The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 98,
December, 1865, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 98, December, 1865

Author: Various

Release Date: June 28, 2010 [EBook #33009]

Language: English

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[Pg 641]

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics.

VOL. XVI.—DECEMBER, 1865.—NO. XCVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by Ticknor and Fields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.

Contents

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.
THE PARTING OF HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.
THE FORGE.
KING JAMES THE FIRST.
THE SLEEPER.
DOCTOR JOHNS.
BOOKS FOR OUR CHILDREN.
DIOS TE DE.
MODE OF CATCHING JELLY-FISHES.
ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER.
BEYOND.
CLEMENCY AND COMMON SENSE.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.

CHAPTER I

"Then I say, once for all, that priest shall never darken my doors again."

"Then I say they are my doors, and not yours, and that holy man shall brighten them whenever he will."

The gentleman and lady, who faced each other pale and furious, and interchanged this bitter defiance, were man and wife, and had loved each other well.

Miss Catharine Peyton was a young lady of ancient family in Cumberland, and the most striking, but least popular, beauty in the county. She was very tall and straight, and carried herself a little too imperiously; yet she would sometimes relax and all but dissolve that haughty figure, and hang sweetly drooping over her favorites; then the contrast was delicious, and the woman fascinating.

Her hair was golden and glossy, her eyes a lovely gray; and she had a way of turning them on slowly and full, so that their victim could not fail to observe two things: first, that they were grand and beautiful orbs; secondly, that they were thoughtfully overlooking him, instead of looking at him.

So contemplated by glorious eyes, a man feels small and bitter.

Catharine was apt to receive the blunt compliments of the Cumberland squires with this sweet, celestial, superior gaze, and for this and other imperial charms was more admired than liked.

The family estate was entailed on her brother; her father spent every farthing he could; so she had no money, and no expectations, except from a distant cousin,—Mr. Charlton, of Hernshaw Castle and Bolton Hall.

Even these soon dwindled. Mr. Charlton took a fancy to his late wife's relation, Griffith Gaunt, and had him into his house, and treated him as his heir. This disheartened two admirers who had hitherto sustained Catharine Peyton's gaze, and they retired. Comely girls, girls long-nosed, but rich, girls snub-nosed, but winning, married on all sides of her; but the imperial beauty remained Miss Peyton at two-and-twenty.

[Pg 642]

She was rather kind to the poor; would give them money out of her slender purse, and would even make clothes for the women, and sometimes read to them: very few of them could read to themselves in that day. All she required in return was, that they should be Roman Catholics, like herself, or at least pretend they might be brought to that faith by little and little.

She was a high-minded girl, and could be a womanly one,—whenever she chose.

She hunted about twice a week in the season, and was at home in the saddle, for she had ridden from a child; but so ingrained was her character, that this sport, which more or less unsexes most women, had no perceptible effect on her mind, nor even on her manners. The scarlet riding-habit and little purple cap, and the great, white, bony horse she rode, were often seen in a good place at the end of a long run; but, for all that, the lady was a most ungenial fox-huntress. She never spoke a word but to her acquaintances, and wore a settled air of dreamy indifference, except when the hounds happened to be in full cry, and she galloping at their heels. Worse than that, when the dogs were running into the fox, and his fate certain, she had been known to rein in her struggling horse, and pace thoughtfully home, instead of coming in at the death, and claiming the brush.

One day, being complimented at the end of a hard run by the gentleman who kept the hounds, she turned her celestial orbs on him, and said,—

"Nay, Sir Ralph, I love to gallop; and this sorry business gives me an excuse."

It was full a hundred years ago. The country teemed with foxes; but it abounded in stiff coverts, and a knowing fox was sure to run from one to another; and then came wearisome efforts to dislodge him; and then Miss Peyton's gray eyes used to explore vacancy, and ignore her companions, biped and quadruped.

But one day they drew Yewtree Brow, and found a stray fox. At Gaylad's first note he broke cover, and went away for home across the open country. A hedger saw him steal out, and gave a view halloo; the riders came round helter-skelter; the dogs in cover one by one threw up their noses and voices; the horns blew, the canine music swelled to a strong chorus, and away they swept across country,—dogs, horses, men; and the Deuse take the hindmost!

It was a gallant chase, and our dreamy virgin's blood got up. Erect, but lithe and vigorous, and one with her great white gelding, she came flying behind the foremost riders, and took leap for leap with them. One glossy, golden curl streamed back in the rushing air; her gray eyes glowed with earthly fire; and two red spots on the upper part of her cheeks showed she was much excited, without a grain of fear. Yet in the first ten minutes one gentleman was unhorsed before her eyes, and one came to grief along with his animal, and a thorough-bred chestnut was galloping and snorting beside her with empty saddle. Presently young Featherstone, who led her by about fifteen yards, crashed through a high hedge, and was seen no more, but heard wallowing in the deep, unsuspected ditch beyond. There was no time to draw bridle. "Lie still, Sir, if you please," said Catharine, with cool civility; then up rein, in spur, and she cleared the ditch and its muddy contents, alive and dead, and away without looking behind her.

On, on, on, till all the pinks and buckskins, erst so smart, were splashed with clay and dirt of every hue, and all the horses' late glossy coats were bathed with sweat and lathered with foam, and their gaping nostrils blowing and glowing red; and then it was that Harrowden Brook, swollen wide and deep by the late rains, came right between the fox and Dogmore Underwood, for which he was making.

The hunt sweeping down a hillside caught sight of Reynard running for the brook. They made sure of him now. But he lapped a drop, and then slipped in, and soon crawled out on the other[Pg 643] side, and made feebly for the covert, weighted with wet fur.

At sight of him, the hunt hallooed and trumpeted, and came tearing on with fresh vigor.

But when they came near the brook, lo, it was twenty feet wide, and running fast and brown. Some riders skirted it, looking for a narrow part. Two horses, being spurred at it, came to the bank, and then went rearing round on their heels, depositing one hat and another rider in the current. One gallant steed planted his feet like a tower, and snorted down at the water. One flopped gravely in, and had to swim, and be dragged out. Another leaped, and landed with his feet on the other bank, his haunches in the water, and his rider curled round his neck, and glaring out between his retroverted ears.

But Miss Peyton encouraged her horse with spur and voice, set her teeth, turned rather pale this time, and went at the brook with a rush, and cleared it like a deer. She and the huntsman were almost alone together on the other side, and were as close to the dogs as the dogs were to poor Pug, when he slipped through a run in a quickset hedge, and, reducing the dogs to single file, glided into Dogmore Underwood, a stiff hazel coppice of five years' growth.

The other riders soon straggled up, and then the thing was to get him out again. There were a few narrow roads cut in the underwood; and up and down these the huntsman and whipper-in went trotting, and encouraged the stanch hounds, and whipped the skulkers back into covert. Others galloped uselessly about, pounding the earth, for daisy-cutters were few in those days; and Miss Peyton relapsed into the transcendental. She sat in one place, with her elbow on her knee, and her fair chin supported by two fingers, as undisturbed by the fracas of horns and voices as an equestrian statue of Diana.

She sat so still and so long at a corner of the underwood that at last the harassed fox stole out close to her with lolling tongue and eye askant, and took the open field again. She thrilled at first sight of him, and her cheeks burned; but her quick eye took in all the signs of his distress, and she sat quiet, and watched him coolly. Not so her horse. He plunged, and then trembled all over, and planted his fore-feet together at this angle \, and parted his hind-legs a little, and so stood quivering, with cocked ears, and peeped over a low paling at the retiring quadruped, and fretted and sweated in anticipation of the gallop his long head told him was to follow. He looked a deal more statuesque than any three statues in England, and all about a creature not up to his knee.—And by the bye: the gentlemen who carve horses in our native isle, did they ever see one,—out of an omnibus?—The whipper-in came by, and found him in this gallant attitude, and suspected the truth, but, observing the rider's tranquil position, thought the fox had only popped out and then in again. However, he fell in with the huntsman, and told him Miss Peyton's gray had seen something. The hounds appeared puzzled; and so the huntsman rode round to Miss Peyton, and, touching his cap, asked her if she had seen nothing of the fox.

She looked him dreamily in the face.

"The fox?" said she; "he broke cover ten minutes ago."

The man blew his horn lustily, and then asked her reproachfully why she had not tally-hoed him, or winded her horn: with that he blew his own again impatiently.

Miss Peyton replied, very slowly and pensively, that the fox had come out soiled and fatigued, and trailing his brush. "I looked at him," said she, "and I pitied him. He was one, and we are many; he was so little, and we are so big; he had given us a good gallop; and so I made up my mind he should live to run another day."

The huntsman stared stupidly at her for a moment, then burst into a torrent of oaths, then blew his horn till it was hoarse, then cursed and swore till he was hoarse himself, then to his horn again, and dogs and men came rushing to the sound.[Pg 644]

"Couple up, and go home to supper," said Miss Peyton, quietly. "The fox is half-way to Gallowstree Gorse; and you won't get him out of that this afternoon, I promise you."

As she said this, she just touched her horse with the spur, leaped the low hedge in front of her, and cantered slowly home across country. She was one that seldom troubled the hard road, go where she would.

She had ridden about a mile, when she heard a horse's feet behind her. She smiled, and her color rose a little; but she cantered on.

"Halt, in the king's name!" shouted a mellow voice; and a gentleman galloped up to her side, and reined in his mare.

"What! have they killed?" inquired Catharine, demurely.

"Not they; he is in the middle of Gallowstree Gorse by now."

"And is this the way to Gallowstree Gorse?"

"Nay, Mistress," said the young man; "but when the fox heads one way and the deer another, what is a poor hunter to do?"

"Follow the slower, it seems."

"Say the lovelier and the dearer, sweet Kate."

"Now, Griffith, you know I hate flattery," said Kate; and the next moment came a soft smile, and belied this unsocial sentiment.

"Flattery?" said the lover. "I have no tongue to speak half your praises. I think the people in this country are as blind as bats, or they'd"——

"All except Mr. Griffith Gaunt; he has found a paragon, where wiser people see a wayward, capricious girl."

"Then he is the man for you. Don't you see that, Mistress?"

"No, I don't quite see that," said the lady, dryly.

This cavalier reply caused a dismay the speaker never intended. The fact is, Mr. George Neville, young, handsome, and rich, had lately settled in the neighborhood, and had been greatly smitten with Kate. The county was talking about it, and Griffith had been secretly on thorns for some days past. And now he could hide his uneasiness no longer; he cried out, in a sharp, trembling voice,—

"Why, Kate, my dear Kate! what! could you love any man but me? Could you be so cruel? could you? There, let me get off my horse, and lie down on this stubble, and you ride over me, and trample me to death. I would rather have you trample on my ribs than on my heart, with loving any one but me."

"Why, what now?" said Catharine, drawing herself up; "I must scold you handsomely"; and she drew rein and turned full upon him; but by this means she saw his face was full of real distress; so, instead of reprimanding him, she said, gently, "Why, Griffith, what is to do? Are you not my servant? Do not I send you word, whenever I dine from home?"

"Yes, dearest; and then I call at that house, and stick there till they guess what I would be at, and ask me, too."

Catharine smiled, and proceeded to remind him that thrice a week she permitted him to ride over from Bolton, (a distance of fifteen miles,) to see her.

"Yes," replied Griffith, "and I must say you always come, wet or dry, to the shrubbery-gate, and put your hand in mine a minute. And, Kate," said he, piteously, "at the bare thought of your putting that same dear hand in another man's, my heart turns sick within me, and my skin burns and trembles on me."

"But you have no cause," said Catharine, soothingly. "Nobody, except yourself, doubts my affection for you. You are often thrown in my teeth, Griffith,—and" (clenching her own) "I like you all the better, of course."

Griffith replied with a burst of gratitude; and then, as men will, proceeded to encroach.

"Ah," said he, "if you would but pluck up courage, and take the matrimonial fence with me at once."

Miss Peyton sighed at that, and drooped a little upon her saddle. After a pause, she enumerated the "just impediments."[Pg 645] She reminded him that neither of them had means to marry on.

He made light of that; he should soon have plenty; Mr. Charlton has as good as told him he was to have Bolton Hall and Grange: "Six hundred acres, Kate, besides the park and paddocks."

In his warmth he forgot that Catharine was to have been Mr. Charlton's heir. Catharine was too high-minded to bear Griffith any grudge; but she colored a little, and said she was averse to come to him a penniless bride.

"Why, what matters it which of us has the dross, so that there is enough for both?" said Griffith, with an air of astonishment.

Catharine smiled approbation, and tacitly yielded that point. But then she objected the difference in their faith.

"Oh, honest folk get to heaven by different roads," said Griffith, carelessly.

"I have been taught otherwise," replied Catharine, gravely.

"Then give me your hand and I'll give you my soul," said Griffith Gaunt, impetuously. "I'll go to heaven your way, if you can't go mine. Anything sooner than be parted in this world or the next."

She looked at him in silence; and it was in a faint, half apologetic tone she objected, that all her kinsfolk were set against it.

"It is not their business; it is ours," was the prompt reply.

"Well, then," said Catharine, sadly, "I suppose I must tell you the true reason: I feel I should not make you happy; I do not love you quite as you want to be loved, as you deserve to be loved. You need not look so; nothing in flesh and blood is your rival. But my heart bleeds for the Church; I think of her ancient glory in this kingdom, and, when I see her present condition, I long to devote myself to her service. I am very fit to be an abbess or a nun,—most unfit to be a wife. No, no,—I must not, ought not, dare not, marry a Protestant. Take the advice of one who esteems you dearly; leave me,—fly from me,—forget me,—do everything but hate me. Nay, do not hate me; you little know the struggle in my mind. Farewell; the saints, whom you scorn, watch over and protect you! Farewell!"

And with this she sighed, and struck her spur into the gray, and he darted off at a gallop.

Griffith, little able to cope with such a character as this, sat petrified, and would have been rooted to the spot, if he had happened to be on foot. But his mare set off after her companion, and a chase of a novel kind commenced. Catharine's horse was fresher than Griffith's mare, and the latter, not being urged by her petrified master, lost ground.

But when she drew near to her father's gate, Catharine relaxed her speed, and Griffith rejoined her.

She had already half relented, and only wanted a warm and resolute wooer to bring her round. But Griffith was too sore, and too little versed in woman. Full of suspicion and bitterness, he paced gloomy and silent by her side, till they reached the great avenue that led to her father's house.

And while he rides alongside the capricious creature in sulky silence, I may as well reveal a certain foible in his own character.

This Griffith Gaunt was by no means deficient in physical courage; but he was instinctively disposed to run away from mental pain the moment he lost hope of driving it away from him. For instance, if Catharine had been ill and her life in danger, he would have ridden day and night to save her,—would have beggared himself to save her; but if she had died, he would either have killed himself, or else fled the country, and so escaped the sight of every object that was associated with her and could agonize him. I do not think he could have attended the funeral of one he loved.

The mind, as well as the body, has its self-protecting instincts. This of Griffith's was, after all, an instinct of[Pg 646] that class, and, under certain circumstances, is true wisdom. But Griffith, I think, carried the instinct to excess; and that is why I call it his foible.

"Catharine," said he, resolutely, "let me ride by your side to the house for once; for I read your advice my own way, and I mean to follow it: after to-day you will be troubled with me no more. I have loved you these three years, I have courted you these two years, and I am none the nearer; I see I am not the man you mean to marry: so I shall do as my father did, ride down to the coast, and sell my horse, and ship for foreign parts."

"Oh, as you will," said Catharine, haughtily: she quite forgot she had just recommended him to do something of this very kind.

Presently she stole a look. His fine ruddy cheek was pale; his manly brown eyes were moist; yet a gloomy and resolute expression on his tight-drawn lips. She looked at him sidelong, and thought how often he had ridden thirty miles on that very mare to get a word with her at the shrubbery-gate. And now the mare to be sold! The man to go broken-hearted to sea,—perhaps to his death! Her good heart began to yearn.

"Griffith," said she, softly, "it is not as if I were going to wed anybody else. Is it nothing to be preferred by her you say you love? If I were you, I would do nothing rash. Why not give me a little time? In truth, I hardly know my own mind about it two days together."

"Kate," said the young man, firmly, "I am courting you this two years. If I wait two years more, it will be but to see the right man come and carry you in a month; for so girls are won, when they are won at all. Your sister that is married and dead, she held Josh Pitt in hand for years; and what is the upshot? Why, he wears the willow for her to this day; and her husband married again, before her grave was green. Nay, I have done all an honest man can to woo you; so take me now, or let me go."

At this, Kate began to waver secretly, and ask herself whether it would not be better to yield, since he was so abominably resolute.

But the unlucky fellow did not leave well alone. He went on to say,—

"Once out of sight of this place, I may cure myself of my fancy. Here I never could."

"Oh," said Catharine, directly, "if you are so bent on being cured, it would not become me to say nay."

Griffith Gaunt bit his lip and hung his head, and made no reply.

The patience with which he received her hard speech was more apparent than real; but it told. Catharine, receiving no fresh positive provocation, relented again of her own accord, and, after a considerable silence, whispered, softly,—

"Think how we should all miss you."

Here was an overture to reconciliation. But, unfortunately, it brought out what had long been rankling in Griffith's mind, and was in fact the real cause of the misunderstanding.

"Oh," said he, "those I care for will soon find another to take my place! Soon? quotha. They have not waited till I was gone for that."

"Ah, indeed!" said Catharine, with some surprise; then, like the quick-witted girl she was, "so this is what all the coil is about."

She then, with a charming smile, begged him to inform her who was his destined successor in her esteem. Griffith colored purple at her cool hypocrisy, (for such he considered it,) and replied, almost fiercely,—

"Who but that young black-a-viséd George Neville, that you have been coquetting with this month past,—and danced all night with him at Lady Munster's ball, you did."

Catharine blushed, and said, deprecatingly,—

"You were not there, Griffith, or to be sure I had not danced with him."

"And he toasts you by name, wherever he goes."

"Can I help that? Wait till I toast[Pg 647] him, before you make yourself ridiculous, and me very angry—about nothing."

Griffith, sticking to his one idea, replied, doggedly,—

"Mistress Alice Peyton shilly-shallied with her true lover for years, till Richard Hilton came, that was not fit to tie his shoes; and then"——

Catharine cut him short,—

"Affront me, if nothing less will serve; but spare my sister in her grave."

She began the sentence angrily, but concluded it in a broken voice. Griffith was half disarmed; but only half. He answered, sullenly,—

"She did not die till she had jilted an honest gentleman and broken his heart, and married a sot, to her cost. And you are of her breed, when all is done; and now that young coxcomb has come, like Dick Hilton, between you and me."

"But I do not encourage him."

"You do not discourage him," retorted Griffith, "or he would not be so hot after you. Were you ever the woman to say, 'I have a servant already that loves me dear'? That one frank word had sent him packing."

Miss Peyton colored, and the water came into her eyes.

"I may have been imprudent," she murmured. "The young gentleman made me smile with his extravagance. I never thought to be misunderstood by him, far less by you." Then, suddenly, as bold as brass,—"It's all your fault; if he had the power to make you uneasy, why did you not check me before?"

"Ay, forsooth, and have it cast in my teeth I was a jealous monster, and played the tyrant before my time. A poor fellow scarce knows what to be at that loves a coquette."

"Coquette I am none," replied the lady, bridling magnificently.

Griffith took no notice of this interruption. He proceeded to say that he had hitherto endured this intrusion of a rival in silence, though with a sore heart, hoping his patience might touch her, or the fire go out of itself. But at last, unable to bear it any longer in silence, he had shown his wound to one he knew could feel for him, his poor friend Pitt. Pitt had then let him know that his own mistake had been over-confidence in Alice Peyton's constancy.

"He said to me, 'Watch your Kate close, and, at the first blush of a rival, say you to her, Part with him, or part with me.'"

Catharine pinned him directly.

"And this is how you take Joshua Pitt's advice,—by offering to run away from this sorry rival."

The shrewd reply, and a curl of the lip, half arch, half contemptuous, that accompanied the thrust, staggered the less ready Griffith. He got puzzled, and showed it.

"Well, but," stammered he at last, "your spirit is high; I was mostly afeard to put it so plump to you. So I thought I would go about a bit. However, it comes to the same thing; for this I do know,—that, if you refuse me your hand this day, it is to give it to a new acquaintance, as your Alice did before you. And if it is to be so, 'tis best for me to be gone: best for him, and best for you. You don't know me, Kate; for, as clever as you are, at the thought of your playing me false, after all these years, and marrying that George Neville, my heart turns to ice, and then to fire, and my head seems ready to burst, and my hands to do mad and bloody acts. Ay, I feel I should kill him, or you, or both, at the church-porch. Ah!"

He suddenly griped her arm, and at the same time involuntarily checked his mare.

Both horses stopped.

She raised her head with an inquiring look, and saw her lover's face discolored with passion, and so strangely convulsed that she feared at first he was in a fit, or stricken with death or palsy.

She uttered a cry of alarm, and stretched forth her hand towards him.

But the next moment she drew it back from him; for, following his eye, she discerned the cause of this ghastly look. Her father's house stood at the end of[Pg 648] the avenue they had just entered; but there was another approach to it, namely, by a bridle-road at right angles to the avenue or main entrance; and up that bridle-road a gentleman was walking his horse, and bid fair to meet them at the hall-door.

It was young Neville. There was no mistaking his piebald charger for any other animal in that county.

Kate Peyton glanced from lover to lover, and shuddered at Griffith. She was familiar with petty jealousy; she had even detected it pinching or coloring many a pretty face that tried very hard to hide it all the time. But that was nothing to what she saw now: hitherto she had but beheld the feeling of jealousy; but now she witnessed the livid passion of jealousy writhing in every lineament of a human face. That terrible passion had transfigured its victim in a moment: the ruddy, genial, kindly Griffith, with his soft brown eye, was gone; and in his place lowered a face older, and discolored, and convulsed, and almost demoniacal.

Women (wiser, perhaps, in this than men) take their strongest impressions by the eye, not ear. Catharine, I say, looked at him she had hitherto thought she knew,—looked and feared him. And even while she looked and shuddered, Griffith spurred his mare sharply, and then drew her head across the gray gelding's path. It was an instinctive impulse to bar the lady he loved from taking another step towards the place where his rival awaited her.

"I cannot bear it," he gasped. "Choose you now, once for all, between that puppy there and me": and he pointed with his riding-whip at his rival, and waited with his teeth clenched for her decision.

The movement was rapid, the gesture large and commanding, and the words manly: for what says the fighting poet?—

CHAPTER II.

Miss Peyton drew herself up and back by one motion, like a queen at bay; but still she eyed him with a certain respect, and was careful now not to provoke nor pain him needlessly.

"I prefer you,—though you speak harshly to me, Sir," said she, with gentle dignity.

"Then give me your hand, with that man in sight, and end my torments; promise to marry me this very week. Ah, Kate, have pity on your poor, faithful servant, who has loved you so long!"

"I do, Griffith, I do," said she, sweetly; "but I shall never marry now. Only set your mind at rest about Mr. Neville there. He has never asked me, for one thing."

"He soon will, then."

"No, no; I declare I will be very cool to him, after what you have said to me. But I cannot marry you, neither. I dare not. Listen to me, and do, pray, govern your temper, as I am doing mine. I have often read of men with a passion for jealousy,—I mean, men whose jealousy feeds upon air, and defies reason. I know you now for such a man. Marriage would not cure this madness; for wives do not escape admiration any more than maids. Something tells me you would be jealous of every fool that paid me some stale compliment, jealous of my female friends, and jealous of my relations, and perhaps jealous of your own children, and of that holy, persecuted Church which must still have a large share of my heart. No, no; your face and your words have shown me a precipice. I tremble and draw back, and now I never will marry at all: from this day I give myself to the Church."

Griffith did not believe one word of all this.

"That is your answer to me," said he, bitterly. "When the right man puts the question (and he is not far off) you will tell another tale. You take me for a fool, and you mock me; you are not the lass to die an old maid: and men are not the fools to let you. With faces like yours, the new servant comes before[Pg 649] the old one is gone. Well, I have got my answer. County Cumberland, you are no place for me! The ways and the fields we two have ridden together,—oh, how could I bear their sight without my dear? Why, what a poor-spirited fool I am to stay and whine! Come, Mistress, your lover waits you there, and your discarded servant knows good-breeding: he leaves the country not to spoil your sport."

Catharine panted heavily.

"Well, Sir," said she, "then it is your doing, not mine. Will you not even shake hands with me, Griffith?"

"I were a brute else," sighed the jealous one, with a sudden revulsion of feeling. "I have spent the happiest hours of my life beside you. If I loved thee less, I had never left thee."

He clung a little while to her hands, more like a drowning man than anything else, then let them go, and suddenly shook his clenched fist in the direction of George Neville, and cried out with a savage yell,—

"My curse on him that parts us twain! And you, Kate, may God bless you single, and curse you married! and that is my last word in Cumberland."

"Amen!" said Catharine, resignedly.

And even with this they wheeled their horses apart, and rode away from each other: she very pale, but erect with wounded pride; he reeling in his saddle like a drunken man.

And so Griffith Gaunt, stung mad by jealousy, affronted his sweetheart, the proudest girl in Cumberland, and, yielding to his foible, fled from his pain.

Our foibles are our manias.

CHAPTER III.

Miss Peyton was shocked and grieved; but she was also affronted and wounded. Now anger seems to have some fine buoyant quality, which makes it rise and come uppermost in an agitated mind. She rode proudly into the court-yard of her father's house, and would not look once behind to see the last of her perverse lover.

The old groom, Joe, who had taught her to ride when she was six years old, saw her coming, and hobbled out to hold her horse, while she alighted.

"Mistress Kate," said he, "have you seen Master Griffith Gaunt anywheres?"

The young lady colored at this question.

"Why?" said she.

"Why?" repeated old Joe, a little contemptuously. "Why, where have you been not to know the country is out after un? First comed Jock Dennet, with his horse all in a lather, to say old Mr. Charlton was took ill, and had asked for Master Griffith. I told him to go to Dogmore Copse: 'Our Kate is a-hunting to-day,' says I; 'and your Griffith, he is sure not to be far from her gelding's tail'; a sticks in his spurs and away a goes. What, ha'n't you seen Jock, neither?"

"No, no," replied Miss Peyton, impatiently. "What, is there anything the matter?"

"The matter, quo' she! Why, Jock hadn't been gone an hour when in rides the new footman all in a lather, and brings a letter for Master Griffith from the old gentleman's housekeeper. 'You leave the letter with me, in case,' says I, and I sends him a-field after t' other. Here be the letter."

He took off his cap and produced the letter.

Catharine started at the sight of it.

"Alack!" said she, "this is a heavy day. Look, Joe; sealed with black. Poor Cousin Charlton! I doubt he is no more."

Joe shook his head expressively, and told her the butcher had come from that part not ten minutes ago, with word that the blinds were all down at Bolton Hall.

Poor human nature! A gleam of joy shot through Catharine's heart; this sad news would compel Griffith to stay at home and bury his benefactor; and that delay would give him time to reflect; and, somehow or other, she felt sure it would end in his not going at all.

But these thoughts had no sooner passed through her than she was ashamed of them and of herself. What! welcome[Pg 650] that poor old man's death because it would keep her cross-grained lover at home? Her cheeks burned with shame; and, with a superfluous exercise of self-defence, she retired from Old Joe, lest he should divine what was passing in her mind.

But she was so wrapt in thought that she carried the letter away with her unconsciously.

As she passed through the hall, she heard George Neville and her father in animated conversation. She mounted the stairs softly, and went into a little boudoir of her own on the first floor, and sat down. The house stood high, and there was a very expansive and beautiful view of the country from this window. She sat down by it and drooped, and looked wistfully through the window, and thought of the past, and fell into a sad reverie. Pity began to soften her pride and anger, and presently two gentle tears dimmed her glorious eyes a moment, then stole down her delicate cheeks.

While she sat thus lost in the past, jovial voices and creaking boots broke suddenly upon her ear, and came up the stairs; they jarred upon her; so she cast one last glance out of the window, and rose to get out of their way, if possible. But it was too late; a heavy step came to the door, and a ruddy, Port-drinking face peeped in. It was her father.

"See-ho!" roared the jovial Squire. "I've found the hare on her form; bide thou outside a moment."

And he entered the room; but he had no sooner closed the door than his whole manner changed from loud and jovial to agitated and subdued.

"Kate, my girl," said he, piteously, "I have been a bad father to thee. I have spent all the money that should have been thine; thy poor father can scarce look thee in the face. So now I bring thee a good husband; be a good child now, and a dutiful. Neville's Court is his, and Neville's Cross will be, by the entail; and so will the baronetcy. I shall see my girl Lady Neville."

"Never, papa, never!" cried Kate.

"Hush! hush!" said the Squire, and put up his hand to her in great agitation and alarm; "hush, or he will hear ye. Kate," he whispered, "are you mad? Little I thought, when he asked to see me, it was to offer marriage. Be a good girl now; don't you quarrel with good luck. You are not fit to be poor; and you have made enemies: do but think how they will flout you when I die, and Bill's jade of a wife puts you to the door, as she will. And now you can triumph over them all, my Lady Neville,—and make your poor father happy, my Lady Neville. Enough said, for I promised you; so don't go and make a fool of me, and yourself into the bargain. And—and—a word in your ear: he hath lent me a hundred pounds."

At this climax, the father hung his head; the daughter winced and moaned out,—

"Papa, how could you?"

Mr. Peyton had gradually descended to that intermediate stage of degradation, when the substance of dignity is all gone, but its shadow, shame, remains. He stamped impatiently on the ground, and cut his humiliation short by rushing out of the room.

"Here, try your own luck, youngster," he cried at the door. "She knows my mind."

He trampled down the stairs, and young George Neville knocked respectfully at the door, though it was half open, and came in with youth's light foot, and a handsome face flushed into beauty by love and hope.

Miss Peyton's eye just swept him as he entered, and with the same movement she turned away her fair head and blushing cheek towards the window; yet—must I own it?—she quietly moulded the letter that lay in her lap, so that the address was no longer visible to the new-comer.

(Small secrecy, verging on deceit, you are bred in woman's bones!)

This blushing and averted cheek is one of those equivocal receptions that have puzzled many a sensible man. It is a sign of coy love; it is a sign of[Pg 651] gentle aversion; our mode of interpreting it is simple and judicious: whichever it happens to be, we go and take it for the other.

The brisk, bold wooer that now engaged Kate Peyton was not the man to be dashed by a woman's coyness. Handsome, daring, good-humored, and vain, he had everything in his favor but his novelty.

Look at Kate! her eye lingers wistfully on that disconsolate horseman whose every step takes him farther from her; but George has her ear, and draws closer and closer to it, and pours love's mellow murmurs into it.

He told her he had made the grand tour, and seen the beauties of every land, but none like her; other ladies had certainly pleased his eye for a moment, but she alone had conquered his heart. He said many charming things to her, such as Griffith Gaunt had never said. Amongst the rest, he assured her the beauty of her person would not alone have fascinated him so deeply; but he had seen the beauty of her mind in those eyes of hers, that seemed not eyes, but souls; and begging her pardon for his presumption, he aspired to wed her mind.

Such ideas had often risen in Kate's own mind; but to hear them from a man was new. She looked askant through the window at the lessening Griffith, and thought "how the grand tour improves a man!" and said, as coldly as she could,—

"I esteem you, Sir, and cannot but be flattered by sentiments so superior to those I am used to hear; but let this go no farther. I shall never marry now."

Instead of being angry at this, or telling her she wanted to marry somebody else, as the injudicious Griffith had done, young Neville had the address to treat it as an excellent jest, and drew such comical pictures of all the old maids in the neighborhood that she could not help smiling.

But the moment she smiled, the inflammable George made hot love to her again. Then she besought him to leave her, piteously. Then he said, cheerfully, he would leave her as soon as ever she had promised to be his. At that she turned sullen and haughty, and looked through the window and took no notice of him whatever. Then, instead of being discouraged or mortified, he showed imperturbable confidence and good-humor, and begged archly to know what interesting object was in sight from that window. On this she blushed and withdrew her eyes from the window, and so they met his. On that he threw himself on his knees, (custom of the day,) and wooed her with such a burst of passionate and tearful eloquence that she began to pity him, and said, lifting her lovely eyes,—

"Alas! I was born to make all those I esteem unhappy!" and she sighed deeply.

"Not a bit of it," said he; "you were born, like the sun, to bless all you shine upon. Sweet Mistress Kate, I love you as these country boors can never be taught to love. I lay my heart, my name, my substance, at your feet; you shall not be loved,—you shall be worshipped. Ah! turn those eyes, brimful of soul, on me again, and let me try and read in them that one day, no matter how distant, the delight of my eyes, the joy of all my senses, the pride of Cumberland, the pearl of England, the flower of womankind, the rival of the angels, the darling of George Neville's heart, will be George Neville's wife."

Fire and water were in his eyes, passion in every tone; his manly hand grasped hers and trembled, and drew her gently towards him.

Her bosom heaved; his passionate male voice and touch electrified her, and made her flutter.

"Spare me this pain," she faltered; and she looked through the window and thought, "Poor Griffith was right, after all, and I was wrong. He had cause for jealousy, and CAUSE FOR FEAR."

And then she pitied him who panted at her side, and then she was sorry for him who rode away disconsolate, still lessening to her eye; and what with[Pg 652] this conflict and the emotion her quarrel with Griffith had already caused her, she leaned her head back against the shutter, and began to sob low, but almost hysterically.

Now Mr. George Neville was neither a fool nor a novice, if he had never been downright in love before, (which I crave permission to doubt,) he had gone far enough on that road to make one Italian lady, two French, one Austrian, and one Creole, in love with him; and each of these love-affairs had given him fresh insight into the ways of woman. Enlightened by so many bitter-sweet experiences, he saw at once that there was something more going on inside Kate's heaving bosom than he could have caused by offering her his hand. He rose from his knees and leaned against the opposite shutter, and fixed his eyes a little sadly, but very observantly, on her, as she leaned back against the shutter, sobbing low, but hysterically, and quivering all over.

"There's some other man at the bottom of this," thought George Neville.

"Mistress Kate," said he, gently, "I do not come here to make you weep. I love you like a gentleman. If you love another, take courage, tell me so, and don't let your father constrain your inclinations. Dearly as I love you, I would not wed your person, and your heart another's: that would be too cruel to you, and" (drawing himself up with sudden majesty) "too unjust to myself."

Kate looked up at him through her tears, and admired this man, who could love ardently, yet be proud and just. And if this appeal to her candor had been made yesterday, she would have said, frankly, "There is one I—esteem." But, since the quarrel, she would not own to herself, far less to another, that she loved a man who had turned his back upon her. So she parried.

"There is no one I love enough to wed," said she. "I am a cold-hearted girl, born to give pain to my betters. But I shall do something desperate to end all this."

"All what?" said he, keenly.

"The whole thing: my unprofitable life."

"Mistress Kate," said Neville, "I asked you, was there another man. If you had answered me, 'In truth there is, but he is poor and my father is averse or the like,' then I would have secretly sought that man, and, as I am very rich, you should have been happy."

"Oh, Mr. Neville, that is very generous, but how meanly you must think of me!"

"And what a bungler you must think me! I tell you, you should never have known. But let that pass; you have answered my question; and you say there is no man you love. Then I say you shall be Dame Neville."

"What, whether I will or no?"

"Yes; whether you think you will or no."

Catharine turned her dreamy eyes on him.

"You have had a good master. Why did you not come to me sooner?"

She was thinking more of him than of herself, and, in fact, paying too little heed to her words. But she had no sooner uttered this inadvertent speech than she felt she had said too much. She blushed rosy red, and hid her face in her hands in the most charming confusion.

"Sweetest, it is not an hour too late, as you do not love another," was stout George Neville's reply.

But nevertheless the cunning rogue thought it safest to temporize, and put his coy mistress off her guard. So he ceased to alarm her by pressing the question of marriage, but seduced her into a charming talk, where the topics were not so personal, and only the tones of his voice and the glances of his expressive eyes were caressing. He was on his mettle to please her by hook or by crook, and was delightful, irresistible. He set her at ease, and she began to listen more, and even to smile faintly, and to look through the window a little less perseveringly.

Suddenly the spell was broken for a while.[Pg 653]

And by whom?

By the other.

Ay, you may well stare. It sounds strange, but it is true, that the poor forlorn horseman, hanging like a broken man, as he was, over his tired horse, and wending his solitary way from her he loved, and resigning the field, like a goose, to the very rival he feared, did yet (like the retiring Parthian) shoot an arrow right into that pretty boudoir and hit both his sweetheart and his rival,—hit them hard enough to spoil their sport, and make a little mischief between them—for that afternoon, at all events.

The arrow came into the room after this fashion.

Kate was sitting in a very feminine attitude. When a man wants to look in any direction, he turns his body and his eye the same way, and does it; but women love to cast oblique regards; and this their instinct is a fruitful source of their graceful and characteristic postures.

Kate Peyton was at this moment a statue of her sex. Her fair head leaned gently back against the corner of the window-shutter; her pretty feet and fair person in general were opposite George Neville, who sat facing the window, but in the middle of the room; her arms, half pendent, half extended, went listlessly aslant her, and somewhat to the right of her knees, yet, by an exquisite turn of the neck, her gray eyes contrived to be looking dreamily out of the window to her left. Still in this figure, that pointed one way and looked another, there was no distortion; all was easy, and full of that subtile grace we artists call repose.

But suddenly she dissolved this feminine attitude, rose to her feet, and interrupted her wooer civilly.

"Excuse me," said she, "but can you tell me which way that road on the hill leads to?"

Her companion stared a little at so sudden a turn in the conversation, but replied by asking her, with perfect good-humor, what road she meant.

"The one that gentleman on horseback has just taken. Surely," she continued, "that road does not take to Bolton Hall."

"Certainly not," said George, following the direction of her finger. "Bolton lies to the right. That road takes to the sea-coast by Otterbury and Stanhope."

"I thought so," said Kate. "How unfortunate! He cannot know; but, indeed, how should he?"

"Who cannot know? and what? You speak in riddles, Mistress. And how pale you are! Are you ill?"

"No, not ill, Sir," faltered Kate; "but you see me much discomposed. My cousin Charlton died this day; and the news met me at the very door." She could say no more.

Mr. Neville, on hearing this news, began to make many excuses for having inadvertently intruded himself upon her on such a day; but, in the midst of his apologies, she suddenly looked him full in the face, and said, with nervous abruptness,—

"You talk like a preux chevalier. I wonder whether you would ride five or six miles to do me a service."

"Ay, a thousand!" said the young man, glowing with pleasure. "What is to do?"

Kate pointed through the window.

"You see that gentleman on horseback. Well, I happen to know that he is leaving the country; he thinks that he—that I—that Mr. Charlton has many years to live. He must be told Mr. Charlton is dead, and his presence is required at Bolton Hall. I should like somebody to gallop after him, and give him this letter; but my own horse is tired, and I am tired; and, to be frank, there is a little coolness between the gentleman himself and me. Oh, I wish him no ill, but really I am not upon terms—I do not feel complaisant enough to carry a letter after him; yet I do feel that he must have it. Do not you think it would be malicious and unworthy in me to keep the news from him, when I know it is so?"

Young Neville smiled.

"Nay, Mistress, why so many words?[Pg 654] Give me your letter, and I will soon overtake the gentleman: he seems in no great hurry."

Kate thanked him, and made a polite apology for giving him so much trouble, and handed him the letter. When it came to that, she held it out to him rather irresolutely; but he took it promptly, and bowed low, after the fashion of the day. She curtsied; he marched off with alacrity. She sat down again, and put her head in her hand to think it all over, and a chill thought ran through her. Was her conduct wise? What would Griffith think at her employing his rival? Would he not infer Neville had entered her service in more senses than one? Perhaps he would throw the letter in the dirt in a rage, and never read it.

Steps came rapidly, the door opened, and there was George Neville again, but not the same George Neville that went out but thirty seconds before. He stood in the door looking very black, and with a sardonic smile on his lips.

"An excellent jest, Mistress!" said he, ironically.

"Why, what is the matter?" said the lady, stoutly; but her red cheeks belied her assumption of innocence.

"Oh, not much," said George, with a bitter sneer. "It is an old story; only I thought you were nobler than the rest of your sex. This letter is to Mr. Griffith Gaunt."

"Well, Sir!" said Kate, with a face of serene and candid innocence.

"And Mr. Griffith Gaunt is a suitor of yours."

"Say, was. He is so no longer. He and I are out. But for that, think you I had even listened to—what you have been saying to me this ever so long?"

"Oh, that alters the case," said George. "But stay!" and he knitted his brows, and reflected.

Up to a moment ago, the loftiness of Catharine Peyton's demeanor, and the celestial something in her soul-like, dreamy eyes, had convinced him she was a creature free from the small dishonesty and lubricity he had noted in so many women otherwise amiable and good. But this business of the letter had shaken the illusion.

"Stay!" said he, stiffly, "You say Mr. Gaunt and you are out?"

Catharine assented by a movement of her fair head.

"And he is leaving the country. Perhaps this letter is to keep him from leaving the country."

"Only until he has buried his benefactor," murmured Kate, in deprecating accents.

George wore a bitter sneer at this.

"Mistress Kate," said he, after a significant pause, "do you read Molière?"

She bridled a little, and would not reply. She knew Molière quite well enough not to want his wit levelled at her head.

"Do you admire the character of Célimène?"

No reply.

"You do not. How can you? She was too much your inferior. She never sent one of her lovers with a letter to the other to stop his flight. Well, you may eclipse Célimène; but permit me to remind you that I am George Neville, and not Georges Dandin."

Miss Peyton rose from her seat with eyes that literally flashed fire; and—the horrible truth must be told—her first wild impulse was to reply to all this Molière with one cut of her little riding-whip. But she had a swift mind, and two reflections entered it together: first, that this would be unlike a gentlewoman; secondly, that, if she whipped Mr. Neville, however inefficaciously, he would not lend her his piebald horse. So she took stronger measures; she just sank down again, and faltered,—

"I do not understand these bitter words. I have no lover at all; I never will have one again. But it is hard to think I cannot make a friend nor keep a friend,"—and so lifted up her hands, and began to cry piteously.

Then the stout George was taken aback, and made to think himself a ruffian.

"Nay, do not weep so, Mistress Kate," said he, hurriedly. "Come, take courage. I am not jealous of Mr. Gaunt,—a man[Pg 655] that hath been two years dangling after you, and could not win you. I look but to my own self-respect in the matter. I know your sex better than you know yourselves. Were I to carry that letter, you would thank me now, but by-and-by despise me. Now, as I mean you to be my wife, I will not risk your contempt. Why not take my horse, put whom you like on him, and so convey the letter to Mr. Gaunt?"

