a minister under such circumstances is an unusual if not an
+unprecedented occurrence. The government which appoints a citizen to
+represent the country at a foreign court assumes a very serious
+obligation to him. The next administration may turn him out and nothing
+will be thought of it. He may be obliged to ask for his passports and
+leave all at once if war is threatened between his own country and that
+which he represents. He may, of course, be recalled for gross misconduct.
+But his dismissal is very serious matter to him personally, and not to be
+thought of on the ground of passion or caprice. Marriage is a simple
+business, but divorce is a very different thing. The world wants to know
+the reason of it; the law demands its justification. It was a great blow
+to Mr. Motley, a cause of indignation to those who were interested in
+him, a surprise and a mystery to the world in general.
+
+When he, his friends, and the public, all startled by this unexpected
+treatment, looked to find an explanation of it, one was found which
+seemed to many quite sufficient. Mr. Sumner had been prominent among
+those who had favored his appointment. A very serious breach had taken
+place between the President and Mr. Sumner on the important San Domingo
+question. It was a quarrel, in short, neither more nor less, at least so
+far as the President was concerned. The proposed San Domingo treaty had
+just been rejected by the Senate, on the thirtieth day of June, and
+immediately thereupon,--the very next day,--the letter requesting Mr.
+Motley's resignation was issued by the executive. This fact was
+interpreted as implying something more than a mere coincidence. It was
+thought that Sumner's friend, who had been supported by him as a
+candidate for high office, who shared many of his political ideas and
+feelings, who was his intimate associate, his fellow-townsman, his
+companion in scholarship and cultivation, his sympathetic co-laborer in
+many ways, had been accounted and dealt with as the ally of an enemy, and
+that the shaft which struck to the heart of the sensitive envoy had
+glanced from the 'aes triplex' of the obdurate Senator.
+
+Mr. Motley wrote a letter to the Secretary of State immediately after his
+recall, in which he reviewed his relations with the government from the
+time of his taking office, and showed that no sufficient reason could be
+assigned for the treatment to which he had been subjected. He referred
+finally to the public rumor which assigned the President's hostility to
+his friend Sumner, growing out of the San Domingo treaty question, as the
+cause of his own removal, and to the coincidence between the dates of the
+rejection of the treaty and his dismissal, with an evident belief that
+these two occurrences were connected by something more than accident.
+
+To this, a reply was received from the Secretary of State's office,
+signed by Mr. Fish, but so objectionable in its tone and expressions that
+it has been generally doubted whether the paper could claim anything more
+of the secretary's hand than his signature. It travelled back to the old
+record of the conversation with Lord Clarendon, more than a year and a
+half before, took up the old exceptions, warmed them over into
+grievances, and joined with them whatever the 'captatores verborum,' not
+extinct since Daniel Webster's time, could add to their number. This was
+the letter which was rendered so peculiarly offensive by a most
+undignified comparison which startled every well-bred reader. No answer
+was possible to such a letter, and the matter rested until the death of
+Mr. Motley caused it to be brought up once more for judgment.
+
+The Honorable John Jay, in his tribute to the memory of Mr. Motley, read
+at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, vindicated his character
+against the attacks of the late executive in such a way as to leave an
+unfavorable impression as to the course of the government. Objection was
+made on this account to placing the tribute upon the minutes of the
+society. This led to a publication by Mr. Jay, entitled "Motley's Appeal
+to History," in which the propriety of the society's action is
+questioned, and the wrong done to him insisted upon and further
+illustrated.
+
+The defence could not have fallen into better hands. Bearing a name which
+is, in itself, a title to the confidence of the American people, a
+diplomatist familiar with the rights, the customs, the traditions, the
+courtesies, which belong to the diplomatic service, the successor of Mr.
+Motley at Vienna, and therefore familiar with his official record, not
+self-made, which too commonly means half-made, but with careful training
+added to the instincts to which he had a right by inheritance, he could
+not allow the memory of such a scholar, of such a high-minded lover of
+his country, of so true a gentleman as Mr. Motley, to remain without
+challenge under the stigma of official condemnation. I must refer to Mr.
+Jay's memorial tribute as printed in the newspapers of the day, and to
+his "Appeal" published in "The International Review," for his convincing
+presentation of the case, and content myself with a condensed statement
+of the general and special causes of complaint against Mr. Motley, and
+the explanations which suggest themselves, as abundantly competent to
+show the insufficiency of the reasons alleged by the government as an
+excuse for the manner in which he was treated.
+
+The grounds of complaint against Mr. Motley are to be looked for:--
+
+1. In the letter of Mr. Fish to Mr. Moran, of December 30, 1870.
+
+2. In Mr. Bancroft Davis's letter to the New York "Herald" of January 4,
+1878, entitled, "Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and their Settlement."
+
+3. The reported conversations of General Grant.
+
+4. The reported conversations of Mr. Fish.
+
+In considering Mr. Fish's letter, we must first notice its animus. The
+manner in which Dickens's two old women are brought in is not only
+indecorous, but it shows a state of feeling from which nothing but harsh
+interpretation of every questionable expression of Mr. Motley's was to be
+expected.
+
+There is not the least need of maintaining the perfect fitness and
+rhetorical felicity of every phrase and every word used by him in his
+interview with Lord Clarendon. It is not to be expected that a minister,
+when about to hold a conversation with a representative of the government
+to which he is accredited, will commit his instructions to memory and
+recite them, like a school-boy "speaking his piece." He will give them
+more or less in his own language, amplifying, it may be, explaining,
+illustrating, at any rate paraphrasing in some degree, but endeavoring to
+convey an idea of their essential meaning. In fact, as any one can see, a
+conversation between two persons must necessarily imply a certain amount
+of extemporization on the part of both. I do not believe any long and
+important conference was ever had between two able men without each of
+them feeling that he had not spoken exactly in all respects as he would
+if he could say all over again.
+
+Doubtless, therefore, Mr. Motley's report of his conversation shows that
+some of his expressions might have been improved, and others might as
+well have been omitted. A man does not change his temperament on taking
+office. General Jackson still swore "by the Eternal," and his illustrious
+military successor of a more recent period seems, by his own showing, to
+have been able to sudden impulses of excitement. It might be said of
+Motley, as it was said of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson, "aliquando
+sufflaminandus erat." Yet not too much must be made of this concession.
+Only a determination to make out a case could, as it seems to me, have
+framed such an indictment as that which the secretary constructed by
+stringing together a slender list of pretended peccadillos. One instance
+will show the extreme slightness which characterizes many of the grounds
+of inculpation:--
+
+The instructions say, "The government, in rejecting the recent
+convention, abandons neither its own claims nor those of its citizens,"
+etc.
+
+Mr. Motley said, in the course of his conversation, "At present, the
+United States government, while withdrawing neither its national claims
+nor the claims of its individual citizens against the British
+government," etc.
+
+Mr. Fish says, "The determination of this government not to abandon its
+claims nor those of its citizens was stated parenthetically, and in such
+a subordinate way as not necessarily to attract the attention of Lord
+Clarendon."
+
+What reported conversation can stand a captious criticism like this? Are
+there not two versions of the ten commandments which were given out in
+the thunder and smoke of Sinai, and would the secretary hold that this
+would have been a sufficient reason to recall Moses from his "Divine
+Legation" at the court of the Almighty?
+
+There are certain expressions which, as Mr. Fish shows them apart from
+their connection, do very certainly seem in bad taste, if not actually
+indiscreet and unjustifiable. Let me give an example:--
+
+ "Instead of expressing the hope entertained by this government that
+ there would be an early, satisfactory, and friendly settlement of
+ the questions at issue, he volunteered the unnecessary, and from the
+ manner in which it was thrust in, the highly objectionable statement
+ that the United States government had no insidious purposes,'" etc.
+
+This sounds very badly as Mr. Fish puts it; let us see how it stands in
+its proper connection:--
+
+ "He [Lord Clarendon] added with some feeling, that in his opinion it
+ would be highly objectionable that the question should be hung up on
+ a peg, to be taken down at some convenient moment for us, when it
+ might be difficult for the British government to enter upon its
+ solution, and when they might go into the debate at a disadvantage.
+ These were, as nearly as I can remember, his words, and I replied
+ very earnestly that I had already answered that question when I said
+ that my instructions were to propose as brief a delay as would
+ probably be requisite for the cooling of passions and for producing
+ the calm necessary for discussing the defects of the old treaty and
+ a basis for a new one. The United States government had no
+ insidious purposes," etc.
+
+Is it not evident that Lord Clarendon suggested the idea which Mr. Motley
+repelled as implying an insidious mode of action? Is it not just as clear
+that Mr. Fish's way of reproducing the expression without the insinuation
+which called it forth is a practical misstatement which does Mr. Motley
+great wrong?
+
+One more example of the method of wringing a dry cloth for drops of
+evidence ought to be enough to show the whole spirit of the paper.
+
+Mr. Fish, in his instructions:--
+
+ "It might, indeed, well have occurred in the event of the selection
+ by lot of the arbitrator or umpire in different cases, involving
+ however precisely the same principles, that different awards,
+ resting upon antagonistic principles, might have been made."
+
+Mr. Motley, in the conversation with Lord Clarendon:--
+
+ "I called his lordship's attention to your very judicious suggestion
+ that the throwing of the dice for umpires might bring about opposite
+ decisions in cases arising out of identical principles. He agreed
+ entirely that no principle was established by the treaty, but that
+ the throwing of dice or drawing of lots was not a new invention on
+ that occasion, but a not uncommon method in arbitrations. I only
+ expressed the opinion that such an aleatory process seemed an
+ unworthy method in arbitrations," etc.
+
+Mr. Fish, in his letter to Mr. Moran:--
+
+ "That he had in his mind at that interview something else than his
+ letter of instructions from this department would appear to be
+ evident, when he says that 'he called his lordship's attention to
+ your [my] very judicious suggestion that the throwing of dice for
+ umpire might bring about opposite decisions.' The instructions
+ which Mr. Motley received from me contained no suggestion about
+ throwing of dice.' That idea is embraced in the suggestive words
+ 'aleatory process' (adopted by Mr. Motley), but previously applied
+ in a speech made in the Senate on the question of ratifying the
+ treaty."
+
+Charles Sumner's Speech on the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty, April 13, 1869:
+
+ "In the event of failure to agree, the arbitrator is determined 'by
+ lot' out of two persons named by each side. Even if this aleatory
+ proceeding were a proper device in the umpirage of private claims,
+ it is strongly inconsistent with the solemnity which belongs to the
+ present question."
+
+It is "suggestive" that the critical secretary, so keen in detecting
+conversational inaccuracies, having but two words to quote from a printed
+document, got one of them wrong. But this trivial comment must not lead
+the careful reader to neglect to note how much is made of what is really
+nothing at all. The word aleatory, whether used in its original and
+limited sense, or in its derived extension as a technical term of the
+civil law, was appropriate and convenient; one especially likely to be
+remembered by any person who had read Mr. Sumner's speech,--and everybody
+had read it; the secretary himself doubtless got the suggestion of
+determining the question "by lot" from it. What more natural than that it
+should be used again when the subject of appealing to chance came up in
+conversation? It "was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted,"
+and we were fortunate in having a minister who was scholar enough to know
+what it meant. The language used by Mr. Motley conveyed the idea of his
+instructions plainly enough, and threw in a compliment to their author
+which should have saved this passage at least from the wringing process.
+The example just given is, like the concession of belligerency to the
+insurgents by Great Britain, chiefly important as "showing animus."
+
+It is hardly necessary to bring forward other instances of virtual
+misrepresentation. If Mr. Motley could have talked his conversation over
+again, he would very probably have changed some expressions. But he felt
+bound to repeat the interview exactly as it occurred, with all the errors
+to which its extemporaneous character exposed it. When a case was to be
+made out against him, the secretary wrote, December 30, 1870:
+
+ "Well might he say, as he did in a subsequent dispatch on the 15th
+ of July, 1869, that he had gone beyond the strict letter of his
+ instructions. He might have added, in direct opposition to their
+ temper and spirit."
+
+Of the same report the secretary had said, June 28, 1869: "Your general
+presentation and treatment of the several subjects discussed in that
+interview meet the approval of this department." This general approval is
+qualified by mild criticism of a single statement as not having been
+conveyed in "precise conformity" to the President's view. The minister
+was told he might be well content to rest the question on the very
+forcible presentation he had made of the American side of the question,
+and that if there were expressions used stronger than were required by
+his instructions, they were in the right direction. The mere fact that a
+minute of this conversation was confidentially submitted to Lord
+Clarendon in order that our own government might have his authority for
+the accuracy of the record, which was intended exclusively for its own
+use, and that this circumstance was overlooked and not reported to the
+government until some weeks afterward, are the additional charges against
+Mr. Motley. The submission of the dispatch containing an account of the
+interview, the secretary says, is not inconsistent with diplomatic usage,
+but it is inconsistent with the duty of a minister not to inform his
+government of that submission. "Mr. Motley submitted the draft of his No.
+8 to Lord Clarendon, and failed to communicate that fact to his
+government." He did inform Mr. Fish, at any rate, on the 30th of July,
+and alleged "inadvertence" as the reason for his omission to do it
+before.
+
+Inasmuch as submitting the dispatch was not inconsistent with diplomatic
+usage, nothing seems left to find fault with but the not very long delay
+in mentioning the fact, or in his making the note "private and
+confidential," as is so frequently done in diplomatic correspondence.
+
+Such were the grounds of complaint. On the strength of the conversation
+which had met with the general approval of the government, tempered by
+certain qualifications, and of the omission to report immediately to the
+government the fact of its verification by Lord Clarendon, the secretary
+rests the case against Mr. Motley. On these grounds it was that,
+according to him, the President withdrew all right to discuss the Alabama
+question from the minister whose dismissal was now only a question of
+time. But other evidence comes in here.
+
+Mr. Motley says:--
+
+ "It was, as I supposed, understood before my departure for England,
+ although not publicly announced, that the so-called Alabama
+ negotiations, whenever renewed, should be conducted at Washington,
+ in case of the consent of the British government."
+
+Mr. Sumner says, in his "Explanation in Reply to an Assault:"--
+
+ "The secretary in a letter to me at Boston, dated at Washington,
+ October 9, 1869, informs the that the discussion of the question was
+ withdrawn from London 'because (the italics are the secretary's) we
+ think that when renewed it can be carried on here with a better
+ prospect of settlement, than where the late attempt at a convention
+ which resulted so disastrously and was conducted so strangely was
+ had;' and what the secretary thus wrote he repeated in conversation
+ when we met, carefully making the transfer to Washington depend upon
+ our advantage here, from the presence of the Senate,--thus showing
+ that the pretext put forth to wound Mr. Motley was an afterthought."
+
+Again we may fairly ask how the government came to send a dispatch like
+that of September 25, 1869, in which the views and expressions for which
+Mr. Motley's conversation had been criticised were so nearly reproduced,
+and with such emphasis that Mr. Motley says, in a letter to me, dated
+April 8, 1871, "It not only covers all the ground which I ever took, but
+goes far beyond it. No one has ever used stronger language to the British
+government than is contained in that dispatch. . . . It is very able and
+well worth your reading. Lord Clarendon called it to me 'Sumner's speech
+over again.' It was thought by the English cabinet to have 'out-Sumnered
+Sumner,' and now our government, thinking that every one in the United
+States had forgotten the dispatch, makes believe that I was removed
+because my sayings and doings in England were too much influenced by
+Sumner!" Mr. Motley goes on to speak of the report that an offer of his
+place in England was made to Sumner "to get him out of the way of San
+Domingo." The facts concerning this offer are now sufficiently known to
+the public.
+
+Here I must dismiss Mr. Fish's letter to Mr. Moran, having, as I trust,
+sufficiently shown the spirit in which it was written and the strained
+interpretations and manifest overstatements by which it attempts to make
+out its case against Mr. Motley. I will not parade the two old women,
+whose untimely and unseemly introduction into the dress-circle of
+diplomacy was hardly to have been expected of the high official whose
+name is at the bottom of this paper. They prove nothing, they disprove
+nothing, they illustrate nothing--except that a statesman may forget
+himself. Neither will I do more than barely allude to the unfortunate
+reference to the death of Lord Clarendon as connected with Mr. Motley's
+removal, so placidly disposed of by a sentence or two in the London
+"Times" of January 24, 1871. I think we may consider ourselves ready for
+the next witness.
+
+Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, Assistant Secretary of State under President
+Grant and Secretary Fish, wrote a letter to the New York "Herald," under
+the date of January 4, 1878, since reprinted as a pamphlet and entitled
+"Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and their Settlement." Mr. Sumner was
+never successfully attacked when living,--except with a bludgeon,--and
+his friends have more than sufficiently vindicated him since his death.
+But Mr. Motley comes in for his share of animadversion in Mr. Davis's
+letter. He has nothing of importance to add to Mr. Fish's criticisms on
+the interview with Lord Clarendon. Only he brings out the head and front
+of Mr. Motley's offending by italicizing three very brief passages from
+his conversation at this interview; not discreetly, as it seems to me,
+for they will not bear the strain that is put upon them. These are the
+passages:--
+
+1. "but that such, measures must always be taken with a full view of the
+grave responsibilities assumed." 2. "and as being the fountain head of
+the disasters which had been caused to the American people." 3. "as the
+fruits of the proclamation."
+
+1. It is true that nothing was said of responsibility in Mr. Motley's
+instructions. But the idea was necessarily involved in their statements.
+For if, as Mr. Motley's instructions say, the right of a power "to define
+its own relations," etc., when a civil conflict has arisen in another
+state depends on its (the conflict's) having "attained a sufficient
+complexity, magnitude, and completeness," inasmuch as that Power has to
+judge whether it has or has not fulfilled these conditions, and is of
+course liable to judge wrong, every such act of judgment must be attended
+with grave responsibilities. The instructions say that "the necessity and
+propriety of the original concession of belligerency by Great Britain at
+the time it was made have been contested and are not admitted." It
+follows beyond dispute that Great Britain may in this particular case
+have incurred grave responsibilities; in fact, the whole negotiations
+implied as much. Perhaps Mr. Motley need not have used the word
+"responsibilities." But considering that the government itself said in
+dispatch No. 70, September 25, 1869, "The President does not deny, on the
+contrary he maintains, that every sovereign power decides for itself on
+its responsibility whether or not it will, at a given time, accord the
+status of belligerency," etc., it was hardly worth while to use italics
+about Mr. Motley's employment of the same language as constituting a
+grave cause of offence.
+
+2. Mr. Motley's expression, "as being the fountain head of the
+disasters," is a conversational paraphrase of the words of his
+instructions, "as it shows the beginning and the animus of that course of
+conduct which resulted so disastrously," which is not "in precise
+conformity" with his instructions, but is just such a variation as is to
+be expected when one is talking with another and using the words that
+suggest themselves at the moment, just as the familiar expression, "hung
+up on a peg," probably suggested itself to Lord Clarendon.
+
+3. "The fruits of the proclamation" is so inconsiderable a variation on
+the text of the instructions, "supplemented by acts causing direct
+damage," that the secretary's hint about want of precise conformity seems
+hardly to have been called for.
+
+It is important to notice this point in the instructions: With other
+powers Mr. Motley was to take the position that the "recognition of the
+insurgents' state of war" was made "no ground of complaint;" with Great
+Britain that the cause of grievance was "not so much" placed upon the
+issuance of this recognition as upon her conduct under, and subsequent
+to, such recognition.
+
+There is no need of maintaining the exact fitness of every expression
+used by Mr. Motley. But any candid person who will carefully read the
+government's dispatch No. 70, dated September 25, 1869, will see that a
+government holding such language could find nothing in Mr. Motley's
+expressions in a conversation held at his first official interview to
+visit with official capital punishment more than a year afterwards. If
+Mr. Motley had, as it was pretended, followed Sumner, Mr. Fish had
+"out-Sumnered" the Senator himself.
+
+Mr. Davis's pamphlet would hardly be complete without a mysterious letter
+from an unnamed writer, whether a faithless friend, a disguised enemy, a
+secret emissary, or an injudicious alarmist, we have no means of judging
+for ourselves. The minister appears to have been watched by somebody in
+London, as he was in Vienna. This somebody wrote a private letter in
+which he expressed "fear and regret that Mr. Motley's bearing in his
+social intercourse was throwing obstacles in the way of a future
+settlement." The charge as mentioned in Mr. Davis's letter is hardly
+entitled to our attention. Mr. Sumner considered it the work of an enemy,
+and the recollection of the M'Crackin letter might well have made the
+government cautious of listening to complaints of such a character. This
+Somebody may have been one whom we should call Nobody. We cannot help
+remembering how well 'Outis' served 'Oduxseus' of old, when he was
+puzzled to extricate himself from an embarrassing position. 'Stat nominis
+umbra' is a poor showing for authority to support an attack on a public
+servant exposed to every form of open and insidious abuse from those who
+are prejudiced against his person or his birthplace, who are jealous of
+his success, envious of his position, hostile to his politics, dwarfed by
+his reputation, or hate him by the divine right of idiosyncrasy, always
+liable, too, to questioning comment from well-meaning friends who happen
+to be suspicious or sensitive in their political or social relations.
+
+The reported sayings of General Grant and of Mr. Fish to the
+correspondents who talked with them may be taken for what they are worth.
+They sound naturally enough to have come from the speakers who are said
+to have uttered them. I quote the most important part of the Edinburgh
+letter, September 11, 1877, to the New York "Herald." These are the words
+attributed to General Grant:--
+
+ "Mr. Motley was certainly a very able, very honest gentleman, fit to
+ hold any official position. But he knew long before he went out
+ that he would have to go. When I was making these appointments, Mr.
+ Sumner came to me and asked me to appoint Mr. Motley as minister to
+ the court of St. James. I told him I would, and did. Soon after
+ Mr. Sumner made that violent speech about the Alabama claims, and
+ the British government was greatly offended. Mr. Sumner was at the
+ time chairman of the committee on foreign affairs. Mr. Motley had
+ to be instructed. The instructions were prepared very carefully,
+ and after Governor Fish and I had gone over them for the last time I
+ wrote an addendum charging him that above all things he should
+ handle the subject of the Alabama claims with the greatest delicacy.
+ Mr. Motley instead of obeying his explicit instructions,
+ deliberately fell in line with Sumner, and thus added insult to the
+ previous injury. As soon as I heard of it I went over to the State
+ Department and told Governor Fish to dismiss Motley at once. I was
+ very angry indeed, and I have been sorry many a time since that I
+ did not stick to my first determination. Mr. Fish advised delay
+ because of Sumner's position in the Senate and attitude on the
+ treaty question. We did not want to stir him up just then. We
+ dispatched a note of severe censure to Motley at once and ordered
+ him to abstain from any further connection with that question. We
+ thereupon commenced negotiations with the British minister at
+ Washington, and the result was the joint high commission and the
+ Geneva award. I supposed Mr. Motley would be manly enough to resign
+ after that snub, but he kept on till he was removed. Mr. Sumner
+ promised me that he would vote for the treaty. But when it was
+ before the Senate he did all he could to beat it."
+
+General Grant talked again at Cairo, in Egypt.
+
+ "Grant then referred to the statement published at an interview with
+ him in Scotland, and said the publication had some omissions and
+ errors. He had no ill-will towards Mr. Motley, who, like other
+ estimable men, made mistakes, and Motley made a mistake which made
+ him an improper person to hold office under me."
+
+ "It is proper to say of me that I killed Motley, or that I made war
+ upon Sumner for not supporting the annexation of San Domingo. But
+ if I dare to answer that I removed Motley from the highest
+ considerations of duty as an executive; if I presume to say that he
+ made a mistake in his office which made him no longer useful to the
+ country; if Fish has the temerity to hint that Sumner's temper was
+ so unfortunate that business relations with him became impossible,
+ we are slandering the dead."
+
+"Nothing but Mortimer." Those who knew both men--the Ex-President and the
+late Senator--would agree, I do not doubt, that they would not be the
+most promising pair of human beings to make harmonious members of a
+political happy family. "Cedant arma togae," the life-long sentiment of
+Sumner, in conflict with "Stand fast and stand sure," the well-known
+device of the clan of Grant, reminds one of the problem of an
+irresistible force in collision with an insuperable resistance. But the
+President says,--or is reported as saying,--"I may be blamed for my
+opposition to Mr. Sumner's tactics, but I was not guided so much by
+reason of his personal hatred of myself, as I was by a desire to protect
+our national interests in diplomatic affairs."
+
+"It would be useless," says Mr. Davis in his letter to the "Herald," "to
+enter into a controversy whether the President may or may not have been
+influenced in the final determination of the moment for requesting
+Motley's resignation by the feeling caused by Sumner's personal hostility
+and abuse of himself." Unfortunately, this controversy had been entered
+into, and the idleness of suggesting any relation of cause and effect
+between Mr. Motley's dismissal and the irritation produced in the
+President's mind by the rejection of the San Domingo treaty--which
+rejection was mainly due to Motley's friend Sumner's opposition
+--strongly insisted upon in a letter signed by the Secretary of State.
+Too strongly, for here it was that he failed to remember what was due to
+his office, to himself, and to the gentleman of whom he was writing; if
+indeed it was the secretary's own hand which held the pen, and not
+another's.
+
+We might as well leave out the wrath of Achilles from the Iliad, as the
+anger of the President with Sumner from the story of Motley's dismissal.
+The sad recital must always begin with M-----------. He was, he is
+reported as saying, "very angry indeed" with Motley because he had,
+fallen in line with Sumner. He couples them together in his conversation
+as closely as Chang and Eng were coupled. The death of Lord Clarendon
+would have covered up the coincidence between the rejection of the San
+Domingo treaty and Mr. Motley's dismissal very neatly, but for the
+inexorable facts about its date, as revealed by the London "Times." It
+betrays itself as an afterthought, and its failure as a defence reminds
+us too nearly of the trial in which Mr. Webster said suicide is
+confession.
+
+It is not strange that the spurs of the man who had so lately got out of
+the saddle should catch in the scholastic robe of the man on the floor of
+the Senate. But we should not have looked for any such antagonism between
+the Secretary of State and the envoy to Great Britain. On the contrary,
+they must have had many sympathies, and it must have cost the secretary
+pain, as he said it did, to be forced to communicate with Mr. Moran
+instead of with Mr. Motley.
+
+He, too, was inquired of by one of the emissaries of the American Unholy
+Inquisition. His evidence is thus reported:
+
+ "The reason for Mr. Motley's removal was found in considerations of
+ state. He misrepresented the government on the Alabama question,
+ especially in the two speeches made by him before his arrival at his
+ post."
+
+These must be the two speeches made to the American and the Liverpool
+chambers of commerce. If there is anything in these short addresses
+beyond those civil generalities which the occasion called out, I have
+failed to find it. If it was in these that the reason of Mr. Motley's
+removal was to be looked for, it is singular that they are not mentioned
+in the secretary's letter to Mr. Moran, or by Mr. Davis in his letter to
+the New York "Herald." They must have been as unsuccessful as myself in
+the search after anything in these speeches which could be construed into
+misinterpretation of the government on the Alabama question.
+
+We may much more readily accept "considerations of state" as a reason for
+Mr. Motley's removal. Considerations of state have never yet failed the
+axe or the bowstring when a reason for the use of those convenient
+implements was wanted, and they are quite equal to every emergency which
+can arise in a republican autocracy. But for the very reason that a
+minister is absolutely in the power of his government, the manner in
+which that power is used is always open to the scrutiny, and, if it has
+been misused, to the condemnation, of a tribunal higher than itself; a
+court that never goes out of office, and which no personal feelings, no
+lapse of time, can silence.
+
+The ostensible grounds on which Mr. Motley was recalled are plainly
+insufficient to account for the action of the government. If it was in
+great measure a manifestation of personal feeling on the part of the high
+officials by whom and through whom the act was accomplished, it was a
+wrong which can never be repaired and never sufficiently regretted.
+
+Stung by the slanderous report of an anonymous eavesdropper to whom the
+government of the day was not ashamed to listen, he had quitted Vienna,
+too hastily, it may be, but wounded, indignant, feeling that he had been
+unworthily treated. The sudden recall from London, on no pretext whatever
+but an obsolete and overstated incident which had ceased to have any
+importance, was under these circumstances a deadly blow. It fell upon
+"the new-healed wound of malice," and though he would not own it, and
+bore up against it, it was a shock from which he never fully recovered.
+
+"I hope I am one of those," he writes to me from the Hague, in 1872, "who
+'fortune's buffets and rewards can take with equal thanks.' I am quite
+aware that I have had far more than I deserve of political honors, and
+they might have had my post as a voluntary gift on my part had they
+remembered that I was an honorable man, and not treated me as a detected
+criminal deserves to be dealt with."
+
+Mr. Sumner naturally felt very deeply what he considered the great wrong
+done to his friend. He says:--
+
+ "How little Mr. Motley merited anything but respect and courtesy
+ from the secretary is attested by all who know his eminent position
+ in London, and the service he rendered to his country. Already the
+ London press, usually slow to praise Americans when strenuous for
+ their country, has furnished its voluntary testimony. The 'Daily
+ News' of August 16, 1870, spoke of the insulted minister in these
+ terms:--
+
+ "'We are violating no confidence in saying that all the hopes of Mr.
+ Motley's official residence in England have been amply fulfilled,
+ and that the announcement of his unexpected and unexplained recall
+ was received with extreme astonishment and unfeigned regret. The
+ vacancy he leaves cannot possibly be filled by a minister more
+ sensitive to the honor of his government, more attentive to the
+ interests of his country, and more capable of uniting the most
+ vigorous performance of his public duties with the high-bred
+ courtesy and conciliatory tact and temper that make those duties
+ easy and successful. Mr. Motley's successor will find his mission
+ wonderfully facilitated by the firmness and discretion that have
+ presided over the conduct of American affairs in this country during
+ too brief a term, too suddenly and unaccountably concluded.'"
+
+No man can escape being found fault with when it is necessary to make out
+a case against him. A diplomatist is watched by the sharpest eyes and
+commented on by the most merciless tongues. The best and wisest has his
+defects, and sometimes they would seem to be very grave ones if brought
+up against him in the form of accusation. Take these two portraits, for
+instance, as drawn by John Quincy Adams. The first is that of Stratford
+Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe:--
+
+ "He is to depart to-morrow. I shall probably see him no more. He
+ is a proud, high-tempered Englishman, of good but not extraordinary
+ parts; stubborn and punctilious, with a disposition to be
+ overbearing, which I have often been compelled to check in its own
+ way. He is, of all the foreign ministers with whom I have had
+ occasion to treat, the man who has most severely tried my temper.
+ Yet he has been long in the diplomatic career, and treated with
+ governments of the most opposite characters. He has, however, a
+ great respect for his word, and there is nothing false about him.
+ This is an excellent quality for a negotiator. Mr. Canning is a man
+ of forms, studious of courtesy, and tenacious of private morals. As
+ a diplomatic man, his great want is suppleness, and his great virtue
+ is sincerity."
+
+The second portrait is that of the French minister, Hyde de Neuville:--
+
+ "No foreign minister who ever resided here has been so universally
+ esteemed and beloved, nor have I ever been in political relations
+ with any foreign statesman of whose moral qualities I have formed so
+ good an opinion, with the exception of Count Romanzoff. He has not
+ sufficient command of his temper, is quick, irritable, sometimes
+ punctilious, occasionally indiscreet in his discourse, and tainted
+ with Royalist and Bourbon prejudices. But he has strong sentiments
+ of honor, justice, truth, and even liberty. His flurries of temper
+ pass off as quickly as they rise. He is neither profound nor
+ sublime nor brilliant; but a man of strong and good feelings, with
+ the experience of many vicissitudes of fortune, a good but common
+ understanding, and good intentions biassed by party feelings,
+ occasional interests, and personal affections."
+
+It means very little to say that a man has some human imperfections, or
+that a public servant might have done some things better. But when a
+questionable cause is to be justified, the victim's excellences are
+looked at with the eyes of Liliput and his failings with those of
+Brobdingnag.
+
+The recall of a foreign minister for alleged misconduct in office is a
+kind of capital punishment. It is the nearest approach to the Sultan's
+bowstring which is permitted to the chief magistrate of our Republic. A
+general can do nothing under martial law more peremptory than a President
+can do with regard to the public functionary whom he has appointed with
+the advice and consent of the Senate, but whom he can officially degrade
+and disgrace at his own pleasure for insufficient cause or for none at
+all. Like the centurion of Scripture, he says Go, and he goeth. The
+nation's representative is less secure in his tenure of office than his
+own servant, to whom he must give warning of his impending dismissal.
+
+"A breath unmakes him as a breath has made."
+
+The chief magistrate's responsibility to duty, to the fellow-citizen at
+his mercy, to his countrymen, to mankind, is in proportion to his power.
+His prime minister, the agent of his edicts, should feel bound to
+withstand him if he seeks to gratify a personal feeling under the plea of
+public policy, unless the minister, like the slaves of the harem, is to
+find his qualification for office in leaving his manhood behind him.
+
+The two successive administrations, which treated Mr. Motley in a manner
+unworthy of their position and cruel, if not fatal to him, have been
+heard, directly or through their advocates. I have attempted to show that
+the defence set up for their action is anything but satisfactory. A later
+generation will sit in judgment upon the evidence more calmly than our
+own. It is not for a friend, like the writer, to anticipate its decision,
+but unless the reasons alleged to justify his treatment, and which have
+so much the air of afterthoughts, shall seem stronger to that future
+tribunal than they do to him, the verdict will be that Mr. Motley was
+twice sacrificed to personal feelings which should never have been
+cherished by the heads of the government, and should never have been
+countenanced by their chief advisers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
+
+A MEMOIR
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+
+Volume III.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+1874. AEt. 60.
+"LIFE OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD."--CRITICISMS.--GROEN VAN PRINSTERER.
+
+The full title of Mr. Motley's next and last work is "The Life and Death
+of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary
+Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years' War."
+
+In point of fact this work is a history rather than a biography. It is an
+interlude, a pause between the acts which were to fill out the complete
+plan of the "Eighty Years' Tragedy," and of which the last act, the
+Thirty Years' War, remains unwritten. The "Life of Barneveld" was
+received as a fitting and worthy continuation of the series of
+intellectual labor in which he was engaged. I will quote but two general
+expressions of approval from the two best known British critical reviews.
+In connection with his previous works, it forms, says "The London
+Quarterly," "a fine and continuous story, of which the writer and the
+nation celebrated by him have equal reason to be proud; a narrative which
+will remain a prominent ornament of American genius, while it has
+permanently enriched English literature on this as well as on the other
+side of the Atlantic."
+
+"The Edinburgh Review" speaks no less warmly: "We can hardly give too
+much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled
+him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers,
+the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to the
+world."
+
+In a literary point of view, M. Groen van Prinsterer, whose elaborate
+work has been already referred to, speaks of it as perhaps the most
+classical of Motley's productions, but it is upon this work that the
+force of his own and other Dutch criticisms has been chiefly expended.
+
+The key to this biographical history or historical biography may be found
+in a few sentences from its opening chapter.
+
+ "There have been few men at any period whose lives have been more
+ closely identical than his [Barneveld's] with a national history.
+ There have been few great men in any history whose names have become
+ less familiar to the world, and lived less in the mouths of
+ posterity. Yet there can be no doubt that if William the Silent was
+ the founder of the independence of the United Provinces, Barneveld
+ was the founder of the Commonwealth itself. . . .
+
+ "Had that country of which he was so long the first citizen
+ maintained until our own day the same proportional position among
+ the empires of Christendom as it held in the seventeenth century,
+ the name of John of Barneveld would have perhaps been as familiar to
+ all men as it is at this moment to nearly every inhabitant of the
+ Netherlands. Even now political passion is almost as ready to flame
+ forth, either in ardent affection or enthusiastic hatred, as if two
+ centuries and a half had not elapsed since his death. His name is
+ so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so indelibly
+ associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it
+ difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the
+ patriotic, of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute
+ impartiality.
+
+ "A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in
+ the history of that famous republic, and can have no hereditary bias
+ as to its ecclesiastical or political theories, may at least attempt
+ the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability
+ to do thorough justice to a most complex subject."
+
+With all Mr. Motley's efforts to be impartial, to which even his sternest
+critics bear witness, he could not help becoming a partisan of the cause
+which for him was that of religious liberty and progress, as against the
+accepted formula of an old ecclesiastical organization. For the quarrel
+which came near being a civil war, which convulsed the state, and cost
+Barneveld his head, had its origin in a difference on certain points, and
+more especially on a single point, of religious doctrine.
+
+As a great river may be traced back until its fountainhead is found in a
+thread of water streaming from a cleft in the rocks, so a great national
+movement may sometimes be followed until its starting-point is found in
+the cell of a monk or the studies of a pair of wrangling professors.
+
+The religious quarrel of the Dutchmen in the seventeenth century reminds
+us in some points of the strife between two parties in our own New
+England, sometimes arraying the "church" on one side against the
+"parish," or the general body of worshippers, on the other. The portraits
+of Gomarus, the great orthodox champion, and Arminius, the head and front
+of the "liberal theology" of his day, as given in the little old quarto
+of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance familiar to
+those who remember the earlier years of our century.
+
+Under the name of "Remonstrants" and "Contra-Remonstrants,"--Arminians
+and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,--the adherents of the two
+Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches,
+and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion. Of
+the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly
+Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic. Barneveld, who, under the title
+of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most important of
+them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its own state
+religion. Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent, the military
+chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-General. 'Cujus
+regio ejus religio' was then the accepted public doctrine of Protestant
+nations. Thus the provincial and the general governments were brought
+into conflict by their creeds, and the question whether the republic was
+a confederation or a nation, the same question which has been practically
+raised, and for the time at least settled, in our own republic, was in
+some way to be decided. After various disturbances and acts of violence
+by both parties, Maurice, representing the States-General, pronounced for
+the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants, and took possession of one of the
+great churches, as an assertion of his authority. Barneveld, representing
+the Arminian or Remonstrant provinces, levied a body of mercenary
+soldiers in several of the cities. These were disbanded by Maurice, and
+afterwards by an act of the States-General. Barneveld was apprehended,
+imprisoned, and executed, after an examination which was in no proper
+sense a trial. Grotius, who was on the Arminian side and involved in the
+inculpated proceedings, was also arrested and imprisoned. His escape, by
+a stratagem successfully repeated by a slave in our own times, may
+challenge comparison for its romantic interest with any chapter of
+fiction. How his wife packed him into the chest supposed to contain the
+folios of the great oriental scholar Erpenius, how the soldiers wondered
+at its weight and questioned whether it did not hold an Arminian, how the
+servant-maid, Elsje van Houwening, quick-witted as Morgiana of the "Forty
+Thieves," parried their questions and convoyed her master safely to the
+friendly place of refuge,--all this must be read in the vivid narrative
+of the author.
+
+The questions involved were political, local, personal, and above all
+religious. Here is the picture which Motley draws of the religious
+quarrel as it divided the people:--
+
+ "In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlors;
+ on board herring-smacks, canal-boats, and East Indiamen; in shops,
+ counting-rooms, farm-yards, guard-rooms, alehouses; on the exchange,
+ in the tennis court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials,
+ christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met
+ each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of
+ Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot
+ theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The
+ blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle
+ half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen
+ fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while
+ each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free-
+ will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in wandering mazes
+ whence there was no issue. Province against province, city against
+ city, family against family; it was one vast scene of bickering,
+ denunciation, heart-burnings, mutual excommunication and hatred."
+
+The religious grounds of the quarrel which set these seventeenth-century
+Dutchmen to cutting each other's throats were to be looked for in the
+"Five Points" of the Arminians as arrayed against the "Seven Points" of
+the Gomarites, or Contra-Remonstrants. The most important of the
+differences which were to be settled by fratricide seem to have been
+these:--
+
+According to the Five Points, "God has from eternity resolved to choose
+to eternal life those who through his grace believe in Jesus Christ,"
+etc. According to the Seven Points, "God in his election has not looked
+at the belief and the repentance of the elect," etc. According to the
+Five Points, all good deeds must be ascribed to God's grace in Christ,
+but it does not work irresistibly. The language of the Seven Points
+implies that the elect cannot resist God's eternal and unchangeable
+design to give them faith and steadfastness, and that they can never
+wholly and for always lose the true faith. The language of the Five
+Points is unsettled as to the last proposition, but it was afterwards
+maintained by the Remonstrant party that a true believer could, through
+his own fault, fall away from God and lose faith.
+
+It must be remembered that these religious questions had an immediate
+connection with politics. Independently of the conflict of jurisdiction,
+in which they involved the parties to the two different creeds, it was
+believed or pretended that the new doctrines of the Remonstrants led
+towards Romanism, and were allied with designs which threatened the
+independence of the country. "There are two factions in the land," said
+Maurice, "that of Orange and that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the
+Spanish faction are those political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert
+and Oldenbarneveld."
+
+The heads of the two religious and political parties were in such
+hereditary, long-continued, and intimate relations up to the time when
+one signed the other's death-warrant, that it was impossible to write the
+life of one without also writing that of the other. For his biographer
+John of Barneveld is the true patriot, the martyr, whose cause was that
+of religious and political freedom. For him Maurice is the ambitious
+soldier who hated his political rival, and never rested until this rival
+was brought to the scaffold.
+
+The questions which agitated men's minds two centuries and a half ago are
+not dead yet in the country where they produced such estrangement,
+violence, and wrong. No stranger could take them up without encountering
+hostile criticism from one party or the other. It may be and has been
+conceded that Mr. Motley writes as a partisan,--a partisan of freedom in
+politics and religion, as he understands freedom. This secures him the
+antagonism of one class of critics. But these critics are themselves
+partisans, and themselves open to the cross-fire of their antagonists. M.
+Groen van Prinsterer, "the learned and distinguished" editor of the
+"Archives et Correspondance" of the Orange and Nassau family, published a
+considerable volume, before referred to, in which many of Motley's views
+are strongly controverted. But he himself is far from being in accord
+with "that eminent scholar," M. Bakhuyzen van den Brink, whose name, he
+says, is celebrated enough to need no comment, or with M. Fruin, of whose
+impartiality and erudition he himself speaks in the strongest terms. The
+ground upon which he is attacked is thus stated in his own words:--
+
+"People have often pretended to find in my writings the deplorable
+influence of an extreme Calvinism. The Puritans of the seventeenth
+century are my fellow-religionists. I am a sectarian and not an
+historian."
+
+It is plain enough to any impartial reader that there are at least
+plausible grounds for this accusation against Mr. Motley's critic. And on
+a careful examination of the formidable volume, it becomes obvious that
+Mr. Motley has presented a view of the events and the personages of the
+stormy epoch with which he is dealing, which leaves a battle-ground yet
+to be fought over by those who come after him. The dispute is not and
+cannot be settled.
+
+The end of all religious discussion has come when one of the parties
+claims that it is thinking or acting under immediate Divine guidance. "It
+is God's affair, and his honor is touched," says William Lewis to Prince
+Maurice. Mr. Motley's critic is not less confident in claiming the
+Almighty as on the side of his own views. Let him state his own ground of
+departure:--
+
+ "To show the difference, let me rather say the contrast, between the
+ point of view of Mr. Motley and my own, between the Unitarian and
+ the Evangelical belief. I am issue of CALVIN, child of the
+ Awakening (reveil). Faithful to the device of the Reformers:
+ Justification by faith alone, and the Word of God endures eternally.
+ I consider history from the point of view of Merle d'Aubigne,
+ Chalmers, Guizot. I desire to be disciple and witness of our Lord
+ and Saviour, Jesus Christ."
+
+He is therefore of necessity antagonistic to a writer whom he describes
+in such words as these:--
+
+ "Mr. Motley is liberal and rationalist.
+
+ "He becomes, in attacking the principle of the Reformation, the
+ passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent
+ apologist of Barnevelt and the Arminians.
+
+ "It is understood, and he makes no mystery of it, that he inclines
+ towards the vague and undecided doctrine of the Unitarians."
+
+What M. Groen's idea of Unitarians is may be gathered from the statement
+about them which he gets from a letter of De Tocqueville.
+
+ "They are pure deists; they talk about the Bible, because they do
+ not wish to shock too severely public opinion, which is prevailingly
+ Christian. They have a service on Sundays; I have been there. At
+ it they read verses from Dryden or other English poets on the
+ existence of God and the immortality of the soul. They deliver a
+ discourse on some point of morality, and all is said."
+
+In point of fact the wave of protest which stormed the dikes of Dutch
+orthodoxy in the seventeenth century stole gently through the bars of New
+England Puritanism in the eighteenth.
+
+"Though the large number," says Mr. Bancroft, "still acknowledged the
+fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all
+eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even
+among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient
+doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with
+freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest
+against Calvinism."
+
+Protestantism, cut loose from an infallible church, and drifting with
+currents it cannot resist, wakes up once or oftener in every century, to
+find itself in a new locality. Then it rubs its eyes and wonders whether
+it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor. There is no end to its
+disputes, for it has nothing but a fallible vote as authority for its
+oracles, and these appeal only to fallible interpreters.
+
+It is as hard to contend in argument against "the oligarchy of heaven,"
+as Motley calls the Calvinistic party, as it was formerly to strive with
+them in arms.
+
+To this "aristocracy of God's elect" belonged the party which framed the
+declaration of the Synod of Dort; the party which under the forms of
+justice shed the blood of the great statesman who had served his country
+so long and so well. To this chosen body belonged the late venerable and
+truly excellent as well as learned M. Groen van Prinsterer, and he
+exercised the usual right of examining in the light of his privileged
+position the views of a "liberal" and "rationalist" writer who goes to
+meeting on Sunday to hear verses from Dryden. This does not diminish his
+claim for a fair reading of the "intimate correspondence," which he
+considers Mr. Motley has not duly taken into account, and of the other
+letters to be found printed in his somewhat disjointed and fragmentary
+volume.
+
+This "intimate correspondence" shows Maurice the Stadholder indifferent
+and lax in internal administration and as being constantly advised and
+urged by his relative Count William of Nassau. This need of constant
+urging extends to religious as well as other matters, and is inconsistent
+with M. Groen van Prinsterer's assertion that the question was for
+Maurice above all religious, and for Barneveld above all political.
+Whether its negative evidence can be considered as neutralizing that
+which is adduced by Mr. Motley to show the Stadholder's hatred of the
+Advocate may be left to the reader who has just risen from the account of
+the mock trial and the swift execution of the great and venerable
+statesman. The formal entry on the record upon the day of his "judicial
+murder" is singularly solemn and impressive:--
+
+ "Monday, 13th May, 1619. To-day was executed with the sword here in
+ the Hague, on a scaffold thereto erected in the Binnenhof before the
+ steps of the great hall, Mr. John of Barneveld, in his life Knight,
+ Lord of Berkel, Rodenrys, etc., Advocate of Holland and West
+ Friesland, for reasons expressed in the sentence and otherwise, with
+ confiscation of his property, after he had served the state thirty-
+ three years two months and five days, since 8th March, 1586; a man
+ of great activity, business, memory, and wisdom,--yea, extraordinary
+ in every respect. He that stands let him see that he does not
+ fall."
+
+Maurice gave an account of the execution of Barneveld to Count William
+Lewis on the same day in a note "painfully brief and dry."
+
+Most authors write their own biography consciously or unconsciously. We
+have seen Mr. Motley portraying much of himself, his course of life and
+his future, as he would have had it, in his first story. In this, his
+last work, it is impossible not to read much of his own external and
+internal personal history told under other names and with different
+accessories. The parallelism often accidentally or intentionally passes
+into divergence. He would not have had it too close if he could, but
+there are various passages in which it is plain enough that he is telling
+his own story.
+
+Mr. Motley was a diplomatist, and he writes of other diplomatists, and
+one in particular, with most significant detail. It need not be supposed
+that he intends the "arch intriguer" Aerssens to stand for himself, or
+that he would have endured being thought to identify himself with the man
+of whose "almost devilish acts" he speaks so freely. But the sagacious
+reader--and he need not be very sharp-sighted--will very certainly see
+something more than a mere historical significance in some of the
+passages which I shall cite for him to reflect upon. Mr. Motley's
+standard of an ambassador's accomplishments may be judged from the
+following passage:--
+
+ "That those ministers [those of the Republic] were second to the
+ representatives of no other European state in capacity and
+ accomplishment was a fact well known to all who had dealings with
+ them, for the states required in their diplomatic representatives
+ knowledge of history and international law, modern languages, and
+ the classics, as well as familiarity with political customs and
+ social courtesies; the breeding of gentlemen, in short, and the
+ accomplishments of scholars."
+
+The story of the troubles of Aerssens, the ambassador of the United
+Provinces at Paris, must be given at some length, and will repay careful
+reading.
+
+ "Francis Aerssens . . . continued to be the Dutch ambassador
+ after the murder of Henry IV. . . . He was beyond doubt one of
+ the ablest diplomatists in Europe. Versed in many languages, a
+ classical student, familiar with history and international law, a
+ man of the world and familiar with its usages, accustomed to
+ associate with dignity and tact on friendliest terms with
+ sovereigns, eminent statesmen, and men of letters; endowed with a
+ facile tongue, a fluent pen, and an eye and ear of singular
+ acuteness and delicacy; distinguished for unflagging industry and
+ singular aptitude for secret and intricate affairs;--he had by the
+ exercise of these various qualities during a period of nearly twenty
+ years at the court of Henry the Great been able to render
+ inestimable services to the Republic which he represented.
+
+ "He had enjoyed the intimacy and even the confidence of Henry IV.,
+ so far as any man could be said to possess that monarch's
+ confidence, and his friendly relations and familiar access to the
+ king gave him political advantages superior to those of any of his
+ colleagues at the same court.
+
+ "Acting entirely and faithfully according to the instructions of the
+ Advocate of Holland, he always gratefully and copiously acknowledged
+ the privilege of being guided and sustained in the difficult paths
+ he had to traverse by so powerful and active an intellect. I have
+ seldom alluded in terms to the instructions and dispatches of the
+ chief, but every position, negotiation, and opinion of the envoy
+ --and the reader has seen many of them is pervaded by their spirit.
+
+ "It had become a question whether he was to remain at his post or
+ return. It was doubtful whether he wished to be relieved of his
+ embassy or not. The States of Holland voted 'to leave it to his
+ candid opinion if in his free conscience he thinks he can serve the
+ public any longer. If yes, he may keep his office one year more.
+ If no, he may take leave and come home.'
+
+ "Surely the States, under the guidance of the Advocate, had thus
+ acted with consummate courtesy towards a diplomatist whose position,
+ from no apparent fault of his own, but by the force of
+ circumstances,--and rather to his credit than otherwise,
+ --was gravely compromised."
+
+The Queen, Mary de' Medici, had a talk with him, got angry, "became very
+red in the face," and wanted to be rid of him.
+
+ "Nor was the envoy at first desirous of remaining. . . .
+ Nevertheless, he yielded reluctantly to Barneveld's request that he
+ should, for the time at least, remain at his post. Later on, as the
+ intrigues against him began to unfold themselves, and his faithful
+ services were made use of at home to blacken his character and
+ procure his removal, he refused to resign, as to do so would be to
+ play into the hands of his enemies, and, by inference at least, to
+ accuse himself of infidelity to his trust. . . .
+
+ "It is no wonder that the ambassador was galled to the quick by the
+ outrage which those concerned in the government were seeking to put
+ upon him. How could an honest man fail to be overwhelmed with rage
+ and anguish at being dishonored before the world by his masters for
+ scrupulously doing his duty, and for maintaining the rights and
+ dignity of his own country? He knew that the charges were but
+ pretexts, that the motives of his enemies were as base as the
+ intrigues themselves, but he also knew that the world usually sides
+ with the government against the individual, and that a man's
+ reputation is rarely strong enough to maintain itself unsullied in a
+ foreign land when his own government stretches forth its hand, not
+ to shield, but to stab him. . . .
+
+ "'I know,' he said, that this plot has been woven partly here in
+ Holland and partly here by good correspondence in order to drive me
+ from my post.
+
+ "'But as I have discovered this accurately, I have resolved to offer
+ to my masters the continuance of my very humble service for such
+ time and under such conditions as they may think good to prescribe.
+ I prefer forcing my natural and private inclinations to giving an
+ opportunity for the ministers of this kingdom to discredit us, and
+ to my enemies to succeed in injuring me, and by fraud and malice to
+ force me from my post. . . . I am truly sorry, being ready to
+ retire, wishing to have an honorable testimony in recompense of my
+ labors, that one is in such hurry to take advantage of my fall. .
+ . . What envoy will ever dare to speak with vigor if he is not
+ sustained by the government at home? . . . My enemies have
+ misrepresented my actions, and my language as passionate,
+ exaggerated, mischievous, but I have no passion except for the
+ service of my superiors.'
+
+ "Barneveld, from well-considered motives of public policy, was
+ favoring his honorable recall. But he allowed a decorous interval
+ of more than three years to elapse in which to terminate his
+ affairs, and to take a deliberate departure from that French embassy
+ to which the Advocate had originally promoted him, and in which
+ there had been so many years of mutual benefit and confidence
+ between the two statesmen. He used no underhand means. He did not
+ abuse the power of the States-General which he wielded to cast him
+ suddenly and brutally from the distinguished post which he occupied,
+ and so to attempt to dishonor him before the world. Nothing could
+ be more respectful and conciliatory than the attitude of the
+ government from first to last towards this distinguished
+ functionary. The Republic respected itself too much to deal with
+ honorable agents whose services it felt obliged to dispense with as
+ with vulgar malefactors who had been detected in crime. . . .
+
+ "This work aims at being a political study. I would attempt to
+ exemplify the influence of individual humors and passions--some of
+ them among the highest, and others certainly the basest that agitate
+ humanity--upon the march of great events, upon general historical
+ results at certain epochs, and upon the destiny of eminent
+ personages."
+
+Here are two suggestive portraits:--
+
+ "The Advocate, while acting only in the name of a slender
+ confederacy, was in truth, so long as he held his place, the prime
+ minister of European Protestantism. There was none other to rival
+ him, few to comprehend him, fewer still to sustain him. As Prince
+ Maurice was at that time the great soldier of Protestantism, without
+ clearly scanning the grandeur of the field in which he was a chief
+ actor, or foreseeing the vastness of its future, so the Advocate was
+ its statesman and its prophet. Could the two have worked together
+ as harmoniously as they had done at an earlier day, it would have
+ been a blessing for the common weal of Europe. But, alas! the evil
+ genius of jealousy, which so often forbids cordial relations between
+ soldier and statesman, already stood shrouded in the distance,
+ darkly menacing the strenuous patriot, who was wearing his life out
+ in exertions for what he deemed the true cause of progress and
+ humanity. . . .
+
+ "All history shows that the brilliant soldier of a republic is apt
+ to have the advantage, in a struggle for popular affection and
+ popular applause, over the statesman, however consummate. . . .
+ The great battles and sieges of the prince had been on a world's
+ theatre, had enchained the attention of Christendom, and on their
+ issue had frequently depended, or seemed to depend, the very
+ existence of the nation. The labors of the statesman, on the
+ contrary, had been comparatively secret. His noble orations and
+ arguments had been spoken with closed doors to assemblies of
+ colleagues, rather envoys than senators, . . while his vast labors
+ in directing both the internal administration and especially the
+ foreign affairs of the commonwealth had been by their very nature
+ as secret as they were perpetual and enormous."
+
+The reader of the "Life of Barneveld" must judge for himself whether in
+these and similar passages the historian was thinking solely of Maurice,
+the great military leader, of Barneveld, the great statesman, and of
+Aerssens, the recalled ambassador. He will certainly find that there were
+"burning questions" for ministers to handle then as now, and recognize in
+"that visible atmosphere of power the poison of which it is so difficult
+to resist" a respiratory medium as well known to the nineteenth as to the
+seventeenth century.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+1874-1877. AEt. 60-63.
+
+DEATH OF MRS. MOTLEY.--LAST VISIT TO AMERICA.--ILLNESS AND DEATH.-LADY
+HARCOURT'S COMMUNICATION.
+
+On the last day of 1874, the beloved wife, whose health had for some
+years been failing, was taken from him by death. She had been the pride
+of his happier years, the stay and solace of those which had so tried his
+sensitive spirit. The blow found him already weakened by mental suffering
+and bodily infirmity, and he never recovered from it. Mr. Motley's last
+visit to America was in the summer and autumn of 1875. During several
+weeks which he passed at Nahant, a seaside resort near Boston, I saw him
+almost daily. He walked feebly and with some little difficulty, and
+complained of a feeling of great weight in the right arm, which made
+writing laborious. His handwriting had not betrayed any very obvious
+change, so far as I had noticed in his letters. His features and speech
+were without any paralytic character. His mind was clear except when, as
+on one or two occasions, he complained of some confused feeling, and
+walked a few minutes in the open air to compose himself. His thoughts
+were always tending to revert to the almost worshipped companion from
+whom death had parted him a few months before. Yet he could often be led
+away to other topics, and in talking of them could be betrayed into
+momentary cheerfulness of manner. His long-enduring and all-pervading
+grief was not more a tribute to the virtues and graces of her whom he
+mourned than an evidence of the deeply affectionate nature which in other
+relations endeared him to so many whose friendship was a title to love
+and honor.
+
+I have now the privilege of once more recurring to the narrative of Mr.
+Motley's daughter, Lady Harcourt.
+
+ "The harassing work and mental distress of this time [after the
+ recall from England], acting on an acutely nervous organization,
+ began the process of undermining his constitution, of which we were
+ so soon to see the results. It was not the least courageous act of
+ his life, that, smarting under a fresh wound, tired and unhappy, he
+ set his face immediately towards the accomplishment of fresh
+ literary labor. After my sister's marriage in January he went to
+ the Hague to begin his researches in the archives for John of
+ Barneveld. The Queen of the Netherlands had made ready a house
+ for us, and personally superintended every preparation for his
+ reception. We remained there until the spring, and then removed to
+ a house more immediately in the town, a charming old-fashioned
+ mansion, once lived in by John de Witt, where he had a large library
+ and every domestic comfort during the year of his sojourn. The
+ incessant literary labor in an enervating climate with enfeebled
+ health may have prepared the way for the first break in his
+ constitution, which was to show itself soon after. There were many
+ compensations in the life about him. He enjoyed the privilege of
+ constant companionship with one of the warmest hearts and finest
+ intellects which I have ever known in a woman,--the 'ame d'elite'
+ which has passed beyond this earth. The gracious sentiment with
+ which the Queen sought to express her sense of what Holland owed him
+ would have been deeply felt even had her personal friendship been
+ less dear to us all. From the King, the society of the Hague, and
+ the diplomatic circle we had many marks of kindness. Once or twice
+ I made short journeys with him for change of air to Amsterdam, to
+ look for the portraits of John of Barneveld and his wife; to
+ Bohemia, where, with the lingering hope of occupying himself with
+ the Thirty Years' War, he looked carefully at the scene of
+ Wallenstein's death near Prague, and later to Varzin in Pomerania
+ for a week with Prince Bismarck, after the great events of the
+ Franco-German war. In the autumn of 1872 we moved to England,
+ partly because it was evident that his health and my mother's
+ required a change; partly for private reasons to be near my sister
+ and her children. The day after our arrival at Bournemouth occurred
+ the rupture of a vessel on the lungs, without any apparently
+ sufficient cause. He recovered enough to revise and complete his
+ manuscript, and we thought him better, when at the end of July, in
+ London, he was struck down by the first attack of the head, which
+ robbed him of all after power of work, although the intellect
+ remained untouched. Sir William Gull sent him to Cannes for the
+ winter, where he was seized with a violent internal inflammation,
+ in which I suppose there was again the indication of the lesion of
+ blood-vessels. I am nearing the shadow now,--the time of which I
+ can hardly bear to write. You know the terrible sorrow which
+ crushed him on the last day of 1874,--the grief which broke his
+ heart and from which he never rallied. From that day it seems to me
+ that his life may be summed up in the two words,--patient waiting.
+ Never for one hour did her spirit leave him, and he strove to follow
+ its leading for the short and evil days left and the hope of the
+ life beyond. I think I have never watched quietly and reverently
+ the traces of one personal character remaining so strongly impressed
+ on another nature. With herself--depreciation and unselfishness she
+ would have been the last to believe how much of him was in her very
+ existence; nor could we have realized it until the parting came.
+ Henceforward, with the mind still there, but with the machinery
+ necessary to set it in motion disturbed and shattered, he could but
+ try to create small occupations with which to fill the hours of a
+ life which was only valued for his children's sake. Kind and loving
+ friends in England and America soothed the passage, and our
+ gratitude for so many gracious acts is deep and true. His love for
+ children, always a strong feeling, was gratified by the constant
+ presence of my sister's babies, the eldest, a little girl who bore
+ my mother's name, and had been her idol, being the companion of many
+ hours and his best comforter. At the end the blow came swiftly and
+ suddenly, as he would have wished it. It was a terrible shock to us
+ who had vainly hoped to keep him a few years longer, but at least he
+ was spared what he had dreaded with a great dread, a gradual failure
+ of mental or bodily power. The mind was never clouded, the
+ affections never weakened, and after a few hours of unconscious
+ physical struggle he lay at rest, his face beautiful and calm,
+ without a trace of suffering or illness. Once or twice he said, 'It
+ has come, it has come,' and there were a few broken words before
+ consciousness fled, but there was little time for messages or leave-
+ taking. By a strange coincidence his life ended near the town of
+ Dorchester, in the mother country, as if the last hour brought with
+ it a reminiscence of his birthplace, and of his own dearly loved
+ mother. By his own wish only the dates of his birth and death
+ appear upon his gravestone, with the text chosen by himself, 'In God
+ is light, and in him is no darkness at all.'"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION.--HIS CHARACTER.--HIS LABORS.--HIS REWARD.
+
+In closing this restricted and imperfect record of a life which merits,
+and in due time will, I trust, receive an ampler tribute, I cannot
+refrain from adding a few thoughts which naturally suggest themselves,
+and some of which may seem quite unnecessary to the reader who has
+followed the story of the historian and diplomatist's brilliant and
+eventful career.
+
+Mr. Motley came of a parentage which promised the gifts of mind and body
+very generally to be accounted for, in a measure at least, wherever we
+find them, by the blood of one or both of the parents. They gave him
+special attractions and laid him open to not a few temptations. Too many
+young men born to shine in social life, to sparkle, it may be, in
+conversation, perhaps in the lighter walks of literature, become
+agreeable idlers, self-indulgent, frivolous, incapable of large designs
+or sustained effort, lose every aspiration and forget every ideal. Our
+gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a
+conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a
+noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid
+amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a
+questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to
+persons of vivacious character and temperament.
+
+It would seem difficult for a man so flattered from his earliest days to
+be modest in his self-estimate; but Motley was never satisfied with
+himself. He was impulsive, and was occasionally, I have heard it said,
+over excited, when his prejudices were roughly handled. In all that
+related to the questions involved in our civil war, he was, no doubt,
+very sensitive. He had heard so much that exasperated him in the foreign
+society which he had expected to be in full sympathy with the cause of
+liberty as against slavery, that he might be excused if he showed
+impatience when he met with similar sentiments among his own countrymen.
+He felt that he had been cruelly treated by his own government, and no
+one who conceives himself to have been wronged and insulted must be
+expected to reason in naked syllogisms on the propriety of the liberties
+which have been taken with his name and standing. But with all his
+quickness of feeling, his manners were easy and courteous, simply because
+his nature was warm and kindly, and with all his natural fastidiousness
+there was nothing of the coxcomb about him.
+
+He must have had enemies, as all men of striking individuality are sure
+to have; his presence cast more uncouth patriots into the shade; his
+learning was a reproach to the ignorant, his fame was too bright a
+distinction; his high-bred air and refinement, which he could not help,
+would hardly commend him to the average citizen in an order of things in
+which mediocrity is at a premium, and the natural nobility of presence,
+which rarely comes without family antecedents to account for it, is not
+always agreeable to the many whose two ideals are the man on horseback
+and the man in his shirt-sleeves. It may well be questioned whether
+Washington, with his grand manner, would be nearly as popular with what
+are called "the masses" as Lincoln, with his homely ways and broad
+stories. The experiment of universal suffrage must render the waters of
+political and social life more or less turbid even if they remain
+innoxious. The Cloaca Maxima can hardly mingle its contents with the
+stream of the Aqua Claudia, without taking something from its crystal
+clearness. We need not go so far as one of our well-known politicians has
+recently gone in saying that no great man can reach the highest position
+in our government, but we can safely say that, apart from military fame,
+the loftiest and purest and finest personal qualities are not those which
+can be most depended upon at the ballot-box. Strange stories are told of
+avowed opposition to Mr. Motley on the ground of the most trivial
+differences in point of taste in personal matters,--so told that it is
+hard to disbelieve them, and they show that the caprices which we might
+have thought belonged exclusively to absolute rulers among their
+mistresses or their minions may be felt in the councils of a great people
+which calls itself self-governing. It is perfectly true that Mr. Motley
+did not illustrate the popular type of politician. He was too
+high-minded, too scholarly, too generously industrious, too polished, too
+much at home in the highest European circles, too much courted for his
+personal fascinations, too remote from the trading world of caucus
+managers. To degrade him, so far as official capital punishment could do
+it, was not merely to wrong one whom the nation should have delighted to
+honor as showing it to the world in the fairest flower of its young
+civilization, but it was an indignity to a representative of the highest
+scholarship of native growth, which every student in the land felt as a
+discouragement to all sound learning and noble ambition.
+
+If he was disappointed in his diplomatic career, he had enough, and more
+than enough, to console him in his brilliant literary triumphs. He had
+earned them all by the most faithful and patient labor. If he had not the
+"frame of adamant" of the Swedish hero, he had his "soul of fire." No
+labors could tire him, no difficulties affright him. What most surprised
+those who knew him as a young man was, not his ambition, not his
+brilliancy, but his dogged, continuous capacity for work. We have seen
+with what astonishment the old Dutch scholar, Groen van Prinsterer,
+looked upon a man who had wrestled with authors like Bor and Van Meteren,
+who had grappled with the mightiest folios and toiled undiscouraged among
+half-illegible manuscript records. Having spared no pains in collecting
+his materials, he told his story, as we all know, with flowing ease and
+stirring vitality. His views may have been more or less partial; Philip
+the Second may have deserved the pitying benevolence of poor Maximilian;
+Maurice may have wept as sincerely over the errors of Arminius as any one
+of "the crocodile crew that believe in election;" Barneveld and Grotius
+may have been on the road to Rome; none of these things seem probable,
+but if they were all proved true in opposition to his views, we should
+still have the long roll of glowing tapestry he has woven for us, with
+all its life-like portraits, its almost moving pageants, its sieges where
+we can see the artillery flashing, its battle-fields with their smoke and
+fire,--pictures which cannot fade, and which will preserve his name
+interwoven with their own enduring colors.
+
+Republics are said to be ungrateful; it might be truer to say that they
+are forgetful. They forgive those who have wronged them as easily as they
+forget those who have done them good service. But History never forgets
+and never forgives. To her decision we may trust the question, whether
+the warm-hearted patriot who had stood up for his country nobly and
+manfully in the hour of trial, the great scholar and writer who had
+reflected honor upon her throughout the world of letters, the high-minded
+public servant, whose shortcomings it taxed the ingenuity of experts to
+make conspicuous enough to be presentable, was treated as such a citizen
+should have been dealt with. His record is safe in her hands, and his
+memory will be precious always in the hearts of all who enjoyed his
+friendship.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+A.
+
+THE SATURDAY CLUB.
+
+This club, of which we were both members, and which is still flourishing,
+came into existence in a very quiet sort of way at about the same time as
+"The Atlantic Monthly," and, although entirely unconnected with that
+magazine, included as members some of its chief contributors. Of those
+who might have been met at some of the monthly gatherings in its earlier
+days I may mention Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley,
+Whipple, Whittier; Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John S. Dwight;
+Governor Andrew, Richard H. Dana, Junior, Charles Sumner. It offered a
+wide gamut of intelligences, and the meetings were noteworthy occasions.
+If there was not a certain amount of "mutual admiration" among some of
+those I have mentioned it was a great pity, and implied a defect in the
+nature of men who were otherwise largely endowed. The vitality of this
+club has depended in a great measure on its utter poverty in statutes and
+by-laws, its entire absence of formality, and its blessed freedom from
+speech-making.
+
+That holy man, Richard Baxter, says in his Preface to Alleine's
+"Alarm:"--
+
+ "I have done, when I have sought to remove a little scandal, which I
+ foresaw, that I should myself write the Preface to his Life where
+ himself and two of his friends make such a mention of my name, which
+ I cannot own; which will seem a praising him for praising me. I
+ confess it looketh ill-favoredly in me. But I had not the power of
+ other men's writings, and durst not forbear that which was his due."
+
+I do not know that I have any occasion for a similar apology in printing
+the following lines read at a meeting of members of the Saturday Club and
+other friends who came together to bid farewell to Motley before his
+return to Europe in 1857.
+
+ A PARTING HEALTH
+
+ Yes, we knew we must lose him,--though friendship may claim
+ To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame,
+ Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
+ 'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
+
+ As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,
+ As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,
+ As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
+ He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
+
+ What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
+ Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
+ While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
+ That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
+
+ In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
+ Where flit the dark spectres of passion and crime,
+ There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
+ There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
+
+ Let us hear the proud story that time has bequeathed
+ From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
+ Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
+ Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
+
+ The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
+ On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,
+ To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine
+ With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
+
+ So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
+ When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed;
+ THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING,--the world holds him dear,--
+
+ Love bless him, joy crown him, God speed his career!
+
+
+
+B.
+
+HABITS AND METHODS OF STUDY.
+
+Mr. Motley's daughter, Lady Harcourt, has favored me with many
+interesting particulars which I could not have learned except from a
+member of his own family. Her description of his way of living and of
+working will be best given in her own words:--
+
+ "He generally rose early, the hour varying somewhat at different
+ parts of his life, according to his work and health. Sometimes when
+ much absorbed by literary labor he would rise before seven, often
+ lighting his own fire, and with a cup of tea or coffee writing until
+ the family breakfast hour, after which his work was immediately
+ resumed, and he usually sat over his writing-table until late in the
+ afternoon, when he would take a short walk. His dinner hour was
+ late, and he rarely worked at night. During the early years of his
+ literary studies he led a life of great retirement. Later, after
+ the publication of the 'Dutch Republic' and during the years of
+ official place, he was much in society in England, Austria, and
+ Holland. He enjoyed social life, and particularly dining out,
+ keenly, but was very moderate and simple in all his personal habits,
+ and for many years before his death had entirely given up smoking.
+ His work, when not in his own library, was in the Archives of the
+ Netherlands, Brussels, Paris, the English State Paper Office, and
+ the British Museum, where he made his own researches, patiently and
+ laboriously consulting original manuscripts and reading masses of
+ correspondence, from which he afterwards sometimes caused copies to
+ be made, and where he worked for many consecutive hours a day.
+ After his material had been thus painfully and toilfully amassed,
+ the writing of his own story was always done at home, and his mind,
+ having digested the necessary matter, always poured itself forth in
+ writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to
+ reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the
+ drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was
+ sheer pleasure to him."
+
+I should have mentioned that his residence in London while minister was
+at the house No. 17 Arlington Street, belonging to Lord Yarborough.
+
+
+
+
+C.
+
+SIR WILLIAM GULL's ACCOUNT OF HIS ILLNESS.
+
+I have availed myself of the permission implied in the subjoined letter
+of Sir William Gull to make large extracts from his account of Mr.
+Motley's condition while under his medical care. In his earlier years he
+had often complained to me of those "nervous feelings connected with the
+respiration" referred to by this very distinguished physician. I do not
+remember any other habitual trouble to which he was subject.
+
+ 74 BROOK STREET, GROSVENOR SQUARE, W.
+ February 13, 1878.
+MY DEAR SIR,--I send the notes of Mr. Motley's last illness, as I
+promised. They are too technical for general readers, but you will make
+such exception as you require. The medical details may interest your
+professional friends. Mr. Motley's case was a striking illustration that
+the renal disease of so-called Bright's disease may supervene as part and
+parcel of a larger and antecedent change in the blood-vessels in other
+parts than the kidney. . . . I am, my dear sir,
+
+ Yours very truly,
+ WILLIAM W. GULL.
+
+To OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, ESQ.
+
+ I first saw Mr. Motley, I believe, about the year 1870, on account
+ of some nervous feelings connected with the respiration. At that
+ time his general health was good, and all he complained of was
+ occasionally a feeling of oppression about the chest. There were no
+ physical signs of anything abnormal, and the symptoms quite passed
+ away in the course of time, and with the use of simple antispasmodic
+ remedies, such as camphor and the like. This was my first interview
+ with Mr. Motley, and I was naturally glad to have the opportunity of
+ making his acquaintance. I remember that in our conversation I
+ jokingly said that my wife could hardly forgive him for not making
+ her hero, Henri IV., a perfect character, and the earnestness with
+ which he replied 'au serieux,' I assure you I have fairly recorded
+ the facts. After this date I did not see Mr. Motley for some time.
+ He had three slight attacks of haemoptysis in the autumn of 1872,
+ but no physical signs of change in the lung tissue resulted. So
+ early as this I noticed that there were signs of commencing
+ thickening in the heart, as shown by the degree and extent of its
+ impulse. The condition of his health, though at that time not very
+ obviously failing, a good deal arrested my attention, as I thought I
+ could perceive in the occurrence of the haemoptysis, and in the
+ cardiac hypertrophy, the early beginnings of vascular degeneration.
+
+ In August, 1873, occurred the remarkable seizure, from the effects
+ of which Mr. Motley never recovered. I did not see him in the
+ attack, but was informed, as far as I can remember, that he was on a
+ casual visit at a friend's house at luncheon (or it might have been
+ dinner), when he suddenly became strangely excited, but not quite
+ unconscious. . . . I believed at the time, and do so still, that
+ there was some capillary apoplexy of the convolutions. The attack
+ was attended with some hemiplegic weakness on the right side, and
+ altered sensation, and ever after there was a want of freedom and
+ ease both in the gait and in the use of the arm of that side. To my
+ inquiries from time to time how the arm was, the patient would
+ always flex and extend it freely, but nearly always used the
+ expression, "There is a bedevilment in it;" though the handwriting
+ was not much, if at all, altered.
+
+ In December, 1873, Mr. Motley went by my advice to Cannes. I wrote
+ the following letter at the time to my friend Dr. Frank, who was
+ practising there:--
+
+ [This letter, every word of which was of value to the
+ practitioner who was to have charge of the patient, relates
+ many of the facts given above, and I shall therefore only give
+ extracts from it.]
+
+ December 29, 1873.
+
+ MY DEAR DR. FRANK,--My friend Mr. Motley, the historian and late
+ American Minister, whose name and fame no doubt you know very well,
+ has by my advice come to Cannes for the winter and spring, and I
+ have promised him to give you some account of his case. To me it is
+ one of special interest, and personally, as respects the subject of
+ it, of painful interest. I have known Mr. Motley for some time, but
+ he consulted me for the present condition about midsummer.
+
+ . . . If I have formed a correct opinion of the pathology of the
+ case, I believe the smaller vessels are degenerating in several
+ parts of the vascular area, lung, brain, and kidneys. With this
+ view I have suggested a change of climate, a nourishing diet, etc.;
+ and it is to be hoped, and I trust expected, that by great attention
+ to the conditions of hygiene, internal and external, the progress of
+ degeneration may be retarded. I have no doubt you will find, as
+ time goes on, increasing evidence of renal change, but this is
+ rather a coincidence and consequence than a cause, though no doubt
+ when the renal change has reached a certain point, it becomes in its
+ own way a factor of other lesions. I have troubled you at this
+ length because my mind is much occupied with the pathology of these
+ cases, and because no case can, on personal grounds, more strongly
+ challenge our attention.
+
+ Yours very truly,
+ WILLIAM W. GULL.
+
+ During the spring of 1874, whilst at Cannes, Mr. Motley had a sharp
+ attack of nephritis, attended with fever; but on returning to
+ England in July there was no important change in the health. The
+ weakness of the side continued, and the inability to undertake any
+ mental work. The signs of cardiac hypertrophy were more distinct.
+ In the beginning of the year 1875 I wrote as follows:--
+
+ February 20, 1875.
+
+ MY DEAR Mr. MOTLEY,--. . . The examination I have just made
+ appears to indicate that the main conditions of your health are more
+ stable than they were some months ago, and would therefore be so far
+ in favor of your going to America in the summer, as we talked of.
+ The ground of my doubt has lain in the possibility of such a trip
+ further disordering the circulation. Of this, I hope, there is now
+ less risk.
+
+ On the 4th of June, 1875, I received the following letter:--
+
+ CALVERLY PARK HOTEL, TUNBRIDGE WELLS,
+ June 4, 1875.
+
+ MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,--I have been absent from town for a long time,
+ but am to be there on the 9th and 10th. Could I make an appointment
+ with you for either of those days? I am anxious to have a full
+ consultation with you before leaving for America. Our departure is
+ fixed for the 19th of this month. I have not been worse than usual
+ of late. I think myself, on the contrary, rather stronger, and it
+ is almost impossible for me not to make my visit to America this
+ summer, unless you should absolutely prohibit it. If neither of
+ those days should suit you, could you kindly suggest another day?
+ I hope, however, you can spare me half an hour on one of those days,
+ as I like to get as much of this bracing air as I can. Will you
+ kindly name the hour when I may call on you, and address me at this
+ hotel. Excuse this slovenly note in pencil, but it fatigues my head
+ and arm much more to sit at a writing-table with pen and ink.
+
+ Always most sincerely yours,
+ My dear Sir William,
+ J. L. MOTLEY.
+
+ On Mr. Motley's return from America I saw him, and found him, I
+ thought, rather better in general health than when he left England.
+
+ In December, 1875, Mr. Motley consulted me for trouble of vision in
+ reading or walking, from sensations like those produced by flakes of
+ falling snow coming between him and the objects he was looking at.
+ Mr. Bowman, one of our most excellent oculists, was then consulted.
+ Mr. Bowman wrote to me as follows: "Such symptoms as exist point
+ rather to disturbed retinal function than to any brain-mischief. It
+ is, however, quite likely that what you fear for the brain may have
+ had its counterpart in the nerve-structures of the eye, and as he is
+ short-sighted, this tendency may be further intensified."
+
+ Mr. Bowman suggested no more than such an arrangement of glasses as
+ might put the eyes, when in use, under better optic conditions.
+
+ The year 1876 was passed over without any special change worth
+ notice. The walking powers were much impeded by the want of control
+ over the right leg. The mind was entirely clear, though Mr. Motley
+ did not feel equal, and indeed had been advised not to apply
+ himself, to any literary work. Occasional conversations, when I had
+ interviews with him on the subject of his health, proved that the
+ attack which had weakened the movements of the right side had not
+ impaired the mental power. The most noticeable change which had
+ come over Mr. Motley since I first knew him was due to the death of
+ Mrs. Motley in December, 1874. It had in fact not only profoundly
+ depressed him, but, if I may so express it, had removed the centre
+ of his thought to a new world. In long conversations with me of a
+ speculative kind, after that painful event, it was plain how much
+ his point of view of the whole course and relation of things had
+ changed. His mind was the last to dogmatize on any subject. There
+ was a candid and childlike desire to know, with an equal confession
+ of the incapacity of the human intellect. I wish I could recall the
+ actual expressions he used, but the sense was that which has been so
+ well stated by Hooker in concluding an exhortation against the pride
+ of the human intellect, where he remarks:--
+
+ "Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the
+ doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to
+ make mention of His Name, yet our soundest knowledge is to know that
+ we know Him, not indeed as He is, neither can know Him; and our
+ safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess
+ without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness
+ above our capacity and reach. He is above and we upon earth;
+ therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."
+
+ Mrs. Motley's illness was not a long one, and the nature of it was
+ such that its course could with certainty be predicted. Mr. Motley
+ and her children passed the remaining days of her life, extending
+ over about a month, with her, in the mutual under standing that she
+ was soon to part from them. The character of the illness, and the
+ natural exhaustion of her strength by suffering, lessened the shock
+ of her death, though not the loss, to those who survived her.
+
+ The last time I saw Mr. Motley was, I believe, about two months
+ before his death, March 28, 1877. There was no great change in his
+ health, but he complained of indescribable sensations in his nervous
+ system, and felt as if losing the whole power of walking, but this
+ was not obvious in his gait, although he walked shorter distances
+ than before. I heard no more of him until I was suddenly summoned
+ on the 29th of May into Devonshire to see him. The telegram I
+ received was so urgent, that I suspected some rupture of a blood-
+ vessel in the brain, and that I should hardly reach him alive; and
+ this was the case. About two o'clock in the day he complained of a
+ feeling of faintness, said he felt ill and should not recover; and
+ in a few minutes was insensible with symptoms of ingravescent
+ apoplexy. There was extensive haemorrhage into the brain, as shown
+ by post-mortem examination, the cerebral vessels being atheromatous.
+ The fatal haemorrhage had occurred into the lateral ventricles, from
+ rupture of one of the middle cerebral arteries.
+
+ I am, my dear Sir,
+ Yours very truly,
+ WILLIAM W. GULL.
+
+
+E.
+
+FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY.
+
+At a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, held on Thursday,
+the 14th of June, 1877, after the reading of the records of the preceding
+meeting, the president, the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, spoke as follows:
+
+ "Our first thoughts to-day, gentlemen, are of those whom we may not
+ again welcome to these halls. We shall be in no mood, certainly,
+ for entering on other subjects this morning until we have given some
+ expression to our deep sense of the loss--the double loss--which our
+ Society has sustained since our last monthly meeting."--[Edmund
+ Quincy died May 17. John Lothrop Motley died May 29.]
+
+After a most interesting and cordial tribute to his friend, Mr. Quincy,
+Mr. Winthrop continued:
+
+ "The death of our distinguished associate, Motley, can hardly have
+ taken many of us by surprise. Sudden at the moment of its
+ occurrence, we had long been more or less prepared for it by his
+ failing health. It must, indeed, have been quite too evident to
+ those who had seen him, during the last two or three years, that his
+ life-work was finished. I think he so regarded it himself.
+
+ "Hopes may have been occasionally revived in the hearts of his
+ friends, and even in his own heart, that his long-cherished purpose
+ of completing a History of the Thirty Years' War, as the grand
+ consummation of his historical labors,--for which all his other
+ volumes seemed to him to have been but the preludes and overtures,
+ --might still be accomplished. But such hopes, faint and flickering
+ from his first attack, had well-nigh died away. They were like
+ Prescott's hopes of completing his 'Philip the Second,' or like
+ Macaulay's hopes of finishing his brilliant 'History of England.'
+
+ "But great as may be the loss to literature of such a crowning work
+ from Motley's pen, it was by no means necessary to the completeness
+ of his own fame. His 'Rise of the Dutch Republic,' his 'History of
+ the United Netherlands,' and his 'Life of John of Barneveld,' had
+ abundantly established his reputation, and given him a fixed place
+ among the most eminent historians of our country and of our age.
+
+ "No American writer, certainly, has secured a wider recognition or a
+ higher appreciation from the scholars of the Old World. The
+ universities of England and the learned societies of Europe have
+ bestowed upon him their largest honors. It happened to me to be in
+ Paris when he was first chosen a corresponding member of the
+ Institute, and when his claims were canvassed with the freedom and
+ earnestness which peculiarly characterize such a candidacy in
+ France. There was no mistaking the profound impression which his
+ first work had made on the minds of such men as Guizot and Mignet.
+ Within a year or two past, a still higher honor has been awarded him
+ from the same source. The journals not long ago announced his
+ election as one of the six foreign associates of the French Academy
+ of Moral and Political Sciences,--a distinction which Prescott would
+ probably have attained had he lived a few years longer, until there
+ was a vacancy, but which, as a matter of fact, I believe, Motley was
+ the only American writer, except the late Edward Livingston, of
+ Louisiana, who has actually enjoyed.
+
+ "Residing much abroad, for the purpose of pursuing his historical
+ researches, he had become the associate and friend of the most
+ eminent literary men in almost all parts of the world, and the
+ singular charms of his conversation and manners had made him a
+ favorite guest in the most refined and exalted circles.
+
+ "Of his relations to political and public life, this is hardly the
+ occasion or the moment for speaking in detail. Misconstructions and
+ injustices are the proverbial lot of those who occupy eminent
+ position. It was a duke of Vienna, if I remember rightly, whom
+ Shakespeare, in his 'Measure for Measure,' introduces as
+ exclaiming,--
+
+ 'O place and greatness, millions of false eyes
+ Are stuck upon thee! Volumes of report
+ Run with these false and most contrarious quests
+ Upon thy doings! Thousand 'stapes of wit
+ Make thee the father of their idle dream,
+ And rack thee in their fancies!'
+
+ "I forbear from all application of the lines. It is enough for me,
+ certainly, to say here, to-day, that our country was proud to be
+ represented at the courts of Vienna and London successively by a
+ gentleman of so much culture and accomplishment as Mr. Motley, and
+ that the circumstances of his recall were deeply regretted by us
+ all.
+
+ "His fame, however, was quite beyond the reach of any such
+ accidents, and could neither be enhanced nor impaired by
+ appointments or removals. As a powerful and brilliant historian we
+ pay him our unanimous tribute of admiration and regret, and give him
+ a place in our memories by the side of Prescott and Irving. I do
+ not forget how many of us lament him, also, as a cherished friend.
+
+ "He died on the 29th ultimo, at the house of his daughter, Mrs.
+ Sheridan, in Dorsetshire, England, and an impressive tribute to his
+ memory was paid, in Westminster Abbey, on the following Sunday, by
+ our Honorary Member, Dean Stanley. Such a tribute, from such lips,
+ and with such surroundings, leaves nothing to be desired in the way
+ of eulogy. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, by the side of
+ his beloved wife.
+
+ "One might well say of Motley precisely what he said of Prescott, in
+ a letter from Rome to our associate, Mr. William Amory, immediately
+ on hearing of Prescott's death: 'I feel inexpressibly disappointed
+ --speaking now for an instant purely from a literary point of view
+ --that the noble and crowning monument of his life, for which he had
+ laid such massive foundations, and the structure of which had been
+ carried forward in such a grand and masterly manner, must remain
+ uncompleted, like the unfinished peristyle of some stately and
+ beautiful temple on which the night of time has suddenly descended.
+ But, still, the works which his great and untiring hand had already
+ thoroughly finished will remain to attest his learning and genius,
+ --a precious and perpetual possession for his country."
+
+ .................................
+
+The President now called on Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said:--
+
+ "The thoughts which suggest themselves upon this occasion are such
+ as belong to the personal memories of the dear friends whom we have
+ lost, rather than to their literary labors, the just tribute to
+ which must wait for a calmer hour than the present, following so
+ closely as it does on our bereavement."
+
+ .................................
+
+ "His first literary venture of any note was the story called
+ 'Morton's Hope; or, The Memoirs of a Provincial.' This first effort
+ failed to satisfy the critics, the public, or himself. His
+ personality pervaded the characters and times which he portrayed,
+ so that there was a discord between the actor and his costume.
+ Brilliant passages could not save it; and it was plain enough that
+ he must ripen into something better before the world would give him
+ the reception which surely awaited him if he should find his true
+ destination.
+
+ "The early failures of a great writer are like the first sketches
+ of a great artist, and well reward patient study. More than this,
+ the first efforts of poets and story-tellers are very commonly
+ palimpsests: beneath the rhymes or the fiction one can almost always
+ spell out the characters which betray the writer's self. Take these
+ passages from the story just referred to:
+
+ "'Ah! flattery is a sweet and intoxicating potion, whether we drink
+ it from an earthen ewer or a golden chalice. . . . Flattery from
+ man to woman is expected: it is a part of the courtesy of society;
+ but when the divinity descends from the altar to burn incense to the
+ priest, what wonder if the idolater should feel himself transformed
+ into a god!'
+
+ "He had run the risk of being spoiled, but he had a safeguard in his
+ aspirations.
+
+ "'My ambitious anticipations,' says Morton, in the story, were as
+ boundless as they were various and conflicting. There was not a
+ path which leads to glory in which I was not destined to gather
+ laurels. As a warrior, I would conquer and overrun the world; as a
+ statesman, I would reorganize and govern it; as a historian, I would
+ consign it all to immortality; and, in my leisure moments, I would
+ be a great poet and a man of the world.'
+
+ "Who can doubt that in this passage of his story he is picturing his
+ own visions, one of the fairest of which was destined to become
+ reality?
+
+ "But there was another element in his character, which those who
+ knew him best recognized as one with which he had to struggle hard,
+ --that is, a modesty which sometimes tended to collapse into self-
+ distrust. This, too, betrays itself in the sentences which follow
+ those just quoted:--
+
+ "'In short,' says Morton, 'I was already enrolled in that large
+ category of what are called young men of genius, . . . men of
+ whom unheard-of things are expected; till after long preparation
+ comes a portentous failure, and then they are forgotten. . . .
+ Alas! for the golden imaginations of our youth. . . . They are
+ all disappointments. They are bright and beautiful, but they fade.'"
+
+ ...........................
+
+The President appointed Professor Lowell to write the Memoir of Mr.
+Quincy, and Dr. Holmes that of Mr. Motley, for the Society's
+"Proceedings."
+
+Professor William Everett then spoke as follows:
+
+ "There is one incident, sir, in Mr. Motley's career that has not
+ been mentioned to-day, which is, perhaps, most vividly remembered by
+ those of us who were in Europe at the outbreak of our civil war in
+ 1861. At that time, the ignorance of Englishmen, friendly or
+ otherwise, about America, was infinite: they knew very little of us,
+ and that little wrong. Americans were overwhelmed with questions,
+ taunts, threats, misrepresentations, the outgrowth of ignorance, and
+ ignoring worse than ignorance, from every class of Englishmen.
+ Never was an authoritative exposition of our hopes and policy worse
+ needed; and there was no one to do it. The outgoing diplomatic
+ agents represented a bygone order of things; the representatives of
+ Mr. Lincoln's administration had not come. At that time of anxiety,
+ Mr. Motley, living in England as a private person, came forward with
+ two letters in the 'Times,' which set forth the cause of the United
+ States once and for all. No unofficial, and few official, men could
+ have spoken with such authority, and been so certain of obtaining a
+ hearing from Englishmen. Thereafter, amid all the clouds of
+ falsehood and ridicule which we had to encounter, there was one
+ lighthouse fixed on a rock to which we could go for foothold, from
+ which we could not be driven, and against which all assaults were
+ impotent.
+
+ "There can be no question that the effect produced by these letters
+ helped, if help had been needed, to point out Mr. Motley as a
+ candidate for high diplomatic place who could not be overlooked.
+ Their value was recognized alike by his fellow-citizens in America
+ and his admirers in England; but none valued them more than the
+ little band of exiles, who were struggling against terrible odds,
+ and who rejoiced with a great joy to see the stars and stripes,
+ whose centennial anniversary those guns are now celebrating, planted
+ by a hand so truly worthy to rally every American to its support."
+
+
+
+G.
+
+POEM BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
+
+I cannot close this Memoir more appropriately than by appending the
+following poetical tribute:--
+
+ IN MEMORY OF JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
+
+ BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
+
+ Sleep, Motley, with the great of ancient days,
+ Who wrote for all the years that yet shall be.
+ Sleep with Herodotus, whose name and praise
+ Have reached the isles of earth's remotest sea.
+ Sleep, while, defiant of the slow delays
+ Of Time, thy glorious writings speak for thee
+ And in the answering heart of millions raise
+ The generous zeal for Right and Liberty.
+ And should the days o'ertake us, when, at last,
+ The silence that--ere yet a human pen
+ Had traced the slenderest record of the past
+ Hushed the primeval languages of men
+ Upon our English tongue its spell shall cast,
+ Thy memory shall perish only then.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+American Men of Letters
+
+EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
+
+
+ "_Thou wert the morning star among the living,
+ Ere thy fair light had fled:
+ Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
+ New splendor to the dead._"
+
+
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
+
+BY
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+1891
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson's family, and the other
+friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and
+furnishing valuable information.
+
+The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat
+abridged by myself.
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+BOSTON, November 25, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+1803-1823. To AET. 20.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section I. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.--Publication of the
+Second Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.
+--Character.--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist
+and Realist.--New England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second
+Visit to England
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review."--Visit to
+Europe.--England.--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published.
+I. Lives of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli"
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1853-1858. AET. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club"
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+1858-1863. AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival.--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of President Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus".
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication of
+"Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality.
+--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--Greatness.
+--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies"
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+Emerson's Poems
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.---A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+"I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. He
+furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography
+is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be
+known and believed."
+
+So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is
+certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates
+himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader
+sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little
+more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him
+in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and
+pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were
+the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social
+influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature
+added to make him Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+He himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain
+characteristics. Though Nature appears capricious, he says, "Some
+qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the
+finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to
+perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent
+in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until
+at last Nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what
+may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college
+catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned
+professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to
+our own time. If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be
+bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are
+developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a
+descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he
+will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will
+be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more
+plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The
+gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than
+a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a
+surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which
+it springs has been long under cultivation.
+
+These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record
+of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was
+remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and
+for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls.
+
+A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the "survival of the
+fittest,"--in the estimate of the descendants. It is inclined to
+remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living
+heirs of the family name and traditions. As every man may count two
+grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers,
+and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. If
+he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of
+personages to choose from. The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the
+sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by
+intermarriage of relatives. One of these, from whom the name descended,
+was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the
+people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood.
+
+His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon,
+Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward
+Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as
+Minister of Concord, Massachusetts.
+
+Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson's sixty-four grandfathers
+at the seventh remove. We know the tenacity of certain family
+characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible
+that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the
+full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted
+his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover
+more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities
+move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of
+chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that
+of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one
+square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows
+in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white
+bishop sweeps the board on his own color. Sometimes the distinguishing
+characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle
+strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt
+lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were
+repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible,
+then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from
+the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early
+history of New England.
+
+The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies
+consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of
+fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or
+second hand, the _Magnolia Christi Americana_, of the Reverend Cotton
+Mather. The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one
+can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a
+few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies
+from the London-printed, folio of 1702.
+
+ "He was descended of an Honourable Family in _Bedfordshire_.--He was
+ born at _Woodhil_ (or _Odel_) in _Bedfordshire_, _January_ 31st,
+ 1582.
+
+ "His _Education_ was answerable unto his _Original_; it was
+ _Learned_, it was _Genteel_, and, which was the top of all, it was
+ very _Pious_: At length it made him a _Batchellor_ of _Divinity_,
+ and a Fellow of Saint _John's_ Colledge in Cambridge.--
+
+ "When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him,
+ added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom
+ he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity: Which
+ one would imagine _Temptations_ enough to keep him out of a
+ _Wilderness_."
+
+But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the
+English Church, and so,--
+
+ "When Sir _Nathaniel Brent_ was Arch-Bishop _Laud's_ General, as
+ Arch-Bishop _Laud_ was _another's_, Complaints were made against Mr.
+ _Bulkly_, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced.
+
+ "To _New-England_ he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there
+ having been for a while, at _Cambridge_, he carried a good Number of
+ Planters with him, up further into the _Woods_, where they gathered
+ the _Twelfth Church_, then formed in the Colony, and call'd the Town
+ by the Name of _Concord_.
+
+ "Here he _buried_ a great Estate, while he _raised_ one still,
+ for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his
+ Husbandry.--
+
+ "He was a most excellent _Scholar_, a very-_well read_ Person, and
+ one, who in his advice to young Students, gave Demonstrations, that
+ he knew what would go to make a _Scholar_. But it being essential
+ unto a _Scholar_ to love a _Scholar_, so did he; and in Token
+ thereof, endowed the Library of _Harvard_-Colledge with no small
+ part of his own.
+
+ "And he was therewithal a most exalted _Christian_--In his Ministry
+ he was another _Farel, Quo nemo tonuit fortius_--And the observance
+ which his own People had for him, was also paid him from all sorts
+ of People throughout the Land; but especially from the Ministers of
+ the Country, who would still address him as a _Father_, a _Prophet_,
+ a _Counsellor_, on all occasions."
+
+These extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be
+referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will
+receive the following counsel:--
+
+"If then any Person would know what Mr. _Peter Bulkly_ was, let him read
+his Judicious and Savory Treatise of the _Gospel Covenant_, which has
+passed through several Editions, with much Acceptance among the People
+of God." It must be added that "he had a competently good Stroke at
+Latin Poetry; and even in his Old Age, affected sometimes to improve it.
+Many of his Composure are yet in our Hands."
+
+It is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this
+distinguished scholar and Christian were reproduced in the descendant
+whose life we are studying. At his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as
+was mentioned, by his son Edward, whose daughter became the wife of the
+Reverend Joseph Emerson, the minister of Mendon who, when that village
+was destroyed by the Indians, removed to Concord, where he died in the
+year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with
+Concord, with which it has since been so long associated.
+
+Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend
+Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one,
+for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "Mr. Edward Emerson, sometime
+Deacon of the first church in Newbury." He was noted for the virtue of
+patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but
+once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were
+somewhat harder than needful,--"_but not often_." This same Edward was
+the only break in the line of ministers who descended from Thomas of
+Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as having been "a merchant in
+Charlestown."
+
+Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden for
+nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel
+Moody,--Father Moody,--of York, Maine. Three of his sons were ministers,
+and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at Concord at the
+period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
+
+As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose
+life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and
+more important and interesting to the biographer. The Reverend William
+Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an excellent and popular
+preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He preached resistance to
+tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to
+make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful
+village, and would have taken a part in the Fight at the Bridge, which
+he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented
+his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord in 1776 to join the army at
+Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to Concord and
+set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter
+of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord.
+This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson's
+ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his
+tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that
+his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs
+which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past
+generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help
+inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter,
+like that which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the
+portrait-painter. He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will
+be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for
+nothing.
+
+William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and
+three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well remembered as
+pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His widow became the wife
+of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of Divinity, and his successor as
+Minister at Concord.
+
+The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and profession,
+and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the year 1769, and
+graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as Minister in the
+town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became Minister of the
+First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth Haskins of Boston. He
+died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph Waldo was the second.
+
+The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man
+like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics
+of the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his own
+writings and from the record of his contemporaries.
+
+The Reverend Dr. Sprague's valuable and well-known work, "Annals of the
+American Pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some of
+his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful
+chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary,
+but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people
+of the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in
+the pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive;
+his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable.
+"He was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an
+enemy.--In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal
+side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--He was,
+however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most
+widely."
+
+Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "Mr. Emerson
+was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks
+slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his
+manners bland and pleasant. He was an honest man, and expressed himself
+decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly.--Mr. Emerson
+was a man of good sense. His conversation was edifying and useful; never
+foolish or undignified.--In his theological opinions he was, to say the
+least, far from having any sympathy with Calvinism. I have not supposed
+that he was, like Dr. Freeman, a Humanitarian, though he may have been
+so."
+
+There was no honester chronicler than our clerical Pepys, good, hearty,
+sweet-souled, fact-loving Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the
+dates of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, starred and
+unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (_Hibernice_), than they did
+themselves. There was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any Boston
+parish than Dr. Charles Lowell. But after the pulpit has said what it
+thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say
+about it.
+
+This is what the late Mr. George Ticknor said in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner" for September, 1849.
+
+"Mr. Emerson, transplanted to the First Church in Boston six years
+before Mr. Buckminster's settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a
+graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without
+its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses,
+and the original resources that could command the few."
+
+As to his religious beliefs, Emerson writes to Dr. Sprague as follows:
+"I did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that I looked
+at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between
+Calvinists and Socinians. He inclines obviously to what is ethical
+and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and
+historical.--I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of
+Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of
+the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on
+it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so."
+
+Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an
+Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection
+of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston,
+besides his contributions to the "Monthly Anthology," of which he was
+the Editor.
+
+Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the
+"Christian Examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of
+the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous
+bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long
+as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew
+how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that
+authority was resigned. Both her mind and her character were of a
+superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar
+softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly
+speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it
+was ever ready, was a reward."
+
+The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son,
+says, "Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children
+resembled their mother."
+
+Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the ideas of parents
+survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had
+a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this
+representative of a long line of ministers. The same trains of thought
+and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of
+near family relationship, though not of blood. After the death of the
+first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson's
+grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra
+Ripley. The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose
+character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before
+The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly"
+for November, 1883. Mr. Emerson says of him: "He was identified with the
+ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same
+time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the
+great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days
+declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and
+liberated America.... The same faith made what was strong and what was
+weak in Dr. Ripley." It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of
+character than Mr. Emerson's living picture of Dr. Ripley. I myself
+remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so
+communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling
+John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton. Mr. Emerson
+says, "He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable,
+manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all
+men.--His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and
+he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His
+friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his
+tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was
+no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous.
+Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his
+compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the
+beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door." How
+like Goldsmith's good Dr. Primrose! I do not know any writing of
+Mr. Emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor,--of the
+picturesque in character,--and as a piece of composition, continuous,
+fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is
+admirable and delightful.
+
+Another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more
+powerful influence on his character,--that of his aunt, Mary Moody
+Emerson. He gave an account of her in a paper read before the Woman's
+Club several years ago, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for
+December, 1883. Far more of Mr. Emerson is to be found in this aunt of
+his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with
+whose history we are acquainted. Her story is an interesting one, but
+for that I must refer the reader to the article mentioned. Her character
+and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "Her early
+reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards,
+and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart,
+Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron.
+Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of
+old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious
+authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining
+quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,--how venerable
+and organic as Nature they are in her mind!"
+
+There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson which remind us very
+strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have
+come from his Essay, "Nature," but it was written when her nephew was
+only four years old.
+
+ "Malden, 1807, September.--The rapture of feeling I would part from
+ for days devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with
+ such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its
+ Author,--feels it is related to Him more than by any ties of
+ creation,--it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. But
+ in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or
+ appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which
+ penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity,--then, however
+ awed, who can fear?"--"A few pulsations of created beings, a few
+ successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable
+ us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories,--to do more,--to
+ date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to
+ measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history
+ of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It
+ is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying,
+ acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting,
+ dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity.
+ Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished,
+ and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the
+ activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of
+ virtue, the approval of God."
+
+Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural
+science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles. After
+speaking of "the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its
+long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist," she says:--
+
+ "Yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses'
+ Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to
+ science."--"And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give
+ the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with
+ arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless
+ ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How
+ grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the
+ Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its
+ steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither
+ psychology nor element."--"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems
+ less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God,
+ retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do
+ what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from
+ sublimity of motive."
+
+So far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character
+and intellect of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we could hardly ask for a better
+inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent
+to Mr. Emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note
+how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his
+brothers. Of these I will mention two, one of whom I knew personally.
+
+Edward Bliss Emerson, who graduated at Harvard College in 1824, three
+years after Ralph Waldo, held the first place in his class. He began
+the study of the law with Daniel Webster, but overworked himself and
+suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. After this he made
+another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled
+himself to Porto Rico, where, in 1834, he died. Two poems preserve his
+memory, one that of Ralph Waldo, in which he addresses his memory,--
+
+ "Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star,"
+
+the other his own "Last Farewell," written in 1832, whilst sailing out
+of Boston Harbor. The lines are unaffected and very touching, full of
+that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy,
+and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no
+more.
+
+I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits
+which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson's character and
+intelligence. As on the wall of some great artist's studio one may find
+unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions
+of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often
+sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its
+rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors
+which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The
+sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life
+is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea.
+
+Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the
+long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy
+Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my
+life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes
+ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the
+veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in
+life might well say with Dryden,--
+
+ "If by traduction came thy mind
+ Our wonder is the less to find
+ A soul so charming from a stock so good."
+
+His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years
+ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from
+myself, since others have quoted them before me.
+
+ Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,
+ The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
+ O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down
+ In graceful folds the academic gown,
+ On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught
+ How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
+ And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
+ Too bright to live,--but O, too fair to die.
+
+Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much
+of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands.
+I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles
+Emerson's coming into my study,--this was probably in 1826 or
+1827,--taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem
+of Marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The
+influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson's
+poems, and Charles' liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo.
+When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called "The
+Harvard Register" was published by students and recent graduates. Three
+articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have
+the titles "Conversation," "Friendship." His quotations are from Horace
+and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and
+Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of
+his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take
+this as an example:--
+
+ "Men and mind are my studies. I need no observatory high in air to
+ aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly
+ apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility.
+ I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all
+ knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my
+ employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at
+ home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy."
+
+The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson's poems.
+He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which
+he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons
+made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness
+in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon;
+the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and
+sisters, and he with them as of his own household.
+
+The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his
+maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.
+
+ "All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson,
+ "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are
+ constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. But
+ our affections we give not thus easily.
+
+ 'The hand of Douglas is his own.'"
+
+ --"I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good
+ men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent
+ conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and,
+ knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life
+ that shall secure my constant attachment. I cannot stand upon the
+ footing of ordinary acquaintance. Friendship is aristocratical--the
+ affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept."
+
+Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long
+outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands reverence,--a
+dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson's sweetness of manner and
+expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. There was
+something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into
+a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul stood
+abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the presence
+of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action
+without recalling Milton's line,
+
+ "Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,"
+
+and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial
+messenger.
+
+No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences,
+and of that exaggeration which belongs to the _laudator temporis acti_.
+But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and
+out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck
+they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the
+class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part
+assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some
+extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the
+result of a Presidential election,--or the Winner of the Derby. But
+Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "Who has a part with ****
+at this next exhibition?" I asked him one day, as I met him in the
+college yard. "***** the Post," answered Hillard. "Why call him _the
+Post_?" said I. "He is a wooden creature," said Hillard. "Hear him and
+Charles Emerson translating from the Latin _Domus tota inflammata erat_.
+The Post will render the words, 'The whole house was on fire.' Charles
+Emerson will translate the sentence 'The entire edifice was wrapped in
+flames.'" It was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the
+Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson's version to the simple nudity of
+"the Post's" rendering.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred
+in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a
+scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental
+life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.
+
+When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion
+by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange
+themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had
+found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of
+political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was
+as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and
+there, waiting to form centres of condensation.
+
+Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a
+number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became
+visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries:
+John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University;
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor;
+Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of
+the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of
+it, as reflected from the pages of "The Monthly Anthology," which very
+soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson.
+
+The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by
+the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these
+friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these
+men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was
+born.
+
+John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is
+remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient
+Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating
+but musical accents: "_Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina_" or
+"_Vernacula_," if the "First Scholar" was about to deliver the English
+oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His "shining morning
+face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did,
+with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks
+of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom,
+with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." It was of him
+that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of
+printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to
+pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished
+out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the
+leaves together as he best might. The Reverend Dr. Lowell says: "He
+always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of
+his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the
+labor." Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson's literary habits, says he used
+to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the
+same way. Emerson's father, however, was very methodical, according
+to Dr. Lowell, and had "a place for everything, and everything in its
+place." Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of
+the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very
+thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries.
+
+Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston.
+The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of
+his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of
+those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as
+images and pictures are to Romanism.
+
+John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was
+then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston. Him I reconstruct from
+scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a
+sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English
+parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. Mild
+Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of
+Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of
+tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal
+persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to
+the interests of learning.
+
+William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the
+"Monthly Anthology," and that of the "North American Review," for he was
+a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the
+founder of the second. Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of
+his "Letters on the Eastern States," as a scholar and a gentleman, an
+impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a
+correct writer. Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and
+character.
+
+Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the "Anthology"
+was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. He
+contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various
+controversial sermons, and writing the "Memoir of Buckminster."
+
+There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities.
+There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much
+scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North
+American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian
+Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity.
+It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine,
+with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine
+ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced
+paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations
+that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to
+Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and
+languid trickle of Laura Matilda's sentimentalities. It talked about
+"the London Reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. It printed
+articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the
+Magazines of to-day. But it had opinions of its own, and would compare
+well enough with the "Gentleman's Magazine," to say nothing of "My
+Grandmother's Review, the British." A writer in the third volume (1806)
+says: "A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our
+country. I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a
+Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our 'Anthology,' however
+superior such publications may now be in that kingdom."
+
+It is well worth one's while to look over the volumes of the "Anthology"
+to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how
+they expressed themselves. The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well
+relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that "The
+child,"--meaning the new periodical,--"shall not be destitute of the
+manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. He shall
+attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town
+shall furnish." The reader of the "Anthology" will find for his reward
+an improving discourse on "Ambition," and a commendable schoolboy's
+"theme" on "Inebriation." He will learn something which may be for his
+advantage about the "Anjou Cabbage," and may profit by a "Remedy for
+Asthma." A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore
+may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for
+relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines
+of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The
+District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine,
+Jr., Esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:--
+
+ "Rise Columbia, brave and free,
+ Poise the globe and bound the sea!"
+
+But the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to English
+literature, for there is a distinct mention of "Mr. Goethe's new novel,"
+and an explicit reference to "Dante Aligheri, an Italian bard." But
+let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find Mr.
+Buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau.
+And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob
+Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries,
+and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is
+sweetening our atmospheric existence.
+
+The late President Josiah Quincy, in his "History of the Boston
+Athenaeum," pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the
+labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the
+"Anthology." A literary journal had already been published in Boston,
+but very soon failed for want of patronage. An enterprising firm of
+publishers, "being desirous that the work should be continued, applied
+to the Reverend William Emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished
+for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen
+of Boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for
+literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this
+purpose they formed themselves into a Society. This Society was not
+completely organized until the year 1805, when Dr. Gardiner was elected
+President, and William Emerson Vice-President. The Society thus formed
+maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued
+ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting
+and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be
+considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after
+that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the
+Revolutionary War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history
+of the United States. Its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a
+pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring
+harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a
+success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little
+sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties
+with which they had to struggle."
+
+The publication of the "Anthology" began in 1804, when Mr. William
+Emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in
+the year of his death, 1811. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight years old at
+that time. His intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat
+obscure afterglow of the "Anthology" was in the western horizon of the
+New England sky.
+
+The nebula which was to form a cluster about the "North American Review"
+did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of
+the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half
+century of that periodical. It is easy to find fault with it for uniform
+respectability and occasional dulness. But take the names of its
+contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of
+that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved
+from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving
+and Cooper. Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and
+Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor,
+Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of
+Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and,
+lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic
+literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"?
+
+These were the writers who helped to make the "North American Review"
+what it was during the period of Emerson's youth and early manhood.
+These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character. We
+may count as symbols the three hills of "this darling town of ours,"
+as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty
+lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and
+shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily
+on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to
+those in which we are living.
+
+The social religious influences of the first part of the century
+must not be forgotten. The two high-caste religions of that day were
+white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism. What called
+itself "society" was chiefly distributed between them. Within less than
+fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat
+changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. This
+movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both
+sexes from domestic service. A large part of the "hired help,"--for
+the word servant was commonly repudiated,--worshipped, not with their
+employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages
+stood at the doors. The congregations that went chiefly from the
+drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the
+culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of
+social cleavage. A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not
+reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable
+result. This must always be remembered in judging the men and women
+of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving
+prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in
+the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. The line of social
+separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of
+Unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present
+day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing
+with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and
+dollars. The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of
+bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of
+independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even
+in the sanctuary. True religious equality is harder to establish than
+civil liberty. No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than
+Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time
+in the whole country.
+
+Such were Emerson's intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and
+environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to
+manhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life.
+
+1803-1823. To _AET_. 20.
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of
+May, 1803.
+
+He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert
+Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy.
+
+His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin
+Franklin, were within a kite-string's distance of each other. When
+the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street
+through the narrow passage long known as Bishop's Alley, now Hawley
+Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot
+where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the
+First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and
+the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo. The oblong quadrangle between
+Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street,
+and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was
+afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner's maps of 1722 and 1769 as
+an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway.
+
+Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a
+most attractive little _rus in urbe_. The sunny gardens of the late
+Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P. Gardner opened their flowers
+and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses
+and other massive edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the "Saint
+Michael," the "Brown Bury," found their natural homes in these sheltered
+enclosures. The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out
+upon these gardens. Some of us can well remember the window of his
+son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening
+to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "The Conquest of
+Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable
+than those encountered by Cortes. It was a charmed region in which
+Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a
+communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other
+living person.
+
+Mr. John Lowell Gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of Mr.
+Emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of
+interest concerning him never before given to the public. With his kind
+permission I have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed
+especially worthy of note from his letter.
+
+ "I may be said to have known Emerson from the very beginning. A very
+ low fence divided my father's estate in Summer Street from the field
+ in which I remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed,--but
+ this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by Chauncy
+ Place Church and by the brick houses on Summer Street. Where the
+ family removed to I do not remember, but I always knew the boys,
+ William, Ralph, and perhaps Edward, and I again associated with
+ Ralph at the Latin School, where we were instructed by Master Gould
+ from 1815 to 1817, entering College in the latter year.
+
+ "... I have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it
+ was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. He never was idle or a
+ lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. I should say
+ that his conduct was absolutely faultless. It was impossible that
+ there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection.
+ He had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you
+ that you have known in him since. Still, he was not prominent in the
+ class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him,
+ his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in
+ recalling College days.
+
+ "The fact that we were almost the only Latin School fellows in the
+ class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the Freshman
+ year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an
+ intimacy arose which continued through our College life. We were in
+ the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose
+ at distant points, as at Mount Auburn, etc.... Emerson was not
+ talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well
+ weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash
+ when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be
+ remembered. He was so universally amiable and complying that my
+ evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his
+ gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his
+ equanimity. All that was wanting to render him an almost perfect
+ character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor.
+
+ "On leaving College our paths in life were so remote from each other
+ that we met very infrequently. He soon became, as it were, public
+ property, and I was engrossed for many years in my commercial
+ undertakings. All his course of life is known to many survivors. I
+ am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. I remember that
+ some years since, when it was known that our classmate ---- was
+ reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two
+ sons, Emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates
+ for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made
+ what I considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was
+ not from any Southern sentiment on the part of Emerson. I send you
+ herewith the two youthful productions of Emerson of which I spoke to
+ you some time since."
+
+The first of these is a prose Essay of four pages, written for a
+discussion in which the Professions of Divinity, Medicine, and Law were
+to be weighed against each other. Emerson had the Lawyer's side to
+advocate. It is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or
+brilliancy. His opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same
+instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and
+the conduct of his life.
+
+ "It is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all
+ possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful
+ auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our
+ attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far
+ as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments
+ being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for
+ the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the
+ subject."
+
+From many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in
+the history of Mr. Emerson's life that "bold appeal to the heart," that
+"tribute of honest conviction," were made eloquent and real. The
+boy meant it when he said it. To carry out his law of sincerity and
+self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he
+did not flinch from his early principles.
+
+It must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his
+College days. The other old manuscript Mr. Gardner sends me is marked
+"'Song for Knights of Square Table,' R.W.E."
+
+There are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. The
+Muses and all the deities, not forgetting Bacchus, were duly invited to
+the festival.
+
+ "Let the doors of Olympus be open for all
+ To descend and make merry in Chivalry's hall."
+ * * * * *
+
+Mr. Sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by
+Emerson about his early years.
+
+The parsonage was situated at the corner of Summer and what is now
+Chauncy streets. It had a yard, and an orchard which Emerson said was as
+large as Dr. Ripley's, which might have been some two or three acres.
+Afterwards there was a brick house looking on Summer Street, in which
+Emerson the father lived. It was separated, Emerson said, by a brick
+wall from a garden in which _pears grew_ (a fact a boy is likely to
+remember). Master Ralph Waldo used to _sit on this wall_,--but we cannot
+believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to
+do so. On the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his
+nightgown to a neighboring house.
+
+After Reverend William Emerson's death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house
+in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands. She kept some
+boarders,--among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State
+of Massachusetts. It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo
+and Charles used to drive their mother's cow there to pasture.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of
+William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W. Emerson
+must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died
+when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in "the new
+parsonage," which was, doubtless, the "brick house" above referred to.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. Mr. Cooke tells us
+that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and
+soon afterwards the Latin School. At the age of eleven he was turning
+Virgil into very readable English heroics. He loved the study of Greek;
+was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses.
+But he thinks "the idle books under the bench at the Latin School" were
+as profitable to him as his regular studies.
+
+Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the "Boyhood
+Memories" of Rufus Dawes. His old schoolmate speaks of him as "a
+spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years
+old,--whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my
+mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him
+so angelic and remarkable." That "blue nankeen" sounds strangely, it may
+be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter
+of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a
+common summer clothing of children. The places where the factories and
+streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open
+fields and farms. My recollection is that we did not think very highly
+of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,--a dull-colored fabric, too
+nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering.
+
+Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College. Having a near
+connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy,
+generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College
+from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William
+Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have
+expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of
+the great writers of his time. I do not recollect hearing of him except
+as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a
+minister. His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college
+days:--
+
+ "Two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into
+ history, although one of them, Charles W. Upham [the connection of
+ mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. Ralph
+ Waldo Emerson and Robert W. Barnwell, for widely different reasons,
+ have caused their names to be known to well-informed Americans. Of
+ Emerson, I regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. Here
+ is the sort of way in which I speak of the man who was to make so
+ profound an impression upon the thought of his time. 'I went to the
+ chapel to hear Emerson's dissertation: a very good one, but rather
+ too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.' The fault, I
+ suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which I have mentioned
+ goes to confirm this belief. It seems that Emerson accepted the duty
+ of delivering the Poem on Class Day, after seven others had been
+ asked who positively, refused. So it appears that, in the opinion of
+ this critical class, the author of the 'Woodnotes' and the 'Humble
+ Bee' ranked about eighth in poetical ability. It can only be because
+ the works of the other five [seven] have been 'heroically unwritten'
+ that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside
+ world. But if, according to the measurement of undergraduates,
+ Emerson's ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be
+ admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better,
+ he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the
+ world has since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes
+ competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson
+ and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to
+ take the two prizes; but--Alas for the infallibility of academic
+ decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much
+ pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should
+ have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who
+ was to be the most original and influential writer born in America
+ was my unsuccessful competitor. But Emerson, incubating over deeper
+ matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of
+ elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was
+ fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. He was quiet,
+ unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of
+ the College authorities. And this is really all I have to say about
+ my most distinguished classmate."
+
+Barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the Valedictory
+Oration, and Emerson the Poem. Neither of these performances was highly
+spoken of by Mr. Quincy.
+
+I was surprised to find by one of the old Catalogues that Emerson
+roomed during a part of his College course with a young man whom I well
+remember, J.G.K. Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard
+Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to
+Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College
+_elegans_ of that time, the _merveilleux_, the _mirliflores_, of their
+day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the
+prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects
+of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help
+wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin
+together as room-mates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+1823-1828. AET. 20-25.
+
+Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of
+Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in
+Various Places.
+
+
+We get a few brief glimpses of Emerson during the years following his
+graduation. He writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from Harvard
+to Andover:--
+
+ "I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German
+ and Hebrew, Parkhurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory
+ aches to think of, on foot at Andover. Meantime, Unitarianism will
+ not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much
+ theological mischief is planned, at Cambridge as at Andover. By the
+ time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will
+ not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly
+ he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and
+ Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie."
+
+ "You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city
+ needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. The sight of
+ broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of Greek and German
+ names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to
+ emulation for a month."
+
+After leaving College, and while studying Divinity, Emerson employed a
+part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively.
+
+Emerson's older brother William was teaching in Boston, and Ralph Waldo,
+after graduating, joined him in that occupation. In the year 1825 or
+1826, he taught school also in Chelmsford, a town of Middlesex County,
+Massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of Lowell.
+One of his pupils in that school, the Honorable Josiah Gardiner Abbott,
+has favored me with the following account of his recollections:--
+
+The school of which Mr. Emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned
+country "Academy." Mr. Emerson was probably studying for the ministry
+while teaching there. Judge Abbott remembers the impression he made
+on the boys. He was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his
+appearance. There was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him;
+he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never
+punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the
+boys. His old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some
+offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only
+these two words: "Oh, sad!" That was enough, for he had the faculty of
+making the boys love him. One of his modes of instruction was to give
+the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them,--from some book
+like Plutarch's Lives,--and the next day to examine them and find out
+how much they retained from their reading. Judge Abbott remembers a
+peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to
+be in the field of vision. The whole impression left on this pupil's
+mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him.
+
+Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among
+his pupils was Mr. John Holmes. His impressions seem to be very much
+like those of Judge Abbott.
+
+My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus:--
+
+ "Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. Rather
+ stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win boys by a
+ surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every inch
+ a king in his dominion. Looking back, he seems to me rather like a
+ captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny,
+ but not amused with its incongruities. He once recommended the use
+ of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items."
+
+In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the
+ministry. He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some
+of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled
+as one of its regular students.
+
+The teachings of that day were such as would now be called
+"old-fashioned Unitarianism." But no creed can be held to be a finality.
+From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to
+Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of
+a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain
+permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are
+not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill
+the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on
+the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to
+Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer,
+and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian
+Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the
+evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church.
+
+There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. If De
+Tocqueville's account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of
+his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached
+acceptably in some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might have
+been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians.
+
+At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the
+dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of
+the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University
+at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry
+Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature,
+followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James
+Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in
+Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that
+the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly
+connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge
+graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable
+in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose
+by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant
+talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which
+their light could shine before men.
+
+Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a
+reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his
+fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of
+a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from
+the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is
+hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned
+professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling
+about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His
+brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found
+his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the
+profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less
+exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his
+instructors: "If they had examined me, they probably would not have let
+me preach at all." His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not
+taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which
+accounted for his being excused from examination. In 1826, after three
+years' study, he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association
+of Ministers. His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he
+went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida. During this
+absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places. On his
+return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in
+Concord, and in Boston. His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we
+shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his
+being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city
+clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a
+settled Minister in Boston.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+1828-1833. AET. 25-30.
+
+Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa
+Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral
+and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs.
+Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon
+Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate.
+
+
+On the 11th of March, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague with
+the Reverend Henry Ware, Minister of the Second Church in Boston. In
+September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker.
+The resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the
+pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed
+them diligently and acceptably. Mr. Conway gives the following brief
+account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of
+Father Taylor too good not to be repeated:--
+
+ "Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston.
+ He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State
+ Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and
+ helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father
+ Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave
+ an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when
+ establishing the Seaman's Mission in Boston. This was told me by
+ Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his
+ company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the
+ Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he
+ softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. I have
+ no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any
+ personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have
+ given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson.
+ Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to"--[the place
+ which a divine of Charles the Second's day said it was not good
+ manners to mention in church].--"'It does look so,' said Father
+ Taylor, 'but I am sure of one thing: if Emerson goes to'"--[that
+ place]--"'he will change the climate there, and emigration will set
+ that way.'"
+
+In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the
+Reverend H.B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley's colleague. His address on giving
+the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his
+collected works.
+
+The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled
+minister were too soon darkened. In February, 1832, the wife of
+his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of
+consumption.
+
+He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties,
+and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. On
+the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord's Supper,
+in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against
+administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples
+were founded. This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one
+which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never
+stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. The sermon
+is in no sense "Emersonian" except in its directness, its sweet temper,
+and outspoken honesty. He argues from his comparison of texts in a
+perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might
+have done. It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon
+his "pressing a piece of _Charity_ disagreeable to the will of the
+_Ruling Elder_, there was occasioned an unhappy _Discord_ in the Church
+of _Concord_; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help
+of a _Council_ and the _Ruling Elder's_ Abdication." So says Cotton
+Mather. Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in
+Emerson's days we need not try to determine. The sermon was only a more
+formal declaration of views respecting the Lord's Supper, which he had
+previously made known in a conference with some of the most active
+members of his church. As a committee of the parish reported resolutions
+radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this
+sermon and at the same time resigned his office. There was no "discord,"
+there was no need of a "council." Nothing could be more friendly, more
+truly Christian, than the manner in which Mr. Emerson expressed himself
+in this parting discourse. All the kindness of his nature warms it
+throughout. He details the differences of opinion which have existed
+in the church with regard to the ordinance. He then argues from the
+language of the Evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent
+institution. He takes up the statement of Paul in the Epistle to the
+Corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter
+our opinion derived from the Evangelists. He does not think that we are
+to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. If that
+church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not
+settle the question for us. On every other subject, succeeding times
+have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of
+Christianity than was the practice of the early ages.
+
+"But, it is said, 'Admit that the rite was not designed to be
+perpetual.' What harm doth it?"
+
+He proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue
+the observance of the rite. It was treating that as authoritative which,
+as he believed that he had shown from Scripture, was not so. It confused
+the idea of God by transferring the worship of Him to Christ. Christ is
+the Mediator only as the instructor of man. In the least petition to God
+"the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your
+mind than your brother or child." Again:--
+
+ "The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the
+ modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and
+ unsuited to affect us. The day of formal religion is past, and we
+ are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The Jewish
+ was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the
+ Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach
+ men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was
+ religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and
+ forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to that purpose;
+ and with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must
+ contend that it is a matter of vital importance,--really a duty to
+ commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable
+ to their understanding or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of
+ God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?"
+
+To these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings
+those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable
+relation with those who do.
+
+The beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity
+in these words at the close of his argument:--
+
+ "Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this
+ institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither
+ should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I
+ not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of
+ my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it
+ stand to the end of the world if it please men and please Heaven,
+ and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces."
+
+He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling
+in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to
+administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been
+confided to him.
+
+This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson's ever published. It was
+impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his
+truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning.
+It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations
+over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up
+entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on
+both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found
+himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+1833-1838. AET. 30-35.
+
+Section 1. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different
+Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at
+Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on
+Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American
+Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the
+Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
+
+Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in
+Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English
+Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching
+in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by
+Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of
+History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of
+Charles Chauncy Emerson.
+
+Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its
+Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
+
+
+Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first
+time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief
+which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford
+him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled
+"English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily,
+Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower
+Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning
+visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom
+he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the
+rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that
+one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together,
+or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was
+explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief
+persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he
+reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions
+incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his
+microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson
+hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look
+through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson
+says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the
+wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with
+these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further
+abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon,
+were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of
+Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom
+he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which,
+follows:--
+
+ "The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people
+ who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that
+ they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply
+ themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost
+ destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that
+ frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best
+ terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or
+ in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you
+ crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I
+ have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to
+ my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these
+ impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of
+ having been met, and a larger horizon."
+
+Emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Edinburgh,
+who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over
+to Mr. Alexander Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of
+him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland's
+presentation of Emerson as he heard him in the Scotch pulpit shows
+that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of
+strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen:--
+
+"On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in
+the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly
+the effect which it produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to
+say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of
+them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts,
+the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the
+calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and
+the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the
+least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not
+long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers,
+whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence
+carried, for the moment, all before them,--his audience becoming like
+clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant
+thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a
+greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His
+voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever
+heard; nothing like it have I listened to since.
+
+ 'That music in our hearts we bore
+ Long after it was heard no more.'"
+
+Mr. George Gilfillan speaks of "the solemnity of his manner, and the
+earnest thought pervading his discourse."
+
+As to the effect of his preaching on his American audiences, I find the
+following evidence in Mr. Cooke's diligently gathered collections. Mr.
+Sanborn says:--
+
+ "His pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means
+ equally so to all persons. In 1829, before the two friends had met,
+ Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing's church on 'The
+ Universality of the Moral Sentiment,' and was struck, as he said,
+ with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the
+ direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers."
+
+Mr. Charles Congdon, of New Bedford, well known as a popular
+writer, gives the following account of Emerson's preaching in his
+"Reminiscences." I borrow the quotation from Mr. Conway:--
+
+ "One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals,
+ with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the
+ first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was
+ a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after
+ Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an
+ indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional
+ illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and
+ dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand
+ them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse."
+
+Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. The Reverend Dr.
+Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford,
+writes to me as follows:--
+
+ "After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there
+ several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who
+ heard him. The Society would have been glad to settle him as their
+ minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for
+ some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion
+ service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at
+ that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration
+ for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a
+ Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his
+ friend, without any action by the Society."
+
+All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable.
+But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must
+have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to
+many a passage from old sermons of his,--for he tells us he borrowed
+from those old sermons for his lectures,--without ever thinking of the
+pulpit from which they were first heard.
+
+Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he
+quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public
+as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H.
+Rice. In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with
+another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being
+at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in
+the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice
+to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along,
+Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of
+thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and
+spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which
+had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after
+generation.
+
+When they parted at the house of young Rice's father, Emerson invited
+the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon. They
+came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off.
+"Boys," said Emerson, "here we recognize the presence of the Universal
+Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d' ye do? How d'
+ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with
+our own How d' ye do? How d' ye do? And all the waving branches of
+the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the
+singing brook, and the insect and the bird,--every living thing and
+things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while
+they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the
+salutation of the Universal Spirit."
+
+We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson's earlier
+Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences
+of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus
+unexpectedly favored. Governor Rice continues:--
+
+ "You know what a captivating charm there always was in Emerson's
+ presence, but I can never tell you how this line of thought then
+ impressed a country boy. I do not remember anything about the
+ remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,--I
+ only remember that I went home wondering about that mystical dream
+ of the Universal Spirit, and about what manner of man he was under
+ whose influence I had for the first time come....
+
+ "The interview left impressions that led me into new channels of
+ thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt
+ not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological
+ dogma and genuine religion in the soul."
+
+In the summer of 1834 Emerson became a resident of Concord,
+Massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to
+be his home for life. He first lived with his venerable connection, Dr.
+Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the "Old Manse." It
+is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene
+of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was built for the Reverend
+William Emerson, his grandfather. In one of the rooms of this house
+Emerson wrote "Nature," and in the same room, some years later,
+Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse."
+
+The place in which Emerson passed the greater part of his life well
+deserves a special notice. Concord might sit for its portrait as an
+ideal New England town. If wanting in the variety of surface which
+many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant
+summits of Monadnock and Wachusett. It has fine old woods, and noble
+elms to give dignity to its open spaces. Beautiful ponds, as they
+modestly call themselves,--one of which, Walden, is as well known in our
+literature as Windermere in that of Old England,--lie quietly in their
+clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges,
+a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy
+margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the
+Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more
+restless Assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by
+and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad Merrimac. The names
+of these rivers tell us that Concord has an Indian history, and there is
+evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our
+own. The native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were
+pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows
+and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters.
+
+The place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its
+physical attractions. Its settlement under the lead of Emerson's
+ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many
+difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble
+leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid
+was fired the first fatal shot of the "rebel" farmers. Emerson appeals
+to the Records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the
+working of our American institutions and the character of the men of
+Concord:--
+
+ "If the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to
+ be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+ fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+ much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+What names that plain New England town reckons in the roll of its
+inhabitants! Stout Major Buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of
+Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers
+and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter
+Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as
+the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as
+the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our
+stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and
+half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a
+school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in
+undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I
+need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning
+the women whose names have added to its distinction. It has long been an
+intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of
+any other, could boast. Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted
+by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the
+dust that is covered by their turf.
+
+Such was the place which the advent of Emerson made the Delphi of New
+England and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions.
+
+On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to
+appear before the public as a lecturer. His first subjects, "Water," and
+the "Relation of Man to the Globe," were hardly such as we should have
+expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical
+and physiological science. They were probably chosen as of a popular
+character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and
+entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him
+pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are
+not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so
+far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating
+the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at
+home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his
+taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. In 1834
+he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund
+Burke. The first two of these lectures, though not included in his
+collected works, may be found in the "North American Review" for 1837
+and 1838. The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in
+prose and verse may be found in these Essays.
+
+The _Cosmos_ of the Ancient Greeks, the _piu nel' uno_, "The Many in
+One," appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his
+"Nature." The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little
+poem entitled "Each and All." The "Rhodora," another brief poem, finds
+itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, "What is Beauty?" and its answer,
+"This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt.
+It may be produced. But it cannot be defined." And throughout this Essay
+the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is
+the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment.
+_Noscitur a sociis_ applies as well to a man's dead as to his living
+companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on
+Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution,
+long remembered, "When you strike at a _King_, you must kill him."
+He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own
+intelligence. What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character
+chiefly interested him. He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble.
+Like his "Humble Bee," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," whom he speaks
+of as
+
+ "Wiser far than human seer,"
+
+and says of him,
+
+ "Aught unsavory or unclean
+ Hath my insect never seen,"
+
+he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is
+repulsive to dwell upon,
+
+ "Seeing only what is fair,
+ Sipping only what is sweet."
+
+Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his
+earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as
+printed in the Essay.
+
+ "He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race;
+ he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty
+ that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and
+ self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness."
+
+Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters
+they draw. One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will
+not take the color of his subject. He may force himself to picture that
+which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he
+delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he
+feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. Let us
+try Emerson by this test in his "Essay on Milton:"--
+
+ "It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour
+ foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?)
+ of all men, in the power to _inspire_. Virtue goes out of him into
+ others." ... "He is identified in the mind with all select and holy
+ images, with the supreme interests of the human race."--"Better than
+ any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely,
+ to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of
+ posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a
+ composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not
+ described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to
+ him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and
+ Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and
+ we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who
+ communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of
+ piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes."
+
+Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, "To raise the idea of man;"
+he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preëminent degree. If ever a man
+communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of
+Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is
+worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a
+school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for
+its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The
+similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into
+their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a
+revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost
+very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them
+in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many
+parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any
+man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer
+of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of
+audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman"
+like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive
+controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But
+though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have
+been conscious, like Milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest
+haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles
+Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the
+feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in
+the line he quotes:--
+
+ "The hand of Douglas is his own."
+
+It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was
+listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that
+of the divine singer.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson,
+who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the
+movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has
+kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:--
+
+ TO REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY.
+
+ PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834.
+
+ MY DEAR SIR,--As the day approaches when Mr. Lewis should leave
+ Boston, I seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of
+ towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the
+ valued manuscripts which I return. The translations excited me much,
+ and who can estimate the value of a good thought? I trust I am to
+ learn much more from you hereafter of your German studies, and much
+ I hope of your own. You asked in your note concerning Carlyle. My
+ recollections of him are most pleasant, and I feel great confidence
+ in his character. He understands and recognizes his mission. He is
+ perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he
+ can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some
+ impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a
+ residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember
+ him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was
+ cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read
+ with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and
+ when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from
+ the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way;
+ whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of
+ two or three years afterward.--He has many, many tokens of Goethe's
+ regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to
+ Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your
+ visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries.
+ He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in
+ the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "Fraser's
+ Magazine." I therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the
+ "Mud Magazine," but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two
+ last numbers. The mail is going, so I shall finish my letter another
+ time.
+
+ Your obliged friend and servant,
+
+ R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+ CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834.
+
+ MY DEAR SIR,--Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece
+ on Goethe and Carlyle. I have read it with great pleasure and a
+ feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it
+ was not published. I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not
+ printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one. Is it too late
+ now? Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account
+ of Carlyle's later pieces, to wit: "Diderot," and "Sartor Resartus."
+ The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched
+ pamphlet. Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public)
+ of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem,
+ reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. And it
+ seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as
+ must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that
+ of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still
+ retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid,
+ having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be
+ glad to know that he values his American readers very highly;
+ that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it
+ questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about
+ publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a
+ part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French
+ Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry,
+ could we tell it right. He adds, moreover, in a letter I have
+ recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he
+ might end in the western woods. Shall we not bid him come, and be
+ Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? Or,
+ as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to
+ become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to
+ spiritual influences of the higher kind? Have you read Sampson
+ Reed's "Growth of the Mind"? I rejoice to be contemporary with that
+ man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives;
+ there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead.
+
+ Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON.
+
+
+ It occurs to me that 't is unfit to send any white paper so far as
+ to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle's letter.
+
+[This may be found in Carlyle's first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.]
+Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part
+of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication
+of "Sartor Resartus," which I will repeat in his own words:--
+
+ "It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of
+ Emerson's marriage] that the 'Sartor Resartus' appeared in 'Fraser.'
+ Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of 'Fraser,' to
+ Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them. The excitement
+ which the book caused among young persons interested in the
+ literature of the day at that time you probably remember. I was
+ quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I
+ determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe
+ & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to
+ a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication.
+ This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate,
+ William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was
+ accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no
+ part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the
+ Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co.,
+ 1836. It was omitted in the third American from the second London
+ edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition
+ appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co.
+ offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and
+ to this I assented.
+
+ [Footnote 1: Revised and corrected by the author.]
+
+ "This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the
+ 'Sartor' in either country, as a distinct edition. Some copies of
+ the sheets from 'Fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent
+ to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing
+ to take the responsibility of printing the book. This shows, I think,
+ how much more interest was taken in Carlyle's writings in this country
+ than in England."
+
+On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of
+that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the
+careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton. This correspondence lasted
+from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his
+last letter to Emerson. The two writers reveal themselves as being in
+strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of
+temperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality
+was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with
+Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers,
+find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not
+weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments
+there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The
+Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a _De_
+_Profundis_ answered by a _Sursum Corda_. "The ground of my existence
+is black as death," says Carlyle. "Come and live with me a year," says
+Emerson, "and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of
+these years; (when the 'History' has passed its ten editions, and been
+translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you."
+
+
+Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia
+Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine
+old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his
+sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their
+marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which
+he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their
+daughter still reside. This is the "plain, square, wooden house," with
+horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which
+has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but
+not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account
+of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "Poets' Homes,"
+by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.
+
+On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an "Historical
+Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of
+the Incorporation of the Town." There is no "mysticism," no
+"transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts
+are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became
+the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful,
+very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative
+Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson
+ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix.
+One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with
+a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with
+annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. Oracles are brief and
+final in their utterances. Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain
+what they say.
+
+It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies
+and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of
+rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. The discourses delivered
+on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a
+clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and
+heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland
+towns of New England. Emerson has told its story in as painstaking,
+faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. But with this
+fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque
+touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.
+
+ "I have read with care," he says, "the town records themselves.
+ They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively
+ agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search
+ after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of
+ a manifest love of justice. I find our annals marked with a uniform
+ good sense.--The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the
+ event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric
+ within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but
+ they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just
+ community." ... "The matters there debated (in town meetings) are
+ such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages
+ of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for
+ confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and
+ private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as
+ proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are
+ approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the
+ good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be
+ suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a
+ fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so
+ much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government."
+
+There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord's
+citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. In fact Mr.
+Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a
+plain Concord citizen. His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant
+upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and
+careful listener to the debates on town matters. That respect for
+"mother-wit" and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals
+itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse
+with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for
+that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in
+their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their
+idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the
+fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into
+a dream--peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who
+insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of
+idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would
+be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of
+self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple
+discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than
+any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which
+amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by
+attending fairly to their natural duties. So admirably is the working of
+a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed
+in the history of Concord's two hundred years of village life, that
+one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed
+for distribution, as an illustration of the American principle of
+self-government.
+
+After settling in Concord, Emerson delivered courses of Lectures in
+Boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten Lectures on
+English Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of
+History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures
+may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them
+probably contributed to the Essays and Discourses which we find in his
+published volumes.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the
+completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight.
+For this occasion Emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the
+lines:--
+
+ Here once the embattled farmers stood,
+ And fired the shot heard round the world.
+
+The last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every American,
+and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. Until the
+autumn of 1838, Emerson preached twice on Sundays to the church at East
+Lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that
+when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of
+Emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied:
+"We are a very simple people, and can understand no one but Mr.
+Emerson." He said of himself: "My pulpit is the Lyceum platform."
+Knowing that he made his Sermons contribute to his Lectures, we need not
+mourn over their not being reported.
+
+In March, 1837, Emerson delivered in Boston a Lecture on War, afterwards
+published in Miss Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers." He recognizes war as one
+of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear
+with the advance of mankind:--
+
+ "At a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a
+ sound body and mind. At a certain high stage he makes no offensive
+ demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable
+ heart. At a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness;
+ passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all
+ converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself,
+ and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity;
+ but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one
+ engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an
+ individual, but to the common good of all men."
+
+In 1834 Emerson's brother Edward died, as already mentioned, in the West
+India island where he had gone for his health. In his letter to Carlyle,
+of November 12th of the same year, Emerson says: "Your letter, which
+I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened
+place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother
+in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong
+sorrow." It was of him that Emerson wrote the lines "In Memoriam," in
+which he says,--
+
+ "There is no record left on earth
+ Save on tablets of the heart,
+ Of the rich, inherent worth,
+ Of the grace that on him shone
+ Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
+ He could not frame a word unfit,
+ An act unworthy to be done."
+
+Another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. On the 7th of October,
+1835, he says in a letter to Carlyle:--
+
+ "I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one
+ too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles
+ Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I
+ believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on
+ all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure
+ pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two
+ gentlemen know each other."
+
+Alas for human hopes and prospects! In less than a year from the date of
+that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle:--
+
+ "Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your
+ first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I
+ have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the
+ inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well,
+ and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave
+ question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so
+ much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for
+ I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better
+ than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time
+ of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my
+ house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have
+ known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.
+ He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of
+ man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He
+ postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so
+ that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But
+ some time I shall see you and speak of him."
+
+
+Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book
+of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no
+name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author,
+Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay
+with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has
+proved for many,--I will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow
+bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they
+must cross it, or one domain of Emerson's intellect will not be reached.
+
+It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It
+talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning
+simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until,
+as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of
+his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words
+which "a certain poet sang" to him.
+
+This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was
+peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's
+"Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was
+vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves
+common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to
+travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very
+long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell
+five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's
+
+ "doubtful tale from fairy-land
+ Hard for the non-elect to understand."
+
+The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.
+
+ "Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the
+ first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance
+ of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a
+ counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering
+ against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William
+ Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was
+ the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since
+ then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the
+ echo of his name."
+
+No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than
+Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "Nature," his
+first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the
+Preface to "The Excursion" that we find in the Introduction to "Nature."
+
+ "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
+ we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
+ relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
+ philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
+ revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
+
+ "Paradise and groves
+ Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
+ Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
+ A history only of departed things,
+ Or a mere fiction of what never was?"
+
+"Nature" is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters,
+which might almost as well have been called cantos.
+
+Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with
+which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first
+time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the
+planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country
+intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted
+as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been
+etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of
+his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these
+excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured
+the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and
+the stars shone again in quiet reflection.
+
+After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses
+himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes "part or particle of
+God," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _Commodity_, the
+ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing
+and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of
+Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has
+called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural
+conveniences.
+
+But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love
+of _Beauty_" which is his next subject. There are some touches of
+description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and
+impressions for pictures.
+
+Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be
+found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. "What is
+common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"Nothing
+is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"No
+reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily
+these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems,
+"Each and All," and "The Rhodora." A good deal of his philosophy comes
+out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:--
+
+ "Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for
+ the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are
+ but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not
+ ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not
+ alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a
+ part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of
+ Nature.".
+
+In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that
+
+ "Beauty is its own excuse for being."
+
+In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse
+itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper
+than itself.
+
+He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of
+natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular
+spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very
+profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in
+which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become
+transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.
+
+ "A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual
+ processes, will find that always a material image, more or less
+ luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought,
+ which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and
+ brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories."
+
+From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful
+mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material
+images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves
+when great exigencies call for them.
+
+ "The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
+ nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year,
+ without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
+ altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long
+ hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in
+ the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their
+ morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the
+ passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again
+ the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and
+ the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
+ infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of
+ power, are put into his hands."
+
+It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say
+that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of
+Wordsworth:--
+
+ "These beauteous forms,
+ Through a long absence, have not been to me
+ As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
+ But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
+ Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
+ In hours of weariness sensations sweet
+ Felt in the blood and felt along the heart."
+
+It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may
+have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the
+comparison.
+
+In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence
+of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.
+Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp,
+because
+
+ "Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral
+ law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the
+ circumference."--"All things with which we deal preach to us.
+ What is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"From the child's successive
+ possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy
+ will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under
+ his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the
+ whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character."
+
+The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to.
+He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a
+friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with
+sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing,
+and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." This
+thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles,
+which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had
+already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some
+recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man
+laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
+Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has
+just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down
+over less worth in the population." This was the first effect of the
+loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders
+events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.
+
+The chapter on _Idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves
+capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment
+of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the
+existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical
+inquiries." The most essential statement is this:--
+
+ "It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World,
+ that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a
+ certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon,
+ man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test
+ the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the
+ impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what
+ difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or
+ some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?"
+
+We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like
+that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which
+cheat the senses by false appearances.
+
+The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities
+between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The
+philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones
+the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought."
+Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature
+and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts
+Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of
+external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses
+the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not
+undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed
+understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a
+child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and
+melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is
+phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the
+world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant
+eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
+
+The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the
+next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_.
+
+Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the
+demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three
+questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory
+answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a
+substance.
+
+ "But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many
+ truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn
+ that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread
+ universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
+ power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all
+ things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that
+ behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is
+ one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from
+ without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through
+ ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the
+ bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at
+ his need, inexhaustible power."
+
+Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a
+"creator in the finite."
+
+ "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more
+ evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from
+ God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer
+ run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us."
+
+All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next
+chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.
+
+This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with
+a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction,
+undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught
+sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the
+"imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In
+a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for
+the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us,
+certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more
+of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and
+to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the
+realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's
+"Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air
+of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature
+which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is
+the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He
+filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
+sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer
+fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop."
+Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct."
+Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England
+Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the
+Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
+The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us,
+"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to
+the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The
+seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There
+shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of
+Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in
+things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable
+appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,
+enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New
+Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "Revelation." He
+found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet,
+considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble
+imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our
+Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a
+poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its
+pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines composed near Tintern
+Abbey" had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers
+who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical
+beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "Democratic Review" in
+terms of enthusiastic admiration.
+
+Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy
+in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical,
+semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner,"
+headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for
+1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his
+subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the
+acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations
+between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article.
+The professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron
+to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes
+successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound
+philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by
+obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more
+than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after
+some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily
+agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:--
+
+ "On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the
+ criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only
+ allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in
+ itself."
+
+Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:--
+
+ "Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I
+ read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a
+ sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back.
+ You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it
+ rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build
+ whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the
+ true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a
+ man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look
+ out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear
+ for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and
+ utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to
+ be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a
+ kind of attempt to write down."
+
+The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words
+from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last
+thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not
+know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:--
+
+ "A subtle chain of countless rings
+ The next unto the farthest brings;
+ The eye reads omens where it goes,
+ And speaks all languages the rose;
+ And striving to be man, the worm
+ Mounts through all the spires of form."
+
+The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course,
+like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was
+printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's
+"Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of
+"The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844,
+had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems
+as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does
+not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to
+catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in
+the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than
+the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an
+acephalous mollusk. "I will not be sworn," says Benedick, "but love may
+transform me to an oyster." For "love" read science.
+
+Unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of Nature and its
+teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to
+which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and
+elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may
+be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an
+aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a
+stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England
+scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it
+was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,--
+
+ "The golden key
+ Which opes the palace of eternity,"
+
+inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth,
+because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through
+the purification of their own souls.
+
+Next to "Nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "The
+American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
+at Cambridge, August 31, 1837."
+
+The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the
+uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that
+philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the
+annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many
+distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual
+addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest.
+Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any
+former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured
+in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded
+and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what
+enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"
+
+Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas
+found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered
+before such an audience. Every real thinker's world of thought has its
+centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle
+round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and
+then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through
+those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture;
+for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become
+atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It
+begins with a note like a trumpet call.
+
+ "Thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign
+ of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to
+ give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
+ indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when
+ it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard
+ intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and
+ fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better
+ than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our
+ long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
+ close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot
+ always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events,
+ actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can
+ doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in
+ the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers
+ announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?"
+
+Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was
+in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into
+fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the
+doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial
+manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole
+man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many
+faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is
+one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and
+strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach,
+an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,
+into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute
+book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship."
+
+This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted
+by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes
+hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.
+It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing
+the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled
+in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a
+fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's
+time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found
+cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when
+in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special
+acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of
+men's thoughts and working faculties.
+
+ "In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
+ intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the
+ degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a
+ mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
+ In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is
+ continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
+ pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."
+
+Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature
+upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his
+previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of
+the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence.
+"Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is
+hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is
+just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to
+give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.
+
+ "Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation
+ for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
+ this."
+
+When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to
+become an object of idolatrous regard.
+
+ "Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The
+ sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the
+ incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this
+ book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.
+ Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
+ by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set
+ out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle.
+ Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to
+ accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;
+ forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
+ libraries when they wrote these books.--One must he an inventor to
+ read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth
+ of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the
+ mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book
+ we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is
+ doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the
+ world."
+
+It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of
+books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.
+
+ "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.
+ Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen
+ into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action
+ past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the
+ intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this
+ by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is
+ converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."
+
+Emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these
+last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful
+paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration
+of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so
+Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were
+his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with
+him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have
+the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.
+
+ "There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not,
+ sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by
+ soaring from our body into the empyrean.
+
+ "Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and
+ dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many
+ another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already;
+ friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation
+ and world must also soar and sing."
+
+Having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by
+action, he speaks of the scholar's duties. "They may all," he says, "be
+comprised in self-trust." We have to remember that the _self_ he means
+is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to
+the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which
+all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he
+sings in "The Sphinx ":--
+
+ "The heavens that now draw him
+ With sweetness untold,
+ Once found,--for new heavens
+ He spurneth the old."
+
+ "First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater
+ by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The
+ man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be
+ enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of
+ this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which,
+ flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily,
+ and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and
+ vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand
+ stars. It is one soul which animates all men."
+
+And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid
+down to the American scholar of to-day. He does not spare his censure;
+he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is
+to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of
+humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather
+confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:--
+
+ "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
+ ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the
+ hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We
+ have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of
+ the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative,
+ tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of
+ this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There
+ is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant."
+
+The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.
+
+ "What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young
+ men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not
+ yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his
+ instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."
+
+Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was
+created to bear.
+
+ "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
+ we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first
+ time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
+ Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
+
+This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence.
+Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel
+Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful
+to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be
+preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there.
+The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was
+startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the
+firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts
+suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic
+illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the
+grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so
+stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet
+had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever
+forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker
+it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more
+like that of immediate inspiration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+1838-1843. AET. 35-40.
+
+Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human
+Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address:
+Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of
+Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The
+Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The
+Dial."--Brook Farm.
+
+Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History,
+Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence,
+Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account
+of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's
+Son.--Threnody.
+
+
+Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an
+Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,
+which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a
+controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus
+when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest
+and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual
+consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for
+the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.
+
+He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the
+change of an expression:--
+
+ "In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath
+ of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with
+ fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and
+ sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new
+ hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
+ Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
+ spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge
+ globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and
+ prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn."
+
+How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear,
+and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased
+attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed
+the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and
+milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the
+smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when
+it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did
+not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from
+the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of
+Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when
+Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and
+cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was
+consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate
+of many a copy of this famous discourse.
+
+It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of
+Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been
+applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this
+new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this
+alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the
+theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that
+it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are
+ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the
+reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and
+its tendencies.
+
+The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty,
+deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws
+which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and
+illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always
+asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.
+
+But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man
+is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and
+weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
+presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately
+stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in
+each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The
+intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
+the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we
+associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
+the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into
+hell."
+
+These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the
+world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one
+mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of
+the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks
+good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being
+shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
+badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms
+him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then
+deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."
+
+ "This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively
+ creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest
+ in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in
+ Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,
+ in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental
+ genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
+ found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
+ mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
+ history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
+ infusion."
+
+But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition.
+What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject
+it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the
+church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the
+doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of
+voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul."
+
+The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity
+and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by
+the discourse:--
+
+ "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with
+ open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,
+ ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
+ Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was
+ true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in
+ man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.
+ He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through
+ me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
+ thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion
+ did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
+ following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear
+ to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this
+ high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This
+ was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say
+ he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his
+ rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not
+ built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a
+ Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He
+ spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and
+ all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the
+ character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian
+ churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
+ with the blowing clover and the falling rain."
+
+He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of
+historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive,
+the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the
+Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us.
+"To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The
+preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies;
+they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and
+peculiarity.
+
+Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of
+Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the
+fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak
+of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were
+dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its
+fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the
+assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is
+closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing
+him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our
+theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
+was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like
+Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost."
+
+When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the
+"practical application," some of his young hearers must have been
+startled at the style of his address.
+
+ "Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
+ conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it
+ first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
+ money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that
+ you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the
+ immeasurable mind."
+
+Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of
+Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and
+secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but
+with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed
+an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed
+as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was
+assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom
+generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity,
+rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same
+divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with
+whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words
+carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the
+spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must
+have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses
+they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one
+having authority, and not as the Scribes.'"
+
+Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its
+doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ
+of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed
+and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in
+which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's
+discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of
+Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:--
+
+ "What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I
+ might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known
+ opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time,
+ and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and
+ presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of
+ dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is
+ perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse,
+ and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very
+ important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the
+ nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my
+ opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would
+ rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise.
+ Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as
+ it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not,
+ be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished
+ by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the
+ 'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I
+ heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and
+ love."
+
+Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of
+September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the
+idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and
+sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of
+which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings
+of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.
+
+To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:--
+
+ CONCORD, October 8, 1838.
+
+ "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter
+ of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right
+ manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it
+ assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it
+ as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition
+ to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your
+ thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think
+ of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men
+ at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of
+ criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical
+ writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to
+ rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed
+ near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the
+ notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated
+ fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no
+ scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I
+ could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not
+ possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on
+ which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments
+ are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in
+ telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it
+ is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see
+ that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the
+ present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly
+ raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I
+ advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make
+ good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such
+ thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have
+ always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the
+ page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing
+ whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the
+ same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that
+ my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society,
+ loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my
+ conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in
+ motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc.
+
+The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no
+part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his
+office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just
+given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his
+listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution,
+not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose
+voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the
+long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore
+Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the
+conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present
+day.
+
+In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course
+of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten
+Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV.
+Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty;
+X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false
+with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life."
+Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures
+or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures
+and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social
+Aims."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my
+kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.
+
+The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which
+was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the
+autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has
+a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected
+works.
+
+ CONCORD, December 7, 1838.
+
+ MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my
+ friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me
+ in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I
+ remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of
+ yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not
+ Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both
+ together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that
+ stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure"
+ also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and
+ critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and
+ those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all
+ for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not,
+ and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_
+ sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and
+ servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
+
+ CONCORD, February 27, 1839.
+
+ MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an
+ answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are
+ quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need
+ the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"].
+ Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a
+ corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them
+ that I think you must read them once again with your critical
+ spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years
+ ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury
+ called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper
+ than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and
+ am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic
+ date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,
+ and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any
+ verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these
+ juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,
+ that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up
+ old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely
+ as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to
+ music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe
+ I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than
+ _afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I
+ may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my
+ MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of
+ a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily
+ treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a
+ year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard
+ to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I
+ remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;
+ but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall
+ have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself
+ of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle
+ Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent
+ spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he
+ writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring
+ lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind
+ enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done
+ by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to
+ betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any
+ line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the
+ universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the
+ old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you
+ will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every
+ possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I
+ heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year,
+ and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men
+ are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted
+ service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that
+ concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail,
+ of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to
+ trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad
+ to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's
+ new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers,
+ aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along
+ the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but
+ I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.
+
+ Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.
+
+On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery
+of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an
+Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor
+of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have
+been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to
+which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of
+Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious
+old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or
+questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which
+they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous
+repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy
+old dogmatists as dry as ever.
+
+Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling
+at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the
+speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his
+audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of
+the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen,
+provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of
+the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver.
+Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental
+conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place
+and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the
+sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony
+between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary
+colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side
+that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go
+anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief
+from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner,
+such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to
+quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.
+
+The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the
+same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence
+as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem
+misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these
+discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his
+complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned
+its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which
+freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and
+all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find
+some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative
+illustration.
+
+"Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a
+prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and
+earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet,
+he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled
+the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are
+indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery
+productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought."
+For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie
+all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his
+confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual
+independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history
+and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits
+a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:--
+
+ "An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
+ injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
+ possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything
+ that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that
+ he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
+ grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny
+ to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
+ piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_
+ annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him
+ talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved."
+
+But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of
+their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be
+forever blighted.
+
+From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his
+tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied.
+"Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of
+Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I
+give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would
+have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to
+the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution
+of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously,
+but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all
+that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of
+the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst
+of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:--
+
+ "You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear
+ that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What
+ is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with
+ derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore
+ truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say,
+ 'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early
+ visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and
+ romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then
+ dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and
+ poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand
+ thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from
+ every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to
+ show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you
+ renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for
+ the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has
+ its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world,
+ and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as
+ shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all
+ men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."
+
+The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before
+the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11,
+1841.
+
+In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this
+season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an
+oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges
+nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches
+acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done,
+what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent,
+sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and
+stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted
+the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced
+in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.
+
+The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is
+"The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments
+and promises of this literary Anniversary.
+
+ "The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the
+ foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of
+ machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle
+ folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid
+ wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the
+ incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes
+ of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the
+ bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the
+ farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and
+ feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other,
+ and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a
+ bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself."
+
+I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than
+in any of those which preceded it.
+
+ "Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this
+ saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with
+ whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think
+ meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his
+ ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?"
+
+That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true
+wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it,
+that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force,"
+that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into
+character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in
+this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how
+far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few
+broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn.
+We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this
+discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of
+their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's
+speculations is well shown in this paragraph:--
+
+ "We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not
+ thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for
+ our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring
+ reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the
+ receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God
+ in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In
+ the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this
+ fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are
+ mine; and all mine are thine.'"
+
+We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same
+paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so
+sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his
+tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond
+explanation."
+
+ "We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency
+ appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is
+ growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else;
+ is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be
+ man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring,
+ a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit
+ and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that
+ it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends,
+ but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no
+ private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
+ one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
+ which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."
+
+Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for
+the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.
+
+ "The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify
+ the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of
+ stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!
+ thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
+ and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry
+ of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of
+ right and wrong."
+
+His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the
+extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--
+
+ "We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
+ that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
+ house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal
+ activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a
+ natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this
+ one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,
+ cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that
+ they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they
+ were."
+
+It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity
+recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which
+is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many
+expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and
+vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history
+of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was
+only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold
+benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would
+feel that they lost by his counsels.
+
+ "The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
+ Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
+ generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
+ themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
+ which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if
+ pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence
+ to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
+ objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
+ to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never
+ touched; always giving health."
+
+Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses
+and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many
+organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their
+views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their
+special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in
+the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the
+Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he
+preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have
+a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up
+labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has
+learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall
+we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the
+meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast
+fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house
+with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I
+may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and
+road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is
+frugality for gods and heroes."
+
+This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one
+apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April
+of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on
+intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him
+that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or
+whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to
+Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed
+so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau
+entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the
+philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others
+carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common
+sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the
+conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to
+prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends
+"Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more
+commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.
+
+"The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they
+have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the
+burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a
+great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual
+and the actual world.
+
+In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a
+nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves
+Reformers had upon him.
+
+ "The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice,
+ but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are
+ quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no
+ more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they
+ reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal
+ and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness
+ that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who
+ are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of
+ mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as
+ the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work
+ of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him;
+ but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done
+ in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management,
+ by tactics and clamor."
+
+All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by
+the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson
+had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser
+and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in
+view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination
+and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts
+that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes
+it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the
+dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who
+sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any
+rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of
+those daring images which defy the critics.
+
+ "As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain,
+ the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall
+ eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we
+ shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds."
+
+He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in
+his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get
+rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been
+accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence
+covers with its soothing tribute!
+
+ "All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame
+ what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but
+ of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment
+ man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised
+ and discredited angels."
+
+The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at
+with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly
+applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples.
+It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and
+accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together
+very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this
+comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson
+explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of
+thoughts cast in a new mould.
+
+ "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism:
+ Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever
+ divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class
+ founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
+ beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class
+ perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us
+ representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they
+ cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
+ force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on
+ the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
+ individual culture."
+
+ "The materialist takes his departure from the external world,
+ and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his
+ departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an
+ appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe."
+
+The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of
+"Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the
+periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were
+in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of
+it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same
+Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was
+their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than
+from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any
+other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and
+the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best
+witness.
+
+In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches
+in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the
+development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two
+parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future;
+the Establishment and the Movement."
+
+About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity
+manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in
+literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the
+genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early
+causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance
+to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who
+returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward
+Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus
+Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great
+orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life
+in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who
+remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his
+full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant,
+grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal
+vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the
+harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the
+glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is
+enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but
+many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great
+master of academic oratory.
+
+Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to
+the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of
+science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the
+influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate
+community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of
+Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it
+so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the
+ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at
+organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came
+together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins
+Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full
+of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on
+smoothly enough with the usual small talk,--
+
+ "When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster
+ supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before
+ Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to
+ establish aesthetic society in Boston.
+
+ "Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.
+ Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies
+ and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller,
+ George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr.
+ Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others
+ gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at
+ each other's houses in a serious conversation."
+
+With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an
+equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were
+intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to
+say:--
+
+ "I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston
+ that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain
+ opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,
+ and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite
+ innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or
+ three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual
+ vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge
+ and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and
+ sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but
+ had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary.
+ I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or
+ sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody
+ knows by whom, or when it was applied."
+
+Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to
+suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.
+
+ "In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human
+ thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any
+ presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts
+ it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this
+ largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks
+ no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his
+ conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its
+ reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has
+ done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
+
+ "These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no
+ compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one
+ compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely
+ exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist
+ in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible
+ friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and
+ what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
+ service to the race of man."
+
+The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in
+nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known
+colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or
+look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or
+water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a
+churl.
+
+Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or
+churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some
+of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing
+machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed
+more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that
+their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What
+forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What
+great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you
+performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little
+real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock
+and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled
+no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist"
+dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as
+that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.
+
+In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious
+persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader
+must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and
+not a scoffer:--
+
+ "They are not good citizens, not good members of society:
+ unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens;
+ they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public
+ religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions,
+ foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
+ temperance society. They do not even like to vote."
+
+After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual
+beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this
+is what they have to say:--
+
+ "'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you
+ want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the
+ labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust:
+ but we do not like your work.'
+
+ 'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'
+
+ 'We have none.'
+
+ 'What will you do, then?' cries the world.
+
+ 'We will wait.'
+
+ 'How long?'
+
+ 'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.'
+
+ 'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.'
+
+ 'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but
+ I will not move until I have the highest command.'"
+
+And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his
+reasons for doing nothing.
+
+It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is
+easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the
+subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life
+and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of
+themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress
+for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true
+arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their
+all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among
+his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a
+fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow.
+Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on
+the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was
+picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of
+themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of
+thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.
+
+Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that
+delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he
+makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.
+
+ "Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must
+ behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet
+ accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there
+ must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and
+ telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers,
+ there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges
+ and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct,
+ who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the
+ by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and
+ monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the
+ electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks
+ the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not
+ be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare
+ and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and
+ verify our bearings from superior chronometers."
+
+It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which
+Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were
+naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle,
+and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical
+judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew
+a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:--
+
+ "There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American
+ Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On
+ inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I
+ was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be
+ certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this
+ elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the
+ Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I
+ should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+ This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much
+ that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying
+ so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.
+ Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has
+ not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not
+ least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to
+ detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe.
+ And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a
+ Transcendentalist."
+
+In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The
+Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of
+that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson
+show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more
+beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference
+to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the
+conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as
+well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and
+treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers
+govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will
+fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a
+general law without a particular application,--law for all that does
+not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine
+resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated
+self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining
+and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so,
+whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed
+of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an
+impossible whole."
+
+He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair
+play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be
+unjust to the present or the past.
+
+We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that
+Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because
+he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue
+a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a
+spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in
+a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this
+country, Emerson says:--
+
+ "It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which
+ we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would
+ do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be
+ made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned
+ to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The
+ Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like....
+ Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous
+ contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured."
+
+The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to
+know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry
+old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be
+content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as
+thus:--
+
+ "'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it
+ may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be
+ things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall
+ certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure
+ forerunner of things better."
+
+There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the
+Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the
+close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest
+which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more
+deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a
+possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm.