Now this was all the fair mourner wanted; so she said,—

"No, no, she would not be beholden to him for anything; he had spoken harshly to her, and misjudged her cruelly, cruelly,—oh! oh! oh!"

Then he implored her to grant him this small favor; then she cleared up, and said, Well, sooner than bear malice, she would. He thanked her for granting him that favor. She went off with the letter, saying,—

"I will be back anon."

But once she got clear, she opened the door again, and peeped in at him gayly, and said she,—

"Why not ask me who wrote the letter, before you compared me to that French coquette?"—and, with this, made him an arch curtsy, and tripped away.

Mr. George Neville opened his eyes with astonishment. This arch question, and Kate's manner of putting it, convinced him the obnoxious missive was not a love-letter at all. He was sorry now, and vexed with himself, for having called her a coquette, and made her cry. After all, what was the mighty favor she had asked of him? To carry a sealed letter from somebody or other to a person who, to be sure, had been her lover, but was so no longer,—a simple act of charity and civility; and he had refused it in injurious terms.

He was glad he had lent his horse, and almost sorry he had not taken the letter himself.

To these chivalrous self-reproaches succeeded an uneasy feeling that perhaps the lady might retaliate somehow. It struck him, on reflection, that the arch query she had let fly at him was accompanied with a certain sparkle of the laughing eye, such as ere now had, in his experience, preceded a stroke of the feminine claw.

As he walked up and down, uneasy, awaiting the fair one's return, her father came up, and asked him to dine and sleep. What made the invitation more welcome was, that it in reality came from Kate.

"She tells me she has borrowed your horse," said the Squire; "so, says she, I am bound to take care of you till day-light; and, indeed, our ways are perilous at night."

"She is an angel!" cried the lover, all his ardor revived by this unexpected trait. "My horse, my house, my hand, and my heart are all at her service, by night and day."

Mr. Peyton, to wile away the time before dinner, invited him to walk out and see—a hog, deadly fat, as times went. But Neville denied himself that satisfaction, on the plea that he had his orders to await Miss Peyton's return where he was. The Squire was amused at his excessive docility, and winked, as much as to say, "I have been once upon a time in your plight," and so went and gloried in his hog alone.

The lover fell into a delicious reverie. He enjoyed, by anticipation, the novel pleasure of an evening passed all alone with this charming girl. The father, being friendly to his suit, would go to sleep after dinner; and then, by the subdued light of a wood-fire, he would murmur his love into that sweet ear for hours, until the averted head should come round by degrees, and the delicious lips yield a coy assent. He resolved the night should not close till he had surprised, overpowered, and secured his lovely bride.

These soft meditations reconciled him for a while to the prolonged absence of their object.

In the midst of them, he happened to glance through the window; and he saw a sight that took his very breath away, and rooted him in amazement to the spot. About a mile from the house, a lady in a scarlet habit was galloping[Pg 656] across country as the crow flies. Hedge, ditch, or brook, nothing stopped her an instant; and as for the pace,—

It was Kate Peyton on his piebald horse.

CHAPTER IV.

Griffith Gaunt, unknown to himself, had lost temper as well as heart before he took the desperate step of leaving the country. Now his temper was naturally good; and ere he had ridden two miles, he recovered it. To his cost; for the sustaining force of anger being gone, he was alone with his grief. He drew the rein half mechanically, and from a spirited canter declined to a walk.

And the slower he went, the chillier grew his heart, till it lay half ice, half lead, in his bosom.

Parted! oh, word pregnant with misery!

Never to see those heavenly eyes again, nor hear that silver voice! Never again to watch that peerless form walk the minuet; nor see it lift the gray horse over a fence with the grace and spirit that seemed inseparable from it!

Desolation streamed over him at the thought. And next his forlorn mind began to cling even to the inanimate objects that were dotted about the place which held her. He passed a little farm-house into which Kate and he had once been driven by a storm, and had sat together by the kitchen fire; and the farmer's wife had smiled on them for sweethearts, and made them drink rum and milk and stay till the sun was fairly out.

"Ah! good-bye, little farm!" he sighed; "when shall I ever see you again?"

He passed a brook where they had often stopped together and given their panting horses just a mouthful after a run with the harriers.

"Good-bye, little brook!" said he; "you will ripple on as before, and warble as you go; but I shall never drink at your water more, nor hear your pleasant murmur with her I love."

He sighed and crept away, still making for the sea.

In the icy depression of his heart his body and his senses were half paralyzed, and none would have known the accomplished huntsman in this broken man, who hung anyhow over his mare's neck and went to and fro in the saddle.

When he had gone about five miles, he came to the crest of a hill; he remembered, that, once past that brow, he could see Peyton Hall no more. He turned slowly and cast a sorrowful look at it.

It was winter, but the afternoon sun had come out bright. The horizontal beams struck full upon the house, and all the western panes shone like burnished gold. Her very abode, how glorious it looked! And he was to see it no more.

He gazed and gazed at the bright house till love and sorrow dimmed his eyes, and he could see the beloved place no more. Then his dogged will prevailed and carried him away towards the sea, but crying like a woman now, and hanging all dislocated over his horse's mane.

Now about half a mile farther on, as he crept along on a vile and narrow road, all woebegone and broken, he heard a mighty scurry of horse's feet in the field to his left; he looked languidly up; and the first thing he saw was a great piebald horse's head and neck in the act of rising in the air, and doubling his fore-legs under him, to leap the low hedge a yard or two in front of him.

He did leap, and landed just in front of Griffith; his rider curbed him so keenly that he went back almost on his haunches, and then stood motionless all across the road, with quivering tail. A lady in a scarlet riding-habit and purple cap sat him as if he had been a throne instead of a horse, and, without moving her body, turned her head swift as a snake, and fixed her great gray eyes full and searching upon Griffith Gaunt.

[Pg 657]

THE PARTING OF HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE.

FROM THE SIXTH BOOK OF THE ILIAD.

[Pg 660]

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.

This active, energetic, and in every way remarkable man, who was not only the originator, proprietor, and purveyor, but the editor,—the actual and only editor,—of "Blackwood's Magazine," up to the day of his death, in 1834, has never been properly understood nor appreciated, either abroad or at home, owing to circumstances the public are unacquainted with.

While exercising despotic power, in all that concerned the management of that bold and saucy and at times unprincipled work, in all that concerned the management or the contributors, and never yielding even to "Old Christopher" himself, who passed for the editor, where any serious question sprang up, he was so careful to keep out of sight himself, and to thrust that old gentleman forward, upon all occasions,—a sort of myth, at the best,—a shadowy, mysterious personage, who deceived nobody, and whom all were glad enough to take on trust, well knowing that Professor Wilson was behind the mask,—that, up to this day, William Blackwood, the little, tough, wiry Scotch bookseller, with a big heart, and a pericardium of net-work,—interwoven steel springs,—has been regarded as the publisher and proprietor only, and Professor Wilson as the editor, and one who would suffer no interference with his prerogative, and "bear no brother near the throne."

To bring about this belief, Blackwood spared no expense of indirect assertion, and no outlay of incidental evidence. Never faltering in his first plan, and never foregoing an opportunity of strengthening the public delusion, what cared he for the reputation of editorship, so long as the great mystery paid? Walter Scott had already shown how profitably and safely such a game might be played, year after year, in the midst of the enemies' camp; and Blackwood was just the man to profit by such experience.

In the Life of Professor Wilson, by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, edited here by Professor Mackenzie, there might be found enough to disabuse the public upon this point, if it were not read by the lamplight—or twilight—of long-cherished opinions.

But as Blackwood, the shrewd, sharp, wary Scotchman, always talked about "our worthy friend Christopher" as a real, and not a mythological personage,—as if, in short, he were himself and nobody else,—and never of Wilson but as one of the contributors, or as the author of "Margaret Lyndsay" or "The Isle of Palms," and then with a look or a smile which he never explained, and which nobody out of the charmed circle ever understood, no wonder the delusion was kept up to the last.

"All I can say," he once wrote me, while negotiating for more grist,—"all I can say is, that whatever is good in itself we are always happy to receive; the only difficulty is, that our worthy friend Christopher is a very absolute person, and therefore always judges for himself with regard to everything that is offered." Now this—considering that he himself, William Blackwood, was Christopher North, in spirit, if not in substance, and that he himself, and not Wilson, was the autocrat from whose judgment there was no appeal—might pass anywhere, I think, for one of the happiest examples of persevering, impudent mystification ever hazarded by a respectable man, while writing confidentially to another, and quite of a piece with the celebrated Chaldee manuscript.

And now for my acquaintance with the man himself. I was living in Baltimore. I had given up my editorships. I had forsworn poetry and story-telling, (on paper,) and had not only entered upon the profession of the law with encouraging success, but had begun to settle upon my lees.[Pg 661]

One day, while dining with my friend Henry Robinson, who introduced gas into Boston, after a series of disastrous experiments in Baltimore, and the conversation happening to turn upon that subject, we wandered off into the state of English opinions generally. He was an Englishman by birth and early education, though his heart was American to the core. Something was said about the literature of the day, and the question was asked,—"Who reads an American book?" I blazed out, of course, and, after denouncing the "Edinburgh Review," where the impudent question was first broached, accompanied by the suggestion, that, so long as we could "import our literature in bales and hogsheads," we had better not try to manufacture for ourselves, I made up my mind on the spot, and within the next following half-hour at furthest, to carry the war into Africa.

Mr. Walsh,—"Robert Walsh, Junior, Esquire,"—the "American Gentleman," as he called himself in the title-page of his Dictionary,—had acknowledged, while undertaking our vindication, that our American Parnassus was barren, or fruitful only in weeds; and by common consent my countrymen had taken for the highest praise throughout the land what I regarded as at best a humiliating admission from our friends over sea. They had acknowledged, and we were base enough to feel flattered by the acknowledgment, that, although we could not even hope to write English, and were wellnigh destitute of invention, having no materials to work with, and little or no aptitude for anything but the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, horn gun-flints, and cuckoo-clocks, and being always too busy for anything better than dicker and truck in a small way,—the haberdashery of nations,—yet, after all, it might be said of us that we were capital imitators, or thieves and counterfeiters, so that our Brockden Brown was at least the American Godwin,—our Cooper, the American Scott,—our Irving, just flowering in the "Sketch-Book," the American Goldsmith or Addison,—and our Sigourney, the American Hemans.

That my blood boiled in my veins, whenever I thought of this, I must acknowledge; and within three weeks, I believe, I was on my way to London, with a novel in the rough, which, after undergoing many transformations, appeared in that city as "Brother Jonathan,"—the manuscript of "Otho, a Tragedy," wholly recast and rewritten, with "exit omnes," and other monstrous Latin blunders corrected, and, on the whole, very much as it afterwards appeared in "The Yankee,"—and heaps of letters, which I could not well afford to deliver, and therefore threw into the fire: leaving my law business to take care of itself, somewhat after the fashion of that Revolutionary volunteer, "Old Put," who, when he heard the sound of a trumpet and knew the lists were opened, left his plough in the furrow, and the cattle standing in the field. My law-library, and the building I occupied, I passed over to the care of a young man of great promise, just entering the profession, who not only burned up my supply of wood for the year, but failed to pay the rent, and then took the liberty of dying suddenly, poor fellow! without a word of notice to my landlord: so that I was fairly adrift.

On arriving in London, I took lodgings in Warwick Street, Pall Mall, introduced to the landlady by Leslie the painter, and occupying the very chambers where Washington Irving was delivered of the "Sketch-Book": my windows on the first floor looking out on the back entrance of Carlton House, by which the Princess Charlotte had escaped not long before, when she ran away from her father, as my landlady took care to inform me; adding, that, from the very window where we stood, she had seen the little madcap get into the carriage—a common hack, by the way—and go off at full speed.

I lost no time in looking about me, and preparing for a literary campaign, where I might forage upon the enemy, beat up his quarters when I chose,[Pg 662] and, if possible, get possession of a battery or so, and turn the guns upon his camp.

Being pretty well acquainted with the characteristics of all the monthlies and quarterlies, I was not long in determining that "Blackwood" was my point d'appui. The "Old Monthly" was dead asleep, and smouldering in white ashes; the "New Monthly," with Campbell for editor, was unfitted for the job I had in view; the "London," though clever and saucy and stinging, wanted manliness and nerve, and would be sure to fail me at a pinch, now that John Scott was disposed of. And as for the quarterlies, even supposing I could secure a place and keep it, they were all slow coaches, and much too dignified and stately, as they lumbered along the smooth, level turnpikes they were built for, to allow of any dashing or skirmishing from the windows. Even the "Westminster" was untrustworthy, as I afterwards found to my cost.

And so I settled down upon "Blackwood," the cleverest and spitefullest of the whole, with Lockhart, "the Scorpion," and Wilson, "the Leopard," for mischief-makers, and "Ebony" for the whipper-in, and "Christopher North" "in golden panoply complete" for collaborateur, a puzzle and a problem to the last. Before I slept, I believe, certainly within a few hours, I wrote a sketch of our five American Presidents, and of the five presidential candidates then actually in the field, and sent it off to Edinburgh with a letter, not for the publisher, not for Blackwood, but for the Editor, saying that I had adopted the name of "Carter Holmes," and writing as a traveller, pretty well acquainted with the United States and with the people thereof. This mask I wore, not with a view to escape responsibility, for I was ready to answer for all I said, but to baffle the curious and the inquisitive. Had I come out boldly as a native American, I knew there was no chance for me in that, or in any other leading British journal.

After a few days, I received the following in reply from Blackwood himself, the Editor, which I give at length.

[Pg 663]

"Five guineas!" said I to myself,—twenty-five dollars cash, for a paper I had flung off at a single sitting, and which at home would have been thought well paid for with a "Much obliged," or, at most, with a five-dollar bill,—even the great "North American Review" then paying, where it paid at all, only a dollar a page in "that day of small things"; and to work I went forthwith, preparing another article upon another American subject, determined to be in season, and not allow the blaze I had lighted up to go out for want of kindling-stuff. The article, I may say here, created quite a sensation, and was copied into the Continental journals and papers, and even reappeared in the great "European Review," then just established at London, Paris, and Vienna, under the editorship of Alexander Walker, a Scotchman, who began his literary career by undertaking to supply the deficiencies of D'Alembert, while he wrote me about a jeux d'esprit, with all seriousness.

One curious little incident occurs to me here in connection with the signature I had adopted. Perhaps the Spiritualists may be able to account for it. Having finished my second article, and folded it up, and directed it, as before, to the "Editor," and being about to affix the seal,—for wafers were not used by decent people in England, and self-sealing envelopes were unheard of in that day,—I went below, where I heard voices in conversation that I knew, to borrow a seal, not wishing to use mine, which not only bore an eagle's head for a crest, but my initials and the striped shield of my country.

There were present Humphreys, the engraver,—Lady Lilicraft, one of Washington Irving's lay figures, and the cast-off chère amie of an English lordling,—Peter Powell, of whom a word or two hereafter,—Chester Harding,—and the celebrated John Dunn Hunter, whose portrait Harding had just under way.

When I had stated my request, two or three hands, with two or three seals, were instantly reached forth. I took the nearest, and was not a little surprised, on looking at the impression, to find the very initials I needed, in old English. The seal belonged to Chester Harding; and as my nom de plume was "Carter Holmes," the "C. H." seemed quite providential. From that time forward, I continued to use the same seal whenever I found Harding within reach, until, one day, a still stranger "happening" occurred. I was in a hurry, and could not wait. Any seal would do, of course; and the mistress, pitying my perplexity, said there was a seal up-stairs somewhere which might serve my turn, if she could find it. After a short absence, she returned, and, handing me an old-fashioned affair, which I did not stop to look at, I made the impression, and was just about sending off the parcel, when my attention was attracted by the very same initials of "C. H.," as you live! Her husband's name was Charles Halloway, Harding was Chester Harding, and I was "Carter Holmes"!

One word now about another of Irving's associates and playmates,—Peter Powell, whom I often met with at Mrs. Halloway's. You will find him frequently mentioned by name in the "Life and Letters of Washington Irving," as a "fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy," and full of the strangest contrivances for "setting the table in a roar"; and more than once, though I do not now remember where, I have met with a grotesque shadow, under a fictitious name,—a sort of Santa Claus or Æsop at large,—either in the "Sketch-Book" or in the "Tales of a Traveller," which I saw at a glance, when I came to know the original, could be no other than Peter Powell himself.

But as Irving did not particularize, I must. Peter would personate a dancing bear; and with the help of a shaggy overcoat pulled up about his ears, and a pair of black kid gloves, he being a small man, hardly taller than a good-sized bear, when standing up with his knees bent, the representation was not only surprisingly faithful, but sometimes absolutely startling.[Pg 664]

He would serve you out with passages from a new opera, taking all the parts himself, either separately or together, and with feet, hands, and voice, a table, a chair, and a paper trumpet extemporized for the occasion from a sheet of music-paper, would almost persuade you that a rehearsal was going on at your elbow.

He would tie a couple of knots in his pocket-handkerchief, throw the rest of it over his hand so as to conceal the action, thrust his left forefinger into the lowest knot for a head, while the uppermost would go for a turban, spread out the middle finger and thumb, covered with the drapery, and make the figure bow and salaam, as if it were alive, to the unspeakable amazement of the little ones. Many years after this, I tried the same trick with the Aztec children, and drove the little monsters half crazy with delight.

He would imitate rooks in their noisiest flights, by putting on a pair of black gloves, and spreading the fingers, and cawing; and butterflies alighting on a flower, by pressing his two hands together where they join the wrist, closing the fingers with a fluttering motion, and moving them this way and that, until it was quite impossible to misunderstand the representation; and he would give you a sailor's hornpipe at the dinner-table, by striping two of his fingers with a pen, drawing a face on the back of his hand, with vest and waistband to explain the trousers, and set you screaming as he went through the steps and flourishes on a plate, with the greatest possible seriousness and propriety.

But enough. Let us now return to Blackwood. For my next paper he paid me ten guineas,—fifty dollars,—and, in reply to certain suggestions of mine, wrote as follows. I give this letter to show how much of a business man he was, and how well fitted for the duties of editorship.

Here was encouragement, certainly; and it was clear enough that he had a willingness to be pleased, if nothing more.

I lost no time, therefore, in recasting and rewriting the whole of "Brother[Pg 665] Jonathan," which, as I have mentioned before, was blocked out before I left America. But, having my board to pay, and not willing to stake much on a single cast, though ready enough "to stand the hazard of the die" after my washerwoman was satisfied, I kept on writing for the magazines and quarterlies, and always about America, and by special desire too, until my papers were to be found, not only in Blackwood every month, but in the "New Monthly," the "Old Monthly," the "London," the "European," the "Oriental Herald," the "Westminster," and others.

On the 8th of the following November, Mr. Blackwood, having worried through the manuscript of "Brother Jonathan," wrote me a letter of six enormous pages, from which I give the following extracts, to show the temper of the man, his downright honesty and heartiness, and great good sense.

"My dear Sir," he says, "you will be blaming me for not writing you sooner; and when I tell you that the delay was caused by my unwillingness to write you"—(here I began to foresee what was coming)—"so very differently from what I had so fondly and anxiously expected, I fear you will blame me, not for the delay, but for my want of taste and judgment in not properly appreciating the merits of 'Brother Jonathan.'"

Here he wronged me; for I was quite prepared to agree with him, having spoiled the original draft by working it up too much, and overdoing and exaggerating all that I was best pleased with.

"Never," he continues,—"never did I take up any manuscript with more sincere wishes for its being everything that could be desired. Unfortunately, my expectations have been disappointed." (Comfortable, hey?) "While I admire the originality and talent and power which the work displays,"—(I began to breathe more freely,)—"I must frankly tell you, that, in my humble opinion, there are defects in your plan, and there are incidents, as well as reflections, which, in this country, would certainly injure any work, however great its talent.

"I wish I had the pleasure of seeing you for half an hour, as I could explain by word of mouth so much better than I can by scribbling what my ideas are, and such as they are. Distrusting my own judgment, after I had carefully perused the manuscript, I gave it, in the strictest confidence, to a friend whose opinion I value much, and begged of him, without saying one word of my opinion, to give me his frankly and without reserve. My mind was so far satisfied, when I received his remarks, as I found, that, in general, he had taken the same view of the work as I had done. I inclose his remarks, as they will save me from going over the same ground."

The remarks referred to were by Professor Wilson, I have good reason to believe. They filled half a dozen pages, and were eminently judicious and proper, and, I may add, far from being unpalatable.

"I shall now, in a rambling way," continues Mr. Blackwood, "state anything that has occurred to me, and I shall make no apology for offering you my crude remarks; only you will suppose me to be speaking to you, and telling you such and such things strike me so and so, that I may be quite wrong," &c., &c.

And then he proceeds to say,—

"The character of the Yankees (Chapter I.) is too didactic, though excellent anywhere else than in the commencement of a novel."

Here, too, he was right. I threw the whole chapter aside in rewriting the book as it now stands, and sent the substance to Campbell's "New Monthly," where it appeared forthwith.

After frankly stating a number of well-founded objections, and suggesting two or three important changes in the plot, he finishes after the following fashion: allow me to commend it to all who find themselves obliged to "give the mitten," or to snub a respectable aspirant. By so doing, they may keep life in him, if nothing more:[Pg 666]—

"I have said a good deal more than I intended to, as to what things have struck me as defects in your work. Its excellences I need not take up your time with dwelling upon. With all the power, interest, and originality, I regret most exceedingly, that, in its present state, I would most earnestly advise you not to publish. It would be doing yourself the greatest injustice. I feel perfectly confident, however, that, with such materials as these, you could make a glorious book, if you would set about it again in the proper way. I do not think it would cost you much trouble, provided that the thing were to strike you."

By way of postscript, he adds,—

"I received your parcel, with No. 3 of the American Writers, and the critique on Cadell's American work. Are you not giving us too much of the Vitæ Virûm Obscurorum? There is a danger of palling the public with too much even of a very good thing. This, too, terrifies me at the length of your critique, as we have had so many American articles lately. It is, in fact, as you say, a work, not an article. However, we shall see what can be done."

The critique here referred to was a review of a book entitled "Summary View of America," and published by Cadell, who was also the London publisher for Blackwood. It was full of dangerous, though somewhat plausible errors, and mischievous, though perhaps unintentional, misrepresentations of our whole political and social system. I did not spare the book, nor the author, nor the publisher; and notwithstanding the great length of the paper, which grew up of itself, as I read the work with pen in hand, into most unreasonable proportions, though divided into brief paragraphs, it appeared, nevertheless, in the next following month, as a leader, with a note from "C. N.," which has already been given in the sketch of Bentham.

Meanwhile this indefatigable purveyor, who knew I was engaged upon "Brother Jonathan," recasting and rewriting the whole,—not for the second time, but for the twentieth time, I verily believe,—and that I was beginning to write for other journals upon American affairs, wanted me to furnish an occasional paper for the "Noctes Ambrosianæ," to be incorporated, warp and woof, into the dialogues which appeared month after month and year after year; up to the death of poor Wilson in 1853, and were afterward embodied in a book by Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, and republished here.

This I could not bring myself to undertake, without first seeing the interlocutors face to face, and looking into their eyes, and hearing them laugh together "like a rhinoceros," or like the chorus in "Der Freischütz." Though I knew Wilson, and Lockhart, and Hogg, and "Old Christopher," and "O'Doherty," and "Timothy Tickler," and "Ebony," by reputation, it was only as a company of shadows, and not as creatures of substantial flesh and blood. The lightning had struck; my guns were in position; I had got the range of the enemies' camp, and meant to be in no hurry, but "to fight it out on the line" I had chosen, if it took me till doomsday. I refused, therefore. I was willing to wait. I knew, to be sure, the Chinese could grow oranges from the seed in half an hour; but then the oranges were peas, and I wanted to grow "some pumpkins." In short, I would not

Next he wanted me to write a review of "Margaret Lyndsay," a charming story by Wilson himself, of which I had incidentally expressed the highest opinion, in our correspondence. Mr. Blackwood sprang at the idea, like a half-famished pickerel at a frog. But no. Although such a paper would be quite in my way, for I have always delighted in showing off, and teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, I could not be persuaded, for reasons which may be guessed at by the proud and sensitive and foolish, so long as the question about "Brother Jonathan" was undecided.

On the 24th of November, having[Pg 667] received my answer to his of the 8th, he wrote again as follows:—

Are not these two extracts enough to show of themselves the leading characteristics of "Ebony," or "Old Christopher"? How business-like, and yet how friendly and judicious are the suggestions!

Meanwhile, I had furnished a paper for him, entitled "Men and Women; or, A Brief Hypothesis concerning the Differences in their Genius." My object was to show, that, although unlike, they were not unequal; that each had a standard for itself. I did not urge that Arabs, who are reckoned pretty good judges of horse-flesh, always give the preference to mares for endurance and swiftness,—that the female bird of prey is larger and fiercer than the male,—that the female body-guard of the King of Dahomey are terrible Amazons,—nor that, where women reign, men rule, and vice versâ; but that, by endowing woman with a more sensitive organization, our Father had given her what was better than a mane for the lioness, a beard for the goat, or a voice and plumage to the female singing-bird, etc., etc. This also appeared, and was handsomely paid for.

"In this number," he says, "you will see, that, though we have given an additional half-sheet, we have only had room for your 'American Writers.'... I hope you are going on with the series; and that you do not dwell more than is necessary upon the Poetæ Minores, whom no one cares about. This is what has sometimes been objected to your articles; and among other remonstrances I have received, I extract the following from the letter of a gentleman for whom I have a great respect. He says your article contains 'misstatements, and some of them of a mischievous tendency; but what mostly concerns you to know is the odium which is likely to be thrown on your Magazine, in America at least, by the manner in which (from malice or blundering) some meritorious individuals are dealt with, who have every claim to the shelter of private life.'"

As the meddling gentleman from whose letter the passage was taken did not particularize, all I could do in reply, and that I lost no time in doing, was to give him the lie direct, and offer my name to the publisher. I called for specifications and proof, which never came; and have an idea that the writer was an artist—a great coxcomb—of whom I had spoken too well, on paper, though not well enough to satisfy his inordinate vanity.

"I make no apology to you," continues "Old Christopher," "for giving you this extract from my friend's letter. He is, I trust, writing under some strong feeling of something or other, which has concerned some one whom he knows; but I am sure he is perfectly sincere in what he says. I hope, therefore, you will be particularly on your guard against saying anything which any one would be entitled on good grounds to say was unfair or ungentlemanly. I regret that, in the hurry of the sheet going to press, what is said of Hall (John E. Hall of Philadelphia) was not modified. 'Blackguard' is a shocking appellation; and had my friend seen[Pg 668] this number, I should not have wondered at his remarks. You will, I am sure, excuse me," etc., etc.

"All very just and proper," said I to myself; but coming from a man who not long before had said in "Maga," or allowed somebody to say for him, with a chuckle of triumph never to be forgotten, that Canning had given the lie to Brougham on the floor of Parliament, I must acknowledge that I felt rather astonished at his sensitiveness.

On the 19th of February, 1825,—by which time I had completed the series of "American Writers," pursuing my first plan without deviating from it a hair's breadth, and introducing an American department into three or four monthlies,—never, in fact, writing a word upon any other subject than our literature, authors, manners, politics, and painters, except in two instances, that I now remember,—he wrote as follows.

"My dear Sir,—You have finished your series in capital style. The whole is spirited and most original. Many may differ from you on some points, but, beauties or blemishes, no one will pretend to say that they are not your own. And may I add, that I hardly know any work except 'Maga' where you could have felt yourself so much at your ease in most fearlessly saying what you thought right of men and things." All very true; and it was for that reason that I launched forth in "Blackwood," hit or miss, neck or nothing, determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn. And then he adds,—"Washington Irving once told me that he considered my 'Maga' as a daringly original work. It was too much for his delicate nerves."

Undoubtedly; and it was for that reason that the papers I wrote in a different style for the "European Magazine," New Series,—out of which grew the famous controversy with Mathews for his admirable misrepresentations of Yankee character,—were attributed for a long while to Washington Irving himself; but he could not have written them, any more than I could have written the "Sketch-Book" or "Bracebridge Hall."

"I hope," continues our friend "Ebony,"—"I hope you are thinking of something else for me, as you must have much to communicate with regard to America, men and matters, which we know nothing of in this country, both as to what has been done and what is now doing. Perhaps it might be well to give anything of this kind just in separate articles, as one is sometimes rather fettered in a regular series. However, all this depends upon the subject-matter and the way in which it happens to strike yourself.... I enclose you an order on Mr. Cadell for fifteen guineas."

Thus much to show, that, however absolute and arbitrary "our worthy friend Christopher" was on ordinary occasions, he was a man of the kindest feelings, delicate, magnanimous, and liberal.

In the course of the next following three months "Brother Jonathan" was finished, read, accepted, and paid for at my own price,—two hundred guineas,—the same that Murray paid Irving for his "Sketch-Book," with a contingent proviso for another hundred guineas, which never amounted to anything.

Meanwhile, however, we were in constant communication by letter, and I give now the following extracts to show his exceeding carefulness, and the consequences—the disastrous consequences, I might say—to both of us. I have already mentioned, that, in the progress of revision, I had probably written the book, not twice, but twenty times over; and this I believe to be true. I had grown too fastidious, over-anxious, nervous, and fidgety. I could not endure the coming together of the same or similar sounds,—ds and ts, for example, or vs and fs,—and wrote some pages or paragraphs at least forty or fifty times over to prevent this, and thereby sacrificed all freedom and naturalness. When Mr. Blackwood wrote me, therefore, as follows, it only served to confirm me in my evil habit,—a disease, in fact,—and the result was further alterations[Pg 669] and corrections, so numerous and so troublesome, though trivial in themselves, that, in going through the press, the printer himself, Mr. Spottiswood, got alarmed, and charged accordingly.

On the 14th of April he writes me at length about the book. "I wished also, before writing you, to be able to give you the opinion of my friend whose remarks I formerly sent you. In some things I agree with him, in others I do not; but I think it best you should judge yourself as to all that he says. I also enclose you a note from another friend, whose judgment I value more than that of any one I know, almost." Here follows a string of suggestions, most of which I took advantage of, in carrying this, my third complete copy of the work, through the press. No wonder it grew more and more artificial, as it grew more and more strange and euphonious.

He continues,—"I have read the manuscript again very carefully," (the third time,—a manuscript of three volumes!) "and I do think you have improved the work very much. I cannot again venture to suggest anything to you, even if I could, (which I am very doubtful of,) because you give yourself so much labor, and any crude ideas of mine may perhaps be more injurious than useful. You must yourself feel best what is necessary, and to your own judgment everything must be left. I have therefore put up the manuscript with this, as it must be printed under your own eye in London. All that I would advise you to do is, to go over the manuscript before sending it to the printer, and correct it as you would do a proof; for, should any material alterations occur to you, you can easily make them on the blank pages....

"I suppose you would wish the work to be printed in post 8vo, like 'Reginald Dalton' and others that I have published. This is certainly the most elegant form, but it is expensive, and it is perhaps worthy of consideration whether or not it might be advisable to take the less expensive form of 12mo, similar to my second edition of 'Adam Blair' (by Lockhart, the 'Scorpion'). I am, I confess, in considerable doubt both ways. If, however, you prefer the post 8vo, my doubts will be at an end. I have written a few lines to my friends the Messrs. Spottiswood, (the King's printers,) in order that you may at once put the manuscript into their hands, as soon as you are ready. If you prefer the post 8vo, you will get from Mr. Cadell a volume of 'Reginald Dalton' or of 'Percy Mallory'; but if you like the 12mo, you will get a copy of the second edition of 'Adam Blair,' and give your directions to Messrs. Spottiswood accordingly....

"I do not think that the volumes should be less than three hundred and sixty pages, for thin volumes look so catchpenny-like. At the same time, it is better to have thin volumes than to keep in or add anything that interrupts or interferes with the story....

"I have been quite overloaded with articles this month, and some of them very long, which cannot for various reasons be delayed. I shall therefore be obliged to keep both of your articles till next month. I am vexed at not being able to get in your tale," (the original sketch of "Rachel Dyer," and the first of a series which I had in contemplation,) "which is very striking and powerful; but it was too long for this number, having so many other long articles, and it would have destroyed it to have divided it. The 'American Books,' too, is very interesting, though you perhaps hit poor Cooper rather hard, and some of the Cockneys will be apt to quote it when 'Brother Jonathan' comes into their paws.... I enclose you ten guineas on account."

April 26th he writes,—"I am very much pleased with the appearance of the sheet, and above all with what you have done to it. The work now starts fair and straightforward, and you will feel your own way much better and take a much firmer hold of your reader by allowing the narrative to take its natural course."

In due time I had my pockets picked of my last shilling, and "Brother Jonathan"[Pg 670] appeared just in the nick of time and in the best possible shape to keep me out of a sponging-house. For a while it created quite a sensation, and led to many new engagements with different periodicals. It was well received on the Continent, and reviewed in the leading journals of France. It would have been republished in this country, had not the sheets been suppressed, which I sent in advance to Wiley, the publisher of Cooper's works, till it was too late. Other copies were lost, I know not how, and I gave up the idea of astonishing the natives here.

Meanwhile Mr. Blackwood and I had never met. Hindrances had happened, month after month, when it seemed that we should certainly have a chance for a grapple; and he had behaved so handsomely to me through all our negotiations and correspondence, that I wanted to look into his eyes.

At last he came down upon me when least expected. Mrs. Halloway tapped at my door to say that a strange gentleman was below, inquiring for Mr. Carter Holmes; and then she handed me Mr. Blackwood's card. "Show him up," said I, as a knowing smile drifted athwart her fine old-fashioned English face,—for she had the secret under lock-and-key, and used to collect my drafts and take charge of the letters to and from "Carter Holmes." The girl who went to the door knew nothing of such a gentleman, and so the landlady took the business into her own hands.

We met after a most agreeable fashion, and I was greatly pleased with my visitor, though disappointed in his personal appearance. I found him a short, "stubbed" man, of about five feet six, I should say, with a plain, straightforward business air,—like that of a substantial tradesman,—and a look of uncommon though quiet shrewdness. You could see at a glance that he was a man to be trusted,—frank and fearless, without being either boastful or aggressive. After talking over matters generally, and getting my pay in cash,—guineas for pounds,—without taking a bill or engaging my name for a discount in the usual course of trade, he invited me to dine with him at an eating-house in the Strand, saying that he had asked "Ensign O'Doherty" (Dr. Maginn) to meet me; the man who wrote Hebrew and Greek and Latin poetry, and had begun for "Blackwood" not long before with rendering the ballad of "Chevy Chase" into Latin verse. I could see, that, although Mr. Blackwood had the highest opinion of the Doctor's genius and scholarship, he was a little shy of him, and I dare say saw through and through him, as I think I did.

The dinner was a plain, substantial affair, without wine or delicacies,—or even whiskey,—which may have been out of deference to me; for when asked what I would "take?" I answered, "Nothing beyond a glass of ale or porter." It may be that our friend the Doctor was a little disappointed, or that "Ebony," knowing his weakness upon that point, was unwilling to show him up altogether, on whiskey-punch, or old Port, before a stranger; for, instead of talking freely and pleasantly, and keeping up appearances, the Doctor grew shy and reserved, and answered the simplest questions with an air of embarrassment, as if he were afraid of being entrapped. In short, he disappointed me. There was nothing in his language, look, or manner to justify his reputation as "Ensign O'Doherty"; nor was there anything in the little that he said or did to indicate the lamentable tendency of his gifted nature, which ended within a few months, or a year or two at most, in his utter degradation and ruin. He had the air and manners of a gentleman, though not of one who had seen much of the world; with a mild, pleasant expression of countenance, and a dash of seriousness. He seemed to be about five-and-twenty, according to my present recollection, of middling stature, and of a decidedly intellectual type; but he said nothing to be remembered while we were together; and I have since had an intimation that he was never himself when sober, and that Mr. Blackwood had just taken him out of a sponging-house to meet me.[Pg 671] Otherwise, our dinner passed off in a very agreeable, unpretending fashion, and we separated, never to meet again,—with a settled conviction on my part, however, that I understood the characters of both as well as if we had been dining together for a twelvemonth.

Soon after this, Mr. Millar, the first publisher of the "Sketch-Book," engaged me to write for the "European Magazine," New Series, without allowing me to know that the "John Bull" newspaper and Theodore Hook were at the bottom of the affair. I wrote for it month after month, upon American matters, until I discovered the truth, and had just got through a sharp controversy with Mathews, when I found it necessary to knock off: the "John Bull" constantly abusing America, and Theodore Hook losing no opportunity of saying the most offensive and brutal things of us,—as, for example, that Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Adams both died drunk on the 4th of July.

I had also contributed a series of papers to the "London Magazine," under the title of "Yankee Notions," and was showing up John Dunn Hunter as he deserved, in which I was followed soon after by Mr. Sparks in the "North American Review," about the time that the "Edinburgh Review" adopted in the lump my theory of "Men and Women," already referred to, saying in September, 1826, substantially what I had said in October, 1824. "We think it probable," says Mr. Jeffrey, "that some men have originally a greater excitability or general vivacity of mind than others, and that is the chief difference. But considering how variously they may be developed or directed in after-life, it seems to us of no sort of importance whether we call it a temperament, and say that it is shown by the color of the hair and the eyes, or maintain that it is a balance of active powers and propensities, the organs of which are in the skull."

I had also written for the "Westminster," and, in short, was furnishing about all of the monthlies and two of the quarterlies with American pabulum; and yet the public were not satisfied. It seemed as if "increase of appetite did grow with what it fed on." This, of course, must have been very gratifying to "Old Christopher," though he did not like the idea of anybody's knowing who wrote for the "Maga," and letting the "delicious secret out." He wanted all his contributors to himself, either in fact or in appearance; and when he found, from something I said in the "London," or somewhere else, that I was known as the writer of the "Blackwood Papers," he took me to task in a way that displeased me. So we quarrelled,—or rather I quarrelled,—for he did not. He kept his temper, and I lost mine,—for which, by the way, I ought to be thankful; and the affair ended by my withdrawing the first of a series of "North American Stories," which I was preparing for him, and returning the fifteen guineas he had paid me for it. It was already in type, and was the framework or skeleton of "Rachel Dyer."

On the whole, I must acknowledge that I was chiefly to blame, though not altogether. I never wrote another line for him, and we had no further correspondence.

About the same time, another misunderstanding arose between him and "O'Doherty," who entered upon a rival enterprise, and became editor of a new monthly, the title of which I do not now remember. It was of the "Blackwood" type, though somewhat exaggerated, being ferocious where "Blackwood" was only sarcastic, and utterly regardless of truth, where "Blackwood" was rather cautious and circumspect in all that required proof. In the very first number there appeared what was claimed to be an extract from that "Life of Byron" which he had given to Moore, and which had been suppressed, if not bought up. It was entitled "My Wedding Night," and went into particulars so much in the style of Byron, that I, for one, have always believed it faithful, and neither an imitation nor a counterfeit. I have since been assured that Lady Caroline Lamb, and two or three more at least "of that ilk," had the reading of these[Pg 672] memoirs, and of course portions of the whole might have been copied. But however that may be, the publication by Dr. Maginn of the chapter mentioned was either such a piece of heartless treachery or such an impudent fabrication as no decent person would venture to encourage. Though other chapters were promised, not another line appeared; the magazine blew up, the Doctor was tabooed, and soon after died a miserable death.

But enough. That William Blackwood was an extraordinary man is evident enough from the astonishing success of his Magazine. Whatever may have been its history, its faults, or its follies, it has maintained itself now in the public favor of the world itself for nearly fifty years, and most of the time at a prodigious elevation, in unapproachable solitude. Burning and acrimonious, unrelenting, and at times deadly in its hatred, full of desperate partisanship, and of judicial blindness toward all who belonged to the other side in politics, it was always full of earnestness and originality and tumultuous life, and often-times not only generous, but magnanimous and forgiving.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

XI.

THE WOMAN QUESTION: OR, WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH HER?

"What do you think of this Woman's Rights question?" said Bob Stephens. "From some of your remarks, I apprehend that you think there is something in it. I may be wrong, but I must confess that I have looked with disgust on the whole movement. No man reverences women as I do; but I reverence them as women. I reverence them for those very things in which their sex differs from ours; but when they come upon our ground, and begin to work and fight after our manner and with our weapons, I regard them as fearful anomalies, neither men nor women. These Women's Rights Conventions appear to me to have ventilated crudities, absurdities, and blasphemies. To hear them talk about men, one would suppose that the two sexes were natural born enemies, and wonders whether they ever had fathers and brothers. One would think, upon their showing, that all men were a set of ruffians, in league against women,—they seeming, at the same time, to forget how on their very platforms the most constant and gallant defenders of their rights are men. Wendell Phillips and Wentworth Higginson have put at the service of the cause masculine training and manly vehemence, and complacently accepted the wholesale abuse of their own sex at the hands of their warrior sisters. One would think, were all they say of female powers true, that our Joan-of-Arcs ought to have disdained to fight under male captains."

"I think," said my wife, "that, in all this talk about the rights of men, and the rights of women, and the rights of children, the world seems to be forgetting what is quite as important, the duties of men and women and children. We all hear of our rights till we forget our duties; and even theology is beginning to concern itself more with what man has a right to expect of his Creator than what the Creator has a right to expect of man."

"You say the truth," said I; "there is danger of just this overaction: and yet rights must be discussed; because, in order to understand the duties, we[Pg 673] owe to any class, we must understand their rights. To know our duties to men, women, and children, we must know what the rights of men, women, and children justly are. As to the 'Woman's Rights movement,' it is not peculiar to America, it is part of a great wave in the incoming tide of modern civilization; the swell is felt no less in Europe, but it combs over and breaks on our American shore, because our great wide beach affords the best play for its waters: and as the ocean waves bring with them kelp, sea-weed, mud, sand, gravel, and even putrefying debris, which lie unsightly on the shore, and yet, on the whole, are healthful and refreshing,—so the Woman's Rights movement, with its conventions, its speech-makings, its crudities and eccentricities, is nevertheless a part of a healthful and necessary movement of the human race towards progress. This question of Woman and her Sphere is now, perhaps, the greatest of the age. We have put Slavery under foot, and with the downfall of Slavery the only obstacle to the success of our great democratic experiment is overthrown, and there seems no limit to the splendid possibilities which it may open before the human race.

"In the reconstruction that is now coming there lies more than the reconstruction of States and the arrangement of the machinery of Government. We need to know and feel, all of us, that, from the moment of the death of Slavery, we parted finally from the régime and control of all the old ideas formed under old oppressive systems of society, and came upon a new plane of life.