+They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in
+July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in
+1841, and breaking up in 1847.
+
+"The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by
+Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse,
+among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street
+and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The
+Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers
+were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman
+Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot
+Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs.
+Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the
+contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest.
+It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and
+enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard
+a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and
+curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond
+the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number.
+Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her
+part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with
+his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems
+in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others,
+whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are
+still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent
+contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its
+crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology."
+Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the
+pledge of a better season.
+
+We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence
+between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before
+the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge
+of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged
+writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more
+interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth
+of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that
+intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the
+inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to
+apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed,
+though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should
+be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake
+of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The
+Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and
+whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did
+print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from
+the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last
+Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's
+"May-day and other Pieces."
+
+On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple
+of months, Emerson writes:--
+
+ "Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism;
+ and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains
+ scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored
+ by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least
+ betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public."
+
+Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and
+tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with
+his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's
+readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for
+the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only
+a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it
+is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_
+body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the
+cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"
+
+Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious
+approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he
+found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object
+of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the
+end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I
+cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is
+Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless."
+
+In the next letter he says:--
+
+ "I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem
+ to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present
+ Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage,
+ and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such
+ like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of
+ perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what
+ impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the
+ fore-hoof."
+
+A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not
+always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.
+
+To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did
+not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty,
+with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.
+
+ "For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write
+ as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of
+ these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary
+ history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite
+ ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make
+ confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish
+ to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and
+ evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they
+ reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer
+ in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come,
+ who will easily do the unknown deed."
+
+"All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of
+inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:--
+
+ "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social
+ reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his
+ waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live
+ cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and
+ scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.
+ One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and
+ another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on
+ the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope."
+
+Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better
+known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this
+undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would
+have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a
+moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and
+generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better
+living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without
+centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual
+sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our
+educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts."
+The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm
+experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder,
+and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential
+relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic
+Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the
+ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the
+sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he
+says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and
+lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to
+the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in
+ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen
+without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward
+laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest
+humorists?
+
+This is his benevolent summing up:--
+
+ "The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made
+ what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All
+ comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of
+ residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine,
+ variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means
+ of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade,
+ did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine.
+ There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the
+ associates, education; to many, the most important period of their
+ life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with
+ the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of
+ letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were
+ always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room.
+ It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of
+ Reason in a patty-pan."
+
+The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire
+in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon
+afterwards it was dissolved.
+
+
+Section 2. Emerson's first volume of his collected Essays was published
+in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History;
+Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence;
+Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. "The Young American,"
+which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844.
+
+Once accustomed to Emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent
+project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we
+cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious
+illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the
+Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by
+the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional
+extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays,
+for instance. "Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts,
+namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative,
+history is to be read and written." When we come to the application,
+in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such
+discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one
+upon the other, but their sense is continuous.
+
+ "I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall,
+ see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on
+ the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these
+ worlds of life?--How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and
+ Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are
+ Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
+ Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau
+ seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the
+ stevedore, the porter?"
+
+The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being
+reminded of a certain great man's Rochester speech as commonly reported
+by the story-teller. "Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall
+a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a
+waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No
+people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty
+feet high!"
+
+We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome
+and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the
+interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous.
+Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should
+be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and
+looked at facts as symbols."
+
+We have become familiar with his doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is
+the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he
+always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks
+authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.
+It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme
+self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his
+proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.
+
+ "Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the
+ common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
+ task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
+ that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
+ that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is
+ to others!"
+
+"Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be
+praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from
+a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that
+judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful,
+and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John
+Bunyan's view:--
+
+ "A Christian man is never long at ease,
+ When one fright's gone, another doth him seize."
+
+Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and
+trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble
+scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which
+would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.
+
+The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:--
+
+ "As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as
+ there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect
+ virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every
+ action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in
+ God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul
+ incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some
+ Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour
+ floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and
+ scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top
+ and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms;
+ until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some
+ other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and
+ head of all living nature."
+
+This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud
+of George Herbert's. The Essay on "Love" is poetical, but the three
+poems, "Initial," "Daemonic," and "Celestial Love" are more nearly equal
+to his subject than his prose.
+
+There is a passage in the Lecture on "Friendship" which suggests
+some personal relation of Emerson's about which we cannot help being
+inquisitive:--
+
+ "It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
+ friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
+ other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
+ not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
+ wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
+ reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
+ companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of
+ treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness,
+ a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for
+ infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both."
+
+Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject
+of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to
+Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson's most hospitable roof.
+"You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." How could
+they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was
+wanting in the social graces. "Come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air,
+heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season
+of close proximity, by that other strain,--
+
+ "No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole!
+ Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!"
+
+But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person,
+perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not
+equal to the demands of friendly intercourse.
+
+He discourses wisely on "Prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for
+himself, and nobly on "Heroism," which was a shining part of his own
+moral and intellectual being.
+
+The points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are
+the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America,
+for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our
+love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all
+one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of
+sad sincerity painful to recognize.
+
+ "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates
+ Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and
+ forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of
+ humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the
+ good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the
+ natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of
+ his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that
+ will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death
+ impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps
+ of absolute and inextinguishable being."
+
+In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the
+impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his
+rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his
+readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of
+reaching, he says,--
+
+ "Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to
+ those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare
+ not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall
+ short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
+ their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising
+ of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use
+ sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what
+ hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of
+ the Highest Law."
+
+"The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual
+imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous,
+God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms
+borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute
+in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those
+applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols,
+varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual
+intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts
+and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to
+Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according
+to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words,
+and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving
+in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of
+consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea,
+which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision.
+Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon
+Him whom "no man can see and live."
+
+But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled
+"Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against
+utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would
+have confessed as much with reference to "The Over-Soul" as he has
+confessed with regard to "Circles," the Essay which follows "The
+Over-Soul."
+
+ "I am not careful to justify myself.... But lest I should mislead
+ any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the
+ reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value
+ on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
+ pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all
+ things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply
+ experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."
+
+Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might
+borrow Goethe's language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with
+which we are left.
+
+ "I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near
+ to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine.
+
+ "I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any
+ time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has
+ stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to
+ understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with
+ himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences
+ for my own way of feeling and acting."
+
+Emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with
+himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling,
+vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess,
+like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these,
+as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache."
+
+The three essays which follow "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect,"
+"Art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we
+should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom.
+
+ "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
+ all things are at risk."
+
+ "God enters by a private door into every individual."
+
+ "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
+ which you please,--you can never have both."
+
+ "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
+ carry it with us, or we find it not."
+
+But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from
+Babylon.
+
+Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to
+Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.
+
+ "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's
+ earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty
+ young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for
+ comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe,
+ $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no
+ other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which
+ was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a
+ rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have
+ food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich
+ no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise
+ man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend,
+ because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not
+ wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife
+ Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and
+ keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,
+ most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal
+ preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and
+ sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and
+ three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my
+ household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,
+ and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+ result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely
+ repellent particle."
+
+A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his
+life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy
+is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love."
+
+Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once
+more:--
+
+ "My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages
+ by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little
+ boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You
+ can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such
+ a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a
+ very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to
+ tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace
+ and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a
+ perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever
+ child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by
+ scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one
+ girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I
+ shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I
+ should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so
+ gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible
+ and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet
+ sustain."
+
+This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic
+of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison
+with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's
+well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the
+place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+1843-1848. AET. 40-45.
+
+"The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation
+of the Negroes in the British West Indies.[1]--Publication of the Second
+Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.--Character.
+--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New
+England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and
+eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of
+Emerson's works, namely, "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures," and
+"Miscellanies."]
+
+Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and
+feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so
+far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in
+American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In
+the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered
+February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent
+patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the
+significance of the following contrast.
+
+ "The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest
+ history in the world; but they need all and more than all the
+ resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that
+ country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of
+ society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to
+ avoid it.... It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only
+ say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal
+ institutions.... If only the men are employed in conspiring with the
+ designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we
+ shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures,
+ out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social
+ state than history has recorded."
+
+Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are
+taken was delivered. The "Young American" of that day is the more than
+middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of
+our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was
+written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans
+and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the
+wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes
+of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly
+acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired
+fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which
+its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of
+Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His
+words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following
+the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic,
+bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of
+his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties.
+
+On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an
+address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the
+British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the
+Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane
+and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate
+method of action.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Emerson's second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are
+many sayings in the Essay called "The Poet," which are meant for the
+initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:--
+
+ "All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is
+ the principal event in chronology."
+
+Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and
+downs of the Hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each
+other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to
+whom we owe the Psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the
+dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind?
+
+The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this
+eloquent apostrophe:--
+
+ "Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or
+ water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,
+ wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
+ wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
+ into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is
+ Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st
+ walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition
+ inopportune or ignoble."
+
+"Experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of
+having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other
+essays. His most important confession is this:--
+
+ "All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I
+ would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly
+ love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my
+ heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in
+ success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from
+ the Eternal."
+
+The Essay on "Character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth
+the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone
+and doctrine.
+
+ "Character is Nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it,
+ or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance and of
+ persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all
+ emulation."
+
+ "There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long
+ intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they
+ have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an
+ accumulation of that power we consider.
+
+ "The history of those gods and saints which the world has written,
+ and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have
+ exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and
+ who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
+ of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death
+ which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol
+ for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest
+ fact."
+
+In his Essay on "Manners," Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:--
+
+ "The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and
+ expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner
+ dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions.
+ Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes
+ good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then
+ gentleness.--Power first, or no leading class.--God knows that
+ all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in
+ strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point
+ at original energy.--The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of
+ this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio,
+ Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very
+ carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to
+ value any condition at a high rate.--I could better eat with one
+ who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and
+ unpresentable person.--The person who screams, or uses the
+ superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms
+ to flight.--I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it
+ excels in woman."
+
+So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which
+seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme.
+
+This essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader.
+Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of
+many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners,
+a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the
+palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the
+society of Philadelphia.
+
+"Gifts" is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some
+hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:--
+
+ "The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
+ Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the
+ farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the
+ painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing."
+
+ "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because
+ they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the
+ utilities of the world.--Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they
+ are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being
+ attached to them."
+
+ "It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning
+ from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very
+ onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally
+ wishes to give you a slap."
+
+Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the
+tingling effect of a witty over-statement.
+
+We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled "Nature,"
+in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed
+in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure.
+
+ Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:--
+ "Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought
+ again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated,
+ and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of
+ free thought."
+
+And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this
+Essay:--
+
+ "They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from
+ the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of
+ our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration
+ of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's
+ life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow."
+
+This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the
+prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets
+are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman
+gave it a name, he would probably call _Onditologie_.
+
+It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be
+satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the
+present time, or when the Essay on "Politics" was written, some years
+before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many
+respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters
+of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson's view of them as they
+then were:--
+
+ "Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share
+ the nation between them, I should say that one has the best
+ cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the
+ poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote
+ with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the
+ abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating
+ in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources
+ of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the
+ so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these
+ liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of
+ democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
+ radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no
+ ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and
+ selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of
+ the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is
+ timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it
+ aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous
+ policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor
+ foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor
+ emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the
+ immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any
+ benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate
+ with the resources of the nation."
+
+The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the
+famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find
+a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and
+Realism." But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering
+and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge "Phi Beta
+Kappa Oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a
+collection of fragmentary men.
+
+As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side
+were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously.
+
+ "In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good
+ deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they
+ round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living.
+
+ "Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in
+ household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees
+ them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind
+ drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion.
+ Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and
+ insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
+ particulars."
+
+_New England Reformers_.--Would any one venture to guess how Emerson
+would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism,
+his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous,
+too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears,
+in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng
+of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites
+many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin?
+
+We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on
+a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the
+state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing.
+To remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim
+of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some
+another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old
+church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was
+for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was
+meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart
+in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had
+the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he
+was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the
+unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the
+lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and
+women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities.
+He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical
+way:--
+
+ "They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a
+ realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable.
+ What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One
+ apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no
+ man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil;
+ another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink
+ damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death
+ to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made
+ yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he
+ does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element
+ in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No,
+ they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment.
+ Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us
+ scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of
+ agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny
+ of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox
+ must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the
+ hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk
+ wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect
+ world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a
+ society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes
+ was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts
+ of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and
+ their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!"
+
+We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment,
+which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation.
+
+Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he
+had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing
+impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of
+which he was in no sense responsible.
+
+He says in the lecture we are considering:--
+
+ "These new associations are composed of men and women of superior
+ talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such
+ a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the
+ good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of
+ superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the
+ association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an
+ asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the
+ strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of
+ men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some
+ compromise."
+
+His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too
+well to believe in a Noah's ark full of idealists.
+
+All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of
+lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in
+and out of New England.
+
+His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how
+punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He
+was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to
+play the part of an accountant.
+
+He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and
+that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he
+could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in
+his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered
+in prose.
+
+In 1846 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems
+had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen,
+having been printed in "The Dial." It is only their being brought
+together for the first time which belongs especially to this period,
+and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in
+connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the
+title, "May-Day and other Pieces."
+
+In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which
+will be spoken of in the following chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+1848-1853. AET. 45-50.
+
+The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" Visit to Europe.--England.
+--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Uses
+of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New
+Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the
+Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the
+World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of
+Margaret Fuller Ossoli."
+
+
+A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name
+of the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." Emerson wrote the "Editor's
+Address," but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being
+the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: "We
+rely on the truth for aid against ourselves."
+
+On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second
+visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers
+were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of
+lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions
+during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit
+have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway
+quotes passages from a letter of Emerson's which show that he had some
+hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be
+heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him.
+
+"I feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in
+England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at
+home." He does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get
+him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or
+friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many
+decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts
+whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps
+in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire
+to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of
+the kingdom.
+
+From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland
+received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with
+him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week
+returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements
+which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland's account of Emerson's
+visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons
+is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons
+visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of
+thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he
+did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George
+Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr.
+Ireland, I borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic
+say more?
+
+Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he
+says: "In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most
+mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared."
+Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never
+addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances,--its
+preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and
+unstinted admiration?
+
+I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other
+notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the
+two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and
+De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon
+him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe
+that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of
+his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy
+behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles
+Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous
+vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric
+rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never
+forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long
+endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter,"
+which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would
+have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such
+noisy manifestations.
+
+During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished
+him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but
+never printed.
+
+From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for
+publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men,"
+which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its
+contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and
+conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a
+good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical,
+and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men
+considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own
+affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography,
+no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of
+his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not
+Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest
+us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and
+Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we
+see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally,
+unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first
+to recognize.
+
+Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation.
+Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of
+all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we
+are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to
+which also Plato was debtor."
+
+Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and
+smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes
+Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of
+Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte.
+
+ "I applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal
+ to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master
+ standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome,
+ eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination
+ into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff,
+ or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the
+ world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and
+ all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of
+ persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our
+ thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the
+ potentate is nothing.--
+
+ "The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
+ qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less,
+ and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that
+ respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the
+ individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
+ catholic existence."
+
+No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But
+Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages
+whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:--
+
+ "Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical
+ compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for
+ their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are
+ still written and debated among men of thought."--
+
+ "In proportion to the culture of men they become his
+ scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up
+ out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with
+ plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are
+ praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and
+ Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and
+ every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone
+ quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."
+
+The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when
+he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his
+storehouses.
+
+A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of
+the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.
+
+The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest
+expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the
+Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu,
+who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as
+not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor
+coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
+others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul,
+and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings;
+and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is
+imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see
+reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of
+immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
+abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of
+a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith
+in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius
+of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its
+philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,
+freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of
+each."
+
+But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of
+another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell
+what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides
+of every great question from him."
+
+The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of
+holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform
+soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are
+fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called
+"Plato: New Readings."
+
+Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or,
+the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of
+divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The
+believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence
+at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
+themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
+which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in
+its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims
+put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.
+"Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called
+them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will
+not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen
+with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the
+poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose
+estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In
+"The Test," the Muse says:--
+
+ "I hung my verses in the wind,
+ Time and tide their faults may find;
+ All were winnowed through and through,
+ Five lines lasted good and true ...
+ Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
+ Nor time unmake what poets know.
+ Have you eyes to find the five
+ Which five hundred did survive?"
+
+In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets
+referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe.
+
+And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his
+books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead
+prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird
+ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so
+transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a
+beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that
+"He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue
+to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature."
+
+Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer,
+he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.
+
+"Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned
+Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for
+Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other
+reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes
+him as being.
+
+ "There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never
+ a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never
+ insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that
+ he cares for.
+
+ "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.
+ I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the
+ language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and
+ they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.--
+
+ "Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and
+ himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,
+ or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish
+ to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or
+ time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes
+ pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we
+ pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he
+ rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones
+ underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration;
+ contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.
+ There is but one exception,--in his love for Socrates. In speaking
+ of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion."
+
+The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same
+characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he
+must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road"
+with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often
+led him round to the point from which he started.
+
+As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative
+and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the
+Essay itself.
+
+In writing of "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," Emerson naturally gives
+expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of
+poetry.
+
+"Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality." A poet has "a heart in unison with his time and
+country."--"There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production,
+but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,
+and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of
+in his times."
+
+When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of
+amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and
+library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd
+of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a
+great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time
+to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who
+appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which
+is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was
+their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors
+from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have
+learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury's which I have had the
+privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.
+
+The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing,
+especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough.
+He was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there
+were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim
+of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their
+acquisitions.
+
+ "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+ tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us."--"Shakespeare is as
+ much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the
+ crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and
+ think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
+ doors."
+
+After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare,
+he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the
+halfness and imperfection of humanity."
+
+ "He converted the elements which waited on his command into
+ entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind."
+
+And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the
+forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet,
+Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: "It must be conceded that these
+are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who
+shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves
+with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with
+equal inspiration."
+
+It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to
+say about "Napoleon; or, the Man of the World."
+
+The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find:--
+
+ "The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle
+ class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate
+ democrat.--
+
+ "Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his
+ fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." As Plato borrowed,
+ as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau "plagiarized every good
+ thought, every good word that was spoken in France," so Napoleon is
+ not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other
+ minds."
+
+He was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as
+Sallust describes Catiline as being. "He had a directness of action
+never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in
+each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object;
+the obstacle must give way."
+
+"When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and
+satisfied."--
+
+"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern
+society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the
+internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the
+opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse."
+
+But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and
+finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson
+gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation
+superfluous:--
+
+ "In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power
+ and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but
+ with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
+ Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.
+
+ "So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the
+ power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry
+ of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de
+ Bonaparte_.'"
+
+ It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death
+ we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible
+ satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by
+ her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks
+ and ruins.
+
+ But after all, Carlyle's "_carrière ouverte aux talens_" is the
+ expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind.
+
+"Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who
+are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the
+fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in
+the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that
+he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could
+hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found
+the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with
+side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds
+an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his
+author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has
+said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into
+literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has
+been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the
+Prometheus.--He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and
+sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not
+spiritualist.--I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives
+of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of
+conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have
+severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for
+this time and for all time."
+
+This must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the Essay which
+finishes the volume.
+
+In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which
+Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took
+a part. Emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from
+her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his
+interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid
+portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written
+of her than by anything she ever wrote herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+1858-1858. AEt. 50-55.
+
+Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture
+read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at
+Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The
+"Saturday Club."
+
+
+After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different
+audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social
+Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of
+which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many
+others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of
+Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same
+year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York.
+His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the
+planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is
+the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand
+millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there
+ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would
+be?"
+
+His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph
+from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could
+not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free
+Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project
+for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in
+1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in
+steel and not in gold:--
+
+ "Pay ransom to the owner,
+ And fill the bag to the brim.
+ Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
+ And ever was. Pay him."
+
+His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with
+indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at
+Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the
+front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode
+inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of
+the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the
+cause of all the trouble.
+
+ "The over-god
+ Who marries Right to Might,
+ Who peoples, unpeoples,--
+ He who exterminates
+ Races by stronger races,
+ Black by white faces,--
+ Knows to bring honey
+ Out of the lion."
+
+Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he
+refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where
+
+ "Things are of the snake."
+
+The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to
+borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men
+took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a
+heartier assent to the outward methods adopted."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a
+lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold,
+and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in
+the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way
+in which he expresses himself:
+
+ "I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in
+ public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it.
+ Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous
+ impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be
+ equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a
+ church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do
+ theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish
+ a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse
+ them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our
+ Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement
+ is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may
+ proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to
+ desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish."
+
+Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor,
+that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord
+before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He
+afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from
+which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch
+concluded:--
+
+ "He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make
+ what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an
+ impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is
+ an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class
+ remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are
+ native."
+
+The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough
+for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.
+
+ "With beams December planets dart
+ His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
+ July was in his sunny heart,
+ October in his liberal hand."
+
+Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was
+published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not
+a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired
+the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the
+wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is
+indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic
+characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final;
+they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less
+sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded,
+sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence
+made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him
+well-disposed to all the world.
+
+A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which
+Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal
+portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a
+chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles,
+_Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character.
+
+He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the
+British Aristocracy:--
+
+ "Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the
+ House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy
+ and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything
+ they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and
+ killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.
+ Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent
+ and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy
+ thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by
+ assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and
+ snake, which they severally resembled."
+
+The race preserves some of its better characteristics.
+
+ "They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age.
+ The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin,
+ a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the
+ island."
+
+English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck,
+vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,
+safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly,
+and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and
+religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.
+
+ "They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and
+ mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the
+ cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They
+ hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use
+ a studied plainness."
+
+ "In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
+ but the dinner is the capital institution."
+
+ "They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They
+ require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in
+ public men."
+
+ "As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.
+ Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy."
+
+Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly
+two hundred years ago.
+
+ "_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing
+ and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless
+ instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those
+ _Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all
+ service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby
+ to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among
+ the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God."
+
+If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the
+Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the
+likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.
+
+ "They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of
+ waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run
+ into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly
+ carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;
+ leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
+ hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock
+ in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every
+ secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;
+ they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why
+ she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the
+ inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate
+ and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from
+ shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror
+ they cause."
+
+This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
+Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.
+
+ "A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the
+ curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
+ deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them
+ justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and
+ low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a
+ savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The
+ stability of England is the security of the modern world."
+
+Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than
+the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,
+and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
+and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
+civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
+castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
+colonies."
+
+In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or
+the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,
+or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust
+doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if
+they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a
+generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not
+grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson
+saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England.
+A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a
+field of mushrooms.
+
+The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and
+fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light
+that have not come through its stained windows.
+
+ "The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on
+ the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's
+ chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed
+ hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him,
+ and the religion of a gentleman.
+
+ "The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing
+ left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and
+ reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to
+ take wine with him."
+
+Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told
+a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from
+nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an
+archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith
+would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch
+of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his
+little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose
+unwieldy bulk he is playing.
+
+Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established
+Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with
+soft-spoken words.
+
+ "Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake
+ the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,
+ et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in
+ England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson,
+ and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame."
+
+"English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the
+annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an
+occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had
+sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up
+in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in
+their utterance.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated
+by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people,
+tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with
+Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all
+this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations
+of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine
+admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its
+playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a
+self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and
+mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not
+be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame
+Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if
+one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American
+traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went
+up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the
+little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through
+the wide-awake town of Concord.
+
+In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing
+the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell
+was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the
+originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old
+contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them
+Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of
+them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh
+volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The
+Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse,"
+"Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus."
+
+At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association,
+which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members
+dining together on the last Saturday of every month.
+
+The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present
+day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic
+connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was
+or had been such an institution, but it never existed.
+
+Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality
+before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic
+idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of
+crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the
+habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House"
+of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a
+club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its
+first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as
+visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat
+Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable
+rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always
+pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's
+conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust,
+sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger
+who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the
+table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana,
+Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar,
+eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical
+critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion
+of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe,
+the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy
+of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of
+the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured
+utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental
+phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular
+attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at
+its table, until within a year or two of his death.
+
+Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed
+unrecorded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+1858-1863: AET. 55-60.
+
+Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial
+Festival--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker
+and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication
+of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture;
+Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions.
+
+
+The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in
+1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the
+influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson's verse. In many of the shorter
+poems and fragments published since "May-Day," as well as in the
+"Quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is
+sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original.
+
+On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held
+at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the
+poet's birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such
+beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as
+one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers
+was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just
+dropped down to him from the clouds." Judge Hoar, who was another of his
+hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his
+time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself
+present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these
+gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His
+words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most
+natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with,
+but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his
+inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.
+
+I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed
+to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most
+devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:--
+
+
+CONCORD, May 13, 1859.
+
+Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these
+lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet
+you the while,--keep him at the door. So long I have promised to
+write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the
+unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with
+Gisela von Arnim (Bettina's daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and
+Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,--wandering in
+Europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. This contumacy of mine I
+shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer
+first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when
+once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are
+drawn.--Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and
+coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you
+did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the
+women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and
+bring home the author of "Counterparts" with you? Or did----write the
+novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How
+strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think
+our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent.
+But----is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him.
+I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than
+mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the
+first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and
+creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the
+irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain
+science. Our _praxis_ is never altered for that. We must forever hold
+our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.
+
+I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an
+immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new
+stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer
+no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in
+our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good
+understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or
+pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but
+from a more convenient nature. But 'tis almost chemistry at last, though
+a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer,
+however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth,
+that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of
+peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in
+the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out
+around me at this moment the new June,--the leaves say June, though the
+calendar says May,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again,
+though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters
+receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little
+ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game
+again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible
+with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this
+summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan
+curiously your E.'s drawings, as they have seen them.
+
+The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!
+
+R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke
+of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor
+to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in
+the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's society after his death. In 1862, he lost
+his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August of the same year. Thoreau
+had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson
+is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the
+canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
+
+The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston
+in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the
+following extract:--
+
+ "Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the
+ earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see
+ Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold
+ them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart
+ with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the
+ melioration of our planet:--
+
+ "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
+ And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.'"
+
+The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860. The chapter on "Fate" might
+leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what
+he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that
+his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in
+adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let
+him hold fast to this reassuring statement:--
+
+ "If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm
+ liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty,
+ the power of character.--We are sure, that, though we know not how,
+ necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world,
+ my polarity with the spirit of the times."
+
+But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the
+mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the
+limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are
+illustrated.
+
+ "Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must
+ see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a
+ man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--The
+ way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider,
+ the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the
+ crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these
+ are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
+ dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
+ the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive
+ races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up
+ and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
+ end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
+ instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a
+ clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity."
+
+Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he
+believed in so fully:--
+
+ "They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
+ lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear."
+
+But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic
+predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who
+dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words,
+which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the
+delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:--
+
+ "People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine
+ brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
+ high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
+ distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that
+ a free-soiler."
+
+Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"--
+
+ "All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were
+ _causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by
+ law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that
+ joins the first and the last of things.
+
+ "The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young
+ orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility
+ in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in
+ all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and
+ fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no
+ habit of self-reliance or original action.--
+
+ "We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_
+ condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of
+ main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found
+ in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the
+ supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive,
+ yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and
+ absorbents provided to take off its edge."
+
+The "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of
+temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example,
+and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "Poor
+Richard" would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the
+Essay on "Wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could
+hardly tell the difference between them.
+
+ "Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and
+ wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet
+ water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress
+ when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick
+ lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross
+ the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in
+ books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and
+ auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it
+ added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day,
+ and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of
+ necessity.--
+
+ "To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and
+ chief men of each race.--
+
+ "The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the
+ thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their
+ word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush
+ to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest
+ civilization should be undone."
+
+Who can give better counsels on "Culture" than Emerson? But we must
+borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of
+secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson's. We know something
+of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet.
+It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite
+portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as
+follows:--
+
+ "The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism
+ is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong
+ necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual
+ attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such
+ necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely
+ overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and
+ disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which
+ each individual persists to be what he is.
+
+ "The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and
+ variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world,
+ with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with
+ eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and
+ religion: books, travel, society, solitude."
+
+ "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they
+ must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their
+ best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for
+ occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude,
+ the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the
+ cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it
+ farther than suns and stars."
+
+We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the
+rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth
+knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims
+high, must dread an easy home and popular manners."
+
+Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble
+career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least.
+But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he
+respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that
+Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the
+introduction to this volume.
+
+Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior."
+
+ "There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an
+ egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke
+ of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage."
+
+Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the
+above title.
+
+ "The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time,
+ as nothing is more vulgar than haste.--
+
+ "Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first
+ time,--and every time they meet.--
+
+ "It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his
+ talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that
+ stands by himself, the universe stands by him also."
+
+In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:--
+
+ "The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming
+ ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind
+ must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church
+ founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a
+ manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church
+ of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will
+ have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol
+ and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture,
+ poetry."
+
+It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and
+unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the
+established facts of science and history when these last reach it in
+their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science
+more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date
+than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such
+confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often
+at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer
+layer.
+
+We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of
+Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical
+intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher
+of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.
+
+ "Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they
+ begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it
+ discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'"
+
+"Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the
+minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant,"
+which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered
+lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this
+matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the
+masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and
+need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede
+anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
+draw individuals out of them."
+
+Père Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer
+in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is
+tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and
+be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not
+make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great
+necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which
+he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often
+discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the
+Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble
+ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather
+than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something
+of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing
+in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens,
+entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses
+his listeners and readers.
+
+The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the
+following passage:--
+
+ "The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
+ everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left
+ their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My
+ boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors,
+ and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the
+ intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word
+ has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my
+ stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box!
+ I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to
+ sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy
+ in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact,
+ which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days
+ so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the
+ imagination."
+
+One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce
+of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day
+memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if
+often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A
+coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a
+Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification.
+Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something
+could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he
+cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.
+
+The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional
+over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them
+amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two
+always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up
+as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no
+one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer's smile
+as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact
+unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found
+a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never
+show him.
+
+The Essay on "Illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall
+not find repeating itself in the Poems.
+
+During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and
+verse to the "Atlantic Monthly," and several to "The Dial," a second
+periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have
+been, or will be, elsewhere referred to.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+1863-1868. AET. 60-65.
+
+"Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other
+Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln."--Essay
+on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta
+Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in
+Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard
+University.--"Terminus."
+
+
+The "Boston Hymn" was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first
+day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from
+beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning "Pay ransom to the owner,"
+has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:--
+
+ "I cause from every creature
+ His proper good to flow:
+ As much as he is and doeth
+ So much shall he bestow.
+
+ "But laying hands on another
+ To coin his labor and sweat,
+ He goes in pawn to his victim
+ For eternal years in debt.
+
+ "To-day unbind the captive,
+ So only are ye unbound:
+ Lift up a people from the dust,
+ Trump of their rescue, sound!"
+
+"Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is
+more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than
+the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."
+
+ "But best befriended of the God
+ He who, in evil times,
+ Warned by an inward voice,
+ Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
+ Biding by his rule and choice,
+ Feeling only the fiery thread
+ Leading over heroic ground,
+ Walled with mortal terror round,
+ To the aim which him allures,
+ And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
+ Peril around, all else appalling,
+ Cannon in front and leaden rain
+ Him duly through the clarion calling
+ To the van called not in vain."
+
+It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they
+were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand
+years:--
+
+ "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+ So near is God to man,
+ When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
+ The youth replies, _I can_."
+
+"Saadi" was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1864, "My Garden" in
+1866, "Terminus" in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many
+others were collected in a small volume, entitled "May-Day, and
+Other Pieces." The general headings of these poems are as follows:
+May-Day.--The Adirondacs.--Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces.--Nature
+and Life.--Elements.--Quatrains.--Translations.--Some of these poems,
+which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous
+pages. "The Adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared
+for its poetical character with "May-Day," one passage from which,
+beginning,
+
+ "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found
+"Brahma," "Days," and others which are well known to all readers of
+poetry.
+
+Emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and
+sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham
+Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the
+homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy:--
+
+ "Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor;
+ the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four
+ years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility
+ of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found
+ wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his
+ fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the
+ centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
+ people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow
+ with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true
+ representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of
+ his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart,
+ the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue."
+
+In his "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association,"
+Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and
+sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to
+understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept
+the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "The Sphinx."
+
+ --"As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within
+ his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds
+ with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to
+ face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the
+ power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste,
+ all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a
+ religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the
+ private action."
+
+Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the
+suggestive remark,--
+
+ --"What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by
+ which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true
+ Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure
+ benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of
+ active duty, that worship finds expression.--The interests that grow
+ out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the
+ old eternal duties."
+
+ In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:--
+ "I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous
+ dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.--If
+ you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a
+ thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of
+ nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on
+ the teachings."
+
+The "Progress of Culture" was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just
+thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very
+instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a
+whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in
+1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more
+sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains
+of the reforming movement:--
+
+ "Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or
+ adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an
+ honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil
+ status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she
+ controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her
+ share in power."
+
+He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of
+intelligence,--"All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,
+teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and
+superseding kings."
+
+He repeats some of his fundamental formulae.
+
+ "The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
+ sentiment.
+
+ "Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any
+ material force, that thoughts rule the world.
+
+ "Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter."
+
+And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in
+1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "Bad kings and
+governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _Non tali auxilio_, we
+exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these
+concluding words: "I read the promise of better times and of greater
+men."
+
+In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as
+the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift.
+
+In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips,
+he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New
+York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards
+published in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in his second volume, under the
+title "Terminus." This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized
+the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which
+must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far
+from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly
+avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes
+about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The
+reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a
+particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:--
+
+ TERMINUS.
+
+ It is time to be old,
+ To take in sail:--
+ The god of bounds,
+ Who sets to seas a shore,
+ Came to me in his fatal rounds,
+ And said: "No more!
+ No farther shoot
+ Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
+ Fancy departs: no more invent;
+ Contract thy firmament
+ To compass of a tent.
+ There's not enough for this and that,
+ Make thy option which of two;
+ Economize the failing river,
+ Not the less revere the Giver,
+ Leave the many and hold the few,
+ Timely wise accept the terms,
+ Soften the fall with wary foot;
+ A little while
+ Still plan and smile,
+ And,--fault of novel germs,--
+ Mature the unfallen fruit.
+ Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
+ Bad husbands of their fires,
+ Who when they gave thee breath,
+ Failed to bequeath
+ The needful sinew stark as once,
+ The baresark marrow to thy bones,
+ But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
+ Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
+ Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
+ Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.
+
+ "As the bird trims her to the gale
+ I trim myself to the storm of time,
+ I man the rudder, reef the sail,
+ Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
+ 'Lowly faithful, banish fear,
+ Right onward drive unharmed;
+ The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
+ And every wave is charmed.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+1868-1873. AET. 65-70.
+
+Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication
+of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude.
+--Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming.
+--Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other
+Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the
+Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at
+Concord on his Return.
+
+
+During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a
+series of Lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the
+Intellect." These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a
+great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or
+reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an
+extract from Prof. Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is
+there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics.
+It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms
+employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and
+object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin
+shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions.
+Once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain English
+handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.
+
+"Society and Solitude" was published in 1870. The first Essay in the
+volume bears the same name as the volume itself.
+
+In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims
+of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of
+solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is
+danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live
+alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--Here again, as
+so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and
+our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--The
+conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our
+sympathy."
+
+The Essay on "Civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a
+very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or
+the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting,
+and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful
+combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the
+press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with
+special brilliancy:--
+
+ "Right position of woman in the State is another index.--Place the
+ sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality
+ gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that
+ is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and
+ learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have
+ thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of
+ good women."
+
+My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader
+will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:--
+
+ "The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and
+ compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,
+ longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven
+ by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from
+ home,--
+
+ "'The pulses of her iron heart
+ Go beating through the storm.'"
+
+I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be
+an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The
+Steamboat:"
+
+ "The beating of her restless heart
+ Still sounding through the storm."
+
+It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer
+lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his
+verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's
+special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that
+
+ 'tis better to be quoted wrong
+ Than to be quoted not at all.
+
+This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy
+to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How
+could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly
+announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that
+he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having
+any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and
+doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:--
+
+ "Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,
+ to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods
+ themselves."--
+
+ "'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that
+ the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON
+ TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and
+ bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find
+ all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear,
+ Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those
+ interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love,
+ freedom, knowledge, utility."--
+
+Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the
+same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and
+the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the
+North Star.
+
+I find in the Essay on "Art" many of the thoughts with which we are
+familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite
+these passages:--
+
+ "We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in
+ hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had
+ a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in
+ the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the
+ artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work
+ of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.--
+
+ --"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the
+ tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals,
+ the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but
+ in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.--
+
+ --"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest
+ and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid
+ every stone.--
+
+ "Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake,
+ whose melody is sweeter than he knows."
+
+The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial,
+than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its
+general purport:--
+
+ "Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards,
+ it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
+ speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it
+ must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.--
+
+ "He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion
+ must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on
+ character and insight.--
+
+ --"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.--
+
+ --"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their
+ integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they
+ toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a
+ reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or
+ morals, as above the whole world and themselves also."
+
+"Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it
+sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of
+the goblet which holds some tonic draught:--
+
+ "Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in
+ his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the
+ soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham
+ and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations
+ when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful,
+ the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to
+ swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful
+ and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that
+ all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more
+ charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching
+ than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day,
+ between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house,
+ sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he
+ fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before
+ him."
+
+Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about
+"Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an
+address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the
+"Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and
+the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some
+general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:--
+
+ "The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try
+ to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to
+ fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--This hard work will
+ always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor
+ by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men
+ of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and
+ timely."
+
+Emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are
+correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his
+imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make
+them almost a surprise:--
+
+ "By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have
+ found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting
+ the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that
+ Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises
+ to pay a better rent than all the superstructure."
+
+In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call
+attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest
+of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and
+predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of
+"the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables
+a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" And once more,
+
+"We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the
+air."
+
+Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on
+wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.
+
+The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose
+version of the fine poem, printed in "May-Day" under the title "Days." I
+shall refer to this more particularly hereafter.
+
+It is wronging the Essay on "Books" to make extracts from it. It is all
+an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the
+public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under
+protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful
+reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader's
+consideration:--
+
+ "There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they
+ are so few.--
+
+ "I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go
+ there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is
+ already within the four walls of my study at home.--
+
+ "The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read
+ any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books.
+ 3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare's phrase,--
+
+ "'No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;
+ In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'"
+
+Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on
+"Clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay.
+Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the
+"Saturday Club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself
+around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he
+was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of
+talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and
+remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a
+"clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he
+would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives
+two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have
+been speaking:--
+
+ "I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in
+ their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to
+ an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion
+ shall have its just influence on public questions of education and
+ politics."
+
+ "A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means
+ of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage."
+
+I do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very
+prominent at the social meetings of the "Saturday Club," but "worthy
+foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the
+meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and
+callings.
+
+All that Emerson has to say about "Courage" is worth listening to, for
+he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more
+cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions
+fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate
+save that which protects him
+
+ "Whose armor is his honest thought,
+ And simple truth his utmost skill."
+
+He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of
+mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. "I need
+not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank.
+They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in
+a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--There are
+good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture,
+which closes with the spirited ballad of "George Nidiver," written "by a
+lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known."
+
+Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its
+subject, like the one now before me, "Success." Emerson complains of the
+same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England:--
+
+ "We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing
+ advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is
+ lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.--
+
+ "Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to
+ all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for
+ success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take
+ Michael Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something
+ of worth and value.'"
+
+Reading about "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books
+of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and
+treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and
+the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate
+directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into
+Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its
+vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached
+by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern
+the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by
+adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were
+placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," or any
+other moralist or economist.--For such as these is meant the cheap
+cynical saying quoted by Emerson, "_Rien ne réussit mieux que le
+succès_."
+
+But this is not the aim and end of Emerson's teaching:--
+
+ "I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition
+ in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public
+ opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one
+ feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly,
+ and the other hospitality of mind."
+
+And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable
+reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character,
+the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the
+market-place.
+
+The Essay on "Old Age" has a special value from its containing two
+personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief
+mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825,
+Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams,
+soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to
+allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all.
+
+But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He
+recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has
+weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so
+that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling
+that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in
+general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing
+his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:--
+
+ "When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well
+ spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works
+ that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in
+ infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions,
+ leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard
+ that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that
+ whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is
+ announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles
+ our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the
+ inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving
+ skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the
+ inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment."
+
+Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the
+Introduction to "Plutarch's Morals" in 1870, and a Preface to William
+Ellery Channing's Poem, "The Wanderer," in 1871. He made a speech at
+Howard University, Washington, in 1872.
+
+In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant
+company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married
+Emerson's daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B.
+Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an
+account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes's
+letter:--
+
+ BOSTON, February 6, 1884.
+
+ MY DEAR DR.,--What little I can give will be of a very rambling
+ character.
+
+ One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting
+ him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him
+ to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage
+ and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in
+ 1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our
+ driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage.
+ We passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the
+ telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were
+ among the last persons on it!
+
+ About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson,
+ his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with
+ B----, the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made
+ the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish
+ I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at
+ this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes
+ drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently
+ indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes
+ of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially
+ remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his
+ reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth,
+ without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding
+ Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was
+ he, at the moment, of his surroundings.
+
+ In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers,
+ in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were
+ deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of
+ humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and
+ the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all
+ beholders.
+
+ When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of
+ calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The
+ Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of
+ hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem
+ to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so
+ doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast
+ between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces.
+
+ I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and
+ other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor
+ J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you
+ some notes that would be valuable.
+
+ Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is
+ his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no
+ doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost
+ none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to
+ his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable
+ recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs
+ which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor
+ which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which
+ you and I know he possessed in a marked degree.
+
+ Yours always,
+
+ J.M. FORBES.
+
+Professor James B. Thayer's little book, "A Western Journey with Mr.
+Emerson," is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning
+which Mr. Forbes wrote the letter just given. Professor Thayer kindly
+read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and
+allows me to make such use of the book as I see fit. Such liberty must
+not be abused, and I will content myself with a few passages in which
+Emerson has a part. No extract will interest the reader more than the
+following:--
+
+ "'How _can_ Mr. Emerson,' said one of the younger members of the
+ party to me that day, 'be so agreeable, all the time, without
+ getting tired!' It was the _naive_ expression of what we all had
+ felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was
+ always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and
+ there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom
+ he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own
+ estimation. One thing particularly impressed me,--the sense that he
+ seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It
+ was the behavior of one who really _believed_ in an immortal life,
+ and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and
+ grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they
+ were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual
+ charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, on that memorable
+ day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own
+ Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself
+ all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power:
+ 'Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of
+ eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave
+ grandeur to the passing hour.'"
+
+This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the
+same subject.
+
+ "The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his
+ address on 'Immortality,' at Dr. Stebbins's church. It was the first
+ time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak
+ better. It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since
+ been printed.
+
+ "At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the 'Alta
+ California.' It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it
+ warmly, and closed with the following observations: 'All left the
+ church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative
+ genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the
+ English language had contributed to that end.'"
+
+The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had
+delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben. Russell, of ruddy
+face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of "The Columbian Centinel,"
+spoke of it in his paper the next day as "the most eloquent prayer ever
+addressed to a Boston audience."
+
+The "Alta California's" "elegant tribute" is not quite up to this
+rhetorical altitude.
+
+ "'The minister,' said he, 'is in no danger of losing his position;
+ he represents the moral sense and the humanities.' He spoke of his
+ own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that 'some one had
+ lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the
+ name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty
+ about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a
+ Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did
+ not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of
+ negation?'"
+
+ "I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent
+ course of lectures at Cambridge, 'The Natural History of the
+ Intellect.' This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas!
+ I could recall but little of it,--little more than the mere hintings
+ of what he said. He cared very little for metaphysics. But he
+ thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own
+ mind,--about memory, for example. These he had set down from time
+ to time. As for making any methodical history, he did not undertake
+ it."
+
+Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but
+neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. Emerson spoke
+of the Mormons. Some one had said, "They impress the common people,
+through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery." "Yes," he said,
+"it is an after-clap of Puritanism. But one would think that after this
+Father Abraham could go no further."
+
+The charm of Boswell's Life of Johnson is that it not merely records
+his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser
+peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and
+shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer
+therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been
+good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take
+leave of his agreeable little volume:--
+
+ "At breakfast we had, among other things, pie. This article at
+ breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson's weaknesses. A pie stood before
+ him now. He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and
+ then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr.----; he too
+ declined. 'But Mr.----!' Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous
+ emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting
+ the entire weight of his character into his manner,--'but Mr.----,
+ _what is pie for_?'"
+
+A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and
+when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very
+desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. Presently
+he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in
+the other,--such a wedge! She could hardly have been more dismayed
+if one of Caesar's _cunei_, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge
+against her.
+
+Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good
+creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. In
+semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate
+stomachs. But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never,
+so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other
+side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with
+indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness
+habitually centred beneath his diaphragm.
+
+Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a
+whiff of tobacco-smoke:--
+
+ "When alone," he said, "he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. But
+ in company it was singular to see how different it was. To one who
+ found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar
+ was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and
+ yet be good company. And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it.
+ On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after
+ our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. This
+ was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with
+ him at home."
+
+Professor Thayer adds in a note:--
+
+ "Like Milton, Mr. Emerson 'was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,'
+ and he used even less tobacco. Milton's quiet day seems to have
+ closed regularly with a pipe; he 'supped,' we are told, 'upon ...
+ some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water
+ went to bed.'"
+
+As Emerson's name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler
+aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in
+this semi-philosophical luxury.
+
+One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room
+filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the
+room over them. The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did
+their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was
+destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson,
+including his father's sermons. Emerson got wet and chilled, and it
+seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory
+which came over his declining years.
+
+His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve
+his temporary needs. A study was made ready for him in the old Court
+House, and the "Old Manse," which had sheltered his grandfather, and
+others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant.
+
+On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor
+of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same
+month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his
+daughter Ellen. We have little to record of this visit, which was
+suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted
+for him. He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had
+no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself
+upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that
+the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,--that,
+as to his Humble-bee,
+
+ "All was picture as he passed."
+
+But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. The
+sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. It did not
+confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement
+organized itself almost without effort. If any such had been needed, the
+attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers
+to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house would have been as
+energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring
+the reprint of "Sartor Resartus." I have his kind permission to publish
+the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily
+carried out.
+
+ _To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson's
+ House, after the Fire of July_ 24, 1872:
+
+ The death of Mr. Emerson has removed any objection which may have
+ before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. I
+ have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the
+ satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate
+ letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most
+ unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the
+ offer to restore for him his ruined home.
+
+ No enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in
+ its purpose and in its results. The prompt and cordial response to
+ the proposed subscription was most gratifying. No contribution was
+ solicited from any one. The simple suggestion to a few friends of
+ Mr. Emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service
+ to him was all that was needed. From the first day on which it was
+ made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques
+ for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks I
+ was enabled to send to Judge Hoar the sum named in his letter as
+ received by him on the 13th of August, and presented by him to Mr.
+ Emerson the next morning, at the Old Manse, with fitting words.
+
+ Other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount
+ on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. A part
+ of this was handed directly to the builder at Concord. The balance
+ was sent to Mr. Emerson October 7, and acknowledged by him in his
+ letter of October 8, 1872.
+
+ All the friends of Mr. Emerson who knew of the plan which was
+ proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a
+ privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and
+ veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of
+ gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much
+ larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had
+ been required, for the object in view.
+
+ Those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly
+ "conspiracy" may well take pleasure in the thought that what they
+ have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety
+ which the calamity of the fire brought with it to Mr. Emerson, and
+ thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble
+ life that was so dear to all of us.
+
+ My thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this
+ message of good-will.
+
+ LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+ BOSTON, May 8, 1882.
+
+
+ BOSTON, August 13, 1872.
+
+ DEAR MR. EMERSON:
+
+ It seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on
+ hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of
+ rebuilding it.
+
+ A few of them have united for this object, and now request your
+ acceptance of the amount which I have to-day deposited to your order
+ at the Concord Bank, through the kindness of our friend, Judge Hoar.
+ They trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere
+ regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it
+ a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of
+ your home.
+
+ And if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work,
+ they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what
+ is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the
+ remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you.
+
+ Very sincerely yours,
+
+ LE BARON RUSSELL.
+
+
+ CONCORD, August 14, 1872.
+
+ DR. LE B. RUSSELL:
+
+ _Dear Sir_,--I received your letters, with the check for ten
+ thousand dollars inclosed, from Mr. Barrett last evening. This
+ morning I deposited it to Mr. Emerson's credit in the Concord
+ National Bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance
+ entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with
+ your letter. I told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends
+ had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to
+ England and examine Warwick Castle and other noted houses that
+ had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas
+ possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which
+ the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood.
+
+ When he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed
+ very deeply moved. He said that he had been allowed so far in life
+ to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say,--that
+ the kindness of his friends was very great. I said what I thought
+ was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of
+ friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their
+ respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a
+ privilege to do so. I mentioned Hillard as you desired, and also
+ Mrs. Tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any
+ assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars,
+ personally.
+
+ I think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of
+ contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. He
+ told me that Mr. F.C. Lowell, who was his classmate and old friend,
+ Mr. Bangs, Mrs. Gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent
+ him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as
+ he could bear. This makes the whole a very gratifying result, and
+ perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book.
+
+ I am glad that Mr. Emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a
+ debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily
+ for what you have done about it. Very truly yours,
+
+ E.R. HOAR.
+
+
+ CONCORD, August 16, 1872.
+
+ MY DEAR LE BARON:
+
+ I have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments
+ till it is high time that I should reply to it, if I can. My
+ misfortunes, as I have lived along so far in this world, have been
+ so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of
+ good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has
+ come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating,
+ soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins,
+ so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment
+ with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished
+ me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without
+ delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a
+ good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward
+ a better deserving. Judge Hoar has, up to this time, withheld from
+ me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that I shall not
+ rest till I have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at
+ night and at morning.
+
+ Your affectionate friend and debtor,
+
+ R.W. EMERSON.
+
+
+ DR. LE BARON RUSSELL
+
+ CONCORD, October 8, 1872.
+
+ MY DEAR DOCTOR LE BARON:
+
+ I received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in
+ one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars.
+
+ Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? No, you will say,
+ but to make me live longer. I thought myself sufficiently loaded
+ with benefits already, and you add more and more. It appears that
+ you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my
+ old days abroad on a young man's excursion.
+
+ I am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their
+ tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. Now that
+ I have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have
+ conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom I have never
+ personally known), I please myself with the thought of meeting each
+ and asking, Why have we not met before? Why have you not told me
+ that we thought alike? Life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought
+ so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best
+ agree. Well, 'tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my
+ solitude. Perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a
+ better lesson.
+
+ Thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that I am
+ not wood or stone, if I have not yet trusted myself so far as to go
+ to each one of them directly.
+
+ My wife insists that I shall also send her acknowledgments to them
+ and you.
+
+ Yours and theirs affectionately,
+
+ R.W. EMERSON.
+
+ DR. LE BARON KUSSELL.
+
+
+The following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for
+rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house:--
+
+Mrs. Anne S. Hooper.
+Miss Alice S. Hooper.
+Mrs. Caroline Tappan.
+Miss Ellen S. Tappan.
+Miss Mary A. Tappan.
+Mr. T.G. Appleton.
+Mrs. Henry Edwards.
+Miss Susan E. Dorr.
+Misses Wigglesworth.
+Mr. Edward Wigglesworth.
+Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.
+Mrs. Sarah S. Russell.
+Friends in New York and Philadelphia, through Mr. Williams.
+Mr. William Whiting.
+Mr. Frederick Beck.
+Mr. H.P. Kidder.
+Mrs. Abel Adams.
+Mrs. George Faulkner.
+Hon. E.R. Hoar.
+Mr. James B. Thayer.
+Mr. John M. Forbes.
+Mr. James H. Beal.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lodge.
+Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge.
+Mr. H.H. Hunnewell.
+Mrs. S. Cabot.
+Mr. James A. Dupee.
+Mrs. Anna C. Lowell.
+Mrs. M.F. Sayles.
+Miss Helen L. Appleton.
+J.R. Osgood & Co.
+Mr. Richard Soule.
+Mr. Francis Geo. Shaw.
+Dr. R.W. Hooper.
+Mr. William P. Mason.
+Mr. William Gray.
+Mr. Sam'l G. Ward.
+Mr. J.I. Bowditch.
+Mr. Geo. C. Ward.
+Mrs. Luicia J. Briggs.
+Mr. John E. Williams.
+Dr. Le Baron Russell.
+
+In May, 1873, Emerson returned to Concord. His friends and
+fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and
+reverence. A set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival.
+Carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him
+with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his
+renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and
+admiring friends and neighbors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+1873-1878. AET. 70-75.
+
+Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the
+Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of
+"Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social
+Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and
+Originality.--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--
+Greatness.--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The
+Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems.
+
+
+In December, 1874, Emerson published "Parnassus," a Collection of Poems
+by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his
+subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together.
+They are as follows: "Nature."--"Human Life."--"Intellectual."
+--"Contemplation."--"Moral and Religious."--"Heroic."--"Personal."
+--"Pictures."--"Narrative Poems and Ballads."--"Songs."--"Dirges and
+Pathetic Poems."--"Comic and Humorous."--"Poetry of Terror."--"Oracles
+and Counsels."
+
+I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis
+Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy," that
+I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his
+excellent work.
+
+"This collection," he says,
+
+ "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying
+ into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many
+ of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on
+ the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost
+ everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet
+ Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious
+ poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections.
+ With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional
+ poems which have attracted devout souls.--His poetical sympathies
+ are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the
+ seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any
+ other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The
+ names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently
+ appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to
+ Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make
+ up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and
+ some whose merit is other than poetical.--This selection of poems
+ is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I
+ not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and
+ introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general
+ reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of
+ the poems and poets appearing in these selections."
+
+I will only add to Mr. Cooke's criticism these two remarks: First, that
+I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look
+for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies
+at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were
+collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss
+of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search
+that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris." The other remark is that
+each one of Emerson's American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted
+would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of
+his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some
+specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen
+fit to indulge us.
+
+In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among
+the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He
+received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was
+elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:--
+
+ "I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen
+ on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in
+ the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my
+ too partial advocate."
+
+Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to "Letters and Social Aims,"
+that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the
+collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the
+illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of
+mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case
+have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even
+whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what
+even he would have tolerated:--
+
+ "There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his
+ full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and
+ arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely
+ to the matter."
+
+This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just
+enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is
+that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than
+the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these
+it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;"
+"Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;"
+"Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with
+which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this
+Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his
+leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh
+in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed
+sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find
+repeated in his verse. Thus:--
+
+ "Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and
+ makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a
+ mortal man!"
+
+And so in the well remembered lines of "The Problem":--
+
+ "Himself from God he could not free."
+
+"He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him,
+and made the sun and stars."
+
+ "Art might obey but not surpass.
+ The passive Master lent his hand
+ To the vast soul that o'er him planned."
+
+Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson's as it was at the
+bottom of Pandora's box:--
+
+ "I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the
+ immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology,
+ symbols, religion of our own.
+
+ --"Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every
+ fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."
+
+Under the title "Social Aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning
+manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a
+specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:--
+
+ "Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions,
+ nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness;
+ even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of
+ unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it."
+
+We have had one Essay on "Eloquence" already. One extract from this new
+discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:--
+
+ "These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain
+ speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but
+ we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your
+ fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes
+ of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in
+ it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to_
+ _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the
+ person to whom you speak_."
+
+The italics are Emerson's.
+
+If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth
+before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and
+strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson's
+Essay on "Resources":--
+
+ "A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching
+ pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds,
+ and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than
+ sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being
+ odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives;
+ if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what
+ man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic;
+ that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man
+ is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to
+ nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has
+ experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put into genial and
+ working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and
+ gratitude to the Cause of Causes."
+
+The Essay or Lecture on "The Comic" may have formed a part of a series
+he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings
+in it will show his view sufficiently:--
+
+ "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or
+ well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to
+ be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
+ performance.
+
+ "If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect
+ between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why
+ we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest
+ than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by
+ stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic
+ seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It
+ appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--A rogue
+ alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost,
+ his fellow-men can do little for him."
+
+These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by
+well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very
+recent date.
+
+"Quotation and Originality" furnishes the key to Emerson's workshop. He
+believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not
+in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king
+borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and
+superscription.
+
+ "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every
+ moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two
+ strands.--We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences,
+ religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses,
+ tables and chairs by imitation.--
+
+ "The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and
+ stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his
+ invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.
+
+ "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of
+ it."--
+
+--"The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has
+already been mentioned.
+
+--The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating,
+is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness."
+
+ "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree.
+ Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--Stick to
+ your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national
+ crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of
+ heaven for you to walk in.
+
+ "Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own,
+ differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this
+ specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever
+ accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens
+ to this whisper which is heard by him alone."
+
+If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is
+concentration.--To the bias of the individual mind must be added the
+most catholic receptivity for the genius of others.
+
+ "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every
+ man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of
+ him."--
+
+ "The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded
+ the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others;
+ sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his
+ cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be
+ himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we
+ seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall
+ he found."
+
+What has Emerson to tell us of "Inspiration?"
+
+ "I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by
+ inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.--
+
+ "How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our
+ affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of
+ these."
+
+I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to
+reproduce his comments on each:--
+
+1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed
+sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the
+faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially
+the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude
+of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel
+in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means
+chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader.
+
+ "Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working
+ mood."
+
+What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is
+to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation
+to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed
+in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such
+sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:--
+
+ "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
+ namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall
+ continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we,
+ if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."
+
+This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the
+possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:--
+
+ "Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'"
+
+He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu
+thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror
+of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two
+skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of
+years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure
+to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in
+permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created
+things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last
+plainly:--
+
+ "Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the
+ world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma."
+
+But turn over a few pages and we may read:--
+
+ "I confess that everything connected with our personality fails.
+ Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a
+ complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We
+ have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to
+ which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The
+ soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not
+ to be good. 'If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,'
+ said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are
+ enlarged and enthroned.'"
+
+Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson's creed, if such a word
+applies to a statement like the following:--
+
+ --"I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are
+ better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for.
+ The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down
+ in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's 'Ode' is the best modern
+ essay on the subject."
+
+Wordsworth's "Ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more?
+The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an
+early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge
+into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The
+eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs
+to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of
+reason.
+
+On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "Fight at
+the Bridge," Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the
+statue of "The Minute-Man," erected at the place of the conflict, to
+commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he
+delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies
+before me I extract a single passage:--
+
+ "In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England,
+ but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had
+ arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play
+ its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine
+ Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the
+ Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England
+ was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely
+ disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel
+ the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all
+ the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he
+ was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent,
+ America was instantly united, and the Nation born."
+
+There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written
+at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary
+labors.
+
+Emerson's collected "Poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent
+collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following
+chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+1878-1882. AET. 75-79.
+
+Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical
+Sketches."--"Miscellanies."
+
+
+The decline of Emerson's working faculties went on gently and gradually,
+but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter,
+Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding
+his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an
+echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind
+faltered and needed a momentary impulse.
+
+With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time
+to read a paper before a select audience. Thus, March 30, 1878, he
+delivered a Lecture in the Old South Church,--"Fortune of the Republic."
+On the 5th of May, 1879, he read a Lecture in the Chapel of Divinity
+College, Harvard University,--"The Preacher." In 1881 he read a paper on
+Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society.--He also published
+a paper in the "North American Review," in 1878,--"The Sovereignty of
+Ethics," and one on "Superlatives," in "The Century" for February, 1882.
+
+But in these years he was writing little or nothing. All these papers
+were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. The same
+thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were
+only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their
+arrangement was the work of Mr. Emerson's friend and literary executor,
+Mr. Cabot. These volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single
+period of his literary life.
+
+Mr. Cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of Emerson's collected works,
+which bears the title, "Lectures and Biographical Sketches," the
+following:--
+
+"NOTE.
+
+"Of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from
+'The Dial,' 'Character,' 'Plutarch,' and the biographical sketches of
+Dr. Ripley, of Mr. Hoar, and of Henry Thoreau, were printed by Mr.
+Emerson before I took any part in the arrangement of his papers. The
+rest, except the sketch of Miss Mary Emerson, I got ready for his use
+in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. He had given up
+the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special
+request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his
+manuscripts, in the manner described in the Preface to 'Letters and
+Social Aims,'--some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new.
+Some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others,
+namely, 'Aristocracy,' 'Education,' 'The Man of Letters,' 'The Scholar,'
+'Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,' 'Mary Moody
+Emerson,' are now published for the first time."
+
+Some of these papers I have already had occasion to refer to. From
+several of the others I will make one or two extracts,--a difficult
+task, so closely are the thoughts packed together.
+
+From "Demonology":--
+
+ "I say to the table-rappers
+
+ 'I will believe
+ Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,'
+ And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!"
+
+ "Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the
+ supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away
+ all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments
+ which haunt us. Willingly I too say Hail! to the unknown, awful
+ powers which transcend the ken of the understanding."
+
+I will not quote anything from the Essay called "Aristocracy." But let
+him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has
+come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England
+air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation
+of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation.
+
+"Perpetual Forces" is one of those prose poems,--of his earlier epoch,
+I have no doubt,--in which he plays with the facts of science with
+singular grace and freedom.
+
+What man could speak more fitly, with more authority of "Character,"
+than Emerson? When he says, "If all things are taken away, I have
+still all things in my relation to the Eternal," we feel that such an
+utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in
+which it was imprisoned.
+
+We have had a glimpse of Emerson as a school-master, but behind and far
+above the teaching drill-master's desk is the chair from which he speaks
+to us of "Education." Compare the short and easy method of the wise man
+of old,--"He that spareth his rod hateth his son," with this other, "Be
+the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of
+his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin."
+
+"The Superlative" will prove light and pleasant reading after these
+graver essays. [Greek: Maedhen agan]--_ne quid nimis_,--nothing in
+excess, was his precept as to adjectives.
+
+Two sentences from "The Sovereignty of Ethics" will go far towards
+reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the Westminster
+Assembly's Catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual
+dynamite:--
+
+ "Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the
+ pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the
+ pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.--
+
+ "If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of
+ Platonism, or of Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more
+ truly, have not yet their own legitimate force."
+
+So, too, this from "The Preacher":--
+
+ "All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation
+ against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and
+ its use.--The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the
+ substantial benefit endures."
+
+The special interest of the Address called "The Man of Letters" is, that
+it was delivered during the war. He was no advocate for peace where
+great principles were at the bottom of the conflict:--
+
+ "War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral
+ aspects at once.--War ennobles the age.--Battle, with the sword,
+ has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and
+ West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie."
+
+"The Scholar" was delivered before two Societies at the University of
+Virginia so late as the year 1876. If I must select any of its wise
+words, I will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to
+show his sense of their importance:--
+
+ "For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the
+ invisible world are the interrogators: _Who are you? What do you?
+ Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness?
+ Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul_?
+
+ "Can he answer these questions? Can he dispose of them? Happy if you
+ can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life!
+ Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer
+ them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general
+ mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all
+ who know them."
+
+The Essay on "Plutarch" has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson
+owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of
+the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. _Mutato nomine_, the
+portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his
+own:--
+
+ "Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in
+ character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral, or
+ metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to
+ his pen with more or less fulness of record.
+
+ "A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an
+ intellectual co-perception. Plutarch's memory is full and his
+ horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his.
+
+ "Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends
+ him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his
+ moral sentiment is always pure.--
+
+ "I do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of Ben
+ Jonson's--'so rammed with life,' and this in chapters chiefly
+ ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental.--His
+ vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an
+ incident.--
+
+ "In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to
+ discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.--'Tis all
+ Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this
+ emperor.
+
+ "It is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I
+ confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a
+ faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but
+ he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a
+ necessity for completing his studies.
+
+ "He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like
+ another Berkeley, 'Matter is itself privation.'--
+
+ "Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the
+ method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and
+ prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato than as a disputant.
+
+ "His natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a
+ physicist.
+
+ "But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature
+ and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of
+ character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to
+ the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his
+ rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the
+ soul. La Harpe said that 'Plutarch is the genius the most naturally
+ moral that ever existed.'
+
+ "Plutarch thought 'truth to be the greatest good that man can
+ receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.'
+
+ "All his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is
+ more delightful to do than to receive a kindness.
+
+ "Plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned--eminently social, he was
+ a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and
+ knew the high value of good conversation.--
+
+ "He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its
+ victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities
+ of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental
+ associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially
+ marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the
+ intellect by the force of morals."
+
+How much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it
+had been set down in an obituary notice of Emerson!
+
+I have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this
+volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the "Plutarch." Some
+of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. They are "Historic
+Notes of Life and Letters in New England;" "The Chardon Street
+Convention;" "Ezra Ripley, D.D.;" "Mary Moody Emerson;" "Samuel Hoar;"
+"Thoreau;" "Carlyle."--
+
+Mr. Cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of Emerson's writings
+with the following "Note":--
+
+ "The first five pieces in this volume, and the 'Editorial Address'
+ from the 'Massachusetts Quarterly Review,' were published by Mr.
+ Emerson long ago. The speeches at the John Brown, the Walter Scott,
+ and the Free Religious Association meetings were published at the
+ time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation
+ on his part. The 'Fortune of the Republic' appeared separately in
+ 1879; the rest have never been published. In none was any change
+ from the original form made by me, except in the 'Fortune of the
+ Republic,' which was made up of several lectures for the occasion
+ upon which it was read."
+
+The volume of "Miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces
+of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. The
+five referred to as having been previously published are, "The Lord's
+Supper," the "Historical Discourse in Concord," the "Address at the
+Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument in Concord," the "Address on
+Emancipation in the British West Indies," and the Lecture or Essay on
+"War,"--all of which have been already spoken of.
+
+Next in order comes a Lecture on the "Fugitive Slave Law." Emerson says,
+"I do not often speak on public questions.--My own habitual view is to
+the well-being of scholars." But he leaves his studies to attack the
+institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered
+any inconvenience, and the "Law," which the abolitionists would always
+call the "Fugitive Slave _Bill_." Emerson had a great admiration for
+Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the
+seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture.
+He warns against false leadership:--
+
+ "To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all
+ foolish trust in others.--He only who is able to stand alone is
+ qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which
+ a soul exists in this world,--to be himself the counter-balance of
+ all falsehood and all wrong.--The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and
+ strong and selfish.--England maintains trade, not liberty."
+
+Cowper had said long before this:--
+
+ "doing good,
+ Disinterested good, is not our trade."
+
+And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen
+years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free
+and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England
+forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of "a great
+empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth."
+
+It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the
+abolitionists. But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp
+point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:--
+
+ "The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us
+ the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and
+ a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get
+ rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom."
+
+These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on "The
+Assault upon Mr. Sumner." A few months later, in his "Speech on the
+Affairs of Kansas," delivered almost five years before the first gun
+was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and
+commanding words:--
+
+ "The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.
+ A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be
+ than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the
+ American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new,
+ it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the
+ enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic
+ interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a
+ net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.
+
+ "Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic,
+ I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves
+ into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning
+ from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the
+ sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the
+ country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no
+ country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a
+ country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any
+ who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes
+ and depart to some land where freedom exists."
+
+Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of
+the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after
+his execution:--
+
+ "Our blind statesmen," he says, "go up and down, with committees of
+ vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy.
+ They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its
+ birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the
+ arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah
+ Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before
+ Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it."
+
+From his "Discourse on Theodore Parker" I take the following vigorous
+sentence:--
+
+ "His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond
+ all men in pulpits,--I cannot think of one rival,--that the essence
+ of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or
+ it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with
+ ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or
+ private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or
+ unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier
+ nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the
+ high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,--it is
+ hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious
+ music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of
+ Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are."
+
+The Lecture on "American Civilization," made up from two Addresses, one
+of which was delivered at Washington on the 31st of January, 1862, is,
+as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. That on the "Emancipation
+Proclamation," delivered in Boston in September, 1862, is as full of
+"silent joy" at the advent of "a day which most of us dared not hope
+to see,--an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and
+uncertainties."
+
+From the "Remarks" at the funeral services for Abraham Lincoln, held
+in Concord on the 19th of April, 1865, I extract this admirably drawn
+character of the man:--
+
+ "He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by
+ step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening
+ his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an
+ entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty
+ millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds
+ articulated by his tongue."
+
+The following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume:
+"Harvard Commemoration Speech;" "Editor's Address: Massachusetts
+Quarterly Review;" "Woman;" "Address to Kossuth;" "Robert Burns;"
+"Walter Scott;" "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious
+Association;" "Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Free Religious
+Association;" "The Fortune of the Republic." In treating of the
+"Woman Question," Emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect
+fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to
+determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. "The
+new movement," he says, "is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and
+woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart
+is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to
+accomplish."
+
+It is hard to turn a leaf in any book of Emerson's writing without
+finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which
+illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for
+an extract. But I must content myself with these few sentences from "The
+Fortune of the Republic," the last address he ever delivered, in which
+his belief in America and her institutions, and his trust in the
+Providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found
+fitting utterance:--
+
+ "Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here
+ let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. What this
+ country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its
+ materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall
+ serve man, and not man corn.
+
+ "They who find America insipid,--they for whom London and Paris have
+ spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I
+ not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for
+ more than there is in the world.
+
+ "Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course
+ of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little
+ wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows
+ the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to
+ their good."
+
+With this expression of love and respect for his country and trust
+in his country's God, we may take leave of Emerson's prose writings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+EMERSON'S POEMS.
+
+
+The following "Prefatory Note" by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume
+of the series of Emerson's collected works:--
+
+ "This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS
+ and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a
+ selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many.
+ Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the
+ expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some
+ pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on
+ various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson's approval,
+ but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it
+ seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their
+ completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished
+ doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of
+ these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify
+ their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been
+ admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts
+ found in the Essays.
+
+ "In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole
+ preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
+ opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
+ time.
+
+ "As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of
+ Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "Selected
+ Poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases
+ preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in
+ fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.
+
+ "A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "May-Day," in the
+ part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
+ bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature."
+
+Emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have
+called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of
+the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize
+its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is
+something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his
+prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear.
+
+Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to
+the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as
+we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the
+redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet.
+
+It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its
+drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet
+excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the
+fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we
+should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon
+by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under
+the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers
+and jewels of his vocabulary.
+
+Here is a prose sentence from Emerson's "Works and Days:"--
+
+ "The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go
+ like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party;
+ but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring,
+ they carry them as silently away."
+
+Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference
+between prose and poetry:--
+
+ "DAYS.
+
+ "Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
+ Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
+ And marching single in an endless file,
+ Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
+ To each they offer gifts after his will,
+ Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
+ I, in my pleachéd garden watched the pomp,
+ Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
+ Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
+ Turned and departed silent. I too late
+ Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."
+
+--Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball! The
+full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like
+bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives
+like edges of embroidery. That one word _pleachéd,_ an heir-loom from
+Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and
+charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the
+poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first
+extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he
+now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It
+is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty
+embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation
+in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion
+that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic
+utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which
+shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm
+that "_In_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _In_ carmine _veritas_.
+As a further illustration of what has just been said of the
+self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more
+especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily
+presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to
+in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.
+
+Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so
+many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip
+on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was
+shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the
+metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract
+of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of
+survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds
+his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.
+
+Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?
+
+ "The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
+ them, of all men, the severest criticism is due."
+
+These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus."
+
+His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They
+lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems
+to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited
+from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but
+with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric,"
+and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple,
+sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be
+forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used
+absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be
+very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the
+poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some
+of the best of Milton's own.
+
+In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson
+was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet
+or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the
+term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat
+at eighty degrees of Réaumur is a very different matter. The rank of
+poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to
+our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to
+this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular
+poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the
+popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered
+passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.
+Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a
+great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that
+length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is
+crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.
+And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in
+the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on
+Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and
+"Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a
+school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of
+poet.
+
+It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in
+a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and
+conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those
+authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And
+after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is
+greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode
+to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so
+often quoted as
+
+ "To point a moral or adorn a tale."
+
+We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry
+with Emerson's own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing
+to Carlyle:--
+
+ "I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of
+ literature, the reporters, suburban men."
+
+But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:--
+
+ "He once said to me, 'I am not a great poet--but whatever is of me
+ _is a poet_.'"
+
+These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and
+different periods.
+
+Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his
+self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the
+faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic
+confessional:--
+
+ "A dull uncertain brain,
+ But gifted yet to know
+ That God has cherubim who go
+ Singing an immortal strain,
+ Immortal here below.
+ I know the mighty bards,
+ I listen while they sing,
+ And now I know
+ The secret store
+ Which these explore
+ When they with torch of genius pierce
+ The tenfold clouds that cover
+ The riches of the universe
+ From God's adoring lover.
+ And if to me it is not given
+ To fetch one ingot thence
+ Of that unfading gold of Heaven
+ His merchants may dispense,
+ Yet well I know the royal mine
+ And know the sparkle of its ore,
+ Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,--
+ Explored, they teach us to explore."
+
+These lines are from "The Poet," a series of fragments given in the
+"Appendix," which, with his first volume, "Poems," his second, "May-Day,
+and other Pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series.
+These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be
+found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of
+Emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had
+most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "The Poet."
+
+Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this
+passage from "Merlin" sufficiently shows:--
+
+ "Thy trivial harp will never please
+ Or fill my craving ear;
+ Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
+ Free, peremptory, clear.
+ No jingling serenader's art
+ Nor tinkling of piano-strings
+ Can make the wild blood start
+ In its mystic springs;
+ The kingly bard
+ Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
+ As with hammer or with mace;
+ That they may render back
+ Artful thunder, which conveys
+ Secrets of the solar track,
+ Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ Great is the art,
+ Great be the manners of the bard.
+ He shall not his brain encumber
+ With the coil of rhythm and number;
+ But leaving rule and pale forethought
+ He shall aye climb
+ For his rhyme.
+ 'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say,
+ 'In to the upper doors,
+ Nor count compartments of the floors,
+ But mount to paradise
+ By the stairway of surprise.'"
+
+And here is another passage from "The Poet," mentioned in the quotation
+before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater
+miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus:--
+
+ "A Brother of the world, his song
+ Sounded like a tempest strong
+ Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
+ And stars from the ecliptic road.
+ Time wore he as his clothing-weeds,
+ He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
+ As melts the iceberg in the seas,
+ As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
+ As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,
+ The solid kingdoms like a dream
+ Resist in vain his motive strain,
+ They totter now and float amain.
+ For the Muse gave special charge
+ His learning should be deep and large,
+ And his training should not scant
+ The deepest lore of wealth or want:
+ His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
+ Every maxim of dreadful Need;
+ In its fulness he should taste
+ Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;
+ Full fed, but not intoxicated;
+ He should be loved; he should be hated;
+ A blooming child to children dear,
+ His heart should palpitate with fear."
+
+We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson's chief favorites. In
+his poems "The Test" and "The Solution," we find that the five whom
+he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe.
+
+Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "The Harp:"--
+
+ "And this at least I dare affirm,
+ Since genius too has bound and term,
+ There is no bard in all the choir,
+ Not Homer's self, the poet-sire,
+ Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,
+ Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
+ Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
+ Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
+ Scott, the delight of generous boys,
+ Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--
+ Not one of all can put in verse,
+ Or to this presence could rehearse
+ The sights and voices ravishing
+ The boy knew on the hills in spring."--
+
+In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already
+mentioned.
+
+Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the
+one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of
+criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman
+amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a
+violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of
+description are not odious.
+
+The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries
+with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and
+arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and
+infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular.
+The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something
+definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols
+used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is
+a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days
+and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that
+hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not
+provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day
+use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are
+too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated
+terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that
+he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual
+life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught
+quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly
+known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that
+he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the
+hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor
+Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using
+the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of
+nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he
+reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates
+undertook to "hew Mount Athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of
+Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes
+"Cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly
+humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.
+
+This is the fascination of Emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of
+universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its
+majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the
+every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet,
+never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas
+is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in
+sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective
+resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and
+contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws
+that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote
+objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of
+fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by
+his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object,
+as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full
+as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head
+up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens
+above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a
+Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The
+poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are
+examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet
+is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of
+Fraunhofer's lines to the man of science.
+
+Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the
+best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest
+heavens: like Milton,--
+
+ "He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
+ The living throne, the sapphire blaze
+ Where angels tremble while they gaze,
+ HE SAW"--
+
+Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been
+a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse
+thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.
+
+Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors
+of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere:--
+
+ "Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air,
+ Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
+ But it carves the bow of beauty there,
+ And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
+
+He called upon the poet to
+
+ "Tell men what they knew before;
+ Paint the prospect from their door."
+
+And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life
+with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or
+into a milking-pail.
+
+This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted
+moods he would have us
+
+ "Give to barrows, trays and pans
+ Grace and glimmer of romance."
+
+But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:--
+
+ "What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
+ of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps
+ Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet."
+
+The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are
+forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He
+himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the
+prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists"
+have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr.
+Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if
+they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader
+a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of
+selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy
+Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all
+stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page
+of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and
+exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as
+he might see fit.
+
+French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the
+slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that
+
+ "In the mud and scum of things
+ There alway, alway something sings."
+
+Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even
+there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected
+districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the
+genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they
+disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too
+wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du
+Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments,
+and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless
+circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not
+for a mere sensational effect.
+
+What a range of subjects from "The Problem" and "Uriel" and
+"Forerunners" to "The Humble-Bee" and "The Titmouse!" Nor let the reader
+who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the
+singularly impressive home-poem, "Hamatreya," beginning with the names
+of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,--probably the
+same he owned after the last of them:--
+
+ "Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,"
+
+and ending with the austere and solemn "Earth-Song."
+
+Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical
+expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part
+of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in
+conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with
+rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born
+singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with
+"Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make
+rhyme without actual verbicide:--
+
+ "Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
+ And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are!
+
+And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?
+
+ "In Adirondac lakes
+ At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed."
+
+It was surely not difficult to say--
+
+ "At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide."
+And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we
+like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more
+neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow
+with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and
+sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs
+against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.
+
+There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often,
+indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line.
+It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the
+supreme artist, and Milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,"
+knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant
+indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of
+the "North American Review" in defence of its use. Willis was fond of
+it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even
+have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse.
+But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback
+may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many
+humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear
+reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's?
+
+ "Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
+ Of minds that each can stand against the world
+ By its own meek and incorruptible will?"
+
+These lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we
+may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great
+poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our
+recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson
+has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his
+leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.
+
+As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared
+of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have
+tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in
+triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.
+
+If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless
+versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something
+in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who
+would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking
+_lagena_?--Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp") and his model
+betrays itself:--
+
+ "These syllables that Nature spoke,
+ And the thoughts that in him woke
+ Can adequately utter none
+ Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
+ Therein I hear the Parcae reel
+ The threads of man at their humming wheel,
+ The threads of life and power and pain,
+ So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
+ And best can teach its Delphian chord
+ How Nature to the soul is moored,
+ If once again that silent string,
+ As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."
+
+There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar
+to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians
+by placing "The Sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem
+was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension,
+not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it
+which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed
+upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it,
+but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young
+person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come
+by and by to the verse:--
+
+ "Have I a lover
+ Who is noble and free?--
+ I would he were nobler
+ Than to love me."
+
+The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est
+magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_.
+
+The third poem in the volume, "The Problem," should have stood first in
+order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier
+verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst
+of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The
+Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or
+"Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for
+Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes."
+
+In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their
+descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is
+like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of
+descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle
+selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants,
+as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for
+its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different
+conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its
+descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the
+imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the
+pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes
+with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then
+mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the
+poem called "Destiny":--
+
+ "Alas! that one is born in blight,
+ Victim of perpetual slight:
+ When thou lookest on his face,
+ Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways!
+ None shall ask thee what thou doest,
+ Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
+ Or listen when thou repliest,
+ Or remember where thou liest,
+ Or how thy supper is sodden;'
+ And another is born
+ To make the sun forgotten."
+
+Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete
+and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a
+poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and
+melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in
+Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one
+conspicuous line,
+
+ "And fired the shot heard round the world,"
+
+must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little
+poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn,
+musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records
+the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power
+that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom
+and her martyrs.
+
+These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and
+delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must
+hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them,
+and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the
+question, let him read the paragraph of "May-Day," beginning,--
+
+ "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
+
+"Sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "Appendix" to his published
+works, called, collectively, "The Poet," blocks bearing the mark of
+poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct,
+and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the
+"Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has
+the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with
+all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's
+picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in
+the language,--with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis,"
+leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and
+larger pattern.
+
+Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold's
+remark on the want of "evolution" in Emerson's poems. One is struck
+with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical
+workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of
+poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot
+help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his
+"Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of.
+We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm
+of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which
+Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we
+go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which
+the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away
+half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of
+sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other
+apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest
+a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be
+something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic
+and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find
+showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on
+the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier
+in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to
+that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another
+century or two of acclimation.
+
+Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties.
+He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal
+respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration
+is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal
+facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and
+also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and
+labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had
+been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he
+habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought.
+
+Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The
+golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their
+way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair
+belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the
+air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between
+storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist
+that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own
+characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by
+
+ "The light that never was on sea or land,"
+
+we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not
+merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.
+
+Emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the
+word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two
+of his own chapters in his "Modern Painters." These are the chapter
+on "The Pathetic Fallacy," and the one which follows it "On Classical
+Landscape." In these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or
+emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He
+asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by
+the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says,
+"he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the
+landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern
+painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature,
+imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval
+painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual
+qualities of the object itself."
+
+Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost
+anywhere in Emerson's poems. Here is one which offers itself without
+search:--
+
+ "Daily the bending skies solicit man,
+ The seasons chariot him from this exile,
+ The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
+ The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
+ Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
+ Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home."