"In this new life we must never forget that we are a peculiar people, that we have to walk in paths unknown to the Old World, paths where its wisdom cannot guide us, where its precedents can be of little use to us, and its criticisms, in most cases, must be wholly irrelevant. The history of our war has shown us of how little service to us in any important crisis the opinions and advice of the Old World can be. We have been hurt at what seemed to us the want of sympathy, the direct antagonism, of England. We might have been less hurt, if we had properly understood that Providence had placed us in a position so far ahead of her ideas or power of comprehension that just judgment or sympathy was not to be expected from her.

"As we went through our great war with no help but that of God, obliged to disregard the misconceptions and impertinences which the foreign press rained down upon us, so, if we are wise, we shall continue to do. Our object must now be to make the principles on which our government is founded permeate consistently the mass of society, and to purge out the leaven of aristocratic and Old World ideas. So long as there is an illogical working in our actual life, so long as there is any class denied equal rights with other classes, so long will there be agitation and trouble."

"Then," said my wife, "you believe that women ought to vote?"

"If the principle on which we founded our government is true, that taxation must not exist without representation, and if women hold property and are taxed, it follows that women should be represented in the State by their votes, or there is an illogical working of our government."

"But, my dear, don't you think that this will have a bad effect on the female character?"

"Yes," said Bob, "it will make women caucus-holders, political candidates."

"It may make this of some women, just as of some men," said I. "But all men do not take any great interest in politics; it is very difficult to get some of the best of them to do their duty in voting; and the same will be found true among women."

"But, after all," said Bob, "what do you gain? What will a woman's vote be but a duplicate of that of her husband or father, or whatever man happens to be her adviser?"

"That may be true on a variety of[Pg 674] questions; but there are subjects on which the vote of women would, I think, be essentially different from that of men. On the subjects of temperance, public morals, and education, I have no doubt that the introduction of the female vote into legislation, in States, counties, and cities, would produce results very different from that of men alone. There are thousands of women who would close grogshops, and stop the traffic in spirits, if they had the legislative power; and it would be well for society, if they had. In fact, I think that a State can no more afford to dispense with the vote of women in its affairs than a family. Imagine a family where the female has no voice in the housekeeping! A State is but a larger family, and there are many of its concerns which equally with those of a private household would be bettered by female supervision."

"But fancy women going to those horrible voting-places! It is more than I can do myself," said Bob.

"But you forget," said I, "that they are horrible and disgusting principally because women never go to them. All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order. When a man can walk up to the ballot-box with his wife or his sister on his arm, voting-places will be far more agreeable than now; and the polls will not be such bear-gardens that refined men will be constantly tempted to omit their political duties there.

"If for nothing else, I would have women vote, that the business of voting may not be so disagreeable and intolerable to men of refinement as it now is; and I sincerely believe that the cause of good morals, good order, cleanliness, and public health would be a gainer, not merely by the added feminine vote, but by the added vote of a great many excellent, but too fastidious men, who are now kept from the polls by the disagreeables they meet there.

"Do you suppose, that, if women had equal representation with men in the municipal laws of New York, its reputation for filth during the last year would have gone so far beyond that of Cologne, or any other city renowned for bad smells? I trow not. I believe a lady-mayoress would have brought in a dispensation of brooms and whitewash, and made a terrible searching into dark holes and vile corners, before now. Female New York, I have faith to believe, has yet left in her enough of the primary instincts of womanhood to give us a clean, healthy city, if female votes had any power to do it."

"But," said Bob, "you forget that voting would bring together all the women of the lower classes."

"Yes; but, thanks to the instincts of their sex, they would come in their Sunday clothes: for where is the woman that hasn't her finery, and will not embrace every chance to show it? Biddy's parasol, and hat with pink ribbons, would necessitate a clean shirt in Pat as much as on Sunday. Voting would become a fête, and we should have a population at the polls as well dressed as at church. Such is my belief."

"I do not see," said Bob, "but you go to the full extent with our modern female reformers."

"There are certain neglected truths, which have been held up by these reformers, that are gradually being accepted and infused into the life of modern society; and their recognition will help to solidify and purify democratic institutions. They are,—

"1. The right of every woman to hold independent property.

"2. The right of every woman to receive equal pay with man for work which she does equally well.

"3. The right of any woman to do any work for which, by her natural organization and talent, she is peculiarly adapted.

"Under the first head, our energetic sisters have already, by the help of their gallant male adjutants, reformed the laws of several of our States, so that a married woman is no longer left the unprotected legal slave of any unprincipled, drunken spendthrift who may be[Pg 675] her husband,—but, in case of the imbecility or improvidence of the natural head of the family, the wife, if she have the ability, can conduct business, make contracts, earn and retain money for the good of the household; and I am sure no one can say that immense injustice and cruelty are not thereby prevented.

"It is quite easy for women who have the good fortune to have just and magnanimous husbands to say that they feel no interest in such reforms, and that they would willingly trust their property to the man to whom they give themselves; but they should remember that laws are not made for the restraint of the generous and just, but of the dishonest and base. The law which enables a married woman to hold her own property does not forbid her to give it to the man of her heart, if she so pleases; and it does protect many women who otherwise would be reduced to the extremest misery. I once knew an energetic milliner who had her shop attached four times, and a flourishing business broken up in four different cities, because she was tracked from city to city by a worthless spendthrift, who only waited till she had amassed a little property in a new place to swoop down upon and carry it off. It is to be hoped that the time is not distant when every State will give to woman a fair chance to the ownership and use of her own earnings and her own property."

"Well," said Bob, "the most interesting question still remains: what are to be the employments of woman? What ways are there for her to use her talents, to earn her livelihood and support those who are dear to her, when Providence throws that necessity upon her? This is becoming more than ever one of the pressing questions of our age. The war has deprived so many thousands of women of their natural protectors, that everything must be thought of that may possibly open a way for their self-support."

"Well, let us look over the field," said my wife. "What is there for woman?"

"In the first place," said I, "come the professions requiring natural genius,—authorship, painting, sculpture, with the subordinate arts of photographing, coloring, and finishing; but when all is told, these furnish employment to a very limited number,—almost as nothing to the whole. Then there is teaching, which is profitable in its higher branches, and perhaps the very pleasantest of all the callings open to woman; but teaching is at present an overcrowded profession, the applicants everywhere outnumbering the places. Architecture and landscape-gardening are arts every way suited to the genius of woman, and there are enough who have the requisite mechanical skill and mathematical education; and though never yet thought of for the sex, that I know of, I do not despair of seeing those who shall find in this field a profession at once useful and elegant. When women plan dwelling-houses, the vast body of tenements to be let in our cities will wear a more domestic and comfortable air, and will be built more with reference to the real wants of their inmates."

"I have thought," said Bob, "that agencies of various sorts, as canvassing the country for the sale of books, maps, and engravings, might properly employ a great many women. There is a large class whose health suffers from confinement and sedentary occupations, who might, I think, be both usefully and agreeably employed in business of this sort, and be recruiting their health at the same time."

"Then," said my wife, "there is the medical profession."

"Yes," said I. "The world is greatly obliged to Miss Blackwell and other noble pioneers who faced and overcame the obstacles to the attainment of a thorough medical education by females. Thanks to them, a new and lucrative profession is now open to educated women in relieving the distresses of their own sex; and we may hope that in time, through their intervention, the care of the sick may also become the vocation of cultivated, refined, intelligent[Pg 676] women instead of being left, as heretofore, to the ignorant and vulgar? The experience of our late war has shown us what women of a high class morally and intellectually can do in this capacity. Why should not this experience inaugurate a new and sacred calling for refined and educated women? Why should not NURSING become a vocation equal in dignity and in general esteem to the medical profession, of which it is the right hand? Why should our dearest hopes, in the hour of their greatest peril, be committed into the hands of Sairey Gamps, when the world has seen Florence Nightingales?"

"Yes, indeed," said my wife; "I can testify, from my own experience, that the sufferings and dangers of the sickbed, for the want of intelligent, educated nursing, have been dreadful. A prejudiced, pig-headed, snuff-taking old woman, narrow-minded and vulgar, and more confident in her own way than seven men that can render a reason, enters your house at just the hour and moment when all your dearest earthly hopes are brought to a crisis. She becomes absolute dictator over your delicate, helpless wife and your frail babe,—the absolute dictator of all in the house. If it be her sovereign will and pleasure to enact all sorts of physiological absurdities in the premises, who shall say her nay? "She knows her business, she hopes!" And if it be her edict, as it was of one of her class whom I knew, that each of her babies shall eat four baked beans the day it is four days old, eat them it must; and if the baby die in convulsions four days after, it is set down as the mysterious will of an overruling Providence.

"I know and have seen women lying upon laced pillows under silken curtains, who have been bullied and dominated over in the hour of their greatest helplessness by ignorant and vulgar tyrants, in a way that would scarce be thought possible in civilized society, and children that have been injured or done to death by the same means. A celebrated physician told me of a babe whose eyesight was nearly ruined by its nurse taking a fancy to wash its eyes with camphor, "to keep it from catching cold," she said. I knew another infant that was poisoned by the nurse giving it laudanum in some of those patent nostrums which these ignorant creatures carry secretly in their pockets, to secure quiet in their little charges. I knew one delicate woman who never recovered from the effects of being left at her first confinement in the hands of an ill-tempered, drinking nurse, and whose feeble infant was neglected and abused by this woman in a way to cause lasting injury. In the first four weeks of infancy, the constitution is peculiarly impressible; and infants of a delicate organization may, if frightened and ill treated, be the subjects of just such a shock to the nervous system as in mature age comes from the sudden stroke of a great affliction or terror. A bad nurse may affect nerves predisposed to weakness in a manner they never will recover from. I solemnly believe that the constitutions of more women are broken up by bad nursing in their first confinement than by any other cause whatever. And yet there are at the same time hundreds and thousands of women wanting the means of support, whose presence in a sick-room would be a benediction. I do trust that Miss Blackwell's band of educated nurses will not be long in coming, and that the number of such may increase till they effect a complete revolution in this vocation. A class of cultivated, well-trained, intelligent nurses would soon elevate the employment of attending on the sick into the noble calling it ought to be, and secure for it its appropriate rewards."

"There is another opening for woman," said I,—"in the world of business. The system of commercial colleges now spreading over our land is a new and a most important development of our times. There that large class of young men who have either no time or no inclination for an extended classical education[Pg 677] can learn what will fit them for that active material life which in our broad country needs so many workers. But the most pleasing feature of these institutions is, that the complete course is open to women no less than to men, and women there may acquire that knowledge of book-keeping and accounts, and of the forms and principles of business transactions, which will qualify them for some of the lucrative situations hitherto monopolized by the other sex. And the expenses of the course of instruction are so arranged as to come within the scope of very moderate means. A fee of fifty dollars entitles a woman to the benefit of the whole course, and she has the privilege of attending at any hours that may suit her own engagements and convenience."

"Then, again," said my wife, "there are the departments of millinery and dress-making and the various branches of needle-work, which afford employment to thousands of women; there is type-setting, by which many are beginning to get a living; there are the manufactures of cotton, woollen, silk, and the numberless useful articles which employ female hands in their fabrication,—all of them opening avenues by which, with more or less success, a subsistence can be gained."

"Well, really," said Bob, "it would appear, after all, that there are abundance of openings for women. What is the cause of the outcry and distress? How is it that we hear of women starving, driven to vice and crime by want, when so many doors of useful and profitable employment stand open to them?"

"The question would easily be solved," said my wife, "if you could once see the kind and class of women who thus suffer and starve. There may be exceptions, but too large a portion of them are girls and women who can or will do no earthly thing well,—and what is worse, are not willing to take the pains to be taught to do anything well. I will describe to you one girl, and you will find in every intelligence-office a hundred of her kind to five thoroughly trained ones.

"Imprimis: she is rather delicate and genteel-looking, and you may know from the arrangement of her hair just what the last mode is of disposing of rats or waterfalls. She has a lace bonnet with roses, a silk mantilla, a silk dress trimmed with velvet, a white skirt with sixteen tucks and an embroidered edge, a pair of cloth gaiters, underneath which are a pair of stockings without feet, the only pair in her possession. She has no under-linen, and sleeps at night in the working-clothes she wears in the day. She never seems to have in her outfit either comb, brush, or tooth-brush of her own,—neither needles, thread, scissors, nor pins: her money, when she has any, being spent on more important articles, such as the lace bonnet or silk mantilla, or the rats and waterfalls that glorify her head. When she wishes to sew, she borrows what is needful of a convenient next neighbor; and if she gets a place in a family as second girl, she expects to subsist in these respects by borrowing of the better-appointed servants, or helping herself from the family stores.

"She expects, of course, the very highest wages, if she condescends to live out, and by help of a trim outside appearance and the many vacancies that are continually occurring in households she gets places, where her object is to do just as little of any duty assigned to her as possible, to hurry through her performances, put on her fine clothes, and go a-gadding. She is on free and easy terms with all the men she meets, and ready at jests and repartee, sometimes far from seemly. Her time of service in any one place lasts indifferently from a fortnight to two or three months, when she takes her wages, buys her a new parasol in the latest style, and goes back to the intelligence-office. In the different families where she has lived she has been told a hundred times the proprieties of household life, how to make beds, arrange rooms, wash china, glass, and silver, and set[Pg 678] tables; but her habitual rule is to try in each place how small and how poor services will be accepted. When she finds less will not do, she gives more. When the mistress follows her constantly and shows an energetic determination to be well served, she shows that she can serve well; but such attention relaxes, she slides back again. She is as destructive to a house as a fire; the very spirit of wastefulnes is in her; she cracks the china, dents the silver, stops the water-pipes with rubbish; and after she is gone, there is generally a sum equal to half her wages to be expended in repairing the effects of her carelessness. And yet there is one thing to be said for her: she is quite as careful of her employer's things as of her own. The full amount of her mischief often does not appear at once, as she is glib of tongue, adroit in apologies, and lies with as much alertness and as little thought of conscience as a blackbird chatters. It is difficult for people who have been trained from childhood in the school of verities,—who have been lectured for even the shadow of a prevarication, and shut up in disgrace for a lie, till truth becomes a habit of their souls,—it is very difficult for people so educated to understand how to get on with those who never speak the truth except by mere accident, who assert any and every thing that comes into the heads with all the assurance and all the energy of perfect verity.

"What becomes of this girl? She finds means, by begging, borrowing, living out, to keep herself extremely trim and airy for a certain length of time, till the rats and waterfalls, the lace hat and parasol, and the glib tongue, have done their work in making a fool of some honest young mechanic who earns three dollars a day. She marries him with no higher object than to have somebody to earn money for her to spend. And what comes of such marriages?

"That is one ending of her career; the other is on the street, in haunts of vice, in prison, in drunkenness, and death.

"Whence come these girls? They are as numerous as yellow butterflies in autumn; they flutter up to cities from the country; they grow up from mothers who ran the same sort of career before them; and the reason why in the end they fall out of all reputable the moment employment and starve on poor wages is, that they become physically, mentally, and morally incapable of rendering any service which society will think worth paying for."

"I remember," said I, "that the head of the most celebrated dress-making establishment in New York, in reply to the appeals of the needle-women of the city for sympathy and wages, came out with published statements to this effect: that the difficulty lay not in unwillingness of employers to pay what work was worth, but in finding any work worth paying for; that she had many applicants, but among them few who could be of real use to her; that she, in common with everybody in this country who has any kind of serious responsibilities to carry, was continually embarrassed for want of skilled work-people, who could take and go on with the labor of her various departments without her constant supervision; that out of a hundred girls, there would not be more than five to whom she could give a dress to be made and dismiss it from her mind as something certain to be properly done.

"Let people individually look around their own little sphere and ask themselves if they know any woman really excelling in any valuable calling or accomplishment who is suffering for want of work. All of us know seamstresses, dress-makers, nurses, and laundresses, who have made themselves such a reputation, and are so beset and overcrowded with work, that the whole neighborhood is constantly on its knees to them with uplifted hands. The fine seamstress, who can cut and make trousseaus and layettes in elegant perfection, is always engaged six months in advance; the pet dress-maker of a neighborhood must be engaged in May for September, and in September for May;[Pg 679] a laundress who sends your clothes home in nice order always has all the work that she can do. Good work in any department is the rarest possible thing in our American life; and it is a fact that the great majority of workers, both in the family and out, do only tolerably well,—not so badly that it actually cannot be borne, yet not so well as to be a source of real, thorough satisfaction. The exceptional worker in every neighborhood, who does things really well, can always set her own price, and is always having more offering than she can possibly do.

"The trouble, then, in finding employment for women lies deeper than the purses or consciences of the employers; it lies in the want of education in women: the want of education, I say,—meaning by education that which fits a woman for practical and profitable employment in life, and not mere common school learning."

"Yes," said my wife; "for it is a fact that the most troublesome and hopeless persons to provide for are often those who have a good medium education, but no feminine habits, no industry, no practical calculation, no muscular strength, and no knowledge of any one of woman's peculiar duties. In the earlier days of New England, women, as a class, had far fewer opportunities for acquiring learning, yet were far better educated, physically and morally, than now. The high school did not exist; at the common school they learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, and practised spelling; while at home they did the work of the household. They were cheerful, bright, active, ever on the alert, able to do anything, from the harnessing and driving of a horse to the finest embroidery. The daughters of New England in those days looked the world in the face without a fear. They shunned no labor; they were afraid of none; and they could always find their way to a living."

"But although less instructed in school learning," said I, "they showed no deficiency in intellectual acumen. I see no such women, nowadays, as some I remember of that olden time,—women whose strong minds and ever active industry carried on reading and study side by side with household toils.

"I remember a young lady friend of mine, attending a celebrated boarding-school, boarded in the family of a woman who had never been to school longer than was necessary to learn to read and write, yet who was a perfect cyclopedia of general information. The young scholar used to take her Chemistry and Natural Philosophy into the kitchen, where her friend was busy with her household work, and read her lessons to her, that she might have the benefit of her explanations; and so, while the good lady scoured her andirons or kneaded her bread, she lectured to her protégée on mysteries of science far beyond the limits of the text-book. Many of the graduates of our modern high schools would find it hard to shine in conversation on the subjects they had studied, in the searching presence of some of these vigorous matrons of the olden time, whose only school had been the leisure hours gained by energy and method from their family cares."

"And in those days," said my wife, "there lived in our families a class of American domestics, women of good sense, and good powers of reflection, who applied this sense and power of reflection to household matters. In the early part of my married life, I myself had American 'help'; and they were not only excellent servants, but trusty and invaluable friends. But now, all this class of applicants for domestic service have disappeared, I scarce know why or how. All I know is, there is no more a Betsey or a Lois, such as used to take domestic cares off my shoulders so completely."

"Good heavens! where are they?" cried Bob. "Where do they hide? I would search through the world after such a prodigy!"

"The fact is," said I, "there has been a slow and gradual reaction against[Pg 680] household labor in America. Mothers began to feel that it was a sort of curse, to be spared, if possible, to their daughters; women began to feel that they were fortunate in proportion as they were able to be entirely clear of family responsibilities. Then Irish labor began to come in, simultaneously with a great advance in female education.

"For a long while nothing was talked of, written of, thought of, in teachers' meetings, conventions, and assemblies, but the neglected state of female education; and the whole circle of the arts and sciences was suddenly introduced into our free-school system, from which needle-work as gradually and quietly was suffered to drop out. The girl who attended the primary and high school had so much study imposed on her that she had no time for sewing or housework; and the delighted mother was only too happy to darn her stockings and do the housework alone, that her daughter might rise to a higher plane than she herself had attained to. The daughter, thus educated, had, on coming to womanhood, no solidity of muscle, no manual dexterity, no practice or experience in domestic life; and if she were to seek a livelihood, there remained only teaching, or some feminine trade, or the factory."

"These factories," said my wife, "have been the ruin of hundreds and hundreds of our once healthy farmers' daughters and others from the country. They go there young and unprotected; they live there in great boarding-houses, and associate with a promiscuous crowd, without even such restraints of maternal supervision as they would have in great boarding-schools; their bodies are enfeebled by labor often necessarily carried on in a foul and heated atmosphere; and at the hours when off duty, they are exposed to all the dangers of unwatched intimacy with the other sex.

"Moreover, the factory-girl learns and practises but one thing,—some one mechanical movement, which gives no scope for invention, ingenuity, or any other of the powers called into play by domestic labor; so that she is in reality unfitted in every way for family duties.

"Many times it has been my lot to try, in my family service, girls who have left factories; and I have found them wholly useless for any of the things which a woman ought to be good for. They knew nothing of a house, or what ought to be done in it; they had imbibed a thorough contempt of household labor, and looked upon it but as a dernier resort; and it was only the very lightest of its tasks that they could even begin to think of. I remember I tried to persuade one of these girls, the pretty daughter of a fisherman, to take some lessons in washing and ironing. She was at that time engaged to be married to a young mechanic, who earned something like two or three dollars a day.

"'My child,' said I, 'you will need to understand all kinds of housework, if you are going to be married.'

"She tossed her little head,—

"'Indeed, she wasn't going to trouble herself about that.'

"'But who will get up your husband's shirts?'

"'Oh, he must put them out. I'm not going to be married to make a slave of myself!'

"Another young factory-girl, who came for table and parlor work, was so full of airs and fine notions, that it seemed as difficult to treat with her as with a princess. She could not sweep, because it blistered her hands, which, in fact, were long and delicate; she could not think of putting them into hot dish-water, and for that reason preferred washing the dishes in cold water; she required a full hour in the morning to make her toilet; she was laced so tightly that she could not stoop without vertigo, and her hoops were of dimensions which seemed to render it impossible for her to wait upon table; she was quite exhausted with the effort of ironing the table-napkins and chamber-towels;—yet she could not think of 'living out' under two dollars a week.[Pg 681]

"Both these girls had had a good free-school education, and could read any amount of novels, write a tolerable letter, but had not learned anything with sufficient accuracy to fit them for teachers. They were pretty, and their destiny was to marry and lie a dead weight on the hands of some honest man, and to increase, in their children, the number of incapables."

"Well," said Bob, "what would you have? What is to be done?"

"In the first place," said I, "I would have it felt by those who are seeking to elevate woman, that the work is to be done, not so much by creating for her new spheres of action as by elevating her conceptions of that domestic vocation to which God and Nature have assigned her. It is all very well to open to her avenues of profit and advancement in the great outer world; but, after all, to make and keep a home is, and ever must be, a woman's first glory, her highest aim. No work of art can compare with a perfect home; the training and guiding of a family must be recognized as the highest work a woman can perform; and female education ought to be conducted with special reference to this.

"Men are trained to be lawyers, to be physicians, to be mechanics, by long and self-denying study and practice. A man cannot even make shoes merely by going to the high school and learning reading, writing, and mathematics; he cannot be a book-keeper, or a printer, simply from general education.

"Now women have a sphere and profession of their own,—a profession for which they are fitted by physical organization, by their own instincts, and to which they are directed by the pointing and manifest finger of God,—and that sphere is family life.

"Duties to the State and to public life they may have; but the public duties of women must bear to their family ones the same relation that the family duties of men bear to their public ones.

"The defect in the late efforts to push on female education is, that it has been for her merely general, and that it has left out and excluded all that is professional; and she undertakes the essential duties of womanhood, when they do devolve on her, without any adequate preparation."

"But is it possible for a girl to learn at school the things which fit her for family life?" said Bob.

"Why not?" I replied. "Once it was thought impossible in schools to teach girls geometry, or algebra, or the higher mathematics; it was thought impossible to put them through collegiate courses: but it has been done, and we see it. Women study treatises on political economy in schools; and why should not the study of domestic economy form a part of every school course? A young girl will stand up at the blackboard, and draw and explain the compound blowpipe, and describe all the process of making oxygen and hydrogen. Why should she not draw and explain a refrigerator as well as an air-pump? Both are to be explained on philosophical principles. When a school-girl, in her Chemistry, studies the reciprocal action of acids and alkalies, what is there to hinder the teaching her its application to the various processes of cooking where acids and alkalies are employed? Why should she not be led to see how effervescence and fermentation can be made to perform their office in the preparation of light and digestible bread? Why should she not be taught the chemical substances by which food is often adulterated, and the tests by which such adulterations are detected? Why should she not understand the processes of confectionery, and know how to guard against the deleterious or poisonous elements that are introduced into children's sugar-plums and candies? Why, when she learns the doctrine of mordants, the substances by which different colors are set, should she not learn it with some practical view to future life, so that she may know how to set the color of a fading calico or restore the color of a spotted one? Why, in short, when a girl has labored through a profound chemical[Pg 682] work, and listened to courses of chemical lectures, should she come to domestic life, which presents a constant series of chemical experiments and changes, and go blindly along as without chart or compass, unable to tell what will take out a stain or what will brighten a metal, what are common poisons and what their antidotes, and not knowing enough of the laws of caloric to understand how to warm a house, or of the laws of atmosphere to know how to ventilate one? Why should the preparation of food, that subtile art on which life, health, cheerfulness, good temper, and good looks so largely depend, forever be left in the hands of the illiterate and vulgar?

"A benevolent gentleman has lately left a large fortune for the founding of a university for women, and the object is stated to be to give women who have already acquired a general education the means of acquiring a professional one, to fit themselves for some employment by which they may gain a livelihood.

"In this institution the women are to be instructed in book-keeping, stenography, telegraphing, photographing, drawing, modelling, and various other arts; but so far as I remember, there is no proposal to teach domestic economy as at least one of woman's professions.

"Why should there not be a professor of domestic economy in every large female school? Why should not this professor give lectures, first on house-planning and building, illustrated by appropriate apparatus? Why should not the pupils have presented to their inspection models of houses planned with reference to economy, to ease of domestic service, to warmth, to ventilation, and to architectural appearance? Why should not the professor go on to lecture further on house-fixtures, with models of the best mangles, washing-machines, clothes-wringers, ranges, furnaces, and cooking-stoves, together with drawings and apparatus illustrative of domestic hydraulics, showing the best contrivances for bathing-rooms and the obvious principles of plumbing, so that the pupils may have some idea how to work the machinery of a convenient house when they have it, and to have such conveniences introduced when wanting? If it is thought worth while to provide at great expense apparatus for teaching the revolutions of Saturn's moons and the precession of the equinoxes, why should there not be some also to teach what it may greatly concern a woman's earthly happiness to know?

"Why should not the professor lecture on home-chemistry, devoting his first lecture to bread-making? and why might not a batch of bread be made and baked and exhibited to the class, together with specimens of morbid anatomy in the bread line,—the sour cotton bread of the baker,—the rough, big-holed bread,—the heavy, fossil bread,—the bitter bread of too much yeast,—and the causes of their defects pointed out? And so with regard to the various articles of food,—why might not chemical lectures be given on all of them, one after another?—In short, it would be easy to trace out a course of lectures on common things to occupy a whole year, and for which the pupils, whenever they come to have homes of their own, will thank the lecturer to the last day of their life.

"Then there is no impossibility in teaching needle-work, the cutting and fitting of dresses, in female schools. The thing is done very perfectly in English schools for the working classes. A girl trained at one of these schools came into a family I once knew. She brought with her a sewing-book, in which the process of making various articles was exhibited in miniature. The several parts of a shirt were first shown, each perfectly made, and fastened to a leaf of the book by itself, and then the successive steps of uniting the parts, till finally appeared a miniature model of the whole. The sewing was done with red thread, so that every stitch might show and any imperfection be at once remedied. The same process was pursued with regard to other garments, and a good[Pg 683] general idea of cutting and fitting them was thus given to an entire class of girls.

"In the same manner the care and nursing of young children and the tending of the sick might be made the subject of lectures. Every woman ought to have some general principles to guide her with regard to what is to be done in case of the various accidents that may befall either children or grown people, and of their lesser illnesses, and ought to know how to prepare comforts and nourishment for the sick. Hawthorne's satirical remarks upon the contrast between the elegant Zenobia's conversation and the smoky porridge she made for him when he was an invalid might apply to the volunteer cookery of many charming women."

"I think," said Bob, "that your Professor of Domestic Economy would find enough to occupy his pupils."

"In fact," said I, "were domestic economy properly honored and properly taught, in the manner described, it would open a sphere of employment to so many women in the home life, that we should not be obliged to send our women out to California or the Pacific, to put an end to an anxious and aimless life.

"When domestic work is sufficiently honored to be taught as an art and science in our boarding-schools and high schools, then possibly it may acquire also dignity in the eyes of our working classes, and young girls who have to earn their own living may no longer feel degraded in engaging in domestic service. The place of a domestic in a family may become as respectable in their eyes as a place in a factory, in a printing-office, in a dress-making or millinery establishment, or behind the counter of a shop.

"In America there is no class which will confess itself the lower class, and a thing recommended solely for the benefit of any such class finds no one to receive it.

"If the intelligent and cultivated look down on household-work with disdain, if they consider it as degrading, a thing to be shunned by every possible device, they may depend upon it that the influence of such contempt of woman's noble duties will flow downward, producing a like contempt in every class in life.

"Our sovereign princesses learn the doctrine of equality very quickly, and are not going to sacrifice themselves to what is not considered de bon ton by the upper classes; and the girl with the laced hat and parasol, without underclothes, who does her best to "shirk" her duties as housemaid, and is looking for marriage as an escape from work, is a fair copy of her mistress, who married for much the same reason, who hates housekeeping, and would rather board or do anything else than have the care of a family;—the one is about as respectable as the other.

"When housekeeping becomes an enthusiasm, and its study and practice a fashion, then we shall have in America that class of persons to rely on for help in household labors who are now going to factories, to printing-offices, to every kind of toil, forgetful of the best life and sphere of woman."

[Pg 684]

THE FORGE.

CHAPTER IX.

It was not long before I was established in my new situation. Mr. Bray said, roughly,—

"I s'pose new friends is better than them your father picked out for you; leastways you must try 'em and see. I don't say as I wouldn't on no account take you back, if I found you couldn't git along without me. You mustn't have that look of bein' twenty mile away, when a hoss's leg is in your hand, and you're ready to shoe him; for I sha'n't be by to bring you back again."

Mrs. Bray said,—

"Well, it is rather a long ride for the grand folks 'way down to Lower Warren, and Amos bein' a family man, of course they wouldn't expect him to be a-movin' to suit them; and as he's had the trainin' of you, they think it'll be all right. I hope it will, I'm sure."

Little Annie looked sadder than usual, but said nothing, until the morning when I was to commence work at the new forge; then she followed me to the door with her little straw basket, in which she had packed a nice lunch, covered with lilac-leaves from the bush by the front door.

"You said you shouldn't have time to come home to dinner, as you go to Hillside this afternoon, Sandy," she said, apologetically, as she slipped it into my hand. "I hope it will be long before you go away altogether, it would be so lonely without you"; and the tears filled her blue eyes.

Why was that gentle, appealing beauty always luring me back to the village life, whose rustic, homely ways I was learning to despise? I could not tell; but she, part and parcel of it though she was, bound to it by parentage and pursuits, had never failed to touch my heart. I stooped and kissed her, as I so often had done before, and answered, laughing,—

"Go away? Never, Annie, until I take you with me."

She blushed; the old happiness stole back into her eyes at the first kind word from me, and she returned to her simple, daily tasks; while I, filled with ambition and pride in my new life, soon dismissed her from my mind.

I had meant to ask Annie to help me in arranging my new forge, as she had helped me with my first picture; and when the necessary purchases were made and in their places, when the woman living in the other part of the building I occupied had swept my floor and washed my solitary window, which was at one end and looked toward the hill, I resolutely determined to delay the unpacking of a box of pictures and books, of which the latter were to fill a small shelf above, and the former to hang around the window, until I could bring Annie up the next day to assist me. Deciding to read, therefore, until some custom should fall to me, I knocked a narrow board off the top of the box and slipped out a single book, when I heard the tramp of horses' feet, and, going to the door, saw the party from Hillside returning from a horseback ride. Mr. Lang, mounted on his magnificent horse, hurried forward and rode fairly within the smithy.

"Why, Sandy, actually established? I thought it was but right that Warrior should be your first visitor. See how he paws! He knows you, and will be getting a shoe off for your benefit."

I patted my old friend, who arched his neck still more proudly, as though hardly brooking the familiarity, when Miss Merton, Miss Darry, and Mr. Leopold rode up.

"Are you entirely ready for work, Sandy?" asked Miss Darry, after the first greeting.

"Ready for work, but not quite in order here," I replied.

"But if anything is lacking, why have[Pg 685] a book there? Why not arrange matters at once?" she continued, with her customary energy.

"What is that shelf for? and that old box? You may as well confess to any little adornments at once."

"I have a few books, and just one or two old pictures there," I replied, reluctantly; "but I have made up my mind not to arrange them until to-morrow: little Annie Bray can help me then, and the poor child has seldom anything to amuse her."

"Nonsense, Sandy! Little Annie Bray cannot put the books on that high shelf without your assistance, and very probably you will have other employment to-morrow. Then you will make yourself late for Mr. Leopold, and will begin wrong, which is about equal to going wrong all the way through. I have half a mind to dismount and help you myself. It will be a charming combination of forge and studio, won't it, Mr. Leopold?"

Mr. Leopold smiled, but assented, as though his interest in the matter was by no means proportioned to hers; and I could but notice that both Miss Merton and Mr. Lang looked as if quite enough of this sunny spring morning had been spent in examination of the new forge. So I replied, hastily,—

"Oh, well, Miss Darry, if it will give you any satisfaction, I'll finish my work here at once."

"Thank you, Sandy. And now I think of it, Alice, a Madeira vine can be trained from the shelf up over the window to make a delightful green curtain. A man, you know, never understands exactly how to plan these things."

"Ah, but I have planned, Miss Darry. This box will occupy the window; but it is to be filled with water, aquatic plants, insects, and tiny fish, for Annie's pleasure, when she makes me a visit."

"You mean to establish a kind of nursery, I see. I hope you won't waste your time, Sandy," retorted Miss Darry.

I could not fail to see that her disapproval of my interest in Annie Bray had not abated; for no plans formed with reference to her seemed to meet with approbation. And so I was the more pleased when Miss Merton turned to me, as they were about to ride away, saying,—

"I forgot to ask you the other evening to bring that sweet little girl to Hillside some day, or let her come alone. I will find plenty of amusement for her that shall not interfere with the work which Miss Darry is so desirous should go on."

They all laughed merrily, as they rode away; but I felt in no gay mood. I was provoked that I had yielded so readily to Miss Darry's wishes, and irritated by her evident dislike to the only person in the world whose affection I possessed.

"Why not dismount and help me herself?" I muttered, impatiently, as I broke open the cover of my box. "Far above me as she is, she has no right to interfere with my friendship with Annie, if she does not give me her own in its place."

However, as the morning wore on, I became interested in my new arrangements; the decorations of my low attic bedroom were displayed to greater advantage in the forge, where I should now pass so much more of my time; and as for Annie, after all, she would enjoy seeing it far better when completed. Before noon, too, I had opened an account with one of the most prosperous farmers in the neighborhood, and in hard manual labor my excitement passed away; and I presented myself at Hillside at the appointed hour, as grateful to us inmates as ever.

CHAPTER X.

Perhaps no art differs more widely with individual mind and temperament than that of teaching. I soon appreciated this under Mr. Leopold's training. For the first few lessons, I was put to no copying, given no verbal instruction; he showed me how to mix oil-colors, expecting his to be prepared[Pg 686] for him, when, in his eagerness to produce an effect, he did not care to stop for the purpose himself; and for the rest, advised me to watch him, which I did narrowly, while he worked sometimes by the hour without speaking. When I commenced painting, therefore, I felt as though I was making constant discoveries, and began to think, in the conceit of my youth and developing power, that I was working without other guide than my own intuition, until I found a number of serious errors indicated. Miss Darry's teaching made me feel that I could not do without her; Mr. Leopold's, that just so far as he carried me, I in turn could take some one else.

The summer days wore on. My hands grew rougher and coarser with hard work, yet just as surely increased their dexterity in holding the brush with a firm grasp and giving flexible and delicate strokes to finer work. My lessons and new forge left but little time for the cottage and Annie Bray now. Moreover, she, too, changed as the months wore on. When did I ever imagine, with all my growing plans and manhood, that she also was to have her work and purpose in the world? Yet she had made her visit to Hillside, had been not only amused and delighted, but instructed, by all she saw there. I was too deeply engrossed in self-development to continue my attention to her studies; but Miss Merton, inspired by Miss Darry's example, or attracted by the modest sweetness so congenial to her own womanly character, undertook the unwonted occupation of teaching; and Mr. Lang, greatly to my surprise, encouraged her in it. Three afternoons in the week Annie went to Hillside to receive a course of instruction, barren of system and conducted with supreme disregard of plainer and more useful branches, yet bringing out in a graceful way all her peculiarly refined tastes. Annie's hours rarely admitted of my walking home with her; and though occasionally she stopped at the forge, on her way through the village, it was only for a moment, and that often a busy one with me. She had grown taller and paler, sadder in expression, too, I fancied, notwithstanding the new interest at Hillside. But then she was leaving childhood behind her; her father had been more rough than ever since I left him; and with a momentary pity and wonder that she was more shy of my fond and brotherly ways than formerly, I ascribed it to these ordinary causes, and kept steadily at my work. It was not for me, the protégé of so brilliant a woman as Frank Darry, and a rising genius, to pause in my career for the pale cheeks of the village blacksmith's daughter.

My intercourse with Mr. Leopold did not become more familiar with time. The idea of his not looking like a genuine artist, the disappointment and failure to comprehend his pictures, changed into awe of the inner force of the man, as I beheld his patient, earnest labor. To my shallow comprehension of the worth of genius, his persistent effort, after the attainment of all I hoped to realize, was marvellous. He was rich, famed, cultivated, yet the ideal excellence hovered ever above him, waiting like a resurrection body to clothe the escaped soul of inspiration; and for this he toiled more unremittingly than I in my struggle for existence even in the world of Art. The secret of this man's soul was not, however, revealed to my questioning. Ever considerate and kind, he was no friend in any sense implying mutual interchange of thought or confidence. With Miss Darry, on the contrary, he was his free and natural self. Whenever I saw them together, I was conscious that his great nature went out irresistibly to meet hers, a fact of which it seemed to me she was far less aware than I. She walked and drove with him, but merely because Miss Merton and Mr. Lang were engrossed with each other, and as a side-play from the main object of her life.

I had been employed for several weeks upon a picture of greater importance than any before attempted. Miss Darry confidently declared it would be accepted at the autumn exhibition of[Pg 687] paintings in the city; and Mr. Leopold briefly advised me to make the attempt, backed by his favor to get it in. It was the working up of the odd fancy in which Annie and I had indulged so long ago,—that the forest haunts were not deserted, even though man did not invade them. In a clearing in the midst of the woods I had assembled the familiar squirrels, birds, and flowers, to play their part in the revels Nature takes on summer afternoons; and from the gnarled trunks and twisted vines whose grotesque involutions hinted the serpent-life within to the elves which peered from beneath the broad dank leaves, I had reasserted the old childish faith.

As I have said, Miss Darry approved my picture, though only as a preliminary to better things, saying,—

"You must paint Chimborazo, or some of the mammoth California scenery, Sandy. The microscope, not the canvas, is the proper instrument by which to scrutinize the minute. Genius certainly need not forever be peeping at Nature through her key-holes, but can enter her open door and dwell amid the grandest scenes of the universe."

CHAPTER XI.

I hurried away from the forge earlier than usual one July day, and, finding the studio vacant, worked a full hour before Mr. Leopold presented himself. He came in hurriedly, glanced at my picture, pointing out a fault or two, then seated himself at his easel for an hour longer of silent work. At the expiration of this time he rose, put away his materials, and said, as he turned toward the door,—

"Miss Merton and Mr. Lang are to be married this afternoon, Sandy. They wished me to ask you down to the ceremony, which is to be private. An unexpected affair, hurried on account of business which calls Mr. Lang to town for a great part of the winter, and so would separate them much, if she could not go with him."

I was extremely surprised. However, Mr. Leopold was so collected that I felt called upon to refrain all expression of astonishment.

"You need not go home to make any alteration in your dress, Sandy," he added. "Come up to my room and help yourself to all the minor articles you need."

It was not long before I entered the drawing-room, where I found Miss Darry, evidently expecting me.

"Well, Sandy, this is a hurried affair. Your presence was particularly desired; and, by the way, Alice insisted upon dispatching a messenger to Annie Bray with an invitation to the ceremony, but her mother sends word that she is away on some excursion. Alice will be sorry, she has taken such a fancy to her: you must explain that she was really wanted."

"Oh, no,—Annie will be so disappointed! I can hunt her up and be back here before Miss Merton is prepared for the occasion"; and I started for the door, but the will stronger than my own recalled me.

"Sandy, pray reflect a moment, and you will attempt nothing of the kind. They leave in the eight o'clock train, and will be married some time about sunset. In the interval you could never go and return from Warren on any other horse than Mr. Lang's, and I suppose you would not expect your little friend to ride before you. Besides, we have been busy to-day planning other matters, and the final decorations have not been thought of. You are the very one to make the proper disposition of light and shade, flowers, etc."

"Miss Darry, do call in Mr. Leopold to gather flowers and pull the shades up or down, and let me try at least to find Annie," I answered, impatiently.

But she only replied,—

"Mr. Leopold! why, you innocent youth, he hasn't half your artistic capacity. I can see how you reverence him; but trust me, it is only from the innate modesty of your nature."

"He exhausted the fanciful region in which I dwell years ago, Miss Darry,[Pg 688] and has gone up higher. You surely must see you undervalue his great nature."

"I see nothing just at present, Sandy, but the need of your assistance," she replied.

And by various devices she busied me until the arrival of the minister and the few intimate friends banished all further thought of Annie's regret at not being present. Miss Merton's loveliness and Mr. Lang's manly beauty made a picture I would gladly have studied longer than the time required to make them man and wife. I had long ago seen the ceremony performed by Mr. Purdo for a rustic couple; but this was a new and more fascinating phase of it. Impressed as I was apt to be by anything appealing to my emotions or sense of beauty, I did not care to join at once Miss Darry and Mr. Leopold, who engaged in their customary repartee directly after the bride retired to prepare for her journey; but Miss Darry, slipping away from Mr. Leopold, soon joined me on the lawn, to which I had stepped from the French window.

"What a serious expression, Sandy! One might imagine you had been making all these solemn promises yourself. You must learn not to be so easily affected by forms and symbols. It is a weakness of your poetic temperament. Their love has existed just as truly all these months as now; yet I never saw you grow serious over the contemplation of it, until a minister consecrated it by prayer and address."

I started.

"You do not give much of a niche to Cupid in your gallery of life, Miss Darry."

"Now that is poorer reasoning than I should have looked for even from you, Sandy. Because I laugh at your reverence for outward expression, do I necessarily depreciate the sentiment?"

"No," I answered, bluntly; "I was thinking how you bade me set aside Annie Bray,—how you always slight her claims upon me."

"Ah, it has a personal application, then," she replied, thoughtfully, but frankly as before. "It is only because I want you to make the most of your fine powers, that I would have you choose friends who can appreciate you."

"I know that you have been disinterested, noble," I returned, remorsefully. "But outward success would never atone to me for the lack of love. Perhaps it is through my very weakness that I cling so to the only human being who really loves me."

Miss Dairy's face changed color. For the first time in her intercourse with me, she was strongly and visibly moved.

"Sandy," she said, after a pause, in a low, broken voice, strangely at variance with its usual ringing tone, "without this love I, as a woman, have lived all my life, until a week ago; and then, because it was not the love I demanded, even though I could have taken it with inexpressible comfort into my lonely life, I rejected it. I tell you this merely as an encouragement. If Annie Bray is all you crave, forsake everything else for her; if not, deny yourself the gratification of being worshipped, and wait until you also can bestow your whole heart."

She stood there, in the waning light, plucking nervously the petals from the rose-bush, and scattering them on the grass,—her dark eye filled with a melancholy which I had never supposed could subdue its flashing light, or relax the outlines of the thinly cut lips,—unsatisfied,—her womanly nature rebelling against an unusually lonely lot. It needed just this humble acknowledgment of human need and human love to make Frank Darry irresistible, and my impressible fancy responded to the spell. Impelled by a passion which from its very force forbade analysis, I bent over her. Even then, as my hand fell upon her shoulder, and her eyes, still lulled in their dangerous trance of sadness, met mine inquiringly, my purpose was arrested by the voices of Nature around me, as if Annie Bray, herself allied to them, were reminding me of claims which had once held such power over me. I recall now the oriole[Pg 689] whose nest swung like a pendulum from the branch above, marking the passing of the summer day, and whose clear note struck more sweetly than the cuckoo clock the evening hour. I noticed a humming-bird nestled in its silver-lined apartment, its long bill looking as though even the honeyed sweetness of the flowers must be rendered more delicate before it could help to nourish the exuberant and palpitating life of its little body. Then I looked at the begonias and fuchsias in Miss Darry's hair, spilling their precious juices on the stem, as they hurried to reveal the glowing secret of their blossom; and while I yielded to the fascination of the scene, the woman beside me was absorbed into its wonderful witchery, Annie Bray and Frank Darry—timid, loving child and brilliantly developed woman—both united to win from me the passion of my life. Had I waited, the affinity of moods which drew us together would probably never have been reproduced; but I exclaimed,—

"Miss Darry, I can never entirely love any other woman than yourself!"

She started almost convulsively from the contact of my hand, and met my burning glance with one of such alarm and astonishment that I was stung almost to madness. Undoubtedly, my anger was partly a reaction from the period of dependence and tutelage, so galling to a proud and sensitive nature.

"You have no right," I cried, passionately, "to despise the love you have created. Listen; I do not expect any return. I know how theories are practically applied,—how one may work for the poor and ignorant on the broad table-land of perfect equality before God, and yet shrink from contact with the befriended brothers and sisters at the same social meal or in the same church. Shakspeare might have blackened Othello's skin by toil, instead of nature, and the obstacles to a happy love would have been in no degree lessened."

I paused; yet not a word did Miss Darry utter. Her face was so pale and rigid that all my suspicion was confirmed; and I exclaimed, more vehemently than before,—

"Remember, you cannot avoid the fact that I, a mere blacksmith, am your lover; if rejected and despised, your lover still. I shall think of you daily. You will not come to me alone the companion of my studio, one of those delicate visions which flit through an artist's brain. You shall stand beside my anvil. I will whisper your name when rough men are about me. You shall be the one gold thread embroidered into the coarse garment of my life,—my constant companion; yes, though you marry the first man in the land."

Still she stood immovable, as if carved in her favorite marble.

"Miss Darry," I implored, "I know how unworthy my character is of your love. Speak! If it is that you reject, I say no more; but what if your prophecies are fulfilled,—if I become what you desire?"

Then my statue glowed with life,—a deep color on the cheek, a frank, loving smile on the lips, banishing the doubtful, troubled expression I had watched so narrowly.

"You do not understand the woman you profess to love, Sandy," she replied, "if you suppose her capable of staking her favor on your future distinction. Not as blacksmith or artist, but as the man I love, I think of you to-night," she added, in a lower tone, returning to my side.

My happiness for the next few moments was complete. I held her closer in that fading light, and studied with delight the sweet, half-yielding, half-reproving expression with which she met my protestations of gratitude and devotion, and which I fondly fancied my love had stamped upon her face forever. Then I heard a quick step in the shrubbery, as of some one sent to summon us, and reluctantly released from my hold the embodiment at that instant of all I esteemed noblest and loveliest in woman. With characteristic composure, Miss Darry answered the message by gathering some of the[Pg 690] roses beside us, and turning to reënter the house. Afraid of my own lack of self-control, I would gladly have gone home like a blushing girl; but my new pride of protecting Miss Darry under all circumstances of difficulty compelled me to follow her. She was, however, on returning to the house, the same bright, helpful person as before. The scene on the lawn became, in half an hour, as the baseless fabric of a dream; and thinking that Miss Darry's sentiment, like that of the Colosseum, was best revealed by moonlight, I trusted in the few parting words which I should seek occasion to speak to her on the steps, as likely to restore her most captivating mood. When we parted, however, she only said, with heightened color, to be sure,—

"Sandy, I am well aware, that, were you the 'mere blacksmith' you called yourself in momentary passion to-night, bounded by narrow aims and desires, I could never love you. We must not, therefore, allow our affection to delay the destiny which, if you are faithful, most surely awaits you."

The fervent nonsense which might naturally have disgusted or at least wearied her she endured at first, as a necessary drawback; but it was soon toned down by the consciousness that she was guiding me, as usual, in paths best, if not always most agreeable to myself. She made no stipulations of secrecy with regard to our engagement. Her frank nature apparently admitted of no dim recesses to which only one must have the key.

After a few days, therefore, I resolved to disclose my new relations to the Brays, though I felt a most unaccountable reluctance to so doing. Mr. Bray received the information with indifference; Mrs. Bray looked surprised, and said she always knew Amos was respected, still she shouldn't have felt certain that the "school-ma'am" (in which capacity Miss Darry was spoken of in the village) would like to marry his apprentice; and Annie stole from her seat at the breakfast-table, and, laying her little hand on my shoulder, with a troubled look in her large blue eyes, asked,—

"Do you really mean it, Sandy,—that you have promised to marry the proud, handsome woman at Hillside?"

"Certainly, my little Annie," I replied; "I have promised to love and care for her, and I suppose we shall be married by-and-by. Miss Darry is not proud; it is only because you are too young to understand her that you think so."

"But I understand Mrs. Lang, and I thought I understood you, Sandy. Are you sure she will help you to grow happier and better?"

The tears were in her eyes. What induced these two—my betrothed wife and little sister—to have such doubts of each other?

"Of course I am sure of her, Annie. She has helped me to grow more of a man ever since I have known her; and as to being happier, two persons loving each other must, of course, be happy together. Besides," I added, smothering a sudden doubt, and assuming the philosopher, "we were not placed in this world to be happy, Annie,—only to make of ourselves all we can in every way."

"And to make others happy, Sandy," she added, in a wistful, tremulous way, as though her heart were full.

"Yes, certainly; and when I have a wife and home, I will make my little Annie so. She shall live with me, and confess that my wife is not proud, but noble and kind."

"No, Sandy, I shall not leave my mother, father, and brother Tom, to live with any one. I shall work with them and for them," she returned, with a womanly dignity I had never before noticed in her.

"You do not love me, then, Annie?" I asked, selfishly grasping at the affection I had so lightly prized.

"Yes, Sandy, as you love me; but not as we either of us care for our own,—you for Miss Darry, I for my mother, father, and Tom."

This final, clear settlement of my claims was all that was granted, though[Pg 691] I lingered while she busied herself with her morning work, in the hope of more hearty sympathy. I carried about with me all day a restless, unsatisfied state of mind, quite strange in a newly accepted lover, and scarcely to be exorcised by Miss Darry's bright cordiality in the evening.

CHAPTER XII.

Mrs. Lang returned from her wedding-journey happy and beautiful, charmed by all she had seen, and Mr. Lang was unusually demonstrative to every one in the excess of his joy; but I had reason to suppose that the announcement of our engagement reduced his exuberance considerably. Miss Darry did not, however, admit the least disappointment in their manner of receiving it; her own judgment was an estimate, from which, for herself, there was no appeal. She was the most entirely self-sustained woman I have ever met. Having decided that I was a genius, and that she loved me, the opinion of others was of no moment in her eyes. Mr. Lang merely offered his congratulations to me by saying,—

"Well, Sandy, my dear fellow, you are to obtain, it seems, what many a man of wealth and position will envy you. You must pardon me for saying that Miss Darry's choice is quite astonishing to her friends. If you possess the genius of Raphael, I shall still regard you as two very peculiar persons to come together; but I am in no mood to cavil at love."

Mrs. Lang said, kindly,—

"We must see more of you than ever, Mr. Allen, if you are finally to deprive us of Miss Darry. She has lived with me ever since the death of her parents, who were old friends of my mother, and we shall miss her very much. She is a splendid woman. You are sure you understand her?" she added, naively; "I freely confess I don't."

My pride swelled at all this. Frank Darry's love was the most blissful proof yet afforded of the personal power of the man who had captivated her, and more vehemently than was perhaps natural under the circumstances, I professed to comprehend, love, nay, worship Miss Darry.

The efforts for my culture were now redoubled. In order to demonstrate the wisdom of Miss Darry's choice, I must give palpable proof of superiority. I had earned enough for present support, and my forge must be given up. I must cut off all my old connections, go to the city, visit studios, draw from casts, attend galleries of paintings, have access to public libraries, make literary and artistic acquaintances, pursue my classical studies, and display the powers which Miss Darry, by her own force of will, projected into me. Such were the business-like plans which usurped the place of those mutual adulatory confidences presumed to occupy the first elysian hours of an engagement. Miss Darry's love was not of that caressing, tendril description, so common with her sex, which plays in tender demonstrativeness around the one beloved; it helped constantly to keep the highest standard before him, and to sustain rather than depend.

About a week after Mr. and Mrs. Lang's return, Mr. Leopold, who had accompanied them, came back; and Miss Darry intimated that it would be well for me to inform him of our engagement. I said to him, therefore, rather abruptly one afternoon, as I was about leaving to seek Miss Darry, (who was never quite ready to see me, if my painting-hours were abridged,)—

"Mr. Leopold, I have sold my forge to-day. I wanted to ask your advice about the course to be pursued in town; but I am under orders now of the most binding kind, I am engaged to Miss Darry."

Mr. Leopold was busy at his easel, his profile toward me. I was certainly not mistaken; the blood rushed over his face, subsided, leaving it very pale, and he made a quick, nervous movement which overthrew his palette. He rose quietly and replaced it, however, saying, in his usual tone,[Pg 692]—

"Very well, Sandy. I am ready to help you in any way I can."

"But you do not—no one congratulates me," I said, deceived by his calmness, and supposing the momentary suspicion that his was the love rejected by Miss Darry must have been a mistaken one.

"If they do not, it is not because of any lack appreciation for either of you," he answered slowly, "but that they fail to see the point of union. I admire the pine; it is straight, strong, self-reliant, and yet wind-haunted by many tender and melancholy sentiments; I like the peach-tree, too, with its pink tufts of fanciful blooming in the spring-time: but if these two should grow side by side, I am not sure but I should wonder a little."

His smile, as he looked me full in the eye, had genuine good-will mingled with its humor; and it softened the indignation I felt at the implied comparison.

"You make me out the weaker vessel of the two, then?" I asked, resentfully.

"No, Sandy, I don't say that; possibly, as whatever power we have runs parallel with Providential forces or against them, it makes mortal strength or weakness. But may you become a truly noble man, if you are to be Miss Darry's husband!" he answered, rising and extending his hand.

I believe he was one to scorn a lack of self-control in himself; but I do not think he cared either to reveal or to hide the love which I read at that moment. I grasped his hand as cordially as it was given, and hurried down stairs, out of the door, and over the hill, with a strong conviction that Miss Darry was a mistaken and foolish woman, and a prompting to disinterestedness not quite compatible with my relations to her. I was in no mood for her society, so I resolved to delay seeing her until evening, and conclude my arrangements at the forge, as I was to go to the city the next week.

Approaching the village, I overtook Miss Dinsmore; and though my new pretensions had not increased my popularity among the villagers, I had reason to consider her my firm friend and advocate; so I was quite willing to escape my unpleasant train of thought in listening to her.

"Well, Sandy, nobody gets a sight of you nowadays down this way. I never was so set up as when I heard tell you was goin' to marry the schoolmarm. Why, I was always certain sure you'd take to Annie Bray. Such a sweet little lamb as she is; not a bit high-strung 'cause she's made much of at the great house on the hill, though she does sing like a bird in an apple-tree every Sunday, when Louisy Purdo doesn't drown her voice with screechin'; but she's grown more sober an' quiet-like than ever. Miss Bray says she helps a powerful deal about house, and Amos don't swear so much now he sees it hurts her."

"She's a dear little thing," I interrupted, impatiently; "but, Miss Dinsmore, do you know Mr. Bray may have all the blacksmith-work to himself now? for I'm going to town for the rest of the summer and autumn."

"You don't say so, Sandy! Well, old Dr. Allen wasn't one of us, as I tell 'em, and there's no sort of reason why you should be; and your mother was a real born lady, though she was so gentle-spoken 't wasn't half the women could tell the difference between her and them."

"But, Miss Dinsmore," I said, "I don't expect to forget my old friends, because I hope to do better somewhere else than here. I shall often come down to Warren."

"Oh, yes, you'll come down, I don't mistrust that," she replied, slowly nodding her green calash, "as long as the schoolmarm is at the Hill; but Annie will look paler than ever. She thinks a sight of you, poor thing, and it will never be the same to her. She loves you like—a sister," added Miss Dinsmore, the tears in her faded blue eyes, and her sense of womanly modesty supplying the familiar title.

We were very near the Variety Store. If I could for a moment drift away from this annoying theme![Pg 693]

"How did you like Mr. Leopold, that afternoon I introduced him to you, Miss Dinsmore?" I asked, in desperation.

"Oh! ah! Well, Sandy, to speak plain, I've seen him a matter of three or four times, may-be, since. He set down, quite friendly-like, to a bit of supper, last time he come. I suppose he feels lonely; he seems pleasant-spoken, and is liked by everybody round here; poor man, he oughtn't to be without a mate. He's taken a great likin' to Annie Bray; but then, of course, he's got some sense of what's becomin'; she's years too young for him."

"Too young! I should think so," indignantly; "he's old enough to be her grandfather."

"No, Sandy,—no, I think not," said Miss Dinsmore, pausing thoughtfully at her door-step. "Old Mr. Bray would have been nigh upon eighty come next harvest; but then Annie has nobody to look out for her now you know, exceptin' Amos, who a'n't over wide-awake, between you and me, though an honester man never lived."

I was very willing to part with Miss Dinsmore.

"Another afternoon experience like this will make a hermit of me," I muttered, impatiently, as I strode away in the same direction from which I had come.

Miss Darry, Mr. Leopold, anybody, was better than Annie Bray, with her sweet, pale face, in my present mood.

"Annie has nobody to look out for her now, you know": many a day I remembered with a pang that this was too true.

CHAPTER. XIII.

I sold my forge and went to the city. My name appeared in the catalogue of the fall exhibition:—"Forest Scene, by Alexander Allen." I have no reason to suppose that the genuine merit of my picture secured for it a place in the gallery, though doubtless some as poor by established artists found their way there; but these having proved they could do better could afford to be found occasionally below concert pitch. However, Mr. Leopold commended it as highly as his conscience would permit, and I reaped the reward; while Miss Darry gloried over its admission as an unalloyed tribute to ability, and treasured the catalogue more carefully than my photograph. The same course of study and labor which I had pursued in Warren was continued in the city, with this difference: I had not the pure air, simple food, regular life, manual exertion, or social evenings at Hillside. Miss Darry wrote to me regularly, but I felt wearied after her letters. There were no tender assurances of undying affection, so soothing, doubtless, to tired brain and heavy heart; but they read somewhat in this style:—

[Pg 694]

And ended often with,—

"I was sadly disappointed at the result of the last," she wrote once. "Mr. Lang showed it to Mr. Peterson, the sculptor, who pronounced it slightly below the average first attempts. Of course, from your devotion to coloring, you did not feel sufficiently interested to put forth all your powers; still I accept the trial as a proof of your affection. Having greater genius for painting, you could certainly succeed in sculpture, nevertheless, if you heartily labored at it. I could never accept the definition of genius given by the author of 'Rab and his Friends,' which limits it, if I remember rightly, to an especial aptitude for some one pursuit. Genius is a tremendous force, not necessarily to succeed only in one channel, although turned to one by natural bent."

Little Annie, at my earnest request, wrote to me occasionally. It was a brief parting with her: she feared her own self-control, possibly. I know I feared mine; for, had she showed actual grief, I might have pacified it at the cost of my profession or my life. She wrote in this wise:—

Sometimes she wrote less brightly and hopefully; but, oh, what a blessing it was to have her write at all! I found myself watching for those natural, loving words, for the acknowledgment of missing me, as, wearied after viewing Alpine peaks, one might stoop cheered and satisfied to pluck a tiny flower. Miss Darry never missed me. She discouraged the idea of a long autumn vacation, and offered to come to the city and board, that my work might still go on. I began to entertain serious doubts, if, when we were married, I should be suffered to live with her,—or whether she would not send me to boarding-school, or to pursue my studies abroad.[Pg 695]

When October came, with the rich sadness of its days, at once a prophecy of grief and an assurance of its soothing, I broke down utterly. My æsthetic and literary friends did not feel that sympathy for my worn-out body and soul which both demanded. I applied to the only legitimate source for aid in my weakness and the permission to yield to it; but before either arrived, Nature proved more than a match for Miss Darry, and sent me exhausted to bed. Miss Darry appeared the next morning, and if the whole breezy atmosphere of Hillside had clung to her garments, she could not have had a more bracing effect. How bright, loving, and gentle she was, when she found me really ill! To be sure, she prescribed vigorous tonics, as was in accordance with her style; in fact, she was one herself; but she relieved my weak and languid dejection by brilliant talk, when I could bear it,—by tender words of hope, when I could not. My late internal censures upon her, as a hard task-mistress, were now the ghosts of self-reproach, which a morbid condition conjured about my pillow; and the vision of her healthy, self-restrained nature presided over every dream, recalling most derisively Mr. Leopold's simile of the pine- and peach-trees.

I left my bed, from very shame at prostration, long before I was able, and returned with her to Hillside, whither Mrs. and Mr. Lang invited me for the rest which she now considered necessary. Mr. Leopold had left Warren, and retaken a studio in town for the fall and winter; but many a memory of his kind deeds and pleasant manners lingered in the place. Every village must have its hero, its great man of past or present, looking down, like Hawthorne's great stone face, in supreme benignity upon it. Mr. Leopold had been the first occupant of this royal chair in Warren; for the enthusiasm which seeks a better than itself had just been called forth by the teaching and influence of Hillside.

One morning, when Miss Darry was occupied with her scholars, I wandered through the village and to the Brays' cottage to make my first call. Mrs. Bray was busy making cake. Annie, so tall and slender, that, as she stood with her face turned from me, I wondered what graceful young lady they had there, was prepared for her walk to Hillside, her books in a little satchel on her arm. Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of my thin, pale face, though her own was fragile as a snow-drop; but she at once apologized for and explained her sorrow by calling me her "dear old brother Sandy." I proposed one of our old-time strolls together up the hill, and we soon started in company. Half way up, at the meadow, where we had arranged and painted our first picture, I yielded to the impulse, which heretofore I had resisted, to sit again on the old stump and recall the scene. I was really weary, for this was my first long walk, and Annie looked as though rest would not come amiss; so I helped her over the stile, and we sat down. The rich, fervid hues I used so homœopathically by the stroke of my brush were spread over miles of forest; a vaporous veil of mist hung over every winding stream and mountain lake, and, reflecting the brilliant-colored shrubbery which bordered them, they glared like stained glass; the sunshine filtered down through haze and vapor like gold-dust on the meadow-land; gold and purple key-notes of autumn coloring in many varying shades of tree, water, and cloud blended to the perfect chord, uttering themselves lastly most quietly in the golden-rods and asters at our feet. That hazy, dreamy atmosphere uniting with my vague, aimless state of mind, I would fain make it accountable for the talk which followed.

First we went over the old times, I recalling, Annie assenting in a quiet, half-sad way, or brightening as though by an effort, and throwing in a reminiscence herself. We talked of those we had mutually known, and I was just recalling the rude admiration of Tracy Waters to her mind, when she suggested that she should be late for her lesson,—it was time to leave.[Pg 696]

"No, indeed, Annie!" I exclaimed, seizing her hand as she sat beside me,—"this is the first hour's actual rest I have had for months; it is like the returning sleep of health after delirium. You shall not go. When have I ever had you to myself before? The time is beautiful; we are happy; do not let us go up to Hillside to-day—or any more."

I spoke not so much wildly as naturally and weariedly; but Annie's cheek flushed scarlet, as she started, with a touch of Miss Darry's energy, from the stump beside me.

"Yes, Sandy, we will go to Hillside at once; you shall tell Miss Darry, that, in talking over by-gone days with your little sister, you forgot yourself and overstayed your time; and I, too, must make my excuses."

She walked quickly away, and before I had risen, in a half-stupefied way, she was at the stile.

It was rather difficult to rejoin her. I had the novel and not altogether pleasing sensation of having been refused before I had asked; and my child-friend, taught of Nature's simple dignity and sense of right, was more at ease for the remainder of the walk than I.

CHAPTER XIV.

I meant to have frankly confessed my talk with Annie to Miss Darry. No orthodox saint could have been more penitentially conscious of having fallen from grace. But she gave me no time. She was either so animated, so thoroughly agreeable and entertaining, that I felt only pride at the part I held in her, or else she gave premonitory symptoms of a return to the drill, which always suggested to me the absolute need of physical exercise, and ended in a walk or horseback ride,—in her company, of course. At last I really was so far restored, that my plea of being so much stronger, more at rest, near her, (which was true, for her oral teaching was not unmingled with subtile fascination,) failed to call forth the genial, loving smile. She began to pine for more honors, greater development, more earnest life. Strange! I, the former blacksmith, was a very flower, lulled in the dolce far niente of summer air and sunshine, beside her more vigorous intellectual nature. Sensation and emotion were scarcely expressed by me before they were taken up into the arctic regions of her brain, and looked coldly on their former selves.

I resolved one day, by a grand effort, to leave the next. As I had not seen Annie since the walk with her to Hillside, and had declined Mrs. Lang's offer to invite her to the house that I might see more of her, on the ground of fatigue and occupation in the evening with Miss Darry, it became incumbent upon me to go to the cottage for a farewell.

It looked very quiet, as I approached. The blinds were closed, as in summer, and there was no one in the kitchen.

Hearing footsteps in the sitting-room, however, I entered, and met Miss Dinsmore with her finger on her lips and an agitated expression on her face.

"For mercy's sake, don't come here now, Sandy Allen! You might have done some good by coming before; but now, poor, sweet lamb, she's very sick, and Miss Bray's most distracted. You're the very last person she'd care to see. You'd better go out just the very same quiet way you come in."

"Annie sick? How? where? when?" I asked, breathlessly.

Miss Dinsmore seized me by the shoulder, and pushing me, not too gently, into the kitchen, closed the door, and stood beside me.

"She's got brain-fever. I guess she caught cold the other day, when she went up to Hillside. She a'n't been out since, and she's been wanderin',—somethin' about not wantin' to go into a meader."

"I shall go up and see her," I answered, turning again to the door.

"Indeed you won't, Sandy Allen! You'll set her wilder than ever again."

"I shall go up and see her," I repeated, firmly; and, pushing by Miss[Pg 697] Dinsmore, I went up the front stairs to Annie's little room.

There she lay,—her bright, golden hair on the pillow, her eyes closed,—a pale, panting phantom of herself, apparently in a troubled sleep,—her mother, the bustling, gaudily attired woman, as quiet as a little child beside her. She turned her head when she heard me, changed color, and the tears filled her eyes; but it was probably owing to the self-control of this woman, whom I had so looked down upon, that I did not snap the thread of Annie Bray's life that day. With her child on the brink of a precipice, she would make no moan to startle her off. The doctor said her sleep must be unbroken. He, too, sat there; and, obeying Mrs. Bray's quiet motion, I seated myself behind the others. The hours wore on; the October sun went down. None of us moved, but gazed in mute apprehension at the figure of her who, it seemed, could awake only in heaven. This earthly love, so strong, so fierce, in the effort to retain her,—would it prevail? This was the question which chained us there; and when, at eight o'clock, she awoke, I waited until the doctor pronounced his favorable opinion, then, without Annie's having seen me, stole out by the other door and away.

At Hillside, when I entered, pale with suppressed excitement, and told where I had been, Mrs. Lang rose at once.

"I wondered why she missed her lessons, until her brother brought word she was not well. I will send some flowers and white grapes to her at once"; and she would have rung the bell, but Miss Darry prevented her.

"Dear Alice," she said, "white grapes are only water sweetened by a little sunshine, and flowers she is too ill to enjoy. Let me make up a basket. Come down with me, Sandy, to the pantry."

Mechanically I followed her down, watched her moving busily about, and heard her talk, yet could not find a word to utter in reply.

"White grapes are excellent for people who sit down to a luxurious dinner every day, but pale, feeble bodies like little Annie Bray's must recuperate on richer fare,—a bottle of wine, some rich, juicy beef; and the sight of this old working world from the window is worth all the flowers in creation."

She filled her basket, called a servant, and sent him off. Still pale and silent, I neither moved nor spoke.

"What is the matter with you, Sandy?" Miss Darry asked, a half-smothered fear in her voice. "You are not strong enough for such excitement. Come to the drawing-room, and I will play you to sleep with some of those grand old German airs. You shall have Mendelssohn or Von Weber, if you are not in the mood for Beethoven or Chopin," she added, compromising to my nervous weakness.

She led the way, I followed, to the parlor,—only, however, once there, and finding it unoccupied, I led, and she listened.

"No music this evening, Frank, for heaven's sake!" I cried, my voice thick with emotion, as she seated herself at the piano. "I must be truthful with you. I have been a weak fool; and to you, whom I respect and admire so thoroughly, I will confess it. Bear with me awhile longer, then you shall speak," I added, as she rose and came toward me.

"In the first place, since I am a genius," I continued, bitterly, "I ought to have had a clearer vision. I ought to have seen, that, because you were the most fascinating, brilliant woman I had ever dreamed of, the most highly cultured, and planned on the noblest scale,—because you disinterestedly devoted yourself to my improvement, kindled a spark of what you were pleased to call genius, and then gave your own life to fan it into a flame,—I ought to have seen that all this did not necessarily imply that subtile bond and affinity between us which alone should end in marriage. But I did not see. I was touched to the heart by your kindness. I thrilled with pride, when you turned from men of refinement and intellect, to smile cordially, tenderly, upon me. I[Pg 698] longed to be a suitable companion for one so superior; and I have worked—honestly, faithfully, have I worked—to become so. But what you grew upon made me languid. I was satiated with study, weary even of my brush. Metaphysics and mystical speculation bewilder a mind too weak to trust itself in their mazes, without the old established guides, the helps to a childlike faith. I was worn out and sick. Then your presence revived me; all the doubts which have since become certainties were thrust aside. I came here; I met Annie Bray; I said some foolish words one day, when we were walking up here, about being worn out and staying where we were forever. They were dishonorable words, for they were due first of all to you; and they have haunted me since like a nightmare. It was Annie herself who reproved and repelled them. To-day I went there with the thought of saying good-bye. I was sure that my feeling for you was firm as a rock; it is only periodically and indefinably, Frank, that it has seemed otherwise; and now I would lay down my life to restrain these words, to be worthy of the love I renounce. Some other and better man must win what I have been too weak to keep. This afternoon has proved to me that I do not belong exclusively to you."

Was I base and unfeeling, or only weak, as I had said? Frank Darry turned away, and walked to the long French window, looking out in the moonlight upon the very spot, perhaps, where I had so passionately declared my love. I could see her tremble with emotion. Yet I dared not speak or go to her. Perhaps five minutes passed,—it might have been an hour,—when, pale, but composed, she came to the sofa, upon which I had thrown myself.

"You love Annie Bray, then, Sandy?" she asked, calmly.

"No," I answered, "I do not love her; but I feel that I have done violence to what might have grown into love between us. I do not intend to see her. I do not wish to ask for what would assuredly not be granted. I desire only to go away, to be alone and quiet."

"You are, indeed, forever rushing to extremes, Sandy," she said, slowly. "We have both done wrong: I, in tempting you, without, of course, a thought of self," she added, proudly, "to set aside this first and strongest interest; and you, in your acceptance of fascination as love. We have done wrong; but you are now right, for you are true. Let me be so also. I consider it no disgrace to my womanhood to admit the pain your avowal gives me, yet I thank you for making it. Remember, Sandy, if a true affection spring up within you, do not crush it from a morbid remembrance of this: it would be a poor revenge for me to desire."

She spoke sadly. I could not reply to her. Such generosity was, indeed, like coals of fire on my head. Say as I might to myself that her strong will had held me spellbound,—reason as I might that it was only because she had developed, made me, as it were, that this motherly, yearning, protecting love had been lavished upon me,—there was still the fact, that this rich, strong nature had given of its best treasure in answer to my passionate pleading, had wasted it on me.

"Frank Darry," I said, "why I do not entirely love what I completely reverence and admire I cannot tell. To live without you seems like drifting through life without aim or guide. I would gladly think that one who suffered through my joy, one far better than I, should yet win what he longed for."

Then only did her paleness vary.

"Sandy, spare me, at least just now, such complete renunciation. Remember, I have not confessed what you have."

She took my hand: it was, I know, burning, while hers was cold as marble. She stooped and kissed my forehead.

"Good night, and good bye, Sandy. The time may come, when, as teacher and pupil, we shall think of each other tenderly."[Pg 699]

Where was the passionate avowal I would once have made? Had I learned a lesson? Yes, the most bitter of my life. When I heard her firm foot-step die away in the hall, I crossed to the library, and in a few brief words explained to Mr. and Mrs. Lang that I must leave their house at once, and that our engagement was broken because I alone had proved unworthy. The color mounted to Mr. Lang's brow.

"You are weak, Sandy," he ejaculated, bitterly; "it is what I always feared."

Mrs. Lang, in her gentle, kindly way, tried to soften his anger; but it must have been a hard task with one who, while he pitied sin, scorned weakness; and I did not await the result, but, hurrying to my room, packed my portmanteau and left for the station.

A fortnight later I received from Miss Dinsmore, in reply to my inquiries, a letter giving a most favorable account of Annie Bray's health. This was all I desired. I wrote a few lines of friendly farewell, and, hinting at no period of return, merely explained that I was about to leave for Europe. I restrained my desire to give her some advice as to her pursuits in my absence. Such mentorship, at present, seemed like creating another barrier between us. I assumed no superiority myself, I had no disposition to seek it in others.

CHAPTER XV.

Worn out and jaded, I began my travels. I strove to make these travels as inexpensive as possible. I walked much, and at times lived both cheaply and luxuriously, as one learns to do after a little experience abroad. At first I resolved to make this tour one long summer day of pleasure through the outward senses. I took no books with me. I painted no picture. I rarely even sketched. Brain and heart rested, while there flowed into them, through the outward avenues of eye and ear, new pictures and harmonies,—I fancied, for present enjoyment merely, but in reality for future use.

When I reached Rome, my funds, which had even previously been eked out by the sale of the few sketches I had made, were quite exhausted. Anticipating this, I had, after great hesitation, written to Mr. Leopold, desiring letters of introduction to some artists, in the hope of obtaining work from them. I found his reply to this letter awaiting my arrival in Rome; and though I had not hinted at my destitution, he must have guessed it, for he inclosed a check and all the information I desired. I provided myself with a humble studio and recommenced work. How fresh and charming was this return to my old mode of life! I even bought a few choice books at the old stalls, and revelled in poetry. Dante opened his Purgatory to me just as I escaped from my own, and I basked in the returning sun-light of a free and happy life.

Copying in a painting-gallery one day, I beheld with pain, albeit he was my benefactor, a ghost of my former life arising to haunt me. Mr. Leopold, having arrived the night before, was enjoying the pictures preparatory to hunting me up. His greeting was cordial; he cheered me by most favorable opinions as to my progress in my art, and was dumb about the past. He desired that I should again work in connection with himself; and the profound respect I had always felt for his abilities was confirmed and heightened by the affection he inspired in me. His really harmonious character guided mine without the absolute surrender of my individuality. One by one I resumed the old interests, and began to feel the old heart which has throbbed through the centuries, from Adam downward, beating within me. How very much I was like other men, after all!

"Sandy," Mr. Leopold said to me one day, as we sat sketching some old ruin on the Campagna, "is it your wish to be silent as to the past? Are you restrained by fear of yourself or me?"

For only answer I exclaimed,—

"How and where is Miss Darry?"

"She is well, and at Munich," he answered, smiling pleasantly,—"developing[Pg 700] in herself the powers with which she invested you. As a sculptress she gives great promise; her figures show wonderful anatomical knowledge."

"And you, Mr. Leopold," I asked breathlessly, "how could you forgive and befriend one who had so weakly treated the woman you alone were worthy to love?"

"You are indeed breaking silence, Sandy," he replied; "it is with you the Chinese wall or illimitable space. Perhaps you have not really wronged either her or me. She worked off some extravagant theories on you. You exhausted your weakness, I trust, on her; and as for me, I have learned to conquer through both."

I have lived several years since that morning in Rome, where, at the headquarters of the confessional, I opened my heart to Mr. Leopold. Standing, as he does, at the head of his art, I follow him. Those who prefer fancy to vigorous thought and imagination, the lovely and familiar in Nature to the sublime, sometimes rank me above him. Time has not evolved the genius which Miss Darry prophesied, yet I am as fully convinced that I occupy my true position and do my appropriate work in the world as though it had. Mrs. Leopold professes occasionally to me, with a smile, that her opinion is unaltered, that my weakness was only an additional proof of genius, but that her husband is a hero worth all the geniuses in the world. She holds this subtile essence more lightly in estimation now than formerly. Some think she possesses it; and her groups of statuary fairly entitle her to more laurels than in her happy domestic life she is likely to win. She laughs at my wife, and calls her sentimental, because her Art instincts, like vines over a humble dwelling, embroider only the common domestic life. Her many fanciful ways of adorning our home, and her own sweet, sunny self, its perpetual light and comfort, are to me just so many 'traps to catch the sunbeams' of life, especially as I see beneath all this the earnest, developed womanhood of the blacksmith's daughter. Do you ask me how I won her? I can describe my passionate admiration, even the weakness and limitations of my nature; but I will not unveil my love. Is it not enough that I am a thorough democrat, have little faith in the hereditary transmission of good or evil, and welcome Mr. and Mrs. Bray to my home and hearth? I am not hurried now.

"You have only this lifetime to make a man in, Sandy," Annie pleads occasionally, when a call for service outside my profession presents itself; "but any special power of mind, it seems to me, will have the mending ages in which to unfold."

To love men, to labor for them and for the ideas which free and redeem them, seems the special mission of our times; and my little wife has caught its spirit, and so helps me to recognize the virtue which eighteen hundred years ago was crucified to rise again, which has been assailed in our country, and is rising again to be the life and inspiration of Christendom, the death-blow to slavery and oppression, the light of many a humble home and simple heart. Unselfishness! keystone to the arch through which each pure soul looks heavenward!

[Pg 701]

KING JAMES THE FIRST.

A merry monarch two years and four months old.

If we could have stood by when the world was a-making,—could have sniffed the escaping gases, as they volatilized through the air,—could have seen and heard the swash of the waves, when the whole world was, so to speak, in hot water,—could have watched the fiery tumult gradually soothing itself into shapely, stately palms and ferns, cold-blooded Pterodactyles, and gigantic, but gentle Megatheriums, till it was refined, at length, into sunshine and lilies and Robin Redbreasts,—we fancy we should have been intensely interested. But a human soul is a more mysterious thing than this round world. Its principles firmer than the hills, its passions more tumultuous than the sea, its purity resplendent as the light, its power too swift and subtile for human analysis,—what wonder in heaven above or earth beneath can rival this mystic, mighty mechanism? Yet it is formed almost under our eyes. The voice of God, "Let there be light," we do not hear; the stir of matter thrilled into mind we do not see; but the after-march goes on before our gaze. We have only to look, and, lo! the mountains are slowly rising, the valleys scoop their levels, the sea heaves against its barriers, and the chaotic soul evolves itself from its nebulous, quivering light, from its plastic softness, into a world of repose, of use, of symmetry, and stability. This mysterious soul, when it first passed within our vision, was only not hidden within its mass of fleshly life, a seed of spirituality deep-sunk in a pulp of earthliness. Passing away from us in ripened perfection, we behold a being but little lower than the angels, heir of God and joint heir with Christ, crowned with glory and honor and immortality.

Come up, then, Jamie, my King, into the presence of the great congregation! There are poets here, and philosophers, wise men of the East who can speak of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. But fear them not, little Jamie! you are of more value, even to science, than many fishes. Wise as these Magi are, yesterday they were such as you, and such they must become again or ever they shall enter the kingdom of heaven. Come up, little Jamie, into the hall of audience! Blue eyes and broad brow, sunny curls, red lips, and dainty, sharp teeth, stout little arm, strong little hand, sturdy little figure, and most still and steadfast gaze: truly it is the face and form of a king,—sweetness in power, unconsciousness in royalty.

"Jamie, you are a little beauty! You are too handsome to live!"

"No!" says Jamie, vehemently, for the fiftieth time, stamping the royal foot and scowling the royal brows. "Gamma say not too ha'some!"

"But you are a young Apollo."

"No my 'Pollo!"

"What are you, then?"

"I goo e baw," which is Jametic for good little boy.

This microcosm, like the macrocosm, may be divided into many departments. As the world is viewed geographically, geologically, historically, astronomically, so in this one little Jamie we have many Jamies. There is the Jamie philological, Jamie theological, Jamie psychological, Jamie emotional, Jamie social; in fact, I can hardly think of any natural, moral, or mathematical science, on which a careful study of Jamie will not throw some light. Would you frame a theory of metaphysics? Consult Reid, and Locke, and Hamilton warily, for they are men, subject to like mistakes as we are; but observe Jamie with utmost confidence and the closest care, for he is the book of God, and will teach only truth, if your eye is single to perceive truth. Theologically, Jamie has points superior to both Andover and[Pg 702] Princeton; he is never in danger of teaching for doctrine the commandments of men; nor have passion and prejudice in him any power to conceal, but, on the contrary, they illuminate truth. For the laws of language, mark how the noble tree of human speech springs in his soul from mustard-seed into fair and fruitful symmetry. In good sooth, one marvels that there should be so much error in the world with children born and growing up all over it. If Jamie were, like Jean Paul, the Only, I should expect philosophers to journey from remotest regions to sit at his feet and learn the ways of God to man. Every one who presumed to teach his fellows should be called upon to produce his diploma as a graduate of Jamie, or forfeit all confidence in his sagacity. But, with a baby in every other house, how is it that we continually fall out by the way? It must be that children are not advantageously used. We pet them, and drug them, and spoil them; we trick them out in silks and fine array; we cross and thwart and irritate them; we lay unholy hands upon them, but are seldom content to stand aside and see the salvation of the Lord.

Tug, tug, tug, one little foot wearisomely ranging itself beside the other, and two hands helping both: that is Jamie coming up stairs. Patter, patter, patter: that is Jamie trotting through the entry. He never walks. Rattle, clatter, shake: Jamie is opening the door. Now he marches in. Flushed with exertion, and exultant over his brilliant escapade from the odious surveillance below, he presents himself peering on tiptoe just over the arm of the big chair, and announces his errand,—

"Come t' see Baddy."

"Baddy doesn't want you."

"Baddy do."

Then, in no wise daunted by his cool welcome, he works his way up into the big chair with much and indiscriminate pulling: if it is a sleeve, if it is a curtain, if it is a table-cloth whereon repose many pens, much ink and paper, and knick-knacks without number, nothing heeds he, but clutches desperately at anything which will help him mount, and so he comes grunting in, all tumbled and twisted, crowds down beside me, and screws himself round to face the table, poking his knees and feet into me with serene unconcern. Then, with a pleased smile lighting up his whole face, he devotes himself to literature. A small, brass-lined cavity in the frame of the writing-desk serves him for an inkstand. Into that he dips an old, worn-out pen with consequential air, and assiduously traces nothing on bits of paper. Of course I am reduced to a masterly inactivity, with him wriggling against my right arm, let alone the danger hanging over all my goods and chattels from this lawless little Vandal prowling among them. Shall I send him away? Yes, if I am an insensate clod, clean given over to stupidity and selfishness; if I count substance nothing, and shadow all things; if I am content to dwell with frivolities forever, and have for eternal mysteries nothing but neglect. For suppose I break in upon his short-lived delight, thrust him out grieved and disappointed, with his brave brow clouded, a mist in his blue eyes, and—that heart-rending sight—his dear little under-lip and chin all quivering and puckering. Well, I go back and write an epic poem. The printers mangle it; the critics fall foul of it; it is lost in going through the post-office; it brings me ten letters, asking an autograph, on six of which I have to pay postage. There is vanity and vexation of spirit, besides eighteen cents out of pocket, and the children crying for bread. I let him stay. A little, innocent life, fearfully dependent on others for light, shines out with joyful radiance, wherein I rejoice. To-morrow he will have the measles, and the mumps, and the croup, and the whooping-cough, and scarlatina; and then come the alphabet, and Latin grammar, and politics, and his own boys getting into trouble: but to-day, when his happiness is in my hands, I may secure it, and never can any one wrest from him the sunshine I may pour into his happy little heart. Oh! the time comes so soon, and comes so often, that Love can only[Pg 703] look with bitter sorrow upon the sorrow which it has no power to mitigate!

Language is unceremoniously resolved into its original elements by Jamie. He is constitutionally opposed to inflection, which, as he must be devoid of prejudice, may be considered indisputable proof of the native superiority of the English to other languages. He is careful to include in his sentences all the important words, but he has small respect for particles, and the disposition of his words waits entirely upon his moods. My usually does duty for I. "Want the Uncle Frank gave me hossey," with a finger pointing to the mantel-piece is just as flexible to his use as "Want the hossey that Uncle Frank gave me." "Where Baddy can be?" he murmurs softly to himself, while peering behind doors and sofas in playing hide-and-seek. Hens are cud-dah, a flagrant example of Onomatopœia. The cradle is a cay-go; corn-balls are ball-corn; and snow-bird, bird-snow; and all his rosy nails are toe-nails. He has been drilled into meet response to "how d' ye do?" but demonstrates the mechanical character of his reply by responding to any question that has the you and how sounds in it, as "What do you think of that?" "How did you do it?" "How came you by this?" "Pit-tee well."