+
+The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with
+a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the
+_sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more
+justly.
+
+It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the
+resemblances between Emerson's poetry and that of other poets. Two or
+three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others
+may be mentioned.
+
+In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at
+least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of
+that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both
+are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates
+himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged
+to him.
+
+ "Good-by, proud world,"
+
+recalls Spenser and Raleigh. "The Humble-Bee" is strongly marked by the
+manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell's
+
+ "Annihilating all that's made
+ To a green thought in a green shade,"
+
+may well have suggested Emerson's
+
+ "The green silence dost displace
+ With thy mellow, breezy bass."
+
+"The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of
+Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by
+comparison with either.
+
+"Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been
+found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:--
+
+ "All constellations of the sky
+ Shed their virtue through his eye.
+ Him Nature giveth for defence
+ His formidable innocence."
+
+Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of
+his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were
+original.
+
+So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many
+moods, but with one pervading spirit:--
+
+ "Melting matter into dreams,
+ Panoramas which I saw,
+ And whatever glows or seems
+ Into substance, into Law."
+
+We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:--
+
+ "The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who
+ suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious,
+ and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to
+ complete in your turn."
+
+Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his
+verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of
+his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is
+higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and
+pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow
+to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them
+as they flow by us.
+
+Incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common
+fault. His pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round
+with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "The Snow-Storm" and "Sea-Shore"
+are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far
+as they go, but forcing us to ask, "Where is the painting for which
+these scraps are studies?" or "Out of what great picture have these
+pieces been cut?"
+
+We do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand
+could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes
+smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer's,
+and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any
+versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we
+trust to meddle with them?
+
+His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws
+on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its
+air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze
+wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and
+from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden
+brilliancy.
+
+After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons,
+we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson's poems
+which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a
+hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from
+all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its
+articulating representatives should call us by name.
+
+All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery
+of _style_. "The style is of [a part of] the man himself," said Buffon,
+and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "The style is the
+man."
+
+The "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not
+confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is
+individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with
+a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in
+an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special
+sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the
+total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with
+his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the
+fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But
+this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought;
+that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the
+accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and
+eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity
+of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and
+phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own,
+with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who
+comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all
+he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and
+moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as
+a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding
+of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues,
+shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the
+Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts
+from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward
+Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services.
+
+
+Mr. Conway gives the following account of two visits to Emerson after
+the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious:--
+
+ "In 1875, when I stayed at his house in Concord for a little time,
+ it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those
+ who used to sit at his feet in silence. But when alone with him he
+ conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at
+ times to disappear. There was something striking in the kind of
+ forgetfulness by which he suffered. He remembered the realities
+ and uses of things when he could not recall their names. He would
+ describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall
+ 'chair' he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and
+ 'the implement that cultivates the soil' must do for plough.--
+
+ "In 1880, when I was last in Concord, the trouble had made heavy
+ strides. The intensity of his silent attention to every word that
+ was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to
+ break through the invisible walls closing around them. Yet his face
+ was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some
+ letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying
+ to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he
+ would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. He
+ was still able to joke about his 'naughty memory;' and no complaint
+ came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long.
+ Emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the
+ sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at
+ his side, is quite indescribable."--
+
+One of the later glimpses we have of Emerson is that preserved in the
+journal of Mr. Whitman, who visited Concord in the autumn of 1881. Mr.
+Ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which I take the
+following:--
+
+ "On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to
+ several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle
+ pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one,
+ remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. And so, there
+ Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A good color in his face, eyes
+ clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old
+ clear-peering aspect quite the same."
+
+Mr. Whitman met him again the next day, Sunday, September 18th, and
+records:--
+
+ "As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the
+ eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best
+ suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost
+ always with a smile."
+
+Dr. Le Baron Russell writes to me of Emerson at a still later period:--
+
+ "One incident I will mention which occurred at my last visit
+ to Emerson, only a few months before his death. I went by Mrs.
+ Emerson's request to pass a Sunday at their house at Concord towards
+ the end of June. His memory had been failing for some time, and his
+ mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and
+ manner had never left him. On the morning after my arrival Mrs.
+ Emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which
+ she took great delight. One red rose of most brilliant color she
+ called our attention to especially; its 'hue' was so truly 'angry
+ and brave' that I involuntarily repeated Herbert's line,--
+
+ 'Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,'--
+
+ from the verses which Emerson had first repeated to me so long ago.
+ Emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden
+ impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, 'I take off
+ my hat to it.'"
+
+Once a poet, always a poet. It was the same reverence for the beautiful
+that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the
+wood, as Governor Rice has told us the story, given in an earlier
+chapter.
+
+I do not remember Emerson's last time of attendance at the "Saturday
+Club," but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words
+had become well marked. "My memory hides itself," he said. The last time
+I saw him, living, was at Longfellow's funeral. I was sitting opposite
+to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked
+intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose
+again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently
+remembering that he had just done so. Mr. Conway reports that he said to
+a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I
+have entirely forgotten his name."
+
+Dr. Edward Emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request,
+with information regarding his father's last years which will interest
+every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to
+the hour of evening shadows.
+
+"May-Day," which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written
+since his first volume appeared. After this he wrote no poems, but with
+some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem "Boston," which had
+remained unfinished since the old Anti-slavery days. "Greatness," and
+the "Phi Beta Kappa Oration" of 1867, were among his last pieces of
+work. His College Lectures, "The Natural History of the Intellect,"
+were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded
+together. In 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from
+them for the "Little Classic" edition of his works, then called
+"Selected Poems." In that year he gave his "Address to the Students of
+the University of Virginia." This was a paper written long before, and
+its revision, with the aid of his daughter Ellen, was accomplished with
+much difficulty.
+
+The year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. During the last
+five years he hardly answered a letter. Before this time it had become
+increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought
+he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter Ellen was
+compelled to assume the correspondence. He did, however, write some
+letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the
+Virginia students.
+
+Emerson left off going regularly to the "Saturday Club" probably in
+1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot
+began to come regularly to work on "Letters and Social Aims," Emerson,
+who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings.
+The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his
+staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a
+part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and
+readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his
+sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled,
+and that "M's" and "N's" troubled him to read. He recognized the members
+of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as I infer from this
+statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new
+acquaintances, as is common with old persons.
+
+He continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works
+with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and
+endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found
+written "Examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date.
+
+In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his
+table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a
+child. He liked to look over the "Advertiser," and was interested in the
+"Nation." He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to
+guests.
+
+All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr.
+Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day
+of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and
+gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing
+and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to
+the very verge of its earthly existence.
+
+But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From
+these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of
+the worn-out bodily frame.
+
+In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he
+could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him,
+he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression
+than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he
+pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle "the
+good man,--my friend." His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which
+seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of
+pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized
+those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his
+arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered
+with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him
+and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the
+completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and
+his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882.
+
+Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for
+the most part, taken the following extracts:--
+
+ "The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place
+ at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried
+ a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted
+ by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church
+ where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town
+ bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with
+ other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped,
+ and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at
+ the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman.
+
+ "The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred
+ at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a
+ kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in
+ character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in
+ the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and
+ close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in
+ three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and
+ white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled
+ with friends and neighbors.
+
+ "At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival
+ of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was
+ packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of
+ pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow
+ jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral
+ tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson
+ school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums
+ and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath.
+
+ "Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut
+ coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back,
+ and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small
+ bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, 'Pleyel's
+ Hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the
+ deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge
+ E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the
+ congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his
+ voice many times trembling with emotion."
+
+I subjoin this most impressive "Address" entire, from the manuscript
+with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me:--
+
+ "The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson
+ has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing
+ company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his
+ grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our
+ parting tribute of memory and love.
+
+ "There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was
+ rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was
+ softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to
+ the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the
+ face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the
+ opening heavens.
+
+ "Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his
+ fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from
+ beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great
+ public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was
+ _ours_. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our
+ village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was
+ to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was
+ our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and
+ the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride.
+
+ "'He is gone--is dust,--
+ He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished!
+ For him there is no longer any future.
+ His life is bright--bright without spot it was
+ And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour
+ Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap.
+ Far off is he, above desire and fear;
+ No more submitted to the change and chance
+ Of the uncertain planets.--
+
+ "'The bloom is vanished from my life,
+ For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth;
+ Transformed for me the real to a dream,
+ Clothing the palpable and the familiar
+ With golden exhalations of the dawn.
+ Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,
+ The _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.'
+
+ "That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high
+ aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which
+ trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large
+ heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that
+ hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no
+ repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh,
+ friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there
+ no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and
+ farewell!"
+
+Judge Hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the
+hymns, "Thy will be done," "I will not fear the fate provided by Thy
+love." The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures.
+
+The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an "Address," from which I
+extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any
+that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their
+subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or
+write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not
+wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion.
+
+ "The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of
+ life we are in death.' But it is still more true that in the midst
+ of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality
+ as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a
+ few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'He is not here:
+ he is risen.' That power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence,
+ that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have
+ been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It
+ has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of
+ our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to
+ nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell,
+ or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from
+ it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which
+ meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose,
+ insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this
+ has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one
+ as he, we can only think of life, never of death.
+
+ "Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'Immortality.'
+ But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the
+ greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the
+ higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief
+ which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those
+ shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the
+ Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the
+ revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Let us then ponder his words:--
+
+ 'Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
+ What rainbows teach and sunsets show?
+ Voice of earth to earth returned,
+ Prayers of saints that inly burned,
+ Saying, _What is excellent
+ As God lives, is permanent;
+ Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
+ Hearts' love will meet thee again._
+
+ * * * *
+
+ House and tenant go to ground
+ Lost in God, in Godhead found.'"
+
+After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M.
+Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the
+church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the
+following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:---
+
+ "His harp is silent: shall successors rise,
+ Touching with venturous hand the trembling string,
+ Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise,
+ And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing?
+ Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes,
+ As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise,
+ World-wide his native melodies did sing,
+ Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories?
+ Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie:
+ None hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill
+ To touch that instrument with art and will.
+ With him, winged poesy doth droop and die;
+ While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament
+ The bard high heaven had for its service sent."
+
+
+ "Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors,
+ friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the
+ dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore
+ a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession
+ took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall
+ pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies
+ of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being
+ concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray
+ surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services
+ here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final
+ resting-place.
+
+ "The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal
+ clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the
+ Lord's Prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.'
+ In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the
+ benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open
+ grave and threw flowers into it."
+
+So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
+and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+EMERSON.--A RETROSPECT.
+
+Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a
+Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As
+influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and
+Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an
+American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and
+Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and
+Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of
+his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.
+
+
+Emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so
+slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the
+accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has
+been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to
+be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all
+immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to
+let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. It
+is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the
+daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals,
+ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly "Great geniuses
+have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
+them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life
+was trivial and commonplace."
+
+The reader has had many extracts from Emerson's writings laid before
+him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are
+so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like
+distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he
+says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life
+to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _Emersoniana_,
+by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson's writings it may
+be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man
+and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may
+probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from
+the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the
+name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the
+same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of
+the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading.
+He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir
+if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the
+interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate.
+
+Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of
+scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in
+the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that
+he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly
+have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very
+light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on
+his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of
+the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller,
+Professor Thayer, "How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?" "A
+hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "Yes, yes, a hundred and
+forty and a half! That _half_ I prize; it is an index of better things!"
+
+Emerson's head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a
+philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the
+_cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches
+and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven
+and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It
+was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly
+equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most
+heads.
+
+His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this
+peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like "Ammon's great son," he carried
+one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose
+somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide,
+well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in
+its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin
+shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His
+expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement,
+centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New
+Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three
+cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied
+thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port
+of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring
+intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our
+fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished
+personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In
+a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my
+quoting, he says of Emerson:--
+
+"There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he
+habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if
+ever, only rise in spurts."
+
+From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars
+relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.
+
+His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick.
+His eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." The member of the
+family who tells me this says:--
+
+"My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else
+had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in
+sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them."
+
+He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very
+limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College,
+and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented
+himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when
+his turn came, said to him, "Chord!" "What?" said Emerson. "Chord!
+Chord! I tell you," repeated the master. "I don't know what you mean,"
+said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise,
+and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come
+again.'"
+
+Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in
+the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with
+others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "It stood before him and
+was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour
+of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven.
+Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could
+do night after night. He never was hungry,--could go any time from
+breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for
+food when it was set before him.
+
+He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and
+often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the
+better.
+
+It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life
+long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency.
+He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about
+ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to
+Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily
+inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:--
+
+ "I bear in youth the sad infirmities
+ That use to undo the limb and sense of age."
+
+Four years later:--
+
+ "Has God on thee conferred
+ A bodily presence mean as Paul's,
+ Yet made thee bearer of a word
+ Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"
+
+and again, in the same year:--
+
+ "Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
+ Trembling for the body's sake."--
+
+Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing
+in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization.
+
+And in writing to Carlyle, he says:--
+
+"You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and
+postponement of the blonde constitution."
+
+Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast
+debility and procrastination."
+
+He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be
+observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that
+semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His
+presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough
+to make him a rapid and enduring walker.
+
+Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the
+lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly
+penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as
+to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through
+his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a
+well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite
+sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon
+pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until
+it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.
+
+He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it
+were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to
+seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while
+his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground
+swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed
+convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to
+Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.
+
+Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered
+the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of
+the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity,
+and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail,
+--which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it
+to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of
+inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very
+accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it
+is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work
+with a spade, cried out, "Take care, papa,--you will dig your leg."
+
+He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about
+his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the
+nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the
+words.
+
+There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the
+earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he
+had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary
+that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with
+endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.
+
+Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy,
+over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos
+eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have
+been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling
+learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with
+impunity.
+
+In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham,
+Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not
+the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its
+envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in
+connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all
+this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden
+and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the
+patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one
+thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left
+no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with
+natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its
+various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity
+(_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it
+appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity,
+according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for
+an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that
+Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.
+
+He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become
+able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships.
+We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first
+edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears
+in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that
+recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still.
+What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded
+worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between
+the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience
+and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to
+make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham
+gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections
+which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his
+equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed,
+and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed
+itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.
+
+Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory
+of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked
+or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be
+his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity
+apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the
+part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little
+children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic
+smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated
+with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are
+living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has
+already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate
+as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of
+five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully
+commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives
+in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne
+awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.
+
+How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came
+to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr.
+Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that
+doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly
+upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew
+would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent
+persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would
+have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to
+the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too
+exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many
+others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal
+frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better
+sphere of being.
+
+Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village
+in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on
+no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures,
+was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt
+to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came
+flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+What was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with
+which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?
+
+Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened
+earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can
+tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.
+
+Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they
+were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country,
+perhaps by too long contact with the "Sons of Liberty," and their
+revolutionary notions. But the most "liberal" Boston pulpit still held
+to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any
+independent thinker.
+
+In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as
+was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." He had opened
+his sealed orders and had read therein:
+
+Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.
+
+Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice
+of God in thine own soul.
+
+Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy
+fellow-servants.
+
+Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit
+of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold
+interests of life and the typical characters of history.
+
+Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious
+union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence.
+
+This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing
+is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least
+appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine
+eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere.
+
+Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they
+must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with
+the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see
+God.
+
+Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect
+freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that
+today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to
+reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun.
+
+To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World,
+that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the
+promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded.
+
+Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent,
+hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere
+thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles,
+privations, opposition, he would not
+
+ "bate a jot
+ Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
+ Right onward."
+
+All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests
+itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest
+sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane"
+where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the
+homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners,
+And all his work was done, not so much
+
+ "As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye,"
+
+as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship.
+
+He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to
+a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an
+idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw
+all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and
+trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him
+above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has
+held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a
+volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a
+confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and
+Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that
+professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the
+fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings
+of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.
+
+Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely
+made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not
+in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague
+aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them,
+in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he
+
+ "Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer."
+
+Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout
+listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn,
+who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was
+over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life
+in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.
+
+ "His was the task and his the lordly gift
+ Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift."
+
+This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier,
+calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more
+help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude
+could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.
+
+"Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his
+genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a
+poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in
+circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these
+directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and
+he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room
+naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from
+the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very
+popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a
+very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.
+
+--"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished
+in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos
+not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as
+conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics,
+argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.
+
+It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave
+most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view
+the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson
+was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a
+play-actor.
+
+The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were,
+accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the
+lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of
+Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given
+length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and
+lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience
+would tire before the allotted time was over.
+
+Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists.
+They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative
+observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in
+their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen
+portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes
+little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an
+elevated sentiment.
+
+It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer
+in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had
+learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his
+apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must
+work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the
+playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good
+estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and
+published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in
+the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never
+became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances
+until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he
+was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor,
+writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and
+dangerous winter season.
+
+He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man
+could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed
+plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer's Almanac."
+Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by
+his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found
+his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.
+
+When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public
+in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it
+borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a
+lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. We must always remember what we are
+dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no
+ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs
+tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little
+system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
+result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent
+particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer
+and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom
+of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it
+tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing,
+sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find
+this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to
+overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so
+diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again,
+"I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and
+am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received."
+Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the
+earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares
+about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest
+itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments.
+But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations
+enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could
+fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very
+advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was
+unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely,
+saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that
+season.
+
+No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages
+with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he
+was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was
+deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the
+end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly,
+without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild
+surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full
+measure to his audience with perfect fairness.
+
+ [Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
+ Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
+ Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]
+
+or, in Bryant's version,
+
+ "as the scales
+ Are held by some just woman, who maintains
+ By spinning wool her household,--carefully
+ She poises both the wool and weights, to make
+ The balance even, that she may provide
+ A pittance for her babes."--
+
+As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle
+this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on
+his younger listeners he says, "To some of us that long past experience
+remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson
+awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of
+the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may
+fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of 'Chevy Chase,' and we in
+Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of
+victory."
+
+There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in
+Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be
+still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember
+that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror,
+I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson's,
+where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An
+hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the
+diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for
+a careworn soul.
+
+An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many
+quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide
+range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading.
+No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would
+seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by
+the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or
+Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not
+pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a
+man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks
+very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.
+
+"As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand;
+but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use
+of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of
+his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the
+original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than
+of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive
+glimpses, and he is content."
+
+One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has
+"contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has
+fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has
+not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to
+Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well
+be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are
+very frequent.
+
+Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly
+know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse
+him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather
+quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson
+quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because
+another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with
+a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously
+appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse
+in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than
+many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his
+authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all,
+and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named
+references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are
+three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred
+and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven
+are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times
+or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or
+more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names
+alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one
+thousand and sixty-five references.
+
+ Authorities. Number of times mentioned.
+ Shakespeare.....112
+ Napoleon.........84
+ Plato............81
+ Plutarch.........70
+ Goethe...........62
+ Swift............49
+ Bacon............47
+ Milton...........46
+ Newton...........43
+ Homer............42
+ Socrates.........42
+ Swedenborg.......40
+ Montaigne........30
+ Saadi............30
+ Luther...........30
+ Webster..........27
+ Aristotle........25
+ Hafiz............25
+ Wordsworth.......25
+ Burke............24
+ Saint Paul.......24
+ Dante............22
+ Shattuck (Hist. of
+ Concord).......21
+ Chaucer..........20
+ Coleridge........20
+ Michael Angelo...20
+ The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times.
+
+It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all
+show the same fondness for Plutarch.
+
+Montaigne says, "I never settled myself to the reading of any book of
+solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."
+
+Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "There was
+among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think
+that time spent to great advantage."
+
+Emerson says, "I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to
+all the ancient writers."
+
+Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four
+moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well,
+has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "English
+Traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the
+intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes.
+
+_Noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as
+well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of
+thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal
+acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve.
+
+"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.
+There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By
+necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."
+
+What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself.
+
+"In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate
+between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into
+the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not
+stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all."
+
+Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend
+themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken
+the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as
+a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from
+an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that
+would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. "I
+dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature;
+but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of
+a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities."
+Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of
+his "lapidary style" and say "I build my house of boulders."
+
+"It is to be remembered," says Mr. Ruskin, "that all men who have sense
+and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they
+meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest
+is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human
+minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the
+world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original
+powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to
+their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it."
+
+The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson's words
+and thoughts and those of others.
+
+Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles"
+comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph
+Waldo.--"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
+This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo
+Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."--"Hiding the badges of
+royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest
+their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags."
+Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the "Harvard Register" nearly
+twenty years before.
+
+ "The hero is not fed on sweets,
+ Daily his own heart he eats."
+
+The image comes from Pythagoras _via_ Plutarch.
+
+Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a
+sentence which recalls Carlyle.
+
+"The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
+The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all
+its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a
+long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule."
+
+Compare this passage from "English Traits" with the following one from
+Carlyle's "French Revolution":--
+
+"So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and
+character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch
+all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire,
+the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day!
+For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass;
+most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the
+burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing
+will put out."
+
+ "O what are heroes, prophets, men
+ But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow
+ A momentary music."
+
+The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in
+one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a
+letter of Leibnitz.
+
+ "He builded better than he knew"
+
+is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly
+recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister's sermon; and a
+Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the "Address
+without a Phoenix" among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any
+trace of this idea elsewhere?
+
+In a little poem of Coleridge's, "William Tell," are these two lines:
+
+ "On wind and wave the boy would toss
+ Was great, nor knew how great he was."
+
+The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle
+called "Characteristics." It reappears in Emerson's poem "Fate."
+
+ "Unknown to Cromwell as to me
+ Was Cromwell's measure and degree;
+ Unknown to him as to his horse,
+ If he than his groom is better or worse."
+
+It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this
+connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest
+themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such
+resemblances. If we find Emerson's wonderful picture, "Initial Love"
+prefigured in the "Symposium" of Plato, we have only to look in the
+"Phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare's
+famous group,--
+
+ "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet."
+
+Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental
+coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed
+from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished
+copies, _éditions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old,
+but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again.
+The more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the
+better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river
+the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson's discourse has
+a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.
+
+It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his
+lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for
+things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected
+him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple's time at
+Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me
+right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown
+in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus
+Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the
+self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not
+concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could
+not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular
+article.
+
+Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him.
+Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most
+easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau.
+Carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his
+valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott's psychological and physiological
+speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set
+of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a
+poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as
+vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like
+those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest
+stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of
+most mortals. Emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an
+outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to
+him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many
+alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits
+predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood
+out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well
+said: "Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his
+ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his
+genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words,
+and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring,
+like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the
+past and refuse all history.'"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot
+properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered
+lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have
+been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments
+rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of
+intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.
+This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost,
+if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why
+the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter
+Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not
+always a writer's fault that he is not understood. Many persons have
+poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand
+themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is
+mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring
+imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no
+reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found
+under the title "Diogenes," in the work of his namesake, Diogenes
+Laertius. I translate from the Latin version.
+
+"Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_
+[_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'I can see a table and a goblet,' said
+the cynic, 'but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.'
+'Quite so,' answered Plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet
+and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and
+gobletity.'"
+
+This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into
+the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation.
+
+Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a
+spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as
+the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of
+course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than
+Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India,
+fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers
+and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux,
+Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has
+his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and
+the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to
+romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge.
+
+That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a
+simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different
+proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its
+retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such
+questions very simply by saying it is so.
+
+The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the
+philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of
+Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It
+sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble
+Ode as working truths.
+
+ "Not in entire forgetfulness,
+ And not in utter nakedness,
+ But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+ From God, who is our home."
+
+In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a
+preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:--
+
+ "Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
+ On whom those truths do rest
+ Which we are toiling all our lives to find."--
+
+These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the
+poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and
+the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of
+ whom he speaks in the lines,--
+
+ "A simple child--
+ That lightly draws its breath
+ And feels its life in every limb,--
+ What should it know of death?"
+
+What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which
+Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone
+render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its
+own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own
+individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a
+good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a
+good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth
+to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this
+counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts.
+He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His
+instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous
+conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided
+tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what
+is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological
+language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson
+might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory
+which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts,
+which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the
+truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after
+them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.
+
+It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new
+doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their
+instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting
+to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the
+door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which
+listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of
+babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as
+one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a
+very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial"
+was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness,
+incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to
+satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.
+
+The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less
+than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.
+It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we
+cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance
+in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout
+religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious
+free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right
+and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its
+legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or
+institutions.
+
+All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of
+emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham
+Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was
+an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some
+susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally
+of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling
+into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself
+distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing
+effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign
+influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the
+effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the
+regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.
+
+Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration
+of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not
+yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but
+so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian
+press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was
+fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over
+the world.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual
+rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let
+go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of
+common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being
+could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob
+Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader
+may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic
+asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the
+contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in
+the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to
+insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable,
+the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played
+with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified
+the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual
+divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach
+to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out
+of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century
+before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant
+to ridicule and parody it.
+
+ "The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
+ Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
+ And nought is everything and everything is nought."
+
+Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma
+that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.
+
+Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine
+of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The
+oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic
+dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a
+peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to
+construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,
+of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and
+ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to
+build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a
+human soul had ever constructed.
+
+Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel,"
+illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's
+calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes
+refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I
+become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This
+was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his
+most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well
+known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for
+a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the
+spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.
+
+Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question
+sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to
+the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a
+charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and
+disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have
+a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself
+perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt
+not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment,
+it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the
+voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest
+imaginative conceptions.
+
+Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of
+universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.
+Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects
+in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the
+landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the
+reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's--
+
+ "The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night
+ And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."--
+
+Now Emerson:--
+
+ "And presently the sky is changed; O world!
+ What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
+ The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
+ _So like the soul of me, what if't were me_?"
+
+We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem
+printed among the "Translations" in the Appendix to Emerson's Poems.
+These are the last two lines of "The Flute, from Hilali":--
+
+ "Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,
+ If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?"
+
+The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley's "Ode
+to the West Wind":
+
+ "Be thou, Spirit fierce,
+ My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"
+
+Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops
+of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical
+metempsychosis.
+
+The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him
+cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of
+land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got
+out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not
+the wig. "It's no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he
+would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: "Ye'd better tak'
+it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on Munrimmon Moor."
+And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman,
+whose _Ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she
+had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of
+her four-footed companion:--
+
+ "If it be I, he'll wag his little tail;
+ And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail."
+
+I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies
+for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would
+doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense
+of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about
+"a foresmell of the Infinite" which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who
+am innocent of all connection with it.
+
+The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial
+concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special
+endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is
+not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great
+composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise
+the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine
+contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of
+arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember
+that his brother Charles had something to say in the "Harvard Register"
+(1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come
+partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of
+Emerson's which follow it.
+
+ "Physician art thou, one all eyes;
+ Philosopher, a fingering slave,
+ One that would peep and botanize
+ Upon his mother's grave?"
+
+Emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new
+edition of his works.
+
+ "Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
+ And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
+ In love he cannot therefore cease his trade;
+ Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
+ He feels it, introverts his learned eye
+ To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.
+ His mother died,--the only friend he had,--
+ Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
+ Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind
+ And throttled all his passion. Is't not like
+ That devil-spider that devours her mate
+ Scarce freed from her embraces?"
+
+The same feeling comes out in the Poem "Blight," where he says the
+"young scholars who invade our hills"
+
+ "Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
+ And all their botany is Latin names;"
+
+and in "The Walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are
+contrasted with the sons of Nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much
+to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson's mind
+was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is
+quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical,
+exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious,
+asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the
+answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders,
+for instance,--
+
+ "Why Nature loves the number five,"
+
+but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any
+farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany
+from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr.
+Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial
+anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz,
+who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most
+delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science
+and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came
+among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their
+specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves
+the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his
+Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:--
+
+"Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's
+curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the
+feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection
+they awake."--
+
+This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of
+nature.
+
+Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes
+quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects.
+His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are
+independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is
+frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the
+special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound
+that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing
+_audacities_:--
+
+"There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is
+naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."--
+
+"He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and
+carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."--
+
+"If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long
+hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy
+which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."--
+
+"Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."--
+
+"The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot
+every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and
+employment and bind them fast in one web."--
+
+He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes
+the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe,
+Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband"
+in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so
+fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its
+employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But
+his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like
+dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It
+belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to
+Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators
+are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of
+Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic
+traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn
+fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and
+his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;"
+his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a
+certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the
+word "melioration."
+
+We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel
+with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and
+surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch
+belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is
+very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects,
+ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool
+and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison
+grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such
+delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to
+match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the
+slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced
+organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling
+the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an
+unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the
+wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has
+changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying
+about the morning light as merchandise.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as
+home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen
+sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets
+familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and
+avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his
+Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant
+America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I
+see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the
+respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he
+says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his
+life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization.
+All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them.
+To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the
+ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here,"
+he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is
+the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has
+recorded."
+
+Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent;
+he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him
+as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our
+fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us
+to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of
+Franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of
+Emerson's:--
+
+ "A blessing through the ages thus
+ Shield all thy roofs and towers,
+ GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
+ Thou darling town of ours!"
+
+Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not
+fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend
+their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop,
+and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the
+penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of
+the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness
+to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite
+their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are
+among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted
+his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but
+collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable
+inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one
+phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far
+as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his
+most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in
+its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The natural purity and elevation of Emerson's character show themselves
+in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him
+from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all
+the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so
+spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave
+their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some
+superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about
+Boileau,--
+
+ "Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur."
+
+(Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up
+dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had
+their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the
+assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him,
+and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy,
+sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England
+was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The
+_dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and
+they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise
+above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until
+he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and
+find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So
+did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our
+stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would
+have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When
+a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened
+persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs
+as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the
+convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about
+which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep
+and anxious and devout religious scepticism.
+
+It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by
+Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his
+ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but
+when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the
+end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the
+more he found himself perplexed.
+
+The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is
+Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can
+tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief
+in the omnipresence of the Deity?
+
+Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood it, in an
+article in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." I borrow this quotation
+from Mr. Cooke:--
+
+"He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of
+Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it.
+He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or
+morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy
+for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates
+at Andover or Cambridge."
+
+We read in his Essay, "Self-Reliance ": "This is the ultimate fact which
+we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all
+into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the
+Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in
+which it enters into all lower forms."
+
+The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the
+doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of
+Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a
+divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in
+all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as
+he was willing to be called a Platonist.
+
+Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like
+this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the
+Almighty unto perfection?" But on certain great points nothing could be
+clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of
+spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His
+views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character,
+brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him
+afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any
+denial of the self-governing power of the will.
+
+His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all
+he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in
+all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through
+all nature he looked up to nature's God; and if he did not worship the
+"man Christ Jesus" as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed
+his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of
+him as more like Christ than any man he had known.
+
+Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church
+from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not
+of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of
+well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an
+impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent
+sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before.
+Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their
+human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago.
+These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials
+with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little
+bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long
+as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully
+treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that.
+
+Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of
+Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical.
+
+Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in
+Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has
+written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the
+New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with
+the following sentence:--
+
+"Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of
+Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one
+of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole,
+tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a
+great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest
+of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'"
+
+"But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says
+Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed
+through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial
+atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all
+the churches equally.'"
+
+What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity?
+The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what
+has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of
+"fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same
+Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him.
+The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if
+he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations
+ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later
+he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was
+called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished
+to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into
+pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.
+
+It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the
+self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the
+Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness
+of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely
+claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:--
+
+"Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place
+these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man
+sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again
+to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our
+faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the
+Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be
+there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and
+the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of
+conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the
+spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of
+voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself
+there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from
+the dead, to swell their number."
+
+The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson's writings and life
+is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and
+critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by
+three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke's elaborate work is
+remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson's teachings.
+Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad" is a lively
+picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr.
+Alexander Ireland's "Biographical Sketch" brings together, from a great
+variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of
+Emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best
+worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the
+various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.
+
+From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our
+intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and
+appreciative criticisms of Emerson's Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the
+portrait of the New England "Plotinus-Montaigne" in his brilliant "Fable
+for Critics," to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John
+Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson's
+writings have furnished one of the most enduring _pièces de résistance_
+at the critical tables of the old and the new world.
+
+He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and
+writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services;
+Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss
+Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man."
+Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson's
+fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but
+unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned
+whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning
+critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the
+testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that
+"a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an
+exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words
+spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the
+glowing tributes of three of Concord's poets,--Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing,
+and Mr. Sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame
+had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored,
+beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his
+own fireside.
+
+It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the
+language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the
+adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison
+or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought
+entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified
+the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as
+a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _Corpora non agunt
+nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as
+material substances before they can act. "That which thou sowest is not
+quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was
+sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "The
+Burial of Sir John Moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a
+classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a
+mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives
+have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost
+in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their
+influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which
+they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare
+to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr.
+Cranch:--
+
+ "The wise will know thee and the good will love,
+ The age to come will feel thy impress given
+ In all that lifts the race a step above
+ Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven."
+
+It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in prose and
+verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or
+fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and
+the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends,
+indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly
+pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose
+footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine
+authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported
+to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws
+of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was
+said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon
+as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these
+teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to
+have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the
+sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to
+as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation
+of the Divinity.
+
+Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity.
+He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even
+the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing
+it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen
+Mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and
+too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too
+honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred
+calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of
+admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them
+their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on
+so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the
+privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise.
+No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks,
+carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to
+his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without
+which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for
+the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after
+truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall
+see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you
+shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because
+you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness.
+
+There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts
+beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So
+transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of
+the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself.
+His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere
+among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest
+manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may
+have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man
+had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we
+can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet"
+would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been
+that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+[For many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general
+headings of _Emerson's Books, Essays, Poems_.]
+
+
+ Abbott, Josiah Gardiner, a pupil of Emerson, 49, 50.
+
+ Academic Races, 2, 3. (See _Heredity_.)
+
+ Action, subordinate, 112.
+
+ Adams, John, old age, 261.
+
+ Adams, Samuel, Harvard debate, 115.
+
+ Addison, Joseph, classic, 416.
+
+ Advertiser, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+ Aeolian Harp, his model, 329, 340.
+ (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Harp.)
+
+ Aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (See _Greek_.)
+
+ Agassiz, Louis:
+ Saturday Club, 222;
+ companionship, 403.
+
+ Agriculture:
+ in Anthology, 30;
+ attacked, 190;
+ not Emerson's field, 255, 256, 365.
+
+ Akenside, Mark, allusion, 16.
+
+ Alchemy, adepts, 260, 261.
+
+ Alcott, A. Bronson:
+ hearing Emerson, 66;
+ speculations, 86;
+ an idealist, 150;
+ The Dial, 159;
+ sonnet, 355;
+ quoted, 373;
+ personality traceable, 389.
+
+ Alcott, Louisa M., funeral bouquet, 351.
+
+ Alexander the Great:
+ allusion, 184;
+ mountain likeness, 322.
+
+ Alfred the Great, 220, 306.
+
+ Allston, Washington, unfinished picture, 334.
+ (See _Pictures_.)
+
+ Ambition, treated in Anthology, 30.
+
+ America:
+ room for a poet, 136, 137;
+ virtues and defects, 143;
+ faith in, 179;
+ people compared with English, 216;
+ things awry, 260;
+ _aristocracy_, 296;
+ in the Civil War, 304;
+ Revolution, 305;
+ Lincoln, the true history of his time, 307;
+ passion for, 308, 309;
+ artificial rhythm, 329;
+ its own literary style, 342;
+ home of man, 371;
+ loyalty to, 406;
+ epithets, 406, 407.
+ (See _England, New England_, etc.)
+
+ Amici, meeting Emerson, 63.
+ (See _Italy_.)
+
+ Amusements, in New England, 30.
+
+ Anaemia, artistic, 334.
+
+ Ancestry:
+ in general, 1-3;
+ Emerson's, 3 _et seq._
+ (See _Heredity_.)
+
+ Andover, Mass.:
+ Theological School, 48;
+ graduates, 411.
+
+ Andrew, John Albion:
+ War Governor, 223;
+ hearing Emerson, 379.
+ (See _South_.)
+
+ Angelo. (See _Michael Angelo_.)
+
+ Antinomianism:
+ in The Dial, 162;
+ kept from, 177.
+ (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Anti-Slavery:
+ in Emerson's pulpit, 57;
+ the reform, 141, 145, 152;
+ Emancipation address, 181;
+ Boston and New York addresses, 210-212;
+ Emancipation Proclamation, 228;
+ Fugitive Slave Law, and other matters, 303-307.
+ (See _South_.)
+
+ Antoninus, Marcus, allusion, 16.
+
+ Architecture, illustrations, 253.
+
+ Arianism, 51.
+ (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+ Aristotle:
+ influence over Mary Emerson, 17;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Arminianism, 51.
+ (See _Methodism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Arnim, Gisela von, 225.
+
+ Arnold, Matthew:
+ quotation about America, 137:
+ lecture, 236;
+ on Milton, 315;
+ his Thyrsis, 333;
+ criticism, 334;
+ string of Emerson's epithets, 406.
+
+ Aryans, comparison, 312.
+
+ Asia:
+ a pet name, 176;
+ immovable, 200.
+
+ Assabet River, 70, 71.
+
+ Astronomy:
+ Harp illustration, 108;
+ stars against wrong, 252, 253.
+ (See _Galileo, Stars, Venus_, etc.)
+
+ Atlantic Monthly:
+ sketch of Dr. Ripley, 14, 15;
+ of Mary Moody Emerson, 16;
+ established, 221;
+ supposititious club, 222;
+ on Persian Poetry, 224;
+ on Thoreau, 228;
+ Emerson's contributions, 239, 241;
+ Brahma, 296.
+
+ Atmosphere:
+ effect on inspiration, 290;
+ spiritual, 413, 414.
+
+ Augustine, Emerson's study of, 52.
+
+ Authors, quoted by Emerson, 381-383.
+ (See _Plutarch_, etc.)
+
+
+ Bacon, Francis:
+ allusion, 22, 111;
+ times quoted, 382.
+
+ Bancroft, George:
+ literary rank, 33;
+ in college, 45.
+
+ Barbier, Henri Auguste, on Napoleon, 208.
+
+ Barnwell, Robert W.:
+ in history, 45;
+ in college, 47.
+
+ Beaumont and Fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129.
+
+ Beauty:
+ its nature, 74, 94, 95;
+ an end, 99, 135, 182;
+ study, 301.
+
+ Beecher, Edward, on preexistence, 391.
+ (See _Preexistence_.)
+
+ Behmen, Jacob:
+ mysticism, 201, 202, 396;
+ citation, 380.
+
+ Berkeley, Bishop:
+ characteristics, 189;
+ matter, 300.
+
+ Bible:
+ Mary Emerson's study, 16;
+ Mosaic cosmogony, 18;
+ the Exodus, 35;
+ the Lord's Supper, 58;
+ Psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253;
+ lost Paradise, 101;
+ Genesis, Sermon on the Mount, 102;
+ Seer of Patmos, 102, 103;
+ Apocalypse, 105;
+ Song of Songs, 117;
+ Baruch's roll, 117, 118;
+ not closed, 122;
+ the Sower, 154;
+ Noah's Ark, 191;
+ Pharisee's trumpets, 255;
+ names and imagery, 268;
+ sparing the rod, 297;
+ rhythmic mottoes, 314;
+ beauty of Israel, 351;
+ face of an angel, 352;
+ barren fig-tree, 367;
+ a classic, 376;
+ body of death, "Peace be still!" 379;
+ draught of fishes, 381;
+ its semi-detached sentences, 405;
+ Job quoted, 411;
+ "the man Christ Jesus," 412;
+ scattering abroad, 414.
+ (See _Christ, God, Religion,_ etc.)
+
+ Bigelow, Jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31.
+
+ Biography, every man writes his own, 1.
+
+ Blackmore, Sir Richard, controversy, 31.
+
+ Bliss Family, 9.
+
+ Bliss, Daniel, patriotism, 72.
+
+ Blood, transfusion of, 256.
+
+ Books, use and abuse, 110, 111.
+ (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+ Boston, Mass.:
+ First Church, 10, 12, 13;
+ Woman's Club, 16;
+ Harbor, 19;
+ nebular spot, 25, 26;
+ its pulpit darling, 27;
+ Episcopacy, 28;
+ Athenaeum, 31;
+ magazines, 28-34;
+ intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste
+ religion, 34;
+ Samaria and Jerusalem, 35;
+ streets and squares, 37-39;
+ Latin School, 39, 40, 43;
+ new buildings, 42;
+ Mrs. Emerson's boarding-house, the Common as a pasture, 43;
+ Unitarian preaching, 51;
+ a New England centre, 52;
+ Emerson's settlement, 54;
+ Second Church, 55-61;
+ lectures, 87, 88, 191;
+ Trimount Oracle, 102;
+ stirred by the Divinity-School address, 126;
+ school-keeping, Roxbury, 129;
+ aesthetic society, 149;
+ Transcendentalists, 155, 156;
+ Bay, 172;
+ Freeman Place Chapel, 210:
+ Saturday Club, 221-223;
+ Burns Centennial, 224, 225;
+ Parker meeting, 228;
+ letters, 263, 274, 275;
+ Old South lecture, 294;
+ Unitarianism, 298;
+ Emancipation Proclamation, 307;
+ special train, 350;
+ Sons of Liberty, 369;
+ birthplace, 407;
+ Baptists, 413.
+
+ Boswell, James:
+ allusion, 138;
+ one lacking, 223;
+ Life of Johnson, 268.
+
+ Botany, 403.
+ (See _Science_.)
+
+ Bowen, Francis: literary rank, 34;
+ on Nature, 103, 104.
+
+ Brook Farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191.
+ (See _Transcendentalism_, etc.)
+
+ Brown, Howard N., prayer, 355.
+
+ Brown, John, sympathy with, 211.
+ (See _Anti-Slavery, South_.)
+
+ Brownson, Orestes A., at a party, 149.
+
+ Bryant, William Cullen:
+ his literary rank, 33;
+ redundant syllable, 328;
+ his translation of Homer quoted, 378.
+
+ Buckminster, Joseph Stevens:
+ minister in Boston, 12, 26, 27, 52;
+ Memoir, 29;
+ destruction of Goldau, 31.
+
+ Buddhism:
+ like Transcendentalism, 151;
+ Buddhist nature, 188;
+ saints
+ 298. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma,
+ --_India_, etc.)
+
+ Buffon, on style, 341.
+
+ Bulkeley Family, 4-7.
+
+ Bulkeley, Peter:
+ minister of Concord, 4-7, 71;
+ comparison of sermons, 57;
+ patriotism, 72;
+ landowner, 327.
+
+ Bunyan, John, quoted, 169.
+
+ Burke, Edmund:
+ essay, 73;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Burns, Robert:
+ festival, 224, 225;
+ rank, 281;
+ image referred to, 386;
+ religious position, 409. (See _Scotland_.)
+
+ Burroughs, John, view of English life, 335.
+
+ Burton, Robert, quotations, 109, 381.
+
+ Buttrick, Major, in the Revolution, 71, 72.
+
+ Byron, Lord:
+ allusion, 16;
+ rank, 281;
+ disdain, 321;
+ uncertain sky, 335;
+ parallelism, 399.
+
+
+ CABOT, J. ELLIOT:
+ on Emerson's literary habits, 27;
+ The Dial, 159;
+ prefaces, 283, 302;
+ Note, 295, 296;
+ Prefatory Note, 310, 311;
+ the last meetings, 347, 348.
+
+ Caesar, Julius, 184,197.
+
+ California, trip, 263-271, 359. (See _Thayer_.)
+
+ Calvin, John:
+ his Commentary, 103;
+ used by Cotton, 286.
+
+ Calvinism:
+ William Emerson's want of sympathy with, 11, 12;
+ outgrown, 51;
+ predestination, 230;
+ saints, 298;
+ spiritual influx, 412.
+ (See _God, Puritanism, Religion, Unitarianism.)_
+
+ Cambridge, Mass.:
+ Emerson teaching there, 50;
+ exclusive circles, 52.
+ (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+ Cant, disgust with, 156.
+
+ Carlyle, Thomas:
+ meeting Emerson, 63;
+ recollections of their relations, 78-80, 83;
+ Sartor Resartus, 81, 82, 91;
+ correspondence, 82, 83, 89, 90, 127, 176, 177, 192, 315, 317, 374,
+ 380, 381, 406, 407;
+ Life of Schiller, 91;
+ on Nature, 104, 105;
+ Miscellanies, 130;
+ the Waterville Address, 136-138;
+ influence, 149, 150;
+ on Transcendentalism, 156-158;
+ The Dial, 160-163;
+ Brook Farm, 164;
+ friendship, 171;
+ Chelsea visit, 194;
+ bitter legacy, 196;
+ love of power, 197;
+ on Napoleon and Goethe, 208;
+ grumblings, 260;
+ tobacco, 270;
+ Sartor reprinted, 272;
+ paper on, 294;
+ Emerson's dying friendship, 349;
+ physique, 363;
+ Gallic fire, 386;
+ on Characteristics, 387;
+ personality traceable, 389.
+
+ Carpenter, William B., 230.
+
+ Century, The, essay in, 295.
+
+ Cerebration, unconscious, 112, 113.
+
+ Chalmers, Thomas, preaching, 65.
+
+ Channing, Walter, headache, 175, 390.
+
+ Channing, William Ellery:
+ allusion, 16;
+ directing Emerson's studies, 51;
+ preaching, 52;
+ Emerson in his pulpit, 66;
+ influence, 147, 149;
+ kept awake, 157.
+
+ Channing, William Ellery, the poet:
+ his Wanderer, 263;
+ Poems, 403.
+
+ Channing, William Henry:
+ allusions, 131, 149;
+ in The Dial, 159;
+ the Fuller Memoir, 209;
+ Ode inscribed to, 211, 212.
+
+ Charleston, S C, Emerson's preaching, 53. (See _South_.)
+
+ Charlestown, Mass., Edward Emerson's residence, 8.
+
+ Charles V., 197.
+
+ Charles XII., 197.
+
+ Chatelet, Parent du, a realist, 326.
+
+ Chatham, Lord, 255.
+
+ Chaucer, Geoffrey:
+ borrowings, 205;
+ rank, 281;
+ honest rhymes, 340;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Chelmsford, Mass., Emerson teaching there, 49, 50.
+
+ Chemistry, 403. (See _Science_.)
+
+ Cheshire, its "haughty hill," 323.
+
+ Choate, Rufus, oratory, 148.
+
+ Christ:
+ reserved expressions about, 13;
+ mediatorship, 59;
+ true office, 120-122;
+ worship, 412. (See _Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Christianity:
+ its essentials, 13;
+ primitive, 35;
+ a mythus, defects, 121;
+ the true, 122;
+ two benefits, 123;
+ authority, 124;
+ incarnation of, 176;
+ the essence, 306;
+ Fathers, 391.
+
+ Christian, Emerson a, 267.
+
+ Christian Examiner, The:
+ on William Emerson, 12;
+ its literary predecessor, 29;
+ on Nature, 103, 104;
+ repudiates Divinity School Address, 124.
+
+ Church:
+ activity in 1820, 147;
+ avoidance of, 153;
+ the true, 244;
+ music, 306. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Cicero, allusion, 111.
+ Cid, the, 184.
+
+ Clarke, James Freeman:
+ letters, 77-80, 128-131;
+ transcendentalism, 149;
+ The Dial, 159;
+ Fuller Memoir, 209;
+ Emerson's funeral, 351, 353-355.
+
+ Clarke, Samuel, allusion, 16.
+
+ Clarke, Sarah, sketches, 130.
+
+ Clarkson, Thomas, 220.
+
+ Clergy:
+ among Emerson's ancestry, 3-8;
+ gravestones, 9. (See _Cotton, Heredity_, etc.)
+
+ Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:
+ allusion, 16;
+ Emerson's account, 63;
+ influence, 149, 150;
+ Carlyle's criticism, 196;
+ Ancient Mariner, 333;
+ Christabel, Abyssinian Maid, 334;
+ times mentioned, 382;
+ an image quoted, 386;
+ William Tell, 387.
+
+ Collins, William:
+ poetry, 321;
+ Ode and Dirge, 332.
+
+ Commodity, essay, 94.
+
+ Concentration, 288.
+
+ Concord, Mass.:
+ Bulkeley's ministry, 4-7;
+ first association with the Emerson name, 7;
+ Joseph's descendants, 8;
+ the Fight, 9; Dr. Ripley, 10;
+ Social Club, 14;
+ Emerson's preaching, 54;
+ Goodwin's settlement, 56;
+ discord, 57;
+ Emerson's residence begun, 69, 70;
+ a typical town, 70;
+ settlement, 71;
+ a Delphi, 72;
+ Emerson home, 83;
+ Second Centennial, 84, 85, 303;
+ noted citizens, 86;
+ town government, the, monument, 87;
+ the Sage, 102;
+ letters, 125-131, 225;
+ supposition of Carlyle's life there, 171;
+ Emancipation Address, 181;
+ leaving, 192;
+ John Brown meeting, 211;
+ Samuel Hoar, 213;
+ wide-awake, 221;
+ Lincoln obsequies, 243, 307;
+ an _under_-Concord, 256;
+ fire, 271-279;
+ letters, 275-279;
+ return, 279;
+ Minute Man unveiled, 292;
+ Soldiers' Monument, 303;
+ land-owners, 327;
+ memorial stone, 333;
+ Conway's visits, 343, 344;
+ Whitman's, 344, 345;
+ Russell's, 345; funeral, 350-356;
+ founders, 352;
+ Sleepy Hollow, 356;
+ a strong attraction, 369;
+ neighbors, 373;
+ Prophet, 415.
+
+ Congdon, Charles, his Reminiscences,
+ 66.
+
+ Conservatism, fairly treated, 156,
+ 157. (See _Reformers, Religion,
+ Transcendentalism,_ etc.)
+
+ Conversation:
+ C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 258;
+ inspiration, 290.
+
+ Conway, Moncure D.:
+ account of Emerson, 55, 56, 66, 194;
+ two visits, 343, 344;
+ anecdote, 346;
+ error, 401;
+ on Stanley, 414.
+
+ Cooke, George Willis:
+ biography of Emerson, 43, 44, 66, 88;
+ on American Scholar, 107, 108;
+ on anti-slavery, 212;
+ on Parnassus, 280-282;
+ on pantheism, 411.
+
+ Cooper, James Fenimore, 33.
+
+ Corot, pearly mist, 335, 336. (See
+ _Pictures_, etc.)
+
+ Cotton, John:
+ service to scholarship, 34;
+ reading Calvin, 286.
+
+ Counterparts, the story, 226.
+
+ Cowper, William:
+ Mother's Picture, 178;
+ disinterested good, 304;
+ tenderness, 333;
+ verse, 338.
+
+ Cranch, Christopher P.:
+ The Dial, 159;
+ poetic prediction, 416, 417.
+
+ Cromwell, Oliver:
+ saying by a war saint, 252;
+ in poetry, 387.
+
+ Cudworth, Ralph, epithets, 200.
+
+ Cupples, George, on Emerson's lectures, 195.
+
+ Curtius, Quintus for Mettus, 388.
+
+ Cushing, Caleb:
+ rank, 33;
+ in college, 45.
+
+
+ Dana, Richard Henry, his literary place, 33, 223.
+
+ Dante:
+ allusion in Anthology, 31;
+ rank, 202, 320;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Dartmouth College, oration, 131-135.
+
+ Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 105.
+
+ Dawes, Rufus, Boyhood Memories, 44.
+
+ Declaration of Independence, intellectual,
+ 115. (See _American_, etc.)
+
+ Delirium, imaginative, easily produced,
+ 238. (See _Intuition_.)
+
+ Delia Cruscans, allusion, 152. (See
+ _Transcendentalism_.)
+
+ Delos, allusion, 374.
+
+ Delphic Oracle:
+ of New England, 72;
+ illustration, 84.
+
+ Democratic Review, The, on Nature, 103.
+
+ De Profundis, illustrating Carlyle's spirit, 83.
+
+ De Quincey, Thomas:
+ Emerson's interview with, 63, 195;
+ on originality, 92.
+
+ De Staël, Mme., allusion, 16.
+
+ De Tocqueville, account of Unitarianism, 51.
+ Dewey, Orville, New Bedford ministry, 67.
+
+ Dexter, Lord Timothy, punctuation, 325, 326.
+
+ Dial, The:
+ established, 147, 158;
+ editors, 159;
+ influence, 160-163;
+ death, 164;
+ poems, 192;
+ old contributors, 221;
+ papers, 295;
+ intuitions, 394.
+
+ Dial, The (second), in Cincinnati, 239.
+
+ Dickens, Charles:
+ on Father Taylor, 56;
+ American Notes, 155.
+
+ Diderot, Denis, essay, 79.
+
+ Diogenes, story, 401. (See _Laertius_.)
+
+ Disinterestedness, 259.
+
+ Disraeli, Benjamin, the rectorship, 282.
+
+ Dramas, their limitations, 375. (See _Shakespeare_.)
+
+ Dress, illustration of poetry, 311, 312.
+
+ Dryden, John, quotation, 20, 21.
+
+ Dwight, John S.:
+ in The Dial, 159;
+ musical critic, 223.
+
+
+ East Lexington, Mass., the Unitarian pulpit, 88.
+
+ Economy, its meaning, 142.
+
+ Edinburgh, Scotland:
+ Emerson's visit and preaching, 64, 65;
+ lecture, 195.
+
+ Education:
+ through friendship, 97, 98;
+ public questions, 258, 259.
+
+ Edwards, Jonathan:
+ allusions, 16, 51;
+ the atmosphere changed, 414.
+ (See _Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+ Egotism, a pest, 233.
+
+ Egypt:
+ poetic teaching, 121;
+ trip, 271, 272;
+ Sphinx, 330. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Sphinx.)
+
+ Election Sermon, illustration, 112.
+
+ Elizabeth, Queen, verbal heir-loom, 313. (See _Raleigh_, etc.)
+
+ Ellis, Rufus, minister of the First Church, Boston, 43.
+
+ Eloquence, defined, 285, 286.
+
+ Emerson Family, 3 _et seq_.
+
+ Emerson, Charles Chauncy, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+ feeling towards natural science, 18, 237;
+ memories, 19-25, 37, 43;
+ character, 77;
+ death, 89, 90;
+ influence, 98;
+ The Dial, 161;
+ "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+ nearness, 368;
+ poetry, 385;
+ Harvard Register, 401.
+
+ Emerson, Edith, daughter of Ralph Waldo, 263.
+
+ Emerson, Edward, of Newbury, 8.
+
+ Emerson, Edward Bliss, brother of Ralph Waldo:
+ allusions, 19, 20, 37, 38;
+ death, 89;
+ Last Farewell, poem, 161;
+ nearness, 368.
+
+ Emerson, Edward Waldo, son of Ralph Waldo:
+ in New York, 246;
+ on the Farming essay, 255;
+ father's last days, 346-349;
+ reminiscences, 359.
+
+ Emerson, Ellen, daughter of Ralph Waldo:
+ residence, 83;
+ trip to Europe, 271;
+ care of her father, 294;
+ correspondence, 347.
+
+ Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker, first wife of Ralph Waldo, 55.
+
+ Emerson, Joseph, minister of Mendon, 4, 7, 8.
+
+ Emerson, Joseph, the second, minister of Malden, 8.
+
+ Emerson, Mrs. Lydia Jackson, second wife of Ralph Waldo:
+ marriage, 83;
+ _Asia_, 176.
+
+ Emerson, Mary Moody:
+ influence over her nephew, 16-18;
+ quoted, 385.
+
+ Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37.
+
+ Emerson, Ralph Waldo, His Life:
+ moulding influences, 1;
+ New England heredity, 2;
+ ancestry, 3-10;
+ parents, 10-16;
+ Aunt Mary, 16-19;
+ brothers, 19-25;
+ the nest, 25;
+ noted scholars, 26-36;
+ birthplace, 37, 38;
+ boyhood, 39, 40;
+ early efforts, 41, 42;
+ parsonages, 42;
+ father's death, 43;
+ boyish appearance, 44;
+ college days, 45-47;
+ letter, 48;
+ teaching, 49, 50;
+ studying theology, and preaching, 51-54;
+ ordination, marriage, 55;
+ benevolent efforts, wife's death, 56;
+ withdrawal from his church, 57-61;
+ first trip to Europe, 62-65;
+ preaching in America, 66, 67;
+ remembered conversations, 68, 69;
+ residence in the Old Manse, 69-72;
+ lecturing, essays in The North American, 73;
+ poems, 74;
+ portraying himself, 75;
+ comparison with Milton, 76, 77;
+ letters to Clarke, 78-80, 128-131;
+ interest in Sartor Resartus, 81;
+ first letter to Carlyle, 82;
+ second marriage and Concord home, 83;
+ Second Centennial, 84-87;
+ Boston lectures, Concord Fight; 87;
+ East Lexington church, War, 88;
+ death of brothers, 89, 90;
+ Nature published, 91;
+ parallel with Wordsworth, 92;
+ free utterance, 93;
+ Beauty, poems,
+ 94;
+ Language, 95-97;
+ Discipline, 97, 98;
+ Idealism, 98, 99;
+ Illusions, 99, 100;
+ Spirit and Matter, 100;
+ Paradise regained, 101;
+ the Bible spirit, 102;
+ Revelations, 103;
+ Bowen's criticism, 104;
+ Evolution, 105, 106;
+ Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 108;
+ fable of the One Man, 109;
+ man thinking, 110;
+ Books, 111;
+ unconscious cerebration, 112;
+ a scholar's duties, 113;
+ specialists, 114;
+ a declaration of intellectual independence, 115;
+ address at the Theological School, 116, 117;
+ effect on Unitarians, 118;
+ sentiment of duty, 119;
+ Intuition, 120;
+ Reason, 121;
+ the Traditional Jesus, 122;
+ Sabbath and Preaching, 123;
+ correspondence with Ware, 124-127;
+ ensuing controversy, 127;
+ Ten Lectures, 128;
+ Dartmouth Address, 131-136;
+ Waterville Address, 136-140;
+ reforms, 141-145;
+ new views, 146;
+ Past and Present, 147;
+ on Everett, 148;
+ assembly at Dr. Warren's, 149;
+ Boston _doctrinaires_, 150;
+ unwise followers, 151-156;
+ Conservatives, 156, 157;
+ two Transcendental products, 157-166;
+ first volume of Essays, 166;
+ History, 167, 168;
+ Self-reliance, 168, 169;
+ Compensation, 169;
+ other essays, 170;
+ Friendship, 170, 171;
+ Heroism, 172;
+ Over-Soul, 172-175;
+ house and income, 176;
+ son's death, 177, 178;
+ American and Oriental qualities, 179;
+ English virtues, 180;
+ Emancipation addresses in 1844, 181;
+ second series of Essays, 181-188;
+ Reformers, 188-191;
+ Carlyle's business, Poems published, 192;
+ a second trip to Europe, 193-196;
+ Representative Men, 196-209;
+ lectures again, 210;
+ Abolitionism, 211, 212;
+ Woman's Rights, 212, 213;
+ a New England Roman, 213, 214;
+ English Traits, 214-221;
+ a new magazine, 221;
+ clubs, 222, 223;
+ more poetry, 224;
+ Burns Festival, 224;
+ letter about various literary matters, 225-227;
+ Parker's death, Lincoln's Proclamation, 228;
+ Conduct of Life, 228-239;
+ Boston Hymn, 240;
+ "So nigh is grandeur to our dust," 241;
+ Atlantic contributions, 242;
+ Lincoln obsequies, 243;
+ Free Religion, 243, 244;
+ second Phi Beta Kappa oration, 244-246;
+ poem read to his son, 246-248;
+ Harvard Lectures, 249-255;
+ agriculture and science, 255, 256;
+ predictions, 257;
+ Books, 258;
+ Conversation, 258;
+ elements of Courage, 259;
+ Success, 260, 261;
+ on old men, 261, 262;
+ California trip, 263-268;
+ eating, 269;
+ smoking, 270;
+ conflagration, loss of memory, Froude banquet, third trip abroad, 272;
+ friendly gifts, 272-279;
+ editing Parnassus, 280-282;
+ failing powers, 283;
+ Hope everywhere, 284;
+ negations, 285;
+ Eloquence, Pessimism, 286;
+ Comedy, Plagiarism, 287;
+ lessons repeated, 288;
+ Sources of Inspiration, 289, 290;
+ Future Life, 290-292;
+ dissolving creed, 292;
+ Concord Bridge, 292, 293;
+ decline of faculties, Old South lecture, 294;
+ papers, 294, 295;
+ quiet pen, 295;
+ posthumous works, 295 _et seq.;_
+ the pedagogue, 297;
+ University of Virginia, 299;
+ indebtedness to Plutarch, 299-302;
+ slavery questions, 303-308;
+ Woman Question, 308;
+ patriotism, 308, 309;
+ nothing but a poet, 311;
+ antique words, 313;
+ self-revelation, 313, 314;
+ a great poet? 314-316;
+ humility, 317-319;
+ poetic favorites, 320, 321;
+ comparison with contemporaries, 321;
+ citizen of the universe, 322;
+ fascination of symbolism, 323;
+ realism, science, imaginative coloring, 324;
+ dangers of realistic poetry, 325;
+ range of subjects, 326;
+ bad rhymes, 327;
+ a trick of verse, 328;
+ one faultless poem, 332;
+ spell-bound readers, 333;
+ workshop, 334;
+ octosyllabic verse, atmosphere, 335, 336;
+ comparison with Wordsworth, 337;
+ and others, 338;
+ dissolving sentences, 339;
+ incompleteness, 339, 340;
+ personality, 341, 342;
+ last visits received, 343-345;
+ the red rose, 345;
+ forgetfulness, 346;
+ literary work of last years, 346, 347;
+ letters unanswered, 347;
+ hearing and sight, subjects that interested him, 348;
+ later hours, death, 349;
+ last rites, 350-356;
+ portrayal, 357-419;
+ atmosphere, 357;
+ books, distilled alcohol, 358;
+ physique, 359;
+ demeanor, 360;
+ hair and eyes, insensibility to music, 361;
+ daily habits, 362;
+ bodily infirmities, 362, 363;
+ voice, 363;
+ quiet laughter, want of manual dexterity, 364;
+ spade anecdote, memory,
+ ignorance of exact science, 305;
+ intuition and natural sagacity united, fastidiousness, 366;
+ impatience with small-minded worshippers, Frothingham's Biography, 367;
+ intimates, familiarity not invited, 368;
+ among fellow-townsmen, errand to earth, inherited traditions, 369;
+ sealed orders, 370, 371;
+ conscientious work, sacrifices for truth, essays instead of sermons,
+ 372;
+ congregation at large, charm, optimism, 373;
+ financially straitened, 374;
+ lecture room limitations, 374, 375;
+ a Shakespeare parallel, 375, 376;
+ platform fascination, 376;
+ constructive power, 376, 377;
+ English experiences, lecture-peddling, 377;
+ a stove relinquished, utterance, an hour's weight, 378;
+ trumpet-sound, sweet seriousness, diamond drops, effect on Governor
+ Andrew, 379;
+ learning at second hand, 380;
+ the study of Goethe, 380;
+ a great quoter, no pedantry, 381;
+ list of authors referred to, 381, 382;
+ special indebtedness, 382;
+ penetration, borrowing, 383;
+ method of writing and its results, aided by others, 384;
+ sayings that seem family property, 385;
+ passages compared, 385-387;
+ the tributary streams, 388;
+ accuracy as to facts, 388;
+ personalities traceable in him, 389;
+ place as a thinker, 390;
+ Platonic anecdote, 391;
+ preëxistence, 391, 392;
+ mind-moulds, 393;
+ relying on instinct, 394;
+ dangers of intuition, 395;
+ mysticism, 396;
+ Oriental side, 397;
+ transcendental mood, 398;
+ personal identity confused, 399;
+ a distorting mirror, 400;
+ distrust of science, 401-403;
+ style illustrated, 403, 404;
+ favorite words, 405;
+ royal imagery, 406;
+ comments on America, 406, 407;
+ common property of mankind, 407;
+ public spirit, solitary workshop, martyrdom from visitors, 408;
+ white shield invulnerable, 409;
+ religious attitude, 409-411;
+ spiritual influx, creed, 412;
+ clerical relations, 413;
+ Dr. Hague's criticism, 413, 414;
+ ameliorating religious influence, 414;
+ freedom, 415;
+ enduring verse and thought, 416, 417;
+ comparison with Jesus, 417;
+ sincere manhood, 418;
+ transparency, 419.
+
+ Emerson's Books:--
+ Conduct of Life, 229, 237.
+ English Traits:
+ the first European trip, 62;
+ published, 214;
+ analysis, 214-220;
+ penetration, 383;
+ Teutonic fire, 386.
+ Essays:
+ Dickens's allusion, 156;
+ collected, 166.
+ Essays, second series, 183.
+ Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 128, 295, 296, 347.
+ Letters and Social Aims, 210, 283, 284, 296.
+ May-day and Other Pieces, 161, 192, 224, 242, 257, 310, 318, 346.
+ Memoir of Margaret Fuller, 209.
+ Miscellanies, 302, 303.
+ Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 179.
+ Nature:
+ resemblance of extracts from Mary Moody Emerson, 17;
+ where written, 70;
+ the Many in One, 73;
+ first published, 91, 92, 373;
+ analysis, 93-107;
+ obscure, 108;
+ Beauty, 237.
+ Parnassus:
+ collected, 280;
+ Preface, 314;
+ allusion, 321.
+ Poems, 293, 310, 318, 339.
+ Representative Men, 196-209.
+ Selected Poems, 311, 347.
+ Society and Solitude, 250.
+
+ Emerson's Essays, Lectures, Sermons, Speeches, etc.:--
+ In general:
+ essays, 73, 88, 91, 92, 310;
+ income from lectures, 176, 191, 192;
+ lectures in England, 194-196;
+ long series, 372;
+ lecture-room, 374;
+ plays and lectures, 375;
+ double duty, 376, 377;
+ charm, 379.
+ (See _Emerson's Life, Lyceum_, etc.)
+ American Civilization, 307.
+ American Scholar, The, 107-115, 133, 188.
+ Anglo-Saxon Race, The, 210.
+ Anti-Slavery Address, New York, 210-212.
+ Anti-Slavery Lecture, Boston, 210, 211.
+ Aristocracy, 296.
+ Art, 166, 175, 253, 254.
+ Beauty, 235-237.
+ Behavior, 234.
+ Books, 257, 380.
+ Brown, John, 302, 305, 306.
+ Burke, Edmund, 73.
+ Burns, Robert, 224, 225, 307.
+ Carlyle, Thomas, 294, 302, 317.
+ Channing's Poem, preface, 262, 263, 403.
+ Character, 183, 295, 297.
+ Chardon Street and Bible Convention, 159, 302.
+ Circles, 166, 174, 175.
+ Civilization, 250-253.
+ Clubs, 258.
+ Comedy. 128.
+ Comic, The, 286, 287.
+ Commodity, 94.
+ Compensation, 166, 169.
+ Concord Fight, the anniversary speech, 292, 293.
+ Concord, Second Centennial Discourse, 84-86.
+ Conservative, The, 156, 157, 159.
+ Considerations by the Way, 235.
+ Courage, 259.
+ Culture, 232, 233.
+ Demonology, 128, 296.
+ Discipline, 97, 98.
+ Divinity School Address, 116-127, 131.
+ Doctrine of the Soul, 127.
+ Domestic Life, 254, 255.
+ Duty, 128.
+ Editorial Address, Mass. Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307.
+ Education, 296, 297.
+ Eloquence, 254;
+ second essay, 285, 286.
+ Emancipation in the British West Indies, 181, 303.
+ Emancipation Proclamation, 228, 307.
+ Emerson, Mary Moody, 295, 296, 302.
+ English Literature, 87.
+ Experience, 182.
+ Farming, 255, 256.
+ Fate, 228-330.
+ Fortune of the Republic, 294, 302, 307-309.
+ Fox, George, 73.
+ France, 196.
+ Free Religious Association, 243, 302, 307.
+ Friendship, 166, 170.
+ Froude, James Anthony, after-dinner speech, 271.
+ Fugitive Slave Law, 303, 304.
+ Genius, 127.
+ Gifts, 184, 185.
+ Goethe, or the Writer, 208, 209.
+ Greatness, 288, 346.
+ Harvard Commemoration, 307.
+ Heroism, 166, 172.
+ Historical Discourse, at Concord, 303.
+ Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England, 147, 165, 296, 302.
+ History, 166, 167.
+ Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214, 295, 302.
+ Home, 127.
+ Hope, 284, 285.
+ Howard University, speech, 263.
+ Human Culture, 87.
+ Idealism, 98-100.
+ Illusions, 235, 239.
+ Immortality, 266, 290-292, 354.
+ Inspiration, 289.
+ Intellect, 166, 175.
+ Kansas Affairs, 305.
+ Kossuth, 307.
+ Language, 95-97.
+ Lincoln, Abraham, funeral remarks, 242, 243, 307.
+ Literary Ethics, 131-136.
+ Lord's Supper, 57-60, 303.
+ Love, 127,128,166,170. (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+ Luther, 73.
+ Manners, 183, 234.
+ Man of Letters, The, 296, 298.
+ Man the Reformer, 142, 143.
+ Method of Nature, The, 136-141.
+ Michael Angelo, 73, 75.
+ Milton, 73, 75.
+ Montaigne, or the Skeptic, 202-204.
+ Napoleon, or the Man of the World, 206-209.
+ Natural History of the Intellect, 249, 268, 347.
+ Nature (the essay), 185, 186, 398.
+ New England Reformers, 188-191, 385.
+ Nominalism and Realism, 188.
+ Old Age, 261, 262.
+ Over-Soul, The, 166, 172-175, 398, 411.
+ Parker, Theodore, 228, 306.
+ Perpetual Forces, 297.
+ Persian Poetry, 224.
+ Phi Beta Kappa oration, 347.
+ Philosophy of History, 87.
+ Plato, 198-200;
+ New Readings, 200.
+ Plutarch, 295, 299-302.
+ Plutarch's Morals, introduction, 262.
+ Poet, The, 181, 182.
+ Poetry, 210.
+ Poetry and Imagination, 283;
+ subdivisions: Bards and Trouveurs,
+ Creation, Form, Imagination,
+ Melody, Morals, Rhythm, Poetry,
+ Transcendency, Veracity, 283, 284;
+ quoted, 325.
+ Politics, 186, 187.
+ Power, 230, 231.
+ Preacher, The, 294, 298.
+ Professions of Divinity, Law, and Medicine, 41.
+ Progress of Culture, The, 244, 288.
+ Prospects, 101-103.
+ Protest, The, 127.
+ Providence Sermon, 130.
+ Prudence, 166, 171, 172.
+ Quotation and Originality, 287, 288.
+ Relation of Man to the Globe, 73.
+ Resources, 286.
+ Right Hand of Fellowship, The, at Concord, 56.
+ Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 295, 302.
+ Scholar, The, 296, 299.
+ School, The, 127.
+ Scott, speech, 302, 307.
+ Self-Reliance, 166, 168, 411.
+ Shakespeare, or the Poet, 204-206.
+ Social Aims, 285.
+ Soldiers' Monument, at Concord, 303.
+ Sovereignty of Ethics, The, 295, 297, 298.
+ Spirit, 100, 101.
+ Spiritual Laws, 166, 168.
+ Success, 260, 261.
+ Sumner Assault, 304.
+ Superlatives, 295, 297.
+ Swedenborg, or the Mystic, 201, 202, 206.
+ Thoreau, Henry D., 228, 295, 302.
+ Times, The, 142-145.
+ Tragedy, 127.
+ Transcendentalist, The, 145-155, 159.
+ Universality of the Moral Sentiment, 66.
+ University of Virginia, address, 347.
+ War, 88, 303.
+ Water, 73.
+ Wealth, 231, 232.
+ What is Beauty? 74, 94, 95.
+ Woman, 307, 308.
+ Woman's Rights, 212, 213.
+ Work and Days, 256, 312, 406, 407.
+ Worship, 235.
+ Young American, The, 166, 180, 181.
+
+ Emerson's Poems:--
+ In general: inspiration from nature, 22, 96;
+ poetic rank in college, 45, 46;
+ prose-poetry and philosophy, 91, 93;
+ annual _afflatus_, in America, 136, 137;
+ first volume, 192;
+ five immortal poets, 202;
+ ideas repeated, 239;
+ true position, 311 _et seq.; in carmine veritas_, 313;
+ litanies, 314;
+ arithmetic, 321, 322;
+ fascination, 323;
+ celestial imagery, 324;
+ tin pans, 325;
+ realism, 326;
+ metrical difficulties, 327, 335;
+ blemishes, 328;
+ careless rhymes, 329;
+ delicate descriptions, 331;
+ pathos, 332;
+ fascination, 333;
+ unfinished, 334, 339, 340;
+ atmosphere, 335;
+ subjectivity, 336;
+ sympathetic illusion, 337;
+ resemblances, 337, 338;
+ rhythms, 340;
+ own order, 341, 342;
+ always a poet, 346.
+ (See _Emerson's Life, Milton, Poets_, etc.)
+ Adirondacs, The, 242, 309, 327.
+ Blight, 402.
+ Boston, 346, 407, 408.
+ Boston Hymn, 211, 221, 241, 242.
+ Brahma, 221, 242, 396, 397.
+ Celestial Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+ Class Day Poem, 45-47.
+ Concord Hymn, 87, 332.
+ Daemonic Love, 170. (Three Loves.)
+ Days, 221, 242, 257, 312;
+ _pleachéd_, 313.
+ Destiny, 332.
+ Each and All, 73, 74, 94, 331.
+ Earth-Song, 327.
+ Elements, 242.
+ Fate, 159, 387.
+ Flute, The, 399.
+ Good-by, Proud World, 129, 130, 338.
+ Hamatreya, 327.
+ Harp, The, 320, 321, 329, 330. (See _Aeolian Harp_.)
+ Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214.
+ Humble Bee, 46, 74, 75, 128, 272, 326, 331, 338.
+ Initial Love, 170, 387. (Three Loves.)
+ In Memoriam, 19, 89.
+ Latin Translations, 43.
+ May Day, 242;
+ changes, 311, 333.
+ Merlin, 318, 319. (Merlin's Song.)
+ Mithridates, 331.
+ Monadnoc, 322, 331;
+ alterations, 366.
+ My Garden, 242.
+ Nature and Life, 242.
+ Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces, 242.
+ Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing, 211, 212.
+ Poet, The, 317-320, 333.
+ Preface to Nature, 105.
+ Problem, The, 159, 161, 253, 284, 326, 337, 380.
+ Quatrains, 223, 242.
+ Rhodora, The, 74, 94, 95, 129.
+ Romany Girl, The, 221.
+ Saadi, 221, 242.
+ Sea-Shore, 333, 339.
+ Snow-Storm, 331, 338, 339.
+ Solution, 320.
+ Song for Knights of Square Table, 42.
+ Sphinx, The, 113, 159, 243, 330, 398.
+ Terminus, 221, 242;
+ read to his son, 246-248, 363.
+ Test, The, 201, 202, 320.
+ Threnody, 178, 333.
+ Titmouse, The, 221, 326.
+ Translations, 242, 399.
+ Uriel, 326, 331, 398.
+ Voluntaries, 241.
+ Waldeinsamkeit, 221.
+ Walk, The, 402.
+ Woodnotes, 46, 159, 331, 338.
+ World-Soul, The, 331.
+
+ Emersoniana, 358.
+
+ Emerson, Thomas, of Ipswich, 38.
+
+ Emerson, Waldo, child of Ralph Waldo:
+ death, 177, 178;
+ anecdote, 265.
+
+ Emerson, William, grandfather of Ralph Waldo:
+ minister of Concord, 8-10, 14;
+ building the Manse, 70;
+ patriotism, 72.
+
+ Emerson, William, father of Ralph Waldo:
+ minister, in Harvard and Boston, 10-14;
+ editorship, 26, 32, 33;
+ the parsonage, 37, 42;
+ death, 43.
+
+ Emerson, William, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37, 39, 49, 53.
+
+ England:
+ first visit, 62-65;
+ Lake Windermere, 70;
+ philosophers, 76;
+ the virtues of the people, 179, 180;
+ a second visit, 192 _et seq.;_
+ notabilities 195;
+ the lectures, 196;
+ Stonehenge, 215;
+ the aristocracy, 215;
+ matters wrong, 260;
+ Anglo-Saxon race, trade and liberty, 304;
+ lustier life, 335;
+ language, 352;
+ lecturing, a key, 377;
+ smouldering fire, 385. (See _America, Europe_, etc.)
+
+ Enthusiasm:
+ need of, 143;
+ weakness, 154.
+
+ Epicurus, agreement with, 301.
+
+ Episcopacy:
+ in Boston, 28, 34, 52;
+ church in Newton, 68;
+ at Hanover, 132;
+ quotation from liturgy, 354;
+ burial service, 356. (See _Calvinism, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Esquimau, allusion, 167.
+
+ Establishment, party of the, 147. (See _Puritanism, Religion,
+ Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+ Eternal, relations to the, 297. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Europe:
+ Emerson's first visit, 62-65;
+ return, 72;
+ the Muses, 114;
+ debt to the East, 120;
+ famous gentlemen, 184;
+ second visit, 193-196;
+ weary of Napoleon, 207;
+ return, 210;
+ conflict possible, 218;
+ third visit, 271-279;
+ cast-out passion for, 308. (See _America, England, France_, etc.)
+
+ Everett, Edward:
+ on Tudor, 28;
+ literary rank, 33;
+ preaching, 52;
+ influence, 148.
+
+ Evolution, taught in "Nature," 105, 106.
+
+ Eyeball, transparent, 398.
+
+
+ Faith:
+ lacking in America, 143,
+ building cathedrals, 253. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Fine, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+ Fire, illustration, 386. (See _England, France_, etc.)
+
+ Forbes, John M., connected with the Emerson family, 263-265;
+ his letter, 263.
+
+ Foster, John, minister of Brighton, 15.
+
+ Fourth-of-July, orations, 386. (See _America_, etc.)
+
+ Fox, George, essay on, 73.
+
+ France:
+ Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+ philosophers, 76;
+ Revolution, 80;
+ tired of Napoleon, 207, 208;
+ realism, 326;
+ wrath, 385, 386. (See _Carlyle, England, Europe_, etc.)
+
+ Francis, Convers, at a party, 149.
+
+ Franklin, Benjamin:
+ birthplace, 37;
+ allusion, 184;
+ characteristics, 189;
+ Poor Richard, 231;
+ quoted, 236;
+ maxims, 261;
+ fondness for Plutarch, 382;
+ bequest, 407.
+
+ Fraunhofer, Joseph, optician, 230, 324.
+
+ Frazer's Magazine:
+ "The Mud," 79;
+ Sartor Resartus, 81. (See _Carlyle_.)
+
+ Freeman, James, minister of King's Chapel, 11, 12, 52.
+ Free Trade, Athenaeum banquet, 220.
+
+ Friendship, C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 23, 77.
+
+ Frothingham, Nathaniel L., account of Emerson's mother, 13.
+
+ Frothingham, Octavius Brooks: Life of Ripley, 165;
+ an unpublished manuscript, 365-367.
+
+ Fuller, Margaret:
+ borrowed sermon, 130;
+ at a party, 149;
+ The Dial, 159, 160, 162;
+ Memoir, 209;
+ causing laughter, 364;
+ mosaic Biography, 368.
+
+ Furness, William Henry:
+ on the Emerson family, 14;
+ Emerson's funeral, 350, 353.
+
+ Future, party of the, 147.
+
+
+ Galton, Francis, composite portraits, 232.
+
+ Gardiner, John Sylvester John:
+ allusion, 26;
+ leadership in Boston, 28;
+ Anthology Society, 32.
+ (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+ Gardner, John Lowell, recollections of Emerson's boyhood, 38-42.
+
+ Gardner, S.P., garden, 38.
+
+ Genealogy, survival of the fittest, 3.
+ (See _Heredity_.)
+
+ Gentleman's Magazine, 30.
+
+ Gentleman, the, 183.
+
+ Geography, illustration, 391.
+
+ German:
+ study of, 48, 49, 78, 380;
+ philosophers, 76;
+ scholarship, 148;
+ oracles, 206;
+ writers unread, 208;
+ philosophers, 380;
+ professors, 391.
+
+ Germany, a visit, 225, 226.
+ (See _Europe, France, Goethe_, etc.)
+
+ Gifts, 185.
+
+ Gilfillan, George:
+ on Emerson's preaching, 65;
+ Emerson's physique, 360.
+
+ Gilman, Arthur, on the Concord home, 83.
+
+ Glasgow, the rectorship, 280.
+
+ God:
+ the universal spirit, 68, 69, 94;
+ face to face, 92, 93;
+ teaching the human mind, 98, 99;
+ aliens from, 101;
+ in us, 139-141;
+ his thought, 146;
+ belief, 170;
+ seen by man, 174;
+ divine offer, 176;
+ writing by grace, 182;
+ presence, 243;
+ tribute to Great First Cause, 267;
+ perplexity about, 410;
+ ever-blessed One, 411;
+ mirrored, 412.
+ (See _Christianity, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Goethe:
+ called _Mr_., 31;
+ dead, 63;
+ Clarke's essay, 79;
+ generalizations, 148;
+ influence, 150;
+ on Spinoza, 174, 175;
+ rank as a poet, 202, 320;
+ lovers, 226;
+ rare union, 324;
+ his books read, 380, 381;
+ times quoted, 382.
+ (See _German_, etc.)
+
+ Goldsmith, Oliver, his Vicar of Wakefield, 9, 10, 15.
+
+ Good, the study of, 301.
+
+ Goodwin, H.B., Concord minister, 56.
+
+ Gould, Master of Latin School, 39.
+
+ Gould, Thomas R., sculptor, 68.
+
+ Gourdin, John Gaillard Keith and Robert, in college, 47.
+
+ Government, abolition of, 141.
+
+ Grandmother's Review, 30.
+
+ Gray, Thomas, Elegy often quoted, 316, 317, 416.
+
+ Greece:
+ poetic teaching, 121;
+ allusion, 108.
+
+ Greek:
+ Emerson's love for, 43, 44;
+ in Harvard, 49;
+ poets, 253;
+ moralist, 299;
+ Bryant's translation, 378;
+ philosophers, 391.
+ (See _Homer_, etc.)
+
+ Greenough, Horatio, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+ Grimm, Hermann, 226.
+
+ Guelfs and Ghibellines, illustration, 47.
+
+
+ Hafiz, times mentioned, 382.
+ (See _Persia_.)
+
+ Hague, William, essay, 413.
+
+ Haller, Albert von, rare union, 324.
+
+ Harvard, Mass., William Emerson's settlement, 10, 11.
+
+ Harvard University:
+ the Bulkeley gift, 6;
+ William Emerson's graduation, 10;
+ list of graduates, 12;
+ Emerson's brothers, 19, 21;
+ Register, 21, 24, 385, 401;
+ Hillard, 24, 25;
+ Kirkland's presidency, 26, 27;
+ Gardner, 39-41;
+ Emerson's connection, 44-49;
+ the Boylston prizes, 46;
+ Southern students, 47;
+ graduates at Andover, 48;
+ Divinity School, 51, 53;
+ a New England centre, 52;
+ Bowen's professorship, 103;
+ Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 115, 133, 188, 244;
+ Divinity School address, 116-132;
+ degree conferred, 246;
+ lectures, 249;
+ library, 257;
+ last Divinity address, 294;
+ Commemoration, 307;
+ singing class, 361;
+ graduates, 411.
+ (See _Cambridge_.)
+
+ Haskins, David Green, at Emerson's funeral, 356.
+
+ Haskins, Ruth (Emerson's mother), 10, 13, 14.
+ Haughty, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+ Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
+ his Mosses, 70;
+ "dream-peopled solitude," 86;
+ at the club, 223;
+ view of English life, 335;
+ grave, 356;
+ biography, 368.
+
+ Hazlitt, William:
+ British Poets, 21.
+
+ Health, inspiration, 289.
+
+ Hebrew Language, study, 48. (See _Bible_.)
+
+ Hedge, Frederic Henry:
+ at a party, 149;
+ quoted, 383.
+
+ Henry VII., tombs, 415.
+
+ Herbert, George:
+ Poem on Man, 102;
+ parallel, 170;
+ poetry, 281;
+ a line quoted, 345.
+
+ Herder, Johann Gottfried, allusion, 16.
+
+ Heredity:
+ Emerson's belief, 1, 2;
+ in Emerson family, 4, 19;
+ Whipple on, 389;
+ Jonson, 393.
+
+ Herrick, Robert, poetry, 281.
+
+ Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (See _Emerson's Books_,--Nature.)
+
+ Hilali, The Flute, 399.
+
+ Hillard, George Stillman:
+ in college, 24, 25;
+ his literary place, 33;
+ aid, 276.
+
+ Hindoo Scriptures, 199, 200. (See _Bible, India_, etc.)
+
+ History, how it should be written, 168.
+
+ Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood:
+ reference to, 223;
+ on the Burns speech, 225;
+ kindness, 273, 274, 276-279;
+ at Emerson's death-bed, 349;
+ funeral address, 351-353.
+
+ Hoar, Samuel:
+ statesman, 72;
+ tribute, 213, 214.
+
+ Holland, description of the Dutch, 217.
+
+ Holley, Horace, prayer, 267.
+
+ Holmes, John, a pupil of Emerson, 50.
+
+ Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
+ memories of Dr. Ripley, 15;
+ of C.C. Emerson, 20, 21;
+ familiarity with Cambridge and its college, 45;
+ erroneous quotation from, 251, 252;
+ jest erroneously attributed to, 400, 401.
+
+ Holy Ghost, "a new born bard of the," 123. (See _Christ, God,
+ Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Homer:
+ poetic rank, 202, 320;
+ plagiarism, 205;
+ Iliad, 253;
+ allusion, 315;
+ tin pans, 325;
+ times quoted, 382. (See _Greek_, etc.)
+
+ Homer, Jonathan, minister of Newton, 15.
+
+ Hooper, Mrs. Ellen, The Dial, 159, 160.
+
+ Hope:
+ lacking in America, 143;
+ in every essay, 284.
+
+ Horace:
+ allusion, 22;
+ Ars Poetica, 316.
+
+ Horses, Flora Temple's time, 388.
+
+ Howard University, speech, 263.
+
+ Howe, Samuel Gridley, the philanthropist, 223.
+
+ Hunt, Leigh, meeting Emerson, 195.
+
+ Hunt, William, the painter, 223.
+
+
+ Idealism, 98-100, 146, 150.
+
+ Idealists:
+ Ark full, 191;
+ Platonic sense, 391.
+
+ Imagination:
+ the faculty, 141;
+ defined, 237, 238;
+ essay, 283;
+ coloring life, 324.
+
+ Imbecility, 231.
+
+ Immortality, 262. (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Incompleteness, in poetry, 339.
+
+ India:
+ poetic models, 338;
+ idea of preëxistence, 391;
+ Brahmanism, 397. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma.)
+
+ Indians:
+ in history of Concord, 71;
+ Algonquins, 72.
+
+ Inebriation, subject in Monthly Anthology, 30.
+
+ Insects, defended, 190.
+
+ Inspiration:
+ of Nature, 22, 96, 141;
+ urged, 146.
+
+ Instinct, from God or Devil, 393.
+
+ Intellect, confidence in, 134.
+
+ Intuition, 394.
+
+ Ipswich, Mass., 3, 4, 8.
+
+ Ireland, Alexander:
+ glimpses of Emerson, 44, 64, 65:
+ reception, 193,194;
+ on Carlyle, 196;
+ letter from Miss Peabody, 317;
+ quoting Whitman, 344;
+ quoted, 350.
+
+ Irving, Washington, 33.
+
+ Italy:
+ Emerson's first visit, 62, 63;
+ Naples, 113.
+
+
+ Jackson, Charles, garden, 38.
+
+ Jackson, Dr. Charles Thomas, anaesthesia, 403.
+
+ Jackson, Miss Lydia, reading Carlyle, 81. (See _Mrs. Emerson_.)
+
+ Jahn, Johann, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+ Jameson, Anna, new book, 131.
+
+ Jesus:
+ times mentioned, 382;
+ a divine manifestation, 411;
+ followers, 417;
+ and Emerson, 419. (See _Bible, Christ, Church, Religion_, etc.)
+ Joachim, the violinist, 225, 226.
+
+ Johnson, Samuel, literary style, 29.
+
+ Jonson, Ben:
+ poetic rank, 281;
+ a phrase, 300;
+ _traduction_, 393.
+ (See _Heredity_, etc.)
+
+ Journals, as a method of work, 384.
+
+ Jupiter Scapin, 207.
+
+ Jury Trial, and dinners, 216.
+
+ Justice, the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+
+ Juvenal:
+ allusion, 22;
+ precept from heaven, 252.
+
+
+ Kalamazoo, Mich., allusion, 388.
+
+ Kamschatka, allusion, 167.
+
+ Keats, John:
+ quoted, 92;
+ Ode to a Nightingale, 316;
+ _faint, swoon_, 405.
+
+ King, the, illustration, 74.
+
+ Kirkland, John Thornton:
+ Harvard presidency, 26, 52;
+ memories, 27.
+
+ Koran, allusion, 198.
+ (See _Bible, God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+
+ Labor:
+ reform, 141;
+ dignity, 142.
+
+ Lacenaire, evil instinct, 392.
+
+ Laertius, Diogenes, 390, 391.
+
+ La Harpe, Jean Francois, on Plutarch, 301.
+
+ Lamarck, theories, 166.
+
+ Lamb, Charles, Carlyle's criticism, 196.
+
+ Landor, Walter Savage, meeting Emerson, 63.
+
+ Landscape, never painted, 339, 240.
+ (See _Pictures, etc_.)
+
+ Language:
+ its symbolism, 95-97;
+ an original, 394.
+
+ Latin:
+ Peter Bulkeley's scholarship, 7;
+ translation, 24, 25;
+ Emerson's Translations, 43, 44.
+
+ Laud, Archbishop, 6.
+
+ Law, William, mysticism, 396.
+
+ Lawrence, Mass., allusion, 44.
+
+ Lecturing, given up, 295.
+ (See _Emerson's Essays, Lectures_, etc.)
+
+ Leibnitz, 386.
+
+ Leroux, Pierre, preëxistance, 391.
+
+ Letters, inspiration, 289.
+
+ Lincoln, Abraham, character, 307.
+ (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+ Linnaeus, illustration, 323, 324.
+
+ Litanies, in Emerson, 314.
+ (See _Episcopacy_.)
+
+ Literature:
+ aptitude for, 2, 3;
+ activity in 1820, 147.
+
+ Little Classics, edition, 347.
+
+ Liverpool, Eng., a visit, 193, 194.
+ (See _England, Europe, Scotland_, etc.)
+
+ Locke, John, allusion, 16, 111.
+
+ London, England.:
+ Tower Stairs, 63;
+ readers, 194;
+ sights, 221;
+ travellers, 308;
+ wrath, 385.
+ (See _England_, etc.)
+
+ Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
+ allusions, 31, 33;
+ Saturday Club, 222, 223;
+ burial, 346.
+
+ Lord, Nathan, President of Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+ Lord's Supper, Emerson's doubts, 57-61.
+
+ Lothrop & Co., publishers, 83.
+
+ Louisville, Ky., Dr. Clarke's residence, 78-80.
+
+ Lounsbury, Professor, Chaucer letter, 205.
+
+ Love:
+ in America, 143;
+ the Arch Abolitionist, 306.
+ (See _Emerson's Poems_.)
+
+ Lowell, Charles:
+ minister of the West Church, 11, 12, 52;
+ on Kirkland, 27.
+
+ Lowell, F.C., generosity, 276.
+
+ Lowell, James Russell:
+ an allusion, 33;
+ on The American Scholar, 107;
+ editorship, 221;
+ club, 223;
+ on the Burns speech, 225;
+ on Emerson's bearing, 360, 361;
+ Hawthorne biography, 368;
+ on lectures, 379.
+
+ Lowell, Mass., factories, 44.
+
+ Luther, Martin:
+ lecture, 73;
+ his conservatism, 298;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Lyceum, the:
+ a pulpit, 88;
+ New England, 192;
+ a sacrifice, 378.
+ (See _Lecturing, Emerson's Lectures_, etc.)
+
+ Lycurgus, 306. (See _Greece_.)
+
+
+ Mackintosh, Sir James, an allusion, 16.
+
+ Macmillan's Magazine, 414.
+
+ Malden, Mass.:
+ Joseph Emerson's ministry, 8;
+ diary, 17.
+
+ Man:
+ a fable about, 109, 110;
+ faith in, 122;
+ apostrophe, 140.
+
+ Manchester, Eng.:
+ visit, 194, 195;
+ banquet, 220.
+ (See _England_, etc.)
+
+ Marlowe, Christopher, expressions, 404.
+
+ Marvell, Andrew:
+ reading by C.C. Emerson, 21;
+ on the Dutch, 217;
+ verse, 338.
+
+ Mary, Queen, her martyrs, 418.
+
+ Massachusetts Historical Society:
+ tribute to C.C. Emerson, 21;
+ quality of its literature, 84;
+ on Carlyle, 294.
+
+ Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307, 411.
+ Materialism, 146, 391.
+ (See _Religion_.)
+
+ Mather, Cotton:
+ his Magnalia, 5-7;
+ on Concord discord, 57;
+ on New England Melancholy, 216;
+ a borrower, 381.
+
+ Mathew, Father, disciples, 368.
+
+ Mayhew, Jonathan, Boston minister, 51.
+
+ Melioration, a characteristic expression, 405.
+
+ Mendon, Mass., Joseph Emerson's ministry, 4.
+
+ Mephistopheles, Goethe's creation, 208.
+
+ Merrimac River, 71.
+
+ Metaphysics, indifference to, 249.
+
+ Methodism, in Boston, 56.
+ (See _Father Taylor_.)
+
+ Michael Angelo:
+ allusions, 73, 75;
+ on external beauty, 99;
+ course, 260;
+ filled with God, 284;
+ on immortality, 290;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Middlesex Agricultural Association, 235.
+ (See _Agriculture, Emerson's Essays._)
+
+ Middlesex Association, Emerson admitted, 53.
+
+ Miller's Retrospect, 34.
+
+ Milton, John:
+ influence in New England, 16;
+ quotation, 24;
+ essay, 73, 75;
+ compared with Emerson, 76, 77;
+ Lycidas, 178;
+ supposed speech, 220;
+ diet, 270, 271;
+ poetic rank, 281;
+ Arnold's citation, Logic, Rhetoric, 315;
+ popularity, 316;
+ quoted, 324;
+ tin pans, 325;
+ inventor of harmonies, 328;
+ Lycidas, 333;
+ Comus, 338;
+ times mentioned, 382;
+ precursor, quotation, 415.
+
+ Miracles:
+ false impression, 121, 122;
+ and idealism, 146;
+ theories, 191;
+ St. Januarius, 217;
+ objections, 244.
+ (See _Bible, Christ, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Modena, Italy, Emerson's visit, 63.
+
+ Monadnoc, Mount, 70.
+
+ Montaigne:
+ want of religion, 300;
+ great authority, 380;
+ times quoted, 382.
+
+ Montesquieu, on immortality, 291.
+
+ Monthly Anthology:
+ Wm. Emerson's connection, 13, 26;
+ precursor of North American Review, 28, 29;
+ character, 30, 31;
+ Quincy's tribute, 31;
+ Society formed, 32;
+ career, 33;
+ compared with The Dial, 160.
+
+ Moody Family, of York, Me., 8,10.
+
+ Morals, in Plutarch, 301.
+
+ Morison, John Hopkins, on Emerson's preaching, 67.
+
+ Mormons, 264, 268.
+
+ Mother-wit, a favorite expression, 404, 405.
+
+ Motley, John Lothrop, 33, 223.
+
+ Mount Auburn, strolls, 40.
+
+ Movement, party of the, 147.
+
+ Munroe & Co., publishers, 81.
+
+ Music:
+ church, 306;
+ inaptitude for, 361;
+ great composers, 401.
+
+ Musketaquid River, 22, 70, 71.
+
+ Mysticism:
+ unintelligible, 390;
+ Emerson's, 396.
+
+
+ Napoleon:
+ allusion, 197;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Napoleon III., 225.
+
+ Nation, The, Emerson's interest in, 348.
+
+ Native Bias, 288.
+
+ Nature:
+ in undress, 72;
+ solicitations, 110;
+ not truly studied, 135;
+ great men, 199;
+ tortured, 402.
+ (See _Emerson's Books, Emerson's Essays_, etc.)
+
+ Negations, to be shunned, 285.
+
+ New Bedford, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 52, 67.
+
+ Newbury, Mass., Edward Emerson's deaconship, 8.
+
+ New England:
+ families, 2, 3, 5;
+ Peter Bulkeley's coming, 6;
+ clerical virtues, 9;
+ Church, 14;
+ literary sky, 33;
+ domestic service, 34, 35;
+ two centres, 52;
+ an ideal town, 70, 71;
+ the Delphi, 72;
+ Carlyle invited, 83;
+ anniversaries, 84;
+ town records, 85;
+ Genesis, 102;
+ effect of Nature, 106;
+ boys and girls, 163;
+ Massachusetts, Connecticut River, 172;
+ lyceums, 192;
+ melancholy, 216;
+ New Englanders and Old, 220;
+ meaning of a word, 296, 297;
+ eyes, 325;
+ life, 325, 335;
+ birthright, 364;
+ a thorough New Englander, 406;
+ Puritan, 409;
+ theologians, 410;
+ Jesus wandering in, 419.
+ (See _America, England_, etc.)
+
+ Newspapers:
+ defaming the noble, 145;
+ in Shakespeare's day, 204.
+
+ Newton, Mass.:
+ its minister, 15;
+ Episcopal Church, 68.
+ (See _Rice_.)
+
+ Newton, Sir Isaac, times quoted, 382.
+
+ Newton, Stuart, sketches, 130.
+
+ New World, gospel, 371. (See _America_.)
+
+ New York:
+ Brevoort House, 246;
+ Genealogical Society, 413.
+
+ Niagara, visit, 263.
+
+ Nidiver, George, ballad, 259.
+
+ Nightingale, Florence, 220.
+
+ Nithsdale, Eng., mountains, 78.
+
+ Non-Resistance, 141.
+
+ North American Review:
+ its predecessor, 28, 29, 33;
+ the writers, 34;
+ Emerson's contributions, 73;
+ Ethics, 294, 295;
+ Bryant's article, 328.
+
+ Northampton, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 53.
+
+ Norton, Andrews:
+ literary rank, 34;
+ professorship, 52.
+
+ Norton, Charles Eliot:
+ editor of Correspondence, 82;
+ on Emerson's genius, 373.
+
+
+ Old Manse, The:
+ allusion, 70;
+ fire, 271-279.
+ (See _Concord_.)
+
+ Oliver, Daniel, in Dartmouth College, 132.
+
+ Optimism:
+ in philosophy, 136;
+ "innocent luxuriance," 211;
+ wanted by the young, 373.
+
+ Oriental:
+ genius, 120;
+ spirit in Emerson, 179.
+
+ Orpheus, allusion, 319.
+
+
+ Paine, R.T., JR., quoted, 31.
+
+ Palfrey, John Gorham:
+ literary rank, 34;
+ professorship, 52.
+
+ Pan, the deity, 140.
+
+ Pantheism:
+ in Wordsworth and Nature, 103;
+ dreaded, 141;
+ Emerson's, 410, 411.
+
+ Paris, Trance:
+ as a residence, 78;
+ allusion, 167;
+ salons, 184;
+ visit, 196, 308.
+
+ Parker, Theodore:
+ a right arm of freedom, 127;
+ at a party, 149;
+ The Dial, 159, 160;
+ editorship, 193;
+ death, 228;
+ essence of Christianity, 306;
+ biography, 368;
+ on Emerson's position, 411.
+
+ Parkhurst, John, studied at Andover, 48.
+
+ Parr, Samuel, allusion, 28.
+
+ Past, party of the, 147.
+
+ Peabody, Andrew Preston, literary rank, 34.
+
+ Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer:
+ her Aesthetic Papers, 88;
+ letter to Mr. Ireland, 317.
+
+ Peirce, Benjamin, mathematician, 223.
+
+ Pelagianisin, 51.
+ (See _Religion_.)
+
+ Pepys, Samuel, allusion, 12.
+
+ Pericles, 184, 253.
+
+ Persia, poetic models, 338.
+ (See _Emerson's Poems, Saadi_).
+
+ Pessimism, 286.
+ (See _Optimism_).
+
+ Philadelphia, Pa., society, 184.
+
+ Philanthropy, activity in 1820, 147.
+
+ Philolaus, 199.
+
+ Pie, fondness for, 269.
+
+ Pierce, John:
+ the minister of Brookline, 11;
+ "our clerical Pepys," 12.
+
+ Pindar, odes, 253.
+ (See _Greek, Homer_, etc.)
+
+ Plagiarism, 205, 206, 287, 288, 384.
+ (See _Quotations, Mather_, etc.)
+
+ Plato:
+ influence on Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+ over Emerson, 22, 52, 173, 188, 299, 301;
+ youthful essay, 74;
+ Alcott's study, 150;
+ reading, 197;
+ borrowed thought, 205, 206;
+ Platonic idea, 222;
+ a Platonist, 267;
+ saints of Platonism, 298;
+ academy inscription, 365;
+ great authority, 380;
+ times quoted, 382;
+ Symposium and Phaedrus quoted, 387;
+ _tableity_, preëxistence, 391;
+ Diogenes dialogue, 401;
+ a Platonist, 411.
+ (See _Emerson's Books_, and _Essays, Greek_, etc.)
+
+ Plotinus:
+ influence over Mary Emerson, 16, 17;
+ ashamed of his body, 99;
+ motto, 105;
+ opinions, 173, 174;
+ studied, 380.
+
+ Plutarch:
+ allusion, 22;
+ his Lives, 50;
+ study, 197;
+ on immortality, 291;
+ influence over Emerson, 299 _et seq_.;
+ his great authority, 380;
+ times mentioned, 382;
+ Emerson on, 383;
+ imagery quoted, 385;
+ style, 405.
+
+ Plymouth, Mass.:
+ letters written, 78, 79;
+ marriage, 83.
+
+ Poetry:
+ as an inspirer, 290;
+ Milton on, 315.
+ (See _Shakespeare_, etc.)
+
+ Poets:
+ list in Parnassus, 281;
+ comparative popularity, 316, 317;
+ consulting Emerson, 408.
+ (See _Emerson's Poems_).
+
+ Politics:
+ activity in 1820, 147;
+ in Saturday Club, 259.
+
+ Pomeroy, Jesse, allusion, 393.
+
+ Pope, Alexander, familiar lines, 316
+
+ Porphyry:
+ opinions, 173, 174;
+ studied, 380.
+
+ Porto Rico, E.B. Emerson's death, 19.
+
+ Power, practical, 259.
+
+ Prayer:
+ not enough, 138, 139;
+ anecdotes, 267.
+ (See _God, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Preaching, a Christian blessing, 123.
+ Preëxistence, 391.
+
+ Presbyterianism, in Scotland, 409.
+
+ Prescott, William, the Judge's mansion, 38.
+
+ Prescott, William Hickling:
+ rank, 33;
+ Conquest of Mexico, 38.
+
+ Prior, Matthew, 30.
+
+ Proclus, influence, 173, 380.
+
+ Prometheus, 209.
+
+ Prospects, for man, 101-103.
+ (See _Emerson's Essays_.)
+
+ Protestantism, its idols, 28.
+ (See _Channing, Religion, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+ Psammetichus, an original language, 394.
+ (See _Heredity, Language_, etc.)
+
+ Punch, London, 204.
+
+ Puritans, rear guard, 15.
+ (See _Calvinism_, etc.)
+
+ Puritanism:
+ relaxation from, 30;
+ after-clap, 268;
+ in New England, 409.
+ (See _Unitarianism_.)
+
+ Putnam's Magazine, on Samuel Hoar, 213, 214.
+
+ Pythagoras:
+ imagery quoted, 385;
+ preëxistence, 391.
+
+
+ Quakers, seeing only broad-brims, 218.
+
+ Quincy, Josiah:
+ History of Boston Athenaeum, 31;
+ tribute to the Anthology, 32, 33;
+ memories of Emerson, 45-47;
+ old age, 261.
+
+ Quotations, 381-383.
+ (See _Plagiarism_, etc.)
+
+
+ Raleigh, Sir Walter, verse, 338.
+
+ Raphael, his Transfiguration, 134.
+ (See _Allston, Painters_, etc.)
+
+ Rats, illustration, 167, 168.
+
+ Reed, Sampson, his Growth of the Mind, 80.
+
+ Reforms, in America, 141-145.
+
+ Reformers, fairness towards, 156, 157, 188-192.
+ (See _Anti-Slavery, John Brown_.)
+
+ Religion:
+ opinions of Wm. Emerson and others, 11-13;
+ nature the symbol of spirit, 95;
+ pleas for independence, 117;
+ universal sentiment, 118-120;
+ public rites, 152;
+ Church of England, 219;
+ of the future, 235;
+ relative positions towards, 409, 410;
+ Trinity, 411;
+ Emerson's belief, 412-415;
+ bigotry modified, 414.
+ (See _Calvinism, Channing, Christ, Emerson's Life, Essays_,
+ and _Poems, Episcopacy, God, Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+ Republicanism, spiritual, 36.
+
+ Revolutionary War:
+ Wm. Emerson's service, 8, 9;
+ subsequent confusion, 25, 32;
+ Concord's part, 71, 72, 292, 293.
+ (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+ Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 228.
+
+ Rhythm, 328, 329, 340.
+ (See _Emerson's Poems_, etc.)
+
+ Rice, Alexander H., anecdote, 68, 69, 346.
+ (See _Newton_.)
+
+ Richard Plantagenet, 197.
+
+ Ripley, Ezra:
+ minister of Concord, 10;
+ Emerson's sketch, 14-16;
+ garden, 42;
+ colleague, 56;
+ residence, 70.
+
+ Ripley, George:
+ a party, 149;
+ The Dial, 159;
+ Brook Farm, 164-166;
+ on Emerson's limitations, 380.
+
+ Robinson, Edward, literary rank, 34.
+
+ Rochester, N.Y., speech, 168.
+
+ Rome:
+ allusions, 167, 168;
+ growth, 222;
+ amphora, 321.
+ (See _Latin_.)
+
+ Romilly, Samuel, allusion, 220.
+
+ Rose, anecdote, 345.
+ (See _Flowers_.)
+
+ Rousseau, Jean Jacques, his Savoyard Vicar, 51, 52.
+
+ Ruskin, John:
+ on metaphysics, 250;
+ certain chapters, 336;
+ pathetic fallacy, 337;
+ plagiarism, 384.
+
+ Russell, Ben., quoted, 267.
+
+ Russell, Le Baron:
+ on Sartor Resartus, 81, 82;
+ groomsman, 83;
+ aid in rebuilding the Old Manse, 272-279;
+ Concord visit, 345.
+
+
+ Saadi: a borrower, 205;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+ (See _Persia_.)
+
+ Sabbath: a blessing of Christianity, 123, 298.
+
+ Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, on poetry, 339.
+
+ Saint Paul, times mentioned, 382.
+ (See _Bible_.)
+
+ Saladin, 184.
+
+ Sallust, on Catiline, 207.
+
+ Sanborn, Frank B.:
+ facts about Emerson, 42, 43, 66;
+ Thoreau memoir, 368;
+ old neighbor, 373.
+
+ Sapor, 184.
+
+ Satan, safety from, 306.
+ (See _Mephistopheles, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Saturday Club:
+ establishment, 221-223, 258;
+ last visits, 346, 347;
+ familiarity at, 368.
+
+ Scaliger, quotation, 109, 110.
+
+ Schelling, idealism, 148;
+ influence 173.
+
+ Schiller, on immortality, 290.
+
+ Scholarship:
+ a priesthood, 137;
+ docility of, 289.
+
+ School-teaching, 297.
+ (See _Chelmsford_.)
+
+ Schopenhauer, Arthur:
+ his pessimism, 286;
+ idea of a philosopher, 359.
+
+ Science:
+ growth of, 148;
+ Emerson inaccurate in, 256;
+ attitude toward, 401, 402.
+ (See _C.C. Emerson_.)
+
+ Scipio, 184.
+
+ Scotland:
+ Carlyle's haunts, 79;
+ notabilities, 195, 196;
+ Presbyterian, 409.
+
+ Scott, Sir Walter:
+ allusion, 22;
+ quotations, 23, 77;
+ dead, 63;
+ "the hand of Douglas," 234;
+ as a poet, 281;
+ popularity, 316;
+ poetic rank, 321.
+
+ Self:
+ the highest, 113;
+ respect for, 288, 289.
+
+ Seneca, Montaigne's study, 382.
+
+ Shakespeare:
+ allusion, 22;
+ Hamlet, 90, 94;
+ Benedick and love, 106;
+ disputed line, 128, 129;
+ an idol, 197;
+ poetic rank, 202, 281, 320, 321;
+ plagiarism, 204-206;
+ on studies, 257, 258;
+ supremacy, 328;
+ a comparison, 374;
+ a playwright, 375, 376;
+ punctiliousness of Portia, 378;
+ times mentioned, 382;
+ lunatic, lover, poet, 387;
+ Polonius, 389;
+ _mother-wit_, 404;
+ _fine_ Ariel, 405;
+ adamant, 418.
+
+ Shattuck, Lemuel, History of Concord, 382.
+
+ Shaw, Lemuel, boarding-place, 43.
+
+ Shelley, Percy Bysshe:
+ Ode to the West Wind, 316, 399;
+ redundant syllable, 328;
+ Adonais, 333.
+
+ Shenandoah Mountain, 306.
+
+ Shingle, Emerson's jest, 364.
+
+ Ships:
+ illustration of longitude, 154;
+ erroneous quotation, 251, 252;
+ building illustration, 376, 377.
+
+ Sicily:
+ Emerson's visit, 62;
+ Etna, 113.
+
+ Sidney, Sir Philip, Chevy Chace, 379.
+
+ Silsbee, William, aid in publishing Carlyle, 81.
+
+ Simonides, prudence, 410.
+
+ Sisyphus, illustration, 334.
+
+ Sleight-of-hand, illustration, 332.
+
+ Smith, James and Horace, Rejected Addresses, 387, 397.
+
+ Smith, Sydney, on bishops, 219.
+
+ Socrates:
+ allusion, 203;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Solitude, sought, 135.
+
+ Solomon, epigrammatic, 405.
+ (See _Bible_.)
+
+ Solon, 199.
+
+ Sophron, 199.
+
+ South, the:
+ Emerson's preaching tour, 53;
+ Rebellion, 305, 407.
+ (See _America, Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+ Southerners, in college, 47.
+
+ Sparks, Jared, literary rank, 33.
+
+ Spenser, Edmund:
+ stanza, 335, 338;
+ soul making body, 391;
+ _mother-wit_, 404.
+
+ Spinoza, influence, 173, 380.
+
+ Spirit and matter, 100, 101.
+ (See _God, Religion, Spenser_, etc.)
+
+ Spiritualism, 296.
+
+ Sprague, William Buel, Annals of the American Pulpit, 10-12.
+
+ Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, on American religion, 414.
+
+ Star:
+ "hitch your wagon to a star," 252, 253;
+ stars in poetry, 324.
+
+ Sterling, J. Hutchinson, letter to, 282, 283.
+
+ Stewart, Dugald, allusion, 16.
+
+ Story, Joseph, literary rank, 33.
+
+ Stuart, Moses, literary rank, 33.
+
+ Studio, illustration, 20.
+
+ Summer, description, 117.
+
+ Sumner, Charles:
+ literary rank, 33:
+ the outrage on, 211;
+ Saturday Club, 223.
+
+ Swedenborg, Emanuel:
+ poetic rank, 202, 320;
+ dreams, 306;
+ Rosetta-Stone, 322;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Swedenborgians:
+ liking for a paper of Carlyle's, 78;
+ Reed's essay, 80;
+ spiritual influx, 412.
+
+ Swift, Jonathan:
+ allusion, 30;
+ the Houyhnhnms, 163;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Synagogue, illustration, 169.
+
+
+ Tappan, Mrs. Caroline, The Dial, 159.
+
+ Tartuffe, allusion, 312.
+
+ Taylor, Father, relation to Emerson, 55, 56, 413.
+
+ Taylor, Jeremy:
+ allusion, 22;
+ Emerson's study, 52;
+ "the Shakespeare of divines," 94;
+ praise for, 306.
+
+ Teague, Irish name, 143.
+
+ Te Deum:
+ the hymn, 68;
+ illustration, 82.
+
+ Temperance, the reform, 141, 152.
+ (See _Reforms_.)
+
+ Tennyson, Alfred:
+ readers, 256;
+ tobacco, 270;
+ poetic rank, 281;
+ In Memoriam, 333;
+ on plagiarism, 384.
+
+ Thacher, Samuel Cooper:
+ allusion, 26;
+ death, 29.
+
+ Thayer, James B.:
+ Western Journey with Emerson, 249, 263, 265-271, 359;
+ _ground swell_, 364.
+ (See _California_.)
+
+ Thinkers, let loose, 175.
+
+ Thomson, James, descriptions, 338.
+
+ Thoreau, Henry D.:
+ allusion, 22;
+ a Crusoe, 72;
+ "nullifier of civilization," 86;
+ one-apartment house, 142, 143;
+ The Dial, 159, 160;
+ death, 228;
+ Emerson's burial-place, 356;
+ biography, 368;
+ personality traceable, 389;
+ woodcraft, 403.
+
+ Ticknor, George:
+ on William Emerson, 12;
+ on Kirkland, 27;
+ literary rank, 33.
+
+ Traduction, 393.
+ (See _Heredity, Jonson_, etc.)
+
+ Transcendentalism:
+ Bowen's paper, 103, 104;
+ idealism, 146;
+ adherents, 150-152;
+ dilettanteism, 152-155;
+ a terror, 161.
+
+ Transcendentalist, The, 157-159.
+
+ Truth:
+ as an end, 99;
+ sought, 135.
+
+ Tudor, William:
+ allusion, 26;
+ connecting literary link, 28, 29.
+
+ Turgot, quoted, 98, 99.
+
+ Tyburn, allusion, 183.
+
+
+ Unitarianism:
+ Dr. Freeman's, 11, 12;
+ nature of Jesus, 13;
+ its sunshine, 28;
+ white-handed, 34;
+ headquarters, 35;
+ lingual studies, 48, 49;
+ transition, 51;
+ domination, 52;
+ pulpits, 53, 54;
+ chapel in Edinburgh, 65;
+ file-leaders, 118;
+ its organ, 124;
+ "pale negations," 298.
+ (See _Religion, Trinity_, etc.)
+
+ United States, intellectual history, 32.
+ (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+ Unity, in diversity, 73, 106, 284.
+
+ Upham, Charles W., his History, 45.
+
+
+ Verne, Jules, _onditologie_, 186.
+
+ Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, literary rank, 33.
+
+ Virginia, University of, 299.
+
+ Volcano, illustration, 113.
+
+ Voltaire, 409.
+
+ Voting, done reluctantly, 152, 153.
+
+
+ Wachusett, Mount, 70.
+
+ Walden Pond:
+ allusion, 22, 70, 72;
+ cabin, 142, 143.
+ (See _Concord_.)
+
+ War:
+ outgrown, 88, 89;
+ ennobling, 298.
+
+ Ware, Henry, professorship, 52.
+ (See _Harvard University_.)
+
+ Ware, Henry, Jr.:
+ Boston ministry, 55;
+ correspondence, 124-127.
+ (See _Unitarianism_, etc.)
+
+ Warren, John Collins, Transcendentalism and Temperance, 149.
+
+ Warren, Judge, of New Bedford, 67.
+
+ Warwick Castle, fire, 275.
+
+ Washington City, addresses, 307.
+ (See _Anti-Slavery_, etc.)
+
+ Waterville College, Adelphi Society, 135-142.
+
+ Webster, Daniel:
+ E.B. Emerson's association with, 19;
+ on Tudor, 28, 29;
+ literary rank, 33;
+ Seventh-of-March Speech, 303;
+ times mentioned, 382.
+
+ Weiss, John, Parker biography, 368.
+
+ Wellington, Lord, seen by Emerson, 63, 64.
+
+ Wesley, John, praise of, 306.
+ (See _Methodism_.)
+
+ Western Messenger, poems in, 128.
+
+ West India Islands, Edward B. Emerson's death, 89.
+
+ Westminster Abbey, Emerson's visit, 63, 64.
+ (See _Emerson's Books_,--English Traits,--_England_, etc.)
+
+ Westminster Catechism, 298.
+ (See _Calvinism, Religion_, etc.)
+
+ Whipple, Edwin Percy:
+ literary rank, 33;
+ club, 223;
+ on heredity, 389.
+
+ White of Selborne, 228.
+
+ Whitman, Walt:
+ his enumerations, 325, 326;
+ journal, 344, 346.
+
+ Wilberforce, William, funeral, 64.
+
+ Will:
+ inspiration of, 289;
+ power of, 290.
+
+ Windermere, Lake, 70.
+ (See _England_.)
+
+ Winthrop, Francis William, in college, 45.
+
+ Wolfe, Charles, Burial of Moore, 416.
+
+ Woman:
+ her position, 212, 213, 251;
+ crossing a street, 364.
+
+ Woman's Club, 16.
+
+ Words, Emerson's favorite, 404, 405.
+ (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Days.)
+
+ Wordsworth, William:
+ Emerson's account, 63;
+ early reception, Excursion, 92, 95;
+ quoted, 96, 97;
+ Tintern Abbey, 103;
+ influence, 148, 150;
+ poetic rank, 281, 321;
+ on Immortality, 293, 392;
+ popularity, 316;
+ serenity, 335;
+ study of nature, 337;
+ times mentioned, 382;
+ We are Seven, 393;
+ prejudice against science, 401.
+
+ Wotton, Sir Henry, quoted, 259.
+
+
+ Yankee:
+ a spouting, 136;
+ _improve_, 176;
+ whittling, 364.
+ (See _America, New England_, etc.)
+
+ Yoga, Hindoo idea, 397.
+
+ Young, Brigham:
+ Utah, 264, 268;
+ on preëxistence, 391.
+
+ Young, Edward, influence in New England, 16, 17.
+
+
+ Zola, Émile, offensive realism, 326.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE
+
+BY
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY DAUGHTER AMELIA
+
+(MRS. TURNER SARGENT)
+
+MY FAITHFUL AND DEVOTED COMPANION
+
+THIS OUTLINE OF OUR SUMMER EXCURSION
+
+IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+A PROSPECTIVE VISIT
+
+
+
+OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I. THE VOYAGE.--LIVERPOOL.--CHESTER.--LONDON.--EPSOM
+
+II. EPSOM.--LONDON.--WINDSOR
+
+III. LONDON.--ISLE OF WIGHT.--CAMBRIDGE.--OXFORD.--YORK.--EDINBURGH
+
+IV. STRATFORD-ON-AVON.--GREAT MALVERN.--TEWKESBURY.--BATH.--SALISBURY.
+--STONEHENGE
+
+V. STONEHENGE.--SALISBURY.--OLD SARUM.--BEMERTON.--BRIGHTON
+
+VI. LONDON
+
+VII. BOULOGNE.--PARIS.--LONDON.--LIVERPOOL.--THE HOMEWARD PASSAGE
+
+VIII. GENERAL IMPRESSIONS.--MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AT THE AGE OF 82. From a painting by Sarah W.
+Whitman
+
+ROBERT BROWNING
+
+MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD
+
+SALISBURY CATHEDRAL
+
+PLACE DE LA CONCORDE
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY.
+
+A PROSPECTIVE VISIT.
+
+
+After an interval of more than fifty years, I propose taking a second
+look at some parts of Europe. It is a Rip Van Winkle experiment which I
+am promising myself. The changes wrought by half a century in the
+countries I visited amount almost to a transformation. I left the
+England of William the Fourth, of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert
+Peel; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Soult, of Thiers, of
+Guizot. I went from Manchester to Liverpool by the new railroad, the
+only one I saw in Europe. I looked upon England from the box of a
+stage-coach, upon France from the coupé of a diligence, upon Italy from
+the cushion of a carrozza. The broken windows of Apsley House were still
+boarded up when I was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid in
+Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in the Seine, as
+I remember it. I did not see it erected; it must have been an exciting
+scene to witness, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed
+by the great stone if it disgraced him by falling in the process. As for
+the dynasties which have overlaid each other like Dr. Schliemann's
+Trojan cities, there is no need of moralizing over a history which
+instead of Finis is constantly ending with What next?
+
+With regard to the changes in the general conditions of society and the
+advance in human knowledge, think for one moment what fifty years have
+done! I have often imagined myself escorting some wise man of the past
+to our Saturday Club, where we often have distinguished strangers as our
+guests. Suppose there sat by me, I will not say Sir Isaac Newton, for he
+has been too long away from us, but that other great man, whom Professor
+Tyndall names as next to him in intellectual stature, as he passes along
+the line of master minds of his country, from the days of Newton to our
+own,--Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829. Would he or I be the listener,
+if we were side by side? However humble I might feel in such a presence,
+I should be so clad in the grandeur of the new discoveries, inventions,
+ideas, I had to impart to him that I should seem to myself like the
+ambassador of an Emperor. I should tell him of the ocean steamers, the
+railroads that spread themselves like cobwebs over the civilized and
+half-civilized portions of the earth, the telegraph and the telephone,
+the photograph and the spectroscope. I should hand him a paper with the
+morning news from London to read by the electric light, I should startle
+him with a friction match, I should amaze him with the incredible truths
+about anesthesia, I should astonish him with the later conclusions of
+geology, I should dazzle him by the fully developed law of the
+correlation of forces, I should delight him with the cell-doctrine, I
+should confound him with the revolutionary apocalypse of Darwinism. All
+this change in the aspects, position, beliefs, of humanity since the
+time of Dr. Young's death, the date of my own graduation from college!
+
+I ought to consider myself highly favored to have lived through such a
+half century. But it seems to me that in walking the streets of London
+and Paris I shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a
+relic of a former generation. Those who have been born into the
+inheritance of the new civilization feel very differently about it from
+those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those
+approaching middle age all these innovations in life and thought are as
+natural, as much a matter of course, as the air they breathe; they form
+a part of the inner framework of their intelligence, about which their
+mental life is organized. To men and women of more than threescore and
+ten they are external accretions, like the shell of a mollusk, the
+jointed plates of an articulate. This must be remembered in reading
+anything written by those who knew the century in its teens; it is not
+likely to be forgotten, for the fact betrays itself in all the writer's
+thoughts and expressions.
+
+The story of my first visit to Europe is briefly this: my object was to
+study the medical profession, chiefly in Paris, and I was in Europe
+about two years and a half, from April, 1833, to October, 1835. I sailed
+in the packet ship Philadelphia from New York for Portsmouth, where we
+arrived after a passage of twenty-four days. A week was spent in
+visiting Southampton, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Wilton, and the Isle of
+Wight. I then crossed the Channel to Havre, from which I went to Paris.
+In the spring and summer of 1834 I made my principal visit to England
+and Scotland. There were other excursions to the Rhine and to Holland,
+to Switzerland and to Italy, but of these I need say nothing here. I
+returned in the packet ship Utica, sailing from Havre, and reaching New
+York after a passage of forty-two days.
+
+A few notes from my recollections will serve to recall the period of my
+first visit to Europe, and form a natural introduction to the
+experiences of my second. I take those circumstances which happen to
+suggest themselves.
+
+After a short excursion to Strasbourg, down the Rhine, and through
+Holland, a small steamer took us from Rotterdam across the Channel, and
+we found ourselves in the British capital.
+
+The great sight in London is--London. No man understands himself as an
+infinitesimal until he has been a drop in that ocean, a grain of sand on
+that sea-margin, a mote in its sunbeam, or the fog or smoke which stands
+for it; in plainer phrase, a unit among its millions.
+
+I had two letters to persons in England: one to kind and worthy Mr.
+Petty Vaughan, who asked me to dinner; one to pleasant Mr. William
+Clift, conservator of the Hunterian Museum, who asked me to tea.
+
+To Westminster Abbey. What a pity it could not borrow from Paris the
+towers of Notre Dame! But the glory of its interior made up for this
+shortcoming. Among the monuments, one to Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, a
+descendant, perhaps, of another namesake, immortalized by Dryden in the
+"Annus Mirabilis" as
+
+ "the Achates of the general's fight."
+
+He accompanied Wolfe in his expedition which resulted in the capture of
+Quebec. My relative, I will take it for granted, as I find him in
+Westminster Abbey. Blood is thicker than water,--and warmer than marble,
+I said to myself, as I laid my hand on the cold stone image of the once
+famous Admiral.
+
+To the Tower, to see the lions,--of all sorts. There I found a "poor
+relation," who made my acquaintance without introduction. A large
+baboon, or ape,--some creature of that family,--was sitting at the open
+door of his cage, when I gave him offence by approaching too near and
+inspecting him too narrowly. He made a spring at me, and if the keeper
+had not pulled me back would have treated me unhandsomely, like a
+quadrumanous rough, as he was. He succeeded in stripping my waistcoat of
+its buttons, as one would strip a pea-pod of its peas.
+
+To Vauxhall Gardens. All Americans went there in those days, as they go
+to Madame Tussaud's in these times. There were fireworks and an
+exhibition of polar scenery. "Mr. Collins, the English PAGANINI,"
+treated us to music on his violin. A comic singer gave us a song, of
+which I remember the line,
+
+ "You'll find it all in the agony bill."
+
+This referred to a bill proposed by Sir Andrew Agnew, a noted Scotch
+Sabbatarian agitator.
+
+To the opera to hear Grisi. The king, William the Fourth, was in his
+box; also the Princess Victoria, with the Duchess of Kent. The king
+tapped with his white-gloved hand on the ledge of the box when he was
+pleased with the singing.--To a morning concert and heard the real
+Paganini. To one of the lesser theatres and heard a monologue by the
+elder Mathews, who died a year or two after this time. To another
+theatre, where I saw Listen in Paul Pry. Is it not a relief that I am
+abstaining from description of what everybody has heard described?
+
+To Windsor. Machinery to the left of the road. Recognized it instantly,
+by recollection of the plate in "Rees's Cyclopedia," as Herschel's great
+telescope.--Oxford. Saw only its outside. I knew no one there, and no
+one knew me.--Blenheim,--the Titians best remembered of its objects on
+exhibition. The great Derby day of the Epsom races. Went to the race
+with a coach-load of friends and acquaintances. Plenipotentiary, the
+winner, "rode by P. Connelly." So says Herring's picture of him, now
+before me. Chestnut, a great "bullock" of a horse, who easily beat the
+twenty-two that started. Every New England deacon ought to see one Derby
+day to learn what sort of a world this is he lives in. Man is a sporting
+as well as a praying animal.
+
+Stratford-on-Avon. Emotions, but no scribbling of name on
+walls.--Warwick. The castle. A village festival, "The Opening of the
+Meadows," a true exhibition of the semi-barbarism which had come down
+from Saxon times.--Yorkshire. "The Hangman's Stone." Story told in my
+book called the "Autocrat," etc. York Cathedral.--Northumberland.
+Alnwick Castle. The figures on the walls which so frightened my man John
+when he ran away from Scotland in his boyhood. Berwick-on-Tweed. A
+regatta going on; a very pretty show. Scotland. Most to be remembered,
+the incomparable loveliness of Edinburgh.--Sterling. The view of the
+Links of Forth from the castle. The whole country full of the romance of
+history and poetry. Made one acquaintance in Scotland, Dr. Robert Knox,
+who asked my companion and myself to breakfast. I was treated to five
+entertainments in Great Britain: the breakfast just mentioned; lunch
+with Mrs. Macadam,--the good old lady gave me bread, and not a stone;
+dinner with Mr. Vaughan; one with Mr. Stanley, the surgeon; tea with Mr.
+Clift,--for all which attentions I was then and am still grateful, for
+they were more than I had any claim to expect. Fascinated with
+Edinburgh. Strolls by Salisbury Crag; climb to the top of Arthur's Seat;
+delight of looking up at the grand old castle, of looking down on
+Holyrood Palace, of watching the groups on Calton Hill, wandering in the
+quaint old streets and sauntering on the sidewalks of the noble avenues,
+even at that time adding beauty to the new city. The weeks I spent in
+Edinburgh are among the most memorable of my European experiences. To
+the Highlands, to the Lakes, in short excursions; to Glasgow, seen to
+disadvantage under gray skies and with slippery pavements. Through
+England rapidly to Dover and to Calais, where I found the name of M.
+Dessein still belonging to the hotel I sought, and where I read Sterne's
+"Preface Written in a Désobligeante," sitting in the vehicle most like
+one that I could find in the stable. From Calais back to Paris, where I
+began working again.
+
+All my travelling experiences, including a visit to Switzerland and
+Italy in the summer and autumn of 1835, were merely interludes of my
+student life in Paris. On my return to America, after a few years of
+hospital and private practice, I became a Professor in Harvard
+University, teaching Anatomy and Physiology, afterwards Anatomy alone,
+for the period of thirty-five years, during part of which time I paid
+some attention to literature, and became somewhat known as the author of
+several works in prose and verse which have been well received. My
+prospective visit will not be a professional one, as I resigned my
+office in 1882, and am no longer known chiefly as a teacher or a
+practitioner.
+
+BOSTON, _April_, 1886.
+
+
+
+
+OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE
+
+
+I.
+
+
+I begin this record with the columnar, self-reliant capital letter to
+signify that there is no disguise in its egoisms. If it were a chapter
+of autobiography, this is what the reader would look for as a matter of
+course. Let him consider it as being such a chapter, and its egoisms
+will require no apology.
+
+I have called the record _our_ hundred days, because I was
+accompanied by my daughter, without the aid of whose younger eyes and
+livelier memory, and especially of her faithful diary, which no fatigue
+or indisposition was allowed to interrupt, the whole experience would
+have remained in my memory as a photograph out of focus.
+
+We left Boston on the 29th of April, 1886, and reached New York on the
+29th of August, four months of absence in all, of which nearly three
+weeks were taken up by the two passages; one week was spent in Paris,
+and the rest of the time in England and Scotland.
+
+No one was so much surprised as myself at my undertaking this visit. Mr.
+Gladstone, a strong man for his years, is reported as saying that he is
+too old to travel, at least to cross the ocean, and he is younger than I
+am,--just four months, to a day, younger. It is true that Sir Henry
+Holland came to this country, and travelled freely about the world,
+after he was eighty years old; but his pitcher went to the well once too
+often, and met the usual doom of fragile articles. When my friends asked
+me why I did not go to Europe, I reminded them of the fate of Thomas
+Parr. He was only twice my age, and was getting on finely towards his
+two hundredth year, when the Earl of Arundel carried him up to London,
+and, being feasted and made a lion of, he found there a premature and
+early grave at the age of only one hundred and fifty-two years. He lies
+in Westminster Abbey, it is true, but he would probably have preferred
+the upper side of his own hearth-stone to the under side of the slab
+which covers him.
+
+I should never have thought of such an expedition if it had not been
+suggested by a member of my family that I should accompany my daughter,
+who was meditating a trip to Europe. I remembered how many friends had
+told me I ought to go; among the rest, Mr. Emerson, who had spoken to me
+repeatedly about it. I had not seen Europe for more than half a century,
+and I had a certain longing for one more sight of the places I
+remembered, and others it would be a delight to look upon. There were a
+few living persons whom I wished to meet. I was assured that I should be
+kindly received in England. All this was tempting enough, but there was
+an obstacle in the way which I feared, and, as it proved, not without
+good reason. I doubted whether I could possibly breathe in a narrow
+state-room. In certain localities I have found myself liable to attacks
+of asthma, and, although I had not had one for years, I felt sure that I
+could not escape it if I tried to sleep in a state-room.
+
+I did not escape it, and I am glad to tell my story about it, because it
+excuses some of my involuntary social shortcomings, and enables me to
+thank collectively all those kind members of the profession who trained
+all the artillery of the pharmacopoeia upon my troublesome enemy, from
+bicarbonate of soda and Vichy water to arsenic and dynamite. One costly
+contrivance, sent me by the Reverend Mr. Haweis, whom I have never duly
+thanked for it, looked more like an angelic trump for me to blow in a
+better world than what I believe it is, an inhaling tube intended to
+prolong my mortal respiration. The best thing in my experience was
+recommended to me by an old friend in London. It was Himrod's asthma
+cure, one of the many powders, the smoke of which when burning is
+inhaled. It is made in Providence, Rhode Island, and I had to go to
+London to find it. It never failed to give at least temporary relief,
+but nothing enabled me to sleep in my state-room, though I had it all to
+myself, the upper berth being removed. After the first night and part of
+the second, I never lay down at all while at sea. The captain allowed me
+to have a candle and sit up in the saloon, where I worried through the
+night as I best might. How could I be in a fit condition to accept the
+attention of my friends in Liverpool, after sitting up every night for
+more than a week; and how could I be in a mood for the catechizing of
+interviewers, without having once lain down during the whole return
+passage? I hope the reader will see why I mention these facts. They
+explain and excuse many things; they have been alluded to, sometimes
+with exaggeration, in the newspapers, and I could not tell my story
+fairly without mentioning them. I got along well enough as soon as I
+landed, and have had no return of the trouble since I have been back in
+my own home. I will not advertise an assortment of asthma remedies for
+sale, but I assure my kind friends I have had no use for any one of them
+since I have walked the Boston pavements, drank, not the Cochituate, but
+the Belmont spring water, and breathed the lusty air of my native
+northeasters.
+
+My companion and I required an attendant, and we found one of those
+useful androgynous personages known as _courier-maids_, who had
+travelled with friends of ours, and who was ready to start with us at a
+moment's warning. She was of English birth, lively, short-gaited,
+serviceable, more especially in the first of her dual capacities. So far
+as my wants were concerned, I found her zealous and active in providing
+for my comfort.
+
+It was no sooner announced in the papers that I was going to England
+than I began to hear of preparations to welcome me. An invitation to a
+club meeting was cabled across the Atlantic. One of my countrywomen who
+has a house in London made an engagement for me to meet friends at her
+residence. A reverend friend, who thought I had certain projects in my
+head, wrote to me about lecturing: where I should appear, what fees I
+should obtain, and such business matters. I replied that I was going to
+England to spend money, not to make it; to hear speeches, very possibly,
+but not to make them; to revisit scenes I had known in my younger days;
+to get a little change of my routine, which I certainly did; and to
+enjoy a little rest, which I as certainly did not, at least in London.
+In a word, I wished a short vacation, and had no thought of doing
+anything more important than rubbing a little rust off and enjoying
+myself, while at the same time I could make my companion's visit
+somewhat pleasanter than it would be if she went without me. The visit
+has answered most of its purposes for both of us, and if we have saved a
+few recollections which our friends can take any pleasure in reading,
+this slight record may be considered a work of supererogation.
+
+The Cephalonia was to sail at half past six in the morning, and at that
+early hour a company of well-wishers was gathered on the wharf at East
+Boston to bid us good-by. We took with us many tokens of their
+thoughtful kindness; flowers and fruits from Boston and Cambridge, and a
+basket of champagne from a Concord friend whose company is as
+exhilarating as the sparkling wine he sent us. With the other gifts came
+a small tin box, about as big as a common round wooden match box. I
+supposed it to hold some pretty gimcrack, sent as a pleasant parting
+token of remembrance. It proved to be a most valued daily companion,
+useful at all times, never more so than when the winds were blowing hard
+and the ship was struggling with the waves. There must have been some
+magic secret in it, for I am sure that I looked five years younger after
+closing that little box than when I opened it. Time will explain its
+mysterious power.
+
+All the usual provisions for comfort made by seagoing experts we had
+attended to. Impermeable rugs and fleecy shawls, head-gear to defy the
+rudest northeasters, sea-chairs of ample dimensions, which we took care
+to place in as sheltered situations as we could find,--all these were a
+matter of course. Everybody stays on deck as much as possible, and lies
+wrapped up and spread out at full length on his or her sea-chair, so
+that the deck looks as if it had a row of mummies on exhibition. Nothing
+is more comfortable, nothing, I should say, more indispensable, than a
+hot-water bag,--or rather, _two_ hot-water bags; for they will
+burst sometimes, as I found out, and a passenger who has become intimate
+with one of these warm bosom friends feels its loss almost as if it were
+human.
+
+Passengers carry all sorts of luxuries on board, in the firm faith that
+they shall be able to profit by them all. Friends send them various
+indigestibles. To many all these well-meant preparations soon become a
+mockery, almost an insult. It is a clear case of _Sic(k) vos non
+vobis_. The tougher neighbor is the gainer by these acts of kindness;
+the generosity of a sea-sick sufferer in giving away the delicacies
+which seemed so desirable on starting is not ranked very high on the
+books of the recording angel. With us three things were best: grapes,
+oranges, and especially oysters, of which we had provided a half barrel
+in the shell. The "butcher" of the ship opened them fresh for us every
+day, and they were more acceptable than anything else.
+
+Among our ship's company were a number of family relatives and
+acquaintances. We formed a natural group at one of the tables, where we
+met in more or less complete numbers. I myself never missed; my
+companion, rarely. Others were sometimes absent, and sometimes came to
+time when they were in a very doubtful state, looking as if they were
+saying to themselves, with Lear,--
+
+ "Down, thou climbing sorrow,
+ Thy element's below."
+
+As for the intellectual condition of the passengers, I should say that
+faces were prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, as it
+seemed, by the monotonous throb and tremor of the great sea-monster on
+whose back we were riding. I myself had few thoughts, fancies, emotions.
+One thing above all struck me as never before,--the terrible solitude of
+the ocean.
+
+ "So lonely 'twas that God himself
+ Scarce seemed there to be."
+
+Whole days passed without our seeing a single sail. The creatures of the
+deep which gather around sailing vessels are perhaps frightened off by
+the noise and stir of the steamship. At any rate, we saw nothing more
+than a few porpoises, so far as I remember.
+
+No man can find himself over the abysses, the floor of which is paved
+with wrecks and white with the bones of the shrieking myriads of human
+beings whom the waves have swallowed up, without some thought of the
+dread possibilities hanging over his fate. There is only one way to get
+rid of them: that which an old sea-captain mentioned to me, namely, to
+keep one's self under opiates until he wakes up in the harbor where he
+is bound. I did not take this as serious advice, but its meaning is that
+one who has all his senses about him cannot help being anxious. My old
+friend, whose beard had been shaken in many a tempest, knew too well
+that there is cause enough for anxiety.
+
+What does the reader suppose was the source of the most ominous thought
+which forced itself upon my mind, as I walked the decks of the mighty
+vessel? Not the sound of the rushing winds, nor the sight of the
+foam-crested billows; not the sense of the awful imprisoned force which
+was wrestling in the depths below me. The ship is made to struggle with
+the elements, and the giant has been tamed to obedience, and is manacled
+in bonds which an earthquake would hardly rend asunder. No! It was the
+sight of the _boats_ hanging along at the sides of the deck,--the
+boats, always suggesting the fearful possibility that before another day
+dawns one may be tossing about in the watery Sahara, shelterless,
+fireless, almost foodless, with a fate before him he dares not
+contemplate. No doubt we should feel worse without the boats; still they
+are dreadful tell-tales. To all who remember Géricault's Wreck of the
+Medusa,--and those who have seen it do not forget it,--the picture the
+mind draws is one it shudders at. To be sure, the poor wretches in the
+painting were on a raft, but to think of fifty people in one of these
+open boats! Let us go down into the cabin, where at least we shall not
+see them.
+
+The first morning at sea revealed the mystery of the little round tin
+box. The process of _shaving_, never a delightful one, is a very
+unpleasant and awkward piece of business when the floor on which one
+stands, the glass in which he looks, and he himself are all describing
+those complex curves which make cycles and epicycles seem like
+simplicity itself. The little box contained a reaping machine, which
+gathered the capillary harvest of the past twenty-four hours with a
+thoroughness, a rapidity, a security, and a facility which were a
+surprise, almost a revelation. The idea of a guarded cutting edge is an
+old one; I remember the "Plantagenet" razor, so called, with the
+comb-like row of blunt teeth, leaving just enough of the edge free to do
+its work. But this little affair had a blade only an inch and a half
+long by three quarters of an inch wide. It had a long slender handle,
+which took apart for packing, and was put together with the greatest
+ease. It was, in short, a lawn-mower for the masculine growth of which
+the proprietor wishes to rid his countenance. The mowing operation
+required no glass, could be performed with almost reckless boldness, as
+one cannot cut himself, and in fact had become a pleasant amusement
+instead of an irksome task. I have never used any other means of shaving
+from that day to this. I was so pleased with it that I exhibited it to
+the distinguished tonsors of Burlington Arcade, half afraid they would
+assassinate me for bringing in an innovation which bid fair to destroy
+their business. They probably took me for an agent of the manufacturers;
+and so I was, but not in their pay nor with their knowledge. I
+determined to let other persons know what a convenience I had found the
+"Star Razor" of Messrs. Kampf, of New York, without fear of reproach for
+so doing. I know my danger,--does not Lord Byron say, "I have even been
+accused of writing puffs for Warren's blacking"? I was once offered pay
+for a poem in praise of a certain stove polish, but I declined. It is
+pure good-will to my race which leads me to commend the Star Razor to
+all who travel by land or by sea, as well as to all who stay at home.
+
+With the first sight of land many a passenger draws a long sigh of
+relief. Yet everybody knows that the worst dangers begin after we have
+got near enough to see the shore, for there are several ways of landing,
+not all of which are equally desirable. On Saturday, May 8th, we first
+caught a glimpse of the Irish coast, and at half past four in the
+afternoon we reached the harbor of Queenstown. A tug came off, bringing
+newspapers, letters, and so forth, among the rest some thirty letters
+and telegrams for me. This did not look much like rest, but this was
+only a slight prelude to what was to follow. I was in no condition to go
+on shore for sight-seeing, as some of the passengers did.
+
+We made our way through the fog towards Liverpool, and arrived at 1.30,
+on Sunday, May 9th. A special tug came to take us off: on it were the
+American consul, Mr. Russell, the vice-consul, Mr. Sewall, Dr. Nevins,
+and Mr. Rathbone, who came on behalf of our as yet unseen friend, Mr.
+Willett, of Brighton, England. Our Liverpool friends were meditating
+more hospitalities to us than, in our fatigued condition, we were equal
+to supporting. They very kindly, however, acquiesced in our wishes,
+which were for as much rest as we could possibly get before any attempt
+to busy ourselves with social engagements. So they conveyed us to the
+Grand Hotel for a short time, and then saw us safely off to the station
+to take the train for Chester, where we arrived in due season, and soon
+found ourselves comfortably established at the Grosvenor Arms Hotel. A
+large basket of Surrey primroses was brought by Mr. Rathbone to my
+companion. I had set before me at the hotel a very handsome floral harp,
+which my friend's friend had offered me as a tribute. It made melody in
+my ears as sweet as those hyacinths of Shelley's, the music of whose
+bells was so
+
+ "delicate, soft, and intense,
+ It was felt like an odor within the sense."
+
+At Chester we had the blissful security of being unknown, and were left
+to ourselves. Americans know Chester better than most other old towns in
+England, because they so frequently stop there awhile on their way from
+Liverpool to London. It has a mouldy old cathedral, an old wall, partly
+Roman, strange old houses with overhanging upper floors, which make
+sheltered sidewalks and dark basements. When one sees an old house in
+New England with the second floor projecting a foot or two beyond the
+wall of the ground floor, the country boy will tell him that "them
+haouses was built so th't th' folks upstairs could shoot the Injins when
+they was tryin' to git threew th' door or int' th' winder." There are
+plenty of such houses all over England, where there are no "Injins" to
+shoot. But the story adds interest to the somewhat lean traditions of
+our rather dreary past, and it is hardly worth while to disturb it. I
+always heard it in my boyhood. Perhaps it is true; certainly it was a
+very convenient arrangement for discouraging an untimely visit. The oval
+lookouts in porches, common in our Essex County, have been said to
+answer a similar purpose, that of warning against the intrusion of
+undesirable visitors. The walk round the old wall of Chester is
+wonderfully interesting and beautiful. At one part it overlooks a wide
+level field, over which the annual races are run. I noticed that here as
+elsewhere the short grass was starred with daisies. They are not
+considered in place in a well-kept lawn. But remembering the cuckoo song
+in "Love's Labour's Lost," "When daisies pied ... do paint the meadows
+with delight," it was hard to look at them as unwelcome intruders.
+
+The old cathedral seemed to me particularly mouldy, and in fact too
+high-flavored with antiquity. I could not help comparing some of the
+ancient cathedrals and abbey churches to so many old cheeses. They have
+a tough gray rind and a rich interior, which find food and lodging for
+numerous tenants who live and die under their shelter or their
+shadow,--lowly servitors some of them, portly dignitaries others, humble
+holy ministers of religion many, I doubt not,--larvae of angels, who
+will get their wings by and by. It is a shame to carry the comparison so
+far, but it is natural enough; for Cheshire cheeses are among the first
+things we think of as we enter that section of the country, and this
+venerable cathedral is the first that greets the eyes of great numbers
+of Americans.
+
+We drove out to Eaton Hall, the seat of the Duke of Westminster, the
+many-millioned lord of a good part of London. It is a palace,
+high-roofed, marble-columned, vast, magnificent, everything but
+homelike, and perhaps homelike to persons born and bred in such
+edifices. A painter like Paul Veronese finds a palace like this not too
+grand for his banqueting scenes. But to those who live, as most of us
+do, in houses of moderate dimensions, snug, comfortable, which the
+owner's presence fills sufficiently, leaving room for a few visitors, a
+vast marble palace is disheartening and uninviting. I never get into a
+very large and lofty saloon without feeling as if I were a weak solution
+of myself,--my personality almost drowned out in the flood of space
+about me. The wigwam is more homelike than the cavern. Our wooden houses
+are a better kind of wigwam; the marble palaces are artificial caverns,
+vast, resonant, chilling, good to visit, not desirable to live in, for
+most of us. One's individuality should betray itself in all that
+surrounds him; he should _secrete_ his shell, like a mollusk; if he
+can sprinkle a few pearls through it, so much the better. It is best,
+perhaps, that one should avoid being a duke and living in a
+palace,--that is, if he has his choice in the robing chamber where souls
+are fitted with their earthly garments.
+
+One of the most interesting parts of my visit to Eaton Hall was my tour
+through the stables. The Duke is a famous breeder and lover of the turf.
+Mr. Rathbone and myself soon made the acquaintance of the chief of the
+stable department. Readers of Homer do not want to be reminded that
+_hippodamoio_, horse-subduer, is the genitive of an epithet applied
+as a chief honor to the most illustrious heroes. It is the last word of
+the last line of the Iliad, and fitly closes the account of the funeral
+pageant of Hector, the tamer of horses. We Americans are a little shy of
+confessing that any title or conventional grandeur makes an impression
+upon us. If at home we wince before any official with a sense of
+blighted inferiority, it is by general confession the clerk at the hotel
+office. There is an excuse for this, inasmuch as he holds our destinies
+in his hands, and decides whether, in case of accident, we shall have to
+jump from the third or sixth story window. Lesser grandeurs do not find
+us very impressible. There is, however, something about the man who
+deals in horses which takes down the spirit, however proud, of him who
+is unskilled in equestrian matters and unused to the horse-lover's
+vocabulary. We followed the master of the stables, meekly listening and
+once in a while questioning. I had to fall back on my reserves, and
+summoned up memories half a century old to gain the respect and win the
+confidence of the great horse-subduer. He showed us various fine
+animals, some in their stalls, some outside of them. Chief of all was
+the renowned Bend Or, a Derby winner, a noble and beautiful bay,
+destined in a few weeks to gain new honors on the same turf in the
+triumph of his offspring Ormonde, whose acquaintance we shall make
+by-and-by.
+
+The next day, Tuesday, May 11th, at 4.25, we took the train for London.
+We had a saloon car, which had been thoughtfully secured for us through
+unseen, not unsuspected, agencies, which had also beautified the
+compartment with flowers.
+
+Here are some of my first impressions of England as seen from the
+carriage and from the cars.--How very English! I recall Birket Foster's
+Pictures of English Landscape,--a beautiful, poetical series of views,
+but hardly more poetical than the reality. How thoroughly England _is
+groomed_! Our New England out-of-doors landscape often looks as if it
+had just got out of bed, and had not finished its toilet. The glowing
+green of everything strikes me: green hedges in place of our
+rail-fences, always ugly, and our rude stone-walls, which are not
+wanting in a certain look of fitness approaching to comeliness, and are
+really picturesque when lichen-coated, but poor features of landscape as
+compared to these universal hedges. I am disappointed in the trees, so
+far; I have not seen one large tree as yet. Most of those I see are of
+very moderate dimensions, feathered all the way up their long slender
+trunks, with a lop-sided mop of leaves at the top, like a wig which has
+slipped awry. I trust that I am not finding everything _couleur de
+rose_; but I certainly do find the cheeks of children and young
+persons of such brilliant rosy hue as I do not remember that I have ever
+seen before. I am almost ready to think this and that child's face has
+been colored from a pink saucer. If the Saxon youth exposed for sale at
+Rome, in the days of Pope Gregory the Great, had complexions like these
+children, no wonder that the pontiff exclaimed, Not _Angli_, but
+_angeli_! All this may sound a little extravagant, but I am giving
+my impressions without any intentional exaggeration. How far these first
+impressions may be modified by after-experiences there will be time
+enough to find out and to tell. It is better to set them down at once
+just as they are. A first impression is one never to be repeated; the
+second look will see much that was not noticed before, but it will not
+reproduce the sharp lines of the _first proof_, which is always
+interesting, no matter what the eye or the mind fixes upon. "I see men
+as trees walking." That first experience could not be mended. When
+Dickens landed in Boston, he was struck with the brightness of all the
+objects he saw,--buildings, signs, and so forth. When I landed in
+Liverpool, everything looked very dark, very dingy, very massive, in the
+streets I drove through. So in London, but in a week it all seemed
+natural enough.
+
+We got to the hotel where we had engaged quarters, at eleven o'clock in
+the evening of Wednesday, the 12th of May. Everything was ready for
+us,--a bright fire blazing and supper waiting. When we came to look at
+the accommodations, we found they were not at all adapted to our needs.
+It was impossible to stay there another night. So early the next morning
+we sent out our courier-maid, a dove from the ark, to find us a place
+where we could rest the soles of our feet. London is a nation of
+something like four millions of inhabitants, and one does not feel easy
+without he has an assured place of shelter. The dove flew all over the
+habitable districts of the city,--inquired at as many as twenty houses.
+No roosting-place for our little flock of three. At last the good angel
+who followed us everywhere, in one shape or another, pointed the
+wanderer to a place which corresponded with all our requirements and
+wishes. This was at No. 17 Dover Street, Mackellar's Hotel, where we
+found ourselves comfortably lodged and well cared for during the whole
+time we were in London. It was close to Piccadilly and to Bond Street.
+Near us, in the same range, were Brown's Hotel and Batt's Hotel, both
+widely known to the temporary residents of London.
+
+We were but partially recovered from the fatigues and trials of the
+voyage when our arrival pulled the string of the social shower-bath, and
+the invitations began pouring down upon us so fast that we caught our
+breath, and felt as if we should be smothered. The first evening saw us
+at a great dinner-party at our well-remembered friend Lady Harcourt's.
+Twenty guests, celebrities and agreeable persons, with or without
+titles. The tables were radiant with silver, glistening with choice
+porcelain, blazing with a grand show of tulips. This was our "baptism of
+fire" in that long conflict which lasts through the London season. After
+dinner came a grand reception, most interesting, but fatiguing to
+persons hardly as yet in good condition for social service. We lived
+through it, however, and enjoyed meeting so many friends, known and
+unknown, who were very cordial and pleasant in their way of receiving
+us.
+
+It was plain that we could not pretend to answer all the invitations
+which flooded our tables. If we had attempted it, we should have found
+no time for anything else. A secretary was evidently a matter of
+immediate necessity. Through the kindness of Mrs. Pollock, we found a
+young lady who was exactly fitted for the place. She was installed in
+the little room intended for her, and began the work of accepting with
+pleasure and regretting our inability, of acknowledging the receipt of
+books, flowers, and other objects, and being very sorry that we could
+not subscribe to this good object and attend that meeting in behalf of a
+deserving charity,--in short, writing almost everything for us except
+autographs, which I can warrant were always genuine. The poor young lady
+was almost tired out sometimes, having to stay at her table, on one
+occasion, so late as eleven in the evening, to get through her day's
+work. I simplified matters for her by giving her a set of formulae as a
+base to start from, and she proved very apt at the task of modifying
+each particular letter to suit its purpose.
+
+From this time forward continued a perpetual round of social
+engagements. Breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions with
+spread tables, two, three, and four deep of an evening, with receiving
+company at our own rooms, took up the day, so that we had very little
+time for common sight-seeing.
+
+Of these kinds of entertainments, the breakfast, though pleasant enough
+when the company is agreeable, as I always found it, is the least
+convenient of all times and modes of visiting. You have already
+interviewed one breakfast, and are expecting soon to be coquetting with
+a tempting luncheon. If one had as many stomachs as a ruminant, he would
+not mind three or four serious meals a day, not counting the tea as one
+of them. The luncheon is a very convenient affair: it does not require
+special dress; it is informal; it is soon over, and may be made light or
+heavy, as one chooses. The afternoon tea is almost a necessity in London
+life. It is considered useful as "a pick me up," and it serves an
+admirable purpose in the social system. It costs the household hardly
+any trouble or expense. It brings people together in the easiest
+possible way, for ten minutes or an hour, just as their engagements or
+fancies may settle it. A cup of tea at the right moment does for the
+virtuous reveller all that Falstaff claims for a good sherris-sack, or
+at least the first half of its "twofold operation:" "It ascends me into
+the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors
+which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of
+nimble, fiery and delectable shapes, which delivered over to the voice,
+the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit."
+
+But it must have the right brain to work upon, and I doubt if there is
+any brain to which it is so congenial and from which it brings so much
+as that of a first-rate London old lady. I came away from the great city
+with the feeling that this most complex product of civilization was
+nowhere else developed to such perfection. The octogenarian Londoness
+has been in society,--let us say the highest society,--all her days. She
+is as tough as an old macaw, or she would not have lasted so long. She
+has seen and talked with all the celebrities of three generations, all
+the beauties of at least half a dozen decades. Her wits have been kept
+bright by constant use, and as she is free of speech it requires some
+courage to face her. Yet nobody can be more agreeable, even to young
+persons, than one of these precious old dowagers. A great beauty is
+almost certainly thinking how she looks while one is talking with her;
+an authoress is waiting to have one praise her book; but a grand old
+lady, who loves London society, who lives in it, who understands young
+people and all sorts of people, with her high-colored recollections of
+the past and her grand-maternal interests in the new generation, is the
+best of companions, especially over a cup of tea just strong enough to
+stir up her talking ganglions.
+
+A breakfast, a lunch, a tea, is a circumstance, an occurrence, in social
+life, but a dinner is an event. It is the full-blown flower of that
+cultivated growth of which those lesser products are the buds. I will
+not try to enumerate, still less to describe, the various entertainments
+to which we were invited, and many of which we attended. Among the
+professional friends I found or made during this visit to London, none
+were more kindly attentive than Dr. Priestley, who, with his charming
+wife, the daughter of the late Robert Chambers, took more pains to carry
+out our wishes than we could have asked or hoped for. At his house I
+first met Sir James Paget and Sir William Gull, long well known to me,
+as to the medical profession everywhere, as preëminent in their several
+departments. If I were an interviewer or a newspaper reporter, I should
+be tempted to give the impression which the men and women of distinction
+I met made upon me; but where all were cordial, where all made me feel
+as nearly as they could that I belonged where I found myself, whether
+the ceiling were a low or a lofty one, I do not care to differentiate my
+hosts and my other friends. _Fortemque Gyan fortemque Cloanthum_,
+--I left my microscope and my test-papers at home.
+
+Our friends, several of them, had a pleasant way of sending their
+carriages to give us a drive in the Park, where, except in certain
+permitted regions, the common numbered vehicles are not allowed to
+enter. Lady Harcourt sent her carriage for us to go to her sister's,
+Mrs. Mildmay's, where we had a pleasant little "tea," and met one of the
+most agreeable and remarkable of those London old ladies I have spoken
+of. For special occasions we hired an unnumbered carriage, with
+professionally equipped driver and footman.
+
+Mrs. Bloomfield Moore sent her carriage for us to take us to a lunch at
+her house, where we met Mr. Browning, Sir Henry and Lady Layard, Oscar
+Wilde and his handsome wife, and other well-known guests. After lunch,
+recitations, songs, etc. House full of pretty things. Among other
+curiosities a portfolio of drawings illustrating Keeley's motor, which,
+up to this time, has manifested a remarkably powerful _vis
+inertice_, but which promises miracles. In the evening a grand
+reception at Lady Granville's, beginning (for us, at least) at eleven
+o'clock. The house a palace, and A---- thinks there were a thousand
+people there. We made the tour of the rooms, saw many great personages,
+had to wait for our carriage a long time, but got home at one o'clock.
+
+English people have queer notions about iced-water and ice-cream. "You
+will surely die, eating such cold stuff," said a lady to my companion.
+"Oh, no," she answered, "but I should certainly die were I to drink your
+two cups of strong tea." I approved of this "counter" on the teacup, but
+I did not think either of them was in much danger.
+
+The next day Rev. Mr. Haweis sent his carriage, and we drove in the
+Park. In the afternoon we went to our Minister's to see the American
+ladies who had been presented at the drawing-room. After this, both of
+us were glad to pass a day or two in comparative quiet, except that we
+had a room full of visitors. So many persons expressed a desire to make
+our acquaintance that we thought it would be acceptable to them if we
+would give a reception ourselves. We were thinking how we could manage
+it with our rooms at the hotel, which were not arranged so that they
+could be thrown together. Still, we were planning to make the best of
+them, when Dr. and Mrs. Priestley suggested that we should receive our
+company at their house. This was a surprise, and a most welcome one, and
+A---- and her kind friend busied themselves at once about the
+arrangements.
+
+We went to a luncheon at Lansdowne House, Lord Rosebery's residence, not
+far from our hotel. My companion tells a little incident which may
+please an American six-year-old: "The eldest of the four children,
+Sibyl, a pretty, bright child of six, told me that she wrote a letter to
+the Queen. I said, 'Did you begin, Dear Queen?' 'No,' she answered, 'I
+began, Your Majesty, and signed myself, Your little humble servant,
+Sibyl.'" A very cordial and homelike reception at this great house,
+where a couple of hours were passed most agreeably.
+
+On the following Sunday I went to Westminster Abbey to hear a sermon
+from Canon Harford on A Cheerful Life. A lively, wholesome, and
+encouraging discourse, such as it would do many a forlorn New England
+congregation good to hear. In the afternoon we both went together to the
+Abbey. Met our Beverly neighbor, Mrs. Vaughan, and adopted her as one of
+our party. The seats we were to have were full, and we had to be stowed
+where there was any place that would hold us. I was smuggled into a
+stall, going through long and narrow passages, between crowded rows of
+people, and found myself at last with a big book before me and a set of
+official personages around me, whose duties I did not clearly
+understand. I thought they might be mutes, or something of that sort,
+salaried to look grave and keep quiet. After service we took tea with
+Dean Bradley, and after tea we visited the Jerusalem Chamber. I had been
+twice invited to weddings in that famous room: once to the marriage of
+my friend Motley's daughter, then to that of Mr. Frederick Locker's
+daughter to Lionel Tennyson, whose recent death has been so deeply
+mourned. I never expected to see that Jerusalem in which Harry the
+Fourth died, but there I found myself in the large panelled chamber,
+with all its associations. The older memories came up but vaguely; an
+American finds it as hard to call back anything over two or three
+centuries old as a sucking-pump to draw up water from a depth of over
+thirty-three feet and a fraction. After this A---- went to a musical
+party, dined with the Vaughans, and had a good time among American
+friends.
+
+The next evening we went to the Lyceum Theatre to see Mr. Irving. He had
+placed the Royal box at our disposal, so we invited our friends the
+Priestleys to go with us, and we all enjoyed the evening mightily.
+Between the scenes we went behind the curtain, and saw the very curious
+and admirable machinery of the dramatic spectacle. We made the
+acquaintance of several imps and demons, who were got up wonderfully
+well. Ellen Terry was as fascinating as ever. I remembered that once
+before I had met her and Mr. Irving behind the scenes. It was at the
+Boston Theatre, and while I was talking with them a very heavy piece of
+scenery came crashing down, and filled the whole place with dust. It was
+but a short distance from where we were standing, and I could not help
+thinking how near our several life-dramas came to a simultaneous
+_exeunt omnes_.
+
+A long visit from a polite interviewer, shopping, driving, calling,
+arranging about the people to be invited to our reception, and an
+agreeable dinner at Chelsea with my American friend, Mrs. Merritt,
+filled up this day full enough, and left us in good condition for the
+next, which was to be a very busy one.
+
+In the Introduction to these papers, I mentioned the fact that more than
+half a century ago I went to the famous Derby race at Epsom. I
+determined, if possible, to see the Derby of 1886, as I had seen that of
+1834. I must have spoken of this intention to some interviewer, for I
+find the following paragraph in an English sporting newspaper, "The
+Field," for May 29th, 1886:--
+
+"The Derby has always been the one event in the racing year which
+statesmen, philosophers, poets, essayists, and _littérateurs_
+desire to see once in their lives. A few years since Mr. Gladstone was
+induced by Lord Granville and Lord Wolverton to run down to Epsom on the
+Derby day. The impression produced upon the Prime Minister's sensitive
+and emotional mind was that the mirth and hilarity displayed by his
+compatriots upon Epsom race-course was Italian rather than English in
+its character. On the other hand, Gustave Doré, who also saw the Derby
+for the first and only time in his life, exclaimed, as he gazed with
+horror upon the faces below him, _Quelle scène brutale!_ We wonder
+to which of these two impressions Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes inclined, if
+he went last Wednesday to Epsom! Probably the well-known, etc., etc.--Of
+one thing Dr. Holmes may rest finally satisfied: the Derby of 1886 may
+possibly have seemed to him far less exciting than that of 1834; but
+neither in 1834 nor in any other year was the great race ever won by a
+better sportsman or more honorable man than the Duke of Westminster."
+
+My desire to see the Derby of this year was of the same origin and
+character as that which led me to revisit many scenes which I
+remembered. I cared quite as much about renewing old impressions as
+about getting new ones. I enjoyed everything which I had once seen all
+the more from the blending of my recollections with the present as it
+was before me.
+
+The Derby day of 1834 was exceedingly windy and dusty. Our party, riding
+on the outside of the coach, was half smothered with the dust, and
+arrived in a very deteriorated condition, but recompensed for it by the
+extraordinary sights we had witnessed. There was no train in those days,
+and the whole road between London and Epsom was choked with vehicles of
+all kinds, from four-in-hands to donkey-carts and wheelbarrows. My
+friends and I mingled freely in the crowds, and saw all the "humours" of
+the occasion. The thimble-riggers were out in great force, with their
+light, movable tables, the cups or thimbles, and the "little jokers,"
+and the coachman, the sham gentleman, the country greenhorn, all
+properly got up and gathered about the table. I think we had "Aunt
+Sally," too,--the figure with a pipe in her mouth, which one might shy a
+stick at for a penny or two and win something, I forget what. The
+clearing the course of stragglers, and the chasing about of the
+frightened little dog who had got in between the thick ranks of
+spectators, reminded me of what I used to see on old "artillery
+election" days.
+
+It was no common race that I went to see in 1834. "It is asserted in the
+columns of a contemporary that Plenipotentiary was absolutely the best
+horse of the century." This was the winner of the race I saw so long
+ago. Herring's colored portrait, which I have always kept, shows him as
+a great, powerful chestnut horse, well deserving the name of "bullock,"
+which one of the jockeys applied to him. "Rumor credits Dr. Holmes," so
+"The Field" says, "with desiring mentally to compare his two Derbies
+with each other." I was most fortunate in my objects of comparison. The
+horse I was about to see win was not unworthy of being named with the
+renowned champion of my earlier day. I quote from a writer in the
+"London Morning Post," whose words, it will be seen, carry authority
+with them:--
+
+"Deep as has hitherto been my reverence for Plenipotentiary, Bay
+Middleton, and Queen of Trumps from hearsay, and for Don John, Crucifix,
+etc., etc., from my own personal knowledge, I am inclined to award the
+palm to Ormonde as the best three-year-old I have ever seen during close
+upon half a century's connection with the turf."