But his performances are not all mechanical. He has a stock of poetry and orations, of which he delivers himself at bedtime with a degree of resignation,—that being the only hour in which he can be reduced to sufficient quietude for recitation; nor is that because he loves quiet more, but bed less. It is a very grievous misfortune, an unreasonable and arbitrary requisition, that breaks in upon his busy life, interrupts him in the midst of driving to mill on an inverted chair, hauling wood in a ditto footstool, and other important matters, and sweeps him off to darkness and silence. So, with night-gown on, and the odious bed imminent, he puts off the evil day by compounding with the authorities and giving a public entertainment, in consideration of a quarter of an hour's delay. He takes large liberties with the text of his poems, but his rhetorical variations are of a nature that shows it is no vain repetition, but that he enters into the spirit of the poem. In one of his songs a person

what it was he was singing.

This Jamie intensifies thus:—

When he reaches the place where

he invariably leaves Gill to take care of herself, and closes with the pathetic moral reflection, "'At too bad!" Little Jack Horner, having put in his thumb and picked out a plum, is made to declare definitely and redundantly,—

He persists in praying,—

Borne off to bed a last, in spite of every pretext for delay, tired Nature droops in his curling lashes, and gapes protractedly through his wide-dividing lips.

"I seepy," he cries, fighting of sleep with the bravery of a Major-General,—observing phenomena, in articulo somni, with the accuracy and enthusiasm of a naturalist, and reasoning from them with the skill of a born logician.

A second prolonged and hearty gape, and

"I two seepies," he cries, adding mathematics to his other accomplishments.

And that is the last of Jamie, till the early morning brings him trudging up stairs, all curled and shining, to "hear Baddy say 'Boo!'"

Total depravity, in Jamie's presence, is a doctrine hard to be understood. Honestly[Pg 704] speaking, he does not appear to have any more depravity than is good for him,—just enough to make him piquant, to give him a relish. He is healthy and hearty all day long. He eats no luncheon and takes no nap, is desperately hungry thrice a day and sleeps all night, going to bed at dark after a solitary stale supper of bread and butter, more especially bread; and he is good and happy. Laying aside the revelations of the Bible and of Doctors of Divinity, I should say that his nature is honest, simple, healthful, pure, and good. He shows no love for wrong, no inclination towards evil rather than good. He is affectionate, just, generous, and truthful. He just lives on his sincere, loving, fun-loving, playful, yet earnest life, from day to day, a pure and perfect example, to my eye, of what God meant children to be. I cannot see how he should be very different from what he is, even if he were in heaven, or if Adam had never sinned. There is so fearful an amount of, and so decided a bent towards, wickedness in the world, that it seems as if nothing less than an inborn aptitude for wickedness can account for it; yet, in spite of all theories and probabilities, here is Jamie, right under my own eye, developing a far stronger tendency to love, kindness, sympathy, and all the innocent and benevolent qualities, than to their opposites. The wrong that he does do seems to be more from fun and frolic, from sheer exuberance of animal spirits and intensity of devotion to mirth, than anything else. He seems to be utterly devoid of malice, cruelty, revenge, or any evil motive. Even selfishness, which I take to be the fruitful mother of evil, is held in abeyance, is subordinate to other and nobler qualities. Candy is dearer to him than he knows how to express; yet he scrupulously lays a piece on the mantel for an absent friend; and though he has it in full view, and climbs up to it, and in the extremity of his longing has been known, I think, to chip off the least little bit with his sharp mouse-teeth, yet he endures to the end and delivers up the candy with an eagerness hardly surpassed by that with which he originally received it. Can self-denial go farther?

It seems to me that the reason of Jamie's gentleness and cheerfulness and goodness is, that he is comfortable and happy. The animal is in fine condition, and the spirit is therefore well served; consequently, both go on together with little friction. And I cannot but suspect that a great deal of human depravity comes from human misery. The destruction of the poor is his poverty. Little sickly, fretful, crying babies, heirs of worn nerves, fierce tempers, sad hearts, sordid tastes, half-tended or over-tended, fed on poison by the hand of love, nay, sucking poison from the breasts of love, trained to insubordination, abused by kindness, abused by cruelty,—that is the human nature from which largely we generalize, and no wonder the inference is total depravity. But human nature, distorted, defiled, degraded by centuries of misdealing, is scarcely human nature. Let us discover it before we define it. Let us remove accretions of long-standing moral and physical disease, before we pronounce sentence against the human nature. If it ever becomes an established and universally recognized principle, as fixed and unquestionable as the right and wrong of theft and murder, that it is a sin against God, a crime against the State, an outrage upon the helpless victim of their ignorance or wickedness, for an unhealthy man or woman to become the parent of a child, I think our creeds would presently undergo modification. Disease seems to me a more fertile source of evil than depravity; at least it is a more tangible source. We must have a race of healthy children, before we know what are the true characteristics of the human race. A child suffering from scrofula gives but a feeble, even a false representation of the grace, beauty, and sweetness of childhood. Pain, sickness, lassitude, deformity, a suffering life, a lingering death, are among the woful fruits of this dire disease, and it is acknowledged[Pg 705] to be hereditary. Is not, then, every person afflicted with any hereditary disease debarred as by a fiat of the Almighty from becoming a parent? Every principle of honor forbids it. The popular stolidity and blindness on these subjects are astonishing. A young woman whose sisters have all died of consumption, and who herself exhibits unmistakable consumptive tendencies, is married, lives to bear three children in quick succession, and dies of consumption. Her friends mourn her and the sad separation from her bereaved little ones, but console themselves with the reflection that these little ones have prolonged her life. But for her marriage, she would have died years before. Of the three children born of this remedial marriage, two die in early girlhood of consumption. One left, a puny infant, languishes into a puny maturity. Even as a remedy, what is this worth? To die in her youth, to leave her suffering body in the dust and go quickly to God, with no responsibility beyond herself, or to pine through six years, enduring thrice, besides all her inherited debility, the pain and peril, the weariness and terror of child-bearing, to be at last torn violently and prematurely away from these beloved little ones,—which is the disease, and which the remedy? And when we look farther on at the helpless little innocents, doomed to be the recipients of disease, early deprived of a mother's care, for which there is no substitute, dragging a load of weakness and pain, and forced down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death before years shall have blunted the point of its terrors, or religion robbed them of their sting,—it is only not atrocious because so unwittingly wrought.

And bodily health is only one of the possessions which every child has a right to claim from its parents. Not merely health, but dispositions, traits, lie within human control far beyond the extent of common recognition. We say that character is formed at fourteen or sixteen, and that training should begin in infancy; but sometimes it seems to me, that, when the child is born, the work is done. All the rest is supplementary and subordinate. Subsequent effort has, indeed, much effect, but it cannot change quality. It may modify, but it cannot make anew. After neglect or ignorance may blight fair promise, but no after wisdom can bring bloom for blight. There are many by-laws whose workings we do not understand; but the great, general law is so plain, that wayfaring folk, though fools, need not err therein. Every one sees the unbridled passions of the father or mother raging in the child. Gentleness is born of gentleness, insanity of insanity, truth of truth. Careful and prayerful training may mitigate the innate evil; but how much better that the young life should have sprung to light from seas of love and purity and peace! Through God's mercy, the harsh temper, the miserly craving, the fretful discontent may be repressed and soothed; but it is always up-hill work, and never in this world wholly successful. Why be utterly careless in forming, to make conscious life a toilsome and thankless task of reforming? Since there is a time, and there comes no second, when the human being is under human control,—since the tiny infant, once born, is a separate individual, is for all its remaining existence an independent human being, why not bring power to bear where form is amenable to power? Only let all the influences of that sovereign time be heavenly,—and whatever may be true of total depravity, Christ has made such a thing possible,—and there remains no longer the bitter toil of thwarting, but only the pleasant work of cultivating Nature.

It is idle, and worse than idle, to call in question the Providence of God for disaster caused solely by the improvidence of man. The origin of evil may be hidden in the unfathomable obscurity of a distant, undreamed-of past, beyond the scope of mortal vision; but by far the greater part of the evil that we see—which is the only evil for which we are responsible—is the result of palpable violation of Divine laws. Humanity here is as powerful as Divinity.[Pg 706] The age of miracles is past. God does not interfere to contravene His own laws. His part in man's creation He long ago defined, and delegated all the rest to the souls that He had made. Man is as able as God to check the destructive tide. And it is mere shuffling and shirking and beating the wind, for a people to pray God to mitigate the ill which they continually and unhesitatingly perpetuate and multiply.

The great mistake made by the believers in total depravity is in counting the blood of the covenant of little worth. We admit that in Adam all die; but we are slow to believe that in Christ all can be made alive. We abuse the doctrine. We make it a sort of scapegoat for short-coming. But Christ has made Adamic depravity of no account. He came not alone to pardon sin, but to save people from sinning. Father-love, mother-love, and Christ-love are so mighty that together they can defy Satan, and, in his despite, the soul shall be born into the kingdom of heaven without first passing through the kingdom of hell. And in this way only, I think, will the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

"Now, Jamie, having set the world right,—you and I, for which the world will be deeply grateful,—let us see what you are about, for you have been suspiciously still lately. What doing, Jamie?"

"Hay-puh!" says Jamie, very red, eager, and absorbed, with no intermission of labor.

"Making hasty pudding! Oh, yes! I know what that means. Only taking all the chips and shavings out of the wood-box in the closet and carrying them half across the room by the eminently safe conveyance of his two fat hands, and emptying them into my box of paper, and stirring all together with a curling-stick. That's nothing. Keep on, Jamie, and amuse yourself; but let us hear your geography lesson.

"Where are you going one of these days?"

"Min-nee-so-toh."

"Where is Minnesota?"

Jamie gives a jerk with his arm to the west. He evidently thinks Minnesota is just beyond the hill.

"Where is papa going to buy his horses?"

"Ill-noy."

"And where does Aunt Sarah live?"

"Cog-go."

"What river are you going to sail up to get to Minnesota?"

"Miss-iss-ipp-ee."

"That's a good little boy! He knows ever so much; and here is a peppermint. Open his mouth and shut his eyes, and pop! it goes."

There is, however, a pretty picture on the other side, that Jamie thrusts his iconoclastic fists through quite as unconcernedly; and that is the dignity of human nature. The human being can be trained into a dignified person: that no one denies. Looking at some honored and honorable man bearing himself loftily through every crisis, and wearing his grandeur with an imperial grace, one may be pardoned for the mistake, but it is none the less a mistake, of reckoning the acquirement of an individual as the endowment of the race. Behold human nature unclothed upon with the arts and graces of the schools, if you would discover, not its possibilities, but its attributes. The helplessness of infancy appeals to all that is chivalric and Christian in our hearts; but to dignity it is pre-eminently a stranger. A charming and popular writer—on the whole, I am not sure that it was not my own self—once affirmed that a baby is a beast, and gave great offence thereby; yet it seems to me that no unprejudiced person can observe an infant of tender weeks sprawling and squirming in the bath-tub, and not confess that it looks more like a little pink frog than anything else. And here is Jamie, not only weeks, but months and years old, setting his young affections on candy and dinner, and eating in general, with an appalling intensity. It is humiliating to see how easily he is moved by[Pg 707] an appeal to his appetite. I blush for my race, remembering the sparkle of his eyes over a dainty dish, and the abandonment of his devotion to it,—the enthusiasm with which his feet spring, and his voice rings through the house, to announce the fact, "Dinnah mo' weh-wy! dinnah mo' weh-wy!" To the naked eye, he appears to think as much of eating as a cat or a chicken or a dog. Reasons and rights he is slow to comprehend; but his conscience is always open to conviction, and his will pliable to a higher law, when a stick of candy is in the case. His bread-and-butter is to him what science was to Newton; and he has been known to reply abstractedly to a question put to him in the height of his enjoyment, "Don' talk t' me now!" This is not dignity, surely. Is it total depravity? What is it that makes his feet so swift to do mischief? He sweeps the floor with the table-brush, comes stumbling over the carpet almost chin-deep in a pair of muddy rubber boots, catches up the bird's seed-cup and darts away, spilling it at every step; and the louder I call, the faster he runs, half frightened, half roguish, till an unmistakable sharpness pierces him, makes him throw down cup and seed together, and fling himself full length on the floor, his little heart all broken. Indeed, he can bear anything but displeasure. He tumbles down twenty times a day, over the crickets, off the chairs, under the table, head first, head last, bump, bump, bump, and never a tear sheds he, though his stern self-control is sometimes quite pitiful to see. But a little slap on his cheek, which is his standing punishment,—not a blow, but a tiny tap that must derive all its efficacy from its moral force,—oh, it stabs him to the heart! He has no power to bear up against it, and goes away by himself, and cries bitterly, sonorously, and towards the last, I suspect, rather ostentatiously. Then he spoils it all by coming out radiant, and boasting that he has "make tear," as if that were an unparalleled feat. If you attempt to chide him, he puts up his plump hand with a repelling gesture, turns away his head in disgust, and ejaculates vehemently, "Don' talk t' me!" After all, however, I do not perceive that he is any more sensitive to reproof than an intelligent and petted dog.

His logical faculty develops itself somewhat capriciously, but is very prompt. He seldom fails to give you a reason, though it is often of the Wordsworthian type,—

"Don' talk t' me! I little Min-nee-so-toh boy!"—as if that were an amnesty proclamation. You invite him to stay with you, and let Papa go to Minnesota without him. He shakes his head dubiously, and protests, with solemn earnestness, "Mus' go Min-nee-so-toh ca'y my fork," which, to the world-incrusted mind, seems but an inadequate pretext. I want him to write me a letter when he is gone away; but, after a thoughtful pause, he decides that he cannot, "'cause I got no pen." If he is not in a mood to repeat the verse you ask for, he finds full excuse in the unblushing declaration, "I bashful." He casts shadows on the wall with his wreathing, awkward little fingers, and is perfectly satisfied that they are rabbits, though the mature eye discerns no resemblance to any member of the vertebrate family. He gazes curiously to see me laugh at something I am reading,—"What 'at? my want to see,"—and climbs up to survey the page with wistful eyes; but it is "a' a muddle" to him. He greets me exultantly after absence, because I have "come home pay coot with Jamie"; and there is another secret out: that it is of no use to be sentimental with a child. He loves you in proportion as you are available. His papa and mamma fondly imagine they are dearer to him than any one else, and it would be cruel to disturb that belief; but it would be the height of folly to count yourself amiable because Jamie plants himself firmly against the door, and pleads piteously, "Don' go in e parly wite!" He wants you to "pay coot" with him,—that is all. If your[Pg 708] breakfast shawl is lying on a chair, it would not be sagacious to attribute an affectionate unselfishness to him in begging leave to "go give Baddy shawl t' keep Baddy back warm." It is only his greediness to enter forbidden ground. Sentiment and sensibility have small lodgement in his soul.

But when Jamie is duly forewarned, he is forearmed. Legally admitted into the parlor to see visitors, he sits on the sofa by his mother's side, silent, upright, prim, his little legs stuck straight out before him in two stiff lines, presenting a full front view of his soles. By the way, I wonder how long grown persons would sit still, if they were obliged to assume this position. But Jamie maintains himself heroically, his active soul subdued to silence, till Nature avenges herself, not merely with a palpable, but a portentous yawn. "You may force me to this unnatural quiet," she seems to say; "but if you expect to prevent me from testifying that I think it intolerably stupid, you have reckoned without your host."

And here Jamie comes out strongly in favor of democracy, universal suffrage, political equality, the Union and the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the rights of man. Uncontaminated by conventional rules, he recognizes the human being apart from his worldly state. He is as silent and abashed in the presence of the day-laborer, coarsely clad and rough of speech and manners, as in that of the accomplished man of the world, or the daintiest silken-robed lady. With simple gravity, and never a thought of wrong, he begs the poet, "Pease, Missa Poet, tie up my shoe." He stands in awe before the dignity of the human soul; but dress and rank and reputation receive no homage from him. He is reverent, but to no false gods. The world finds room for kingdoms and empires and oligarchies; but undoubtedly man is born a democrat.

Is there only one Jamie here? Can one little urchin about as high as the table so fill a house with mirth and mischief, so daguerrotype himself in every corner, possess, while claiming nothing, so large a share of the household interest? For he somehow bubbles up everywhere. Not a mischance or a misplacement but can pretty surely be brought home to him. Is a glass broken? Jamie broke it. Is a door open that ought to be shut? Jamie opened it. Or shut that ought to be open? Jamie shut it. Is there a mighty crash in the entry? It is Jamie dropping the crowbar through the side-lights. The "Atlantic" has been missing all the morning.

"Jamie,"—a last, random resort, after fruitless search,—"where is the 'Atlantic Monthly'?"

"In daw."

"In the drawer? No, it is not in the drawer. You don't know anything about it."

Not quite so fast. Jamie knows the "Atlantic Monthly" as well as you; and if you will open the drawer for him, he will rapidly scatter its contents till he comes to the missing "Monthly," safe under the shawls where he deposited it.

If you are hanging your room with ground-pine, he lays hold of every stray twig, and tucks it into every crack he can reach. Will you have some corn out of the barrel? It is Jamie for balancing himself on the edge, and reaching down into the depths after it, till little more than his heels are visible. If, in a sudden exuberance, you make a "cheese,"—not culinary, but whirligig—round go his little bobtail petticoats in fatuous imitation. You walk the floor awhile, lost in day dreaming, to find this little monkey trotting behind you with droll gravity, his hands clasped behind his head, like yours; and he breaks in upon your most serious meditations with, "Baddy get down on floor, want wide on Baddy back," as nonchalantly as if he were asking you to pass the salt. All that he says, all that he does, has its peculiar charm. Not that he is in the least a remarkable child.

Otherwise what will befall this sketch?

I do not expect anything will ever[Pg 709] come of him. In a few years he will be just like everybody else; but now he is the peculiar gift of Heaven. Men and women walk and talk all day long, and nobody minds them; while this little ignoramus seldom opens his lips but you think nothing was ever so winsomely spoken. I suspect it is only his complete simplicity and sincerity. What he says and what he does are the direct, unmistakable effusions of his nature. All comes straight from the secret place where his soul abideth. Even his subterfuges are open as the day. You know that you are looking upon virgin Nature. Just as it flashed from its source, you see the unadulterated spirit. If grown-up persons would or could be as frank as he,—if they had no more misgivings, concealments, self-distrust, self-thought than he,—they would doubtless be as interesting. Every separate human being is a separate phenomenon and mystery; and if he could only be unthinkingly himself, as Jamie is, that self would be as much more captivating as it is become great and subtle by growth and experience. But we—fashion, habit, society, training, all the culture of life, mix a sort of paste, and we gradually become coated with it, and it hardens upon us; so it comes to pass by-and-by that we see our associates no longer, but only the casing in which they walk about; and as one is a good deal like another, we are not deeply fascinated. Sometimes a Thor's hammer breaks this flinty rock in pieces. Sometimes a fervid sun melts it, and you are let in to where the vigilant soul keeps watch and ward. Sometimes, alas! the hardening process seems to have struck in, and you find nothing but petrifaction all the way through.

Perhaps, after all, it is just as well; for, if our neighbors won upon us unawares as Jamie does, when should we ever find time to do anything? On the whole, it is a great deal better as it is, until the world has learned to love its neighbor as itself. For the present, it would not be safe to go abroad with the soul exposed. You fetch me a blow with your bludgeon, and I mind it not at all through my coat-of-mail; but if it had fallen on my heart, it would have wounded me to death. Nay, if you did but know where the sutures are, how you would stab and stab, dear fellow-man and brother, not to say Christian! No, we are not to be trusted with each other yet,—I with you, nor you with me; so we will keep our armor on awhile, please Heaven.

And as I think of Jamie frisking through the happy, merry days, I see how sad, unnatural, and wicked a thing it is, that mothers must so often miss the sunshine that ought to come to them through their little ones. We speak of losing children, when they die; but many a mother loses her children, though they play upon her threshold every day. She loses them, because she has no leisure to bask, and loiter, and live in them. She is so occupied in providing for their wants, that she has no time to sun herself in their grace. She snatches from them sweetness enough to keep herself alive, but she does not expand and mellow and ripen in their warmth for all the world. And the hours go by, and the days go by, evening and morning, seed-time and harvest, and the little frocks are outgrown, and the little socks outworn, and the little baby—oh! there is no little baby any more, but a boy with the crust formed already on his soul.

I marvel what becomes of these small people in heaven. They cannot stay as they are, for then heaven would be a poorer place than earth, where all but idiots increase in wisdom and stature. And if they keep growing,—why, it seems but a sorry exchange, to give up your tender, tiny, clinging infant, that is still almost a part of your own life, and receive in return a full-grown angel a great deal wiser and stronger than you. Perhaps it is only a just punishment for our guilty ignorance and selfishness in treating the little things so harshly, that they die away from us in sheer self-defence. And how good is the All-Father thus to declare for His little ones, when the strife waxes too hot, and the odds[Pg 710] too heavy against them! We can maltreat them, but only to a certain limit. Beyond that, the lovely, stern angel of Death steps in, and bears them softly away to perpetual peace. I read our vital statistics,—so many thousands under five years of age dying each year; and I rejoice in every one. If their chances were fair for purity and happiness, the earth is too beautiful to slip so quickly from their hold; but, with sin and suffering, twin beasts of prey, lying in wait to devour, oh! thrice and four times happy are they who escape swiftly from the struggle in which they are all too sure to fail. So many, at least, are safe within the fold.

And thus, too, it seems providential, that the sin of pagan nations should take the form of infanticide. It is Satanic work, but God overrules it for good. Evil defeats itself, and hatred crowds the lists of love. From misery and wickedness, from stifled cities, over-full, from pagan lands, steeped centuries long in vice and crime, from East and West and North and South, over all the world, the innocent souls go up,—little lily-buds, swelling white and pure from earthly slime to bloom in heavenly splendor.

Jamie, Jamie, do you see birdie has put his head under his wing and gone to sleep? What does that mean? It means "Good night, Jamie." Now come, let us have "Cr-e-e-p, cr-e-e-p, cr-e-e-p!" And two fingers go slowly, measuring Jamie from toe to neck, and Jamie cringes and squirms and finally screams outright, and almost flings himself upon the floor; but, as soon as his spasm is over, begs again, "Say, 'K-e-e-p, k-e-e-p, k-e-e-p!'" and would keep it going longer than I have time to wait.

In this very passion for reiteration may be found a sufficient answer to those uneasy persons who are perpetually attempting to bring new singing-books into our churches, on pretext that people are tired of the old tunes. You never hear from Jamie's pure taste any clamor for new songs or stories. Whenever he climbs up into your lap to be amused, he is sure to ask for the story of "Kitty in Ga'et Window," though he knows it as Boston people know oratorio music, and detects and condemns the slightest departure from the text. And when you have gone through the drama, with all its motions and mewings, he wants nothing so much as "Kitty in Ga'et Window 'gen." Let us keep the old tunes. It is but a factitious need that would change them.

Gentle and friendly reader, I pray your pardon for this childish record. Some things I say of set purpose for your good, and the more you do not like them, the more I know they are the very things you need; and I shall continue to deal them out to you from time to time, as you are able to bear them. But this broken, rambling child-talk—with "a few practical reflections, arising naturally from my subject," as the preachers say—was penned only for your pleasure—and mine; and if you do not like it, I shall be very sorry, and wish I had never written it. For we might have gone away by ourselves and enjoyed it all alone;—could we not, Jamie, you and I together? Oh, no, no! Never again! Never, never again! for the mountains that rise and the prairies that roll between us. Ah! well, Jamie, I shall not cry about it. If you had stayed here, it would have been but a little while before you would have grown up into a big boy, and then a young fellow, and then a man, and been of no account. So what does it signify? Good night, little Jamie! good night, darling! Do I hear a sleepy echo, as of old, wavering out of the West, "Goo-i-dah-ing"?

[Pg 711]

THE SLEEPER.

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XL.

It would lead us far too widely from the simple order of our narrative to detail the early history of Madame Arles; and although the knowledge of it might serve in some degree to explain the peculiar interest which that poor woman has shown in the motherless Adèle, we choose rather to leave the matter unexplained, and to regard the invalid enthusiast as one whose sympathies have fastened in a strange way upon the exiled French girl, and grow all the stronger by the difficulties in the way of their full expression.

Madame Arles did not forego either her solicitude or the persistence of her inquiry under the harsh rebuff of the Doctor. Again and again, after nightfall, he saw her figure flitting back and forth upon the street, over against Adèle's window; and the good man perplexed himself vainly with a hundred queries as to what such strange conduct could mean. The village physician, too, had been addressed by this anxious lady with a tumult of questionings; and the old gentleman—upon whose sympathies the eager inquirer had won an easier approach than upon those of the severe parson—had taken hearty satisfaction in assuring her, within a few days after the night interview we have detailed, that the poor girl was mending, was out of danger, in fact, and would be[Pg 714] presently in a condition to report for herself.

After this, and through the long convalescence, Madame Arles was seen more rarely upon the village street. Yet the town gossips were busy with the character and habits of the "foreign lady." Her devotion to the little child of the outcast Boody woman was most searchingly discussed at all the tea-tables of the place; and it was special object of scandal, that the foreign lady, neglectful of the Sabbath ministrations of the parson, was frequently to be seen wandering about the fields in "meeting-time," attended very likely by that poor wee thing of a child, upon whose head the good people all visited, with terrible frowns, the sins of the parents. No woman, of whatever condition, could maintain a good reputation in Ashfield under such circumstances. Dame Tourtelot enjoyed a good sharp fling at the "trollop."

"I allers said she was a bad woman," submitted the stout Dame; and her audience (consisting of the Deacon and Miss Almiry) would have had no more thought of questioning the implied decision than of cutting down the meeting-house steeple.

"And I'm afeard," continued the Dame, "that Adeel isn't much better; she keeps a crucifix in her chamber!—needn't to look at me, Tourtelot!—Miss Johns told me all about it, and I don't think the parson should allow it. I think you oughter speak to the parson, Tourtelot."

The good Deacon scratched his head, over the left ear, in a deprecating manner.

"And I've heerd this Miss Arles has been a-writin' to Mr. Maverick, Adeel's father,—needn't to look at me, Tourtelot!—the postmaster told me; and she's been receivin' furren letters,—filled with Popery, I ha'n't a doubt."

In short, the poor woman bore a most execrable reputation; and Doctor Johns, good as he was, took rather a secret pride in such startling confirmation of his theories in respect to French character. He wrote to his friend Maverick, informing him that his suspicions in regard to Madame Arles were, he feared, "only too well-founded. Her neglect of Sabbath ordinances, her unhallowed associations, her extreme violence of language, (which was on a signal occasion uttered in my hearing,) have satisfied me that your distrust was only too reasonable. I shall guard Adaly from all further intercourse with extreme care."

Indeed, Miss Eliza and the Doctor (the latter from the best of motives) had scrupulously kept from Adèle all knowledge of Madame Arles's impatient and angry solicitude during her illness. And when Adèle, on those first sunny days of her convalescence, learned incidentally that her countrywoman was still a resident of the village, it pained her grievously to think that she had heard no tender message from her during all that weary interval of sickness, and she was more than half inclined (though she did not say this) to adopt the harshest judgments of the spinster. There was not a visitor at the parsonage, indeed, but, if the name were mentioned, sneered at the dark-faced, lonely woman, who was living such a godless life, and associating, as if from sheer bravado, with those who were under the ban of all the reputable people of Ashfield.

When, therefore, Adèle, on one of her early walks with Reuben, after her recovery was fully established, encountered, in a remote part of the village, Madame Arles, trailing after her the little child of shame,—and yet darting toward the French girl, at first sight, with her old effusion,—Adèle met her coolly, so coolly, indeed, that the poor woman was overcome, and, hurrying the little child after her, disappeared with a look of wretchedness upon her face that haunted Adèle for weeks and months. Thereafter very little was seen of Madame Arles upon the principal street of the village; and her avoidance of the family of the parsonage was as studied and resolute as either the Doctor or Miss Eliza could have desired. A moment of chilling indifference on the part of Adèle had worked stronger repulse[Pg 715] than all the harsh rebuffs of the elder people; but of this the kind-hearted French girl was no way conscious: yet she was painfully conscious of a shadowy figure that still, from time to time, stole after her in her twilight walks, and that, if she turned upon it, shrank stealthily from observation. There was a mystery about the whole matter which oppressed the poor girl with a sense of terror. She could not doubt that the interest of her old teacher in herself had been a kindly one; but whatever it might have been, that interest was now so furtive, and affected such concealment, that she was half led to entertain the cruellest suspicions of Miss Eliza, who did not fail to enlarge upon the godlessness of the stranger's life, and to set before Adèle the thousand alluring deceits by which Satan sought to win souls to himself.

Rumor, one day, brought the story, that the foreign woman, who had been the subject of so much village scandal, lay ill, and was fast failing; and on hearing this, Adèle would have broken away from all the parsonage restraints, to offer what consolations she could: nor would the good Doctor have repelled her; but the rumor, if not false, was, in his view, grossly exaggerated; since, on the Sunday previous only, some officious member of his parish had reported the Frenchwoman as strolling over the hills, decoying with her that little child of her fellow-lodger, which she had tricked out in the remnants of her French finery, and was thus wantoning throughout the holy hours of service.

A few days later, however, the Doctor came in with a serious and perplexed air; he laid his cane and hat upon the little table within the door, and summoned Adèle to the study.

"Adaly, my child," said he, "this unfortunate countrywoman of yours is really failing fast. I learn as much from the physician. She has sent a request to see you. She says that she has an important message, a dying message, to give you."

A strange tremor ran over the frame of Adèle.

"I fear, my child, that she is still bound to her idolatries; she has asked that you bring to her the little bauble of a rosary, which, I trust, Adaly, you have learned to regard as a vanity."

"Yet I have it still, New Papa; she shall have it"; and she turned to go.

"My child, I cannot bear that you should go as the messenger of a false faith, and to carry to her, as it were, the seal of her idolatries. You shall follow her wishes, Adaly; but I must attend you, my child, were it only to protest against such vanities, and to declare to her, if it be not too late, the truth as it is in the Gospel."

Adèle was only too willing; for she was impressed with a vague terror at thought of this interview, and of its possible revelations; and they set off presently in company. It was a chilly day of later autumn. Only a few scattered, tawny remnants of the summer verdure were hanging upon the village trees, and great rows of the dead and fallen leaves were heaped here and there athwart the path, where some high wall kept them clear of the winds; and as the walkers tramped through them, they made a ghostly rustle, and whole platoons of them were set astir to drift again until some new eddy caught and stranded them in other heaps. Adèle, more and more disturbed in mind, said,—

"It's such a dreary day, New Papa!"

"Is it the thought that one you know may lie dying now makes it dreary, my child?"

"Partly that, I dare say," returned Adèle; "and then the wind so tosses about these dead leaves. I wish it were always spring."

"There is a country," said the parson, "where spring reigns eternal. I hope you may find it, Adaly; I hope your poor countrywoman may find it; but I fear, I fear."

"Is it, then, so dreadful to be a Romanist?"

"It is dreadful, Adaly, to doubt the free grace of God,—dreadful to trust in any offices of men, or in tithes of mint and anise and cumin,—dreadful[Pg 716] to look anywhere for absolution from sin but in the blood of the Lamb. I have a conviction, my child," continued he, in a tone even more serious, "that the poor woman has not lived a pure life before God, or even before the world. Even at this supreme moment of her life, if it be such, I should be unwilling to trust you alone with her, Adaly."

Adèle, trembling,—partly with the chilling wind, and partly with an ill-defined terror of—she knew not what,—nestled more closely to the side of the old gentleman; and he, taking her little hand in his, as tenderly as a lover might have done, said,—

"Adaly, at least your trust in God is firm, is it not?"

"It is! it is!" said she.

The house, as we have said, lay far out upon the river-road, within a strip of ill-tended garden-ground, surrounded by a rocky pasture. A solitary white-oak stood in the line of straggling wall that separated garden from pasture, and showed still a great crown of leaves blanched by the frosts, and shivering in the wind. An artemisia, with blackened stalks, nodded its draggled yellow blossoms at one angle of the house, while a little company of barn-door fowls stood closely grouped under the southern lea, with heads close drawn upon their breasts, idling and winking in the sunshine.

The young mother of the vagrant little one who had attracted latterly so much of the solitary woman's regard received them with an awkward welcome.

"Miss Arles is poorly, to-day," she said, "and she's flighty. She keeps Arthur" (the child) "with her. You hear how she's a-chatterin' now." (The door of her chamber stood half open.) "Arty seems to understand her. I'm sure I don't."

Nor, indeed, did the Doctor, to whose ear a torrent of rapid French speech was like the gibberish of demons. He never doubted 't was full of wickedness. Not so Adèle. There were sweet sounds to her ear in that swift flow of Provençal speech,—tender, endearing epithets, that seemed like the echo of music heard long ago,—pleasant banter of words that had the rhythm of the old godmother's talk.

"Ah, you're a gay one! Now—put on your velvet cap—so. We'll find a bride for you some day—some day, when you're a tall, proud man. Who's your father, Arty? Pah! it's nothing. You'll make somebody's heart ache all the same,—eh, Arty, boy?"

"Do you understand her, Miss Maverick?" says the mother.

"Not wholly," said Adèle; and the two visitors stepped in noiselessly.

The child, bedizened with finery, was standing upon the bed where the sick woman lay, with a long feather from the cock's tail waving from his cap. Madame Arles, with the hot flush of the fever upon her, looked—saving the thinness—as she might have looked twenty years before. And as her flashing eye caught the newcomers, her voice broke out wildly again,—

"Here's the bride, and here's the priest! Where's the groom? Where's the groom? Where's the groom, I say?"

The violence of her manner made poor Adèle shiver.

The boy laughed as he saw it, and said,—

"She's afraid! I'm not afraid."

"Oh, no!" said the crazed woman, turning on him. "You're a man, Arty: men are not afraid,—you wanton, you wild one! Where's the groom?" said she again, addressing the Doctor, fiercely.

"My good woman," says the old gentleman, "we have come to offer you the consolations that are only to be found in the Gospel of Christ."

"Pah! you're a false priest!"—defiantly. "Where's the groom?"

And Adèle, hoping to pacify the poor woman, draws from her reticule the little rosary, and, holding it before the eyes of the sufferer, says, timidly,—

"My dear Madam, it is I,—Adèle; I have brought what you asked of me; I have come to comfort you."

And the woman, over whose face there ran instantly a marvellous change,[Pg 717] snatched the rosary, and pressed it convulsively to her lips; then, looking for a moment yearningly, with that strange double gaze of hers, upon the face of Adèle, she sprang toward her, and, wreathing her arms about her, drew her fast upon her bosom,—

"Ma fille! ma pauvre fille!"

The boy slipped down from the bed,—his little importance being over,—and was gone. The Doctor's lips moved in silent prayer for five minutes or more, wholly undisturbed, while the twain were locked in that embrace. Then the old gentleman, stooping, says,—

"Adaly, will she listen to me now?"

And Adèle, turning a frightened face to him, whispers,—

"She's sleeping; unclasp her hands; she holds me tightly."

And the Doctor, with tremulous fingers, does her bidding.

Adèle, still whispering, says,—

"She's calm now; she'll talk with us when she wakes, New Papa."

"My poor child," said the Doctor, solemnly, and with a full voice, "she'll never wake again."

And Adèle, turning,—in a maze of terror, as she thought of that death-clasp,—saw that her eyes had fallen open,—open, and fixed, and lustreless. So quietly Death had come upon his errand, and accomplished it, and gone; while without, the fowls, undisturbed, were still blinking idly in the sunshine under the lea of the wall, and the yellow chrysanthemums were fluttering in the wind.

XLI.

In the winter of 1838-9, Adèle, much to the delight of Dr. Johns, avowed at last her wish to join herself to the little church-flock over which the good parson still held serenely his office of shepherd. And as she told him quietly of her desire, sitting before him there in the study of the parsonage, without urgence upon his part, it was as if a bright gleam of sunshine had darted suddenly through the wintry clouds, and bathed both of them in its warm effulgence. The good man, rising from his chair and crossing over to her place, touched her forehead with as tender and loving a kiss as ever he had bestowed upon the lost Rachel.

He had seen too closely the development of her Christian faith to disturb her with various questionings. She rejoiced in this; for even then, with all the calm serenity of her trust, it was doubtful if her answers could have fully satisfied the austerities of his theological traditions. Nay, she doubted, even, if the exuberance of her spirits would not sometimes, in days to come, bound over the formalities of his Sunday observance, and startle a corrective glance; but withal she knew her trust was firm, and on this had full repose. Even the little rosary, so obnoxious to the household of the parsonage, was, by its terrible association with the death-scene of Madame Arles, endeared to her tenfold; and she could not forbear the hope that the poor woman, at the very last, by that clinging kiss upon the image of Christ, told a prayer that might give access to His abounding mercy.

Nor did Adèle seek to comprehend in their entireness all those wearisome dogmatic utterances which were familiar to her tongue, and which she could understand might form the steps to fulness of belief for the rigorous mind of the Doctor: for herself there was other ladder of approach, in finding which the emotional experiences of Reuben had been of such signal service.

To Reuben himself those experiences, brought a temporary exhilaration, but as yet no peace. He has a vague notion creeping over him, with fearfully chilling effect, that his sensibilities have been wrought upon rather than his reason; a confused sense of having yielded to enthusiasms, which, if they once grow cool, will leave him to slump back into a mire worse than the old. Therefore he must, by all possible means, keep them at fever-heat. A dim consciousness, however, possessed him, that, for the feeding of the necessary[Pg 718] fires, there would be needed an immense consumption of fuel,—such stock as an ordinary experience could hardly hope to supply. By degrees, this consciousness took the force of conviction, and he became painfully sensible of his own limitations. There was a weary, matter-of-fact world to struggle with, in whose homely cares and interests he must needs be a partner. He could not wear the gyves of a Gabriel on the muddy streets of life, or carry the ecstatic language of praise into the world's talk: if he could, he would be reckoned insane, and not unjustly, since sanity is, after all, but a term to express the average normal condition of mind. He looked with something like envy upon the serene contentment of Adèle. He lived like an ascetic; he sought, by reading of all manner of exultant religious experience, to keep alive the ferment of the autumn. "If only death were near," he said to himself, "with what a blaze of hope one might go out!" But death was not near,—or, at least, life and its perplexing duties were nearer. The intensity of his convictions somehow faded, and they lost their gorgeous hue, under the calm doctrinal sermons of the parson. If the glory of the promises and the tenderness of Divine entreaty were to be always dropping mellifluously on his ear, as upon that solemn Sunday of the summer, it might be well. But it is not thus; and even were the severe quiet of the Ashfield Sundays lighted up by the swift and burning words of such fiery evangelism, yet six solid working-days roll over upon the heel of every Sunday,—in which he sees good Deacon Tourtelot in shirt-sleeves driving some sharp bargain for his two-year-old steers, or the stout Dame hectoring some stray peddler by the hour for the fall of a penny upon his wares, and wonders where their Christian largeness of soul is gone. Is the matter real to him? And if real, where is the peace? Shall he consult the good Doctor? He is met straightway with an array of the old catechismal formulas, clearly stated, well argued, but brushing athwart his mind like a dusty wind. The traditional dislikes of his boyhood have armed him against all such, cap-à-pie. In this strait, he wanders over the hills in search of loneliness, and a volume of Tillotson he carries with him is all unread. Nature speaks more winningly, but scarce more helpfully.

Adèle, with a quick eye, sees the growing unrest, and, with a great weight of gratitude upon her heart, says, timidly,—

"Can I help you, Reuben?"

"No, thank you, Adèle. I understand you; I'm in a boggle,—that's all."

The father, too, at a hint from Adèle, (whose perceptions are so much quicker,) sees at last how the matter stands.

"Reuben," he says, "these struggles of yours are struggles with the Great Adversary of Souls. I trust, my son, you will not allow him to have the mastery."

It was kindly said and earnestly said, but touched the core of the son's moral disquietude no more than if it were the hooting of an owl. Yet, for all this, Reuben makes a brave struggle to wear with an outward calm the burden of the professions he has made,—a terrible burden, when he finds what awful chasms in his faith have been overleaped by his vaulting Quixotic fervor. Wearily he labors to bridge them across, with over-much reading, there in the quiet study of the parsonage, of Newton and Tillotson and Butler; and he takes a grim pleasure (that does not help him) in following the amiable argumentation of Paley. It pains him grievously to think what humiliation would possess the old Doctor, if he but knew into what crazy currents his boy's thoughts were drifting over the pages of his beloved teachers. But a man cannot live a deceit, even for charity's sake, without its making outburst some day, and wrecking all the fine preventive barriers which kept it in.

The outburst came at last in the quiet of the Ashfield study, Reuben had been poring for hours—how wearily![Pg 719] how vainly!—over the turgid dogmas of one of the elder divines, when he suddenly dashed the book upon the floor.

"Confound the theologies! I'll have no more of them!"

The Doctor dropped his pen, and stared as if a serpent had stung him.

"My son! Reuben! Reuben!"

It was not so much the expression that had shocked him, as it was the action and the defiance in his eye.

"I can't help it, father. It's the Evil One, perhaps. If it be, I'll cheat him, by making a clean breast of it. I can't abide the stuff; I can't see my way through it."

"My son, it is your sin that blinds you."

"Very likely," says Reuben.

"It was not thus with you three months ago, Reuben," continues the Doctor, in a softened tone.

"No, father, there was a strange light around me in those days. It seemed to me that the path lay clear and shining through all the maze. If Death had caught me then, I think I could have sung hosannas with the saints. It was a beautiful dream. It's faded dismally, father,—as if the Devil had painted it."

The old man shuddered, and lifted his hands, as he was wont to do in his most earnest pleas at the Throne of Grace.

"The muddle of the world and the theologies has come in since," continued Reuben, "and the base professions I see around me, and the hypocrisies and the cant, have taken away the glow. It's all a weariness and a confusion, and that's the solemn truth."

The Doctor said, measuredly, (as if the Book were before him,)—

"'Some seeds fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.' Reuben! Reuben! we must agonize to enter into the strait gate!"

"It's a long agony," said Reuben; and he rose and paced back and forth for a time; then suddenly stopping before the Doctor, he laid his hand upon his shoulder, (the boy was of manly height now, and overtopped the old gentleman by an inch,)—"Father, it grieves me to pain you,—indeed it does; but truth is truth. I have told you my story; but if you wish it, I will live outwardly as if no such talk had passed. I will respect as much as ever all your religious observances, and no person shall be the wiser."