+
+Ormonde, the Duke of Westminster's horse, was the son of that other
+winner of the Derby, Bend Or, whom I saw at Eaton Hall.
+
+Perhaps some coeval of mine may think it was a rather youthful idea to
+go to the race. I cannot help that. I was off on my first long vacation
+for half a century, and had a right to my whims and fancies. But it was
+one thing to go in with a vast crowd at five and twenty, and another
+thing to run the risks of the excursion at more than thrice that age. I
+looked about me for means of going safely, and could think of nothing
+better than to ask one of the pleasantest and kindest of gentlemen, to
+whom I had a letter from Mr. Winthrop, at whose house I had had the
+pleasure of making his acquaintance. Lord Rosebery suggested that the
+best way would be for me to go in the special train which was to carry
+the Prince of Wales. First, then, I was to be introduced to his Royal
+Highness, which office was kindly undertaken by our very obliging and
+courteous Minister, Mr. Phelps. After this all was easily arranged, and
+I was cared for as well as if I had been Mr. Phelps himself. On the
+grand stand I found myself in the midst of the great people, who were
+all very natural, and as much at their ease as the rest of the world.
+The Prince is of a lively temperament and a very cheerful aspect,--a
+young girl would call him "jolly" as well as "nice." I recall the story
+of "Mr. Pope" and his Prince of Wales, as told by Horace Walpole. "Mr.
+Pope, you don't love princes." "Sir, I beg your pardon." "Well, you
+don't love kings, then." "Sir, I own I love the lion best before his
+claws are grown." Certainly, nothing in Prince Albert Edward suggests
+any aggressive weapons or tendencies. The lovely, youthful-looking,
+gracious Alexandra, the always affable and amiable Princess Louise, the
+tall youth who sees the crown and sceptre afar off in his dreams, the
+slips of girls so like many school misses we left behind us,--all these
+grand personages, not being on exhibition, but off enjoying themselves,
+just as I was and as other people were, seemed very much like their
+fellow-mortals. It is really easier to feel at home with the highest
+people in the land than with the awkward commoner who was knighted
+yesterday. When "My Lord and Sir Paul" came into the Club which
+Goldsmith tells us of, the hilarity of the evening was instantly
+checked. The entrance of a dignitary like the present Prince of Wales
+would not have spoiled the fun of the evening. If there is any one
+accomplishment specially belonging to princes, it is that of making the
+persons they meet feel at ease.
+
+The grand stand to which I was admitted was a little privileged
+republic. I remember Thackeray's story of his asking some simple
+question of a royal or semi-royal personage whom he met in the courtyard
+of an hotel, which question his Highness did not answer, but called a
+subordinate to answer for him. I had been talking some time with a tall,
+good-looking gentleman, whom I took for a nobleman to whom I had been
+introduced. Something led me to think I was mistaken in the identity of
+this gentleman. I asked him, at last, if he were not So and So. "No," he
+said, "I am Prince Christian." You are a Christian prince, anyhow, I
+said to myself, if I may judge by your manners.
+
+I once made a similar mistake in addressing a young fellow-citizen of
+some social pretensions. I apologized for my error.
+
+"No offence," he answered.
+
+_Offence_ indeed! I should hope not. But he had not the "_manière
+de prince_", or he would never have used that word.
+
+I must say something about the race I had taken so much pains to see.
+There was a preliminary race, which excited comparatively little
+interest. After this the horses were shown in the paddock, and many of
+our privileged party went down from the stand to look at them. Then they
+were brought out, smooth, shining, fine-drawn, frisky, spirit-stirring
+to look upon,--most beautiful of all the bay horse Ormonde, who could
+hardly be restrained, such was his eagerness for action. The horses
+disappear in the distance.--They are off,--not yet distinguishable, at
+least to me. A little waiting time, and they swim into our ken, but in
+what order of precedence it is as yet not easy to say. Here they come!
+Two horses have emerged from the ruck, and are sweeping, rushing,
+storming, towards us, almost side by side. One slides by the other, half
+a length, a length, a length and a half. Those are Archer's colors, and
+the beautiful bay Ormonde flashes by the line, winner of the Derby of
+1886. "The Bard" has made a good fight for the first place, and comes in
+second. Poor Archer, the king of the jockeys! He will bestride no more
+Derby winners. A few weeks later he died by his own hand.
+
+While the race was going on, the yells of the betting crowd beneath us
+were incessant. It must have been the frantic cries and movements of
+these people that caused Gustave Doré to characterize it as a brutal
+scene. The vast mob which thronged the wide space beyond the shouting
+circle just round us was much like that of any other fair, so far as I
+could see from my royal perch. The most conspicuous object was a man on
+an immensely tall pair of stilts, stalking about among the crowd. I
+think it probable that I had as much enjoyment in forming one of the
+great mob in 1834 as I had among the grandeurs in 1886, but the last is
+pleasanter to remember and especially to tell of.
+
+After the race we had a luncheon served us, a comfortable and
+substantial one, which was very far from unwelcome. I did not go to the
+Derby to bet on the winner. But as I went in to luncheon, I passed a
+gentleman standing in custody of a plate half covered with sovereigns.
+He politely asked me if I would take a little paper from a heap there
+was lying by the plate, and add a sovereign to the collection already
+there. I did so, and, unfolding my paper, found it was a blank, and
+passed on. The pool, as I afterwards learned, fell to the lot of the
+Turkish Ambassador. I found it very windy and uncomfortable on the more
+exposed parts of the grand stand, and was glad that I had taken a shawl
+with me, in which I wrapped myself as if I had been on shipboard. This,
+I told my English friends, was the more civilized form of the Indian's
+blanket. My report of the weather does not say much for the English May,
+but it is generally agreed upon that this is a backward and unpleasant
+spring.
+
+After my return from the race we went to a large dinner at Mr. Phelps's
+house, where we met Mr. Browning again, and the Lord Chancellor
+Herschell, among others. Then to Mrs. Cyril Flower's, one of the most
+sumptuous houses in London; and after that to Lady Rothschild's, another
+of the private palaces, with ceilings lofty as firmaments, and walls
+that might have been copied from the New Jerusalem. There was still
+another great and splendid reception at Lady Dalhousie's, and a party at
+Mrs. Smith's, but we were both tired enough to be willing to go home
+after what may be called a pretty good day's work at enjoying ourselves.
+
+We had been a fortnight in London, and were now inextricably entangled
+in the meshes of the golden web of London social life.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+The reader who glances over these papers, and, finding them too full of
+small details and the lesser personal matters which belong naturally to
+private correspondences, turns impatiently from them, has my entire
+sympathy and good-will. He is not one of those for whom these pages are
+meant. Having no particular interest in the writer or his affairs, he
+does not care for the history of "the migrations from the blue bed to
+the brown" and the many Mistress Quicklyisms of circumstantial
+narrative. Yet all this may be pleasant reading to relatives and
+friends.
+
+But I must not forget that a new generation of readers has come into
+being since I have been writing for the public, and that a new
+generation of aspiring and brilliant authors has grown into general
+recognition. The dome of Boston State House, which is the centre of my
+little universe, was glittering in its fresh golden pellicle before I
+had reached the scriptural boundary of life. It has lost its lustre now,
+and the years which have dulled its surface have whitened the dome of
+that fragile structure in which my consciousness holds the session of
+its faculties. Time is not to be cheated. It is easy to talk of
+perennial youth, and to toy with the flattering fictions which every
+ancient personage accepts as true so far as he himself is concerned, and
+laughs at as foolish talk when he hears them applied to others. When, in
+my exulting immaturity, I wrote the lines not unknown to the reading
+public under the name of "The Last Leaf", I spoke of the possibility
+that I myself might linger on the old bough until the buds and blossoms
+of a new spring were opening and spreading all around me. I am not as
+yet the solitary survivor of my literary contemporaries, and,
+remembering who my few coevals are, it may well be hoped that I shall
+not be. But I feel lonely, very lonely, in the pages through which I
+wander. These are new names in the midst of which I find my own. In
+another sense I am very far from alone. I have daily assurances that I
+have a constituency of known and unknown personal friends, whose
+indulgence I have no need of asking. I know there are readers enough who
+will be pleased to follow me in my brief excursion, _because I am
+myself_, and will demand no better reason. If I choose to write for
+them, I do no injury to those for whom my personality is an object of
+indifference. They will find on every shelf some publications which are
+not intended for them, and which they prefer to let alone. No person is
+expected to help himself to everything set before him at a public table.
+I will not, therefore, hesitate to go on with the simple story of our
+Old World experiences.
+
+Thanks to my Indian blanket,--my shawl, I mean,--I found myself nothing
+the worse for my manifold adventures of the 27th of May. The cold wind
+sweeping over Epsom downs reminded me of our own chilling easterly
+breezes; especially the northeasterly ones, which are to me less
+disagreeable than the southeasterly. But the poetical illusion about an
+English May,--
+
+ "Zephyr with Aurora playing,
+ As he met her once a-Maying,"--
+
+and all that, received a shrewd thrust. Zephyr ought to have come in an
+ulster, and offered Aurora a warm petticoat. However, in spite of all
+difficulties, I brought off my recollections of the Derby of 1886 in
+triumph, and am now waiting for the colored portrait of Ormonde with
+Archer on his back,--Archer, the winner of five Derby races, one of
+which was won by the American horse Iroquois. When that picture, which I
+am daily expecting, arrives, I shall have it framed and hung by the side
+of Herring's picture of Plenipotentiary, the horse I saw win the Derby
+in 1834. These two, with an old portrait of the great Eclipse, who, as
+my engraving of 1780 (Stubbs's) says, "was never beat, or ever had
+occation for Whip or Spur," will constitute my entire sporting gallery.
+I have not that vicious and demoralizing love of horse-flesh which makes
+it next to impossible to find a perfectly honest hippophile. But a racer
+is the realization of an ideal quadruped,--
+
+ "A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift;"
+
+so ethereal, so bird-like, that it is no wonder that the horse about
+whom those old story-tellers lied so stoutly,--telling of his running a
+mile in a minute,--was called Flying Childers.
+
+The roses in Mrs. Pfeiffer's garden were hardly out of flower when I
+lunched with her at her pretty villa at Putney. There I met Mr.
+Browning, Mr. Holman Hunt, Mrs. Ritchie, Miss Anna Swanwick, the
+translator of Æschylus, and other good company, besides that of my
+entertainer.
+
+One of my very agreeable experiences was a call from a gentleman with
+whom I had corresponded, but whom I had never met. This was Mr. John
+Bellows, of Gloucester, publisher, printer, man of letters, or rather of
+words; for he is the author of that truly remarkable little manual, "The
+Bona Fide Pocket Dictionary of the French and English Languages." To the
+review of this little book, which is dedicated to Prince Lucien
+Bonaparte, the "London Times" devoted a full column. I never heard any
+one who had used it speak of it except with admiration. The modest
+Friend may be surprised to find himself at full length in my pages, but
+those who know the little miracle of typography, its conciseness,
+completeness, arrangement, will not wonder that I was gratified to see
+the author, who sent it to me, and who has written me most interesting
+letters on the local antiquities of Gloucester and its neighborhood.
+
+We lunched that day at Lady Camperdown's, where we were happy to meet
+Miss Frances Power Cobbe. In the afternoon we went by invitation to a
+"tea and talk" at the Reverend Mr. Haweis's, at Chelsea. We found the
+house close packed, but managed to get through the rooms, shaking
+innumerable hands of the reverend gentleman's parishioners and other
+visitors. It was very well arranged, so as not to be too fatiguing, and
+we left the cordial gathering in good condition. We drove home with
+Bishop and Mrs. Ellicott.
+
+After this Sir James Paget called, and took me to a small and early
+dinner-party; and A---- went with my secretary, the young lady of whom I
+have spoken, to see "Human Nature," at Drury Lane Theatre.
+
+On the following day, after dining with Lady Holland (wife of Sir Henry,
+niece of Macaulay), we went across the street to our neighbor's, Lady
+Stanley's. There was to be a great meeting of schoolmistresses, in whose
+work her son, the Honorable Lyulph Stanley, is deeply interested. Alas!
+The schoolma'ams were just leaving as we entered the door, and all we
+saw of them was the trail of their descending robes. I was very sorry
+for this, for I have a good many friends among our own schoolmistresses,
+--friends whom I never saw, but know through the kind words they have
+addressed to me.
+
+No place in London looks more reserved and exclusive than Devonshire
+House, standing back behind its high wall, extending along Piccadilly.
+There is certainly nothing in its exterior which invites intrusion. We
+had the pleasure of taking tea in the great house, accompanying our
+American friend, Lady Harcourt, and were graciously received and
+entertained by Lady Edward Cavendish. Like the other great houses, it is
+a museum of paintings, statues, objects of interest of all sorts. It
+must be confessed that it is pleasanter to go through the rooms with one
+of the ladies of the household than under the lead of a liveried
+servant. Lord Hartington came in while we were there. All the men who
+are distinguished in political life become so familiar to the readers of
+"Punch" in their caricatures, that we know them at sight. Even those who
+can claim no such public distinction are occasionally the subjects of
+the caricaturist, as some of us have found out for ourselves. A good
+caricature, which seizes the prominent features and gives them the
+character Nature hinted, but did not fully carry out, is a work of
+genius. Nature herself is a remorseless caricaturist, as our daily
+intercourse with our fellow men and women makes evident to us, and as is
+curiously illustrated in the figures of Charles Lebrun, showing the
+relations between certain human faces and those of various animals.
+Hardly an English statesman in bodily presence could be mistaken by any
+of "Punch's" readers.
+
+On the same day that we made this quiet visit we attended a great and
+ceremonious assembly. There were two parts in the programme, in the
+first of which I was on the stage _solus_,--that is, without my
+companion; in the second we were together. This day, Saturday, the 29th
+of May, was observed as the Queen's birthday, although she was born on
+the 24th. Sir William Harcourt gave a great dinner to the officials of
+his department, and later in the evening Lady Rosebery held a reception
+at the Foreign Office. On both these occasions everybody is expected to
+be in court dress, but my host told me I might present myself in
+ordinary evening dress. I thought that I might feel awkwardly among so
+many guests, all in the wedding garments, knee-breeches and the rest,
+without which I ventured among them. I never passed an easier evening in
+any company than among these official personages. Sir William took me
+under the shield of his ample presence, and answered all my questions
+about the various notable personages at his table in a way to have made
+my fortune if I had been a reporter. From the dinner I went to Mrs.
+Gladstone's, at 10 Downing Street, where A---- called for me. She had
+found a very small and distinguished company there, Prince Albert Victor
+among the rest. At half past eleven we walked over to the Foreign Office
+to Lady Rosebery's reception.
+
+Here Mr. Gladstone was of course the centre of a group, to which I was
+glad to add myself. His features are almost as familiar to me as my own,
+for a photograph of him in his library has long stood on my revolving
+bookcase, with a large lens before it. He is one of a small circle of
+individuals in whom I have had and still have a special personal
+interest. The year 1809, which introduced me to atmospheric existence,
+was the birth-year of Gladstone, Tennyson, Lord Houghton, and Darwin. It
+seems like an honor to have come into the world in such company, but it
+is more likely to promote humility than vanity in a common mortal to
+find himself coeval with such illustrious personages. Men born in the
+same year watch each other, especially as the sands of life begin to run
+low, as we can imagine so many damaged hour-glasses to keep an eye on
+each other. Women, of course, never know who are their contemporaries.
+
+Familiar to me as were the features of Mr. Gladstone, I looked upon him
+with astonishment. For he stood before me with epaulets on his shoulders
+and a rapier at his side, as military in his aspect as if he had been
+Lord Wolseley, to whom I was introduced a short time afterwards. I was
+fortunate enough to see and hear Mr. Gladstone on a still more memorable
+occasion, and can afford to leave saying what were my impressions of the
+very eminent statesman until I speak of that occasion.
+
+A great number of invitations had been given out for the reception at
+Lady Rosebery's,--over two thousand, my companion heard it said.
+Whatever the number was, the crowd was very great,--so great that one
+might well feel alarmed for the safety of any delicate person who was in
+the _pack_ which formed itself at one place in the course of the
+evening. Some obstruction must have existed _a fronte_, and the
+_vis a tergo_ became fearful in its pressure on those who were
+caught in the jam. I began thinking of the crushes in which I had been
+caught, or which I had read and heard of: the terrible time at the
+execution of Holloway and Haggerty, where some forty persons were
+squeezed or trampled to death; the Brooklyn Theatre and other similar
+tragedies; the crowd I was in at the unveiling of the statue on the
+column of the Place Vendome, where I felt as one may suppose Giles Corey
+did when, in his misery, he called for "more weight" to finish him. But
+there was always a _deus ex machina_ for us when we were in
+trouble. Looming up above the crowd was the smiling and encouraging
+countenance of the ever active, always present, always helpful Mr.
+Smalley. He cleared a breathing space before us. For a short time it was
+really a formidable wedging together of people, and if a lady had
+fainted in the press, she might have run a serious risk before she could
+have been extricated. No more "marble halls" for us, if we had to
+undergo the _peine forte et dure_ as the condition of our presence!
+We were both glad to escape from this threatened asphyxia, and move
+freely about the noble apartments. Lady Rosebery, who was kindness
+itself, would have had us stay and sit down in comfort at the
+supper-table, after the crowd had thinned, but we were tired with all we
+had been through, and ordered our carriage. _Ordered our carriage!_
+
+ "I can call spirits from the vasty deep." ...
+ _But will they come when you do call for them?_"
+
+The most formidable thing about a London party is getting away from it.
+"C'est le _dernier_ pas qui coute." A crowd of anxious persons in
+retreat is hanging about the windy door, and the breezy stairway, and
+the airy hall.
+
+A stentorian voice, hard as that of Rhadamanthus, exclaims,--
+
+"Lady Vere de Vere's carriage stops the way!"
+
+If my Lady Vere de Vere is not on hand, and that pretty quickly, off
+goes her carriage, and the stern voice bawls again,--
+
+"Mrs. Smith's carriage stops the way!"
+
+Mrs. Smith's particular Smith may be worth his millions and live in his
+marble palace; but if Mrs. Smith thinks her coachman is going to stand
+with his horses at that door until she appears, she is mistaken, for she
+is a minute late, and now the coach moves on, and Rhadamanthus calls
+aloud,--
+
+"Mrs. Brown's carriage stops the way!"
+
+Half the lung fevers that carry off the great people are got waiting for
+their carriages.
+
+I know full well that many readers would be disappointed if I did not
+mention some of the grand places and bring in some of the great names
+that lend their lustre to London society. We were to go to a fine
+musical party at Lady Rothschild's on the evening of the 30th of May. It
+happened that the day was Sunday, and if we had been as punctilious as
+some New England Sabbatarians, we might have felt compelled to decline
+the tempting invitation. But the party was given by a daughter of
+Abraham, and in every Hebrew household the true Sabbath was over. We
+were content for that evening to shelter ourselves under the old
+dispensation.
+
+The party, or concert, was a very brilliant affair. Patti sang to us,
+and a tenor, and a violinist played for us. How we two Americans came to
+be in so favored a position I do not know; all I do know is that we were
+shown to our places, and found them very agreeable ones. In the same row
+of seats was the Prince of Wales, two chairs off from A----'s seat.
+Directly in front of A---- was the Princess of Wales, "in ruby velvet,
+with six rows of pearls encircling her throat, and two more strings
+falling quite low;" and next her, in front of me, the startling presence
+of Lady de Grey, formerly Lady Lonsdale, and before that Gladys Herbert.
+On the other side of the Princess sat the Grand Duke Michael of Russia.
+
+As we are among the grandest of the grandees, I must enliven my sober
+account with an extract from my companion's diary:--
+
+"There were several great beauties there, Lady Claude Hamilton, a
+queenly blonde, being one. Minnie Stevens Paget had with her the pretty
+Miss Langdon, of New York. Royalty had one room for supper, with its
+attendant lords and ladies. Lord Rothschild took me down to a long table
+for a sit-down supper,--there were some thirty of us. The most superb
+pink orchids were on the table. The [Thane] of ---- sat next me, and how
+he stared before he was introduced! ... This has been the finest party
+we have been to, sitting comfortably in such a beautiful ball-room,
+gazing at royalty in the flesh, and at the shades of departed beauties
+on the wall, by Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. It was a new experience to
+find that the royal lions fed upstairs, and mixed animals below!"
+
+A visit to Windsor had been planned, under the guidance of a friend
+whose kindness had already shown itself in various forms, and who,
+before we left England, did for us more than we could have thought of
+owing to any one person. This gentleman, Mr. Willett, of Brighton,
+called with Mrs. Willett to take us on the visit which had been arranged
+between us.
+
+Windsor Castle, which everybody knows, or can easily learn, all about,
+is one of the largest of those huge caverns in which the descendants of
+the original cave men, when they have reached the height of human
+grandeur, delight to shelter themselves. It seems as if such a great
+hollow quarry of rock would strike a chill through every tenant, but
+modern improvements reach even the palaces of kings and queens, and the
+regulation temperature of the castle, or of its inhabited portions, is
+fixed at sixty-five degrees of Fahrenheit. The royal standard was not
+floating from the tower of the castle, and everything was quiet and
+lonely. We saw all we wanted to,--pictures, furniture, and the rest. My
+namesake, the Queen's librarian, was not there to greet us, or I should
+have had a pleasant half-hour in the library with that very polite
+gentleman, whom I had afterwards the pleasure of meeting in London.
+
+After going through all the apartments in the castle that we cared to
+see, or our conductress cared to show us, we drove in the park, along
+the "three-mile walk," and in the by-roads leading from it. The
+beautiful avenue, the open spaces with scattered trees here and there,
+made this a most delightful excursion. I saw many fine oaks, one about
+sixteen feet of honest girth, but no one which was very remarkable. I
+wished I could have compared the handsomest of them with one in Beverly,
+which I never look at without taking my hat off. This is a young tree,
+with a future before it, if barbarians do not meddle with it, more
+conspicuous for its spread than its circumference, stretching not very
+far from a hundred feet from bough-end to bough-end. I do not think I
+saw a specimen of the British _Quercus robur_ of such consummate
+beauty. But I know from Evelyn and Strutt what England has to boast of,
+and I will not challenge the British oak.
+
+Two sensations I had in Windsor park, or forest, for I am not quite sure
+of the boundary which separates them. The first was the lovely sight of
+the _hawthorn_ in full bloom. I had always thought of the hawthorn
+as a pretty shrub, growing in hedges; as big as a currant bush or a
+barberry bush, or some humble plant of that character. I was surprised
+to see it as a tree, standing by itself, and making the most delicious
+roof a pair of young lovers could imagine to sit under. It looked at a
+little distance like a young apple-tree covered with new-fallen snow. I
+shall never see the word hawthorn in poetry again without the image of
+the snowy but far from chilling canopy rising before me. It is the very
+bower of young love, and must have done more than any growth of the
+forest to soften the doom brought upon man by the fruit of the forbidden
+tree. No wonder that
+
+ "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of
+ love,"
+
+with the object of his affections awaiting him in this boudoir of
+nature. What a pity that Zekle, who courted Huldy over the apples she
+was peeling, could not have made love as the bucolic youth does, when
+
+ "Every shepherd tells his tale
+ Under the hawthorn in the dale!"
+
+(I will have it _love_-tale, in spite of Warton's comment.) But
+I suppose it does not make so much difference, for love transmutes the
+fruit in Huldy's lap into the apples of the Hesperides.
+
+In this way it is that the associations with the poetry we remember come
+up when we find ourselves surrounded by English scenery. The great poets
+build temples of song, and fill them with images and symbols which move
+us almost to adoration; the lesser minstrels fill a panel or gild a
+cornice here and there, and make our hearts glad with glimpses of
+beauty. I felt all this as I looked around and saw the hawthorns in full
+bloom, in the openings among the oaks and other trees of the forest.
+Presently I heard a sound to which I had never listened before, and
+which I have never heard since:--
+
+Coooo--coooo!
+
+Nature had sent one cuckoo from her aviary to sing his double note for
+me, that I might not pass away from her pleasing show without once
+hearing the call so dear to the poets. It was the last day of spring. A
+few more days, and the solitary voice might have been often heard; for
+the bird becomes so common as to furnish Shakespeare an image to fit
+"the skipping king:"--
+
+ "He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
+ Heard, not regarded."
+
+For the lyric poets the cuckoo is "companion of the spring," "darling of
+the spring;" coming with the daisy, and the primrose, and the blossoming
+sweet-pea. Where the sound came from I could not tell; it puzzled
+Wordsworth, with younger eyes than mine, to find whence issued
+
+ "that cry
+ Which made me look a thousand ways
+ In bush, and tree, and sky."
+
+Only one hint of the prosaic troubled my emotional delight: I could not
+help thinking how capitally the little rogue imitated the cuckoo clock,
+with the sound of which I was pretty well acquainted.
+
+On our return from Windsor we had to get ready for another great dinner
+with our Minister, Mr. Phelps. As we are in the habit of considering our
+great officials as public property, and as some of my readers want as
+many glimpses of high life as a decent regard to republican
+sensibilities will permit, I will borrow a few words from the diary to
+which I have often referred:--
+
+"The Princess Louise was there with the Marquis, and I had the best
+opportunity of seeing how they receive royalty at private houses. Mr.
+and Mrs. Phelps went down to the door to meet her the moment she came,
+and then Mr. Phelps entered the drawing-room with the Princess on his
+arm, and made the tour of the room with her, she bowing and speaking to
+each one of us. Mr. Goschen took me in to dinner, and Lord Lorne was on
+my other side. All of the flowers were of the royal color, red. It was a
+grand dinner.... The Austrian Ambassador, Count Karoli, took Mrs. Phelps
+in [to dinner], his position being higher than that of even the Duke [of
+Argyll], who sat upon her right."
+
+It was a very rich experience for a single day: the stately abode of
+royalty, with all its manifold historical recollections, the magnificent
+avenue of forest trees, the old oaks, the hawthorn in full bloom, and
+the one cry of the cuckoo, calling me back to Nature in her spring-time
+freshness and glory; then, after that, a great London dinner-party at a
+house where the kind host and the gracious hostess made us feel at home,
+and where we could meet the highest people in the land,--the people whom
+we who live in a simpler way at home are naturally pleased to be with
+under such auspices. What of all this shall I remember longest? Let me
+not seem ungrateful to my friends who planned the excursion for us, or
+to those who asked us to the brilliant evening entertainment, but I feel
+as Wordsworth felt about the cuckoo,--he will survive all the other
+memories.
+
+ "And I can listen to thee yet,
+ Can lie upon the plain
+ And listen, till I do beget
+ That golden time again."
+
+Nothing is more hackneyed than an American's description of his feelings
+in the midst of the scenes and objects he has read of all his days, and
+is looking upon for the first time. To each of us it appears in some
+respects in the same way, but with a difference for every individual. We
+may smile at Irving's emotions at the first sight of a distinguished
+Englishman on his own soil,--the ingenious Mr. Roscoe, as an earlier
+generation would have called him. Our tourists, who are constantly going
+forward and back between England and America, lose all sense of the
+special distinctions between the two countries which do not bear on
+their personal convenience. Happy are those who go with unworn,
+unsatiated sensibilities from the New World to the Old; as happy, it may
+be, those who come from the Old World to the New, but of that I cannot
+form a judgment.
+
+On the first day of June we called by appointment upon Mr. Peel, the
+Speaker of the House of Commons, and went through the Houses of
+Parliament. We began with the train-bearer, then met the housekeeper,
+and presently were joined by Mr. Palgrave. The "Golden Treasury" stands
+on my drawing-room table at home, and the name on its title-page had a
+familiar sound. This gentleman is, I believe, a near relative of
+Professor Francis Turner Palgrave, its editor.
+
+Among other things to which Mr. Palgrave called our attention was the
+death-warrant of Charles the First. One name in the list of signers
+naturally fixed our eyes upon it. It was that of John Dixwell. A lineal
+descendant of the old regicide is very near to me by family connection,
+Colonel Dixwell having come to this country, married, and left a
+posterity, which has resumed the name, dropped for the sake of safety at
+the time when he, Goffe, and Whalley, were in concealment in various
+parts of New England.
+
+We lunched with the Speaker, and had the pleasure of the company of
+Archdeacon Farrar. In the afternoon we went to a tea at a very grand
+house, where, as my companion says in her diary, "it took full six men
+in red satin knee-breeches to let us in." Another grand personage asked
+us to dine with her at her country place, but we were too full of
+engagements. In the evening we went to a large reception at Mr. Gosse's.
+It was pleasant to meet artists and scholars,--the kind of company to
+which we are much used in our aesthetic city. I found our host as
+agreeable at home as he was when in Boston, where he became a favorite,
+both as a lecturer and as a visitor.
+
+Another day we visited Stafford House, where Lord Ronald Gower, himself
+an artist, did the honors of the house, showing us the pictures and
+sculptures, his own included, in a very obliging and agreeable way. I
+have often taken note of the resemblances of living persons to the
+portraits and statues of their remote ancestors. In showing us the
+portrait of one of his own far-back progenitors, Lord Ronald placed a
+photograph of himself in the corner of the frame. The likeness was so
+close that the photograph might seem to have been copied from the
+painting, the dress only being changed. The Duke of Sutherland, who had
+just come back from America, complained that the dinners and lunches had
+used him up. I was fast learning how to sympathize with him.
+
+Then to Grosvenor House to see the pictures. I best remember
+Gainsborough's beautiful Blue Boy, commonly so called, from the color of
+his dress, and Sir Joshua's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which
+everybody knows in engravings. We lunched in clerical company that day,
+at the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol's, with the Archbishop of York,
+the Reverend Mr. Haweis, and others as guests. I told A---- that she was
+not sufficiently impressed with her position at the side of an
+archbishop; she was not _crumbling bread_ in her nervous
+excitement. The company did not seem to remember Sydney Smith's remark
+to the young lady next him at a dinner-party: "My dear, I see you are
+nervous, by your crumbling your bread as you do. _I_ always crumble
+bread when I sit by a bishop, and when I sit by an archbishop I crumble
+bread with both hands." That evening I had the pleasure of dining with
+the distinguished Mr. Bryce, whose acquaintance I made in our own
+country, through my son, who has introduced me to many agreeable persons
+of his own generation, with whose companionship I am glad to mend the
+broken and merely fragmentary circle of old friendships.
+
+The 3d of June was a memorable day for us, for on the evening of that
+day we were to hold our reception. If Dean Bradley had proposed our
+meeting our guests in the Jerusalem Chamber, I should hardly have been
+more astonished. But these kind friends meant what they said, and put
+the offer in such a shape that it was impossible to resist it. So we
+sent out our cards to a few hundreds of persons,--those who we thought
+might like invitations. I was particularly desirous that many members of
+the medical profession whom I had not met, but who felt well disposed
+towards me, should be at this gathering. The meeting was in every
+respect a success. I wrote a prescription for as many baskets of
+champagne as would be consistent with the well-being of our guests, and
+such light accompaniments as a London company is wont to expect under
+similar circumstances. My own recollections of the evening, unclouded by
+its festivities, but confused by its multitudinous succession of
+introductions, are about as definite as the Duke of Wellington's alleged
+monosyllabic description of the battle of Waterloo. But A---- writes in
+her diary: "From nine to twelve we stood, receiving over three hundred
+people out of the four hundred and fifty we invited." As I did not go to
+Europe to visit hospitals or museums, I might have missed seeing some of
+those professional brethren whose names I hold in honor and whose
+writings are in my library. If any such failed to receive our cards of
+invitation, it was an accident which, if I had known, I should have
+deeply regretted. So far as we could judge by all we heard, our
+unpretentious party gave general satisfaction. Many different social
+circles were represented, but it passed off easily and agreeably. I can
+say this more freely, as the credit of it belongs so largely to the care
+and self-sacrificing efforts of Dr. Priestley and his charming wife.
+
+I never refused to write in the birthday book or the album of the
+humblest schoolgirl or schoolboy, and I could not refuse to set my name,
+with a verse from one of my poems, in the album of the Princess of
+Wales, which was sent me for that purpose. It was a nice new book, with
+only two or three names in it, and those of musical composers,--
+Rubinstein's, I think, was one of them,--so that I felt honored by
+the great lady's request. I ought to describe the book, but I only
+remember that it was quite large and sumptuously elegant, and that
+I copied into it the last verse of a poem of mine called "The Chambered
+Nautilus," as I have often done for plain republican albums.
+
+The day after our simple reception was notable for three social events
+in which we had our part. The first was a lunch at the house of Mrs.
+Cyril Flower, one of the finest in London,--Surrey House, as it is
+called. Mr. Browning, who seems to go everywhere, and is one of the
+vital elements of London society, was there as a matter of course. Miss
+Cobbe, many of whose essays I have read with great satisfaction, though
+I cannot accept all her views, was a guest whom I was very glad to meet
+a second time.
+
+In the afternoon we went to a garden-party given by the Princess Louise
+at Kensington Palace, a gloomy-looking edifice, which might be taken
+for a hospital or a poorhouse. Of all the festive occasions which I
+attended, the garden-parties were to me the most formidable. They are
+all very well for young people, and for those who do not mind the
+nipping and eager air, with which, as I have said, the climate of
+England, no less than that of America, falsifies all the fine things the
+poets have said about May, and, I may add, even June. We wandered about
+the grounds, spoke with the great people, stared at the odd ones, and
+said to ourselves,--at least I said to myself,--with Hamlet,
+
+ "The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold."
+
+[Illustration: Robert Browning.]
+
+The most curious personages were some East Indians, a chocolate-colored
+lady, her husband, and children. The mother had a diamond on the side of
+her nose, its setting riveted on the inside, one might suppose; the
+effect was peculiar, far from captivating. A---- said that she should
+prefer the good old-fashioned nose-ring, as we find it described and
+pictured by travellers. She saw a great deal more than I did, of course.
+I quote from her diary: "The little Eastern children made their native
+salaam to the Princess by prostrating themselves flat on their little
+stomachs in front of her, putting their hands between her feet, pushing
+them aside, and kissing the print of her feet!"
+
+I really believe one or both of us would have run serious risks of
+catching our "death o' cold," if we had waited for our own carriage,
+which seemed forever in coming forward. The good Lady Holland, who was
+more than once our guardian angel, brought us home in hers. So we got
+warmed up at our own hearth, and were ready in due season for the large
+and fine dinner-party at Archdeacon Farrar's, where, among other guests,
+were Mrs. Phelps, our Minister's wife, who is a great favorite alike
+with Americans and English, Sir John Millais, Mr. Tyndall, and other
+interesting people.
+
+I am sorry that we could not have visited Newstead Abbey. I had a letter
+from Mr. Thornton Lothrop to Colonel Webb, the present proprietor, with
+whom we lunched. I have spoken of the pleasure I had when I came
+accidentally upon persons with whose name and fame I had long been
+acquainted. A similar impression was that which I received when I found
+myself in the company of the bearer of an old historic name. When my
+host at the lunch introduced a stately-looking gentleman as Sir Kenelm
+Digby, it gave me a start, as if a ghost had stood before me. I
+recovered myself immediately, however, for there was nothing of the
+impalpable or immaterial about the stalwart personage who bore the name.
+I wanted to ask him if he carried any of his ancestor's "powder of
+sympathy" about with him. Many, but not all, of my readers remember that
+famous man's famous preparation. When used to cure a wound, it was
+applied to the weapon that made it; the part was bound up so as to bring
+the edges of the wound together, and by the wondrous influence of the
+sympathetic powder the healing process took place in the kindest
+possible manner. Sir Kenelm, the ancestor, was a gallant soldier, a
+grand gentleman, and the husband of a wonderfully beautiful wife, whose
+charms he tried to preserve from the ravages of time by various
+experiments. He was also the homoeopathist of his day, the Elisha
+Perkins (metallic tractors) of his generation. The "mind cure" people
+might adopt him as one of their precursors.
+
+I heard a curious statement which was illustrated in the person of one
+of the gentlemen we met at this table. It is that English sporting men
+are often deaf on one side, in consequence of the noise of the frequent
+discharge of their guns affecting the right ear. This is a very
+convenient infirmity for gentlemen who indulge in slightly aggressive
+remarks, but when they are hit back never seem to be conscious at all of
+the _riposte_,--the return thrust of the fencer.
+
+Dr. Allchin called and took me to a dinner, where I met many
+professional brothers, and enjoyed myself highly.
+
+By this time every day was pledged for one or more engagements, so that
+many very attractive invitations had to be declined. I will not follow
+the days one by one, but content myself with mentioning some of the more
+memorable visits. I had been invited to the Rabelais Club, as I have
+before mentioned, by a cable message. This is a club of which the late
+Lord Houghton was president, and of which I am a member, as are several
+other Americans. I was afraid that the gentlemen who met,
+
+ "To laugh and shake in Rabelais's easy chair,"
+
+might be more hilarious and demonstrative in their mirth than I, a sober
+New Englander in the superfluous decade, might find myself equal to. But
+there was no uproarious jollity; on the contrary, it was a pleasant
+gathering of literary people and artists, who took their pleasure not
+sadly, but serenely, and I do not remember a single explosive guffaw.
+
+Another day, after going all over Dudley House, including Lady Dudley's
+boudoir, "in light blue satin, the prettiest room we have seen," A----
+says, we went, by appointment, to Westminster Abbey, where we spent two
+hours under the guidance of Archdeacon Farrar. I think no part of the
+Abbey is visited with so much interest as Poets' Corner. We are all
+familiarly acquainted with it beforehand. We are all ready for "O rare
+Ben Jonson!" as we stand over the place where he was planted standing
+upright, as if he had been dropped into a post-hole. We remember too
+well the foolish and flippant mockery of Gay's "Life is a Jest." If I
+were dean of the cathedral, I should be tempted to alter the _J_ to
+a _G_. Then we could read it without contempt; for life _is_ a
+gest, an achievement,--or always ought to be. Westminster Abbey is too
+crowded with monuments to the illustrious dead and those who have been
+considered so in their day to produce any other than a confused
+impression. When we visit the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides, no
+side-lights interfere with the view before us in the field of mental
+vision. We see the Emperor; Marengo, Austerlitz, Waterloo, Saint Helena,
+come before us, with him as their central figure. So at Stratford,--the
+Cloptons and the John a Combes, with all their memorials, cannot make us
+lift our eyes from the stone which covers the dust that once breathed
+and walked the streets of Stratford as Shakespeare.
+
+Ah, but here is one marble countenance that I know full well, and knew
+for many a year in the flesh! Is there an American who sees the bust of
+Longfellow among the effigies of the great authors of England without
+feeling a thrill of pleasure at recognizing the features of his native
+fellow-countryman in the Valhalla of his ancestral fellow-countrymen?
+There are many memorials in Poets' Corner and elsewhere in the Abbey
+which could be better spared than that. Too many that were placed there
+as luminaries have become conspicuous by their obscurity in the midst of
+that illustrious company. On the whole, the Abbey produces a distinct
+sense of being overcrowded. It appears too much like a lapidary's
+store-room. Look up at the lofty roof, which we willingly pardon for
+shutting out the heaven above us,--at least in an average London day;
+look down at the floor and think of what precious relics it covers; but
+do not look around you with the hope of getting any clear, concentrated,
+satisfying effect from this great museum of gigantic funereal bricabrac.
+Pardon me, shades of the mighty dead! I had something of this feeling,
+but at another hour I might perhaps be overcome by emotion, and weep, as
+my fellow-countryman did at the grave of the earliest of his ancestors.
+I should love myself better in that aspect than I do in this coldblooded
+criticism; but it suggested itself, and as no flattery can soothe, so no
+censure can wound, "the dull, cold ear of death."
+
+Of course we saw all the sights of the Abbey in a hurried way, yet with
+such a guide and expositor as Archdeacon Farrar our two hours' visit was
+worth a whole day with an undiscriminating verger, who recites his
+lesson by rote, and takes the life out of the little mob that follows
+him round by emphasizing the details of his lesson, until "Patience on a
+monument" seems to the sufferer, who knows what he wants and what he
+does not want, the nearest emblem of himself he can think of. Amidst all
+the imposing recollections of the ancient edifice, one impressed me in
+the inverse ratio of its importance. The Archdeacon pointed out the
+little holes in the stones, in one place, where the boys of the choir
+used to play marbles, before America was discovered, probably,--
+centuries before, it may be. It is a strangely impressive glimpse
+of a living past, like the _graffiti_ of Pompeii. I find it
+is often the accident rather than the essential which fixes my attention
+and takes hold of my memory. This is a tendency of which I suppose I
+ought to be ashamed, if we have any right to be ashamed of those
+idiosyncrasies which are ordered for us. It is the same tendency which
+often leads us to prefer the picturesque to the beautiful. Mr. Gilpin
+liked the donkey in a forest landscape better than the horse. A touch of
+imperfection interferes with the beauty of an object and lowers its
+level to that of the picturesque. The accident of the holes in the stone
+of the noble building, for the boys to play marbles with, makes me a boy
+again and at home with them, after looking with awe upon the statue of
+Newton, and turning with a shudder from the ghastly monument of Mrs.
+Nightingale.
+
+What a life must be that of one whose years are passed chiefly in and
+about the great Abbey! Nowhere does Macbeth's expression "dusty death"
+seem so true to all around us. The dust of those who have been lying
+century after century below the marbles piled over them,--the dust on
+the monuments they lie beneath; the dust on the memories those monuments
+were raised to keep living in the recollection of posterity,--dust,
+dust, dust, everywhere, and we ourselves but shapes of breathing dust
+moving amidst these objects and remembrances! Come away! The good
+Archdeacon of the "Eternal Hope" has asked us to take a cup of tea with
+him. The tea-cup will be a cheerful substitute for the funeral urn, and
+a freshly made infusion of the fragrant leaf is one of the best things
+in the world to lay the dust of sad reflections.
+
+It is a somewhat fatiguing pleasure to go through the Abbey, in spite of
+the intense interest no one can help feeling. But my day had but just
+begun when the two hours we had devoted to the visit were over. At a
+quarter before eight, my friend Mr. Frederick Locker called for me to go
+to a dinner at the Literary Club. I was particularly pleased to dine
+with this association, as it reminded me of our own Saturday Club, which
+sometimes goes by the same name as the London one. They complimented me
+with a toast, and I made some kind of a reply. As I never went prepared
+with a speech for any such occasion, I take it for granted that I
+thanked the company in a way that showed my gratitude rather than my
+eloquence. And now, the dinner being over, my day was fairly begun.
+
+This was to be a memorable date in the record of the year, one long to
+be remembered in the political history of Great Britain. For on this
+day, the 7th of June, Mr. Gladstone was to make his great speech on the
+Irish question, and the division of the House on the Government of
+Ireland Bill was to take place. The whole country, to the corners of its
+remotest colony, was looking forward to the results of this evening's
+meeting of Parliament. The kindness of the Speaker had furnished me with
+a ticket, entitling me to a place among the "distinguished guests,"
+which I presented without modestly questioning my right to the title.
+
+The pressure for entrance that evening was very great, and I, coming
+after my dinner with the Literary Club, was late upon the ground. The
+places for "distinguished guests" were already filled. But all England
+was in a conspiracy to do everything possible to make my visit
+agreeable. I did not take up a great deal of room,--I might be put into
+a seat with the ambassadors and foreign ministers. And among them I was
+presently installed. It was now between ten and eleven o'clock, as
+nearly as I recollect. The House had been in session since four o'clock.
+A gentleman was speaking, who was, as my unknown next neighbor told me,
+Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, a leading member, as we all know, of the
+opposition. When he sat down there was a hush of expectation, and
+presently Mr. Gladstone rose to his feet. A great burst of applause
+welcomed him, lasting more than a minute. His clean-cut features, his
+furrowed cheeks, his scanty and whitened hair, his well-shaped but not
+extraordinary head, all familiarized by innumerable portraits and
+emphasized in hundreds of caricatures, revealed him at once to every
+spectator. His great speech has been universally read, and I need only
+speak of the way in which it was delivered. His manner was forcible
+rather than impassioned or eloquent; his voice was clear enough, but
+must have troubled him somewhat, for he had a small bottle from which he
+poured something into a glass from time to time and swallowed a little,
+yet I heard him very well for the most part. In the last portion of his
+speech he became animated and inspiriting, and his closing words were
+uttered with an impressive solemnity: "Think, I beseech you, think well,
+think wisely, think not for a moment, but for the years that are to
+come, before you reject this bill."
+
+After the burst of applause which followed the conclusion of Mr.
+Gladstone's speech, the House proceeded to the division on the question
+of passing the bill to a second reading. While the counting of the votes
+was going on there was the most intense excitement. A rumor ran round
+the House at one moment that the vote was going in favor of the second
+reading. It soon became evident that this was not the case, and
+presently the result was announced, giving a majority of thirty against
+the bill, and practically overthrowing the liberal administration. Then
+arose a tumult of applause from the conservatives and a wild confusion,
+in the midst of which an Irish member shouted, "Three cheers for the
+Grand Old Man!" which were lustily given, with waving of hats and all
+but Donnybrook manifestations of enthusiasm.
+
+I forgot to mention that I had a very advantageous seat among the
+diplomatic gentlemen, and was felicitating myself on occupying one of
+the best positions in the House, when an usher politely informed me that
+the Russian Ambassador, in whose place I was sitting, had arrived, and
+that I must submit to the fate of eviction. Fortunately, there were some
+steps close by, on one of which I found a seat almost as good as the one
+I had just left.
+
+It was now two o'clock in the morning, and I had to walk home, not a
+vehicle being attainable. I did not know my way to my headquarters, and
+I had no friend to go with me, but I fastened on a stray gentleman, who
+proved to be an ex-member of the House, and who accompanied me to 17
+Dover Street, where I sought my bed with a satisfying sense of having
+done a good day's work and having been well paid for it.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+On the 8th of June we visited the Record Office for a sight of the
+Domesday Book and other ancient objects of interest there preserved. As
+I looked at this too faithful memorial of an inexorable past, I thought
+of the battle of Hastings and all its consequences, and that reminded me
+of what I have long remembered as I read it in Dr. Robert Knox's "Races
+of Men." Dr. Knox was the monoculous Waterloo surgeon, with whom I
+remember breakfasting, on my first visit to England and Scotland. His
+celebrity is less owing to his book than to the unfortunate connection
+of his name with the unforgotten Burke and Hare horrors. This is his
+language in speaking of Hastings: "... that bloody field, surpassing far
+in its terrible results the unhappy day of Waterloo. From this the Celt
+has recovered, but not so the Saxon. To this day he feels, and feels
+deeply, the most disastrous day that ever befell his race; here he was
+trodden down by the Norman, whose iron heel is on him yet.... To this
+day the Saxon race in England have never recovered a tithe of their
+rights, and probably never will."
+
+The Conqueror meant to have a thorough summing up of his stolen
+property. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says,--I quote it at second
+hand,--"So very straitly did he cause the survey to be made, that there
+was not a single hyde, nor a yardland of ground, nor--it is shameful to
+say what he thought no shame to do--was there an ox or a cow, or a pig
+passed by, and that was not down in the accounts, and then all these
+writings were brought to him." The "looting" of England by William and
+his "twenty thousand thieves," as Mr. Emerson calls his army, was a
+singularly methodical proceeding, and Domesday Book is a searching
+inventory of their booty, movable and immovable.
+
+From this reminder of the past we turned to the remembrances of home;
+A---- going to dine with a transplanted Boston friend and other ladies
+from that blessed centre of New England life, while I dined with a party
+of gentlemen at my friend Mr. James Russell Lowell's.
+
+I had looked forward to this meeting with high expectations, and they
+were abundantly satisfied. I knew that Mr. Lowell must gather about him,
+wherever he might be, the choicest company, but what his selection would
+be I was curious to learn. I found with me at the table my own
+countrymen and his, Mr. Smalley and Mr. Henry James. Of the other
+guests, Mr. Leslie Stephen was my only old acquaintance in person; but
+Du Maurier and Tenniel I have met in my weekly "Punch" for many a year;
+Mr. Lang, Mr. Oliphant, Mr. Townsend, we all know through their
+writings; Mr. Burne-Jones and Mr. Alma Tadema, through the frequent
+reproductions of their works in engravings, as well as by their
+paintings. If I could report a dinner-table conversation, I might be
+tempted to say something of my talk with Mr. Oliphant. I like well
+enough conversation which floats safely over the shallows, touching
+bottom at intervals with a commonplace incident or truism to push it
+along; I like better to find a few fathoms of depth under the surface;
+there is a still higher pleasure in the philosophical discourse which
+calls for the deep sea line to reach bottom; but best of all, when one
+is in the right mood, is the contact of intelligences when they are off
+soundings in the ocean of thought. Mr. Oliphant is what many of us call
+a mystic, and I found a singular pleasure in listening to him. This
+dinner at Mr. Lowell's was a very remarkable one for the men it brought
+together, and I remember it with peculiar interest. My entertainer holds
+a master-key to London society, and he opened the gate for me into one
+of its choicest preserves on that evening.
+
+I did not undertake to renew my old acquaintance with hospitals and
+museums. I regretted that I could not be with my companion, who went
+through the Natural History Museum with the accomplished director,
+Professor W. H. Flower. One old acquaintance I did resuscitate. For the
+second time I took the hand of Charles O'Byrne, the celebrated Irish
+giant of the last century. I met him, as in my first visit, at the Royal
+College of Surgeons, where I accompanied Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson. He was
+in the condition so longed for by Sydney Smith on a very hot day;
+namely, with his flesh taken off, and sitting, or rather standing, in
+his bones. The skeleton measures eight feet, and the living man's height
+is stated as having been eight feet two, or four inches, by different
+authorities. His hand was the only one I took, either in England or
+Scotland, which had not a warm grasp and a hearty welcome in it.
+
+A---- went with Boston friends to see "Faust" a second time, Mr. Irving
+having offered her the Royal box, and the polite Mr. Bram Stoker serving
+the party with tea in the little drawing-room behind the box; so that
+she had a good time while I was enjoying myself at a dinner at Sir Henry
+Thompson's, where I met Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and other
+distinguished gentlemen. These dinners of Sir Henry's are well known for
+the good company one meets at them, and I felt myself honored to be a
+guest on this occasion.
+
+Among the pleasures I had promised myself was that of a visit to
+Tennyson, at the Isle of Wight. I feared, however, that this would be
+rendered impracticable by reason of the very recent death of his younger
+son, Lionel. But I learned from Mr. Locker-Lampson, whose daughter Mr.
+Lionel Tennyson had married, that the poet would be pleased to see me at
+his place, Farringford; and by the kind intervention of Mr.
+Locker-Lampson, better known to the literary world as Frederick Locker,
+arrangements were made for my daughter and myself to visit him. I
+considered it a very great favor, for Lord Tennyson has a poet's
+fondness for the tranquillity of seclusion, which many curious explorers
+of society fail to remember. Lady Tennyson is an invalid, and though
+nothing could be more gracious than her reception of us both, I fear it
+may have cost her an effort which she would not allow to betray itself.
+Mr. Hallam Tennyson and his wife, both of most pleasing presence and
+manners, did everything to make our stay agreeable. I saw the poet to
+the best advantage, under his own trees and walking over his own domain.
+He took delight in pointing out to me the finest and the rarest of his
+trees,--and there were many beauties among them. I recalled my morning's
+visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a little more than a year
+ago, when he led me to one of his favorites, an aspiring evergreen which
+shot up like a flame. I thought of the graceful American elms in front
+of Longfellow's house and the sturdy English elms that stand in front of
+Lowell's. In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, where everything
+grows with such a lavish extravagance of greenness that it seems as if
+it must bankrupt the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary eyes and
+overtasked brains might reach their happiest haven of rest. We all
+remember Shenstone's epigram on the pane of a tavern window. If we find
+our "warmest welcome at an inn," we find our most soothing companionship
+in the trees among which we have lived, some of which we may ourselves
+have planted. We lean against them, and they never betray our trust;
+they shield us from the sun and from the rain; their spring welcome is a
+new birth, which never loses its freshness; they lay their beautiful
+robes at our feet in autumn; in winter they "stand and wait," emblems of
+patience and of truth, for they hide nothing, not even the little
+leaf-buds which hint to us of hope, the last element in their triple
+symbolism.
+
+This digression, suggested by the remembrance of the poet under his
+trees, breaks my narrative, but gives me the opportunity of paying a
+debt of gratitude. For I have owned many beautiful trees, and loved many
+more outside of my own leafy harem. Those who write verses have no
+special claim to be lovers of trees, but so far as one is of the
+poetical temperament he is likely to be a tree-lover. Poets have, as a
+rule, more than the average nervous sensibility and irritability. Trees
+have no nerves. They live and die without suffering, without
+self-questioning or self-reproach. They have the divine gift of silence.
+They cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the
+most agreeable of companions. The whole vegetable world, even "the
+meanest flower that blows," is lovely to contemplate. What if creation
+had paused there, and you or I had been called upon to decide whether
+self-conscious life should be added in the form of the existing animal
+creation, and the hitherto peaceful universe should come under the rule
+of Nature as we now know her,
+
+ "red in tooth and claw"?
+
+Are we not glad that the responsibility of the decision did not rest on
+us?
+
+I am sorry that I did not ask Tennyson to read or repeat to me some
+lines of his own. Hardly any one perfectly understands a poem but the
+poet himself. One naturally loves his own poem as no one else can. It
+fits the mental mould in which it was cast, and it will not exactly fit
+any other. For this reason I had rather listen to a poet reading his own
+verses than hear the best elocutionist that ever spouted recite them. He
+may not have a good voice or enunciation, but he puts his heart and his
+inter-penetrative intelligence into every line, word, and syllable. I
+should have liked to hear Tennyson read such lines as
+
+ "Laborious orient ivory, sphere in sphere;"
+
+and in spite of my good friend Matthew Arnold's _in terrorem_, I
+should have liked to hear Macaulay read,
+
+ "And Aulus the Dictator
+ Stroked Auster's raven mane,"
+
+and other good mouthable lines, from the "Lays of Ancient Rome." Not
+less should I like to hear Mr. Arnold himself read the passage
+beginning,--
+
+ "In his cool hall with haggard eyes
+ The Roman noble lay."
+
+The next day Mrs. Hallam Tennyson took A---- in her pony cart to see
+Alum Bay, The Needles, and other objects of interest, while I wandered
+over the grounds with Tennyson. After lunch his carriage called for us,
+and we were driven across the island, through beautiful scenery, to
+Ventnor, where we took the train to Ryde, and there the steamer to
+Portsmouth, from which two hours and a half of travel carried us to
+London.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+My first visit to Cambridge was at the invitation of Mr. Gosse, who
+asked me to spend Sunday, the 13th of June, with him. The rooms in
+Neville Court, Trinity College, occupied by Sir William Vernon Harcourt
+when lecturing at Cambridge, were placed at my disposal. The room I
+slept in was imposing with the ensigns armorial of the Harcourts and
+others which ornamented its walls. I had great delight in walking
+through the quadrangles, along the banks of the Cam, and beneath the
+beautiful trees which border it. Mr. Gosse says that I stopped in the
+second court of Clare, and looked around and smiled as if I were
+bestowing my benediction. He was mistaken: I smiled as if I were
+receiving a benediction from my dear old grandmother; for Cambridge in
+New England is my mother town, and Harvard University in Cambridge is my
+Alma Mater. She is the daughter of Cambridge in Old England, and my
+relationship is thus made clear.
+
+Mr. Gosse introduced me to many of the younger and some of the older men
+of the university. Among my visits was one never to be renewed and never
+to be forgotten. It was to the Master of Trinity, the Reverend William
+Hepworth Thompson. I hardly expected to have the privilege of meeting
+this very distinguished and greatly beloved personage, famous not alone
+for scholarship, or as the successor of Dr. Whewell in his high office,
+but also as having said some of the wittiest things which we have heard
+since Voltaire's _pour encourager les autres_. I saw him in his
+chamber, a feeble old man, but noble to look upon in all "the monumental
+pomp of age." He came very near belonging to the little group I have
+mentioned as my coevals, but was a year after us. Gentle, dignified,
+kindly in his address as if I had been his schoolmate, he left a very
+charming impression. He gave me several mementoes of my visit, among
+them a beautiful engraving of Sir Isaac Newton, representing him as one
+of the handsomest of men. Dr. Thompson looked as if he could not be very
+long for this world, but his death, a few weeks after my visit, was a
+painful surprise to me. I had been just in time to see "the last of the
+great men" at Cambridge, as my correspondent calls him, and I was very
+grateful that I could store this memory among the hoarded treasures I
+have been laying by for such possible extra stretch of time as may be
+allowed me.
+
+My second visit to Cambridge will be spoken of in due season.
+
+While I was visiting Mr. Gosse at Cambridge, A---- was not idle. On
+Saturday she went to Lambeth, where she had the pleasure and honor of
+shaking hands with the Archbishop of Canterbury in his study, and of
+looking about the palace with Mrs. Benson. On Sunday she went to the
+Abbey, and heard "a broad and liberal sermon" from Archdeacon Farrar.
+Our young lady-secretary stayed and dined with her, and after dinner
+sang to her. "A peaceful, happy Sunday," A---- says in her diary,--not
+less peaceful, I suspect, for my being away, as my callers must have got
+many a "not at 'ome" from young Robert of the multitudinous buttons.
+
+On Monday, the 14th of June, after getting ready for our projected
+excursions, we had an appointment which promised us a great deal of
+pleasure. Mr. Augustus Harris, the enterprising and celebrated manager
+of Drury Lane Theatre, had sent us an invitation to occupy a box, having
+eight seats, at the representation of "Carmen." We invited the
+Priestleys and our Boston friends, the Shimminses, to take seats with
+us. The chief singer in the opera was Marie Roze, who looked well and
+sang well, and the evening went off very happily. After the performance
+we were invited by Mr. Harris to a supper of some thirty persons, where
+we were the special guests. The manager toasted me, and I said
+something,--I trust appropriate; but just what I said is as
+irrecoverable as the orations of Demosthenes on the seashore, or the
+sermons of St. Francis to the beasts and birds.
+
+Of all the attentions I received in England, this was, perhaps, the
+least to be anticipated or dreamed of. To be fêted and toasted and to
+make a speech in Drury Lane Theatre would not have entered into my
+flightiest conceptions, if I had made out a programme beforehand. It is
+a singularly gratifying recollection. Drury Lane Theatre is so full of
+associations with literature, with the great actors and actresses of the
+past, with the famous beauties who have stood behind the footlights and
+the splendid audiences that have sat before them, that it is an
+admirable nucleus for remembrances to cluster around. It was but a vague
+spot in memory before, but now it is a bright centre for other images of
+the past. That one evening seems to make me the possessor of all its
+traditions from the time when it rose from its ashes, when Byron's poem
+was written and recited, and when the brothers Smith gave us the
+"Address without a Phoenix," and all those exquisite parodies which make
+us feel towards their originals somewhat as our dearly remembered Tom
+Appleton did when he said, in praise of some real green turtle soup,
+that it was almost as good as mock.
+
+With much regret we gave up an invitation we had accepted to go to
+Durdans to dine with Lord Rosebery. We must have felt very tired indeed
+to make so great a sacrifice, but we had to be up until one o'clock
+getting ready for the next day's journey; writing, packing, and
+attending to what we left behind us as well as what was in prospect.
+
+On the morning of Wednesday, June 16th, Dr. Donald Macalister called to
+attend us on our second visit to Cambridge, where we were to be the
+guests of his cousin, Alexander Macalister, Professor of Anatomy, who,
+with Mrs. Macalister, received us most cordially. There was a large
+luncheon-party at their house, to which we sat down in our travelling
+dresses. In the evening they had a dinner-party, at which were present,
+among others, Professor Stokes, President of the Royal Society, and
+Professor Wright. We had not heard much talk of political matters at the
+dinner-tables where we had been guests, but A---- sat near a lady who
+was very earnest in advocating the Irish side of the great impending
+question.
+
+The 17th of June is memorable in the annals of my country. On that day
+of the year 1775 the battle of Bunker's Hill was fought on the height I
+see from the window of my library, where I am now writing. The monument
+raised in memory of our defeat, which was in truth a victory, is almost
+as much a part of the furniture of the room as its chairs and tables;
+outside, as they are inside, furniture. But the 17th of June, 1886, is
+memorable to me above all the other anniversaries of that day I have
+known. For on that day I received from the ancient University of
+Cambridge, England, the degree of Doctor of Letters, "Doctor Litt.," in
+its abbreviated academic form. The honor was an unexpected one; that is,
+until a short time before it was conferred.
+
+Invested with the academic gown and cap, I repaired in due form at the
+appointed hour to the Senate Chamber. Every seat was filled, and among
+the audience were youthful faces in large numbers, looking as if they
+were ready for any kind of outbreak of enthusiasm or hilarity.
+
+The first degree conferred was that of LL.D., on Sir W. A. White,
+G.C.M., G.C.B., to whose long list of appended initials it seemed like
+throwing a perfume on the violet to add three more letters.
+
+When I was called up to receive my honorary title, the young voices were
+true to the promise of the young faces. There was a great noise, not
+hostile nor unpleasant in its character, in answer to which I could
+hardly help smiling my acknowledgments. In presenting me for my degree
+the Public Orator made a Latin speech, from which I venture to give a
+short extract, which I would not do for the world if it were not
+disguised by being hidden in the mask of a dead language. But there will
+be here and there a Latin scholar who will be pleased with the way in
+which the speaker turned a compliment to the candidate before him, with
+a reference to one of his poems and to some of his prose works.
+
+_"Juvat nuper audivisse eum cujus carmen prope primum 'Folium ultimum'
+nominatum est, folia adhuc plura e scriniis suis esse prolaturum.
+Novimus quanta lepore descripserit colloquia illa antemeridiana,
+symposia illa sobria et severa, sed eadem festiva et faceta, in quibus
+totiens mutata persona, modo poeta, modo professor, modo princeps et
+arbiter, loquendi, inter convivas suos regnat."_
+
+I had no sooner got through listening to the speech and receiving my
+formal sentence as Doctor of Letters than the young voices broke out in
+fresh clamor. There were cries of "A speech! a speech!" mingled with the
+title of a favorite poem by John Howard Payne, having a certain amount
+of coincidence with the sound of my name. The play upon the word was not
+absolutely a novelty to my ear, but it was good-natured, and I smiled
+again, and perhaps made a faint inclination, as much as to say, "I hear
+you, young gentlemen, but I do not forget that I am standing on my
+dignity, especially now since a new degree has added a moral cubit to my
+stature." Still the cries went on, and at last I saw nothing else to do
+than to edge back among the silk gowns, and so lose myself and be lost
+to the clamorous crowd in the mass of dignitaries. It was not
+indifference to the warmth of my welcome, but a feeling that I had no
+claim to address the audience because some of its younger members were
+too demonstrative. I have not forgotten my very cordial reception, which
+made me feel almost as much at home in the old Cambridge as in the new,
+where I was born and took my degrees, academic, professional, and
+honorary.
+
+The university town left a very deep impression upon my mind, in which a
+few grand objects predominate over the rest, all being of a delightful
+character. I was fortunate enough to see the gathering of the boats,
+which was the last scene in their annual procession. The show was
+altogether lovely. The pretty river, about as wide as the Housatonic, I
+should judge, as that slender stream winds through "Canoe Meadow," my
+old Pittsfield residence, the gaily dressed people who crowded the
+banks, the flower-crowned boats, with the gallant young oarsmen who
+handled them so skilfully, made a picture not often equalled. The walks,
+the bridges, the quadrangles, the historic college buildings, all
+conspired to make the place a delight and a fascination. The library of
+Trinity College, with its rows of busts by Roubiliac and Woolner, is a
+truly noble hall. But beyond, above all the rest, the remembrance of
+King's College Chapel, with its audacious and richly wrought roof and
+its wide and lofty windows, glowing with old devices in colors which are
+ever fresh, as if just from the furnace, holds the first place in my
+gallery of Cambridge recollections.
+
+I cannot do justice to the hospitalities which were bestowed upon us in
+Cambridge. Professor and Mrs. Macalister, aided by Dr. Donald
+Macalister, did all that thoughtful hosts could do to make us feel at
+home. In the afternoon the ladies took tea at Mr. Oscar Browning's. In
+the evening we went to a large dinner at the invitation of the
+Vice-Chancellor. Many little points which I should not have thought of
+are mentioned in A----'s diary. I take the following extract from it,
+toning down its vivacity more nearly to my own standard:--
+
+"Twenty were there. The Master of St. John's took me in, and the
+Vice-Chancellor was on the other side.... The Vice-Chancellor rose and
+returned thanks after the meats and before the sweets, as usual. I have
+now got used to this proceeding, which strikes me as extraordinary.
+Everywhere here in Cambridge, and the same in Oxford, I believe, they
+say grace and give thanks. A gilded ewer and flat basin were passed,
+with water in the basin to wash with, and we all took our turn at the
+bath! Next to this came the course with the finger-bowls!... Why two
+baths?"
+
+On Friday, the 18th, I went to a breakfast at the Combination Room, at
+which about fifty gentlemen were present, Dr. Sandys taking the chair.
+After the more serious business of the morning's repast was over, Dr.
+Macalister, at the call of the chairman, arose, and proposed my welfare
+in a very complimentary way. I of course had to respond, and I did so in
+the words which came of their own accord to my lips. After my
+unpremeditated answer, which was kindly received, a young gentleman of
+the university, Mr. Heitland, read a short poem, of which the following
+is the title:--
+
+LINES OF GREETING TO DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
+
+AT BREAKFAST IN COMBINATION ROOM, ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
+ENGLAND.
+
+I wish I dared quote more than the last two verses of these lines, which
+seemed to me, not unused to giving and receiving complimentary tributes,
+singularly happy, and were so considered by all who heard them. I think
+I may venture to give the two verses referred to:--
+
+ "By all sweet memory of the saints and sages
+ Who wrought among us in the days of yore;
+ By youths who, turning now life's early pages,
+ Ripen to match the worthies gone before:
+
+ "On us, O son of England's greatest daughter,
+ A kindly word from heart and tongue bestow;
+ Then chase the sunsets o'er the western water,
+ And bear our blessing with you as you go."
+
+I need not say that I left the English Cambridge with a heart full of
+all grateful and kindly emotions.
+
+I must not forget that I found at Cambridge, very pleasantly established
+and successfully practising his profession, a former student in the
+dental department of our Harvard Medical School, Dr. George Cunningham,
+who used to attend my lectures on anatomy. In the garden behind the
+quaint old house in which he lives is a large medlar-tree,--the first I
+remember seeing.
+
+On this same day we bade good-by to Cambridge, and took the two o'clock
+train to Oxford, where we arrived at half past five. At this first visit
+we were to be the guests of Professor Max Müller, at his fine residence
+in Norham Gardens. We met there, at dinner, Mr. Herkomer, whom we have
+recently had with us in Boston, and one or two others. In the evening we
+had music; the professor playing on the piano, his two daughters, Mrs.
+Conybeare and her unmarried sister, singing, and a young lady playing
+the violin. It was a very lovely family picture; a pretty house,
+surrounded by attractive scenery; scholarship, refinement, simple
+elegance, giving distinction to a home which to us seemed a pattern of
+all we could wish to see beneath an English roof. It all comes back to
+me very sweetly, but very tenderly and sadly, for the voice of the elder
+of the two sisters who sang to us is heard no more on earth, and a deep
+shadow has fallen over the household we found so bright and cheerful.
+
+Everything was done to make me enjoy my visit to Oxford, but I was
+suffering from a severe cold, and was paying the penalty of too much
+occupation and excitement. I missed a great deal in consequence, and
+carried away a less distinct recollection of this magnificent seat of
+learning than of the sister university.
+
+If one wishes to know the magic of names, let him visit the places made
+memorable by the lives of the illustrious men of the past in the Old
+World. As a boy I used to read the poetry of Pope, of Goldsmith, and of
+Johnson. How could I look at the Bodleian Library, or wander beneath its
+roof, without recalling the lines from "The Vanity of Human Wishes"?
+
+ "When first the college rolls receive his name,
+ The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame;
+ Resistless burns the fever of renown,
+ Caught from the strong contagion of the gown:
+ O'er Bodley's dome his future labors spread,
+ And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head."
+
+The last line refers to Roger Bacon. "There is a tradition that the
+study of Friar Bacon, built on an arch over the bridge, will fall when a
+man greater than Bacon shall pass under it. To prevent so shocking an
+accident, it was pulled down many years since." We shall meet with a
+similar legend in another university city. Many persons have been shy of
+these localities, who were in no danger whatever of meeting the fate
+threatened by the prediction.
+
+We passed through the Bodleian Library, only glancing at a few of its
+choicest treasures, among which the exquisitely illuminated missals were
+especially tempting objects of study. It was almost like a mockery to
+see them opened and closed, without having the time to study their
+wonderful miniature paintings. A walk through the grounds of Magdalen
+College, under the guidance of the president of that college, showed us
+some of the fine trees for which I was always looking. One of these, a
+wych-elm (Scotch elm of some books), was so large that I insisted on
+having it measured. A string was procured and carefully carried round
+the trunk, above the spread of the roots and below that of the branches,
+so as to give the smallest circumference. I was curious to know how the
+size of the trunk of this tree would compare with that of the trunks of
+some of our largest New England elms. I have measured a good many of
+these. About sixteen feet is the measurement of a large elm, like that
+on Boston Common, which all middle-aged people remember. From twenty-two
+to twenty-three feet is the ordinary maximum of the very largest trees.
+I never found but one exceed it: that was the great Springfield elm,
+which looked as if it might have been formed by the coalescence from the
+earliest period of growth, of two young trees. When I measured this in
+1837, it was twenty-four feet eight inches in circumference at five feet
+from the ground; growing larger above and below. I remembered this tree
+well, as we measured the string which was to tell the size of its
+English rival. As we came near the end of the string, I felt as I did
+when I was looking at the last dash of Ormonde and The Bard at
+Epsom.--Twenty feet, and a long piece of string left.--Twenty-one.
+--Twenty-two.--Twenty-three.--An extra heartbeat or two.--Twenty-four!
+--Twenty-five and six inches over!!--The Springfield elm may have grown
+a foot or more since I measured it, fifty years ago, but the tree at
+Magdalen stands ahead of all my old measurements. Many of the fine old
+trees, this in particular, may have been known in their younger days to
+Addison, whose favorite walk is still pointed out to the visitor.
+
+I would not try to compare the two university towns, as one might who
+had to choose between them. They have a noble rivalry, each honoring the
+other, and it would take a great deal of weighing one point of
+superiority against another to call either of them the first, except in
+its claim to antiquity.
+
+After a garden-party in the afternoon, a pleasant evening at home, when
+the professor played and his daughter Beatrice sang, and a garden-party
+the next day, I found myself in somewhat better condition, and ready for
+the next move.
+
+[Illustration: Magdalen College, Oxford.]
+
+At noon on the 23d of June we left for Edinburgh, stopping over night at
+York, where we found close by the station an excellent hotel, and where
+the next morning we got one of the best breakfasts we had in our whole
+travelling experience. At York we wandered to and through a flower-show,
+and _did_ the cathedral, as people _do_ all the sights they
+see under the lead of a paid exhibitor, who goes through his lesson like
+a sleepy old professor. I missed seeing the slab with the inscription
+_miserrimus_. There may be other stones bearing this sad
+superlative, but there is a story connected with this one, which sounds
+as if it might be true.
+
+In the year 1834, I spent several weeks in Edinburgh. I was fascinated
+by the singular beauties of that "romantic town," which Scott called his
+own, and which holds his memory, with that of Burns, as a most precious
+part of its inheritance. The castle with the precipitous rocky wall out
+of which it grows, the deep ravines with their bridges, pleasant Calton
+Hill and memorable Holyrood Palace, the new town and the old town with
+their strange contrasts, and Arthur's Seat overlooking all,--these
+varied and enchanting objects account for the fondness with which all
+who have once seen Edinburgh will always regard it.
+
+We were the guests of Professor Alexander Crum Brown, a near relative of
+the late beloved and admired Dr. John Brown. Professor and Mrs. Crum
+Brown did everything to make our visit a pleasant one. We met at their
+house many of the best known and most distinguished people of Scotland.
+The son of Dr. John Brown dined with us on the day of our arrival, and
+also a friend of the family, Mr. Barclay, to whom we made a visit on the
+Sunday following. Among the visits I paid, none was more gratifying to
+me than one which I made to Dr. John Brown's sister. No man could leave
+a sweeter memory than the author of "Rab and his Friends," of "Pet
+Marjorie," and other writings, all full of the same loving, human
+spirit. I have often exchanged letters with him, and I thought how much
+it would have added to the enjoyment of my visit if I could have taken
+his warm hand and listened to his friendly voice. I brought home with me
+a precious little manuscript, written expressly for me by one who had
+known Dr. John Brown from the days of her girlhood, in which his
+character appears in the same lovable and loving light as that which
+shines in every page he himself has written.
+
+On Friday, the 25th, I went to the hall of the university, where I was
+to receive the degree of LL.D. The ceremony was not unlike that at
+Cambridge, but had one peculiar feature: the separate special investment
+of the candidate with the _hood_, which Johnson defines as "an
+ornamental fold which hangs down the back of a graduate." There were
+great numbers of students present, and they showed the same exuberance
+of spirits as that which had forced me to withdraw from the urgent calls
+at Cambridge. The cries, if possible, were still louder and more
+persistent; they must have a speech and they would have a speech, and
+what could I do about it? I saw but one way of pacifying a crowd as
+noisy and long-breathed as that which for about the space of two hours
+cried out, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" So I stepped to the front
+and made a brief speech, in which, of course, I spoke of the
+"_perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_." A speech without that would have
+been like that "Address without a Phoenix" before referred to. My few
+remarks were well received, and quieted the shouting Ephesians of the
+warm-brained and warm-hearted northern university. It gave me great
+pleasure to meet my friend Mr. Underwood, now American consul in
+Glasgow, where he has made himself highly esteemed and respected.
+
+In my previous visit to Edinburgh in 1834, I was fond of rambling along
+under Salisbury Crags, and climbing the sides of Arthur's Seat. I had
+neither time nor impulse for such walks during this visit, but in
+driving out to dine at Nidrie, the fine old place now lived in by Mr.
+Barclay and his daughters, we passed under the crags and by the side of
+the great hill. I had never heard, or if I had I had forgotten, the name
+and the story of "Samson's Ribs." These are the columnar masses of rock
+which form the face of Salisbury Crags. There is a legend that one day
+one of these pillars will fall and crush the greatest man that ever
+passes under them. It is said that a certain professor was always very
+shy of "Samson's Ribs," for fear the prophecy might be fulfilled in his
+person. We were most hospitably received at Mr. Barclay's, and the
+presence of his accomplished and pleasing daughters made the visit
+memorable to both of us. There was one picture on their walls, that of a
+lady, by Sir Joshua, which both of us found very captivating. This is
+what is often happening in the visits we make. Some painting by a master
+looks down upon us from its old canvas, and leaves a lasting copy of
+itself, to be stored in memory's picture gallery. These surprises are
+not so likely to happen in the New World as in the Old.
+
+It seemed cruel to be forced to tear ourselves away from Edinburgh,
+where so much had been done to make us happy, where so much was left to
+see and enjoy, but we were due in Oxford, where I was to receive the
+last of the three degrees with which I was honored in Great Britain.
+
+Our visit to Scotland gave us a mere glimpse of the land and its people,
+but I have a very vivid recollection of both as I saw them on my first
+visit, when I made an excursion into the Highlands to Stirling and to
+Glasgow, where I went to church, and wondered over the uncouth ancient
+psalmody, which I believe is still retained in use to this day. I was
+seasoned to that kind of poetry in my early days by the verses of Tate
+and Brady, which I used to hear "entuned in the nose ful swetely,"
+accompanied by vigorous rasping of a huge bass-viol. No wonder that
+Scotland welcomed the song of Burns!
+
+On our second visit to Oxford we were to be the guests of the
+Vice-Chancellor of the university, Dr. Jowett. This famous scholar and
+administrator lives in a very pleasant establishment, presided over by
+the Muses, but without the aid of a Vice-Chancelloress. The hospitality
+of this classic mansion is well known, and we added a second pleasant
+chapter to our previous experience under the roof of Professor Max
+Müller. There was a little company there before us, including the Lord
+Chancellor and Lady Herschell, Lady Camilla Wallop, Mr. Browning, and
+Mr. Lowell. We were too late, in consequence of the bad arrangement of
+the trains, and had to dine by ourselves, as the whole party had gone
+out to a dinner, to which we should have accompanied them had we not
+been delayed. We sat up long enough to see them on their return, and
+were glad to get to bed, after our day's journey from Edinburgh to
+Oxford.
+
+At eleven o'clock on the following day we who were to receive degrees
+met at Balliol College, whence we proceeded in solemn procession to the
+Sheldonian Theatre. Among my companions on this occasion were Mr. John
+Bright, the Lord Chancellor Herschell, and Mr. Aldis Wright. I have an
+instantaneous photograph, which was sent me, of this procession. I can
+identify Mr. Bright and myself, but hardly any of the others, though
+many better acquainted with their faces would no doubt recognize them.
+There is a certain sensation in finding one's self invested with the
+academic gown, conspicuous by its red facings, and the cap with its
+square top and depending tassel, which is not without its accompanying
+satisfaction. One can walk the streets of any of the university towns in
+his academic robes without being jeered at, as I am afraid he would be
+in some of our own thoroughfares. There is a noticeable complacency in
+the members of our Phi Beta Kappa society when they get the pink and
+blue ribbons in their buttonholes, on the day of annual meeting. How
+much more when the scholar is wrapped in those flowing folds, with their
+flaming borders, and feels the dignity of the distinction of which they
+are the symbol! I do not know how Mr. John Bright felt, but I cannot
+avoid the impression that some in the ranks which moved from Balliol to
+the Sheldonian felt as if Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
+the candidates for the degree of D.C.L.
+
+After my experience at Cambridge and Edinburgh, I might have felt some
+apprehension about my reception at Oxford. I had always supposed the
+audience assembled there at the conferring of degrees was a more
+demonstrative one than that at any other of the universities, and I did
+not wish to be forced into a retreat by calls for a speech, as I was at
+Cambridge, nor to repeat my somewhat irregular proceeding of addressing
+the audience, as at Edinburgh. But when I found that Mr. John Bright was
+to be one of the recipients of the degree I felt safe, for if he made a
+speech I should be justified in saying a few words, if I thought it
+best; and if he, one of the most eloquent men in England, remained
+silent, I surely need not make myself heard on the occasion. It was a
+great triumph for him, a liberal leader, to receive the testimonial of a
+degree from the old conservative university. To myself it was a graceful
+and pleasing compliment; to him it was a grave and significant tribute.
+As we marched through the crowd on our way from Balliol, the people
+standing around recognized Mr. Bright, and cheered him vociferously.
+
+The exercises in the Sheldonian Theatre were more complex and lasted
+longer than those at the other two universities. The candidate stepped
+forward and listened to one sentence, then made another move forward and
+listened to other words, and at last was welcomed to all the privileges
+conferred by the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, which was announced as
+being bestowed upon him. Mr. Bright, of course, was received with
+immense enthusiasm. I had every reason to be gratified with my own
+reception. The only "chaffing" I heard was the question from one of the
+galleries, "Did he come in the One-Hoss Shay?"--at which there was a
+hearty laugh, joined in as heartily by myself. A part of the
+entertainment at this ceremony consisted in the listening to the reading
+of short extracts from the prize essays, some or all of them in the dead
+languages, which could not have been particularly intelligible to a
+large part of the audience. During these readings there were frequent
+_interpellations_, as the French call such interruptions, something
+like these: "That will do, sir!" or "You had better stop, sir!"
+--always, I noticed, with the sir at the end of the remark. With us it
+would have been "Dry up!" or "Hold on!" At last came forward the young
+poet of the occasion, who read an elaborate poem, "Savonarola," which
+was listened to in most respectful silence, and loudly applauded at its
+close, as I thought, deservedly. Prince and Princess Christian were
+among the audience. They were staying with Professor and Mrs. Max
+Müller, whose hospitalities I hope they enjoyed as much as we did. One
+or two short extracts from A----'s diary will enliven my record: "The
+Princess had a huge bouquet, and going down the aisle had to bow both
+ways at once, it seemed to me: but then she has the Guelph spine and
+neck! Of course it is necessary that royalty should have more elasticity
+in the frame than we poor ordinary mortals. After all this we started
+for a luncheon at All Souls, but had to wait (impatiently) for H. R. H.
+to rest herself, while our resting was done standing."
+
+It is a long while since I read Madame d'Arblay's Recollections, but if
+I remember right, _standing_ while royalty rests its bones is one
+of the drawbacks to a maid of honor's felicity.
+
+"Finally, at near three, we went into a great luncheon of some fifty.
+There were different tables, and I sat at the one with royalty. The
+Provost of Oriel took me in, and Mr. Browning was on my other side.
+Finally, we went home to rest, but the others started out again to go to
+a garden-party, but that was beyond us." After all this came a
+dinner-party of twenty at the Vice-Chancellor's, and after that a
+reception, where among others we met Lord and Lady Coleridge, the lady
+resplendent in jewels. Even after London, this could hardly be called a
+day of rest.
+
+The Chinese have a punishment which consists simply in keeping the
+subject of it awake, by the constant teasing of a succession of
+individuals employed for the purpose. The best of our social pleasures,
+if carried beyond the natural power of physical and mental endurance,
+begin to approach the character of such a penance. After this we got a
+little rest; did some mild sight-seeing, heard some good music, called
+on the Max Müllers, and bade them good-by with the warmest feeling to
+all the members of a household which it was a privilege to enter. There
+only remained the parting from our kind entertainer, the
+Vice-Chancellor, who added another to the list of places which in
+England and Scotland were made dear to us by hospitality, and are
+remembered as true homes to us while we were under their roofs.
+
+On the second day of July we left the Vice-Chancellor's, and went to the
+Randolph Hotel to meet our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Willett, from Brighton,
+with whom we had an appointment of long standing. With them we left
+Oxford, to enter on the next stage of our pilgrimage.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+It had been the intention of Mr. Willett to go with us to visit Mr.
+Ruskin, with whom he is in the most friendly relations. But a letter
+from Mr. Ruskin's sister spoke of his illness as being too serious for
+him to see company, and we reluctantly gave up this part of our plan.
+
+My first wish was to revisit Stratford-on-Avon, and as our travelling
+host was guided in everything by our inclinations, we took the cars for
+Stratford, where we arrived at five o'clock in the afternoon. It had
+been arranged beforehand that we should be the guests of Mr. Charles E.