"I would not have you practise hypocrisy, my son; but I would not have you withdraw yourself from any of the appointed means of grace."

And at this Reuben went out,—out far upon the hills, from which he saw the village roofs, and the spire, and the naked tree-tops, the fields all bare and brown, the smoke of a near house curling lazily into the sky; and the only sound that broke the solemn stillness was the drumming of a partridge in the woods or the harsh scream of a belated jay.

Never had Reuben been more kind or attentive to the personal wants of the old gentleman than on the days which followed upon this interview. There was something almost like a daughter's solicitude in his watchfulness. On the next Sunday the Doctor preached with an emotion that was but poorly controlled, and which greatly mystified his people. Twice in the afternoon his voice came near to failing. Reuben knew where the grief lay, but wore a composed face; and as he supported the old gentleman home after service, he said, (but not so loudly that Adèle could hear, who was tripping closely behind,)—

"Father, I grieve for you,—upon my soul I do; but it's fate."

"Fate, Reuben?" said the Doctor, but with a less guarded voice,—"fate? God only is fate!"

The Doctor was too much mortified by this revelation of Reuben's present state of feeling to make it the subject of conversation, even with Miss Eliza, and much less with the elders of his flock.[Pg 720] To Squire Elderkin, indeed, whose shrewd common-sense he had learned to value even in its bearings upon the "weightier matters of the law," he had dropped some desponding reflections in regard to the wilful impetuosity of his poor son Reuben, from which the shrewd Squire at once suspected the difficulty.

"It's the blood of the old Major," he said. "Let it work, Doctor, let it work!"

From which observation, it must be confessed, the good man derived very little comfort.

Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidant in these latter secrets of the study, cannot, however, fail to see that Reuben's constancy to the Doctor's big folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under the reserve which had grown out of his later experiences. She has hopes from this—true to her keen worldly wisdom—that the abandoned career of the city may yet win his final decision. But her moral perceptions are not delicate enough to discover the great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from sharp sense of duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious reflections, which set his whole moral nature on edge. Nor is this the limit of her blindness: perceiving, as she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans with respect to himself and Adèle, she thinks to further the matter by dropping hints of the rare graces of Adèle and of her brilliant prospects,—assuring him how much that young lady's regard for him has been increased since his conversion, (which word has to Reuben just now a dreary and most detestable sound,) and in a way which she counts playful, but which to him is agaçant to the last degree, she forecasts the time when Reuben will have his pretty French wife, and a rich one.

Left to himself, the youth would very likely have found enough to admire in the face and figure and pleasantly subdued enthusiasm of Adèle; but the counter irritant of the spinster's speech drove him away on many an evening to the charming fireside of the Elderkins, where he spent not a few beguiling hours in listening to the talk of the motherly mistress of the household, and in watching the soft hazel eyes of Rose, as they lifted in eager wonderment at some of his stories of the town, or fell (the long lashes hiding them with other beauty) upon the work where her delicate fingers plied with a white swiftness that teased him into trains of thought which were not wholly French.

Adèle has taken a melancholy interest in decking the grave of the exiled lady, which she has insisted upon doing out of her own resources, and thus has doubled the little legacy which Madame Aries had left to the outcast woman and child with whom she had joined her fate, and who, with good reason, wept her death bitterly. Hour upon hour Adèle pondered over that tragic episode, tasking herself to imagine what message the dying woman could have had to communicate, and wondering if the future would ever clear up the mystery. To the good Doctor it seemed only a strange Providence, by which the religious convictions of Adèle should be deepened and made sure. And in no way were the results of those convictions more beautifully apparent than in the efforts of Adèle to overcome her antipathies to the spinster. It is doubtful, indeed, if a bolder challenge can be made to the Christian graces of any character whatever than that which demands the conquest of social prejudices which have grown into settled aversion. With all the stimulus of her new Christian endeavor, Adèle sought to think charitably of Miss Eliza. Yet it was hard; always, that occasional cold kiss of the spinster had for Adèle an iron imprint, which drove her warm blood away, instead of summoning it to response.

For her, Miss Eliza's staple praises of Reuben, and her adroit stories of the admiration and attachment of Mrs. Brindlock for her nephew, were distasteful to the last degree. Coarse natures[Pg 721] never can learn upon what fine threads the souls of the sensitive are strung.

Adèle felt a tender gratitude toward Reuben, which it seemed to her the boisterous affection of the spinster could never approach. She apprehended his spiritual perplexities more keenly than the austere aunt, and saw with what strange ferment his whole nature was vexed. Had he been a brother by blood, she could not have felt for him more warmly. And if she ever allowed herself to guess at a nearer tie, it was not to Miss Eliza that she would have named the guess,—not even, thus far, to herself. As yet there was a soft fulness in her heart that felt no wound,—at least no wound in which her hope rankled. Whether Reuben were present or away, her songs rose, with a sweeter, a serener, and a loftier cheer than of old under the roof of the parsonage; and, as of old, the Doctor laid down his book and listened, as if an angel sang.

XLII.

In the summer of 1840 the Doctor received a letter from Maverick which overwhelmed him with consternation; and its revelations, we doubt not, will, prove as great a surprise to our readers.

"My good friend Johns," he wrote, "I owe you a debt of gratitude which I can never repay; you have shown such fatherly interest in my dear child,—you have so guided and guarded her,—you have so abundantly filled the place which, though it was my duty, I had never the worthiness to fill, that I have no words to thank you. And now you have crowned all by giving her that serene trust"——

"Not I! not I!" says the Doctor to himself,—"only God's mercy,—God's infinite mercy!"—and he continues, "that serene trust in Heaven which will support her under all trials. Poor child, she will need it all!"

"And that this man," pursues the Doctor meditatively, "who thinks so wisely, should be given over still to the things of this world!"

"I hear still further,—from what sources it will be unnecessary for me now to explain,—that a close intimacy has grown up latterly between your son Reuben and my dear Adèle, and that this intimacy has provoked village rumors of the possibility of some nearer tie. These rumors may be, perhaps, wholly untrue; I hope to Heaven they are, and my informant may have exaggerated only chance reports. But the knowledge of them, vague as they are, has stimulated me to a task which I ought far sooner to have accomplished, and which, as a man of honor, I can no longer defer. I know that you think lightly of any promptings to duty which spring only from a sense of honor; and before you shall have finished my letter I fear that you will be tempted to deny me any claim to the title. Indeed, it has been the fear of forfeiting altogether your regard that has kept me thus far silent, and has caused me to delay, from year to year, that full explanation which I can no longer with any propriety or justice withhold.

"I go back to the time when I first paid you a visit at your parsonage. I never shall forget the cheery joyousness of that little family scene at your fireside, the winning modesty and womanliness of your lost Rachel, and the serenity and peace that lay about your household. It was to me, fresh from the vices of Europe, like some charming Christian idyl, in whose atmosphere I felt myself not only an alien, but a profane intruder; for, at that very time, I was bound by one of those criminal liaisons to which so many strangers on the Continent are victims. Your household and your conversation prompted a hope and a struggle for better things. But, my dear Johns, the struggle was against a whole atmosphere of vice. And it was only when I had broken free of entanglement, that I learned, with a dreary pang, that I was the father of a child,—my poor, dear Adèle!"

The Doctor crumpled the letter in[Pg 722] his hand, and smote upon his forehead. Never, in his whole life, had he known such strange revulsion of feeling. With returning calmness he smooths the letter upon his desk, and continues:—

"I expect your condemnation, of course; yet listen to my story throughout. That child I might have left to the tender mercies of the world, might have ignored it, and possibly forgotten its existence. Many a man, with fewer stains on his conscience than I have, would have done this, and met the world and old friends cheerily. But then the memory of you and of your teachings somehow kindled in me what I counted a worthier purpose. I vowed that the child should, if possible, lead a guileless life, and should no way suffer, so far as human efforts could prevent, for the sins of the parents. The mother assented, with what I counted a guilty willingness, to my design, and I placed her secretly under the charge of the old godmother of whom Adèle must often have spoken.

"But I was no way content that she should grow up under French influences, and to the future knowledge (inevitable in these scenes) of the ignominy of her birth. And if that knowledge were ever to come, I could think of no associations more fitted to make her character stanch to bear it than those that belong to the rigid and self-denying virtues which are taught in a New England parish. Is it strange that I recurred at once to your kindness, Johns? Is it strange that I threw the poor child upon your charity?

"It is true, I used deceit,—true that I did not frankly reveal the truth; but See how much was stake! I knew in what odium such trespasses were held in the serenity of your little towns; I knew, that, if you, with Spartan courage, should propose acceptance of the office, your family would reject it. I knew that your love of truth would be incapable of the concealments or subterfuges which might be needed to protect the poor child from the tongue of scandal. In short, I was not willing to take the risk of a repulse. 'Such deceit as there may be,' I said, 'is my own. My friend Johns can never impute it as a sin to Adèle.' I am sure you will not now. Again, I felt that I was using deceit (if you will allow me to say it) in a good cause, and that you yourself, when once the shock of discovery should be past, could never reprimand yourself for your faithful teachings to an erring child, but must count her, in your secret heart, only another of the wandering lambs which it was your duty and pleasure to lead into the true fold. Had she come to you avowedly as the child of sin, with all the father's and mother's guilt reeking upon her innocent head, could you have secured to her, my dear Johns, that care and consideration and devotion which have at last ripened her Christian character, and made her proof against slander?"

Here the Doctor threw down the letter again, and paced up and down the room.

"The child of sin! the child of sin! Who could have thought it? Yet does not Maverick reason true? Does not Beelzebub at time reason true? Adaly! my poor, poor Adaly!"

"It seemed to me," the letter continued, "that there might possibly be no need that either you or my poor child should ever know the whole truth in this matter; and I pray (with your leave) that it maybe kept from her even now. You will understand, perhaps, from what I have said, why my visits have been more rare than a fatherly feeling would seem to demand: to tell truth, I have feared the familiar questionings of her prattling girlhood. Mature years shrink from perilous inquiry, I think, with an instinct which does not belong to the freshness of youth.

"But from your ears, in view of the rumors that have come to my hearing, I could not keep the knowledge longer. I cannot, dear Johns, read your heart, and say whether or not you will revolt at the idea of any possible family tie between your son and my poor Adèle. But whatever aspect such possibility may present to your mind, I can regard it only with horror. If I have deceived[Pg 723] you, the deceit shall reach no such harm as this. Whatever your Christian forgiveness or your love for Adèle (and I know she is capable of winning your love) may suggest, I can never consent that any stain should be carried upon your family record by any instrumentality of mine. I must beg, therefore, that, if the rumor be true, you use all practicable means, even to the use of your parental authority, in discountenancing and forbidding such intimacy. If necessary to this end, and Reuben be still resident at the parsonage, I pray you to place Adèle with Mrs. Brindlock, or other proper person, until such time as I am able to come and take her once more under my own protection.

"If you were a more worldly man, my dear Johns, I should hope to win your heartier cooperation in my views by telling you that recent business misfortunes have placed my whole estate in peril, so that it is extremely doubtful if Adèle will have any ultimate moneyed dependence beyond the pittance which I have placed in trust for her in your hands. Should it be necessary, in furtherance of the objects I have named, to make communication of the disclosures in this letter to your son or to Miss Johns, you have my full liberty to do so. Farther than this, I trust you may not find it necessary to make known the facts so harmful to the prospects and peace of my innocent child.

"I have thus made a clean breast to you, my dear Johns, and await your scorching condemnation. But let not any portion of it, I pray, be visited upon poor Adèle. I know with what wrathful eyes you, from your New England standpoint, are accustomed to look upon such wickedness; and I know, too, that you are sometimes disposed to 'visit the sins of the fathers upon the children'; but I beg that your anathemas may all rest where they belong, upon my head, and that you will spare the motherless girl you have taught to love you."

Up and down the study the Doctor paced, with a feverish, restless step, which in all the history of the parsonage had never been heard in it before.

"Such untruth!" is his exclamation. "Yet no, there has been no positive untruth; the deception he admits."

But the great fact comes back upon his thought, that the child of sin and shame is with him. All his old distrust and hatred of the French are revived on the instant; the stain of their iniquities is thrust upon his serene and quiet household. And yet what a sweet face, what a confiding nature God has given to this creature conceived in sin! In his simplicity, the good Doctor would have fancied that some mark of Cain should be fixed on the poor child.

Again, the Doctor had somewhere in his heart a little of the old family pride. The spinster had ministered to it, coyly indeed by word, but always by manner and conduct. How it would have shocked the stout Major, or his good mother, even, to know that he had thus fondled and fostered the vagrant offspring of iniquity upon his hearth! A still larger and worthier pride the Doctor cherished in his own dignity,—so long the honored pastor of Ashfield,—so long the esteemed guide of this people in paths of piety.

What if it should appear, that, during almost the entire period of his holy ministrations, he had, as would seem, colluded with an old acquaintance of his youth—a brazen reprobate—to shield him from the shame of his own misdeeds, and to cover with the mantle of respectability and with all the pastoral dignities this French-speaking child, who, under God, was the seal of the father's iniquities?

As he paced back and forth, there was a timid knock at the door; and in a moment more, Adèle, blooming with health, and radiant with hope, stood before him. Her face had never beamed with a more wondrous frankness and sweetness.

[Pg 724]

BOOKS FOR OUR CHILDREN

The war is over, yet our fight is not through; and we always, in this life of ours, and especially in this new country and eventful age, have trouble enough to keep our eyes open when they ought to sleep, and our hands busy when they have earned the right to rest. Several knotty questions already begin to try us sorely, although we are confident that the knots can be untied by skillful fingers without calling upon the sword to cut them. We shall settle the Reconstruction problem, the Negro, the Debt, John Bull and Louis Napoleon, all in due time, and without war. But there is a question to be settled which comes nearer home to each family, and which distances all others in magnitude and interest:—What shall we do with our children? how train and teach them in body and mind, by schools and books, by play and work, for that marvellous American life that is now opening to us its new and eventful chapter in the history of man? The Slaveholders' Rebellion is put down; but how shall we deal with the never-ceasing revolt of the new generation against the old? and how keep our Young America under the thumb of his father and mother without breaking his spirit or blighting his destiny? Our brave old flag has swept the waters of all Secession craft, and our iron-clad Monitors do not flinch in fear of the model fleets of France and England mustered at Cherbourg. But what standard rules over our children and youth? and what Monitors are keeping watch over our countless schools and playgrounds? Our people have risen to a new and mighty sense of our national life, and the thousands of Americans who are now returning from Europe say that the tide there has wholly turned in our favor, and Americans are too proud to boast of their country, and are quite safe in leaving her to speak for herself. But how are we recruiting the ranks of the nation from the fresh blood and spirits, the new impulses and passions of childhood? And how does our legion of juvenile infantry compare with the young legions of England, France, Germany, Russia, or Italy? These are grave questions, not to be approached without misgiving, yet not by any means with mistrust, much less with despair. We of course do not propose to try to answer all or any of them now, but must be content with throwing out a few plain thoughts upon the kind of intellectual food we are giving our children, and especially upon the kind of juvenile literature that we ought to encourage. We do not claim for the American child any exemption from the common lot, nor make him out to be above or below the human nature to which he belongs, in common with the children of the Old World. He is a chip of the old block; and that old block is from the old trunk that has been growing for ages, is a great deal older than the father or mother, as old as mankind; and each new comer into the field bears with him some traces or remains of all the traits and dispositions and liabilities that have appeared in the ancestors and become the heritage of the race. Not only the is the American child of the same nature as his European contemporary, but he is born into very much of the same life, the same general circumstances of climate, scenery, morals, and religion, and surely into much of the same nursery talk and juvenile amusement, not excepting books. "Mother Goose" has a nursery catholicity wherever the English language is spoken, that is denied to any other book; and fruitful as America has been and is in children's books, we have not yet apparently added a single one to the first rank of juvenile classics, and have distanced Æsop, Bunyan, De Foe, Edgeworth, and the old fairy story-tellers, as little as we have distanced Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth,[Pg 725] and Goethe in the higher imagination.

It may be that the children's books that have been most characteristic of our native authors have been in important respects a mistake, and the "Quarterly Review," not without reason, assailed them some years ago in two articles of considerable sagacity and much patient study. But we have outgrown them now, and see the error that afflicted them. We have ceased to think it the part of wisdom to cross the first instincts of children, and to insist upon making of them little moralists, metaphysicians, and philosophers, when great Nature determines that their first education shall be in the senses and muscles, the affections and fancy, rather than in the critical judgment, logical understanding, or analytic reason. Peter Parley—Heaven rest his soul!—has gone to his repose, and much of his philosophizing and moralizing is buried deeper than his dust; yet Peter himself lives, and will live, in the graphic histories, anecdotes, sketches of life and Nature, and the rich treasures of pictorial illustration, that have blessed the eyes and ears, the hearts and imaginations of our children. He was wisest when he least thought of being wise, and weakest when he tried to be strong. We are not likely to repeat his mistakes, and our best new juvenile literature is too loyal to the old standards and to common-sense to undertake to make a precocious reasoning monster of the dear little child whom God is asking us to help onward in the unfolding of his senses and the observation of the world and its scenes and people.

We must be willing to own that our America is a child of the ages, and to give our children a full share of their birthright as heirs of the juvenile treasures of all nations. Judæa must still give her sacred stories, that charm youth as much, as they edify maturity; Arabia loses nothing of the enchantment of her marvellous tales in the clear light of this nineteenth century, but makes her dreams dearer, as science and business insist that we shall not dream at all; the old classic times shall still teach us in the fables of Æsop, and the romantic ages shall be with us in the legends of fairies and elves, dwarfs and giants, saints and angels, that are constantly coming up with faces new or old; the Protestant Reformation shall speak to our little folks in the lives of the martyrs and in "Pilgrim's Progress"; the age of modern adventure shall never tire in "Robinson Crusoe"; the new secular era of ethical schooling shall not lose its power so long as Maria Edgeworth finds a printer; nor will the didactic school of writers of juvenile religious books die out so long as Hannah More stands by our Sunday schools and Tract Societies, and keeps their piety and ethics from swamping themselves wholly in dogmatism and dulness.

Yet whilst we are thus to acknowledge and use the old treasures, we are none the less bound to have a juvenile literature of our own; and because we are possessed by the truly catholic spirit that appreciates all good things, we are more likely to have a full and fair growth from the good seed that takes root in our own nurseries. What that new growth shall be we do not presume to predict, for it cannot be fully known until it comes up and speaks for itself; yet it is not presumption to undertake to say what are the essential conditions of its rise and the probable traits of its character. It must grow out of our civilized Christian mind under the peculiar circumstances and dispositions of our children, according to the great laws of God, as they bear upon our sensibilities, tastes, faculties, and associations. It is already showing unmistakable signs of its quality, and none the less so, although we must allow that its best specimens are fugitive stories, stray poems, and magazine pieces, rather than any conspicuous master-works of literature that rival the old standards.

The American child is undoubtedly in some respects peculiar alike in temperament, disposition, and surroundings. He is somewhat delicate and sensitive in organization, and not as[Pg 726] tough and thick-skinned, surely, as his English cousins. He grows up in the midst of excitement, with an average amount of privilege and prosperity unknown heretofore to the mass of children in any community. Our children are generally supplied with pocket-money to an extent unknown in the good old times; and the books that circulate among them at holiday seasons, and are sometimes found in school and Sunday libraries, often have a richness and beauty that were never seen fifty years ago on the parlor tables or shelves of parents. Reading begins very early among us; and the universal hurry of the American mind crowds children forward, and tempts them in pleasure, as in study and work, to rebel at the usual limitations of years, and push infancy prematurely into childhood, childhood into youth, and youth into maturity. The spirit of competition shows its head unseasonably, and there is a precocious fever of ambition among those who are taught almost in the cradle to feel that here the race for the highest prizes is open to all, and the emulation of the school is the forerunner of the rivalry of business, society, and politics. Our heads are apt to be much older than our shoulders, and English critics of our juvenile literature say that much of it seems written for the market and counting-room rather than for the nursery and play-ground. Yet we are not disposed to quarrel with the American child, or put him down at the feet of the pet children of Europe. He is a precious little creature, with rare susceptibilities and powers, whose very perils indicate high aptitudes, and whose great exposures should move us to temper not a little our pity for his failings with admiration for his excellence. Our boys and girls have done nobly, and the nation which they have now become may well prove its greatness by new wisdom and care for the boys and girls who are yet to grow up men and women and become the nation that is to be.

There are vital questions that meet us at the very outset of the discussion:—What are children? and what is the difference between them and grown people? and what should be the difference in the reading provided for the two? Some persons seem to think and speak of children as a distinct order of beings, and not as a part of mankind. The simple truth is, that they are men and women in nature, but not in development. All that is actual in the mature mind is potential in them, and there is no theory more absurd than that which affirms that the adult powers and dispositions are wholly factitious, and education makes us what we are, instead of simply bringing out what is born in us. The great human mind is in the little child as well as in the gray-headed sage; but it has not come forth into activity and consciousness. The most complete culture, instead of obliterating diversities of natural talent and tendency, does but develop them more effectually; and our great masters and schools are more memorable for the strongly pronounced minds and wills that go forth from them than for any monotony of mediocre scholars or uniformity of paragons of genius. True culture brings out the common human mind in all, and the rare gifts that are in the few, and vindicates the force of Nature by the perfection of its art. Our juvenile literature should proceed upon this idea, and treat its little readers as representatives of the great human mind on its way to its full rights and powers and quite true to its high birthright, as far as it puts forth its prerogative.

What error, then, can be greater than to take it for granted that children have no mind, because they have not had time and means to bring out their whole mind? As far as it goes, is not their mind the great human intelligence? and even in its lispings and stumblings, does it not give hints and promises of the majestic powers that are on the way to development? Children are, indeed, treated and written about, sometimes, as if they were little fools, and any baby-talk or twaddle were good enough for them; but we are inclined to believe that they are in the main great fools who make[Pg 727] this mistake, and so sadly libel God's handiwork. In fact, it is probably safe to say, that, so far as their mind works, it works with more intensity and quickness than the adult mind; for they are fresh and unworn, and they put their whole life into the first play of their faculties. They do not know many things, indeed, and require constant instruction; but their intelligence is by no means as defective as their knowledge, but is as sharp and unwearied as their insatiate appetite for food. Talk nonsense to children, forsooth! Rather talk it to anybody else,—far rather to the pedants and worldlings who have fooled away their common-sense by burying thought under book-dust, or by hiding nature under shams and artifices. Children not only want the true thing said to them, but want to have it said in a true and fitting way; and no language pleases them so much as the pure, simple speech which the good old Bible uses, and which all our great masters of style follow. Any one who has seen the quizzical expression of a score or two of bright little children in listening to some old or young proser, who is undertaking to palm off upon them his platitudes for wisdom and his baby-talk for simplicity, cannot remain long in doubt as to which party leans most towards the fool.

There is, indeed, great difference between tween the mind of children and of adults, and literature should respect and provide for this difference,—although it is true that the best books please and edify both, and the nursery and parlour can meet in pretty full fellowship over "Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," and "Pilgrim's Progress," if not over the "Vicar of Wakefield" and Edgeworth's "Popular Tales." The great distinction between juvenile and adult literature is a very obvious and natural one. Not to discuss now the absence of business cares and ambition, children, in their normal, healthful state, know nothing of love as a passion, whilst it is the conspicuous feature of adult society, and the motive of all romances for readers of advanced years, and especially for all who have just passed into the charmed borders of adult life. I do not say, indeed, that children are to know nothing of love, or that it should be shut out of their habitual reading; for love is a part of human life, and is organized into manners and institutions, and sanctioned and exalted by religion. As a fact, and as sustaining great practical relations, love is to be treated freely in juvenile literature, but not as a passion. Every boy and girl who reads the Prayer-Book, and hears every-day talk, and sees what is going on in the world, knows that men and women marry, and young people fall in love and are engaged. This is all well, and children's stories may tell freely whatever illustrates the home usages and social customs of the people; but the more the love senses and passions are left to sleep in their sacred and innocent reserve within their mystic cells, so much the better for the child whilst a child, and so much the better for the youth when no more a child, and Nature betrays her great secret, and the charming hallucinations of romance open their fascinations and call for the sober counsels of wisdom and kindness.

But if love, as a passion, does not belong to our juvenile literature, its place is fully supplied by a power quite as active and marvellous,—the mighty genius of play. Try to read a three-volume novel of love and flirtation to a set of well-trained, healthfully organized children, or try them with a single chapter that describes the raptures or the jealousies, and gives the letters and dialogues, of the enamored couple, who are destined, through much tribulation, to end their griefs at the altar, not of sacrifice, but of union, and you will find your auditors ready to go to sleep or to run away. The girls may, indeed, brighten up, if a famous dress or set of jewels, a great party or grand wedding, is described; and the boys may open their eyes, if the story turns upon a smart horse-race or a plucky fight. Children, in their normal state, do not enter into the romance of the passion, nor should they be trained to it. They may[Pg 728] be bred in all courtesy and refinement without it; and the girls and boys may be true to their sex, and have all the gentle manners that should come from proper companionship. The boys will not want a certain chivalry in the schoolroom, play-ground, and parlor, and the girls will learn from instinct as well as discipline the delicacy that is their charm and shield. Nothing can be worse than to ply them with love-stories, or throw them into the false society that fosters morbid sentiments and impulses, and gives them the passions without the judgment and control of men and women. Kind Providence, in the gift of play, has mercifully averted this danger, and brought our children into a companionship that needs no precocious passion to give it charm.

How wonderful it is, this instinct for play, and how worthy of our careful and serious study! It is the key to the whole philosophy of juvenile literature: for we take it for granted that books for children belong to the easy play, rather than to the hard work of life; and that they are an utter failure, if they do not win their way by their own charms. Here, in fact, we distinguish between juvenile literature and school-books. School-books are for children, indeed, but not for them alone, but for the teacher also, and they are to be as interesting as possible; yet they are not for play, but for work, and it is best to be quite honest at the outset, and let the little people know that study is work and not play, and that their usual gift-books are not for study mainly, but for entertainment. In this way, study is the more patient and comforting, and reading more free and refreshing. Children make the distinction very shrewdly, and are quite willing to pore carefully over their school-lessons, but are very impatient of lessons that are sugared over with pleasantry, and detect the pedagogue under the mask of the playmate. They are willing to have their pills sugared over, but do not like to have them called sugar-plums.

Playfulness does not require the sacrifice of good sense or sound principle or serious purpose, but subjects them to certain conditions; and there is no form in which exalted characters or sacred truths are brought home more effectually to the hearts both of young and old than in the stones and dramas that make life speak for itself, and play themselves into the affections and fancy. It does require that the laws of attention and emotion, the unities and the varieties of æsthetic art, shall be observed; and as soon as the book is dull, and offers no sparkling waters nor fair flowers nor tempting fruits to lure the flagging reader over its intervals of dusty road or sandy waste, it is a failure, and not what it pretends to be. With children, play demands more the varieties than the unities of Art; and their first education deals with those spontaneous sensibilities and impulses that insist upon being played upon freely, with little regard to exact method. Those sports are most pleasing to young children, especially, that touch the greatest number of the keys of sensation and will, and make them answer to the pulse of Nature and companionship. One may learn a deal of philosophy from the most popular nursery rhymes; and Mother Goose, good old soul, who has sung many of those strange old verses to children for a thousand years, if the antiquaries are not mistaken, proves to us that the way to please little ears and eyes is by presenting a variety of images in the easiest succession, without any attempt at intellectual method or logical unity. Her style is that of the kaleidoscope, and she turns words and pictures over as rapidly, and with as little method, as that instrument shows in its handling of colors. As the child's development advances, the varieties need more of the unities, and the favorite sports rise into more method and sequence, nearer the rule of actual life: marbles give way to cricket, and blindman's bluff yields to chess. For a long time, however, anything like severe intellectual unity of plan is irksome, and even the toys that require careful thought and embody extraordinary workmanship are less agreeable than[Pg 729] the rude playthings that can be knocked about at will, and made to take any shape or use that the changing mood or fancy may decree. The rag baby is more popular with the little girl than the mechanical doll; and a tin pot, with a stick to drum upon it, pleases little master more than the elegant music-box. As long as the child's mind is in a chaos of unsorted sensations and impulses, he does not like plays that are so utterly in advance of his position as to present a perfect order that calls up Kosmos within him before its time. There is a good Providence in this necessity, and Nature is servant of God in her attempt to touch and voice the separate keys of the great organ, before she tunes them together to the great harmonies and symphonies that are to be performed. She is busy with each key first by itself; and there is something winning, as well as healthful, in that intensity which attaches to the sensations and impulses of children in this their first education. They are finding themselves and the universe at once; and the marvellous zest with which they see and feel and hear and handle whatever comes within their reach is a kind of rapturous wedding of the senses to the world of Nature and life, and a prelude to that more interior and spiritual union that is to be.

Our best books for children must not forget this great fact, and they must present great variety of impression and images in such sequence and unity as the young reader's mind can easily appreciate and enjoy. The great juvenile classics are rich illustrations of this law, and they have a "variety" as "infinite" as Cleopatra's, whilst they aim at a purpose far more true and persistent than hers, and do not end with a broken life and a serpent's sting. They are invariably sensuous in their imagery, but not sensual; and the great masters of the nursery well know that the senses are not made to be earth-born drudges of the flesh, but godly ministers of the spirit, and their true office is to open the gates of the whole world of truth and goodness and beauty. All who know the ways of true children will understand the distinction between sensual and sensuous impression. Hold up before a true child a ripe, red apple, or a bunch of purple grapes, and how the eye sparkles and the hand reaches forth! But the desire expressed is half aspiration and half appetite, and the dainty rises into ideal beauty under this dear little aspirant's gaze, and is seen in a light quite other than that which falls on a gourmand's table, after he is gorged with viands and wine, and ends his gross banquet with a dessert of fruit which his stupid and uncertain eye can hardly distinguish. The child is sensuous, the gourmand is sensual. We should give the benefit of this distinction to all of our authors who abound in graphic description and encourage pictorial illustration. The senses should be skilfully appealed to, and the higher spheres of the reason, conscience, and affections may thus be effectually reached. Pictures, whether in words or lines or colors, are symbols; and the child's mind is a rare master of all the true symbolism of Nature and Art. There is no end to the range of susceptibility in children to impressions from this source; and all the chords of feeling and impulse, pathos and humor, seem waiting and eager to be played upon. Instead of needing to be laboriously schooled to pass from one emotion or mental state to another, they go by alternations as easy as the changing feet that pass from a walk to a run and back again, as if change were the necessity of Nature, not the work of the striving will.

Our books for children should study this great law, and be free to go "from grave to gay, from gentle to severe," as is the habit of all high literature. They should not be afraid to let the child have a good hearty laugh before or after telling him that he should study or should pray. It is odd to see the rapid transitions through which very well-behaved children will go in an instant; and I have known a child who has been romping in a complete gale of innocent roguery to burst into tears, if not duly called to the table in time to hear grace[Pg 730] said, and, after clucking with the hens, crying as if heart-broken over a dead bird. I went last spring with a friend to witness a great religious festival at a distinguished ecclesiastical community,—the festival of Corpus Christi, with its gorgeous procession. We were admitted through the private entrance, and saw the altar-boys in the entry waiting in caps and robes to lead off the pageant. They were in high spirits, and pulling and nudging each other like boys of the usual mould. Soon they appeared in church with folded hands, chanting the "Lauda Sion" before the uplifted Host as demurely as if they had walked down from the pictures of seraphs on the walls. "What little hypocrites!" the Philistines at once cry; "what a trick, thus to affect to be pious, after those pranks of mischief!" I say, No such thing; and although not personally given to Corpus-Christi ceremonials as a devotee, I interpret such transitions as I would interpret the conduct of my own children who came from a frolic on the lawn or a game of croquet to a Scripture lesson or the household worship. Let us be true to human nature, and give every genuine faculty and impulse fair play. Our American literature can afford to be more generous to children than it has been, and let them gambol on the play-ground none the less from keeping the library open for grave reading, and the chapel not closed in ghostly gloom.

Our books for children must be truthful as well as interesting; and we are quite strong in the belief that they should be true to all our just American ideas. It cannot be expected, indeed, that our story-tellers, poets, and biographers for the young will desert their pleasant arts, and inflict upon their readers prosy essays upon American law, society, reform, and progress. What we should expect and demand is, that our children should be brought up to regard American principles as matters of course; and their books should take these principles for granted, and illustrate them with all possible interest and power. They should be trained in the belief that here the opportunities for education, labor, enterprise, freedom, influence, and prosperity are to be thrown open to all; and the highest encouragement should be given to every one to seek the chief good. We are not afraid to say that our children's books should be thoroughly republican, or, in the best sense of the word, democratic, and should aim to give respect to the genuine man more than to his accidents, and to rank character above circumstance. They should rebuke the ready American failings, the haste to be rich, the passion of ostentation, the rage for extravagance, the habit of exaggeration, the impatience under moderate means, the fever for excitement, and the great disposition to subordinate the true quality of life to the quantity of appliances of living. They should especially assail the failing to which our children are tempted,—the morbid excitement, precocious sensibility, and airs and ambition to which they are prone. Some of our best juvenile books, especially some of our best magazine writers, do great service in this way; and it has seemed to use that we may well learn wisdom from the juvenile literature of France in this matter, and translate with profit many of those excellent books for children which do not for a moment countenance the idea that they are to have any hot-bed forcing, or have their senses and fancy turn upon the passions and cares that belong to mature years. Christendom has no cause for gratitude to France for its adult romantic literature; and it is an offence to American as to English homes for its free notions of married life. But the French literature for the young is quite another matter, and may teach purity and wisdom to the parents who allow their sons and daughters to ape the ways and often the follies of men and women, and spoil the flower and fruit of maturity by forcing open the tender bud of childhood and youth.

We may take quite as serious lessons against the wrong of schooling the young in precocious care and calculation,[Pg 731] and setting a bounty upon the too ready covetousness of our people. We spend freely, indeed, as well as accumulate eagerly; but there is a fearful over-estimate of wealth amongst us, in the absence of other obvious grounds of distinction; and the evil is nurtured sometimes from childhood. Such books as "The Rich Poor Man and the Poor Rich Man" do vast good; and it is very important that our sons and daughters should have a loving, helpful, cheerful, devout childhood, a true age of gold, to look back upon and ever to remember, without the taint of Mammon-worship that multiplies care, blasts prosperity with inordinate desires, and curses adversity by making it out to be the loss of the supreme good, and little short of hell. It is well to take very high ground with them, and train them to know and enjoy the supreme treasures that are open to them all, to make them observers and lovers of Nature and Art, and to take it for granted that the best gifts of God and humanity are freely offered to every true life. Our magnificent country should be held before them as their rightful heritage, and its flowers, plants, trees, minerals, animals, lakes, rivers, seas, mountains, should be made a part of every child's property. What observers of Nature, in its uses and beauty, bright children are, and how much may be made of their aptness by good books and magazines! I confess, for my own part, that I never saw and enjoyed Nature truly until I learned to see it through a bright child's eyes. Good Providence gave us our little farm and our little May at about the same time; and the child has been the priestess of our domain, and has made spring of our autumn, May of our September. She noticed first only bright colors and moving objects and striking sounds; but with what zest she noticed them, and jogged our dull eyes and ears! Then she observed the finer traits of the place, and learned to call each flower and tree, and even each weed, by name, and to join the birds and chickens in their glee. She gathered bright weeds as freely as garden-flowers, and, with larger wisdom than she knew, came shouting and laughing with a lapful of treasures, in which the golden-rod or wild aster, the violet or buttercup, the dandelion or honeysuckle, were as much prized as the pink or larkspur, the rose or lily. Darling seer, how much wiser and better might we be, if we had as open eye for loveliness and worth within and without the inclosures of our pride and our pets! I called the first rustic arbor that I built by her name; and May's Bower, on its base of rock, with solid steps cut in the granite by a faithful hand, and with a sight of the distant sea through its clustering vines, is to us a good symbol of childhood, as observer, interpreter, and lover of Nature. When I see in a handsome book or magazine for children any adequate sketch of natural scenes and objects, I am grateful for it as a benefaction to children, and a help to them in their playful yearning to read that elder alphabet of God.

How much power there is in the elements of the beautiful that so abound in the universe, and what capacity in children for enjoying them, especially in our American children, may we not say! The constitution of Americans is in some respects delicate, and shows great susceptibility in early life, and capability of æsthetic culture. Our children are vastly wiser and happier by being taught to distinguish beauty from tinsel pretence, and to see the difference between the fine and superfine. The whole land groans in ignorance of this distinction; and the most extravagant outlay for children and adults is made for dress and furniture, toys and ornaments, that are an abomination to true taste. We may begin the reform at the beginning, and apply the ideas of the truly beautiful in the books and magazines that we put before our children. We can make Preraphaelites of them of the right kind, by training their eye, not to love bald scenes and ghostly figures, but to appreciate natural form, feature, and color, and composition, and so possess their senses and fancy with the materials and impressions[Pg 732] of loveliness, that, when the constructive reason or the ideal imagination begins to work, it will work wisely and well, and not only dream fair visions and speak and write fair words, but carve true shapes, and plan noble grounds, and rear goodly edifices for dwelling, or for study, art, humanity, or religion. The child that learns to see the beautiful has the key of a blessed gate to God's great temple, and can find everywhere an entrance to the shrine. What a new and higher Puritanism will come, when we learn to apply pure taste to common affairs, and carry out all the laws of truth and beauty, as the old saints carried out the letter of the Bible! The day is coming, and is partly come. Do not many New-Yorkers look upon the Central Park as being, with its waters and flowers and music for all, as good a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount as any in the Astor Library? and does not solid Boston regard its great organ as a part of that great interpretation of the Divine Mind which Cotton and Winthrop sought only in the sacred book? Give us a thirty years' fair training of our children in schools and reading, galleries and music-halls, gardens and fields, and our America, the youngest among the great nations, will yield to none the palm of strength or of beauty; and as she sits the queen, not the captive, in her noble domain, her children, who have learned grace under her teaching, shall rise up and call her blessed.

In claiming thus for our children's books this embodiment of wholesome truth in beautiful forms, we are not favoring any feeble dilettanteism, or sacrificing practical strength to pleasant fancy. Nay, quite the contrary; for it is certain that truth has power, especially with the young, only when it is so embodied as to show itself in the life, and to speak and act for itself. We believe in dynamic reading for children; and we now make a distinct and decided point of this, quite positive, as we are, that books are a curse, if they merely excite the sensibilities and stimulate the nerves and brain, and bring on sedentary languor, and do not stir the muscles, and quicken the will, and set the hand and foot to work and play under the promptings of a cheerful heart. Undoubtedly many children read too much, and spindle legs and narrow chests and dropsical heads are the sad retribution upon the excess. But the best books are good tonics, and as refreshing and strengthening as the sunshine and the sea-water, the singing-circle, and the play-ground. Let us encourage this tonic quality in our juvenile literature, and favor as much of sound muscular morality and religion as stories of adventure, sketches of sports, hints of exercise and health, with all manner of winning illustrations, can give. It is well that Dio Lewis is now on a mission to our Young Folks, and after exhorting adults, and especially the clergy, to repent of their manifold sins against the body, he is now carrying the gospel of health to children; and I have been quite amused at having him quoted against my own physical transgressions, by his most attentive reader, the youngest member of the family. The cure should not stop there; but the tonic force should knock at every door of the mental and moral faculties, and touch every chord of latent power. A fresh, free, dauntless will should breathe through every page, and be the invigorating air of our juvenile literature, and be as essential to its strength as truth is to its light and beauty to its color. The great social, civil, and religious forces that move the nation should be brought to bear upon the young, not by learned essays or by ambitious philosophizing, but by living portraitures and taking life-sketches, stirring songs and ballads. A good home story can express as much of the law and economy of the household as a chapter of Paley or Wayland. Our girls and boys will feel the great pulse-beat of patriotism and loyalty more free, by following the brave old flag through perils to final peace, in graphic sketches of our history, from Washington's times to Lincoln's, from the days of Greene and Putnam to those of Sherman and Grant,[Pg 733] than from any learned lectures on the Constitution, or abridgments of Kent and Story. Those more universal and spiritual forces that bind us to our race and to God are surely not to be ignored in books for children, difficult as it is to present them adequately; and the absence of a national church makes religion so various in its ideas and forms as not to offer that ready and common symbolism that makes the cross as expressive as the flag to some nations, and binds the home and country to the altar. But our best writers are finding the way to touch the chords of supreme religion in the young, and the nation is fast developing a faith and worship that meet the wants of youthful feeling and fancy better than catechisms and lectures. Our children have a much more genial church nurture now than their parents had, and the worship in their chapels is sometimes more impressive than that in the churches. I confess to great regret that we, who are now in our prime, had so little joy and action in connection with our early religious impressions, and wish better things for our children, and delight to see the signs of amendment. Our best books are helping it on, and bringing poetry and art, as well as good sense and devout faith, to the rescue of our boys and girls from the prosy pedantry that forgets that the religion of the Bible itself did not begin in the dry letter, but was a rich and various life with Nature and among men, before it was made into a book.

All moving forces, whether domestic, social, civil, or religious, reach children most effectually through personal influence; and not only do they imitate the examples, but they seem to imbibe or breathe in the spirit of their associates and teachers. Hence the importance of having our best people write for children, and give them the precious ministry of all their high qualities of mind and heart. The little readers may not take in the whole of the influence consciously at once, but they are more receptive than they know, and take in the grace of refined manner and pure culture, even as they take diseases, without being aware of the fact at the time. Is it not well to treat them in their relation to human life as God treats them in their relation to the universe? He puts before them the broad earth and the glorious heavens from the first, and He does not strike off a toy edition of Nature to come down to little eyes and ears. Children look upon the whole universe at once, and their first impressions store up truths that years may interpret, but cannot exhaust. Why not throw open the best minds, and their earth and heaven of earthly sense and starry wisdom, with equal generosity to the young, and put them into communication with the best writers and thinkers of the land? They will not take the whole sense and spirit of the talk or story in at once, but they will have a certain impression or germinal seed of it within; and even before they can interpret or explain what they have learned, they will feel and enjoy and apply most of its meaning and power. Especially do they take in more than they know of the higher manifestations of moral and spiritual life; and a good story of a true soul, or an earnest sermon or devout prayer, goes deeper into their minds and hearts than they can understand, and they may have a great deal of religion before they know a word of theology.