+Flower, one of the chief citizens of Stratford, who welcomed us to his
+beautiful mansion in the most cordial way, and made us once more at home
+under an English roof.
+
+I well remembered my visit to Stratford in 1834. The condition of the
+old house in which Shakespeare was born was very different from that in
+which we see it to-day. A series of photographs taken in different years
+shows its gradual transformation since the time when the old projecting
+angular sign-board told all who approached "The immortal Shakespeare was
+born in this House." How near the old house came to sharing the fortunes
+of Jumbo under the management of our enterprising countryman, Mr.
+Barnum, I am not sure; but that he would have "traded" for it, if the
+proprietors had been willing, I do not doubt, any more than I doubt that
+he would make an offer for the Tower of London, if that venerable
+structure were in the market. The house in which Shakespeare was born is
+the Santa Casa of England. What with my recollections and the
+photographs with which I was familiarly acquainted, it had nothing very
+new for me. Its outside had undergone great changes, but its bare
+interior was little altered.
+
+My previous visit was a hurried one,--I took but a glimpse, and then
+went on my way. Now, for nearly a week I was a resident of
+Stratford-on-Avon. How shall I describe the perfectly ideal beauty of
+the new home in which I found myself! It is a fine house, surrounded by
+delightful grounds, which skirt the banks of the Avon for a considerable
+distance, and come close up to the enclosure of the Church of the Holy
+Trinity, beneath the floor of which lie the mortal remains of
+Shakespeare. The Avon is one of those narrow English rivers in which
+half a dozen boats might lie side by side, but hardly wide enough for a
+race between two rowing abreast of each other. Just here the river is
+comparatively broad and quiet, there being a dam a little lower down the
+stream. The waters were a perfect mirror, as I saw them on one of the
+still days we had at Stratford. I do not remember ever before seeing
+cows walking with their legs in the air, as I saw them reflected in the
+Avon. Along the banks the young people were straying. I wondered if the
+youthful swains quoted Shakespeare to their ladyloves. Could they help
+recalling Romeo and Juliet? It is quite impossible to think of any human
+being growing up in this place which claims Shakespeare as its child,
+about the streets of which he ran as a boy, on the waters of which he
+must have often floated, without having his image ever present. Is it
+so? There are some boys, from eight to ten or a dozen years old, fishing
+in the Avon, close by the grounds of "Avonbank," the place at which we
+are staying. I call to the little group. I say, "Boys, who was this man
+Shakespeare, people talk so much about?" Boys turn round and look up
+with a plentiful lack of intelligence in their countenances. "Don't you
+know who he was nor what he was?" Boys look at each other, but confess
+ignorance.--Let us try the universal stimulant of human faculties. "Here
+are some pennies for the boy that will tell me what that Mr. Shakespeare
+was." The biggest boy finds his tongue at last. "He was a writer,--he
+wrote plays." That was as much as I could get out of the youngling. I
+remember meeting some boys under the monument upon Bunker Hill, and
+testing their knowledge as I did that of the Stratford boys. "What is
+this great stone pillar here for?" I asked. "Battle fought here,--great
+battle." "Who fought?" "Americans and British." (I never hear the
+expression Britishers.) "Who was the general on the American side?"
+"Don' know,--General Washington or somebody."--What is an old battle,
+though it may have settled the destinies of a nation, to the game of
+base-ball between the Boston and Chicago Nines which is to come off
+to-morrow, or to the game of marbles which Tom and Dick are just going
+to play together under the shadow of the great obelisk which
+commemorates the conflict?
+
+The room more especially assigned to me looked out, at a distance of not
+more than a stone's-throw, on the northern aspect of the church where
+Shakespeare lies buried. Workmen were busy on the roof of the transept.
+I could not conveniently climb up to have a talk with the roofers, but I
+have my doubts whether they were thinking all the time of the dust over
+which they were working. How small a matter literature is to the great
+seething, toiling, struggling, love-making, bread-winning,
+child-rearing, death-awaiting men and women who fill this huge,
+palpitating world of ours! It would be worth while to pass a week or a
+month among the plain, average people of Stratford. What is the relative
+importance in human well-being of the emendations of the text of Hamlet
+and the patching of the old trousers and the darning of the old
+stockings which task the needles of the hard-working households that
+fight the battle of life in these narrow streets and alleys? I ask the
+question; the reader may answer it.
+
+Our host, Mr. Flower, is more deeply interested, perhaps, than any other
+individual in the "Shakespeare Memorial" buildings which have been
+erected on the banks of the Avon, a short distance above the Church of
+the Holy Trinity. Under Mr. Flower's guidance we got into one of his
+boats, and were rowed up the stream to the Memorial edifice. There is a
+theatre, in a round tower which has borrowed some traits from the
+octagon "Globe" theatre of Shakespeare's day; a Shakespeare library and
+portrait gallery are forming; and in due time these buildings, of
+stately dimensions and built solidly of brick, will constitute a
+Shakespearean centre which will attract to itself many mementoes now
+scattered about in various parts of the country.
+
+On the 4th of July we remembered our native land with all the
+affectionate pride of temporary exiles, and did not forget to drink at
+lunch to the prosperity and continued happiness of the United States of
+America. In the afternoon we took to the boat again, and were rowed up
+the river to the residence of Mr. Edgar Flower, where we found another
+characteristic English family, with its nine children, one of whom was
+the typical English boy, most pleasing and attractive in look, voice,
+and manner.
+
+I attempt no description of the church, the birthplace, or the other
+constantly visited and often described localities. The noble bridge,
+built in the reign of Henry VII. by Sir Hugh Clopton, and afterwards
+widened, excited my admiration. It was a much finer piece of work than
+the one built long afterwards. I have hardly seen anything which gave me
+a more striking proof of the thoroughness of the old English workmen.
+They built not for an age, but for all time, and the New Zealander will
+have to wait a long while before he will find in any one of the older
+bridges that broken arch from which he is to survey the ruins of London.
+
+It is very pleasant to pick up a new epithet to apply to the poet upon
+whose genius our language has nearly exhausted itself. It delights me to
+speak of him in the words which I have just found in a memoir not yet a
+century old, as "the Warwickshire bard," "the inestimable Shakespeare."
+
+Ever since Miss Bacon made her insane attempt to unearth what is left of
+Shakespeare's bodily frame, the thought of doing reverently and openly
+what she would have done by stealth has been entertained by
+psychologists, artists, and others who would like to know what were his
+cranial developments, and to judge from the conformation of the skull
+and face which of the various portraits is probably the true one. There
+is little doubt that but for the curse invoked upon the person who
+should disturb his bones, in the well-known lines on the slab which
+covers him, he would rest, like Napoleon, like Washington, in a fitting
+receptacle of marble or porphyry. In the transfer of his remains the
+curiosity of men of science and artists would have been gratified, if
+decay had spared the more durable portions of his material structure. It
+was probably not against such a transfer that the lines were
+written,--whoever was their author,--but in the fear that they would be
+carried to the charnel-house.
+
+"In this charnel-house was contained a vast collection of human bones.
+How long they had been deposited there is not easily to be determined;
+but it is evident, from the immense quantity contained in the vault, it
+could have been used for no other purpose for many ages." "It is
+probable that from an early contemplation of this dreary spot
+Shakespeare imbibed that horror of a violation of sepulture which is
+observable in many parts of his writings."
+
+The body of Raphael was disinterred in 1833 to settle a question of
+identity of the remains, and placed in a new coffin of lead, which was
+deposited in a marble sarcophagus presented by the Pope. The
+sarcophagus, with its contents, was replaced in the same spot from which
+the remains had been taken. But for the inscription such a transfer of
+the bones of Shakespeare would have been proposed, and possibly carried
+out. Kings and emperors have frequently been treated in this way after
+death, and the proposition is no more an indignity than was that of the
+exhumation of the remains of Napoleon, or of André, or of the author of
+"Home, Sweet Home." But sentiment, a tender regard for the supposed
+wishes of the dead poet, and a natural dread of the consequences of
+violating a dying wish, coupled with the execration of its contemner,
+are too powerful for the arguments of science and the pleadings of art.
+If Shakespeare's body had been embalmed,--which there is no reason that
+I know of to suppose,--the desire to compare his features with the bust
+and the portraits would have been much more imperative. When the body of
+Charles the First was examined, under the direction of Sir Henry
+Halford, in the presence of the Regent, afterwards George the Fourth,
+the face would have been recognized at once by all who were acquainted
+with Vandyke's portrait of the monarch, if the lithograph which comes
+attached to Sir Henry's memoir is an accurate representation of what
+they found. Even the bony framework of the face, as I have had occasion
+to know, has sometimes a striking likeness to what it was when clothed
+in its natural features. As between the first engraved portrait and the
+bust in the church, the form of the bones of the head and face would
+probably be decisive. But the world can afford to live without solving
+this doubt, and leave his perishing vesture of decay to its repose.
+
+After seeing the Shakespeare shrines, we drove over to Shottery, and
+visited the Anne Hathaway cottage. I am not sure whether I ever saw it
+before, but it was as familiar to me as if I had lived in it. The old
+lady who showed it was agreeably communicative, and in perfect keeping
+with the place.
+
+A delightful excursion of ten or a dozen miles carried our party,
+consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Flower, Mr. and Mrs. Willett, with A---- and
+myself, to Compton Wynyate, a most interesting old mansion, belonging to
+the Marquis of Northampton, who, with his daughter-in-law, Lady William
+Compton, welcomed us and showed us all the wonders of the place. It was
+a fine morning, but hot enough for one of our American July days. The
+drive was through English rural scenery; that is to say, it was lovely.
+The old house is a great curiosity. It was built in the reign of Henry
+the Eighth, and has passed through many vicissitudes. The place, as well
+as the edifice, is a study for the antiquarian. Remains of the old moat
+which surrounded it are still distinguishable. The twisted and variously
+figured chimneys are of singular variety and exceptional forms. Compton
+_Wynyate_ is thought to get its name from the vineyards formerly
+under cultivation on the hillsides, which show the signs of having been
+laid out in terraces. The great hall, with its gallery, and its
+hangings, and the long table made from the trunk of a single tree,
+carries one back into the past centuries. There are strange nooks and
+corners and passages in the old building, and one place, a queer little
+"cubby-hole," has the appearance of having been a Roman Catholic chapel.
+I asked the master of the house, who pointed out the curiosities of the
+place most courteously, about the ghosts who of course were tenants in
+common with the living proprietors. I was surprised when he told me
+there were none. It was incredible, for here was every accommodation for
+a spiritual visitant. I should have expected at least one haunted
+chamber, to say nothing of blood-stains that could never be got rid of;
+but there were no legends of the supernatural or the terrible.
+
+Refreshments were served us, among which were some hot-house peaches,
+ethereally delicate as if they had grown in the Elysian Fields and been
+stolen from a banquet of angels. After this we went out on the lawn,
+where, at Lady William Compton's request, I recited one or two poems;
+the only time I did such a thing in England.
+
+It seems as if Compton Wynyate must have been written about in some
+novel or romance,--perhaps in more than one of both. It is the place of
+all others to be the scene of a romantic story. It lies so hidden away
+among the hills that its vulgar name, according to old Camden, was
+"Compton in the Hole." I am not sure that it was the scene of any actual
+conflict, but it narrowly escaped demolition in the great civil war, and
+in 1646 it was garrisoned by the Parliament army.
+
+On the afternoon of July 6th, our hosts had a large garden-party. If
+nothing is more trying than one of these out-of-door meetings on a cold,
+windy, damp day, nothing can be more delightful than such a social
+gathering if the place and the weather are just what we could wish them.
+The garden-party of this afternoon was as near perfection as such a
+meeting could well be. The day was bright and warm, but not
+uncomfortably hot, to me, at least. The company strolled about the
+grounds, or rested on the piazzas, or watched the birds in the aviary,
+or studied rudimentary humanity in the monkey, or, better still, in a
+charming baby, for the first time on exhibition since she made the
+acquaintance of sunshine. Every one could dispose of himself or herself
+as fancy might suggest. I broke away at one time, and wandered alone by
+the side of the Avon, under the shadow of the tall trees upon its bank.
+The whole scene was as poetical, as inspiring, as any that I remember.
+It would be easy to write verses about it, but unwritten poems are so
+much better!
+
+One reminiscence of that afternoon claims precedence over all the rest.
+The reader must not forget that I have been a medical practitioner, and
+for thirty-five years a professor in a medical school. Among the guests
+whom I met in the grounds was a gentleman of the medical profession,
+whose name I had often heard, and whom I was very glad to see and talk
+with. This was Mr. Lawson Tait, F.R.C.S., M.D., of Birmingham. Mr., or
+more properly Dr., Tait has had the most extraordinary success in a
+class of cases long considered beyond the reach of surgery. If I refer
+to it as a scientific _hari kari_, not for the taking but for the
+saving of life, I shall come near enough to its description. This
+operation is said to have been first performed by an American surgeon in
+Danville, Kentucky, in the year 1809. So rash and dangerous did it seem
+to most of the profession that it was sometimes spoken of as if to
+attempt it were a crime. Gradually, however, by improved methods, and
+especially by the most assiduous care in nursing the patient after the
+operation, the mortality grew less and less, until it was recognized as
+a legitimate and indeed an invaluable addition to the resources of
+surgery. Mr. Lawson Tait has had, so far as I have been able to learn,
+the most wonderful series of successful cases on record: namely, one
+hundred and thirty-nine consecutive operations without a single death.
+
+As I sat by the side of this great surgeon, a question suggested itself
+to my mind which I leave the reader to think over. Which would give the
+most satisfaction to a thoroughly humane and unselfish being, of
+cultivated intelligence and lively sensibilities: to have written all
+the plays which Shakespeare has left as an inheritance for mankind, or
+to have snatched from the jaws of death more than a hundred fellow-
+creatures,--almost seven scores of suffering women,--and restored them
+to sound and comfortable existence? It would be curious to get the
+answers of a hundred men and a hundred women, of a hundred young people
+and a hundred old ones, of a hundred scholars and a hundred operatives.
+My own specialty is asking questions, not answering them, and I trust I
+shall not receive a peck or two of letters inquiring of me how I should
+choose if such a question were asked me. It may prove as fertile a
+source of dispute as "The Lady or the Tiger."
+
+It would have been a great thing to pass a single night close to the
+church where Shakespeare's dust lies buried. A single visit by daylight
+leaves a comparatively slight impression. But when, after a night's
+sleep, one wakes up and sees the spire and the old walls full before
+him, that impression is very greatly deepened, and the whole scene
+becomes far more a reality. Now I was nearly a whole week at
+Stratford-on-Avon. The church, its exterior, its interior, the
+birthplace, the river, had time to make themselves permanent images in
+my mind. To effect this requires a certain amount of exposure, as much
+as in the case of a photographic negative.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And so we bade good-by to Stratford-on-Avon and its hospitalities, with
+grateful remembrances of our kind entertainers and all they did for our
+comfort and enjoyment.
+
+Where should we go next? Our travelling host proposed Great Malvern, a
+famous watering-place, where we should find peace, rest, and good
+accommodations. So there we went, and soon found ourselves installed at
+the "Foley Arms" hotel. The room I was shown to looked out upon an
+apothecary's shop, and from the window of that shop stared out upon me a
+plaster bust which I recognized as that of Samuel Hahnemann. I was glad
+to change to another apartment, but it may be a comfort to some of his
+American followers to know that traces of homoeopathy,--or what still
+continues to call itself so,--survive in the Old World, which we have
+understood was pretty well tired of it.
+
+We spent several days very pleasantly at Great Malvern. It lies at the
+foot of a range of hills, the loftiest of which is over a thousand feet
+in height. A---- and I thought we would go to the top of one of these,
+known as the Beacon. We hired a "four-wheeler," dragged by a
+much-enduring horse and in charge of a civil young man. We turned out of
+one of the streets not far from the hotel, and found ourselves facing an
+ascent which looked like what I should suppose would be a pretty steep
+toboggan slide. We both drew back. _"Facilis ascensus,"_ I said to
+myself, _"sed revocare gradum."_ It is easy enough to get up if you
+are dragged up, but how will it be to come down such a declivity? When
+we reached it on our return, the semi-precipice had lost all its
+terrors. We had seen and travelled over so much worse places that this
+little bit of slanting road seemed as nothing. The road which wound up
+to the summit of the Beacon was narrow and uneven. It ran close to the
+edge of the steep hillside,--so close that there were times when every
+one of our forty digits curled up like a bird's claw. If we went over,
+it would not be a fall down a good honest precipice,--a swish through
+the air and a smash at the bottom,--but a tumbling, and a rolling over
+and over, and a bouncing and bumping, ever accelerating, until we
+bounded into the level below, all ready for the coroner. At one sudden
+turn of the road the horse's body projected so far over its edge that
+A---- declared if the beast had been an inch longer he would have
+toppled over. When we got close to the summit we found the wind blowing
+almost a gale. A---- says in her diary that I (meaning her honored
+parent) "nearly blew off from the top of the mountain." It is true that
+the force of the wind was something fearful, and seeing that two young
+men near me were exposed to its fury, I offered an arm to each of them,
+which they were not too proud to accept; A---- was equally attentive to
+another young person; and having seen as much of the prospect as we
+cared to, we were glad to get back to our four-wheeler and our hotel,
+after a perilous journey almost comparable to Mark Twain's ascent of the
+Riffelberg.
+
+At Great Malvern we were deliciously idle. We walked about the place,
+rested quietly, drove into the neighboring country, and made a single
+excursion,--to Tewkesbury. There are few places better worth seeing than
+this fine old town, full of historical associations and monumental
+relics. The magnificent old abbey church is the central object of
+interest. The noble Norman tower, one hundred and thirty-two feet in
+height, was once surmounted by a spire, which fell during divine service
+on Easter Day of the year 1559. The arch of the west entrance is sixteen
+feet high and thirty-four feet wide. The fourteen columns of the nave
+are each six feet and three inches in diameter and thirty feet in
+height. I did not take these measurements from the fabric itself, but
+from the guidebook, and I give them here instead of saying that the
+columns were huge, enormous, colossal, as they did most assuredly seem
+to me. The old houses of Tewkesbury compare well with the finest of
+those in Chester. I have a photograph before me of one of them, in which
+each of the three upper floors overhangs the one beneath it, and the
+windows in the pointed gable above project over those of the fourth
+floor.
+
+I ought to have visited the site of Holme Castle, the name of which
+reminds me of my own origin. "The meaning of the Saxon word 'Holme' is a
+meadow surrounded with brooks, and here not only did the castle bear the
+name, but the meadow is described as the 'Holme,--where the castle
+was.'" The final _s_ in the name as we spell it is a frequent
+addition to old English names, as Camden mentions, giving the name
+Holmes among the examples. As there is no castle at the Holme now, I
+need not pursue my inquiries any further. It was by accident that I
+stumbled on this bit of archaeology, and as I have a good many
+namesakes, it may perhaps please some of them to be told about it. Few
+of us hold any castles, I think, in these days, except those _châteaux
+en Espagne_, of which I doubt not, many of us are lords and masters.
+
+In another of our excursions we visited a venerable church, where our
+attention was called to a particular monument. It was erected to the
+memory of one of the best of husbands by his "wretched widow," who
+records upon the marble that there never was such a man on the face of
+the earth before, and never will be again, and that there never was
+anybody so miserable as she,--no, never, never, never! These are not the
+exact words, but this is pretty nearly what she declares. The story is
+that she married again within a year.
+
+From my window at the Foley Arms I can see the tower of the fine old
+abbey church of Malvern, which would be a centre of pilgrimages if it
+were in our country. But England is full of such monumental structures,
+into the history of which the local antiquarians burrow, and pass their
+peaceful lives in studying and writing about them with the same innocent
+enthusiasm that White of Selborne manifested in studying nature as his
+village showed it to him.
+
+In our long drives we have seen everywhere the same picturesque old
+cottages, with the pretty gardens, and abundant flowers, and noble
+trees, more frequently elms than any other. One day--it was on the 10th
+of July--we found ourselves driving through what seemed to be a
+gentleman's estate, an ample domain, well wooded and well kept. On
+inquiring to whom this place belonged, I was told that the owner was Sir
+Edmund Lechmere. The name had a very familiar sound to my ears. Without
+rising from the table at which I am now writing, I have only to turn my
+head, and in full view, at the distance of a mile, just across the
+estuary of the Charles, shining in the morning sun, are the roofs and
+spires and chimneys of East Cambridge, always known in my younger days
+as Lechmere's Point. Judge Richard Lechmere was one of our old Cambridge
+Tories, whose property was confiscated at the time of the Revolution. An
+engraving of his handsome house, which stands next to the Vassall house,
+long known as Washington's headquarters, and since not less celebrated
+as the residence of Longfellow, is before me, on one of the pages of the
+pleasing little volume, "The Cambridge of 1776." I take it for granted
+that our Lechmeres were of the same stock as the owner of this property.
+If so, he probably knows all that I could tell him about his colonial
+relatives, who were very grand people, belonging to a little
+aristocratic circle of friends and relatives who were faithful to their
+king and their church. The Baroness Riedesel, wife of a Hessian officer
+who had been captured, was for a while resident in this house, and her
+name, scratched on a window-pane, was long shown as a sight for eyes
+unused to titles other than governor, judge, colonel, and the like. I
+was tempted to present myself at Sir Edmund's door as one who knew
+something about the Lechmeres in America, but I did not feel sure how
+cordially a descendant of the rebels who drove off Richard and Mary
+Lechmere would be received.
+
+From Great Malvern we went to Bath, another place where we could rest
+and be comfortable. The Grand Pump-Room Hotel was a stately building,
+and the bath-rooms were far beyond anything I had ever seen of that
+kind. The remains of the old Roman baths, which appear to have been very
+extensive, are partially exposed. What surprises one all over the Old
+World is to see how deeply all the old civilizations contrive to get
+buried. Everybody seems to have lived in the cellar. It is hard to
+believe that the cellar floor was once the sun surface of the smiling
+earth.
+
+I looked forward to seeing Bath with a curious kind of interest. I once
+knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world
+over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and
+lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections. She gave me
+the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was
+more especially the paradise of decayed gentlewomen. There, she told me,
+persons with very narrow incomes--not _demi-fortunes_, but
+_demi-quart-de-fortunes_--could find everything arranged to
+accommodate their modest incomes. I saw the evidence of this everywhere.
+So great was the delight I had in looking in at the shop-windows of the
+long street which seemed to be one of the chief thoroughfares that,
+after exploring it in its full extent by myself, I went for A----, and
+led her down one side its whole length and up the other. In these shops
+the precious old dears could buy everything they wanted in the most
+minute quantities. Such tempting heaps of lumps of white sugar, only
+twopence! Such delectable cakes, two for a penny! Such seductive scraps
+of meat, which would make a breakfast nourishing as well as relishing,
+possibly even what called itself a dinner, blushing to see themselves
+labelled threepence or fourpence! We did not know whether to smile or to
+drop a tear, as we contemplated these baits hung out to tempt the coins
+from the exiguous purses of ancient maidens, forlorn widows, withered
+annuitants, stranded humanity in every stage of shipwrecked penury. I am
+reminded of Thackeray's "Jack Spiggot." "And what are your pursuits,
+Jack? says I. 'Sold out when the governor died. Mother lives at Bath. Go
+down there once a year for a week. Dreadful slow. Shilling whist.'" Mrs.
+Gaskell's picture of "Cranford" is said to have been drawn from a
+village in Cheshire, but Bath must have a great deal in common with its
+"elegant economies." Do not make the mistake, however, of supposing that
+this splendid watering-place, sometimes spoken of as "the handsomest
+city in Britain," is only a city of refuge for people that have seen
+better days. Lord Macaulay speaks of it as "that beautiful city which
+charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and
+Palladio." If it is not quite so conspicuous as a fashionable resort as
+it was in the days of Beau Nash or of Christopher Anstey, it has never
+lost its popularity. Chesterfield writes in 1764, "The number of people
+in this place is infinite," and at the present time the annual influx of
+visitors is said to vary from ten to fourteen thousand. Many of its
+public buildings are fine, and the abbey church, dating from 1499, is an
+object of much curiosity, especially on account of the sculptures on its
+western façade. These represent two ladders, with angels going up and
+down upon them,--suggested by a dream of the founder of the church,
+repeating that of Jacob.
+
+On the 14th of July we left Bath for Salisbury. While passing Westbury,
+one of our fellow-passengers exclaimed, "Look out! Look out!" "What is
+it?" "The horse! the horse!" All our heads turned to the window, and all
+our eyes fastened on the figure of a white horse, upon a hillside some
+miles distant. This was not the white horse which Mr. Thomas Hughes has
+made famous, but one of much less archaic aspect and more questionable
+history. A little book which we bought tells us all we care to know
+about it. "It is formed by excoriating the turf over the steep slope of
+the northern escarpment of Salisbury Plain." It was "remodelled" in
+1778, and "restored" in 1873 at a cost of between sixty and seventy
+pounds. It is said that a smaller and ruder horse stood here from time
+immemorial, and was made to commemorate a victory of Alfred over the
+Danes. However that may be, the horse we now see on the hillside is a
+very modern-looking and well-shaped animal, and is of the following
+dimensions: length, 170 feet; height from highest part of back, 128
+feet; thickness of body, 55 feet; length of head, 50 feet; eye, 6 by 8
+feet. It is a very pretty little object as we see it in the distance.
+
+Salisbury Cathedral was my first love among all the wonderful
+ecclesiastical buildings which I saw during my earlier journey. I looked
+forward to seeing it again with great anticipations of pleasure, which
+were more than realized.
+
+Our travelling host had taken a whole house in the Close,--a privileged
+enclosure, containing the cathedral, the bishop's palace, houses of the
+clergy, and a limited number of private residences, one of the very best
+of which was given over entirely into the hands of our party during our
+visit. The house was about as near the cathedral as Mr. Flower's house,
+where we stayed at Stratford-on-Avon, was to the Church of the Holy
+Trinity. It was very completely furnished, and in the room assigned to
+me as my library I found books in various languages, showing that the
+residence was that of a scholarly person.
+
+If one had to name the apple of the eye of England, I think he would be
+likely to say that Salisbury Cathedral was as near as he could come to
+it, and that the white of the eye was Salisbury Close. The cathedral is
+surrounded by a high wall, the gates of which,--its eyelids,--are closed
+every night at a seasonable hour, at which the virtuous inhabitants are
+expected to be in their safe and sacred quarters. Houses within this
+hallowed precinct naturally bring a higher rent than those of the
+unsanctified and unprotected region outside of its walls. It is a realm
+of peace, glorified by the divine edifice, which lifts the least
+imaginative soul upward to the heavens its spire seems trying to reach;
+beautified by rows of noble elms which stretch high aloft, as if in
+emulation of the spire; beatified by holy memories of the good and great
+men who have worn their lives out in the service of the church of which
+it is one of the noblest temples.
+
+For a whole week we lived under the shadow of the spire of the great
+cathedral. Our house was opposite the north transept, only separated by
+the road in front of it from the cathedral grounds. Here, as at
+Stratford, I learned what it was to awake morning after morning and find
+that I was not dreaming, but there in the truth-telling daylight the
+object of my admiration, devotion, almost worship, stood before me. I
+need not here say anything more of the cathedral, except that its
+perfect exterior is hardly equalled in beauty by its interior, which
+looks somewhat bare and cold. It was my impression that there is more to
+study than to admire in the interior, but I saw the cathedral so much
+oftener on the outside than on the inside that I may not have done
+justice to the latter aspect of the noble building.
+
+Nothing could be more restful than our week at Salisbury. There was
+enough in the old town besides the cathedral to interest us,--old
+buildings, a museum, full of curious objects, and the old town itself.
+When I was there the first time, I remember that we picked up a
+guide-book in which we found a verse that has remained in my memory ever
+since. It is an epitaph on a native of Salisbury who died in Venice.
+
+ "Born in the English Venice, thou didst dye
+ Dear Friend, in the Italian Salisbury."
+
+This would be hard to understand except for the explanation which the
+local antiquarians give us of its significance. The Wiltshire Avon flows
+by or through the town, which is drained by brooks that run through its
+streets. These, which used to be open, are now covered over, and thus
+the epitaph becomes somewhat puzzling, as there is nothing to remind one
+of Venice in walking about the town.
+
+While at Salisbury we made several excursions: to Old Sarum; to
+Bemerton, where we saw the residence of holy George Herbert, and visited
+the little atom of a church in which he ministered; to Clarendon Park;
+to Wilton, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, a most interesting place
+for itself and its recollections; and lastly to Stonehenge. My second
+visit to the great stones after so long an interval was a strange
+experience. But what is half a century to a place like Stonehenge?
+Nothing dwarfs an individual life like one of these massive, almost
+unchanging monuments of an antiquity which refuses to be measured. The
+"Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" was represented by an old man, who told
+all he knew and a good deal more about the great stones, and sheared a
+living, not from sheep, but from visitors, in the shape of shillings and
+sixpences. I saw nothing that wore unwoven wool on its back in the
+neighborhood of the monuments, but sheep are shown straggling among them
+in the photographs.
+
+The broken circle of stones, some in their original position, some
+bending over like old men, some lying prostrate, suggested the thoughts
+which took form in the following verses. They were read at the annual
+meeting, in January, of the class which graduated at Harvard College in
+the year 1829. Eight of the fifty-nine men who graduated sat round the
+small table. There were several other classmates living, but infirmity,
+distance, and other peremptory reasons kept them from being with us. I
+have read forty poems at our successive annual meetings. I will
+introduce this last one by quoting a stanza from the poem I read in
+1851:--
+
+ As one by one is falling
+ Beneath the leaves or snows,
+ Each memory still recalling
+ The broken ring shall close,
+ Till the night winds softly pass
+ O'er the green and growing grass,
+ Where it waves on the graves
+ Of the "Boys of 'Twenty-nine."
+
+ THE BROKEN CIRCLE.
+
+ I stood on Sarum's treeless plain,
+ The waste that careless Nature owns;
+ Lone tenants of her bleak domain,
+ Loomed huge and gray the Druid stones.
+
+ Upheaved in many a billowy mound
+ The sea-like, naked turf arose,
+ Where wandering flocks went nibbling round
+ The mingled graves of friends and foes.
+
+ The Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane,
+ This windy desert roamed in turn;
+ Unmoved these mighty blocks remain
+ Whose story none that lives may learn.
+
+ Erect, half buried, slant or prone,
+ These awful listeners, blind and dumb,
+ Hear the strange tongues of tribes unknown,
+ As wave on wave they go and come.
+
+ "Who are you, giants, whence and why?"
+ I stand and ask in blank amaze;
+ My soul accepts their mute reply:
+ "A mystery, as are you that gaze.
+
+ "A silent Orpheus wrought the charm
+ From riven rocks their spoils to bring;
+ A nameless Titan lent his arm
+ To range us in our magic ring.
+
+ "But Time with still and stealthy stride,
+ That climbs and treads and levels all,
+ That bids the loosening keystone slide,
+ And topples down the crumbling wall,--
+
+ "Time, that unbuilds the quarried past,
+ Leans on these wrecks that press the sod;
+ They slant, they stoop, they fall at last,
+ And strew the turf their priests have trod.
+
+ "No more our altar's wreath of smoke
+ Floats up with morning's fragrant dew;
+ The fires are dead, the ring is broke,
+ Where stood the many stand the few."
+
+ --My thoughts had wandered far away,
+ Borne off on Memory's outspread wing,
+ To where in deepening twilight lay
+ The wrecks of friendship's broken ring.
+
+ Ah me! of all our goodly train
+ How few will find our banquet hall!
+ Yet why with coward lips complain
+ That this must lean and that must fall?
+
+ Cold is the Druid's altar-stone,
+ Its vanished flame no more returns;
+ But ours no chilling damp has known,--
+ Unchanged, unchanging, still it burns.
+
+ So let our broken circle stand
+ A wreck, a remnant, yet the same,
+ While one last, loving, faithful hand
+ Still lives to feed its altar-flame!
+
+My heart has gone back over the waters to my old friends and my own
+home. When this vision has faded, I will return to the silence of the
+lovely Close and the shadow of the great Cathedral.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+The remembrance of home, with its early and precious and long-enduring
+friendships, has intruded itself among my recollections of what I saw
+and heard, of what I felt and thought, in the distant land I was
+visiting. I must return to the scene where I found myself when the
+suggestion of the broken circle ran away with my imagination.
+
+The literature of Stonehenge is extensive, and illustrates the weakness
+of archaeologists almost as well as the "Praetorium" of Scott's
+"Antiquary." "In 1823," says a local handbook, "H. Browne, of Amesbury,
+published 'An Illustration of Stonehenge and Abury,' in which he
+endeavored to show that both of these monuments were antediluvian, and
+that the latter was formed under the direction of Adam. He ascribes the
+present dilapidated condition of Stonehenge to the operation of the
+general deluge; for, he adds, 'to suppose it to be the work of any
+people since the flood is entirely monstrous.'"
+
+We know well enough how great stones--pillars and obelisks--are brought
+into place by means of our modern appliances. But if the great blocks
+were raised by a mob of naked Picts, or any tribe that knew none of the
+mechanical powers but the lever, how did they set them up and lay the
+cross-stones, the imposts, upon the uprights? It is pleasant, once in a
+while, to think how we should have managed any such matters as this if
+left to our natural resources. We are all interested in the make-shifts
+of Robinson Crusoe. Now the rudest tribes make cords of some kind, and
+the earliest, or almost the earliest, of artificial structures is an
+earth-mound. If a hundred, or hundreds, of men could drag the huge
+stones many leagues, as they must have done to bring them to their
+destined place, they could have drawn each of them up a long slanting
+mound ending in a sharp declivity, with a hole for the foot of the stone
+at its base. If the stone were now tipped over, it would slide into its
+place, and could be easily raised from its slanting position to the
+perpendicular. Then filling in the space between the mound and two
+contiguous stones, the impost could be dragged up to its position. I
+found a pleasure in working at this simple mechanical problem, as a
+change from the more imaginative thoughts suggested by the mysterious
+monuments.
+
+One incident of our excursion to Stonehenge had a significance for me
+which renders it memorable in my personal experience. As we drove over
+the barren plain, one of the party suddenly exclaimed, "Look! Look! See
+the lark rising!" I looked up with the rest. There was the bright blue
+sky, but not a speck upon it which my eyes could distinguish. Again, one
+called out, "Hark! Hark! Hear him singing!" I listened, but not a sound
+reached my ear. Was it strange that I felt a momentary pang? _Those
+that look out at the windows are darkened, and all the daughters of
+music are brought low._ Was I never to see or hear the soaring
+songster at Heaven's gate,--unless,--unless,--if our mild humanized
+theology promises truly, I may perhaps hereafter listen to him singing
+far down beneath me? For in whatever world I may find myself, I hope I
+shall always love our poor little spheroid, so long my home, which some
+kind angel may point out to me as a gilded globule swimming in the
+sunlight far away. After walking the streets of pure gold in the New
+Jerusalem, might not one like a short vacation, to visit the
+well-remembered green fields and flowery meadows? I had a very sweet
+emotion of self-pity, which took the sting out of my painful discovery
+that the orchestra of my pleasing life-entertainment was unstringing its
+instruments, and the lights were being extinguished,--that the show was
+almost over. All this I kept to myself, of course, except so far as I
+whispered it to the unseen presence which we all feel is in sympathy
+with us, and which, as it seemed to my fancy, was looking into my eyes,
+and through them into my soul, with the tender, tearful smile of a
+mother who for the first time gently presses back the longing lips of
+her as yet unweaned infant.
+
+On our way back from Stonehenge we stopped and took a cup of tea with a
+friend of our host, Mr. Nightingale. His house, a bachelor
+establishment, was very attractive to us by the beauty within and around
+it. His collection of "china," as Pope and old-fashioned people call all
+sorts of earthenware, excited the enthusiasm of our host, whose
+admiration of some rare pieces in the collection was so great that it
+would have run into envy in a less generous nature.
+
+It is very delightful to find one's self in one of these English country
+residences. The house is commonly old, and has a history. It is
+oftentimes itself a record, like that old farmhouse my friend John
+Bellows wrote to me about, which chronicled half a dozen reigns by
+various architectural marks as exactly as if it had been an official
+register. "The stately homes of England," as we see them at Wilton and
+Longford Castle, are not more admirable in their splendors than "the
+blessed homes of England" in their modest beauty. Everywhere one may see
+here old parsonages by the side of ivy-mantled churches, and the
+comfortable mansions where generations of country squires have lived in
+peace, while their sons have gone forth to fight England's battles, and
+carry her flags of war and commerce all over the world. We in America
+can hardly be said to have such a possession as a family home. We
+encamp,--not under canvas, but in fabrics of wood or more lasting
+materials, which are pulled down after a brief occupancy by the
+builders, and possibly their children, or are modernized so that the
+former dwellers in them would never recognize their old habitations.
+
+In my various excursions from Salisbury I was followed everywhere by the
+all-pervading presence of the towering spire. Just what it was in that
+earlier visit, when my eyes were undimmed and my sensibilities unworn,
+just such I found it now. As one drives away from the town, the roofs of
+the houses drop out of the landscape, the lesser spires disappear one by
+one, until the great shaft is left standing alone,--solitary as the
+broken statue of Ozymandias in the desert, as the mast of some mighty
+ship above the waves which have rolled over the foundering vessel. Most
+persons will, I think, own to a feeling of awe in looking up at it. Few
+can look down from a great height without creepings and crispations, if
+they do not get as far as vertigos and that aerial calenture which
+prompts them to jump from the pinnacle on which they are standing. It
+does not take much imagination to make one experience something of the
+same feeling in looking up at a very tall steeple or chimney. To one
+whose eyes are used to Park Street and the Old South steeples as
+standards of height, a spire which climbs four hundred feet towards the
+sky is a new sensation. Whether I am more "afraid of that which is high"
+than I was at my first visit, as I should be on the authority of
+Ecclesiastes, I cannot say, but it was quite enough for me to let my
+eyes climb the spire, and I had no desire whatever to stand upon that
+"bad eminence," as I am sure that I should have found it.
+
+I soon noticed a slight deflection from the perpendicular at the upper
+part of the spire. This has long been observed. I could not say that I
+saw the spire quivering in the wind, as I felt that of Strasburg doing
+when I ascended it,--swaying like a blade of grass when a breath of air
+passes over it. But it has been, for at least two hundred years, nearly
+two feet out of the perpendicular. No increase in the deviation was
+found to exist when it was examined early in the present century. It is
+a wonder that this slight-looking structure can have survived the
+blasts, and thunderbolts, and earthquakes, and the weakening effects of
+time on its stones and timbers for five hundred years. Since the spire
+of Chichester Cathedral fell in 1861, sheathing itself in its tower like
+a sword dropping into its scabbard, one can hardly help looking with
+apprehension at all these lofty fabrics. I have before referred to the
+fall of the spire of Tewkesbury Abbey church, three centuries earlier.
+There has been a good deal of fear for the Salisbury spire, and great
+precautions have been taken to keep it firm, so that we may hope it will
+stand for another five hundred years. It ought to be a "joy forever,"
+for it is a thing of beauty, if ever there were one.
+
+I never felt inclined to play the part of the young enthusiast in
+"Excelsior," as I looked up at the weathercock which surmounts the
+spire. But the man who oils the weathercock-spindle has to get up to it
+in some way, and that way is by ladders which reach to within thirty
+feet of the top, where there is a small door, through which he emerges,
+to crawl up the remaining distance on the outside. "The situation and
+appearance," says one of the guide-books, "must be terrific, yet many
+persons have voluntarily and daringly clambered to the top, even in a
+state of intoxication." Such, I feel sure, was not the state of my most
+valued and exemplary clerical friend, who, with a cool head and steady
+nerves, found himself standing in safety at the top of the spire, with
+his hand upon the vane, which nothing terrestrial had ever looked down
+upon in its lofty position, except a bird, a bat, a sky-rocket, or a
+balloon.
+
+In saying that the exterior of Salisbury Cathedral is more interesting
+than its interior, I was perhaps unfair to the latter, which only yields
+to the surpassing claims of the wonderful structure as seen from the
+outside. One may get a little tired of marble Crusaders, with their
+crossed legs and broken noses, especially if, as one sometimes finds
+them, they are covered with the pencilled autographs of cockney
+scribblers. But there are monuments in this cathedral which excite
+curiosity, and others which awaken the most striking associations. There
+is the "Boy Bishop," his marble effigy protected from vandalism by an
+iron cage. There is the skeleton figure representing Fox (who should
+have been called Goose), the poor creature who starved himself to death
+in trying to imitate the fast of forty days in the wilderness. Since
+this performance has been taken out of the list of miracles, it is not
+so likely to be repeated by fanatics. I confess to a strong suspicion
+that this is one of the ambulatory or movable stories, like the
+"hangman's stone" legend, which I have found in so many different parts
+of England. Skulls and crossbones, sometimes skeletons or skeleton-like
+figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an
+earlier period. Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast
+story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the oak
+or apple tree.
+
+With far different emotions we look upon the spot where lie buried many
+of the Herbert family, among the rest,
+
+ "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother,"
+
+for whom Ben Jonson wrote the celebrated epitaph. I am almost afraid to
+say it, but I never could admire the line,
+
+ "Lies the subject of all verse,"
+
+nor the idea of Time dropping his hour-glass and scythe to throw a dart
+at the fleshless figure of Death. This last image seems to me about the
+equivalent in mortuary poetry of Roubiliac's monument to Mrs.
+Nightingale in mortuary sculpture,--poor conceits both of them, without
+the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in the marble; but the
+rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us from feeling that we are
+standing by the resting-place of one who was
+
+ "learn'd and fair and good"
+
+enough to stir the soul of stalwart Ben Jonson, and the names of Sidney
+and Herbert make us forget the strange hyperboles.
+
+History meets us everywhere, as we stray among these ancient monuments.
+Under that effigy lie the great bones of Sir John Cheyne, a mighty man
+of war, said to have been "overthrown" by Richard the Third at the
+battle of Bosworth Field. What was left of him was unearthed in 1789 in
+the demolition of the Beauchamp chapel, and his thigh-bone was found to
+be four inches longer than that of a man of common stature.
+
+The reader may remember how my recollections started from their
+hiding-place when I came, in one of our excursions, upon the name of
+Lechmere, as belonging to the owner of a fine estate by or through which
+we were driving. I had a similar twinge of reminiscence at meeting with
+the name of Gorges, which is perpetuated by a stately monument at the
+end of the north aisle of the cathedral. Sir Thomas Gorges, Knight of
+Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the
+well-remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period.
+The title this gentleman bore had a far more magnificent sound than
+those of his contemporaries, Governor Carver and Elder Brewster. No
+title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of
+"Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine of the Province of Maine," a
+province with "Gorgeana" (late the plantation of Agamenticus) as its
+capital. Everywhere in England a New Englander is constantly meeting
+with names of families and places which remind him that he comes of a
+graft from an old tree on a new stock. I could not keep down the
+associations called up by the name of Gorges. There is a certain
+pleasure in now and then sprinkling our prosaic colonial history with
+the holy water of a high-sounding title; not that a "Sir" before a man's
+name makes him any better,--for are we not all equal, and more than
+equal, to each other?--but it sounds pleasantly. Sir Harry Vane and Sir
+Harry Frankland look prettily on the printed page, as the illuminated
+capital at the head of a chapter in an old folio pleases the eye of the
+reader. Sir Thomas Gorges was the builder of Longford Castle, now the
+seat of the Earl of Radnor, whose family name is Bouverie. Whether our
+Sir Ferdinando was of the Longford Castle stock or not I must leave to
+my associates of the Massachusetts Historical Society to determine.
+
+We lived very quietly at our temporary home in Salisbury Close. A
+pleasant dinner with the Dean, a stroll through the grounds of the
+episcopal palace, with that perpetual feast of the eyes which the
+cathedral offered us, made our residence delightful at the time, and
+keeps it so in remembrance. Besides the cathedral there were the very
+lovely cloisters, the noble chapter-house with its central pillar,--this
+structure has been restored and rejuvenated since my earlier visit,--and
+there were the peaceful dwellings, where I insist on believing that only
+virtue and happiness are ever tenants. Even outside the sacred enclosure
+there is a great deal to enjoy, in the ancient town of Salisbury. One
+may rest under the Poultry Cross, where twenty or thirty generations
+have rested before him. One may purchase his china at the well-furnished
+establishment of the tenant of a spacious apartment of ancient
+date,--"the Halle of John Halle," a fine private edifice built in the
+year 1470, restored and beautified in 1834; the emblazonment of the
+royal arms having been executed by the celebrated architectural artist
+Pugin. The old houses are numerous, and some of them eminently
+picturesque.
+
+Salisbury was formerly very unhealthy, on account of the low, swampy
+nature of its grounds. The Sanitary Reform, dating from about thirty
+years ago, had a great effect on the condition of the place. Before the
+drainage the annual mortality was twenty-seven in the thousand; since
+the drainage twenty in the thousand, which is below that of Boston. In
+the Close, which is a little Garden of Eden, with no serpent in it that
+I could hear of, the deaths were only fourteen in a thousand. Happy
+little enclosure, where thieves cannot break through and steal, where
+Death himself hesitates to enter, and makes a visit only now and then at
+long intervals, lest the fortunate inhabitants should think they had
+already reached the Celestial City!
+
+[Illustration: Salisbury Cathedral.]
+
+It must have been a pretty bitter quarrel that drove the tenants of the
+airy height of Old Sarum to remove to the marshy level of the present
+site of the cathedral and the town. I wish we could have given more time
+to the ancient fortress and cathedral town. This is one of the most
+interesting historic localities of Great Britain. We looked from
+different points of view at the mounds and trenches which marked it as a
+strongly fortified position. For many centuries it played an important
+part in the history of England. At length, however, the jealousies of
+the laity and the clergy, a squabble like that of "town and gown," but
+with graver underlying causes, broke up the harmony and practically
+ended the existence of the place except as a monument of the past. It
+seems a pity that the headquarters of the Prince of Peace could not have
+managed to maintain tranquillity within its own borders. But so it was;
+and the consequence followed that Old Sarum, with all its grand
+recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows,--as much a
+tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh. Old Sarum
+is now best remembered by its long-surviving privilege, as a borough, of
+sending two members to Parliament. The farcical ceremony of electing two
+representatives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end
+to by the Reform Act of 1832.
+
+Wilton, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, within an easy drive's
+distance from Salisbury, was the first nobleman's residence I saw in my
+early visit. Not a great deal of what I then saw had survived in my
+memory. I recall the general effect of the stately mansion and its
+grounds. A picture or two of Vandyke's had not quite faded out of my
+recollection. I could not forget the armor of Anne de Montmorenci,--not
+another Maid of Orleans, but Constable of France,--said to have been
+taken in battle by an ancestor of the Herberts. It was one of the first
+things that made me feel I was in the Old World. Miles Standish's sword
+was as far back as New England collections of armor carried us at that
+day. The remarkable gallery of ancient sculptures impressed me at the
+time, but no one bust or statue survived as a distinct image. Even the
+beautiful Palladian bridge had not pictured itself on my mental tablet
+as it should have done, and I could not have taken my oath that I had
+seen it. But the pretty English maidens whom we met on the day of our
+visit to Wilton,--daughters or granddaughters of a famous inventor and
+engineer,--still lingered as vague and pleasing visions, so lovely had
+they seemed among the daisies and primroses. The primroses and daisies
+were as fresh in the spring of 1886 as they were in the spring of 1833,
+but I hardly dared to ask after the blooming maidens of that early
+period.
+
+One memory predominates over all others, in walking through the halls,
+or still more in wandering through the grounds, of Wilton House. Here
+Sir Philip Sidney wrote his "Arcadia," and the ever youthful presence of
+the man himself rather than the recollection of his writings takes
+possession of us. There are three young men in history whose names
+always present themselves to me in a special companionship: Pico della
+Mirandola, "the Phoenix of the Age" for his contemporaries; "the
+Admirable Crichton," accepting as true the accounts which have come down
+to us of his wonderful accomplishments; and Sidney, the Bayard of
+England, "that glorious star, that lively pattern of virtue and the
+lovely joy of all the learned sort, ... born into the world to show unto
+our age a sample of ancient virtue." The English paragon of excellence
+was but thirty-two years old when he was slain at Zutphen, the Italian
+Phoenix but thirty-one when he was carried off by a fever, and the
+Scotch prodigy of gifts and attainments was only twenty-two when he was
+assassinated by his worthless pupil. Sir Philip Sidney is better
+remembered by the draught of water he gave the dying soldier than by all
+the waters he ever drew from the fountain of the Muses, considerable as
+are the merits of his prose and verse. But here, where he came to cool
+his fiery spirit after the bitter insult he had received from the Earl
+of Leicester; here, where he mused and wrote, and shaped his lofty plans
+for a glorious future, he lives once more in our imagination, as if his
+spirit haunted the English Arcadia he loved so dearly.
+
+The name of Herbert, which we have met with in the cathedral, and which
+belongs to the Earls of Pembroke, presents itself to us once more in a
+very different and very beautiful aspect. Between Salisbury and Wilton,
+three miles and a half distant, is the little village of Bemerton, where
+"holy George Herbert" lived and died, and where he lies buried. Many
+Americans who know little else of him recall the lines borrowed from him
+by Irving in the "Sketch-Book" and by Emerson in "Nature." The
+"Sketch-Book" gives the lines thus:--
+
+ "Sweet day, so pure, so calm, so bright,
+ The bridal of the earth and sky."
+
+In other versions the fourth word is _cool_ instead of _pure_,
+and _cool_ is, I believe, the correct reading. The day when we
+visited Bemerton was, according to A----'s diary, "perfect." I was
+struck with the calm beauty of the scene around us, the fresh greenness
+of all growing things, and the stillness of the river which mirrored the
+heavens above it. It must have been this reflection which the poet was
+thinking of when he spoke of the bridal of the earth and sky. The river
+is the Wiltshire Avon; not Shakespeare's Avon, but the southern stream
+of the same name, which empties into the British Channel.
+
+So much of George Herbert's intellectual and moral character repeat
+themselves in Emerson that if I believed in metempsychosis I should
+think that the English saint had reappeared in the American philosopher.
+Their features have a certain resemblance, but the type, though an
+exceptional and fine one, is not so very rare. I found a portrait in the
+National Gallery which was a good specimen of it; the bust of a near
+friend of his, more intimate with him than almost any other person, is
+often taken for that of Emerson. I see something of it in the portrait
+of Sir Philip Sidney, and I doubt not that traces of a similar mental
+resemblance ran through the whole group, with individual characteristics
+which were in some respects quite different. I will take a single verse
+of Herbert's from Emerson's "Nature,"--one of the five which he
+quotes:--
+
+ "Nothing hath got so far
+ But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
+ His eyes dismount the highest star:
+ He is in little all the sphere.
+ Herbs gladly cure our flesh because that they
+ Find their acquaintance there."
+
+Emerson himself fully recognizes his obligations to "the beautiful
+psalmist of the seventeenth century," as he calls George Herbert. There
+are many passages in his writings which sound as if they were
+paraphrases from the elder poet. From him it is that Emerson gets a word
+he is fond of, and of which his imitators are too fond:--
+
+ "Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
+ Makes that and the action _fine_."
+
+The little chapel in which Herbert officiated is perhaps half as long
+again as the room in which I am writing, but it is four or five feet
+narrower,--and I do not live in a palace. Here this humble servant of
+God preached and prayed, and here by his faithful and loving service he
+so endeared himself to all around him that he has been canonized by an
+epithet no other saint of the English Church has had bestowed upon him.
+His life as pictured by Izaak Walton is, to borrow one of his own lines,
+
+ "A box where sweets compacted lie;"
+
+and I felt, as I left his little chapel and the parsonage which he
+rebuilt as a free-will offering, as a pilgrim might feel who had just
+left the holy places at Jerusalem.
+
+Among the places which I saw in my first visit was Longford Castle, the
+seat of the Earl of Radnor. I remembered the curious triangular
+building, constructed with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, as
+churches are built in the form of the cross. I remembered how the
+omnipresent spire of the great cathedral, three miles away, looked down
+upon the grounds about the building as if it had been their next-door
+neighbor. I had not forgotten the two celebrated Claudes, Morning and
+Evening. My eyes were drawn to the first of these two pictures when I
+was here before; now they turned naturally to the landscape with the
+setting sun. I have read my St. Ruskin with due reverence, but I have
+never given up my allegiance to Claude Lorraine. But of all the fine
+paintings at Longford Castle, no one so much impressed me at my recent
+visit as the portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein. This is one of those
+pictures which help to make the Old World worth a voyage across the
+Atlantic. Portraits of Erasmus are not uncommon; every scholar would
+know him if he met him in the other world with the look he wore on
+earth. All the etchings and their copies give a characteristic
+presentation of the spiritual precursor of Luther, who pricked the false
+image with his rapier which the sturdy monk slashed with his broadsword.
+What a face it is which Hans Holbein has handed down to us in this
+wonderful portrait at Longford Castle! How dry it is with scholastic
+labor, how keen with shrewd scepticism, how worldly-wise, how conscious
+of its owner's wide-awake sagacity! Erasmus and Rabelais,--Nature used
+up all her arrows for their quivers, and had to wait a hundred years and
+more before she could find shafts enough for the outfit of Voltaire,
+leaner and keener than Erasmus, and almost as free in his language as
+the audacious creator of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
+
+I have not generally given descriptions of the curious objects which I
+saw in the great houses and museums which I visited. There is, however,
+a work of art at Longford Castle so remarkable that I must speak of it.
+I was so much struck by the enormous amount of skilful ingenuity and
+exquisite workmanship bestowed upon it that I looked up its history,
+which I found in the "Beauties of England and Wales." This is what is
+there said of the wonderful steel chair: "It was made by Thomas Rukers
+at the city of Augsburgh, in the year 1575, and consists of more than
+130 compartments, all occupied by groups of figures representing a
+succession of events in the annals of the Roman Empire, from the landing
+of Æneas to the reign of Rodolphus the Second." It looks as if a life
+had gone into the making of it, as a pair or two of eyes go to the
+working of the bridal veil of an empress.
+
+Fifty years ago and more, when I was at Longford Castle with my two
+companions, who are no more with us, we found there a pleasant, motherly
+old housekeeper, or attendant of some kind, who gave us a draught of
+home-made ale and left a cheerful remembrance with us, as, I need hardly
+say, we did with her, in a materialized expression of our good-will. It
+always rubbed very hard on my feelings to offer money to any persons who
+had served me well, as if they were doing it for their own pleasure. It
+may have been the granddaughter of the kindly old matron of the year
+1833 who showed us round, and possibly, if I had sunk a shaft of
+inquiry, I might have struck a well of sentiment. But
+
+ "Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,"
+
+carried into practical life, is certain in its financial result to the
+subject of the emotional impulse, but is less sure to call forth a
+tender feeling in the recipient. One will hardly find it worth while to
+go through the world weeping over his old recollections, and paying gold
+instead of silver and silver instead of copper to astonished boatmen and
+bewildered chambermaids.
+
+On Sunday, the 18th of July, we attended morning service at the
+cathedral. The congregation was not proportioned to the size of the
+great edifice. These vast places of worship were built for ages when
+faith was the rule and questioning the exception. I will not say that
+faith has grown cold, but it has cooled from white heat to cherry red or
+a still less flaming color. As to church attendance, I have heard the
+saying attributed to a great statesman, that "once a day is Orthodox,
+but twice a day is Puritan." No doubt many of the same class of people
+that used to fill the churches stay at home and read about evolution or
+telepathy, or whatever new gospel they may have got hold of. Still the
+English seem to me a religious people; they have leisure enough to say
+grace and give thanks before and after meals, and their institutions
+tend to keep alive the feelings of reverence which cannot be said to be
+distinctive of our own people.
+
+In coming out of the cathedral, on the Sunday I just mentioned, a
+gentleman addressed me as a fellow-countryman. There is something,--I
+will not stop now to try and define it,--but there is something by which
+we recognize an American among the English before he speaks and betrays
+his origin. Our new friend proved to be the president of one of our
+American colleges; an intelligent and well-instructed gentleman, of
+course. By the invitation of our host he came in to visit us in the
+evening, and made himself very welcome by his agreeable conversation.
+
+I took great delight in wandering about the old town of Salisbury. There
+are no such surprises in our oldest places as one finds in Chester, or
+Tewkesbury, or Stratford, or Salisbury, and I have no doubt in scores or
+hundreds of similar places which I have never visited. The best
+substitute for such rambles as one can take through these mouldy
+boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem,
+Newburyport, Portsmouth. Without imagination, Shakespeare's birthplace
+is but a queer old house, and Anne Hathaway's home a tumble-down
+cottage. With it, one can see the witches of Salem Village sailing out
+of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on
+purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby's wharf and gaze at
+"Cleopatra's Barge," precursor of the yachts of the Astors and Goulds
+and Vanderbilts, as she comes swimming into the harbor in all her gilded
+glory. But it must make a difference what the imagination has to work
+upon, and I do not at all wonder that Mr. Ruskin would not wish to live
+in a land where there are no old ruins of castles and monasteries. Man
+will not live on bread only; he wants a great deal more, if he can get
+it,--frosted cake as well as corn-bread; and the New World keeps the
+imagination on plain and scanty diet, compared to the rich traditional
+and historic food which furnishes the banquets of the Old World.
+
+What memories that week in Salisbury and the excursions from it have
+left in my mind's picture gallery! The spire of the great cathedral had
+been with me as a frequent presence during the last fifty years of my
+life, and this second visit has deepened every line of the impression,
+as Old Mortality refreshed the inscriptions on the tombstones of the
+Covenanters. I find that all these pictures which I have brought home
+with me to look at, with
+
+ "that inward eye
+ Which is the bliss of solitude,"
+
+are becoming clearer and brighter as the excitement of overcrowded days
+and weeks gradually calms down. I can _be_ in those places where I
+passed days and nights, and became habituated to the sight of the
+cathedral, or of the Church of the Holy Trinity, at morning, at noon, at
+evening, whenever I turned my eyes in its direction. I often close my
+eyelids, and startle my household by saying, "Now I am in Salisbury," or
+"Now I am in Stratford." It is a blessed thing to be able, in the
+twilight of years, to illuminate the soul with such visions. The
+Charles, which flows beneath my windows, which I look upon between the
+words of the sentence I am now writing, only turning my head as I sit at
+my table,--the Charles is hardly more real to me than Shakespeare's
+Avon, since I floated on its still waters, or strayed along its banks
+and saw the cows reflected in the smooth expanse, their legs upward, as
+if they were walking the skies as the flies walk the ceiling. Salisbury
+Cathedral stands as substantial in my thought as our own King's Chapel,
+since I slumbered by its side, and arose in the morning to find it still
+there, and not one of those unsubstantial fabrics built by the architect
+of dreams.
+
+On Thursday, the 22d of July, we left Salisbury for Brighton, where we
+were to be guests at Arnold House, the residence of our kind host. Here
+we passed another delightful week, with everything around us to
+contribute to our quiet comfort and happiness. The most thoughtful of
+entertainers, a house filled with choice works of art, fine paintings,
+and wonderful pottery, pleasant walks and drives, a visitor now and
+then, Mr. and Mrs. Goldwin Smith among the number, rest and peace in a
+magnificent city built for enjoyment,--what more could we have asked to
+make our visit memorable? Many watering-places look forlorn and desolate
+in the intervals of "the season." This was not the time of Brighton's
+influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull. The houses are very
+large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes; the shops are
+well supplied; the salt breeze comes in fresh and wholesome, and the
+noble esplanade is lively with promenaders and Bath chairs, some of them
+occupied by people evidently ill or presumably lame, some, I suspect,
+employed by healthy invalids who are too lazy to walk. I took one
+myself, drawn by an old man, to see how I liked it, and found it very
+convenient, but I was tempted to ask him to change places and let me
+drag him.
+
+With the aid of the guide-book I could describe the wonders of the
+pavilion and the various changes which have come over the great
+watering-place. The grand walks, the two piers, the aquarium, and all
+the great sights which are shown to strangers deserve full attention
+from the tourist who writes for other travellers, but none of these
+things seem to me so interesting as what we saw and heard in a little
+hamlet which has never, so far as I know, been vulgarized by sightseers.
+We drove in an open carriage,--Mr. and Mrs. Willett, A----, and
+myself,--into the country, which soon became bare, sparsely settled, a
+long succession of rounded hills and hollows. These are the South Downs,
+from which comes the famous mutton known all over England, not unknown
+at the table of our Saturday Club and other well-spread boards. After a
+drive of ten miles or more we arrived at a little "settlement," as we
+Americans would call it, and drove up to the door of a modest parsonage,
+where dwells the shepherd of the South Down flock of Christian
+worshippers. I hope that the good clergyman, if he ever happens to see
+what I am writing, will pardon me for making mention of his hidden
+retreat, which he himself speaks of as "one of the remoter nooks of the
+old country." Nothing I saw in England brought to my mind Goldsmith's
+picture of "the man to all the country dear," and his surroundings, like
+this visit. The church dates, if I remember right, from the thirteenth
+century. Some of its stones show marks, as it is thought, of having
+belonged to a Saxon edifice. The massive leaden font is of a very great
+antiquity. In the wall of the church is a narrow opening, at which the
+priest is supposed to have sat and listened to the confession of the
+sinner on the outside of the building. The dead lie all around the
+church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries. One
+epitaph, which the unlettered Muse must have dictated, is worth
+recording. After giving the chief slumberer's name the epitaph adds,--
+
+ "Here lies on either side, the remains of each of his former wives."
+
+Those of a third have found a resting-place close by, behind him.
+
+It seemed to me that Mr. Bunner's young man in search of Arcady might
+look for it here with as good a chance of being satisfied as anywhere I
+can think of. But I suppose that men and women and especially boys,
+would prove to be a good deal like the rest of the world, if one lived
+here long enough to learn all about them. One thing I can safely
+say,--an English man or boy never goes anywhere without his fists. I saw
+a boy of ten or twelve years, whose pleasant face attracted my
+attention. I said to the rector, "That is a fine-looking little fellow,
+and I should think an intelligent and amiable kind of boy." "Yes," he
+said, "yes; he can strike from the shoulder pretty well, too. I had to
+stop him the other day, indulging in that exercise." Well, I said to
+myself, we have not yet reached the heaven on earth which I was fancying
+might be embosomed in this peaceful-looking hollow. Youthful angels can
+hardly be in the habit of striking from the shoulder. But the well-known
+phrase, belonging to the pugilist rather than to the priest, brought me
+back from the ideal world into which my imagination had wandered.
+
+Our week at Brighton was passed in a very quiet but most enjoyable way.
+It could not be otherwise with such a host and hostess, always arranging
+everything with reference to our well-being and in accordance with our
+wishes. I became very fond of the esplanade, such a public walk as I
+never saw anything to compare with. In these tranquil days, and long,
+honest nights of sleep, the fatigues of what we had been through were
+forgotten, the scales showed that we were becoming less ethereal every
+day, and we were ready for another move.
+
+We bade good-by to our hosts with the most grateful and the warmest
+feeling towards them, after a month of delightful companionship and the
+experience of a hospitality almost too generous to accept, but which
+they were pleased to look upon as if we were doing them a favor.
+
+On the 29th of July we found ourselves once more in London.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+We found our old quarters all ready and awaiting us. Mrs. Mackellar's
+motherly smile, Sam's civil bow, and the rosy cheeks of many-buttoned
+Robert made us feel at home as soon as we crossed the threshold.
+
+The dissolution of Parliament had brought "the season" abruptly to an
+end. London was empty. There were three or four millions of people in
+it, but the great houses were for the most part left without occupants
+except their liveried guardians. We kept as quiet as possible, to avoid
+all engagements. For now we were in London for London itself, to do
+shopping, to see sights, to be our own master and mistress, and to live
+as independent a life as we possibly could.
+
+The first thing we did on the day of our arrival was to take a hansom
+and drive over to Chelsea, to look at the place where Carlyle passed the
+larger part of his life. The whole region about him must have been
+greatly changed during his residence there, for the Thames Embankment
+was constructed long after he removed to Chelsea. We had some little
+difficulty in finding the place we were in search of. Cheyne (pronounced
+"Chainie") Walk is a somewhat extended range of buildings. Cheyne Row is
+a passage which reminded me a little of my old habitat, Montgomery
+Place, now Bosworth Street. Presently our attention was drawn to a
+marble medallion portrait on the corner building of an ordinary-looking
+row of houses. This was the head of Carlyle, and an inscription informed
+us that he lived for forty-seven years in the house No. 24 of this row
+of buildings. Since Carlyle's home life has been made public, he has
+appeared to us in a different aspect from the ideal one which he had
+before occupied. He did not show to as much advantage under the
+Boswellizing process as the dogmatist of the last century, dear old Dr.
+Johnson. But he remains not the less one of the really interesting men
+of his generation, a man about whom we wish to know all that we have a
+right to know.
+
+The sight of an old nest over which two or three winters have passed is
+a rather saddening one. The dingy three-story brick house in which
+Carlyle lived, one in a block of similar houses, was far from
+attractive. It was untenanted, neglected; its windows were unwashed, a
+pane of glass was broken; its threshold appeared untrodden, its whole
+aspect forlorn and desolate. Yet there it stood before me, all covered
+with its associations as an ivy-clad tower with its foliage. I wanted to
+see its interior, but it looked as if it did not expect a tenant and
+would not welcome a visitor. Was there nothing but this forbidding
+house-front to make the place alive with some breathing memory? I saw
+crossing the street a middle-aged woman,--a decent body, who looked as
+if she might have come from the lower level of some not opulent but
+respectable household. She might have some recollection of an old man
+who was once her neighbor. I asked her if she remembered Mr. Carlyle.
+Indeed she did, she told us. She used to see him often, in front of his
+house, putting bits of bread on the railing for the birds. He did not
+like to see anything wasted, she said. The merest scrap of information,
+but genuine and pleasing; an instantaneous photograph only, but it makes
+a pretty vignette in the volume of my reminiscences. There are many
+considerable men in every generation of mankind, but not a great number
+who are personally interesting,--not a great many of whom we feel that
+we cannot know too much; whose foibles, even, we care to know about;
+whose shortcomings we try to excuse; who are not models, but whose
+special traits make them attractive. Carlyle is one of these few, and no
+revelations can prevent his interesting us. He was not quite finished in
+his parental existence. The bricklayer's mortar of his father's calling
+stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with
+his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns. We do not wish either to
+have been other than what he was. Their breeding brings them to the
+average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a
+simpler expression of our common humanity. As we rolled in the cars by
+Ecclefechan, I strained my eyes to take in every point of the landscape,
+every cottage, every spire, if by any chance I could find one in that
+lonely region. There was not a bridge nor a bit of masonry of any kind
+that I did not eagerly scrutinize, to see if it were solid and honest
+enough to have been built by Carlyle's father. Solitary enough the
+country looked. I admired Mr. Emerson's devotion in seeking his friend
+in his bare home among what he describes as the "desolate heathery
+hills" about Craigenputtock, which were, I suppose, much like the region
+through which we were passing.
+
+It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle.
+Nature, who seems to be fond of trios, has given us three dogmatists,
+all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose
+personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the
+trio, still interests us,--Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an
+oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their
+descendants. The author of "Taxation no Tyranny" had wholesale opinions,
+and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in
+expression: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful
+for anything we allow them short of hanging." We smile complacently when
+we read this outburst, which Mr. Croker calls in question, but which
+agrees with his saying in the presence of Miss Seward, "I am willing to
+love all mankind _except an American_."
+
+A generation or two later comes along Coleridge, with his circle of
+reverential listeners. He says of Johnson that his fame rests
+principally upon Boswell, and that "his _bow-wow_ manner must have
+had a good deal to do with the effect produced." As to Coleridge
+himself, his contemporaries hardly know how to set bounds to their
+exaltation of his genius. Dibdin comes pretty near going into rhetorical
+hysterics in reporting a conversation of Coleridge's to which he
+listened: "The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one
+observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than
+another fell from his tongue.... As I retired homeward I thought a
+SECOND JOHNSON had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men." And
+De Quincey speaks of him as "the largest and most spacious intellect,
+the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet
+existed amongst men." One is sometimes tempted to wish that the
+superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old experts.
+What are men to do when they get to heaven, after having exhausted their
+vocabulary of admiration on earth?
+
+Now let us come down to Carlyle, and see what he says of Coleridge. We
+need not take those conversational utterances which called down the
+wrath of Mr. Swinburne, and found expression in an epigram which
+violates all the proprieties of literary language. Look at the
+full-length portrait in the Life of Sterling. Each oracle denies his
+predecessor, each magician breaks the wand of the one who went before
+him. There were Americans enough ready to swear by Carlyle until he
+broke his staff in meddling with our anti-slavery conflict, and buried
+it so many fathoms deep that it could never be fished out again. It is
+rather singular that Johnson and Carlyle should each of them have
+shipwrecked his sagacity and shown a terrible leak in his moral
+sensibilities on coming in contact with American rocks and currents,
+with which neither had any special occasion to concern himself, and
+which both had a great deal better have steered clear of.
+
+But here I stand once more before the home of the long-suffering,
+much-laboring, loud-complaining Heraclitus of his time, whose very smile
+had a grimness in it more ominous than his scowl. Poor man! Dyspeptic on
+a diet of oatmeal porridge; kept wide awake by crowing cocks; drummed
+out of his wits by long-continued piano-pounding; sharp of speech, I
+fear, to his high-strung wife, who gave him back as good as she got! I
+hope I am mistaken about their everyday relations, but again I say, poor
+man!--for all his complaining must have meant real discomfort, which a
+man of genius feels not less, certainly, than a common mortal.
+
+I made a second visit to the place where he lived, but I saw nothing
+more than at the first. I wanted to cross the threshold over which he
+walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write,
+to look at the chimney-place down which the soot came, to sit where he
+used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure up his wraith to look in
+once more upon his old deserted dwelling. That vision was denied me.
+
+After visiting Chelsea we drove round through Regent's Park. I suppose
+that if we use the superlative in speaking of Hyde Park, Regent's Park
+will be the comparative, and Battersea Park the positive, ranking them
+in the descending grades of their hierarchy. But this is my conjecture
+only, and the social geography of London is a subject which only one who
+has become familiarly acquainted with the place should speak of with any
+confidence. A stranger coming to our city might think it made little
+difference whether his travelling Boston acquaintance lived in Alpha
+Avenue or in Omega Square, but he would have to learn that it is farther
+from one of these places to the other, a great deal farther, than it is
+from Beacon Street, Boston, to Fifth Avenue, New York.
+
+An American finds it a little galling to be told that he must not drive
+in his _numbered_ hansom or four-wheeler except in certain portions
+of Hyde Park. If he is rich enough to keep his own carriage, or if he
+will pay the extra price of a vehicle not vulgarized by being on the
+numbered list, he may drive anywhere that his Grace or his Lordship
+does, and perhaps have a mean sense of satisfaction at finding himself
+in the charmed circle of exclusive "gigmanity." It is a pleasure to meet
+none but well-dressed and well-mannered people, in well-appointed
+equipages. In the high road of our own country, one is liable to fall in
+with people and conveyances that it is far from a pleasure to meet. I
+was once driving in an open carriage, with members of my family, towards
+my own house in the country town where I was then living. A cart drawn
+by oxen was in the road in front of us. Whenever we tried to pass, the
+men in it turned obliquely across the road and prevented us, and this
+was repeated again and again. I could have wished I had been driving in
+Hyde Park, where clowns and boors, with their carts and oxen, do not
+find admittance. Exclusiveness has its conveniences.
+
+The next day, as I was strolling through Burlington Arcade, I saw a
+figure just before me which I recognized as that of my townsman, Mr.
+Abbott Lawrence. He was accompanied by his son, who had just returned
+from a trip round the planet. There are three grades of recognition,
+entirely distinct from each other: the meeting of two persons of
+different countries who speak the same language,--an American and an
+Englishman, for instance; the meeting of two Americans from different
+cities, as of a Bostonian and a New Yorker or a Chicagonian; and the
+meeting of two from the same city, as of two Bostonians.
+
+The difference of these recognitions may be illustrated by supposing
+certain travelling philosophical instruments, endowed with intelligence
+and the power of speech, to come together in their wanderings,--let us
+say in a restaurant of the Palais Royal. "Very hot," says the talking
+Fahrenheit (Thermometer) from Boston, and calls for an ice, which he
+plunges his bulb into and cools down. In comes an intelligent and
+socially disposed English Barometer. The two travellers greet each
+other, not exactly as old acquaintances, but each has heard very
+frequently about the other, and their relatives have been often
+associated. "We have a good deal in common," says the Barometer. "Of the
+same blood, as we may say; quicksilver is thicker than water." "Yes,"
+says the little Fahrenheit, "and we are both of the same mercurial
+temperament." While their columns are dancing up and down with laughter
+at this somewhat tepid and low-pressure pleasantry, there come in a New
+York Réaumur and a Centigrade from Chicago. The Fahrenheit, which has
+got warmed up to _temperate_, rises to _summer heat_, and even
+a little above it. They enjoy each other's company mightily. To be sure,
+their scales differ, but have they not the same freezing and the same
+boiling point? To be sure, each thinks his own scale is the true
+standard, and at home they might get into a contest about the matter,
+but here in a strange land they do not think of disputing. Now, while
+they are talking about America and their own local atmosphere and
+temperature, there comes in a second Boston Fahrenheit. The two of the
+same name look at each other for a moment, and rush together so eagerly
+that their bulbs are endangered. How well they understand each other!
+Thirty-two degrees marks the freezing point. Two hundred and twelve
+marks the boiling point. They have the same scale, the same fixed
+points, the same record: no wonder they prefer each other's company!
+
+I hope that my reader has followed my illustration, and finished it off
+for himself. Let me give a few practical examples. An American and an
+Englishman meet in a foreign land. The Englishman has occasion to
+mention his weight, which he finds has gained in the course of his
+travels. "How much is it now?" asks the American. "Fourteen stone. How
+much do you weigh?" "Within four pounds of two hundred." Neither of them
+takes at once any clear idea of what the other weighs. The American has
+never thought of his own, or his friends', or anybody's weight in
+_stones_ of fourteen pounds. The Englishman has never thought of
+any one's weight in _pounds_. They can calculate very easily with a
+slip of paper and a pencil, but not the less is their language but half
+intelligible as they speak and listen. The same thing is in a measure
+true of other matters they talk about. "It is about as large a space as
+the Common," says the Boston man. "It is as large as St. James's Park,"
+says the Londoner. "As high as the State House," says the Bostonian, or
+"as tall as Bunker Hill Monument," or "about as big as the Frog Pond,"
+where the Londoner would take St. Paul's, the Nelson Column, the
+Serpentine, as his standard of comparison. The difference of scale does
+not stop here; it runs through a great part of the objects of thought
+and conversation. An average American and an average Englishman are
+talking together, and one of them speaks of the beauty of a field of
+corn. They are thinking of two entirely different objects: one of a
+billowy level of soft waving wheat, or rye, or barley; the other of a
+rustling forest of tall, jointed stalks, tossing their plumes and
+showing their silken epaulettes, as if every stem in the ordered ranks
+were a soldier in full regimentals. An Englishman planted for the first
+time in the middle of a well-grown field of Indian corn would feel as
+much lost as the babes in the wood. Conversation between two Londoners,
+two New Yorkers, two Bostonians, requires no foot-notes, which is a
+great advantage in their intercourse.
+
+To return from my digression and my illustration. I did not do a great
+deal of shopping myself while in London, being contented to have it done
+for me. But in the way of looking in at shop windows I did a very large
+business. Certain windows attracted me by a variety in unity which
+surpassed anything I have been accustomed to. Thus one window showed
+every conceivable convenience that could be shaped in ivory, and nothing
+else. One shop had such a display of magnificent dressing-cases that I
+should have thought a whole royal family was setting out on its travels.
+I see the cost of one of them is two hundred and seventy guineas.
+Thirteen hundred and fifty dollars seems a good deal to pay for a
+dressing-case.
+
+On the other hand, some of the first-class tradesmen and workmen make no
+show whatever. The tailor to whom I had credentials, and who proved
+highly satisfactory to me, as he had proved to some of my countrymen and
+to Englishmen of high estate, had only one small sign, which was placed
+in one of his windows, and received his customers in a small room that
+would have made a closet for one of our stylish merchant tailors. The
+bootmaker to whom I went on good recommendation had hardly anything
+about his premises to remind one of his calling. He came into his
+studio, took my measure very carefully, and made me a pair of what we
+call Congress boots, which fitted well when once on my feet, but which
+it cost more trouble to get into and to get out of than I could express
+my feelings about without dangerously enlarging my limited vocabulary.
+
+Bond Street, Old and New, offered the most inviting windows, and I
+indulged almost to profligacy in the prolonged inspection of their
+contents. Stretching my walk along New Bond Street till I came to a
+great intersecting thoroughfare, I found myself in Oxford Street. Here
+the character of the shop windows changed at once. Utility and
+convenience took the place of show and splendor. Here I found various
+articles of use in a household, some of which were new to me. It is very
+likely that I could have found most of them in our own Boston Cornhill,
+but one often overlooks things at home which at once arrest his
+attention when he sees them in a strange place. I saw great numbers of
+illuminating contrivances, some of which pleased me by their arrangement
+of reflectors.
+
+Bryant and May's safety matches seemed to be used everywhere. I procured
+some in Boston with these names on the box, but the label said they were
+made in Sweden, and they diffused vapors that were enough to produce
+asphyxia. I greatly admired some of Dr. Dresser's water-cans and other
+contrivances, modelled more or less after the antique, but I found an
+abundant assortment of them here in Boston, and I have one I obtained
+here more original in design and more serviceable in daily use than any
+I saw in London. I should have regarded Wolverhampton, as we glided
+through it, with more interest, if I had known at that time that the
+inventive Dr. Dresser had his headquarters in that busy-looking town.
+
+One thing, at least, I learned from my London experience: better a small
+city where one knows all it has to offer, than a great city where one
+has no disinterested friend to direct him to the right places to find
+what he wants. But of course there are some grand magazines which are
+known all the world over, and which no one should leave London without
+entering as a looker-on, if not as a purchaser.
+
+There was one place I determined to visit, and one man I meant to see,
+before returning. The place was a certain book-store or book-shop, and
+the person was its proprietor, Mr. Bernard Quaritch. I was getting very
+much pressed for time, and I allowed ten minutes only for my visit. I
+never had any dealings with Mr. Quaritch, but one of my near relatives
+had, and I had often received his catalogues, the scale of prices in
+which had given me an impression almost of sublimity. I found Mr.
+Bernard Quaritch at No. 15 Piccadilly, and introduced myself, not as one
+whose name he must know, but rather as a stranger, of whom he might have
+heard through my relative. The extensive literature of catalogues is
+probably little known to most of my readers. I do not pretend to claim a
+thorough acquaintance with it, but I know the luxury of reading good
+catalogues, and such are those of Mr. Quaritch. I should like to deal
+with him; for if he wants a handsome price for what he sells, he knows
+its value, and does not offer the refuse of old libraries, but, on the
+other hand, all that is most precious in them is pretty sure to pass
+through his hands, sooner or later.
+
+"Now, Mr. Quaritch," I said, after introducing myself, "I have ten
+minutes to pass with you. You must not open a book; if you do I am lost,
+for I shall have to look at every illuminated capital, from the first
+leaf to the colophon." Mr. Quaritch did not open a single book, but let
+me look round his establishment, and answered my questions very
+courteously. It so happened that while I was there a gentleman came in
+whom I had previously met,--my namesake, Mr. Holmes, the Queen's
+librarian at Windsor Castle. My ten minutes passed very rapidly in
+conversation with these two experts in books, the bibliopole and the
+bibliothecary. No place that I visited made me feel more thoroughly that
+I was in London, the great central mart of all that is most precious in
+the world.
+
+_Leave at home all your guineas, ye who enter here_, would be a
+good motto to put over his door, unless you have them in plenty and can
+spare them, in which case _Take all your guineas with you_ would be
+a better one. For you can here get their equivalent, and more than their
+equivalent, in the choicest products of the press and the finest work of
+the illuminator, the illustrator, and the binder. You will be sorely
+tempted. But do not be surprised when you ask the price of the volume
+you may happen to fancy. You are not dealing with a _bouquiniste_
+of the Quais, in Paris. You are not foraging in an old book-shop of New
+York or Boston. Do not suppose that I undervalue these dealers in old and
+rare volumes. Many a much-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and
+Burnham and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York; and
+in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or
+an Elzevir, have I found among the trumpery spread out on the parapets
+of the quays. But there is a difference between going out on the Fourth
+of July with a militia musket to shoot any catbird or "chipmunk" that
+turns up in a piece of woods within a few miles of our own cities, and
+shooting partridges in a nobleman's preserves on the First of September.
+I confess to having felt a certain awe on entering the precincts made
+sacred by their precious contents. The lord and master of so many
+_Editiones Principes_, the guardian of this great nursery full of
+_incunabula_, did not seem to me like a simple tradesman. I felt that
+I was in the presence of the literary purveyor of royal and imperial
+libraries, the man before whom millionaires tremble as they calculate,
+and billionaires pause and consider. I have recently received two of Mr.
+Quaritch's catalogues, from which I will give my reader an extract or two,
+to show him what kind of articles this prince of bibliopoles deals in.
+
+Perhaps you would like one of those romances which turned the head of
+Don Quixote. Here is a volume which will be sure to please you. It is on
+one of his lesser lists, confined principally to Spanish and Portuguese
+works:--
+
+"Amadis de Gaula ... folio, gothic letter, FIRST EDITION, unique ... red
+morocco super extra, _doublé_ with olive morocco, richly gilt,
+tooled to an elegant Grolier design, gilt edges ... in a neat case."
+
+A pretty present for a scholarly friend. A nice old book to carry home
+for one's own library. Two hundred pounds--one thousand dollars--will
+make you the happy owner of this volume.
+
+But if you would have also on your shelves the first edition of the
+"Cronica del famoso cabaluero cid Ruy Diaz Campadero," not "richly
+gilt," not even bound in leather, but in "cloth boards," you will have
+to pay two hundred and ten pounds to become its proprietor. After this
+you will not be frightened by the thought of paying three hundred
+dollars for a little quarto giving an account of the Virginia
+Adventurers. You will not shrink from the idea of giving something more
+than a hundred guineas for a series of Hogarth's plates. But when it
+comes to Number 1001 in the May catalogue, and you see that if you would
+possess a first folio Shakespeare, "untouched by the hand of any modern
+renovator," you must be prepared to pay seven hundred and eighty-five
+pounds, almost four thousand dollars, for the volume, it would not be
+surprising if you changed color and your knees shook under you. No doubt
+some brave man will be found to carry off that prize, in spite of the
+golden battery which defends it, perhaps to Cincinnati, or Chicago, or
+San Francisco. But do not be frightened. These Alpine heights of
+extravagance climb up from the humble valley where shillings and
+sixpences are all that are required to make you a purchaser.
+
+One beauty of the Old World shops is that if a visitor comes back to the
+place where he left them fifty years before, he finds them, or has a
+great chance of finding them, just where they stood at his former visit.
+In driving down to the old city, to the place of business of the
+Barings, I found many streets little changed. Temple Bar was gone, and
+the much-abused griffin stood in its place. There was a shop close to
+Temple Bar, where, in 1834, I had bought some brushes. I had no
+difficulty in finding Prout's, and I could not do less than go in and
+buy some more brushes. I did not ask the young man who served me how the
+old shopkeeper who attended to my wants on the earlier occasion was at
+this time. But I thought what a different color the locks these brushes
+smooth show from those that knew their predecessors in the earlier
+decade!
+
+I ought to have made a second visit to the Tower, so tenderly spoken of
+by Artemus Ward as "a sweet boon," so vividly remembered by me as the
+scene of a personal encounter with one of the animals then kept in the
+Tower menagerie. But the project added a stone to the floor of the
+underground thoroughfare which is paved with good intentions.
+
+St. Paul's I must and did visit. The most striking addition since I was
+there is the massive monument to the Duke of Wellington. The great
+temple looked rather bare and unsympathetic. Poor Dr. Johnson, sitting
+in semi-nude exposure, looked to me as unhappy as our own half-naked
+Washington at the national capital. The Judas of Matthew Arnold's poem
+would have cast his cloak over those marble shoulders, if he had found
+himself in St. Paul's, and have earned another respite. We brought away
+little, I fear, except the grand effect of the dome as we looked up at
+it. It gives us a greater idea of height than the sky itself, which we
+have become used to looking upon.
+
+A second visit to the National Gallery was made in company with A----.
+It was the repetition of an attempt at a draught from the Cup of
+Tantalus. I was glad of a sight of the Botticellis, of which I had heard
+so much, and others of the more recently acquired paintings of the great
+masters; of a sweeping glance at the Turners; of a look at the
+well-remembered Hogarths and the memorable portraits by Sir Joshua. I
+carried away a confused mass of impressions, much as the soldiers that
+sack a city go off with all the precious things they can snatch up,
+huddled into clothes-bags and pillow-cases. I am reminded, too, of Mr.
+Galton's composite portraits; a thousand glimpses, as one passes through
+the long halls lined with paintings, all blending in one not unpleasing
+general effect, out of which emerges from time to time some single
+distinct image.
+
+In the same way we passed through the exhibition of paintings at the
+Royal Academy. I noticed that A---- paid special attention to the
+portraits of young ladies by John Sargent and by Collier, while I was
+more particularly struck with the startling portrait of an ancient
+personage in a full suit of wrinkles, such as Rembrandt used to bring
+out with wonderful effect. Hunting in couples is curious and
+instructive; the scent for this or that kind of game is sure to be very
+different in the two individuals.
+
+I made but two brief visits to the British Museum, and I can easily
+instruct my reader so that he will have no difficulty, if he will follow
+my teaching, in learning how not to see it. When he has a spare hour at
+his disposal, let him drop in at the Museum, and wander among its books
+and its various collections. He will know as much about it as the fly
+that buzzes in at one window and out at another. If I were asked whether
+I brought away anything from my two visits, I should say, Certainly I
+did. The fly sees some things, not very intelligently, but he cannot
+help seeing them. The great round reading-room, with its silent
+students, impressed me very much. I looked at once for the Elgin
+Marbles, but casts and photographs and engravings had made me familiar
+with their chief features. I thought I knew something of the sculptures
+brought from Nineveh, but I was astonished, almost awe-struck, at the
+sight of those mighty images which mingled with the visions of the
+Hebrew prophets. I did not marvel more at the skill and labor expended
+upon them by the Assyrian artists than I did at the enterprise and
+audacity which had brought them safely from the mounds under which they
+were buried to the light of day and the heart of a great modern city. I
+never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and
+the tablets in which the history of Nebuchadnezzar was recorded spread
+before me. The Empire of the Spade in the world of history was founded
+at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and
+its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently
+at work at the present day. I feel very grateful that many of its
+revelations have been made since I have been a tenant of the travelling
+residence which holds so many secrets in its recesses.
+
+There is one lesson to be got from a visit of an hour or two to the
+British Museum,--namely, the fathomless abyss of our own ignorance. One
+is almost ashamed of his little paltry heartbeats in the presence of the
+rushing and roaring torrent of Niagara. So if he has published a little
+book or two, collected a few fossils, or coins, or vases, he is crushed
+by the vastness of the treasures in the library and the collections of
+this universe of knowledge.
+
+I have shown how not to see the British museum; I will tell how to see
+it.
+
+Take lodgings next door to it,--in a garret, if you cannot afford
+anything better,--and pass all your days at the Museum during the whole
+period of your natural life. At threescore and ten you will have some
+faint conception of the contents, significance, and value of this great
+British institution, which is as nearly as any one spot the _noeud
+vital_ of human civilization, a stab at which by the dagger of
+anarchy would fitly begin the reign of chaos.
+
+On the 3d of August, a gentleman, Mr. Wedmore, who had promised to be my
+guide to certain interesting localities, called for me, and we took a
+hansom for the old city. The first place we visited was the Temple, a
+collection of buildings with intricate passages between them, some of
+the edifices reminding me of our college dormitories. One, however, was
+a most extraordinary exception,--the wonderful Temple church, or rather
+the ancient part of it which is left, the round temple. We had some
+trouble to get into it, but at last succeeded in finding a slip of a
+girl, the daughter of the janitor, who unlocked the door for us. It
+affected my imagination strangely to see this girl of a dozen years old,
+or thereabouts, moving round among the monuments which had kept their
+place there for some six or seven hundred years; for the church was
+built in the year 1185, and the most recent of the crusaders' monuments
+is said to date as far back as 1241. Their effigies have lain in this
+vast city, and passed unharmed through all its convulsions. The Great
+Fire must have crackled very loud in their stony ears, and they must
+have shaken day and night, as the bodies of the victims of the Plague
+were rattled over the pavements.
+
+Near the Temple church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain
+stone laid flat on the turf bears these words: "Here lies Oliver
+Goldsmith." I believe doubt has been thrown upon the statement that
+Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some poet ought to have
+written,
+
+ Where doubt is disenchantment
+ 'Tis wisdom to believe.
+
+We do not "drop a tear" so often as our Della Cruscan predecessors, but
+the memory of the author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" stirred my feelings
+more than a whole army of crusaders would have done. A pretty rough set
+of filibusters they were, no doubt.
+
+The whole group to which Goldsmith belonged came up before me, and as
+the centre of that group the great Dr. Johnson; not the Johnson of the
+"Rambler," or of "The Vanity of Human Wishes," or even of "Rasselas,"
+but Boswell's Johnson, dear to all of us, the "Grand Old Man" of his
+time, whose foibles we care more for than for most great men's virtues.
+Fleet Street, which he loved so warmly, was close by. Bolt Court,
+entered from it, where he lived for many of his last years, and where he
+died, was the next place to visit. I found Fleet Street a good deal like
+Washington Street as I remember it in former years. When I came to the
+place pointed out as Bolt Court, I could hardly believe my eyes that so
+celebrated a place of residence should be entered by so humble a
+passageway. I was very sorry to find that No. 3, where he lived, was
+demolished, and a new building erected in its place. In one of the other
+houses in this court he is said to have labored on his dictionary. Near
+by was a building of mean aspect, in which Goldsmith is said to have at
+one time resided. But my kind conductor did not profess to be well
+acquainted with the local antiquities of this quarter of London.
+
+If I had a long future before me, I should like above all things to
+study London with a dark lantern, so to speak, myself in deepest shadow
+and all I wanted to see in clearest light. Then I should want time,
+time, time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is
+one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of
+any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than
+would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my
+younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre
+was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time
+spent in walking the wards of a hospital.
+
+Another grand sight there was, not to be overlooked, namely, the
+Colonial Exhibition. The popularity of this immense show was very great,
+and we found ourselves, A---- and I, in the midst of a vast throng, made
+up of respectable and comfortable looking people. It was not strange
+that the multitude flocked to this exhibition. There was a jungle, with
+its (stuffed) monsters,--tigers, serpents, elephants; there were
+carvings which may well have cost a life apiece, and stuffs which none
+but an empress or a millionairess would dare to look at. All the arts of
+the East were there in their perfection, and some of the artificers were
+at their work. We had to content ourselves with a mere look at all these
+wonders. It was a pity; instead of going to these fine shows tired,
+sleepy, wanting repose more than anything else, we should have come to
+them fresh, in good condition, and had many days at our disposal. I
+learned more in a visit to the Japanese exhibition in Boston than I
+should have learned in half a dozen half-awake strolls through this
+multitudinous and most imposing collection of all
+
+ "The gorgeous East with richest hand
+ Showers on her kings,"
+
+and all the masterpieces of its wonder-working artisans.
+
+One of the last visits we paid before leaving London for a week in Paris
+was to the South Kensington Museum. Think of the mockery of giving one
+hour to such a collection of works of art and wonders of all kinds! Why
+should I consider it worth while to say that we went there at all? All
+manner of objects succeeded each other in a long series of dissolving
+views, so to speak, nothing or next to nothing having a chance to leave
+its individual impress. In the battle for life which took place in my
+memory, as it always does among the multitude of claimants for a
+permanent hold, I find that two objects came out survivors of the
+contest. The first is the noble cast of the column of Trajan, vast in
+dimensions, crowded with history in its most striking and enduring form;
+a long array of figures representing in unquestioned realism the
+military aspect of a Roman army. The second case of survival is thus
+described in the catalogue: "An altar or shrine of a female saint,
+recently acquired from Padua, is also ascribed to the same sculptor
+[Donatello]. This very valuable work of art had for many years been used
+as a drinking-trough for horses. A hole has been roughly pierced in it."
+I thought the figure was the most nearly perfect image of heavenly
+womanhood that I had ever looked upon, and I could have gladly given my
+whole hour to sitting--I could almost say kneeling--before it in silent
+contemplation. I found the curator of the Museum, Mr. Soden Smith,
+shared my feelings with reference to the celestial loveliness of this
+figure. Which is best, to live in a country where such a work of art is
+taken for a horse-trough, or in a country where the products from the
+studio of a self-taught handicraftsman, equal to the shaping of a
+horse-trough and not much more, are put forward as works of art?
+
+A little time before my visit to England, before I had even thought of
+it as a possibility, I had the honor of having two books dedicated to me
+by two English brother physicians. One of these two gentlemen was Dr.
+Walshe, of whom I shall speak hereafter; the other was Dr. J. Milner
+Fothergill. The name Fothergill was familiar to me from my boyhood. My
+old townsman, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who died in 1846 at the age of
+ninety-two, had a great deal to say about his relative Dr. John
+Fothergill, the famous Quaker physician of the last century, of whom
+Benjamin Franklin said, "I can hardly conceive that a better man ever
+existed." Dr. and Mrs. Fothergill sent us some beautiful flowers a
+little before we left, and when I visited him he gave me a medallion of
+his celebrated kinsman.
+
+London is a place of mysteries. Looking out of one of the windows at the
+back of Dr. Fothergill's house, I saw an immense wooden blind, such as
+we have on our windows in summer, but reaching from the ground as high
+as the top of the neighboring houses. While admitting the air freely, it
+shut the property to which it belonged completely from sight. I asked
+the meaning of this extraordinary structure, and learned that it was put
+up by a great nobleman, of whose subterranean palace and strange
+seclusion I had before heard. Common report attributed his unwillingness
+to be seen to a disfiguring malady with which he was said to be
+afflicted. The story was that he was visible only to his valet. But a
+lady of quality, whom I met in this country, told me she had seen him,
+and observed nothing to justify it. These old countries are full of
+romances and legends and _diableries_ of all sorts, in which truth
+and lies are so mixed that one does not know what to believe. What
+happens behind the high walls of the old cities is as much a secret as
+were the doings inside the prisons of the Inquisition.
+
+Little mistakes sometimes cause us a deal of trouble. This time it was
+the presence or absence of a single letter which led us to fear that an
+important package destined to America had miscarried. There were two
+gentlemen unwittingly involved in the confusion. On inquiring for the
+package at Messrs. Low, the publishers, Mr. Watts, to whom I thought it
+had been consigned, was summoned. He knew nothing about it, had never
+heard of it, was evidently utterly ignorant of us and our affairs. While
+we were in trouble and uncertainty, our Boston friend, Mr. James R.
+Osgood, came in. "Oh," said he, "it is Mr. Watt you want, the agent of a
+Boston firm," and gave us the gentleman's address. I had confounded Mr.
+Watt's name with Mr. Watts's name. "W'at's in a name?" A great deal
+sometimes. I wonder if I shall be pardoned for quoting six lines from
+one of my after-dinner poems of long ago:--
+
+ --One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt,
+ One trivial letter ruins all, left out;
+ A knot can change a felon into clay,
+ A not will save him, spelt without the k;
+ The smallest word has some unguarded spot,
+ And danger lurks in i without a dot.
+
+I should find it hard to account for myself during our two short stays
+in London in the month of August, separated by the week we passed in
+Paris. The ferment of continued over-excitement, calmed very much by our
+rest in the various places I have mentioned, had not yet wholly worked
+itself off. There was some of that everlasting shopping to be done.
+There were photographs to be taken, a call here and there to be made, a
+stray visitor now and then, a walk in the morning to get back the use of
+the limbs which had been too little exercised, and a drive every
+afternoon to one of the parks, or the Thames Embankment, or other
+locality. After all this, an honest night's sleep served to round out
+the day, in which little had been effected besides making a few
+purchases, writing a few letters, reading the papers, the Boston "Weekly
+Advertiser" among the rest, and making arrangements for our passage
+homeward. The sights we saw were looked upon for so short a time, most
+of them so very superficially, that I am almost ashamed to say that I
+have been in the midst of them and brought home so little. I remind
+myself of my boyish amusement of _skipping stones_,--throwing a
+flat stone so that it shall only touch the water, but touch it in half a
+dozen places before it comes to rest beneath the smooth surface. The
+drives we took showed us a thousand objects which arrested our
+attention. Every street, every bridge, every building, every monument,
+every strange vehicle, every exceptional personage, was a show which
+stimulated our curiosity. For we had not as yet changed our Boston eyes
+for London ones, and very common sights were spectacular and dramatic to
+us. I remember that one of our New England country boys exclaimed, when
+he first saw a block of city dwellings, "Darn it all, who ever see
+anything like that 'are? Sich a lot o' haousen all stuck together!" I
+must explain that "haousen" used in my early days to be as common an
+expression in speaking of houses among our country-folk as its phonetic
+equivalent ever was in Saxony. I felt not unlike that country-boy.
+
+In thinking of how much I missed seeing, I sometimes have said to
+myself, Oh, if the carpet of the story in the Arabian Nights would only
+take me up and carry me to London for one week,--just one short
+week,--setting me down fresh from quiet, wholesome living, in my usual
+good condition, and bringing me back at the end of it, what a different
+account I could give of my experiences! But it is just as well as it is.
+Younger eyes have studied and will study, more instructed travellers
+have pictured and will picture, the great metropolis from a hundred
+different points of view. No person can be said to know London. The most
+that any one can claim is that he knows something of it. I am now just
+going to leave it for another great capital, but in my concluding pages
+I shall return to Great Britain, and give some of the general
+impressions left by what I saw and heard in our mother country.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+Straitened as we were for time, it was impossible to return home without
+a glimpse, at least, of Paris. Two precious years of my early manhood
+were spent there under the reign of Louis Philippe, king of the French,
+_le Roi Citoyen_. I felt that I must look once more on the places I
+knew so well,--once more before shutting myself up in the world of
+recollections. It is hardly necessary to say that a lady can always find
+a little shopping, and generally a good deal of it, to do in Paris. So
+it was not difficult to persuade my daughter that a short visit to that
+city was the next step to be taken.
+
+We left London on the 5th of August to go _via_ Folkestone and
+Boulogne. The passage across the Channel was a very smooth one, and
+neither of us suffered any inconvenience. Boulogne as seen from the
+landing did not show to great advantage. I fell to thinking of Brummel,
+and what a satisfaction it would have been to treat him to a good
+dinner, and set him talking about the days of the Regency. Boulogne was
+all Brummel in my associations, just as Calais was all Sterne. I find
+everywhere that it is a distinctive personality which makes me want to
+linger round a spot, more than an important historical event. There is
+not much worth remembering about Brummel; but his audacity, his starched
+neckcloth, his assumptions and their success, make him a curious subject
+for the student of human nature.
+
+Leaving London at twenty minutes before ten in the forenoon, we arrived
+in Paris at six in the afternoon. I could not say that the region of
+France through which we passed was peculiarly attractive. I saw no fine
+trees, no pretty cottages, like those so common in England. There was
+little which an artist would be tempted to sketch, or a traveller by the
+railroad would be likely to remember.
+
+The place where we had engaged lodgings was Hôtel d'Orient, in the Rue
+Daunou. The situation was convenient, very near the Place Vendome and
+the Rue de la Paix. But the house was undergoing renovations which made
+it as unpresentable as a moulting fowl. Scrubbing, painting of blinds,
+and other perturbing processes did all they could to make it
+uncomfortable. The courtyard was always sloppy, and the whole condition
+of things reminded me forcibly of the state of Mr. Briggs's household
+while the mason was carrying out the complex operations which began with
+the application of "a little compo." (I hope all my readers remember Mr.
+Briggs, whose adventures as told by the pencil of John Leech are not
+unworthy of comparison with those of Mr. Pickwick as related by
+Dickens.) Barring these unfortunate conditions, the hotel was
+commendable, and when in order would be a desirable place of temporary
+residence.
+
+It was the dead season of Paris, and everything had the air of suspended
+animation. The solitude of the Place Vendome was something oppressive; I
+felt, as I trod its lonely sidewalk, as if I were wandering through
+Tadmor in the Desert. We were indeed as remote, as unfriended,--I will
+not say as melancholy or as slow,--as Goldsmith by the side of the lazy
+Scheldt or the wandering Po. Not a soul did either of us know in that
+great city. Our most intimate relations were with the people of the
+hotel and with the drivers of the fiacres. These last were a singular
+looking race of beings. Many of them had a dull red complexion, almost
+brick color, which must have some general cause. I questioned whether
+the red wine could have something to do with it. They wore glazed hats,
+and drove shabby vehicles for the most part; their horses would not
+compare with those of the London hansom drivers, and they themselves
+were not generally inviting in aspect, though we met with no incivility
+from any of them. One, I remember, was very voluble, and over-explained
+everything, so that we became afraid to ask him a question. They were
+fellow-creatures with whom one did not naturally enter into active
+sympathy, and the principal point of interest about the fiacre and its
+arrangements was whether the horse was fondest of trotting or of
+walking. In one of our drives we made it a point to call upon our
+Minister, Mr. McLane, but he was out of town. We did not bring a single
+letter, but set off exactly as if we were on a picnic.
+
+While A---- and her attendant went about making their purchases, I
+devoted myself to the sacred and pleasing task of reviving old memories.
+One of the first places I visited was the house I lived in as a student,
+which in my English friend's French was designated as "Noomero sankont
+sank Roo Monshure ler Pranse." I had been told that the whole region
+thereabout had been transformed by the creation of a new boulevard. I
+did not find it so. There was the house, the lower part turned into a
+shop, but there were the windows out of which I used to look along the
+Rue Vaugirard,--_au troisième_ the first year, _au second_ the
+second year. Why should I go mousing about the place? What would the
+shopkeeper know about M. Bertrand, my landlord of half a century ago; or
+his first wife, to whose funeral I went; or his second, to whose bridal
+I was bidden?
+
+I ought next to have gone to the hospital La Pitié, where I passed much
+of my time during those two years. But the people there would not know
+me, and my old master's name, Louis, is but a dim legend in the wards
+where he used to teach his faithful band of almost worshipping students.
+Besides, I have not been among hospital beds for many a year, and my
+sensibilities are almost as impressible as they were before daily habit
+had rendered them comparatively callous.
+
+How strange it is to look down on one's venerated teachers, after
+climbing with the world's progress half a century above the level where
+we left them! The stethoscope was almost a novelty in those days. The
+microscope was never mentioned by any clinical instructor I listened to
+while a medical student. _Nous avons changé tout cela_ is true of
+every generation in medicine,--changed oftentimes by improvement,
+sometimes by fashion or the pendulum-swing from one extreme to another.
+
+On my way back from the hospital I used to stop at the beautiful little
+church St. Etienne du Mont, and that was one of the first places to
+which I drove after looking at my student-quarters. All was just as of
+old. The tapers were burning about the tomb of St. Genevieve. Samson,
+with the jawbone of the ass, still crouched and sweated, or looked as if
+he did, under the weight of the pulpit. One might question how well the
+preacher in the pulpit liked the suggestion of the figure beneath it.
+The sculptured screen and gallery, the exquisite spiral stairways, the
+carved figures about the organ, the tablets on the walls,--one in
+particular relating the fall of two young girls from the gallery, and
+their miraculous protection from injury,--all these images found their
+counterpart in my memory. I did not remember how very beautiful is the
+stained glass in the _charniers_, which must not be overlooked by
+visitors.
+
+It is not far from St. Etienne du Mont to the Pantheon. I cannot say
+that there is any odor of sanctity about this great temple, which has
+been consecrated, if I remember correctly, and, I will not say
+desecrated, but secularized from time to time, according to the party
+which happened to be uppermost. I confess that I did not think of it
+chiefly as a sacred edifice, or as the resting-place, more or less
+secure, of the "_grands hommes_" to whom it is dedicated. I was
+thinking much more of Foucault's grand experiment, one of the most
+sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records
+of science. The reader may not happen to remember it, and will like,
+perhaps, to be reminded of it. Foucault took advantage of the height of
+the dome, nearly three hundred feet, and had a heavy weight suspended by
+a wire from its loftiest point, forming an immense pendulum,--the
+longest, I suppose, ever constructed. Now a moving body tends to keep
+its original plane of movement, and so the great pendulum, being set
+swinging north and south, tended to keep on in the same direction. But
+the earth was moving under it, and as it rolled from west to east the
+plane running through the north and south poles was every instant
+changing. Thus the pendulum appeared to change its direction, and its
+deviation was shown on a graduated arc, or by the marks it left in a
+little heap of sand which it touched as it swung. This experiment on the
+great scale has since been repeated on the small scale by the aid of
+other contrivances.
+
+My thoughts wandered back, naturally enough, to Galileo in the Cathedral
+at Pisa. It was the swinging of the suspended lamp in that edifice which
+set his mind working on the laws which govern the action of the
+pendulum. While he was meditating on this physical problem, the priest
+may have been holding forth on the dangers of meddling with matters
+settled by Holy Church, who stood ready to enforce her edicts by the
+logic of the rack and the fagot. An inference from the above remarks is
+that what one brings from a church depends very much on what he carries
+into it.
+
+The next place to visit could be no other than the Café Procope. This
+famous resort is the most ancient and the most celebrated of all the
+Parisian cafés. Voltaire, the poet J. B. Rousseau, Marmontel, Sainte
+Foix, Saurin, were among its frequenters in the eighteenth century. It
+stands in the Rue des Fossés-Saint Germain, now Rue de l'Ancienne
+Comédie. Several American students, Bostonians and Philadelphians,
+myself among the number, used to breakfast at this café every morning. I
+have no doubt that I met various celebrities there, but I recall only
+one name which is likely to be known to most or many of my readers. A
+delicate-looking man, seated at one of the tables, was pointed out to me
+as Jouffroy. If I had known as much about him as I learned afterwards, I
+should have looked at him with more interest. He had one of those
+imaginative natures, tinged by constitutional melancholy and saddened by
+ill health, which belong to a certain class of poets and sentimental
+writers, of which Pascal is a good example, and Cowper another. The
+world must have seemed very cruel to him. I remember that when he was a
+candidate for the Assembly, one of the popular cries, as reported by the
+newspapers of the time, was _A bas le poitrinaire!_ His malady soon
+laid him low enough, for he died in 1842, at the age of forty-six. I
+must have been very much taken up with my medical studies to have
+neglected my opportunity of seeing the great statesmen, authors,
+artists, orators, and men of science outside of the medical profession.
+Poisson, Arago, and Jouffroy are all I can distinctly recall, among the
+Frenchmen of eminence whom I had all around me.
+
+The Café Procope has been much altered and improved, and bears an
+inscription telling the date of its establishment, which was in the year
+1689. I entered the cafe, which was nearly or quite empty, the usual
+breakfast hour being past.
+
+_Garçon! Une tasse de café._
+
+If there is a river of _mneme_ as a counterpart of the river
+_lethe_, my cup of coffee must have got its water from that stream
+of memory. If I could borrow that eloquence of Jouffroy which made his
+hearers turn pale, I might bring up before my readers a long array of
+pallid ghosts, whom these walls knew well in their earthly habiliments.
+Only a single one of those I met here still survives. The rest are
+mostly well-nigh forgotten by all but a few friends, or remembered
+chiefly in their children and grandchildren.
+
+"How much?" I said to the garçon in his native tongue, or what I
+supposed to be that language. "_Cinq sous_," was his answer. By the
+laws of sentiment, I ought to have made the ignoble sum five francs, at
+least. But if I had done so, the waiter would undoubtedly have thought
+that I had just come from Charenton. Besides, why should I violate the
+simple habits and traditions of the place, where generation after
+generation of poor students and threadbare Bohemians had taken their
+morning coffee and pocketed their two lumps of sugar? It was with a
+feeling of virile sanity and Roman self-conquest that I paid my five
+sous, with the small additional fraction which I supposed the waiter to
+expect, and no more.
+
+So I passed for the last time over the threshold of the Café Procope,
+where Voltaire had matured his plays and Piron sharpened his epigrams;
+where Jouffroy had battled with his doubts and fears; where, since their
+time,--since my days of Parisian life,--the terrible storming youth,
+afterwards renowned as Léon Michel Gambetta, had startled the quiet
+guests with his noisy eloquence, till the old _habitués_ spilled
+their coffee, and the red-capped students said to each other, _"Il ira
+loin, ce gaillard-là!"_
+
+But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my
+early friends and companions, that came up before me in all the
+freshness of their young manhood? The memory of them recalls my own
+youthful days, and I need not go to Florida to bathe in the fountain of
+Ponce de Leon.
+
+I have sometimes thought that I love so well the accidents of this
+temporary terrestrial residence, its endeared localities, its precious
+affections, its pleasing variety of occupation, its alternations of
+excited and gratified curiosity, and whatever else comes nearest to the
+longings of the natural man, that I might be wickedly homesick in a
+far-off spiritual realm where such toys are done with. But there is a
+pretty lesson which I have often meditated, taught, not this time by the
+lilies of the field, but by the fruits of the garden. When, in the June
+honeymoon of the seasons, the strawberry shows itself among the bridal
+gifts, many of us exclaim for the hundredth time with Dr. Boteler,
+"Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never
+did." Nature, who is God's handmaid, does not attempt a rival berry. But
+by and by a little woolly knob, which looked and saw with wonder the
+strawberry reddening, and perceived the fragrance it diffused all
+around, begins to fill out, and grow soft and pulpy and sweet; and at
+last a glow comes to its cheek, and we say the peach is ripening. When
+Nature has done with it, and delivers it to us in its perfection, we
+forget all the lesser fruits which have gone before it. If the flavor of
+the peach and the fragrance of the rose are not found in some fruit and
+flower which grow by the side of the river of life, an earth-born spirit
+might be forgiven for missing them. The strawberry and the pink are very
+delightful, but we could be happy without them.
+
+So, too, we may hope that when the fruits of our brief early season of
+three or four score years have given us all they can impart for our
+happiness; when "the love of little maids and berries," and all other
+earthly prettinesses, shall "soar and sing," as Mr. Emerson sweetly
+reminds us that they all must, we may hope that the abiding felicities
+of our later life-season may far more than compensate us for all that
+have taken their flight.
+
+I looked forward with the greatest interest to revisiting the Gallery of
+the Louvre, accompanied by my long-treasured recollections. I retained a
+vivid remembrance of many pictures, which had been kept bright by seeing
+great numbers of reproductions of them in photographs and engravings.
+
+The first thing which struck me was that the pictures had been
+rearranged in such a way that I could find nothing in the place where I
+looked for it. But when I found them, they greeted me, so I fancied,
+like old acquaintances. The meek-looking "Belle Jardinière" was as
+lamb-like as ever; the pearly nymph of Correggio invited the stranger's
+eye as frankly as of old; Titian's young man with the glove was the
+calm, self-contained gentleman I used to admire; the splashy Rubenses,
+the pallid Guidos, the sunlit Claudes, the shadowy Poussins, the moonlit
+Girardets, Géricault's terrible shipwreck of the Medusa, the exquisite
+home pictures of Gerard Douw and Terburg,--all these and many more have
+always been on exhibition in my ideal gallery, and I only mention them
+as the first that happen to suggest themselves. The Museum of the Hôtel
+Cluny is a curious receptacle of antiquities, many of which I looked at
+with interest; but they made no lasting impression, and have gone into
+the lumber-room of memory, from which accident may, from time to time,
+drag out some few of them.
+
+After the poor unsatisfactory towers of Westminster Abbey, the two
+massive, noble, truly majestic towers of Notre Dame strike the traveller
+as a crushing contrast. It is not hard to see that one of these grand
+towers is somewhat larger than the other, but the difference does not
+interfere with the effect of the imposing front of the cathedral.
+
+I was much pleased to find that I could have entrance to the Sainte
+Chapelle, which was used, at the time of my earlier visit, as a
+storehouse of judicial archives, of which there was a vast accumulation.
+
+With the exception of my call at the office of the American Legation, I
+made but a single visit to any person in Paris. That person was M.
+Pasteur. I might have carried a letter to him, for my friend Mrs.
+Priestley is well acquainted with him, but I had not thought of asking
+for one. So I presented myself at his headquarters, and was admitted
+into a courtyard, where a multitude of his patients were gathered. They
+were of various ages and of many different nationalities, every one of
+them with the vague terror hanging over him or her. Yet the young people
+seemed to be cheerful enough, and very much like scholars out of school.
+I sent my card in to M. Pasteur, who was busily engaged in writing, with
+his clerks or students about him, and presently he came out and greeted
+me. I told him I was an American physician, who wished to look in his
+face and take his hand,--nothing more. I looked in his face, which was
+that of a thoughtful, hard-worked student, a little past the grand
+climacteric,--he was born in 1822. I took his hand, which has performed
+some of the most delicate and daring experiments ever ventured upon,
+with results of almost incalculable benefit to human industries, and the
+promise of triumph in the treatment of human disease which prophecy
+would not have dared to anticipate. I will not say that I have a full
+belief that hydrophobia--in some respects the most terrible of all
+diseases--is to be extirpated or rendered tractable by his method of
+treatment. But of his inventive originality, his unconquerable
+perseverance, his devotion to the good of mankind, there can be no
+question. I look upon him as one of the greatest experimenters that ever
+lived, one of the truest benefactors of his race; and if I made my due
+obeisance before princes, I felt far more humble in the presence of this
+great explorer, to whom the God of Nature has entrusted some of her most
+precious secrets.
+
+There used to be--I can hardly think it still exists--a class of
+persons who prided themselves on their disbelief in the reality of any
+such distinct disease as hydrophobia. I never thought it worth while to
+argue with them, for I have noticed that this disbelief is only a
+special manifestation of a particular habit of mind. Its advocates will
+be found, I think, most frequently among "the long-haired men and the
+short-haired women." Many of them dispute the efficacy of vaccination.
+Some are disciples of Hahnemann, some have full faith in the mind-cure,
+some attend the séances where flowers (bought from the nearest florist)
+are materialized, and some invest their money in Mrs. Howe's Bank of
+Benevolence. Their tendency is to reject the truth which is generally
+accepted, and to accept the improbable; if the impossible offers itself,
+they deny the existence of the impossible. Argument with this class of
+minds is a lever without a fulcrum.
+
+I was glad to leave that company of--patients, still uncertain of their
+fate,--hoping, yet pursued by their terror: peasants bitten by mad
+wolves in Siberia; women snapped at by their sulking lap-dogs in London;
+children from over the water who had been turned upon by the irritable
+Skye terrier; innocent victims torn by ill-conditioned curs at the doors
+of the friends they were meaning to visit,--all haunted by the same
+ghastly fear, all starting from sleep in the same nightmare.
+
+If canine rabies is a fearful subject to contemplate, there is a sadder
+and deeper significance in _rabies humana_; in that awful madness
+of the human race which is marked by a thirst for blood and a rage for
+destruction. The remembrance of such a distemper which has attacked
+mankind, especially mankind of the Parisian sub-species, came over me
+very strongly when I first revisited the Place Vendôme. I should have
+supposed that the last object upon which Parisians would, in their
+wildest frenzy, have laid violent hands would have been the column with
+the figure of Napoleon at its summit. We all know what happened in 1871.
+An artist, we should have thought, would be the last person to lead the
+iconoclasts in such an outrage. But M. Courbet has attained an
+immortality like that of Erostratus by the part he took in pulling down
+the column. It was restored in 1874. I do not question that the work of
+restoration was well done, but my eyes insisted on finding a fault in
+some of its lines which was probably in their own refracting media.
+Fifty years before an artist helped to overthrow the monument to the
+Emperor, a poet had apostrophized him in the bitterest satire since the
+days of Juvenal:--
+
+ "Encor Napoléon! encor sa grande image!
+ Ah! que ce rude et dur guerrier
+ Nous a couté de sang et de pleurs et d'outrage
+ Pour quelques rameaux de laurier!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Eh bien! dans tous ces jours d'abaissement, de peine,
+ Pour tous ces outrages sans nom,
+ Je n'ai jamais chargé qu'un être de ma haine,...
+ Sois maudit, O Napoléon!"
+
+After looking at the column of the Place Vendôme and recalling these
+lines of Barbier, I was ready for a visit to the tomb of Napoleon. The
+poet's curse had helped me to explain the painter's frenzy against the
+bronze record of his achievements and the image at its summit. But I
+forgot them both as I stood under the dome of the Invalides, and looked
+upon the massive receptacle which holds the dust of the imperial exile.
+Two things, at least, Napoleon accomplished: he opened the way for
+ability of all kinds, and he dealt the death-blow to the divine right of
+kings and all the abuses which clung to that superstition. If I brought
+nothing else away from my visit to his mausoleum, I left it impressed
+with what a man can be when fully equipped by nature, and placed in
+circumstances where his forces can have full play. "How infinite in
+faculty! ... in apprehension how like a god!" Such were my reflections;
+very much, I suppose, like those of the average visitor, and too
+obviously having nothing to require contradiction or comment.
+
+Paris as seen by the morning sun of three or four and twenty and Paris
+in the twilight of the superfluous decade cannot be expected to look
+exactly alike. I well remember my first breakfast at a Parisian café in
+the spring of 1833. It was in the Place de la Bourse, on a beautiful
+sunshiny morning. The coffee was nectar, the _flute_ was ambrosia,
+the _brioche_ was more than good enough for the Olympians. Such an
+experience could not repeat itself fifty years later. The first
+restaurant at which we dined was in the Palais Royal. The place was hot
+enough to cook an egg. Nothing was very excellent nor very bad; the wine
+was not so good as they gave us at our hotel in London; the enchanter
+had not waved his wand over our repast, as he did over my earlier one in
+the Place de la Bourse, and I had not the slightest desire to pay the
+garçon thrice his fee on the score of cherished associations.
+
+We dined at our hotel on some days, at different restaurants on others.
+One day we dined, and dined well, at the old Café Anglais, famous in my
+earlier times for its turbot. Another day we took our dinner at a very
+celebrated restaurant on the boulevard. One sauce which was served us
+was a gastronomic symphony, the harmonies of which were new to me and
+pleasing. But I remember little else of superior excellence. The garçon
+pocketed the franc I gave him with the air of having expected a
+napoleon.
+
+Into the mysteries of a lady's shopping in Paris I would not venture to
+inquire. But A---- and I strolled together through the Palais Royal in
+the evening, and amused ourselves by staring at the glittering windows
+without being severely tempted. Bond Street had exhausted our
+susceptibility to the shop-window seduction, and the napoleons did not
+burn in the pockets where the sovereigns had had time to cool.
+
+Nothing looked more nearly the same as of old than the bridges. The Pont
+Neuf did not seem to me altered, though we had read in the papers that
+it was in ruins or seriously injured in consequence of a great flood.
+The statues had been removed from the Pont Royal, one or two new bridges
+had been built, but all was natural enough, and I was tempted to look
+for the old woman, at the end of the Pont des Arts, who used to sell me
+a bunch of violets, for two or three sous,--such as would cost me a
+quarter of a dollar in Boston. I did not see the three objects which a
+popular saying alleges are always to be met on the Pont Neuf: a priest,
+a soldier, and a white horse.
+
+The weather was hot; we were tired, and did not care to go to the
+theatres, if any of them were open. The pleasantest hours were those of
+our afternoon drive in the Champs Elysées and the Bois de Boulogne,--or
+"the Boulogne Woods," as our American tailor's wife of the old time
+called the favorite place for driving. In passing the Place de la
+Concorde, two objects in especial attracted my attention,--the obelisk,
+which was lying, when I left it, in the great boat which brought it from
+the Nile, and the statue of Strasbourg, all covered with wreaths and
+flags. How like children these Parisians do act; crying "À Berlin, à
+Berlin!" and when Berlin comes to Paris, and Strasbourg goes back to her
+old proprietors, instead of taking it quietly, making all this parade of
+patriotic symbols, the display of which belongs to victory rather than
+to defeat!
+
+I was surprised to find the trees in the Bois de Boulogne so well grown:
+I had an idea that they had been largely sacrificed in the time of the
+siege. Among the objects which deserve special mention are the shrieking
+parrots and other birds and the yelping dogs in the grounds of the
+Society of Acclimatization,--out of the range of which the visitor will
+be glad to get as soon as possible. A fountain visited by newly married
+couples and their friends, with a restaurant near by, where the bridal
+party drink the health of the newly married pair, was an object of
+curiosity. An unsteadiness of gait was obvious in some of the feasters.
+At one point in the middle of the road a maenad was flinging her arms
+about and shrieking as if she were just escaped from a madhouse. But the
+drive in the Bois was what made Paris tolerable. There were few fine
+equipages, and few distinguished-looking people in the carriages, but
+there were quiet groups by the wayside, seeming happy enough; and now
+and then a pretty face or a wonderful bonnet gave variety to the
+somewhat _bourgeois_ character of the procession of fiacres.
+
+[Illustration: Place de la Concorde]
+
+I suppose I ought to form no opinion at all about the aspect of Paris,
+any more than I should of an oyster in a month without an _r_ in
+it. We were neither of us in the best mood for sight-seeing, and Paris
+was not sitting up for company; in fact, she was "not at home."
+Remembering all this, I must say that the whole appearance of the city
+was dull and dreary. London out of season seemed still full of life;
+Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid. The recollection of the
+sorrow, the humiliation, the shame, and the agony she had passed through
+since I left her picking her way on the arm of the Citizen King, with
+his old _riflard_ over her, rose before me sadly, ominously, as I
+looked upon the high board fence which surrounded the ruins of the
+Tuileries. I can understand the impulse which led the red caps to make a
+wreck of this grand old historical building. "Pull down the nest," they
+said, "and the birds will not come back." But I shudder when I think
+what "the red fool-fury of the Seine" has done and is believed capable
+of doing. I think nothing has so profoundly impressed me as the story of
+the precautions taken to preserve the Venus of Milo from the brutal
+hands of the mob. A little more violent access of fury, a little more
+fiery declamation, a few more bottles of _vin bleu_, and the
+Gallery of the Louvre, with all its treasures of art, compared with
+which the crown jewels just sold are but pretty pebbles, the market
+price of which fairly enough expresses their value,--much more, rather,
+than their true value,--that noble gallery, with all its masterpieces
+from the hands of Greek sculptors and Italian painters, would have been
+changed in a single night into a heap of blackened stones and a pile of
+smoking cinders.
+
+I love to think that now that the people have, or at least think they
+have, the power in their own hands, they will outgrow this form of
+madness, which is almost entitled to the name of a Parisian endemic.
+Everything looked peaceable and stupid enough during the week I passed
+in Paris. But among all the fossils which Cuvier found in the Parisian
+basin, nothing was more monstrous than the _poissardes_ of the old
+Revolution, or the _pétroleuses_ of the recent Commune, and I fear
+that the breed is not extinct. An American comes to like Paris as warmly
+as he comes to love England, after living in it long enough to become
+accustomed to its ways, and I, like the rest of my countrymen who
+remember that France was our friend in the hour of need, who remember
+all the privileges and enjoyments she has freely offered us, who feel
+that as a sister republic her destinies are of the deepest interest to
+us, can have no other wish than for her continued safety, order, and
+prosperity.
+
+We returned to London on the 13th of August by the same route we had
+followed in going from London to Paris. Our passage was rough, as
+compared to the former one, and some of the passengers were seasick. We
+were both fortunate enough to escape that trial of comfort and
+self-respect.
+
+I can hardly separate the story of the following week from that of the
+one before we went to Paris. We did a little more shopping and saw a few
+more sights. I hope that no reader of mine would suppose that I would
+leave London without seeing Madame Tussaud's exhibition. Our afternoon
+drives made us familiar with many objects which I always looked upon
+with pleasure. There was the obelisk, brought from Egypt at the expense
+of a distinguished and successful medical practitioner, Sir Erasmus
+Wilson, the eminent dermatologist and author of a manual of anatomy
+which for many years was my favorite text-book. There was "The
+Monument," which characterizes itself by having no prefix to its generic
+name. I enjoyed looking at and driving round it, and thinking over
+Pepys's lively account of the Great Fire, and speculating as to where
+Pudding Lane and Pie Corner stood, and recalling Pope's lines which I
+used to read at school, wondering what was the meaning of the second
+one:--
+
+ "Where London's column, pointing to the skies
+ Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies."
+
+The week passed away rapidly enough, and we made ready for our
+departure. It was no easy matter to get a passage home, but we had at
+last settled it that we would return in the same vessel in which we had
+at first engaged our passage to Liverpool, the Catalonia. But we were
+fortunate enough to have found an active and efficient friend in our
+townsman, Mr. Montgomery Sears, who procured staterooms for us in a much
+swifter vessel, to sail on the 21st for New York, the Aurania.
+
+Our last visitor in London was the faithful friend who had been the
+first to welcome us, Lady Harcourt, in whose kind attentions I felt the
+warmth of my old friendship with her admired and honored father and her
+greatly beloved mother. I had recently visited their place of rest in
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, recalling with tenderest emotions the many
+years in which I had enjoyed their companionship.
+
+On the 19th of August we left London for Liverpool, and on our arrival
+took lodgings at the Adelphi Hotel.
+
+The kindness with which I had been welcomed, when I first arrived at
+Liverpool, had left a deep impression upon my mind. It seemed very
+ungrateful to leave that noble city, which had met me in some of its
+most esteemed representatives with a warm grasp of the hand even before
+my foot had touched English soil, without staying to thank my new
+friends, who would have it that they were old friends. But I was
+entirely unfit for enjoying any company when I landed. I took care,
+therefore, to allow sufficient time in Liverpool, before sailing for
+home, to meet such friends, old and recent, as cared to make or renew
+acquaintance with me. In the afternoon of the 20th we held a reception,
+at which a hundred visitors, more or less, presented themselves, and we
+had a very sociable hour or two together. The Vice-Consul, Mr. Sewall,
+in the enforced absence of his principal, Mr. Russell, paid us every
+attention, and was very agreeable. In the evening I was entertained at a
+great banquet given by the Philomathean Society. This flourishing
+institution enrolls among its members a large proportion of the most
+cultivated and intelligent gentlemen of Liverpool. I enjoyed the meeting
+very highly, listened to pleasant things which were said about myself,
+and answered in the unpremeditated words which came to my lips and were
+cordially received. I could have wished to see more of Liverpool, but I
+found time only to visit the great exhibition, then open. The one class
+of objects which captivated my attention was the magnificent series of
+models of steamboats and other vessels. I did not look upon them with
+the eye of an expert, but the great number and variety of these
+beautiful miniature ships and boats excited my admiration.
+
+On the 21st of August we went on board the Aurania. Everything was done
+to make us comfortable. Many old acquaintances, friends, and family
+connections were our fellow-passengers. As for myself, I passed through
+the same trying experiences as those which I have recorded as
+characterizing my outward passage. Our greatest trouble during the
+passage was from fog. The frequency of collisions, of late years, tends
+to make everybody nervous when they hear the fog-whistle shrieking. This
+sound and the sight of the boats are not good for timid people.
+Fortunately, no one was particularly excitable, or if so, no one
+betrayed any special uneasiness.
+
+On the evening of the 27th we had an entertainment, in which Miss
+Kellogg sang and I read several poems. A very pretty sum was realized
+for some charity,--I forget what,--and the affair was voted highly
+successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor
+through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old
+rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or the much-lied-about
+maelstrom.
+
+On Sunday, the 29th of August, my birthday, we arrived in New York. In
+these days of birthday-books our chronology is not a matter of secret
+history, in case we have been much before the public. I found a great
+cake had been made ready for me, in which the number of my summers was
+represented by a ring of raisins which made me feel like Methuselah. A
+beautiful bouquet which had been miraculously preserved for the occasion
+was for the first time displayed. It came from Dr. Beach, of Boston,
+_via_ London. Such is the story, and I can only suppose that the
+sweet little cherub who sits up aloft had taken special charge of it, or
+it would have long ago withered.
+
+We slept at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which we found fresh, sweet,
+bright,--it must have been recently rejuvenated, I thought. The next day
+we took the train for New Haven, Springfield, and Boston, and that night
+slept in our own beds, thankful to find ourselves safe at home after our
+summer excursion, which had brought us so many experiences delightful to
+remember, so many friendships which have made life better worth living.
+
+In the following section I shall give some of the general impressions
+which this excursion has left in my memory, and a few suggestions
+derived from them.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+My reader was fairly forewarned that this narrative was to be more like
+a chapter of autobiography than the record of a tourist. In the language
+of philosophy, it is written from a subjective, not an objective, point
+of view. It is not exactly a "Sentimental Journey," though there are
+warm passages here and there which end with notes of admiration. I
+remind myself now and then of certain other travellers: of Benjamin of
+Tudela, going from the hospitalities of one son of Abraham to another;
+of John Buncle, finding the loveliest of women under every roof that
+sheltered him; sometimes, perhaps, of that tipsy rhymester whose record
+of his good and bad fortunes at the hands of landlords and landladies is
+enlivened by an occasional touch of humor, which makes it palatable to
+coarse literary feeders. But in truth these papers have many of the
+characteristics of private letters written home to friends. They
+_are_ written for friends, rather than for a public which cares
+nothing about the writer. I knew that there were many such whom it would
+please to know where the writer went, whom he saw and what he saw, and
+how he was impressed by persons and things.
+
+If I were planning to make a tour of the United Kingdom, and could
+command the service of all the wise men I count or have counted among my
+friends, I would go with such a retinue summoned from the ranks of the
+living and the dead as no prince ever carried with him. I would ask Mr.
+Lowell to go with me among scholars, where I could be a listener; Mr.
+Norton to visit the cathedrals with me; Professor Gray to be my
+botanical oracle; Professor Agassiz to be always ready to answer
+questions about the geological strata and their fossils; Dr. Jeffries
+Wyman to point out and interpret the common objects which present
+themselves to a sharp-eyed observer; and Mr. Boyd Dawkins to pilot me
+among the caves and cairns. Then I should want a better pair of eyes and
+a better pair of ears, and, while I was reorganizing, perhaps a quicker
+apprehension and a more retentive memory; in short, a new outfit, bodily
+and mental. But Nature does not care to mend old shoes; she prefers a
+new pair, and a young person to stand in them.
+
+What a great book one could make, with such aids, and how many would
+fling it down, and take up anything in preference, provided only that it
+were short enough; even this slight record, for want of something
+shorter!
+
+Not only did I feel sure that many friends would like to read our
+itinerary, but another motive prompted me to tell the simple story of
+our travels. I could not receive such kindness, so great evidences of
+friendly regard, without a strong desire, amounting to a positive
+necessity, for the expression of my grateful sense of all that had been
+done for us. Individually, I felt it, of course, as a most pleasing
+experience. But I believed it to have a more important significance as
+an illustration of the cordial feeling existing between England and
+America. I know that many of my countrymen felt the attentions paid to
+me as if they themselves shared them with me. I have lived through many
+strata of feeling in America towards England. My parents, full-blooded
+Americans, were both born subjects of King George III. Both learned in
+their early years to look upon Britons as the enemies of their country.
+A good deal of the old hostility lingered through my boyhood, and this
+was largely intensified by the war of 1812. After nearly half a century
+this feeling had in great measure subsided, when the War of Secession
+called forth expressions of sympathy with the slaveholding States which
+surprised, shocked, and deeply wounded the lovers of liberty and of
+England in the Northern States. A new generation is outgrowing that
+alienation. More and more the older and younger nations are getting to
+be proud and really fond of each other. There is no shorter road to a
+mother's heart than to speak pleasantly to her child, and caress it, and
+call it pretty names. No matter whether the child is something
+remarkable or not, it is _her_ child, and that is enough. It may be
+made too much of, but that is not its mother's fault. If I could believe
+that every attention paid me was due simply to my being an American, I
+should feel honored and happy in being one of the humbler media through
+which the good-will of a great and generous country reached the heart of
+a far-off people not always in friendly relations with her.
+
+I have named many of the friends who did everything to make our stay in
+England and Scotland agreeable. The unforeseen shortening of my visit
+must account for many disappointments to myself, and some, it may be, to
+others.
+
+First in the list of lost opportunities was that of making my bow to the
+Queen. I had the honor of receiving a card with the invitation to meet
+Her Majesty at a garden-party, but we were travelling when it was sent,
+and it arrived too late.
+
+I was very sorry not to meet Mr. Ruskin, to whom Mr. Norton had given me
+a note of introduction. At the time when we were hoping to see him it
+was thought that he was too ill to receive visitors, but he has since
+written me that he regretted we did not carry out our intention. I
+lamented my being too late to see once more two gentlemen from whom I
+should have been sure of a kind welcome,--Lord Houghton and Dean
+Stanley, both of whom I had met in Boston. Even if I had stayed out the
+whole time I had intended to remain abroad, I should undoubtedly have
+failed to see many persons and many places that I must always feel sorry
+for having missed. But as it is, I will not try to count all that I
+lost; let me rather be thankful that I met so many friends whom it was a
+pleasure to know personally, and saw so much that it is a pleasure to
+remember.
+
+I find that many of the places I most wish to see are those associated
+with the memory of some individual, generally one of the generations
+more or less in advance of my own. One of the first places I should go
+to, in a leisurely tour, would be Selborne. Gilbert White was not a
+poet, neither was he a great systematic naturalist. But he used his eyes
+on the world about him; he found occupation and happiness in his daily
+walks, and won as large a measure of immortality within the confines of
+his little village as he could have gained in exploring the sources of
+the Nile. I should make a solemn pilgrimage to the little town of Eyam,
+in Derbyshire, where the Reverend Mr. Mompesson, the hero of the plague
+of 1665, and his wife, its heroine and its victim, lie buried. I should
+like to follow the traces of Cowper at Olney and of Bunyan at Elstow. I
+found an intense interest in the Reverend Mr. Alger's account of his
+visit to the Vale of Llangollen, where Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss
+Ponsonby passed their peaceful days in long, uninterrupted friendship.
+Of course the haunts of Burns, the home of Scott, the whole region made
+sacred by Wordsworth and the group to which he belongs would be so many
+shrines to which I should make pilgrimages.
+
+I own, also, to having something of the melodramatic taste so notable in
+Victor Hugo. I admired the noble façade of Wells cathedral and the grand
+old episcopal palace, but I begged the bishop to show me the place where
+his predecessor, Bishop Kidder, and his wife, were killed by the falling
+chimney in the "Great Storm."--I wanted to go to Devizes, and see the
+monument in the market-place, where Ruth Pierce was struck dead with a
+lie in her mouth,--about all which I had read in early boyhood. I
+contented myself with a photograph of it which my friend, Mr. Willett,
+went to Devizes and bought for me.
+
+There are twenty different Englands, every one of which it would be a
+delight to visit, and I should hardly know with which of them to begin.
+
+The few remarks I have to make on what I saw and heard have nothing
+beyond the value of first impressions; but as I have already said, if
+these are simply given, without pretending to be anything more, they are
+not worthless. At least they can do little harm, and may sometimes amuse
+a reader whom they fail to instruct. But we must all beware of hasty
+conclusions. If a foreigner of limited intelligence were whirled through
+England on the railways, he would naturally come to the conclusion that
+the chief product of that country is _mustard_, and that its most
+celebrated people are Mr. Keen and Mr. Colman, whose great advertising
+boards, yellow letters on a black ground, and black letters on a yellow
+ground, stare the traveller in the face at every station.
+
+Of the climate, as I knew it in May and the summer months, I will only
+say that if I had any illusions about May and June in England, my
+fireplace would have been ample evidence that I was entirely
+disenchanted. The Derby day, the 26th of May, was most chilly and
+uncomfortable; at the garden-party at Kensington Palace, on the 4th of
+June, it was cold enough to make hot drinks and warm wraps a comfort, if
+not a necessity. I was thankful to have passed through these two ordeals
+without ill consequences. Drizzly, or damp, or cold, cloudy days were
+the rule rather than the exception, while we were in London. We had some
+few hot days, especially at Stratford, in the early part of July. In
+London an umbrella is as often carried as a cane; in Paris _"un homme
+à para-pluie"_ is, or used to be, supposed to carry that useful
+article because he does not keep and cannot hire a carriage of some
+sort. He may therefore be safely considered a person, and not a
+personage.
+
+The soil of England does not seem to be worn out, to judge by the
+wonderful verdure and the luxuriance of vegetation. It contains a great
+museum of geological specimens, and a series of historical strata which
+are among the most instructive of human records. I do not pretend to
+much knowledge of geology. The most interesting geological objects in
+our New England that I can think of are the great boulders and the
+scratched and smoothed surface of the rocks; the fossil footprints in
+the valley of the Connecticut; the trilobites found at Quincy. But the
+readers of Hugh Miller remember what a variety of fossils he found in
+the stratified rocks of his little island, and the museums are full of
+just such objects. When it comes to underground historical relics, the
+poverty of New England as compared with the wealth of Old England is
+very striking. Stratum after stratum carries the explorer through the
+relics of successive invaders. After passing through the characteristic
+traces of different peoples, he comes upon a Roman pavement, and below
+this the weapons and ornaments of a tribe of ancient Britons. One cannot
+strike a spade into the earth, in Great Britain, without a fair chance
+of some surprise in the form of a Saxon coin, or a Celtic implement, or
+a Roman fibula. Nobody expects any such pleasing surprise in a New
+England field. One must be content with an Indian arrowhead or two, now
+and then a pestle and mortar, or a stone pipe. A top dressing of
+antiquity is all he can look for. The soil is not humanized enough to be
+interesting; whereas in England so much of it has been trodden by human
+feet, built on in the form of human habitations, nay, has been itself a
+part of preceding generations of human beings, that it is in a kind of
+dumb sympathy with those who tread its turf. Perhaps it is not literally
+true that
+
+ One half her soil has walked the rest
+ In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages;
+
+but so many of all these lie within it that the whole mother island is a
+_campo santo_ to all who can claim the same blood as that which
+runs in the veins of her unweaned children.
+
+The flora and fauna of a country, as seen from railroad trains and
+carriages, are not likely to be very accurately or exhaustively studied.
+I spoke of the trees I noticed between Chester and London somewhat
+slightingly. But I did not form any hasty opinions from what happened to
+catch my eye. Afterwards, in the oaks and elms of Windsor Park, in the
+elms of Cambridge and Oxford and Salisbury, in the lindens of Stratford,
+in the various noble trees, including the cedar of Lebanon, in which
+Tennyson very justly felt a pride as their owner, I saw enough to make
+me glad that I had not uttered any rash generalizations on the strength
+of my first glance. The most interesting comparison I made was between
+the New England and the Old England elms. It is not necessary to cross
+the ocean to do this, as we have both varieties growing side by side in
+our parks,--on Boston Common, for instance. It is wonderful to note how
+people will lie about big trees. There must be as many as a dozen trees,
+each of which calls itself the "largest elm in New England." In my
+younger days, when I never travelled without a measuring-tape in my
+pocket, it amused me to see how meek one of the great swaggering elms
+would look when it saw the fatal measure begin to unreel itself. It
+seemed to me that the leaves actually trembled as the inexorable band
+encircled the trunk in _the smallest place it could find_, which is
+the only safe rule. The English elm (_Ulmus campestris_) as we see
+it in Boston comes out a little earlier perhaps, than our own, but the
+difference is slight. It holds its leaves long after our elms are bare.
+It grows upward, with abundant dark foliage, while ours spreads,
+sometimes a hundred and twenty feet, and often droops like a weeping
+willow. The English elm looks like a much more robust tree than ours,
+yet they tell me it is very fragile, and that its limbs are constantly
+breaking off in high winds, just as happens with our native elms. Ours
+is not a very long-lived tree; between two and three hundred years is, I
+think, the longest life that can be hoped for it. Since I have heard of
+the fragility of the English elm, which is the fatal fault of our own, I
+have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours.
+There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the
+Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to
+each other. It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness
+and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long,
+tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own,
+might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females
+of the two countries.
+
+I saw no horse-chestnut trees equal to those I remember in Salem, and
+especially to one in Rockport, which is the largest and finest I have
+ever seen; no willows like those I pass in my daily drives.
+
+On the other hand, I think I never looked upon a Lombardy poplar equal
+to one I saw in Cambridge, England. This tree seems to flourish in
+England much more than with us.
+
+I do not remember any remarkable beeches, though there are some very
+famous ones, especially the Burnham beeches.
+
+No apple-trees I saw in England compare with one next my own door, and
+there are many others as fine in the neighborhood.
+
+I have spoken of the pleasure I had in seeing by the roadside primroses,
+cowslips, and daisies. Dandelions, buttercups, hawkweed looked much as
+ours do at home. Wild roses also grew at the roadside,--smaller and
+paler, I thought, than ours.
+
+I cannot make a chapter like the famous one on Iceland, from my own
+limited observation: _There are no snakes in England._ I can say
+that I found two small caterpillars on my overcoat, in coming from Lord
+Tennyson's grounds. If they had stayed on his premises, they might
+perhaps have developed into "purple emperors," or spread "the tiger
+moth's deep damasked wings" before the enraptured eyes of the noble
+poet. These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard,
+or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few
+birds,--rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain
+just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately. I
+neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret. They had
+been singing at Oxford a short time before my visit to that place. The
+only song I heard was that which I have mentioned, the double note of
+the cuckoo.
+
+England is the paradise of horses. They are bred, fed, trained, groomed,
+housed, cared for, in a way to remind one of the Houyhnhnms, and
+strikingly contrasting with the conditions of life among the wretched
+classes whose existence is hardly more tolerable than that of those
+_quasi_-human beings under whose name it pleased the fierce
+satirist to degrade humanity. The horses that are driven in the hansoms
+of London are the best I have seen in any public conveyance. I cannot
+say as much of those in the four-wheelers.
+
+Broad streets, sometimes, as in Bond Street, with narrow sidewalks;
+_islands_ for refuge in the middle of many of them; deep areas;
+lofty houses; high walls; plants in the windows; frequent open spaces;
+policemen at near intervals, always polite in my experience,--such are
+my recollections of the quarter I most frequented.
+
+Are the English taller, stouter, lustier, ruddier, healthier, than our
+New England people? If I gave my impression, I should say that they are.
+Among the wealthier class, tall, athletic-looking men and stately,
+well-developed women are more common, I am compelled to think, than with
+us. I met in company at different times five gentlemen, each of whom
+would be conspicuous in any crowd for his stature and proportions. We
+could match their proportions, however, in the persons of well-known
+Bostonians. To see how it was with other classes, I walked in the Strand
+one Sunday, and noted carefully the men and women I met. I was surprised
+to see how many of both sexes were of low stature. I counted in the
+course of a few minutes' walk no less than twenty of these little
+people. I set this experience against the other. Neither is convincing.
+The anthropologists will settle the question of man in the Old and in
+the New World before many decades have passed.
+
+In walking the fashionable streets of London one can hardly fail to be
+struck with the well-dressed look of gentlemen of all ages. The special
+point in which the Londoner excels all other citizens I am conversant
+with is the hat. I have not forgotten Béranger's
+
+ "_Quoique leurs chapeaux soient bien laids_
+ *** ***! moi, j'aime les Anglais;"
+
+but in spite of it I believe in the English hat as the best thing of its
+ugly kind. As for the Englishman's feeling with reference to it, a
+foreigner might be pardoned for thinking it was his fetich, a North
+American Indian for looking at it as taking the place of his own
+medicine-bag. It is a common thing for the Englishman to say his prayers
+into it, as he sits down in his pew. Can it be that this imparts a
+religious character to the article? However this may be, the true
+Londoner's hat is cared for as reverentially as a High-Church altar. Far
+off its coming shines. I was always impressed by the fact that even with
+us a well-bred gentleman in reduced circumstances never forgets to keep
+his beaver well brushed, and I remember that long ago I spoke of the hat
+as the _ultimum moriens_ of what we used to call gentility,--the
+last thing to perish in the decay of a gentleman's outfit. His hat is as
+sacred to an Englishman as his beard to a Mussulman.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+In looking at the churches and the monuments which I saw in London and
+elsewhere in England, certain resemblances, comparisons, parallels,
+contrasts, and suggestions obtruded themselves upon my consciousness. We
+have one steeple in Boston which to my eyes seems absolutely perfect:
+that of the Central Church, at the corner of Newbury and Berkeley
+streets. Its resemblance to the spire of Salisbury had always struck me.
+On mentioning this to the late Mr. Richardson, the very distinguished
+architect, he said to me that he thought it more nearly like that of the
+Cathedral of Chartres. One of our best living architects agreed with me
+as to its similarity to that of Salisbury. It does not copy either
+exactly, but, if it had twice its actual dimensions, would compare well
+with the best of the two, if one is better than the other.
+Saint-Martin's-in-the-Fields made me feel as if I were in Boston. Our
+Arlington Street Church copies it pretty closely, but Mr. Gilman left
+out the columns. I could not admire the Nelson Column, nor that which
+lends monumental distinction to the Duke of York. After Trajan's and
+that of the Place Vendôme, each of which is a permanent and precious
+historical record, accounting sufficiently for its existence, there is
+something very unsatisfactory in these nude cylinders. That to the Duke
+of York might well have the confession of the needy knife grinder as an
+inscription on its base. I confess in all honesty that I vastly prefer
+the monument commemorating the fire to either of them. That _has_ a
+story to tell and tells it,--with a lie or two added, according to Pope,
+but it tells it in language and symbol.
+
+As for the kind of monument such as I see from my library window
+standing on the summit of Bunker Hill, and have recently seen for the
+first time at Washington, on a larger scale, I own that I think a
+built-up obelisk a poor affair as compared with an Egyptian monolith of
+the same form. It was a triumph of skill to quarry, to shape, to
+transport, to cover with expressive symbols, to erect, such a stone as
+that which has been transferred to the Thames Embankment, or that which
+now stands in Central Park, New York. Each of its four sides is a page
+of history, written so as to endure through scores of centuries. A
+built-up obelisk requires very little more than brute labor. A child can
+shape its model from a carrot or a parsnip, and set it up in miniature
+with blocks of loaf sugar. It teaches nothing, and the stranger must go
+to his guide-book to know what it is there for. I was led into many
+reflections by a sight of the Washington Monument. I found that it was
+almost the same thing at a mile's distance as the Bunker Hill Monument
+at half a mile's distance; and unless the eye had some means of
+measuring the space between itself and the stone shaft, one was about as
+good as the other. A mound like that of Marathon or that at Waterloo, a
+cairn, even a shaft of the most durable form and material, are fit
+memorials of the place where a great battle was fought. They seem less
+appropriate as monuments to individuals. I doubt the durability of these
+piecemeal obelisks, and when I think of that vast inverted pendulum
+vibrating in an earthquake, I am glad that I do not live in its shadow.
+The Washington Monument is more than a hundred feet higher than
+Salisbury steeple, but it does not look to me so high as that, because
+the mind has nothing to climb by. But the forming taste of the country
+revels in superlatives, and if we could only have the deepest artesian
+well in the world sunk by the side of the tallest column in all
+creation, the admiring, not overcritical patriot would be happier than
+ever was the Athenian when he looked up at the newly erected Parthenon.
+
+I made a few miscellaneous observations which may be worth recording.
+One of these was the fact of the repetition of the types of men and
+women with which I was familiar at home. Every now and then I met a new
+acquaintance whom I felt that I had seen before. Presently I identified
+him with his double on the other side. I had found long ago that even
+among Frenchmen I often fell in with persons whose counterparts I had
+known in America. I began to feel as if Nature turned out a batch of
+human beings for every locality of any importance, very much as a
+workman makes a set of chessmen. If I had lived a little longer in
+London, I am confident that I should have met myself, as I did actually
+meet so many others who were duplicates of those long known to me.
+
+I met Mr. Galton for a few moments, but I had no long conversation with
+him. If he should ask me to say how many faces I can visually recall, I
+should have to own that there are very few such. The two pictures which
+I have already referred to, those of Erasmus and of Dr. Johnson, come up
+more distinctly before my mind's eye than almost any faces of the
+living. My mental retina has, I fear, lost much of its sensitiveness.
+Long and repeated exposure of an object of any kind, in a strong light,
+is necessary to fix its image.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Among the gratifications that awaited me in England and Scotland was
+that of meeting many before unseen friends with whom I had been in
+correspondence. I have spoken of Mr. John Bellows. I should have been
+glad to meet Mr. William Smith, the Yorkshire antiquary, who has sent me
+many of his antiquarian and biographical writings and publications. I do
+not think I saw Mr. David Gilmour, of Paisley, whose "Paisley Folk" and
+other writings have given me great pleasure. But I did have the
+satisfaction of meeting Professor Gairdner, of Glasgow, to whose
+writings my attention was first called by my revered instructor, the
+late Dr. James Jackson, and with whom I had occasionally corresponded. I
+ought to have met Dr. Martineau. I should have visited the Reverend
+Stopford Brooke, who could have told me much that I should have liked to
+hear of dear friends of mine, of whom he saw a great deal in their hours
+of trial. The Reverend Mr. Voysey, whose fearless rationalism can hardly
+give him popularity among the conservative people I saw most of, paid me
+the compliment of calling, as he had often done of sending me his
+published papers. Now and then some less known correspondent would
+reveal himself or herself in bodily presence. Let most authors beware of
+showing themselves to those who have idealized them, and let readers not
+be too anxious to see in the flesh those whom they have idealized. When
+I was a boy, I read Miss Edgeworth's "L'Amie Inconnue." I have learned
+to appreciate its meaning in later years by abundant experiences, and I
+have often felt unwilling to substitute my real for my imaginary
+presence. I will add here that I must have met a considerable number of
+persons, in the crowd at our reception and elsewhere, whose names I
+failed to hear, and whom I consequently did not recognize as the authors
+of books I had read, or of letters I had received. The story of my
+experience with the lark accounts for a good deal of what seemed like
+negligence or forgetfulness, and which must be, not pardoned, but sighed
+over.
+
+I visited several of the well-known clubs, either by special invitation,
+or accompanied by a member. The Athenaeum was particularly attentive,
+but I was unable to avail myself of the privileges it laid freely open
+before me during my stay in London. Other clubs I looked in upon were:
+the Reform Club, where I had the pleasure of dining at a large party
+given by the very distinguished Dr. Morell Mackenzie; the Rabelais, of
+which, as I before related, I have been long a member, and which was one
+of the first places where I dined; the Saville; the Savage; the St.
+George's. I saw next to nothing of the proper club-life of London, but
+it seemed to me that the Athenaeum must be a very desirable place of
+resort to the educated Londoner, and no doubt each of the many
+institutions of this kind with which London abounds has its special
+attractions.
+
+My obligations to my brethren of the medical profession are too numerous
+to be mentioned in detail. Almost the first visit I paid was one to my
+old friend and fellow-student in Paris, Dr. Walter Hayle Walshe. After
+more than half a century's separation, two young friends, now old
+friends, must not expect to find each other just the same as when they
+parted. Dr. Walshe thought he should have known me; my eyes are not so
+good as his, and I would not answer for them and for my memory. That he
+should have dedicated his recent original and ingenious work to me,
+before I had thought of visiting England, was a most gratifying
+circumstance. I have mentioned the hospitalities extended to me by
+various distinguished members of the medical profession, but I have not
+before referred to the readiness with which, on all occasions, when
+professional advice was needed, it was always given with more than
+willingness, rather as if it were a pleasure to give it. I could not
+have accepted such favors as I received had I not remembered that I, in
+my time, had given my services freely for the benefit of those of my own
+calling. If I refer to two names among many, it is for special reasons.
+Dr. Wilson Fox, the distinguished and widely known practitioner, who
+showed us great kindness, has since died, and this passing tribute is
+due to his memory. I have before spoken of the exceptional favor we owed
+to Dr. and Mrs. Priestley. It enabled us to leave London feeling that we
+had tried, at least, to show our grateful sense of all the attentions
+bestowed upon us. If there were any whom we overlooked, among the guests
+we wished to honor, all such accidental omissions will be pardoned, I
+feel sure, by those who know how great and bewildering is the pressure
+of social life in London.
+
+I was, no doubt, often more or less confused, in my perceptions, by the
+large number of persons whom I met in society. I found the
+dinner-parties, as Mr. Lowell told me I should, very much like the same
+entertainments among my home acquaintances. I have not the gift of
+silence, and I am not a bad listener, yet I brought away next to nothing
+from dinner-parties where I had said and heard enough to fill out a
+magazine article. After I was introduced to a lady, the conversation
+frequently began somewhat in this way:--
+
+"It is a long time since you have been in this country, I believe?"
+
+"It is a _very_ long time: fifty years and more."
+
+"You find great changes in London, of course, I suppose?"
+
+"Not so great as you might think. The Tower is where I left it. The
+Abbey is much as I remember it. Northumberland House with its lion is
+gone, but Charing Cross is in the same old place. My attention is drawn
+especially to the things which have not changed,--those which I
+remember."
+
+That stream was quickly dried up. Conversation soon found other springs.
+I never knew the talk to get heated or noisy. Religion and politics
+rarely came up, and never in any controversial way. The bitterest
+politician I met at table was a quadruped,--a lady's dog,--who refused a
+desirable morsel offered him in the name of Mr. Gladstone, but snapped
+up another instantly on being told that it came from Queen Victoria. I
+recall many pleasant and some delightful talks at the dinner-table; one
+in particular, with the most charming woman in England. I wonder if she
+remembers how very lovely and agreeable she was? Possibly she may be
+able to identify herself.
+
+People--the right kind of people--meet at a dinner-party as two ships
+meet and pass each other at sea. They exchange a few signals; ask each
+other's reckoning, where from, where bound; perhaps one supplies the
+other with a little food or a few dainties; then they part, to see each
+other no more. But one or both may remember the hour passed together all
+their days, just as I recollect our brief parley with the brig
+Economist, of Leith, from Sierra Leone, in mid ocean, in the spring of
+1833.
+
+I am very far from despising the science of gastronomy, but if I wished
+to institute a comparison between the tables of England and America, I
+could not do it without eating my way through the four seasons. I will
+say that I did not think the bread from the bakers' shops was so good as
+our own. It was very generally tough and hard, and even the muffins were
+not always so tender and delicate as they ought to be. I got impatient
+one day, and sent out for some biscuits. They brought some very
+excellent ones, which we much preferred to the tough bread. They proved
+to be the so-called "seafoam" biscuit from New York. The potatoes never
+came on the table looking like new fallen snow, as we have them at home.
+We were surprised to find both mutton and beef overdone, according to
+our American taste. The French talk about the Briton's "_bifteck
+saignant_," but we never saw anything cooked so as to be, as we
+should say, "rare." The tart is national with the English, as the pie is
+national with us. I never saw on an English table that excellent
+substitute for both, called the Washington pie, in memory of him whom we
+honor as first in pies, as well as in war and in the hearts of his
+countrymen.
+
+The truth is that I gave very little thought to the things set before
+me, in the excitement of constantly changing agreeable companionship. I
+understand perfectly the feeling of the good liver in Punch, who
+suggests to the lady next him that their host has one of the best cooks
+in London, and that it might therefore be well to defer all conversation
+until they adjourned to the drawing-room. I preferred the conversation,
+and adjourned, indefinitely, the careful appreciation of the
+_menu_. I think if I could devote a year to it, I might be able to
+make out a graduated scale of articles of food, taking a well-boiled
+fresh egg as the unit of gastronomic value, but I leave this scientific
+task to some future observer.
+
+The most remarkable piece of European handiwork I remember was the steel
+chair at Longford Castle. The most startling and frightful work of man I
+ever saw or expect to see was another specimen of work in steel, said to
+have been taken from one of the infernal chambers of the Spanish
+Inquisition. It was a complex mechanism, which grasped the body and the
+head of the heretic or other victim, and by means of many ingeniously
+arranged screws and levers was capable of pressing, stretching,
+piercing, rending, crushing, all the most sensitive portions of the
+human body, one at a time or many at once. The famous Virgin, whose
+embrace drove a hundred knives into the body of the poor wretch she took
+in her arms, was an angel of mercy compared to this masterpiece of
+devilish enginery.
+
+Ingenuity is much better shown in contrivances for making our daily life
+more comfortable. I was on the lookout for everything that promised to
+be a convenience. I carried out two things which seemed to be new to the
+Londoners: the Star Razor, which I have praised so freely, and still
+find equal to all my commendations; and the mucilage pencil, which is a
+very handy implement to keep on the writer's desk or table. I found a
+contrivance for protecting the hand in drawing corks, which all who are
+their own butlers will appreciate, and luminous match-boxes which really
+shine brightly in the dark, and that after a year's usage; whereas one
+professing to shine by night, which I bought in Boston, is only visible
+by borrowed light. I wanted a very fine-grained hone, and inquired for
+it at a hardware store, where they kept everything in their line of the
+best quality. I brought away a very pretty but very small stone, for
+which I paid a large price. The stone was from Arkansas, and I need not
+have bought in London what would have been easily obtained at a dozen or
+more stores in Boston. It was a renewal of my experience with the
+seafoam biscuit. "Know thyself" and the things about thee, and "Take the
+good the gods provide thee," if thou wilt only keep thine eyes open, are
+two safe precepts.
+
+Who is there of English descent among us that does not feel with Cowper,
+
+ "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still"?
+
+Our recently naturalized fellow-citizens, of a different blood and
+different religion, must not suppose that we are going to forget our
+inborn love for the mother to whom we owe our being. Protestant England
+and Protestant America are coming nearer and nearer to each other every
+year. The interchange of the two peoples is more and more frequent, and
+there are many reasons why it is likely to continue increasing.
+
+Hawthorne says in a letter to Longfellow, "Why don't you come over,
+being now a man of leisure and with nothing to keep you in America? If I
+were in your position, I think I should make my home on this side of the
+water,--though always with an indefinite and never-to-be-executed
+intention to go back and die in my native land. America is a good land
+for young people, but not for those who are past their prime. ... A man
+of individuality and refinement can certainly live far more comfortably
+here--provided he has the means to live at all--than in New England. Be
+it owned, however, that I sometimes feel a tug at my very heart-strings
+when I think of my old home and friends." This was written from
+Liverpool in 1854.
+
+We must not forget that our fathers were exiles from their dearly loved
+native land, driven by causes which no longer exist. "Freedom to worship
+God" is found in England as fully as in America, in our day. In placing
+the Atlantic between themselves and the Old World civilizations they
+made an enormous sacrifice. It is true that the wonderful advance of our
+people in all the arts and accomplishments which make life agreeable has
+transformed the wilderness into a home where men and women can live
+comfortably, elegantly, happily, if they are of contented disposition;
+and without that they can be happy nowhere. What better provision can be
+made for a mortal man than such as our own Boston can afford its wealthy
+children? A palace on Commonwealth Avenue or on Beacon Street; a
+country-place at Framingham or Lenox; a seaside residence at Nahant,
+Beverly Farms, Newport, or Bar Harbor; a pew at Trinity or King's
+Chapel; a tomb at Mount Auburn or Forest Hills; with the prospect of a
+memorial stained window after his lamented demise,--is not this a pretty
+programme to offer a candidate for human existence?
+
+Give him all these advantages, and he will still be longing to cross the
+water, to get back to that old home of his fathers, so delightful in
+itself, so infinitely desirable on account of its nearness to Paris, to
+Geneva, to Rome, to all that is most interesting in Europe. The less
+wealthy, less cultivated, less fastidious class of Americans are not so
+much haunted by these longings. But the convenience of living in the Old
+World is so great, and it is such a trial and such a risk to keep
+crossing the ocean, that it seems altogether likely that a considerable
+current of re-migration will gradually develop itself among our people.
+
+Some find the climate of the other side of the Atlantic suits them
+better than their own. As the New England characteristics are gradually
+superseded by those of other races, other forms of belief, and other
+associations, the time may come when a New Englander will feel more as
+if he were among his own people in London than in one of our seaboard
+cities. The vast majority of our people love their country too well and
+are too proud of it to be willing to expatriate themselves. But going
+back to our old home, to find ourselves among the relatives from whom we
+have been separated for a few generations, is not like transferring
+ourselves to a land where another language is spoken, and where there
+are no ties of blood and no common religious or political traditions. I,
+for one, being myself as inveterately rooted an American of the
+Bostonian variety as ever saw himself mirrored in the Frog Pond, hope
+that the exchanges of emigrants and re-migrants will be much more evenly
+balanced by and by than at present. I hope that more Englishmen like
+James Smithson will help to build up our scientific and literary
+institutions. I hope that more Americans like George Peabody will call
+down the blessings of the English people by noble benefactions to the
+cause of charity. It was with deep feelings of pride and gratitude that
+I looked upon the bust of Longfellow, holding its place among the
+monuments of England's greatest and best children. I see with equal
+pleasure and pride that one of our own large-hearted countrymen has
+honored the memory of three English poets, Milton, and Herbert, and
+Cowper, by the gift of two beautiful stained windows, and with still
+ampler munificence is erecting a stately fountain in the birthplace of
+Shakespeare. Such acts as these make us feel more and more the truth of
+the generous sentiment which closes the ode of Washington Allston,
+"America to Great Britain:" We are one!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+I have told our story with the help of my daughter's diary, and often
+aided by her recollections. Having enjoyed so much, I am desirous that
+my countrymen and countrywomen should share my good fortune with me. I
+hesitated at first about printing names in full, but when I remembered
+that we received nothing but the most overflowing hospitality and the
+most considerate kindness from all we met, I felt sure that I could not
+offend by telling my readers who the friends were that made England a
+second home to us. If any one of them is disturbed by such reference as
+I have made to him or to her, I most sincerely apologize for the liberty
+I have taken. I am far more afraid that through sheer forgetfulness I
+have left unmentioned many to whom I was and still remain under
+obligations.
+
+If I were asked what I think of people's travelling after the commonly
+accepted natural term of life is completed, I should say that everything
+depends on constitution and habit. The old soldier says, in speaking of
+crossing the Beresina, where the men had to work in the freezing stream
+constructing the bridges, "Faut du tempérament pour cela!" I often
+thought of this expression, in the damp and chilly weather which not
+rarely makes English people wish they were in Italy. I escaped unharmed
+from the windy gusts at Epsom and the nipping chill of the Kensington
+garden-party; but if a score of my contemporaries had been there with
+me, there would not improbably have been a funeral or two within a week.
+If, however, the super-septuagenarian is used to exposures, if he is an
+old sportsman or an old officer not retired from active service, he may
+expect to elude the pneumonia which follows his footsteps whenever he
+wanders far from his fireside. But to a person of well-advanced years
+coming from a counting-room, a library, or a studio, the risk is
+considerable, unless he is of hardy natural constitution; any other will
+do well to remember, "Faut du tempérament pour cela!"
+
+Suppose there to be a reasonable chance that he will come home alive,
+what is the use of one's going to Europe after his senses have lost
+their acuteness, and his mind no longer retains its full measure of
+sensibilities and vigor? I should say that the visit to Europe under
+those circumstances was much the same thing as the _petit
+verre_,--the little glass of Chartreuse, or Maraschino, or Curaçoa,
+or, if you will, of plain Cognac, at the end of a long banquet. One has
+gone through many courses, which repose in the safe recesses of his
+economy. He has swallowed his coffee, and still there is a little corner
+left with its craving unappeased. Then comes the drop of liqueur,
+_chasse-café_, which is the last thing the stomach has a right to
+expect. It warms, it comforts, it exhales its benediction on all that
+has gone before. So the trip to Europe may not do much in the way of
+instructing the wearied and overloaded intelligence, but it gives it a
+fillip which makes it feel young again for a little while.
+
+Let not the too mature traveller think it will change any of his habits.
+It will interrupt his routine for a while, and then he will settle down
+into his former self, and be just what he was before. I brought home a
+pair of shoes I had made in London; they do not fit like those I had
+before I left, and I rarely wear them. It is just so with the new habits
+I formed and the old ones I left behind me.
+
+But am I not glad, for my own sake, that I went? Certainly I have every
+reason to be, and I feel that the visit is likely to be a great source
+of happiness for my remaining days. But there is a higher source of
+satisfaction. If the kindness shown me strengthens the slenderest link
+that binds us in affection to that ancestral country which is, and I
+trust will always be to her descendants, "dear Mother England," that
+alone justifies my record of it, and to think it is so is more than
+reward enough. If, in addition, this account of our summer experiences
+is a source of pleasure to many friends, and of pain to no one, as I
+trust will prove to be the fact, I hope I need never regret giving to
+the public the pages which are meant more especially for readers who
+have a personal interest in the writer.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Complete PG Works of Oliver
+Wendell Holmes, Sr., by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PG WORKS OF O.W. HOLMES ***
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