In view of this assimilating force of example and personal character, it is cheering to note the number of our first-class writers who are giving their pens and studies to our children. The authors who figure on the list of contributors to our leading juvenile magazine need not hide their heads before any staff of contributors to any periodical in the country; and they do not seem to lose their wisdom or their wit in getting down from their stately heights to chat and romp with the boys and girls who come thronging to meet them. It is a good sign for our American letters; and I am not ashamed to say, that, after reading some of the numbers of that monthly, and talking over the remainder with a bright child of six, and as bright a girl of eighteen, I felt somewhat[Pg 734] envious of the position of those writers, and wondered whether I could write anything that the rising millions of American children would be eager to read. Who might not be envious of the distinction, and which of our poets may not be proud to walk in the steps of Whittier, and sing loving words for the nursery and play-ground, after ringing the liberty-bell and sounding the bugle-call of liberty through the nation?

We close these cursory thoughts by presenting one idea that seems to us of the highest importance, although it may strike others as far-fetched or fanciful. It refers to the start that our children are to take in life, or, rather, to the ground from which they are to start. Their destiny depends, of course, upon what they make of themselves in their career; but does it not also depend upon their starting-ground, and is there not something dreary in the frequent remark that we can make anything of ourselves, and the implication that we are nothing at all at the outset? The old civilization reversed this and the great question was not, What shall a man make of himself? but, What is his status? and his family or national birthright was more urged than his individual enterprise. Now I am not fighting against our American individualism, or expecting to establish a new national caste; yet may I not hint that it would be well, if our children were brought up in such sense of their native privilege, worth, and respectability as to start upon a solid ground of loyalty and reliance, and to go forth into the world with the feeling, that, whilst they have much to win, they have also much to hold? I would not have them bred in Jewish exclusiveness or pride; yet even that is better than no sense of birthright at all. How striking and suggestive is that trait in the life of one of the most benevolent and liberal-minded of our American Israelites, who, when his leg was broken, and his physician advised amputation, stoutly refused to submit to the knife, and said that he would rather die first, since he was of the tribe of Levi, and none of that tribe were allowed to enter the sanctuary with mutilated limbs! A plucky son of Abraham indeed; and his pluck would be worthy of our imitation, if we insisted on such a status of manly integrity as to refuse to do any wrong to our manhood, on the ground of its destroying our position and selling our birthright. We do need certainly some deeper sense of our personal and national worth at the outset: and our children should be trained to look upon themselves as heirs of the ages, children of Providence, and bound to keep the priceless trust confided to them. A cheerful home should love them before they can return the love, a great nation guard over themselves, and a broad and exalted and genial and helpful church should be mother to them before they know how to interpret her care; and the golden light of the first home should shine upon them as but the faint, earthly gleam of that uncreated light that kindles every rational intelligence, and sends it into the world, as if, "trailing clouds of glory," we came "from God who is our home." We ask our writers for children to throw this cheerful radiance upon the outset of their pilgrimage, and relieve the sore pressure of care, and the anxious burden of never ceasing responsibility, and the force of incessant temptation, by the great and blessed conviction that we start from the supreme good, and, if we go away from it, we not only come short of a precious prize, but we forfeit a sacred birthright. All the ages, nations, leaders, sages, heroes, apostles, have endowed us and our children with a priceless heritage; and we are not to start in life as if we were a set of beggars, aliens, slaves, or heathen. Rome has thought to bless and enrich our America by putting the land under the watch of the immaculate and supernatural Mother. I will not stop now to fight against Rome, but will be content to say that our children have from God a peculiar guardianship from the natural mother who bore them, and from[Pg 735] that natural humanity which is the daughter of God and the recipient of all natural and supernatural graces. Mystical as this thought may seem, when stated in general terms, every genuine American poem and story is full of its meaning; and our best juvenile literature is making it our household faith and love. We shall see good days, when our children start from the true home feeling, and a sacred memory joins hands with a brave and cheerful hope. Our good old mothers thought so; and our books are good as they repeat their wisdom and renew their love. We might weary our readers, if we tried to say what is in our minds of the American mother in history, and the ideal mother that should charm our books and pictures; but no more now.

DIOS TE DE.[1]

[Pg 736]

MODE OF CATCHING JELLY-FISHES.

Not the least attractive feature in the study of these animals is the mode of catching them. We will suppose it to be a warm, still morning at Nahant, in the last week of August, with a breath of autumn in the haze, that softens the outlines of the opposite shore, and makes the horizon line a little dim. It is about eleven o'clock, for few of the Jelly-Fishes are early risers; they like the warm sun, and at an earlier hour they are not to be found very near the surface. The sea is white and glassy, with a slight swell, but no ripple, and seems almost motionless as we put off in a dory from the beach near Saunders's Ledge. We are provided with two buckets: one for the larger Jelly-Fishes, the Zygodactyla, Aurelia, etc.; the other for the smaller fry, such as the various kinds of Ctenophoræ, the Tima, Melicertum, etc. Besides these, we have two nets and glass bowls, in which to take up the more fragile creatures that cannot bear rough handling. A bump or two on the stones before we are fairly launched, a shove of the oar to keep the boat well out from the rocks along which we skirt for a moment, and now we are off. We pull around the point to our left and turn toward the ledge, filling our buckets as we go. Now we are crossing the shallows that make the channel between the inner and outer rocks of Saunders's Ledge. Look down: how clear the water is, and how lovely the sea-weeds above which we are floating! dark brown and purple fronds of the Ulvæ, and the long blades of the Laminaria with mossy green tufts between. As we issue from this narrow passage we must be on the watch, for the tide is rising, and may come laden with treasures, as it sweeps through it. A sudden cry from the oarsman at the bow, not of rocks or breakers ahead, but of "A new Jelly-Fish astern!" The quick eye of the naturalist of the party pronounces it unknown to zoölogists, undescribed by any scientific pen. Now what excitement! "Out with the net!—we have passed him! he has gone down! no, there he is again! back us a bit." Here he is floating close by us; now he is within the circle of the net, but he is too delicate to be caught safely in that way; while one of us moves the net gently about, to keep him within the space inclosed by it, another slips the glass bowl under him, lifts it quickly, and there is a general exclamation of triumph and delight;—we have him! And now we look more closely. Yes, decidedly he is a novelty as well as a beauty (Ptychogena lactea, A. Ag.). Those white mossy tufts for ovaries are unlike anything we have found before, and not represented in any published figures of Jelly-Fishes. We float about here for a while, hoping to find more of the same kind, but no others make their appearance, and we keep on our way to East Point, where there is a capital fishing-ground for Medusæ of all sorts. Here two currents meet, and the Jelly-Fishes are stranded, as it were, along the line of juncture, able to move neither one way nor the other. At this spot the sea actually swarms with life: one cannot dip the net into the water without bringing up Pleurobrachia, Bolina, Idyia, Melicertum, etc., while the larger Zygodactyla and Aurelia float about the boat in numbers. These large Jelly-Fishes produce a singular effect as one sees them at some depth beneath the water; the Aureliæ, especially, with their large disks, look like pale phantoms wandering about far below the surface; but they constantly float upward, and if not too far out of reach, one may bring them up by stirring the water under them with the end of the oar.

When we passed an hour or so floating about just beyond East Point, and have nearly filled our buckets with Jelly-Fishes of all sizes and descriptions, we turn and row homeward. The[Pg 737] buckets look very pretty as they stand in the bottom of the boat with the sunshine lighting up their living contents. The Idyia glitters and sparkles with ever-changing hues; the Pleurobrachiæ dart about, trailing their long, graceful tentacles after them; the golden Melicerta are kept in constant motion by their quick, sudden contractions; and the delicate, transparent Tima floats among them all, not the less beautiful because so colorless. There is an unfortunate Idyia, who, by some mistake, has got into the wrong bucket, with the larger Jelly-Fish, where a Zygodactyla has entangled it among his tentacles and is quietly breakfasting upon it.

Ptychogena lactea.

During our row the tide has been rising, and as we near the channel of Saunders's Ledge, it is running through more strongly than before, and at the entrance of the shallows a pleasant surprise is prepared for us: no less than half a dozen of our new friends, (the Ptychogena, as he has been baptized,) come to look for their lost companion perhaps, await us there, and are presently added to our spoils. We reach the shore heavily laden with the fruits of our morning's excursion.

The most interesting part of the work for the naturalist is still to come. On our return to the Laboratory, the contents of the buckets are poured into separate glass bowls and jars; holding them up against the light, we can see which are our best and rarest specimens; these we dip out in glass cups and place by themselves. If any small specimens are swimming about at the bottom of the jar, and refuse to come within our reach, there is a very simple mode of catching them. Dip a glass tube into the water, keeping the upper end closed with your finger, and sink it till the lower end is just above the animal you want to entrap; then lift your finger, and as the air rushes out the water rushes in, bringing with it the little creature you are trying to catch. When the specimens are well assorted, the microscope is taken out, and the rest of the day is spent in studying the new Jelly-Fishes, recording the results, making notes, drawings, etc.

Still more attractive than the rows by day are the night expeditions in search of Jelly-Fishes. For this object we must choose a quiet night; for they will not come to the surface if the water is troubled. Nature has her culminating hours, and she brings us now and then a day or night on which she seems to have lavished all her treasures. It was on such a rare evening,[Pg 738] at the close of the summer of 1862, that we rowed over the same course by Saunders's Ledge and East Point described above. The August moon was at her full, the sky was without a cloud, and we floated on a silver sea; pale streamers of the aurora quivered in the north, and notwithstanding the brilliancy of the moon, they, too, cast their faint reflection in the ocean. We rowed quietly along past the Ledge, past Castle Rock, the still surface of the water unbroken, except by the dip of the oars and the ripple of the boat, till we reached the line off East Point, where the Jelly-Fishes are always most abundant, if they are to be found at all. Now dip the net into the water. What genie under the sea has wrought this wonderful change? Our dirty, torn old net is suddenly turned to a web of gold, and as we lift it from the water, heavy rills of molten metal seem to flow down its sides and collect in a glowing mass at the bottom. The truth is, the Jelly-Fishes, so sparkling and brilliant in the sunshine, have a still lovelier light of their own at night; they give out a greenish golden light, as brilliant as that of the brightest glow-worm, and on a calm summer night, at the spawning season, when they come to the surface in swarms, if you do but dip your hand into the water, it breaks into sparkling drops beneath your touch. There are no more beautiful phosphorescent animals in the sea than the Medusæ. It would seem that the expression, "rills of molten metal," could hardly apply to anything so impalpable as a Jelly-Fish, but, although so delicate in structure, their gelatinous disks give them a weight and substance; and at night, when their transparency is not perceived, and their whole mass is aglow with phosphorescent light, they truly have an appearance of solidity which is most striking, when they are lifted out of the water and flow down the sides of the net.

The various kinds present very different aspects. Wherever the larger Aureliæ and Zygodactylæ float to the surface, they bring with them a dim spreading halo of light, the smaller Ctenophoræ become little shining spheres, while a thousand lesser creatures add their tiny lamps to the illumination of the ocean: for this so-called phosphorescence of the sea is by no means due to the Jelly-Fishes alone, but is also produced by many other animals, differing in the color as well as the intensity of their light; and it is a curious fact that they seem to take possession of the field by turns. You may row over the same course which a few nights since glowed with a greenish golden light wherever the surface of the water was disturbed, and though equally brilliant, the phosphorescence has now a pure white light. On such an evening, be quite sure, that, when you empty your buckets on your return and examine their contents, you will find that the larger part of your treasures are small Crustacea (little shrimps). Of course there will be other phosphorescent creatures, Jelly-Fishes, etc., among them, but the predominant color is given by these little Crustacea. On another evening the light will have a bluish tint, and then the phosphorescence is principally due to the Dysmorphosa.

Notwithstanding the beauty of a moonlight row, if you would see the phosphorescence to greatest advantage, you must choose a dark night, when the motion of your boat sets the sea on fire around you, and a long undulating wave of light rolls off from your oar as you lift it from the water. On a brilliant evening this effect is lost in a great degree, and it is not until you dip your net fairly under the moonlit surface of the sea that you are aware how full of life it is. Occasionally one is tempted out by the brilliancy of the phosphorescence, when the clouds are so thick, that water, sky, and land become one indiscriminate mass of black, and the line of rocks can be discerned only by the vivid flash of greenish golden light, when the breakers dash against them. At such times there is something wild and weird in the whole scene, which at once fascinates and appalls the imagination; one seems to be rocking above a volcano, for the surface around is intensely black, except[Pg 739] where fitful flashes or broad waves of light break from the water under the motion of the boat or the stroke of the oars. It was on a night like this, when the phosphorescence was unusually brilliant, and the sea as black as ink, the surf breaking heavily and girdling the rocky shore with a wall of fire, that our collector was so fortunate as to find in the rich harvest he brought home the entirely new and exceedingly pretty little floating Hydroid, described under the name of Nanomia. It was in its very infancy, a mere bubble, not yet possessed of the various appendages which eventually make up its complex structure; but it was nevertheless very important to have seen it in this early stage of its existence, since, when a few full-grown specimens were found in the autumn, which lived for some days in confinement and quietly allowed their portraits to be taken, it was easy to connect the adult animal with its younger phase of life, and thus make a complete history.

Marine phosphorescence is no new topic, and we have dwelt too long, perhaps, upon a phenomenon that every voyager has seen, and many have described; but its effect is very different, when seen from the deck of a vessel, from its appearance as one floats through its midst, distinguishing the very creatures that produce it; and any account of the Medusæ which did not include this most characteristic feature would be incomplete.

ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER.

In the spring of the year 1853, I observed, as conductor of the weekly journal, "Household Words," a short poem among the proffered contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical, and possessing much more merit. Its authoress was quite unknown to me. She was one Miss Mary Berwick, whom I had never heard of; and she was to be addressed by letter, if addressed at all, at a circulating-library in the western district of London. Through this channel, Miss Berwick was informed that her poem was accepted, and was invited to send another. She complied, and became a regular and frequent contributor. Many letters passed between the journal and Miss Berwick, but Miss Berwick herself was never seen.

How we came gradually to establish at the office of "Household Words" that we knew all about Miss Berwick, I have never discovered. But we settled somehow, to our complete satisfaction, that she was governess in a family; that she went to Italy in that capacity, and returned; and that she had long been in the same family. We really knew nothing whatever of her, except that she was remarkably business-like, punctual, self-reliant, and reliable; so I suppose we insensibly invented the rest. For myself, my mother was not a more real personage to me than Miss Berwick the governess became.

This went on until December, 1854, when the Christmas number, entitled "The Seven Poor Travellers," was sent to press. Happening to be going to dine that day with an old and dear friend, distinguished in literature as "Barry Cornwall," I took with me an early proof of that number, and remarked, as I laid it on the drawing-room table, that it contained a very pretty poem, written by a certain Miss Berwick. Next day brought me the disclosure that I had so spoken of the poem to the mother of its writer, in its writer's presence; that I had no such correspondent in[Pg 740] existence as Miss Berwick; and that the name had been assumed by Barry Cornwall's eldest daughter, Miss Adelaide Anne Procter.

The anecdote I have here noted down, besides serving to explain why the parents of the late Miss Procter have looked to me for these poor words of remembrance of their lamented child, strikingly illustrates the honesty, independence, and quiet dignity of the lady's character. I had known her when she was very young; I had been honored with her father's friendship when I was myself a young aspirant; and she had said at home, "If I send him, in my own name, verses that he does not honestly like, either it will be very painful to him to return them, or he will print them for papa's sake, and not for their own. So I have made up my mind to take my chance fairly with the unknown volunteers."

Perhaps it requires an editor's experience of the profoundly unreasonable grounds on which he is often urged to accept unsuitable articles—such as having been to school with the writer's husband's brother-in-law, or having lent an alpenstock in Switzerland to the writer's wife's nephew, when that interesting stranger had broken his own—fully to appreciate the delicacy and the self-respect of this resolution.

Some verses by Miss Procter had been published in the "Book of Beauty," ten years before she became Miss Berwick. With the exception of two poems in the "Cornhill Magazine," two in "Good Words," and others in a little book called "A Chaplet of Verses," (issued in 1862 for the benefit of a Night Refuge,) her published writings first appeared in "Household Words" or "All the Year Round."

Miss Procter was born in Bedford Square, London, on the 30th of October, 1825. Her love of poetry was conspicuous at so early an age, that I have before me a tiny album, made of small note-paper, into which her favorite passages were copied for her by her mother's hand before she herself could write. It looks as if she had carried it about, as another little girl might have carried a doll. She soon displayed a remarkable memory and great quickness of apprehension. When she was quite a young child, she learned with facility several of the problems of Euclid. As she grew older, she acquired the French, Italian, and German languages, became a clever piano-forte player, and showed a true taste and sentiment in drawing. But as soon as she had completely vanquished the difficulties of any one branch of study, it was her way to lose interest in it and pass to another. While her mental resources were being trained, it was not at all suspected in her family that she had any gift of authorship, or any ambition to become a writer. Her father had no idea of her having ever attempted to turn a rhyme, until her first little poem saw the light in print.

When she attained to womanhood, she had read an extraordinary number of books, and throughout her life she was always largely adding to the number. In 1853 she went to Turin and its neighborhood, on a visit to her aunt, a Roman Catholic lady. As Miss Procter had herself professed the Roman Catholic faith two years before, she entered with the greater ardor on the study of the Piedmontese dialect, and the observation of the habits and manners of the peasantry. In the former she soon became a proficient; and on the latter head, I extract from her familiar letters, written home to England at the time, two pleasant pieces of description.

A BETROTHAL.

"We have been to a ball, of which I must give you a description. Last Tuesday we had just done dinner at about seven, and stepped out into the balcony to look at the remains of the sunset behind the mountains, when we heard very distinctly a band of music, which rather excited my astonishment, as a solitary organ is the utmost that toils up here. I went out of the room for a few minutes, and on my returning, Emily said,—

"'Oh! that band is playing at the[Pg 741] farmer's near here. The daughter is fiancée to-day, and they have a ball.'

"I said,—

"'I wish I was going!'

"'Well,' replied she, 'the farmer's wife did call to invite us.'

"'Then I shall certainly go,' I exclaimed.

"I applied to Madame B., who said she would like it very much, and we had better go, children and all. Some of the servants were already gone. We rushed away to put on some shawls, and put off any shred of black we might have about us, (as the people would have been quite annoyed, if we had appeared on such an occasion with any black,) and we started. When we reached the farmer's, which is a stone's throw above our house, we were received with great enthusiasm; the only drawback being, that no one spoke French, and we did not yet speak Piedmontese. We were placed on a bench against the wall, and the people went on dancing. The room was a large whitewashed kitchen, (I suppose,) with several large pictures in black frames, and very smoky. I distinguished the 'Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,' and the others appeared equally lively and appropriate subjects. Whether they were Old Masters or not, and if so, by whom, I could not ascertain. The band were seated opposite us. Five men, with wind instruments, part of the band of the National Guard, to which the farmer's sons belong. They played really admirably, and I began to be afraid that some idea of our dignity would prevent my getting a partner; so, by Madame B.'s advice, I went up to the bride, and offered to dance with her. Such a handsome young woman! Like one of Uwins's pictures. Very dark, with a quantity of black hair, and on an immense scale. The children were already dancing, as well as the maids. After we came to an end of our dance, which was what they call a Polka-Mazourka, I saw the bride trying to screw up the courage of fiancé to ask me to dance, which, after a little hesitation, he did. And admirably he danced, as indeed they all did,—in excellent time, and with a little more spirit than one sees in a ball-room. In fact, they were very like one's ordinary partners, except that they wore ear-rings and were in their shirt-sleeves, and truth compels me to state that they decidedly smelt of garlic. Some of them had been smoking, but threw away their cigars when we came in. The only thing that did not look cheerful was, that the room was only lighted by two or three oil-lamps, and that there seemed to be no preparation for refreshments. Madame B., seeing this, whispered to her maid, who disengaged herself from her partner, and ran off to the house; she and the kitchen-maid presently returning with a large tray covered with all kinds of cakes, (of which we are great consumers and always have a stock,) and a large hamper full of bottles of wine, with coffee and sugar. This seemed all very acceptable. The fiancée was requested to distribute the eatables, and a bucket of water being produced to wash the glasses in, the wine disappeared very quickly,—as fast as they could open the bottles. But elated, I suppose, by this, the floor was sprinkled with water, and the musicians played a Monferrino, which is a Piedmontese dance. Madame B. danced with the farmer's son, and Emily with another distinguished member of the company. It was very fatiguing,—something like a Scotch reel. My partner was a little man, like Pierrot, and very proud of his dancing. He cut in the air and twisted about, until I was out of breath, though my attempts to imitate him were feeble in the extreme. At last, after seven or eight dances, I was obliged to sit down. We stayed till nine, and I was so dead beat with the heat that I could hardly crawl about the house, and in an agony with the cramp, it is so long since I have danced."

A MARRIAGE.

"The wedding of the farmer's daughter has taken place. We had hoped it would have been in the little chapel of our house; but it seems some special[Pg 742] permission was necessary, and they applied for it too late. They all said, 'This is the Constitution. There would have been no difficulty before!'—the lower classes making the poor Constitution the scapegoat for everything they don't like. So, as it was impossible for us to climb up to the church where the wedding was to be, we contented ourselves with seeing the procession pass. It was not a very large one; for, it requiring some activity to go up, all the old people remained at home. It is not the etiquette for the bride's mother to go, and no unmarried woman can go to a wedding,—I suppose for fear of its making her discontented with her own position. The procession stopped at our door, for the bride to receive our congratulations. She was dressed in a shot silk, with a yellow handkerchief, and rows of a large gold chain. In the afternoon they sent to request us to go there. On our arrival, we found them dancing out-of-doors, and a most melancholy affair it was. All the bride's sisters were not to be recognized, they had cried so. The mother sat in the house, and could not appear; and the bride was sobbing so, she could hardly stand. The most melancholy spectacle of all, to my mind, was, that the bridegroom was decidedly tipsy. He seemed rather affronted at all the distress. We danced a Monferrino,—I with the bridegroom, and the bride crying the whole time. The company did their utmost to enliven her, by firing pistols, but without success; and at last they began a series of yells, which reminded me of a set of savages. But even this delicate method of consolation failed, and the wishing good-bye began. It was altogether so melancholy an affair, that Madame B. dropped a few tears, and I was very near it,—particularly when the poor mother came out to see the last of her daughter, who was finally dragged off between her brother and uncle, with the last explosion of pistols. As she lives quite near, makes an excellent match, and is one of nine children, it really was a most desirable marriage, in spite of all the show of distress. Albert was so discomfited by it that he forgot to kiss the bride, as he had intended to, and therefore went to call upon her yesterday, and found her very smiling in her new house, and supplied the omission. The cook came home from the wedding declaring she was cured of any wish to marry; but I would not recommend any man to act upon that threat, and make her an offer. In a couple of days we had some rolls of the bride's first baking, which they call Madonna's. The musicians, it seems, were in the same state as the bridegroom; for, in escorting her home, they all fell down in the mud. My wrath against the bridegroom is somewhat calmed by finding that it is considered bad luck, if he does not get tipsy at his wedding."

Those readers of Miss Procter's poems who should suppose from their tone that her mind was of a gloomy or despondent cast would be curiously mistaken. She was exceedingly humorous, and had a great delight in humor. Cheerfulness was habitual with her; she was very ready at a sally or a reply; and in her laugh (as I remember well) there was an unusual vivacity, enjoyment, and sense of drollery. She was perfectly unconstrained and unaffected; as modestly silent about her productions as she was generous with their pecuniary results. She was a friend who inspired the strongest attachments; she was a finely sympathetic woman, with a great accordant heart and a sterling noble nature. No claim can be set up for her, thank God, to the possession of any of the conventional poetical qualities. She never, by any means, held the opinion that she was among the greatest of human beings; she never suspected the existence of a conspiracy on the part of mankind against her; she never recognized in her best friends her worst enemies; she never cultivated the luxury of being misunderstood and unappreciated; she would far rather have died without seeing a line of her composition in print than that I should have maundered[Pg 743] about her here as "the Poet" or "the Poetess."

With the recollection of Miss Procter, as a mere child and as a woman, fresh upon me, it is natural that I should linger on my way to the close of this brief record, avoiding its end. But even as the close came upon her, so must it come here, and cannot be staved off.

Always impelled by an intense conviction that her life must not be dreamed away, and that her indulgence in her favorite pursuits must be balanced by action in the real world around her, she was indefatigable in her endeavors to do some good. Naturally enthusiastic, and conscientiously impressed with a deep sense of her Christian duty to her neighbor, she devoted herself to a variety of benevolent objects. Now it was the visitation of the sick that had possession of her; now it was the sheltering of the houseless; now it was the elementary teaching of the densely ignorant; now it was the raising up of those who had wandered and got trodden under foot; now it was the wider employment of her own sex in the general business of life; now it was all these things at once. Perfectly unselfish, swift to sympathize, and eager to relieve, she wrought at such designs with a flushed earnestness that disregarded season, weather, time of day or night, food, rest. Under such a hurry of the spirits, and such incessant occupation, the strongest constitution will commonly go down; hers, neither of the strongest nor the weakest, yielded to the burden, and began to sink.

To have saved her life then, by taking action on the warning that shone in her eyes and sounded in her voice, would have been impossible, without changing her nature. As long as the power of moving about in the old way was left to her, she must exercise it, or be killed by the restraint. And so the time came when she could move about no longer, and took to her bed.

All the restlessness gone then, and all the sweet patience of her natural disposition purified by the resignation of her soul, she lay upon her bed through the whole round of changes of the seasons. She lay upon her bed through fifteen months. In all that time her old cheerfulness never quitted her. In all that time not an impatient or a querulous minute can be remembered.

At length, at midnight on the 2d of February, 1864, she turned down a leaf of a little book she was reading, and shut it up.

The ministering hand that had copied the verses into the tiny album was soon around her neck; and she quietly asked, as the clock was on the stroke of one,—

"Do you think I am dying, mama?"

"I think you are very, very ill to-night, my dear."

"Send for my sister. My feet are so cold! Lift me up."

Her sister entering as they raised her, she said, "It has come at last!" and, with a bright and happy smile, looked upward, and departed.

Well had she written,—

[Pg 744]

BEYOND.

[Pg 745]

CLEMENCY AND COMMON SENSE.

A CURIOSITY OF LITERATURE; WITH A MORAL.

Here are two famous verses, both often quoted, and one a commonplace of literature. That they have passed into proverbs attests their merit both in substance and in form. Something more than truth is needed for a proverb. And so also something more than form is needed. Both must concur. The truth must be expressed in such a form as to satisfy the requirements of art.

Most persons whose attention has not been turned especially to such things, if asked where these verses are to be found, would say at once that it was in one of the familiar poets of school-boy days. Both have a sound as of something that has been heard in childhood. The latter is very Virgilian in its tone and movement. More than once I have heard it insisted that it was by Virgil. But nobody has been able to find it there, although the opposite dangers are well represented in the voyage of Æneas:[3]—

Thinking of the historical proverb, I am reminded of the eminent character who first showed it to me in the heroic poem where it appears. I refer to the late Dr. Maltby, Bishop of Durham, who had been a favorite pupil of Dr. Parr, and was unquestionably one of the best scholars in England. His amenity was equal to his scholarship. I was his guest at Auckland Castle early in the autumn of 1838. Conversation turned much upon books and the curiosities of study. One morning after breakfast the learned Bishop came to me with a small volume in his hand, printed in the Italian character, and remarking, "You seem to be interested in such things," he pointed to this much-quoted verse. It was in a Latin poem called "Alexandreïs, sive Gesta Alexandri Magni," by Philippus Gualterus, a mediæval poet of France.

Of course the fable of Scylla and Charybdis is ancient; but this verse cannot be traced to antiquity. For the fable Homer is our highest authority, and he represents the Sirens as playing their part to tempt the victim.

These opposite terrors belong to mythology and to geography. Mythologically, they were two voracious monsters, dwelling opposite to each other,—Charybdis on the coast of Sicily, and Scylla on the coast of Italy. Geographically, they were dangers to the navigator in the narrow strait between Sicily and Italy. Charybdis was a whirlpool, in which ships were often sucked to destruction; Scylla was a rock, on which ships were often dashed to pieces.

Ulysses in his wanderings encountered these terrors, but by prudence and the counsels of Circe he was enabled to steer clear between them, although the Sirens strove to lure him on to the rock. The story is too long; but there are passages which are like pictures, and they have been illustrated by the genius of Flaxman. The first danger on the Sicilian side is thus described in the Odyssey:[4]—

But endeavoring to shun this peril, the navigator encounters the other:—

[Pg 746]

Near by were the Sirens, who strove by their music to draw the navigator to certain doom:—

Forewarned is forearmed. Ulysses took all precautions against the opposite perils. Avoiding the Sicilian whirlpool, he did not run upon the Italian rock or yield to the voice of the charmer. And yet he could not renounce the opportunity of hearing the melody. Stuffing the ears of his companions with wax, so that they could not be entranced by the Sirens, or comprehend any countermanding order which his weakness might induce him to utter, he caused himself to be tied to the mast,—like another Farragut,—and directed that the ship should be steered straight on. It was steered straight on, although he cried out to stop. His deafened companions heard nothing of the song or the countermand,—

The dangers of both coasts were at length passed, not without the loss of six men, "chiefs of renown," who became the prey of Scylla. But the Sirens, humbled by defeat, dashed themselves upon the rocks and disappeared forever.

There are few stories which have been more popular. It was natural that it should enter into poetry and become a proverb. Milton more than once alludes to it. Thus, in the exquisite "Comus," He shows these opposite terrors subdued by another power:—

In the "Paradise Lost," while portraying Sin, the terrible portress at the gates of Hell, the poet repairs to this story for illustration:[5]—

And then again, when picturing Satan escaping from pursuit, he shows him[6]

Though thus frequently employing the story, Milton did not use the proverb.

Not only the story but the proverb, was known to Shakspeare, who makes Launcelot use it in his plain talk with Jessica:[7]—"Truly, then, I fear you are damned both by father and mother; thus, when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother: well, you are gone both ways." Malone, in his note to this passage, written in the last century, says,—"Alluding to the well-known line of modern Latin poet, Philippe Gaultier, in his poem entitled 'Alexandreïs.'" To this note of Malone's, another editor, George Steevens, whose early bibliographical tastes inspired the praise of Dibdin, adds as follows:—"Shakspeare might have met with a translation of this line in many places; among others in the Dialogue between Custom and Veretie, concerning the use and abuse of Dancing and Minstrelsie:—

But this proverb had already passed into tradition and speech. That Shakspeare should absorb and use it was natural. He was the universal absorbent.

The history of this verse seemed for a while forgotten. Like the Wandering Jew, it was a vagrant, unknown in origin, but having perpetual life. Erasmus, whose learning was so vast, quotes the verse in his great work on Proverbs, and owns that he does not know the author of it. Here is this confession:—"Celebratur apud Latinos hic versiculus, quocunque natus auctore, nam in presentia non occurrit."[8] It seems from these words that this profound scholar regarded the verse as belonging to antiquity: at least I so interpret the remark, that it was "celebrated among the Latins." But though ignorant of its origin, it is clear that the idea which it[Pg 747] embodies found much favor with this representative of moderation. He dwells on it with particular sympathy, and reproduces it in various forms. Here is the equivalent on which he hangs his commentary: Evitata Charybdi, in Scyllam incidi. It is easy to see how inferior in form this is to the much-quoted verse. It seems to be a literal translation of some Greek iambics, also of uncertain origin, although attributed to Apostolius, one of the learned Greeks scattered over Europe by the fall of Constantinople. There is also something like it in the Greek of Lucian.[9] Erasmus quotes words of kindred sentiment from the "Phormio" of Terence: Ita fugias ne præter casam, which he tells us means that we should not so fly from any vice as to be carried into a greater.[10] He quotes also another proverb with the same signification: Fumum fugiens, in ignem incidi, which warns against running into the fire to avoid the smoke. In his letters the ancient fable recurs more than once. On one occasion he warns against the dangers of youth, and says that the ears must be stopped, not, as in the Homeric story, by wax, but "by the precepts of philosophy."[11] In another letter he avows a fear lest in shunning Scylla he may fall on Charybdis:—"Nunc vereor ne sic vitemus hanc Scyllam, ut incidamus in Charybdim multo perniciosiorem."[12] Thus did his instinctive prudence find expression in this familiar illustration.

If Erasmus had been less illustrious for learning,—perhaps if his countenance were less interesting, as we now look upon it in the immortal portraits by two great artists, Hans Holbein and Albert Dürer,—I should not be tempted to dwell on this confession of ignorance. And yet it belongs to the history of this verse, which has had strange ups and downs in the world. The poem from which it is taken, after enjoying an early renown, was forgotten,—and then again, after a revival, was forgotten, again to enjoy another revival. The last time it was revived through this solitary verse, without which, I cannot doubt, it would have been extinguished in night.

Even before the days of Erasmus, who died in 1536, this verse had been lost and found. It was circulated as a proverb of unknown origin, when Galeotto Marzio, an Italian, of infinite wit and learning[13] who flourished in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and was for some time the instructor of the children of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, pointed out its author. In a work of Ana, amusing and instructive, entitled "De Doctrina Promiscua," which first saw the light in Latin, and was afterwards translated into Italian, the learned author says,—"Hoc carmen est Gualteri Galli de Gestis Alexandri, et non vagum proverbium, ut quidam non omnino indocti meminerint." It was not a vague proverb, as some persons not entirely unlearned have supposed, but a verse of the "Alexandreïs." And yet shortly afterwards the great master of proverbs, whose learning seemed to know no bounds, could not fix its origin. At a later day, Pasquier, in his "Recherches de la France,"[14] I made substantially the same remark as Marzio. After alluding to the early fame of its author, he says,—"C'est lui dans les oeuvres duquel nous trouvons un vers, souvent par nous allegué sans que plusieurs sachent qui en fut l'auteur." In quoting this verse the French author uses Decidis instead of Incidis. The discovery by Marzio, and the repetition of this discovery by Pasquier, are chronicled at a later day in the Conversations of Ménage, who found a French Boswell before the Bosweil of Dr. Johnson was born.[15] Jortin, in the elaborate notes to his Life of Erasmus, borrows from Ménage, and gives the same history.[16]

When Galeotto Marzio made his discovery,[Pg 748] this poem was still in manuscript; but there were several editions before the "Adagia" of Erasmus. An eminent authority—the "Histoire Littéraire de la France,"[17] that great work commenced by the Benedictines, and continued by the French Academy—says that it was printed for the first time at Strasburg, in 1513. This is a mistake, which has been repeated by Warton.[18] Brunet, in his "Manuel de Libraire," mentions an edition, without place or date, with the cipher of Guillaume Le Talleur, who was a printer at Rouen, in 1487. Panzer, in his "Annales Typographici,"[19] describes another edition, with the monogram of Richard Pynson, the London printer, at the close of the fifteenth century. Beloe, in his "Anecdotes of Literature,"[20] also speaks of an edition with the imprint of R. Pynson. There appears to have been also an edition under date of 1496. Then came the Strasburg edition of 1513, by J. Adelphus. All these are in black letter. Then came the Ingolstadt edition, in 1541, in Italic, or, as it is called by the French, "cursive characters," with a brief life of the poet, by Sebastian Link. This was followed, in 1558, by an edition at Lyons, also in Italic, announced as now for the first time appearing in France, nunc primum in Gallia, was a mistake. This edition seems to have enjoyed peculiar favor. It has been strangely confounded with imaginary editions which have never existed; thus, the Italian Quadrio assures us that the best was at London, in 1558;[21] and the French Millin assures us that the best was at Leyden, in 1558.[22] No such editions appeared; and the only edition of that year was at Lyons. After a lapse of a century, in 1659, there was another edition, by Athanasius Gugger, a monk of the Monastery of St. Gall, in France, published at the Monastery itself, according to manuscripts there, and from its own types, formis ejusdem. The editor was ignorant of the previous editions, and in his preface announces the poem as a new work, although ancient; according to his knowledge, never before printed; impatiently regarded and desired by many; and not less venerable for antiquity than for erudition:—"En tibi, candide lector, opus novum, ut sic antiquum, nusquam quod sciam editum, a multis cupide inspectum et desideratum, non minus antiquitate quam eruditione venerabile."

This edition seems to have been repeated at St. Gall in 1693; and these two, which were the last, appear to have been the best. From that time this poem rested undisturbed until our own day, when an edition was published at Hanover, in Germany, by W. Müldener, after the Paris manuscripts, with the following title:—"Die zehn Gedichte des Walther von Lille, genannt von Châtillon. Nach der pariser Handschrift berichtigt, und zum ersten Male vollständig herausgegeben von W. Müldener." Hanover, 1859, 8vo. Such an edition ought to be useful in determining the text, for there must be numerous manuscripts in the Paris libraries. As long ago as 1795 there were no less than nineteen in the National Library, and also a manuscript at Tours, which had drawn forth a curious commentary by M. de Forcemagne.[23]

I ought not to forget here that in 1537 a passage from this poem was rendered into English blank verse, and is an early monument of our language. This was by Grimoald Nicholas, a native of Huntingdonshire, whose translation is entitled "The Death of Zoroas, an Egyptian Astronomer, in the First Fight that Alexander had with Persians."[24] This is not the only token of the attention it had awakened in England. Alexander Ross, the Scotch divine and author, made preparations for an edition. His dedicatory letter was written,[Pg 749] bearing date 1644; also two different sets of dedicatory verses, and verses from his friend David Eclin, the scholarly physician to the king,[25] who had given him this "great treasure." But the work failed to appear. The identical copy presented by Eclin, with many marginal notes from Quintus Curtius and others, is mentioned as belonging to the Bishop of Ely at the beginning of the present century.[26] But the homage of the Scotchman still exists in his dedicatory letter:—"Si materiam consideres, elegantissimam utilissimamque historiam gestorum Alexandri magni continet; certe sive stylum, sive subjectum inspicias, dignam invenies quæ omnium teratur manibus, quamque adolescentes nocturna versentque manu, versentque diurna."[27] It will be observed that he does not hesitate to dwell on this poem as "most elegant and most useful," and by its style and subject worthy of the daily and nightly study of youth. In his verses Ross announces that Alexander was not less fortunate in his poet than the Greek chieftain in Homer:—

There was also another edition planned in France, during the latter part of the last century, by M. Daire, the librarian of the Celestines in Paris, founded on the Latin text, according to the various manuscripts, with a French translation; but this never appeared.[28]

Until the late appearance of an edition in Germany, it was only in editions shortly after the invention of printing that this poem could be found. Of course these are rare. The British Museum, in its immense treasure-house, has the most important, one of which belonged to the invaluable legacy of the late Mr. Grenville. The copy in the library of Lord Spencer is the Lyons edition of 1558. By a singular fortune, this volume was missing some time ago from its place on the shelves; but it has since been found; and I have now before me a tracing from its title-page. My own copy—and perhaps the only one this side of the Atlantic—is the Ingolstadt edition. It once belonged to John Mitford, and has on the fly-leaves some notes in the autograph of this honored lover of books.

Bibliography dwells with delight upon this poem, although latterly the interest centres in a single line. Brunet does full justice to it. So does his jealous rival, Graesse, except where he blunders. Watt, in his "Bibliotheca Britannica," mentions only the Lyons edition of 1558, on which he remarks, that "the typography is very singular." Clarke, in his "Repertorium Bibliographicum," bearing date 1819, where he gives an account of the most celebrated British libraries, mentions a copy of the first edition in the library of Mr. Steevens, who showed his knowledge of the poem in his notes to Shakspeare;[29] also a copy of the Lyons edition of 1558 in the library of the Marquis of Blandford, afterwards Duke of Marlborough. This learned bibliographer has a note calling attention to the fact that "there are variations in the famous disputed line in different editions of this poem": that in the first edition the line begins Corruis in Scyllam, but in the Lyons edition, Incidis in Scyllam; while, as we have already seen, Pasquier says, Decidis in Scyllam. Bohn, in his "Bibliographer's Manual," after referring in general terms to the editions, says of the poem, "In it will be found that trite verse so often repeated, Incidis, &c.,"—words which he seems to have borrowed from Beloe.[30] "Trite" seems to be hardly respectful.[31]

Very little is known of the author. He is called in Latin Philippus Gualterus[Pg 750] or Galterus; in French it is sometimes Gaultier and sometimes Gautier. The French biographical dictionaries, whether of Michaud or of Didot, attest the number of persons who bore this name, of all degrees and professions. There was the Norman knight sans Avoir, who was one of the chiefs of the first Crusade. There also was another Gautier, known as the Sire d'Yvetot, stabbed to death by his sovereign, Clotaire, who afterwards in penitence erected the lordship of Yvetot into that kingdom which Béranger has immortalized. And there have been others of this name in every walk of life. Fabricius, in his "Bibliotheca Latina Mediæ et Infimæ Ætatis,"[32] mentions no less than seventy-six Latin authors of this name. A single verse has saved one of these from the oblivion which has overtaken the multitude.

He was born at Lille, but at what precise date is uncertain. Speaking generally, it may be said that he lived and wrote during the last half of the twelfth century, while Philip Augustus was King of France, and Henry II. and Richard Cœur-de-Lion ruled England, one century after Abélard, and one century before Dante. After studying at Paris, he went to establish himself at Châtillon; but it is not known at which of the three or four towns of this name in France. Here he was charged with the direction of schools, and became known by the name of this town, as appears in the epitaph, somewhat ambitiously Virgilian, which he wrote for himself:—

But he is known sometimes by his birthplace, and sometimes by his early residence. The highest French authority calls him Gaultier of Lille or of Châtillon.[33] He has been sometimes confounded with Gaultier of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who was born in the island of Jersey;[34] and sometimes with the Bishop of Maguelonne of the same name, who was the author of an Exposition of the Psalter, and whose see was on an island in the Mediterranean, opposite the coast of France.[35]

Not content with his residence at Châtillon, he repaired to Bologna in Italy, where he studied the civil and canon law. On his return to France he became the secretary of two successive Archbishops of Rheims, the latter of whom, by the name of William,—a descendant by his grandmother from William the Conqueror,—occupied this place of power from 1176 to 1201. The secretary enjoyed the favor of the Archbishop, who seems to have been fond of letters. It was during this period that he composed, or at least finished, his poem. Its date is sometimes placed at 1180; and there is an allusion in its text which makes it near this time. Thomas à Becket was assassinated before the altar of Canterbury in 1170; and this event, so important in the history of the age, is mentioned as recent: "Nuper—cæsum dolet Anglia Thomam." The poem was dedicated to the Archbishop, who was to live immortal in companionship with his secretary:[36]—

The Archbishop was not ungrateful, and he bestowed upon the poet a stall in the cathedral of Amiens, where he died of the plague at the commencement of the thirteenth century.[37]

This does not appear to have been his only work. Others are attributed to him. There are dialogues adversus Judæos, which Oudin publishes in his collection entitled "Veterum aliquot Galliæ et Belgii Scriptorum Opuscula Sacra nunquam edita." This same Oudin, in another publication, speaks of a collection, entitled "Opuscula Varia," preserved[Pg 751] among the manuscripts in the Imperial Library of France, as by Gaultier, although the larger part of these Opuscula have been attributed to a very different person, Gaultier Mapes, chaplain to Henry II., King of England, and Archdeacon of Oxford.[38] But more recent researches seem to restore them to Philip Gaultier. Among these are satirical songs in Latin on the world, and also on prelates, which, it is said, were sung in England as well as throughout France. Indeed, the second verse of the epitaph already quoted seems to point to these satires:—

In these pieces, as in the "Alexandreïs," we encounter the indignant sentiments inspired by the assassination of Becket. The victim is called "the flower of priests," and the king, Neronior est ipso Nerone.[39] But these poems, whether by Walter Mapes or by Philip Gaultier, are now forgotten. The "Alexandreïs" has had a different fortune.

The poem became at once famous. It had the success of Victor Hugo or Byron. Its author took rank, not only at the head of his contemporaries, but even among the classics of antiquity, Leyser chronicles no less than one hundred Latin poets in the twelfth century,[40] but we are assured that not one of them is comparable to Gaultier.[41] M. Édélestand du Méril, who has given especial attention to this period, speaks of the "Alexandreïs" as "a great poem," and remarks that its "Latinity is very elegant for the time."[42] Another authority calls him "the first of the modern Latin poets who appears to have had a spark of true poetic genius."[43] And still another says, that, "notwithstanding all its defects, we must regard this poem, and the 'Philippis' of William of Brittany, which appeared about sixty years later, as two brilliant phenomena in the midst of the thick darkness which covered Europe from the decline of the Roman Empire to the revival of letters in Italy."[44] Pasquier, to whom I have already referred, goes so far, in his chapter on the University of Paris, as to illustrate its founder, Peter Lombard, by saying that he had for a contemporary "one Galterus, an eminent poet, who wrote in Latin verses, under the title of the 'Alexandreïs,' a great imitator of Lucan"; and the learned writer then adds, that it is in his work that we find a verse often quoted without knowing the author,[45] These testimonies show his position among his contemporaries; but there is something more.

An anonymous Latin poet of the next century, who has left a poem on the life and miracles of Saint Oswald, calls Homer, Gaultier, and Lucan the three capital heroic poets. Homer, he says, has celebrated Hercules, Gaultier the son of Philip, and Lucan has sung the praises of Cæsar; but these heroes deserve to be immortalized in verse much less than the holy confessor Oswald.[46] In England, the Abbot of Peterborough transcribed Seneca, Terence, Martial, Claudian, and the "Gesta Alexandri."[47] In Denmark, Arnas Magnseus made a version in Icelandic of the "Alexandreïs Gualteriana," which has been called "Incomparabile antiguitatis septentrionalis monumentum."[48] It appears that the new poem was studied, even to the exclusion of ancient masters and of Virgil himself. Henry of Ghent, who wrote about 1280, says that it "was of such dignity in the schools, that for it the reading of the ancient poets was neglected."[49] This testimony is curiously confirmed by the condition of the manuscripts which have come down to us, most of which are loaded with glosses and interlinear explanations, doubtless[Pg 752] for public use in the schools.[50] It is sometimes supposed that Dante repaired to Paris. It is certain that his excellent master, Brunette Latini, passed much time there. This must have been at the very period when the new poem was taught in the schools. Perhaps it may be traced in the "Divina Commedia."

Next after the tale of Troy, the career of Alexander was at this period the most popular subject for poetry, romance, or chronicle. The Grecian conqueror filled a vast space in the imagination. He was the centre of marvel and of history. Every modern literature, according to its development, testifies to this predominance. Even dialects testify. In France, the professors of grammar at Toulouse were directed by statutes of the University, dated 1328, to read to their pupils "De Historiis Alexandri."[51] In England, during the reign of Henry I., the sheriff was ordered to procure the Queen's chamber at Nottingham to be painted with the History of Alexander,—"Depingi facias Historiam Alexandri undiquaque."[52] Chaucer, in his "House of Fame," places Alexander with Hercules, and then again shows the universality of his renown:—

We have the excellent authority of the poet Gray for saying that the Alexandrine verse, which "like a wounded snake drags its slow length along," took its name from an early poem in this measure, called "La View d'Alexandre." There was also the "Roman d'Alexandre," contemporary with the "Alexandreïs," which Gray thinks was borrowed from the latter poem, apparently because the authors say that they took it from the Latin.[53] There was also "The Life and Actions of Alexander the Macedonian," originally written in Greek, by Simeon Seth, magister and protovestiary or wardrobe-keeper of the palace at Constantinople in 1070, and translated from Greek into Latin, and then into French, Italian, and German.[54] Arabia also contributed her stories, and the Grecian conqueror became a hero of romance. Like Charlemagne, he had his twelve peers; and he also had a horn, through which he gave the word of command, which took sixty men to blow it, and was heard sixty miles,—being the same horn which afterwards Orlando sounded at Roncesvalles. That great career which was one of the epochs of mankind,—which carried in its victorious march the Greek language and Greek civilization,—which at the time enlarged the geography of the world, and opened the way to India,—was overlaid by an incongruous mass of fable and anachronism, so that the real story was lost. Times, titles, and places were confounded. Monks and convents, churches and confessors, were mixed with the achievements of the hero; and in an early Spanish History of Alexander, by John Lorenzo, we meet such characters as Don Phoebus, the Emperor Jupiter, and the Count Don Demosthenes; and we are assured that the mother of Alexander fled to a convent of Benedictine nuns.

Philip Gaultier, With all his genius, has his incongruities and anachronisms; but his poem is founded substantially upon the History of Quintus Curtius, which he has done into Latin hexameters, with the addition of long speeches and some few inventions. Aristotle is represented with a hideous exterior, face and body lean, hair neglected, and the air of a pedant exhausted by study. The soldiers of Alexander are called Quirites, as if they were Romans. The month of June in Greece is described as if it were in Rome:—

Events connected with the passion of Jesus Christ are treated as having already passed in the time of Alexander.[Pg 753]

The poem is divided into ten books,[55] and the ten initial letters of these books, when put together like an acrostic, spell the name of the Archbishop, Guillermus, the equivalent for William at that time, who was the patron of the poet. Besides this conceit, there is a dedication both at the beginning and at the end. Quantity, especially in Greek or Asiatic words, is disregarded; and there are affectations in style, of which the very beginning is an instance:—

In the same vein is the verse,—

and another verse, describing the violence of the soldiers after victory:—

A rapid analysis of the poem will at least exhibit the order of the events it narrates, and its topics, with something of its character.

Alexander appears, in the first book, a youth panting for combat with the Persians, enemies of his country and of his father. There also is his teacher, Aristotle. Philip dies, and the son repairs to Corinth to be crowned. Under the counsels of Demosthenes, the Athenians declare against him. The young King arrives under the walls of Athens. Demosthenes speaks for war; Æschines for peace. The party of peace prevails; and the Macedonian turns to Thebes, which he besieges and captures by assault. The poet Cloades, approaching the conqueror, chants in lyric verses an appeal for pardon, and reminds him that without clemency a kingdom is unstable:—

And the words of this chant are still resounding. But Alexander, angry and inexorable, refuses to relent. He levels the towers which had first risen to the music of Amphion, and delivers the city to the flames: thus adding a new act to that tragic history which made Dante select Thebes as the synonyme of misfortune.[56] Turning from these smoking ruins, he gathers men and ships for his expedition against Persia. Traversing the sea, he lands in Asia; and here the poet describes geographically the different states of this continent,—Assyria, Media, Persia, Arabia, with its Sabæan frankincense and its single Phœnix, ending with Palestine and Jerusalem, where a God was born of a Virgin, at whose death the world shook with fear. Commencing his march through Cilicia and Phrygia, the ambitious youth stops at Troy, and visits the tomb of Achilles, where he makes a long speech.

The second book opens with the impression produced on the mind of Darius, menaced by his Macedonian enemy. He writes an insolent letter, which Alexander answers simply by advancing. At Sardes he cuts the Gordian knot, and then advances rapidly. Darius quits the Euphrates with his vast army, which is described. Alexander bathes in the cold waters of the Cydnus, is seized with illness, and shows his generous trust in the physician that attended him,—drinking the cup handed him, although it was said to be poisoned. Restored to health, he shows himself to his troops, who are transported with joy. Meanwhile the Persians advance. Darius harangues his soldiers. Alexander harangues his. The two armies prepare for battle.

The third book is of battle and victory at Issus, described with minuteness and warmth. Here is the death of Zoroas, the Egyptian astronomer, than whom nobody was more skilled in the stars, the origin of winter's cold or summer's heat, or in the mystery of squaring the circle,—circulus an possit quadrari.[57] The Persians are overcome. Darius seeks shelter in Babylon. His treasures are the prey of the conqueror. Horses are laden with spoils, and the sacks are so full that they cannot be tied. Rich ornaments are torn from the women, who are surrendered to the brutality[Pg 754] of the soldiers. The royal family alone is spared. Conducted to the presence of Alexander, they are received with the regard due to their sex and misfortune. The siege and destruction of Tyre follow; then the expedition to Egypt and the temple of Jupiter Ammon. Here is a description of the desert, which is said, like the sea, to have its perils, with its Scylla and its Charybdis of sand:—

Meanwhile Darius assembles new forces. Alexander leaves Egypt and rushes to meet him. There is an eclipse of the moon, which causes a sedition among his soldiers, who dare to accuse their king. The phenomenon is explained by the soothsayers, and the sedition is appeased.

The fourth book opens with a funeral. It is of the queen of the Persian monarch. Alexander laments her with tears. Darius learns at the same time her death and the generosity of his enemy. He addresses prayers to the gods for the latter, and offers propositions of peace. Alexander refuses these, and proceeds to render funeral honors to the queen of the king he was about to meet in battle. Then comes an invention of the poet, which may have suggested afterwards to Dante that most beautiful passage of the "Purgatorio," where great scenes are sculptured on the walls. At the summit of a mountain a tomb is constructed by the skilful Hebrew Apelles, to receive the remains of the Persian queen; and on this tomb are carved, not only kings and names of Greek renown, but histories from the beginning of the world:—

Here in breathing gold is the creation in six days; the fall of man, seduced by the serpent; Cain a wanderer; the increase of the human race; vice prevailing over virtue; the deluge; the intoxication of Noah; the story of Esau, of Jacob, of Joseph; the plagues of Egypt,—

the flight of the Israelites,—

the manna in the wilderness; the giving of the law; the gushing of water from the rock; and then the succession of Hebrew history, stretching through a hundred verses, to the reign of Esdras,—

After these great obsequies Alexander marches at once against Darius. And here the poet dwells on the scene presented by the Persian army watching by its camp-fires. Helmets rival the stars; the firmament is surprised to see fires like its own reflected from bucklers, and fears lest the earth be changed into sky and the night become day. Instead of the sun, there is the helmet of Darius, which shines like Phœbus himself, and at its top a stone of flame, obscuring the stars and yielding only to the rays of the sun: for, as much as it yields to the latter, so much does it prevail over the former. The youthful chieftain, under the protection of a benignant divinity, passes the night in profound repose. His army is all marshalled for the day, and he still sleeps. He is waked, gives the order for battle, and harangues his men. The victory of Arbela is at hand.

The fifth book is occupied by a description of this battle. Here are episodes in imitation of the ancients, with repetitions or parodies of Virgil. The poet apostrophizes the unhappy, defeated Darius, as he is about to flee, saying,—"Whither do you go, O King, about to perish in useless flight? You do not know, alas! lost one, you do not know from whom you flee. While you flee from one enemy, you run upon other enemies. Desiring to escape Charybdis, you run upon Scylla."

The Persian monarch finds safety at last in Media, and Alexander enters Babylon in triumph, surpassing all other triumphs, even those of ancient Rome: and this is merited,—so sings the poet,—for his exploits are above those of the most celebrated warriors, whether sung by Lucan in his magnificent style, or by Claudian in his pompous verses. The poet closes this book by referring to the condition of Christianity in his own age, and exclaiming, that, if God, touched by the groans and the longings of his people, would accord to the French such a king, the true faith would soon shine throughout the universe.

The sixth book exhibits the luxury of Alexander at Babylon, the capture of Susa, the pillage of Persepolis. Here the poet forgets the recorded excesses of his hero with Thais by his side, and the final orgy when the celebrated city was given to the flames at the bidding of a courtesan; but he dwells on an incident of his own invention, which is calculated to excite emotions of honor rather than of condemnation. Alexander meets three thousand Greek prisoners, wretchedly humiliated by the Persians, and delivers them. He leaves to them the choice of returning to Greece, or of fixing themselves in the country there on lands which he promises to distribute. Some propose to return. Others insist, that, in their hideous condition, they cannot return to the eyes of their families and friends, when an orator declares that it is always pleasant to see again one's country, that there is nothing shameful in the condition caused by a barbarous enemy, and that it is unjust to those who love them to think that they will not be glad to see them. A few follow the orator; but the larger part remain behind, and receive from their liberator the land which he had promised, also money, flocks, and all that was necessary for a farmer.

The seventh book exhibits the treason of Bessus substantially as in Quintus Curtius. Darius, with chains of gold on his feet, is carried in a covered carriage to be delivered up. Alexander, who was still in pursuit of his enemy, is horror-struck by the crime. He moves with more rapidity to deliver or to avenge the Persian monarch than he had ever moved to his defeat. He is aroused against the criminals, like Jupiter pursuing the giants with his thunder. Darius is found in his carriage covered with wounds and bathed in his blood. With the little breath that remains, and while yet struggling on the last confines of life, he makes a long speech, which the poet follows with bitter ejaculations of his own against his own age, beginning with venal Simon and his followers, and ending with the assassins of Thomas à Becket:—

Thus here again the poet precedes Dante, whose terrible condemnation of Simon has a kindred bitterness:—

These ejaculations are closed by an address to the manes of Darius, and a promise to immortalize him in the verse of the poet. The grief of Alexander for the Persian queen is now renewed for the sovereign. The Hebrew Apelles is charged to erect in his honor a lofty pyramid in white marble, with sculptures in gold. Four columns of silver, with base and capitals of gold, support with admirable art a concave vault where are represented the three continents of the terrestrial globe, with their rivers, forests, mountains, cities, and people. In the characteristic description of each nation, France has soldiers and Italy wine:—

From funeral the poet passes to festival, and portrays the banquets and indulgence to which Alexander now invites his army. A sedition ensues. The soldiers ask to return to their[Pg 756] country. Alexander makes an harangue, and awakens in them the love of glory. They swear to affront all dangers, and to follow him to the end of the world.

The eighth book chronicles the march into Hyrcania; the visit of Talestris, queen of the Amazons, and her Amazonian life, with one breast burnt so as to accommodate the bent bow; then the voluntary sacrifice of all the immense booty of the conqueror, as an example for the troops; then the conspiracy against Alexander in his own camp; then the examination and torture of the Son of Parmenio, suspected of complicity; and then the doom of Bessus, the murderer of Darius, who is delivered by Alexander to the brother of his victim. Then comes the expedition to Scythia. The Macedonian, on the banks of the Tanaïs, receives an embassy. The ambassador fails to delay him: he crosses the river, and reduces the deserts and the mountains of Scythia to his dominion. And here the poet likens this people, which, after resisting so many powerful nations, now falls under the yoke, to a lofty, star-seeking Alpine fir, astra petens abies, which, after resisting for ages all the winds of the east, of the west, and of the south, falls under the blows of Boreas. The name of the conqueror becomes a terror, and other nations in this distant region submit voluntarily, without a blow.

The ninth book commences with a mild allusion to the murder of Clitus, and other incidents, teaching that the friendships of kings are not perennial:—

Here comes the march upon India. Kings successively submit. Porus alone dares to resist. With a numerous army he awaits the Macedonian on the Hydaspes. The two armies stand face to face on opposite banks. Then occurs the episode of two youthful Greeks, Nicanor and Symmachus, born the same day, and intimate, like Nisus and Euryalus. Their perilous expedition fails, under the pressure of numbers, and the two friends, cut off and wounded, after prodigies of valor, at last embrace, and die in each other's arms. Then comes the great battle. Porus, vanquished, wounded, and a prisoner, is brought before Alexander. His noble spirit touches the generous heart of the conqueror, who returns to him his dominions, increases them, and places him in the number of friends,—

The gates of the East are now open. His movement has the terror of thunder breaking in the middle of the night,—

A single city arrests the triumphant march. Alexander besieges it, and himself mounts the first to the assault. His men are driven back. Then from the top of the ladder, instead of leaping back, he throws himself into the city, and alone confronts the enemy. Surrounded, belabored, wounded, he is about to perish, when his men, learning his peril, redouble their efforts, burst open the gates, inundate the place, and massacre the inhabitants. After a painful operation, Alexander is restored to his army and to his great plans of conquest. The joy of the soldiers, succeeding their sorrow, is likened to that of sailors, who, after seeing the pilot overboard, and ready to be ingulfed by the raging floods, as Boreas dances, Borea bacchante, at last behold him rescued from the abyss and again at the helm. But the army is disturbed by the preparation for distant maritime expeditions. Alexander avows that the world is too small for him; that, when it is all conquered, he will push on to subjugate another universe; that he will lead them to the Antipodes and to another Nature; and that, if they refuse to accompany him, he will go forth alone and offer himself as chief to other people. The army is on fire with this answer, and vow again never to abandon their king.

The tenth book is the last. Nature, indignant that a mortal should venture to penetrate her hidden places, suspends her unfinished works, and descends[Pg 757] to the world below for succor against the conqueror. Before the gates of Erebus, under the walls of the Stygian city,—

are sisters, monsters of the earth, representing every vice,—thirst of gold, drunkenness, gluttony, treachery, detraction, envy, hypocrisy, adulation. In a distant recess is a perpetual furnace, where crimes are punished, but not with equal flames, as some are tormented more lightly and others more severely. Leviathan was in the midst of his furnace, but he drops his serpent form and assumes that divine aspect which he had worn when he wished to share the high Olympus,—

To him the stranger appeals against the projects of Alexander, which extend on one side to the unknown sources of the Nile and the Garden of Paradise, and on the other to the Antipodes and ancient Chaos. The infernal monarch convenes his assembly. He calls the victims from their undying torments,—

where ice and snow are punishments, as well as fire. The satraps of Styx are collected, and the ancient serpent addresses sibilations from his hoarse throat:—

He commands the death of the Macedonian king before his plans can be executed. Treason rises and proposes poison. All Hell applauds; and Treason, in disguise, fares forth to instruct the agent. The whole scene suggests sometimes Dante and sometimes Milton. Each was doubtless familiar with it. Meanwhile Alexander returns to Babylon. The universe is in suspense, not knowing to which side he will direct his arms. Ambassadors from all quarters come to his feet. In the pride of power he seems to be universal lord. At a feast, surrounded by friends, he drinks the fatal cup. His end approaches, and he shows to the last his grandeur and his courage. The poet closes, as he began, with a salutation to his patron.

Such is the sketch of a curiosity of literature. It is interesting to look upon this little book, which for a time played so considerable a part; to imagine the youthful students who were once nurtured by it; to recognize its relations to an age when darkness was slowly yielding to light; to note its possible suggestions to great poets who followed, especially to Dante; and to behold it lost to human knowledge, and absolutely forgotten, until saved by a single verse, which, from its completeness of form and its proverbial character, must live as long as the Latin language endures. The verse does not occupy much room; but it is a sure fee simple for the poet. And are we not told by an ancient, that it is something, in whatever place or recess you may be, to have made yourself master of a single lizard?

A poem of ten books shrinks to a very petty space. There is a balm of a thousand flowers, and here is a single hexameter which is the express essence of many times a thousand verses. It was the jest of the grave-digger, in "Hamlet," that the noble Alexander, returning to dust and loam, had stopped a bung-hole. But the memorable poem celebrating him is reduced as much, although it may be put to higher uses.

MORAL.

At the conclusion of a fable there is a moral, or, as it is sometimes called, the application. There is also a moral now, or, if you please, the application. And, believe me, in these serious days, I should have little heart for any literary diversion, if I did not hope to make it contribute to those just principles which are essential to the well-being, if not the safety of the Republic. To this[Pg 758] end I have now written. This article is only a long whip with a snapper to it.

Two verses saved from the wreck of a once popular poem have become proverbs, and one of these is very famous. They inculcate clemency, and that common sense which is found in not running into one danger to avoid another. Never was their lesson more needed than now, when, in the name of clemency to belligerent traitors, the National Government is preparing to abandon the freedmen, to whom it is bound by the most sacred ties; is preparing to abandon the national creditor also, with whose security the national welfare is indissolubly associated; and is even preparing, without any probation or trial, to invest belligerent traitors, who for four bloody years have murdered our fellow-citizens, with those Equal Rights in the Republic which are denied to friends and allies, so that the former shall rule over the latter. Verily, here is a case for common sense.

The lesson of clemency is of perpetual obligation. Thanks to the mediæval poet for teaching it. Harshness is bad. Cruelty is detestable. Even justice may relent at the prompting of mercy. Do not fail, then, to cultivate the grace of clemency. Perhaps no scene in history is more charming than that of Cæsar, who, after vows against an enemy, listened calmly to the appeal for pardon, and, as he listened, let the guilty papers fall from his hand. Early in life he had pleaded in the Senate for the lives of conspirators; and afterwards, when supreme ruler of the Roman world, he practised the clemency he had once defended, unless where enemies were incorrigible, and then he knew how to be stern and positive. It is by example that we are instructed; and we may well learn from the great master of clemency that the general welfare must not be sacrificed to this indulgence. And we may learn also from the Divine Teacher, that, even while forgiving enemies, there are Scribes and Pharisees who must be exposed, and money-changers who must be scourged from the temple. But with us there are Scribes and Pharisees, and there are also criminals, worse than any money-changers, who are now trying to establish themselves in the very temple of our government.

Cultivate clemency. But consider well what is embraced in this charity. It is not required that you should surrender the Republic into the hands of pardoned criminals. It is not required that you should surrender friends and allies to the tender mercies of these same pardoned criminals. Clearly not. Clemency has its limitations; and when it transcends these, it ceases to be a virtue, and is only a mischievous indulgence. Of course, one of these limitations, never to be disregarded, is the general security, which is the first duty of government. No pardon can be allowed to imperil the nation; nor can any pardon be allowed to imperil those who have a right to look to us for protection. There must be no vengeance upon enemies; but there must be no sacrifice of friends. And here is the distinction which cannot be forgotten. Nothing for vengeance; everything for justice. Follow this rule, and the Republic will be safe and glorious. Thus wrote Marcus Aurelius to his colleague and successor in empire, Lucius Verus. These words are worthy to be repeated now by the chief of the Republic:—

It is easy for the individual to forgive. It is easy also for the Republic to be generous. But forgiveness of offences must not be a letter of license to crime; it must not be a recognition of an ancient tyranny, and it must not be a stupendous ingratitude. There is a familiar saying, with the salt of ages, which is addressed to us now:—"Be just before you are generous." Be just to all before you are generous to the few. Be just to the millions only half rescued from oppression, before you are generous to their cruel taskmasters. Do not imitate that precious character in the[Pg 759] gallery of old Tallemant de Réaux, of whom it was said, that he built churches without paying his debts.[60] Our foremost duties now are to pay our debts, and these are twofold:—first, to the national freedman; and, secondly, to the national creditor.

Apply these obvious principles practically. A child can do it. No duty of clemency can justify injustice. Therefore, in exercising the beautiful power of pardon at this moment in our country, several conditions must be observed.

(1.) As a general rule, belligerent traitors, who have battled against the country, must not be permitted at once, without probation or trial, to resume their old places of trust and power. Such a concession would be clearly against every suggestion of common sense, and President Johnson clearly saw it so, when, addressing his fellow-citizens of Tennessee, 10th June, 1864, he said,—"I say that traitors should take a back seat in the work of restoration. If there be but five thousand men in Tennessee, loyal to the Constitution, loyal to freedom, loyal to justice, these true and faithful men should control the work of reorganization and reformation absolutely."

(2.) Especially are we bound, by every obligation of justice and by every sentiment of honor, to see to it that belligerent traitors, who have battled against their country, are not allowed to rule the constant loyalists, whether white or black, embracing the recent freedmen, who have been our friends and allies.

(3.) Let belligerent traitors be received slowly and cautiously back into the sovereignty of citizenship. It is better that they should wait than that the general security be imperilled, or our solemn obligations, whether to the national freedman or the national creditor, be impaired.

(4.) Let pardons issue only on satisfactory assurance that the applicant, who has been engaged for four years in murdering our fellow-citizens, shall sustain the Equal Rights, civil and political, of all men, according to the principles of the Declaration of Independence; that he shall pledge himself to the support of the national debt; and, if he be among the large holders of land, that he shall set apart homesteads for all his freedmen.

Following these simple rules, clemency will be a Christian virtue, and not a perilous folly.

The other proverb has its voice also, saying plainly, Follow common sense, and do not, while escaping one danger, rush upon another. You are now escaping from the whirlpool of war, which has threatened to absorb and ingulf the Republic. Do not rush upon the opposite terror, where another shipwreck of a different kind awaits you, while Sirens tempt with their "song of death." Take warning: Seeking to escape from Charybdis, do not rush upon Scylla.

Alas! the Scylla on which our Republic is now driving is that old rock of concession and compromise which from the beginning of our history has been a constant peril. It appeared in the convention which framed the National Constitution, and ever afterwards, from year to year, showed itself in Congress, until at last the Oligarchy, nursed by our indulgence, rebelled. And now that the war is over, it is proposed to invest this same Rebel Oligarchy with a new lease of immense power, involving the control over loyal citizens, whose fidelity to the Republic has been beyond question. Here, too, are Sirens, in the shape of belligerent traitors, suing softly that the Republic may be lured to the old concession and compromise. Alas! that, escaping from Charybdis, we should rush upon Scylla!

The old Oligarchy conducted all its operations in the name of State Rights, and in this name it rebelled. And when the Republic sought to suppress the Rebellion, it was replied, that a State could not be coerced. Now that the Rebellion is overthrown, and a just effort is made to obtain that "security for the future" without which the war will have been in vain, the same cry of State Rights is raised, and we are told again that a[Pg 760] State cannot be coerced,—as if the same mighty power which directed armies upon the Rebellion could be impotent to exact all needful safeguards. It was to overcome these pretensions, and stamp E Pluribus Unum upon the Republic, that we battled in war; and now we surrender to these tyrannical pretensions again. Escaping from war, we rush upon the opposite peril,—as from Charybdis to Scylla.

Again, we are told gravely, that the national power which decreed emancipation cannot maintain it by assuring universal enfranchisement, because an imperial government must be discountenanced,—as if the whole suggestion of "imperialism" or "centralism" were not out of place, until the national security is established, and our debts, whether to the national freedman or the national creditor, are placed where they cannot be repudiated. A phantom is created, and, to avoid this phantom, we rush towards concession and compromise,—as from Charybdis to Scylla.

Again, we are reminded that military power must yield to the civil power and to the rights of self-government. Therefore the Rebel States must be left to themselves, each with full control over all, whether white or black, within its borders, and empowered to keep alive a Black Code abhorrent to civilization and dangerous to liberty. Here, again, we rush from one peril upon another. Every exercise of military power is to be regretted, and yet there are occasions when it cannot be avoided. War itself is the transcendent example of this power. But the transition from war to peace must be assured by all possible safeguards. "Civil power and self-government cannot be conceded to belligerent enemies until after the establishment of security for the future." Such security is an indispensable safeguard, without which there will be new disaster to the country. Therefore, in escaping from military power, care must be taken that we do not run upon the opposite danger,—as from Charybdis to Scylla.

Again, it is said solemnly, that "we must trust each other"; which, being interpreted, means, that the Republic must proceed at once to trust the belligerent enemies who have for four years murdered our fellow-citizens. Of course, this is only another form of concession. In trusting them, we give them political power, including the license to oppress loyal persons, whether white or black, and especially the freedman. For four years we have met them in battle; and now we rush to trust them, and to commit into their keeping the happiness and well-being of others. There is peril in trusting such an enemy, more even than in meeting him on the field. God forbid that we rush now upon this peril,—as from Charybdis to Scylla!

The true way is easy. Follow common sense. Seeking to avoid one peril, do not rush upon another. Consider how everything of worth or honor is bound up with the national security and the national faith; and that until these are fixed beyond change, agriculture, commerce, and industry of all kinds must suffer. Capital cannot stay where justice is denied. Emigration must avoid a land blasted by the spirit of caste. Cotton itself will refuse to grow until labor is assured its just reward. By natural consequence, that same Barbarism which has drenched the land in blood will continue to prevail, with wrong, outrage, and the insurrections of an oppressed race; the national name will be dishonored, and the national power will be weakened. But the way is plain to avoid these calamities. Follow common sense; and obtain guaranties commensurate with the danger. Do this without delay, so that security and reconciliation may not be postponed. Every day's delay is a loss to the national wealth and an injury to the national treasury. But if adequate guaranties cannot be obtained at once, then at least postpone all present surrender to the Oligarchy, trusting meanwhile to Providence for protection, and to time for that awakened sense of justice and humanity which must in the end prevail. And finally, take care not to rush from Charybdis to Scylla.

[Pg 761]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Happy the youth who has this Stoic repast fresh and untasted before him! Heaven give him appetite and digestion; for here is food indeed!

Epictetus and Marcus Antoninus, at the two extremes of the social system,—the one that most helpless of human beings, a Roman slave, the other that terrestrial god, a Roman Emperor,—are yet so associated in fame that he who names either thinks of the other also. Neither of them men of astonishing intellect, though certainly of a high intelligence, they have yet uttered thoughts that cannot die,—thoughts so simple, vital, and central, so rich in the purest blood of man's moral being, that their audience and welcome are perpetual. Without literary ambition, one of them wrote only for his own eye, merely emphasizing the faith he lived by, while the other wrote not at all, but, like another and yet greater, simply spoke with men as he met them, his words being only the natural respirations of belief. Yet that tide of time which over so many promising ambitions and brilliant fames has rolled remorseless, a tide of oblivion, bears the private notes or casual conversation of these men in meek and grateful service.

A vital word,—how sure is it to be cherished and preserved! All else may be neglected, all else may perish; but a word true forever to the heart of humanity will be held too near to its heart to suffer from the chances of time.

Of these two authors, Epictetus has the more nerve, spirit, and wit, together with that exquisite homeliness which Thoreau rightly named "a high art"; while Antoninus is characterized by more of tenderness, culture, and breadth. The monarch, again, has a grave, almost pensive tone; the slave is full of breezy health and cheer. One commonly prefers him whom he has read last or read most. The distinction of both is, that they hold hard to the central question, How shall man be indeed man? how shall he be true to the inmost law and possibility of his being? Their thoughts are, as we have said, respirations, vital processes, pieces of spiritual function, the soul in every syllable. And hence through their pages blows a breath of life which one may well name a wind of Heaven.

Our favorite was Antoninus until Mr. Higginson beguiled us with this admirable version. For it is, indeed, admirable. It would be hard to name a translation from Greek prose which, while faithful in substance and tone to the original, is more entirely and charmingly readable.

Of mere correctness we do not speak. Correctness is cheap. It may be had for money any day. A passage or two we notice, concerning which some slight question might, perhaps, be opened; but it would be a question of no importance; and the criticism we should be inclined to make might not be sustained. Unquestionably the version is true, even nicely true, to the ideas of the author.

But it is more and better. It is ingenious, felicitous, witty. Mr. Higginson has the great advantage over too many translators (into English, at least) of being not only a man of bright and vivid intelligence, but also a proper proficient in the use of his mother tongue, melodious in movement, elegant in manner, fortunate in phrase. Now that Hawthorne is dead, America has not perhaps a writer who is master of a more graceful prose. His style has that tempered and chaste vivacity, that firm lightness of step, that quickness at a turn, not interfering with continuity and momentum, which charms all whom style can charm. Lowell's best prose—in "Fireside Travels," for example—has similar qualities, and adds to them a surprising delicacy of wit and subtilty of phrase, while it has less movement and less of rhythmical emphasis. Between the two, in the respects mentioned, we are hardly able to choose.

Mr. Higginson is, indeed, a little fastidious, a little inclined to purism, a little rigid upon the mint, anise, and cumin of literary law. But this rendered him only the more fit for his present task. A translator must bear somewhat hard upon minor obligations to his vernacular, in order to overcome the resistance of a foreign idiom.

He has succeeded. He has given us[Pg 762] Greek thought in English speech, not merely in English words. It is, indeed, astonishing how modern Epictetus seems in this version. This is due in part to the translator's tact in finding modern equivalents for Greek idioms, or for antiquated allusions and illustrations. Once in a while one is a littled startled by these; but more often they are so happy that one fancies he must have thrown dice for them, or obtained them by some other turn of luck.

But he was favored, not only by literary ability, but by a native affinity with his author and an old love for him. His taste is very marked for this peculiar form of sanctity and heroism, the simple Stoic morality, especially in that mature and mellow form which it assumes with the later Stoic believers. In these first centuries of our era a suffusion of divine tenderness seems to have crept through the veins of the world, partly derived from Christianity, and partly contemporaneous with it. In the case of Epictetus it must have been original. And the peculiar simplicity with which he represents this tender spirit of love and duty, while combining it with the utmost iron nerve of the old Stoic morality,—its comparative disassociation in his pages with the speculative imaginations which glorify or obscure it elsewhere,—is deeply grateful, one sees, to the present translator.

He must have enjoyed his task heartily, while its happy completion has prepared for many others, not only an enjoyment, but more and better than that. May it, indeed, be for many! What were more wholesome for this too luxuriant modern life than a little Stoic pruning?

Having mentioned that the book comes forth under the auspices of Little, Brown, & Co., we have no need to say that it is an elegant volume.

Mr. Mill in this book defends England from the reproach of indifference to the higher philosophy. Americans are at least not indifferent to John Stuart Mill; and for his sake the volumes will no doubt be attempted by many a respectable citizen who would be seriously puzzled whether to class the author as a Cosmothetic Idealist or as a Hypothetical Dualist. And assuming, as such a reader very possibly will, that this last name designates those who are disposed to fight for their hypotheses, he will hardly think it in this case a misnomer. Yet Mr. Mill seems very generous and noble in this attitude. He has consented to put on the gloves since he fought Professors Whewell and Sedgwick without them; and there is perhaps no finer passage in the history of controversy than his simple expression of regret, in his preface, on attacking an antagonist who can no longer defend himself.

Yet his handling of Sir William is tolerably unflinching, when he settles to the work; and he will carry the sympathy of most readers in his criticisms, whatever they may think of his own peculiar views. The students of his Logic were rather daunted, years ago, on discovering that a mind so able was content to found upon mere experience its conviction that two and two make four, and to assume, by implication at least, that on some other planet two and two may make five. He still holds to this attitude. But so perfect are his candor and clearness, that no dissent from his views can seriously impair the value of his writings; and though no amount of clearness can make such a book otherwise than abstruse to the general reader, yet there are some chapters which can be read with pleasure and profit by any intelligent person,—as, for instance, the closing essay on mathematical study. This must not, however, be taken for an indorsement of all which that chapter contains; for it must be pronounced a little inconsistent in Mr. Mill to criticize Hamilton for underrating mathematics without having studied them, when this seems to be precisely his critic's attitude towards the later German metaphysics. He speaks with some slight respect of Kant, to be sure, but complains of the speculations of his successors as "a deplorable waste of time and power," though he gives no hint or citation to indicate that he has read one original sentence of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. Indeed, he heaps contempt in Latin superlatives upon the last-named thinker, and then completes the insult by quoting him at second-hand through Mansel, (I. 61,)—that Mansel some of whose doctrines he elsewhere proclaims to be "the most morally pernicious now current." (I. 115.) He afterwards makes it a sort of complaint against Hamilton, that he had read "every fifth-rate German transcendentalist"; but if[Pg 763] this was so, surely a competent critic of Hamilton should have followed him at least through the first-rates. This unfairness,—if, indeed, these surmises be correct,—although it seems very much like the Englishman whom our current prejudices represent, seems very unlike John Stuart Mill.

As the ablest work that modern British philosophy has produced, this book will doubtless have many American readers, and well deserves them.

The publishers have done well in placing this volume before the public. One among the most important results of the war is that of vastly increasing the practical, however it may be with the theoretical, power of the executive. It has done this, in the first place, by direct addition. The "war powers of the President," though beyond question legitimate, made him for the time being wellnigh absolute; and now that overt war is ended, it is found impracticable to return immediately to the ancient limits of executive authority. Exercises of sovereignty, accordingly, which would once have been called most dangerous encroachments upon coördinate branches of government, pass without protest, it be with general approbation. An instance of such is seen in the appointment of Southern governors who by an explicit law of Congress are ineligible. But, in the second place, this power is increased, perhaps, even more by the marked disposition of the people to accept the initiative of the President. The prodigious bids made by the Democratic party for his countenance, and the extreme reluctance of the Republicans to open an issue with him, illustrate this disposition, and are of great significance.

We are stating facts, not complaining of them. A great change has undoubtedly taken place in the practical economy of the Government,—a significant change in the relative importance of its coördinate branches. It may not be permanent, but it can scarcely be brief.

A the same time the importance of the Government as a whole has been greatly enhanced. We have reached a point where the nation, for, perhaps, the first time, is to be saved by statesmanship, and where it is apparent that only statesmanship of a high order will be equal to the task. Formerly the Government could be contemptible without being fatal. When its imbecility led to civil war, the courage, patriotism, and persistency of the people sufficed to purchase victory; and though the Government was tasked heavily, its tasks were of a simple kind. But now a point is reached where must begin a long stretch of wise, far-seeing, faithful statesman's work, or where, in the want of this, prospects open which on patriot can contemplate with satisfaction.

A series of able, temperate, true-hearted Presidents has now become indispensable; but the highest qualities will be needed in no subsequent administration so much as in the present; and very serious mistakes in the present would go far to render the highest ability in the future unavailing. Under these circumstances, there must be a common and anxious desire to know what may reasonably be expected of President Johnson.

Hence the timeliness and importance of the volume under notice. An attentive perusal of these pages will afford ground for some critical estimate of the man in whose hands so much power is lodged, and whose use of power so great issues depend. The biographical sketch, though somewhat vague, and marked by occasional inaccuracies, affords some tolerable notion of the experience he has passed through; and the speeches, though covering but few years, exhibit that portion of his opinions which is most related to existing problems.

We find here the image of a very honest, patriotic man, vigorous in mind, resolute in will, definite in character, and bearing deeply the impress of a special and marked experience. Of his honesty, to begin with, there can be no doubt. His administration may be mistaken, but it will not be corrupt. And to feel assured of so much is very healthful. But an honest man, in his position, must be patriotic,—must be looking to the welfare of the country, rather than casting about to make bargains for his private advantage; and we gather from this book, that, if any meditate buying or bribing the President, they will learn a lesson in due time. He may come to coincide with them, but it will be by their acquiescence in his judgment, not by his acceptance of their proffers.

It is when we come to inspect his intellectual position, to consider the quality of his[Pg 764] honest convictions, as determined chiefly by his peculiar experience, that the real question opens.

Mr. Johnson was a Southern "poor white." He became the ornament, then the champion of his class; rescued it from political subjection in Tennessee, and, in his own election to the Governor's chair, and then to the United States Senate, gave it a first feast of supremacy. In this long struggle, the peculiar opinion and sentiment of his class—that is, of its best portion—became with him, though in an enlarged form, impassioned convictions, deeply incorporated with his character, and held with somewhat of religious fervor.

In the first speech contained in the present collection, dating so lately as 1858, he is found still resting upon this experience. His sympathy is wholly with the simpler forms of country life, with mechanics and small landholders, "the middle class," as he calls them. He hates cities; he cannot help showing some mild jealousy of the commercial and manufacturing interest; literature and science he does not wish to undervalue, but his whole heart is with the class who live a well-to-do, honest life, by manual labor in their own shops or on their own acres. Like his class, he dislikes the cotton lords, but likes Slavery, and has no faith in the negro; it has not occurred to him to think of the negro as a man, and he wished that every white man in the country had a slave to do his "menial" labor.

In the next speech, made two years later, he is confronting the immediate probability of Secession. He grapples with it sturdily, but still regards it from a strictly Southern point of view,—that of his class. The South, he thinks, has real grievances; it has, indeed, been wronged by the election of a "sectional President and Vice-President"; it is entitled to redress; only it should seek redress in the Union, not out of it.

Even when what he feared and fought against was become overt and bloody war, when his own life was vengefully sought, when his own friends were hunted down, and either murdered without mercy or dragged mercilessly away to fight an alien battle with a sword behind and cannon in front, even then he finds great difficulty in changing his point of view. He speaks no more of wrongs which the South has suffered; but it is because his feeling of that is overwhelmed by his sense of the horrible wrong it is committing. He declares, at length, that, if Slavery or the Union must go down, he will stand by the Union; but he evidently accepts the alternative with reluctance, though with resolution. When it becomes apparent that this possible alternative is indeed actual, he is true to his pledge; but it is a new charge in his mind against the Secessionists, that they have forced him to such election. They will have it so, he says, and since they will have it so, be it so; the necessity is not of his making; the retribution is real, but it is deserved. His final proclamation of freedom in Tennessee, in advance of executive warrant, was an intrepid and memorable act, worthy of his resolute spirit,—but was an act rather directed against the Rebels than prompted by sympathy with the slaves. His career in Tennessee was already far advanced before he fairly held forth his hand to the negroes as men, with the rights and interests of human beings; and it needed all the roused passion of his soul, all the touching trust of this people in him as their "Moses," all his intensity of recoil from treason, and all his sense of personal outrage, to nerve him for that triumph over his traditional prejudices.

The impression of Andrew Johnson which this book gives us is that of a deep, powerful, impassioned nature, inflexible, but inflexible rather by definite determination of character and fixity of conviction than by obstinacy of will. A man of large ability, he is, so to speak, deeply immersed in his own past,—limited by the bonds of his earnest, but, until lately, narrow experience. His power to change his point of view upon theoretical considerations is small, for he does little but expand his experience into theory. Facts alone can instruct him; and if these run counter to his intellectual predilection, they must be impressive to be effectual. He follows the law of his mind in proceeding to make an "experiment" in dealing with the South, and in making it as nearly as possible in accordance with the ancient customs of his thought. There is danger, we think, that he will look at facts too much with a traditional eye; but there is no danger that he will not act upon them with vigor, courage, and honest patriotism so far as he shall see them in their true light.

It should be said, that, to learn the latest modifications of his opinions, the reader must consult the Introduction.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No.
98, December, 1865, by Various

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